By Zephyria 
Side Story Episode 8.
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Now that he had found Joo-oh, he had to scour the facility for any possible written documents or information on the Starpath that hadn’t been uploaded to the database.
He suspected there wouldn’t be any, but since someone’s survival was at stake, it didn’t hurt to be thorough.
“Jin Mu-hae. From the ‘Imagine Sang-chan Cooking’ series, number 12, raspberry cream cheese tart…”
“Yeah. I know. I said I’d make it.”
“And apple pie and meat sandwiches too…”
“Uh-huh.”
“And also, I want fish poached in oil until it’s tender with a refreshing cream sauce to eat with a fork, and make the eggs fluffy and rolled big.”
“….”
The list of demands grew endlessly throughout the entire search of the research facility. At this point, Mu-hae could guess without even looking at his face.
This bastard is feeling better. That clumsiness from earlier—he really was just riding a rhythm.
Still, he didn’t put him down. He’d rather shoulder this weight than let him disappear somewhere again.
Besides, the expression on Joo-oh’s face when he had stood there blankly didn’t seem entirely fake.
‘His hands were cold, too.’
Teacher Jung, perhaps due to some misunderstanding, treated him like a nuisance who overprotected and coddled a grown adult man every chance he got, but Mu-hae knew himself best.
He was the one who found him, and he was the one who had fed, cleaned, and made him useful up until now.
“Put syrup and Fruit Tornado on top of the pancakes, and oh, I want meat noodles too.”
“Get down.”
“…I think I don’t need to eat them.”
“Do you want to get down, or should I throw you?”
…Of course, since Teacher Jung acted as a doctor, his knowledge had to be respected.
Mu-hae glared at the arrogant fellow with eyes full of complex emotions.
While the reaction earlier wasn’t a lie, it seemed he had recovered quite a bit by now.
“We’re leaving. Run after me.”
It was time to leave this city filled only with the traces of the dead. In his mind, he wanted to stay longer to carve Solar City into his memory, but once the sun set, the Beasts that had gone outside or any potential Aberrants would return.
“I’m going to run, so keep up. Keep your eyes wide open.”
“Tsk.”
Unfortunately for some, there was no way to improve the flaws of the Starpath within Solar City. That fact alone seemed to lighten the heavy feeling in his chest.
Now, if they could get out without injury and board the small aircraft, the job would be roughly finished. Mu-hae ran like he was flying through the corridor, passing through a broken door.
He pulled hard to climb up using a wire he had installed beforehand, but…
Crack, rumble… Clang! Clang!
Damn it. The spot where the wire was installed collapsed, and broken flooring poured down.
Mu-hae nimbly dodged the hook falling over his head, slammed it onto the floor, and examined the rattling joint.
“I guess other parts cracked when I tore up the floor earlier.”
Yeah, it seemed so. To make matters worse, a seat that Joo-oh had moved away collapsed into the fissure, blocking the corridor.
Damn. Climbing over this was out of the question. Jin Mu-hae stared blankly up at the hole where the light had vanished.
However, he wasn’t thirsty with worry, as he had no fear of being trapped here and drying up.
‘Kanrano.’
Joo-oh had denied it, but the Aberrant in the video he saw earlier was a smaller version of a black him.
That being had left the underground research facility, Solar City, and the entire surrounding area, and was standing in the forests of Kanrano, far away, looking up at the sky.
In other words, there was another way out besides the corridor leading to the shopping center basement. Unless, despite just drooling a bit, he had stood up unlike a typical Aberrant and walked his way out through a secret exit using the stolen Link Watch.
‘He was scratching everything like a wild animal, so it’s hard to say he was sane.’
It seemed Joo-oh was the only Experiment to escape from here. In the research records, S-22 was the only Experiment who survived until the end.
When Solar City collapsed, he must have pushed through, smashed, and crushed the laboratory to escape somewhere. As Mu-hae slowly looked back at Joo-oh, the other glanced back, meeting his eyes and gauging his mood.
“There must be another door.”
“I’ll look for it.”
Joo-oh took the lead, just as he had on the way down to the basement. His red pupils rolled quickly, scanning the traces left on the walls and floor.
Passing through spaces they had already scanned once, he walked toward a dead-end corridor. Then, beep—he pressed the Link Watch from the corpse he had been carrying.
The entire metal wall moved and disappeared upward. What was at the end of the corridor wasn’t a wall, but a shutter blocking the sector.
Seeing that there was no damage to the shutter, it seemed to have closed after the Aberrant had rampaged through.
“I smelled the wind from this way. I only just noticed it.”
Joo-oh added the detail without being asked. Mu-hae ran beside Joo-oh, scanning a sight even more disastrous than the outside.
If the creature had left traces this clear, he wouldn’t have to rely on Joo-oh anymore.
After running further along a winding path following claw marks, the two finally discovered a large tear in what looked like a ventilation shaft.
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know. We have to get out first.”
Clunk, clatter… Boom!
It had been morning when they arrived near Solar City. But after digging through the dirt and rocks blocking the passage and emerging, the real sky visible above the collapsed dome lid was the color of a sunset.
Jin Mu-hae stood covered in dirt on a slope on the outskirts of central. Judging by the shape of the land, the place that should have been a park was now dotted with beast dens made of bones, fabric, and fur.
Grrrr…
It was too early to relax. As expected, Beasts were dwelling in the ruins of the city where humans had vanished.
Beasts that looked like a mix of small bears and wolves began to appear one by one from here and there.
He immediately felt for his sides and back, but there was no equipment in his hands. Come to think of it, he had handed everything over to Joo-oh earlier.
Krrr-!
Just then, a cry that wasn’t human sounded from behind him. His spine chilled, and he spun around into a combat stance, only to find it was embarrassingly Joo-oh.
“…It’s not like that,” he quickly explained.
Perhaps he thought that while he used his strength flashily in front of others, bending rebar with his bare hands seemed inhuman, and suppressing Beasts with mere presence seemed like an Aberrant.
In Mu-hae’s personal opinion, both were far from ordinary, but there was no need to tell him this and discourage him. Mu-hae shouldered the equipment he received from Joo-oh, keeping a wary eye on the group of beasts that were slowly backing away.
Bang! Zzzzz!
With a single warning shot, the Beasts, who looked as if they would swarm in a pack, completely tucked their tails.
Forgetting the events in the basement, Mu-hae unhesitatingly rubbed and stroked his head. Kireung. Joo-oh, letting out a strange sound as if an afterglow remained, quickly covered his mouth.
“Let’s go. It’s a long way home.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t just pick up random things on the way because they look interesting.”
“…And if it’s not random?”
“Don’t pick it up.”
Looking at Solar City under the sunset, it felt a waste to just pass through, no matter how much of a ruin it had become.
However, unlike other animals, the human life expectancy is generous, and as the West Wind said, a time as brilliant as gold remained before Jin Mu-hae.
Having achieved his goal and obtained data on the Aberrant that resembled Joo-oh, it had been a quite successful business trip.
The sun had fully set after they left Solar City. Strangely, the Beasts or Aberrants that had been prowling inside the city were nowhere to be seen around the private plane.
He had been worried since the day had completely ended, so it was a relief. Feeling exhausted for some reason, Jin Mu-hae boarded the aircraft without even shaking off the dirt.
Only after the small aircraft took flight did the suppressed sigh of relief burst out.
“Jin Mu-hae. I have something to say.”
Joo-oh, who had been pressed against the window watching the outside, spoke in a small, whispering voice.
It was a voice that was secret and cautious in his own way, as if sharing a secret.
“That thing from earlier… it might have been me.”
“….”
“It was uglier than me and I don’t remember it, but just in case.”
Was that considered ugly? To be honest, as long as it didn’t have skin with bright red muscle patterns or clumps of dirty fur, Mu-hae thought that whether it was the past Joo-oh or the large Joo-oh, the form wasn’t bad for an Aberrant.
He could walk on two legs when necessary, and couldn’t you see pointed ears amidst the black smoke?
But he couldn’t just brush off a confession that the other had spat out after much deliberation, thinking it was an important story, with such an indifferent reaction.
“You’ll remember someday.”
“I might not.”
“Then just live without remembering. Isn’t that enough?”
“…Right. Jin Mu-hae is smart.”
He calls him a fool when things go wrong. With a single word, he swings between genius and fool. Mu-hae looked at the one who moved away from the window and curled up toward him.
It was funny to see the round head resting a cheek on his leg, breathing with small twitches.
“I’m not making the fish. Nor the pancakes.”
At the small spite, a whining sound of disappointment escaped.
“I might try that blueberry cheese whatever, but in exchange, don’t be annoying behind me when I’m cooking.”
“It’s raspberry.”
“Whatever berry it is.”
The guy who clings to him and rubs his mouth to interfere whenever he rolls up his sleeves to cook has an absurdly large number of shameless demands.
Mu-hae tapped the head of the one who didn’t respond, pretending not to hear.
As if feeling that as a rhythm, Joo-oh began to hum a song out of habit.
A melody that, no matter how much he thought about it, he had never heard anywhere else, yet strangely felt like déjà vu.
Perhaps it felt that way because he was the one singing it. Because the mismatched words ‘unfamiliarity’ and ‘déjà vu’ strangely fit and made sense whenever they were attached to Joo-oh.
“And, um, let’s give some to Olga too. Since she lent us the bracelet.”
“Do as you wish. Use the cake I made to be generous with your heart.”
“It’s good because it’s Jin Mu-hae’s. Jin Mu-hae’s cake.”
“Sure. Just like my clothes that you buy and wear yourself.”
The image of the Aberrant from the data flickered before his eyes. A form clearly smaller and less threatening than the one he had seen in person.
Was it because he was young then, and now he is roughly a proper adult?
If so, the age of twenty-two that Joo-oh claimed also roughly fits. Mu-hae roughly fiddled with the fluttering hair and suddenly asked a question he had never asked before.
“When is your birthday?”
“…I don’t know.”
Since he had no memories, it was a natural answer, but seeing him hesitate and curl his body further made Mu-hae wonder if he had asked for no reason.
“But since you became Joo-oh after meeting Jin Mu-hae, let’s count that day.”
A bright voice followed, as if those pitiful feelings were merely misplaced worries. Joo-oh turned around abruptly and blinked his eyes.
“Then you’re twenty-three now.”
At the lightly spoken words, Mu-hae saw a vision of something like a tidal wave crashing over those clear eyes.
Like someone who didn’t know he could age, his face, which had been blank for a moment, brightened as if waking up.
“Yeah. Twenty-three.”
Thinking of the day they first met as his birthday, he felt it was a waste to have just let it pass. Since he didn’t particularly celebrate his own birthday, it had passed naturally, but next time, he should try the food the other begged for, as a way to commemorate fishing a useful fellow out of Kanrano.
“By the way. What was that thing you swallowed back then?”
“What?”
“The thing you talked nonsense about being a cream puff.”
Joo-oh giggled, finding something very funny.
“There is. Something like a diary.”
“If it’s a diary, isn’t it paper? Why would you swallow that?”
“I didn’t swallow it. I stored it.”
Telling another nonsensical story.
The cozy aircraft flew endlessly through the pitch-black darkness.
In a sky where not a speck of human-made light was yet visible, Mu-hae silently took the hand of the one lying idly.