By Zephyria 
Prologue
It was a fragment of a perishing world.
The earth flowed and the sky poured down. The air hardened like resin, and the celestial sphere plummeted. The flickering stars lost their light, and the microcosm twisted. A world patched and sewn together in a chaotic mess, as if an unskilled painter had spilled paint over a sketch and stirred it with a brush. A world covered in countless corpses. A world where only two existed.
A five-year-old child. A teenage boy. A young man in his twenties and thirties.
A man with the same face as the countless blood-stained corpses slowly approached.
“Si-baek hyung.”
The smile of the man walking forward, stepping over a corpse with a face identical to his own, was radiantly twisted.
“It is time to choose.”
The man whispered, spreading his arms elegantly to the sides like a maestro.
“If you choose me, your precious younger brothers will die and this world will perish. Conversely, if you choose this world, everyone survives—everyone.”
Everyone.
The man’s voice curved pleasurably as he uttered that word. And Kim Si-baek knew. That the ‘everyone’ who would survive would exclude only that man.
The man also knew. That Kim Si-baek knew.
As if already certain of what Kim Si-baek, who understood and knew everything, would answer, the man asked with a bright smile.
“What will you choose, hyung?”
It is a memory of a certain summer day when a redness hotter than the summer heat filled every alley beyond the stadium.
After finishing night shift and getting off work in the morning, I slept throughout the day and only stepped out of my studio apartment in the afternoon with a yawn. Knowing that orders at the chicken shop would explode once the soccer match started at night, I had stopped by early, but the waiting line was already quite long.
When I visited the orphanage with both hands full of chicken and cola, the children rushed toward me with cheers. I roughly ruffled the heads of the children, unsure if they were welcoming me or the chicken.
I was in the middle of gathering laundry from the rooftop after playing with them for a while. That child came up to help.
Finding it admirable that a kid who still looked like a child in my eyes had come to help, I stroked his head, and his face turned bright red.
When I asked what was wrong, the child hesitated for a long time before producing a voice as red as his face.
〈Hyung.〉
The youthful voice that burst from immature lips was hotter than the summer heat that scorched and warmed everything around.
〈I know I’m young. But I’m already a middle school person this year.〉
He seemed reluctant to be treated like a child. I smiled and comforted him, saying I wouldn’t do it anymore, but the child’s youthful voice grew even more dense.
With a longing so thick that he could no longer pretend not to notice.
〈In just a few more years, I’ll be an adult. An adult just like you, hyung. So I… hyung…〉
The torrent of emotions overflowing in his young heart eventually turned into a sob. The watery voice clung to him desperately.
Because the searing heat distorted his vision, he blinked his sweat-laden eyelashes several times. Even so, his five senses, entwined in the child’s heat, would not clear.
The only things vivid were the child’s earnest black eyes and the rift in the world distorting around the child. Because it looked as if the child would be swallowed by that rift.
He reached out to the child without hesitation. Just like nine years ago.
As he grabbed and pushed the child away, the rift began to swallow him instead. The child’s eyes widened and his lips trembled as if to say something, but the sounds of the world no longer reached him.
Soon, he felt the scenery of the world rapidly receding. Capturing the image of the child’s small hand reaching out toward him one last time, he smiled.
That was his last memory on Earth.
✽ ✽ ✽
Kim Si-baek snapped his eyes open at the feeling of the child’s hand—which had remained small even in middle school—suddenly growing large and gripping him, just like the hand he had seen last. He blinked blankly for a moment before slowly understanding.
It was a dream. Letting out a languid sigh, he absentmindedly fiddled with the ring on the middle finger of his left hand. He must have been tired. To doze off on a battlefield when the start of the war is imminent. As he rubbed his stiff neck to loosen it, a divine utterance was output in the air before him.
[Death and Beauty looks upon its apostle with concern.]
Perhaps because he had just woken from an old dream, Kim Si-baek stared for a moment at the letters floating strangely in the void. Divine utterance—a means to convey the will of a god while protecting humans, whose spirit and body would be annihilated and whose soul lost if exposed directly to the essence of a god.
This phenomenon, which he had never experienced on Earth, made him realize more clearly than anything else that this was another world.
“Uh, it’s nothing. I just dozed off for a second.”
[Death and Beauty manifests as an avatar and appears before you.]
Before the output even finished, a fluffy baby crow appeared. The baby crow, moving its short wings clumsily to perch on the crown of Kim Si-baek’s head, clattered its beak. The words coming from the beak were not the chirping of a bird, but a voice speaking like a human.
“My apostle. Your god is concerned, for your appearance is steeped in sorrow.”
“I just had a bit of a dream, Lord Biyendwe.”
Kim Si-baek raised his hand to the crown of his head and gently stroked the avatar of Biyendwe, the god of death and beauty, with his palm.
“Did you dream of Earth?”
“You’re sharp.”
“Who would know my apostle better than I?”
Laughing softly, Kim Si-baek leaned deep into his chair. As his balance shifted, the baby crow moved its position slightly.
“Did you not dream of that child? In the eyes of your god, my apostle’s sorrow deepens whenever he recalls the memories of that brat in particular.”
“Was that so.”
He absentmindedly rubbed his face with his palm.
“Well, it was a very long time ago, after all.”
Sixty-eight years had passed since he had crash-landed in ‘Mak Slecht’ after being swept away by something like an unidentified rift. In the fantasy novels he occasionally read on PC communication or at rental shops, they always found a clue to return to Earth somehow, but in reality, it wasn’t so easy.
At first, he missed his home and struggled, but sixty-eight years is enough time for the landscape to change seven times over. It had long been that his home was not Earth, but Mak Slecht. More than twenty years had passed since the thought of returning to Earth had vanished from his mind.
Because the time in the new world was more vivid, the time on Earth had faded significantly, yet there was a longing that did not grow dull.
Kim Si-baek injected divine power into the ring on the middle finger of his left hand. A hologram rose from the ring, projecting scanned photos. They were the only two photos that had been in his wallet when he crash-landed in Mak Slecht.
One was a photo at the orphanage taken with his close younger brothers, and the other was a photo taken just the two of them on the day that child graduated from elementary school. These photos, preserved even as his Earthly belongings wore down, had become a long-lasting longing.
“Do you still not be able to forget your brothers?”
“I’ve given up on returning, but that doesn’t mean the longing is erased.”
His brothers, who were frozen in time as children in his memory, must have grown up a lot. Imagining his brothers’ grown-up appearances was both a joy and a pain for Kim Si-baek.
As years passed, the longing remained as a memory that he would occasionally pull from deep within his chest and smile at. However, there was a memory that made his heart ache every time he looked back.
〈Hyung.〉
The black eyes that always followed him.
If there was anything left that could be called a lingering attachment to Earth, it would be that child.
Kim Si-baek brushed back his hair and shook off the thoughts of the child. He was a child he would never see again. He had no choice but to believe the child was doing well even without him. He shifted the conversation in a deliberately light tone.
“So, anyway, once this war is over, I really want to host a World Cup in Mak Slecht too, you know?”
[Death and Beauty is annoyed to death, saying he’s sick of hearing about that damn World Cup Round of 16.]
Biyendwe grumbled via divine utterance without even opening the avatar’s mouth, showing just how sick he was of it. However, the grievance of a Korean who had come to another world without seeing the result of the first-ever advancement to the World Cup Round of 16 remained even after sixty-eight years. Since there would be the advantage of being the host country, wouldn’t a miracle happen where they win in the Round of 16?
“No, but listen. The meaning of the first Round of 16 is…”
[Death and Beauty is fed up.]
Because he had spent years elaborately rambling about his memories of the World Cup—which he intentionally clung to in order to forget the heat of the child that always seemed to follow him—it had eventually become a sincere desire. Kim Si-baek intended to definitely persuade the Emperor to host an international soccer match once the war ended.
“How peaceful would it be, a friendly match between nations instead of a war.”
“Fine. And what do you intend to do after hosting that international match or whatever?”
“Then… I’ll just rest without thinking about anything.”
Having rolled through decades of hardship after falling into another world with nothing, it was time for a vacation. Thinking of a peaceful remainder of his life, Kim Si-baek smiled thinly. A life without the smell of blood—just the thought of it was incredibly satisfying.
Before long, the paladin arrived. Biyendwe sensed the presence of the grand warrior who served him first and clattered his beak.
“Your Excellency the Apostle, it is time for the commencement of war. Will you don your sacred artifact?”
“Not right now. This is a battlefield where a priest like me doesn’t need to use a sword personally.”
Kim Si-baek rose from his chair and left the temporary building, escorted by the grand warrior, whose stature was two heads taller. He saw soldiers lined up in rows and columns stretching beyond the horizon. It was the allied forces centered around the Atrebatum Empire.
The Emperor’s speech to inspire the soldiers’ morale echoed loudly through the camp. Then, the apostles of the religious sects, who could grant effective blessings on the battlefield, offered prayers with the assistance of the High Priests.
Along with a holy radiance, blessings were layered over the entire allied army. Unbreakable bravery added a keen edge to the allied forces’ weapons, noble faith bolstered their will to fight, and an overflowing abundance of vitality promoted healing power.
And then came the turn of Kim Si-baek, the apostle of Biyendwe, the god of death and beauty.
Unlike the other apostles who required the assistance of High Priests, Kim Si-baek ascended alone. Among all the religious sects in Mak Slecht, there may have been apostles who had received the god’s protection for longer, but there was no apostle with more pure divine power than he.
“May they fear death, yet not succumb to it.”
[Death and Beauty looks down upon the allied forces.]
The god responded to the apostle’s prayer and granted the blessing. A holy energy surged, and the aura of the god of death swept over the allied forces. Not a reckless bravado that treats death lightly, but a steadfast courage took root in the soldiers’ hearts.
It was the opening of the final crusade of the era to subjugate Edokus, the chaos grand warrior who sought to plunge the world into confusion and destroy it.
That day, at the same time Edokus’s core was destroyed, one apostle disappeared from Mak Slecht.
✽ ✽ ✽
October 202X, District 0 of Daejeon, the temporary capital of the Republic of Korea.
“Block it! If this gets breached, you’re all dead!”
“I think we’ll be killed by these bastards before the manager can kill us!”
“Why the hell are these bastards suddenly swarming in!”
District 0-C was in chaos with screams bordering on desperation and the roars of magical beasts. Gwak Yun-sang, the manager of the Support Division of the Supernatural Phenomenon Response Agency, ran frantically in all directions, encouraging hunters to block the magical beasts trying to cross the barrier.
“Hey! Where the hell are the reinforcements? I heard the Seven Guild Master returned to the country this morning!”
That mad dog is out of contact again! Anyway, the Guild Master isn’t here, but the Seven Guild will soon be on your side, Manager… Holy shit.
The communications officer over the wireless communication suddenly choked on a curse. If a curse came out unconsciously even while communicating with a superior, just what kind of situation had occurred? Unable to even imagine the scene on the other side, a chill ran down Gwak Yun-sang’s spine. Could there be anything more chaotic than magical beasts suddenly attacking the barrier after leaving their habitat?
Manager. Another Id Portal has occurred in Jungri-dong.
“…Fuck.”
And the world let him know that far more chaotic situations could happen at any time. Jungri-dong was a downtown area where civilians resided. Consequently, the 7777 Guild, which had been heading to District 0-C for support, was dispatched to Jungri-dong. Gwak Yun-sang bit his lip, tasting blood.
Not only District 0-C, but because magical beasts inhabiting the vicinity of Daejeon had suddenly begun to riot, all of District 0 adjacent to the barrier were in turmoil. Requests for rescue were exchanged frantically over the wireless communication.
‘Surely the Great Cataclysm isn’t repeating itself?’
While Gwak Yun-sang was trying to shake off the ominous imagination and swinging his sword, a distortion suddenly appeared in the air. At a precursor phenomenon different from the occurrence of an Id Portal, the hunters nearby, including Gwak Yun-sang, grew tense.
The distortion, crumpled like a piece of paper, seemed to split into a pitch-black rift of darkness, and from beyond it, a sharp ray of light shot out. At the stimulus of light that pierced his eyes painfully, Gwak Yun-sang forgot he was in the middle of a fierce battle and closed his eyes.
When he finally opened them, what existed there was not a rift, but a young man.
“….”
Pressing his temple as if dizzy, he staggered for a moment and looked around. The distance was too far to see his face clearly, but he seemed to have a surprised expression.
Gwak Yun-sang was also extremely surprised.
‘What is that person? A mage? No, but why are his clothes like that?’
He didn’t know what that strange rift was, but appearing suddenly could be explained as a type of magic. However, more surprising than the fact that magic was used was the young man’s attire. It wasn’t a robe that hunters who awakened magic wore to look stylish, but a long, flowing garment of a strange design. On top of that, he had some kind of black ball of fluff perched on his head.
Concluding that he was a lunatic cosplaying in front of a swarm of magical beasts, Gwak Yun-sang hurriedly shouted.
“Mage over there! Do your cosplay later and run this way, quickly!”
The swarm of magical beasts, which had paused for a moment due to the ray of light, soon revealed their ferocious nature again. To them, a single human just standing there blankly would be a wonderful snack.
Unaware that he had become a bite-sized snack, the young man only tilted his head and watched the magical beasts swarming toward him.
“You piece of shit!”
He was a lunatic, but he couldn’t let him die before his eyes. Just as Gwak Yun-sang was rushing toward the cosplaying lunatic while swearing, it happened.
The young man, who had been standing still, clenched his fist and lightly raised one hand. A faint radiance seemed to envelop his fist for a moment, and then he struck the head of a magical beast that had approached and opened its maw wide. With his bare hand.
Thwack!
The magical beast, its head shattered, died instantly without even being able to let out a final scream.
“….”
Not only Gwak Yun-sang, but the other hunters also doubted their eyes. He didn’t know if it was a hallucination, but even the magical beasts seemed to flinch. Was the skull of a magical beast… soft enough to be broken with a bare fist?
“Gasp.”
The moment he blinked, the young man was already standing in front of Gwak Yun-sang, who was bewildered by the unbelievable reality. He was clearly far away just a moment ago. Before he could grasp the situation, the young man smiled and lightly tapped the back of the sword he was holding.
“Ye-yes? Uh, you want the sword…”
Whether he understood the words or not, the young man just looked at him silently.
Normally, this would have been out of the question. Why would a hunter hand over their weapon to someone else in the middle of a fight with magical beasts? Moreover, his weapon was a sabre, a fencing sword. Awakened people in Korea who use swords as their primary weapon mainly use hwandos based on kendo; could this young man handle it skillfully?
However, the young man’s smile was harmless and soft, and above all, he was a powerhouse who had crushed a magical beast’s head with his bare hands.
Gwak Yun-sang hesitantly handed over his sabre. Receiving the sabre, the young man swung it a few times as if to gauge the balance of the sword, then stepped forward with his right hand and right foot, raised the sword, and took a cavalry stance. Gwak Yun-sang’s mouth opened slightly.
‘Did that person learn fencing too?’
Before he could voice that question, the momentum of the hesitating magical beasts became fierce again. The massive creature approaching from the front, making the ground thud, was named the Iron-Clad Brown Bear. True to its name, it was a magical beast whose outer skin was so hard that it was difficult to destroy its core. No matter how strong that young man was, he wouldn’t be able to fight it alone.
It was just as Gwak Yun-sang was drawing another sabre he carried as a spare to join the young man. The youth extended his sabre far forward. Before Gwak could even admire the surprisingly perfect fente (a fencing attack posture), the tip of the blade touched the hide of the charging armored fire bear.
Puhwak!
“…….”
The armored fire bear burst instantly, as if a water balloon had been popped. That was it. If it was difficult to destroy the core hidden deep within the body, one could simply destroy the entire body.
And so, the magical beast dismantling show began. The hunters, including Gwak Yun-sang, stood with their mouths agape, blankly following the young man as he slaughtered the swarm of magical beasts with elegant movements, as if he were lightly dancing through the air.
It was the return of Kim Si-baek, a former detective and current apostle, after 68 years.
As he easily killed the magical beasts, Kim Si-baek asked Biyendwe, who was clutching his hair with claws. His voice was low, barely audible to the dazed hunters around them.
“It’s been a very long time since I’ve used a sword. By the way, this isn’t even a mak slecht, so why are magical beasts appearing?”
[Death and Beauty is bewildered.]
[Death and Beauty screams, asking where this place is.]
[Death and Beauty longingly calls for Death and Rest.]
[There is no answer from Death and Rest.]
[Death and Beauty weeps, begging his older sister to save him.]
“Biyendwe-nim, you’re being distracting.”
Unlike Biyendwe, who was half-crazed and flustered, Kim Si-baek calmly hunted the magical beasts while scanning the surroundings. Seriously, where is this place?
✽ ✽ ✽
It has been exactly 7,777 days since that day.
“Ah.”
Within an infinitely pure darkness. With a short exclamation, a man’s lips curled into a thin arc. Found it. Found it. Found it. Finally found it.
The darkness wavered as a laugh, drenched in mad ecstasy, spread.
“I’m coming now, Brother.”