Yu Jitae walked into the Association.
His feet were in a hurry as he forced his way in. All the doors in his path were destroyed – he had no time to wait for them to open.
An SS- ranked fissure had cracked open outside the Association. The neutralisation of the fissure was almost finished so the inside of the Association was also returning to its former stability from the urgent confusion.
“Ah! Season…!”
Someone saluted him but he pushed his head away. Like a man struck by a dump truck, the man ended up rolling across the floor in one cluster with the person standing behind him.
He crushed open the doors of the underground isolation chambers.
When he headed downstairs, the director of the isolation rooms, Thimithi, approached him with a shivering body. It seemed that she had an idea of what was happening thanks to the surveillance cameras. She went down low and begged for his forgiveness.
Her job was to control the isolation rooms and there was no need for a soldier who couldn’t follow orders.
He slapped her by the cheek. Her head turned to the side as she fainted and turned silent.
With rushed steps he headed straight to the end of the corridor. A black barrier was stopping his approach so he bashed it with his fist. Like glass fragments, the barrier shattered and dissipated.
He looked inside the isolation room.
A black and large dog was lying dead on the floor.
Two Grade 0 agents were dead.
And lastly,
…Myu was dead,
With a hole in her chest.
She was undoubtedly dead this time.
An emotional void was like a hole – with nothing inside, there was nothing more that could be pierced. There was already a big hole in his heart and he didn’t feel any dejection even when looking at Myu’s corpse.
The equation of the coordinates had already been copied and there were no problems there. However, a severe death-inducing tension was sweeping past him. This entire room was resonating with Yu Bom’s mana.
It was Bom who killed Myu.
He turned his feet with bitterness in his tongue. A cold bead of sweat was travelling down his back.
After meeting Bom, Myu must have said something. He didn’t even consider the off chance that everything was fine – things had already gone terribly wrong.
The worst case scenario he had predicted had already been unfolded. Something was driving him into the very bottom of the abyss as the worst situations he could think of were constantly being etched into his head.
But what was fortunate was that none of the hatchlings had killed themselves yet. That would have spread a global shockwave and he would have noticed it immediately.
That was the only source of hope for him.
If Bom was the only one who knew it.
If that girl, who used to be the most stable in other timelines, was the only one that knew about it.
Things might be okay.
He called Unit 301 but none of the kids picked it up; not a single one did, even though he could definitely feel their presence at Unit 301. After calling several times, Yu Jitae turned off the watch. He glared at the watch with wide eyes before gripping his hand.
The metal frame lost its structure due to his grip and was crushed. When the reinforced glass shattered to pieces, he threw the watch straight into the wall. Shot like a bullet, it dug into the metal wall with a loud thud.
Even that was not enough to satiate his irritation and impulse.
“Yu Bom…”
He murmured, while trying his hardest to suppress the fury within.
“Yu Bom…”
His irritation grew increasingly bigger.
That damned bitch was the problem.
“Yu Bom…”
Bom had somehow dragged the Witch to her side. This was hard for Yu Jitae to believe because most of the things in the world could not move the Witch.
It meant that Bom had put something remarkable on her side of the negotiation, to make him eat shit.
Yu Jitae knew she would cause a problem and that was why he had assigned Clone 1 for the task. However, he certainly wasn’t expecting her to drive the situation into the gutters like this.
“What should I do with you…”
He contemplated. With each passing second, his irritation and displeasure towards Yu Bom increased in size.
“Yu Bom.”
In the past iteration, Yu Bom was not like this.
She used to stand firm no matter how abused and tormented she was. In fact, she had even acted as an emotional support for the other baby dragons.
And yet now in the 7th iteration, she was trying to ruin everything.
An impulse.
Rising inside was an impulse that resembled madness.
When did all these go wrong, he wondered. Was it when that girl suddenly and needlessly started to appear pretty? If not, then was it perhaps from the very beginning? Was his choice to live a daily life wrong in the first place?
Maybe my plan was too much for me to handle?
Before anything, he had to check the result.
Moving his feet that were glued to the ground,
Yu Jitae headed to Unit 301.
***
He stood in front of the door.
Without even opening the door, he could tell that Yeorum, Kaeul and Gyeoul were inside the house with Bom being the only exception.
But even so, his sensitive sense of smell could accurately track Bom’s smell. Bom had definitely been to this place.
In order to open the door, he reached out. He rested his hand on the door knob but he just couldn’t open it.
Never had the door knob been as heavy as it was today.
[Hostility] must have conveyed the memories of the past, and would have included only the dirtiest of them. It would have shown Bom the worst moments without showing the reason and previous events, and those memories weren’t things that the kids could handle.
Were the kids alive?
For now, they definitely were.
He could have long checked by now had he opened the door and gone in without thinking about such things, but he couldn’t.
Why can I not open the door?
Because my sin is on the other side of it.
It would have been better if he had firmly locked his heart before touching daily lives. Because of his half-assed mindset, he couldn’t even act like a hypocrite and the blanket covering what had to be hidden was way too light that they ended up flying away to the fluttering wings of small birds.
Even so, he had to twist the knob and pull it.
Yu Jitae opened the door, and went inside.
Carefully he closed it behind him.
The kids didn’t notice him coming in. Blue, red, yellow – the primary colours resembling traffic lights were all sitting in the living room.
He could see their backs.
His heart dropped an inch.
It just happened to be their backs that entered his sight.
“…”
The blue one turned her head, as the blue pair of eyes looked into his.
Their gazes met.
And the child;
She gave a smile.
“…!”
With a gaze dripping with worry, Gyeoul smiled. After that, Yeorum and Kaeul also turned their heads to look at Yu Jitae. Concern was in their expressions, with a tiny bud of relief in their eyes.
Gyeoul carefully stood up and started sprinting towards Yu Jitae, throwing her arms wide open.
He reached his arms out as Gyeoul wrapped her arms around his neck and placed her bum on his forearm. It was a blunder – he had no plans of hugging the child.
“You are late, ahjussi…!”
While he was confused by their reactions, Kaeul asked a question with a face filled with concern.
Why didn’t you pick up, he asked. As for the tone of his voice that had asked the question, he had no idea.
“Unni told us not to pick it up!”
Why.
“Bom-unni said she will leave the house for a bit because she had a fight with ahjussi…!”
A fight with me?
“What did you fight about? Did something happen with unni?”
We didn’t fight.
“Then what happened? Ahjussi, don’t tell me you… don’t like unni anymore…?”
Yeorum scowled in response to that question and Gyeoul also widened her eyes into circles from his arms.
He replied.
.
After running his mouth, he had to hesitate.
What did I say just then?
He had no way of knowing the truth.
“Please be honest. Okay…?”
Despite his words, the kids had serious looks on their faces. When he shook his hand, Kaeul grabbed his left hand with both of her arms.
“What is it? Please tell us what happened! Unni looked really strange. She looked really serious…!”
. .
“Then why…? Why are you like this…? …Unni’s expression, voice and everything looked really terrible. And like, she also looked very hurt. Why did you fight? What happened between you two…!”
. .
“What? Wait. Are you seriously saying that?”
It was then.
Yeorum suddenly started walking towards him with a frown.
“Like, why are you saying that?”
Every sentence had power in them. Sometimes, they had the power to flip anything in existence.
He realised that something important had just gone wrong. Plus, he also realised that he had to shut his mouth before things became any worse.
“Dear. Be honest. What happened.”
.
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know anything! This is the last time I’ll ask this. Don’t lie to me. What happened outside.”
.
Yeorum reacted with a sudden shout.
“Please just stop! How long are you going to be like that!? Huh?”
…
“How long! Are you going to see us as fucking kids that don’t know shit?!”
What did I say?
What is it that I’ve said, that things are going wrong even though they were kept short?
Regardless of what they were, he had to stop speaking.
He put Gyeoul back down. Even though the child clenched onto his sleeves after being surprised by Yeorum’s shout, it was pointless. He placed her on the ground.
Gyeoul tried to grab onto his pants again but when she looked into his eyes, she freaked out and her tiny hands stopped in mid-air.
Her fingers closed to a fist.
“Where are you going! Hey! Where the fuck are you going!”
To bring Bom, he replied.
“You’re going? Just like this? I asked you how many times, and you’re just going without telling us what happened?”
He didn’t reply as Yeorum’s sharp voice dug into his ears.
“Aren’t we a family?”
He didn’t reply and her shout continued without an end.
“How can you ignore your family like this?”
She did not stop shouting even after the door closed in her sight.
“Fuck, I thought we were supposed to be a family–!!”
***
He looked into his heart.
Something dark had begun resting inside by the time he realised it. It was dirty, sticky and crawled along the abyss, sprinkling a bucket of pollution everywhere.
Before the start of the 7th iteration, that thing had been veiled. The world was dark, and the dark thing reflected no light. He couldn’t even tell what horrendous being there was inside him, nor how he looked like himself.
In a world like that came sunlight, budding flowers and singing birds that started spreading warmth onto the dark world. That was the start of the 7th iteration. The man who had been crouching in the darkness noticed his nakedness due to the sudden shed of light and felt shame.
Plus, the dark and hideous objects began to show themselves from within the darkness. The rotten cages and carcasses of birds that had been deeply hidden inside the quagmire were unveiled, as well as the dark crawling thing shooting out pollution.
Within that world that had suddenly been brightened up by light,
The man was defenceless.
He had been living through a long night with many things invisible in his sight. Never had he expected the day to arrive, and he therefore had felt no need to bother hiding things that were veiled by the darkness.
However, was it reasonable to say he had no idea? Were sins committed due to necessity able to escape their nature of being a sin? Was sin committed in response to wickedness a good sin?
No.
At the very least, he didn’t want to be a hypocrite.
However, the night he lived was too long to be rectified.
Therefore, he had no choice but to hide them.
He had to hide them at any cost. That was why he built a fence: to make sure the animals inside couldn’t leave the area and to make sure the things he wanted to hide could stay away from sight.
And he told the animals beforehand to not leave the fence. He persuaded them and at times was strict about it.
The animals listened nicely because the inside of the fence was quite comfortable.
But one disobedient rabbit at last tried to jump over the fence.
He placed a trap to stop it from doing so but now the rabbit even jumped over that.
Until now, he had never used his hands to grab it – there was no need to because each side had been keeping their hands to themselves. He thought the rabbit would respect him, like how he respected the rabbit. Even though everything had started with him building the fence on his own accord, there was no reason for him to show any more consideration to the animals than what he was already doing.
However, that respect of his was shattered.
He changed his mind.
He had to catch it.
Even if he had to use a gun.