Running along the wall, I found an emergency hammer and an emergency axe. The moment I took the axe down from the wall, thinking I ought to bring it, it occurred to me that I should probably take the hammer too, so I put the hammer in my pocket and held the axe with both hands.
I ran again until I was out of breath, and as I approached the place where the hostages were tied up, the people who saw the axe began screaming.
“Please spare me!”
“Huh?”
Looking at myself, I was a madman with my face hidden by a mask and a cap, carrying a gun and an axe. The smell of burning was awful even through the mask. Sin Haeryang had freed the cable-tie handcuffs binding his own ankles and was sawing at the ankles of the woman closest to him with a knife. Should we free the ankles first? As I hovered there holding the axe, Sin Haeryang shouted without even looking at me.
“Free the ankles first.”
Is that so? I thought the wrists came first. So Sin Haeryang thinks the ankles come first. Since the knife Sin Haeryang was using had already been used several times, it felt like the blade had gone dull. Sin Haeryang cut about halfway through the cable tie with the knife, then used the strength of both arms to pull the rest sideways.
“You can break that with arm strength?”
“These cuffs have a maximum tensile strength of about 120 kilograms.”
I don’t think applying 120 kilograms of force is something ordinary people can do easily. Sin Haeryang snapped the cable tie by force, pulled the woman slumped on the floor to her feet with one hand, and told her to run toward the Russian restaurant.
The woman whose ankles had been freed bolted off exactly as Sin Haeryang told her. I stared for a few seconds as someone with her wrists tied behind her back ran away at tremendous speed, then raised the axe in my hand. Right beside me, a man wearing cable ties looked up at me with anxious eyes and asked.
“Hey, brother. You ever used an axe before?”
“Uh. No.”
“You’re a man and you’ve never swung an axe once in your life!”
As if he had heard some utterly ridiculous bullshit, the man sat up and started yelling. When would someone living in the city ever have used an axe? Ask me if I’ve used a scalpel instead. The man seemed to have grasped from the way I held the axe that I had never even swung a baseball bat properly. I answered him honestly.
“I don’t usually have any reason to use an axe.”
“Put that axe down on the floor! I’m not letting you send my ankles flying right here!”
The man shrieked at the top of his lungs. Could I avoid that person’s wrists and ankles and accurately strike a cable tie over one centimeter thick and wide with an axe? Before even a second passed, I put the axe down on the floor. Then the people around me wriggled closer, stood the axe blade upright, and began grinding their cable-tie cuffs against the edge.
I told them to free their ankles first, but there was no stopping them. They probably thought they could hop away even with their ankles tied. Even when they scraped or cut their skin while rubbing the cable ties against the axe blade, the terrified people paid no mind. Smoke that had drifted in from somewhere made everything look hazy, and the stench of burning was terrible. My breath caught stiflingly, so I lifted my head and looked at the ceiling; smoke had gathered thickly up there, and it seemed the ventilation wasn’t working properly.
The brown-haired woman at my feet was taking a lighter out of her pants pocket when she dropped it on the floor and cursed. I lit the lighter and brought the flame to the part of the wrist cuff farthest from her flesh. Being careful not to burn her, I melted the plastic. Maybe because the cable tie was tightened too much around her wrists, the flame of the lighter inevitably touched the backs of her hands and the cable tie over them.
“Ah! Hot! Ah! It’s hot! Owowowowow!”
“I’m sorry. Please bear with it just a little. You’re doing well.”
“How much has it melted?”
“It’s almost done.”
After melting the cable tie’s plastic until it went limp, I pulled it apart by force. The melted plastic was incredibly hot. On top of that, the cable tie was so sturdy that my fingers and arms tingled. If it hadn’t been half-melted, I wouldn’t have been able to tear it apart by force. A line in the shape of a cable tie was almost forming on my index finger.
I barely succeeded in freeing her wrists, but the back of her hand, scorched by the flame, was bright red. The woman looked ready to cry at the sight of the first-degree burn on the back of her hand, then snatched the lighter from me and began melting the ankle cuffs with the flame. Sin Haeryang, who had freed another man’s ankles and sent him fleeing from the central plaza, looked up at the ceiling, swept his eyes over the hostages, and then spoke to me in a loud voice.
“Sir. You said you had to stop by the exhibition hall. You have to go now.”
Go now? He remembered that? Even I had been too frantic and had forgotten. There were still many people rolling around on the floor, tied up. Please free me too! The people were shouting because of the smoke and the burnt smell, but with my bad hearing, they sounded like the cries of animals.
“How can I go in this situation?”
“Go. I’ll handle this place.”
Sin Haeryang asked me for the gun. As soon as I quickly took off the one slung over my back and handed it to him, Sin Haeryang received my gun and shouldered it. Then he asked me.
“Do you remember where I told you to meet me?”
“Bread and Salt!”
“You have to come as quickly as possible. If you’re late, we’ll leave you behind.”
Sin Haeryang picked up the axe that people had been rubbing their cable ties against this way and that. Then he grabbed the wrist of the man who had tried to kick him. As soon as his wrist was seized, the man panicked and thrashed to escape Sin Haeryang’s grasp.
“Uwaaah! Sin! You can’t do this now! When I cursed at you earlier, I wasn’t cursing because I wanted to curse!”
When Sin Haeryang grabbed him by the wrist from behind, the man twisted his body wildly to get away and kicked Sin Haeryang’s forearm with his bound feet. Because of that, Sin Haeryang dropped the axe, gritted his teeth, and with his bare fist struck the crown of the man’s head hard.
There was a thud, and the man’s violent movements stopped. Sin Haeryang picked the axe back up, closed his eyes tightly as if dizzy, then opened them again. Then, after swallowing a sigh, he put his weight on the axe blade and pressed it down over the cable tie, cutting the man’s cuffs apart. Sin Haeryang threw the axe to the person he had just beaten and said.
“Free the others.”
Sin Haeryang instructed a woman whose ankles were bound by cuffs not to move and to stay still, then said to me.
“I’ll see you later.”
Our eyes met. Sin Haeryang was right. If I didn’t go now, I would never be able to go. I didn’t know when I would ever be able to come to the Second Undersea Base again. With Sin Haeryang and the others here, the people tied up would somehow be able to free themselves and escape.
I immediately turned around and started running. Feeling as if something were tugging at the back of my head, I ran wildly from the central plaza toward the exhibition hall. When I looked back, Sin Haeryang had the muzzle of the gun pressed to a cuff. Bang! The moment I heard the gunshot, I ran into the exhibition hall.
As I ran into the slippery exhibition hall, I stepped wrong on the floor. One leg floated briefly into the air, then I slid, and since I fell on my back and butt, my head wasn’t injured. Instead, it felt like my butt had shattered. Straight ahead, I could see the words [The Sea, the Birth and Time of Great Life].
I crawled on all fours and barely managed to get myself up. Ah. It hurts so much. It felt like my butt had split into ten pieces. When I checked why it hurt so much, I realized I had sat on the emergency hammer in my pocket. Damn it.
Rubbing my pelvis, butt, and lower back with my hands, I limped into the exhibition hall. Unlike outside, it was as quiet as death inside. The thick doors of the exhibition hall seemed to shut out the hellish situation of the undersea base as if cutting it away.
Three-dimensional holograms of deep-blue sea color and waves rippling like water poured past my body. A video was automatically playing and explaining how the planet called Earth had formed, but I could hardly hear it properly. Thinking things like, I must have fallen the wrong way, I limped through those sections.
Then, as I passed in front of a video with the sound of waves, my gaze was stolen for a moment. An image entered my eyes: seawater so clear the underwater world was brightly visible, a white sand beach soft as flour, and a midday shore where hot sunlight poured down in torrents.
The crisp, cool sound of waves came gently to my ears. As I stood still in front of the video, a three-dimensional image spread out around me in 360 degrees. The seawater became a three-dimensional hologram, came close to my feet, broke white into droplets, then receded again. The waves came toward me, moved away, and came toward me again. In the distance, I heard the cries of seagulls, and the snow-white clouds in the video drifted very slowly through the deep-blue sky. As if they had no worries at all.
······I want to go there. As I stared blankly at the dazzling beach, the pain in my butt and lower back woke me. My index finger, burned several times while melting the cuffs with the lighter, began to sting sharply as well. It felt as if my broken body were dragging my weak mental state, which wanted to stand here forever staring only at that video, down into reality and whipping it mercilessly. Sniffling a little, I passed through that section.
The videos that came next were of countless dolphins and sharks. The moment I saw the sharks, I snapped back to my senses as if I had been bitten in the side. Walking with a mind as alert as though I had consumed caffeine, I found the blond android, and in this difficult situation, seeing its face made gladness come before any resentment over what had happened in the past. Eyes like melted gold looked at me without any emotion. The machine wasn’t at fault. The problem was the people who made and used it. Pouring cold sweat and rubbing my butt and lower back, I spoke to it.
“It’s nice to see you after so long. Please help support me. You just need to carry me to the end of the exhibition hall.”
The android stared for a moment, then bent down and easily lifted me, an adult man. As I wrapped my arms around the android’s neck, I immediately understood what the injured Seo Jihyeok must have thought. Maybe because the android was hard, it wasn’t very comfortable. It probably wouldn’t, but I was a little afraid it might drop me while walking. The android walked without a sound and said to me.
“Nice_to_meet_you. Traveler_journeying_through_the_sea_of_time. How_is_today’s_journey?”
“I’m exhausted. I want to go home. I’d like to see just a few of the most important exhibits and leave.”
“I_will_guide_you. The_most_famous_exhibit_in_this_exhibition_hall_is_the_diamond_containing_the_radiance_of_the_stars. At_3,200_carats_it_is_also_the_largest_diamond_in_the_world.”