Over that vibration, Noise’s receiver began to overheat.
Fzzzzt.
—“Can’t get Feed Seventeen! Put it back up, back up!”
—“Lower battery signal is dead!”
—“Dead my ass, fuck! Third rank is still firing! Who reported it dead!”
—“Lower screen on Seventeen is smashed, calibration won’t take!”
The voices poured out all at once. They split over the same sector, commands and curses tangling along the same channel.
Blackbeak asked.
“Breached?”
“Not yet.”
Noise’s fingers swept over the terminal. Numbers and waveforms slipped past like water.
“The barrier is holding. Problem is, the eyes are dead. Observation feeds aren’t matching up, and battery telemetry keeps cutting in and out. Field channel is swamped, total chaos.”
“The upper monitoring station.”
“It’s half alive.”
“Patch me through.”
“Yes.”
Noise pulled a short cable from his waist and plugged it into an old panel on the maintenance garage wall.
Chk. Kkak. Kkagak.
The surface they’d thought was a wall pushed inward. Behind it, a wide ramp was revealed. It was an abandoned cargo inspection route reinforced with steel plates and supports, built so people, beasts, and anything fairly large could climb.
Blackbeak stepped in first.
Two wolf-types followed. As if it were a familiar path, they kept low and climbed the ramp.
Noise pressed the receiver.
“Opening upper observation gear. Boss is checking personally.”
Fzzzt.
—“The upper net? Turn that on and it leaves bypass channel logs. Whether it’s the Jeoksonghoe or the district network, they can trace it.”
Noise looked at Blackbeak.
“Boss.”
“Turn it on.”
“The logs.”
“Later.”
The other side of the receiver went quiet for a moment.
Static.
“…Opening it.”
From above the ramp, outside, sounds layered over each other. Sirens, shutters closing, vehicles forcing their way through narrow paths, people’s curses and footsteps.
“Run! The door’s closing!”
“Get the kids up first! Fuck, the kids first!”
“No filters! Just block it with cloth!”
“Move! I said move!”
The smell of humans rising from below churned. Between sweat, iron, blood, and cheap medicine, freshly born tension spread.
Noise ground his teeth from behind.
“Bastards who kept the alarm off and kept trading ’til C-Two, now they’re the first to drop their shutters.”
“They’ve got instincts too.”
Noise shut his mouth.
The upper exit was hidden behind a broken billboard. When Noise worked the terminal, the lock clanked open. Blackbeak pulled the steel plate, and outside air rushed in all at once.
It was high.
Above the maintenance garage was an old observation deck connected to a waste compression facility. Illegal transmitters, cables, broken antennas, and Blackbeak’s marks were all mixed together.
Beyond it, Sector 30 unfolded.
The lower area was a mess. Wooden floors, old steel frames, waste rails, and narrow alleys tangled together. The neon was still on, and the billboards were still smiling. But people no longer walked slowly. They ran, shoved, or closed doors.
“Filters! I have filters left! Double price!”
“Double my ass, fuck!”
“Then don’t breathe!”
Someone kicked over a stall. Filter boxes spilled onto the ground, and waiting people rushed in all at once. From inside the stall, an electric baton shot out and struck one man’s jaw. Feet passed over the fallen body, and a child clutching a bloodied filter crawled out between people’s legs.
The inside of the city was different.
Beyond the low, filthy lower structures, a tiny part of Sector 30’s core jutted like a blade. Skyscrapers, armored glass, high-rises stamped with corporate logos. Around them, an inner perimeter was lined with guard towers, armored gates, and auto-turrets.
A massive barrier blocking the outside, and a smaller barrier protecting the inside.
Between those two was Sector 30.
Blackbeak soon turned his head to the opposite side.
Toward the outer barrier.
It was too far. Elevated rails, buildings, cables, and illegally added floors split the view. The barrier was beyond that. Its scale was so vast that its shape was hard to make out.
It looked like nothing more than darkness embedded in the horizon.
Thud.
A low rumble came from afar. It was closer to a dull shock that arrived late through the ground than an explosion. The steel plating of the observation deck trembled slightly, and cables hanging from transmitters knocked against each other.
Noise connected the terminal to the observation gear.
“Putting up video.”
The old observation panel lit up. The screen immediately tore. Black dots and horizontal lines spread, catching and losing parts of the barrier.
A massive metal face. Artillery batteries embedded upon it. Faint lights running between the batteries.
And below it.
At first, it looked like a black stain.
Noise moved his fingers. Magnify. Calibrate. Magnify again.
The black stain moved.
“…”
Noise’s hand froze.
The pattern inside my golden eye slowly rotated.
Eye Technique.
I narrowed the scope thinly. I couldn’t widen it. Human heat, communication signals, jamming waves, traces resembling mana, the stench of pollution were all tangled together. Widening it wouldn’t be seeing; it would be getting swept away.
I narrowed it. Narrowed it further.
Only the lowest, darkest place beyond the barrier.
The inside of my eye grew hot. My vision shook once. Noise split and entered like a serpent’s tongue. Through that, barely one outline caught.
A black wave.
The low horizon beyond the barrier rippled black.
At first, I thought it was a wave. The more I narrowed my vision, the larger it grew. It wasn’t a wave. It was a tidal wave.
It was not a tidal wave of water. Things resembling beasts, bugs, and people were layered and tangled together, surging toward the barrier like a single black tidal wave.
Noise swallowed his words.
“Wa—”
It broke off once.
“Wave.”
Expression vanished from Blackbeak’s face.
“No.”
He continued speaking toward the barrier.
“That’s impossible. Something that size moving would tear the outside apart first. The small fry hiding in burrows would jump out, and the timid ones would react first.
“There was no such movement.”
“That’s why it doesn’t make sense. Blood smell, footsteps, screams. Something should have reacted first. But there was nothing.”
Noise couldn’t answer.
The official broadcast rang out.
[Erosion Grade C-4 maintained.]
[Outer Barrier Sector 17 defensive line reorganizing.]
[Non-combat personnel, move to designated shielded sectors.]
Noise let out a hollow laugh.
“Talking about reorganization.”
Another voice burst from the receiver.
—“Lower Seventeen all batteries silent! Repeating, all batteries silent!”
—“Left flank is collapsing! The Association bastards can’t hold!”
—“Don’t push, fuck! If you push back, the door closes! I said don’t push!”
Noise clenched his teeth.
“The official net still says C-Four.”
“It’ll change soon.”
Before those words even finished, the city’s siren tone dropped once more.
Ooooooong—
It wasn’t a short, sharp alarm. It was a low-pitched sound like something being scraped up from the bottom. The observation deck shook, and it resonated deep in the chest.
[Warning.]
The broadcast changed.
[Sector 30 outer barrier Erosion Grade C-5.]
Someone below screamed.
[Repeating.]
[Erosion Grade C-5.]
[Non-combat personnel, move to shielded sectors immediately.]
[All Barrier Association personnel assemble.]
[Awaiting approval for upper-level response.]
Noise gripped the terminal.
“Approval…”
His lips twisted.
“Guess the suits are still stamping their seals.”
Then, a sound of metal scraping came from below.
Kkigigigik.
It wasn’t just once.
Kkik. Kkak. Kkagagak.
It was from inside the maintenance garage.
Noise grabbed the receiver immediately.
“What’s going on.”
Static. “—The inner wire mesh is shaking! Ah fuck, it’s tearing!”
Behind the static, something like teeth chewing metal mixed in.
—“The winged ones are tearing the rings! The rat bastards are digging through the wall! Stop them, stop them!”
Before those words finished, a louder sound erupted from below.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Something was ramming the iron door with its body. Beastly howls, trembling like insects rubbing wings, and the sound of wet teeth chewing metal all mixed together.
Static.
—“One of them has its eyes flipped! Th-that bastard’s nape! Gck!”
—“Don’t release the rings! Back off, you bastard! Back off!”
—“Fuck, fuck, the commands aren’t working!”
Blackbeak’s fingers moved.
Click.
The two wolf-types flinched.
Grrrrrk.
A wet sound came from inside their throats. Their backs hunched slightly. A short light blinked and died inside the metal rings embedded in their napes.
Blackbeak flicked his fingers again.
Click.
This time, one of the wolf-types didn’t lie down immediately.
Its front paw scratched the steel plate.
Skree.
Blackbeak’s fingers stopped in midair.
“Lie down.”
Drool flowed between the wolf-type’s teeth. It understood the command. But its body shook first. Its pupils clouded, and a boiling sound rose from inside its throat.
That sensation reached me too.
The Wave was coming from beyond the barrier. But it was already stirring the instincts of the contaminants on this side.
My insides churned.
Yokryeok surged outward.
It recognized that the black tidal wave was in the same direction. The impulse to mix scratched beneath my scales.
Doryeok twisted the direction of the surge.
The Taeguk’s circuit accelerated by one rotation. The yokryeok that had tried to leak outward was rewound into an internal circulation. The call was fierce. Still, it wasn’t enough to overturn the circuit.
Once the internal circulation settled, a thin aura leaked out past my scales. It wasn’t intentional. The overflow had spilled out.
Hssssss.
Breath leaked between my teeth.
The leaked aura touched the napes of the two wolf-types first. Their ears folded back simultaneously. The rings in their napes flickered again. This time, the light slowly faded.
Before a command was given again, they stopped first.
The sounds tearing the wire mesh below also died down a beat later. The rings embedded in their necks dimmed their lights one by one.
Skree. Kkigik. Bang.
And stopped.
Noise tilted his ear to the receiver.
Static. “—Wh-what? It stopped.”
“What was that just now?”
Noise couldn’t answer.
The light went out from the rings in the two wolf-types’ napes.
Blackbeak looked straight at me.
“You.”
He said.
“That was your doing just now.”
The two wolf-types were still baring their teeth, but their bodies no longer moved forward. The sounds of scratching wire mesh from the nest below had also vanished.
Blackbeak no longer treated me like a beast.
“White scales.”
—Hey.
The AI cut in carefully.
—You were affected just now too, right?
—Even my senses shook. Your body reacted toward the barrier just now.
It was true.
The Wave was still outside the barrier. Yet it had already shaken this side. Before striking the barrier, it was breaking the contaminants inside.
—It’s a sector-extinction class disaster. Wave.
What is it.
—The records have more blanks than names. Erased sectors. Deleted cities. There are records of stopping it. By abandoning several sectors.
It paused briefly.
—Records of failing to stop it are short.
How.
—Because there’s nothing after.
I looked toward the barrier again.
The black tidal wave was still beyond the wall. Yet it didn’t feel far. There were too many. It was too vast. It was of a different scale than something to be called a horde.
A living black sea was surging toward the city.
Noise asked, gripping the receiver.
“Boss. What do we do.”
Blackbeak pointed to the barrier, the alley below, then me in turn.
“Send the nest kids to the lower hiding sector first.”
“If it’s blocked, it’s over.”
“The outside is finished from now on.”
“Once the last one is in, drop the partition.”
“Yes, Boss.”
Noise immediately pressed the receiver.
“You heard? Drag all the nest kids down below. If any have their eyes flipped, break their joints and take them down. Once the last one’s in, drop the partition. Just keep them breathing.”
Static. “—Yes.”
Noise lowered the terminal.
Blackbeak looked this way.
“Can you do what you just did again?”
I didn’t answer.
“You didn’t deny it, so I’ll take that as a yes.”
He took a step closer. The two wolf-types instinctively tried to move but stopped. The aftereffect from just now still remained.
“I’ll give you a place to hide in the lower hiding sector. Ask, and I’ll answer what I know.”
He pointed his chin toward the barrier.
“In exchange, if the nest folks go crazy and rampage again, stop them like you just did.”
I pushed my will.
Conditions.
“Speak.”
Safe hiding. The Wave. The identities of the pursuers.
Three meanings were conveyed in order.
“Fine. When we reach the lower level, I’ll answer. As much as I know.”
Then, light burst from afar.
It was above the barrier.
A white flash swelled beyond the darkness. The sound was late. A few beats later, a dull, low impact came through the ground.
Kuuuung.
The observation deck shook violently.
Black smoke rose from the barrier side. At first it was thin. Soon it thickened, spread sideways, and obscured part of the barrier. The smoke was visible even beyond the neon and billboard lights.
The black tidal wave didn’t stop.
Rather, it surged larger beneath the smoke.
Something leaped up over it.
At first, I thought they were fragments torn from the barrier or black debris pushed by the explosion.
They weren’t.
They changed direction in midair. What had been a few multiplied to dozens in an instant, and from then on they were countless.
The wall hadn’t collapsed yet.
But the tidal wave was already beginning to surmount the wall.
Noise muttered.
“Fuck.”