Chapter Text
Yoo Joonghyuk was getting increasingly irritated at the incarnation Kim Dokja. ‘Why hasn't this squid shown his skills? Why can't I see any of them using ‘Sage's Eye’? Why wasn't he in past regressions?’ These were all very reasonable questions that would not get answered in normal circumstances.
The brutal clash with the Incarnations Dokja Kim and Yoo Joonghyuk at Geumho Station had completely fractured the platform. Kim Dokja’s desperate battle against the delusional Yoo Joong-Hyuk had brought down a massive concrete support beam, completely sealing him off from Yoo Sangah and the rest of his main group.
Trapped in a dust-choked, isolated corridor, Dokja wiped sweat from his face and stared at a bizarre, glowing holographic terminal pulsing against the wall. To his eyes, it looked exactly like a localized, glitched extension of the Dokkaebi Bag.
Believing he had stumbled into a hidden system exploit, he frantically began buying up iron rations, weird… golden looking apples, and basic gear in massive bulk. He wanted to clear the inventory before the Constellations or the bureaucrats of the Star Stream noticed the oversight.
Meanwhile, on the main platform, the peace hadn't lasted long. A second wave of armed thugs, emboldened by the chaos of Dokja's separation, lunged out from the shadows of the train cars to seize control of the remaining civilians.
"Take the station! Kill anyone who resists!"
Their leader screamed, brandishing a heavy iron pipe.
They didn't get far.
Flamefrags stepped forward, his Netherite sword gleaming under the flickering emergency lights. With a practiced, fluid motion, he intercepted the lead thug, ducking beneath a wild swing and delivering a slash to the other man that sent him skittering across the concrete.
Beside him, wemmbu moved with terrifying efficiency. He couldn't take to the air, but he didn't need to. He unholstered Crucible—a brutal, heavy mace perfectly optimized for tight, interior quarters.
A thug charged wemmbu with a rusted machete. Without shifting his stance, wemmbu swung Crucible in a devastating upward arc. The heavy metal connected with a sickening crunch, shattering the weapon and sending the attacker flying backward into a pile of rubble.
Another rushed his flank, but Flamefrags caught him with a sweep of his leg, grounding the threat instantly. Within minutes, the remaining thugs were completely routed, groaning on the floor.
Flamefrags wiped a splatter of blood off his armor, bracing his weight against a structural pillar.
"Well, that handles the muscle. But we've got a different problem."
Wemmbu wasn't looking at the defeated thugs. He was staring at a completely separate, pixelated floating interface that resembled a Minecraft crafting grid, which he used to manage his own localized stock.
"Seriously, who is this sweatlord?"
wemmbu grumbled, his eyes narrowing as the numbers on his screen rapidly ticked downward. Wemmbu had been exhausted (barely standing) and frankly sick of this bull.
"Someone using a proxy terminal on the Dokkaebi network is spam-buying all my raw materials and enchantment books through the cross-grid store."
Flamefrags snorted.
"Can you see who it is?"
"No, but I can spy on their local terminal feed through the merchant link,"
wemmbu scoffed. He tapped the holographic air, opening a small, remote viewing window. His eyes locked onto Dokja in the distant tunnel, who was currently huddled over a blocky, runic enchantment book, trying to decipher it.
Suddenly, wemmbu’s expression shifted from irritation to absolute, annoyed anger. Flamefrags watched with both amusement and just a tiny bit of excitement as to seeing what wemmbu would do.
Wemmbu watched Dokja open a specific page of the ancient book, mouth the words completely wrong, and confidently misinterpret a basic protection 1 as a weapon upgrade. The language on those pages wasn't just magic to wemmbu—it was sacred, a core part of any Endlings identity.
"What the hell is this illiterate parasite doing?!"
wemmbu hissed, his voice dropping into a dangerous, deeply offended register.
"He just translated 'Efficiency' as 'Shiny Speed'! He conjugated the passive verbs into the past-imperfect tense! Who gave this fraud a copy of the text? If I find out his coordinates, I’m caving his skull in with Crucible!” Flame snickered at Wemmbu's obviously anger at the situation.
Back in the blocked corridor, Yoo Sangah—the mysterious lady who had been trailing the group—quietly stepped through the dust. At this point in time, her trust in Dokja was one of the few anchors she had left, in this hectic world of scenarios…
She approached the terminal, squinting at the blocky, pixelated runic text floating above Dokja's shopping cart. Thanks to her specific attribute modifiers of languages, she managed to piece together a tiny bit of the language aloud.
"Hey... Dokja,"
She muttered, pointing a slender finger at the screen.
"I think you just triggered a localized faction alert. If I'm reading this right, the text says: 'Warning, the local craftsman finds your pronunciation profoundly offensive and promises violent correction.'”
Dokja paused, his hand hovering over a stack of iron blocks.
"An offensive pronunciation? It's just a system translation error in the Dokkaebi Bag."
"No, look,"
she insisted, leaning closer.
"A living user on the other side of the grid is forcing these error messages. Whoever owns this shop interface is getting incredibly pissed off at how bad you are at reading that book."
Before Dokja could fully process her warning, the pixelated grid suddenly short-circuited, flashing a violent, angry crimson red.
[The localized crafting grid has been locked] [Current Inventory: Frozen.]
"Well, looks like we can no longer use the shop…"
Yoo Sangah sighed, crossing her arms.The brief comedy of the shopping feud dissolved the moment Dokja and Yoo Sangha navigated the collapsed tunnels back to the main tracks, finally reuniting with Flamefrags and Wemmbu.
The environment on the main platform was grim. The survivors of Geumho Station were huddled in shivering, desperate circles. Flame and wemmbu had successfully neutralized the immediate threat of the thugs, but a much more terrifying, silent executioner had just arrived.The food supplies were entirely gone.
"The ground-level convenience stores are completely picked clean,"
Flamefrags reported, his face turning serious as he looked over the headcount of hungry mouths.
"And with the network experiencing localized lockouts, we can't craft or buy automated drops."
Dokja glanced at Wemmbu, who was still muttering curses under his breath about syntax errors while cleaning the blood off his Crucible. Dokja wisely kept his mouth shut, realizing his clumsy reading session was the exact reason the shop network had just been frozen.
"We have two choices to prevent total starvation before the main timer runs out,"
Dokja announced, drawing the attention of the desperate group.
"We either launch an immediate, highly dangerous scouting expedition deeper into the unmapped depths of the metro line... or we gear up to hunt down the Dark Keeper roaming the lower rails.”