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Three Ways to Survive in a Ruined World: excerpt from Chapter 1439
Most of the trip to the tent was blurred the way a battlefield blurred in its own aftermath: smeared with wet blood and dried exhaustion. His head thudded against strong shoulders. It was Lee Hyunsung carrying him on his back. Lee Jihye and Kim Namwoon cleared the way ahead with shouts. Prosthetics cracked and dangling—his life on a thread. He could do nothing but slump into those shoulders, the phantom pain screaming with all the other wounds that tore through his body, his bones.
Beside him, a shaking Shin Yoosung hid her sobs. Beside him, the archangel Uriel was uncharacteristically silent.
Within one wave of faintness and the next, the grim chaos of the remaining battlefield had vanished, and the violent ringing of his ears was quelled with the wetness of cloth and Lee Seolhwa’s hands.
A sickbed.
“Your eyes,” she murmured, and her fingers lay against them lightly, pained. “I cannot bring them back.”
“I know.” And it didn’t matter. He was not worried about the blindness tapering his abilities—he could fight without eyesight. “Was necessary.”
“Foolish.” He had staggered through nearly a thousand rounds, yet only she could insult him with such care. “Yoosung-ah… Her heart must be breaking right now.”
He thought to the tamer’s broken form in the height of the 77th Scenario. He himself had been stumbling across the cracked earth, propped against his sword, ragged. Against the towering stars, he had not been enough to save Shin Yoosung.
So when the constellation brought him the bargain, he had sworn on it easily, and then his vision burst into razor-fiery gold, leaving her knelt over his body. Her reaction had been worse than seeing Lee Jihye’s quaking eyes or Lee Hyunsung’s heartbroken expression when he had sacrificed his arm and leg; just Shin Yoosung’s wail, shattered and guttural, still rang in his ears.
He only wished that his last sight had not been her stricken face.
“Had to save her,” he tried to say.
She was alive. That was all that mattered.
Something rattled wetly; he realized it was his own breath breaking in crushed lungs.
Heal me quickly, he prayed. The next scenario will begin soon.
Lee Seolhwa wrapped a cool cloth over his head. When she lifted him to secure it from behind, he was struck by dizziness. “You’re in no shape to be thinking about the next scenario.”
He hadn’t realized he was thinking out loud. Something in the fever of sweat coursing through his body made him fervent, and he turned his wishes to his cursed sponsor. Let me live a little longer, too. My companions still need to be saved.
It hurt to breathe. His eyes burned—phantom pain again, but he held back his groan. He had lost an arm and a leg. Through this, he could persist as well.
His consciousness must have faded from the tremors of pain, as seemingly within his next breath, a trembling hand was clutching his own. Though it had grown up—he had witnessed this himself for hundreds of rounds—it was still small against his one palm.
Yoo Joonghyuk knew it well.
“Don’t cry, Yoosung-ah,” he said it as gentle as he could. “It doesn’t hurt.”
A pang burned through his temples. Somewhere to his left, he heard a sniffle. “Don’t lie.”
Before he could muster up energy to respond, the others bustled around him. With some secret relief, he found he could still recognize the tread of his shield, hear the gasps of his mentees, sense the flutter of angel feathers. Shin Yoosung stroked his hair, and the cotton sheets were soft beneath his bandaged back, but he could barely focus on anything—his body was falling apart, his head was splitting open.
He kept silent, but Lee Seolhwa seemed to understand.
“His eyesight was taken by no unconventional means. There’s nothing more I can do now,” she said. “The best course of action is for us to go out so that he may rest in silence for a few hours, to ease the headache.”
And though her fingers squeezed his hand as if to protest, Shin Yoosung eventually, slowly released her grasp.
“Please, rest,” she whispered.
End of Chapter 1439.
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When Yoo Joonghyuk awakened to nothing, a cool touch was resting against his brow.
Unfamiliar. Danger. He tried to sit up, but the moment he raised his head, his guts jolted, and unconsciousness threatened to drag him away again. The hand—fingertips—pushed him back down to the bed with ease.
“Are you crazy? Lay still.” Through his ringing ears, Yoo Joonghyuk tried to profile the voice: it was a man’s, quiet. There was another mutter, something that sounded like “this stupid sunfish.”
If a stranger was here, one powerful enough to evade his companions, that meant they were gone. Or worse, he was a scenario that Yoo Joonghyuk had never faced before. His limbs were too heavy to jerk up, but he sluggishly dug his hands into the bed anyway. The scenario—!
“No. Stop it—stop trying to get up. There’s no scenario.”
No need to push him back down—he had already collapsed himself, and the voice wavered in and out of sound, a nauseating pulse through his bloodstream. Soft-spoken as it was, his pounding head throbbed even more at its tenor.
“Don’t panic. This is… Ah, you are dreaming right now.”
[The statement has been confirmed to be false.]
There was a sharp tsk.
“Can’t you just trust me, Yoo Joonghyuk?”
Annoyance twinged beneath the haze of pain. This utter stranger was the one caught in his own lie, and for some reason, he was irritated at Yoo Joonghyuk instead. Irksome.
He wished he could see who it was that knew him by name. The blindness was unsettling—he would have to become used to it quickly.
“Relax, I have no ill intentions.” The person shifted, and there was the rustle of a long coat brushing the floor, a chair creaking from a weight. “I’m just here to visit for a few minutes.”
Rasps of labored breath—his own. The stranger’s—steady and even.
[The statement has been confirmed to be the truth.]
Slowly, Yoo Joonghyuk unwound his joints, slumped into the sheets.
He waited for more, but the stranger had fallen silent. Cool air indicated that it was nighttime. The scent of sanitization was sharp with medicine and blood—his own. His arm was a stump where his prosthetics had been removed. A dismantled puppet.
He wondered if his sponsor was watching him now.
To another person, in another moment, Yoo Joonghyuk might have asked, “Why are you here then, if you have nothing useful to say?”
Yet his mind could not help but calm at the scene—had already become tranquil in its fever soon after he had awoke. In a space between scenarios, between all the bloodshed, someone, just a stranger, was sitting peacefully beside him for a quiet moment. Without wanting from him, without desiring to tear him apart.
Yoo Joonghyuk must be hallucinating then, rather than dreaming. He wondered if he would remember this person—this vision—later.
Laying quietly like this—It had been so long.
“Who are you?” he asked instead. His mouth wasn’t moving properly, and the question came out slurred.
“I’m just a reader,” the stranger replied. And when Yoo Joonghyuk’s breath stuttered, the man paused.
“You’re hurt.”
Some wry humor came to him. The tone didn’t sound mocking, nor was it surprised. It was almost resigned, a heaviness he knew all too well.
“Your eyes, too…” And a hand brushed over his face, fluttering over the cloth strip on his eyelids. He felt cuts and sword callouses in those thin fingertips when they grazed his cheekbone.
Perhaps they were alike, then.
He wondered how the two of them looked right now—he himself was a pitiable sight, he knew, with bandages sticking to sweat sticking to hot skin. His ruined limbs. His empty, blindfolded eyes. Completely at another’s mercy.
“Are they in a lot of pain?” It was asked as if the answer was already clear.
“No.”
It was necessary, he wanted to say, like he did to Lee Seolhwa. Every sacrifice I make is necessary.
He had been through worse, beneath the ever-silent gaze of his sponsor and the cackling stars. Yet, laying in this cot, left alone in this moment where he was weak and sightless, he allowed the thought to surface to his consciousness. He would die for them. Had died for them all.
I would do it again.
The hand brushed through his thoughts, the fever. It lay against his cheek, so cool to the touch. Pleasant like the moonlight, like a sweet spring of water. Yoo Joonghyuk found himself leaning into it.
“You’ve done so much.” The man’s voice cracked. “All these regressions…”
The words registered distantly in Yoo Joonghyuk’s brain. He was grasping, his consciousness fading in, out, in.
“You… Just who are…?”
It was quiet again.
“I know death well, too.”
It was a lonely voice.
“And—“ There was a pause, and the wavering of tone became soft again, like the man had suddenly put up a wall. “There is a man like you that I know well, except he’s much more sullen.” A chuckle that made Yoo Joonghyuk offended on the mentioned’s behalf. “The other…”
Yoo Joonghyuk was still slipping away. “Like me?”
The hand stilled.
“You could say that’s why I asked someone to send me here. Next to you. Just for a while, before…”
For some reason, his reserved voice crumpled raw, as if Yoo Joonghyuk was really someone that he cared for. Listening to the tattered soul in those words, he wondered once more what expression was on the stranger’s face.
What have you been through to sound so sorrowful?
“I won’t die right now,” he murmured. “…still have things to do this round.”
A little laugh. “Of course.”
The hand began to stroke his hair one more, steadily following the curve of his bangs to the right ear. It was almost as if the man had done this often.
Below them, he knew, was the cog of a great, creaking wheel. Slowly turning round after round, rusty with his sins. Once more, he had told himself. The last round, and the last, and the one before that. But who would tell him to stop? Could it just end here, with a stranger—his own imagination—by his side?
His thoughts were so bleary. Time fogged his consciousness, and he didn’t know how long had passed. He wished he heard the man speak more. He wished he was awake enough to register it.
Inevitably, the touch began to draw away. Inevitably, and too soon.
“Wait,” he said before he could stop himself. When had he allowed himself to sound so weak? Nonetheless, the stranger seemed to pause.
“Will I ever see you again?”
Silence.
A thumb brushed the sweat from his brow.
“Get some rest, Joonghyuk-ah.”
It really was pained, that voice—it was heavy with the weight of too much. The hand lingered, caressed down his face and brushed off his chin even as the sound of the chair pushed back. Yoo Joonghyuk found himself missing the touch.
He didn’t know if he slipped away again, but suddenly the door of the room tore open.
“Master! We felt a presence—we heard...“
The air stilled. Lee Jihye’s voice dwindled into a mutter as the sound of his companion’s footsteps filed behind her.
“But I swear I…”
“It’s alright,” Yoo Joonghyuk said, soft. The tension in his shoulders had nearly seeped away. He could still feel the tingling, sweet respite of fingers against his feverish cheek, the melancholic voice that had kept his aches company. He wondered if he would remember it the next day.
The weariness still loomed ahead of him, like a giant, crushing stone pushed against a hillside. He had to ensure that everyone was safe. He would have to begin planning for the next round very soon.
Yoo Joonghyuk had this inevitable responsibility.
But for now, remembering those gentle words, he would allow himself to be selfish, just one time this round. The darkness of his vision was no longer something he abhorred. He felt his consciousness slip away again, dipping back into the sensation of gentle hands that felt like stars. His vision seemed to be reaching toward a twinkling sky.
The world had gone silent.
“Don’t worry,” he murmured to the ones gathered by his sickbed.
“Today, I think I can rest a little easy.”