Chapter Text

The Church of the Luminous Unknown did not pretend to be humble. It adorned itself in sanctity like a spectacle.

Everything about it was ostentatious. Artificial light spilled through stained glass in slow, heavy slants; a stage set rather than sunlight. Gilded flower garlands lined the arches, etched over with hundreds of unintelligible glyphs.

A chandelier hung above—sharp glass teeth, silent and watching.

The air was thick with something like reverence—or rot.

Choi knew the weight of wealth when he saw it, and he recognized theft when it masqueraded as donation. He had seen the ledgers. He had followed the trails of funding like veins, watched them pulse toward offshore shelters and shell companies bloated with corruption.

The Church was a carcass, animated by belief and bribes alike. He glanced at the vaulted ceilings, the engraved doors, the relics encased in pearl-shell glass—everything expensive, everything immaculate.

Nothing about this was subtle. It was the aftermath of business dealt in belief.

Everything was soft-edged and quiet and slow, like the world inside this place ran just a second behind the one outside.

Choi stood beneath an arch of pale stone and he wanted, so badly, to smoke. The ghost of a cigarette hung behind his teeth, weightless and cruel; his fingers curled instinctively, as if around a carton that no longer lived in his coat. 

He had not carried one in months.

He’d promised Jaekwan he’d quit—not a vow, not really; just one of those petty arguments between missions, when survival made them sharp and stubborn and too alive.

Jaekwan had wrinkled his nose in that way he always did when pretending he wasn’t worried, saying, you’re going to die early, senior and if you do, I’ll drag your ghost back, see if I don’t. 

Choi had laughed, then. He’d thought there was time. He’d touched Jaekwan’s wrist and said, fine, Jaekwan-ie. I’ll try. Happy now?

And then—Jaekwan had died first.

The irony tasted like ash. Choi had not smoked since.

Still, when he breathed too deeply, something inside him stung. A phantom bloom of fire in his ribs, like regret left too long unspoken. He wondered if the tar was still there—bitter, black, nestled beneath the cage of his chest like a grudge. Maybe it coats the lining of his lungs like a resentment; maybe it clung to the soft inner walls of him, slick and ruinous, a slow poison turned relic. Maybe it kept him full of all the things he hadn’t managed to say. 

Maybe it remembered him.

The urge wrapped around him like fog—familiar, insidious. He imagined it often: the click of a lighter, the flare of orange, the first drag splitting him open with that familiar ache. 

He missed that pain. It was honest, at least. Something earned. Something deserved.

At least it had a name.

But the carton was gone. The lighter was gone. Jaekwan was gone.

His pockets stayed empty.

He wondered, sometimes, if Jaekwan would’ve laughed—whether he’d sigh and say finally, I knew you could do it, or just give him that look, the one with the small smile tucked into the corner of his mouth like a secret Choi was never deserving to hold onto.

Choi had only kept his word, after all, when there was no one left to hold him to it.

Maybe this was what it meant to miss someone: to burn forever, and never light the match.

They had thought he’d snapped.

After Jaekwan’s death—after the report had come back, incomplete and cold, littered with phrases like unknown variables and declared deceased—they had started looking at him differently.

Everyone had known who had trained Bronze; the senior had called him junior with half a smirk and a hand on the shoulder.

Some had tried to be subtle. Others hadn’t bothered.

A few had avoided him altogether, as if grief were a contagion—something that might spread if they stood too close.

Choi hadn’t blamed them. But he hadn’t snapped. Not yet, at least.

He had known what it looked like: the sleepless, dazed stare; the sharpness in his voice when questions came too slow; the way he kept reopening the file like something in it might’ve changed if he read it enough.

But he hadn’t lost control—not really.

He had known worse ends. He had spent over a decade on the Bureau’s payroll; he had learned the shape of loss the way some people learned songs—by heart, by repetition, by ruin.

Jaekwan hadn’t been the first. And he wouldn’t be the last.

The job tore through good people with no regard for rank, timing, or who loved the world the most.

Still—Jaekwan had been different. Not just his junior, not just someone he’d trained; but something closer.

He had been the youngest. The one Choi had known the longest.

It hadn’t just been his death—it had been the absurdity of it.

A mission they had flagged as routine. The same cassettes they had recycled before. A location even Choi himself had passed through, once, without incident.

Nothing that should have warranted death.

And Choi hadn’t been there for it. That was the part that gnawed at him: that Jaekwan had died in some lodge too high in the air, with no backup, no partner, no voice in his ear.

That his last words—if there had been any—had disappeared into distortion.

That someone else had walked out of that building.

Someone else had survived.

And that someone hadn’t been Jaekwan.

Choi still remembered.

He remembered the call, crackling and faint, carried down the mountainside on weak signal and weaker breath; Jaekwan’s voice, too polite for panic but too thin to hide it, asking quietly—Senior, can you help me?

A man who had followed upper management’s orders to the letter, even when they’d asked for the impossible—how much must he have suffered, alone, to reach out like that? How long must he have stood in the cold, deliberating whether to swallow his pride before dialing the number he always diligently memorized?

And Choi—Choi had felt guilty then, and still guiltier now; not just for what he hadn’t done, but for how little he’d known.

He had assumed Jaekwan would be waiting.

Choi had stood at the base of the mountain with his coat unbuttoned and his gloves half-on, staring up into the mist; and the list of things he wanted to do for his junior had only grown longer with each passing minute. A tight hug, comfort and consolation, visit Elder, go to the hot springs—he had mused on it idly with a smile, imagining it all as he waited.

But the path stayed empty.

He doesn’t like to recall what came next; the blur between breath and motion; the way his voice cracked through the comms, asking for answers no one could give.

He doesn’t like to remember the sound of his own footsteps—how they lost their rhythm, how they forgot what ground was; how the trees didn’t blur fast enough as he ran.

He doesn’t like to recall the wind, the pervasive craving for ash in his mouth, and the paracusia of someone calling for him.

But mostly he hates to remember the silence; the kind that buries a man alive when he realizes too late that he should’ve run sooner.

He had investigated Jaekwan’s death the only way he knew how—by vanishing into the paperwork.

There had been no one else who would have done it with the same doggedness; no one else who owed what he owed.

No case had been assigned. No task force formed. No debriefings conducted beyond the rote statements circulated the day after Jaekwan’s death: Our condolences. There was an unfortunate incident. Counseling is available.

The Bureau had always known how to speak at length while saying nothing at all.

So Choi had gone backwards. He’d pulled the names of every criminal who had received a cassette that cycle. Serious offenders only; men and women whose guilt had been confirmed by more than confession.

He had built a chart—printouts and string, red yarn pulled taut from pin to pin across his office wall like arteries across a body.

There had been Xs marked through the photos of those reported deceased; double slashes for the cases where a cassette had been recovered. It had been nearly clean—too clean.

But one had stood out.

A man. His name hadn’t mattered—a trafficking ring organizer, already dead in a car crash. Public, messy, documented. A case tied off with a bow—except for the cassette.

It had never been recovered. No trace of it in the follow-up logs, no chain of custody. The kind of gap you only noticed when you were searching for anomalies in the records.

Choi had pulled the thread. Red string tied to nothing, drifting further from the Bureau’s reach the longer he followed.

He had traced the man’s movements, his last known addresses, the accounts through which he had funneled money.

One had led to a house in a rural village—quiet, picturesque: Jisan.

A place Choi had known all too well.

Others had called it coincidence. These things happen, someone had said, methodically, during a debrief. Accusations of paranoia and conspiracy had been thrown around.

But the pattern hadn’t let Choi go.

It should’ve been a dead end.

It hadn’t been.

Jisan—once a forgotten village, now host to a ritual festival no one could quite explain.

The Church had always rooted itself in places like this; places saturated with folklore, where faith could ferment and fester to be harvested.

And somehow, they had grown bolder—no longer content to linger in the margins.

Too many disappearances. Too many overlapping anomalies in the archives.

Choi hadn’t had time to dig properly. There had been too many other active Disasters elsewhere that had demanded more intervention than a hunch.

He had filed what he could, flagged the anomaly, and moved on. But the unease had never left him.

Everything had been bleeding. All the lines had been crossing; too many disappearances unaccounted for, too many Disasters not ending cleanly.

And the coincidences had started to pile up—missing persons cases whose names had appeared in the Church’s donation rolls; Bureau sites that should’ve been sealed off, now acquired by shell corporations; high-ranking politicians with cult ties slipping into elections with too-easy smiles.

And worst of all: Disasters had been getting worse.

More and more, he had seen familiar titles appear where they shouldn’t have. Cases he had known to be resolved—suddenly marked reopened. Disasters they had completely eliminated, now reviving in new forms.

He had brought it up to the higher-ups. The response had been worse than denial—it had been tepid concern. Polite nods. Promises to “keep an eye on it.” The kind of response designed to end conversations, not begin them.

And when he had pushed harder—asking for a sanctioned investigation, a task force, a named directive—they had told him to let it go.

Resources were limited, they had said. Other cases were higher priority. There were more important things to focus on. Too many other Disasters in motion.

It hadn’t been disbelief. That would’ve been cleaner.

No—what Choi had faced was worse: they had known he was right. But it had been easier for him not to be.

The Church had too many friends in the wrong places; too many people who owed favors, prayed in private, donated under aliases.

Some of them, he had heard, had even worn Bureau uniforms.

No one had wanted an internal war—not when the Disasters kept escalating.

So Choi had volunteered. He had insisted.

He had made the request in a meeting that had gone too quiet too quickly. He had named his own precedent: Daydream, and everything he had pulled out of it. He had survived more Disasters than half the other teams combined.

If anyone could avoid disappearing inside a narrative this large—it had been him.

He had known he wasn’t being objective. But he hadn’t pretended otherwise. He had long passed the point of pretending.

They had told him no. Then maybe. Then—nothing.

Choi had taken that as permission.

The mission had never been sanctioned. Not properly. They couldn’t give him formal support.

He had started alone. He would end alone. That had been fine.

He had known what the others said about him—too unstable, too obsessed, a man on a suicide mission still pretending it was duty. A man walking toward the fire, not to save anyone—but to burn.

Maybe he had been.

He hadn’t argued. He hadn’t cared.

Choi hadn’t known what he was chasing anymore—vengeance, redemption, his name at the end instead.

But he had known one thing: if no one else would do it, he would.

Choi has worn more names than most criminals; buried more lives than the records will ever admit. His loyalties are layered; his debts, diversified. He keeps contacts far outside regulation—people who owe him favors they can't speak aloud, networks stitched together with false papers and real blood.

Choi has never been a man with clean hands. That is what made him good at what he does.

He had infiltrated the Church. It was a story lived too many times for his own good. He lied when necessary, flattered when useful, spoken more than he listened. It hadn’t been hard—none of it had ever been hard. He had done it all before. 

Charm was just another tool in his arsenal; performance, a habit worn into his being.

People let him in. They always did. It was what he was best at—becoming what others wanted to see. It wasn't difficult to feign devotion; belief had been performance, and Choi had always been an excellent actor.

People liked him. They had told him things they shouldn't. They invited him into their homes, into their rituals, into the hollow warmth of collective delusion.

But it had eaten at Choi, too. They hadn’t been harmless believers—they had been people who’d begun to assimilate with Disasters not meant to coexist with humanity.

Choi studied them, befriended them, and watched them fragment beneath their own skin. Sometimes, he had hesitated. Sometimes he had wondered what any of it would cost him in the long run. 

But the thought had always faded quickly—because none of it had mattered, not when the Church had been tied to Disasters that had led to the deaths of good people.

People like Jaekwan. 

So he smiled and moved forward, and when he had been told he was ready, he hadn’t faltered. Access to the second circle had been earned through faith—but also through skill; through loyalty; through acts unspeakable outside their ranks.

Choi had done what needed to be done.

He doesn't speak of the scar that lives not on his throat but beneath his shirt, invisible and constant; doesn't name the ache still blooming in his chest, the grief that still permeates his bones. Jaekwan—always Jaekwan—is still threaded tight around the spine of him, a red line strung from memory to movement. 

It guides him still. It still burns.

At last, they had told him he was ready. He had proven himself. He could step forward. The second circle had parted like a curtain, and the final stage had been lit. One audience; once a year; one chance to speak to the Saint.

Kim Soleum.

The Saint who had existed for only a year; and already he had become myth—a name almost more widely whispered than Ireum-nim.

The Church said he was chosen.

The voice of Ireum-nim, they said. Kim Soleum’s tongue did not belong to him and him alone. They said that he never hesitated; that no question would ever surprise him.

The Saint answered truly; he asked in return. The exchange was sacred. The price was always personal.

No one had seen the Saint unless chosen. Audiences were granted, not scheduled.

His presence had remained limited and unknown. Most believers never see him once in their lives—only hear his voice through proxy. The Saint was more symbol than body; more story than man.

The Bureau’s files had been useless: blank where they shouldn’t be. Choi had tried, had tried, and had tried again. Even backchannel contacts had turned up nothing. None of it had been redacted—just nonexistent.

So, of course, there were rumors. A black market had sprung up for portraits; oil, graphite, ink—passed around in quiet corners, admired in silence, obsessed over with devotional intensity, traded between believers like contraband.

Someone had told Choi she’d caught a glimpse of the Saint once, and had sworn she dreamt of him for three days. “He’s so—” she had begun, then stopped. “You’ll see.”

Choi hadn’t cared much, then. But as the doors swing open, something coils low in his gut; not fear, exactly.

He wanted to know how close the artists got.

Chapter Text

The door closed behind him like the last page of a book sealed shut.

The chamber wasn’t large, but it felt endless.

Light didn’t simply fall here—it pooled in strange, soundless ways: too soft at the edges, too golden at the center. It wasn’t warm, but primeval—the kind of light one didn’t stand in, but returned to. Stepping into it felt like remembering something the body had never lived, but always longed for: the hush before breath, the breath before birth.

Choi stepped forward.

He bowed—low, sharp, spine folded just so. Not out of devotion. Not even out of respect. But necessity. For survival. For show. 

But when he lifted his head, he didn’t straighten all the way. His breath caught.

At the far end of the room sat the Saint. Kim Soleum.

He was still. Young. Unplaceably beautiful. He looked less like a person than a figure remembered too vividly—a face seen once, then dreamt of ever since.

His posture was immaculate: spine long, shoulders loose, hands folded gently in his lap, like he had all the time in the world—because he did.

The Saint wore white—white upon white upon white. Not like innocence, but like forgetting. He wore it the way silence wore a secret. Robes layered and sheer, diaphanous silk upon silk, the hem pooling like moonlight, like the breath of life in winter.

The fabric parted down the center—not by accident, but with intent—framing a narrow line of skin from clavicle to sternum. The bare, vulnerable shape of his chest glowed with quiet revelation.

His sleeves folded like wings beneath brighter sheer, pinned by goldwork so fine it shimmered like stardust. They floated as if held aloft by wind, though no air moved. 

It was as if gravity, too, feared to touch him.

The cloth moved even when he didn’t. It rustled not like fabric, but like pages—like something being read aloud in the seconds between heartbeats.

A veil fell from the Saint’s crown—tracing light along his cheekbones where it dared to brush his skin. Beneath it, his features shimmered in and out of focus. Enough to unsettle. Never enough to forget.

His skin was pale—a lunar pallor not born of delicacy, but of withdrawal. His cheeks bore no flush; no sun had the chance to kiss that face. Only the faint shadows beneath his eyes betrayed any exhaustion—dark crescents like fingerprints on porcelain. 

The only flaw, and even that seemed chosen, like it existed only to make him more unreal.

His face was a study in restraint: mouth small, unsmiling, lips the shade of first blood on snow.

Jewelry adorned him not like ornamentation, but punctuation. Precious metals were sewn into his veil like footnotes, glinting along the hem of thought. A fine crimson thread ran along the edge, sharp only if you were looking. His bracelets hung loose, slipping low on the wrist, as though borrowed or misplaced; their charms chimed faintly—ink bottles, arrowheads, constellations. 

At his throat lay a necklace: silver wire in layered twists. Not tight, but loose, conspicuously so. A choker, almost. A binding. It gleamed like something unfinished.

And his eyes—

Not lightless; not cold. But distant. Soft as clouds layered over stars, dark as the margin of the sky just before night became its truest self.

And when the Saint looked up—when those eyes landed on Choi—

 —for half a second, something shifted.

The faintest widening; not alarm, but something near it. A stutter in the gaze, a barely-there flicker of surprise; recognition, perhaps, or something worse.

It vanished before Choi could decide whether it had ever been real. He was left wondering if he’d imagined it entirely; if the chamber’s strange, reverent light had twisted his perception; if grief had led him to coax meaning out of the mundane.

But nothing about the Saint was mundane.

If a figure like this was venerated by the Church—if such dangerous people, people with Disasters sewn into the seams of their skin, knelt for him—then how dangerous must the Saint himself be?

“Greetings, Saint-nim,” Choi said at last. His voice came out rougher than intended; the syllables felt foreign in his mouth. He had always considered the Church absurd—gilded nonsense and moral theater, built on opportunistic predation.

But here, in this impossible light, in front of this impossible man, the ridicule quieted.

Here, he almost felt… calm.

“Greetings,” the Saint returned.

The word was soft; it lilted like the first fall of snow. He spoke like a lullaby, the way a creator might soothe a creation curled inside the womb.

“If you have something to ask me,” the Saint continued, “please feel free to do so.”

Choi swallowed; the motion scraped down his throat like gravel. It felt as if he hadn’t spoken in days.

There was silence—long enough to feel wrong. He’d forgotten how to speak.

He had long memorized the rules: believers were granted one question each; it was theirs alone, and the Saint would answer.

And in return—this part was he could never forget—the Saint too would ask. One for one; inquiry for inquiry; as though truth could ever be even.

But Choi, here, now, wasn’t only himself. He stood as the Bureau’s proxy; the voice of all who didn’t make it, who died in Disasters and were never heard. He was the echo of everyone who never got to ask.

He inhaled once; steady, shallow.

He spoke—for them, if no one else.

“What are the ways to neutralize the most dangerous Darknesses under the jurisdiction of the Church?”

He watched the Saint carefully. Searched his face for tension, for a flicker of panic, for any tell of a lie.

Instead, the Saint only smiled—soft, serene, unreadable; like moonlight glinting off a blade.

He didn’t answer in words.

Instead, he rose—slowly, like the ghost of a thought made flesh—and walked toward a cabinet carved from something old, bone-pale, and worn. His feet made no sound on the marble; Choi couldn’t be sure they even touched it.

From within, the Saint retrieved a book; cloth-bound, nondescript, without title or mark—just a featureless weight in his slender hands.

He returned and held it out. Choi took it, frowning.

“Do not open it,” the Saint murmured, “until you’re alone.” A pause, then, quieter still: “And safe.”

Choi stared at him, confounded. The Saint met his gaze with impossible calm.

There was a beat of silence; and in that silence, anger flared. Sharp; sudden; absurd.

What if the book was blank? A joke? A test? What if it was nothing at all?

But he didn’t say that—couldn’t; wouldn’t. Not here.

Outside this chamber waited a dozen believers who had merged with Disasters—bodies altered, minds aligned—and any one of them could reduce him to ash in seconds.

And Choi, for all his experience, was only one man.

If he disrespected the Saint, he would not make it. And worse—others might not either.

“…Thank you, Saint-nim,” Choi said, after a pause, just to be polite. He calmed himself—bit down the bitter laugh that clawed up his throat; swallowed the heat of humiliation, of unease.

He prepared, instead, for the Saint’s question.

Because that was the rule: for every question asked, another was owed.

It was said the Saint—Kim Soleum—was not omniscient, and yet spoke on behalf of something that was; that if your life held meaning, then Ireum-nim knew of it, and by extension, so did the Saint.

And Choi wondered, then, whether that omniscience was real.

Did the Saint see through him? Through the mask, the mission, the farce of faith?

Did he know what Choi truly believed—or didn’t?

Could he see it? The ache that never settled; the illusion of tobacco on his tongue; the way he sometimes lit incense not for prayer but to only imagine a cigarette caught aflame. The way he sometimes lit matches just to watch them burn down. The way Jaekwan and countless others lived in his lungs now—soft and solemn and constant—a weight that refused to cease.

Choi wondered what it might feel like, to be seen completely. For someone to look at him and see it all: the burden he carried; the things he wished he believed in; the silence that shaped him; the hollow rattle of his heart.

Would that be faith? Would that be something worth believing in, if only once—if only here?

He didn’t know.

But the Saint was still watching him, and Choi found that he could not look away.

The Saint tilted his head slightly, considering.

“I will ask you something now,” he said.

Choi nodded, once.

“May I observe you?” the Saint asked.

Choi blinked—a slow, startled gesture that did little to conceal the stunned recoil of his thoughts. “What?”

“Your scar,” the Saint said—gently, as though this were customary. “I’ve always wanted to see it up close.”

The phrasing startled him. Not would like, not I wonder, or may I— but always, as if the desire predates the meeting; as if Saint had known of its shape long before laying eyes on it; kept it pressed between the pages of his mind the way one might preserve a flower.

And before Choi could consider refusing—before he could remember this was not just a man, but more—the word fell out of him, involuntary:

“…Yes.”

—before he had the time or rhyme or reason to say no.

There was silence. The Saint tilted his head; his veil shifted.

“Come closer,” he said, voice warm and unhurried.

Choi obeyed. A strange thing, that: he hadn’t wanted to move, and yet he did; not out of compulsion, but some narrative gravity, the sense of a role already written and a stage already lit.

The Saint’s eyes tracked him—closer; closer still.

“…Even closer,” he murmured, and Choi’s breath stuttered.

He stopped just shy of contact—still a hairsbreadth of respectful distance between them. Their bodies didn’t touch, but their presence did; heat lapped at heat.

Choi wasn’t quite close enough for their breaths to mingle; not yet. But he found himself, vaguely horrified, wondering what it might feel like to press forward just slightly—enough that their chests brushed, enough to feel a human heartbeat against something divine.

He could imagine it now—an act of heresy. The warmth of a mere man pressed to the imagined body of Ireum-nim.

Choi looked up. And because he was closer now—closer than any average believer had likely ever been—he could see.

The veil was not as thick as it had first appeared; the Saint’s features resolved slowly, the way a painting does when you realize it’s more than brushstrokes.

Lashes, long and midnight-black, casting crescents of shadow; cheeks pale but slightly flushed, shaped with maddening delicacy; lips parted faintly, pink as the first blossom of spring, with the curve of someone on the cusp of speaking—or being kissed. His eyes—those strange, lucent, inky things—caught the shape of Choi and reflected it back at him.

Choi wondered then, wry and sick with it, if the Saint admired his own visage there in Choi’s pupils—if he thought, how lovely I am in the eyes of another. If he had ever known ugliness—or wanted.

No portrait had done him justice. The real thing outshone them all—not because he was unreal, but because he was too real; achingly so, with the kind of presence that made Choi want to look away, and also never look away again.

The Saint’s hand rose, unhurried. Not commanding—but inevitable.

Choi didn’t flinch, though the ache beneath his skin twisted—low and familiar.

Then, with agonizing slowness, the soft pads of the Saint’s fingers made contact; so gentle it felt like a whisper beneath the skin.

The tremor was instantaneous—and humiliating—his body reacting before his mind could intercept. But the Saint did not pause. He only observed, thumb moving with aching, deliberate care along the seam of ruined flesh.

It was the kind of tenderness one might reserve for something once lost and now found again; like brushing the curved spine of a favorite book.

“You lived,” the Saint said softly. Not as praise. As truth.

Choi didn’t respond. I did, he could’ve said. But what about everyone else who didn’t?

Instead, he swallowed. His throat moved beneath the Saint’s palm; scar shifting with the movement underneath the Saint.

His hand was still on Choi’s neck. But it wasn’t just the touch—it was the way he looked while doing it. Like he was reading something sacred. Like the raised tissue of Choi’s skin spelled out a story he had always loved, and now, finally, he could reach inside the book and trace it.

Choi’s mouth was dry. His thoughts kept circling back to what he knew: that this place was a cult. That the Saint was a body, not a god. That he was a man—not much younger than Choi—

So why did it feel like standing on the edge of something that had no end?

“You’re not afraid of me,” the Saint said.

Choi exhaled, slow. “I think I should be.”

The Saint smiled—small, serene; not victorious, not cruel. Bittersweet in a way that made Choi’s skin itch. 

He didn’t contradict the statement.

His thumb pressed a little deeper—a firmer pass down the ridge of ruined flesh, tracing the uneven line like it meant something.

Choi shuddered.

The pressure was feather-light, but devastating. His body knew pain; it had been taught violence, trained for it—but this was not pain.

This was something worse. This was warmth; this was tenderness; this was the Saint’s hand on his throat like annotation—drawing a finger down the lines of his margins and saying: Here. This matters.

The scar had always stung in winter; it had burned with phantom cold when he stayed outside too long. Now, beneath the heat of another person’s palm—beneath the simple, staggering human heat—it wounded in a different way.

“I’ve always liked your story,” the Saint confessed suddenly, almost to himself. “You try very hard to be a good man.”

His nails grazed next—barely, lightly—just the suggestion of crescent edges against raw memory. It struck too deep, too fast.

Choi jerked in place like he’d been opened.

“You say that like you know me,” he rasped, more accusation than question.

A pause. The Saint looked up, and his eyes—brilliant and soft, utterly unafraid—held Choi there; pinned better than violence ever could.

“I know everyone,” he said, as though that were answer enough.

The fingers ghosted over the edge of Choi’s jaw; the scar passed beneath them like the binding of a book too often held.

And Choi—mortal, fighter, unbeliever—let it happen. He stood there and felt it; the Saint’s touch lingered as if it were the last line of a story he wasn’t ready to leave.

He felt the unbearable contrast: the myth’s hand and the man’s warmth; the reverence in the gesture and the unfathomable truth of the flesh that made it.

He wondered, suddenly and with desperate vividness, what might happen if he reached out; if he took those slender wrists in his hands and tugged.

If he closed the distance—pressed his body, scar and all, into the Saint’s until they were inseparable: breath and bone, real and reverent; until the Saint could no longer pretend to be myth, and Choi could no longer pretend to be immune.

What would he do? Choi thought, wild, breathless. If I pushed him down right now? If I touched him the way he’s touching me?

He could imagine it too clearly: the Saint’s weight against his, the veil tangled between them, no room left for reverence.

And it wasn’t desire—not exactly—but something crueler: the wish to break the fourth wall, to see if the Saint could be exposed, to see if he could falter too.

Choi’s body betrayed him again. His hands twitched at his sides, unsure what to do—intervene? invite? —and he hated the way his skin reached for more contact in spite of himself.

The Saint continued his slow, sensual transcription.

He glided down the length of the scar, then reversed course with a subtle drag—like commas drawing the sentence longer; like clause upon clause upon clause.

Choi stood still, breath caught in his throat, skin tingling where gooseflesh rose in the wake of where the Saint’s fingers had passed.

He didn’t dare move.

He simply let the Saint trace his suffering like poetry—slow, inexorable, sentence by sentence.

The Saint’s hand dipped—now lower, now to the place just beneath the scar where undamaged skin met ruined edge.

Here, he slowed further. His thumb circled once, twice, then drew a careful, curved line just barely grazing the surface—half-touch, half-heat. Then a pause. Then he did it again.

Each pass felt like a word being underlined.

And each pass made Choi shudder. Not because it hurt, but because it didn’t. Because it felt good—and that was worse. That was much, much worse.

The worst part was how thoroughly tender it was. Curious, not cruel.

The Saint leaned a fraction closer, breath warm against Choi’s jaw.

“You survived,” he said. 

This time, it felt not like truth, but admiration.

He let the pads of two fingers rest there, at the top of the scar now—firm but unmoving, as if closing a cover.

Then, slowly, he drew his hand away.

The absence left behind was immediate and echoing; Choi’s skin stung in the shape of the Saint’s fingers—not from pain, but from sensation denied.

And then, with a voice low and unassuming, the Saint asked, “Would you like to ask another question?”

Choi froze. It took a beat too long to understand the words—not because they were unclear, but because he hadn’t expected them; casual as conversation, quiet as a door being opened; and yet—something in them rang like invitation, or temptation, or warning.

He hadn’t expected that. The Bureau had given him one question to ask—only one, meant to be precious, honed, weighty. And he’d already asked it, hadn’t he? Had already spent it without even knowing what it had bought.

But now—now the Saint was offering him another; and suddenly, a thousand thoughts clambered up inside him, ragged, graceless, greedy: Why do you look at me like that; what do you see when you look at me; what is it you want?

But none of those would do. None of them would matter. He was supposed to be here for something else—something more than hunger in the shape of a man, more than the way the Saint’s voice had sounded when he said always like it meant forever.

Choi should have been wiser. He should have weighed his words. He should have—

“Why did Agent Bronze die at the Horizon Mountain Lodge?”

The words left him before he could shape them right; clumsy, breathless. Not how. Not what happened. Just why.

Why him? Why there? Why then?

The Saint’s gaze stilled.

Like water sealed beneath ice; like music caught between notes. Something in his eyes flickered and fell—something that had not been meant to rise.

Not surprise. Not guilt.

Grief, maybe.

“…Ryu Jaekwan,” the Saint repeated, low. The syllables curled like smoke against Choi’s ear—fragrant and fatal; the kind of temptation he thought he’d sworn off.

“He wasn’t recognized,” Choi said, before he could stop himself.

The Saint didn’t answer.

But he didn’t need to. Something in the silence answered for him—in the way it gathered, gently but irrevocably, like a curtain falling at the end of a play no one had asked to finish.

When he spoke again, his voice was quiet.

“Baek Saheon was recognized by Ireum-nim,” the Saint said tonelessly. “Ryu Jaekwan… was not.”

The sentence came across like a rite; regular, routine. 

Baek Saheon.

The name thudded in Choi’s chest like a wrong note struck too loud—off-pitch, off-script, but unmistakably real. He stood still, frozen in that exact moment between recognition and revulsion. Not shock—certainty.

He had heard of Baek Saheon before. Of course he had—everyone in Daydream Inc. had.

That was the name of their newest top recruit. Daydream’s prized rookie, minted just last year. Barely experienced enough to carry rank.

But there it was—his name.

The will of Ireum-nim had been conveyed. The Saint had spoken.

Baek Saheon was recognized.

Recognition. The word curled like a hook in Choi’s gut.

A rookie from Daydream Inc. Daydream, of all places. A company built on pain, profiting off Disasters.

His hands curled at his sides before he could stop them. 

Jaekwan—Agent Bronze—had practically bled for the Bureau. 

He had never left a report unfinished. He had given up the easy Disasters to the Agents with kids. He had used his rare vacations to revisit the orphanage he came from every winter for the holidays.

Now, he was just a footnote in the Bureau database: Died in action. No retrieval possible.

A slow breath. A sharp ache behind his eyes.

Maybe it was real. Maybe this was the will of Ireum-nim. But Choi couldn’t help wondering what kind of god looked at two lives and chose that one; couldn’t help the old cynicism from blooming black and thick in his throat.

What did recognition mean, anyway? If the Church’s doctrine was to unearth Darknesses—how had a fresh recruit like Baek Saheon been recognized, while Jaekwan, who had navigated Disasters daily, had been left for dead on a mountain?

None of it made any sense.

Choi shouldn’t have taken doctored doctrine personally—but how could he not, when the metrics of this strange, divine system seemed rigged against every kind of logic he knew?

What kind of cosmic calculation reduced a life like Jaekwan’s to nothing, while raising up someone who’d barely started?

At least now there was something to chase. Baek Saheon.

A name that didn’t belong to the dead—but maybe should have.

Choi looked down at his hands; no longer steady. They trembled—with withdrawal or withstanding he couldn’t quite say—like they had in training, years ago—back when he’d still believed things had to make sense. When he still thought, foolishly, that the world rewarded those who tried to make it better.

Across from him, the Saint only watched; something like weariness had sunk into his face, a heaviness behind the eyes too human for a figure like him. 

As if he were watching a tragedy unfold the same way it always did.

Then, gently—almost kindly:

“You’re free to leave.”

Not go. Not you should. Just: free.

Freedom. The worst kind of cruelty: choice.

He should have left. There was nothing left for him here but the echo of Jaekwan’s voice across dead channels; the ghost of fingers on his skin.

But still—he stayed.

Even though he knew, rationally, that he shouldn’t; that this kind of desire wasn’t normal; that perhaps, with every word he heard and heard, he was getting contaminated.

Because grief had hollowed him out, and confusion had made him heavy, and some part of him still believed—if I leave now, it all stays senseless forever.

Maybe Choi was a fool.

Maybe Jaekwan had been, too.

Maybe this was their fate in the end: not to be right, not to be rewarded—just to stay.

“You didn’t ask me a question,” Choi said, like an idiot. Like a child, still clinging to the rhythm of a conversation long since ended.

The Saint looked at him—and this time, he smiled. His eyes crinkled at the corners, dark lashes brushing pale skin, and there was something unbearably radiant in the way he looked at Choi now; small, unguarded, terribly alive.

He looked like someone you could love, even as they lied—for how sweetly they meant it.

“I asked,” the Saint reminded him, amused, “if you would like a second question.”

It landed not as admonishment, but as jest; a glint in the Saint’s eye, light and teasing, like it was fun to watch Choi come undone.

His smile was devastating in its ease. Choi couldn’t look at it too long. It felt like a trick.

Maybe that was the real trap—not the Saint’s knowledge, not even his question—but the way he delivered it all, bare and warm and unbearably kind, like every terrible answer would be worth it if he was the one to give it.

The man before Choi looked nothing like the figure described by hundreds in hushes. How could this be the same person who commanded entire sects with a word? Who was spoken of only in whispers, even within the Church’s inner sanctums? 

He seemed… startlingly approachable.

There was something hopelessly enticing about it.

The Saint didn’t speak like a symbol. He spoke like a man—low, amused, close. I asked if you would like a second question, he said, like they were sharing a secret, not a sentence. Like they were equals.

It was the worst lie of all.

Choi wondered if the stories built around the Saint—the men dead in his wake, the monsters that safeguarded him in shadow—were just that: stories.

The distance between them collapsed—not in title, not in rank, but in want. It wasn’t logic that bridged it; it was longing.

It terrified Choi.

It tempted him more.

There was no logic to what Choi felt next. Only compulsion. A terrible, golden desire—not hope, not exactly, but something deeper and more deranged; the need to hear another word, and then another, as if every syllable falling from the Saint’s lips were a drug. A hymn. A curse. Like a siren’s melody—sweet, and slow, and fatal.

He knew he should have left.

And yet—

“So,” Choi said, daring, reckless, “you can ask me something else. That doesn’t have to count.”

It wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t smart. It was senseless surrender.

The Saint tilted his head.

Then: “Come first,” he replied, “before I ask you.”

It wasn’t a command. But it wasn’t a question, either.

So, Choi went.

The Saint was even closer now. His presence was unbearable—gentle in the way of drowning. Like a tide that had already decided to take you.

His hand lifted, unhurried, as if this had happened before in another life; as if the moment was being remembered, not made. Reverent fingers traced the scar along Choi’s throat again—not a wound, that touch seemed to say, but a word. Not a flaw, but a story.

His thumb paused just beneath the hollow, where breath stuttered and blood thrummed like a prayer.

It was obscene, this touch. The way it didn’t ask permission, but made you want to give it.

And worse: it made Choi want to be read. To be seen. To be known.

Choi’s breath stuttered. He felt himself flush—blood surging to the surface in slow, helpless waves—and he couldn’t tell if it was shame or hunger or heat, only that it seared. All he knew was that the Saint’s fingers were still there, still moving; still so soft—softer than they had any right to be.

“You wanted the truth,” the Saint murmured.

His voice had softened, dangerously so; it curled into Choi’s ear like a blessing meant only for him. Fingers like mercy trailed the line of his old wound, ghosting down. He was being opened—not with violence, but with care. As if he were a letter, and the Saint the recipient; reading not just the scar but the man who wore it.

“But the truth,” he continued, “isn’t what will help you.”

And Choi—government dog, sinner, survivor—let himself be contaminated by the sound. Let it stain him sweetly. Sirens had never needed to drag men down; not when they were so lovely drowning felt like desire.

“Who do you think you would be,” the Saint whispered, “if you were not recognized by Ireum-nim… as Agent Choi?”

Choi stared at him, stupefied. Like someone shot through the heart, but too slow to feel the pain.

It wasn’t the question that stunned him—it was the name.

He had never said it aloud. Never offered it. No other believer knew what the Saint did.

Still, the Saint looked at him with that same placid omniscience; like he had known from the start. Perhaps he had known the moment Choi walked through the door. Maybe he had. Maybe he always had.

And still, that gaze had never wavered. Had looked upon him as if this recognition changed nothing.

Recognition. The aspiration of all in the Church of the Luminous Unknown.

Was this the privilege he was receiving now—this strange, awful boon; this fragile illusion of favor that Jaekwan—dutiful, righteous Jaekwan—had never been deemed worthy of? Was this what the Saint offered: not forgiveness, not salvation, but recognition—the most cherished of miracles, the cruelest of rites?

To be seen. To be named. To be deemed worthy. To be held up and told: you exist, and that is enough?

Who did he think he would be, if—? What a question. What a trap. It was spoken like someone who had never been haunted by their own reflection.

Choi wanted to snap back; to spit it in the Saint’s face with a grimace and a curse and a sneer sharp enough to cut the veil of mysticism between them.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t. Not now—not when the Saint had called him by name.

If the Saint cried wolf—if this was bait, a test of devotion or truth or ego—then he was already done for. Especially now. Especially with his identity unmasked and laid bare beneath that quiet, all-seeing gaze.

With his name exposed, he was already halfway dead.

The Saint didn’t speak. He only watched.

If you were not recognized, he had said—dangerous in all that it entailed. The implication hung thick and suffocating in the air: that he had been. Somewhere, deep within the Church’s twisted latticework of myth and meaning, he had been judged worthy.

What Jaekwan hadn’t been deemed enough for; what Choi had told himself he never wanted nor needed.

What the hell was it all supposed to mean?

Who would he be, if not Agent Choi? He’d had aliases by the dozen; masks, masks, and more masks—shuffled like tarot across bloodstained years. But all of them threaded back to the same loom: Agent Choi, representative of the Bureau.

It was the foundation beneath every falsehood, the core of every carefully worn face; without it, the structure collapsed. Without it, there was no story left.

Just wreckage. Just ruin. No more narrative. Only absence.

And who would ever find And who would ever find beauty in that void? There would be nothing to cherish. Could nothing ever be cherished? 

And yet the Saint was still looking at him as if none of that mattered.

Would Choi—just Choi, stripped of his title—be enough for even him?

Choi exhaled, slow and sharp. He turned his head, as if the motion might shield him from the weight of it all. His gaze slipped toward the walls, the curtains, the long shadows thrown by the Saint in the light.

He thought of the Bureau; of every face he’d worn and buried. Of Jaekwan—always Jaekwan—whose body had never come back; whose ghost had never come home. He thought of the countless times he had run toward and away from the memory of the same fire, calling it duty, calling it love, hoping that if he moved fast enough, he might finally burn clean.

He stared back at the Saint. 

He wasn’t sure what he had expected to receive in return—maybe a sharper barb, a calculated pry; some question that might’ve gouged real information from him, if the Saint truly knew what Choi was. If he knew of the Bureau—if he knew the stakes—then there were a thousand questions better suited for leverage in their brief, faltering exchange.

Instead, he was given a riddle; a kindness, almost. A gift.

Something dangerous in a different way.

“Nobody,” Choi said at last. The word came out flat, sardonic—meant to wound and ward off in equal measure. It should have been armor, but it leaked resentment like poison through the cracks. “I would presume you—the voice of Ireum-nim—would know better than I. Saint-nim.”

The title came like an afterthought; aggrieved punctuation to an already bleeding line. His cover was blown. The longer he lingered here, the worse it would get. He had to go. Leave, before this place peeled him back further.

There was mockery in his voice, yes; but it wasn’t just that. There was an ache too—something clenched too long and pressed too deep; the kind that only resurged when someone reached for a wound you thought was well-hidden.

If the Saint knew so much—if he could see through everything Choi was and everything he had tried so hard not to be—then why had he asked this?

Why offer his gaze as a mirror, a reflection that felt like a confession?

The Saint smiled; softly, sadly; like someone who had heard it all before, from mouths just as bitter, just as scared.

Choi’s fingers curled. He wanted to lash out again; wanted to say something that would undo the moment, unravel the stillness in the Saint’s eyes—but he didn’t.

It wasn’t pity he saw in the Saint’s expression. He could have stomached pity.

No. It was something else.

Familiarity.

He thought of the Church’s doctrine. Their sick obsession with narrative and purpose; their twisted need to categorize every soul as either worthy or waste. The belief that only those chosen by Ireum-nim would persist past the end. That to be significant was to be saved.

There was no salvation outside the will of Ireum-nim. Freedom wasn’t real. Hope wasn’t enough. Idealism wasn’t worthy.

Only recognition mattered.

And suddenly, Choi felt sick.

“So what?” he said, voice hoarse and acerbic. “I should be grateful it was me who satisfied being significant enough to ‘Ireum-nim’?”

The Saint’s expression didn’t change—but his voice did.

“That’s not how Ireum-nim works,” he said—and there was something strange in his tone; an edge not hallowed, a note not practiced.

Choi blinked. For the first time, the Saint sounded… irritated. Not like a symbol, not like an icon, but like something far more individual. Something had slipped—someone else leaking through.

The Saint continued, softer this time; like someone walking into a truth he hadn’t meant to expose.

“I care less about pre-written endings,” he said. His gaze flicked up to meet Choi’s, unreadable. “I prefer happier ones.”

It took a second for the words to land.

Then the Saint’s expression flickered—like he had startled himself.

Choi frowned. “You… prefer?”

The Saint didn’t reply. Just stared—wide-eyed, speechless—as if caught with a declaration he wasn’t permitted.

And for the first time, he looked young.

Not eternal. Not sacred. Just a person no older than Choi’s juniors, blinking up at him like a deer in headlights. A figurehead meant to speak for another, who had accidentally spoken for himself.

Choi didn’t mean to say it. The words slipped from him—

“You don’t seem like you have a happy ending.”

—sharp, unerring, as though his mouth had been waiting to betray him all along.

The Saint looked stunned, as if the words had reached inside and tugged something loose; like no one had ever dared say that to him—not like that, not so plainly. Not even himself.

He didn’t blink or breathe. The look on his face was something raw and wide and wordless—an answer Choi hadn’t meant to ask for.

He stared, transfixed by this moment of unraveling; of purity twisted with pain. It should have felt like power. He had won something, yes—but it wasn’t the victory he wanted. He didn’t know why it hurt to witness.

His pulse stuttered—not from guilt, exactly, but from the dissonance of seeing someone so untouchable look suddenly, heartbreakingly lost.

There was no triumph in watching the divine falter; only disquiet.

The Saint didn’t speak. His lips parted, then closed; as if caught between instinct and consequence. They opened again, like they were reaching for the shape of something—words, maybe, or an apology, or a reason not to—

But nothing came.

Instead, he reached—hesitated—reached again.

Choi flinched, stepping back on reflex. It didn’t matter.

The world halted for a beat.

This time, the Saint didn’t hesitate.

He moved—too fast, too sudden—and this time, there was nothing regal about it. The chair shrieked against stone, harsh and graceless. His robes snapped open like wings caught in wind, unfastened by urgency. Whatever spell had kept him tethered to stillness snapped with a soundless violence.

The silence shattered.

The sharp clink of ornaments slammed against his chest; a hitch in his breath escaped unbidden as he crossed the space between them; a sudden rush of motion left no room for composure.

And then—he was there.

Hands, first.

Gripping Choi’s shoulders, almost hard enough to bruise—thumbs pressed against collarbones, palms trembling with desperation, as if to say don’t leave, not yet. The touch wasn’t violent, but it was raw—graceless, unpracticed, as if he had never begged before and didn’t know how. His fingers quake like he thought Choi might vanish if he didn’t hold fast enough. Like if he didn’t now, he never would.

“Wait,” he breathed—and there was no title left in his voice. No Saint, no salvation. Just that cracking, broken edge of please.

Choi didn’t have time to think.

Because the Saint’s fingers tightened, dragged him forward—and before Choi could speak, or protest, or even breathe, they were colliding with a force that wasn’t violent but could destroy them both. They crashed like magnets forced together, and it was nowhere near reverent—too close, too hot, too real.

Their foreheads pressed together so tightly their lashes tangled in the spaces between; their bodies nearly flush now as warmth bled through the layers, their balance tangled in the tension of touch.

His veil slipped—no, it was shoved; shouldered aside by closeness, by need, by the way the Saint leaned in. It caught on his cheekbone, folded across Choi’s temple like a whisper, gossamer falling as it slipped free entirely—a jeweled pin clattered to the floor with it, scattering gemstones like falling stars.

They fit badly—shoulders misaligned, breath caught between them, noses shy of meeting again and again with each unsteady gasp. The Saint’s jewelry swung and sang between them, delicate and misplaced—gold and silver and bronze brushing Choi’s sternum with little chimes, each a tiny failure to pull away. It swayed between them like a pendulum counting down to some inevitable moment.

The Saint’s arms trembled, like he didn’t trust himself to let go.

His breath was ragged—uneven, wet—and Choi could feel each one hot against his cheek, ghosting down the line of his jaw, catching in the dip beneath his throat. There was a scent on his skin; lilies crushed under the musk of sweat and salt and the grief of being unmade.

Their noses brushed—once, twice, a fraction too far. The distance between them was measured not in inches, but in choices.

Choi didn’t dare move.

He was held like an answer the Saint had never thought he’d get to ask for; like something stolen, or sacred, or doomed. Their hearts rose and fell in uneven rhythm, both locked in some terrible cadence neither of them could stop.

The Saint exhaled again—brokenly this time, as if the truth inside him was too terrible to survive air. His lips parted, and there was a breath between them—a question suspended—wet and open and so near that Choi could nearly feel the ghost of a kiss without ever touching. The space between their mouths was agony; not because it was unbridgeable, but because it wasn’t.

One inch. Less.

The soft pull of gravity; the heat of surrender; the crumbling cliff edge of something that would destroy them both.

And the Saint—he didn’t even pretend to be above it.

His eyes were glassy. His chest shuddered against Choi’s. He leaned in, inch by inch, like prayer turned confession, like salvation chasing sin.

Like this was the only thing he’d ever wanted and the only thing he’d never let himself have.

Like this was ruinous—and he was still choosing it anyway.

The Saint’s forehead leaned harder into his—temples aligned like mirrored stars, as if to fuse thought to thought, fate to fate. His hands slid lower, thumbs grazing the edge of Choi’s ribs, like he was trying to stay tethered to something he knew was slipping away.

“If—” the Saint choked, voice cracking, nearly breaking.

And Choi saw it then—the raw edge of something shattering behind those eyes.

“D̴̡̧̫̘̥̖͚͊̂o̸͖̟͉̬̗̦̞͍̟͕̽̂ͅn̷̘͚̫̦̣̙̰͉͒͐̽’̵̢̜͔͓̮̗̺̺̥̜͐͌̅̀̉̐͐̉̆̒̾t̵̲̒͒͑̅ ̵̨̡̳̭͕͚̥̯̝͔̤͉͔̑̀̊͛̍̈́́̌̈͘̚͜g̷̲͍̮̲̥͙͇̱̟͉͖̤̐̓̇̍͒̓̚͠͠o̵͚̭̣̬̫̚ ̴̧̳̖̬̺̼̫͈̞̺̠̣̩͎̇̑̋́̄̈͠ţ̷̘͔͚̭͖̞̟̟̰̖͊̍ͅo̷̢̭̜̪͇̩̭̖̦̝̺̥͂͑ͅ ̵͇̩͙̠̥͓̜͔̭͉͕͚͌̒ţ̷͈͔̯̘̝̣̹̈́̄h̵̨̻̘̀̐͛̓ḛ̷̺͙͎̦̆͌̇̎̚ ̸̬̳̲̆f̸̛͔̔̏͗́̈̓͒̕͘͝o̷̧̯̦̩̗̟̼̣̫͖̔u̵̧͉̭̭̠͉̭̯͎̯̓r̶̡̯̲͉͚̊̀͐̈̐̈͜ţ̵̢̛̛̦̗̙̌h̶̨̧͇̱̮͙̤̮͇͌̑̔͊͆̇̐̎̈͝͠—”

𝐃𝕀𝔑𝒢. D𝐈𝓝G. 𝘿𝙄𝙉𝙂. 𝐃—𝕀𝔑𝔾. D—I—N—G. D I N G. D  I  N  G. 𝔇𝕀𝓝𝔾. 𝑫𝑰𝑵𝑮. 𝒟𝕀𝒩𝔾. 𝓓-I-N-G. 𝙳𝚒𝙽𝚐. 𝕯𝓲𝓝𝔾. 𝔇𝖎𝔑𝖌.
   D𝐈𝓝G. 𝐃  I  N  G.  𝓓𝓘𝓝𝓖. D𝕀𝔑G. D𝙄𝙉𝙂. 𝔇—𝓘—N—𝒢. 𝕯.𝖨.𝓝.𝖦. 𝔇—𝐈—𝐍—𝐆. 𝘋𝘐𝘕𝘎. 𝙳𝙸𝙽𝙶. 𝐃𝓘𝓝𝐆.
      D...I...N...G.  𝕯𝖨𝖭𝖦. D—Ṅ̴͕͘G.  𝒟𝓘—G. 𝔇̴͕͗—NG.  𝓓̶͑𝓘̶͠𝓝̶͘𝓖̶́. 𝕯͘͟𝖎͝͠𝖓͡𝖌͝.

A sound split the air; delicate, crystalline, sharp as a child’s laughter and twice as cruel.

Bells.

Bells, loud and impossibly near. They rang high and jingled wrong.

Choi flinched. Then, he heard the rest clearly.

A music box: thin and distorted, winding open in some distant hallway—or maybe in his own skull. It warbled something innocent and old, something meant to lull but twisted now.

A melody he wouldn’t remember until it was too late.

The Saint stilled; froze. All that heat, that breath, that trembling nearness—gone in an instant, as though something had ripped it from him.

He pulled back, but not far; his hands stayed where they were, clinging to Choi like an apology, his expression shuttered into something thin and pale and despondent.

“It’s not safe,” he said—and the voice that had broken for Choi now sounded empty. Not cold, not angry, but like someone already mourning the loss of something they hadn’t even dreamed of being able to keep.

He didn’t look at Choi. He looked past him—through him—to something only he could see. Something older than them both, and much, much worse. And in his eyes, for a moment, bloomed a child’s kind of sorrow—bewildered, betrayed, bruised by the potential of what could have been.

“You have to leave,” he affirmed, quieter this time, more to himself than to Choi, as though still trying to convince his own hands to let go.

There was no tenderness in his voice. Only disappointment; a distant kind of devastation. Someone who had dared to hope—and now remembered why he shouldn’t. Like he hadn’t wanted to let this happen. 

Like he had hoped, just once, for a different ending.

His eyes didn’t shine anymore; they dulled in real time as constellations inside collapsed inward, one star at a time.

“I knew you couldn’t,” the Saint said despairingly, barely above a whisper; not scolding, not even sad—just hollow. Just tired. “But I—I wanted—I thought maybe you—”

He swallowed the rest. As if the words would taint the moment if released.

Choi didn’t understand—didn’t know if he could understand—but the ache in his chest bloomed anyway; ugly and hot, blooming behind his ribs like grief.

Wait— he tried to say; his lips parted, his lungs stuttered—but no sound came. He reached forward on instinct, not thought, still caught in the warmth of a body no longer touching his. But his voice existed only in his own head; the word echoing uselessly, again and again, like a name screamed in a dream.

This isn’t over—!

There was a split second—just enough to feel the Saint’s fingers twitch, just enough to see his lips part like he might have changed his mind after all—

—a strange reversal, like breath sucked inward too fast; like a page being turned backward; like a dream crumpling at the edges.

And then:

Choi was at the door. Again. His knuckles suspended mid-motion. Alone.

Just as he had been before. Just as he would be again.

He stood as though untouched, unheld, unruined; but his breath stung and his chest ached and he thought he could feel roots now growing—threading through old scars like memory, blooming lilies in the blackened soil of repurposed tar that used to cling, and it was wrong, it was so wrong, but it was also beautiful, this flowering—this thing the Saint had left behind, intentional or not, blessing or not, memory or not. 

Now there was something sweet decaying beneath his sternum, something soft where there should have been grit, something verdant where there should have been void—and he wanted to tear it out with his hands and also keep it forever.

All the while, that sound kept playing: the crooning, cruel jingle like chain and charm and causality.

He didn’t know for how long he stayed standing there.

His shadow leaned forward, as if it, too, still believed.

But the door stayed closed.

And he was alone.

Again.

Chapter Text

Choi is home. The lights hum low. The walls sit still. He performs his standard checkup like clockwork—methodical, mechanical. Every sign, every symbol, every drop of protective ink inlaid in the corners all come back the same:

He is clear.

The symbols never lie. They’ve never failed him before. Still, he checks again. And again. The verdict doesn’t change—clean, yes; untouched, yes; no trace of anomaly, no infection of mind or blood or spirit; not even a whisper of residual contamination.

And yet—it doesn’t help.

If anything, it makes it worse.

Because if nothing remains, then why does he still feel it? That trace of fingers brushing the edge of his scar like a reader dragging slow fingertips across the worn line of a favorite passage—familiar, beloved, memorized—over time.

Why does the scent of lilies keep seeping into the air just as he’s about to fall asleep—soft, sweet, suffocating? No flowers nearby; no vase on the windowsill; no explanation for it at all. Just the ghost of it; just memory made sensory, sprouting again and again from tar he never thought could give rise to anything living.

He dreams of the Saint. Often. Too often for his own good.

Not always as he was in the Church—veiled and hidden, desperate and unraveling—but as something else.

Someone else.

Once, he dreams of the three of them—Team Hyunmoo—riding high on the thrill of a vanquished Disaster, lungs clear of ash and full of laughter. That breathless, impossible joy that only comes when no one dies. When they all make it out.

Jaekwan is there—bright-eyed, bruised, alive. His grin is crooked, hair stuck to his forehead, and Choi feels that impossible swell of relief again—he’s okay, he’s okay.

And then there’s the Saint.

He's different here. Not veiled in mystique, not cloaked in that slow ruin of self-sabotage. He is rosy-cheeked and radiant with something like pride. Just a teammate; a piece of the whole. He smiles with his whole face, sun-kissed and unburdened.

He then touches Choi’s shoulder and asks sweetly, Did I do well, sunbae? and Choi looks at him—staggered, undone—and thinks, wildly, helplessly: could it have been like this, instead?

He tells no one about the dream. Tries not to wonder if it was ever meant to be real. Whether the scene he’s seen could—should—have been a happy ending.

Each morning, he wakes with his fingers curled tight in the sheets, grief blooming behind his ribs—thick-stemmed things, wet with dew, crowding out his breath. He doesn’t remember them blossoming; only knows it feels as if they’ve always been there, rooted and waiting.

He coughs, but they don’t leave. He swears he can feel soil in his lungs—tar turned terrain for lilies.

Lilies again; always lilies. He smells them sometimes in the steam of his shower; sees them pressed ghost-white in the mirror behind his eyes.

He runs the checkup again—just in case—and watches the symbols confirm, again, what they always do. 

He is clean.

He is clear.

He is not sure he believes them.

Still—

the lilies do not leave.

Choi shouldn’t be doing this.

He knows that there’s no ambiguity to it, no room in protocol for sentiment or softness.

He’s supposed to hand it over the second he steps out of the Church’s reach; he should’ve bagged it, catalogued it, added it to the evidence report with all the other looted artifacts—his mission is over; his cover is gone; there’s no longer any reason to hold onto this except—

Except.

Except it was given to him.

Not left behind. Not misplaced. Given—deliberately, directly—into his hands.

He told me to open it when I was alone, Choi thinks, again, and again, and again, the words turning into something like a chant. And safe, the Saint had said.

So Choi—careful, rational, practiced Choi—seals himself in his apartment with the shades drawn and the lights dimmed. He runs his checks. Once, twice, three times over. The notebook reads clean. Nothing dangerous, nothing new.

And now he’s here, spine bent low over the open page, and the notebook does not attack him. 

It only reveals.

He reads in silence; reads until his eyes blur and his fingers cramp around the spine. The deeper he goes, the more he sees it—clarity sharpened by obsession. 

It’s detailed—too detailed. Meticulously written, diagrammed and annotated and mapped in a way that speaks not only to knowledge but to intention—and that’s what’s unsettling, the way each line feels like it was written for him: how long had the Saint been preparing this?

Had he meant to hand this over from the beginning? 

Had he known—long before Choi had asked, long before he had even been embedded—that someone would come looking? That someone would want answers? 

That someone would be him?

The thought chills him more than it should.

Still—he keeps reading.

Each page is dense, methodical, a dismantling of dogma; steps and notes and strategies for dealing with the Church’s Disasters with eerie precision; knowledge of their rhythms, their strengths, their weaknesses. There are circled symbols and warnings and long lost rituals and urgent marginalia that all scream of someone who had lived inside a structure long enough to know where it splintered.

Choi flips another page. Then another.

And then he stops.

This one—

It’s not about the Church at all.

It’s a sketch of a map, not fully formed. Next to it, a line of writing—slanted slightly, hurried, mid-thought. A correction, a counterpoint, a self-interruption. 

He reads it once, then twice, then again.

His eyes catch on the stroke of a letter—how it curves too widely, the way someone might write when their wrist is aching or the hour is too late. A lapse in style. And suddenly he’s studying the Saint’s handwriting like it’s a code to be cracked; like it holds more than what it says. 

It becomes its own kind of worship. 

The Saint’s handwriting is beautiful. Not in any traditional sense—it’s inconsistent, if anything; some pages are written with patience, each letter precise and clear—others are messy, hastened, jagged at the ends as though he couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with what needed to be said. 

Choi lingers on those pages longest.

He traces them with the back of his knuckle, careful not to smudge. Wonders where the Saint was when he wrote them—what hour, what starlight, what heartbeat. Wonders if he wrote the neater parts during the day, seated and sure of himself, and the frantic ones in hiding, breathless, crouched in shadow with trembling fingers and a deadline. Wonders if he was alone when he wrote these things—or if someone watched him; if someone else would have seen the act of writing as an act of apostasy.

Choi flips forward. Finds a page where the writing is erratic, hurried; sentences left dangling, like the Saint had been interrupted mid-thought. Choi stares, heart hammering. Was it fear? Were you hiding this? Did you think someone would find it before me?

He stares too long at these irregularities; the shift in slant, the variance in pressure. Some strokes press deep into the paper, carving valleys that catch the pad of his finger when he glides it across the page. Others float so faintly they seem like they were barely allowed. 

He wonders, dizzy—did the Saint pause after every sentence? Did he reread it aloud? Did he trace his own notes the way he once traced Choi’s scar?

Reader, Choi thinks of himself one day, sudden and aching and alone. 

Their roles have been reversed.

Against his better judgment, Choi, compulsive as ever, begins annotating in kind.

He can’t help it, though. He’s always done this—always adds notes in the margins, always tracks his thoughts through ink—but this time it feels more like dialogue than documentation; like he’s responding to something intimate, something unfinished. His pen strokes chase the Saint’s across the page like fingerprints over scars.

He writes his own thoughts beside the Saint’s in tiny script, traces letters beside letters, never overwriting, never disrespecting, but shadowing the thoughts like a second voice, like a conversation, like the brushing of shoulders in a space too narrow to ignore. Thought meeting thought. Ink skimming ink. 

It should feel mad—this slow, devotional conversation with a man he’d known so briefly—but Choi does it anyway, and does it every day.

Some entries, Choi scribbles over with unrelated notes—observations, names, reminders—doodles, too, of men and monsters and myths.

He wonders, bitterly, if this is all they have now—this slow, delicate communion through words neither of them will ever get to hear spoken aloud.

He shouldn’t be doing this. It isn’t even permitted. It isn’t even remotely sane.

But he can’t stop. 

He reads and rereads, not for understanding, but for presence—where were you when you wrote this? he wants to ask. What were you feeling? What did you think I would feel? 

Some pages are stained. One in particular has a smear near the margin, a slight warping of the paper where liquid touches it—clear, salt-rimmed, the shape of something spilled in sorrow.

Choi tells himself it could be water. It could be anything. It could be nothing. But the idea takes root: did you cry while writing this?

He doesn’t even notice when he starts brushing his fingers along the indentations, not reading anymore but feeling each word; as if by learning the texture of the pen’s path, he could learn more of the man who wrote it. As if the rhythm of the Saint’s hand could decode the rhythm of his mind, his nerves, his heart.

Sometimes, he writes back. Not in a clear voice, not really.

Things like:

Five new agents. Twelve casualties. Recruitment is behind again.

Another note:

They’re planning on dropping the examination standards.

Jaekwan would have hated that.

Little things:

I need to go grocery shopping.

Sometimes, he rants, about how the newbies are getting younger and greener and dying quicker and how the intake isn’t keeping pace with the loss rate anymore.

Other times, he writes about his dreams: the Saint seated in a train car, him waving at Choi with arms he shouldn’t have—and he writes, absently, Jaekwan would’ve liked you, as if this Saint, the one of dreams, were someone different altogether; someone both more and less real.

He writes as if the Saint might someday write back.

Of course, he never answers.

Still, Choi flips the pages over every night like maybe—just maybe—some new ink will have bled underneath his.

He presses his palm flat over one of the later entries, the one where the handwriting steadies again, calms as though the Saint has made peace with what he’s giving up. The page is warm beneath his hand—only in imagination, of course, but the illusion holds.

Choi shuts his eyes.

There are too many things he hadn’t known. The notebook doesn’t answer them all. It only gives him more.

But still, he reads it. Choi cannot stop tracing every line of the Saint’s hand, again and again, like it might open, someday, into a door.

Did you know? he wants to write, as if he would receive a response. You must’ve known.

He still doesn’t know. The book doesn’t answer the real questions. It doesn’t tell him whether the Saint had written these pages in joy or despair; whether he intends to idle; whether he had ever meant to leave himself within Choi or had only ever meant to send him away.

It doesn’t tell him if it had been a kindness—or a farewell.

He holds the notebook like something illicit and wonders if the Saint had ever touched it the same way; wonders if the pages remember if he had. Wonders what it means that he still dreams of the Saint and whether he does the same in turn of Choi. 

And so—he still doesn’t hand it over. Not the original. 

“Good work,” one of the higher-ups says, too late and too easily; it costs them nothing. Like it means anything now.

Choi doesn’t bother to look up; he doesn’t need to see their faces to know which one it came from. They had doubted him earlier—narrowed their eyes, shifted their weight, spoken in clipped tones and glances edged with unease.

Loose cannon, someone had muttered, before. Liability. 

There’s no smoke without fire, another of them had whispered. Everyone else had agreed. 

They hadn’t wanted him here. Or there. Not when he first brought the conspiracy forward. 

Too volatile, too obsessed, too close to the subject; they had called him compromised, not committed. 

Back then, the whole room had gone still around him like they were waiting for him to combust. No one had wanted to stand too close to be caught in the blast radius. Even now, no one can quite meet his gaze.

Now, though, he’s difficult to ignore. 

The Saint’s notebook.
The incident thread unraveled.
The dead mapped and mourned.

For all his work, they now hand him empty praise as if they always believed in him.

Choi wants to laugh. Wants to scoff right in front at their polished faces and spotless suits. But he only shifts his weight; lifts his shoulder in a half-shrug, as if to suggest cockily, it wasn’t much, but thanks.

Regardless, he is all too aware it doesn’t matter. Not to them. Not to people who will quote the intelligence but never touch the source. They keep their distance even in flattery.

Whatever.

Choi doesn’t care. He tells himself that, anyway. He has no need for credit. He never has. Not when lives hang in the balance and kids younger than him come home zipped in plastic, and new agents are now cycled through too fast to memorize their names. 

As long as Disasters are defused, streets made safer, then—fine. 

Let them clap each other on the back. Let them be undecided whether he’s a tool or a threat. Let them offer commendation only when the dust settles.

And yet—

Recognized, the word flickers at the edge of his mind like a spark against a match. He exhales sharply through his nose to cast it out, but the concept is awfully persistent.

It lingers, this idea—that he might matter more than the others in the room, despite the way they try so hard to look past him.

It thrums deep inside him; a low, slow burn. 

Lee Kangheon breathes again.

Within the sleek, shallow sheen of Choi’s phone screen—within the borders of an old photo taken beneath false palms and a plastic sky, false sun forever rising behind soft clouds someone else filtered like something from a discount postcard kiosk.

Lee Kangheon lives once more. 

One of Choi’s lost lives, carefully crafted and long discarded, plucked from limbo and brought back to haunt.

From there, it doesn’t take long. A few careful searches, some social engineering, and it all unfolds. 

Baek Saheon: top rookie of Daydream Inc. Everyone seems to speak his name.

And then—there it is.

A picture. One Choi is not prepared for. A click, a blink, a breath—and everything stutters.

Because he knows that face.

Not from reports. Not from research. From before.

From that quiet day on the mountain path, the one soaked in sick hope and sunny yearning, when he had waited too patiently for Jaekwan to return. From the moment he heard someone whistling—off-key, offbeat, off in the worst way. 

A young man, blinking against the sunlight, descending down all ease and laughter and then sudden, startled guilt.

Choi should’ve followed.

His instincts had prickled—uneasy, suspicious—beneath his skin. 

He had debated. He had watched. He had wondered. 

But in the end, he had let him go.

He had stayed. Because he wanted to see Jaekwan. Because he had taken for granted his junior would appear unmarred and unblemished and unharmed. Because hope was cruel and soft and slow and Choi had let the loss of it eat him alive.

And he had let Baek Saheon go.

He had watched him walk away, that gentle smile, that almost-boyish ease, and for one damning instant he had thought: he’s harmless.

Now he thinks: how many lives had that veneer unmade?

If he were here, Jaekwan would’ve told him not to seek revenge.

Jaekwan wouldn’t want him to. He would’ve warned against it, hand firm on his shoulder, voice firm with that unbearable steadiness that Choi had embarrassingly never quite matched as his senior. 

But Jaekwan isn’t here. Jaekwan is gone. 

Choi is already failing him in a thousand, quiet ways, breaking his promises, already slipping—drinking again, ignoring all the warnings, always writing into the Saint’s notebook when he had sworn he wouldn’t, pen trembling in his grip as he scrawls nonsense along the margins, fragments, accusations, questions the Saint will never see: Is this true? Is this real? Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know what I've I'll do?

It makes no difference.

The Saint’s voice returns to him anyway, soft and sweet and sealed like an echo in a deep, dry well in a village forlorn. 

Choi hears his voice when he thinks of Jaekwan. It is not a blessing.

Baek Saheon was recognized. Ryu Jaekwan was not.

He is failing him. Over and over. He couldn’t save him; couldn’t even honor him; can’t even stop himself from craving something jagged and final and smoke and satisfaction. He knows it’s wrong. He knows. But—

—he can’t help it, because someone has to pay, because someone has to bleed, because if no one remembers Jaekwan then Choi will make them, because what is justice if not balance, what is fate if not cruel, and what is Choi if not the hand that must balance the scales, if not the man who sees and acts and corrects, and oh, he’ll correct it alright, he’ll make it right so even if it kills him, because he is Agent Choi and every lie he has lived and every name he has said and every mask he has worn all comes down to him as this man who is made for this, isn't he, this is what he does, what he was meant to do, he is made to do, he has to do, he will do. 

An eye for an eye.

A fate for a fate.

Choi—clever, cunning, careful, cruel when he needs to be—will find a way.

Chapter Text

The summons comes in the early hours; not via comms, but a slip of paper tucked into his jacket pocket unseen, ink already curling from the heat of him. Agent Sha. ASAP. Office 11C. 

No title. No reason. Just that. Strange, if not foreboding. 

Choi turns it over once, as if there might be a trick underneath, then pockets it with fingers still shaking with withdrawal.

The hallway hums as he walks down. He knocks once, sharp, and enters without waiting.

“Agent Choi,” Agent Sha says, not looking up. “Sit.”

He does.

Agent Sha’s voice was always softer than expected; that was the disarming part. You never quite knew where she stood—except above you. Her presence is a quiet, inexorable thing, like tides or taxes. Take your pick. Whichever one you fear more.

Of all the Bureau’s upper echelons, she’s one of the few he doesn’t detest. Talented, well-tempered, with a past so shrouded even rumors had given up reconstructing it. She hadn’t ruled out his infiltration of the Church; had instead watched him with cool precision instead of reflexive doubt. 

For that, he grants her something close to respect.

“You did well,” she says. “The Saint—Kim Soleum. The Church of the Luminous Unknown. The notes were thorough.”

He shrugs, exhausted. “I didn’t die.”

Agent Sha gives no indication of amusement. “That’s more than I expected, given the file.” 

Her gaze flicks over him. “You did what others couldn't. That matters.”

Choi doesn’t respond. His fingers ache from holding pens too long. His eyes burn from light. He can’t remember when he last slept. 

Agent Sha slides a dossier across the desk.

“I know Team Hyunmoo is, at present, only you.” She says this without sympathy. “But we’re assigning you a new recruit.”

His mouth twists. “Why?”

“Oversee their training,” she continues, not bothering to answer. “This will be good for you.”

That stops him. Good for you. Like a prescription. He’s not someone’s pet project to be saved. He’s sick of death and others and responsibility.

He huffs a laugh, dry and sharp and ugly. “I don’t believe I’m capable of another subordinate,” he says, voice brittle. The weight behind it isn’t. “Not right now.”

Agent Sha watches him. Her pause is weighted; knowing her, it was calculated. 

“This new agent has unique circumstances,” she says at last. “Not unheard of. They’re here through referral. You’ve seen stranger. But it’s better for all of us if you keep an eye on them. You understand how these things can slip through cracks.”

Choi does. That’s the problem. Death slips through too often. Every recruit a risk. Every recruit a responsibility. Every mission another stack of corpses with his name left off the margin as survivor. 

How many times can a team be resurrected before it becomes a mockery of the original?

He stares at her; then away. 

“Fine,” he says, but only after a moment too long. “But I’m not a babysitter.”

He owes her, anyway. She had chosen to believe him, back when belief came at cost. Had shelved his disciplinary requests without fanfare. Hadn’t called him broken; not out loud, at least.

“Noted,” Agent Sha replies, smooth as ever. “It’s likely better if you aren’t.”

He leans back, catches sight of her desk. A lacquered tube sits near the penholder—deep blue, metallic, with a dragon carved along the base.

“I didn’t think that was your shade,” he scoffs, and hates it the second it leaves his mouth. It’s petty. Weak. Especially for him. 

But Agent Sha merely smirks, unbothered. “Bold of you to assume it’s mine.” Her thumb drags across the dragon’s scales—slow, deliberate. 

“Pretty, though. Don’t you think?”

And for a moment—he feels something cold ghost across the old scar on his neck like phantom fingers or mirrored touch. 

He shudders. Tries not to let it show.

From the look Agent Sha gives him, she notices anyway.

The other agents whisper, as they always do. Poor rookie, they say. Poor thing. Assigned to Team Hyunmoo, of all places. 

The words taste like pity, like preemptive mourning. And no one says it out loud, but they all think it: Team Hyunmoo is cursed. 

A rotation of Disaster and death. There’s only one active name still left, and it’s Choi’s. The rest are inked in red or suspended in silence—Elder remains, dormant and dreaming in a hospital bed; the others, dust or memory.

He brings the new recruit anyway.

They sit beside the bed in Blue Hope Hospital. The new agent is quiet, respectful, eyes lowered.  Choi doesn’t explain why this matters—only watches as they fold their hands and bow their head, and turns his head away from the slight shift of air when Elder’s spirit stirs to meet them.

The Elder approves. The rookie seems steadier after.

Later, when they have gone—

“I like them,” Elder starts. Her voice is low and fond.

"…Elder," he addresses respectfully. 

“Yes, little one?”

"Am I still on the right path?"

“You are always trying to be.”

He bows his head in frustration. “What does trying matter, if people keep dying anyway?”

“Because trying is what keeps you from becoming something worse.”

Choi thinks of Baek Saheon’s photo still pinned in his apartment, red circled around like condemnation. He thinks of the new recruit and how harsh he has been and how they are too sharp-eyed and too bright and too young and how scarred they already are.

He is tired—especially after those nights, imagining them turning into ash. He is tired of being the one left to sweep it up and bear the burden of recollection.

He closes his eyes. How much worse is there for him to become?

“I’m tired,” he says, finally, weary. “You think this one will last? I don’t want to raise another junior just to—”

“You fear the end so deeply, you refuse the beginning. Don’t make a prophecy come true just because you expected it to.”

The Elder’s hand rests on his, worn and gentle. Her voice softens.

“What happened to the little Choi who trailed after me, calling me sunbae so eagerly? So sweet, so annoying. So desperate for someone to call him sunbae in return.”

He doesn’t answer. The words twist in his mouth.

That Choi is dead, he thinks—but doesn’t speak it. He doesn’t need to. She knows. Of course she knows.

Neither of them need to speak his name.

“You did well. You are doing well. You are always trying to make the world better. That counts.”

He nods, once. It’s for the sake of politeness. Inside, he mourns something nameless.

He thinks—selfishly—of that impossible dream; Team Hyunmoo whole. Jaekwan, the Saint, and himself. No death, no disappearances. Just laughter. Just purpose. 

Just home.

(In that world, he likes to think that no one leaves.)

Somewhere, bells jingle faintly in his memory. Choi doesn’t remember their sound, only the manner in which they shake his sense and senses.

DING!

The doors of Looky Mart slide open with their usual cheerful chime. It looks like a store. It’s supposed to be a store.

But so many lives have been lost here.

They don’t come back out. The Bureau logs list them for now “Missing n Action,” but the subtext reads abandoned. Only a quarter of the rescue targets who ever call for help inside this place weren’t already dead by the time anyone got in. 

Agent Choi steps in anyway. He has been here before. Too many times. First for rescues. Then for retrievals. Now, for—

He wasn’t even sure, anymore.

(Did you know all along what I would—?)

His rescue targets are all dead. He has decided to challenge this place. He needs to know. He needs to understand.

He shouldn’t be here.

He knows that.

But he isn’t known for obedience. Not for a long time.

He hadn’t lived for so long by playing by the rules. 

The Bureau leaflet had one rule it emphasized above all: Do not go to the fourth floor.

And yet—

He clicks his recorder on.

[REC begins.]

“So. I’m on the third floor,” Choi mutters. His voice is low so it avoids echoing. “and I’ve just found a door leading to the fourth floor. 

A beat.

“I’m only going to open it a little. I’m not crazy, okay? But we can’t just leave that place alone, right? Isn’t it recorded that nearly a hundred people have gone missing after going upstairs?” 

Another.

“Look, I know this probably sounds like a death wish. It’s not. I’m just tired of not knowing. I keep thinking about Jaekwan. I used to tell him that we keep losing people because we’re too scared to go against the book.”

A short, bitter laugh.

“Am I wrong? Between the two of us, who's here and who’s g-gone?”

His voice cracks. 

“I don’t know what the Bureau has become. I don’t know what I’ve become, either. Maybe Elder was wrong. Maybe trying doesn’t keep me from becoming something worse. But someone has to look. Someone has to know. And if I go missing, maybe that’s proof. Maybe more lives get saved. Who knows?”

A pause. 

“If I die—Agent Sha, I know you’ll listen to this—you can give all my shit to the Bureau. Maybe you’ll throw most of it away, and I guess that’s fine. My notes are in the second drawer under the false bottom. Burn them. Seriously.” 

A cough.

“There’s a photograph in my drawer of Team Hyunmoo. The original. And a letter. And a check I never mailed to Elder’s granddaughter. I don’t think she needs it, but, I don’t know, the more the merrier, right? Not like I’ve got anyone else to leave it to.” 

A sigh.

“Fuck—Coming of Age Day’s coming up, isn’t it? Kinda wanted to have a drink with her. Just once.”

A scoff.

“God, I really hope she doesn’t come work here too. ”

A deep breath. Another. Then—

“Tell the rookie I’m sorry. I know I was a shit mentor. I kept pushing them into the deep end and pretending it was training. It wasn’t. I just—I didn’t want to get attached.”

Silence.

“I shouldn't have looked at them like a countdown instead of a person. I didn’t mean to—I just didn’t want—I guess I thought if I held them at arm’s length, it wouldn’t hurt when–if…”

He trailed off.

“…Shit. It still hurts.”

His breath catches. 

“If you’re hearing this, I guess I didn’t make it. Or maybe I did, and I’m different now. I don’t know which one is worse.”

“Okay. I’m going to open it.”

The door creaks open with no resistance. Choi steps through before his nerves could talk him out of it, boots scraping against the threshold.

“All right,” he cheers insincerely, breath shallow. “I’m opening the door to the fourth floor now. And… it’s open. Ta-da!”

The door gives with a hiss and a reluctant groan.  Footsteps echo, one-two-three in; the door slams behind him harder than he means it to.

He winces.

“Looks normal enough,” he says, though the words get stuck in his throat. “Just some old emergency exit… there’s a staircase… nothing unusual. The exit door’s still there.” Intact. Undisturbed.

He waits. Five seconds. Then ten. 

Nothing stirs.

The silence has a weight to it, like pressure deep underwater. The longer he stands here, the more he feels it press against his eardrums.

He almost relaxes. He moves anyway. 

“Great,” Choi sighs. “I’m heading up now.”

The stairwell feels longer than it should have been; he climbs past where three flights should’ve ended, counted fourteen turns, but it still doesn’t end, Just one foot after another. And another. And another.

He stops.

“Whew,” Choi says, panting. “Made it. Fourth floor door. Looks like nothing special on the outside. It’s just a metal door.”

It’s feigned. He’s not sure how much he believes it.

His hand closes over the handle. It’s cold, but not unnaturally so.

“…All right, I’m opening it now.”

He braced one hand against the wall, pressed the other against the bar, and pushed.

D̴I̶N̷G̸.

The sound hits him like a slap: a cheerful, tinny noise piped in from a ceiling speaker that isn’t there. Looky Mart 's corporate theme, rendered in bright xylophones and mocking whistles; a looped commercial lullaby.

He freezes.

The jingle begins.

Dɪɴɢ. Not—ii—ng… D— ing— gg— D— i— n—

His head reels. Oh, he thinks, a crack forming at the base of his skull, I know this—had always known it— but never like this .

He’s heard it before—not just in passing—but there. In that space with the Saint where he had been warned away. 

The jingle had played—

The sound slots into place like it had been waiting, a shape that matches the hollow inside him. His mind buckles under it.

—he simply hadn’t remembered until now.

DInG—DiNG–d–ii–d–di-iNN–gG!

Something breaks open inside him. The melody sharpens; it mutates. Notes go missing. Chords wobble, detune, reassemble themselves.

“…Huh?” he says, but it’s a whisper now.

The jingle grows louder.

DING–ding. DING. ding. dingdingDINGDINGDING.

The floor shifts under him. No, the world does. A cacophony begins—not music, not language—just sound. Roaring, but not like an animal; like pressure, like a scream that has no throat to issue it; thunderclap, backwards; the howl of wind spiraling into a void; a scream stitched together from hundreds of begging mouths, layered so deep the sobs turned to texture; voices, not crying out, but crying inward; the sound of balloons rubbing, growing tighter, tighter—

Then—

P

O

P.

He screams. 

Not in fear. Not in despair.

In pain—unlike anything he’d felt before; not like frost, not like the cold clean crack of bone, not like grief or anger or guilt; but a pure, primal, primitive agony, the kind that does not come with meaning. His body seizes; back arches violently; his knees buckle and he falls—no, not falls— swells. His fingers curl not from choice but pressure—something inside pushing outside.

“No—stop, stop,” he begs. “Stop—please— ”

The wind is inside him now. Filling him. Inflating him. Not metaphor but reality.

Each breath came with a squeak; his skin stretches; his chest swells; fingers puff; he could feel it, rubbery and taut, stomach distending along overinflating lungs. His lips puff into a useless O; no scream can escape. His eyes bulge, vision strobing red.

He can hear the hiss of air rushing into him—a balloon being filled from the inside, one cell at a time. Every nerve screams. It is not like cold. It is not like death. It is not like anything he has known.

It is pain.

Raw, shapeless, kaleidoscopic agony.

His voice is a squeak, bursting and high-pitched: “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop—!”

It only adds to the racket. The din of ding-dinging won't stop.

ding—DING—dingding— DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING—

He claws at his own chest; tries to pop himself; tries to scream but it comes out as squeal through a slit in rubber. There is the sound of balloons rubbing, of one finally bursting—maybe his eye. Maybe his tongue.

The jingle keeps on looping.

A child’s voice chants the tune now, slow and sweet: “Welcome… to… LoOooky Marrrt…”

He thinks of the Saint—suddenly, irrationally—and the way he has heard this song before. The words distorted finally understood: Don’t go to the fourth—  

—and Choi wonders deliriously if this is all that recognition amounts to. 

The sounds swell again—unmaking him.

His spine creaks. His skin glistens. He can feel air surging into him from no opening at all; it floods every place that used to be warm. Muscles balloon, then split, then reknit with plastic.

“I—I’m not—I don’t—please—I'm not a toy—”

He isn’t even speaking anymore. His throat whistles.

DING.

dingDINGDINGDINGDING—

Somewhere beneath the whine of his expanding skin, he hears them—the lost. Whispering. Begging. Laughing.

Rain inside his skull. Static beneath his skin. He is unrecognizable.

And still—there is the jingle.

And still—there is the door, now open.

And still—

D   I   N   G.

“Welcome to Looky Mart!” 

[REC ends.]

Chapter Text

Agent Choi’s voice had burst out from the recorder, a little too loud, a little too bright; that same fake chipper tone he had always used when he wanted to successfully get on someone’s nerves. 

The tape had clicked after—then nothing.

The rookie sits stiffly, staring. They don’t blink or breathe; still enough to hear the hiss of the old recorder between tracks.

Their hands lie flat on the table, palms sweating.

Across from them, Agent Sha sighs; a long-suffering exhale that could be irritation or grief or some morbid combination of both. She pinches the bridge of her nose and mutters something too low to them to hear.

Then—

Thud. A box, dropped in front of them.

“What is this?” the last active member of Team Hyunmoo asks, voice rising in pitch. They hate how small it sounds. They’re still catching up—still reeling from the idea that Agent Choi is gone.

Their team lead; however briefly he had held the title.

Agent Sha’s voice comes clipped.

“Everything Agent Choi left to you,” she says flatly, tired. “Or rather—the Disaster Management Bureau. But since most of his financials were forwarded to the family of his former team lead, we figured that the rest of his non-Bureau affiliated materials could go to you.”

The other Agent stares.

They swallow. “I—I didn’t know he left anything.”

“Technically, he didn’t,” Agent Sha mutters, rubbing her temple now. “His only will is that recording. Careless. We had to listen to it ten times to confirm.”

Their breath trembles. They reach for the box. Touch only the edge. The cardboard is soft with wear.

Inclusion isn’t something they had expected here. 

Agent Choi had been aggravating—always storming in with snark and sneers and smug smiles and pushing them past their limits—but he had always meant well. Far more preferable than their other coworkers; past and present.

They don’t know what to say. They weren’t all that close.

They were just… the new rookie of Team Hyunmoo.

Now, being in someone’s will is—well. It’s strange. It feels impossible. They’ve never even thought about the logistics of death that way.

And Agent Choi… he had always laughed through everything. They had never thought there’d be a day he wouldn’t.

Their throat hurts.

Agent Sha leans back in her chair with another sigh; her expression softens, fractionally at their distress. “You don’t have to open it now.”

“Okay,” they whisper, hands folded on the table. The recorder is still. The weight of the tape—not the voice, but what it means—hangs in the air like static.

“Okay. I’ll take it.”

Agent Sha says nothing. Just pushes her chair back, turns away, and leaves them to it.

The rookie peels back the tape with surgical precision—cautious, as if the thing might contain something volatile, or fragile, or worse, personal.

They reach in with one hand—the prosthetic hangs at their side, impassive—and pull the first item free.

“Huh,” they murmur. The first item tucked carefully between folders isn’t a medal or souvenir or keepsake; it’s a photograph.

Glossy. Printed. Circled—in red.

Their breath catches.

Baek Saheon stares back at them.

Not smiling, not posing—just standing in front of some unremarkable building, his gaze slightly off-center, as if someone calls his name the second the shutter clicks. The background is washed out by overexposure; only he remains sharp.

He looks… almost normal.

They nearly drop it.

For one long, seizing second, they think it might be a mistake—wrong box, wrong photo. But they fumble quickly, clumsily, through the layers of paper beneath it and find: notes, files, clippings. Diagrams. Notes with red arrows connecting words like Jisan and known strengths and probable weaknesses. Dozens of them, labeled meticulously.

The mask. The goat. The devil. The epicenter of paper and tape and ink.

Their stomach twists.

Baek Saheon. He who had callously thrown them to the automatons.

An eye. An ear. An arm. All gone.

And still, they had managed to live and walk away. Had left Daydream and shook hands with both Director Cheong and Agent Sha over a contract that had stripped them of even the right to regret it.

The Bureau doesn’t trust them with everything. They know that. This isn’t all of it. This is the box they give to someone they don’t quite believe in.

But even that was more than they had ever received from Daydream Inc.

Here, their coworkers never ignore their screams. The Baekho Team is merciless, yes; overloaded, yes—but there is something like honor beneath it.

Here, pain is passion, not demand.

And yet—

They turn over the photo. Agent Choi’s scrawl on the back, nearly illegible. Just three words: Horizon Mountain Lodge.

The wind leaves them.

More papers now. Sketches of building layouts. Schedules. Internal Daydream protocols—sloppy copies of real things they recognize, all the way down to the shitty formatting. A plan. A complete plan. Step by step, wall by wall. Entrances. Disguises. Risks.

This isn’t closure. This is a call to arms.

How long had Agent Choi been planning this? How long had he been contemplating this?

Their hands tremble as they reach deeper. More pages, more notes. Diagrams that fold out like origami. Timelines—badly made, scribbled-through, but filled with names.

Baek Saheon’s, mostly.

They pause.

Ryu Jaekwan. A name they only know by succession—former Team Hyunmoo, now gone. One of the dead. 

Once, the Elder had said, back in that room, with a sigh too heavy to be anything but apprehension, I hope he won’t lose you like he did Jaekwan.

And Agent Choi—how many times had he started, only to stop? Jaekwan would’ve known… or Back when Jaekwan— and then silence, like something inside him had bitten through the tongue of memory.

Both of them had loved him. And had lost him—to Baek Saheon. 

Somewhere beneath their sternum, something moves. Not grief, not fear—something older. Hotter. Like the thing inside them that had been born when Baek Saheon had pushed them and left them for dead with a shove that meant, You understand, don’t you? It has to be someone.

They stare at the notes. At the mess of red ink winding through them like veins. Their fingertips press too hard to the page, smear a marker line that bleeds across their thumb.

It looks like blood. It looks earned.

Yes.

It has to be someone.

Why not him?

Agent Choi had been many things—loud, irritating, carelessly kind—but he had followed Baek Saheon to the end and left her a map through it. 

Whether as revenge or redemption or a legacy, they don’t know.

Agent Choi had circled his name like a curse. Agent Bronze’s legacy clings to the pages like a grudge. Their own missing pieces ache with a score to settle for the sin of the devil that had scathed the three of them.

And now it’s just them, the last active member of Team Hyunmoo.

This isn't a mantle—they didn’t choose to wear it—but it’s an heirloom all the same; the terrible weight of being the last one left to carry what the dead could not put down with fingers smudged red like prophecy.

Now, they have a plan.

Now, they have not just reason, but reasons.

And their hands are already stained.

The Goral is a lamb who shall slaughter.