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There was something wrong with Kim Soleum.
These were the words Saheon couldn’t help but think as the three of them, Goat included, rounded another corridor. It had been a few minutes since they left the destroyed laboratory.
Saheon silently watched the one-sided conversation happening in front of him.
“Oh… that’s interesting. I didn’t know Kalasan Sodas were produced on Level 2 too,” Kim Soleum commented. “So you’re saying one of the pipes sprayed you with the melon-flavored ones?”
The goat entity nodded.
“Then your body was soaked in it? Long enough for you to retain its effects until it was vaporized by some of the substances in the other room?”
It nodded again.
“Huh. Then you should consider finding pipes that contain the durian variant too. Did you know that it’s known to increase your speed?”
Why the fuck would you tell it that?
Regardless of whether it was friendly or not, it was still a monster spawned by a Darkness. Saheon trusted it as much as he trusted this place—which was to say, not at all. If Kim Soleum was in his right mind, he wouldn’t trust it so much either.
If Kim Soleum, Daydream’s most talented rookie, was in his right mind, he wouldn’t be suggesting a plan similar to one that already failed.
Saheon brought a hand up to touch the outer rim of his left eye. The one he hadn’t hidden ever since he lifted his eyepatch back in the generator room. Not that it seemed to bother Kim Soleum at all right now, seeing Saheon with both his eyes open, in a situation that he deemed safe.
Saheon lifted his eyepatch back in the generator room when he felt something shift in the air—like there was suddenly an extra person with them in the room. The feeling was especially noticeable in the small, enclosed space. When he did, he saw the unmistakable outline of the goat-headed entity, complete with the green halo around it, standing at the opposite doorway.
As he was about to warn Kim Soleum, Saheon’s words caught in his throat. Because the area around Kim Soleum, who was inspecting something on the machine’s other side at the time, was a blinding yellow.
Before he even realized what he was doing, his hand went into his wallet to search for his glove.
“Baek Saheon?”
The guy who might not be Kim Soleum called for his attention. The words made the goat-headed entity behind him step forward.
“Are you deaf?” He continued, unaware. “I asked if-”
Before he could even think, Saheon yelled at him to move. Kim Soleum dodged the hoof and dragged Saheon, who was still reeling from what he saw, out of the room.
Then, the generator exploded behind them.
A laugh bubbled out of Kim Soleum’s throat.
Before Saheon could even consider running in another direction, Kim Soleum grabbed his arm and led him back the way they came from. Through an assembly factory. Into a chemical lab. Down multiple corridors, he oddly remembered the path to. At first, Saheon thought he was being led toward an unsafe location, but they eventually did end up back in the laboratory that contained a pulsing black mass.
Then, Kim Soleum started spouting some bullshit with a disappointed face. After that, Saheon wanted to tie both him and the fucking goat down with his rope.
He tried not to think about the events that followed.
But even with that holy-looking halo hovering so close to his body that Saheon felt his stomach turn, he didn’t think the concern Kim Soleum showed at the time was fake.
He could have left him behind to die, but he didn’t. Just like when he had pulled Saheon into the vent. And yet Kim Soleum’s halo at the time had been the deep red Saheon was used to seeing on him. And after years of living with this eye, red was no longer a color Saheon was afraid to see.
Saheon’s left eye graded danger levels based on something like a heat scale. No halo meant that whatever or whoever it was posed no danger. Blue, the color where flames burned at their hottest, meant that Saheon should start running away from it. It was a color he only saw within Darknesses that were B-Grade and above.
Other colors usually meant something more conditional, such as “dangerous but not by itself” or “dangerous but only when provoked by an external force.” Saheon had always understood those colors through the same heat scale, even when they weren’t directly related to fire. After all, fire could be mixed with very specific chemicals to produce unusual colors.
As an individual with a color directly related to fire, Kim Soleum was dangerous no matter who, where, or what the circumstances were. But the red he carried was the color of a fire at its weakest. In other words, the eye deemed him dangerous but not overtly so… or that he had the capacity to be dangerous. It was why Saheon had desperately tried to stay on his good side back then. Red was something he associated with E-Grade Darknesses or some of the items he owned.
But right now, in this instance, his eye was saying Kim Soleum was an active threat—bright yellow, where fire burned at its brightest.
And this should be Kim Soleum, right? After all, he and Saheon never went their separate ways, even when they were running in the dark. He even apologized. Saheon didn’t think the Supervisor Roe Deer he knew was capable of that, but that agent was. Maybe.
So, something must have happened to Kim Soleum after they exited the office they had rested in and before they entered the generator room.
“Baek Saheon, are you listening?”
His thoughts were interrupted by Kim Soleum, who briefly turned his head to look at Saheon.
“Yeah, yeah,” Saheon replied. Of course he was listening. He needed to be extra aware of the conversations you two dangerous individuals were having. “We go in running, barricade the door like we’re hiding, then this guy,” he gestured toward the eight-foot entity in front of them, the bastard whose presence was the only thing keeping Saheon from grabbing Kim Soleum by the sweater and shaking him for answers, “crashes through it and wrecks the place without destroying any of the CCTVs.”
Not that it matters. Saheon wanted to say. This was another thing a Kim Soleum in his right mind would have been bothered with.
The lack of people on this floor.
“Isn’t it because they’re watching from somewhere safe?” Kim Soleum asked when he brought it up earlier. “We discussed this—we need to call them down here.”
Saheon agreed with Kim Soleum’s earlier assessment—there were researchers in this place. They had a manual. Technology as advanced as theirs could have led them to create something like a permanent entrance to the place. It could be on this floor.
But where were they? Why were all the doors to supposedly important facilities unlocked?
And another thing: where were the things that supposedly should have appeared during the blackout?
Saheon even entertained the thought that Kim Soleum had gotten this one wrong. But Saheon had seen this forum civilians supposedly as like a crowdsourced manual. He didn’t think thousands of entries could all be faked. And even if the website itself was fake, wasn’t it natural for all sorts of oddities to happen when it was dark in a Darkness?
This was what Saheon’s instincts, which kept him alive until he was promoted to section chief, told him.
He would think about all this until he and Kim Soleum ran into the first laboratory they were in. By then, he would regret not shoving the last bottle of Almond Water he had down Kim Soleum’s throat when he had the chance.