Fourteen Years Back

"What?"

"......What's wrong with you. Did you drink yourself under last night?"

Thump. Thump. Something kicked me, and I barely dragged my eyes open through a scowl. Desperately.

"You... G-Gyeol... you...!"

I was horrified.

What kind of situation was this? Why was that guy here?! Was he dead? Had he died along with me?

What filled both my eyes was unmistakably Han Gyeol.

No. Impossible. I shook my head, and it was still my friend Gyeol.

This couldn't be happening. It mustn't. This guy wasn't allowed to die.

"What, why are you— mmph?!"

I grabbed Gyeol's cheeks and yanked them out. Soft. There was texture. So this wasn't a dream after all.

"Damn it! How could this happen? I definitely took that monster down. Don't tell me this idiot followed me and killed himself...?! No. No matter how you look at it, Han Gyeol isn't the kind of guy who'd pull something that insane. We clawed our way up through absolute hell since we were kids, and suicide? That's absurd. He couldn't! If he was going to, he should've done it way earlier. Now, of all times... If he actually killed himself, I'll kill him! Wait— now that I think about it, the event completion rate never filled all the way... Did this bastard get hit after that? Yeah. His head was completely gone. An S-Rank team leader, and he goes and falls apart."

"L-let... go...!"

Gyeol shoved me off hard. I'd pulled and stretched his face like I was working dough, and his cheeks had gone blotchy red.

Hm? My eye line was a little low. Why did Han Gyeol seem smaller? He was still taller than me, of course.

He'd been about my height once, then kept growing even after he turned twenty. I'd been furious about it. And his face, on top of that...

Fierce eyes, a sharp nose, a jaw like it had been carved—he could have passed for a celebrity. It was definitely Gyeol. A face you couldn't forget after a single glance, and I'd been looking at it for decades, so of course I knew. Though there did seem to be a bit of baby fat left in his cheeks.

"......Huhhh?"

"Don't huhhh me!"

"What is this... Something like... heaven, where you go back to the time you were happiest? I don't get it."

"It's morning and you're already talking complete nonsense. Get a grip and eat."

Only then did I look around. A narrow room, dreary wallpaper—look closer, and it was a semi-basement. Why had it been so blinding a moment ago? Oh. The fluorescent light.

"This is... the two-room we lived in during our twenties... So it isn't even a particularly happy time...? If you're going to send me somewhere, send me to when we were making real money and things were stable."

"......Eun Ha-jun. Are you actually sick?"

Gyeol had been heading for the living room, but he must have caught my muttering, because he came back in. He frowned and laid a hand on my forehead.

"No fever. What's going on?"

"Gyeol."

"Yeah?"

"You are Gyeol, right?"

"......"

"Gyeol. How old are you right now?"

"......Ha. Quit messing around."

Gyeol gave up on me, pulled out his phone, and started searching something.

"Alcohol dementia or whatever."

Listening to him mutter, I fought to get my head on straight.

A dream? Had everything up until a moment ago been a dream?

Awakeners, Hunters, monsters, dungeons—had all of that been a dream? A vicious one...

"Hmm. Radiation out of a dungeon? Says it could be something like that... Happens to people sometimes. They drop into a coma, or... Right. While we're at it, you quit the dungeon porter work. It's too dangerous for you. Those Awakener bastards treat porters like goddamn dogs."

From the way Gyeol was muttering, Awakeners really did exist.

Then where had it gone wrong? Why had I dreamed of dying...

No, wait. I thought I'd had one more dream.

I'd dreamed I died. My mind had gone hazy, and then I'd had a second dream. What was it? What had it been about? Damn it—wrestling with Gyeol had wiped the memory clean.

A thin ringing started in my ears, and with the headache came a handful of broken scenes.

Did I fail? Really—did everyone die...

"Eun Ha-jun?"

"Uh, ah, no... No. It's nothing..."

Was it nothing? I didn't understand a single thing.

Gyeol took one look at my lost face and caught my arm, hauling me up.

"Hurry up. Wash your face and eat first."

"I-I'm not really hungry..."

"Hungry or not, you eat, then you go to work. Haah. Company dinner or not, who drinks like that? You're not the type."

Gyeol's expression twisted.

"Did something happen?"

"Gyeol... um, so... how old are we right now?"

The twist on his face came undone into pure disbelief, his mouth falling open.

I scrambled for my phone and checked the date.

Fourteen years ago.

Which meant I was twenty-one.

"......Want to just go straight to the hospital?"

The hospital? A hospital. And do what there? Had something gone wrong in my head? I couldn't make this call alone.

No. I was fine. I was normal.

But did this make any sense? I'd come back to the past?

"Did you get hurt on site yesterday? You did, didn't you. Why hide something like that? I told you—if anything happens, you say it right away."

"......Did I?"

Maybe. Yeah, if I went to a hospital... No. But was this real? Not a dream, and not the afterlife?

Clack. Clack.

I came back to myself in the middle of the confusion and found I was already on the subway.

Were we heading to the hospital?

Gyeol's sharp eyes had no intention of leaving me. He watched me the way you watch a child set down at the water's edge.

Well. Fair enough. It would have been stranger if he felt safe.

Twenty-one. Even then, we'd had no one but each other.

Ever since the day we first met at the orphanage, when we were ten.

I'd been orphaned at eight. Gyeol had been so young he couldn't even remember it.

Not every facility is the same, but the one we'd been in was no decent place. Put shortly, it was cruel, and it was cold.

We couldn't endure it, so at seventeen we ran together.

There's a line in a famous comic: run as far as you like, and there is no paradise waiting where you arrive.

Even after we fled for our lives, what followed was nothing but pure hell. We started with nowhere to sleep but the street. Hardly anyone would hire minors with no clear identity... But we had to live. We took whatever work came.

If it could make money, we did it.

Back then we really did live like stray dogs.

Twenty-one... right. That was when we could finally breathe a little. We even managed a room of our own, semi-basement or not.

Gyeol's face was grave. I wanted to pull myself together, but I still couldn't tell what was what.

So I decided to start with the simple things and sort them one by one.

If I walked back through what I remembered, piece by piece, maybe my head would settle.

First: this is a world with dungeon portals, and with Awakeners.

Like lightning out of a clear sky. One day, without warning, portals leading into dungeons began to appear. Mountains, fields, the sea, the insides of buildings—everywhere in the world, all at once.

The portals had simply appeared, but they caused a great many accidents.

I lost my parents then, too. A dungeon had opened in the middle of a road. It would have been stranger if there hadn't been a crash.

Nations started researching the anomaly and sent the military in to investigate the dungeons.

And inside, there were monsters. Modern weapons did nothing at all. You only learned that after you'd already gone in.

Even when the people who entered failed to return, the government kept the investigation going.

A great many people died just to learn a little. A truly great many.

In the midst of that, Awakeners appeared.

Humans who could use superhuman powers. Humans whose bodies had been strengthened.

It wasn't limited to children born anew, like some fresh humanity. Ordinary people were overturned overnight into something superhuman.

Of course, at first there weren't many of them.

The state studied them and learned that their power worked inside the dungeons. Awakeners became Hunters who hunted the monsters within, and people discovered that what came out of those places was extraordinarily useful.

Spoils taken by hunting monsters.

Monster corpses, and items granted by the System.

Almost nothing on a monster's corpse went to waste. Hide, shell, horn, claws, even the meat. They were popular enough that there was nowhere they weren't used.

They were tough, they were unique, and they didn't burn through the Earth's finite resources.

Even as mere ornaments, the demand was staggering. The world had nearly ended, and the rich still threw themselves into collecting rarities—the way people poached elephants for ivory whether the species went extinct or not, and dug mammoth tusks out of ice melted by the climate crisis.

And then the items won through the hunt. Like a game system, dungeon hunting paid out all kinds of items as rewards, and they were special things that simply did not exist on this Earth.

Weapons from outside were useless against what lived in a dungeon, but the reverse was not true. Powerful items taken from inside could be used in the dungeons, and in the reality beyond them.

Some could be used only by Awakeners, and some by ordinary people as well, but that wasn't what mattered.

What mattered was that they worked outside. Which meant they could be used on humans. And then what?

Not only in the war against the System, the dungeons, and the monsters, but in wars between humans, an Awakener became an indispensable weapon.

An Awakener was no different from a living nuclear bomb.

So I'm twenty-one now... Isn't this when almost nothing was known about the dungeons? The government was locking information down, so ordinary people barely knew about Awakeners either. Of course, before the regression... the dream... Anyway, by then, businesses built on dungeon byproducts were already booming.

The moment my thoughts reached that far, my heart dropped.

Wait. I'm twenty-one? What month is it? Today—what day is today?

I checked my phone and immediately seized the backpack on Gyeol's shoulders.

"Eun Ha-jun?"

Past his startled face, the Han River came into view. A familiar landscape. And a scene burned into my mind. A faint déjà vu laid itself over the present, sharp and clear. Yes. I remembered. I couldn't forget this day. I couldn't forget this hour.

Because this was the day I awakened.

How was I here again, at this same time, in this same place? And why was I only realizing it now? Was a person's fate something you simply couldn't change?

With my free hand I locked both arms around the pole.

KWAAAAANG!!

A roar, and the train bucked wildly.

KAGAGAGA!! SCREEEEE!!

The sound of it leaving the rails was horribly clear. Inertia and impact flung bodies in every direction.

"Kyaaa!!"

"Agh!"

Crash, bang! I clung desperately to the pole and to Gyeol both. Both arms hurt like they were about to snap.

Hissss...

The impact died and the car went still, but groans and sobbing never stopped.

"Ugh, uwaaah... aaaah..."

"M-my arm's broken..."

"It hurts, it hurts! It hurts!"

"H-help me. Please, just..."

"What the hell is happening!"

"Somebody call emergency services..."

The overturned car was already a wretched sight.

Belongings had rolled everywhere, and the place was a wreck.

People bleeding from split skulls. People already dead, necks broken. People hanging halfway out of shattered windows.

It was as miserable as if we'd stepped into a frame from a disaster film.

It's real. The same as back then. I kept telling myself no way. Regression? Something like that? Really? What even is this... That only happens in novels and movies... I've actually come back to the past...

My head spun. I should have realized sooner. If I had, couldn't I have saved the people dying here?

If I'd checked my phone that morning and understood at once...

But how was I supposed to catch on any faster than this? I was an ordinary person, and honestly I still hadn't fully grasped it.

Really regression, or whatever this was? This wasn't a movie. Me? Why?

But I couldn't doubt it anymore. The pain slamming through my whole body was telling me this was no dream.

"Grrrgh!!"

"Eun Ha-jun!! You okay?"

Gyeol checked my face and held me up. And beyond him, through the train window, I watched Seoul's sky warp.

As if something vast and dreadful were swallowing it whole.

The sky was heaving like the sea. The sky seemed to be screaming.

An unfamiliar light, no color I could name, filled it, and something like a faint wave prickled across my skin.

Instinct understood.

That this moment was profoundly dangerous. That every inch of space was filling with fear.

"What? The Se— ...what is that?"

The dungeons that had first appeared thirteen years ago had never spat monsters out.

Only Awakeners could go in. But from today, the dungeons changed completely.

The things inside them had gained the power to come out.

I remembered it clearly. Today, more death would cover this land than when the dungeon portals first appeared.

If you could call it compensation. This unknowable law, as if granting a favor, had also dealt humanity a single card.

Awakeners, until now an extreme few, would appear in massive numbers.

Yes. From this day forward, an enormous number of people awakened. Including me.

And Han Gyeol, right beside me.

In Gyeol's eyes, meeting mine, a light like the sky's aurora was turning. An Esper's power. Proof of awakening. He would be seeing that same light in my eyes.

Once the awakening finished, the strange glow would leave the pupils.

A chill climbed me as an unfamiliar energy rose through my whole body.

Every fine hair stood on end, as if static would jump at a touch.

And as if I were inside a VR game, translucent text rose before my eyes.