Seo Minjun lived on the fourteenth floor of a residential tower in Jongno-gu that looked like every other residential tower in Jongno-gu — glass and concrete, twenty-two stories, the kind of building that Seoul produced with the efficient uniformity of a factory printing circuit boards.
Jiwon stood across the street at 05:40 on December 10th, studying the building's entrance and calculating the approach. The building had keycard access. A security guard in the lobby — visible through the glass doors, a man in his fifties reading something on his phone, the kind of building security that existed to deter teenagers and package thieves, not invisible operatives. Cameras at the entrance, the elevator, and each floor's hallway. None of which would register Jiwon.
The problem wasn't getting in. The problem was what happened once he was inside apartment 1407 with a C-rank hunter who could probably kill him with one hand.
"His last ability-usage record was two weeks ago," Jihye's voice in his earpiece. The analyst had stayed at the Seodaemun-gu maintenance corridor with Byeongsu, Seo Yeong, and Dr. Noh. The group split as planned — Doha and Mirae running channeling sessions at Gate 229 in Seodaemun-gu under Eunji's monitoring, Taesik scouting approach routes for the other borderline hunter contacts, and Jiwon here. At the building across from the first borderline hunter they were going to try to recruit. "The ability log shows diminishing output over the past three months. His registered combat ability is kinetic reinforcement — enhanced physical strength and impact resistance. At C-rank capacity, that means he could put a fist through a car door."
"And at degraded capacity?"
"Unknown. The ability log shows his last recorded output at roughly sixty percent of his rated C-rank baseline. Which still means he could put a fist through a person."
"Helpful."
"You asked."
Jiwon crossed the street. The guard didn't look up. The keycard reader didn't react — the electronic access system seeing nothing where Jiwon stood, the door's sensor registering no approach, no presence, no request for entry. He waited. Three minutes. A resident left the building — a woman in running clothes, earbuds in, the pre-dawn exercise routine of a person whose world still worked the way worlds were supposed to work. The door opened for her. Jiwon caught it before it closed.
Inside. The lobby warm. The elevator — keycard-activated for floor access. Another wait. Another resident, this one a man in a delivery uniform, heading to the service elevator. Jiwon followed him in. The man pressed 14. Providence or coincidence. The elevator rose.
Fourteenth floor. Hallway. Apartment 1407 — third door on the left. Jiwon stood in front of it and processed the operational parameters of what he was about to attempt.
A C-rank hunter. Diminished but not gone. Carrier frequency 1.47 — borderline, but still above the erased threshold. The System still connected to him, still filtering his perception, still potentially blocking his ability to see or hear an erased person. The hypothesis — untested — was that his degraded connection would allow partial perception. He might see Jiwon as a blur. A shimmer. A presence at the edge of visual processing that his mind couldn't categorize.
Or he might see nothing at all, and Jiwon would be standing in a stranger's apartment, speaking to a man who couldn't hear him, with no way to make contact except the physical — touching him, moving objects, the poltergeist method that erased people used as a last resort because it triggered the fear response rather than the trust response.
Jiwon knocked.
The sound was real. Knocking was physical — fist on wood, the vibration traveling through the door, audible regardless of System filtering. The System erased perception, not physics. A knocked door was a knocked door.
Footsteps inside. The sound of a man approaching his front door at 05:52 AM — the kind of approach that carried wariness, the who-knocks-at-this-hour gait that every city dweller recognized.
The door opened.
Seo Minjun was taller than Jiwon expected. Broader. The physical build of a C-rank hunter whose kinetic reinforcement had spent years enhancing his body's structural capacity — even at diminished output, the years of System-enhanced training had left their mark in the dense musculature of his shoulders and the thickness of his forearms. He wore a T-shirt and sweatpants. His hair was disarranged. His eyes — dark, alert, the eyes of a man who had been awake before the knock — scanned the hallway.
They scanned past Jiwon.
Then they came back.
Not to Jiwon. To the space where Jiwon was. The hunter's eyes moving through the hallway, finding nothing, reaching the end, and then returning to the spot directly in front of his door where something wasn't right. His brow creased. His weight shifted — the subtle redistribution of a trained fighter whose body recognized a discrepancy before his mind categorized it.
"Is someone there?" His voice was rough. Sleep or disuse. The question asked to an empty hallway by a man who had been hearing sounds that didn't correspond to identifiable sources.
"Yes," Jiwon said.
Minjun's reaction was not what Jiwon expected. No startled backward step. No combat stance. No shout. The hunter went still. Completely still. The disciplined immobility of a man who had encountered the inexplicable before — in dungeons, in combat, in the three days since a voice had come through a wall and told him something he couldn't quite hear — and whose response to the inexplicable was to stop moving and start processing.
"I can't see you." Statement. Not question. The voice of a man confirming data.
"Your System connection is degrading. Your ability to perceive certain things is changing. I'm standing directly in front of you. I'm human. My name is Oh Jiwon. I'm not a threat."
"How did you get into my building?"
"I walked in. The security systems can't detect me for the same reason you can't see me."
Minjun's eyes were still on the space where Jiwon stood. Not on Jiwon — on the space. The hunter could sense the presence but couldn't resolve it into a visual image. The System's perceptual filter was still active, still screening Jiwon from Minjun's enhanced vision, but the filter was degraded. Thin. The way static on a screen obscured the image behind it without eliminating the fact that the image was there.
"The ringing," Minjun said. "Since Tuesday. The sounds at night. That's connected to this."
"Yes."
"You're one of the — " He stopped. His hand on the door frame, the grip of a man steadying himself against a shift in the floor that only he felt. "The erased. The people the Association files talk about. The ones who don't register."
"You've read the files."
"I'm a C-rank with unexplained symptoms. I asked questions. My branch supervisor showed me the containment protocol documents. 'For awareness,' he said. Like he was warning me about something." Minjun's jaw worked. The physical tell of a man processing implications. "He was warning me. About what I might become."
"Can I come in?"
Minjun stepped aside. The gesture of a man who had decided that the invisible person at his door was less threatening inside his apartment than in a public hallway where neighbors might hear a one-sided conversation.
---
The apartment was clean. Sparse. The living space of a man who had built his life around a function that was failing — hunter gear in a case by the door, Association credentials on the counter, a training schedule pinned to the refrigerator with the last two weeks crossed out. The crossed-out weeks were the tell. A C-rank hunter who had stopped training. A fighter whose body was the tool and whose tool was losing its edge.
Minjun sat on the couch. He didn't offer Jiwon a seat — whether from the disorientation of hosting an invisible guest or from the particular social calculation of a man who didn't know where the other person was and didn't want to gesture at an empty chair. Jiwon sat on the opposite chair without being directed. The springs compressed. Minjun's eyes tracked the compression — the visual evidence of a weight that his enhanced perception couldn't resolve into a shape.
"Talk," Minjun said.
Jiwon talked.
Not the full briefing. Not the entity, not the barrier, not the countdown. The operational decision of what to reveal first was the same decision that any systems administrator made when explaining a critical failure to a non-technical user: start with what they can see, connect it to what they've felt, and build toward what they need to understand.
"Your carrier frequency is 1.47," Jiwon said. "That number means nothing to you because the Association doesn't share it with individual hunters. But it means your System connection is operating at roughly half the strength of a standard C-rank. Your abilities are at sixty percent and dropping. The ringing you've been hearing since Tuesday is substrate emission — energy from the System's infrastructure that your degraded connection can no longer filter out. You're hearing the background noise that fully connected hunters can't hear."
"Substrate emission. The reports call it that. The anomalous energy readings that the Association monitors at gates." Minjun's hands were on his knees. Big hands. The hands of a kinetic reinforcement specialist whose punch could go through car doors. "You're telling me I'm hearing gate energy."
"I'm telling you your connection to the System is weakening and the weakness is letting you perceive things that the connection normally blocks."
"Why?"
"The System's infrastructure is degrading. Not just your connection — the System itself. The carrier frequencies of four hundred hunters in Seoul are declining. You're not an isolated case. You're part of a pattern. The System is failing from the edges inward, starting with its weakest connections."
Minjun absorbed this. His face held the expression of a man hearing a diagnosis that he'd already suspected — the confirmation of symptoms that had been accumulating for weeks, the name for the unnamed thing that had been changing his abilities and his sleep and his confidence in the world he'd built his life around.
"And you know this how?"
"Because I'm on the other side of the process. I was connected to the System once. Now I'm not. The connection didn't degrade slowly the way yours is degrading. It was severed all at once. But the result is the same — I can perceive the substrate emissions, the background energy, the things the System filters out. And I can interact with them in ways that connected hunters can't."
"Interact how?"
Jiwon made the choice. The calculated risk of showing rather than telling — the demonstration that would either convince Minjun or terrify him, that would either recruit the first borderline hunter or send a C-rank combat specialist into a fight-or-flight response that Jiwon's non-enhanced body couldn't survive.
He held up his left hand. Palm out.
"You can't see my hand. But your spatial awareness — your enhanced perception, even degraded — is registering something at this location. Focus on it. Not with your eyes. With the sense that tells you something is in front of you."
Minjun's expression shifted. The hunter's training engaging — the combat awareness that processed spatial data through channels deeper than visual input, the sixth sense that dungeon veterans developed for detecting threats that didn't announce themselves.
His eyes widened. Not much. A fraction. The dilation of pupils that had just received input from a processing channel that didn't usually deliver visual data.
"I can — almost." His voice dropped. The rough quality changing to something closer to concentration. "There's a — it's like seeing through smoked glass. A shape. Where your hand is. I can — you're holding your hand up."
"Your degraded connection is letting you perceive past the System's filter. Not fully. Not clearly. But partially. The filter is still active. It's just thin enough that your spatial awareness can push through."
Minjun stared at the space where Jiwon's hand was. The space that contained, for a fully connected hunter, absolutely nothing — the System's filter rendering a null entity as a gap, an absence, a nothing where a person stood. But for Minjun, the nothing had edges. The nothing had shape. The filter was failing and the failure was letting the hunter see the ghost that the System said wasn't there.
"Shit," Minjun said.
The profanity was the right register. Not shock. Recognition. The word of a man who had been navigating an unexplained situation and who had just received an explanation that made the situation worse and better simultaneously. Worse because the System was failing. Better because the failure had a name.
"There's more," Jiwon said. "But the more requires context that's going to sound like I'm losing my mind. I'm not. I can prove everything I'm about to tell you, but the proof requires going somewhere and doing something that a C-rank hunter with diminished abilities might reasonably think is a trap."
"Try me."
Jiwon told him. Gate 447. The wound. The entity. The repair process. The channeling. The flow stabilizers. Seventy-eight centimeters of sealed barrier tissue. The thing on the other side. The countdown. The forty-three gates in Seoul and the thousands worldwide and the four hundred and twelve borderline hunters whose degrading connections might allow them to do what the erased people had proven could be done.
He told him everything because the operational logic required it. A partial briefing would produce partial trust. A partial trust would produce partial commitment. And partial commitment from a C-rank hunter was worse than no commitment — it was a variable that could flip to opposition at the moment it mattered most.
Minjun listened. The hunter's body maintained its trained stillness throughout — the discipline of a man who processed input before generating output, who let the briefing complete before engaging with its implications. His face changed during the telling — the jaw tightening when Jiwon described the wound, the hands gripping his knees when Jiwon described the channeling, the momentary close of eyes when Jiwon described the countdown.
When Jiwon finished, Minjun sat in silence for fourteen seconds. Jiwon counted.
"The voice through the wall," Minjun said. "Three days ago. The Flash. I heard four — not sentences. Fragments. Pieces of sentences. Like hearing someone shout from the bottom of a well. I couldn't make out the words but I knew someone was speaking. And the emotion — the content wasn't in the words. The content was in the frequency. Something was afraid. Something vast was telling me it was afraid."
The entity's communication, filtered through a degraded System connection, received by a C-rank hunter as emotional content without linguistic structure. The four-sentence message reduced to its essence: fear. The barrier's defender afraid. The cosmic entity whose maintenance was the only thing between humanity and what lived beyond, broadcasting its fear through a channel that connected a dying infrastructure to a man in an apartment in Jongno-gu.
"It is afraid," Jiwon said. "It's been holding the barrier alone. The repair material it produces gets intercepted by the System. It's been pushing energy into wounds that the System siphons away. It's been losing. And now its countdown is reaching zero."
"And you want me to — what? Go to a gate. Touch a wound in something I can't see. Channel energy I don't understand through a device built from phone parts."
"Yes."
"I'm a C-rank hunter. I fight things. My ability is kinetic reinforcement. I punch hard and I don't break. That's what I do. I don't channel cosmic energy. I don't talk to entities. I don't — " He stopped. His hand went to his ear. The left ear. The one that had been ringing since Tuesday, that heard sounds through walls, that received the background noise of a System infrastructure that was failing.
"The ringing got louder," he said. "Just now. While you were talking. It — pulsed."
"That's the substrate emission from Gate 112. Three hundred meters from this building. Your body is in the gate's emission field. Has been since you moved here. The ringing is your degraded connection letting the emission through. And the pulse is the entity's maintenance rhythm. The heartbeat of the barrier repair attempt that's been failing since before you heard the Flash."
Minjun's hand stayed on his ear. The hunter sitting on his couch in his sparse apartment, touching the ear that heard the heartbeat of a cosmic entity, processing the request from an invisible man to add his body to the repair process that the entity couldn't complete alone.
"Gate 112 is three blocks south," Minjun said.
"Yes."
"E-rank classification."
"Probably not E-rank anymore. The barrier is degrading everywhere. Gate classifications are based on the old framework. The wounds are all getting worse."
"And you want me to go there. Touch it. See if I can do what you did at Gate 447."
"Not alone. Eunji — our perceiver — needs to monitor. The flow stabilizer needs to be present. And we need to know if your carrier frequency allows channeling or if the System's residual connection will intercept the energy before it reaches the wound."
"An experiment."
"A test. Controlled. Monitored. With equipment and people who have done this before. If your connection is too strong, the channeling won't work and you walk away knowing what's happening to you but not required to do anything about it. If your connection is degraded enough — "
"Then I stand at a wound and hold the world together."
The statement was flat. Not dramatic. Not heroic. The register of a man stating a fact about a job description.
"Something like that."
Minjun stood. The motion of a C-rank hunter's body — even at sixty percent, even with diminished kinetic reinforcement, the movement carried a controlled power that Jiwon's null-status frame couldn't approach. A different kind of body. A body built by the System to fight. Now being asked to heal.
"When?"
"Today. The countdown isn't waiting."
"I need to — " He looked around his apartment. The gear case. The credentials. The training schedule with the crossed-out weeks. The life of a hunter, suspended between what it had been and what it was becoming.
"I have a medical evaluation on the 12th," he said. "The Association wants to examine my degrading abilities. If I don't show up, they'll send someone to check. If I'm at a gate doing something the Association hasn't authorized — "
"The evaluation won't happen on the 12th. By the 12th, the situation will have changed in ways that make medical evaluations irrelevant."
"Because of the countdown."
"Because of the countdown."
Minjun processed this for three seconds. Then he walked to his bedroom. The sounds of a man changing clothes, the deliberate preparation of someone who had made a decision and was converting the decision into action.
He returned wearing athletic clothes and boots. The practical attire of a hunter who didn't know what the mission required but who defaulted to mobility and durability because twelve years of training had built those defaults into his operational baseline.
"I can almost see you," he said. Standing by his door. Looking at the space where Jiwon stood. The smoked-glass perception that his degrading connection provided — not clear, not defined, but present. The shape of a man visible through the thinning filter of a System that was letting him go. "You're shorter than I expected."
"Most people are, when they can see me at all."
---
They walked to Gate 112 through the pre-dawn streets of Jongno-gu.
The gate was in a small park between two office buildings — the kind of municipal green space that Seoul embedded in its commercial districts, the token gesture toward nature in a city made of glass and concrete. At 06:20, the park was empty. The gate's shimmer visible to Jiwon as the familiar vertical distortion — the tear in the visual field, the air not behaving like air, the wound.
Gate 112 was smaller than Gate 447. The wound's opening maybe a meter and a half across, the edges tighter, the scar tissue less ragged. An E-rank gate by the old classification — the barrier damage minimal, the entity's maintenance manageable, the wound stable. But Eunji wasn't here to read its actual condition. And the classification system was built on a framework that didn't account for the entity's failing reserves.
Minjun stopped at the park's entrance. His body responding to the emission field — the substrate energy that flowed through Gate 112's wound, the repair material that the entity pushed and that the System intercepted, the background radiation that his degraded connection translated into the ringing that hadn't stopped since Tuesday.
"The ringing is louder here," he said. "A lot louder. It's not ringing anymore. It's — vibration. My whole body."
The same sensation that Jiwon experienced in the emission field. The substrate energy registering in bone and tissue and nerve, the physical awareness of standing inside a current of cosmic repair material. Minjun felt it because his connection was too thin to block it entirely. The filter still operated — he couldn't see the wound as clearly as Jiwon did, the distortion appearing to him as a heat shimmer rather than a visible tear — but his body registered the emission with the full-body response that Jiwon had learned to recognize as the baseline of operating near a wound.
"That's the entity's repair energy," Jiwon said. "Flowing through the wound. Being intercepted by the System before it reaches the barrier tissue. If you can feel it — "
"I can feel it."
"Then your carrier frequency is low enough that the interception isn't complete. The System is losing its grip on you. The energy is getting through."
Minjun looked at the shimmer. The heat distortion that hid a wound in reality. Three hundred meters from his apartment. Present every day of the three years he'd lived in this building. Invisible to him until Tuesday, when a twenty-three-minute system failure let the background noise through his degraded filter and showed him the edges of something that had been there all along.
"What do I do?"
"Touch it."
The instruction was simple because the process was simple. The theory was cosmic and the implications were species-wide but the action was a hand on a wound. The rest — the stabilizer, the monitoring, the controlled sessions — were operational infrastructure around a core act that was fundamentally physical. A person touching a damaged thing and letting what was needed flow through them.
Jiwon didn't have the flow stabilizer. It was with Doha at Gate 229. The crude limiters were with Mirae and packed as backup. They had nothing except Minjun's body and the wound and the question of whether a borderline hunter's partial System connection would block the channeling.
"No device," Jiwon said. "This is a contact test. Touch the wound's edge. Brief contact — two seconds maximum. We're not channeling. We're testing whether the energy flows through you or gets intercepted."
"Two seconds."
"Two seconds. Then pull back."
Minjun walked to the gate. The C-rank hunter approaching the wound with the gait of a man who had walked into dungeons — measured, balanced, the kinetic reinforcement specialist whose body had been built for impact even at sixty percent capacity. He stopped at the wound's edge. The shimmer was a meter from his face. His eyes — unable to see the wound clearly through the System's residual filter — tracked the edges of the distortion with the approximate awareness that his spatial sense provided.
He raised his hand.
"The edges move," he said. "I can see them — almost. Like heat rising off pavement. But it pulses. The shimmer contracts and expands."
"That's the entity's maintenance rhythm. Touch it where the contraction is tightest. That's the wound's edge."
Minjun reached out.
His fingers contacted the wound.
Jiwon saw the effect before Minjun reported it. The C-rank hunter's body stiffened — not the catastrophic seizure that Jiwon's unprotected first attempt had produced, not the crude-limiter jolt that Doha had weathered. Something between. A sharp intake of breath. A widening of eyes. The body registering an input that was new and intense and that the System's residual connection tried to intercept and partially succeeded and partially didn't.
The wound's edge responded. The scar tissue shifted. Not the dramatic contraction that Jiwon's channeling had produced. A tremor. A recognition. The repair material flowing through Minjun's body — some of it intercepted by his remaining System connection, diverted into the System's power network the way all repair material was diverted, but not all of it. Some of the energy pushed through the connection's gaps. Found the wound. Entered the tissue.
Minjun pulled his hand back at the two-second mark. His breath came hard. His eyes were wide. His hand — the hand that had touched the wound — was shaking.
"I felt it," he said. "The energy. It went through me. Not all of it — something caught most of it. Pulled it away. Like a drain sucking water before it reaches the sink. But some got through. I could feel it reach the — the wound. The thing my hand was on. The energy went in and the wound reacted."
"The drain is your System connection. The interception. At 1.47, your connection is strong enough to intercept most of the repair material. But not all of it. The leakage — what got through — is enough to test the principle."
"How much leakage?"
"I don't know. Eunji could measure it. But the fact that you felt the wound respond means energy reached it. Your carrier frequency is low enough for partial channeling. With the flow stabilizer regulating the throughput and with your frequency dropping — because it will keep dropping — the channeling efficiency will increase."
Minjun looked at his hand. The hand that had touched a wound in reality. The hand of a C-rank hunter whose career was built on punching hard and not breaking, whose value to the System was measured in kinetic output, whose function was destruction. And that hand had just done something constructive for the first time.
Not fighting. Healing. The body built for impact used for repair. The hunter whose power was being taken away discovering that the taking opened a door to something the power had prevented.
"It talked," Minjun said. "The two seconds. The wound. Or — not the wound. Through the wound. Something on the other side. The same thing I heard through the wall on Tuesday. The voice. It was there. In the energy. In the flow. It said — " He closed his eyes. The hunter standing in a park in Jongno-gu, eyes closed, processing the two-second contact with a cosmic entity's repair attempt. "It said my name."
Jiwon felt the words land. Not as surprise — the entity communicated through the repair material, Doha had described feeling gratitude through the channeling flow, Byeongsu had received entire conceptual frameworks through the handshake. The entity spoke through substrate contact. And Minjun, at the two-second boundary of a test that wasn't supposed to be channeling, had heard something that the entity had waited an incalculable time to say to someone who could hear it.
His name. The entity knew his name.
"It knows you," Jiwon said. "It knows every hunter connected through the System. The System was built on the entity's framework. Every carrier frequency is a thread that connects back to the barrier, back to the entity's maintenance, back to the thing that holds the world together. The entity has been watching through those threads for longer than the System has existed."
"And now the threads are breaking."
"And now the threads are breaking. And the people connected by the thinnest threads — the borderline hunters, the degrading connections — are the ones the entity can reach directly. Because the System's filter is too thin to block the communication."
Minjun opened his eyes. The C-rank hunter who had walked into a park expecting a test and who was now standing at the intersection of a career that was ending and a purpose that was beginning. His face didn't show resolution. It showed something harder. The expression of a man who had been given information that eliminated the option of doing nothing.
"How many others?"
"In Seoul: four hundred and twelve below 3.0. Eighty-nine below 2.0. Thirty-one below 1.5. You're one of eleven we've identified with addresses. We have teams reaching out to the others."
"Four hundred. And they all — they're all losing their connections."
"All of them. At different rates. The ones nearest gates are degrading fastest."
Minjun was quiet for six seconds. Then he pulled his phone from his pocket. The phone of a registered hunter — System-integrated, Association-connected, the device that linked him to the institutional infrastructure that had defined his life for eight years.
"The hunters near gates," he said. "I know some of them. The low-rank hunters in Jongno-gu. The ones who've been complaining about ability malfunctions, unexplained symptoms, reduced output. We have a group chat. Informal. The kind of thing hunters make when they share a district and the Association doesn't solve their problems fast enough."
"How many in the chat?"
"Fourteen. All E-rank or D-rank. All in Jongno-gu. All of them have been reporting symptoms for weeks."
Fourteen hunters in a single district. A pre-existing communication channel. A group that had already self-selected for the degradation symptoms that Jihye's data predicted. The network effect — Minjun didn't just represent one borderline hunter. He represented access to fourteen.
"Can you reach them?"
"I can reach them right now. The question is what I tell them. 'Hey guys, I just touched an invisible wound in the park and a cosmic entity said my name' isn't going to land well at six in the morning."
"Tell them the truth. The simple version. Their connections are degrading. The Association doesn't have answers. You met someone who does. And there's something they can do about it that matters more than anything the Association has ever asked of them."
Minjun looked at his phone. At the group chat. At the names of fourteen hunters who were losing their connection to the System that defined them, who were becoming something between what they had been and what Jiwon was, who were standing at the edge of an erasure that the System was performing incrementally rather than all at once.
He typed a message.
Jiwon couldn't see the screen — Minjun's body between him and the phone, the hunter's broad shoulders blocking the view. But he heard the typing. The tap of fingers on glass. The sound of a C-rank hunter reaching out to his network, converting contact into action, the first ripple of recruitment spreading outward from a park in Jongno-gu where an invisible wound breathed and a dying entity waited for the hands it needed.
The responses came within minutes. 06:28 AM. The early hour not a barrier for hunters who had been sleeping badly for days, whose ringing ears and malfunctioning abilities and unexplained symptoms had been waking them before dawn, whose bodies had been telling them something was wrong even when the Association said it was temporary.
Fourteen hunters. Nine responded within ten minutes. Seven said they could meet today.
Seven borderline hunters in Jongno-gu. Plus Minjun. Eight potential channelers from a single district, recruited through a group chat, connected by the shared experience of losing something that had once defined them.
"One-point-six seconds," Jiwon heard through his earpiece. Eunji's voice, transmitted from the Seodaemun-gu corridor through the encrypted channel, the Dreamer's countdown continuing its descent.
But for the first time, the number didn't land as only a measure of what they were running out of. It landed as a measure of what they needed to outrun.
Eight hunters. Forty-three gates. The countdown falling.
They were still losing the race. But the race had runners now.
