The Seo family apartment was on the ninth floor of a building that had been painted beige in 2014 and hadn't been repainted since, the color fading through a decade of coastal weather into something closer to the shade of old teeth. Bupyeong was twenty minutes from Incheon proper by subway, a district of apartment complexes and hagwons and chicken restaurants that served the families who'd bought into the promise of affordable housing near the capital and had received, in exchange, thirty-year mortgages and a view of other apartment complexes.
Agent Seo led them through the lobby. The elevator was small — built for a building that expected two people and a grocery bag, not two people and a swordsman whose shoulders required him to stand at a diagonal. Jihoon carried his sword in a sports bag. The gym bag disguise — the concealment method of a man who brought weapons to residential buildings often enough to have developed a protocol for it.
"My mother knows we're coming," Seo said. His voice was different here. Not the Bureau agent's measured professionalism — the voice of a son returning to his parents' apartment with a stranger who claimed to talk to ghosts. Younger. The consonants softer, the register shifting toward the dialect that came out when institutional Seoul fell away and the Incheon kid underneath resurfaced. "She's — she wants this. My father is going to sit in the bedroom and pretend it isn't happening."
"That's fine."
"It's not fine. It's how he handles things he doesn't understand. He saw Minjun in the hallway. Twice. Both times he went to bed afterward and didn't mention it in the morning. My mother thinks he's in denial. I think he's terrified and the only coping mechanism he has is the one where he closes a door and waits for the problem to stop existing."
The elevator opened. The ninth floor hallway was narrow, lit by fluorescent tubes that buzzed at a frequency Yeji's left ear could just barely detect — the fifty-hertz hum of aging ballast transformers, the sound of Korean residential infrastructure that had been installed competently and maintained indifferently. The hallway smelled like doenjang-jjigae from one apartment and fabric softener from another, the olfactory geography of a floor where six families lived in proximity and expressed their existence through their doors' leaking aromas.
Apartment 903. Seo unlocked the door. The entryway was the standard Korean layout — a step down from the hallway, a shoe rack, the transition zone between public and private space that served as both storage and boundary. The shoe rack held four pairs. Women's flats. Men's loafers. Seo's Bureau-standard boots. And a pair of running shoes — gray, worn, the tread pattern of a brand that mid-range hunters wore because they couldn't afford the mana-reinforced models and needed something that could handle dungeon terrain without pretending to be designed for it.
Minjun's shoes. Still on the rack. Two years dead and his shoes were still by the door.
The apartment was clean. Not decorated — clean. The distinction of a household where someone invested effort in maintenance rather than aesthetics, the surfaces scrubbed, the floor mopped, the furniture arranged with the practical geometry of people who needed things to function rather than to express. A couch. A television. A dining table with four chairs — one of which had a jacket draped over its back, the draping of a garment placed by someone who'd just come home, as if someone had just come home and would return for the jacket any moment.
Minjun's jacket. On the chair. Two years.
Mrs. Seo was in the kitchen doorway. She was fifty, maybe fifty-five — the age range where Korean women's faces held a decade of ambiguity because the effort of maintaining a household and a teaching career and a grief had compressed the years into a texture rather than a number. Her hair was pulled back. An apron over a blouse. The domestic uniform of a woman who'd been cooking when guests arrived and hadn't changed because changing would mean acknowledging that this visit was different from a normal visit and acknowledging that would require a kind of composure she was conserving for whatever came next.
"You must be Miss Ahn." Her voice was steady. Teacher-steady. The vocal control of a woman who stood in front of thirty teenagers five days a week and had learned to keep her voice level when the situation demanded it, and this situation demanded it, and the demand was the only thing holding the level together. "Taeyang told me about you."
"Thank you for having me, Mrs. Seo."
"Can I get you something? Tea? There's sikhye in the refrigerator—"
"We're fine. Thank you."
Mrs. Seo's hands went to her apron strings. Adjusted them. The gesture of a woman who needed to hold something and the apron strings were what her hands found. "He said you can — that you're able to—" The teacher's composure flexed. Held. "—to communicate with them. With people who've passed."
"Sometimes. Not always. It depends on what they've left behind."
"Minjun left everything behind."
The sentence landed. Not self-pity — fact. The unbearable fact of a mother who'd lost a son and who experienced the loss not as an absence but as a presence, the everything that remained — the shoes, the jacket, the chair, the hallway where his ghost stood at night returning to a home he couldn't enter.
Jihoon stood by the door. His sword bag on the floor. He'd assessed the apartment in three seconds — habit, not necessity, the sweep identifying exits and sight lines in a space where the only threat was grief. He positioned himself at the entryway, the location that let him observe without intruding, the body language of a man who understood that this room belonged to other people's pain and his job was to guard its perimeter.
"The hallway," Seo said. He gestured to the corridor that ran from the entryway past the bedrooms to the bathroom. A narrow passage. Five meters, maybe six. The walls were lined with framed photographs — school portraits, family trips, the visual timeline of two sons growing up in a Bupyeong apartment. Minjun in a middle school uniform, grinning. Minjun and Taeyang at a beach, the older brother's arm around the younger brother's shoulders. Minjun in his hunter registration photo — serious, formal, the expression of a twenty-one-year-old who'd awakened as a D-rank and was treating the registration process with the gravity that young men applied to things they thought made them adults.
"This is where he appears?"
"Here." Seo pointed. The hallway's midpoint. Between the bathroom and the second bedroom. The spot directly in front of the shoe rack's overflow area — a small section of floor where extra shoes were stored, the spillover from the entryway rack, the place where Minjun had dropped his runners when the rack was full.
The spot where he left his shoes.
Yeji knelt. The floor was vinyl — the standard Korean apartment flooring, heated from below by the ondol system, warm under her knees. She placed her palms flat. The grounding gesture. Fingers spread. The declaration of physical presence before spiritual extension.
*Activating left temporal pathway,* Eunsoo said. The healer's voice carried the additional tension of an operation outside the established protocol — no Bureau agents monitoring, no mana density reader, no safety perimeter. Just a hallway in a Bupyeong apartment and a summoner with a recovering channel. *Twelve percent. Ambient spiritual density is standard residential baseline. Your operational ceiling here is your actual ceiling — twenty percent. Proceed carefully.*
The channel opened. Twelve percent. The perception extended through the vinyl flooring, through the ondol pipes beneath, into the space of the hallway. And immediately — not gradually, not building, immediately — Yeji found him.
Minjun.
Not a fragment. Not the residue she'd found in Gimpo — the name-loops and kinesthetic echoes and screams, the spiritual fingerprints of people reduced to their last moments. This was more. A partial spirit. Coherent enough to manifest visually, to maintain a spatial position, to return to a specific location with the consistency that suggested intention even if intention wasn't quite the right word. A consciousness that existed in the gap between fragment and spirit — not enough to communicate, not enough to understand its own state, but enough to be. Enough to stand in a hallway at night and be seen by a mother getting water and a father who closed his door and a brother who joined the Bureau because the Bureau studied the dead and the dead included someone he needed to understand.
The anchor was the spot. Not the shoes themselves — the act of leaving them. The kinesthetic routine of a man who'd come home thousands of times and dropped his shoes in the same place every time, the bodily habit so deeply encoded that death hadn't erased it, the spiritual equivalent of a path worn into grass by repeated walking. Minjun's ghost returned to the hallway because the hallway was where coming home happened, and coming home was the thing his consciousness still knew how to do.
"He's here," Yeji said. "Right now. The hallway. He's anchored to this spot. Not a fragment — a partial spirit. More of him is present than I expected."
Mrs. Seo was in the living room. She'd moved to the edge of the couch — not sitting fully, perched, the posture of a woman who was prepared to stand and move and do whatever was needed. Her hands were still on her apron strings.
"Can he hear us?"
"I don't think so. Not yet. His consciousness isn't processing external input at a conversational level. He's... repeating. The routine. The coming-home. He's doing the last thing he knew how to do."
Seo stood behind his mother. His hand on the couch's back. The position of a son who wanted to touch his mother's shoulder but didn't because touching her would acknowledge that she needed touching and acknowledging that would break the composure they were both maintaining with the careful desperation of people standing on thin ice who knew that the ice held as long as nobody shifted their weight.
*Fourteen percent. Stable. The partial spirit's signature is clean — no corruption, no degradation beyond what's expected for a two-year-old manifestation. His consciousness is in a loop state but the loop is intact. He's not deteriorating. He's just... stuck.*
"I'm going to try to make contact," Yeji said. "When I do, he might manifest. Visibly. The way you've been seeing him. I need you to stay where you are. Don't approach. Don't speak to him unless I say it's safe."
Mrs. Seo nodded. Her knuckles were white on the apron strings.
Yeji pushed [Requiem] into the partial spirit. Not a broad extension — the focused beam that Eunsoo's rehabilitation exercises had refined, the narrow, deep perception that penetrated a single target instead of scanning a wide field. The beam found Minjun's consciousness the way a key found a lock: the shape matched, the contact was immediate, and the consciousness responded.
Minjun began to manifest.
Faintly. A shimmer in the hallway air — not the full spectral form of a Nari or a Minwoo, not the visible ghost that interacted with light and occupied space. A sketch. An outline. The barest suggestion of a human form standing in the hallway where the shoes went, the shape of a young man in his twenties drawn in spiritual energy so faint that looking directly at it made it disappear and looking slightly to the side brought it back, the visual trick of a consciousness that existed at the threshold of perception.
Seo made a sound. Small. The kind of sound that bypassed the vocal cords' voluntary control system and came directly from the chest, the involuntary output of a man who was looking at his dead brother and knowing — for the first time knowing, with the confirmation of a summoner's presence and the context of understanding — that the thing in the hallway was real. Was Minjun. Was what remained.
Mrs. Seo didn't make a sound. She went still. A stillness her body imposed — any movement, any breath too deep, any shift of weight, any tremor in the hands that gripped the apron might disturb the manifestation, might break whatever fragile mechanics allowed her dead son to stand in the hallway one more time. Tears ran down her face. She didn't wipe them. Wiping would have required moving.
Yeji focused. The contact was open — [Requiem]'s beam piercing the partial spirit's consciousness, the channel receiving Minjun's stored data, the fragmented memories of a dead man's last experience arriving in pieces through the narrow pathway.
The dungeon. Not visual — Minjun's consciousness hadn't preserved visual data. Kinesthetic. The sensation of running. Feet on stone. The tunnel narrowing. Behind him: sounds. The sounds of a dungeon breaking — not the quiet degradation of a system failing but the explosive, geological violence of a spatial anomaly collapsing, the reality it contained folding inward and taking everything inside with it.
Running. The passage ahead. The ceiling sagging — the stone bowing under pressure that stone wasn't designed to bear, the dungeon's architecture abandoning its structural integrity the way a body abandoned its posture in the moment before a fall.
Impact. Not from the front. From above. The ceiling coming down. The irreversible sensation of being struck by something so massive that the body didn't register pain — just force, the compressive force of stone on bone, the sound of his own skeleton receiving a load it was designed to bear for zero seconds and receiving it for all the remaining seconds.
Then: stillness. Not death. Not yet. Minjun was alive under the rubble. The consciousness preserved this with terrible clarity — the awareness of being trapped, the inventory of the body's status conducted by a nervous system that was still functional in the sections that weren't crushed. Right arm: gone. Legs: gone. Left arm: partially free. The hand, specifically. The left hand, protruding from the rubble, the fingers exposed to the dungeon's stale air, the one part of him that could still move.
The phone. In his pocket. Crushed with his right hip. Unreachable. The hand that was free was the wrong hand and the phone that could have called home was on the wrong side and the rubble between his free fingers and his crushed pocket might as well have been the distance between continents.
He tried anyway. The left hand reaching. The fingers stretching toward the rubble over his right hip, the impossible geometry of a trapped man trying to cross his own destroyed body to reach a device that was probably broken. The hand moved. Centimeters. The fingers scraping stone. The effort producing nothing except the continued expenditure of a consciousness that had a finite amount of itself left and was spending it on a phone call it would never make.
He died reaching. The left hand extended, fingers stretched, the last posture of a man whose final act was trying to call home and whose body had run out of the ability to try before his mind had run out of the intention.
Yeji's eyes were burning. Her throat had closed. The channel was at seventeen percent — the emotional processing load adding to the perceptual load, the pathway strain increasing because the data it was carrying wasn't just spiritual information but the preserved desperation of a twenty-three-year-old man dying alone in a collapsed tunnel with his hand reaching for a phone he couldn't touch.
*Seventeen percent. You're approaching the boundary. The emotional bleedthrough is generating secondary channel strain. Process and withdraw or withdraw now.*
Yeji didn't withdraw. She had enough. She had what she needed. The pieces of Minjun's death — the running, the collapse, the trapped stillness, the hand reaching — assembled into a coherent picture. Not his regret. Partial spirits didn't have regret structures. But his anchor. The thing that kept him returning to this hallway, to this spot, to the place where coming home happened. Not the shoes. The call. The phone call he couldn't make. The connection he couldn't complete. His ghost stood in the hallway because the hallway was the closest thing to the other end of that call — the place where the people he'd been trying to reach lived, the destination of a message that never arrived.
She couldn't resolve this. The realization was clinical and absolute. A partial spirit lacked the cognitive architecture for resolution — no regret to address, no consciousness to negotiate with, no decision-making capacity to participate in a covenant or a release. Minjun's ghost would continue to stand in this hallway because standing was all it knew how to do.
But she could do something else.
"Minjun." She spoke aloud. Into the hallway. To the faint outline of a dead man standing where his shoes went. "Minjun, I don't know if you can hear me. I don't know if hearing is something you do anymore. But I'm going to tell you something and I need you to — to receive it, if you can."
The outline didn't respond. The manifestation held — the faint sketch of a person, the spiritual energy maintaining its shape in the hallway air.
"Your family sees you. When you come here at night and stand in this spot and try to come home — they see you. Your mother. Your brother. Your father, even though he won't say it." Yeji's voice was steady. The professional control she'd learned from Eunsoo's clinical precision and Jihoon's operational calm and the simple necessity of speaking clearly when the words mattered more than the speaker's composure. "And the call you were trying to make. The phone call. They know. They know you were trying to reach them. The message you couldn't send — I'm delivering it now. You were coming home. You wanted to tell them — something. And you didn't get to. But they're here. Right here. On the other end. They've been on the other end this whole time."
The outline changed.
Not dramatically. Not the dynamic, responsive manifestation of a covenant spirit who could interact and speak and choose. A shift. The faint form — which had been oriented toward the door, toward the entryway, toward the outside, the direction of arrival — rotated. Slowly. The outline turning in the hallway the way a compass needle turned toward north, the movement not voluntary but responsive, the consciousness reacting to a stimulus that penetrated whatever threshold separated partial spirits from the world they haunted.
Minjun's ghost turned toward his mother.
The outline faced the living room. The faint form oriented toward the couch where Mrs. Seo sat frozen with tears on her face and her hands on her apron strings and her body locked in the stillness of a woman who was watching her dead son look at her for the first time.
Two seconds. The manifestation held. The outline — Minjun's outline, the shape of a twenty-three-year-old man who'd died reaching for a phone — was turned toward his mother and the turn was the closest thing to communication that a partial spirit could produce.
Then he faded. The spiritual energy dispersed. The outline thinned, became transparent, became nothing. The hallway was empty. The photographs on the walls were photographs of a person who was no longer standing between them.
Mrs. Seo's composure broke. Not loudly. A sound — the sound of a woman crying who'd been practicing not crying for two years and whose practice had just been defeated by her dead son looking at her. She bent forward on the couch. Her hands covered her face. The apron strings dangled. Seo sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders and his face was doing something that Yeji couldn't watch because watching it would have broken her own composure and her composure was the only functional tool she had left.
*Channel closing. Sixteen point eight percent. No microtear activity. You're intact.*
Yeji stayed kneeling on the hallway floor. The vinyl was warm under her knees. The ondol heating working exactly as designed, the infrastructure maintaining the home's temperature for the people who lived here and for the ghost who visited.
A door opened. The bedroom. The one Mrs. Seo had indicated as Minjun's father's retreat — the room where a man who'd seen his dead son twice had gone to wait for the problem to stop existing.
Mr. Seo was tall. Taller than Taeyang — the height that the older brother had inherited and the younger brother probably had too, the vertical genetics of a family that produced men who stood above most rooms' expectations. His face was Taeyang's face in twenty-five years — the same bone structure weathered by time and by a job that Yeji couldn't identify from the apartment's sparse clues but that had involved enough physical labor to leave its record in the hands and the posture. He stood in the bedroom doorway. He'd been listening. The doorway's position — four meters from the hallway's midpoint — was close enough to hear everything and far enough to pretend he hadn't.
He didn't look at his wife. Didn't look at Taeyang. He looked at Yeji. The look was direct. Undecorated. The gaze of a man who'd decided to ask a question and needed to ask it before the decision expired.
"Was he in pain? At the end?"
Five words. The question that every family of every dead person wanted to ask and that most of them never got to ask because the dead didn't come with translators and the reports filed by dungeon recovery teams used phrases like "significant trauma consistent with structural collapse" that meant everything clinically and nothing humanly.
Yeji knew the answer. She'd felt it. The running. The impact. The trapped stillness. The hand reaching. The consciousness spending its last reserves on a phone call that would never connect. Minjun's death had been slow. Aware. The cruelty of a man who'd been crushed from the waist down and left with enough life to understand what was happening and not enough to do anything about it except reach for a phone that was three inches and an infinity away from his free hand.
Pain. Yes. Not just pain — the loneliness of dying alone in a collapsed tunnel where nobody could hear you and nobody was coming and the last thing your body could do was reach and the reaching was the most painful part because the reaching was hope and the hope was wrong.
Mr. Seo waited. His face was the controlled blankness of a man who'd asked and would accept whatever answer arrived and would take that answer into the bedroom and close the door and carry it for whatever remained of his life.
"He was thinking about you," Yeji said. "About coming home."
The lie was warm. Smooth. It left her mouth with the practiced ease of a truth because it was built on the chassis of a truth — Minjun had been trying to call home, had been oriented toward home, had anchored his ghost to home. The lie wasn't in the content. The lie was in the omission. The parts she left out: the pain, the trapped awareness, the hand reaching for a crushed phone, the consciousness spending itself on an action that produced nothing. The truth would have been: he was in agony and alone and terrified and his last act was a failure. She gave them: he was thinking about you.
Mr. Seo's jaw moved. Not speaking. The physical processing of information by a face that didn't have the vocabulary for what it was receiving. He nodded. Once. The nod of a man accepting an answer that he'd needed to hear regardless of whether it was true and that he would never examine closely because examining it would risk discovering the answer underneath.
He went back to the bedroom. The door closed. Not slammed — placed. The careful click of a latch engaged by a man who'd asked his question and received his answer and was now returning to the space where he processed things he didn't understand.
On the couch, Mrs. Seo was still crying. Seo held her. The agent's Bureau training was invisible — no professional detachment, no measured response. Just a son holding his mother in an apartment where his dead brother's shoes were still on the rack and his dead brother's jacket was still on the chair and his dead brother's ghost had just looked at her for the first and possibly last time.
Yeji stood. Her knees ached from the vinyl floor. The hallway was empty — no manifestation, no outline, no faint shimmer of a partial spirit trying to come home. Just photographs and fluorescent light and the ondol warmth rising through the floor.
*You lied,* Eunsoo said. Not accusatory. Observational. The clinical notation of a healer who documented everything and whose documentation now included the first instance of her summoner providing inaccurate spiritual data to a subject's family.
"I know."
*The death was traumatic. Extended. The consciousness data clearly indicated sustained pain and awareness during the terminal phase. Your report to the father omitted these elements entirely.*
"I know what I did."
*I'm not criticizing. I'm noting. For the record. The healer's record, not the Bureau's.* A pause. The silence of a woman who'd been a medical professional in life and who'd understood that medical professionals sometimes withheld information from families and that the withholding was a clinical decision and that clinical decisions carried consequences and that the consequences were the clinician's to bear. *The question is whether you'll do it again.*
Yeji didn't answer. She didn't know the answer. The lie had been easy — easier than the truth, easier than watching a man's face receive the information that his son had died in pain and alone and reaching. The lie was mercy. The lie was also the first time she'd used [Requiem]'s information as material to be edited rather than transmitted, the first exercise of a power she'd never asked for: the power to decide what the living knew about their dead.
She'd do it again. She knew that already. The question wasn't whether. The question was when the lies would stop being mercy and start being something else.
---
They left the apartment at 9 PM. Mrs. Seo pressed a container of sikhye into Yeji's hands at the door — the rice punch cold and sweet, the offering of a woman who expressed gratitude through food because the words for what she was grateful for didn't exist in a vocabulary built for normal losses. Seo walked them to the elevator. His eyes were still red but the redness had changed — not the chronic insomnia red of the Gimpo site but the acute red of a man who'd cried recently and wasn't ashamed of it and was processing the crying the way he processed operational data: noting it, filing it, moving forward.
"He might come back," Yeji said. In the elevator. The small space and the downward motion and the three of them standing at angles to accommodate Jihoon's shoulders. "The manifestation. It might recur. Partial spirits don't have the cognitive architecture for permanent resolution. The anchor is still there — the hallway, the habit, the coming-home pattern. He might stand in the hallway again."
"I know."
"But he turned. He looked at her. That's new. That's a change in the manifestation pattern. Whether it persists or reverts — I don't know."
Seo was quiet until the lobby. Then:
"Thank you."
Two words. The same two words that everyone said and that in this case carried the weight of a man who'd asked a stranger to talk to his dead brother and the stranger had done it and the dead brother had looked at their mother and the stranger was now standing in an elevator holding a container of rice punch and being thanked for the most intimate and impossible thing she'd ever done in someone else's hallway.
"I wish I could have done more."
"You did enough." Seo held the lobby door. "You did enough."
The night air. Bupyeong's residential streets — the apartment complexes lit from within, each window a rectangle of someone's evening, the stacked domesticity of Korean urban life arranged vertically in concrete and glass. Jihoon's car was parked on the street. He'd been silent through the apartment visit — present, positioned, guarding. The swordsman doing what the swordsman did: protecting the summoner while the summoner did the work that required protecting.
In the car, Jihoon started the engine. The drive back to Seoul would take forty minutes. The highway. The bridge. The night traffic of a weekday evening, the commuters who'd worked late and the delivery trucks that worked always and the flow of a country that never fully stopped moving.
"You did something in there," Jihoon said. Two blocks from the apartment complex. His voice was the quiet register — not the dangerous quiet, not the operational quiet. The quiet of a man who'd observed something he needed to name. "When you told the father about the end. You changed the answer."
Not a question. Jihoon didn't do accusations. He did observations that carried the weight of judgments without the vocabulary of judgments.
"Yes."
"The death was bad."
"The death was bad."
He drove. Three blocks. Four. The Bupyeong streets giving way to the highway on-ramp, the residential quiet replaced by the ambient roar of Korean infrastructure in motion.
"I'd want someone to change the answer for me," he said. "If it were — if someone I—" He stopped. The sentence had reached the territory where Jihoon's voice went from quiet to absent, the operational mind encountering the personal and choosing silence over vulnerability. He cleared his throat. "Roger that."
The highway opened. Seoul's glow on the horizon. Yeji held the container of sikhye on her lap and thought about the lie and the ease of it and the door it had opened and whether the door could be closed and whether she wanted it closed.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Changwon.
*Call when you can. Important.*
She called. Changwon answered on the first ring — the immediate pickup of a man who'd been holding his phone and waiting.
"There's a dungeon in Mapo-gu," Changwon said. No greeting. The delivery-driver efficiency of a man who prioritized information over pleasantries. "The Association upgraded it today. D-rank to C-rank. New survey data came in this morning — mana density readings spiked overnight. The structural assessment team went in at noon."
"Where in Mapo-gu?"
"Yeongdeungpo-ro. The old commercial basement complex. Two blocks from the laundromat."
Two blocks. From the safe house. From the apartment where Kwon logged observations and Nari slept on the refrigerator and the radiators worked in theory and the windows leaked cold air and Yeji did rehabilitation exercises on the bedroom floor.
"Why the upgrade?"
"The survey team's report cited anomalous mana growth patterns — the dungeon's energy output increased forty percent in seventy-two hours. Spontaneous rank escalation. The Association's classification board bumped it to C-rank pending full reassessment." Changwon paused. The pause of a man who had one more piece of information and was delivering it with the careful placement of someone who understood that the last detail was the one that mattered. "The survey team also reported auditory anomalies. Voices. In the walls. Three team members heard them. One filed a formal incident report."
Voices in the walls. Two blocks from her safe house. A dungeon that had spontaneously escalated from D-rank to C-rank in three days — the same three days since Yeji had moved into the laundromat apartment and begun rehabilitation exercises that extended her perception into the ground beneath the building.
The deep vibration. The old, angry presence beneath Seoul that she'd detected during the second rehabilitation session. The tectonic fury that existed below the city's foundation. Had her perception touched something? Had the narrow beam of [Requiem]'s focused extension reached into the earth and contacted something that had been sleeping and was now, because a summoner had knocked on its door, waking up?
Jihoon glanced at her. He'd heard enough of the call — one ear, the good angle, the fragments sufficient for a tactical assessment.
"Two blocks," he said. One word would have done it. He used two. Which meant he was worried.
Yeji looked at the highway. Seoul ahead. The safe house that might not be safe. The dungeon that was growing. The voices in its walls that might be spirits or might be something older and angrier and deeper than anything she'd heard before.
"How fast can we get back?" she asked.
Jihoon accelerated.
