Chương 126: Something No Human Should Do

The front door opened halfway. Batu blocked the gap with his body. With an intruding arm caught between his fangs, he twisted his head. A stun baton fell to the floor. Dust ran to its tip and pulled out a spring. A second man came through the balcony. Riphiel stayed in front of the parents' room until he crossed the line. Then she struck his knee with the back of her blade. As he sank down, she hit his wrist. His gun slid across the living room floor.

"Came back to catch the little woman?" Riphiel turned her sword in her bandaged hand.

"No chair to tie me to this time." Argaon grew. He stopped before his back touched the low ceiling, but his spread wings blocked the gap between the living room and the balcony.

"My house."

"It's not your house." Kichan laid a man out on the floor.

"What's yours is mine."

"Save it for later."

"The freezer is mine too." Riphiel knocked another man down with her scabbard.

"The ice cream is mine." His mother shouted from the bedroom.

"Is this really the time, you two?" Both shut up. Valkyrie gathered the white gas spreading near the ceiling. Leaving the clean water as a thin film, she pushed only the portion smelling of chemicals into an empty flowerpot outside on the balcony. Dust ran between the guns and the door-breaching device. Pins, springs, and ignition contacts piled on the floor with the sound of pieces dropping into a cookie tin. The last man through the entrance dropped his weapon.

"I'm out." Kichan let him pass. Batu did not bite him either. The man went down the stairs with both hands raised. In the parking lot, someone else who had received the same order inserted a magazine into a gun. The command terminal on the entryway floor cycled through different locations. The video feeds were gone, but more acknowledgments of the order kept coming in. At one branch, a man put his gun on the floor. In another vehicle, a driver started the engine. Same order. Different actions.

Kichan took the wrist of a man lying outside the entrance. Fear. Pain. The thought that refusing an order meant death. Those alone could not bring the people far away within his grasp. A little later, he touched something different. Possess Riphiel. Take the other world's miracles, even if it meant killing his parents. The people who read those words and took up weapons with their own hands. Distance and affiliation did not matter.

The moment they made the same choice, they overlapped, all pointing in one direction. Kichan pressed the call button on the terminal. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"I'm telling you for the last time." A voice answered through the static.

"Hand over the entity. Your parents will be spared."

"Riphiel isn't a thing."

"Han Kichan. Do you know how many people you killed today?" Kichan remembered the coat on the examination room floor. The hand lowering the needle. The red marks on Riphiel's wrists.

"Thanks for reminding me." He ended the call. Riphiel watched him from in front of his parents' room. Argaon said no more either. At Kichan's fingertips, the people who had embraced the same desire overlapped into a single form.

"Then I'll cut it off." The first thing he caught was the rebar beneath the apartment floor. Then the front door lock, the balcony railing, and the fallen men's weapons. Kichan followed the metal with the sense he had learned from the Rohonc copy. The grain of life he had read in the Voynich Manuscript overlapped it. His senses did not stop at home. A laboratory in Seoul. A warehouse on the outskirts. An underground branch. Vehicles on the road. The people who received the same order were in different places.

Neither a shared drug nor matching name tags bound them. The man who dropped his weapon and went downstairs receded from his fingertips. An employee hiding under a desk and a patient trapped while seeking treatment remained outside the form. Instead, people whose faces he had never seen overlapped in one place. Possess Riphiel and the other world's miracles. Eliminate Kichan's family to keep them. They could have walked away after reading the order. Some put down their guns. Some got out of their vehicles.

But those who remained checked their triggers, broke down doors, and headed for his parents' home. That choice put them inside a single form. Kichan inhaled. A boundary opened between those trembling under someone else's orders and those who came to kill his family with their own hands. The hand choosing that boundary was his too. Below the apartment, the last vehicle door opened. Riphiel stood before his parents' room, sword in her bandaged hand. Batu stayed behind the threshold. He stopped only those coming in.

Argaon hooked a wing over the balcony window frame and looked outside the building.

"Kichan." All playfulness had left the old dragon's voice. Kichan did not answer. There were too many pulses inside the form. At a distant branch, someone pressed an ignition switch. In a vehicle headed for his parents' home, a magazine entered a gun. Kichan took hold of the overlapping form. No set incantation came to mind. He did not even know what to call this power. He severed what had joined like a single being so that it could no longer remain joined.

A gun hit the floor in a Seoul laboratory. At the outlying warehouse, only an open vehicle door swung. A radio crackled ownerless in the corridor of an underground branch. A moving vehicle veered out of its lane as the driver's seat emptied. The man in the back who had thrown down his weapon remained. He grabbed the wheel. Clothes and equipment fell to the apartment stairs too. Outside the front door, the hands holding the breaching device vanished.

At that same moment, combat equipment and command networks stopped at several facilities. Those who remained fled. Those who had dropped their weapons were alive. Argaon grew larger to support equipment tilting toward the balcony. He used his wings to keep fire from spreading next door. Valkyrie separated chemicals from the firefighting water on the floor and blocked the drain. Dust pulled out the last ignition contact and placed it on the back of Kichan's hand.

Batu did not move a step from in front of his parents.

Through Kichan's fingertips came the sensation of people going out, one by one. Not facilities. Not the name of an organization. He had grasped them as a single mass, but they disappeared one person at a time. One. Then another. Too fast to count. His arms lost their strength. Kichan could not lift his hands from the floor. Dust from the entryway tiles and powdered glass lodged between his fingers. Ah. He had annihilated too many people at once. Riphiel approached, then stopped. There was no blood on her sword.

Argaon returned to his small form and landed beside Kichan. The dragon knew that more than buildings and an organization's name had just vanished. He did not say Kichan had done well. He did not say there had been no choice. Together they looked at the entryway, where clothes and weapons lay without their owners.

That night, the family sat at the table again. His mother set rice before Riphiel, whose wrists had fresh bandages. She put out a separate helping of meat for Argaon. Batu lay by the entrance. Valkyrie's water bowl and Dust's empty plate were back in their places. Riphiel's second bowl of rice had been reheated.

"I'll buy you ice cream tomorrow," Kichan said.

"I will not go alone." Riphiel ate a spoonful of rice.

"I will take Batu."

"That's not happening either." No one could laugh. Dirt and powdered glass remained between Kichan's fingers despite washing. Then a meaning caught inside his throat. There was no sound. It named no punishment, no reward, and no place to go. Kichan turned over the shopping receipt at the end of the table. His father silently passed him a pen. He wrote down the two sentences exactly as they came. `To the human Han Kichan, who opened the boundary of death. ` `We request your response concerning what you have done.

` That was all. Kichan pushed the receipt to the middle of the table. His father read the two sentences.

"Will you go?" Kichan looked at the bandaged Riphiel and the silent Argaon. At Batu guarding the entrance and the meal his mother had made. Then he picked up his spoon.

"If it's urgent, they can come here."