Chương 68: 67: The Unknown

VIII. The Woman She came at dusk. She didn't arrive through the main entrance, the docks, or any door the island possessed. She simply came through, as though walls were suggestions and the distance between outside and inside was a minor inconvenience. Sangmin never saw her arrive. He felt her. The air carried a crushing presence, so dense that breathing became an effort. The cameras flickered, their red lights dying, reviving, then dying again. Between those stutters, he caught a glimpse of her.

She stood in the corridor outside his door. He knew it without seeing. Her presence pressed through the thin wood, closer than anyone had been all day. It was the feeling of cold before touching ice, the instinct prey felt before the predator struck. She then moved on. No footsteps. No rustling fabric. The air grew lighter, the cameras steadied, and he could breathe again. Somewhere on the island, she was walking. The Stepper followed. She walked through the corridors as though they belonged to her.

A blue-black suit shimmered between deep navy and glossy black, feathers so impossibly fine they resembled silk yet shifted like living wings. Her hands rested behind her back with effortless certainty. Where the Stepper's armor wore the colors of blood and ash, hers echoed deep water and midnight skies, shades where light simply disappeared. She carried her helmet beneath one arm as casually as a handbag. Green lenses faced outward while her uncovered face defied age.

Behind her, the Stepper moved in perfect silence, white lenses fixed ahead, needing only her. Together, they crossed the island. They passed the staff quarters, where survivors cowered in silence. They passed the staff quarters, where survivors cowered in silence. They passed the medical wing, where the wounded stopped moaning as she drew near. They passed the gala hall, where bodies had begun to rot, the old man still lying with a butter knife through his throat, his signet ring gleaming beneath the dim lights.

She never spared any of them a glance. She didn't have to. She already knew. In the main hall - the same hall where Sangmin had first seen the smiling men a year ago - she stopped. The Stepper halted behind her. A dozen staff members looked up. Confusion became hope. Hope became fear. Fear settled into blank acceptance, the expression of people who had exhausted every other response. She looked at them. The first man clutched his chest. His eyes widened in disbelief before he collapsed without a sound.

Another dropped beside him, convulsing so violently his limbs hammered against the marble floor. Foam spilled from his mouth. A woman screamed, pressed both hands over her ears as if trying to block something out, then seized a fallen shard of glass and drove it into her own throat. Others simply... stopped. Their hearts gave out beneath the impossible weight of her presence, minds breaking before they could even understand what they were looking at. Nobody attacked. Nobody ran.

The ones still alive could only tremble as tears streamed down their faces, their instincts insisting that whatever stood before them had never been meant to exist. She raised a single finger, tracing a small circle through the air. The Stepper moved. Sangmin never saw it happen. He felt it. A rush of displaced air. A pressure change that made his ears pop. Then came silence. Not the silence of absence, but the silence of completion. His door opened. One moment it was closed.

The next, he stood in the corridor beside the other children, all pulled from their rooms without taking a single step. They lined the hallway like dolls. A blur of red and gray. Another whisper of air. Outside. The wind struck him first. Real wind. Salt air. Living air. Not the filtered breath of the island. He hadn't felt it in a year. Only then did he truly see her. She stood fifty feet away, hands clasped behind her back, the Stepper motionless behind her. Her skin was pale as milk, bone, moonlight.

Hair the color of fresh snow spilled past her shoulders, and her eyes... Purple. Deep violet. Bruise-colored. A shade that seemed impossible in nature. They looked through him rather than at him, as though seeing things no one else could perceive. She was albino. He remembered the word from long ago, whispered in his village whenever rare things were discussed. Fragility had nothing to do with her. She was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen. The first thing he noticed was her hair.

It flowed past her knees, impossibly long. He'd never seen anyone with hair like that before. The second was her presence. She had so much presence she had none, yet every instinct in his body screamed that something was terribly wrong. Most people carried something into a room - warmth, tension, fear. She carried nothing. She simply existed, and everything else arranged itself around her. Like a grave carved into existence. A hole where something should have been.

Her violet eyes swept across the children, perhaps twenty or thirty of them, as though counting... remembering. Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.

"You will be taken back to your parents." The words settled over them.

"All of you. You will be cared for. The boats will work again. The phones will work again. People will find you and ask questions you don't need to answer. You will say you don't remember." She paused, her gaze drifting across the line once more.

"You will be telling the truth." Another heartbeat passed.

"This island will not exist tomorrow. The people who brought you here will not exist tomorrow. The people who bought you, sold you, smiled at you... you will never see them again." Silence lingered before a little girl broke first, a tiny sob escaping her lips. Another child followed, then another, until half the line had collapsed into uncontrollable tears, calling for mothers and fathers in languages Sangmin couldn't always understand. The woman watched without expression. The Stepper never moved.

Sangmin didn't cry. He thought about going home. Back to his parents. Back to the village. Back to the mountains. Back to Bora's empty place at the table. He pictured his mother's face. His father's hands. His grandfather's voice. The winding path leading home. He felt nothing. Only cold. The boy who had climbed trees, carried rice, and held his sister's hand had disappeared the day he was taken. Someone else stood here now, someone who counted cracks in ceilings and knew everything could be stolen in a single day.

Going home wouldn't bring that boy back. It would only be pretending. He'd sit at that table, eat that rice, hear those stories, while part of him remained trapped on this island. Every glance at his parents would end with them being dragged away. Every time he closed his eyes, Bora's hand would still be reaching through the dark. Safety no longer existed. Only the cold, the counting, and the waiting. He wasn't going back.... He moved before he realized he had.

Leaving the line, he crossed the open ground toward the woman with violet eyes and the presence that felt like an empty grave. The Stepper shifted ever so slightly before she raised a finger, stopping it without a word. Ten feet away, Sangmin dropped to his knees. The gravel dug into his skin. He didn't notice. Looking up at her, he struggled through broken English.

"Please... I want join you." She regarded him without surprise.

"You do not know what you ask." He shook his head.

"I don't care. Before..." He pointed toward the island behind him.

"I inventory. I nothing. But you..." His eyes found her suit, the silent Stepper, the impossible feathers.

"You not nothing. You something. Please... make me something." She tilted her head.

"You are a child."

"I know." His voice cracked.

"I learn. I learn fast." The English failed him.

"제발. 저를 쓸모없게 만들지 마세요. 무엇이든 하겠습니다. 무엇이든." Please. Don't make me useless. I'll do anything. Anything. She stared down at him while the Stepper remained perfectly still. Behind them, the other children continued crying for their parents. Sangmin waited. Nothing happened. Then she spoke. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Goddess." He blinked.

"What?"

"You called me 'goddess.'" She repeated his Korean flawlessly.

"제발, 여신님." Please, goddess. He hadn't even realized he'd said it. After another long silence, she turned away.

"Bring him," she told the Stepper.

"Process the rest as instructed." Without another glance, she walked toward the island's main building, hands still clasped behind her back, already focused on something beyond him. The Stepper moved. A blur of red and gray. Sangmin was lifted effortlessly from the gravel and carried after her into the darkness.... She stopped and turned her head toward the horizon. The ocean. Sangmin followed her gaze as a distant roar swelled across the water. A fighter jet.

It screamed low over the waves, cutting through the bruised sky with terrifying speed. His heart lurched. It must belong to her. Why else would it come here? The nose dipped. The cannon opened fire. BRRRRRRRTTTT!! A storm of armor-piercing rounds tore toward the shoreline. Sangmin squeezed his eyes shut. Death again. He barely had time to think it. Silence. He opened one eye. The woman hadn't moved. She stood exactly where she had been, facing the sea as though nothing had happened. The gunfire...

Had never reached them. His gaze drifted upward. The fighter jet no longer existed as a fighter jet. It had been disassembled. Thousands upon thousands of individual components lay arranged in immaculate rows beneath a lone tree. Every bolt, rivet, wire, turbine blade, hydraulic piston, circuit board, fuel line, canopy shard, and screw had been sorted with impossible precision, as though an obsessive engineer had spent months cataloguing the aircraft piece by piece.

The pilot hung beside them, a thick rope looped around his neck and suspended from a sturdy branch. He kicked helplessly, clawing at the noose as his face darkened. No one had seen her move. No one had seen anything. She calmly walked toward the shoreline. When she reached the water's edge, she slowly raised one hand, straightened her fingers into a knife-hand, and swung. The ocean obeyed. FWOOOOOM. Water split apart in a perfectly straight line. It continued. And continued.

The sea peeled open all the way to the horizon, exposing the dark ocean floor while walls of water towered impossibly high on either side, held apart by a force Sangmin couldn't begin to understand. Far beyond the horizon lay an island, tiny from this distance. She had felt something there. The invisible slash reached it. There was no explosion. The island simply... Split apart. Rock, concrete, forests, and buildings collapsed inward before vanishing beneath the sea.

The ocean rushed back together, and a thunderclap rolled across the world.... Seconds later, only waves remained. Sangmin's face went white.

"무... 무서워..." S-Scary... His eyes shook. What kind of person could split the ocean apart with a single swing? Another roar split the sky. Sangmin looked up. One fighter jet had become five. They rushed over the horizon in perfect formation, engines screaming as they descended toward the island. Crook didn't even look up. She simply stamped her foot. BOOM. The shoreline erupted. A massive boulder burst from the earth, spinning into the air. She pivoted and drove a sharp kick into it. KRAAAAM!

The stone crossed the distance faster than Sangmin's eyes could follow. The lead fighter exploded. The remaining aircraft answered with a storm of gunfire. BRRRRRRRTTTTT!! Crook stepped onto the ocean. The sea held her weight as though it had always been solid ground. She walked several paces across the surface before tapping her feet in a precise rhythm. Tap. Tap. Tap. Every step sent delicate splashes dancing around her ankles.

Instead of falling back into the sea, the droplets hung suspended around her like a glittering halo. Sangmin stared. Her hands blurred. Thousands of tiny impacts rang through the air as every droplet shot outward, intercepting the incoming bullets one by one before they could reach her. Tink. Tink. Tink. Tink. The ocean itself had become her shield. She spun. One hand thrust forward. FWOOM. The air cracked. An invisible strike crossed the distance in an instant.

The second fighter folded cleanly in half before spiraling into the sea. The suspended droplets were still moving. They reached the third aircraft. One hundred tiny punctures appeared across its fuselage at the same moment. The wings separated. The engines tore free. The cockpit split open. The aircraft came apart into countless fragments before plunging into the ocean.... The last two fighters split apart.

One banked sharply, releasing a pair of missiles while the other accelerated directly toward her, afterburners blazing. Crook calmly raised both hands. The air changed. Sangmin waited for some overwhelming force to reveal itself. Instead, the heat simply disappeared. The orange glow inside the jet's engines dimmed until it went dark. The missiles lost their blazing exhaust as warmth drained from them, frost racing across metal at impossible speed until both the aircraft and its missiles became solid masses of ice.

The engines died. Momentum faded. Gravity reclaimed them. The frozen machines fell soundlessly into the ocean and disappeared beneath the waves. Sangmin's mouth hung open.

"말도 안 돼..." That... that's impossible... The final fighter was already upon her. Crook ceased to occupy the place where she stood. Before Sangmin's mind could process her absence, she was beside the cockpit. Her fist moved. It struck with barely a sound. Color bled across the sky like a wound, reality warping around the impact before the aircraft flickered once... twice... Then it simply wasn't there anymore. The distortion faded. More engines. Sangmin looked up.

Another formation was already screaming in from beyond the horizon. Tiny black specks multiplied against the sky until they numbered in the dozens, contrails crisscrossing the clouds as they converged on the shoreline. Crook let herself fall. She dropped through open air without resistance, her hair streaming past her knees. She ran. On nothing. Sangmin's heartbeat thundered in his ears. Her feet never touched the ground.

Each step punched into empty air, compressing it until the atmosphere behaved like solid stone. Circular ripples burst beneath every footfall as air molecules reverberated violently, hurling her forward in impossible strides. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. The sky shook beneath every step. She stretched out one arm. Crook became the highest conductive path in the sky. Thunder answered. The atmosphere convulsed as countless electrical discharges abandoned the clouds and raced toward her outstretched hand.

She caught the blinding discharge as it flowed through her, redirected it with a twist of her wrist, and lashed it outward like a whip. KRAAAAAK! Lightning lashed across the heavens. The bolt tore through the formation. One jet split apart. Then another. Then another. Fireballs bloomed across the sky as molten wreckage rained into the sea, the thunder arriving only after the destruction was already over. Crook was already back where she had been, lowering her hand as though she'd done nothing remarkable.

Sangmin could only stare. Everything she'd done defied reason, yet throughout it all he had sensed nothing from her. The Stepper radiated presence. Other extraordinary beings carried an unmistakable weight. Crook carried neither. She performed miracles with the quiet certainty of someone following ordinary rules no one else understood. Accepting a goddess hurling islands apart with supernatural power would've been easy. This was infinitely harder.

She accomplished the impossible through mastery alone until mastery itself had become indistinguishable from reality. At that moment, Sangmin understood what his heart had chosen. His devotion wasn't to power. It was to skill. Silence returned. Crook stepped back onto land as though she had taken a leisurely stroll, lowered her hands, and continued walking toward them. Sangmin stared, his mouth hanging slightly open as his mind refused to accept what he had witnessed. The jets, pilots, ocean, an entire island...

gone. At last, he understood. The Stepper hadn't been protecting her. It had been protecting everyone else. IX. The Making Years passed. He didn't count them anymore. Counting belonged to ceilings, waiting, and the child he'd once been. That child was gone. The other children went home.

He knew because reports crossed his instructors' desks, and sometimes reunion footage played across briefing screens - parents weeping, children clinging to them while carefully curated news broadcasts covered the Syndicate's latest tragedy. Multiple massacres. Multiple islands. Celebrities and politicians listed among the dead and missing. The world watched for weeks, then months, before moving on. His family believed he was dead. He let them.

Officials had visited the village with paperwork and rehearsed sympathy, explaining that the children taken that night had never been found. The investigation continued. They were terribly sorry. His parents had probably cried. His grandfather had probably stood beneath the mountains in silence. Sangmin never let himself think beyond that. Instead, he trained. They sent him to New Zealand, to a Syndicate facility buried beneath the red interior where an empty wilderness concealed countless eyes.

It existed for one purpose: turning children into weapons. He arrived as raw material. He became one. Training began before dawn and ended long after sunset. His body was pushed beyond limits he hadn't known existed, broken and rebuilt until both became ordinary. The instructors were ruthless. He didn't care. Everything had a schedule. Everything had a place. Every corridor, classroom, dormitory and training hall was monitored, catalogued and organised with obsessive precision. Compared to the island...

It felt wonderful. Meals arrived on time every day. The food was incredible. He found himself looking forward to breakfast, lunch and dinner with almost embarrassing enthusiasm. The other children were disciplined. They laughed. They argued. They built friendships. Nobody stopped them. But friendship wasn't why they were there. Every conversation ended when the whistle blew. Every smile disappeared the moment training resumed. Broken jaws stopped meaning much after the third.

Broken ribs lost their significance before the first month ended. His skull fractured once during a sparring match against someone twice his age and size. He refused to stay down until the final blow put him in medical for a week. The first question he asked after waking was when he could resume training. The instructors watched him closely. Unlike the cameras on the island, they weren't observing to control him. They wanted to measure him. To discover where he would finally fail. He never did.

Sangmin trained like a starving wolf guarding its meal, certain someone would steal it the moment he relaxed. Every strike carried desperation. Every drill carried hunger. He learned faster, endured longer and hit harder than the others. Talent helped. It wasn't the reason. The others still had homes. Families. A future waiting beyond the gates. Sangmin had only the cold, the counting and the certainty that everything worth loving could disappear in a single day. So he trained.

By thirteen, he was already showing more promise than assets twice his age. The Magpie serum came next. The instructors explained the changes before administering it. Strength. Speed. Dexterity. Reaction time. Efficiency. Every physical attribute multiplied fiftyfold. The price was nightmares. Some recruits never recovered from them. There was another cost. The serum judged its host. Those whose will proved too weak couldn't withstand it.

Their own cells began breaking down as the transformation consumed them from within. More than one recruit died before morning. Sangmin accepted the injection without asking a single question. The effects arrived almost immediately. It felt like acid had replaced the blood in his veins. Every heartbeat spread unbearable pain through his body as every cell screamed. The agony lasted the entire night. He never cried out. The instructors merely observed. One finally nodded.

'Good.'

'That's just the weakness burning away.' His entire batch erupted with excitement. One boy held a plank for an entire week without collapsing. Another completed ten thousand push-ups because he was bored. A girl began bench pressing several tons as part of her warm-up. One quiet recruit glanced at university-level equations and solved them almost instantly. The serum didn't make everyone identical. It magnified whatever they already excelled at.

The testing grounds sprawled across acres of engineered wilderness, a controlled maze of dense forest, jagged rock and open clearings where the Syndicate forged its future weapons. The instructors released them. The forest erupted. Children tore through the canopy, leaping from branch to branch, swinging across thick vines like monkeys, flipping through the air and rebounding off trunks with reckless joy.

Others raced through the undergrowth playing tag with cheetahs, laughing as the cats lunged after them before darting away again. Gravity became optional as they flowed through the forest in every direction while exhausted instructors struggled to keep them inside the testing zone. Sangmin didn't laugh. He simply ran. Wind tore past his face as the world slowed around him. Every branch, leaf and landing point aligned in his mind before he reached it.

His body followed without hesitation, movement feeling less like effort than instinct. Beyond the trees, the real trials began. A girl barely sixteen faced a grizzly twice her size. It reared up with a roar. She caught it by the throat and delivered a one handed chokeslam that blasted a crater into the earth. The dazed bear wheezed. She patted its head and walked away. Nearby, a broad shouldered boy hoisted an elephant onto his back, carried it ten metres across the clearing and gently set it down.

The elephant trumpeted in confusion. He only grinned. Another trainee hammered a full grown oak. Bark burst apart with every strike. His knuckles split open, healed and split again until a foot wide crater scarred the trunk. Across the field, a lanky teenager sprinted for his life. An enormous ox thundered after him.

"I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING!" The ox disagreed. At the edge of the clearing, Sangmin stood before a charging rhinoceros. Crash. His shoulder smashed into its flank, sending shockwaves through the ground. The rhino stumbled sideways. Sangmin laughed, planted his feet and charged again. The rhino looked deeply offended. Elsewhere, another group had stranger ideas. They sat in a circle with sleeves rolled up as cobras and black mambas sank their fangs into exposed arms. Nobody flinched. One checked his watch.

"Twenty seconds."

"Thirty, easy."

"I bet you're out before a minute."

"Loser buys lunch." The venom barely had time to spread before their bodies neutralised it. By the end of the hour, every puncture wound had disappeared completely. Sangmin watched from a distance, arms folded. He didn't trust it. He'd seen broken bones mend within an hour, deep cuts disappear overnight and stab wounds fade before sunrise. Everyone celebrated it. They welcomed bites, bruises and fractures because they knew they would recover. Sangmin knew better.

He drew a knife, sliced a shallow line across his forearm, wrapped it and waited. Ten minutes later he removed the bandage. Only a thin white scar remained. His jaw tightened. He wanted to trust it. He couldn't. The instructors were already preparing the next phase. Broken bones. Stab wounds. Concussions. The trainees endured injuries that should have been fatal, then stood up and kept fighting. Every fracture healed faster. Every wound closed stronger.

A boy with a broken rib continued sparring until his partner drove a knee into the same spot. He staggered, spat blood and swung back.

"You call that a hit?!"

"You call that a rib?!" They laughed. Sangmin didn't. He trained. He bled. He healed. He grew stronger. He simply never forgot the wounds were still there. Even if his body insisted they weren't. The nightmares came too. Every night, Bora reached for him through the darkness. Every night, he reached back. Every night, she slipped away. He always woke gasping, his heart racing, his sheets soaked with sweat. Eventually, he stopped wishing they would end. They were the price.

More importantly, they were proof he still remembered. As long as the dreams remained, Bora still existed somewhere inside him. That was enough.