Chương 69: 68: The Search

One night, years later, he looked out his window and saw snow. Only a light dusting. It would be gone by morning. He stared anyway. The island, the training, the serum, and the nightmares all fell away, leaving only the memory of a child lying beneath a white ceiling, praying for snow, praying for cold enough to make everything stop. He remembered a voice asking, Did you feel that? A hand reaching through the dark. And finally... Her name. Bora. 보라. Purple. The color of mountains at sunset.

The wildflowers beside the irrigation channels. His little sister, who followed him everywhere, waited beneath trees until he climbed down, endlessly calling, "Oppa!" She was still out there. Alive. Dead. He didn't know. He'd buried the question so deeply that even his nightmares couldn't reach it. The snow brought it back. He couldn't ignore it anymore. He left immediately. The laboratory was quiet, occupied only by the night shift.

A few technicians glanced up as the teenager in Magpie black walked in with the unmistakable certainty of someone who wouldn't be turned away. He stopped beside a weary technician.

"I need a scan."

"You're not sched-""I need a scan." Something in his voice silenced her.

"…What are we scanning?"

"My brain." She frowned.

"For memory extraction." Her expression changed.

"I need to find someone." Memory extraction existed, though it was invasive, uncomfortable, and almost exclusively reserved for interrogations or asset recovery. Volunteering for it was practically unheard of.

"You understand it might not work?" she asked quietly.

"Memories fade. What you're looking for may not exist anymore." Sangmin simply looked at her. After a long silence, she sighed.

"…I'll make the call."

"Wait here."... Permission came faster than expected. An executive Sangmin had never met approved the request within the hour. He wouldn't learn until much later that his file had been watched for years. The Syndicate had plans for him, and if finding his sister kept him focused, they were willing to help. He only knew the chair was cold. The electrodes were cold. The machine surrounding his head was cold. Together, they felt strangely familiar.

"Close your eyes," the technician said.

"Think about her. The machine will do the rest." He obeyed. Bora's laugh. Her tiny hand in his. The way she called, "Oppa," as though it were the safest word in the world. The fear in her eyes that night. Her hand reaching through the darkness as she was pulled away. The machine hummed. The electrodes pulsed. Deep within his mind, the memory was copied and fed into the Syndicate's search systems. The search began. An hour passed before the technician finally spoke.

"…I found something." Sangmin opened his eyes. She stared at the screen for a long moment before turning toward him.

"She's alive." The words refused to register.

"She's alive." She turned the monitor. There she was. A recent photograph. Older now. Seventeen, perhaps eighteen. But unmistakably Bora. The same eyes. The same smile. The same quiet way of standing. 보라. Alive. Sangmin stared without blinking. His hands tightened around the chair until his knuckles whitened, his jaw clenching so hard he felt a tooth crack beneath the pressure. She had survived. Somewhere beyond his reach, she was living a life he knew nothing about. He would find her. No matter how long it took.

No matter what stood between them. The technician kept speaking - procedures, warnings, restrictions - but he heard none of it. He saw only Bora's face. For the first time in ten years, something besides cold filled his chest. It was purpose. He would find her. Everything else could wait. Part Three: The Escape I. The Fortress The Syndicate fortress lay hidden in the heart of New Zealand.

From above, it looked like nothing more than an ordinary research institution, invisible to anyone the Syndicate hadn't permitted to see it. Beneath the surface, however, sprawled an entire underground city. Training facilities. Armories. Laboratories. Dormitories for assets who had nowhere else to belong. Sangmin had never understood how it all fit beneath the earth.

He knew almost nothing about architecture, yet every corridor, every district, every impossible expanse made him feel as though the underground should have collapsed under its own weight. Apis made the impossible real. He was nineteen now. Ten years had passed since the island. Ten years of training, serum adjustments, and relentless conditioning had shaped him into someone who could kill without hesitation. The nightmares never left.

Bora's hand still reached for him through the dark every night, but he'd learned to wake silently and count the cracks above his bunk until his heartbeat slowed. 하나, 둘, 셋, 넷. Tonight was different. Tonight, he had a plan. He'd built it over months, piece by invisible piece. Every allowance earned through completed training modules had been hidden instead of spent, tucked behind a ventilation grate he'd hollowed out himself. A black shirt, gray trousers, a small backpack, and information.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. A compound in Southeast Asia. A name. A photograph of a girl with his sister's face. She was alive. She was also in the hands of a man who trafficked in things that should never be owned. Sangmin told no one. Permission would be denied, and help would always come with conditions. The Syndicate would turn Bora into another asset, another bargaining chip, just as they'd turned him into one.

He refused to let that happen. So he planned. He waited. He counted. And tonight... He moved. — The fortress never slept, but it had rhythms. Shift changes. Patrol routes. Blind spots trainees weren't supposed to notice. Sangmin noticed all of them. He slipped through the gaps like smoke, moving from his quarters into a ventilation shaft, down to the maintenance level, then into an abandoned access tunnel. Over three nights he'd loosened the grate, a quarter turn at a time. Tonight, it came free without a sound.

Cold air rushed over him. Real air. Outside. He crawled out beneath a sky crowded with stars. The desert stretched endlessly ahead. There were no fences. There didn't need to be. The nearest town lay two hundred kilometers away, and no one was supposed to leave. Except him. He started walking. II. The Crossing It took three days to reach the first town. He barely ate or slept. The serum kept him moving, burning through exhaustion while he survived on rainwater, cattle troughs and whatever puddles he found.

Blisters formed, healed and returned. The desert tried to kill him. He kept walking. On the second day, curiosity got the better of him. He waited until nothing surrounded him except endless desert before testing his limits. He started running. He timed himself. One hundred metres. One-eight of a second. The sound came afterwards. BOOOOOM! A sonic boom ripped across the desert. Another followed.

Every stride detonated the air behind him as sand erupted into towering plumes and the hardened ground shattered beneath each footstep. As he accelerated, the air itself became a furnace. Friction blistered the skin across his arms, face and neck before it healed almost as quickly as it burned. His shirt began to smoke, the fabric around the sleeves and collar charring before he forced himself to stop. The burns disappeared within minutes. His clothes didn't.

He looked back across the trail he'd carved through the desert and finally understood. At full speed he wouldn't just outrun people. Every sprint would create sonic booms, generate enough heat to scorch everything around him and smash roads and soil beneath his feet. Near a town, the shockwaves alone could kill innocent people. From that moment onward, he never ran at full speed around others again. He also discovered there was a difference between bursting and sustaining.

For a few hundred metres, he could force his body to terrifying speeds, but every second beyond that demanded more oxygen than he could draw and more energy than even the serum could immediately replace. His pace steadily declined until it settled into a speed he could maintain without exhausting himself. It was still impossibly fast by any human standard. Just... survivable. Rain caught him on the fourth day. He stopped beneath the open sky and held out a hand. His hands blurred. One drop. Another. Another.

His fingers snapped through the rain faster than the eye could follow, plucking individual droplets from the downpour before they struck the ground. For a moment... He almost smiled. The smile disappeared just as quickly. He spent the rest of the storm testing himself. Flies never escaped. He caught them gently by their wings before letting them go. Mosquitoes fared no better. Their tiny proboscises found themselves pinched neatly between his fingertips before they could draw blood.

His body moved almost before his mind gave the command. Every successful catch reminded him just how much he had changed. At the town, he hid beneath a tarp in the back of a freight truck heading north. The driver never knew. At the coast, he slipped aboard a fishing boat after dark and crossed to Indonesia concealed among diesel fumes and rotting fish. From there, the journey became jungle. He avoided roads, checkpoints and towns, traveling by night and sleeping in trees during the day.

Fruit, river water and stubborn determination kept him alive as he crossed Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos and beyond, slipping through borders wherever watchful eyes failed to look. The cash in his backpack remained untouched. It belonged to Bora. It would pay for her freedom, for food, shelter and a future after he found her. He would sooner starve than spend it on himself. By the time he reached Myanmar, he hadn't eaten properly in six days or slept in four.

His body ran on sheer will, and the image of his sister's face. It was enough. It had to be. III. The City The city rose from the jungle like a fever dream. Streets overflowed with cars, motorbikes, and people weaving around one another without slowing. Markets spilled onto the sidewalks. Glass towers stood beside collapsing shacks. The smell of fried food mixed with exhaust and something darker that clung to the back of the throat. Sangmin disappeared into it. No one spared him a second glance.

A teenager in worn clothes wasn't unusual here. He was invisible. The compound lay on the far side of the city. So did Bora. He slipped through impossible traffic on instinct, his enhanced reflexes carrying him between speeding vehicles. Then someone grabbed his backpack. The pull nearly spun him around. By the time he turned, both the hand and the bag were gone. A young thief darted through the crowd, already several metres away, moving with the effortless confidence of someone who'd spent a lifetime stealing.

Sangmin froze. The cash. The documents. Bora's photograph. Everything he'd saved for four years. He ran. IV. The Chase The crowd should have slowed him, but it opened before him instead. People stumbled aside without understanding why. A woman barely avoided a blur passing inches from her face. A motorcyclist swerved in panic as something outran him. Sangmin held himself back. One full-speed sprint would turn the street into a disaster. Even restrained, he was moving faster than anyone could properly follow.

The thief was fast. Sangmin was faster. The gap shrank from ten metres to five, then two. The thief dove into an alley, and Sangmin followed through twisting passages lined with rubbish and hanging laundry. The runner knew every turn, keeping barely ahead until he burst onto a busy boulevard packed with traffic. He never slowed. Neither did Sangmin. He vaulted a stalled motorbike, ducked beneath a vendor's cart, and drove straight through the crowd.

The thief reached the roadside, waving frantically as a battered sedan screeched to a halt. He threw himself inside, and the tyres screamed as the car shot back into traffic. The rear window rolled down. The thief leaned out, grinning as he raised a middle finger. Moments later the sedan blended into hundreds of identical vehicles and disappeared. Sangmin stopped at the roadside. His backpack. His money. Bora's photograph. Gone.

Despair flickered through him for a single heartbeat before something colder settled in its place. V. The Highway He didn't double back into the crowd or return to the alley. He ran for the highway. The sedan would have to merge eventually. City streets offered endless turns, but the highway was a river, and every river had a direction. So he ran. Asphalt blurred beneath his feet as shoppers cried out in confusion. A woman dropped her groceries. A cyclist swerved into a parked car.

Drivers turned in disbelief while the black-clad teenager reached the on-ramp without slowing. He sprinted onto the highway shoulder. Traffic thundered around him. He began overtaking it. Cars travelling at highway speed fell behind one after another. Drivers slammed their brakes, leaned on their horns, or simply stared as the boy outran them. A truck driver watched him pull steadily ahead until he disappeared into the stream of vehicles. Sangmin kept accelerating.

Families watched through their windows in stunned silence, children pointing while their parents searched for an explanation that didn't exist. VI. The Car He found it. Three hundred metres ahead, the battered sedan cut through traffic while the thief glanced into the rear window, convinced he'd escaped. He hadn't. Sangmin accelerated. Three hundred metres became two hundred. One hundred. The driver finally saw him. The sedan swerved between lanes and surged forward. It wasn't enough. Twenty-five metres. Ten.

Sangmin drew level with the driver's window. The man's face drained of colour. The thief turned. Their eyes met. Every trace of confidence disappeared. He yanked out a cheap pistol and fired. Glass exploded. The bullet tore past Sangmin's cheek, close enough for him to feel its heat. He didn't slow. A second shot followed. It missed. The driver buried the accelerator. Sangmin matched the sedan stride for stride while the thief fired again. The bullet sailed wide.

Ahead, a mother stepped onto a crosswalk with her young daughter. Sangmin saw everything at once. The child. The bullet. The impact seconds away. He changed direction instantly, cutting across lanes as horns blared and brakes screamed. A truck thundered toward him, its driver frozen in horror, but Sangmin ignored it. He reached the crossing just in time, shoved the mother and daughter onto the pavement, and the bullet ripped through the space they'd occupied a heartbeat earlier. They survived.

The truck didn't stop. It hit Sangmin. VII. The Impact The impact sounded wet. The truck launched Sangmin across the highway. He crashed into the median and lay twisted among broken concrete as the driver stumbled out, trembling, unable to speak. People gathered. Someone called for an ambulance. A woman cautiously reached toward him. Sangmin stood. He shook the haze from his head. A few cracked bones. Bruised muscles. Nothing serious. The serum was already knitting everything back together. He didn't have time.

The crowd watched in stunned silence as he fixed his eyes on the highway. The sedan was almost gone. A low growl escaped him, something deeper than anger, older than fear. He ran again. VIII. The Buildings The highway wouldn't be fast enough. He needed height. Sangmin veered toward the nearest high-rise and leapt, catching a balcony railing before swinging upward.

His body flowed from ledge to ledge without hesitation, vaulting railings, rebounding off walls and twisting through impossibly narrow gaps with effortless precision. Every movement blended into the next until the climb resembled a blur more than a person. Residents stared through their windows in disbelief. A woman dropped her coffee. A smoker nearly swallowed his cigarette. A child pointed excitedly until his father yanked him away from the glass. Someone screamed. Another began filming.

Several people simply stood frozen, convinced they were hallucinating. The rooftop arrived. He scanned the highway. There. The sedan. He sprinted across the roof and launched himself onto the next building, then another, crossing the skyline in impossible leaps that should've shattered his legs. They didn't. Gasps echoed from the streets below. Traffic slowed as drivers leaned out of windows to watch. Construction workers stopped mid-task.

Office employees pressed against glass walls dozens of floors above the city. Phones rose in every direction, some hands trembling too hard to keep him in frame. Somewhere in the distance, a news helicopter banked sharply and altered course. Sangmin never noticed. He was almost above them.