Chương 80: 79: Back To The Present

Months later, he found himself in another country during one of the rare weeks where neither of them had a mission. The streets bustled with life. Street musicians filled the air with soft melodies while food stalls sent clouds of fragrant smoke drifting between colourful storefronts. Children chased pigeons through the square. Couples wandered beneath strings of lanterns stretched overhead. Sphinx insisted they were 'touching grass.'

Zeinai had traded his armour for a charcoal suit, crisp white shirt and black tie. The eyepatch remained, his mechanical arm hidden beneath a tailored sleeve and glove, though nothing could disguise his towering frame. She emerged from a boutique carrying several shopping bags, wearing a flowing cream-coloured summer dress that swayed around her knees whenever the breeze caught it. It was simple, elegant, and so unlike her usual combat gear that Zeinai paused for a second.

"You stole it?" She stopped dead.."What?"

"The dress." A loud slap landed against his chest.

"I actually bought it!" Another slap followed.

"You giant troglodyte!" He rubbed the spot with a faint smile.

"Sorry."

"You should be." She folded her arms with theatrical offence before her attention drifted elsewhere.

"…Whoa." Her eyes settled on him. The black eyepatch. The metallic arm replacing his left. She stared longer than he expected. Sphinx walked a slow circle around him.

"Oh my God." He raised an eyebrow.

"You look like you're about to acquire a small company."

"I'm wearing a suit."

"You look all serious and business-like."

"…Is that bad?" She studied him for another moment before nodding once.

"No." A grin spread across her face.

"You actually look really good." He blinked.

"…Thank you."

"Don't let it get to your head." She examined his arm.

"…I'm actually surprised you survived." Her voice had lost its usual sarcasm.

"For a while..." she admitted quietly.

"…I thought you were dead." Zeinai flexed the mechanical fingers.

"They work."

"They're creepy."

"They are?" She nodded.

"You somehow look even scarier now." He chuckled.

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"You shouldn't." The streets bustled with life as they continued walking. Street musicians filled the air with soft melodies while food stalls sent fragrant smoke drifting between colourful storefronts. Children chased pigeons through the square, couples wandered beneath strings of lanterns overhead, and for once neither of them had to kill anyone. Without saying a word, Sphinx reached over and grabbed his hand. He looked down.

"What?"

"So we don't get separated."

"You've memorised the map."

"I know."

"…You can let go."

"No." She squeezed harder.

"You're basically a walking landmark. If I lose someone six-foot-six with an eyepatch and robot arm, that's on me." He let her keep holding it. They wandered aimlessly for hours. Sphinx somehow found something to insult in every country they visited.

"These pigeons have attitude."

"That statue definitely owes somebody money."

"Why's every tourist dressed like they're auditioning for disappointment?" Zeinai listened more than he spoke. He'd discovered she never actually expected answers. She simply liked talking. Eventually the conversation drifted toward work.

"You know what's actually awesome about becoming an Operative?"

"The pay?"

"The pay." She nodded vigorously.

"It skyrockets." She proudly puffed out her chest.

"I bought my sister a house." A grin spread beneath her mask.

"She cried for, like... twenty minutes." She laughed.

"It was really awkward."

"And she's getting married soon."

"That's nice."

"It is." Her voice carried nothing but happiness. Zeinai smiled. His thoughts wandered elsewhere, back to a tiny village and parents who had probably believed their son had vanished forever. He'd never gone home. Never written. Never even checked whether they were still alive. Sangmin could have returned. Zeinai never did. Perhaps neither could. Those children had died long ago. Bora. Sangmin. Both buried beneath fire and memory. Over the years, he'd hunted every organisation he could find that trafficked children.

Entire networks disappeared overnight, one after another. He never counted the bodies. He only hoped it had been enough. People noticed him long before they reached them. Conversations softened. Several instinctively stepped aside, giving the enormous man plenty of space. One father quietly guided his children behind him until Zeinai offered them a small nod.

"He's got to be military," someone whispered.

"No... look at that arm."

"A veteran?"

"Maybe special forces." Others simply stared. A group of tourists hesitated before one nervously approached.

"E-Excuse me..."

"Yes?"

"Would... would you mind taking a picture with us?" Zeinai looked mildly confused.

"With me?"

"Yes!" He glanced at Sphinx. She was already squeezing herself beside him.

"Smile!" The tourists blinked.

"We... um... only asked—""Nope." Sphinx folded her arms confidently.

"It's a two-for-one deal."

"…Okay?"

"Excellent." She immediately threw up a peace sign. The picture was taken. Another group wandered over. Soon there were several. Someone wanted a photo with "the giant guy." The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Another wanted one because his robotic arm was "awesome." One elderly woman insisted he reminded her of her late husband, "except taller... much, much taller." Sphinx inserted herself into every single photograph. Every time. Without fail.

One teenager finally frowned.

"…Why are you in all of these?" She gasped dramatically.

"Excuse me?"

"You asked for him." She pointed between herself and Zeinai.

"It's a two-for-one deal."

"…Who made that rule?"

"I did."

"…Can we just have one with him?"

"No." She folded her arms.

"I come free with purchase." Zeinai's lips twitched.

"You're enjoying this."

"Immensely." She leaned closer, lowering her voice.

"Besides, if they crop me out later, I'll never know."... Sphinx suddenly groaned dramatically.

"My legs hurt." Zeinai looked at her.

"No they don't."

"They absolutely do."

"You're an Operative."

"So?"

"You ran thirty kilometres yesterday."

"That was yesterday." She sighed.

"Carry me."

"No." She didn't even pretend to wait for permission. With a running start she launched herself upward.

"Ah-" Her legs hooked over his shoulders as she landed perfectly balanced. People nearby gasped. An elderly woman nearly dropped her shopping bags. A little boy pointed excitedly.

"Mum! Look!" His mother quickly covered his eyes.

"Oh my goodness..." Sphinx cheerfully waved.

"Hello!" Someone pulled out a phone. Another whispered, "Is that some kind of performance?" A pair of teenagers burst into laughter.

"You're enormous!" Sphinx announced from her new throne.

"See? This is why you're useful." Zeinai sighed.

"You lied."

"I embellished."

"You said your legs hurt."

"They do."

"They don't."

"They hurt emotionally." He reached up as though to pull her down. She slapped his hand away.

"No refunds." Leaning comfortably against the top of his head, she lazily kicked her feet while directing him around corners as though he were an oversized horse.

"Left." He turned left.

"Right." He turned right.

"Stop." He stopped.

"Good." She patted his head.

"What a well-trained giant." She smiled toward the evening sky as lanterns gradually flickered to life across the city.

"So... where are we eating?" That outing became another. Then another. Weeks turned into months, and somehow they kept finding excuses to meet whenever missions allowed it. Sometimes they wandered unfamiliar cities. Other times they sat on rooftops watching sunsets in comfortable silence. Conversation always found them eventually.

"You seriously don't have a favourite food?" Sphinx asked one afternoon, staring at him as though he'd confessed to eating rocks. Zeinai shrugged.

"I eat whatever tastes good."

"So if I handed you fermented shark eyeballs..."

"I'd try them." She stared.

"You're actually insane."

"And you?"

"Anything with lots of meat."

"I noticed." She pointed a finger at him.

"Don't judge me."

"I wasn't."

"You were thinking it."

"I wasn't." Another day, while wandering through a quiet market, Zeinai glanced sideways at her.

"Tell me a riddle."

"I don't know any."

"But..." He looked genuinely confused.

"Your name's Sphinx." She blinked.

"…Oh." A laugh escaped her before she could stop it.

"That's actually funny."

"You're laughing."

"Shut up."

"You laughed."

"I sneezed."

"You laughed." She shoved him hard enough to make him stumble.

"You're annoying."

"You still laughed." She spent the next ten minutes denying it.... Months passed like that. Meaningless arguments. Walks that lasted hours. Comfortable silences. He slowly became someone she expected to see. She became someone he looked forward to meeting. One evening, after another day wandering through a city neither of them had visited before, they stopped on a quiet riverside bridge overlooking the lights below. Neither spoke for a while. Sphinx rested her elbows on the railing.

"You know..."

"Hm?" She kept watching the water.

"You're really slow."

"At what?" She sighed dramatically.

"Oh, I don't know. I've only been hanging around you for months." Silence.

"…And?" She rolled her eyes so hard he could practically hear it.

"Oh my God." She turned to face him.

"Are you going to kiss me or do I have to file paperwork first?" Zeinai blinked.

"I... thought you didn't like me."

"I insult everybody."

"I noticed."

"You're being sarcastic."

"I'm always sarcastic."

"So how am I supposed to know?" She groaned.

"You're unbelievable." A faint smile touched his lips.

"…Can I kiss you?" She folded her arms.

"Well, since you finally asked..." She let the silence linger just long enough to torment him.

"…Yes, you idiot." He stepped closer and gently slipped his hands around her waist.

"…What are you doing?" she asked, though she made no effort to pull away.

"You're too short." Before she could answer, he lifted her effortlessly until they were almost eye level. She gave a tiny, startled squeak before instinctively resting her hands on his shoulders.

"…Show-off."

"You said yes."

"I know." He leaned in slowly, giving her every chance to change her mind. She didn't. Their lips met beneath the glow of the city lights as the river drifted quietly beneath the bridge. When they finally parted, he was still holding her, and for a moment neither of them said anything. Sphinx looked away first.

"…That took forever."

"You complained the whole time."

"I did."

"I liked it." She bumped his shoulder with a small huff.

"Don't get used to agreeing with me."

"I won't."

"You better not." He kissed her again. She complained a little less that time. They stayed together until sunrise, talking about everything and nothing, slowly discovering that somewhere between the arguments, sarcasm and relentless teasing, friendship had quietly become something far more precious. Zeinai changed. The New Zealand Faction changed with him. Their experiment programs accelerated beyond anything they'd imagined. Every year brought another breakthrough, another impossible invention.

Singularity bombs capable of folding entire battlefields into microscopic collapse. Needle grenades that ignored conventional armor by phasing through molecular gaps before detonating inside a target. Smarter Apis reactors. Faster wormhole generators. Deadlier combat suits. More efficient nanite systems. More weapons. More technology. More everything. The Nest never stopped evolving. Neither did Zeinai. The memory dissolved. Part Eight: The Grave The jet hummed at thirty-seven thousand feet. Zeinai opened his eyes.

The memory of the mountain was already fading. The facts remained, but the feeling slipped further away with every passing hour - Paris's hand on his shoulder, Bora's face beyond the gap between worlds, the dream mist forever rising from the place his arm had once been. The aircraft began its descent. Through the window, the meadow came into view. The same meadow where he had buried Bora after reclaiming her body from the authorities. They'd found her in the fire with no identification, no next of kin.

She would've disappeared into an unmarked grave, forgotten like countless others. He found her anyway. He dug her out himself beneath cold rain, using nothing but his hands, then carried her here, where wildflowers covered the hills and the sky stretched endlessly overhead. Time had changed him. The boy from the village had vanished beneath years of war. His face was harder now, framed by a neatly trimmed beard touched with gray. His shoulders were broader, his hands heavier.

He'd killed more people than he could remember and accepted a cruelty his younger self would never have understood. He had done it all for Bora. The jet touched down. As the hatch opened, he stepped onto dew-soaked grass, his boots sinking into earth that still felt sacred. He walked to her grave. The stone was no longer bare. He'd carved it himself years earlier, every uneven letter cut by hand.

보라 사랑하는 누이 영원히 그리울 Bora Beloved sister Forever missed He knelt and removed a small bundle of purple and white wildflowers from his pocket. They were the same flowers that had grown beside the irrigation channels of their childhood village. He'd cultivated them himself inside a hydroponics lab, waiting months for them to bloom. He laid them gently across the stone. The world shimmered. She stood in the meadow.

Not the broken girl who had died in his arms, nor the nameless inventory bought and sold until nothing remained. Just Bora. The little sister who had followed him everywhere, waited beneath the trees while he climbed them, and called him Oppa as though it were the safest word in the world. Her dark hair drifted freely behind her. A white dress swayed in a wind that didn't exist. She was looking at him. She looked at him, not as the boy who had held her hand, but as the man he'd become. The beard. The scars.

The broad shoulders that had carried too much. The pale blue eye that saw things even she probably couldn't name. Tilting her head, she smiled.

"오빠, 너 완전 몸 좋아졌다." Oppa, you got so buff. He almost laughed.

"수염도 생기고. 완전 아저씨 됐잖아." You grew a beard too. You're totally an old man now. His own smile came slowly.

"Bora." The word caught in his throat. She lingered only a heartbeat longer before fading away, leaving an ordinary meadow and an ordinary grave. Zeinai sat with his back against the stone, his prosthetic hand resting on his knee as blue light pulsed beneath its matte-black casing. His thoughts drifted to Henry Kalaway. Ruffled blond hair that never stayed in place. Bright blue eyes that always seemed ready to laugh.

A Stepper, patient and observant, the sort of man who blended into any room without anyone noticing. Zeinai had sent him undercover into the police force to find the perfect specimen. Henry had excelled. He made friends, collected DNA without raising suspicion, and quietly built a complete profile on Thornburgh.

It was Henry who discovered the dormant genetic markers, documented the conceptual resilience, tracked the family's routines, and filled his reports with candid photographs of a man laughing with his daughters, completely unaware he'd already been chosen. Zeinai had read every report. Then he approved the extraction. The operation ended with Kiri dead, Thornburgh in a Syndicate laboratory, and another life shattered in service of a greater plan.

He still remembered Henry saluting before that first mission, grinning like an excited recruit instead of a man walking toward the kind of quiet horror that never truly let anyone return. Zeinai had known, even then, that Henry wouldn't come back the same. Nobody ever did. He thought about Thornburgh. The man he had chosen to kill Butter. He'd intended to do it himself once. He tracked her, studied her, waited for the perfect shot. When the moment finally came, he couldn't pull the trigger.

Somewhere along the way, the love he'd carried for her father had become love for the daughter he'd never met. That alone was enough to make him fail. So he found someone else. Someone who'd lost a daughter of his own. Someone whose grief could become a weapon. He guided Thornburgh onto Butter's path, fed him the information, the timing, the opportunity. It worked. Butter died. Thornburgh accomplished what Zeinai never could. Sitting against Bora's grave, flowers resting at its base, another thought surfaced.

Butter had been Crook's daughter. For years he'd dismissed it as impossible. Crook had never seemed capable of love, motherhood, or even the desire to create life. Paris would've never chosen such a thing willingly either. The only explanation that made sense was that his genes had been stolen, harvested without consent and combined with hers inside some Syndicate laboratory. He never searched for the truth. Years later, fragments finally reached him. Butter hadn't been an only child.

There was Clock, the flawless monster even Korhess had fled from, and Maze, the unseen sibling whose existence remained little more than whispered rumor because nobody who searched for Maze ever returned. Three children. Crook's children. Paris's children. Born from something that should never have been possible. When Zeinai became commander, the New Zealand Faction quietly changed course. Hunting operations slowed. Expansion was deprioritized.

Resources poured into research, upgraded abominations, experimental weapons, and soldiers capable of surviving whatever calamities still waited beyond the horizon. Butter's death had never been the end. Whatever Paris had planned, whatever his children had been meant to become, that plan hadn't failed. It had simply changed shape. Zeinai had carried his part without question. That was what men like him did. They saw a debt and paid it. Yet one splinter never left him. Paris had lied.

He hadn't merely read the future. He had lived it. Bora had been the first clue.

"That man is very kind. He comes to me often." Often. Paris had only spent an hour with Zeinai. There'd been no time to visit Bora over and over unless he'd done it across years instead of hours, returning again and again to the afterlife, sitting beside her, asking her to come back. She always refused. That was why he'd already known her answer on the mountain. Another question followed. How? They had only fought for minutes. Unless there was more than one Paris. Copies. Clones.

Fragments scattered through time, each carrying the same memories and purpose. The man Zeinai fought on the rooftop might not even have been the original. He stopped trying to solve it. One question remained. If Paris truly knew the future, what had he witnessed that required his own daughter to die? What horror had been so unbearable that he hid the truth behind vague prophecies instead? Zeinai would never know. Paris was gone. Butter was dead.

The future remained unwritten, and he was still here, carrying the weight of a promise he'd accepted without fully understanding. Whatever Paris had seen, he would face it. He always did. Footsteps rustled through the grass. He didn't turn.

"Are you alright?" Her voice was small. Young. Too young to carry so much weight. He let out a slow breath.

"I'm fine, hummingbird."