Chapter 31

At least, that was the plan—right until the secondary charges wired beneath the atrium floorboards detonated in a blinding wall of orange fire, and the concrete floor dropped out from under my boots.

Freezing water surging straight up my nostrils shocked me back to consciousness.

“Guh—khh!”

Coughing up dirty pipe water, I braced a trembling palm against shattered concrete chunks and levered my torso upright. Half my body was submerged in a subterranean pool fed by a ruptured main line overhead. Instinctively patting my chest and thighs to confirm all four limbs were still attached, my hands reached for my primary sling—and closed on empty air. The force of the collapse had sheared my K2C4 carbine clean off its mount.

Blinking through the stinging grit in my eyes, I tapped my left temple. One of my night-vision tubes was cracked dead; lifting the assembly back onto my helmet, I squinted into a subterranean corridor lit only by the slow, rhythmic pulse of crimson emergency strobes.

“Charlie 2-1, this is 2-6. Radio check. Over.”

I thumbed the PTT switch three times. Not even static answered—the concrete collapse had sheared the relay antenna or crushed the comm pack on my back.

Just finished telling myself that getting cut off down here meant game over, and thirty seconds later I’m solo in the basement. Unholstering my 9mm sidearm with a steady two-handed grip, I rose from the rubble and checked my corners. Since our stack had breached on the ground level and the floor had given way beneath me, I had to be somewhere on B1 or B2. If I kept moving toward the core, I could still link up with Jaguar’s element near the panic room.

Moving silently down the flooded passage with every nerve ending raised like hackles, I reached the first intact steel door, pied the threshold, and swept inside.

Two steps across the threshold, I froze dead in my tracks.

It was a subterranean armory.

My eyes darted from the reinforced weapon racks to the concrete pillars. Wait—the blueprints didn’t show an armory on B1. In fact, neither the width of the corridor outside nor the load-bearing columns in this room matched a single schematic the NSD had handed us during the pre-mission briefing.

Lowering my pistol muzzle an inch, I stepped up to a row of tall steel gear lockers bathed in the pulsing blood-red emergency light—and the breath caught in my lungs.

Stenciled in stark white block letters across the back panels of the military-grade plate carriers hanging inside were four letters:

And across the front chest Velcro:

Peeling off my right tactical glove with my teeth, I ran bare fingers over the ceramic trauma plates and the heavy Cordura weave. These weren’t black-market knockoffs fabricated by cultists; they were genuine, serialized government-issue tactical rigs, flanked in the adjacent rack by military-issue rifles and crates of fragmentation grenades.

Either this entire compound is an off-books NSD black site they lied to us about, or the State Security Maintenance Department is compromised all the way to the top.

A cold, greasy dread crawled up my spine. That massive demolition charge under the atrium floor hadn’t been rigged to delay us—it had been wired to bury the entire assault team alive along with the defenders. Why expend this level of military firepower instead of simply evacuating the physicist out a back tunnel? What the hell had that babbling old man built inside this bunker?

Backing out of the armory, I found the main stairwell choked with tons of collapsed rebar, leaving only a service ramp slanting deeper into the sub-basement. With no way up, I locked my jaw and descended into the lower level.

Down here, shielded from the upper-floor blast by three meters of reinforced concrete, the air smelled of ozone and hot copper, and the emergency strips burned with a steadier glow. At the end of the passage stood a massive circular blast door engineered to survive a direct bunker-buster strike—another structure completely absent from our briefing packet. Bracing myself for a locked vault, I tested the wheel latch, and to my astonishment, the heavy steel door swung inward unlocked.

My heartbeat thundered in my eardrums as I stepped across the coaming—and collided chest-first with a wild-eyed man bolting out of the inner laboratory with his arms full of metallic hardware.

Before he could take a breath, I jammed the muzzle of my 9mm squarely against his sternum.

“Hands up! Don’t move!”

It was the physicist—our extraction target. Recognition didn’t bring a shred of relief to his sunken, ash-gray face; stumbling backward two steps, he stared right through me with dilated, terror-crazed pupils while his chapped lips moved in a frantic, soundless stream of equations.

“Drop what’s in your hands and get on the floor! Now!”

Still muttering under his breath like a man possessed, the professor slowly bent his knees and lowered himself face-down onto the concrete, though he kept both arms curled tightly around two cylindrical brass-and-glass devices roughly the size of thermoses. When he ignored my barked order to place his hands behind his lower back, I holstered my pistol for half a second, dropped a knee across his shoulder blades, and reached down to wrench his wrists together.

The instant my fingers brushed the brass cylinders in his hands, the scrawny sixty-year-old erupted with the freakish, manic strength of a cornered lunatic—twisting violently beneath my knee and flinging his right arm wide. With a metallic clatter, one of the intricate devices skittered across the concrete floor, while the second bounced all the way out through the open blast door into the corridor.

“Shit—stop moving!”

Ignoring my shout, the old man shrieked at the top of his lungs and thrashed until I drove my forearm down and snapped the steel handcuffs shut around both of his bony wrists—at the exact microsecond his hoarse scream echoed off the bunker walls:

“I’ll blow us all to hell!”

Every hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. Dropping my gaze to his cuffed hands twisted against his chest, the blood drained from my face.

Clutched between his skeletal, twig-like fingers was an olive-drab fragmentation grenade—with his right index finger hooked squarely through the pull-ring of the cotter pin.

“Back off!” he shrieked, kicking backward across the floor like a crab as I vaulted off his back and raised my pistol. “Stay back or I pull the pin!”

Could I put a bullet through his wrist or dive on his hands before he yanked that ring? Against a rational combatant, maybe, but the professor’s hands were spasming so violently the spoon was already rattling against the fuse assembly.

“—Primary objective is live recovery of the VIP, not elimination.”

Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa’s order rang like a funeral bell inside my helmet. Just picturing how I was going to explain letting our VIP blow himself—and me—into pink mist with a frag grenade made my vision swim. Forget getting chewed out; if I survived this, Jaguar would skin me alive himself.

“There’s no time left!” the professor sobbed, bowing his forehead over his cuffed fists as dry, racking wails tore from his throat like blowing ash. “Give it back to me… Please, I’m sorry, just give it back…”

Keeping my front sight locked between his eyes, I risked a split-second glance down at the first cylindrical device lying near my boot. Etched across its casing were glowing geometric filaments unlike any military hardware I had ever seen.

Crouching slowly without taking my eyes off the grenade pin, I scooped the first cylinder up with my left hand. “This?”

“Yes! That one!”

Is this genius an absolute moron outside of a chalkboard? Didn’t he realize that a fragmentation grenade had a lethal radius of fifteen meters, while I was standing two steps from a reinforced blast door with his precious machine in my hand? Tucking the first cylinder securely into my utility pouch, I raised a brow.

“Put yourself in my boots, Doctor. Would you hand this over to a guy holding a live grenade?”

“You don’t understand—if you just give them back to me, I can stop all of this! I can undo what we’ve done!”

“Undo what?”

Still weeping on the floor, he jerked his chin frantically toward the open blast door behind me, where the second cylinder had rolled into the corridor. “I’ll explain the entire project to you—to you alone! Just bring me the other unit from the hallway before the cycle completes! There’s no time!”

“Doctor, my squad is breaching the upper floor right now. You’re not walking out of this bunker.”

“Bring it to me or I pull the pin right now!”

Keeping my muzzle trained on his chest, I backed slowly across the threshold into the corridor, felt behind my heel with my free hand, and lifted the second cylinder off the concrete.

Wait a second.

Risking a peripheral glance down at the small digital display recessed into the brass casing, I felt my brow furrow.

“Hold on…”

Why were red luminescent digits rapidly counting backward toward zero on the screen—just like a detonator timer? Lifting the cylinder higher in the crimson emergency light, I stared at the weeping physicist.

“…Hey, Doctor. This thing isn’t a bomb too, is it?”

* * *

A crushing, suffocating dead weight pressing straight down across my ribs and sternum dragged me up from the abyss.

“Hyung.”

Why can’t I expand my lungs? Groaning under what felt like a fallen roof beam, I strained to lever my shoulders off the mattress and peeled my eyelids open.

“…Jeez, Gyu-hwa, you nearly stopped my heart. I thought a sleep-paralysis demon was sitting on my chest.”

Looming three inches above my nose in the pre-dawn gloom was fifteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa’s pale, unblinking face, framed by disheveled black hair like the vengeful ghost from a horror movie I’d snuck into as a kid.

“What are you doing on top of me?” I wheezed.

“You were having another nightmare.”

“Pretty sure I was only having a nightmare because a boulder was crushing my ribcage.”

“Does blaming the person who woke you up make you feel better about yourself, hyung?”

“Look at the mouth on this brat—do you want to do squats until sunrise? No, I don’t want water, just slide off my lungs before my ribs crack.”

As he rolled reluctantly off my chest onto the mattress beside me, I sat up and rubbed my sternum with a long exhale. “How much do you even weigh now?”

“Fifty-five kilograms,” he lied without blinking.

“Want to bet five hundred and fifty thousand won on the clinic scale tomorrow morning?”

“…Seventy kilograms.”

Seventy?! Standing just shy of 180 centimeters now with zero body fat on his frame, the boy was seventy kilograms of dense, solid muscle—and he had just parked his entire bodyweight squarely on my solar plexus. Calling a guy built like a welterweight fighter a kid was starting to feel like perjury.

“Go back to sleep, hyung,” he murmured, propping his chin on his forearm. “You’ve been having bad dreams almost every week lately.”

“They weren’t nightmares.”

Just because a memory left my pulse racing and my shirt damp didn’t make it a nightmare. In almost every dream that visited me in this house, Ji Gyu-hwa was there—pulling me out of artillery craters, steadying my aim, reminding me why I was still breathing. Those weren’t nightmares; they were the only tether connecting me to the life I had lived.

…Okay, fine, watching that mad scientist’s timer hit zero five seconds ago definitely qualified as a nightmare.

“What were you dreaming about just now?” Gyu-hwa asked.

“Dreamt all my molars fell out at once,” I deadpanned.

“…”

“And then I fell off a skyscraper.”

“Hyung.”

“And then I walked into the national college entrance exam and realized I forgot to bring my computer-grade marker.”

Chuckling softly at his unimpressed stare, I reached out to smooth back his sleep-tousled bangs—then paused and laid my palm flat against the center of his sternum.

“Hey. If I’m the one who had the nightmare, why is your heart hammering harder than mine?”

Beneath my palm, his pulse was racing against his ribs like a trapped bird.

“It’s not racing,” he said, letting out a quiet breath of a laugh as he gently pried my hand off his chest.

“Must be my ears going bad with age, then.”

“You worry about me way too much, hyung.”

Shaking his head, Gyu-hwa lay flat on his back beside me, and I tugged the comforter up over both our shoulders. Yet as his breathing slowed beside me, my eyes stayed wide open in the dark.

Why had my brain replayed the exact final seconds before the time slip tonight, of all nights? Reaching blindly behind my pillow, I tapped my phone screen awake and looked at the date glowing in the top corner.

The six hundred and sixteenth day had arrived. It really was time for me to go back.