They called it the Fracture.
Seven years ago, reality broke. Not gradually. Not with warning. One moment the world was normal. The next, portals tore open across the globe, and monsters poured through.
We called them Devourers.
Humanity called it the end.
We were almost right.
Eighty percent casualty rate in the first month. Governments collapsed. Cities fell. The military—conventional weapons, tanks, missiles—all of it was useless against creatures that regenerated faster than we could kill them.
Then the Augmented appeared.
Humans who'd survived close contact with Devourer essence. Whose bodies had mutated, adapted, gained impossible abilities. They became our last hope. Our final weapon against extinction.
They were also dying faster than we could replace them.
The augmentation process wasn't kind. It gave you power, sure—strength beyond human limits, abilities that defied physics, the capacity to fight monsters on equal ground. But it came with a price. The foreign tissue that granted these abilities slowly consumed its host from the inside out. Some Augmented lasted years before the burnout. Others barely made it past their first month.
There was no cure. No treatment. No way to reverse what had been done.
Once you were Augmented, you were on borrowed time.
The government didn't advertise this, of course. Recruitment posters showed heroes in sleek armor, standing victorious over Devourer corpses. They showed hope. Strength. A future worth fighting for.
They didn't show the medical wards filled with Augmented soldiers whose bodies were eating themselves alive. They didn't show the funeral pyres that burned every single day. They didn't show the look in a person's eyes when they realized they had maybe six months left to live.
I knew that look well.
I saw it in the mirror every morning.
My name is Kang Minjae.
I'm twenty-four years old.
I've been Augmented for six months.
And I've already killed more people than I can count—some of them were even Devourers.
The rest? Fellow soldiers who'd turned. Who'd let the augmentation consume them completely, transforming them into something just as monstrous as the creatures we were fighting. When that happened, when an Augmented went rogue, there was only one protocol.
Immediate termination.
I'd executed four of them myself. Four people who'd fought beside me, bled beside me, survived impossible odds beside me. Four people whose names I still remembered, even though I tried not to.
Park Junho. Kim Sera. Choi Minwoo. Lee Hyejin.
They'd trusted me.
And I'd put bullets in their heads.
That's what being Augmented meant. That's what this war had turned us into.
Not heroes.
Executioners.
But someone had to do it. Someone had to stand between humanity and extinction. Someone had to make the hard choices, pull the trigger, live with the nightmares.
Might as well be me.
After all, I was already dying.
What was a little more blood on my hands?