The second bullet struck near Do-jin's head, shattering the glass of a streetlamp and scattering shards like diamonds across the darkness. Yuna grabbed Do-jin by his coat with a strength he hadn't expected from her slight frame. They threw themselves behind a concrete barrier under the bridge as the rain poured down, washing away the blood that had begun to seep from Do-jin's left ear.
"Move!" Yuna hissed. She pulled a small device from her bag and triggered a homemade electromagnetic pulse. The sniper's optics flickered out for a few crucial seconds. They seized the opening and sprinted toward a narrow service tunnel beneath the bridge's massive structure.
Inside, where the roar of water against the pillars echoed, they stopped to catch their breath. Do-jin was trembling—not from fear, but because the radio in his lap had begun to vibrate with a violence that felt like it was trying to splinter his ribs.
"What is 'Frequency Zero'?" Do-jin asked, his voice rasping as he tried to steady the device with hands that were losing their sense of feeling.
Yuna looked at him with eyes carrying a legacy of pain. "It's the frequency that doesn't belong to souls, but to 'Sins.' Frequency Zero is the acoustic fingerprint of a murder before it even happens. It is the timeline set by 'The Hunters' to erase those who threaten their order. Soo-ah discovered that they don't kill randomly; they follow a specific rhythm that feeds their entities."
Yuna opened her bag and connected delicate wires from her laptop to the wooden radio. "The device you hold is the only thing capable of decoding this frequency because it has a living 'heart.' If we can activate it now, we will know the next victim... and we will know where the Hunter is hiding."
The moment the connection was complete, a dense crimson light erupted from the radio, coating the tunnel walls. The device began to shriek with the sound of metal grinding against metal. Suddenly, Do-jin felt a lethal coldness crawling from his fingertips toward his heart. The Great Exchange had begun.
He had lost his sense of touch.
The scalpel slipped from his hand without him feeling it hit the ground. He looked at his fingers gripping the radio; he could see them, but he could not feel the texture of the wood or the bite of the cold metal. His body had become nothing more than a visual phantom. In exchange for this loss, the "Insight" in his healthy right eye opened to a terrifying degree.
He no longer saw the tunnel as concrete walls; he saw it as threads of decaying energy. On the radio's display, golden coordinates and numbers began to dance amidst the crimson mist.
"Do... jin..."
The voice came from the radio. It wasn't Soo-ah's. it was a deep voice, heavy with nostalgia and grief. The voice of his father, who had vanished years ago in a mysterious accident where no body was ever found.
"Don't listen to it!" Yuna screamed, noticing Do-jin's pupils dilating and turning a ghostly gray. "It's a Frequency Trap! The Hunter is using your memories to break your defenses!"
But Do-jin had already left reality. In his mind, he stood in the center of an infinite morgue, where cold storage units stretched to the horizon. At the end of the hall stood The Man in the Black Coat, holding a dagger of black glass dripping with an ink-like fluid.
"Give me the device, my son," the entity said in his father's voice. "Give it to me, and I will return everything you've lost. I will give you back your sight, your touch... I will give you back my presence. Don't you long for your father's embrace?"
Do-jin wavered. The temptation exceeded human endurance. But then he remembered Soo-ah, the blood on the paper, and the fact that this entity was the one who had turned the city into a slaughterhouse for silent souls.
"My father would never have wanted me to live in a world ruled by silence," Do-jin whispered. With a surge of pure willpower, he slammed the "Overload" button on the radio.
A white wave exploded from the device, shattering the lethal illusion. The entity let out a silent shriek and dissolved like smoke. Do-jin returned to the tunnel, falling to his knees, gasping for air as blood ran from his nose.
On the radio screen, a single number settled, glowing and steady: 00:00.
"We did it," Yuna whispered, touching his shoulder, but Do-jin felt nothing. "Frequency Zero is live. It's identifying the next target now."
The sound from the radio shifted into a live broadcast: the sound of rhythmic footsteps on marble, distant classical music, and a man's voice speaking with treacherous calm.
"I know this place," Do-jin said, his right eye gleaming with an unhuman brilliance. "This is 'The Echo Club.' Where the politicians and judges are meeting tonight. And the target isn't an ordinary citizen... it's the Director of the Morgue himself. They are erasing the witnesses."
Do-jin stood up. Though he couldn't feel his feet touching the ground, he moved with a strange, guided stability, as if the radio itself were piloting him. "Yuna, stay here and monitor the frequency. I'm going to the Club. It's time the killers heard the echoes of their victims."
Do-jin stepped out of the tunnel into the city's rain, carrying the radio—now a ticking "frequency bomb"—knowing that in the next chapter, there would be no turning back. He had sold his touch and half his sight; what remained of him was merely a Vessel for the Truth.