The car smelled like coffee and whatever cheap air freshener their mom bought last week. Coconut, maybe.
Ji-hu: stared at his phone, thumb scrolling past posts he'd already seen.
Hana: You're ignoring me.
Ji-hu: I'm cherishing the silence.
Hana: You're so boring.
Dad: I'm driving. You two want to walk?
Ji-hu smirked and Hana stuck her tongue out at the rearview mirror. Their mom laughed, soft and tired from work, but laughing all the same.
It was a normal evening on a mountain road with his family inside the car.
Then the sky tore open.
---
There was no sound at first, just light. A crack in the air ahead of them, vertical and jagged, like someone had punched a hole through reality and forgotten to close it. But above that crack, higher than anything, something else hung in the sky—a wound in the world itself, a rip so vast it spanned horizon to horizon. Through it, impossible colors bled like ink in water. Purple and green and something else, something human eyes weren't meant to see.
Ji-hu saw it for one second before the road vanished beneath them.
Their dad slammed the brakes, but it was too late.
Then the car flipped and he forgot about the sky.
The road beneath them changed. Asphalt rippled and shifted and became something else entirely—jagged rock, dark red and steaming like it had just been pulled from a furnace. The car flipped, metal screaming and glass exploding, and Ji-hu's head hit something hard. The world became nothing but noise and spinning and his sister screaming somewhere behind him.
They slid and tumbled and finally stopped.
The car teetered on the edge of a cliff, engine smoking with fire flickering beneath the hood. Below them, dark water waited, distant and patient.
---
Ji-hu tried to move and couldn't.
His leg was trapped, metal folded around his calf and pinning him to the seat.
Ji-hu: Hana!
She was in the back, dazed and bleeding from her forehead but still moving.
Hana: Oppa—
Ji-hu: Get out!
The car tipped forward, just a little, just enough. The water below was closer now.
Ji-hu: Get OUT!
Hana kicked her door once, then twice. It groaned and jammed, but on the third kick it flew open. She looked back at him with wide eyes, fourteen years old and scared and his to protect, and he couldn't even move.
Ji-hu: GO!
She fell into the dark.
The car tipped again and dropped and hit the water.
---
It was cold and dark and they were sinking.
Fire still burned from the engine, flames flickering underwater like nothing he had ever seen, defying everything he knew was possible. Ji-hu pulled at his leg but the metal held. He pulled harder and got nothing. His lungs burned and his vision spotted and he pulled again, and this time something tore—not the metal but his own flesh, muscle ripping and skin peeling away.
He didn't stop.
The metal gave, barely but enough, and he kicked through the broken window into black water with his lungs screaming and his vision dying—
---
Hands grabbed his collar and pulled.
He broke the surface gasping, coughing, gasping again. Hana was treading water beside him, holding him up. She was fourteen and shouldn't have been this strong, but adrenaline didn't care about what should have been.
They grabbed onto wreckage and held on, gasping for air.
The car was gone. Sunk.
Their parents were inside.
Ji-hu opened his mouth to say something—what, he didn't know—but then the water churned.
---
Something rose from the depths.
It looked like a wolf, if a wolf could swim and had scales instead of fur and moved through water like it was born there. Its eyes glowed faintly in the dark, yellow and hungry. It was injured, a deep gash along its side bleeding black into the water, and it was confused and panicked.
Then it saw them.
It lunged straight at Hana.
---
Ji-hu didn't think.
His hand found debris, a piece of metal from the car that was sharp at one end and heavy in his grip. The creature closed the distance, five meters then three then one, and Hana screamed.
Ji-hu moved. Not because he was brave or heroic, but because he was a brother acting before his brain could catch up. He thrust the rod forward and placed it between Hana and the monster.
The wolf-creature impaled itself.
It kept coming, sliding down the metal with its jaws snapping inches from his face, and hot blood sprayed across his chest and his hands and his face. It was black and steaming and warm. The creature thrashed and died and went still.
Ji-hu stared at his hands, covered in blood.
He couldn't tell if it was his or the creature's. Hana was crying and grabbing his arm and saying something he couldn't hear, but he just stared at his hands.
He had just killed something.
All of it happened in less than a minute.
---
They were found hours later by rescue boats with flashlights and shouting voices. They were wrapped in blankets and had hot drinks pushed into their cold hands. Hana never let go of his arm and Ji-hu didn't speak.
Someone asked what happened. Where were their parents. Did they see anything. Did they see the creature.
Ji-hu looked at his hands. They were clean now—someone had washed them—but he still felt it. The hot spray, the thrashing body, the life ending on his skin.
He opened his mouth to speak.
Nothing came out.
---
He never told anyone what he did in the water that night.
Not that night and not ever.
---
END CHAPTER 1