Oh Si-kyung was dreaming.
He stood in a long, narrow hallway drowned in darkness, the kind of dark that seemed to eat the edges of the walls rather than simply hide them, swallowing the corridor's true length so he couldn't tell if it stretched ten meters or a thousand. The air pressed against his chest like something sitting on top of him, and every breath tasted faintly of dust and something colder underneath — like the smell before rain, except wrong. The floor beneath his bare feet was cold enough to sting, and each step echoed a fraction too long, as if the hallway were repeating his footsteps back at him on purpose, mocking the rhythm of his own fear.
At the far end, two figures appeared.
"Si-kyung…"
His body froze. He knew those voices anywhere. His parents stood there, smiling gently, exactly as they had in the photographs on his desk. Hope surged through him so violently it hurt, and he ran.
"Mom… Dad…!"
The distance didn't shrink the way distance should — until, without him ever closing the gap, they were suddenly close enough to touch. That was when their smiles began to twist, slowly, the way a photograph curls near a flame. The overhead lights flickered, and with each flicker their shadows stretched further along the walls, thin and impossibly tall, crawling like something alive only pretending to be a shadow.
"Why didn't you save us?" his mother asked, her voice trembling with something hungrier than grief.
His father's eyes went flat and dark, no white left in them at all. "You were awake. But you chose to look away."
The ceiling cracked open like a shell. Blood began to fall, one slow drop at a time. The hallway groaned and folded inward, walls collapsing like paper giving up on being real.
"Stop!" Si-kyung screamed. "Please — stop!"
Their mouths opened too wide, hinging like something unlocking, and from those impossible mouths came a chorus of overlapping voices, all speaking at once:
"You're still dreaming."
He woke gasping, his chest heaving, sweat soaked through his shirt. The room slowly resolved into the familiar shape of his apartment. Moonlight slipped through the curtains in thin silver bars, revealing the particular loneliness of a room built for one person. He pressed a hand to his chest, counting his breaths until the room stopped tilting.
"…It happened again," he said quietly, to no one.
His eyes drifted to the framed photograph on his desk — his parents, smiling, caught mid-laugh in some ordinary afternoon he could no longer quite place. A thin crack ran across the glass, splitting their faces slightly out of alignment. He looked away, the way he always did.
Morning came too quickly, the way it always did after nights like that.
Si-kyung walked to school alone, hands in his pockets, blending into the current of students flowing down the same street they flowed down every morning. Laughter drifted past in fragments. Someone's phone played tinny music from a back pocket. Cars idled at the crossing, engines humming low. Everything looked ordinary in that unremarkable way mornings usually were — which was exactly what made it feel, in some small corner of his mind, fragile, like something that could crack if pressed too hard.
"Did you see the sky today?" a student ahead of him said, not looking up from his phone.
"Yeah. Looks weird. Probably nothing."
Si-kyung glanced up out of habit. The sky was blue. Calm. Silent. Just another day, he told himself.
In class, the teacher's voice droned on as equations filled the board. Si-kyung stared out the window, thoughts still tangled in a hallway that didn't exist. Then he heard it — a faint cracking sound, like ice breaking somewhere far away. At first he thought it was in his head. Then it came again, closer, louder. A whisper rippled across the room. The teacher's chalk paused mid-stroke.
Then the sky broke.
Not clouds. Not lightning. The sky itself split apart like struck glass, jagged fractures spreading outward in an instant. Through the cracks leaked something that wasn't darkness exactly, but the absence darkness only imitates — deep, endless, and somehow aware.
Screams tore through the classroom.
"What is that?!"
"Everyone stay calm!" the teacher shouted, his voice cracking on the second word.
Si-kyung couldn't move. The paralysis from his nightmare flooded back, stronger now. Something moved behind the cracks, vast and patient. Watching.
"…No way."
The first scream never finished. It cut off mid-sound, replaced by a violent, wet explosion. One moment the boy by the window was alive. The next, his body burst apart without warning, blood spraying across desks and ceiling, painting the room a deep, horrifying red.
Then it happened again. And again. Students collapsed not from any visible wound but because there was simply nothing left of them, their bodies detonating as if something dormant inside each of them had been triggered all at once, in a rhythm with no discernible logic. Desks splintered. Windows spider-webbed and gave way. The heavy iron smell of blood filled the air until it was the only thing Si-kyung could taste.
"W–What…?" Si-kyung whispered.
The teacher turned to speak. His body burst mid-turn, and the spray of it hit Si-kyung across the face.
The classroom fell silent — the kind of silence that rings louder than screaming.
Si-kyung stood frozen, unable to look away from what remained of his classmates. Why was he still alive? He turned, desperate, and found one other student standing — a boy leaning against a desk, hands in his pockets, uniform splattered with blood, his face calm. Too calm. Not laughing, not grinning wildly. Just a soft, quiet smile, like someone studying an interesting puzzle.
"Y–You… you're alive too?"
The boy turned his head slowly. His eyes were sharp, observant, almost curious.
"Seems like it," he said, casual as a comment about the weather.
"W–What's your name?"
"Lee Seo-jun."
The name landed strangely, heavier than a name should. Before Si-kyung could ask anything else, another explosion echoed from outside the classroom, followed by screaming, then silence.
They moved through the school cautiously, stepping over broken glass and blood-slicked tile. Hallways that once echoed with laughter were dead quiet now, painted in long red streaks. Sometimes they found survivors, huddled and silent. More often they found only the places where people used to be.
"I don't understand…" Si-kyung muttered. "Why are people just dying? There's no pattern. No warning."
Lee Seo-jun glanced at him. "You're thinking too loudly."
"What?"
"Fear spreads faster than anything here," Seo-jun said. "If you lose control, you'll explode too."
"What are you talking about?"
"I mean exactly what I said. Control yourself. Or whatever is doing this will notice you."
The lights flickered and died down the hallway. The air turned cold enough to see their breath. A shadow stretched across the wall ahead, bending the wrong way, unnaturally — the way his mother's shadow had bent, in the dream. From the darkness at the end of the corridor, something began to take shape, its outline shifting as if reality hadn't decided what it should look like.
Si-kyung's body locked in place. Fear surged through him harder than anything he'd felt before.
Beside him, Lee Seo-jun smiled again. Not with joy. Not with madness. With interest.
The creature stepped forward.
And the nightmare truly began.
The thing moved. Si-kyung didn't even see it happen — one instant it stood several meters away, flickering like a broken shadow, the next it was directly in front of him.
Pain exploded through his body. His right hand hit the floor.
For a second his mind refused to understand. Then the pain arrived in full, and his knees buckled, a raw sound tearing from somewhere beneath his voice. Blood spread across the tile. His whole body shook.
"I… I can't—"
The creature raised its arm again.
Then a voice cut through the chaos, calm and absolute.
"Sit down."
The creature froze — and slowly, stiffly, knelt on the blood-stained floor.
Si-kyung turned his head, every motion an effort, and looked at Lee Seo-jun, standing exactly as before, hands in his pockets, relaxed, as if nothing strange had happened at all.
"What… did you do…?"
"It listens," Seo-jun said. "For now."
"You—You said one word. That thing just—"
"I know what's happening," Seo-jun interrupted calmly.
"Then tell me. Please."
Seo-jun's smile faded completely. "This world," he said slowly, "is not ours anymore. It doesn't belong to humans. Not to schools. Not to cities. Not to rules we used to believe in." His eyes darkened. "It belongs to something else."
"Something else…?"
"No one knows what it is. Not its true name. Not its form. Not its origin. Some call it a god. Some call it a system. Some call it a nightmare that woke up." He glanced at the kneeling creature. "All we know is that it has claimed this world."
"Then why am I still alive?"
Seo-jun met his eyes. "Because you're afraid. And because you're resisting it."
The creature twitched at the words.
"Fear is the rule now," Seo-jun continued. "Those who lose control explode. Those who accept it disappear. And those who stand in between… change."
Si-kyung looked down at his bleeding arm.
"Do you know what you'll become?" Seo-jun asked quietly.
Si-kyung had no answer.
Seo-jun smiled again, small and unreadable. "That's the interesting part."
Behind them, the darkness continued to spread. And somewhere far above, beyond the broken sky, something watched.
Pain pulsed through Si-kyung's body in slow, heavy waves. He sat on the cold floor, pressing his remaining hand against the torn sleeve where his other hand used to be. Blood had already soaked into the fabric.
"…My hand is gone."
Lee Seo-jun looked down at the kneeling creature as if it were furniture. "Don't worry," he said. "I know many things about this world now. I can regenerate your hand too."
The words didn't register at first. "…What?"
"Your hand. I can bring it back."
Shock erased the pain for a moment. "What are you?" Si-kyung asked. "Who are you, really?"
Seo-jun smiled that same unreadable smile. "You'll know later. My friend."
Something about that answer scared Si-kyung more than the creature had. From the very beginning, Lee Seo-jun had been wrong — too calm, too aware, too composed for someone standing in the wreckage of everything he'd known that morning. It was like watching someone observe the end of the world rather than live through it, taking notes instead of grieving.
They left the school. Outside, the city was unrecognizable. Buildings that had stood for decades had folded in on themselves, reduced to twisted rebar and broken concrete slabs jutting at impossible angles. Fires burned in scattered pockets across the skyline, smoke mixing with the cracks still splitting the sky apart, so that it was hard to tell where the ruin of the ground ended and the ruin of the sky began. Cars lay overturned in the street. Sirens wailed in the distance, then cut off one by one, swallowed by whatever was silencing everything else.
Si-kyung's legs weakened. Tears rolled down his face silently.
"This… this was our city…"
Seo-jun stood beside him, hands in his pockets, calmly observing the ruin. He smiled — not happily, not cruelly, just calmly. That neutrality hurt worse than cruelty would have.
They both looked up. The sky was still broken.
Even Seo-jun frowned slightly. "…Interesting. I didn't expect this."
They walked deeper into the ruined streets, Seo-jun leading the way through debris and fire as if he already knew where to go. Si-kyung followed, studying him closely, cataloguing every small reaction.
They entered a partially collapsed building. Bodies lay scattered inside — some torn apart, some frozen in fear, others twisted impossibly. Blood stained the walls.
Seo-jun stopped, looking around slowly. "…Disappointing," he said.
"Disappointing?"
"There should be more."
A chill ran down Si-kyung's spine. He had been watching Lee Seo-jun from the very start. Now he was sure.
This person was not normal.
Then, from deeper inside the building, a sound reached them — footsteps, breathing. Someone alive.
Si-kyung turned sharply. "A survivor."
Seo-jun's eyes narrowed with interest. "Let's talk to him."
They moved toward the sound.