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The stink of spilled blood hung thick in the air, mingling with the sharp, pungent aroma of spicebush flowers. Above, K Corp.’s Singularity looked down at the corpses strewn across the ground and wept.
Breathing heavily, Yi Sang leaned on his branch-spear for support and gazed at his fallen opponents. It was a pity, he thought, that he had not met them earlier, before K Corp. had gotten its hands on them. Perhaps some of them would have understood their cause – the goals the Technology Liberation Alliance had rallied behind, or his own, true aims – and they could have been allies.
Not all the blood coating Yi Sang’s clothes was his, but he had not gone unscathed. As the tension slowly drained from his body, weariness set in, and he became acutely aware of the worsening burn and ache from the bruises, gashes and punctures inflicted on him. One arm hung useless at his side, the sleeve heavily soaked in blood; the fair-haired man’s lance had all but pulverized his shoulder. Each breath he took was labored, and came with spikes of pain in his torso.
They had fought him with intent to kill, and he responded in kind. Their undoing had been the flowers; as with K Corp.’s excision staff, they hadn’t been prepared for the way the flowers’ presence and growth overwhelmed their minds, leading their concentration astray, eating away at their sanity. Although there were differences in how they used E.G.O. compared to the gear the Technology Liberation Alliance had scavenged from the former L Corp. branch, Yi Sang had quickly realized that they not only seemed reliant on E.G.O., they were not immune to the psychological toll it took. It had become easier to face them when they struggled not to succumb to their E.G.O.’s influence.
Half of them were dead, or nearly so, impaled by the spicebush trees he had willed into being. The other half lay prone on the ground, flowers blooming from the wounds on their bodies. Somewhere behind them all, Yi Sang saw a flicker of flames; the strange person with a clock for a head sat numbly on the ground, pushed out of harm’s way by the man with snow-white hair. He hung limp, skewered through the chest and lower back by flowering branches.
And Dongbaek… he saw Dongbaek struggling to lift herself off the ground, bloodstained petals falling from where branches had lanced through her left arm and side.
“Well, Yi Sang…” He looked up and saw Dongrang, slowly approaching him, holding the Golden Bough. Despite the carnage around them, he remained unfailingly calm. “Are you satisfied with how things turned out? You know, if you had stayed and given your all, we would have reached even greater heights than what we were capable of in the League of Nine. Don’t you think it’d have been better for you to give up on that dream of yours?”
It was almost laughable that Dongrang would even suggest such a thing, after all that happened. He must have known it as well, because his calm expression shifted slightly. “Even if you destroyed the Singularity and were able to escape, you didn't think you'd be able to destroy all the technology in the City...”
His footsteps were self-assured, knowing Yi Sang was too battered to do anything against him. “You’ve known all along that what you want won’t ever come to be, right?” Dongrang continued, without any hint of emotion in his voice. “Here’s what I think. You didn’t care if your goal was a suicide mission. You didn’t mind the idea of dying... in fact, you wanted to die, didn’t you?”
His entire life, Yi Sang had only ever known his former friend to be a tender man. Even when the animals he cared for when they lived in T Corp.’s district were too sickly or injured to recover, he had always sought to make their passing as painless as possible. Even on that day when Yi Sang had been hauled before the Singularity and interrogated, Dongrang had not taken part.
Just as he and Dongbaek had changed, so too had Dongrang, for him to thrive in K Corp. For him to now, having come closer to Yi Sang, stab the Golden Bough into his chest without any hesitation, with the same ease as injecting a syringe.
“If you have such an earnest wish to die, Yi Sang,” Dongrang softly said, “then let me be the one to kill you.”
Dongrang’s expression was strange: he looked at Yi Sang with pity, but there was something in his eyes that made him look as though he was hoping Yi Sang would relent, just before his life ebbed away. It was as though he had hoped Yi Sang would come to his senses and crawl back to K Corp.’s cage like he realized it was where he belonged.
If he had… Yi Sang saw what would become of himself, in his mind’s eye. If he had, Dongrang would inject him with a regeneration ampule, healing both the wound in his chest and every injury he had sustained as though the battle had never happened. If he had, then in K Corp.’s grasp, he saw himself being used to wring more tears from the Singularity, clawed at for his understanding of E.G.O. and the glass window, experimented on to decipher what he manifested. He saw a lifetime of torture and healing awaiting him; the memory of his eye being gouged out burned.
Even if Dongrang or Alfonso had believed he would be more useful to K Corp. alive, he would be little more than a taxidermied thing, locked up in a cage.
Revulsion surged hot through his veins. Before Dongrang could force the Golden Bough deeper, or pull out an ampule, or make any kind of movement, Yi Sang rammed his branch-spear into him. It landed at a terrible angle, and amounted to little better than a shove; his grip had weakened and he was unable to lift his weapon properly, much less stab through Dongrang, but it was enough to knock him back.
Dongrang looked surprised, but he made no attempt to follow when Yi Sang backed away from him, as though he were a dangerous animal. Although more pain bloomed across his body with each step, he would rather bear this agony than whatever K Corp. would devise for him.
His steps were deliberate. During the fight, some of his opponents had lost themselves to their E.G.O.’s influence and attacked with little, if any, recognition of who was friend or foe. In the chaos, some of their stronger, more destructive attacks had smashed through a portion of the walls around them. Light and cool air swept into the screening room. Amid its tears, the Singularity’s gaze darted to and lingered on the opening.
This high up, the wind whipped around Yi Sang, rustling the fabric of his hanbok, his hair, and the spicebush flowers blooming from him. He closed his eye and savored the feeling of the wind at his back, weaving through the flowering branches that spread outwards from his shoulders. In that moment, everything could be forgotten: the physical pain of his wounds, the deeper scars that he carried since the League had scattered apart, the wistful understanding that he would never fly.
Yi Sang felt a gloved hand seize his wrist and opened his eye to see Dongbaek standing before him. He glanced above her head and saw a noticeably fresh, large splatter of blood on the ground where she had been pinned earlier, and one of her allies – the imposing, tattooed woman – collapsed beside the tree. An unsteady trail of crimson droplets and yellow petals marked Dongbaek’s steps to the edge.
He felt a thrum in his heart, seeing her alive, even in her injured and bloodied state. Blooming spicebush emerged from the wounds in her arm and torso. This close, he saw that the flowers continued to affect her; Dongbaek’s bright eyes were wide and quivering as she stared at him. She didn’t take her eyes off him, even as her dark hair whipped about her face, but he knew she was aware of the drop by how tightly she grasped him.
Yi Sang had thought about death often: about the suffering and losses that had drawn his followers to the Technology Liberation Alliance, their willingness to kill and throw their lives down for the cause, shattering Yeonsim and severing his connection to Sang Yi, killing his heart so that he would not falter, what his own death would be like. He was under no illusion that the attack on K Corp. was unlikely to end in his demise. The thought had always been at the back of his mind as he schemed and planned, but he had long accepted it.
Dongrang had accused him of wanting to die, and perhaps there was some truth in it, that some part of him truly wanted to die. Yet if it was impossible for him to achieve his goals, if he had to die at anyone’s hands, Yi Sang had only ever wished for those hands to be Dongbaek’s.
He gently lifted those very hands now, intending to have her take hold of the Golden Bough and finish what Dongrang had started. If he asked, would she kill him, granting him a kinder death than what he planned for himself? Would she have resented him, or forgiven him, for asking that of her?
Dongbaek must have realized his intention. She recoiled as though she’d been burned and made a motion to wrench her hands away from him, then caught herself and froze. Yi Sang smiled weakly. Though he had hoped she would have driven the Bough deeper into his heart, he wasn’t disappointed that she had hesitated.
“Yi Sang–” Dongbaek’s face twisted, a flash of terror in her eyes, when Yi Sang gently pried himself loose from her grasp. As he took a step back, over the edge, she lunged after him, even as they both knew she was in no condition to pull him back, to keep him from falling-
Yi Sang felt a weight against him that wrought fresh pain across his body and knocked what little breath he had from his lungs. Buffeted by the wind, dragged under the pull of gravity, it took him a moment to register what that weight was: Dongbaek’s body against his, her arms thrown around him.
“Dongbaek,” he breathed, stunned, “why would…”
He trailed off as Dongbaek tilted her head towards him. Distantly, he felt her heartbeat, the warmth of her body, exhaled breath against his cheek. Yi Sang’s intact arm circled around her body without him having to think about it.
“I won’t let you fall alone this time,” she answered. Although her voice was strained, just rising above a whisper, her words carried clearly, sincerity and resolve and affection poured into eight simple words.
Dongbaek tightened her embrace, careful to avoid pressing down on his deeper wounds. How strange it was, Yi Sang thought as he tilted his head towards her, that everything – the sensation of falling, the blur of the world around them, the glow of the Golden Bough – seemed so muted and insignificant compared to the feeling of her arms around him. How strange it was, that in these fleeting moments, his heart felt lighter, as it had once been during those innocent times with his compatriots, with Dongbaek.
In the end, he hadn’t been able to kill his heart entirely. He thought it should be something he regretted, yet he could not find it in himself to regret this; even after everything that had happened, Dongbaek had chosen to fall with him.
The sky, already unreachable, grew ever more distant. Yi Sang closed his eye against it, and gave himself up to Dongbaek’s comforting embrace.