Chapter Text
The street, once so ordinary it scarcely merited remembrance, had become a wounded throat screaming itself raw, filled with the torn, overlapping cries of civilians, the blunt concussion of explosions, the relentless hammering of soldiers’ boots against broken asphalt, and the sharp, merciless cadence of orders that poured from their mouths as if the very act of speaking had been stripped of humanity. Smoke hung low, heavy and suffocating, and each new detonation seemed not merely to shatter buildings but to grind time itself into fragments, leaving only chaos, noise, and fear behind.
Another bomb erupted nearby, its force slamming into bodies and senses alike, and people crumpled to the ground, hands clawing at their skulls as though they could physically tear away the dizziness, the shrieking silence flooding their ears. Before they could even understand that they had fallen, soldiers descended upon them like a closing iron wall. Rifles were raised, muzzles dark and empty of hesitation, and after a single indifferent command, gunfire erupted. Brief, efficient, final.
Jisung remained at the threshold of what had once been his home, a hollowed-out skeleton of walls and memories, and found himself unable to move, as though the world had turned to stone around him and he alone had been fossilized inside it. His eyes drifted over the bodies scattered through the street—neighbors whose voices still echoed in his mind, neighbors with whom he had talked only hours earlier about peace, about rebuilding, about how life might limp forward once the war finally loosened its grip.
“Sora,” he said, turning toward his daughter. His voice splintered, fear sharpening it into something almost cruel. “Hide inside. Now.”
Her small face folded into panic, terror blooming far beyond what such a young body could bear, but his tone left no room for protest. She nodded quickly and vanished into the ruins, into the broken remains of the place that had once been her entire world.
Jisung turned back to the street. Mrs. Choi lay there, dragging herself forward, eyelids fluttering as she struggled to stay conscious, one trembling hand stretching out in a silent plea that cut deeper than any scream.
“She’s alive,” Jisung breathed, disbelief surging through him like a spark of impossible hope, and he had already shifted his weight forward, already chosen the room where he could hide her, when the barrel of a rifle pressed coldly to the back of her head.
The soldier bent down, grinning, and whispered something into her ear, something meant only to terrify. Mrs. Choi’s body shuddered violently, tears streaking down her face, while the soldier’s smile widened, bright and grotesque. She opened her mouth to scream, but the sound never came.
The shot echoed briefly.
The soldier straightened and finally noticed Jisung standing in the doorway—alive, watching. One of the few still standing. The weapon lifted again, steady and deliberate, and Jisung knew instantly that running would be meaningless. There was no direction, no speed, no prayer that could save him now.
He closed his eyes.
Seconds stretched thin and unbearable. He accepted death not with peace, but with a single desperate thought, that somehow, impossibly, his daughter might live. He would have begged any god, any force that still existed in this ruined world, to spare her, even if it meant erasing him completely. Five seconds passed. Then ten. Then more.
The gun didn’t fire.
His body trembled, a tear escaping despite his effort to remain still. When he opened his eyes, the soldier was still there, still aiming, smiling now in open delight. A loud and hysterical laughter spilled from him, and his eyes gleamed with a madness that fed on anticipation, savoring the fear, stretching the moment until it became torture.
The waiting was unbearable. Worse than death. Jisung’s legs trembled, his chest burned, and tears slid freely down his face. He wished, desperately, that the soldier would simply end it.
Instead, the world exploded again.
The sound was so overwhelming that it erased thought itself. Jisung watched, frozen, as the roof of his home collapsed inward. Panic tore him loose at last. He turned and ran inside, his heart battering his ribs as his eyes searched the devastation.
“Sora!” he shouted.
“I’m here,” came her small, clear voice.
Relief struck him so violently it almost brought him to his knees. He found her behind a pile of stone and debris, grabbed her hands, searched her face, her arms, her body.
“Are you okay? Nothing hurts?” She shook her head.
“Stay here,” he said quickly, kissing her forehead. “Don’t move. I’ll make sure it’s safe.”
He moved back toward the doorway, peering out carefully.
The soldier was still there.
Their eyes met. The soldier smiled again and advanced toward the house, unhurried, confident. Panic surged through Jisung as he turned back to his daughter, his mind spiraling uselessly. She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve to die. She was only four years old. She had barely entered the world.
The thought shattered mid-breath.
Another explosion.
For a moment, a long, impossible moment, Jisung simply didn’t understand what his eyes were seeing, as though reality itself had faltered, as though the world had made a mistake too vast for the mind to accept, because his daughter had been there, sitting, breathing, looking at him with frightened trust only a heartbeat ago, and now there was only stone, dust, and a silence so heavy it crushed his lungs.
No.
No, no, no—this could not be happening, this could not be real, this was wrong, utterly wrong, and his mind clawed desperately for any explanation that didn’t involve the truth pressing down on him with the same merciless weight as the concrete slab. His heart slammed violently against his ribs, each beat jagged and painful, as if trying to break free from a body that had already failed its purpose. His hands trembled uselessly, his legs buckled, and he collapsed to his knees without realizing he had moved at all.
She had been right there.
She had answered him.
She had trusted him.
The air burned in his chest as he dragged himself forward, nails scraping against debris, breath coming in broken, choking gasps that did nothing to fill his lungs. His vision blurred, the world narrowing to the unbearable shape before him, until he saw it. Her hand, small and pale, trapped beneath the stone, impossibly still.
Too small.
God, it was too small.
A sound tore out of him then, not a scream, not a word, but something raw, something that felt as though it had been ripped directly from his chest. He reached for her, gathering her hand into his own as if he could shield it, warm it, protect it even now, his fingers curling around hers with desperate care, trembling as though touch alone might be enough to wake her up, to undo what the world had done.
“I’m here,” he whispered, though he didn’t know who he was talking to anymore. To her, to himself, to a god that had long since turned away. “Daddy’s here. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
But her hand didn’t move.
The realization hit him in waves, each one crueler than the last, stripping something essential from him every time it crashed down: she was not crying, not breathing, not reaching back for him the way she always did. His chest seized, breath stalling entirely, panic surging into pure, blinding agony as he bowed forward, pressing his forehead to the rubble, his body shaking violently around the small hand he refused to let go of.
“I told you to stay,” he whispered brokenly, guilt slicing through his grief like a blade. “I told you… I was supposed to keep you safe.”
His tears fell freely now, hot and relentless, soaking into the dust beneath him as his sobs tore through his body with such force that it felt as though he might split apart. There was no space left inside him for thought, for hope, for fear, only the crushing certainty that the center of his world had been erased in a single, meaningless second, leaving behind a hollow so vast it threatened to swallow him whole.
Breathing became impossible. Living became unthinkable.
He sank down beside her, his body folding inward as if drawn by instinct alone, curling toward the slab that pinned her in place, toward the space where his daughter still lingered in some unbearable, unreachable way. The world narrowed to that small, brutal distance between his hand and hers. And in that narrowing, a certainty settled over him with merciless calm: nothing lay beyond this moment. There would be no tomorrow waiting to be reached, no survival worth naming, no meaning left to assemble from the wreckage. Ahead of him stretched only the long, hollow reverberation of her absence, echoing forward without end.
Behind him, heavy boots crunched against the ruins. Jisung didn’t turn. He didn’t care.
Let the world finish what it had started.
In the next second, another crash followed, quieter than the others, yet somehow heavier, more final, as the remnants of the roof, which had clung to balance with their last, trembling strength, finally surrendered and collapsed downward in a crushing, smothering fall. Jisung heard the long, drawn-out scream of a soldier, raw with pain, before sharp agony tore through his own body, and a cold, detached thought surfaced amid the chaos with terrifying clarity: So, this is it. This is how it ends. He coughed violently as thick dust flooded his lungs, burning his throat, scraping at his chest, stealing the air from him in ragged bursts, until darkness mercifully closed over his vision and his eyes slid shut.
Consciousness didn’t leave him completely. It hovered, cruel and half-awake, and when his awareness sharpened again, it brought with it the crushing realization that he couldn’t move. A heap of bricks, beams, and splintered boards pressed down on him from every side, pinning his body as if the house itself had decided to finish the job, its weight absolute and inescapable. His legs were numb beneath the merciless pressure, not pain yet but something worse, the terrifying absence of sensation, while a piercing, unnatural silence rang in his ears so loud it felt as though it might split his skull from the inside.
His gaze wandered uselessly through the narrow gaps between debris, unable to focus on anything solid or familiar, as dust drifted slowly through the air like ash, settling into his hair, his mouth, his lungs. Each breath came shallow and strained, as though the world had shrunk to the size of his chest, leaving him to fight for every fragment of air. The weight didn’t shift. The ruins didn’t yield. And with every passing second, the certainty grew heavier than the rubble itself.
He was buried alive.
Death crawled toward him with a maddening, deliberate slowness, inching forward with the precision of a predator that takes its time savoring the torment of its prey, each heartbeat stretching into an eternity of dread, each breath a jagged reminder of how small and helpless he was beneath the crushing weight of debris and despair. When the panic briefly receded, leaving a fleeting clarity in its place, a sudden, searing pain tore through his chest and limbs like molten iron, and he screamed, his voice raw and ragged, scraping against the walls of silence as though the world itself mocked him, indifferent to his agony. Fresh rivers of tears carved salt-streaked paths down his dirt-smeared cheeks, and his chest heaved with the helpless desperation of a man who couldn’t save even himself.
Jisung clawed at the air with desperate, useless hands, hoping, pleading that the soldiers would return, that they would see him, that they would end this unbearable suspension with a single, merciful bullet, just as they had done to trembling, terrified Mrs. Choimere minutes ago, because even the certainty of death would be a relief compared to this unending suffocation of fear and helplessness.
But no one came. The North Korean soldiers lingered for a few deliberate minutes, savoring the sound of his raw, unrestrained anguish as though it were a symphony written to torment the living. Then they turned and walked away, vanishing into the distance. Their laughter drifted down the ruined street, growing fainter and fainter until it dissolved completely—swallowed by smoke and shattered stone. With it disappeared the last illusion that mercy might still exist in this place. Panic returned to Jisung like a familiar enemy, crawling back into his lungs, forcing his breaths into shallow, desperate pulls. He lay immobilized beneath the remains of his home, unable to move a single plank or dislodge even the smallest stone, as though the rubble itself had decided he was to be buried alive. His skull throbbed with savage insistence, the pain blooming and splitting, while warm blood slid down his face in slow, humiliating rivulets. A brick, indifferent, final, had struck him squarely on the head, and the earth had accepted him without question.
The awareness that he was still alive crushed him more heavily than the debris. Once, in another life, he had believed death to be the ultimate horror. War had taught him otherwise. The true cruelty was this: to remain breathing, pinned beneath his own roof, while less than a meter away, under a slab of merciless concrete, lay the body of his daughter, small, silent, and already claimed by the same war that had spared him. The nearness of her corpse poisoned the air in his lungs, made every breath an act of betrayal.
Pain surged through him in violent waves, a pulsing agony that consumed his limbs and tore through his chest. The world darkened at the edges of his vision, collapsing inward, and the last thing he released into the ruins was a scream, ragged, animal, and utterly futile, thrown into a battlefield that had no ears left to listen. Then his strength fled him, abandoning him to the rubble like a deserter.
Time dissolved, stripped of sequence and mercy, and when sound resurfaced, it did so fractured and remote, barely real.
“I swear to you, there was a scream. I heard it myself,” said a hoarse, unfamiliar voice, dragging Jisung upward from the mud of unconsciousness.
“They don’t leave survivors. They never do,” another voice replied, flat and practiced, the voice of someone who had learned to trust the efficiency of slaughter.
“Just help me.”
Stones and splintered boards crashed to the ground, the harsh, echoing noise of men disturbing the dead. Someone was digging toward him. Jisung tried to cry out, to prove that he was not yet another body swallowed by the ruins, that there was still breath inside him, still suffering but his mouth betrayed him. No sound emerged. Not even a whisper. His voice had already joined the dead.
Through his half-sealed eyes, he caught a weak intrusion of light, pale and uncertain, cutting through dust and smoke. They were close.
“There’s someone here,” the hoarse voice said again, nearer now, and Jisung felt the crushing weight begin to lift from his legs, inch by inch.
“It’s just a corpse, Felix. Leave it. We’re done here,” the second man muttered with weary irritation, as if speaking of debris rather than a human being.
Despair closed around Jisung with finality. If death, in its perverse cruelty, refused to take him, then war would condemn him to something worse—to lie forgotten among the ruins, breathing beside the dead, slowly decaying beneath the remains of a life already erased. And if he still had one remaining act of defiance left in him, it would not be to die quietly where no one would ever know he had survived.
Jisung gathered every shred of strength still clinging to him, forcing his ruined body to obey long enough to produce at least some sound, anything that might prove he was still alive but once again the effort ended in failure. The soldier couldn’t easily reach his neck, his wrist, or even his ankle to feel for a pulse and confirm the other man’s words. From beneath the wreckage of what had once been his home, only a portion of Jisung’s face was visible, along with his boots, which had emerged solely because of the young man who continued tossing boards off his body.
Felix, if Jisung had heard the name correctly, ignored the order and kept stripping the debris from the barely living form beneath it.
His thin fingers began to move slowly over the exposed leg, searching for signs of fractures, deformities, anything irrevocably broken, and he let out a quiet hum of relief, joyful, insofar as joy was still possible in such a place, when he found nothing.
“We’re going back. There’s no time for this. Leave him,” the second voice said again, and just as Felix turned to protest, he added, “That’s an order, Lieutenant.”
The man’s voice was cold and unyielding, and it sent a fine tremor through Jisung’s body. At the same time, it sounded disturbingly familiar, as though it belonged to someone from another life, but no matter how hard he searched his fractured thoughts, he couldn’t summon a face to match it.
He knew then that his last chance at survival was slipping away, flowing out of reach like water through open fingers.
“No… please, wait,” he rasped, but the sound was too weak to reach anyone. “Please… help me,” he tried again, louder this time, and tears of desperation spilled from his eyes, cutting pale tracks through the dust on his face.
Felix spun around sharply, uncertain whether he had truly heard another voice or if exhaustion was beginning to deceive him. He rushed toward Jisung’s face, stumbling over jagged stones, and his eyes widened when he saw that the man was indeed alive, lying there with his eyelids barely held open, staring at him with naked terror and pleading for help. Without hesitation, Felix tore away the boards and stones again, this time with greater force, freeing more of Jisung’s broken body.
“He’s alive, Minho. Help me!” Felix shouted.
Jisung barely had the strength to move, but he felt someone approaching. Boots shifted over the debris, steady at first, then halting abruptly. The pause was sharp, sudden, as if the air itself had thickened around the figure. Jisung could feel it: the hesitation in the motion, the tautness that lingered in the stance, a careful, almost unnatural balance between impulse and restraint. It made the presence above him feel charged, unpredictable.
After a moment, the figure crouched.
Hands moved to the boards and bricks with forceful precision, efficient and unflinching, yet the rhythm faltered subtly, too fast, then too slow, uneven, betraying a tension Jisung could sense without fully grasping. The hands never lingered on his face, only on the rubble, clearing it methodically. Each shift, each pause, spoke of control held tight, of something barely contained.
Felix noticed it too. Jisung caught the subtle glance, the flicker of attention, the brief pause in the othersoldier’s movements, suspicion, perhaps, or unease. It lasted only a moment, and then Felix’s focus returned entirely to the work.
Jisung’s vision swam. Shapes and shadows blurred above him. He couldn’t see faces, couldn’t distinguish one pair of hands from another, only that someone was removing the weight from his body, piece by piece.
He never felt the moment the pressure fully lifted. Consciousness slipped away quietly before relief could arrive. Darkness closed in, thick and absolute, his limbs numb as he sank into a cold, soundless void.
The last thing to surface in his fading mind was a name.
Minho.
Jisung opened his eyes on a narrow cot, an IV drip cold against his arm. The room pressed down on him with its heavy, muted weight. The walls were yellowed and streaked with dried blood; the floorboards creaked with each step; bare bulbs dangled from the ceiling, flickering weakly over thirty cots lined in three uneven rows. About half were occupied by soldiers: heads wrapped after concussions, torsos bound from stabbings or gunshots, bodies breathing shallow and ragged, silent testimonies to the cruelty of survival.
A soldier caught his gaze, scowled, and turned away, ignoring any sign of pain. Jisung’s eyes dropped to his wounded hands. Every movement sent sharp ripples of ache through his arms, shoulders, and up into his skull.
He felt worse than unwell. Pain coiled through him in endless waves. His head throbbed with every heartbeat, and nausea twisted low in his stomach, rising relentlessly. Black dots flickered at the edges of his vision; his limbs tingled and grew heavy. He knew what was coming.
He barely had time to roll to the edge of the cot before it struck. Bile surged violently, scorching his throat, and he emptied himself into a bucket that appeared just in time. Each convulsion shook his body; the acrid stench clawed at his senses. When it finally ceased, he spit the last remnants into the bucket and lay back, trembling, limbs numb and uncooperative.
A man faced him, holding the bucket with steady, almost indifferent composure, as though the world could throw bile, blood, and chaos at him and he would remain untouched. The man handed it off to a girl, who carried it away silently, leaving behind only the echo of its stench.
“Awake?” The man’s voice flowed into the room, smooth, low, and unhurried, almost liquid in its cadence. “You were out for two days. Honestly, they didn’t expect you to make it.” He chuckled lightly, a sound that scraped across Jisung’s nerves, sharp, faintly amused, yet utterly alien to him.
“Where am I?” His voice rasped, hoarse, cracking under the weight of his own body and the nausea that lingered like a shadow across his chest.
“Gimpo headquarters. We’re patching you up after your concussion,” the man said, voice smooth, but steady, controlled.
“Gimpo?” Jisung spat. “I was in Seongnam. What… why here?”
Hyunjin’s expression stayed steady, calm, but the silence that followed made Jisung’s chest pound harder. The walls seemed to press in; the floor groaned beneath him. He could taste bile at the back of his throat. His hands trembled as he pressed them against the cot.
“All that remained of Seongnam was its name. Almost everything else had been reduced to rubble. Your defense,” the man said bluntly, “has clearly failed. Seoul is too dangerous now. That’s why the captain ordered you brought here, to our headquarters.”
“Our defense wouldn’t be failing,” Jisung shot back, voice tight, raw with anger, trembling almost from the memory itself, “if you had arrived on time. Before the civilians were nothing but pieces of bodies strewn across the streets, begging for help. I had to see it with my own eyes, neighbors I’ve known my whole life, people who practically raised me, lying on the ground, bleeding, crying, dying. I saw…” He stopped, jaw tightening, eyes narrowing. To speak it aloud would make it real. To name it would mean accepting the nightmare he had lived through. “They waited, clinging to the idea that help might still exist. Every second they waited, the bullets kept coming. And where were you?”
“They came as soon as they could,” the man said, shrugging, tone casual, indifferent.
“You’re joking,” Jisung spat, fury and horror coiling in his chest. “You’re—”
“Now listen,” the man interrupted, his smile calm, almost mocking, slamming Jisung’s anger against a wall of brutal truth. “This is not our sector. It never was. We did not, and could not, simply appear in your district on a whim. Why the Gwangju headquarters remained in silence, hands folded, watching, we cannot say. It is not our fault. Our soldiers cannot appear on a dime where it is not assigned, sorry if that’s inconvenient. Now swallow your bitterness and be grateful the lieutenant and the captain managed to pull you out at all. Otherwise, you’d still be there, dying slowly, screaming, bleeding out, alone. Clear?”
Jisung’s throat tightened. He hated to admit it, but the man was right. Gimpo wasn’t far from Seongnam, yet the city was never their point. The units from Gwangju had been assigned to the city; the weight of death, of every life he had watched shattered, belonged to them, not the Gimpo officers, not himself. The burden of his neighbors’ deaths was theirs alone to carry.
The death of his daughter.
Still, he couldn’t acknowledge his own mistake, couldn’t bow to the truth, so he turned his head sharply, nodding irritably. Satisfied with the response, the man continued.
“My name is Hwang Hyunjin. I am the chief medical officer here. Any questions about your health, your injuries, your body, come to me. Right now, I need to fill out your medical record. We cannot keep an unknown person in the headquarters. Can you answer questions?”
Jisung nodded, voice caught somewhere between exhaustion and the remnants of rage.
Hyunjin moved to the corner desk. Some patients cast narrow, resentful glances. Others muttered sharp, irritated words at the disruption. Jisung ignored them, exhaling slow and controlled, eyes flicking over the doctor instead. Long, dark hair tied back, deceptively youthful face with a quiet authority that belied his height and lean frame. Broad, disciplined shoulders hinted at years of structure and order, a presence that commanded attention without threat, without violence, yet still radiated the unspoken rigor of someone who had survived more than most.
The doctor caught the gaze and frowned, approaching the cot with a folder in hand.
“Already calculating the best moment to strangle me with a pillow?” Hyunjin asked, a half-smile lifting one brow.
“Just ask your questions,” Jisung muttered, crossing his arms.
“Name?”
“Han Jisung.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-eight.”
The questions were long, procedural, tedious, a series of checks that made Jisung’s eyes grow heavy, the monotony pressing against the exhaustion that had settled into his bones and nerves. When Hyunjin finally finished and declared lights out, Jisung allowed relief to wash over him, letting fatigue seep fully into every fiber, dragging away the anxious thoughts that had been scraping at the edges of his mind.
What was he supposed to do now? Where would he go? Would they let him stay here, or cast him out the gates once he recovered?
Even as these questions hovered, heavier truths pressed closer, suffocating, unavoidable: the truth of his daughter, which he couldn’t bear to admit. It was easier, for now, to imagine that Sora had been taken away with the other children, evacuated from the city before the soldiers arrived. He wrestled with the idea ceaselessly, twisting it over and over, until the line between doubt and belief blurred, leaving a hollow certainty that chilled him from within.
Sleep offered no mercy, only a trembling surrender, taut and restless, threaded with the shadows of loss, the relentless press of exhaustion, and the lingering, hollow ache of all he had endured.