View cover
Seoul, in a cramped studio apartment where pale exhaust fumes and the noise of the city seeped in through the window.
Only the blue glow of the monitor lit the room like a ghost.
Kim Ji-hwan.
Age twenty-eight.
Not long ago, he had cheerfully slammed in his resignation from a notorious black company that sucked the marrow out of people’s bones.
After being exploited as corporate disposable trash, all that remained of his battered daily life was the pitiful balance in his bank account and an endless sense of helplessness.
The only escape he had left while wasting his life in the gutter was the newly released game Cyberpunk 2077, which was setting the whole world on fire.
"Ugh, this mod is way too much. ...Nah, pass."
Slouched in front of a desk littered with pizza boxes, Ji-hwan idly scrolled through the mod board with a hollow expression, clicking the mouse wheel as he skimmed it without a shred of soul.
"This one... tsk, the skin is ugly as hell. Oh, this one’s not bad."
Muttering absently, he eyed a few usable mods, and his finger habitually hit the F5 key to refresh the page.
Blink
The moment the screen refreshed, a strange post that had just been uploaded jumped to the top of the board.
[Title: No-Chrome. Organic Evolution and Hardcore Survival Mode]
[Views: 0]
A spark lit in Ji-hwan’s dull eyes.
A suspicious post with no description and no thumbnail image. But what caught his eye at once was the absurdly massive file size, far larger than the combined weight of hundreds of ordinary mods.
"...Zero views and this kind of file size? Damn. I can’t pass this up."
Snickering to himself, Ji-hwan clicked the download button without hesitation.
It downloaded in an instant, and with a grin full of anticipation, he hit the launch button for the mod.
Vrrrrr—!!
As the execution gauge began to fill, the monitor screen started shaking like crazy, and even the room’s lights began flickering as if they couldn’t handle the overload.
Alarmed by the ominous change, Ji-hwan’s face went pale as he hammered at the keyboard.
"Shit, did I download the wrong thing? A virus?? What the hell?"
Panicking, Ji-hwan broke out in a cold sweat and violently shook the mouse. He pounded the keyboard like a madman, trying to cancel the launch somehow, but the system had already completely lost control.
And then, right as the execution gauge passed halfway—
Crack—!KWA-BOOM—!!
It wasn’t the monitor screen.
The very air right in front of the monitor, inches from Ji-hwan’s nose, split open with a bizarre tearing sound, like reality’s glass had shattered.
A jet-black fissure ripped through empty space. Ji-hwan’s reason froze cold at the sight of that impossible phenomenon, while his survival instincts screamed like mad.
'I have to run!!!'
Ji-hwan kicked back his chair and spun around without looking behind him, just as he reached for the doorknob.
Vooooom—!!
From the crack torn open in the air, an immense, grotesque force of attraction burst forth—something no one could possibly resist.
"Aaaah?!"
Ji-hwan’s outstretched fingertips toward the door froze in midair.
A horrifying sensation swept over his body, as if an invisible iron chain had wrapped around him from head to toe and was forcibly dragging him backward.
"What the hell is this!! Fuck, what is it!! Help me!!"
Terrified beyond reason, Ji-hwan let out a desperate scream and collapsed onto the floor. To escape the crack sucking him in, he clawed at the linoleum like a lunatic, nails bending back and blood beading up at the tips.
But his meager strength could never overcome the suction. Before long, even the desk leg he was gripping crumpled and broke, and his body floated up into the air.
The alien space began swallowing him from the small of his back.
"Aaaaaaah!!!"
With a final, wretched scream soaked in the terror of flesh being torn away, Kim Ji-hwan’s body was sucked into the crack ripped open in midair.
Blackness where sensation vanished and blinding white that made sight go distant flashed back and forth hundreds of times in an instant.
How much time had passed? When Ji-hwan finally managed to open his eyes, the first thing he felt was a gaze.
Far above in the sky, an unidentifiable 'eye' was looking down at him.
It was an eye, and yet something that was not an eye.
Human reason could not begin to comprehend that grotesque shape, but Ji-hwan’s soul could clearly feel the overwhelming presence piercing straight through him.
And the instant his gaze met that thing’s, Ji-hwan’s reason was paralyzed. It felt as though all his thoughts, memories, and fragments of logic were being sucked whole into that pupil.
'...!!'
In that absolute helplessness, where he could not even breathe, a chilling sensation suddenly swept through his entire body, as if something deep inside him had gone "pop" in a grotesque burst.
Was it the sensation of a soul bursting apart, or of breaking through some limit? Something was being forcibly crammed into him.
"A...ahh...!!"
At the same time, an agony as if his skull were shattering slammed into Ji-hwan’s brain.
Just as he was about to scream like an animal, eyes rolling back from the horrific pain of his brain cells boiling over—
Ding—! Tidididing—!
With a sharp system-tearing sound, blue translucent error windows poured down like a waterfall, blanketing his vision as if to block out the overwhelming 'eye' crushing him.
[Warning: #$%@ error occurred.]
[이%귤# 발생]
[■■■&*$#%^@……Protect]
As the bizarre eye’s gaze was blocked by the cascading error windows, the splitting headache abruptly stopped, and his crushed vision opened again.
Gasping for breath, Ji-hwan looked down beneath his feet. There, piercing through gray clouds, the vast skyline of Night City spread out below—towering megastructures and neon signs tangled together like veins in a machine.
Maybe because of the internal explosion and the pain that had nearly burst his skull, Ji-hwan was so drained he couldn’t make sense of any of it, and his body had gone completely rigid.
Then the bizarre text, which had been garbled like alien script, changed into a single clear sentence and blocked his view.
[Choose.]
'Choose? W-what choice...'
Before Ji-hwan could even grasp the meaning of the window—
The bizarre weightless state wrapping around his body suddenly snapped.
Only then did Ji-hwan realize it.
He was falling straight down from the top of the sky, with no protective gear whatsoever.
Whoooooosh—!!
"Fuuuuuuuck!!!!!! Aaaahhh!!"
As the sheer terror of plummeting with no end in sight crushed him, Ji-hwan’s vision filled with exhaust fumes and filthy concrete rushing up at a horrific speed, mercilessly charging toward his face.
"H...help me!!!"
Crack—!!
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register