Chapter 433: Chapter 433

After defeating the Nemesis-type, control of New Seoul naturally shifted to the people from Jeju.

It was an organic transition.

The city was exhausted from the prolonged battles and was showing signs of collapse on all fronts.

With its strength drained, their integration was a necessary move for survival.

Besides, the person in charge of our city was Woo Min-hee, and she was from Jeju as well—so unification was inevitable.

Many vehicles lined the roadside.

Most were construction vehicles.

They were retrieving building materials from the government asset vault in the ruined basement of The Hope, and using them to build a new town in the west.

The people set to live in this new settlement were, of course, those from Jeju.

I had been bedridden for a long time, so I didn’t know the full story, but I often overheard doctors, nurses, and hospital staff chatting, and occasionally, visiting friends would update me on the outside world.

“Feels like a taut wire stretched tight.”

Cheon Young-jae, who hadn’t been able to join the last battle, had recovered enough to move around with crutches.

It had been downplayed, but he had nearly died too.

If Heo Jong-chul hadn’t found the bullet fragments drifting inside his body, he could’ve become another casualty or been left with a permanent disability.

Even so, he deeply regretted not participating in the battle.

Bringing him to this gathering was my way of being considerate.

To show him that he wasn’t insignificant.

Traffic came to a halt.

From the sounds outside the window, it seemed like another protest had broken out.

“Looking out here ... kinda reminds me of the old National Assembly.”

Cheon Young-jae chuckled.

“There were protests there all 365 days of the year, huh?”

Even in minus 20 degrees Celsius, there were people protesting.

So in this relatively warm weather—just two or three degrees below zero—it's the perfect temperature for a demonstration.

I wasn’t interested in the politics, but I asked the government guide sitting in the passenger seat what the protests were about.

“It’s always the same—more rest, more rations, political participation, restoration of pre-war freedoms and rights, punishment of corrupt officials, opposition to integration, and so on.”

The driver clicked his tongue.

“People really are fickle. They went through that hell barely a month ago, and now they’re out here like it never happened. They didn’t even save this city. If we’re being honest, wasn’t it Skelton who saved it?”

Cheon Young-jae looked at me.

I pretended not to notice.

“That Skelton guy vanished like the wind, but these protesters keep crawling back, never dying off.”

Surprisingly, not many people know that I’m Skelton.

Maybe it’s because, like Baek Seung-hyun, I only used a bodycam, showing everything from a first-person view. Or maybe it’s because the reception of Live! Apocalypse! via Necropolis was so poor that the footage was distorted and riddled with noise.

Especially the audio—it suffered from severe distortion. Some people even muted the video while watching it.

That broadcast, using Necropolis transmissions, inevitably mixed in voices of the dead—frequencies from beyond the Rift.

I’ve watched my own livestream before. The ominous low tones playing throughout, like a sinister background track, were unmistakable.

Maybe it was the Rift itself making those sounds.

Woo Min-hee also did me a favor.

If people found out I was Skelton, like [N O V E L I G H T] back then when they swarmed after Professor to kill him, I’d just be surrounded by annoying people all over again.

The car finally moved.

Just a little further, and we’d reach the “castle” where Kang Han-min was staying.

I was staring idly at the endless lines of protesters when something unusual caught my eye.

A group of elderly folks was protesting together.

Before the war, that might’ve been normal—but afterward, the elderly became extremely rare.

Amid the horrors of war and chaos, they were not welcomed and quickly disappeared.

Yet here they were, protesting as a group.

I rolled down the window and listened to their voices.

One elderly man shouted,

“Release Woo Min-hee!”

“Where’s Min-hee? You people took her, didn’t you?”

“It’s been a month since we last saw her!”

Suddenly, the image of the nursing home Woo Min-hee managed flashed through my mind.

Were they the old folks from her facility?

But now, concern crept in.

Even the elderly who relied on her for their livelihood didn’t know where she’d gone.

That implied something had happened to her—something that had only been speculated so far.

That something did happen to Woo Min-hee.

Well, I’d find out soon enough.

Kang Han-min was just ahead.

Inside that half-collapsed building standing lonely in the distance.

It was natural that past memories would rise to the surface as I approached what could only be called a fateful meeting with Kang Han-min.

As the car rolled on, I looked out the window and remembered.

Our school dorms were single rooms.

Even prestigious universities usually went for double occupancy, so this was an exceptional privilege.

Because of that, the rooms weren’t very large.

I never entered one myself, but people said it was about the size of a goshiwon.

As I remember it, the space could just about fit a single bed and two people sitting facing each other—it was that small.

Still, back then I had very little luggage, and the built-in wardrobe was fairly spacious, so it never felt cramped.

Single rooms were often criticized even for a nationally funded school, but my mentor, Jang Ki-young, insisted on it.

“These students will go to war and move as one with their team until they die. Their thoughts and actions must be aligned. Shouldn’t we at least guarantee them personal privacy?”

Not everyone liked Jang Ki-young, but this was one point everyone praised—his persistence in keeping the one-person dorms.

We were all teenagers.

At that age, privacy—especially personal space—is sensitive.

Even in that cramped space, students found comfort in having something that was solely theirs. Some even decorated their dorms with care.

And Jang Ki-young never interfered with what anyone did inside their rooms.

“Everyone needs a bit of shade to rest in. Leave it be.”

It was hard to believe such tolerance came from that strict, oppressive instructor who demanded everything down to the way we walked and posed.

I knew a guy who had plastered his room with huge nude posters like some Vietnam War-era American GI. No one ever told him off.

Jang Ki-young genuinely respected autonomy inside the dorms.

But people’s thoughts change over time.

Back then, I believed he allowed such freedom so we could have some shade under the blazing sun of training.

Now, I see it differently.

Maybe that autonomy was exactly what Jang Ki-young wanted to observe.

This suspicion evolved into a fairly sharp insight when combined with things I’d previously overlooked.

“I got food poisoning and went back to the dorm on doctor’s orders. Guess who suddenly popped out of nowhere? Instructor Jang.”

“Now that you mention it, I’ve seen him entering the dorm during class time.”

“There were rumors about him lurking around the girls’ dorm, too.”

“That’s probably Assistant Instructor Song’s territory. Jang wouldn't stoop that low.”

At the time, we treated those as gossip. But it seems Jang Ki-young really did drop by the students’ rooms occasionally.

Of course, what he wanted to observe wasn’t personal lives or petty secrets.

He wanted to see how students expressed themselves inside the only free space he allowed them.

To see whether even the smallest traces aligned with his idea of an ideal hunter.

If that theory holds, then I was destined to be his protégé.

There was nothing in my room—no decorations, no symbols, no personal belongings.

Not even a stash of snacks like everyone else had.

I only had a uniform, textbooks, and the school-issued tablet.

No diary, no mementos of lost family—nothing.

Jang Ki-young must’ve seen that.

In that completely empty space, he must’ve read my resolve.

I wasn’t his student by chance. It was inevitable.

But Kang Han-min was different.

Even I, someone who rarely reflects on the past, clearly remember certain episodes about him.

One of them involved his dorm room.

“You seen Kang Han-min’s room? Damn. I don’t even know how he got accepted here.”

“Having one or two figures or models is fine. But that guy’s entire room is stuffed with that crap.”

“Where’d he get the money?”

“His family died too, but he must’ve been well off. I heard he inherited over a billion won.”

“Moving day’s gonna be a sight.”

Back then, I didn’t care much about his room.

He had plenty of other issues.

Like watching tropical fish in an aquarium—when one is weak or injured, the others don’t help.

They gang up and peck it to death faster.

Kang Han-min was a clear underachiever with no charisma or popularity to offset it.

He wasn’t good-looking, athletic, or especially nice.

At our school, being teamed up with someone weak affected your own grades. So students like him were universally avoided.

I once heard a detailed description of his room—from Gong Gyeong-min.

Unlike me, he was social and had approached Kang Han-min through shared hobbies.

Also, one of Gong Gyeong-min’s hobbies was snooping around other people’s homes.

“Being an otaku’s fine. I am one too. But this? Something felt wrong.”

He described Kang Han-min’s dorm as an eerie space crammed with figures, models, posters—like the rumors said.

But Gong Gyeong-min had an unusual sense of perception for someone his age.

Maybe because he was a bit off himself.

“But he’s not an otaku. That’s not why he had all that. There was no affection in it. I watched that anime he liked—it was the classic kind where a cool older guy inspires a boy to defeat evil. Cute girls, adorable heroine. But the stuff he collected? It was a mess. Broken decorations, misaligned heads, shattered models stuffed under the bed like corpses.”

I still remember Gong Gyeong-min’s young, disturbed face vividly.

“What creeped me out wasn’t that he liked anime. It was the atmosphere. That room had this heavy, negative energy. Like a haunted dollhouse in a horror movie.”

He bit his thumb and muttered with conviction.

“Just watch. When we graduate or he gets kicked out, he’ll throw all that stuff in the trash. Without a second thought. You know why? Because he never liked it to begin with.”

Jang Ki-young must’ve sensed something off in that room too.

“You airheaded bastard! What are you thinking?! Is your brain as cluttered as that filthy room?!”

One time, he yelled at Kang Han-min with words that strongly implied he’d seen the room.

During our China deployment, there was no talk of his room.

There were dorms, but he didn’t sleep there.

He commuted from a place he rented nearby, supposedly to socialize with locals.

He only slept there—he always ate at the dorm.

So no one knew what his place looked like.

He never invited anyone over.

It was about a month after I’d teamed up with Kang Han-min.

Our relationship was... strange.

He tried to approach me with excessive friendliness, while I kept a firm wall up.

One day, with a determined face, he said,

“If it’s okay with you, want to have a drink at my place tonight?”

“Drink? You know I don’t drink. And it’s your house, not a bar.”

“Oh, nothing fancy. There’s this anime I love—you’ve probably heard about it. The one I was obsessed with back in school. It fills me with strength and courage.”

“Well... you’ve looked tired lately. Like you’re always sleepy. I thought something fiery might help rekindle your spirit. I make great cocktails, by the way. And I can do non-alcoholic too.”

“Sorry, I don’t have time. I have a meeting with the Chinese side.”

“Then maybe next time...”

“If the opportunity comes.”

He never asked again after that.

He must’ve realized—whatever he said, I wasn’t going to accept.

Over ten years have passed since.

I can now see that tall building in the distance.

That’s Kang Han-min’s place.

I wonder what his room looks like now.

Gong Gyeong-min, wearing a crisp suit instead of combat gear, greeted me.

No need for many words between us.

He said it all with one look.