Hongdae never slept. The street was a river of neon and sweat and bass, packed with students in loose shirts, makeup shining under club lights, food carts breathing garlic and oil. Flyers for a midnight EDM set floated like confetti. Somewhere a busker hammered a drum line so tight it stitched the night together.
I walked straight through it all, hood up, hands inside my pockets, not because I was cold but because I needed them to stop shaking.
My name is Han Jae-hyun. I used to be an e-sports pro. Reflexes like lightning. Hands that could flick a mouse faster than thought. It didn't matter anymore. Not since the crash.
I still heard the sound sometimes: the metal folding, the roll, my mother's voice becoming air.
A chant rose near the club entrance. "Open—open—open!"
For a second I thought they were calling for the DJ.
Then the air split.
It didn't tear with a noise. It tore with a color—red that pulsed from inside, red that felt wet, red that made the sweat on my neck turn to ice. The crowd stuttered. Phones lifted. Laughter became a question mark.
A Gate.
"Red!" someone shouted. "That's a Red!"
The red oval widened in midair, thick as blood, a vertical wound hanging above the street. Sparks pushed out of it, but they were not sparks. They were… flakes, like burning ash that didn't fall down. They hung there and hummed.
This was how it happens, people say later. As if the city itself gets tired of pretending things are normal and opens a door.
A siren somewhere tried to be brave. "Civilians, please evacuate—" a mounted speaker began. But the voice cracked and died when the Gate pulsed again.
A club promoter with gold chains laughed too loud. "Yo, free content!" He held up his phone and streamed. A dozen others did the same.
Something crawled at the edge of the wound.
My hands stopped shaking.
It's strange, the way your body knows it's about to die and wakes up anyway. My heartbeat became a metronome I could put my thoughts on. Step. Breath. Exit routes. The metal stairs to the roof? The alley by the convenience store? Could I make it two blocks if the first wave was fast?
A girl cried. "Where are the Hunters?"
That was the question. Hongdae had dozens on any night. But guilds took time to mobilize. The government took longer. And Red Gates… Reds didn't wait.
I should have run. I should have been like everyone else—pulling a friend's hand, grabbing a wrist, spilling into the side streets.
Instead I walked closer.
The night wavered like heat rising off a road. I saw myself in a club window—thin, black hoodie, hair too long, eyes that didn't blink enough. The reflection was wrong. In the glass, for a second, I looked blue. Not my face. The space around me.
I blinked, and the blue was gone.
The Gate lunged.
Not physically. It pulled the air, like a tide reversing, like gravity choosing a new direction. The crowd screamed as bodies slid an inch, then a foot, toward the red wound. The club sign bent. A banner ripped. A boy tripped and skinned his knee and cried and was dragged anyway.
I threw myself sideways and grabbed the boy's backpack. My shoulder hit asphalt. The pull wasn't strong yet. I yanked him behind a concrete post.
"Hold," I said. My voice sounded steady, like a stranger's. "Hold and don't let go."
His eyes were wide. "Hyung—"
"Where's your mother?" I asked.
"I—she—inside the club—"
The Gate boomed. The street lights popped out like candles. The bass from the club cut off mid drop. For one second the world was only breath.
Then red spilled over everything.
I didn't decide to move. I was already moving. I sprinted toward the club entrance, toward the Gate, toward the wrong thing. My body remembered how to cut inputs into tiny pieces. I sidestepped a falling light rig, planted a foot on a toppled scooter, vaulted it, rolled under a snapping cable.
The bouncer had tried to be a wall. He lay on his back now, eyes rolling. I touched his throat. Pulse. Good. I dragged him toward the stairs, set him with his head uphill.
I turned back.
The Gate bulged, and the ash-sparks flashed. A line of red text appeared in the air in front of it. People gasped.
[Gate Classification: RED (S). Estimated Breach: 00:04:57.]
It hovered there like a sign hung in a hurricane. It wasn't the government. It wasn't on any device. It was just there, as if the air had learned to write.
I'd seen system text before. Everyone had. Since the first Gates three years ago, the world had changed. Hunters saw white system panes. Civilians saw a simplified overlay—warnings, evacuation arrows, sometimes a fuzz of white text too fast to read.
This wasn't white.
The numbers counted down in a steady, silent tick.
I stepped closer. The air tasted metallic. The red ash touched my skin and sizzled, and the pain was intimate, the way a paper cut hurts because it's yours.
I could leave, I told myself. The choice is still there. Walk away. Find a wall to lean against and let the world decide what happens next.
But the world had already decided once. On a rainy night with a drunk truck driver. It had decided without asking me.
So I asked it back.
I took a breath, then another, and let the last one go slow. I stepped into the red.
The temperature wasn't different. The gravity wasn't either. The noise changed. Hongdae's hum fell off a cliff. The Gate made a thin, high, impossible sound, like glass singing itself to pieces.
The street blinked.
I was no longer on a street.
I stood on cracked stone under a sky that pulsed like a heartbeat. Red light came from everywhere and nowhere. The air smelled like an old battery. The club, the food carts, the posters—gone. In their place: a broken plaza with a statue of something that had too many arms.
The Gate text appeared again, brighter.
[Instance: Hongdae-Red-S-σ7] [Party Detected: 1/6] [Safety Zone: 10 meters. Timer: 00:00:10]
A white circle drew itself on the stone around me, ten meters across. It felt like stepping into the eye of a storm—the wind died, the ash stopped, the hum softened.
The counter hit zero.
The circle went out.
Motion in the dark. Shadows that didn't belong to me.
A hiss.
Then another.
I didn't have a weapon. I didn't have a plan.
I reached for my pocket, habit more than hope. My fingers closed on the only thing I had—a cheap metal ring threaded on a cord. It had been my father's. He wore it when he worked double shifts, "so I remember I'm married even when I forget what day it is," he'd joke. The ring was cool and smooth and alive in my palm.
"Okay," I breathed. "Okay."
Something flickered to my left. I turned hard and the air split where my head had been. The shadow hissed again. It was fast and low and it wore the shape of a body only because it needed to be somewhere. I could feel it deciding to be behind me.
My feet moved without questions. My body had been trained to guess where the enemy would be not where he was. I pivoted, slid, reached.
The thing's arm was a blade. It took a slice at my belly. I let the cut happen to the air an inch in front of me. The blade hissed across my hoodie and left a thread of cold, like a line drawn in ice.
"Come on," I said. "Come on."
The shadow came again, and this time I didn't dodge. I stepped into it.
I had no weapon, but I had hands. I jammed my forearm up under its blade arm, close to the elbow—if it was an elbow—and used its momentum. My shoulder hit its chest. The body was wrong—too light, too hollow. I heard something crack. It felt like breaking a crate in a game and the wood splinters turned into pixels.
The shadow staggered.
I drove with my legs, felt the stone under my feet, and threw it down.
It hit the plaza with a sound that wasn't stone. Like dropping a glass in a sink full of water. It dissolved into red smoke.
A pane of text slammed into my vision.
[Host Detected.] [Awakening Triggered.]
The words were not white.
They were electric blue.
They were wrong.
They were mine.
I didn't breathe for a heartbeat.
Blue text opened like a flower.
[System: ERROR MODE] [Name: Han Jae-hyun] [Rank: F (Unawakened) → ???] [Level: 1] [HP: 100/100 | MP: — ] [Core Skill: — ] [Stat Allocation: 0] [Traits: — ] [Note: Unauthorized interface detected. Investigating…]
My mouth was dry. My hands trembled again and then didn't.
"Error… mode?" I whispered.
The blue text pulsed like a hidden laugh.
A soft chime bloomed in my head.
[Core Skill Unlocked: PLUNDER (EX) — Passive] Effect: Steal one random skill from a defeated enemy. Chance: 100%. Rank of stolen skill capped at S.
Restriction: Overuse causes Overload (visual/auditory echoes).
Note: Repeated Plunder from same entity type reduces returns.
The plaza shifted. The blue panes faded to the edge of my vision but stayed there like an afterimage. The place smelled stronger now—old blood and iron rails and something sweet rotting.
A second chime.
[You have defeated: Shade Stalker (D).] [Skill Plundered: Ghost Step (B).] [Ghost Step (B): Short-range phase-step. Slip one body-length through space. Leaves a cold afterimage. Cooldown: 7 seconds.]
I laughed once, quietly. It sounded like I had found a coin on the street.
It sounded like I had become something I didn't ask to be.
Something hissed behind me, sharper, closer. I spun and Ghost Step answered before I finished the thought. The world smeared sideways, cool wind threading my ribs, and my body slid one body-length to the left. The blade slash went through the place my chest had been. The afterimage shone for a second and the shade stabbed at it again, confused, the way a cat hits the shadow of its own paw.
I didn't waste it. I stepped in and drove my knee up, hard, into where its face would be if it had one. The impact was soft and stiff at the same time, like hitting ice fruit. The shape broke. Smoke burst.
Blue chime.
[You have defeated: Shade Stalker (D).] [No additional skill plundered (duplicate class).] [+10 EXP.]
Something else moved at the edge of the plaza. Then something else. The statue with too many arms lifted one. It wasn't a statue.
I backed toward the center of the stone, eyes scanning, breath counting. One. Two. Don't hyperventilate. Don't flood your blood with more fear than your muscles can use.
Hongdae was a world away. The boy with the ripped knee. The siren that tried to be brave. My father's ring in my hand.
I slid the ring onto my finger.
Another pane unrolled.
[Instinct Bonus Detected: Focused Combat (E)] Effect: Minor stabilization of breath/heart rate during combat. Reduces panic.
Applied due to prior discipline (e-sports/hand-eye conditioning).
"Thanks," I muttered, unsure if I meant the system or the past.
The shades circled now. Six of them. Their lines were wrong, like sketches of men by someone who had never seen one. Eyes the color of old TV static. Blades for forearms. They moved in a pattern that would have looked random if I didn't know how patterns always hide in motion.
"Okay," I told them, which meant okay, Jae-hyun.
They rushed.
Ghost Step cooled down. I felt it like a chill at the base of my neck that faded, then was gone.
I moved.
I stepped not away from the nearest one but through the gap the two far ones would make when they committed. They weren't thinking. They didn't have to. The pattern had made them.
Ghost Step took me between them. I was behind one before it knew where I had been. I grabbed the back of its neck and twisted, not because I thought necks mattered but because twists always do. It popped and poured smoke.
I used the dying body like a shield. A blade meant for my ribs hit its chest and sank. I pulled the body forward, dragged the blade with it, and the attacker stumbled. I kicked its knee. It folded like a hung coat.
Blue chimes layered: bright, bright, bright.
[+10 EXP.]
[+10 EXP.]
[Ghost Step (B): Cooldown Reset (Chain Kill).]
A blade slid into my shoulder. I didn't feel it right away. Then I felt only it. White pain, hot and clean.
I turned and slammed my forehead into the face of the thing holding the blade. We met in the middle. It broke first.
I staggered back. Blood ran warm down my arm inside the hoodie. My fingers felt thick.
Blue text slid in.
[HP: 73/100] [Minor Bleed: -1 HP/5 sec. Duration: 00:00:30]
I exhaled through my nose and the breath shivered. "I'm fine," I told no one. The trick with pain is to give it a place to sit so it doesn't wander.
Three shades left. They had learned nothing. Good.
I let them come, then Ghost Step backward this time, passed through one, came up on its blind, cut my palm on its blade on purpose to mark where it was. Blood slicked it. I gripped its arm with both hands and pulled. It stumbled a half-step. I lifted my knee. Its head went the wrong direction and didn't come back.
[+10 EXP.]
[Level Up: 1 → 2]
[Stat Points: +5]
The last two split. One went high, one low. I jumped the low one, felt the blade whisper under my sneakers. The high one's blade traced a clean line toward my throat.
I used Ghost Step like a breath, not a sprint. Half a body-length. The blade kissed air. I fell into a roll and came up close to the low one. I didn't have a weapon. I had concrete and anatomy. I stomped its ankle. It made the sound of paper torn. I dropped and punched upward, once, under the chin. The chin dissolved on my knuckles.
The last shade should have run. It didn't. It charged with both blades cocked. I couldn't Ghost Step. I didn't need to. I waited too long, past the place where waiting is smart, into fear's living room. Then I took one small step to the right and met it the way you catch a glass before it hits a floor. My hands closed on both its wrists. It had wrists. Good. I planted and twisted. One arm snapped back, the blade kissing its shoulder. The other kept going until the line broke. I put my forehead into the space where a nose would have been again because sometimes simple is mercy.
Silence came like a wave. Smoke thinned.
Blue panes unfolded with the patience of a banker counting cash.
[Wave 1 Cleared.] [Entities Defeated: 7] [EXP: +70] [Loot: Wisp Shard × 7 (E)] [Gate Objective: Locate and destroy Gate Core.]
The plaza changed. The statue with too many arms softened like it was made of wax. Its face opened. Not like a mouth. Like a door that was a wound. Deep inside, something pulsed blue.
Not red. Blue.
I took an unsteady breath. My shoulder throbbed. The bleed stopped.
[HP: 73/100] [Status: Stable.]
Footsteps echoed from the far side of the plaza. Not mine. Not theirs. Real steps. Heavy boots on stone.
For a heartbeat I felt relief. Hunters. Guild. Anyone.
Then they spoke.
"There," a voice said. It was young and amused and wrong at the edges. "A civilian inside a Red Gate."
"Not civilian," another voice said, cold and sure. "Look."
They stepped from the shadow. Three figures. Two wore matte armor with pale plates that reflected the red like the inside of a tongue. The third didn't wear armor. She wore a winter coat, light gray, clean, wrong for the heat that wasn't heat. Her hair was tied back. Her face was carved from ice.
Her eyes were on the air over my shoulder. I realized my blue panes were still visible—at least to me. I still didn't know if anyone else saw blue.
"Hunter?" I asked, my voice scratching.
The woman's gaze slid to me. "You're bleeding," she said, as if asking me to apologize.
"New feature," I said.
She tilted her head. "Open your panel," she told me.
My mouth went dry. "What?"
"System screen," she said, like a schoolteacher grading a paper. "White pane, top left. Civilians have a simplified overlay, but if you moved like that, you're not a civilian. Open it."
Her two guards kept their blades low, but their bodies said ready, ready, ready.
I didn't move.
A thin smile touched her mouth and died. "He doesn't know how," she said, amused again. "Either unawakened or lying."
"I just killed seven of these," I said, louder than I felt. "If you're here to help, help. If not, get out of the way."
One guard took a half step. The other stopped him with two fingers on his forearm.
The woman looked at the statue. Her eyes narrowed at the blue glow inside it. A tiny line appeared between her brows. "Strange," she said. "Core shouldn't be visible yet."
"Core?" I asked.
She didn't answer. "What's your name?" she asked instead, still not looking at me.
"Han Jae-hyun."
"Guild?"
"None."
She finally looked. Her eyes were very, very dark. "You entered a Red Gate alone. Why?"
"Someone had to," I said. My voice came out quiet. I hated it for being honest.
Something in her face changed the way a seam tightens in leather. She glanced at my shoulder, then at my hands. She noticed the way I shifted my weight to my left leg when my right calf cramped. She noticed a thousand small things and decided something I wouldn't know until later.
"Clear the core," she said to her guards. "He's bait or he's brave, and either way, we don't have time."
They moved, blades up, toward the statue.
The statue moved first.
Its arms didn't bend like arms. They unfolded like a map that hated being folded. A blade too long to understand came down like a curtain. The first guard raised his sword. It didn't matter. The blade hit him and kept going, like the word no said to a river.
He didn't scream. He ceased.
The second guard reacted the way a good man reacts—by running toward danger. He slid under the next strike and stabbed. The blade sank into gray flesh and stuck as if the statue had been waiting for that exact angle. The statue's other arms turned, slow, sure, and closed.
He did scream.
I was already moving.
Ghost Step came off cooldown like a breath I had been holding too long. I let it go and slid to the statue's flank. The air around it felt wrong, like thick syrup and knives. The guards' blood steamed and didn't steam. The woman had not moved. She watched. Not with coldness, but with a precision that made cold a kind of kindness.
"Don't," she said.
I ignored her because I had already ignored myself harder than I could ignore anyone else.
The statue swung. I couldn't get under it. I couldn't get over it. So I moved into it—Ghost Step half a beat late, not a dodge but a misalignment—and the blade traveled through space that wasn't where I was anymore. It screamed anyway. My teeth rang.
I reached the core wound. Blue light beat inside like a heart that remembered oceans. I didn't have a weapon. I had my father's ring and my hands.
Sometimes that's enough.
I clenched my fist with the ring turned inward so the metal bit my palm. I drove that fist into the wound.
It was like punching a wet freezer.
Pain cracked my knuckles like glass. I hit again. And again. And again.
Blue panes burst like fireworks behind my eyes.
[Gate Core Contact.] [Plunder Attempt? Y/N]
I didn't know if I was supposed to be able to do that. I didn't know if the question was for me or for the world.
"Yes," I said, tasting blood.
The world hesitated.
[Plunder Engaged: Core Fragment] [Warning: Unstable interaction. Error User signature detected. Proceeding…]
The statue spasmed. Its arms stuttered like legs on ice. The blue light rushed up my arm like cold fire. I felt a thousand tiny hands trying to pull pieces of me off and keep them. I kept them instead.
The woman shouted something I didn't understand. It sounded like my name thrown into a glacier.
The blue light flooded my chest, then my throat, then my head.
I saw a street in summer, children throwing water balloons. I saw an old man counting bills in a shop that sold only buttons. I saw a woman in a white mask humming to herself as she sharpened knives. I saw an ocean that didn't know the word shore.
The statue collapsed from the middle out. Its arms fell like dead spiders. The wound tore open and spilled smoke like a funeral in reverse.
I fell to my knees.
Blue text perked up, trimmed itself, and waited to be read, pleased with its own handwriting.
[Gate Core Fragment Plundered.] [Skill Acquired: Dim Light (E) — Utility] Effect: Create a blue glow from the skin. Duration: 00:00:30. Cooldown: 05:00.
Note: Core fragments cannot be consumed for stat increases. Additional fragments may attract attention.
I laughed again, breathless. "Dim light," I said to the stone. "Perfect."
"Get back," the woman said sharply.
I looked up.
The plaza wasn't quieter. It was… emptier. As if sound had gone outside and shut the door. The red sky darkened a shade. The cracks in the stone crawled like worms. The Gate text unrolled and for the first time the words seemed to read themselves and hate what they found.
[Gate Behavior: Abnormal.]
[Boss Entity: Pre-Trigger.]
[System Advisory: Purge Event Likely.]
The woman was pale in the red light in a way that wasn't fear. It was recognition. "Error," she said softly, and she did not mean the way I had made bad choices. She meant me.
"We need to leave," she said louder. "Now."
I pushed myself up on shaking legs. "The Gate isn't cleared?"
"It isn't closing," she said. Her eyes flicked to the space above my shoulder again, to my blue panes. "We'll need a team. Reinforcements. And containment."
The statue's remains twitched. Tiny shapes like insects crawled from the cracks—their forms trying out different bodies like clothes. A hundred. A thousand. I didn't have a number for that many.
I opened my panel without knowing how. My blue screen obeyed like it had been waiting.
[System: ERROR MODE] [Name: Han Jae-hyun] [Level: 2] [HP: 61/100] [Core Skill: PLUNDER (EX) — Passive] [Active Skills: Ghost Step (B), Dim Light (E)] [Stats: STR 6 | AGI 9 | VIT 7 | INT 6 | LUCK — ] [Unassigned Points: 5]
The woman saw none of that or saw something different and just did not blink.
"Can you move?" she asked.
"Can you?" I shot back.
Her mouth twitched, then flattened. "Stay behind me."
She lifted a hand. The air around her cooled. The red ash that never fell froze in place like the universe had paused a frame. Frost filmed the stone at her feet and crept forward in a living pattern, like lace made by a mathematician. She exhaled and a thin line of white breath stretched from her lips like a blade.
A thin wall of ice rose across the plaza, shimmering. The insects—a wave of gnats with knives—hit the ice and stuck like black confetti.
So, she could do that.
I swallowed. The taste of copper had become normal. "I can move," I said.
"Good," she said. "Don't die."
An odd instruction to give a stranger. A precise one.
We ran.
The plaza stretched, then shortened, then turned inside out as if it disliked being a place anyone could navigate. The air hammered at my ears with pressure. The blue panes floated beside me like a patient friend.
The Gate exit appeared as a wound in the red—more bright than dark, more nothing than something. We sprinted for it.
The wave of gnats-with-knives broke the ice. Not all at once. In a zipping, stabbing hunger. Little bodies hit the stone and lifted again. They were faster than my eyes but not faster than a pattern.
"Left," I said without knowing I would say it. The woman stepped left two steps before the ground where she had been erupted in tiny needle points. She didn't look at me. "Again," I said. "Right—now."
She didn't thank me. Good. I didn't need thanks. I needed her to keep moving.
"Name," she said, not as a question.
I realized she wanted to file it, to place it and me in whatever structure kept her world from falling apart. "Han Jae-hyun."
She nodded once. "Seo—"
A shadow cut across the red behind us. Not a shade. Not a statue. Something bigger. Something that wore a man's shape like clothing and a crown of thorns made of numbers.
The Gate shuddered.
The wound at the exit narrowed.
We ran harder.
We reached the edge and the world turned inside out again without asking us if we were ready. The smell of frying oil punched my nose. The cold became summer. The red became night. The music came back and died again as the power grid tried to stand up and fell.
I was on my knees on the Hongdae street. The bouncer groaned twenty feet away. The boy with the skinned knee clutched a post with both arms like it was his mother.
The Gate still hung open, narrower, angrier.
The woman—Seo something—stood with her coat dusted with frost like she'd walked through a freezer. She watched the red wound with a face that could have been stone if stone could calculate.
"Do not move," she said to me. She lifted a small device to her mouth—a silver pebble that flashed blue. "Frostblade unit on-site, Hongdae Red, hostile core interaction, unknown blue interface detected. Send containment. Now."
The word Frostblade hit me like a history lesson. One of the big guilds. Chaebol money. Teams on billboards. Cold, clean, rich.
The boy peeled himself off the post. "Hyung," he said to me. "You came back."
"I said I would," I said. My voice surprised me by being soft.
Sirens approached. Not brave this time. Angry. More voices. Footfalls. Hunters, fast. Drones hummed overhead like flies the size of plates.
Across the sky, above Hongdae, text began to write itself on the air the way it had inside the Gate. Not small. Not private.
Huge.
[World Announcement.]
The entire street went silent by instinct. Even the Gate, for one second, seemed to pause the way a chest does before a scream.
The letters cut the night with light. People on other blocks saw them and ran toward them. The drones tilted their cameras up.
[World Announcement: Red Gate Hongdae — Solo Clear (Partial).]
[Unregistered User Signature Detected: ERROR.]
[Calamity Seed Probability: 13% → 29% → 47%…]
The numbers climbed while the announcement wrote itself. People whispered. The boy's hand found mine without asking.
The woman's eyes were on the sky. Her jaw tightened.
[Designation Issued: ERROR USER 07.]
My heart hit my ribs harder than any blade had.
Phones were up. Streams lit. Comments exploded.
The Gate pulsed. The red ash fell for the first time—and didn't hit the ground. It hung around me, slowly orbiting like I was a planet no one had approved.
The world text brightened.
[System Advisory: Purge Event Consideration. Awaiting Guild/Government Response.]
A drone drifted closer and the woman turned and the air around it crystallized and the drone fell to the asphalt in a clatter of frost. She didn't look sorry. She didn't look at me either.
"Han Jae-hyun," she said, voice low enough to be under the sirens. "Do not run."
"I wasn't going to," I said.
"You will want to," she said, and then her gaze slashed up at the sky again.
The numbers on the world pane ticked upward with a rhythm that felt like the pulse of something that had noticed me and was deciding what I was, the way a hyena decides whether a man is food or problem or both.
[Calamity Seed Probability: 58% → 61% → 67%…]
A ripple moved through the Gate's surface like a body turning over in a bed.
I became aware of a new sound before I understood it. It was a crowd, but not from the street. It was bigger, far away and also here. The sound of attention.
It was the sound of the world looking.
Blue text purred at my shoulder.
[Skill Interaction: Ghost Step (B) — Ready.] [Core Skill: PLUNDER (EX) — Passive — Ready.]
I looked up at the sky where the world had written my name. The letters hung there like a verdict waiting to land.
Something moved in the Gate.
Not out. In. Like a hand withdrawing. Like a choice being made elsewhere.
Then the red deepened. The ash brightened.
And the world text, huge and clean and neither on my side nor against it, wrote three new words:
[System Purge Incoming.]
The sirens cut off like a throat closed. The boy's hand tightened on mine.
The woman finally looked me in the eyes. "Run," she said.
The Gate Screamed.
To be continued...