Free Web NovelWithout a mirror—or some tool like it—we can’t see ourselves.
That’s because we see the world in first-person.
No one knows who first realized the face reflected in the water was their own, but people are affected just as much by how they appear to others as by how they truly are.
Before the war, appearance-based hierarchy and greed were cynically embraced as two great truths about human nature by people too lazy to think for themselves.
And even now, in this wrecked world, that obsession with appearances hasn’t really changed.
“Was her name Lee Haru? She was kind of pretty.”
Cheon Young-jae must’ve seen Lee Haru’s name on the Hunter registry.
“Dream on. Do you even know the age gap?”
“So what? Age is just a number.”
“More importantly, did you check what I asked for?”
“Oh, that? Yeah, it’s true. Kang Han-min went into the Fissure. And he hasn’t come out. Apparently, when he goes in, it’s not unusual for him to stay in there over three months.”
Kang Han-min was inside the Fissure.
But I’d gotten a message from him—someone who was supposed to be inside that Fissure.
From Anonymous68: Let’s meet this Saturday. Got a reservation at a decent restaurant!
That’s why I asked Cheon Young-jae to look into Kang Han-min’s whereabouts.
So... did he send this message from the Fissure?
Hard to say.
Maybe, if he used Necropolis to connect. But Viva! Apocalypse! communicates through satellites orbiting Earth—it's a system based here, not in the Fissure.
“Man. Isn’t there a single decent woman around...”
While Cheon Young-jae was groaning like an animal in heat, my phone rang.
Speak of the devil.
It was Lee Haru.
“Captain Park Gyu, I’m really sorry, but we’re seriously short on hands right now. Could you help us, just for a bit?”
“It’s been a while, Haru. What’s going on?”
I said her name out loud on purpose, but Cheon Young-jae didn’t react at all.
Figures.
He must not have been that interested to begin with.
He picked up his view of the world through half-baked internet education. He doesn’t strike me as the type to lead—more like he’s into strong, dominant women who’ll lead him.
Still hasn’t had enough experience, clearly.
Anyway, Lee Haru needed me.
“We found another capsule.”
*
Thud!
“Neutralize the field!”
The woman in front barked sharply.
The people behind her responded immediately with a coordinated volley.
Tat tat tat tat tat!
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Media always makes them seem weak, but rifles that fire 5.56mm rounds are terrifying weapons.
Without the barrier known as a reflective field, a single volley is enough to vaporize a monster into particles of light.
Probably because she’d just raised the field, Lee Haru walked over looking a bit fatigued.
“Thanks. I know you’re busy, so I appreciate you coming to observe.”
I didn’t participate directly in this capsule removal.
But since most of the Hunters on Haru’s team were rookies and had little capsule experience, I’d come just in case.
I glanced at her team members.
All of them looked young—no, more like kids.
There were some who looked no older than early to mid-teens.
As shitty and despicable as the Jeju government is, there’s one thing they’re undeniably good at.
Fissure policy.
They didn’t just close the Fissure in Jeju for show—within a short time, they established systems, cleared monster-infested areas across Seoul, and pushed for recruitment.
I’d like to think I played a role in that.
With regular Awakened being assigned to teams, the need for surgically precise, hyper-elite Hunters like in our time has dropped.
Dangerous maneuvers like Intimidating and Skelping, meant to disrupt reflective fields, are no longer necessary when you’ve got a regular Awakened who can just neutralize the field.
As those death-defying stunts became unnecessary, the entry bar was lowered.
Of course, what matters most for a Hunter isn’t their skill in acrobatics—it’s their courage to face down those pale giants that threaten humanity, and the hatred needed to kill them.
“Who’s that guy?”
“Dunno. But if Team Leader Haru knows him, he’s probably not just some nobody.”
The rookies didn’t recognize my face.
I’d already asked Haru not to refer to me by any identifying titles.
Fame feels good, sure, but I don’t live off it.
There’s nothing wrong with caution.
I stepped aside with Haru and we talked privately.
Maybe because it’d been a while, she had a lot to say. I just listened quietly as my old subordinate spoke.
“Seunghwan? Yeah, he’s doing fine. Hanna’s hanging in there too. She’s taking a break from ops for now. She kinda overdid it last time, you know? Poor girl’s been through enough.”
“We don’t really mix with the folks from Jeju. Technically we’re part of the same consolidated department, but their faction didn’t get merged. They’re still an independent unit and act like they live in a different world.”
“Right, the capsules. We’re finding tons of them lately. Can’t really be helped, I guess. We wiped out so many monsters last battle. Still, the numbers are weird. Just this week alone, we’ve found fifteen.”
All of what she said was worth hearing—but one thing caught my attention.
“Capsules?”
I already knew, from the forums, that capsules were popping up everywhere.
And just like Haru said, when a lot of monsters are wiped out, capsules tend to appear.
But what she described didn’t quite match what I knew.
“One per spot?”
Capsules are kind of like fruit.
They can appear one by one.
In areas with weaker corruption, that’s pretty normal.
But in cases like this—when capsules appear en masse—they don’t show up solo. They emerge in tightly clustered, revolting swarms.
If this capsule surge was really a result of the last battle, then the sheer number makes sense. But the fact that they appeared one by one in scattered, isolated spots? That’s not right.
The second problem was where they were appearing.
I called Haru’s superior to get permission, then summoned her to my office.
“Oh, this is your office, Captain? Unit 803. I’ve heard the name a lot, but it’s way more rugged than I imagined.”
She was lucky.
She came on a day when Woo Min-hee wasn’t here.
Min-hee had gone off to indulge her new hobby—visiting the homes of families that had committed group suicide.
She tried to rope me into it, but I used the capsule incident as an excuse to avoid that grim, miserable outing.
“Here. These are the files I brought.”
I reviewed the data.
Locations where capsules had recently been discovered and removed.
If I’d just skimmed through it, I might’ve written it off as one of those post-massacre anomalies.
But it wasn’t.
“Captain, is something wrong?”
I handed the data to Cheon Young-jae.
He might’ve learned about the world through the internet, but he’s still an elite trained in the academy.
“Why are they all spaced out like this?”
He saw it too.
Something unnatural was happening in this new Seoul.
He glanced at Haru, who still looked puzzled, and added,
“What if someone’s placing them?”
I was thinking the same thing.
The capsules were found in places like factories and residential zones—heavily populated areas where they’d be easy to spot.
None were found in abandoned ruins or shadowy sewers.
Maybe we just didn’t check those places—but even so, the fact that all of them turned up in highly visible areas was enough to raise suspicion.
Luckily, most of those locations had CCTV.
No matter how broken the world gets, anywhere society still functions has cameras.
Especially when the place is crawling with fanatics or remnants of warlords, CCTV isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.
We requested footage from the police.
Surprisingly, they cooperated quickly.
“Hello? Hunter Park Gyu, right? I’m Superintendent Kim Gye-sun of New Seoul’s Surveillance Control Center.”
Superintendent Kim—male—sent over the footage.
From 14 out of 15 capsule sites, he sent CCTV clips taken from at least three different angles each.
He even included indexing tags to highlight when people entered frame—an unexpectedly thoughtful touch.
But the goodwill didn’t last long.
“Uh... there’s nothing here.”
The capsules just... appeared.
In the blink of a frame.
Which isn’t actually that strange.
Fissure-related phenomena are beyond human perception to begin with.
What disappointed us was the total lack of evidence in all 14 clips—no signs of anyone transporting or placing the capsules.
“Maybe the footage was edited?”
Cheon asked.
“I dunno. Would the cops—especially the Jeju-controlled ones—go through all the trouble of faking something just to mislead us?”
The Jeju government wants a world it can control.
They already have their hands around the city’s throat. Why stir up unrest by planting capsules?
Together, Cheon and I headed to the last site—the one without CCTV.
The moment we got there, I didn’t like the feel of the place.
“...Tch.”
Cheon clicked his tongue.
Criminals, outcasts, beggars, sex workers, quacks, organ traffickers.
Call them what you want.
This was the dregs of society.
*
There’s never been an accurate population count since survivors are still streaming in, but the current estimate puts New Seoul’s population at just under a million.
That might sound like a lot, but given that the entirety of Gyeonggi Province—once part of the greater metropolitan area—was wiped out, it means the capital region’s population has dropped to 10% of what it was just five years ago.
And when that many people cluster together, naturally, some end up pushed to the margins.
Whether by choice or force, they’ve carved out their own territory at a distance from the residential zones and built a world of their own.
“It probably started with the North Koreans.”
School textbooks and state-run media always taught that North Koreans were “our people,” but the reality isn’t that simple.
This is a world where people get killed over the slightest misunderstandings.
Even if they’re the same ethnicity, people who’ve lived their entire lives in completely different worlds don’t just mix easily.
“Then came the exiles, and the ones whose origins they couldn’t disclose.”
By “those whose origins they couldn’t disclose,” they probably meant remnants of warlords.
Once Jeju began formally managing the city, a lot of warlord remnants in the surrounding areas drifted into town.
Some even tried to surrender, but were ignored.
They weren’t even considered worth negotiating with.
Once there was a place for the discarded and unaccepted, more people who had fallen out of the system gathered there in droves.
The Jeju government simply let them be.
They knew it was cheaper to let them form their own ghettos than to manage them directly.
To those of us who survived the Collapse, places like this don’t look all that different from the countless refugee shelters where everyone fended for themselves.
Still, you have to be careful.
...
I brought a Chinese-made rifle.
They’re not particularly popular on the market.
Not because of their performance—but because the ammo’s rare.
Even NATO rounds, once plentiful, are drying up. People are already using homemade firearms and crossbows. Enemy rounds? Forget it.
Besides the rifle, I brought two pistols. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
Cheon Young-jae carried a domestically produced submachine gun. It also used NATO rounds, but wasn’t popular due to accuracy issues.
He only brought one pistol—but packed a grenade and a tear gas grenade instead.
He said the ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) tear gas was something he got used to back in the shelter days.
We didn’t bring Defender with us.
He and his team are too well known.
And their reputation isn’t exactly stellar.
Defender was the one who introduced me to this guy.
“You’re Yoo Jung-woo, right?”
Defender had said he was someone you’d recognize from far away.
And he wasn’t wrong.
His face was... hard to look at.
Whether from the battlefield or the war itself, his face had been torn to shreds—disfigured into something horrifying, enough to trigger disgust and fear.
Most people with wounds like that died on the spot, but those who miraculously survived were, if I recall, offered government-funded reconstructive surgery.
At the very least, they’d wear something to hide their face.
But he wore nothing.
The man looking at me was better known by his nickname, “Undead,” than by his real name.
His looks were grotesque, but his clothes were of decent quality, and he was surprisingly clean.
The hair that had grown over the scorched half of his scalp wasn’t greasy—it had a fresh, healthy bounce to it. He even had a faint scent of cologne on him.
He was a Hunter trained at the Academy.
A skilled one—skilled enough to make even other academy graduates tread carefully around him. He’d built quite the record in China, too. But then the war broke him.
And instead of being placed in Hunter HQ, they dumped him here, at the edge of a village of castaways.
“You’re the one they talked about?”
His voice, crisp and pleasant, was in complete contrast to his appearance.
Cheon and I, like trained Hunters, showed no reaction to his appearance.
But further down the street, some kids—missing arms or legs—walked past and muttered just loud enough to be heard.
“Undead.”
“Uuuundead~.”
But Yoo Jung-woo, dubbed “Undead,” showed no reaction at all.
Instead, he reached into his coat, pulled out a Chinese cigarette, placed it between his torn, puckered lips, and lit it.
Fwoosh.
His face was so wrecked you couldn’t read any emotion from it.
A moment later, blowing out a puff of smoke, he said,
“Don’t mind them. It happens all the time.”
He didn’t sound angry, or ashamed.
In fact, his voice was calm, almost soothing.
Those boys were still loitering behind him.
Cheon turned.
“Want me to drive them off?”
Yoo Jung-woo chuckled and replied,
“No need. I really don’t care. In fact...”
Click.
He drew his pistol and aimed it at Cheon Young-jae.
Of course, Cheon and I both raised our rifles at the exact same time, almost instinctively.
“I don’t like people who worry about me.”
Yoo Jung-woo gave a dry little laugh and lowered his pistol.
Then, in a cheerful tone, he said,
“I’m really fine.”
