Chapter 42: Hell Wears a Human Face

A suppressed sob burst out alongside a cloud of white breath.

Just when I’d finally convinced myself that maybe I could live the rest of my life in peace, reality mocked me openly and shoved me back toward the edge of a storm-ridden cliff.

“No. No!”

There were too many things that didn’t make sense.

Just one week ago, when I sent a letter to the shelter, word had reached me through the center’s contact network that they’d received it safely.

And every time they wrote back, the shelter residents would say things had improved greatly thanks to me.

They’d include photographs too.

Pictures of the renovated old building and their small, ordinary daily lives.

Smiling faces.

Warm expressions.

It had only been days since I stared at those photographs and renewed my will to keep living.

There was no way all of it had been fake.

Whoooosh—

After wandering uphill through the snowfield, I finally collapsed from exhaustion.

My lips had split completely from dehydration.

My empty stomach growled endlessly.

Barely managing to crawl into a massive abandoned cement pipe in a vacant lot, I hid there to escape the cold.

Every breath I exhaled scattered pale mist into the air.

My fingertips had already turned from red to bluish purple.

“Hic… where are you? Where did everyone go…?”

More than the cold or hunger, I missed human warmth.

That loneliness alone was enough to make tears fall.

Pulling out the photographs of the shelter residents I’d carefully kept close to my chest, I illuminated them with a flashlight.

And suddenly, everything felt unreal.

So unreal that I began wondering if every single thing I’d experienced had merely been a delusion.

Maybe my existence itself had been fabricated from the beginning.

Maybe even the shelter residents were nothing more than false memories implanted by the center researchers to make me function more efficiently as a guide.

Vroooooom—

“?”

The terrifying spiral of thoughts stopped instantly.

A deafening motorcycle engine roared from atop the hill.

My half-closed eyes snapped open.

Quickly lowering myself and retreating deeper into the pipe, I watched dozens of motorcycles speed into the plaza beneath the streetlights before stopping.

“Hold position!”

It was too dark to see clearly, but every rider wore deep green military uniforms.

Uniforms marked with the red cross — the symbol of the rebels.

The rebels.

Soldiers who had voluntarily descended into the lower districts decades ago in an attempt to stop the conflict between District 3 and District 4.

Unlike the official military under the National Security Bureau, they were essentially a civilian resistance force gathered to rebuild the corrupt and abandoned lower districts.

They saved countless lives while moving between war zones and conflict regions.

They fought fierce battles against forces attempting to reduce the districts to rubble again.

At one point, they even grew powerful enough to threaten the government itself and launched an actual coup.

“Move all the supplies into one place. These resources were hard enough to obtain, so keep watch over them carefully.”

“Yes, sir.”

But the coup failed catastrophically once the center — the organization of espers — intervened.

The rebel forces that had finally begun resembling a proper army were shattered by government suppression.

Now, all they did was wage scattered wars across the lower districts.

“Hey! Grab your tools! Let’s get to work!”

The man who appeared to be their leader swung a massive metal weapon he’d pulled from one of the heavily loaded motorcycles.

The soldiers, whose morale had clearly dropped from the cold weather, immediately followed after seeing their leader take initiative.

Each grabbed a weapon and headed toward the shopping district beside the plaza.

BANG—! CRASH—!

“f*ck, come out! You hear me or not?!”

I barely managed to cover my mouth to stop the scream threatening to escape.

The men violently smashed against the sealed storefront doors before storming inside through the bent metal shutters and charging upstairs.

Then—

A thin voice echoed from one of the old mold-covered buildings.

Far too small and fragile to belong to an adult man.

Like hunters tightening a noose around trapped prey, the rebels closed in and grabbed fleeing children by the backs of their necks.

“N-No! No!”

“f*ck, hey! What’re you idiots staring at? If they’re gonna keep making trouble, just shoot them already!”

A sickly woman — likely the children’s mother — clung desperately to the men’s pant legs.

The children screamed and fought wildly after being torn away from her.

Even then, the woman desperately tried to comfort them.

But after repeated kicks slammed into her back and waist, she finally collapsed.

“Hah… haa….”

Only ten minutes passed before the woman’s filthy clothes became soaked red with blood.

The mother who’d fought so desperately to protect her children was left discarded across the freezing ground, her entire body bruised black and blue.

But the men didn’t stop there.

To silence the children, they drove their fists brutally into their tiny stomachs.

“Ugh….”

The shadows stretching across the white snow beneath the lonely streetlights looked monstrous.

The children’s skin — so much smaller and softer than even an adult woman’s — bruised violently beneath rough military boots.

The rebels ignored the injured children entirely and continued looting every bit of hidden food they could find inside the buildings.

‘…There used to be at least some people around. Why is it so quiet?’

“Ah….”

I remembered the words I’d spoken earlier while walking through the silent streets.

And only then did I finally understand.

Why the streets were empty.

Why the neighborhoods once filled with traces of human life had become so desolate.

“Search every other building too! It’s already hard enough surviving this damn cold without these worthless bastards causing trouble…!”

At the leader’s command, the men resumed searching nearby stores without even pausing to rest.

And just like the dying woman earlier, parents clung desperately to the rebels, trying to drag their children back into their arms.

“f*ck! Why do you idiots keep hesitating?! They’re all gonna die sooner or later anyway, so just shoot them already!”

Children too young to even properly read were forced apart from their parents before my eyes.

Gunshots exploded repeatedly from rifles without silencers.

Bang. Bang.

“Mom… Dad….”

The children, too young to even understand what death truly meant, cried desperately while staring at parents who no longer answered them.

A woman with a bullet lodged directly through the center of her forehead slumped lifelessly to the ground.

Even in death, her hand still clung tightly to her child.

“Move already! Didn’t you hear me?!”

Humans are hell.

Suddenly, I remembered the words Kwon Yiyul once casually said to me.

“If you keep wasting time here, you’ll end up dead just like those kids’ parents. Got it?”

The men hoisted the frozen, traumatized children onto their backs one by one and carried them toward a truck hauling massive cages.

The unconscious children were thrown into cramped iron cages like livestock headed for slaughter.

‘No. No….’

Inside my head, a voice screamed at me to stop them somehow.

But my body remained frozen against the ground.

There was no way I could fight that many people alone.

And even if I somehow saved the children, escorting dozens of newly orphaned kids by myself would only lead all of us to death.

‘If only I’d been stronger. If only I’d possessed power like those damned espers….’

Never in my life did I imagine that less than three days after escaping the center, I’d end up envying the abilities of Assault Team 3.

Never imagined I’d crave the very power I despised.

Never imagined I’d finally understand how desperately necessary that strength could be.

Thunk—

“We’re leaving. We need to arrive before sunrise, so don’t stop along the way.”

Before the blood staining the snow could even freeze, the men quickly departed with only the healthy children.

The fading roar of motorcycle engines echoed endlessly in my ears like artillery fire.

‘The shelter residents… were they attacked by those people too?’

Only after everything ended did the pieces finally begin falling into place.

From the looks of it, the rebels had been roaming this area, looting children, food, money, and anything else they could find.

Which meant the shelter — one of the few places still receiving government support — would’ve been their primary target.

‘If I run after them now and stop them….’

More importantly, beyond government subsidies, the shelter also managed the money I regularly sent every month.

To the rebels, there couldn’t have been a more valuable target.

And if that assumption was true…

Then the destroyed shelter building.

The bullet holes everywhere.

And the complete disappearance of over a hundred shelter residents without a trace—

All of it finally made sense.

I had just watched my greatest enemies escape right in front of me.

“No… no. Why does everything always end up like this…?”

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