Chapter 365

Chapter 365
## Chapter 365

Terror (2)

A sudden frown creased his brow as an unsettling premonition drifted in from the distance.

It was a massive tidal wave of raw emotion originating from some unknown epicenter, a turbulent ripple slicing through the local currents of causality.

‘This feeling…’

In an instant, understanding dawned on him.

—We break into our regular programming with an urgent update! Coordinated explosive attacks have shattered multiple sectors across Seoul! The administration has—

—Boom!—

He had switched on the television on a whim, only for the broadcaster’s frantic bulletin to be violently cut short by a massive blast.

The detonation must have occurred right outside the studio doors; the sound reverberated with jarring clarity through the speakers. The anchor visibly flinched on screen, her eyes wide with unadulterated panic.

Vrrr— Vrrr—

Right on cue, his professional mobile device began vibrating continuously, flooded with urgent digital alerts.

—Jin So-ran: My Lord! Coordinated detonations are occurring right now adjacent to our Blood Alliance strongholds and various Howard Industry outlets…

—Hans’s Slave #1: Hahoe Mask-nim! Signs point to the Heaven’s Turn Society being the architects of this assault! The Supernatural Management Bureau is currently issuing a maximum-level alert…

Despite the unfolding pandemonium, reports were streaming in from Jin So-ran—the liaison for Heinz the Second who oversaw the domestic vampire factions—and Ahn Seong-jin, the practitioner of dark magic whom Hans had brought into the fold.

And that wasn’t all.

—Do not step outside! Stay locked indoors!

A text message had arrived from Kang Tae-san, his solitary confidant.

It was a brief, frantic transmission, filled with broken syntax and scrambled lettering.

Taking in the full scope of the emergency, I shut my eyes and forced my cognitive processing into overdrive.

Simultaneous, massive detonations rocking the heart of Seoul.

The culprit was clear.

‘No one but the Heaven’s Turn Society has the infrastructure for an operation of this scale.’

The domestic criminal underworld operated strictly under the thumb of the Blood Alliance.

Contraband channels were tightly monitored, making the covert importation of such a massive payload of military-grade explosives virtually impossible without their radar picking it up.

Granted, in a domain where mystic forces operated, the impossible could be engineered…

‘But this requires immense coordination. Given how quiet they’ve been, I assumed they had fully retreated from the peninsula…’

Instead, they had been playing the long game, burrowing deep into the dark even as their field operatives were systematically hunted down and liquidated.

All this time, they were structuring this exact strike.

“The audacity.”

A freezing, venomous growl tore from his throat.

The words slipped out purely on instinct, so low and feral that he only registered his own voice after the sound hung in the silent room.

South Korea was his personal domain.

They were well aware of that reality.

Yet, they chose to openly spit in his face.

“Sigh…”

He drew a long, measured breath, fighting to suppress the volatile fury rising within him.

An unnatural, sickening heat—a toxic malice—was clawing at his insides.

Had it not been for the stabilizing effects of 「Clear Mind」, his restraint would have shattered completely.

‘Anger won’t solve this. I need a tactical response.’

Stabilizing the capital took precedence over everything else.

He refused to let these terrorists dismantle the hard-earned order and quiet equilibrium he had painstakingly implemented across the country.

He would channel this wrath into the absolute annihilation of their entire organization.

‘I can’t afford to recall Hans at this juncture.’

The theater of operations in Ganghwange was hovering on a knife-edge.

The grand coalition of the Murim Alliance was massing its legions near Beijing, signaling the imminent outbreak of total warfare.

Pulling Hans away from overseeing that vital front was an unacceptable strategic risk.

‘Then again, Hans’s physical presence isn’t strictly mandatory.’

He possessed a specific capability designed precisely for this kind of logistical dilemma.

Without a second thought, he triggered the ability.

Fwip—

In that exact heartbeat,

…the ambient temperature of the apartment plunged into sub-zero territory.

The overhead fixtures flickered violently before dying out, allowing deep shadows to stretch from the corners of the room.

His outer flesh and musculature dissolved into nothingness, exposing a stark white skeletal frame.

His heart, which had been beating with human vitality, transformed into a frozen, dormant core pulsing with pure necromantic energy. His sight shifted completely, shattering the boundaries of mortal vision to adopt the absolute perception of the unliving.

An intoxicating, cosmic sensation of supreme authority flooded his consciousness.

A dark amusement forced its way out.

[“Heh heh— Kahahaha!”]

「Individual Projection」—a supreme art allowing him to cast his awareness into an external vessel, utterly supplanting the avatar’s native persona and recollection.

He had successfully inhabited the guise of Hans, the tyrannical Demon King who had terrorized Ganghwange.

Shedding the flesh-sculpted chimera illusion, his attire hung loosely around his bones. He draped himself in a sweeping midnight-black mantle and firmly pressed the Hahoe Mask onto his pale skull.

[“Hmph— It seems the vermin have finally crawled out from the floorboards.”]

The meteoric ascent of Howard Industry must have pushed them past their breaking point.

The rigid discipline they had maintained over the months had cracked under the pressure.

While their ultimate endgame remained obscured,

[“Let us see what you hope to achieve—”]

…it was entirely irrelevant.

[“—I will simply tear the answers directly from your minds.”]

He would hunt them down, drag them into the light, and dissect their memories.

—

A young man sprinted blindly through the chaos, clutching a mobile device secured to a stabilizer mount while an action recorder bounced against his sternum. His respiration was ragged, his words tumbling out in sheer terror.

“Hah… Whew… What kind of madness is this?!”

It was Hong Doo-sik, the digital content creator who had struck gold by broadcasting the advent of the Gold Dragon from a flawless vantage point.

That single broadcast had caused his subscriber metrics to explode, turning him into a desperate addict chasing the next viral sensation.

Unfortunately, as public fascination faded, his viewership metrics had entered a catastrophic nosecone dive.

He had tasted brief internet celebrity, but it was dissolving. Without the dragon, his lack of creative substance became painfully obvious as he struggled to find compelling angles for his stream.

Even so, he refused to return to obscurity.

He had invested in high-end field cameras, using mundane neighborhood restaurant vlogs as a front to prowl the city streets, keeping his vision sharp and his lenses prepped for anything bizarre.

He was praying for lightning to strike twice, yearning for another legendary clip to match the dragon footage.

‘Curse it all! I’m a streamer, not a war correspondent! Why am I running toward the gunfire?! I should be sitting in my room playing video games!’

When the initial thunder of the explosions echoed, his first instinct had been pure euphoria, believing his golden goose had arrived.

After all, South Korea boasted some of the lowest crime statistics on the globe.

He foolishly assumed the authorities would suppress whatever minor incident was occurring within minutes…

Yet the reality unfolding before him was an absolute nightmare.

Blazing infernos, plumes of suffocating obsidian smoke, structural facades fracturing into pieces, concrete rain…

A sea of citizens screaming in agony, a terrified stampede clogging the thoroughfares…

One wrong step in this human torrent, and he would be crushed under a hundred boots.

‘Where are the superhuman Guardians?! Where are the emergency units and the police?!’

What the streamer failed to realize was that this wasn’t a standard localized strike.

Moments before the detonations, a deluge of coordinated ‘imminent terror threats’ had flooded every emergency dispatch center, firehouse, and police precinct in the city.

The sheer volume of reports was catastrophic, with the vast majority being deliberately placed hoaxes.

The municipal emergency framework had collapsed under the logistical weight. First responders were running blind, dividing their forces to intercept real threats, neutralize unexploded devices, and investigate phantom alerts simultaneously.

‘Wait… what is he doing?’

As the human tide dragged him along in its desperate bid to escape the carnage,

…his eyes locked onto an elderly gentleman standing motionless in the center of the boulevard, his expression vacant and his gaze completely hollow.

In the middle of a disaster zone, shell-shocked individuals were common… yet an instinctual dread crept up Hong Doo-sik’s spine. He found himself paralyzed, unable to look away.

Snap!

The elder produced a pocket lighter, sparking a small flame that caught the edge of a crumpled parchment held in his opposite hand.

The ignited paper slipped from his fingers—.

Fwoosh—

…and the fire caught instantly, racing along a shimmering path of accelerant that had been poured across the asphalt.

“Aieee!”

“What the—?! What do you think you’re doing?! Are you insane?!”

“Stop pushing! Fall back! Turn around!”

The fleeing crowd reversed direction in a panic as a wall of fire erupted, severing their escape route.

Yet Hong Doo-sik remained oblivious to the shouting around him.

His vision was glued to the path of the traveling fire.

Zip—

The flames tore down the street with unnatural speed, behaving like a predatory beast rushing toward—.

“Aaaah! Take cover!”

…a massive commercial fuel transport vessel.

He bellowed at the top of his lungs, tackling the nearest pedestrians to the concrete as he threw his own body down.

He harbored no illusions that a prone position would save him from a thermal blast of that magnitude, but it beat standing upright like a target.

Then,

Baaaaam—!

Craaaash—!

An earth-shattering shockwave tore through the air, instantly pulverizing every pane of glass for blocks.

‘I should have just stayed in my room playing games!’

He clamped his eyelids shut, bracing for the inevitable wave of agonizing heat.

He had read that severe thermal trauma was the worst pain a human could endure.

What percentage of total body burns triggered systemic failure?

Was instantaneous vaporization preferable to a prolonged death in an intensive care unit?

His mind spun out of control, a chaotic cocktail of terror and profound regret.

They always said a person’s perception of time expanded in their final moments.

It felt as though an eternity had passed, yet there was no agonizing heat, no deafening sound…

‘…In fact… it’s freezing… ’

Had his nervous system been obliterated before he could register the trauma?

As the thought crossed his mind,

[“Hmph, quite the mess…”]

…a bizarre, chilling resonance vibrated through his auditory nerves, cutting cleanly through his internal panic.

It was an icy, ethereal cadence that instantly evoked images of the mythic psychopomp.

‘…I’ve crossed over.’

His limbs lost all tension, his muscles going completely slack as absolute fatalism took hold.

Biting his lip, he took a slow, trembling breath and forced his eyes open, tilting his chin upward.

If he could somehow broadcast the architecture of the afterlife, it would be the ultimate viral content—a absurd thought flickered through his mind.

And then,

“Oh.”

…every trace of his superficial thoughts evaporated as he processed the impossible tableau before him.

A world suspended in frost.

True chronology hadn’t ground to a halt, but the human brain could find no other vocabulary for it.

The violent plumes of the explosion were locked solid mid-burst. Jagged shards of glass and shattered masonry hung motionless in the vacuum, their kinetic trajectories frozen in place.

The atmosphere, which seconds ago had been a suffocating oven, was now deathly cold and perfectly static. A visible plume of condensation escaped his lips with every breath.

The fleeing populace, their features twisted into grotesque masks of horror and helplessness, stood like statues, their desperate wails choked off into silence.

An environment where even the concept of time appeared to have bowed to a greater power.

Hong Doo-sik, his jaw dropped precisely like the frozen victims around him, gazed at the spectacle until an inexplicable pull drew his eyes toward the sky.

And there,

…perched high above the street, suspended at least thirty feet in the empty air,

…‘he’ hovered.

A midnight shroud, a deeply drawn cowl, and a stylized, grinning wooden visage.

Supernatural embers danced within the hollow sockets of the mask, a freezing, oppressive pressure radiating outward like an icy fog.

The manifestation of absolute, undiluted terror.

‘The Hahoe Mask…?’

It was the enigmatic vigilante, South Korea’s most notorious rogue sorcerer.

As the realization registered, the streamer’s paralyzed intellect sparked back to life, rapidly piecing together the anomalies.

The figure mirrored the archetype of the Grim Reaper, yet he was undeniably flesh and bone.

Unless the dark arcanist had undergone a sudden career shift into a god of death…

Which meant, by extension, that he was still among the living…

[“…Cognitive manipulation, is it?”]

The Hahoe Mask hovered lower, scrutinizing the elderly perpetrator who had sparked the fuel line, murmuring in a detached tone.

The old man’s pupils were completely dilated, his jaw hanging loose as a thin line of saliva dripped to his collar.

His spiritual essence, laid bare beneath Hans’s 「Abyssal Eye」, was fractured and deeply corrupted.

‘They planned this meticulously.’

This wasn’t a standard continuous psychological puppet strings method; it was a sleeper trigger keyed to distinct external prompts, neutralizing any attempt to trace the origin of the spell back to the caster.

Furthermore, they had left no room for error, systematically burning away any residual magical signatures by… completely shattering the host’s spiritual core.

This wasn’t random violence; it was a pointed declaration of war aimed directly at his doorstep.

‘You wish to contest this territory with me?’

The ghostly embers swirling within the Hahoe Mask’s eyes flared with renewed intensity.

His mood had already been foul prior to this provocation, and this display… this was merely pouring high-octane fuel onto an open furnace.

He could feel his phantom phantom organs churning with profound irritation.

‘If a slaughter is what you desire, I shall oblige.’

Furthermore, he had no intention of resolving this single-handedly.

He immediately projected his consciousness to establish contact with an asset.

[“Andrew Weaver, your operational leave is revoked.”]

—W-what?! Understood, my lord!

An individual possessing 「Trajectory Observation」—a highly specialized trait uniquely tailored for tracking vectors and intelligence extraction.

Naturally, dedicating his focus to this investigation meant he would be unable to assist with active localized search-and-rescue operations… but he had alternative assets to deploy for that.

He was far from short on resources.

—

“Save us! Is anyone out there?! Please!”

“*Cough, hack*… Help me… my chest…”

Citizens trapped on the rooftop terrace of a multi-story commercial complex, their desperate cries rising into the smoke.

The crimson jaws of the inferno were snapping shut around their position.

Then,

Fwoosh—

…the advancing wall of fire abruptly died down, as if smothered by an invisible blanket.

The dense, toxic smog was swept out of the valley by a sudden, violent updraft. The temperature dropped instantly, replacing the blistering heat with a crisp, rejuvenating breeze.

“We’re saved… Wait, what?”

“…?”

The transformation was so jarringly instantaneous that it struck the survivors completely dumb.

They exchanged bewildered glances, unable to reconcile how they had been pulled from the brink of a fiery demise into… well, it wasn’t paradise, but the danger had evaporated.

Similar miraculous interventions were manifesting across various disaster sectors simultaneously.

‘…What a drag… I can barely breathe through this… I just want to go back to my couch… ’

These bizarre micro-climates seemed to drift alongside a figure navigating the wreckage in a dull motorcycle helmet, their strides slow and completely devoid of urgency, looking as though they would rather be anywhere else on earth.

—

Meanwhile, in a separate district,

“Look up! It’s Iron Man!”

“Don’t be ridiculous… Oh my god, it actually is!”

“Look at his wrist attachments… Are those… Spider-Man’s web-shooters?”

An enigmatic savior, encased in a state-of-the-art armored exoskeleton, sliced through the aerial corridors with blinding velocity and surgical precision.

He was plucking stranded civilians from crumbling structures, utilizing high-tensile dark fibers deployed from his right gauntlet.

‘It’s based on neither of those fictional properties.’

He let out a quiet sigh of exasperation inside his visor.

He had deliberately overhauled the aesthetic blueprint to avoid these exact comparisons, but it appeared public frame of reference was remarkably narrow.

None of the civilian commentary mattered at the moment.

‘I hadn’t realized this chassis integrated an automated rescue subroutine. Then again, it’s a high-tier cybernetic matrix, so it follows logically.’

Hesperon surged forward, charting his course via the real-time telemetry provided by his 「Cybernetic Eye: Callicas」.

He was orchestrating his grand introduction to the population of Earth, ensuring it would be a debut etched into their collective memory.