"Get away from my brother," Tae-hyun shouted, and he was not alone.Behind him came Song Mi-rae with fifty people from her network, Ara with a dozen resistance fighters, Han Woo-jin with his tactical experience, and Choi Jin-woo carrying some kind of device that was probably meant to disrupt System energy.Min-joon felt simultaneous relief and horror, relief that reinforcements had arrived but horror that Tae-hyun had put himself in danger despite everything."I thought you were staying with Seo-rin," Min-joon managed to say through his pain."I was, and then I realized I was being selfish letting you face this alone just because I was angry," Tae-hyun replied, positioning himself between Min-joon and the Remnant operatives. "We can argue about boundaries later, right now we fight."The seventeen Remnant operatives regrouped quickly, clearly not having expected reinforcements to breach the building despite the explosive traps. The lead figure pointed at the newcomers."Kill them all,

The government file on the Eastern Europe situation arrived on Min-joon's laptop at exactly nine in the morning, while he was still lying on the couch with bandaged ribs and a heating pad pressed against his side. Tae-hyun had gone out to buy medicine, so the apartment was quiet when Min-joon opened the file and started reading.He wished it had stayed quiet after that.The file was put together by a joint intelligence team from three countries, South Korea, Germany, and Poland. It detailed a research facility operating somewhere in the border region between Ukraine and Romania, in an area with weak government oversight. The facility called itself the Vela Institute, and on paper it looked like a normal neuroscience research centre. But the intelligence report said something very different was happening inside.According to the report, the Vela Institute had somehow obtained fragments of the original System architecture, not living nodes, not the Core's backup seeds, but actual code f

The call came from an unlikely source. It was Kim Yu-ri, the former living node from Gwangju who had been freed by Min-joon months ago and had since dedicated herself to helping trauma victims. Her daughter had died of leukemia while she was under the Core's control, and that grief had quietly shaped everything she did afterward.She called Min-joon at two in the afternoon, and from the first word she spoke he could tell something was wrong."There is a young man in Gwangju," she said, her voice low and controlled the way it always was when she was trying not to show how frightened she was. "His name is Park Dong-su. He is twenty-two years old. He came to my support group three weeks ago, perfectly normal, dealing with anxiety and some financial stress. He seemed okay.""What happened?" Min-joon asked."He stopped coming to the group sessions. I did not think much of it at first, people come and go. But then his sister came to find me yesterday because she is scared. She says her brot

The train to Daejeon left Seoul at nine in the evening and arrived a little after eleven. Min-joon sat by the window with his jacket pulled close, the ache in his ribs a steady reminder that he was not fully recovered and that whatever happened tonight would need to be careful and controlled. Tae-hyun sat beside him reading through Lee Chan-young's file on his phone again, looking for anything they might have missed."His father's debt," Tae-hyun said quietly, keeping his voice low in the half-empty train car. "Forty-seven million won from a restaurant business that failed. Chan-young has been paying it back for two years on a delivery driver's salary. At his current rate he will be paying it for another nine years minimum.""Same profile as the original players," Min-joon replied, keeping his eyes on the dark landscape sliding past the window. "Ordinary person, inherited someone else's failure, no way out that does not take a decade.""The System always found people who felt trapped,

At four in the morning, Min-joon called the resistance contact in Cheongju directly.Her name was Oh Seon-joo, and she answered the phone sounding frustrated and slightly out of breath, like she had been walking fast for a while."She is not in the apartment," Seon-joo said without waiting for Min-joon to ask. "I knocked for twenty minutes. A neighbour told me she left around midnight, alone, walking in the direction of the southern district. The neighbour said she looked strange, like she was not fully awake but still moving with purpose."Min-joon pressed two fingers against his forehead and thought fast."She is already moving toward the task location," he said."That is what I assumed," Seon-joo replied. "I need an address. I can follow her if I know where she is going."Min-joon sent her the Cheongju node coordinates from Choi's data, the location nearest to Jung So-ra's apartment that had shown an active signal. Seon-joo confirmed receipt and ended the call, already moving.Tae-