MY DEAD FIANCÉE LEFT ME AN SSS-CLASS ABILITY

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

The Conduit-7 site was a drainage facility on the eastern edge of the city, concrete channels built to move stormwater, now repurposed because someone had found a Gate seam in the bedrock underneath it.

They sent him in with the cleanup crew, because that was what F-Class utility was for.

"They want confirmation of the seams," the crew chief told him, handing him a headlamp. "You walk the channel, you tell us if you feel anything. Nothing to it."

"Nothing to it," Jae-won said.

Forty minutes later, the Gate Breached.

It went the way these things go: without warning, without dignity. The alarm came late. The channel was supposed to be cleared. It wasn't. The Bureau's containment team was mid-rotation. Somebody had signed off on a clearance form that shouldn't have been signed, and eight people walked into a channel that had a Hollow in it.

Jae-won found out later that six of them made it out. He was one of the six. He found that out much later. In the moment, all he knew was that the headlamp went out, and the screaming started, and he was alone in a concrete pipe with water at his knees and something moving wrong in the dark.

He pressed his back to the wall and did not move.

He had spent three years learning how to be still.

The Hollow passed within two meters of him. He heard its breath, not breath exactly, but the sound of air moving over something too complicated, like wind through a broken organ. It moved past. It did not notice him. He thought, with a strange calm, this is it, this is how I die, hauled out of a pipe and put in a bag by someone who reads my name off a clipboard.

And then, behind the Hollow, a light came on.

A hunter. Wading down the channel, alone, holding a lamp in one hand and a short blade in the other. Not dressed for it, no helmet, no vest, just a black jacket and a look on his face that said he'd come in from the street the moment he heard.

Oh Se-jin.

Jae-won recognized him right away, and the recognition felt like swallowing glass. The same young hunter from the parking structure. The one who'd said You're... and died before he could finish.

Only he wasn't dead. He was alive, and he was walking straight at the Hollow, and his eyes were on Jae-won.

"You!" he shouted. "Get down!"

Jae-won got down.

What happened next, Jae-won would describe to the Bureau as "a fight." It wasn't a fight. It was a young man who had no business being there doing something he clearly wasn't supposed to be able to do. Oh Se-jin's ability, Jae-won would later learn, was called Ironhide, a hardening, a skin of dense material that flared over his forearms and shins. It wasn't strong. On paper, it was a C-Class defensive utility.

He used it like a sledgehammer.

He put his shoulder into the Hollow's leading joint and snapped it sideways. He took a hit that should have opened him to the bone and the iron across his ribs held. He got his blade into the thing's neck notch, the same notch the parking-structure hunters had found, the one that seemed to be where the imitation anatomy gave up, and he twisted.

The Hollow made a sound that was almost human.

And then, in the last second, it did something it shouldn't have. It rolled. And it took Oh Se-jin's leg out and dragged him down into the water and closed on him.

"Hey..." Jae-won heard his own voice and didn't recognize it. "Hey!"

He was already moving.

He had no weapon. He had no ability, or none that mattered. He had a headlamp that had come back on and a length of rusted conduit lying in the water and a body that had spent three years doing exactly one thing: standing in the place where the worst had happened.

He brought the conduit down on the Hollow's head and it didn't care.

But it noticed him. And that was enough. It turned, away from the dying hunter, toward the one who hit it, and Oh Se-jin, dragging himself up out of the water with one working arm, jammed his blade into the notch and pushed until his hand was inside the thing up to the wrist.

The Hollow came apart.

Jae-won crawled to him.

"Hey," he said. "Hey. Look at me. You're..."

"Don't." Blood was coming out of the young man's mouth. "Don't do that thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you tell me it's fine." He laughed, and it was a terrible sound. "You're him. The F-Class. I saw you at Yongin. I saw you." He coughed. "I knew..."

"Knew what? Knew what?"

Oh Se-jin's good eye found his face and held it.

"I knew she didn't make a mistake," he said.

And then he died.

✦

It happened again. That same pull, that compass-needle direction, that reaching thing in Jae-won's chest. Only this time it wasn't faint. This time it knew what it was reaching for.

The light lifted off Oh Se-jin's body and came toward him, and Jae-won, kneeling in two inches of cold water with a dead man's blood on his hands, felt his own chest open.

「 RESONANCE INITIATED 」

Target: Deceased Awakened, Oh Se-jin

Ability detected: IRONHIDE

Compatibility: 17%

Warning: Compatibility below threshold. Deployment likely to cause physical damage. Proceed?

There was a warning. There was a proceed.

Jae-won looked down at the young man's face. Twenty four years old. A sister somewhere who would get a call. And a shape in his chest, reaching, reaching, reaching.

"Proceed," he said, out loud, to nobody.

「 RESONANCE ESTABLISHED, 90 SECONDS 」

The iron came up over his forearms.

He had never felt anything like it. It wasn't strength, it was weight, a density settling into his bones like a held breath. His skin went the color of wet slate. He could feel it, the exact way Oh Se-jin must have felt it, the way the man's ability worked. It didn't feel like a gift. It felt like wearing somebody's coat while their body was still warm in the room.

The second Hollow came around the corner of the channel.

Jae-won stood up. He raised his arm the way he'd seen Se-jin raise it, and the Hollow hit him and the iron held.

He screamed. Not from fear. From the impact, from the ninety seconds burning in his chest like a fuse, from the terrible understanding that he had been standing in the place where the worst thing happened for three years and had never once been able to do anything, and now he could, and it was this: a dead boy's skin and a ninety-second clock and a body that was not built to hold it.

He hit the Hollow. He'd never hit anything like that in his life.

「 45 SECONDS 」

He hit it again. The joint he needed. The notch.

「 15 SECONDS 」

The Hollow folded. Jae-won fell to his knees beside Oh Se-jin's body.

「 RESONANCE ENDED 」

The iron left him, tearing like a scab pulled off too fast. And in the instant it left, in the exact instant the ability pulled back, he saw something. Not the channel. Not the water. A room somewhere else, white walls, a phone on a table, a woman's voice on speakerphone saying a name he didn't catch, and a man in a blue suit standing in the corner of the room, perfectly still, watching. No face. Just a shape. Just a presence. Just a man who had no reason to be in the final memory of a twenty-four-year-old hunter who died in a drain.

Then it was gone.

And it was then, kneeling in the dark with his arm going black from the elbow down like frostbitten meat, that Jae-won heard the voice again, the one from the parking structure, the one he had spent two weeks telling himself was a concussion.

"Jae-won."

Clear as a bell. Warm as skin. Dead as gone.

"You have to get out of here. Now. He's already coming.”