The phone call came at noon, but Jin had been awake since four.
Not because he was doing anything useful—he just didn't sleep anymore.
He was at his desk, half-slouched, a reheated dumpling pressed to the roof of his mouth while his fingers flicked aimlessly across his keyboard. When his phone rang, he almost didn't answer.
Almost.
He glanced at the screen.
MOM.
He debated it.
Then sighed and picked up. "Hey."
"Jin," she said. Her voice was clipped. "I just got off the phone with Clemens. Why didn't you show up?"
He rubbed the side of his temple. "I… forgot."
"You forgot?" She laughed, but it wasn't funny. "I spent two weeks negotiating with the CEO of a cement company. A man I barely know. Do you have any idea how difficult it was convincing him to sit down with you? One hour, Jin. One hour. And you forgot?"
"I'm sorry."
"That's not good enough."
"I know."
There was a pause on her end. Jin closed his eyes, let her silence dig in.
"You can't keep doing this," she said eventually, her tone softening but not by much. "You can't live in the past."
He lowered his gaze to the floor, stared at the cane leaning against his dresser. "I know," he said again.
But knowing didn't fix it.
He still remembered the blast. He was thirteen. The bombing had come out of nowhere. First explosion ripped through the parking garage. People screamed. Then panic.
He tried running.
Didn't get far. The crowd was a wave, and he got swept under it. Kicked. Stepped on. Screamed until he couldn't. He remembered the smell of shoes and blood. Then the second explosion hit. A shard of metal—shrapnel—dug near his chest. Another tore into his knee.
It took his father two hours to find him. By then, the ambulance had already tagged him as a probable loss. No one thought he'd walk again.
He did.
Sort of.
He glanced over at the pill bottles stacked beside his monitor. Behind them, a laptop sat open on a paused video of someone screaming into a flashlight in a dark hallway. The feed glitched every few seconds.
"You've been keeping up with your therapist?" his mother asked suddenly.
"Yeah," he said. "Of course."
He hadn't.
He missed last week. And the week before. He kept meaning to reschedule, but the nightmares were back and he didn't feel like explaining them again.
May 31st was coming up.
The date always messed him up. He hated it.
He hated remembering.
These days, he didn't sleep. He just sat up, scrolling. He'd been obsessed with the INHUMAN launch for months now, even though he knew it wasn't for him. It was horror. Straight-up, in-your-face nightmare fuel. Bad for his heart. His doctor told him to avoid stress. Hell, even watching horror gave him palpitations.
But the way people talked about it… the detail, the realism, the monster AI, the evolving domains—it made him curious.
"You'll show up for dinner next week," his mother said.
He nodded, forgetting she couldn't see him. "Okay."
"And take a walk sometime. The maid says you haven't left your room in days."
He stared at the empty food boxes near the door. There was a trash bag there, but he hadn't taken it out.
"I will."
"I have to go," she said. "I have an appointment with the senator of France."
"Bye, Mom—"
But the line had already cut. He set the phone down. The guilt came slow, but steady.
He didn't hate his mother. Or his family.
He just didn't belong with them.
His mother, Evanly Turner—who shortened her name to "Evans" when she founded Evans Automobiles—was one of the few women to run a global motor company back in the early 2000s. People still wrote articles about her.
His father, late now, had served as Vice President of South Korea's economic board before passing away from stage four pancreatic cancer.
His siblings were all recognizable. One in med-tech, one in politics.
And then there was Jin.
The Turner son no one saw.
The family recluse.
There were even conspiracy videos online about him—some calling him a failed child prodigy, others claiming he was a ghost fabricated by the media.
He wished he could laugh about it.
But all he felt was that old pressure again. The one that came crawling over his chest every time he thought about leaving the apartment.
He knew it didn't make sense.
He knew it was irrational.
But that didn't stop the feeling.
With a long, slow exhale, he reached for the painkillers, tossed two back dry. His leg ached, a sharp burn traveling from thigh to ankle like someone dragging a nail through his nerves.
The sound on the monitor flickered to life.
MeTube.
A recommended video hovered at the top:
[LIVE NOW: B-CLASS DOMAIN RAID | 3RD SQUAD VS "THE GULLET" | WARNING: PARASITIC ENTITIES | VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED]
His mouse hovered over it.
He should've backed away. Turned off the screen. Laid down. Instead, he remembered the fortune from the cookie he cracked open yesterday.
"Only by taking bold steps will fear step aside."
He didn't believe in stuff like that.
He still clicked.
His therapist once told him his biggest problem wasn't his trauma—it was his refusal to heal. That he liked being broken. Jin had rolled his eyes at the time. Now, he just minimized the screen that said "This content may not be suitable for viewers with a heart condition."
And watched anyway.
The stream loaded instantly.
Jin leaned back in his chair, thumb hooked on the label of his Cope can, the carbonated hiss barely registering over the sound of the broadcast's faint cave ambience. The screen was already mid-action. No flashy intros. No team posing. Just five heavily-geared players in matte-black suits, flashlights shaking along damp cave walls that looked half-rotted and half-alive.
One of them let out a nervous chuckle.
"That thing look like a prolapsed butthole or is it just me?"
Another player laughed, "Gross, bro—"
The chat exploded:
💀💀💀💀💀
"This squad always wilding"
"PLZ don't die first again, Dan"
"We placing bets now???"
A counter in the corner showed 105,394 live viewers.
Still climbing.
Jin cracked his Cope and took a sip.
The acid burned his throat a little—probably because he hadn't eaten.
The cave looked disgusting. Not in a gamey, exaggerated way either. The walls were covered in something that looked like mucus. Greenish. Yellowish. Wet. Every step the players took made a sound like old meat being slapped.
This was a B-Class Mystery Domain. It was supposed to be manageable. Mystery types were weird, sure—but they weren't unwinnable like No Escape domains.
The players whispered something Jin didn't catch, and the stream cut for a second as they flipped into night goggles.
The screen turned that sickly green. The outlines of stalactites sharpened. Moisture dripped from the ceiling like sweat. Jin leaned forward, blbows on his thighs. Heart tapping faster than it should've been.
He knew everything about INHUMAN.
Not from playing, obviously. He was a heart risk. Horror wasn't his thing. But he read the blogs. Watched the VODs. Knew the domain codes and the way players couldn't actually kill monsters without proper Inhuman Cards.
They could only trap.
Each monster had to be studied. Patterned. Referenced. You had to predict its behaviors using old footage, logs, and notes from people who got lucky enough to escape.
Only Inhumans—characters summoned via Cards—could land killing blows.
Actual players? They were just bait with fancy weapons.
One of the team members cocked his energy wave gun.
It let out a low whir.
Those guns could slow monsters down. Sometimes.
"Yo, what's that?" one player whispered.
Up ahead, a silhouette.
Just standing there.
The comments went into overdrive.
"AYO RUN."
"Why he just chilling??"
"Pause the game. Pause the whole damn game."
Jin shifted in his seat.
The figure ahead started making a sound. A gurgling rasp like someone trying to cough through water.
Jin's fingers tightened on his cup. His chest buzzed.
The players froze.
Then, chaos. The silhouette lurched forward without warning. One of the players fired. The rest followed, rounds of sonic blasts lighting up the screen in jerky flashes.
But then—
The feed zoomed in just enough.
And Jin's gut dropped.
The silhouette had gotten close. Real close.
Its skin was warped—wet and sagging, with patches of another player's jacket and ID sloughing off its shoulder.
A second later, one of the team members collapsed, blood pouring from their mouth. Their eyes were wide, confused.
They hadn't even been hit.
It was their skin.
Their own skin was melting, bullets somehow ricocheting off, circling back.
Jin gripped his chest. Tight. Too tight.
"Oh—oh God—"
The rest of the squad turned to their fallen teammate, panicked, shouting his name—Dan, the one who joked earlier—just in time to see something bulging beneath his chest cavity.
The skin tore like wet paper. Out shot legs, eight of them. Long. Furry. Jointed like blades. A spider. Massive. Soaked in blood, its movements slick and jerking. Inside its head? Dan's face—frozen mid-scream, stretched across the carapace like a mask.
Jin's pulse spiked.
He backed up from his desk, chair legs scraping the floor.
The spider screeched. Not like a monster—more like a metal door being bent in half.
Then it climbed the cave wall.
Effortless. Fast. It shouldn't have fit through the crevice it slipped into. But it did.
Gone.
The squad scrambled. One knelt beside Dan's body—except there was no face.
No head.
Just an empty cavity and a puddle of whatever was left inside.
The stream chat had gone from funny to feral:
"WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF"
"OH HELL NOOOOOOO"
"THIS IS JUST A GAME????"
"300K LIVE????"
"clip that CLIP THAT RIGHT NOW"
Jin's monitor flickered.
He gasped.
Then gripped his shirt.
It wasn't just his chest tightening now—
—his breathing was wrong.
—short.
—sharp.
—sharp.
He tried to move.
Couldn't.
His hands trembled. The can fell from his lap, bounced off the floor and rolled under the desk.
"No… no—"
He lurched sideways.
Pain. Blinding.
Like a blade had been lodged behind his ribs and someone was twisting it—hard.
Blood filled his throat.
He coughed. Choked.
Saw black.
Everything crashed.
Then—
—static.
—cold.
A voice, too close.
"Young man. Young man. Are you asleep?"
Jin blinked.
Everything was white.
A bit noisy.
He saw a face. An old one. Wrinkled and leaning too close.
"What…?" His voice came out hoarse.
"You kids," the man muttered, shaking his head. "Can't even get a full night's sleep before a job interview."
Job interview?
Jin's eyes widened. He sat up straighter. Looked around.
The room looked like one of those clean conference halls used for company awards. Bleached floors. Long rows of white chairs. Far too quiet.
The man wore a plain suit with a small name tag:
INTERVIEWEE #14
"What… what did you say?" Jin asked again.
The man gave him a strange look. "The MCO, of course."
Jin froze.
MCO?
His brain lit up in warning.
That stood for Monster Containment Organization.