Yongsan Presidential Office — Situation Room
The screens along the wall were a mosaic of live feeds: hospital wards, police dashboards, flight-line cams stuck on early morning haze. The room hummed with tired air and hotter tempers.
"…we can't touch them," said Dr. Seo Eun-kyung, voice tight with the kind of calm that comes after too much coffee and no sleep.
"Every subject's body is visible yet immaterial. Needles, electrodes, even fabric—everything passes through. No heart sounds. No pulse oximetry. Thermal imaging shows a slow drop in skin temperature but no clear pattern. Without physical contact, we can't collect samples or attach monitors. I'm sorry, Mr. President—right now...we can't determine anything."
President Kim Do-hyun stared at the tabletop—its glass reflected a small, contained man trying not to explode. When he looked up, his eyes were already sharp.
"Can't determine anything?" he said, voice flat as a blade.
"I want something I can use. A hypothesis, a direction—anything. Find me something that can make sense of all this, or I'll find someone who will."
Dr. Seo swallowed; the Minister of Science started to say something, then decided not to.
The door burst open. A junior aide half-stumbled inside, clutching a tablet. "Sir—! We have new reports. Some of the bodies are gone."
The room snapped toward him.
"Gone?" the National Security Advisor asked. "As in moved?"
"As in… disappeared," the aide said, throat working.
"Hospitals and homes. Mostly older patients—fifty-five and up. Families swear they were there on the bed, and then—in the space of a blink—nothing."
A ripple of sound broke across the table. The Defense Minister leaned forward, knuckles white. The Police Commissioner cursed under his breath. Someone dropped a pen that clacked too loudly in the silence that followed.
"Do we...have any footage?" President Kim asked weakly.
"Some home CCTVs show… a kind of flicker," the aide said. "No obvious intrusion. Just...gone."
The room felt smaller.
Then another aide slid through the door, breathless.
"Mr. President, Seoul National University Hospital just reported a subject who woke up. Conscious. He's talking."
You could feel the air shift. Chairs scraped. Every head turned to the President.
"Good," Kim said, grabbing the moment like a rung.
"Bring him here if he can travel. And if can't, then get him on a line, now."
The President stood up, with strength returning to his body.
"Anyone who has woken civilians, police, soldiers, I want them in this room or on a line now. I don't care about rank or protocol. If they can explain, they have to come. Move."
"Yes, sir!"
...
Half an hour later, the room had a different pulse. The jittery panic had bled into focused motion—papers sliding, tablets lighting with notes, aides moving on hushed cues.
Several newly awakened arrivals had joined. The room agreed to call the people involved in the phenomenon "Players."
They'd already walked everyone through the situation multiple times, with only minor differences between accounts.
Among the new arrivals, there stood a broad-shouldered man with a tired face. And now it was his turn to explain.
He bowed once. "Sergeant Han Joon-seok, Seoul Metropolitan Police. Organized Crime & Kidnapping Task Force."
"Speak, Sergeant," President Kim said. "Anything different from what we've heard so far?"
Han didn't touch the chair offered. He stood with a raid leader's posture—feet planted, words simple.
"Most of it matches the others," he began. "One difference… there's a player who stands out. Last I checked—" he glanced around, as if measuring how absurd it would sound, "—he was Level 5."
"What? Level five?" someone blurted.
"No way—stop the cap," a younger player muttered from the back.
Seeing the reactions of these players, the president understood that this was an abnormal situation.
"Who?" President Kim asked.
"He goes by Loki."
The name landed in notebooks like a small detonation.
"Tell us more," came from two directions at once.
Han laid it out: the town announcements, the boss kills, what he'd seen with his own eyes. The other players were in disbelief, as if hearing about a person from a fairy tale.
When he finished, President Kim nodded.
"Sergeant, if you see him again, ask if he can spare time to meet me."
"Yes, Mr. President." Han bowed again and stepped back.
President Kim turned to the room.
"Set up a single channel for reports from inside GFS. Funnel everything into one authoritative pipeline so decisions are made on facts, not noise. After taking coordinates with other countries, share what we've learned and compare notes. Outside of essential posts, rotate police and military into GFS. Make them sleep in staggered shifts—to stabilize the Newbie Towns, protect civilians, and guide them to safety. Their first orders are crowd control and information relay. And—" he paused, weighing the words, "identify the ones adapting quickly in there. If this is our new normal, we'll need them."
The room moved to meet the orders: ministries drafting scripts for broadcast and comms standing up a hotline. Fear was still under the table, but now it wore a collar.
...
Ashen Hollow, Deepforest.
'When was the last time anyone carried me this close…? Not since childhood, probably.'
Before etiquette drills and acquisition wars. Before rooms went quiet when she walked in. In boardrooms, men twice her age swallowed their words; at the table, she moved numbers—and people—like pieces on a board.
And now she was weightless in someone else's arms, ferried through the trees like a storybook princess.
'…Not a feeling I dislike, I suppose.'
Wind brushed her lashes. She felt the faint rune-thrum through the plate over his chest, the warm crook of his arm beneath her back, the unshowy strength that never let her tip.
"This isn't uncomfortable for you, is it?" Loki's voice came low, purely functional.
"I'll live," she said, dry—then, softer, "Why carry me?"
"It's faster," he answered.
One corner of her mouth shaped something close to a smile.
"Mm. So you can get rid of me sooner."
He said nothing.
"Cruel," she murmured—but there was no heat in it.
He adjusted his hold by a fraction, and the thoughts slid in.
She was light. Delicate in the literal sense—fine-boned, contained. It didn't match the rumor that followed her: the viper who bent markets. Hard to reconcile the person in his arms with the serpent that could coil around a city and squeeze.
Haeun felt the subtle shift in his grip, the small care there. She let herself look—not at a face she couldn't see, but at the silhouette under the hood: the black mask veined with faint gold, the steady rise and fall of his breath, and those two cold-gold eyes burning inside the darkness.
Oddly calming.