Chapter 33

Chapter 33 - Possibility

Young-cheol was sitting in a café across from the hospital, his surgery finished for the day.

"Are you Mr. Kim Young-cheol?"

By the time condensation had begun to bead on his iced Americano, the person he'd been waiting for arrived.

"Ah, yes. That's me. You must be Ms. Lee Hwi-yeon?"

Young-cheol stood and greeted her, and she returned a polite bow.

The person he was meeting today was someone quite special.

"First of all, my condolences. Losing someone dear to you......"

At his words, Hwi-yeon paused for a moment.

Having someone immediately acknowledge her loss and offer condolences like this—

She was desperate enough that even that small gesture felt like something to be grateful for.

"......Yes. You mentioned that a friend of yours disappeared as well."

At her words, Young-cheol nodded gravely.

A precious person who had vanished.

Young-cheol had come to meet Hwi-yeon, who organized a support group for people in exactly that situation.

"That's actually what I wanted to discuss with you today."

Young-cheol hesitated briefly, then gathered his thoughts and spoke with measured calm.

"Have you ever had any...... extraordinary experiences? The kind of nightmarish, surreal things that no one would believe if you told them?"

Hwi-yeon seemed to mull it over at his question.

The fact that she was even considering such a strange question was practically an answer in itself.

Recognizing that, Young-cheol decided to go first.

"I have. An impossible situation—with monsters, and bizarre rules that threatened our survival."

As he spoke, Young-cheol unbuttoned a few of his shirt buttons and showed his shoulder.

The wound still hadn't fully healed; oversized bandages were plastered all over it.

"I nearly lost my career as a surgeon in that place."

But in the end, Young-cheol had come back.

He'd returned to the real world somehow and was now going through the motions of a daily life that felt emptier than before.

He could have pretended he knew nothing and settled for this reality.

But his awareness of the person who had vanished made it impossible to sit still.

He had to find and gather every scrap of evidence he could.

"The problem is that no one noticed I was gone for three days."

As Young-cheol's explanation continued, the light in Hwi-yeon's eyes wavered.

Seeing her waver, he pressed on without hesitation.

"And I didn't realize my friend had disappeared until after I came back. Before that, I was living as if his very existence had been forgotten."

At that point, Hwi-yeon finally spoke.

"You believe that recognizing someone's absence is itself connected to those...... extraordinary experiences?"

Young-cheol nodded with conviction.

Hwi-yeon thought it over carefully, then began her own story.

"I, too, went to a strange place. In my case...... I went with my younger brother—the one who disappeared."

It had started with a reckless curiosity—her brother's idea to explore an abandoned house.

A deserted mountain lodge in some rural area.

The moment they entered, they found themselves swept into an utterly unfamiliar space.

"It was...... a forest, draped in darkness. So dark and dense we had to rely on moonlight to walk—nowhere that could possibly be Korea."

Not a mountain. A forest.

One where hours of wandering revealed no end, and no signal reached their phones.

Unless they'd been circling the same area endlessly—but even considering that, nothing changed.

"I was with my brother the entire time, from the very beginning."

In a place of nothing but darkness, something had chased them—some unknown beast.

Hwi-yeon, similarly unbothered about appearances, removed her suit jacket and unfastened the button on her shirt sleeve.

On her left forearm was a scar—the kind left by something massive piercing clean through it, hard to even imagine what.

Only now was it apparent that her left hand moved slightly unnaturally.

"At first there were other people besides us, but they started dying off one by one."

In the end, only the two siblings remained.

Hwi-yeon endured because her brother was there, and her brother endured because his sister was there.

Neither could give up, and they clung to survival with everything they had.

"The last thing we found was a strange staircase."

A staircase.

Young-cheol, who had been listening quietly, interrupted her.

"There was a staircase in the forest?"

"......Yes. It was...... jarring, like a bad edit. An unnaturally solitary staircase leading upward, with a door at the top."

So the two siblings had been suspicious of it.

But there was nowhere else to go, and everything was dangerous regardless, so they decided to try something.

"I planned to go up first and check whether it was safe."

At the time, Hwi-yeon was in critical condition from blood loss, while her brother was still relatively unscathed.

If something went wrong, Hwi-yeon intended to throw herself from the staircase.

If she was lucky, her brother could catch her and run.

"Of course, I didn't think that would actually work. I just...... wanted to be the decoy. To draw whatever threat there was and reduce the danger for him."

Hwi-yeon climbed the staircase and opened the door.

And that was the end.

"When I came to, I was back—and my brother was already gone."

That was where Hwi-yeon's story ended.

After that, she never saw her younger brother again.

His photographs, the memories of him—all of it had vanished, leaving him as an existence recognized only by her.

"Everyone in your group who's lost someone—they've all been to a place like that, haven't they?"

Young-cheol asked precisely.

Since she organized this group for those with missing loved ones, he figured she must have heard plenty of similar stories.

"The very ability to recognize that someone has disappeared seems to require having been to one of those places. So if someone remembers enough to attend the group, then surely......"

Hwi-yeon cut him off mid-sentence, shaking her head.

"Most of the people in our group are ordinary families of ordinary missing persons."

Hwi-yeon's expression as she said this was deeply bitter.

"There are a few who've experienced supernatural phenomena like us, but most of them eventually convince themselves they've gone insane and stop showing up."

A death-adjacent, impossible experience like a midsummer night's dream. And afterward, the realization that someone had vanished.

Only you remembered them. Everyone else's minds had been wiped clean of that person.

Concluding you'd lost your mind was actually the more logical response.

"I was half-doubting my own sanity as well."

At Hwi-yeon's words, Young-cheol waved his hands urgently.

"No—I can tell you with absolute certainty that what we experienced was real."

Young-cheol spoke with an intensity bordering on agitation.

"Every person we remember was swept up in those phenomena and went missing. And we retain our memories precisely because we went through it ourselves!"

Young-cheol held up his phone and showed her the employee ID of Shin Hyeon-seok—the missing person Ju-hee had lost.

"This man is Shin Hyeon-seok, executive director of a cosmetics subsidiary under Shinseong Group. He's one of the missing."

Hwi-yeon studied what Young-cheol showed her, then shook her head.

"The people I'm talking about vanished without leaving behind so much as a single photograph. They were erased even from people's memories......"

"Exactly. This man, too—his company has no record of him ever existing."

Even then, Hwi-yeon only half-believed Young-cheol.

Perhaps he was just using a metaphor for someone abruptly fired from a company.

It had been nearly ten years since Hwi-yeon lost her brother, and she'd had to endure countless rounds of denial.

"We entered another supernatural phenomenon and found this man there. We took this from him ourselves."

But at Young-cheol's words, which she could no longer dismiss, Hwi-yeon's expression hardened.

"How...... how is that even......"

Is that possible?

She seemed to be asking exactly that, her words faltering. Young-cheol answered.

"The person who saved me—who got me out of that hotel—is right now going back into another phenomenon to rescue that man."

Everything Young-cheol told her was utterly foreign to Hwi-yeon.

But gradually, her heart began to beat in a peculiar way.

If all of this was true...... If it really was....

"You said Shin Hyeon-seok, executive director at Shinseong Group. May I look into that?"

"Yes, please do."

At Young-cheol's words, Hwi-yeon nodded and stood abruptly.

There might be a way to find her brother again.

Before fully trusting him, Hwi-yeon wanted to verify the truth of what Young-cheol had said.

"If we pool our information and combine our efforts, wouldn't there be more people we could save?"

Young-cheol called out to Hwi-yeon's retreating back.

The words were neither too loud nor too soft, but they struck Hwi-yeon as if they'd lodged in her heart.

"Is that...... really possible?"

"I think it is. With that person—it's possible."

And curiosity about the person Young-cheol spoke of surged within her.

But the more she felt that pull, the more Hwi-yeon resolved to be cautious.

Wasn't the moment you were weakest and most desperate also the easiest time to be deceived?

Especially when the desperation involved stories of supernatural phenomena.

Even by her own estimation, it was perfect fodder for a con.

"I'll be in touch soon."

Hwi-yeon clenched her trembling hands tight, trying her best not to let the turmoil show, and left.

The moment she stepped out of the café, she raised her phone to her ear.

"Hey, it's me. Look into someone named Shin Hyeon-seok, executive director at Shinseong Group."

***

Su-myeon felt a pain in his seized wrist as if it might snap.

Good God. What the hell was that Trump Card head doing here?

Between the unexpected situation and the pain, Su-myeon forgot to scream and clutched his own arm.

"Is that staff member from Baekya Land or not?!"

Amid the emergency, Han-su fired the question.

Du-pal yelled that it was a ridiculous thing to ask right now, but Su-myeon understood Han-su's intent.

"No!"

If it were a Baekya Land staff member, it would have appeared as an NPC within the game.

Something that shouldn't have been here had clearly followed him into this place.

At Su-myeon's answer, Han-su immediately pulled an item from his Heartphone storage.

THWACK—!

Hatchet in hand, Han-su brought the blade down hard.

The forearm of the Heart figure, severed at the elbow, dropped and rolled across the floor.

"Ngh...!"

Su-myeon flinched and tore the hand off.

It had lasted only a moment, but the grip had been so powerful that finger-shaped marks were imprinted on his forearm.

"Are you alright?"

"Are you okay?"

"Is your arm broken?!"

All three fussed over him, checking his arm.

The sensation of something's limb being severed clean off while it gripped him.

The feeling of strength draining from a hand as its nerves were cut.

The grotesque sensation shook even Su-myeon considerably, but he shook out both hands and forced himself past it.

"I'm fine. I'm fine! Let's just win that thing and get out of here."

Su-myeon simply wanted to finish the job and leave this place.

One small mercy was that the game coins they'd purchased were already in hand.

"......We have to win it with just these, right?"

Ju-hee said, holding the coins.

The small mercy ended there.

"..........."

They only had ten coins.