Inside the windowless building, the air was thick with the damp stench of mold, mixed with the burnt scent of overheated electronics.
A man held his breath, pressing a hand over his mouth to stifle the sound of his ragged breathing.
"An AI? This isn't how the job was supposed to go!"
Cursing under his breath, he squeezed himself deeper into the shadows, his eyes darting around the darkened room.
A faint glow flickered from his left arm—a cybernetic prosthetic—betraying his presence.
He yanked his tattered jacket over it, desperate to muffle the light.
This place was supposed to be the hideout of a small-ti gang called "Needle Brain"—just another bunch of lowlifes who got their na from their habit of jabbing cybernetic needles into their skulls.
A half-collapsed concrete building in one of the city's abandoned districts.
A place forgotten by most of the world.
The job had seed simple: retrieve an antique data cube from the gang’s stash.
But now?
It felt like he had walked straight into a horror movie starring a rogue AI.
His eyes scanned the room, taking in the unnatural distortions around him.
The shadows on the walls moved, shifting as though they were alive—until suddenly, they froze, breaking apart into jagged, pixelated fragnts.
Water dripped from the ceiling, but instead of falling, the droplets hovered in midair, flowing sideways as if gravity had been rewritten.
The walls rippled like liquid, warping and bending reality into sothing impossible.
"An AI takeover... ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ It’s starting."
He knew exactly what this ant.
This was the sign of an AI evolving beyond its own limits.
A self-improving, self-modifying intelligence.
And that ant one thing—
This job was a setup.
MK Corporation had pioneered AI developnt years ago, but this?
This wasn't sothing a bunch of third-rate gangsters should be capable of.
"The gang’s probably dead already."
He raised his chanical left arm, activating the built-in cara embedded in his wrist.
A thin lens extended forward, allowing him to peek around the corner without exposing himself.
His augnted vision scanned the hallway.
Superficially, it looked normal.
Other than the disintegrating shadows, the corridor was eerily silent.
But silence ant nothing in a situation like this.
His grip on reality was already crumbling.
"I should’ve turned this job down."
Regret gnawed at him.
Eight hundred credits.
That was all he had been promised.
Just 800 asly credits—barely enough to cover a week’s rent.
At first, he had been ready to reject the mission outright.
But his broker, Amber, had convinced him otherwise.
"It’s a simple retrieval job," she had said.
According to her, the data cube was just an old relic that a small-ti gang had stumbled across by accident.
Nothing dangerous.
Just grab the cube and get out.
But the mont he had stepped inside the building—
Reality had broken apart.
The entire structure had beco corrupted, like a glitched-out simulation.
"An actual AI infiltration... No. No, no, no—this is real."
Desperately, he kept sending distress signals to the rcenary dispatch network, pressing himself into the corner.
The radio waves coming from his comm device were drowned in static.
The connection was nearly dead.
But it was the only hope he had left
****
Just beyond the city’s bustling streets lay a dead industrial district, a place as if sliced out of existence by an invisible blade.
There, the remnants of abandoned factories stood like ancient ruins, their walls eroded into dust.
The wind carried sand through the streets, reducing visibility to almost nothing.
The air was thick with grit, stinging the eyes of anyone foolish enough to wander through.
Amber pulled her coat tighter, bracing herself against the biting sandstorm.
High above, she could see the wall of an approaching sand vortex, swirling like an impending storm.
"Hahh..."
She exhaled through her gas mask, the filter hissing softly as it purified the toxic air.
This place...
Before the Great Convergence, it had been a thriving industrial hub.
Now, all that remained was a desolate wasteland.
"Still the sa as ever."
She muttered, her voice muffled through the chanical filter of her mask.
This place never changed.
Not in the past ten years.
And it wouldn’t change in the next ten, either.
With a single blink, her cybernetic eye activated, pulling up an AR interface.
A holographic interface flickered into view, casting a blue glow over her vision.
Her screen displayed the "Seoul rcenary Dispatch" system—
A small network she operated to keep freelancers in line.
[NO RESPONSE]
Her screen pulsed red—another failed connection attempt.
Her tenth one.
"Damn it."
Amber let out a sharp sigh.
Dragging herself through a storm-blasted hellscape wasn’t exactly her idea of a productive afternoon.
She picked up her pace, her boots crunching against the gritty pavent.
Her gun, strapped to her hip, bounced lightly against her leg with each step.
"Why can’t that idiot just pick up his damn comms...?"
She muttered, irritation clear in her tone.
The wind howled louder.
Amber hurried forward, scanning the area—
And then, sothing caught her eye.
On the side of a crumbling factory wall, faded graffiti was barely visible beneath the layers of sand.
Most of it had been erased by ti, but three words still burned bright in neon spray paint:
"ANGER."
"DEATH."
"LOVE."
The graffiti almost looked like a painting—an intricate web of characters woven together in a way that seed almost deliberate.
Amber couldn't read it, but her cybernetic implant automatically translated it for her.
Not that she needed the assistance.
She already knew exactly what she was looking at.
Hangeul.
A language that had once belonged to a people who had vanished long ago.
After the Great Convergence, it had been labeled a cursed language.
Corporations had capitalized on the paranoia, actively hunting down and eliminating its last remaining users.
For nearly a century, it had been erased from existence.
But in the present era, things had shifted.
Hangeul had beco a symbol of mystique, a forgotten relic turned underground obsession.
Among rebellious youth, rumors swirled:
"They say it can summon demons."
"It carries a supernatural energy."
The growing fascination had led anti-corporate resistance groups to adopt Hangeul in their hacker aliases and crew nas.
Amber, however, never believed in any of the mysticism.
To her, it was simply a historical relic.
Then why was her rcenary dispatch office called "Seoul"—written in Hangeul?
Because their top rcenary had an unusual obsession with the language.
A sharp alert rang through Amber’s internal receiver.
Her AR display flickered, pulling up a real-ti weather report—
A sandstorm was closing in fast.
Amber picked up her pace.
Storms in this corrupted wasteland were more than just natural disasters.
They could strip the flesh off your bones.
She adjusted her gas mask, pulled her coat’s hood tighter, and pressed forward through the decaying ruins of the old city.
By the ti she arrived at her destination, her boots were coated in a fine layer of dust.
The building before her looked like nothing more than an abandoned warehouse—
But in this dead zone, it was probably the sturdiest structure left standing.
Amber ascended a rusted steel staircase, her AR overlay scanning the building as she climbed.
A dense energy signature flared up on her display.
"So. The bastard’s alive after all."
At the top of the stairs, she ca face-to-face with a reinforced steel door.
A small scanner was installed beside it, but Amber ignored it.
It had been broken since the day she first ca here.
Like always, she went with the simpler thod—
She balled up her fist and hamred on the door.
KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.
"Hey. I know you’re in there. I’m coming in."
Not bothering to wait for a response, she pushed the door open.
As expected, it wasn’t locked.
For a rcenary’s safehouse, this place had laughably bad security.
The inside was a single cramped studio apartnt.
Half the room was dominated by a massive steel-fra bed.
A work desk cluttered with laptops and cables took up another corner.
Empty pizza boxes were scattered across the floor.
One entire wall was plastered with handwritten notes—every single one written in Hangeul.
And there, lying motionless on the bed—
A pale-skinned girl, a slice of pizza balanced on her face, slowly nibbling at it without moving.
She had obviously heard Amber enter, but showed zero reaction.
She just lay there, facing the ceiling, biting into the pizza bit by bit.
Chomp. Chomp.
Amber stared.
...This is our office’s best rcenary?
The girl wore an oversized black coat, glowing with faint blue circuit patterns along the seams.
Her long hair, spread across the bed, shimred at the edges—flickering between black and electric blue, like a holographic effect.
Her skin was so pale, it barely looked human.
And this strange, tiny creature was the top operative of the "Seoul" rcenary Office.
The undefeated ace who had never failed a single mission.
Amber crossed her arms, exasperated.
"A. I’ve been calling you all day. Why didn’t you pick up?"
The girl, A, finally lifted the pizza slice and swallowed it in a single bite.
Then, slowly, she sat up.
Her glowing blue eyes locked onto Amber’s.
"I was eating."
She replied in a monotone voice.
Amber blinked.
Since when did "eating pizza" involve wearing it on your face?
She sighed, deciding to let it go.
"A, I need your help."
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