The moment I saw Kang Han-min, who had become a monster, the boundary between dream and illusion—which had already been eroding—completely collapsed.

And so, all memories after that are scattered, with no clear order or causality, and—regrettably—even whether each person’s words were truthful remains unclear.

The first complete memory I can clearly recall begins from when I was walking slowly, almost like taking a stroll, through the chilling space known as the neural nexus of the rift with Kang Han-min.

There, he was Kang Han-min from before he became a savior, dressed in the combat uniform he used to wear during the China days.

He guided me through the neural nexus of the rift with a face like the owner of a mansion giving a tour of his garden.

He pointed to a flat rock like a stone bench.

"That’s where I used to doze off for a while. You see all the garbage lying around? Usually, there’s no trash near me. There’s always a bunch of people desperate to serve, organizing my stuff and volunteering without pay or even thanks. But I used to enjoy dozing off in the trash I made myself, spacing out or falling asleep after binging games or anime all night."

Then he led me toward another cliffside.

Surprisingly, on the opposite side, a stream like a waterfall was crashing down in swirling waves.

"It looks like water, but it’s not. I’ve gotten close to it—can’t drink it, and when it touches your body, it just dissolves into particles."

He kicked up a shockwave and drew a portion of the stream over to me.

I touched the spherical water-like form, like a suspended droplet in space.

Sure enough, it vanished without a trace the moment my fingertip touched it, as if it had never existed.

"As you know, the defining feature of this space called the rift is that it pathologically tries to conceal the materials that compose it. I met a German scholar once in the rift who said the reason we can’t analyze the rift is because it’s made up of four-dimensional structures. But when I asked what the fourth dimension even is, he couldn’t answer."

The next place he led me was another cave.

In front of the entrance, he looked at me with half-lidded eyes and said:

"Want me to make a prediction? The next space we’ll see—guaranteed you’ll like it. No doubt. I mean, we were together for over five years, right? They say even a mutt learns a poem after three months in school, so how could I not know the Professor’s tastes?"

The place he introduced next was a space that visually represented change itself.

Though deep inside, it was brightly lit like other parts of the rift—a space filled with shifting white-gray light—where white-gray statues were rapidly formed and destroyed over and over again.

Whether intentional or not, and perhaps because I was overwhelmed, I finally broke my silence and asked the question burning in my mind.

"What the hell is that?"

Thousands, tens of thousands of statues repeatedly emerged and disintegrated.

Some were things I’d never seen, things I couldn’t even imagine, things I couldn’t begin to understand how they functioned.

But among those fleetingly glinting statues, one was familiar.

A statue with three legs, a short torso, and sharp, hook-like appendages resembling an elephant’s trunk.

It bore an uncanny resemblance to the monster I had taken down before arriving here.

Which meant—this statue I was seeing was perhaps the model of a monster the rift was trying to create.

Kang Han-min corrected my assumption.

"Can’t say for sure."

He had now taken the form of Kang Han-min from our school days.

"But maybe those are inhabitants of other planets."

"Other planets?"

"Yeah."

Kang Han-min nodded and stared at one of the statues with a knowing smile.

"I mean the residents of planets that this rift world has destroyed."

I followed his gaze.

There, a statue shockingly human-like stood tall, one hand raised as if in greeting.

It might’ve been coincidence, but that statue looked exactly like the human figure etched into the Golden Record aboard Voyager, which even now sails beyond the solar system.

"The rift," Kang Han-min said as he transformed again.

Now he was a boy in a fancy shirt and shorts, like a rich family’s pampered son.

"—is probably a cosmic-scale predator."

"A predator?"

"Yeah. In the vastness of space, it detects life-bearing planets with incomprehensible insight, opens dimensional cracks, paints the world in its color, and devours everything alive within."

"They’ve never been seen consuming organic matter."

"The global-scale phenomenon of Infiltration we’re experiencing might be one form of the rift’s predatory behavior."

"······."

I nodded slowly.

It’s a plausible idea.

Just a hypothesis, sure—but what else can we humans propose about the rift besides hypotheses?

If it sounds convincing, it’s valid.

And Kang Han-min is the one human who knows the most about the rift.

He walked ahead.

The next destination was a dead end.

A perfect darkness with no trace of twilight unfolded before us like true infinity.

"What’s this?"

"The end of the rift."

"But didn’t rocket-based observations show that the curvature of the rift remains constant?"

"The concept of an ‘end’ is sudden. It looks like the end from here, but—"

Kang Han-min stepped aside and gestured for me to come to his position.

I walked over.

Nodded again.

Indeed.

The infinite blackness had become a gray-white wall.

An end that could only be seen from a specific point.

A fitting boundary for something as incomprehensible as the rift.

Kang Han-min changed forms.

Now he was wearing tidy casual clothes.

This was the face he had after minor cosmetic surgery and dental work.

The face of the man with the title of "Savior."

That Kang Han-min lowered his ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ eyelashes and spoke with a serious face.

"No one knows the rift’s true purpose. And no one can. I tried for a long time to become a resident of the rift, to understand its will—but the only answer was this: it is incomprehensible."

The air felt heavier.

Not emotionally—physically.

The pressure of the rift, which I had momentarily forgotten, now returned with a more brutal intensity.

"But after investing so much time and effort to become one with the rift, I did learn one thing."

"What?"

Despite the pressure, despite the blurred boundary between reality and hallucination, I felt vividly alive and asked the question.

Kang Han-min knows what I most want to understand.

Even if he were someone else—if what he said had credibility—I would bow my head to get that answer.

In my anticipation, Kang Han-min spoke.

"When the rift invades a world, it first identifies the dominant species. Then it invades with a customized plan for that species. That plan surely ends in the world’s destruction, but from what I’ve understood, there’s another goal beyond that."

I paused in thought.

Then nodded and said,

"To collect cases?"

Kang Han-min smiled.

"As expected of you, Professor."

Annihilation of species, absorption, harvesting of nutrients, and—though hard to believe—extraction of invisible energies like souls, the destruction of Earth...

Many possible answers existed.

But from what I’d seen, heard, and felt in this dying world, one thing was clear: the rift has no human-like will.

It moves and reacts like a living organism, yes—but from what I’ve understood, it’s closer to a program.

Its objective is to exterminate all living things on a given world.

That’s the most plausible hypothesis.

And yet—I still have doubts.

How should I say this?

There’s a sense that something remains unexplained.

The box of incomprehensible answers that was hurled into my mind when I destroyed the Nemesis-type hinted that my hypothesis might be slightly off.

There’s something else.

That puzzle still refuses to show me its secrets, but it’s there.

Kang Han-min let out a soft sigh and continued.

"You know this already, but the rift is alive. Whether we can call it an organism is uncertain, but it’s definitely something close to life."

This is the most important part.

The question I’ve long wanted answered from Kang Han-min.

How do we defeat the rift?

Kang Han-min is about to give that answer. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Throbbing pain, old emotions—all of it means nothing in the face of one absolute goal.

With my mind sharpened like a solitary light in the darkness, I listened to the monster speak.

"Every life form has a unique signaling system. The rift does too. Humanity has already created something called Necropolis using the rift’s own transmissions."

Yes.

It may have been a lucky discovery, but we found a way to use even the rift’s broadcast waves.

We now use them like the internet, but their potential applications go further.

The shape of Kang Han-min’s idea is starting to form.

"You mean to use that broadcast?"

"As you know, the rift is too mighty an enemy for humanity to handle. We don’t know its exact scale, but you know it’s a planetary-level catastrophe filled with malice, right?"

"······."

"A single human can’t hope to win. Neither power nor time is on our side. The rift will eventually consume all of Earth in Infiltration, and humanity will go extinct—like all the other species it’s erased. Sure, maybe someone like Melon Mask could fly off into space, but even he proved that humanity can’t survive out there."

Kang Han-min nodded.

Then he declared, in a voice full of certainty:

"Humanity cannot defeat the rift."

This is the conclusion spoken from the mouth of the Savior.

I had suspected it, but still—I had hoped.

Despite all the misunderstanding, I had been watching only him.

Feeling a deep sense of collapse and futility, I asked bitterly,

"Then what do you plan to do?"

In that instant, Kang Han-min transformed.

Yes.

His original form—the one I’d briefly forgotten.

The Nemesis-type.

A monster.

Surprisingly, even when I looked directly at the embodiment of my burning hatred, I felt no rage.

I understood.

That monster ahead of me was my peer, my teammate, the very person who had haunted my inferiority complex—Kang Han-min.

My rival, now a monster, spoke.

"To beat them, we must become one with them."

The moment I heard that, I understood Kang Han-min’s plan.

In silence, the monster continued.

"As you know, being an Awakened is just a mutated version of a human. Mutation means a form adapted to the rift’s waveforms. In other words, we’re Earthlings, but we’re also rift-dwellers."

I stared at the monster and asked:

"You’re going to destroy their signaling system from the inside?"

The monster didn’t move as it answered.

For a brief instant, Kang Han-min’s smiling face flashed before me like a hallucination.

"The Nemesis-type you first defeated and named—that’s what happens when an over-Level-10 Awakened fully assimilates with the rift. The reason we’ve always feared the Nemesis-types isn’t because they’re powerful—it’s because they feel familiar. There was always a theory that they were our mutated forms. But no one dared to prove it. Because to prove it, someone had to kill a Nemesis-type."

Was I that proof?

Yeah.

That’s why Kang Han-min showed up in the helicopter that day.

He must’ve been desperate in his own way.

Wondering whether I could take it down.

"You did it. I never doubted you would. Yeah. By killing it, Park Gyu, you gave us insight into the true nature of the Nemesis-type."

The monster reverted to Kang Han-min’s form.

This Kang Han-min—nothing added, nothing removed—was the clumsy, insecure schoolboy who once nursed a fire of hatred in the deepest part of his eyes.

"Thanks to you, a once-imagined plan could finally be put into action."

Kang Han-min smiled.

"You understand what the plan is, don’t you?"

I nodded.

"You’re going to destroy them from within."

Kang Han-min burst into laughter.

"I plan to plant the seed of malice inside them. Yeah. I’ll shove the seed of humanity’s hatred deep into their gray soil."

"Is that why you became... that?"

I asked, looking at the human Kang Han-min.

But I already knew.

He was no longer human.

In this madman’s dream-world, Kang Han-min could orchestrate miracles like magic.

Planting a seed of hatred that could destroy the rift—that would be child’s play to him now.

That Kang Han-min held out his hand to me.

"But I can’t do it alone."

I knew that one line concealed many things.

Chief among them, the man now forgotten—Jeong Dae-gyeong.

He had tried to turn me into a monster through Jeong Dae-gyeong.

Now it’s different.

Or rather, the essence is the same.

Kang Han-min wants to turn me—

—into a monster, the very thing we hate.

"Won’t you join me?"

Kang Han-min said again, with desperation in his voice.

"Professor!"

In the gray space, the inferiority complex that a man had bottled up and fermented his entire life burst like paint.

At the center of it stood Park Gyu, in his most radiant years, walking side by side with Na Hye-in along the railway, wearing a bright smile.