Seoul Cyberpunk Story-Chapter 109: True Dragon (2)

The moment Dominic Krilov gave the order, the soldier gripped the key tightly and sprinted toward the stairs.

“Haa... haa...”

His ragged breaths echoed through the darkened emergency stairwell.

The elevator had long since ceased functioning, disabled by the web, and much of the building’s power systems were down.

Only the self-illuminating emergency lights remained.

A flickering bluish-green glow cast unsteady shadows along the concrete walls.

THUD!

Suddenly, something collapsed above.

The soldier instinctively rolled to the side—and just then, a massive chunk of concrete came crashing down where he had just been.

“Damn it...”

The building's structure had begun to collapse, unable to withstand the pressure of the web.

Twisted rebar jutted out like snapped bones, and cracks spread along the walls like spiderwebs.

52nd floor.

The stairs had collapsed completely.

The soldier hesitated.

Then, steeling himself, he began to climb.

With no handholds, he smashed the concrete with brute force, dragging himself upward. His arm implant issued an overload warning, but he ignored it.

135th floor.

While climbing over debris, a crumbling girder caught his leg and pinned it in place.

There was no time.

The soldier drew the combat knife from his belt.

Without hesitation, he brought it down on his own leg.

He severed the connection point of the implant with precision.

Blood spurted from the site, but he managed to stop the bleeding with an emergency coagulant.

He continued upward on one leg.

208th floor.

The repeated strain of uncalculated movement pushed his arm implant to the limit.

With a screech and a hiss, smoke began to rise. Sparks followed.

It was inevitable. The implant was only designed to handle weapon recoil—smashing reinforced concrete was far beyond its specs.

“Aaaaagh!”

The burning pain spread through his nerves.

Gritting his teeth, the soldier tore out the arm implant with his remaining hand.

My team... everyone’s counting on me...

It was the kind of ordeal you’d expect to see in a heroic action film.

And yet, the soldier pushed through it with nothing but duty driving him forward.

Maybe it was because not just his own life, but the lives of his comrades, were on the line.

Even as his remaining leg implant started to groan, and his other arm was spewing smoke, he didn’t stop.

He had to reach the rooftop—where Paradigm Directive’s last line of defense was installed.

At last, dragging his mangled body, he reached the door to the rooftop.

His whole body was covered in blood and dust. One arm and one leg were gone.

But it wasn’t over yet.

With trembling fingers, he pulled out the key and inserted it into the lock.

SCREEEECH.

The warped hinges shrieked as a massive steel box opened.

The soldier peeked inside, filled with anticipation and hope.

And then—

“...What... the hell is this...”

A massive, pizza-shaped magic circle.

Nearby, robotic arms whirred into motion, kneading dough, applying toppings, and sliding pizzas into an oven.

Apparently powered by an independent generator, it was functioning perfectly despite the blackout.

Ssssss.

Steam rose from a freshly baked pizza. The smell of pepperoni and melted cheese hit him.

The soldier’s expression shifted from disbelief... to pure emptiness.

What he’d discovered atop the rooftop wasn’t an advanced weapon or a defensive system—

It was a pizza-making machine.

He collapsed where he stood, all strength drained.

****

At the heart of Jinlong Technologies headquarters.

Once a place feared and watched closely by all the megacorps, it had transformed into something completely alien.

The entire building was cocooned in glowing blue web.

The massive central hall—no longer a space for humans.

Ten Jinlong operatives hung upside-down from the ceiling.

They could no longer be called human.

Their once porcelain-smooth, white skin had shattered and fallen to the floor, and what showed beneath was not blood or flesh—

—but a pulsating mass of blue web.

The web throbbed like living veins, continuously spreading from their bodies and filling the space.

But the most astonishing thing was the ceiling.

The physical ceiling had disappeared, replaced by what looked like an endless expanse of space.

Vivid nebulas spiraled through the pitch-black void, and the shadows of incomprehensible entities floated between stars.

[The system is complete.]

The first operative’s will pulsed through the web.

It was not a voice. Not thought. A pure transmission of intent.

The web was their nervous system—they were no longer individuals.

[Twenty years...]

The second operative murmured.

Blue light leaked from his empty eye sockets.

[It’s been twenty years since we witnessed the end MK tried to hide.]

[They fled in terror—but we saw opportunity.]

[I understand. Witnessing the end and remaining sane? Impossible.]

The fragmented consciousness of the operatives echoed across the hall.

They were speaking—yet it sounded more like overlapping monologues.

[MK tried something—but it changes nothing.]

[At last, our objective is realized.]

[The moment we glimpsed the being that devours worlds, every one of us knew what we desired.]

Something shifted in the space above.

It resembled the ocean—but it was not the ocean. It resembled a living being—but it was not alive.

A massive entity, swirling with blue and black.

Thousands of eyes. Tens of thousands of tendrils. An incomprehensible form.

[Ah...]

One operative gasped.

More web shot out from his body.

[Becoming one. That is our only salvation.]

[A hundred comrades joined together.]

[We eliminated the Jinlong leadership, seized the organization, gathered technology.]

[The attack five years ago. The theft of other megacorps' tech. All for this moment.]

The web began to spread faster.

It had already broken past the building—now extending across all of Babel.

As if to transform the entire city into one massive nervous system.

[Soon, all will be one.]

[The illusion of individuality will fade.]

[True integration will be achieved.]

[That is true dominion.]

Their bodies continued transforming into web.

Their original forms were no longer recognizable.

Only their will drifted through the threads—becoming a part of the endlessly expanding network.

At that moment, the entity in the sky above drew nearer.

Blue waves shimmered—blurring the boundary between reality and unreality.

The entire hall bathed in blue light.

The web was no longer a mere substance.

It had become a bridge between dimensions—a tether pulling the incomprehensible into reality.

Jinlong Technologies was no longer a corporation.

It had become a consciousness.

A shrine.

A gate.

****

I arrived at Paradigm Directive headquarters via shadow movement.

But what awaited me was no peaceful pizza party.

“...What the hell is this...”

Before me lay a man, limbs severed, collapsed on the floor...

And beyond him, a vision of the end.

All of eastern Babel was now blanketed in massive blue web.

Skyscrapers leaned as they were wrapped tightly in threads, and the roads were buried entirely beneath the glowing filaments.

It looked as if some enormous spider had wrapped the entire city in webbing, preparing it as prey.

Dominic and the Prototypes were barely maintaining a shadow barrier around the building's perimeter.

But it didn’t look like they’d last much longer.

And on the rooftop... the pizza was still baking.

Golden cheese, crispy crust, fragrant pepperoni...

But this was no time to enjoy any of that.

First, I need to do something about that damn web.

I swallowed a sigh and hurled myself toward the web.

Shadow burst explosively from every inch of my body.

The shadows sliced through the air like dancers, crashing into the blue web.

The collision of web and shadow ripped through the atmosphere with sound.

Surprisingly, the shadows were pushing back the web far more easily than expected.

I’d thought it would be a brutal fight—it looked just like the webs I’d seen back in the Hexa Core Armory warehouse...

Even though I was fending it off with unexpected ease, my expression didn’t relax.

No matter how I looked at it, only a bleak future awaited.

The web stretched too far, too wide.

Everywhere I looked, beyond the horizon, the world was stained blue.

It felt as though all of Babel had already sunk into a sea of webs.

This... this isn’t something I can handle on my own.

No matter how powerful I was, I was still alone.

My energy had limits. I couldn’t cover all of Babel with shadow.

What the hell can I even do to fix this?

If I erase it with White Shadow, will the entire web vanish? Or just parts of it?

Do I need to summon the Giant Shadow Child? Can it eat even this blue web?

While I kept turning over those fundamental questions, the situation shifted dramatically. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

“!!!”

The density of the web changed.

It felt heavier—like some massive presence had taken a step closer.

Then, the web began to writhe, as though it were alive, and surged toward me from all directions at once.

As if it had identified me as its greatest threat.

“What?!”

I quickly reinforced the shadows and threw up a barrier.

But the web was more relentless than I’d anticipated.

It was probing, like it had intelligence, slipping into weak points.

A /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ cold sensation ran down my left arm.

A single strand had pierced through the barrier and touched my skin.

I severed it with shadow immediately—but it was too late.

Even that brief contact was enough. The web had already latched onto my arm and began spreading fast.

More webs crashed in from every direction.

From above, below, the sides—everywhere, all at once.

It was clear that simply pushing them back with shadow wouldn’t be enough, so I tried to escape.

I attempted a shadow shift to break out...

Thud.

I bounced off something—rebounded hard.

The web had sealed off the space itself.

Like I’d been trapped in some enormous net, the area I could move in was rapidly shrinking.

Right leg. Left leg. Torso...

The web was crawling all the way up my body.

My shadow and the web collided, making a strange sound.

As if two entirely different dimensions were being forcibly mixed together.

My vision slowly turned blue.

The web crept up to my face.

My consciousness grew faint.

The last thing I saw was a vast ocean of blue webs filling the sky.

And then—

Complete darkness swallowed me whole.

****

Pitch-black darkness.

That was all I could perceive.

I couldn’t tell whether I had been overtaken by the web or had simply lost consciousness.

Then, a faint figure appeared in the darkness.

At first, I thought it was just another part of the void. But as it grew clearer, a familiar form emerged.

A child.

But not like the ones that usually ran around near me.

There was a depthless intelligence in this child’s eyes, and despite their small frame, a strange sense of pressure radiated from them.

The sharp one. The clever version of the child I hadn’t seen since a hundred years ago.

Strangely, the child looked slightly hazier than the others.

The child looked down at me with a blank expression.

The clever one always used to look at me like that—calm, detached—as they offered help in different ways...

[Establishing a quantum entanglement-based data transmission mechanism....]

[...By leveraging causality collapse within a nonlinear spacetime framework, it becomes possible—though limited—to probabilistically forecast future ideation.]

The child opened their mouth.

But what came out was far too complex for me to grasp.

‘Is... is that what they call quantum mechanics?’

I didn’t understand a single word, but the child didn’t seem to care and went on.

[...]

[With this... a more complete prediction. A simulation.]

The child reached out their hand.

And in that moment, something streamed into my mind.

It wasn’t knowledge. It wasn’t memory. It was more like... a feeling.

[A more complete foresight....]

The child’s voice grew quieter.

At the same time, their form became even more transparent.

As if they were giving me a part of their very existence.

They were now so faint they were barely visible.

But on that transparent face, for the first time, a hint of a smile appeared.

[If there’s... a next time.]

Suddenly, the child’s tone changed.

It was no longer mechanical or cold.

There was a trace of longing, a wistful emotion buried within.

[I hope... we can eat pizza again, like we did a hundred years ago....]

‘!’

In that moment, I realized.

I knew who this child was. The one I had shared my last slice of pizza with, a hundred years ago.

‘No way... is it really you?’

I tried to open my mouth to ask.

To ask if it was really them from back then.

Why they were only appearing now.

Where they had been all this time.

But in this black space, no voice came out.

The child was already almost gone.

Only a faint outline remained—and then, that shadow waved one last time.

[Bye.]

And vanished completely.

At the same time, the dark space began to brighten.

As if waking from a long dream, my sense of reality slowly returned.