A long way from here. A long way from now.
So. This is the part where I finally die.
Not a near miss. Not one more almost. The real thing — the version you only get to do once, with no morning waiting on the other side of it.
Honestly? I'd been looking forward to it.
The sky was coming apart above me. Not clouds, not weather — the sky, splitting down the middle like old cloth, and through the tear they were pouring out. Silhouettes. Huge ones. Things the size of mountains and things the size of nothing at all, shapes that hurt to look at head-on, falling out of the black between the stars and reaching down for the dirt I was standing on.
Some of them were constellations. I'd learned their names the hard way. The rest didn't have names — eldritch, old, the kind of old that was already old the first time a human looked up and got scared. They'd eaten the rest of the universe on the way here.
Earth was just the last plate on the table.
And me? I was the last thing left on it.
I want to tell you what I looked like by then, because I think it matters.
All muscle and bad history. My chest alone carried hundreds of small scars, layered over each other like tally marks somebody lost count of — and three big ones straight across the middle, long and horizontal, raked in deep. I'd stopped knowing where most of them came from. Didn't matter. The body keeps its own records, even when the man forgets.
I rolled my shoulders. Spat blood into the dirt. Looked up at the things falling out of the sky, and grinned with what was left of my face.
"At last," I said. "Come on, then. Let's see which of us lasts longer."
It wasn't brave. Bravery ran out eras ago. It was just the only thing I had left that was still mine.
I won't walk you through the fight. There isn't a way to. You don't trade blows with a constellation the way you'd swing at a man — you just survive it, second by second, and call surviving a win. I'd been winning a long time. Longer than the cities. Longer than the oceans. Longer than every single person who ever stood at my side and swore we'd make it out together.
That last part was the one that finally put me on the ground.
So that's where I ended up. Flat on my back. Sky still tearing open above me. My own blood going cold in the dirt underneath, and — for the first time in longer than I could measure — quiet. The kind of quiet I hadn't been allowed in a thousand years.
And I thought: good.
I thought: maybe now.
Maybe now I get to see them again.
My mother. Hyejin.
My first little sister — Jiyeon.
My little brother — Junha.
My youngest. Miyoung.
Here's the thing I'll admit, lying there in the dirt, since there was no one left alive to admit it to:
By the end, their names were all I had left of them.
Not their faces. Not their voices. War is long and survival is longer, and somewhere across all those years the system kept my body breathing while it quietly let everything soft inside me wear down to nothing. So I held onto the names. Five words. I said them through every catastrophe like a prayer to a god who'd already packed up and left.
I'm tired, I thought. I've earned tired.
And I let my eyes start to close.
That's when I heard it.
Cling.
One small, bright sound. Completely wrong for the end of the world — like a coin dropped on a marble floor, in a building that didn't exist anymore.
My eyes came back open.
The words hanging in front of me weren't gold. Gold was the system — the thing that had handed me my titles, my points, my deaths, for longer than I'd been alive. I knew gold.
This was a different color. I couldn't tell you which one. Every time I tried to name it my eyes slid right off, like it was a color that didn't want to be looked at. A color from somewhere above the rules.
[ Hey. Last survivor. ]
[ Don't panic. I'm above your little system — way, way above it. I cracked the thing open so I could talk to you directly. ]
[ Truth is, I'm bored out of my skull up here. And you're the last interesting thing left in this whole dead universe. ]
[ So. Before you go — got a last wish? ]
A wish. From the thing standing on top of the thing that had taken everything from me.
I almost laughed. It would've hurt too much.
"...One," I said. My voice didn't even sound like mine anymore. "Just one. I want to see my family again."
A pause. Long enough that I figured it had already gotten bored and wandered off.
Then:
[ You know what? Same. Bored, I mean. ]
[ And I've got a feeling that what I'm about to do is going to be very interesting. ]
I didn't get the chance to ask what that meant.
The world dropped out from under me.
Not the falling-sky kind of dropping. This was clean — everything just went, all at once. The dirt, the blood, the things in the sky, the weight of every year sitting on my spine. Gone. The void swallowed me whole, and for the first time in an age, nothing inside it was trying to kill me.
I closed my eyes at the end of the world.
I opened them somewhere else completely.
Fluorescent light. The hum of air conditioning. The specific, forgotten smell of office carpet and burnt coffee.
I was at a desk. My desk — one I hadn't seen in more lifetimes than I could hold in my head — in a clean white shirt, sitting in a body that didn't hurt anywhere.
There was a glass of water beside my keyboard. I caught my reflection in it.
A face I'd buried a thousand years ago looked back. Younger. Twenty-eight. No blood, no grime. And the eyes — God, the eyes were soft. They hadn't seen any of it yet.
I dragged my sleeve up. Skin. Just skin, no tally marks. I pulled my collar aside with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking — and the three long scars that should have been carved across my chest weren't there.
Nothing.
Impossible, I thought. I don't believe it. I don't believe myself.
But I was already on my feet.
Because if this was real — if I was really here, really now, before any of it had happened — then there was exactly one place I needed to be. And I was about a thousand years late.
I came out of that chair so fast it spun.
"Whoa — Minho?" The guy at the next desk, half-standing, coffee still in his hand, nothing wrong in his world yet. "Where's the fire? Why're you running?"
You don't know yet, I thought. In a few minutes, you will.
"Emergency. At home." I was already at the door. "I'm leaving. Tell the boss."
I took the stairs because I couldn't stand to wait for the elevator. Across the lot. Into a car I somehow still knew how to start, hands moving on memory from a life I hadn't lived yet.
I made it maybe three streets before the sky lit up gold.
I knew what it was before I even looked up. I'd seen it from inside a thousand nightmares that turned out not to be nightmares at all. Up over the skyline, hanging in the air where nothing has any business hanging, the words burned themselves across the morning in letters of molten gold:
[ World damnation begins in the following few days. ]
Behind me, the city started to scream. Tires. Horns. People spilling out of doorways to stand in the street and stare up at the sky.
I didn't stare. I'd had a thousand years to stare.
I put my foot down.
I don't remember the roads. I remember pulling up outside a house I had watched burn to the ground — standing there whole, and lit, and so painfully ordinary that it knocked the breath clean out of me. I remember my legs barely holding as I climbed out. I remember standing at a door I had grieved for a thousand years, raising a hand that, an hour ago, had been holding back the end of the universe.
And I knocked.
DUM. DUM.
Please, I thought. Please. Still be in there.
— To be continued.