We had three birds. Three small, wooden weights that felt heavier with every passing minute.
Junseo was panting beside me, his jacket torn at the shoulder from a narrow escape in the ventilation shafts. "Hyung," he wheezed, "if I ever say I want a pet bird after this, just punch me. Seriously."
"Save your breath," I muttered, my eyes scanning the corridor. "Orina just buzzed in. She found a fourth near the cooling towers, but she's being tailed."
We weren't the hunters anymore. We were the prey.
As we turned the corner toward the main atrium, the air shattered. A group of four candidates—heavily built, eyes bloodshot with desperation—blocked the path. These weren't thieves; they were former mercenaries, and they didn't care about the "no lethal force" rule.
"Hand them over, Kim," the leader growled, cracking his knuckles. "Twenty-four hours of freedom is too much for a couple of street rats."
"Back off," I said, my voice low, dropping into a defensive stance. I moved Junseo behind me. My "two-minute" instinct was screaming.
Then, it got worse. Another team emerged from the shadows behind us. We were boxed in. Eight against two.
"Hyung..." Junseo's voice was small. "I don't think we can talk our way out of this one."
The first mercenary lunged. I dodged, parrying a blow that would have broken my ribs, but the numbers were too high. I saw a fist fly toward Junseo's face—I reached out to pull him back—
Then, the world went cold.
A shadow blurred past me. It wasn't a man; it was a ghost of white hair and silver fury.
CRACK.
The sound of a breaking nose echoed through the atrium like a gunshot. Miran had arrived.
I've seen violence. I've lived in the shadows of Seoul where the desperate fight for scraps. But I had never seen anything like Miran Konstantinov.
He didn't fight. He harvested.
He caught a man's wrist and twisted it until the bone audibly splintered. He didn't even blink as the man screamed. With a terrifying, fluid grace, he spun, his elbow connecting with a second attacker's temple with a sickening thud. The man went down like a puppet with its strings cut, his eyes rolling back into his head.
"Miran! Stop!" I shouted. "It's a game! Just take the birds!"
He didn't hear me. Or he didn't care.
He moved to the third man, who was already backing away, hands raised in terror. Miran grabbed him by the throat, lifting him off the ground with one hand. The man's face turned a bruised purple, his legs kicking uselessly. Miran's expression remained as calm as a frozen lake—no anger, no adrenaline. Just a cold, psychotic focus.
"Miran!" I lunged forward, grabbing his arm. It felt like grabbing a pillar of iron. "You're going to kill him!"
Miran turned his head slowly. His blue eyes were vacant, the pupils blown wide. For a second, I thought he might turn that violence on me.
He dropped the man, who collapsed into a heap, gasping for air and sobbing.
The silence that followed was deafening. The other teams fled, leaving their injured behind. Miran stood in the center of the carnage, his breathing perfectly steady. He reached into the pocket of the unconscious leader, pulled out two more wooden birds, and walked toward me.
He dropped them into my shaking hand. "Six," he said flatly. "With Orina's, we win."
The buzzer rang. The hunt was over.
But as the lights flickered back to their normal brightness, the "victory" felt like ashes in my mouth.
I followed him as we walked back toward the briefing room. My skin was crawling. My stomach felt like it was tied in knots. As soon as we were alone in the sterile hallway, I stepped in front of him, forcing him to stop.
"What the hell was that?" I hissed, my voice trembling with an irritation I couldn't suppress.
Miran tilted his head, his white hair falling over his eyes. "We won the game, Thief."
"That wasn't a game!" I snapped, stepping closer, my chest heaving. "Those were people. You broke that man's arm in three places. For a wooden bird? For twenty-four hours of freedom? You're a psychopath."
Miran took a step toward me, closing the gap until I had to look up to meet his gaze. The smell of cold metal and something sharp, like winter air, surrounded him.
"Everything is a game, Seol-wol," he whispered, his voice dangerously smooth. "And the only rule that matters is winning. You worry about 'honor' and 'boundaries.' That is why you are a thief, and I am a weapon."
"You could have hurt anyone," I said, my heart hammering against my ribs. "You would have hurt me if I stood in your way, wouldn't you?"
Miran leaned down, his lips inches from my ear. I felt his breath—cold and steady.
"I do whatever I have to do to win," he murmured. "Don't make yourself an obstacle, and you won't have to find out what I'm willing to break."
He walked past me, leaving me standing in the hallway, cold and hollow. I looked down at my hands—the hands of a "classic" thief who hated violence. They were shaking.
I wasn't just in a heist. I was trapped with a monster.
The buzzer signaled the end of the game, but the ringing in my ears didn't stop.
As we stood there handing over the wooden birds—the small, carved prizes that had cost so much skin and bone—the room felt suffocating. We were officially rewarded with twenty-four hours of freedom, a "gift" from Borislav that felt more like a temporary parole. Around us, the other candidates were erupting in cheers, the tension of the month finally breaking into jagged laughter and excited whispers about the world outside the concrete.
But inside, I was a mess of friction. My heart felt like it had been rubbed raw. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the vacant, icy look in Miran's eyes as he dismantled those men. It wasn't just irritation; it was a deep, unsettling itch under my skin.
Junseo, ever the barometer for my moods, nudged me with his elbow. His shoulder was bruised, and his breathing was still a bit ragged, but his eyes were bright with a desperate kind of hunger.
"Hyung," he said, his voice dropping into that familiar, persuasive hum. "Look at us. We're covered in dust, we smell like a hardware store, and my throat feels like I swallowed a desert. It's been days—weeks—since we had a real drink. Let's find a pub. A loud, dark, crowded one where no one knows our names."
I looked at him, wanting to say no, wanting to just lock myself in our room and scrub the memory of the atrium off my hands. But he needed this. And maybe, if I was honest, I did too.
"Fine," I said, a small sigh escaping me. "A pub. But we're not getting carried away."
"Spoken like a true two-minute-older brother," he grinned, the shadow of the hunt finally lifting from his face.
Before we could head for the exits, a shadow crossed our path. Kyla.
She looked at me, her eyes sweeping over my face with a sharp, quiet intelligence. She had been on a different team, and for a moment, a genuine flash of disappointment hit me. Having her around during that chaos might have made it feel... human.
"Congratulations," she said, her voice a soft purr against the backdrop of the noisy hall. She stepped closer, just enough for me to catch the faint, clean scent she always wore. "I heard what happened. It's a shame I wasn't on your team, Seol-wol. I think we would have made a much more interesting pair than you and the Ice King."
"It wasn't exactly a team effort," I replied, the bitterness leaking into my tone.
Kyla smiled, a small, genuine curve of her lips. She reached out, her fingers briefly grazing the sleeve of my jacket. "Don't worry about us," she said, nodding toward the rest of the candidates who were staying behind. "Go. Enjoy your twenty-four hours. Try to remember what it's like to breathe air that hasn't been filtered by a machine."
I watched her walk away, her words sticking to me.
"Come on, Hyung," Junseo urged, pulling on my arm. "The booze isn't going to drink itself."
We walked toward the heavy main gates, the "freedom" ahead of us feeling both light and dangerously heavy. We decided to take a long, winding round of the surrounding area first—just to see the sky, to feel the bite of the Russian wind, and to make sure no one was following.
But even as we walked away from that building, the irritation in my chest stayed. It was a cold weight, a reminder that no matter how far we walked, we were still tied to this game. And the pub was waiting—dark, loud, and hopefully enough to drown out the silence of the man with white hair.