The hallway of the facility felt narrower than it had yesterday, the reinforced concrete walls pressing in on me with every sluggish step. Or maybe it was just my head. My skull felt like a hollow drum, and every pulse of blood behind my eyes was a mallet strike, echoing the rhythmic, artificial hum of the recessed lights overhead.
I moved like a man made of thin glass, careful and agonizingly stiff. My neck was the epicenter of the pain—a dull, hot throb that flared into a sharp sting whenever I turned my head too quickly. I didn't need to find a mirror to know what was there; I could feel the phantom pressure of Miran's hand, the faint, dark shadows where his thumb had dug into my skin to pin me against that stone wall. The memory of it was a cold weight in my gut that no amount of water could wash away.
"You're alive. Sort of," a voice chirped, dripping with a brand of mischief I wasn't ready for.
I didn't even have to look. Junseo was leaning against the doorframe of the mess hall, balancing a tray of lukewarm food with the kind of effortless energy that made my stomach turn. He looked annoyingly refreshed, his hair actually brushed and his eyes bright with a dangerous glint.
"Barely," I croaked, my voice sounding like it had been dragged through gravel.
"You know," Junseo said, falling into step beside me as we navigated the morning rush of candidates, "I've seen you do some truly reckless things, Hyung. I've seen you climb a rusted drainpipe in a monsoon. I've seen you pick a high-security lock while a guard was sneezing three feet away. But I have never seen you try to pick a fight with a Russian glacier by asking if he wanted to date you."
I stopped dead in my tracks, the movement sending a fresh wave of nausea through me.
The blood rushed to my face so fast my vision actually swam. "Junseo. If you value your life, you will never speak those words again. Not to me, not to the walls, not even to yourself."
"Oh, come on! 'Are you interested in me?'"
Junseo mimicked my drunken, desperate slur with terrifying accuracy, his voice dropping into a mocking, heavy tone. "The whole bar went quiet, Hyung. Even the bartender stopped cleaning glasses just to see if Miran was going to snap your neck or kiss you. You really know how to make an impression."
"I was intoxicated," I hissed, finally reaching a table and burying my face in my hands. "The liquor was toxic. It was... a tactical error."
"A tactical error is forgetting to check for a pressure plate," Junseo countered, sliding a cup of bitter, jet-black coffee toward me.
"What you did was a social suicide mission.
But hey, look on the bright side—he didn't kill you. He just dropped you like a sack of flour near the entrance and told me to 'collect my garbage.' He looked more bored than angry, which, honestly? Might be worse."
I groaned into my palms, the shame settling into my bones. It was worse. Much worse. I was the "Classic Thief," the man of shadows and precision. And I had just handed the most dangerous man in the facility the ultimate weapon: my own public humiliation.
"Eat," Junseo ordered, his tone finally softening. "We have a briefing in ten minutes. Borislav is in a foul mood, and he doesn't give a damn about your ego."
The briefing room was a cavern of cold blue light and the scent of ozone. It was already half-full when we arrived, the air thick with the hushed, nervous whispers of the other candidates. Kyla was there, leaning against the far wall with a tablet in hand; she caught my eye and gave me a small, sympathetic wince. It was a look that said the rumors had already traveled through the entire facility before sunrise.
And then there was Miran.
He was sitting at the far end of the long steel table, his back perfectly straight, staring at a holographic map of a jagged northern railway line. He looked exactly the same as he did every morning—crisp, freezing, and utterly composed. He didn't look up when I sat down. He didn't acknowledge the fact that I was currently vibrating with a mix of caffeine and mortification. He just kept staring at the map, his fingers tapping a slow, silent, predatory rhythm on the table.
"Glad to see everyone survived their taste of freedom," Borislav's voice boomed, the heavy doors slamming shut behind him. He marched to the head of the table, his eyes sharp and unforgiving. He paused when his gaze hit me, a thin, cruel glint appearing in his eyes. "Some of you clearly enjoyed it more than others."
I kept my gaze fixed on the table, my fingers tracing the cold edge of my coffee cup as if it were a lifeline.
"Now," Borislav continued, the hologram zooming in on a high-speed, reinforced locomotive. "Enough games. In ten days, a high-security transport train leaves the northern hub. It is a ghost on the tracks, carrying a reinforced cryogenic container.
Inside that box is the real prize: the master blueprints for a highly classified underground sector. We need those documents to move forward. Without them, we are effectively blind for the main event."
He tapped the console, and the hologram fractured into a cross-section of the cargo car. It was a nightmare of security engineering—infrared sweeps, ultrasonic grids, and kinetic triggers.
"This is a mission that can, and will, take lives," Borislav said, his voice dropping into a register that made the air feel thin. "There is no room for 'classic' hesitation or drunken mistakes. Today, we begin the final simulations. But listen carefully: this is no longer just training. This is a selection process."
He leaned over the table, his shadow stretching across the holographic map.
"We are using live-feedback suits today. You will feel every pulse, every shock, and every impact as if it were real. Those who fail the objective in the simulation will be removed from the program entirely. Do you understand? Only the survivors—the original team that makes it out with the blueprints—will be allowed to see the real mission. The rest of you are just noise to be filtered out."
A suffocating, heavy silence descended over the room. Borislav wasn't talking about a test; he was talking about a cull. He was going to weed out the weak by breaking them in a digital cage.
I felt a shift in the air to my right. Slowly, I lifted my head, my neck protesting the movement.
Miran was looking at me now. His expression was a mask of pure, professional challenge, but his eyes were narrowed, tracking the faint, yellowish bruise on my neck before locking onto mine. There was no mockery there—only a cold, expectant demand.
"Start acting like a professional," his voice seemed to echo from the night before.
I straightened my shoulders, the thief's pride finally pushing through the fog of the hangover. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing me flinch. Not again.
"The cargo car has a vibration-sensitive floor," I spoke up, my voice steady despite the sandpaper feel of my throat. "At two hundred kilometers per hour, the rattle of the train will mask traditional footsteps, but the weight displacement will still trigger the silent alarms. We need to bypass the local sensors before we even touch the floor, or the vault locks down before we're halfway across."
The room went quiet. It was the first time I'd spoken with authority since the hunt. Miran's lips curved—a tiny, almost imperceptible shift that wasn't quite a smile.
"Finally," he murmured, his voice a low rasp that only reached my ears. "The thief showed up."
Borislav nodded, a predatory grin spreading across his face. "Team Four. You're up first.
Get to the sim-chamber. Let's see who among you is actually worth the air they breathe."
As we stood to leave, Miran walked past me, his shoulder brushing mine with intentional force. He didn't stop, but his voice drifted back to me like a chilling winter wind.
"Don't let the hangover kill you in there, Seol-wol. I'd rather do it myself when you're sober."
I watched him walk away, my heart hammering against my ribs. I looked at Junseo, whose face had gone pale as he realized the stakes. We weren't just practicing a heist anymore. We were walking into a meat grinder, and the real thing was , with our own choice.