Seol-wol gasped, his body locking up in terror. He didn't turn around. He couldn't.
The weight of the hand on his shoulder felt like lead, pinning him to the spot while the image of the armed men and the submissive Borislav burned in his mind.
For a heartbeat, he was certain a silencer was being pressed against the back of his skull.
"Seol-wol? What in the hell are you doing out here?"
The voice wasn't cold or mechanical. It was deep, gravelly, and familiar. Seol-wol felt the tension drain from his legs so quickly he nearly stumbled. He turned slowly, his breath coming in ragged hitches, to find Peter standing over him.
The large man's face was usually a mask of calm indifference, but now, his brow was furrowed with a sharp, genuine worry. He didn't wait for an answer; he gripped Seol-wol's arm and physically hauled him back from the corner, away from the view of the main hallway where the armed shadows had passed.
"This is no place for us to be loitering around, kid," Peter hissed, his eyes darting toward the heavy blast doors. "If the supervisors or those... guests... saw you watching them, they wouldn't be happy.
And when people like that aren't happy, people like us stop breathing."
Seol-wol grabbed Peter's sleeve, his fingers trembling. "Peter, wait. Who are those people? I saw Borislav—he was acting like a servant. He was bowing to them. Why would he behave like that?
He's the one in charge."
Peter's expression darkened, the shadows of the corridor making the deep lines around his eyes look like scars. He didn't answer. Instead, he kept his hand on Seol-wol's shoulder, guiding him firmly down the sterile, white hallway toward the relative safety of the dormitory sector. The sound of their boots against the metal floor felt too loud, like a countdown clock ticking in the silence.
They reached the small communal hall near their rooms—a place filled with the hum of vending machines and the dim, yellow glow of recessed lighting. Peter sat Seol-wol down on a hard plastic chair, leaning over him with his hands on his knees, his massive frame blocking the entrance.
"Listen to me," Peter said, his voice dropping to a low, somber rumble. "You asked me once if I'd worked with people like this before. You remember that?"
Seol-wol nodded, his mind racing. "You said you'd seen things. That you knew how these operations worked."
"Then listen well," Peter said, his eyes locking onto Seol-wol's with a terrifying intensity. "As you already know, these people brought us here to do a heist.
That's the story they sold us. And yes, Borislav is the leader of this facility. But Borislav is just a face. He's the dog on the leash, Seol-wol. There are others—men who sit so high above him that they don't even have names in places like this. They don't see us as thieves. They don't even see us as people."
Seol-wol felt a chill that had nothing to do with the facility's air conditioning. "Miran said... he said the training was a lie. He asked me if I knew who was behind all of this."
Peter flinched at the mention of Miran's name, but he didn't let go of the conversation. "I am telling you one thing, and I'm telling you as a friend: it is better to do what you were bought for. You are a thief. You were hired to move through shadows and take what isn't yours. Stick to that. Don't try to know things that you shouldn't. In this world, curiosity doesn't just kill the cat—it erases the cat's entire bloodline."
He stood up, his shadow stretching across the floor. "You're a good kid, Seol-wol. You and your brother. That's why I'm telling you this. Don't look at the men in the suits. Don't look at the guards. Just look at the prize and get out before the floor gives way beneath you."
Without waiting for Seol-wol to respond, Peter began to walk, gesturing for him to follow. He led Seol-wol back toward the common area where Junseo, Kyla, and the others were still gathered, trying to maintain the illusion of a normal evening.
As they walked, the banter of the crew reached Seol-wol's ears—the sound of Junseo laughing at one of Orina's jokes, the clicking of Gu Wan's tablet. But for Seol-wol, the sounds were muffled, as if he were underwater.
Peter's warning, instead of calming him, had only fed the fire of his anxiety. All these things—Miran's cryptic offer, Borislav's fear, the military-grade shadows in the hall—were lingering in his mind, coiling around his thoughts like a snake.
The Seol-wol who had walked into the training hall that morning was gone. That Seol-wol had just been trying to do his work, earn his credits, and take care of his brother. But the Seol-wol standing here now was surrounded by a thousand questions, each one a sharp, jagged edge. He realized that the heist wasn't just a job; it was a labyrinth, and he was already too deep inside to find the way out.
He sat back down at the table with the others, but as Kyla reached out to offer him a drink, he could only stare at his reflection in the dark liquid of his cup. He wasn't a thief anymore. He was a witness to something he wasn't supposed to see.
Hours later, the facility finally succumbed to its version of night. The overhead lights in the corridors dimmed to a ghostly, ultraviolet blue, and the constant thrum of activity settled into a low, predatory hum. In the barracks, the deep, rhythmic breathing of the other thieves echoed off the cold metal walls—a symphony of exhausted people who believed they were sleeping in preparation for a payday.
But in Seol-wol's room, the darkness felt heavy, pressing down on his chest like a physical weight. He lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling where the shadows shifted with every flicker of the ventilation fan.
His mind was a battlefield. One side held the memory of Junseo's laughter from earlier that evening—a sound of pure, naive hope. The other side was a jagged landscape of Miran's dark warnings and the sight of Borislav, a man they all feared, bowing like a servant to shadows in tactical gear.
Don't try to know things you shouldn't, Peter's gravelly voice whispered in his memory.
Seol-wol closed his eyes, but the images only became more vivid. He felt the "Neural Residue" pulsing in the hollow of his throat, a constant reminder that he was tethered to this place by more than just a contract. He was tethered by his very biology.
Despite the confusion, despite the suffocating fear that made his pulse throb in his temples, one realization began to crystallize in the dark. It was a cold, hard fact that sat in the center of his mind: these halls went deeper than the maps showed. This facility wasn't just a training ground built on the surface of a wasteland.
It was an iceberg, and the "Remnants" were only standing on the tip.
The secrets weren't in the training pods or the cafeteria. They were in the levels where the air grew colder and the guards carried no insignia. They were in the places where Borislav went to beg for his orders.
Seol-wol rolled onto his side, his fingers clutching the edge of his thin blanket. He knew now that he couldn't just be the quiet thief anymore. He couldn't just follow the rhythm and hope for a beach that might not exist. If he and Junseo were ever going to be truly free, he couldn't just survive the heist—he had to understand the machine that was trying to eat them.
He needed to reach the end of the labyrinth. He needed to see what lay at the very bottom of those deep, dark halls, even if the truth was enough to shatter him.
The decision felt like a ghost-light in the dark, cold and flickering, but it was the only thing he had left to follow. As he finally drifted into a fitful, shallow sleep, his last thought wasn't of the credits or the escape. It was of the descent.
He was going down. And he was going to take the truth back up with him, or he wouldn't come back at all.