Min Seo-ah's sleep was shattered, haunted by memories she couldn't escape. She was on a plane, the hum of engines vibrating beneath her, but her mind was back in that dark, suffocating night—the night everything changed. In her nightmare, she lay hidden in the closet with her brother, Daon. The shadows of that night crept into her mind as the killer prowled outside, the cold dread tightening in her chest. Her body tensed, ready to scream for help—when suddenly, her father's urgent signal cut through her thoughts.
Her brother's hand shot out, covering her mouth just as her body was about to cry out. Her heart pounded wildly, eyes wide with terror. The killer's shadowy figure paused, sensing suspicion. His approach became cautious—he was close now, moving slowly toward the closet.
Her father, noticing the danger, made a loud noise—knocking over a vase, banging a door—to distract him. His goal wasn't to shoot, but to divert the killer's attention away from her and her mother's hiding place.
The distraction worked. The killer turned sharply, eyes narrowing, drawn toward the noise. Her father, in that fleeting moment, kept the killer occupied, buying precious seconds.
But then, with cold, merciless eyes, the killer moved quickly—he found her mother, who had tried to come to her husband's side, and shot her in the agony of her last moments. Her mother's scream was cut short as she fell.
The killer then turned his attention back to her father, who was trying to shield her and her family from the danger. The killer approached swiftly—without mercy—killing her father in a final, cold act of violence.
The vivid scene replayed—her helplessness, her muffled screams, her father's sacrifice, her mother's screams—each image searing into her mind. Guilt gnawed at her; if she hadn't screamed, if she had been quieter, maybe her father would have escaped, and the killer wouldn't have found them.
She snapped awake on the plane, gasping for air, drenched in sweat. Her body trembled violently, her heart hammering in her chest. The memories lingered, vivid and relentless, echoing in her mind even as the plane's cabin noises surrounded her.
Her pupils darted around the dark cabin as she tried to catch her breath. The distant roar of the engines was a stark reminder of her current reality, but the ghosts of her past refused to fade.
Later, she emerged from her seat, trembling and pale. She saw her brother, Min Daon, waiting at the aisle. As soon as their eyes met, he immediately recognized her distress. Her fists clenched tightly as she fought back tears, her face a mask of desperation.
She moved toward him with a mixture of desperation and vulnerability. Her voice cracked as she tried to speak, but her words caught in her throat. Her eyes shimmered with unshed tears. She looked like she was about to break apart.
Min Daon stepped closer, gently wrapping her in a reassuring hug. His voice was soft but steady, understanding what she was going through.
"Hey, Seo," he said quietly, holding her close. "I know those nightmares haunt you. But I'm here. We're safe now. Everything's going to be okay."
She clung to him desperately, fighting back tears, her body trembling from the emotional storm inside her. His calm presence was a fragile anchor as she struggled to regain her composure amid the chaos of her memories.
After the flight, after the tight embrace and whispered reassurances, Seo-ah followed her brother home in silence.
Outwardly, she was the same Aoi Minase everyone knew—quiet, withdrawn, polite to a fault. She spoke softly, avoided eye contact, kept her hands folded neatly in front of her. She moved through the house like a shadow, careful not to disturb anything, as if she feared the walls themselves might break if she made too much noise.
This was her normal self—shy, humble, almost cozy in how small she tried to make herself. The kind of girl who stayed low, unnoticed, safe.
But safety had never truly existed for her.
The trauma had carved itself too deeply into her mind. Her parents' deaths were never treated, never addressed. No therapist. No early intervention. No one ever sat her down and explained that what she felt was not her fault. Instead, fear, stress, and guilt—all of it had been left to rot quietly inside her.
And something else had grown there.
That other side of her wasn't gentle. It wasn't timid. It wasn't afraid.
It was violent. Aggressive. Cold. Built from fear, rage, and survival. A personality created not out of choice, but necessity—a shield her mind forged when she was too young and too broken to understand what was happening.
The contradiction was cruel: one version of her wanted to disappear; the other longed to destroy anything that came close.
No one knew about it. Not her brother. Not anyone. Only her.
Or rather—only part of her knew.
Because even she was only slightly aware.
Lately, strange things had been happening. She would wake exhausted despite sleeping through the night. Bruises she couldn't explain appeared on her arms. Objects in her room were moved—drawers opened, windows unlocked, items placed where she never remembered putting them. Sometimes her body ached as if she had been running, fighting, doing something.
At first, she told herself it was stress.
Then fear crept in.
Late one night, after returning home with her brother and locking herself in her room, she made a decision. With shaking hands, she set up a small camera facing her bed. She told herself it was just to observe her sleep—to reassure herself that nothing was wrong.
She pressed record.
The next morning, she almost didn't watch it.
But curiosity—and dread—won.
As the footage played back, her breath slowly left her lungs.
At first, everything looked normal. She lay still beneath the blankets, breathing evenly.
Then, hours into the recording, her body moved. Not restlessly—not like a dream.
Deliberately.
She sat up. Her expression was wrong. Her eyes were open, sharp, alert—nothing like the timid girl she recognized. The way she moved was controlled, predatory. She stood, checked the door, touched her face as if confirming her reflection, and smiled.
It wasn't her smile.
She whispered things—low, calm, almost amused. She paced. She stretched her fingers as if testing strength. At one point, she looked directly into the camera.
Seo-ah slammed the laptop shut, her hands trembling violently.
That was the moment she understood.
She didn't just have trauma. She had two personalities.
One fragile, quiet, trying to survive by staying invisible. The other born from untreated fear and violence—aware, dangerous, and hidden.
And the most terrifying part?
The second one knew far more about her than she knew about it.
As time passed, Seo-ah began to understand something even more disturbing.
The second personality wasn't trying to protect her.
That was a comforting lie she had almost believed.
It wasn't a shield. It wasn't a guardian. It wasn't born out of care or survival. It did not exist to keep her safe or to save her from the world.
It was born from violence.
Every scream she swallowed as a child. Every moment of terror she endured without being allowed to react. Every surge of rage she buried because she was too small, too powerless, too afraid.
None of it disappeared. It festered.
The second personality was the result of all that suppressed fury being compressed into something sharp, volatile, and merciless. It didn't emerge to defend—it emerged to act. To strike. To dominate. To release what had been locked away for too long.
Where Seo-ah hesitated, it moved without restraint. Where she felt guilt, it felt nothing. Where she wanted to hide, it wanted control.
That was what terrified her most.
Because if it had been protection, she might have reasoned with it.
But violence didn't listen. Violence didn't justify itself. Violence didn't stop once it started.
Late at night, in the quiet of her room, Seo-ah sometimes felt unfamiliar sensations—brief flashes of clarity after anger, moments where fear vanished entirely. Those moments didn't feel like relief. They left her cold and shaken.
They felt like loss of restraint.
And slowly, painfully, she came to accept the truth she was most afraid of:
The second personality did not exist for her.
It existed despite her.
Fear followed Seo-ah into the nights.
It wasn't fear of intruders, or the dark, or the memories that surfaced when she closed her eyes.
It was fear of herself.
Every night, without exception, she locked her bedroom door from the inside. The click of the lock became a ritual—steady, deliberate, necessary. Afterward, she would take the key and walk to the small safe hidden behind her dresser. The safe was designed to open slowly, requiring patience and careful precision. No frantic movement could unlock it. No sudden impulse. That was why she chose it.
She placed the key inside and sealed it away.
Only then would she breathe.
The delay mattered. The time it took to open the safe mattered. It was the thin line between restraint and disaster. If she woke in the night and the other personality surfaced—if it moved her body before her mind could catch up—there would be no immediate access to the door.
No easy escape. No chance to reach anyone else. Especially not her brother.
That thought alone made her chest tighten.
Some nights, the testing began.
She would wake with her heart pounding, awareness blurred, her body already upright before fear fully returned. Her eyes would drift to the door. Locked.
Her feet touched the floor without sound. The violent part didn't rush. It observed. It learned. It memorized the room—the distance from bed to dresser, the faint creak of the floorboards, the time it took for her breathing to change. Her hand would hover near the wall where the safe was hidden, not reaching, merely considering.
Sometimes her palm pressed flat against the door, fingers curling slowly, as if imagining what lay beyond it.
Seo-ah would regain control in fragments—the cold beneath her feet, the tension in her muscles, the horrifying realization that she had almost moved without choosing to. She would retreat back to her bed, shaking, forcing herself to stay awake long enough to be sure she was still herself.
The lock held. The safe held.
But the intent lingered.
She imagined it too easily—waking to find her hands shaking, her thoughts blank, her body already standing, already moving. The possibility haunted her: that one night, she might hurt someone without remembering how or why. That she might cross a line she could never come back from.
So she contained herself. She became her own prison.
Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, Seo-ah listened to the quiet of the house and measured her breathing, clinging to consciousness as if it were the last barrier between who she was and what echoed inside her.
Sleep was no longer rest. It was a gamble. A surrender of control she didn't trust herself to afford.
Some nights, she cried silently into her pillow. Not because she was weak. But because she was terrified of what she might become .
Meanwhile, in the gritty shadows of the city, Kang Rian was in the middle of a brutal fight. It was like watching a storm. Her movements were swift and deadly—flickering shadows, precise strikes. She dodged a wild swing from a pipe, spun low, and delivered a devastating kick to her opponent's knee. The man crumpled, groaning. The alley echoed with chaos: shouts, fists pounding, metal clashing.
Blood dripped from her brow, staining her face and clothes. Her body ached, her muscles screamed, but she fought on—each punch, each dodge driven by raw instinct. She was like a ghost—fluid, relentless. Then her last opponent—a brute wielding a metal rod, yelling like a madman—charged at her with reckless abandon.
Rian's eyes sharpened. She ducked under the wild swing, grabbed the rod, and held it firmly, preventing him from swinging again. With a brutal uppercut, she sent him crashing to the ground, unconscious.
She stared at him for a moment, her chest rising and falling wildly, blood streaming from her face and arms. Her vision blurred, pain flared across her ribs, but she pushed herself up, blood staining her clothes, her limbs trembling. She ran. Her legs carried her out onto the busy street—noisy, alive, full of people. She staggered onto the sidewalk, clutching her side, gasping as her strength waned.
Her eyes darted around desperately. She saw a woman—wealthy, with a designer bag—standing nearby. The woman's face twisted in disgust at the sight of her—bloodied, broken, unclean.
"Eww, look at her," the woman spat, her voice cold and disdainful. "Disgusting. Ugh, she's filthy. I don't want to touch that. Stay away from me."
Other passersby echoed her sentiment. A man in a suit scoffed. "Ugh, get her away. Some trash, that one." The crowd's reaction was cold—anger, disgust, rejection. No one stepped forward to help. Instead, they looked at her as if she were unclean, a stain on the city's pristine image.
Rian's trembling hand reached out weakly, voice hoarse and trembling. "Help me... please..." But the crowd's disdain only deepened. A woman, clutching her purse, sneered and snapped, "Stay away from her. She's dirty. She's unclean. Don't touch her." Her internal thoughts questioned her own foolishness—Why did I even ask?—but her body betrayed her.
Her knees buckled; her strength fading fast. The rejection, the disgust—they had made her feel invisible, worthless.
As she tried to steady herself, a woman nearby—irritated by her presence—spoke loudly, her voice dripping with disdain. "Ugh, I don't want to be bothered with this mess," she sneered. Without hesitation, she took out her phone and, out of irritation, called the police.
The sirens wailed in the distance. The police arrived reluctantly, pushing through the crowd with evident annoyance. Before they could reach her, she finally collapsed onto the pavement, her body going limp as she laid unconscious, overwhelmed by exhaustion and despair. The crowd continued to look on with contempt, some sneering, others turning away. No one offered help. Only disgust and indifference.