Chapter 127: The Blue Roses (２)

****

Somewhere on the abandoned Line 10.

Six Blue Roses had gathered around a fire. Dongmajang Station had been abandoned long ago—in fact, it had never even been completed in the first place…

But the concrete was still there.

Silver held a marshmallow skewer over the campfire. The fire, burning whatever junk had been thrown on it, left soot on the white marshmallow.

“Why are we even staying in Seoul? If we’re thinking of liberating Blue Rose-0 to grow our strength, wouldn’t it be better to head back to Jeju now? Or go after Blue Rose-13.”

“There’s something we need to do first.”

“Like what.”

Contrabass let out a sigh.

“We don’t have a choice. Now that we’ve been abandoned, we can only survive by making contact with a Group of Interest. And the king of the Groups of Interest is, as you know…”

The Orchestra.

Most Groups of Interest trying to survive outside the Foundation’s fence end up with one foot in the Orchestra’s camp, differing only in degree.

Or the Orchestra gets a foot in with them. Either way, there’s not much difference.

“And. Six people is too large a target to slip through the Foundation’s surveillance net. We should move in groups of three. At least above ground.”

Silver nodded.

Silver’s amber eyes swept the surroundings. If anyone had been lurking in the darkness, the reflective glint of eyes that humans shouldn’t have would have been visible to Silver.

“Is there a Group of Interest stationed in this Dongmajang Station place? Or do we need to search further?”

“I can’t say for certain what’s happening underground. But if we keep searching, an underground organization is bound to surface. No need to rush.”

Spade glanced around.

“All well and good, but let’s not go too deep. I feel like there’s something scary in the underground tunnel network. Something waiting down there…”

What is the Abyss?

The Abyss coiled beneath Seoul—is it the Orchestra’s base, an Elder God whose very name has been forgotten, or something else entirely?

****

Another peaceful day.

The sunlight is warm, the grass is green, and several ultra-high-output humanoid anomalies, stitched together by the Foundation from the corpse of an Elder God, are roaming the streets of Seoul.

I’m dead tired.

The Foundation’s Seoul Branch is on high alert again today.

This time, the Foundation’s soldiers convened a war room. I don’t really know what they’re planning. How are we supposed to fight an enemy we don’t even know yet?

Let’s just go in and hear them out. I sat there with a bored expression while the department heads and section chiefs gathered in the room engaged in heated debate. Hmm, maybe something decent will come out of this.

“Let’s go catch them.”

“How do we catch something that’s underground?”

Exactly.

“Head of Support. Is there any way to track them?”

“We’re attempting remote viewing and precognition as we speak. They seem to be somewhere beneath Jamsil right now.”

“What are they doing?”

“Still looking into it.”

“No, Head of Support. Every time I ask, it’s ‘we don’t know,’ ‘we’re looking into it’—you convene a meeting before the coffee stain on the conference room table has even dried. Could you maybe do some investigating before calling us in?”

“My apologies.”

The Head of Support bowed her head.

“Keep going. What’s the plan for finding the lost Blue Rose instances?”

To summarize: Support wanted a sweep.

Eliminate the underworld organizations under surveillance in Seoul, take control of areas with heavy anomaly activity, and monitor the entire city.

Recovery wanted to enter the labyrinth.

Their position was to attempt control over the Seoul underground and strike at the Blue Roses’ base. But this operation has problems on multiple fronts.

They might not even have a base.

The elimination, the underground entry—all of it only works under the assumption that the Blue Roses have nested somewhere and are gathering followers or collaborators.

If they’re really just six people operating exclusively underground, there’s no clear way to chase them. The Foundation’s surveillance net isn’t infinite, after all.

“What if the Blue Roses’ goal isn’t to gather forces or establish a base? Maybe they’re just trying to survive or hide.”

The Head of Support nodded.

“Then the difficulty goes way up.”

“Let’s do this. We’ll track the Blue Roses through magical means and investigate their purpose as thoroughly as we can. Leave the actual pursuit to a specialist team for now.”

This time, most of the people gathered in the meeting room nodded.

I’m against entering the labyrinth myself. I don’t see a good enough reason to pay that kind of price.

****

We returned to the Director’s Office without any major results. We said we’d assign a specialist team, but I’m not even sure who that would be.

What matters now is keeping an eye on the vanished Blue Roses without pouring too much of our resources into it. We still have work to do, after all.

The key locations in Seoul’s underground labyrinth are as follows: Sogong-dong Station near City Hall, where Seoul Subway Lines 10 and 11 meet, and Dongmajang Station, where Lines 10 and 12 meet.

That’s how it works. Lines 10, 11, and 12—left unfinished, abandoned, and forgotten—form the backbone of Seoul’s underground labyrinth.

That abandoned underground bunker we saw last time was near Poi Station, at the end of Line 11. We’d temporarily named it the Poi Station Underground Bunker.

Think about it a little more and it gets even more complicated.

Nanami stared at my computer screen with her arms crossed. It’s more complex than I thought.

“The more I look, the more of a mess it is.”

“This is a city with at least a thousand years of history. Thirty generations of secrets—born, raised, and buried in this city—are layered and hidden underneath.”

“Still. They didn’t spend hundreds of years building the subway. That’s a recent thing.”

Nanami tilted her head.

“Got any evidence for that?”

No.

Look at the Catacombs of Paris—the tunnel network there started from quarries dating back to the Roman Empire. As for Seoul’s underground tunnel network, there’s no way to know when or where it began.

I kept my mouth shut.

“To get into the underground world: Poi Station, where we ran the elimination operation last time, Sogong-dong Station under City Hall, and Dongmajang Station near Dongdaemun-gu Office.”

“That’s horrifying.”

“Just looking at the Seoul subway—it extends up to 80 meters underground, right? In terms of apartment or commercial building floors, that’s 16 stories below ground. And we mostly live above it.”

Nanami thought a bit more.

“Come to think of it… there’s no guarantee it stops at 16 floors underground. You can’t know how much is down there.”

It’s a fear I haven’t felt in a long time.

Loneliness filled with nameless gods and monsters, alien airships, angels, parallel worlds that beguile humans. But more than any of that—

The fact that endless darkness and the Abyss lie just a short walk from the spaces we live in… was utterly unpleasant.

“I don’t want to take the subway anymore.”

“Take a helicopter. Or call a driver.”

Nanami’s answer was clear-cut.

“Anyway. We’ll explore those three key points. We can’t know what kind of trouble the Blue Roses will cause now that they’ve gone underground.”

****

The aforementioned Poi Station, Dongmajang Station, and Sogong-dong Station all have their entrances buried or hidden. They’re hard to find.

And not places you can just go to if you want.

“So. You’re telling us to find these three hidden subway stations and explore their interiors? To check whether a Group of Interest is hiding there?”

Foundation Field Engineer Team 1. The people who enter dangerous sites, clean up when combat breaks out, and recover and research anomalies.

Probably the shittiest job in the world, I’m thinking. The engineer team leader mulled it over for a long while, and I nodded.

“What do we do if we find something?”

“Withdraw.”

“I don’t know much, but there’s always something underground. Whether it’s ghosts, mimics, or mole people.”

“…”

Ugh, my head hurts.

“Withdraw if you feel you should.”

I didn’t really want to, but… judging by the mood, it looked like I’d have to go back underground. For now, I’d follow them to the site and decide whether to actually enter the underground once we got there.

****

[Rumors About the Omelet]

[Filed by: Head of Research Lee Seah]

[I have never made Nigurath-4 into an omelet and eaten it. I have no idea how that rumor started.]

[I think the rumor spread because Nigurath-4 is so well sealed that people assumed it had disappeared. It’s fine, so don’t worry.]

[However. I have been thinking of ways to open Nigurath-4. Aren’t you all curious? Don’t you want to see it opened?]

[Option One: Gas Gun]

[The Foundation’s research lab has one giant compressed-hydrogen gas gun used for satellite and orbital collision research.]

[Using this facility, a .50-caliber round can be accelerated to 10 kilometers per second. Wouldn’t that crack that dragon egg of ours?]

[Option Two: Terawatt-Class Laser]

[Among the Foundation’s facilities, there is an ultra-high-power research laser. The duration of its output is only a few femtoseconds, but its maximum output is 100 terawatts.]

[Wouldn’t that be enough to crack the egg?]

[Option Three: The Blooming Rite]

[Let’s place the egg in the center and conduct the Blooming Rite. The egg might just crack open on its own.]

****

[Re: Rumors About the Omelet]

[Filed by: Aide An]

[I would like to remind the Head of Research that the Foundation is currently conducting research to prevent Nigurath-4 from hatching.]

[You son of a bitch.]