I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 196: Jisoo?!

He was running.

That was the only thing that mattered right now— the rhythm of his feet hitting the cracked flooring, the dust kicking up behind him, the weight of the girl clinging to his front with both arms locked around his neck and both legs wrapped around his waist like she had personally decided this was the safest place in the building and had no plans to relocate, because, yea it is... Her face was buried against his shoulder. He could feel her breathing— fast, shallow, not panicking yet but getting close.

Behind him, the sound was getting louder.

He looked back.

The corridor was full of them. Pouring through from the stairwell entrance at the far end, spilling around the corner in a mass that moved with the specific, horrible energy of things that didn’t get tired and didn’t slow down— shapes that had been human recently enough that the outline was still there, the shoulders and the arms and the forward lean of running, but wrong in every detail up close.

Their mouths were open. The sound they made wasn’t quite a scream and wasn’t quite silence, somewhere between the two. Guttural sounds.

"Shit—" Si Hon turned back around, already recalculating. "Fucksle!!?!!!!!"

The corridor ended fifteen meters ahead.

Not a door. Not a turn. Just— a edge of the building, the outer wall blown out entirely, open air beyond it, and across that open air, maybe three or four meters of nothing, the face of the next building sitting right there like it was waiting.

He looked at the gap.

He looked back at the horde filling the corridor behind him.

He looked at the girl on his front.

She lifted her head from his shoulder just enough to look at his face, read whatever was on it, and immediately looked toward where he was looking. Her grip tightened. "No," she said.

"We have to jump," he said.

"That’s— how far is that—"

"Close enough." He was already adjusting his hold on her, both arms locking under her, pulling her higher against his chest. The sound behind them was getting louder. Closer. He could hear individual footsteps now breaking apart from the mass. "Hold on."

"I’m already—"

"Tighter."

"I’m scared, Si Hon..."

She made a sound and locked her arms around him hard enough that he felt it in his ribs and he hit the edge of the floor at full sprint and jumped.

***

(A few hours earlier. Maybe days. Or minutes. We don’t know.)

Jisoo and Si Hon stood in the middle of the ruined city and said nothing for a long moment, both of them taking stock of the same landscape from slightly different angles. The tall grass moved without wind. The howling in the distance had gone quiet, which somehow felt worse than when it was loud. The vines on the building to their left creaked softly, shifting against stone, and something in the upper floors of a structure across the street made a sound that was probably just settling architecture and probably wasn’t.

Si Hon looked at Jisoo.

"Okay," he said. "What do we actually know about this trial?"

Jisoo’s eyes were already moving— scanning rooflines, entry points, the gaps between buildings where the overgrowth had swallowed the sightlines completely. "Less than I’d like," she said, which from her was basically an admission of being completely in the dark. "The original goblin dungeon I know. Layout, spawn points, timing. This—" she gestured at all of it, "is not that. The system rebuilt the difficulty from scratch when it detected us. Which means the original data is useless."

"So we’re going in blind."

"We’re going in blind," she confirmed. "Together, for now. Until we know what we’re dealing with."

Si Hon looked at the street ahead, at the way the grass thinned near the center and thickened again toward the buildings where shadows pooled deepest.

Somewhere in this city there was a hidden Core they needed to find and protect, maybe... somewhere in this city were things that had already started howling. And the rules had made it very clear that leaving wasn’t an option until one of those two facts resolved the other.

He put his hands in his pockets.

"Alright," he said. "Let’s go find trouble."

Jisoo almost smiled. "It’ll find us first."

She was right, as usual.

It always did.

Suddenly. Something hit her without warning.

One second Jisoo was standing beside him, eyes moving across the overgrown street with that sharp, methodical focus she never fully switched off, and the next—

"thud."

Si Hon looked over and she was just. On the ground. Sitting sideways in the tall grass like her legs had quietly submitted a resignation letter and left without telling the rest of her. Her hands were in her lap. Her expression was completely lost.

"Wah," she said. "Wah...?"

Si Hon stared at her for a second. Then he laughed, short and genuine, the kind that escaped before he could decide whether the situation deserved it. "The fuck, What are you doing," he said. "What is that?"

Jisoo opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at her own hands like they belonged to someone else.

Then she stood up— fast, too fast, the motion uncoordinated in a way she never was— and lunged sideways into him. Both arms locked around his side, her face turned into his shoulder, and she was trembling, a fine continuous shake running through her that he could feel where her arms gripped his uniform.

Si Hon flinched hard. "Ah— okay, alright..." He reached up automatically and tried to peel her off, got nowhere, tried again with slightly more intention and still got nowhere.

Her grip was locked.

"Dude. Dude. If this is a act, you win, okay, you win, I’m fully uncomfortable, you’ve achieved your goal, can we please start moving?"

"I’m not playing!!" Her voice came out loud and she immediately slammed a hand over her own mouth, going rigid, eyes wide above her fingers as the sound carried out across the empty street.

Abit of silence followed.