Chapter 230: C.R.E.E.D IV
(Kim Si Hon — Night)
The northwest wall held.
I stood at the top of the watchtower beside Jisoo and watched it happen— the Bloomed came first, that familiar swollen silhouette moving too fast for something that size, and the gunfire from the reinforced positions cutting them down before they made it within thirty meters.
Jisoo had moved the shooters last night, repositioned every single firing point so the angles overlapped exactly where the Bloomed’s momentum would carry them regardless of approach. It was working. Every single calculation of hers was working.
The Sporeheads came next, dozens of them, fungal crowns catching the firelight as they pushed toward the wall in a mass.
The barricades caught them at the outer ring and funneled them into the kill zone, and the people in the towers did the rest.
A Bloomed detonated somewhere in the middle of the horde, and instead of taking out a section of the wall it just took out the horde around it because it was nowhere near the camp itself.
Someone cheered from the south tower.
Then someone else.
Then it spread, half or maybe 80% of the camp was cheering. Laughter, somewhere. A woman crying— Guards clapping each other on the back without taking their eyes off the perimeter..... ... ..... yea.
"We did it," I said, watching the outer ring hold clean and clear. "Wow. That was actually kind of easy."
Jisoo looked at me.
I looked back.
"Please," she said, very specifically, "stop talking."
"I’m just saying—"
"You’re jinxing it."
"Oh, yea, jinx is real."
"I know," she said. "And I’ve had significantly more experience than you. So please. Stop. Talking."
I looked back at the wall. There were still hundreds of them out there— the horde hadn’t broken, hadn’t retreated, just kept pressing and dying and pressing again against the outer defenses.
But the wall was holding.
The trucks at the east angle were holding. The staggered barriers were holding. Everything Jisoo had ordered at 10PM in that tent while exhausted people with bad posture tried to understand her was working exactly the way she’d said it would.
I kept my mouth shut.
For approximately 90 seconds.
Then, for no reason. They stopped.
Not a few of them. Not a section. All of them, a collective motion that went from pushing-and-pressing to completely still in the space of about 3 seconds.
Thousands of them— the Sporeheads and the Bloomed and the fast skinny ones and the slow lumbering ones and every variant in between— standing in the street beyond the outer barricades and not doing anything.
Not growling.
Not attacking.
Just looking at the wall.
"The fuck," I said quietly.
"I don’t know," Jisoo said. Her voice was different. Quieter. "This is making my skin crawl somehow."
Below. The camp.
The cheering had stopped. I looked down at the camp and found the same expression on every face— the guards who’d been smiling 30 seconds ago now standing stiff at their posts, eyes forward, weapons up, not sure what to aim at because nothing was moving.
A child somewhere in the residential building had been laughing and wasn’t anymore. The camp had gone as still as the horde.
Two things staring at each other.
Neither of them moving.
The silence stretched. 1 second, 5, 10, 30. Kiara appeared at the base of the tower, looking up, and I could see her doing what Jisoo was doing— counting them, checking the angles, trying to figure out what had changed. She didn’t call up. She just watched.
I watched the horde.
The horde watched the wall.
The camp from above.
Fire from the cooking stations still burning. The watchtowers, four of them, manned. The northwest wall solid, the barricades intact, the trucks at their angles. And beyond the outer perimeter, spread across three blocks in every direction, a sea of bodies that had all simultaneously decided to do nothing.
Then for no reason, the Forest Moves.
I heard it before I saw anything.
CRACK.
Then, several seconds later— THUD. The kind of impact that came up through the tower structure and into the soles of my feet before it reached my ears.
Then silence.
Then: CRACK.
THUD.
Slow. Deliberate. The specific rhythm of something that didn’t need to hurry because it already knew where it was going.
The treeline to the north moved first— not wind, not the small shifting of branches in a breeze, but an actual movement, entire trees bending sideways away from something that was walking between them.
I activated Focus Eye and pushed it as far north as it would go, and what I saw was the canopy— a wave of disturbance moving south through it, getting closer, the trees not falling but bending, forced aside by its displacement alone.
Then the birds came.
Dozens of them, then hundreds, exploding up out of the canopy that spread across the sky and scattered in every direction at once.
The kind of evacuation that happened when every living thing in a space decided simultaneously that staying wasn’t an option.
The ground shook.
Not dramatically— just enough. A faint vibration in the tower floor, in the wall, in the earth itself, the kind that came from something very large taking very deliberate steps.
CRACK.
THUD.
It was getting closer. Still not visible. Just sound and shaking and the canopy bending toward us in a slow terrible wave.
I looked down at the camp.
The people who had been cheering were frozen. Completely. A child pressed her face against an apartment window on the third floor, both hands on the glass.
A guard had his weapon raised at the treeline and wasn’t firing because he doesn’t know where to fire at. Two men had stopped mid-sentence, mouths still open, looking at the bending trees.
CRACK.
THUD.
Closer.
Close-up— a guard’s hands on the stock of his weapon. Knuckles white. Not shaking yet. Just tight.
Jisoo said nothing. She was watching the treeline with her arms at her sides and her face turning pale
"Jisoo."
"I know."
"What is it?"
A pause. "I don’t know. That’s the problem."
After a few minutes...
The guard with white hair on the east post suddenly fired first.
I don’t know what he was aiming at. Maybe one of the horde that had shifted position. Maybe nothing, just his own hands deciding they’d been still long enough.
The shot went wide, hit something in the outer ring, and the sound of it broke whatever agreement had been holding the whole situation in place.
And, the horde [moved.]
All of them, at once, from dead stillness to full push in under a second, and the noise they made doing it, was the sound of thousands of bodies hitting together.
The outer barricades held for a moment— then a Bloomed hit the wrong section at the wrong angle and [exploded] took out six meters of the outer ring and the smoke came down and suddenly [nobody could see anything.]
"NORTHWEST—" somebody screamed.
"EAST WALL—" somebody else screamed, from a different direction.
Gunfire from three positions firing into smoke at things they couldn’t see.
Another explosion, further in this time, and a section of the inner wall buckled— not broke, buckled, held by the additional layer Jisoo had ordered last night, bent inward but still standing.
I jumped from the tower.
Hit the ground, found my feet, and looked around. Smoke everywhere. People running in two different directions. Someone had a torch and was trying to see through the haze and was mostly just making shadows.
The sound was layered and wrong— screaming and [gunfire] and the horde noise and underneath all of it, was still, CRACK.
THUD.
Getting closer.
After looking around for probably a minute, I found her behind a supply box near the center of the courtyard, curled into the smallest possible shape, both arms around a stitched white bunny, eyes shut.
"Mio—"
She looked up.
Then she was on her feet and moving and she hit me with both arms, face into my jacket, sobbing furiously. "AHJUSSI— I’m scared— it’s so loud and I can’t see—"
"Where are your parents?" I said, already looking around. Already scanning.
Her grip tightened. "They said to just run. They said—" She stopped.
A sob. "They left me. They left me, they said just run and they— they went... they abandoned me! I know I would get abandoned by them someday but..."
Something moved in the smoke to my left and I turned and hit it before I’d finished processing what it was, the punch connecting with a skull that cracked on impact and sent the body backward into the haze.
I turned back to Mio.
"Please don’t leave me too," she said into my jacket. Very small. "Si Hon. Please. Please don’t."
I crouched down to her level. "I’m coming back. I promise. But I need you somewhere safe first, okay? Can you be brave for 30 seconds?"
She looked at me. Teary, red-eyed, still holding the bunny.
Then she nodded, once, to herself.
I picked her up and ran.
The supply garage was on the south side, away from the worst of the noise, the metal rolling door still intact.
I got it open, got her inside, found a clear corner behind a row of boxes. She grabbed my sleeve when I tried to step back.
"I’ll come back," I said. "I promise."
"...Okay." She let go. "Okay. I’ll wait."