I brushed away the hand that had been covering my mouth and started walking slowly. Im Haekyung, who had called me like they had something to say, didn’t add anything in particular.

Pushing through the people who’d gone quiet as if in a temporary lull, I calmly checked the corpse.

‘A corpse… well, nothing to be done.’

Even in the instant their abdomen had been pierced, it looked like they’d resisted—there were traces of the stalk melting and fusing together in front of and behind the puncture.

I closed the corpse’s eyes, then quickly checked the large creature’s body. The moment I touched it to move it aside—something obviously not normally heavy—a hot pain flared in my palm.

Ignoring it, I forced a gap open, grabbed the hand trapped underneath, and hauled it out.

‘Alive.’