SSG 260
by CristaeThe roar of the wind battered his eardrums. It was nothing like the clumsy “whoooosh!” onomatopoeia you might see in a novel—it was a sound on a completely different level, almost like some unheard-of monster’s cry.
He couldn’t see a few meters in front of him. No matter how good Yuseong’s vision was—honed by habit and boosted by nanomachines—the swirling snow erased visibility itself. There was nothing he could do about it.
Still, Yuseong forged ahead.
‘I hope this is the right way.’
He looked down at his portable computer. The hologram showed his current location and destination. With visibility this bad, it was the only thing lighting Yuseong’s way.
But did he trust it fully? He wasn’t sure.
With every satellite destroyed, GPS was of course useless.
So what Yuseong was looking at now was an inertial navigation system, independently developed by Messiah, relying both on the portable computer’s advanced sensors and geographic data from the parallel world.
But the computer wasn’t designed exclusively for this purpose, so he couldn’t help but worry a little.
On top of that, even if it was a parallel world, was the geography really still identical?
‘Still, I have no choice but to trust this.’
As he walked, keeping his eye on the hologram, Yuseong suddenly drew his gun.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The loud gunshots were swallowed by the raging wind.
Click!
He reloaded and pressed on. Not far ahead, he came across a beast, bleeding out on the ground.
‘At least this is something I can rely on.’
He looked at the radar in the corner of his HUD, feeling reassured.
Cold, blizzard, monsters, beasts, leads.
Each one was enough to be maddening or deadly, yet Yuseong managed to push through them all.
‘Not much farther.’
On the hologram, the distance between the dot marked “Yuseong” and Alaska had shrunk dramatically.
The Bering Strait is at its narrowest 85 km. In his exoskeleton, Yuseong could have crossed it in just a few hours, but forced to stick to solid ice patches, he’d had to make a wide detour north—practically doubling the distance.
And the hostile conditions meant he couldn’t move at full speed.
But after enduring all of it, he had made it near his goal.
Yet, the closer he got, the stranger things felt.
‘Why can’t I see it?’
By now, he should be seeing land instead of the endless floating ice. But there was only a sea of ice ahead.
Something was definitely wrong.
‘Of course.’
Had anything in his life ever gone smoothly? Muttering a few curses, he kept moving.
He had no choice but to keep going.
‘There are two possibilities.’
Either the program was wrong, or the geography had changed.
‘Messiah said the program was reliable.’
Messiah had boasted there was no way the portable computer’s own distance calculations were off.
Regardless of his anxiety, the odds of a technical fault seemed low.
‘So maybe the topography is different.’
This left another two options.
Maybe the American continent’s shape, distance, or location was simply different from his world’s—but that was unlikely.
‘Every bit of landscape I passed so far matched up. Only Alaska is different?’
How likely was that?
That left a final possibility.
‘The terrain changed because of the war.’
Civilization, before its destruction, had enough firepower to alter geography.
Coming toward Alaska, Yuseong had seen plenty of such scars. All the terrain that looked different from his world had been scars like that.
‘Why did you have to blow up exactly here!’
He had no choice but to curse the people who’d altered the land, even knowing they must have had their reasons.
‘Still, it can’t be much farther now.’
They might have changed the shoreline, but they couldn’t have wiped out Alaska altogether. It must be just a little farther. Or so he had to convince himself.
‘Another lead.’
Wide-open water flowed ahead. Sighing, he jumped again.
Crash!
The ice cracked. He’d faced this many times before. Nimbly, he took off the exoskeleton and leapt again.
Bang!
‘Damn it!’
The ice in this area was even weaker.
Whole sheets nearby shattered at once. Yuseong leapt forward as fast as he could, but however strong his body, you can’t run in midair with no footing.
Splash!
Icy seawater rushed over him.
The Bering’s average temperature was brutally low. You had to watch not only for drowning but instant hypothermia. Escaping the water didn’t guarantee survival.
But with his highly developed body and nanomachines, Yuseong was in no immediate danger.
He swam quickly to the nearest ice floe.
‘Hurry! Hurry!’
Once in the water, it was a race against time.
Swish!
The giant monster, lazily using its senses, turned its head.
Something was approaching from the north.
An unforgettable presence—the one it had longed for.
A human.
Up till now, it had only sensed the human’s presence inside a boat, but this time it was coming from the open water.
Despite sensing what it had wanted most, the monster felt not joy, but utter confusion, panic, and anger.
The human was now detected not on its original continent, but all the way near the opposite shore.
When had it gotten that far?
Boom!
The monster began swimming toward the human’s presence, its massive tail churning up huge plumes of water.
As it swam, the monster thought.
It wasn’t hard to guess how the human had arrived there.
Ice.
All those feints of crossing by boat, but actually crossing on the ice.
It had been played for a fool.
-KUOOOO!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The monster’s enraged roars sent explosive shockwaves racing across the surrounding sea.
As soon as he climbed out of the water, Yuseong shed his soaked clothes, dried off roughly, put on fresh gear and a new exoskeleton, and started running again.
‘I can see it!’
Finally, he could make out land.
Alaska, long yearned for while stuck on the Chukchi Peninsula. Hard trials surely awaited him on arrival, but at this moment, the simple sight of land was enough to make him truly happy.
At this pace, he’d arrive in five minutes.
But of course, this damned world wouldn’t let Yuseong reach his goal so easily.
Boom!
He heard an explosion in the distance. Looking that way, he saw blocks of ice shooting high into the air, as if bombed.
No need to check—there could be no doubt. It was the giant monster.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The explosions drew closer. The ice sheet shattered and cracked all around.
Wham!
He leapt over a wide fissure to move ahead, but cracks kept forming, faster and more frequently.
‘I’m right there!’
Staring at the land just ahead, he bit his lip. Lamenting wouldn’t change anything. He had to keep moving as fast as possible.
Thankfully, it seemed the monster hadn’t closed in entirely—the explosions still sounded far off. At this rate, maybe he could reach the coast before it arrived.
Boom!
Suddenly, the ice beneath his feet broke and a huge snout shot out. Ice was crushed in razor teeth.
But there was no blood or flesh.
‘Barely dodged it!’
Yuseong panted. If not for the radar blipping blue at the last second, he’d have been caught off guard and eaten.
‘It tricked me!’
The distant water explosions had been a decoy. The monster had quietly moved underneath the ice, straight at Yuseong. Its mastery of wide-ranging water manipulation made this trick possible.
But the radar and Yuseong’s superhuman reflexes had foiled its plan.
He started running toward the shore again. The monster’s roar echoed behind him. He wanted to focus on running, but forced himself to turn and look back.
You never want to turn your back on a monster—you might as well write your own death sentence.
CRAAAAAAASH!
He dodged a jet of water from its mouth. It was “just water,” but easily sliced through thick ice. Getting hit would mean certain death, exoskeleton or not.
Boom! Boom!
“Urgh!”
Jets of water burst up through the ice below his feet. Any of those would do irreparable damage if they hit.
Thankfully, he could feel the ice shaking and avoid them just in time.
‘Crossing on the ice was the right call.’
Without the ice, he’d already be a frozen corpse floating in the sea.
-KRAAAAAAA!
Frustrated by failed attacks, the giant monster now tried to eat Yuseong directly. Using raw strength and monstrous size, it tore through the ice, bearing down on him—then dove back beneath the surface.
‘It’s going to launch up at me again!’
Yuseong stared at the radar.
‘Now!’
Feeling the ice start to quake, he jumped aside.
BOOM!
Once more, the monster burst through the ice in a mighty leap, its blue eyes gleaming, searching for Yuseong.
He was lying a bit away from where the monster emerged.
But he wasn’t just helplessly sprawled—he already had his railgun ready.
“Die!”
BOOM!
The ice where Yuseong lay was obliterated as the railgun fired.
-KYAAAAAA!
The monster shrieked in pain, half its head blasted off. It flailed, shaking its head in agony.
But Yuseong wasn’t satisfied.
‘The ground is too unstable!’
The ice had shattered from the railgun’s recoil, throwing off his aim. Had the footing been better, he could have blown its head clean off.
He shrugged off his exoskeleton. Submerged in the icy water as the ice broke, he scrambled back onto the floe and took off running.
‘When it’s suffering, that’s my chance!’
There wasn’t time to don a new exoskeleton or insert new batteries.
Besides, dry land was truly within sight.
Yuseong ran with every ounce of strength he had.