Ha-neul woke up to the sensation of someone touching his hand. Every part of his body hurt, and he struggled to even peel his eyes open. He saw that the girl, Mebb, was holding his hand by the wrist and staring intently at it. She was moving her head around, trying to see his blackened fingers from different angles. Ha-neul jumped back, pulling his hand away.
He stared at her with alarm for a moment. She looked up and smiled, leaning in a little to close. She said in her high voice, "Jung, you are awake!"
He scooted back a little more and then rubbed his eyes. He somberly asked, "what's going to me happen now?"
She smiled and said, "I'm going to go get my friends. You stay here, okay?"
He nodded and watched as she stood up and walked through an open doorway and out of sight. He was in a different room then he'd gone unconscious in, but he was unmistakably still in the castle. The walls were made of the same white stone, showing through cracked and peeling plaster. The room he had been brought to was some sort of storage room, although all its supplies were rusty and broken. At the same time, it was clean and orderly. Perhaps the work of the Undead sweeper and it's friends. On the ceiling there was a small blue crystal growing, giving off a faint light in the room. Looking through the door, he realized he hadn't been moved far. In fact, they had dragged him just far enough that he wasn't lying in his own blood. His foot, which was still in the kitchen, was just ten centimeters away from a barrel with the skeleton's left leg in it.
He looked down at himself, despite his bruises and frostbite, he did not look as terrible as he felt. His left leg and forehead were stitched closed and wrapped in bandages. And the blood and dirt had been washed away. He could feel the sting of the magic runes stitched into his skin, looking like a faint tattoo. Zalgoe had been right, though. The cold had saved his life. And magic had been enough to save the frozen leg. His fingers and toes were a different story, they were fully dead and would need to be removed at some point.
There was something off about that cold though. For example, snow is a great insulator, so why was he freezing as much as he was while buried under it? But that was one of many things he had been too tired and too busy not dying to think about. Why was he so good at falling, and skiing, and fighting? Something about him had changed fundamentally, and he wasn't sure what it was. Was he Noticed? But it was called that because people who got powers did so by being noticed by the Sovereign Mind. However, the only voice he had heard in his head was his own. It might have just been a fact about this world that people gained some sort of magic power. He'd have to ask the Japanese boy about his experience with coming here.
Also, how did he fall through a Gate? He though that that was supposed to be impossible. Was it simply that no one had thought to try before? Or that anyone who had tried didn't live to tell the tale? He didn't buy that, there was something else to it. The Noticed had many secrets. Or actually, they had so many conflicting rumors that their true nature was unknowable. Propaganda and AI bots had made the truth obsolete a long time ago. The idea of not being able to go through a gate was too consistent a rule to be correct. At the same time, some facts were too indisputable and too easy to check to be obfuscated that much. But, did Gates fall into that category? He didn't know. Nothing was for certain. Wasn't it true that Magic was so inherently incomprehensible, people would believe whatever they were told about it simply because it wasn't bound to common sense?
If Ha-neul compared what he thought he knew about the Gates now to what he believed a year ago, they had barely anything in common. He had learned too much, and studied too hard, to believe the mysticism and half truths he had believed last year. And last year he had thought the same thing about the previous year, and so on. Four years was just enough time for the average schmuck to wrap their head around gates. The lies spread by foreign governments, his own government, and other bad guys he hadn't even considered yet had gotten better too. They must have shaped his couscous in ways he didn't understand. The clankers didn't tell the basic lies and fake stories like they had in the wake of the Great Dying. Now they carefully trimmed the psyche of the masses towards their own aims with thousands of unique tools and strategies.
All Ha-neul knew for sure was that he had fallen into a gate. And for some reason that was possible. Somehow, he'd even survived the ordeal. Now he was here. What next? He was fully at the mercy of the people who saved him. He also probably owed them a great debt for saving them. Still, he'd be a fool to leave himself to the whims of an unknown group of people. He needed to gain some agency of his own.
Ha-neul, without giving himself time to think about it, forced himself into a sitting position. His core burned and he was seeing stars. He sat hunched over, fighting the pain for a long moment before he pushed himself back against the wall opposite of the door to the kitchen. Lying down, he hadn't been able to see that behind him was another door. It was closed and was bared by a plank of cracked and splintering wood. Ha-neul was now leaning against it, gathering his strength. Still, he was going to need to rest for a moment before attempting to stand up.
Before he could do that though, he heard a door open in the kitchen, and moments later felt the icy wind hit his skin before the door was forced shut again. He heard the boy speaking in Japanese, and Zalgoe responding in English? Or not quite, she was speaking an entirely different language, but for some reason he understood it perfectly. As they walked to the store room, the boy did most of the talking. However, Zalgoe added a few small lines that made it hard not to guess the subject of their discussion. It also made it hard not to feel queasy.
"Alive, yes. Able to walk, even, no."
"Fresh meat is hard to come by."
"If you insist."
Ha-neul sprung up onto his feet. His right ankle was still sprained, and his left had trouble moving at all.
'Their cannibals. Of course their cannibals! That girl, she wasn't inspecting my wound, she was probably wondering how it tasted!'
He staggered forwards, feeling like was walking on two peg-legs over towards the barred door. He was nearly blinded by the pain. Before he could get there, The three of them entered the store room.
The boy looked at him for a moment and then lowered his head, "I'm sorry Mr. Jung. I think we got off on the wrong foot."
Ha-neul yanked the board off of the door and held it like a bat. "Foot? Is that what you're planning to eat first?"
"No," the boy said, "we're not cannibals. Okay? Um, Zalgoe might be, the jury's still out on that one."
He did not lower the board.
Zalgoe sneered at Ha-neul, "Master, do you want me to cut his head off?"
The boy shook his head emphatically. "NO! For crying out loud. You're not helping even a little right now! Let me do the talking. We got off on the wrong foot, sir. My name is Tamotsu Shimazu. Back on Earth I was in secondary school. I was summoned by the Alliance King to defend this world, only to be cast aside for being weak. They sent me to this ruin to die, but through a series of unlikely events and sheer determination, I survived! The king underestimated me!" He paused for a moment, and then in a lower voice, added, "this is Zalgoe and Mebb." He paused again, then cleared his throat and said, "they are my harem."