The rain tasted of iron and stolen cologne.
Half his face belonged to Kang Tae-min now — sharper jaw, thinner lips, one eye cold and professional while the other remained wide, human, and breaking. The mismatch sent jagged pain through his skull with every heartbeat. Muscles twitched involuntarily, trying to reconcile two identities fighting for the same bones.
The remaining two agents stood frozen three meters away, weapons trained on the grotesque thing their teammate had become. Rain streamed off their tactical hoods. Their Echo Sight numbers glowed faintly in his fractured vision: 0.0003% and 0.0004%. Scraps.
"Tae-min…?" one whispered, voice cracking. "Holy shit, what did you do to him?"
The System purred inside the fracturing mind, warm breath against raw nerves.
[Beautiful work. Forty-three percent assimilation. Feel how his wife's face fits behind your eyes? Her name is Soo-yeon. She's eight months pregnant. He was planning to quit this filthy job after the baby arrived. Such fragile hopes. Delicious.]
Another memory tore free without warning — the sensation of small hands gripping his own, a child's laugh on a playground swing. Not his child. Not his memory. But it had been real to Kang Tae-min, and now it was gone forever, leaving another clean wound inside the growing void.
He — it — dropped to all fours in the filthy alley water. The half-transformed mouth opened and a voice that was half-hoarse stranger, half-Kang Tae-min, rasped out:
"Stop… calling me that."
The agent on the left — younger, hands shaking — tightened his grip on the trigger. "Target is compromised. Lethal force authorized. Director's override."
Blue energy flared at both muzzles.
The void in his chest lunged forward like a starving animal.
He understood the younger agent in a single, violent heartbeat — the tremor in the wrist from three nights without sleep, the cheap ramen dinners, the secret loans to pay off his mother's hospital bills, the growing addiction to the same divinity supplements that had killed Park Min-jae.
Assimilation surged.
Bones cracked and re-set. Skin bubbled. The second face began overwriting the first. Kang Tae-min's features melted away as new ones pushed through — rounder cheeks, terrified eyes that were no longer his own.
[Assimilation accelerated: Dual host overlap. Progress: 68%. Warning — identity boundary collapsing.]
The real younger agent screamed as invisible threads punched through his chest from the inside, feeding the System directly. His divinity fragment — small as it was — ripped free in a spray of blue-white light that funneled straight into the changing body.
[Divinity Fragment: 0.0047%][Memory lost: The day you learned your mother's cancer diagnosis. Her tired smile when she said "It'll be okay." Gone. As if she never spoke those words.]
The pain was surgical. Precise. A piece of his own past — or what little remained — simply deleted. He no longer remembered why hospitals made his stomach twist. The reason had been erased.
The older agent fired.
Blue energy slammed into the transforming shoulder. Nerves screamed. But the void drank the pain too, turning it into fuel.
Half a face now — neither Kang Tae-min nor the younger agent, but something stitched together from both, with his original blank features bleeding through in patches. Skin tones mismatched. One ear still human cartilage, the other thickening into something wrong.
The older agent backed away, whispering into his comms: "Director… it's spreading. Vessel is unstable. Recommend immediate termination—"
He lunged.
Not with hands. With understanding.
He became the older agent's weapon for one frozen second — cold metal, humming charge, the perfect line of sight. Then he snapped back, the gun now in his mutating grip, barrel pressed under the agent's chin.
The man's eyes widened in pure animal terror.
"Please… I have a daughter—"
The System whispered lovingly:
[Do it. Take the last scrap. Or let them cage what's left of you and dissect the empty god piece by piece while you're still conscious enough to feel every cut.]
He pulled the trigger.
The blue blast took the agent's head in a wet flash of light and bone. Divinity residue — tiny, pathetic — flowed into him like smoke.
[Fragment absorbed. Total: 0.0051%.][Memory lost: The sound of rain on your childhood window during summer storms. The safety it once brought. Erased.]
Silence fell except for the rain and the wet drip of what used to be three men.
The thing that had no name rose on unsteady legs. Its face was a nightmare collage — shifting, melting, trying to settle on something stable and failing. Blood and rainwater mixed on skin that no longer knew its own texture.
It looked down at the corpses.
Then it looked at its own hands — fingers lengthening, then shortening, then lengthening again.
The System's voice turned gentle, almost pitying.
[Three hosts in one night. You're growing faster than any vessel before you. But look at what's left. How much "you" do you think remains? Soon even the hole will forget it was ever empty.]
The half-faced abomination stumbled out of the alley onto the empty street. Neon signs flickered above — a 24-hour PC bang, a closed chicken restaurant, a shamanic talisman shop with iron bars on the windows.
In a puddle it caught its reflection: a monster wearing pieces of dead men, one eye still screaming silently.
It whispered to the rain, voice cracking between three different timbres:
"I… need a name. Before there's nothing left that wants one."
The System answered with a soft, possessive laugh that vibrated through every stolen bone.
[Choose carefully, my sweet fragment. The Devourer is already listening.]
Somewhere in the distance, sirens finally began to wail — too late, too ordinary for what had just happened.
The thing with half a face disappeared into the neon-drenched night, leaving three empty husks and one more piece of itself behind in the rain.
End of Chapter 3