"Let me ask you something."
"If someone tossed you into hell—stripped you naked, broke your legs, dropped you in a world where even the plants want to eat you—would you pray for help?"
"Would you beg whatever god you believe in?"
"I did. For the first two days. Then I started listening."
"Not to a god. To a voice with no emotion, no mercy. It told me how to survive. What to kill. What to consume. What to become."
"It called itself A.R.K."
"And now, after 297 kills, I finally understand: the abyss isn't a place. It's not some flaming pit or endless void."
"It's a moment."
"The moment you realize no one is coming to save you. And you stop waiting."
My name was Kellan Jin. Once.
And this is the story of the moment I stopped being prey.
—
The bell rang like a guillotine dropping.
Kellan flinched even before the noise finished echoing through the halls. He could already feel them coming—like hounds released from chains. The shuffle of oversized shoes. The hollow laughs. That sticky, stomach-curdling anticipation of pain.
He adjusted the strap of his backpack and walked faster, head down. Maybe they wouldn't notice today.
They did.
"Kellan!" a voice barked from behind. Too loud. Too theatrical. "You forget your daily exercise again?"
His breath caught.
"Don't stop walking," he whispered to himself. "Corner. Hall. Storage closet. Four doors down. You can make it."
He heard footsteps quicken behind him. Three sets. One of them always carried a cheap keychain that jangled when he ran. That was Min-Jae. The quiet one. But today he was laughing too.
Kellan's sneakers squeaked as he darted the last few meters and yanked open the janitor's closet door. The dark swallowed him. He slammed it shut.
A moment later, fists pounded on the outside. Laughter. "Oi, you dead yet?"
"Smells like piss in there, ratboy."
"Why don't you come out and draw us another pretty picture? That one you did of your little sister—what's her name, Sera?—that was cute. We liked it."
Kellan clenched his fists and pressed his forehead to the wooden door. He said nothing. Not because he was brave. Because anything he said would shake, and they'd hear it.
Eventually, they got bored. The pounding faded. The laughter echoed down the hall, replaced by the distant squeak of sneakers and the slam of classroom doors.
He exhaled and slumped against the wall. Inside the closet, it smelled like mildew and bleach. A single light flickered above him. His body ached from yesterday's bruises. His shoulder still throbbed from being slammed into a locker. He pulled his sketchbook from his bag and opened to a clean page, just to center himself.
He drew a tree. Not one he'd ever seen. Something twisted, ancient, with roots that wrapped around skulls. He didn't know where the image came from. It just felt... inevitable.
As his pencil sketched the final branch, the flickering light above him went dark.
The air changed.
He looked up.
There was a sound—not a noise, exactly, but a pressure. Like the walls exhaled. A faint hum, low and metallic, buzzed beneath his skin. Then the floor glowed.
A perfect circle of shifting symbols lit up beneath him in dull red and violent white. The lines moved—twisting, reforming, locking in like gears finding place.
[System Initialization: ERROR 874-BETA — Dimensional Anchor Failed.]
Kellan barely had time to gasp.
The floor vanished.
Gravity didn't pull. It ripped.
One second he was in a closet in a crumbling high school. The next, he was falling—not down, but sideways, backwards, inside out.
And he was screaming.