Chapter Two - Matrix Open ||

They looked around for a while and Jihyeok felt his stomach churn uncomfortably at the sickening thought that they were the only ones who survived the stampede as there was no one else around, he wondered where the stampede went and how people are gonna react to it and even whether they would survive.

He snapped himself out of it and looked at Nakyung who stood in place, staring in horror. He cleared his throat and looked around, raising his head slightly to clear the tears that were forming in his eyes and looked towards Nakyung again "Thank you" he muttered. Nakyung blinked and looked at him with a fairly welcome gaze and a little smile which made Jihyeok feel very much more indebted to Nakyung, after all without Nakyung; would he be standing there right then?

Nakyung walked over to him and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder, "Let's go and look for help first before we start celebrating survival, hm?" Jihyeok hummed in agreement.

They were about to leave when Jihyeok remembered the bright blue-red light he had seen before from one of the stars before the figures made an appearance; he looked up to see if it'd still be there, in all its eye-catching glory. But by his second blink a feeling of dread washed over him as he recognized the blue-red light in many other stars lighting up the sky. Fear gripped him, paralyzing his whole body and he fell into a trance once again. He saw things much like he had seen when he fell into a trance earlier but more vivid.

The earlier things he had seen were blurry snippets of unimaginable catastrophes. He saw them when the earthquake happened and everyone was running while he stood still in their midst, staring up into the sky as though he had no care what was happening around him and no fear was present in his body and as though he was sure of his survival amidst chaos, but it was in fact the opposite. Looking up and staring into the sky at that time made him see blurry events that looked terrifying enough to any common man, it amazed him so that he forgot his surroundings temporarily like an oblivious child.

Now that Jihyeok saw similar things, he started over thinking. Is this a message of some sorts? What exactly is going on in these pictures? Is he meant to be concerned? Should he tell someone about it? Can they see it too...or is he the only one? –questions like these ran through his head, but of course they had no one to answer them so they remained as passing thoughts.

Jihyeok, who had entered another trance, stood in a spot without moving for a while which naturally gained Nakyung's attention. Nakyung carried a bag n which he had packed some varied kinds of food items that he scavenged which ha managed to survive too; Jihyeok was meant to be doing that too but it seemed he was too pre-occupied staring at the stars. Nakyung looked at Jihyeok strangely and looked up, he didn't see anything so powerful to full on freeze a whole human, the only shocking thing was the milky way being so visible, he looked at Jihyeok again and thought, 'Why is he like that' he remembered how Jihyeok stood still when people were busy running for their lives: to be brutally honest, in his opinion, Jihyeok looked very abstract, conceptual and otherworldly which is abnormal for humans.

He looked up again to see the stars in the milky way, 'Maybe the stars are what's entrancing him…yeah, he probably worked too hard and became too occupied to stargaze and starts don't shine this bright in the city' he tried to form a feasible explanation, normalizing Jihyeok's abnormal behaviour.

Nakyung groaned contentedly as he stretched, then he walked over to Jihyeok and tapped his shoulder, "Let's go?" Jihyeok looked at him with wide eyes and released a breath he didn't know he was holding "Where to..?" Nakyung pointed with his right index finger, "Let's go west, towards Jeongdae" Jihyeok hummed and made to carry one of the bags hanging by the sides of Nakyung's waist but his wrist got held by Nakyung effectively stopping him. "Don't worry, I'll carry them" Jihyeok wanted to protest but he thought it'd just be a waste of his energy so he kept quiet and stared walking forward.

The pair made their way carefully and quietly towards Jeongdae, then immediately went back to Sangchurae, where they were coming from. The reason was because they saw two of those distorted figures with their two set of pointed teeth exposed from eating. These ones had a set of teeth around the curvature of their mouth and another on the inside etched onto a disgusting piece of blue-black flesh. Its round-like unshaped body, that was a dirty colour of brown and red respectively, lay without care on the bodies of some unfortunate humans and its teeth were stained with red as it ate the insides of the human pierced into with its pincers; basically it was a bloody and very unsightly.

Four eyes of four different colours suddenly looked to the right where the duo was spying at it from. Jihyeok grabbed Nakyung's, now untamed, hair and pulled him down behind a cluster of large rocks. Nakyung grunted under his breath and glared in silence at Jihyeok who only looked away with a guilty expression.

Jihyeok looked at him again when the intensity of the glare reduced and showed the sign he particularly liked whenever he saw it in action movies. He folded his fingers and let his index and middle finger stay unfolded, like a handgun, then pointed it up and raised it a little above his head before swiping it down; a sign to go forward stealthily. Nakyung who had has also watched a lot of action movies in his spare time, knew what it meant so he nodded.

Nakyung slowly lifted his bodyweight from the ground followed by Jihyeok, still crouching, they both sneaked from one boulder to another before finally getting into the previous street and making a run for it. 

Okay, so I know that's 'Jeongdae' and 'Sangchurae' are not real places in Seoul but I don't know anything about their streets except for a few districts and states so for the sake of the story, let's just pretend they are real places in Yeondeungpo. Besides, their real names will become unfamiliar later on...