The Boy of Cheongan (靑霧)

Episode 3: Geometric Edge

The flow of the weightless vacuum shoved us violently forward and carried our drifting group straight toward the second geometric anomaly point. It was not just a flat silhouette hanging in the void. It was a three-dimensional pyramid, rising विशालly in a space spread out blindingly white.

Deep, heavy grooves were carved across the entire surface of the structure, and jagged tracks had been etched into each metal edge. The moment the vacuum’s flow hurled me closer, I bent my upper body forward. My fingers desperately dug into the protruding edge gap and clung on, trying somehow to keep my balance. Then, a split second later, a firm hand came down hard over mine. When I looked up, Jiseok’s intense eyes met my gaze, and his fingers intertwined with mine, locking our grip securely in place over the smooth, cold metal surface. Behind us, the rest of the team was scrambling through the weightless void, frantically reaching out to catch the deep tracks running along the pyramid’s base.

Right above the hand we could barely keep hold of, alien characters flashed sharply on the metal surface. The letters glowed in periodic, angry red, written in a completely unfamiliar script that was impossible to recognize. As the entire pyramid suddenly began rotating around its axis, line after line of text hummed with a faint vibration and shifted shape beneath our fingertips.

The rotational motion became a brutal centrifugal force, slamming into us hard. Reality tilted in an instant, and the sudden momentum threatened to rip the edge of my fluttering skirt to shreds and tear my fingers straight out of the holes in the grooves. My vision blurred into a chaotic wash of flashing lights, dark smoke, and afterimages of the team members’ raw fear, growing starker the faster it spun. We lost all sense of up and down, and the pressure crushing my chest without mercy sucked the air clean out of my lungs.

We held on and held on for what felt like forever. My muscles burned with pain as we resisted, refusing to let go of the track or each other.

And then, in an instant, gravity cut out.

The furious spinning stopped in the blink of an eye, and the weightless void hurled us straight downward. The lights shattered and scattered. I fell vertically out into empty space, plunging downward and downward until I slammed and tumbled roughly across the cold, merciless dirt floor.