Kim Tae-hoon goes to a supermarket for something so forgettable that he barely thinks about it afterward.
A few minutes later, people are running, shelves are overturned, and strange creatures are moving through the building as if they belong there. Nobody understands what is happening. Some freeze in place, some try to hide, and others convince themselves the situation will somehow fix itself if they wait long enough.
It doesn’t.
For Kim, the shock wears off quickly. His previous line of work left him with habits that are difficult to lose, especially when things start going wrong. While everyone else is still trying to understand what they are looking at, he is already thinking about exits, blind spots, useful tools, and how long the food supplies inside the supermarket might last.
The creatures are dangerous enough on their own.
The panic spreading among the survivors isn’t much better.
What begins as a struggle to get through a single afternoon gradually turns into something far larger. News stops arriving. Familiar places become difficult to recognize. Groups of survivors form and break apart as people search for somewhere safe, though nobody seems entirely sure such a place still exists.
Kim never planned on becoming responsible for anyone else.
Unfortunately, circumstances keep putting him in that position.
Again and again, he finds himself making decisions that affect far more people than just himself. Some work out. Others create new problems a few days later. In a world changing faster than anyone can keep up with, certainty becomes a luxury.
At first, most survivors believe the situation will settle down once the creatures are dealt with. That hope doesn’t last very long. Reports from other areas paint an increasingly grim picture, and every attempt to understand what is happening seems to uncover another problem nobody had considered before.
For Kim, that realization changes everything. The skills that once belonged to a previous profession suddenly become useful again, and the decisions he makes carry more weight than they used to. Surviving the next encounter is important, but so is figuring out how to keep moving forward in a world that no longer follows the rules people were used to.
