Please Give Me A Kiss, Healer! Chapter 123

The man stopped walking among the ruins of the collapsed buildings and turned around.

“…I knew it. It’s not him.”

The small hope he had held onto disappeared into thin air in an instant.

The moment their eyes met, Ji-woo knew for certain that he wasn’t Gang-woo.

There was none of the warmth or affection in his eyes that Gang-woo always had when he looked at him.

‘If he really were Gang-woo, he wouldn’t have made me wander around like this in the first place.’

But before Ji-woo could think any further, his feet were already running toward the man.

Even though he expected that the man wasn’t Gang-woo, he couldn’t help but chase after him like an idiot.

Because he couldn’t let go of even the smallest possibility.

“Hello.”

The man looked extremely tired, as if he had been through a lot.

Dust covered his entire body, as though he had just escaped from a battle, and blood was flowing through the tears in his clothes.

Even knowing that he wasn’t Gang-woo, Ji-woo’s heart still ached.

What if Gang-woo was injured like this somewhere without me?

As Ji-woo looked the man over with a face that seemed ready to cry, the man asked,

“Why? Disappointed because I’m not the person you were looking for?”

“…Why did you lure me here?”

The man had stopped directly beneath the gate.

It was the place with more monsters than anywhere else. Even now, monsters continued to gather there without stopping.

Seeing Ji-woo on guard, the man asked gently,

“You came here with your own two feet. What are you talking about, Ji-woo?”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Now you won’t even let me call you that.”

The man laughed lightly, then staggered for a moment.

Ji-woo instinctively reached out a hand, then pulled it back.

“How did you get hurt?”

“Why? Are you going to heal me?”

The man spoke sarcastically, even though he could barely stand because of his injuries.

“Seo Gang-woo must be really lucky. He has someone who worries about him this devotedly.”

“……”

“But you’re not exactly in a position to pity me right now, are you?”

He pointed toward the night sky.

More precisely, he pointed at the gate that was slowly growing larger.

Beneath the faint moonlight, the ominous gate continued to expand.

It looked as though it could swallow the entire world.

Looking at the man standing boldly beneath the light of the gate, Ji-woo suddenly became certain.

“You opened the dungeon gate.”

“That isn’t a dungeon gate. It’s a portal.”

“A portal…?”

At those words, Ji-woo’s gaze fixed once again on the swirling mass of light in the night sky.

‘That’s not a gate, but a portal?’

…That was impossible.

He couldn’t believe it.

He didn’t want to believe it.

The number of monsters that came from a dungeon was limited, so every battle had an end.

You kept fighting and fighting, and eventually, you won.

That simple belief was the Hunters’ only hope.

‘But if that thing is connected to another world…’

Ji-woo suddenly found it hard to breathe.

The roar of a monster passing beside him reminded him of the harsh reality.

The enemies the Awakened had to face were no longer limited to the monsters inside dungeons.

This would become a war against the entire world.

“I told you to come with me from the beginning. Then you wouldn’t have had to see this.”

The portal in the sky continued to grow.

It was as if the door to another world was slowly opening all the way.

The thought of the beings from another world that would cross over through the portal sent a chill down Ji-woo’s spine.

“What exactly do you want from me? …If I go with you now, will you close the portal?”

Ji-woo looked at the man with a small glimmer of hope.

If this was the man who had tried so desperately to take him away, then perhaps…

Even in the darkness, Ji-woo could clearly read the look in his eyes.

The man’s silhouette slowly formed a smile.

“That is tempting… but I’ve sacrificed too much because of that stubborn bastard, Seo Gang-woo.”

There was a faint trace of hatred in his voice.

But Ji-woo had no time to be disappointed by his refusal.

At the name Seo Gang-woo, his eyes sharpened.

Seeing the concern slowly appear on Ji-woo’s face, the man clicked his tongue.

“I’m a little hurt. Isn’t this a bit too much favoritism?”

“Where is Gang-woo right now?”

Instead of answering, he pointed toward the sky once again.

The enormous portal in the night sky.

That was his answer.

The moment Ji-woo understood what he meant, he felt as though he couldn’t breathe.

“Didn’t you notice that the number of monsters falling from up there has been decreasing?”

In other words, someone had entered the portal and was stopping the monsters that were trying to cross into this world.

And that someone was probably…

Seeing Ji-woo’s face turn pale, the man looked satisfied.

“You know how to close the portal, too, don’t you, Do Ji-woo?”

Unlike a gate, which would not disappear until the dungeon was cleared, a portal was a semi-permanent passage that could be destroyed with even a small amount of force.

If they had known that the thing in the sky was a portal rather than a gate, everyone would have chosen to find a way to destroy it instead of evacuating.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I’ve already accomplished everything I came here to do.”

“Your purpose…?”

So opening the portal in the sky wasn’t his only purpose?

Ji-woo looked up at the man.

He rubbed between his eyebrows.

“Ah, this is bad. Why do I keep going soft? Is it because I copied his appearance that I’m starting to resemble Seo Gang-woo on the inside, too?”

“…Tell me. Please.”

Ji-woo desperately asked, hiding his trembling hands behind his back.

Whether the man was becoming soft-hearted as he said, or whether it was simply the arrogance of someone who had already won, it didn’t matter.

Ji-woo had to use whatever he could.

Fortunately, perhaps because his plan had worked, the man whispered as though revealing a secret.

“You know all those people you risked your lives to save?”

Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered in Yeouido.

Tens of thousands must have died, but some had survived.

They had safely evacuated through the portal created by Ji-woo’s younger brother, Hee-sung.

But…

“Do you really think all of them are ‘real’ people?”

“What?”

“Have you ever thought that something could have slipped in among them?”

Ji-woo doubted his own ears.

A chill crawled up his back.

There was no better situation for hiding something than a disaster that struck without warning.

An uncountable number of people had gone missing in Yeouido that day.

With monsters involved, even identifying the bodies afterward would be difficult.

‘What if Doppelgängers appeared here?’

The chaos of the disaster would provide them with the perfect hiding place.

The Doppelgängers would pretend to be people who had luckily survived, then steal the lives of the dead and live in their place.

Taking the appearance of someone who had died here, they could go anywhere, at any time.

“There are fewer than I originally planned, but… it’s not bad. We can gradually increase their numbers.”

“What are you planning to do by increasing the number of Doppelgängers? If you’re trying to conquer the world…”

“If that were all, I wouldn’t have gone through this much trouble.”

The man kicked the debris on the ground with the toe of his shoe.

He looked around at the ruined scenery and quietly spoke.

“Isn’t it unfair? There’s no real difference between our side and this side. But just because we were a little unlucky, we had to lose everything.”

There was a trace of loneliness in his voice, but Ji-woo scoffed.

He didn’t know why the world the man had come from had been destroyed.

But surely that wasn’t the fault of the people living in this world.

“So what? You’re upset about it, so you want everyone to go down together?”

“Just sharing the good things. Together, like good friends.”

The man smiled warmly and added,

“Watch closely. See how this world changes.”

 

 

****

 

 

 

‘The portal won’t close until everything from that land crosses over. The choice is yours.’

The cursed words echoed in Ji-woo’s ears.

The man disappeared after leaving him with those final words.

There was no reason to chase after him.

Even if Ji-woo tried to fight him, he didn’t think he could overpower him.

After catching his breath, Ji-woo took out his communicator.

When he switched to the right channel, he could hear the Hunters’ communications.

[We can’t hold out any longer. Stop the search immediately and come back!]

[Holding the main sector comes first! If B-1 breaks through, it’s all over!]

The Hunters guarding B-1 were shouting desperately.

The monsters had sensed the large concentration of living beings and were gathering toward B-1, where the evacuation route was located.

The situation was so desperate that they needed to call back the Hunters who had gone into the center of Yeouido to search.

“Hunter Lee Yeon-woo, are you there?”

[Hunter Do Ji-woo?! Where on earth have you been all this time?]

She sounded extremely worried about Ji-woo.

His communicator had been silent for so long that she probably thought the monsters had gotten him.

Ji-woo was about to answer when Shin Woo-hyuk’s voice came through first.

[Where are you?]

“I’m… at Yeouido Station.”

[I’ll come to you right away. Can you hold out on your own until we join up?]