Chapter Text
The Church of the Luminous Unknown did not pretend to be humble. It adorned itself in sanctity like a spectacle.
Everything about it was ostentatious. Artificial light spilled through stained glass in slow, heavy slants; a stage set rather than sunlight. Gilded flower garlands lined the arches, etched over with hundreds of unintelligible glyphs.
A chandelier hung above—sharp glass teeth, silent and watching.
The air was thick with something like reverence—or rot.
Choi knew the weight of wealth when he saw it, and he recognized theft when it masqueraded as donation. He had seen the ledgers. He had followed the trails of funding like veins, watched them pulse toward offshore shelters and shell companies bloated with corruption.
The Church was a carcass, animated by belief and bribes alike. He glanced at the vaulted ceilings, the engraved doors, the relics encased in pearl-shell glass—everything expensive, everything immaculate.
Nothing about this was subtle. It was the aftermath of business dealt in belief.
Everything was soft-edged and quiet and slow, like the world inside this place ran just a second behind the one outside.
Choi stood beneath an arch of pale stone and he wanted, so badly, to smoke. The ghost of a cigarette hung behind his teeth, weightless and cruel; his fingers curled instinctively, as if around a carton that no longer lived in his coat.
He had not carried one in months.
He’d promised Jaekwan he’d quit—not a vow, not really; just one of those petty arguments between missions, when survival made them sharp and stubborn and too alive.
Jaekwan had wrinkled his nose in that way he always did when pretending he wasn’t worried, saying, you’re going to die early, senior and if you do, I’ll drag your ghost back, see if I don’t.
Choi had laughed, then. He’d thought there was time. He’d touched Jaekwan’s wrist and said, fine, Jaekwan-ie. I’ll try. Happy now?
And then—Jaekwan had died first.
The irony tasted like ash. Choi had not smoked since.
Still, when he breathed too deeply, something inside him stung. A phantom bloom of fire in his ribs, like regret left too long unspoken. He wondered if the tar was still there—bitter, black, nestled beneath the cage of his chest like a grudge. Maybe it coats the lining of his lungs like a resentment; maybe it clung to the soft inner walls of him, slick and ruinous, a slow poison turned relic. Maybe it kept him full of all the things he hadn’t managed to say.
Maybe it remembered him.
The urge wrapped around him like fog—familiar, insidious. He imagined it often: the click of a lighter, the flare of orange, the first drag splitting him open with that familiar ache.
He missed that pain. It was honest, at least. Something earned. Something deserved.
At least it had a name.
But the carton was gone. The lighter was gone. Jaekwan was gone.
His pockets stayed empty.
He wondered, sometimes, if Jaekwan would’ve laughed—whether he’d sigh and say finally, I knew you could do it, or just give him that look, the one with the small smile tucked into the corner of his mouth like a secret Choi was never deserving to hold onto.
Choi had only kept his word, after all, when there was no one left to hold him to it.
Maybe this was what it meant to miss someone: to burn forever, and never light the match.
They had thought he’d snapped.
After Jaekwan’s death—after the report had come back, incomplete and cold, littered with phrases like unknown variables and declared deceased—they had started looking at him differently.
Everyone had known who had trained Bronze; the senior had called him junior with half a smirk and a hand on the shoulder.
Some had tried to be subtle. Others hadn’t bothered.
A few had avoided him altogether, as if grief were a contagion—something that might spread if they stood too close.
Choi hadn’t blamed them. But he hadn’t snapped. Not yet, at least.
He had known what it looked like: the sleepless, dazed stare; the sharpness in his voice when questions came too slow; the way he kept reopening the file like something in it might’ve changed if he read it enough.
But he hadn’t lost control—not really.
He had known worse ends. He had spent over a decade on the Bureau’s payroll; he had learned the shape of loss the way some people learned songs—by heart, by repetition, by ruin.
Jaekwan hadn’t been the first. And he wouldn’t be the last.
The job tore through good people with no regard for rank, timing, or who loved the world the most.
Still—Jaekwan had been different. Not just his junior, not just someone he’d trained; but something closer.
He had been the youngest. The one Choi had known the longest.
It hadn’t just been his death—it had been the absurdity of it.
A mission they had flagged as routine. The same cassettes they had recycled before. A location even Choi himself had passed through, once, without incident.
Nothing that should have warranted death.
And Choi hadn’t been there for it. That was the part that gnawed at him: that Jaekwan had died in some lodge too high in the air, with no backup, no partner, no voice in his ear.
That his last words—if there had been any—had disappeared into distortion.
That someone else had walked out of that building.
Someone else had survived.
And that someone hadn’t been Jaekwan.
Choi still remembered.
He remembered the call, crackling and faint, carried down the mountainside on weak signal and weaker breath; Jaekwan’s voice, too polite for panic but too thin to hide it, asking quietly—Senior, can you help me?
A man who had followed upper management’s orders to the letter, even when they’d asked for the impossible—how much must he have suffered, alone, to reach out like that? How long must he have stood in the cold, deliberating whether to swallow his pride before dialing the number he always diligently memorized?
And Choi—Choi had felt guilty then, and still guiltier now; not just for what he hadn’t done, but for how little he’d known.
He had assumed Jaekwan would be waiting.
Choi had stood at the base of the mountain with his coat unbuttoned and his gloves half-on, staring up into the mist; and the list of things he wanted to do for his junior had only grown longer with each passing minute. A tight hug, comfort and consolation, visit Elder, go to the hot springs—he had mused on it idly with a smile, imagining it all as he waited.
But the path stayed empty.
He doesn’t like to recall what came next; the blur between breath and motion; the way his voice cracked through the comms, asking for answers no one could give.
He doesn’t like to remember the sound of his own footsteps—how they lost their rhythm, how they forgot what ground was; how the trees didn’t blur fast enough as he ran.
He doesn’t like to recall the wind, the pervasive craving for ash in his mouth, and the paracusia of someone calling for him.
But mostly he hates to remember the silence; the kind that buries a man alive when he realizes too late that he should’ve run sooner.
He had investigated Jaekwan’s death the only way he knew how—by vanishing into the paperwork.
There had been no one else who would have done it with the same doggedness; no one else who owed what he owed.
No case had been assigned. No task force formed. No debriefings conducted beyond the rote statements circulated the day after Jaekwan’s death: Our condolences. There was an unfortunate incident. Counseling is available.
The Bureau had always known how to speak at length while saying nothing at all.
So Choi had gone backwards. He’d pulled the names of every criminal who had received a cassette that cycle. Serious offenders only; men and women whose guilt had been confirmed by more than confession.
He had built a chart—printouts and string, red yarn pulled taut from pin to pin across his office wall like arteries across a body.
There had been Xs marked through the photos of those reported deceased; double slashes for the cases where a cassette had been recovered. It had been nearly clean—too clean.
But one had stood out.
A man. His name hadn’t mattered—a trafficking ring organizer, already dead in a car crash. Public, messy, documented. A case tied off with a bow—except for the cassette.
It had never been recovered. No trace of it in the follow-up logs, no chain of custody. The kind of gap you only noticed when you were searching for anomalies in the records.
Choi had pulled the thread. Red string tied to nothing, drifting further from the Bureau’s reach the longer he followed.
He had traced the man’s movements, his last known addresses, the accounts through which he had funneled money.
One had led to a house in a rural village—quiet, picturesque: Jisan.
A place Choi had known all too well.
Others had called it coincidence. These things happen, someone had said, methodically, during a debrief. Accusations of paranoia and conspiracy had been thrown around.
But the pattern hadn’t let Choi go.
It should’ve been a dead end.
It hadn’t been.
Jisan—once a forgotten village, now host to a ritual festival no one could quite explain.
The Church had always rooted itself in places like this; places saturated with folklore, where faith could ferment and fester to be harvested.
And somehow, they had grown bolder—no longer content to linger in the margins.
Too many disappearances. Too many overlapping anomalies in the archives.
Choi hadn’t had time to dig properly. There had been too many other active Disasters elsewhere that had demanded more intervention than a hunch.
He had filed what he could, flagged the anomaly, and moved on. But the unease had never left him.
Everything had been bleeding. All the lines had been crossing; too many disappearances unaccounted for, too many Disasters not ending cleanly.
And the coincidences had started to pile up—missing persons cases whose names had appeared in the Church’s donation rolls; Bureau sites that should’ve been sealed off, now acquired by shell corporations; high-ranking politicians with cult ties slipping into elections with too-easy smiles.
And worst of all: Disasters had been getting worse.
More and more, he had seen familiar titles appear where they shouldn’t have. Cases he had known to be resolved—suddenly marked reopened. Disasters they had completely eliminated, now reviving in new forms.
He had brought it up to the higher-ups. The response had been worse than denial—it had been tepid concern. Polite nods. Promises to “keep an eye on it.” The kind of response designed to end conversations, not begin them.
And when he had pushed harder—asking for a sanctioned investigation, a task force, a named directive—they had told him to let it go.
Resources were limited, they had said. Other cases were higher priority. There were more important things to focus on. Too many other Disasters in motion.
It hadn’t been disbelief. That would’ve been cleaner.
No—what Choi had faced was worse: they had known he was right. But it had been easier for him not to be.
The Church had too many friends in the wrong places; too many people who owed favors, prayed in private, donated under aliases.
Some of them, he had heard, had even worn Bureau uniforms.
No one had wanted an internal war—not when the Disasters kept escalating.
So Choi had volunteered. He had insisted.
He had made the request in a meeting that had gone too quiet too quickly. He had named his own precedent: Daydream, and everything he had pulled out of it. He had survived more Disasters than half the other teams combined.
If anyone could avoid disappearing inside a narrative this large—it had been him.
He had known he wasn’t being objective. But he hadn’t pretended otherwise. He had long passed the point of pretending.
They had told him no. Then maybe. Then—nothing.
Choi had taken that as permission.
The mission had never been sanctioned. Not properly. They couldn’t give him formal support.
He had started alone. He would end alone. That had been fine.
He had known what the others said about him—too unstable, too obsessed, a man on a suicide mission still pretending it was duty. A man walking toward the fire, not to save anyone—but to burn.
Maybe he had been.
He hadn’t argued. He hadn’t cared.
Choi hadn’t known what he was chasing anymore—vengeance, redemption, his name at the end instead.
But he had known one thing: if no one else would do it, he would.
Choi has worn more names than most criminals; buried more lives than the records will ever admit. His loyalties are layered; his debts, diversified. He keeps contacts far outside regulation—people who owe him favors they can't speak aloud, networks stitched together with false papers and real blood.
Choi has never been a man with clean hands. That is what made him good at what he does.
He had infiltrated the Church. It was a story lived too many times for his own good. He lied when necessary, flattered when useful, spoken more than he listened. It hadn’t been hard—none of it had ever been hard. He had done it all before.
Charm was just another tool in his arsenal; performance, a habit worn into his being.
People let him in. They always did. It was what he was best at—becoming what others wanted to see. It wasn't difficult to feign devotion; belief had been performance, and Choi had always been an excellent actor.
People liked him. They had told him things they shouldn't. They invited him into their homes, into their rituals, into the hollow warmth of collective delusion.
But it had eaten at Choi, too. They hadn’t been harmless believers—they had been people who’d begun to assimilate with Disasters not meant to coexist with humanity.
Choi studied them, befriended them, and watched them fragment beneath their own skin. Sometimes, he had hesitated. Sometimes he had wondered what any of it would cost him in the long run.
But the thought had always faded quickly—because none of it had mattered, not when the Church had been tied to Disasters that had led to the deaths of good people.
People like Jaekwan.
So he smiled and moved forward, and when he had been told he was ready, he hadn’t faltered. Access to the second circle had been earned through faith—but also through skill; through loyalty; through acts unspeakable outside their ranks.
Choi had done what needed to be done.
He doesn't speak of the scar that lives not on his throat but beneath his shirt, invisible and constant; doesn't name the ache still blooming in his chest, the grief that still permeates his bones. Jaekwan—always Jaekwan—is still threaded tight around the spine of him, a red line strung from memory to movement.
It guides him still. It still burns.
At last, they had told him he was ready. He had proven himself. He could step forward. The second circle had parted like a curtain, and the final stage had been lit. One audience; once a year; one chance to speak to the Saint.
Kim Soleum.
The Saint who had existed for only a year; and already he had become myth—a name almost more widely whispered than Ireum-nim.
The Church said he was chosen.
The voice of Ireum-nim, they said. Kim Soleum’s tongue did not belong to him and him alone. They said that he never hesitated; that no question would ever surprise him.
The Saint answered truly; he asked in return. The exchange was sacred. The price was always personal.
No one had seen the Saint unless chosen. Audiences were granted, not scheduled.
His presence had remained limited and unknown. Most believers never see him once in their lives—only hear his voice through proxy. The Saint was more symbol than body; more story than man.
The Bureau’s files had been useless: blank where they shouldn’t be. Choi had tried, had tried, and had tried again. Even backchannel contacts had turned up nothing. None of it had been redacted—just nonexistent.
So, of course, there were rumors. A black market had sprung up for portraits; oil, graphite, ink—passed around in quiet corners, admired in silence, obsessed over with devotional intensity, traded between believers like contraband.
Someone had told Choi she’d caught a glimpse of the Saint once, and had sworn she dreamt of him for three days. “He’s so—” she had begun, then stopped. “You’ll see.”
Choi hadn’t cared much, then. But as the doors swing open, something coils low in his gut; not fear, exactly.
He wanted to know how close the artists got.