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It’s too easy to kill the man that he used to be.
For all the B squad leader’s arrogance, he falls easily to a real wolf. His bones snap under J3’s teeth. The taste of his blood on J3’s tongue is far too familiar.
The man staggers, broken, and sinks to the ground.
All that pride for nothing.
Behind him, Kim Soleum is screaming. He scrambles to the floor next to the squad leader who will soon be a corpse, hands shaking as he frantically tries to figure out how to save him. It makes for a strange image to see—J3’s dearest friend, trying to save the man he used to be.
Would J3’s life have changed if he’d known Kim Soleum back then…?
The thought cuts off before it’s even fully formed. It doesn’t matter.
What ifs have never mattered to him.
There is only one way J3’s story was meant to end, and that’s for him to be standing here, more beast than human, the blood of his past on his tongue.
“You don’t need to worry,” he says softly, to Kim Soleum’s panicked form. “It… it’ll be alright.”
Soleum frantic mumbling doesn’t make any sense. He’s losing his mind, trying to stop the blood pouring from the gash in the squad leader’s neck.
J3 knows why he’s so afraid.
It isn’t a good idea to mess around like this in a ghost story. Destroying something of the past like this is a risk. The dead in Sekwang go back to their own worlds, so there’s no telling that the B squad leader won’t have ended up back in theirs—but what Soleum doesn’t seem to realize is that the B squad leader is already dead there.
He’s dead and lost inside of J3’s soul, in a place where he can never be real again.
So it isn’t a risk at all. The squad leader can’t go back to existing in a world that he’s never been in. The corpse at his feet will stay a corpse, as he should.
This proud man, who, despite seeing his future right in front of him, was still foolish enough to think there was a way out of it.
The solutions he’d come up with were ridiculous.
To deny the corruption, to store items to avoid it, to run, to run, to run—
A fool.
The squad leader had always been a fool.
“Roe deer-ssi,” he says quietly. “You… shouldn’t feel bad for him.”
Kim Soleum looks broken.
He’s known this corpse for a few hours at most, and he’s already mourning him.
“He was you,” Soleum manages to say.
“Yes,” J3 agrees. “He is me.”
“You—you killed him.”
“It’s alright,” J3 says again. “It’ll be okay.”
He reaches out to pat Kim Soleum’s head, as he’s seen his teammates often do, but is startled by the sight of blood left on the fingertips that used to be claws.
He retracts his hand quietly.
“Why?” Kim Soleum asks at last, voice cracked.
“I know him,” J3 says. “I know… me. He would have tried to leave us here.”
Soleum shakes his head.
He can’t seem to give up on this corpse that can’t be saved.
For a moment, J3 sees something of the B squad leader in him. The inability to take a step back.
The refusal to understand that there is no way out but forward.
Kim Soleum is J3’s dearest friend, but he has never been able to accept what his life has turned out to be. He’s always searching for another way, for something that’s been overlooked, for any method to bend the inevitable future into one that he can stomach being in.
J3 doesn’t hold it against him. He can’t, when he was the same when he was younger.
But the J3 that was younger lies dead on the floor, killed by his own hands, and he doesn’t want Kim Soleum to end up the same way.
He’s already too close to the edge.
More creature than human, more darkness than real. Kim Soleum hasn’t been the same, not since he got his wish ticket and bid J3 farewell, telling him that they’d never see each other again.
There are brief moments where he appears to be the man he was once—like now, in the depths of this darkness, wearing a body that might not even be his own. He insists that he keeps returning to Sekwang to save the people he cares for, to complete his mission with the director—but J3 knows that he also just wants to be human.
Sekwang lets him be human.
Kim Soleum doesn’t yet know how to not be.
Just like the B squad leader. He sees his own future, can’t stomach it, and tries to run, and run, and run.
But J3 can’t hold it against him.
Kim Soleum is still young.
He just hopes that he learns one day that he can’t run from himself, before the person that he truly is tries to leave him for dead.
He reaches out again, to pat Kim Soleum on the head, and once again is startled by the sight of blood on his hands.
He retracts his fingers once more.
“Roe deer-ssi,” he starts quietly. “Do you… think I’m a tragedy?”
Kim Soleum looks up, alarmed.
He looks a mess, the squad leader’s blood on his own hands. On his clothes. He looks distressed, mourning a part of J3 that J3 isn’t mourning himself.
“What?”
“Do you think… that man should have lived longer?”
“I—yes? What? I—”
“If he’d lived longer,” J3 says, “I would have lived less. Do you… still think he should have lived longer?”
Kim Soleum falls silent.
“He’s not—” he tries to say. “You’re not—you’re the same person. You’re the same person.”
J3 nods. “Yes. So why are you crying?”
“I—”
“I’m still here.”
“...”
“Do you… think it’s tragic? That I’m here?”
Soleum shakes his head again. He seems torn, his gentle hands fisted in the squad leader’s blood soaked suit, but twitching as if he wants to reach towards J3 as well.
“Do you think I shouldn’t have changed? I… should have stayed the way I was before?”
Soleum says nothing.
He can’t.
Because if that man had stayed, J3 wouldn’t exist, and J3 is one of Kim Soleum’s friends.
Soleum cares about him enough to not wish that J3 was less of a beast. He knows that J3 is J3 and that’s enough for him.
“I wouldn’t think that,” Soleum says at last, voice cracked.
J3 gives in to the urge at last and pets Soleum’s head with his bloodied fingers. Soleum’s hair is rough, unkempt, almost as bad as J3’s own.
“I’m still me,” J3 says. “Even with that man gone. Roe deer-ssi… it’s the same for you.”
“What?”
“When we leave,” J3 says. “And this body… is your past. You’re still you.”
Soleum shakes his head.
He still can’t accept it.
His wet, bloodied hair beneath J3’s fingertips.
“Whatever you turn into…” J3 continues. “It’s what you are.”
Because Soleum needs to understand this. He has to, before he loses himself the way the B squad leader tried to, fighting fate to try to turn into something that he never was.
The B squad leader had never not been a beast.
And Kim Soleum, perhaps, had never been human.
Fighting to be one, resenting the him that wasn’t one—
It would only end with the creature that Kim Soleum tried not to be consuming him and leaving him for dead.
J3 looks at the corpse of the B squad leader and feels nothing at all.
The corpse that is his own.
The face that is his own.
The man so convinced that he was human that he thought he could outrun being a beast.
Kim Soleum should never be in that position.
He should never have to be killed by his own hands—the hands that should have loved him the most.
“Don’t mourn him,” J3 says. He levels his gaze at Kim Soleum.
The broken, empty look in his eyes.
And he says, more firmly—
“And don’t mourn yourself.”
“...”
“You aren’t dead.”
It doesn’t matter what form he’s in.
The human in front of him, barely holding himself together. The yellow mascot that had stood by J3’s side these past hours. The strange creature that J3 had carried around in a cat carrier, who communicated in smoke and unfamiliar writing.
His past, his future. It’s all been the same.
It’s all been Kim Soleum.
Whatever creature he turns out to be, the moment they wake up back in the real world—
“It’s not a tragedy,” J3 says. “It’s… you.”
Soleum’s expression crumples.
He ducks his head, hiding his face. J3 doesn’t stop patting his head.
The B squad leader’s corpse looks peaceful.
There is no need to mourn him.