Souls of Seoul: The Rise and Fall | OT7

13.

It's hard to tell whether anyone is speaking to you. Well, you know they are, but the words fail to imprint themselves. Your sole focus is the bloodied body at your feet. Mechanical actions. That's all you seem to know at the moment. Knees hitting the asphalt, heedless of the growing pool of blood around Jisoon. Arms and hands grappling for purchase, slipping in the sticky crimson soaking shirt and skin alike.

You eventually pull the young man into your lap. Your blood soaked fingers skitter over his neck in search of a pulse. Please, let there be a pulse. A pulse. Anything. Find a pulse!

Thud.

The faintest jump beneath his skin. But it's enough to latch onto hope. You count them, the labored and shallow pulses against your fingertips.

Everything finally catches up with you. Someone is shaking your shoulder, shouting in your ear. You blink a few times before tearing your eyes away from the graying face of Jisoon in your lap. Namjoon is kneeling beside you, his face inches from yours. He's panicked.

"Hey! Hey! We gotta move!" he yells. Yelling because he has to in order to be heard over the noise.

Noise?

Your eyes flick to the open door and into the back of the seamstress shop. You realize everyone else is inside. There are faint flashes of metal, glinting as they arch and catch the moonlight through the windows. The smell of blood is thicker now, you realize. There are menacing screams coming from inside. They mingle with the sounds of exertion and the meaty thudding of steel meeting flesh.

"We can't leave him, Namjoon, we can't! He's still alive!" You protest as Namjoon tries to pull you free from Jisoon's limp body. He manages to pull you up but you struggle against him. "We have to help him!"

"We'll come back for him, milae, I swear. But, right now, your clan needs you!"

As if to punctuate his desperate words you hear a pained swear echo from inside the shop. But it's more than the outcry that kicks your body into action. It's the searing heat along the red strand of the bond that makes your own blood boil. Hobi has been hurt, and you're just standing here.

You ignore the pang of guilt as you leap over Jisoon's prone body and dash into the back of the shop. Being immersed in the dark of the room helps your eyes adjust, your quaerenti senses kicking into overdrive. The other six members of your clan stand out, faint hues of their bond colors. Among them you see bodily outlines bathed in the darkest black. While Yoongi's bond is inky with the faintest kiss of gold and silver, making the strand stand out, these black figures are darker than any abyss. It's as if they suck the light from around them.

In the seconds it takes for your eyes to adjust, assessing the fray, you see something that makes your blood run cold. The closer your clan members get to the dark figures, the more their bond colors ebb away and go paler in color, like the abyss is sucking in small tendrils of their being.

Namjoon steps past you, easily slipping into the fray, and you hear the wet thud of flesh hitting the floor as he severs the arm of a figure engaged with Jungkook. The last thing you notice before bringing up your own blade and stepping into the mass of blood and bodies is the overwhelming feeling of sickly disgust and rage.

You step forward to meet the first tentoria in your line of sight. It seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. Gnashing teeth and fetid breath crowd to within just inches of your face before you can bring your sword up and take the lower jaw completely off the beast. You catch a glimpse of what once was a man, perhaps in his mid-forties with graying hair and dark eyes. The tattered rags covering his body may have, at one point, been a well-to-do business suit. The small details don't matter, they're just an infinitesimal blip on your mental radar as you rotate your wrist to complete a backward hack to sever a swinging arm at the elbow before inhuman claws can be buried into your throat.