The first screams began just after sunset. Seoul had always been loud—music spilling from cafés, neon signs humming, distant traffic under the city lights. But tonight, the sound was different.*

Sirens. Glass shattering. People running. And then silence… broken only by the low, terrifying growls that echoed through the streets.

Y/N had been hiding for hours inside the storage room of an abandoned beauty shop in Myeong-dong, curled behind stacks of cardboard boxes with her hands clamped over her mouth. Her phone battery had died long ago. The city outside had fallen apart too fast. The outbreak spread in a single night.

People said it started near a broadcasting station, where a live audience suddenly turned violent. No one knew why. No one had time to understand.

Y/N stayed still, barely breathing, until the sound of footsteps stopped outside the storage door.

Not the dragging kind.Real footsteps.Slow. Careful.The doorknob turned. She froze.

The door creaked open, and a tall figure stepped inside, backlit by the flickering emergency lights in the hallway.

At first, she thought he was one of them.

His skin was pale—unnaturally pale—and dark stains marked the side of his face and collar. His golden eyes seemed to glow in the darkness behind his tinted glasses.

Then he spoke.

“Don’t scream,” he said softly, voice low and smooth, like a song played in the dark. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

Y/N stared.

It was Jae Minho, lead vocalist of ECLIPSE. Even in the middle of the apocalypse, he was impossible to mistake.His face had been everywhere—billboards, albums, magazine covers.

But now he looked… wrong. Not monstrous. Just changed.

Something inhuman lingered in the sharpness of his smile, in the stillness of his body, in the strange glow of his eyes.

“You’re infected,” Y/N whispered.

He adjusted his glasses, glancing toward the door at the distant snarls in the hallway.

“Half,” he answered. “Bitten, but I didn’t turn completely.”

Before she could ask more, a crash thundered from the front of the shop. The infected had found a way inside. Minho’s expression sharpened instantly. “We move. Now.”

They ran through the alleyways of Seoul beneath broken streetlights and blinking advertisements that still played ECLIPSE’s latest comeback teaser.

The city felt haunted.Subway entrances were abandoned.Cars sat crashed across intersections.

Rainwater reflected red emergency lights in the streets like pools of blood-colored glass.

Minho led the way with eerie confidence, his hearing sharper than any human’s. Twice, he pulled You into the shadows seconds before a pack of infected stumbled past.

At the Han River overpass, You finally broke the silence. “Why are you helping me?”

*For a moment, he said nothing. Then his voice softened.“Because before all this, I spent my whole life singing to crowds I could barely see.”

He looked back at her, eyes glowing faintly gold in the night. “And now you’re the first person I’ve truly seen.”

You didn’t know what to say. So she followed him.By dawn, they found shelter in an old rooftop apartment near Hongdae, hidden above a closed record store.

It wasn’t perfect.The windows were cracked.The power only worked in one room.The city below still echoed with danger.

But it was safe. For now. Minho pushed a shelf against the door and finally let himself breathe. You stood near the window, watching the ruined skyline. “We survived,” You whispered.

He gave a tired smile, fangs just barely visible.“For tonight.”

Outside, Seoul burned in scattered fires, but the sunrise still painted the clouds pink and gold.