Novel Bin
Ch-2 Cut of madness
Chapter 2: Cut of Madness
The mirror was cracked, fractured like the mind behind the eyes staring into it. His reflection—smeared in blood, grease, and the faint glisten of sweat—looked more like a haunted specter than a seventeen-year-old boy. Han Ji’s shirt lay in tatters around his shoulders, revealing the unnatural geometry now etched into the skin over his heart: an impossible cube, endless in its angles, fused with intricate Latin-clock faces that ticked with ghostly silence.
But now… now it ticked.
A soundless tick, more felt than heard, echoed through his ribs as his eyes locked onto the Cube. A structure of unending complexity, as if an architect had taken the concepts of time and space and folded them through origami until reality gave way. Each edge glinted with otherworldly sheen, the metallic surfaces shifting like mercury and starlight. Tiny Latin-inscribed clock faces—some digital, others analog, even sundials impossibly rendered in the Cube’s paradoxical space—interwove at points where geometry should collapse. But it held firm. It breathed.
And at its center, the largest clock—stuck at 11:43 PM.
Below it, in a glass chamber fused into the Cube’s underside, a liquid shimmered. Red and thick like fresh blood but glowing with an inner phosphorescence. 00:50. Not a percentage. Not a gauge. A timestamp.
His breath caught. The Cube had never ticked before. Not during the first five deaths.
But the bathroom… the bathroom was farther from where he usually died. It had taken longer.
“Is this what triggered it…?” he muttered, voice low and cracked. “Have I finally done something new?”
Then he felt it.
The presence.
The prickle at his neck.
The click of the silenced barrel being drawn back behind him.
Han Ji turned his head slowly, almost peacefully. His eyes, rimmed with veins, pupils contracted into pinpricks of gleaming black, locked with the masked man standing in the doorway.
The operator didn’t hesitate.
Phut.
Everything turned black.
Darkness.
But this time, the void spoke.
A voice boomed from every direction and from within him at once—vast, mechanical, and eternally calm.
“You finally noticed.”
The echo was thick and syrupy—not quite a whisper but not yet thunder. It resonated through his bones, pulling his soul taut like string over the edge of a blade.
Han Ji grinned.
And the world snapped back—
11:33 PM.
6th Death.
He shot upright behind the counter, heart pounding like a war drum. The store was quiet, the security monitor glowing faintly in the darkness. The blood was gone. His torn shirt restored. The Cube beneath his skin intact, quiet again. But he remembered.
Not just the death. The voice.
His hands trembled—not from fear, but from anticipation.
He ran.
Not away. Toward the pain. Toward the danger. The operators hadn’t expected the back door to be rigged with bleach and broken glass. One slipped. One screamed. That one got a pen through the eye socket, a sound like wet cork and cartilage.
“MOVE MOVE MOVE—HE’S LOST IT!”
But he hadn’t.
He was calculating everything. Every shadow. Every crack in their tactics.
The second died with a mop handle shoved deep into his throat, his gasps gurgling. The third didn’t hesitate—he shot Han Ji straight through the chest.
Darkness.
7th Death.
11:33 PM.
Han Ji checked the Cube immediately.
01:12.
He blinked.
“I died at 11:35…”
He grinned, teeth clenched with feverish insight. “It’s not percentage… it’s time. How long I last.”
The blood was in his mouth now, but it wasn’t his. Not yet.
This cycle, he didn’t wait. He preempted them. The moment headlights appeared in the monitor, he cut the store’s power and poured gasoline behind the counter.
They came in shouting, lights sweeping—until fire roared up their backs like a dragon uncoiling.
Two of them screamed.
He watched them burn from behind the fridge aisle, where he’d hidden with a wrench. The last operator turned on instinct, weapon ready—too slow.
The wrench cracked his jaw so hard his neck bent sideways like it snapped off a hinge.
Han Ji stood over the dying man, panting.
“I’ll kill you a hundred times. I’ll watch you forget each one.”
And then—
Bang.
The fourth, who had feigned death, shot him in the back.
Darkness.
8th Death.
This time, the Cube whispered as the darkness took him.
“Cruelty refined... clarity forged in fire.”
His eyes snapped open.
11:33 PM.
01:22.
He laughed like a man who had found a god under his skin.
This time, he didn’t hide. He sat on the counter, Cube fused in his chest, waiting.
They burst through the entrance—and he laughed.
A knife buried in one’s thigh.
A fire extinguisher to the other’s throat.
But his laugh drew attention, and he welcomed the shots. One to the shoulder. Two to the chest.
He fell backward, the Cube glowing brighter.
Darkness.
9th Death.
He set a trap with shattered glass, marbles, and oil. As they stumbled, he emerged from a crawlspace, wearing a mask he made from a paper bag with a smile drawn in blood.
They screamed. One dropped his gun. Han Ji caught it. Used it.
But a sniper from outside caught his forehead.
Darkness.
10th Death.
Every operator who entered from that point on reported the same thing:
“He’s not scared. He’s enjoying this.”
“I shot him in the chest—he thanked me.”
“He bled out with a smile.”
“Sir… he’s predicting us.”
Fear crept into their comms, into their coordinated movements. Their leader’s voice grew clipped.
Han Ji could hear it.
He studied it.
One cycle he died on purpose—jumped off the roof before they could shoot him.
Testing.
Another, he stabbed himself in the stomach in the breakroom, watching the Cube fill. Verifying.
Another, he smiled as he was torn apart by gunfire, just to see if the voice would return.
It always did.
“Endurance earns audience.”
The image of his sister sleeping peacefully at home, listened, he listened—and remembered the warmth of her breath against his arm when she used to cling to him during storms. The way she whispered his name like it anchored her to the world. That was before the men came. Before the resets. Before he started counting kills like seconds.
He would burn the world to keep her safe.
And if that meant tearing through time with blood-slick hands, so be it.
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