I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 181 181: ROOFTOP.

(We'll do this right this time.)

Si Hon then picked Suha and Han both up.

One arm under Suha, one arm under Han, and suddenly he was carrying both of them like some exhausted but functional pack mule moving through the wreckage of a first floor that was rapidly becoming less of a floor and more of a suggestion.

Suha immediately grabbed his collar with both fists and looked around at the chaos with bright curious eyes like this was a theme park ride she hadn't been warned about but was enjoying anyway.

"(≧▽≦) Woah!! Everything is shaking!!" Han, on the other side, just pressed his face against Si Hon's shoulder and sniffled quietly, one hand still gripping the fabric of his shirt like he had decided he was staying here and that was it.

The fire had started three rooms down from where they'd been.

Not from the dragon— not yet. Somewhere in the first floor in a science lab there was a gas line running along the back wall, and when the building shook the first time from the dragon forcing its way through the upper floors, the pressure had cracked a junction point that nobody had ever thought to reinforce because nobody had ever designed this school with the expectation that a dragon would one day use it as a climbing frame.

The gas had found the pilot light on the demonstration burner that the teacher had left running before evacuating, and from there it had moved fast and without any particular interest in being stopped.

By the time the smell reached the corridor it was already too late for the rooms nearest to it, fire crawling outward through the shared wall in lazy orange lines while the sprinkler system overhead tried its best and achieved almost nothing.

That was why the first floor smelled like burning plastic and something chemical underneath it.

That was why every exit on the left side of the corridor was already compromised.

Si Hon had known this was coming and moved right anyway, which was why they were still alive and moving upward instead of trapped and not.

(I was so lucky I read that book fully detailed.) He thought to himself as they kept running.

"Stairs," he said, to no one in particular, and started going up.

The second floor arrived with the particular chaos that the second floor always had in this loop— students everywhere, moving in every direction at once like some group of ants who's colony got disturbed.

Some heading down. Some frozen against walls. Someone sitting on the floor in the middle of the stairwell landing for reasons that were unclear and unhelpful to everyone trying to get past them.

The building shuddered again mid floor, deep and rolling, and Si Hon stumbled— not badly, just enough that his shoulder hit the wall and his grip on the kids tightened automatically.

Then Jisoo grabbed him.

Specifically— she grabbed his hair.

Both hands. A full fistful of it from the back of his head, yanking him sideways and back upright before he could finish stumbling, which was functionally effective and also genuinely unpleasant in a very specific way.

Si Hon straightened up.

Looked at her.

"Out of everything," he said, with the flat controlled energy of a man choosing his words carefully because the children were present. "Why the f— why my HAIR."

Jisoo let go. She was already laughing— not politely, not quietly, shoulders shaking, the expression of someone who had found something genuinely funny in the middle of an active disaster and had zero intention of apologizing for it. "It was the nearest thing," she said, completely unapologetic.

"My collar was right there."

"Hair was closer."

"That's not—" He stopped.

The building shuddered again. "We're moving," he said instead, and kept going up.

Suha watched this entire exchange with great interest from her position tucked under his arm. "(≧▽≦)" she said.

Third floor.

The difference between the second and third floor was the difference between controlled panic and structural failure.

Up here the dragon's presence was visible in everything— doors hanging off hinges from the pressure changes when it had forced its way through the upper section of the building, cracks running floor to ceiling across the corridor walls in branching lines like something had tried to split the building apart from the inside.

One classroom door on the left was simply gone, the frame still standing but the door itself somewhere inside the room in pieces.

Rubble scattered across the floor in chunks ranging from dust to pieces of ceiling tile large enough to trip over.

Papers drifting through smoke hazed air. Someone's phone lying face up against the baseboard, screen still lit, notifications still coming in from a world outside that had no idea any of this was happening.

Si Hon stepped over a chunk of fallen concrete and kept moving.

The rooftop door appeared at the end, slightly bent from the pressure but still operable, and he hit it with his shoulder and pushed through into—

Wind.

Cold and immediate and carrying rain in it, not falling yet but present in the air, that particular smell of water and ozone that meant the sky had already made its decision and was just waiting to follow through.

Si Hon stepped out onto the rooftop and looked up instinctively, the way he always did, and the sky above them was wrong in the specific way it had been every loop— heavy and dark, clouds pressed low and moving fast, and every few seconds the interior of the clouds lit up from inside with the particular cold light of lightning that hadn't found its way to the ground yet.

Like the sky was building toward something. Like everything was building toward something.

Then the dragon moved overhead and the scale of it reset in his chest the way it always did regardless of how many times he'd seen it.

Aeloria was already in the middle of the rooftop.