Surviving Among the Letters

How much time had passed?

It had been several hours since the truck left the smooth asphalt road and began bouncing along the uneven dirt path.

The truck had stopped once, around midday, when the soldiers handed out small pieces of bread and cups of water.

Now, judging by the absence of sunlight filtering through the gaps in the canvas, night had fallen.

Screech!

The truck slowed to a stop.

Footsteps sounded, followed by the noise of someone climbing down.

Soon, the footsteps approached the back of the truck, and the canvas covering was pulled aside.

“Let’s see. No one dead, right?”

A soldier began pointing at each of us, counting heads.

“Ten… eleven… Hey, is that one dead or just sleeping? Hey, you!”

The soldier’s words were directed at a child slumped over, sleeping soundly on another kid’s shoulder.

The sleeping child didn’t react, so the kid providing their shoulder gave them a shake to wake them up.

“Oh, just sleeping. Twelve! All alive.”

Satisfied, the soldier pulled a radio from his belt.

“This is Spain Team. All twelve accounted for. Open the transport bay.”

Whirrrrr!

Clank!

Loud mechanical noises echoed from ahead—likely the sound of the transport bay opening.

The truck began moving again, and the incline suggested we were entering a massive aircraft.

As the truck moved further inside, the sheer scale of the plane became apparent. The doors alone were over 10 meters tall, and the vast interior stretched endlessly.

“Alright, here we go!”

The soldier climbed into the truck bed and tossed a bundle of keys onto the floor.

“Those are for your cuffs. Find the right key, unlock yourselves, and get off. Don’t even think about running—there’s nowhere to go.”

At his words, the kids scrambled for the keys, jostling and yelling.

“Give it to me!”
“Let go, you idiot!”

Amid the chaos, they began unlocking their cuffs one by one and disembarking from the truck.

Eventually, I was the only one left.

“Not getting off?”

A girl, the last to leave, turned back to look at me.

“I don’t see the point in wasting energy on stuff like this,” I replied flatly.

“If you say so…”

Knowing I couldn’t stay on the truck forever, I eventually found the key to my cuffs, unlocked them, and climbed down.

The interior of the aircraft was far more massive than I’d imagined.

The ceiling soared over three stories high, and the space was filled with military trucks just like the one I’d been on.

At this scale, it didn’t feel like a transport plane at all—it was more like a spaceship straight out of Star Wars.

Clap!

“Attention! This is the first and last time I’ll explain, so listen up.”

The soldier clapped his hands to grab everyone’s attention.

“We’re heading to Paradise. We’re near the Spanish border now, so it’ll take about 13 hours. There’s plenty of space, so sleep if you want. Don’t fight with the others—there are plenty more kids like you on board. If anyone gets hurt, you won’t die peacefully, so remember that. You’ll get water and bread once during the trip, so don’t whine. That’s all.”

With that, the soldier turned and disappeared through a sliding automatic door—one that looked so high-tech it could have been pulled straight from Star Wars.

“Hey… what are we going to do now?”

A voice interrupted my thoughts.

I turned to see the girl from earlier, the one who had spoken to me on the truck.

“What do you think? Just conserve energy and sleep,” I replied without much interest.

“Let’s look around. There might be something useful,” she said, grabbing my hand and pulling me along before I could protest.

Reluctantly, I followed her.

“This plane is enormous. Where do you think they’re taking us?”

The girl marveled at the size of the transport aircraft as we wandered through its interior.

It wasn’t an unreasonable question. The novel’s setting was the 2020s, and even with the rapid technological advancements spurred by the emergence of Gates, this kind of aircraft wasn’t something easily operable.

“No idea. They said we’re going to Paradise, so we’ll probably just end up as lab rats and die there, I guess.”

Not everyone sent to Paradise became test subjects, but I already knew what awaited us.

The protagonist and their team would one day stumble upon records in an abandoned lab in Paradise—records detailing the fates of the children sent there.

What kind of experiments were conducted here?

While digging through the experimental records, the protagonist stumbled upon a name that felt disturbingly familiar:

[──Rin Casa, Age: 12, Status: Deceased, Cause of Death: Cardiac arrest due to convulsions during X-02 drug injection.]

The two smudged characters at the beginning of the name were likely “Ellie.”

Given that the protagonist’s surname was also Casa and the age matched, it became clear: this test subject was his younger sister.

This realization drove the protagonist to hunt down every researcher involved and kill them all.

“What… what do we do now? Are we all going to die?”

“I’m not dying.”

“…Why not?”

“Because I’ll make sure I don’t.”

I wasn’t about to let myself be used as a test subject and die at the hands of the mad scientists in Paradise.

There had to be a way to survive.

No matter what it took, I would find a way back home.

“Right! Then I’ll survive too! Uh… my name’s Remy Traus. What’s yours?”

Remy, a short-haired girl with bright blue hair, declared her determination to survive as well. She extended her hand to me, introducing herself, clearly expecting me to do the same.

I had no reason to be cold to someone trying to be friendly, so I opened my mouth to reply.

“…”

“What? Don’t want to tell me?”

“No… I don’t know my name.”

The problem was, I genuinely didn’t know the name of the body I was inhabiting.

Of course, I remembered my real name before I possessed this body, but there was no way I could give a Korean name while in the body of a Spanish girl sold into this hell.

“Hm… then I’ll name you! Let’s see… your hair is super white, so how about ‘Blanco’?”

Blanco—it was the Spanish word for “white.” If this were Korea, it would be akin to naming someone “Whitey” because of their snowy hair.

It wasn’t a bad name.

“Alright.”

“Great! Blanco it is! Let’s look around; maybe we’ll find something useful!”

With that, the two of us began wandering around the massive transport plane.

Despite our exploration, we found nothing useful.

Of course, that was to be expected.

This place wasn’t meant for anything but transporting kids like us. Anything of value had likely been stripped away long ago.

As we wandered, Remy pointed to a wall.

“Look! A map!”

We approached to find a torn world map pinned to the wall.

“This is my first time seeing a world map. It’s amazing… but why is it ripped?”

“They probably tore it down in a rush and just left it like this.”

“That big thing in the center must be the Siberian Gate. It’s massive…”

The map of this world, while somewhat similar to reality, was also strikingly different.

The most noticeable feature was the Siberian Gate, which had swallowed much of Russia, and the Great Siberian Wall built to contain it.

Another major difference was the continued existence of the Soviet Union, which had somehow managed to maintain its structure despite the chaos.

The novel I had been reincarnated into, The Idealistic Hero in Paradise, depicted a world teetering on the edge of apocalypse.

“Why do Gates in hunter stories always appear in cities?”

“And why are there Gates hidden deep in the wilderness?”

The author had questioned these clichés and imagined a world where Gates appeared randomly.

During what this world called the Great War (since World War II never occurred here), a mysterious artifact known as the Aeras Crystal, which had been protecting Earth from other dimensions, was destroyed in the chaos.

That was when Gates began to appear.

Earth was vast, and the random appearance of Gates made it nearly impossible for humanity to detect them all.

How could anyone notice a Gate opening in the endless wilderness of Siberia?

Left unchecked, these Gates began to spill monsters into the world through Gate Breaks.

Not only that, but Gates absorbed Earth’s life energy, growing larger and more powerful over time.

By the time humanity became aware of them, it was already too late.

The Siberian Gate had grown into a colossal threat, and another Gate had opened beneath the Pacific Ocean.

The Soviet Union lost most of its territory, retreating westward, while much of Asia fell into ruin.

The Pacific Gate unleashed aquatic monsters, taking control of the oceans and severing the Old World from the New.

Asia faced endless battles against waves of monsters, while Europe, still recovering from the Great War, struggled to defend itself from the sporadic emergence of Gates.

Yet, even in the depths of despair, hope emerged.

Magicians, who had been persecuted and forced into hiding, came forward during the Great War.

Whether due to the destruction of the Aeras Crystal or the influence of the Gates, humanity gained the ability to wield magic without the artifact.

Martial artists surpassed their limits, and individuals began awakening supernatural abilities.

Thus began humanity’s war against the Gates—a battle that had continued for nearly a century.

The map I now saw reflected the scars of that struggle.

“Wow, Blanco! You’re surprisingly smart!”

After I summarized this history for Remy, she stared at me with wide-eyed amazement.

“I thought you were just an airhead who forgot their own name, but I guess you really didn’t know it, huh?”

Her misunderstanding wasn’t unreasonable, but I let it slide as she continued examining the map.

Eventually, Remy pointed to a spot on the map.

“Is this Paradise? Is this where we’re going?”

“Yeah.”

The place she pointed to was a region near the Korean Peninsula—Paradise.

Originally named with the hope that humanity might find a safe haven, Paradise had become a land of darkness.

Scientists from all over the world had gathered there in the name of progress, but it also became a haven for mad scientists.

And it was to this very place that we were being sold.

Staring at the map, the reality of my situation began to sink in.

The lines of text the author had casually written now loomed before me as a living hell.