I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 175 175: What happened?

The chaos of students had thinned out up here, most of them having already pushed toward the lower exits, which left the corridor quieter than it should have been given that a dragon was actively involved in the day's events.

Quieter, and worse.

Because the ones who hadn't made it out were still here.

Si Hon's eyes moved across the hallway without slowing his pace.

A desk knocked into the corridor from a classroom doorway. A bag split open, its contents scattered across the tile.

Someone's phone still lit up against the floor with three missed calls on the screen from a contact saved as 엄마.

And the people— the ones still on the floor, the ones who weren't going to make it to the stairwell under their own power.

A girl with her back against the lockers pressing both hands against her side, breathing in shallow uneven pulls.

A boy dragging himself forward with his arms, the lower half of his body at an angle that meant something had gone very wrong with his spine, leaving a dark smear across the tile behind him.

Someone else face down near the classroom door, not moving, not making any sound at all.

Si Hon walked past all of it.

His pace didn't change.

His eyes moved across each person and moved on, cataloguing without stopping, and his expression stayed exactly where it was— flat, tired, present but not reacting.

Like he was walking through a scene he had already processed the emotional weight of somewhere private and had nothing left to show on the surface.

Jisoo watched him from the side.

"Woah," she said, in the specific tone of someone genuinely curious rather than accusing. "You're actually pretty unique. You don't even try to help?"

Si Hon didn't look at her. "Even if I did, they're going to die soon anyway."

"I see," Jisoo said simply.

But her thoughts moved differently. (...(⌐■-■) Is this guy a loner? Or just... someone who's seen enough of this thing that helping feels pointless? Or is it something else entirely— some kind of talent for separating himself from things that would break other people?) She filed it next to everything else she was collecting about him and kept walking.

The stairwell door opened under Si Hon's hand and they went up.

The rooftop hit them with wind and smoke and the particular quality of open sky that felt wrong above a building currently being destroyed from the inside.

And directly across the rooftop— the dragon. alive. Still moving. Its massive body shifting against the far edge of the school while Aeloria stood in the center of the rooftop sending ice formation after ice formation toward its scales with the focused, slightly desperate energy of someone who had been doing this alone for too long.

Some were helping, wind, boulder throw, fireball, etc but it won't even scratch the dragon.

Then Mihu spotted them the moment they came through the door.

She was across the rooftop in seconds, green hair wild from the wind, face carrying the specific expression of someone who had been holding themselves together through pure willpower and was very close to the end of it.

"S-Si Hon!!" Her voice cracked slightly on the second syllable. "H-help us— I… I don't think we can kill it, we need more people, Aeloria's been going since—"

"Where's Seong," Si Hon said. "And the twins."

Mihu stopped.

Her expression shifted.

"I... I thought they were with you? They're not up here, I assumed—"

Si Hon was already moving back toward the stairwell door.

Jisoo followed without being asked.

They went down fast— third floor, nothing. The hallway empty except for debris and the distant sound of the dragon above them shifting weight across the roof.

Second floor, still nothing. The smoke was thicker here, rolling in uneven clouds through the corridor from somewhere below, and the structural damage was worse— entire sections of wall caved inward, the floor buckled in one spot where something heavy had come down from above.

Si Hon moved through all of it without slowing, his eyes sweeping every classroom doorway they passed.

First floor.

The heat hit them before the smoke cleared enough to see properly.

Fire. Not everywhere, but enough— orange light flickering through the cracked doorways of two classrooms on the left, the smell of burning plastic and something worse underneath it, heat pressing against exposed skin from several meters away.

And underneath all of it—

Crying.

Si Hon's head snapped toward it immediately.

[Classroom C-2]

Door hanging half off its frame from the impact damage, fire crawling up the far wall in lazy uneven lines.

They pushed through the doorway together and the heat intensified instantly, pressing against their faces while smoke stung at their eyes.

Han sat on the floor in the center of the room.

Small. Curled slightly inward. Both hands pressed flat against the floor in front of him while he cried with the particular quality of a child whose body had run out of ways to process what it was feeling and had defaulted to something raw and uncontrolled.

He didn't look up immediately when they came in.

He was staring at the debris pile against the far wall— a collapsed section of ceiling, concrete slabs and twisted rebar and broken desk fragments piled against each other in a heap that reached halfway up the wall.

Si Hon crossed the room fast and dropped down beside him, hands on Han's shoulders. "Han. Han, look at me."

Han looked up.

His face was a mess— tear tracks cutting through concrete dust, eyes swollen, bottom lip trembling badly. He lifted one arm and pointed at the debris pile with a shaking finger.

"M-mom," he managed. His voice broke completely on the word. "And Suha. They're— dad, they're in there—"

Si Hon was already up.

He moved to the debris pile and started lifting— not carefully, not methodically, just pulling pieces away with both hands as fast as he could manage, chunks of concrete scraping against his palms, rebar grinding against the floor as he dragged it aside.

Piece by piece, piece by piece.