Sometimes, the best defense was an outright attack.
Seoyeon made up her mind and charged toward the skeletal fingers
And the moment she did, her body lifted effortlessly into the air.
She moved freely, like a snowflake carried on the wind.
Did this even need explaining? If I were holding a sword, I would have to use it.
Seoyeon gripped the sword’s hilt with both hands and raised it high.
She brought it down with all her strength,striking the joint between the skeletal fingers,
and in that instant, a flash of light burst forth. She clearly saw the skeleton flinch, its hand recoiling.
The recoil from the clash knocked Seoyeon downward as well, but she quickly reclaimed the high ground.
Once more.
Again and again, she swung the blade, driving the skeleton back.
Seoyeon delivered the final blow. A crisp metallic ring echoed as cracks spread through the bones of the skeletal fingers.
That’s it. She couldn’t stop herself from smiling, as if she’d just won a bet.
BOOOOOONG
But the ominous sound rang out again. Instead of retreating like before,
the skeletal hand paused for a split second, then sliced through the air with the quickness of a flyswatter.
Sparks flew from the friction at its fingertips, vivid and unmistakable.
In the blink of an eye, Seoyeon was slammed into the stadium floor.
Pain surged through her, rising in waves from deep within her body.
“Are you okay?!” Hyerin and Sohyun rushed over in unison.
Get back.
The words rose to the back of Seoyeon’s throat, but she couldn’t muster the strength to move even a finger.
Then the blood rushed to her head. The skeleton had lifted her upside down.
But the real problem wasn’t Seoyeon’s own predicament. It was the members’ reaction.
Starting with Chaeyeon, followed by Sullin and a few others, they grabbed hold of her as if in a tug-of-war, trying to pull her back. Their hands clung to Seoyeon’s limp arm and the broad blade of her sword,
crowded together in a desperate cluster.
You fools.
Seoyeon lamented inwardly.
From high above, the skeleton suddenly released her, then swept its hand across the stadium as if brushing off dust.
The last thing Seoyeon saw was the members scattering through the air, every single one of them.
Even the sword that had withstood the fiercest assault shattered with a sharp crack, splitting into four pieces.
You have to be okay without me.
Seoyeon’s eyes slid shut, and her consciousness faded.
A moment later…
Sullin felt as though she’d been tossed into the middle of a gray desert.
She blinked and looked around, but there was nothing of note.
Only a dim sky and rock-strewn ground. It was almost as if…
“Are we on the moon?” Kaede broke the silence.
“The moon? Then how are we breathing?” Shion cut in, eyes wide.
“No idea.” Kaede shrugged, her curly hair floating up and staying there until she reached up and pushed it back down herself.
“We all saw Seoyeon unnie with a sword,” Jiyeon said calmly. “And that huge skeleton thing, too.
Nothing about this makes sense. So us getting flung to the moon isn’t exactly the strangest part.”
True enough.
Sullin agreed silently.
The real problem was the fragment of Seoyeon’s sword clenched in her own hand.
What that implied… Sullin shoved the chunk of metal into her pocket.
She counted only six members in sight, including herself.
Were the other eighteen still back on Earth?The old sense of isolation crept back in, the feeling from her early days,
when she tried to communicate in English with nothing but hand gestures and body language to rely on.
Like being pushed to the sidelines. Like becoming an extra in someone else’s story.
While Kaede, Shion, and Jiyeon argued heatedly over whether any of this was real,
Lynn hurried over to Sohyun and leaned her head against Sohyun.
“Unnie… what do we do now?”
Faced with Lynn’s anxious question, Sohyun, unusually, had no immediate answer.
Lynn’s voice wavered into quiet sobs, and the others began pacing in circles, lost.
Then someone had to pretend they were okay.
“Stop!”
Sullin clapped her hands, drawing every eye.
“We’re going home,” she said, raising her voice and hiding the tremor in it.
She started walking without looking back. She could feel the others hesitate, then follow.
But she had no idea what came next.
When her steps began to slow, Lynn hurried up beside her and whispered.
“So-chan says you’re reliable, Sullin.”
Then I can’t stop.
Sullin clenched her teeth and kept moving,
hiding her aching legs and the fear gnawing at her just as much as anyone else’s.
Not long after, an unbelievable sight unfolded.
In the middle of the moon stood a lone bus stop, and parked in front of it,
a lunar rover that looked like something humanity might have sent up decades ago.
But what drew the eye most was a massive, oval gemstone, as large as a building.
Following the chain attached to its top with her gaze…
A colossal whale skeleton emerged in the sky.
An elongated skeleton cutting through space, writhing as if alive.
Its head was so enormous it cast a shadow over the sun, and three long fin-bones
like fingers reached all the way down to Earth.
It was unmistakably the same thing she’d seen at the stadium.
“What… is all this?” Kaede asked. Sullin, too stunned to speak, couldn’t answer.
The moment she showed a crack, all the questions she’d been holding back came flooding out.
Lynn rushed toward the lunar rover first, but her body passed straight through it,
unable to touch a thing. It felt as if she’d become a ghost.
“Are we dead?” Lynn asked, her voice trembling again.
Next, Jiyeon grabbed the sword fragment sticking out of Sullin’s pocket.
“This was Seoyeon unnie’s… What happened to her?”
As the questions came crashing down one after another, Sullin squeezed her eyes shut and covered her ears.
Think. Think, Pirada Bunraksa. There has to be a way out of this.
But the words that burst from Sullin’s throat were anything but composed.
“I don’t know!”
Silence fell.
“I don’t know! I don’t know what I’m doing, or if we can even go home…” Sullin clamped a hand over her mouth.
She stood there, tense, bracing herself.
Then Sohyun gently patted her back.
“It’s okay. If you hadn’t pushed forward, we wouldn’t even be here. We’re here because of you, Sullin.”
Sometimes, a single sentence could quiet a thousand fears at once. Sullin hugged Sohyun tightly.
“Thank you.”
Her heart settled, oddly calm.
There were things only people who weren’t the protagonist could do,
supporting everyone from behind instead of dragging them forward.
Yeah. We can do this. We’ll find a way. Not me—us.
“Um, sorry to interrupt the wholesome moment,”
Shion said, raising a finger.
“But earlier we passed straight through objects, right?
That means we can’t grab anything. Which means… we can’t eat, right?That’s actually what scares me the most. Being on the moon makes me crave puffed rice snacks.
Just the other day—”
“Let’s focus on getting home first,” Sohyun said, tapping Shion’s shoulder playfully.
Laughter finally bloomed among them again.
Thank goodness. Sullin let out a quiet sigh of relief.
After that, they began investigating more calmly.
One detail caught Sullin’s attention: they couldn’t touch the lunar rover at all,
but the absurdly large gemstone and even the bus stop felt completely solid.
“Uh… this…” Sohyun hesitated while examining the gem.
“Tell me,” Sullin said. She wanted to be someone others could lean on, the way she had leaned on members.
“It’s a cameo. Like the kind used in… lockets—”
“Rockets?!” Kaede snapped her head up, suddenly energized.
Before anyone could stop her, she sprinted forward,
leaping up and clinging to a protruding edge of the gem like a rock climber.
“Then we can go home, right? Let’s go!”
“No—uh—not rocket. Locket. Like a necklace.
Carvings like this are called cameos,” Sohyun corrected herself with an awkward smile.
Just as Sohyun had said, its sheer scale made the details hard to grasp at first,
but up close, the gem was finely and delicately crafted. At its center was a curled-up space whale surrounded by various women.
Twentyfour women were carved in solid lines,
with more women branching off in dotted outlines like souls leaving their bodies.
It looked as though they were hunting the whale or holding it back.
Is that us? Sullin leaned her head against Sohyun’s shoulder, lost in thought.
What is all this?
Meanwhile, the others seemed fixated on the idea of escaping the moon by clinging to the gem.
“But Ede kind of has a point,” Jiyeon said, bouncing lightly in place, arms outstretched to keep her balance.
“I think… I’m getting the hang of it.”
She grabbed Kaede’s arm as she spoke. And that would’ve been fine if the whale hadn’t suddenly started moving.
The same ship-horn-like sound echoed thunderously, and the gem began dragging across the lunar surface.
“If not now, we’ll miss it!” Jiyeon shouted, reaching out.
“What do we do? Get on that?” Shion stomped her feet in panic.
Sullin bit her nails. Shion wasn’t talking about the whale’s necklace.
At that exact moment, a flute-shaped spacecraft slid to a stop in front of the bus stop.
Tiny pink aliens, no bigger than dolls, climbed out from between the rocks and boarded it one by one.
They looked like a strange mix of rabbits and foxes. A few of them stared curiously at Sullin’s group.
Boarding the ship might be the fastest way back to Earth.
But the cameo carved into the necklace, the twenty-four women, was even more intriguing.
Maybe there was a reason they’d been flung all the way out here.
“Run,” Sullin said quietly.
That was the signal. All six of them sprinted toward the massive gem.
The moment they clung on, the gem fully lifted off the moon’s surface.
Their outfits transformed into heavy cloaks and antique ribbons, layering themselves over their thin stage costumes.
The fabric shimmered softly, rough yet luminous, as if the moon’s surface itself had been woven into it.
“Hold on tight!” Kaede shouted.
Pulled forward by momentum, the gem surged ahead across the vastness of space…,
past countless stars…, straight into the maw of the whale monster.
Meanwhile, in another place…
A piercing scream jolted Xinyu awake. Chaeyeon was shrieking at the top of her lungs, her face draining of color.
“What? What is it?”
“Go take a look.”
Xinyu did as Chaeyeon said.
The moment she pushed open the white metal door, a vast sea of crimson flame spread out before her.
It was as if they had fallen straight into the heart of the sun, the blazing light and heat raging all around them.
What she had thought was a room inside a building only moments ago turned out to be the cabin of a small yacht.
They had been cast adrift in the middle of a burning ocean.
“Hold on.” Xinyu rubbed her eyes.
In the distance, a gigantic skeletal whale was charging toward them, as if it meant to swallow the yacht whole.
Its momentum was terrifying. “What on earth is that?”
Yooyeon scratched her head. “This is why I said we should’ve rechecked today’s schedule.”
The deck was pure chaos.
Members who usually needed no instructions to find and do their jobs had fallen into a state of near-panic.
The whale, jaws gaping menacingly, was drawing closer by the second, and there was nowhere to run.
Mayu clung to the railing, trembling as if seasick, while Hyerin and Yooyeon whispered urgently to each other.
With the decisive moment approaching, there was no sense of unity at all.
“But from far away, doesn’t it kind of look cute?” Chaewon said, raising her voice slightly as she crouched down.
“What’s cute about that?!” Chaeyeon snapped, bursting out of the cabin.
“The way it wriggles~ it’s cute. If they sold it as a keyring, I’d buy one.”
Chaewon’s dreamy tone was unhelpful enough,
but what truly shocked Xinyu was a single word she caught from Hyerin and Yooyeon’s conversation.
“Jump?” Xinyu strode over and cut in. “Who said anything about jumping?”
“Well, it’s clearly chasing the boat.
Since we don’t seem to burn to death anyway, I was thinking maybe we could just splash down…” Hyerin avoided her gaze.
“You stupid?” What Xinyu had meant was something closer to,
This boat is our only hope. Are you seriously talking about abandoning it?
But in moments of desperation, words had a way of coming out wrong.
This chaos had to end.
Xinyu knew that in a crisis, someone had to take control. And right now, she saw no one else who could.
“tripleS!” Xinyu straightened her shoulders and back.
“We’re not dying! Let’s try doing exactly what I say from now on, okay? Our target is… over there.”
She pointed toward a city encased in translucent pink bubbles.
It looked abandoned and desolate, but it seemed like it could offer shelter.
Given that they were all still alive, an ancient civilization at the center of the sun barely registered as strange anymore.
As everyone stood frozen, Hyerin was the first to back Xinyu, boldly.
“Let’s do it!”
Right. Better than jumping into fire.
Xinyu moved fluidly, assigning roles.
Yooyeon and Chaeyeon to the helm, Chaewon and Hyerin to the sails, while she took command from the deck.
The problem was Mayu, who was struggling just to stay on her feet.
“Mayu.” Xinyu knelt to meet her eye level. “You watch the back and tell us how close it’s getting. Okay?”
The helm and cabin were both toward the bow.
“Can you really trust me with that?” Mayu sniffled. “I’m just the Barbie role.”
“No, Mayu,” Xinyu said firmly. “You’re the smartest one here and the most driven. Trust yourself.”
Mayu nodded, and from then on, the team steered the yacht, weaving to avoid the whale.
Still, the city showed no sign of getting closer.
The skeletal whale, on the other hand, was far too fast.
Its hollow eye sockets loomed so large that hands could no longer hide them. Xinyu’s heart pounded violently.
What now?
At the brink of disaster, Chaewon’s earlier words echoed in Xinyu’s mind.
Doesn’t it kind of look cute?
“Let’s go inside it.” Xinyu blurted out. Even she couldn’t believe what she had just said.
“Are you insane?!” Hyerin shouted.
“We can’t get into that.” Xinyu pointed at the shielded city.
“But the whale, look at the size difference. Maybe we’ll actually be safer inside it.”
“Have you lost your mind?!” Hyerin shot back.
“This is about whether we live or die! Why do you get to decide that on your own?”
The sudden accusation left Xinyu speechless.
Did I mess up? I was thinking about everyone…
“No, hey, Zhou Xinyu cries over letters.
Her words might not be reckless after all.” Chaeyeon stepped in, uncharacteristically serious.
“You’re sure?”
“Trust me.” Xinyu pleaded, gripping her hand.
Soon, the yacht’s bow turned.
It seemed everyone had reached the same conclusion that no matter what they did, being swallowed was inevitable.
As they sped forward and passed through the whale’s jawbone, Xinyu squeezed her eyes shut.
But the landing was unexpectedly calm.
Inside the whale’s bones stretched a vast grayish tunnel.
The ground shook like an earthquake whenever the whale moved,
but otherwise, there was plenty of footing, and it wasn’t difficult to walk.
“Wow, look at this. Someone’s been living here.
There are fields and everything~ Think we could grow sweet potatoes? I’d totally settle down.” Chaewon said airily.
“Didn’t you talk about sweet potato pie last time, too?” Chaeyeon chuckled.
“It’s my retirement dream.”
After that exchange, Xinyu and the others followed the traces of civilization deeper inside,
like Hansel and Gretel trailing crumbs. After walking for about half an hour, a familiar sight appeared.
Inside the whale’s bones was a space identical to the city they had just given up on.
Xinyu stepped across the boundary as if drawn by a spell.
A living city. Or…
A chilling thought crept in. Was there any guarantee this cosmic beast hadn’t swallowed entire alien cities whole?
Maybe that was why it had come to Earth to devour everything.
At that moment, a distant thud, thud of drums echoed.
Small creatures, barely reaching Xinyu’s knees, peeked out from all directions.
Perky ears, tiny limbs, and strangely monstrous pink bodies…
Aliens that looked like they belonged on a mascot poster formed a circle around them.
By sheer coincidence, the whale’s rib bones, towering like pillars,
were carved with images of twenty-four women clad in armor like warriors.
Their faces were indistinct, but no matter how she looked at them, Xinyu was sure they were tripleS.
As Xinyu studied the mural with unease, the aliens’ music grew more intense.
Simple yet powerful, like tribal, polyrhythmic drumming.
In time with the beat, vine-like flowers sprouted over the members’ clothes.
Embroidery formed without thread or needle.
Their white outfits shifted into roomier pink fabric, hoods and frills added,
until they looked ready to cast spells at any moment.
A phrase from their debut-era teaser surfaced in her mind.
Girls with special powers live without knowing each other’s.
I thought it was just good marketing.
The situation was bewildering, but Xinyu realized she didn’t entirely hate it.
“What is this, what is this? Why is it following me?!” Hyerin shrank back, dodging the aliens.
“She’s actually scared of animals. They’re cute, though.” Yooyeon laughed.
In that instant, Xinyu’s vision warped.
For a split second, the small aliens all looked like threatening skeletons before snapping back to their original forms.
Or maybe this was the disguise, and the skeletons were their true shapes. Xinyu clenched her fist.
Now, the aliens encircling them no longer seemed harmless.
But Chaeyeon was happily greeting them.
“They’re like Hello Kitty!”, while Chaewon crouched beside one,
matching movements with an alien that didn’t even share a language.
To make matters worse, she spotted other members waving from a distance.
Sohyun, Jiyeon, Kaede, Shion, Lynn, and Sullin.
She was glad to see them, but the meaning of their gestures was unclear.
Were they warning them to run away? Or calling them over?
Xinyu glanced at her members. Should she trust the warning rising from her gut?
Or surrender herself to what felt like an inevitable flow of fate?
It was time to decide.
Q. What will happen in the next scene?
1. Just Dance / Groove with aliens
2. Chosen Warriors / Aliens gift weapons
3. Rescue Run / Rushing to face aliens
4. Answer Call / A distant member calls
