SANABI Story 1 · A Commander’s Morning, a City with No People in Sight

This is an original narrative commentary following the events and endings of the main game. It develops the emotional progression from the characters’ actions and dialogue, without adding new events or invented dialogue. The series covers the main game from its prologue through both endings and the epilogue. The side story Haunted Day is a separate story. Every installment contains spoilers.

1. The Morning Called by the Commander

There was a small voice calling to her father. He had seen something through to the end, yet his daughter was telling him that this alone was not enough. Before he could finish asking why, the memory went dark. The bright mountain landscape took the place of the missing answer.

The life he knew was here now. Once, he had fought in the special operations unit of Room 17 of Joseon’s Royal Investigation Bureau. A brigadier general who had become a legend with a single worn chain arm. Before his daughter, however, rank and legend were of little use. The child waking her father on his day off and begging him to play needed a dad who would listen to her, rather than a soldier feared above all others.

His daughter wanted to be the commander. She even unfolded the paper she had prepared to explain the operation, but became muddled over the order in which to read it. A child’s mistake slipped into the soldier game she had begun so confidently. Her father accepted that comically earnest seriousness. The chain arm that had subdued people on battlefields now moved to follow the rules his child had chosen.

Bare ground became lava. The ordinary hill behind the house became dangerous dinosaur country, and going to gather wild raspberries became a mission to rescue the troops. In the world his child made, these rules truly mattered. If her father simply stepped on the ground for his own convenience, the whole game would fall apart. So he gripped walls and launched himself through the air. He did it so his daughter could be the commander to her heart’s content, rather than to show off an adult’s skill.

Their happiness was made of no grand events. The footsteps following her father, the glance checking the rules of their game, and the brief rest to pick and eat raspberries filled the hours of a day. His daughter liked playing with him. For him too, this little space filled with her voice felt like a life far removed from war and orders.

When her father looked tired, she changed the game. This time they could use radios. She left one with him and ran home to get the other. It was a game in which they could call to each other even when apart for a little while. Knowing her voice would soon return, he waited.

The voice did come. There was a big clock in the house, she said. He did not remember bringing anything like that home. Curious, the child read the letters on it. Sanabi. In that instant his manner changed. The game stopped, and he urgently ordered her to get out of the house at once.

But the radio connection faltered. He could not tell whether she had heard the order or was running to the door. He raced toward the house. Even the chain arm that let him move faster than anyone could not erase that short distance in time. The house exploded before his eyes. In the memory he believed, the peaceful world he had shared with his daughter only moments earlier vanished in an instant.

2. The Chain Seventeen Days Later

Seventeen days passed. What he had grasped was a lead toward revenge, rather than an end to his grief. Following the name Sanabi, he crushed organizations connected to it. He found even those who had supplied the bomb that destroyed the house, but the true identity of the one he sought still eluded him. The more he learned, the clearer it became that he had no home to return to.

The organization’s armed machine, Kang Seon, blocked his way. Its heavy equipment and attacks were threatening, but the General’s chain arm closed the distance by following his opponent’s movements. He had not come to fight to display his strength. Only one purpose remained: eliminate whatever barred the path to Sanabi. Victory brought no relief. Defeating an enemy and recovering his daughter’s voice were two different things.

Colonel Baek was waiting outside the building. His former junior addressed him as his senior, but the General could not receive that familiarity warmly. In his memory, resentment lingered: Baek’s mistake had let Sanabi escape. His grief could not soften even before an old comrade.

Baek told him that traces of Sanabi had appeared again. Something abnormal had happened in Mago City, owned by the enormous Mago Group. The military wanted the General back. As a condition of taking the mission, he demanded Operation Zero. In his remembered past, that order gave him grounds to retain control of the operation and see it through to the end.

At the unit, soldiers who recognized him paid their respects. Their respect could not restore the time he believed he had lost. His reunion with Major Song was no different. His junior welcomed him and inspected his equipment, but the chain arm was already retired matériel. The days when it could easily be repaired through regular supply channels had passed. Her advice to try the black market exposed a simple reality: the legendary soldier’s equipment was now an old relic.

In training, his body still moved. Long-practiced combat returned, and the chain arm extended as he willed it. But when he was alone, his proficiency in fighting offered no shield. He took out the iron identification token that carried memories of his daughter. Looking at the trace she had left behind, the grief suppressed during operations rose again. The General remembered by soldiers and the father remembered by his daughter were one person, yet it seemed that only one of those selves could now keep him standing.

Everything so far is the memory he believes to be true. At present he does not ask where that memory came from. He believes finding Sanabi will answer every question. Holding that conviction intact, he sets off for Mago City.

3. A City with No People in Sight

The briefing described a difficult event to comprehend. A blackout had struck Mago City the previous day, and reports said that 2.97 million citizens had disappeared within a short time. In a city where even investigation teams had lost contact, a lone survivor named Mari Gold had sent a distress signal. The General had to find her, secure her safety, and obtain the information she reportedly discovered.

He cared more about the connection to Sanabi than the strangeness of the report. But anti-aircraft batteries attacked the helicopter as it approached, disrupting the mission from the outset. Baek’s voice advised withdrawal. Invoking the Operation Zero he had issued, the General made them maintain their course. Desperation drove that judgment: he could not lose another chance to reach his revenge.

As they neared the landing point, he tried to descend and send the pilot back. The pilot refused, insisting on escorting him to the end. Further bombardment brought down the helicopter. Barely escaping, the General entered the city’s lower reaches. Neither the planned arrival nor normal communications remained. He would now have to force a way through with his chain arm and his own body.

The lowest district bore traces of habitation. Streets, buildings, and abandoned objects marked the places where people had lived. Yet no people were visible. The city’s devices were still operating, and their attacks pursued him as if responding to a living intruder. Life had stopped, while the machines’ purposes continued. That was the landscape the General could see.

A small drone followed him. At first it seemed like another machine to be wary of, but it knew the way to Mari Gold. He followed its guidance. Between dangerous streets and obstacles, the drone called Mufin conveyed the presence of someone he had yet to meet.

4. Mari Gold in the Rubbish

Mari Gold did not appear as an imposing intelligence operative. She was hiding in a rubbish heap and was frightened by the General’s arrival. Then she began telling him how exceptional a hacker she was. She also explained that she had once been arrested and pardoned on condition that she work for the military. The General preferred immediate movement to her long, bustling explanation.

The ground shook, interrupting their conversation. Writ of Execution was approaching. Its name sounded like a written order, but it was an enormous mobile shredder that ground buildings away. Built to redevelop the lowest district, the machine advanced on them. Mari now had to flee with Mufin before she could even finish introducing herself.

As they fled together, the General urged her to leave. She seemed to have no reason to unravel the city’s secrets or become entangled in his revenge. Mari would not withdraw so easily. She reported that all data had been erased and proposed a way to recover the missing information. Perhaps Writ of Execution’s black box was still intact.

Her proposed operation was reckless but concrete. Weaken the shredder’s power and pull it down with a crane to recover the records inside. The plan required both the General’s strength and Mari’s hacking. She kept making a place beside him as someone who would solve problems with him, rather than simply be rescued and sent away.

On the way to the waste-processing site, Mari explained that all cargo drones were converging there. This was different from the disorder left by an improvised attack on the city. The city’s basic settings themselves were directing objects toward disposal. Before he could properly consider what that meant, however, a missile struck the General. He fell, and Mufin tried to haul him up with Mari.

The drone lacked the strength to support him. He could not allow Mari to be dragged down as well. In the end he let go and fell into the depths of the processing site. The man who had resisted her company was already putting his own safety second so that she could survive.

5. Writ of Execution’s Heart and the Golden Key

Facing Writ of Execution again at the bottom, he saw it even closer and larger. Dodging attacks, the General broke its power systems one after another. He had to buy time until Mari brought the crane. Though he appeared to fight alone, the battle’s conclusion depended on an opportunity someone else would make.

Mari’s crane caught Writ of Execution. But the machine’s output was greater than expected. The crane intended to pull it down instead began to be dragged along. Mari abandoned the plan and tried at least to save the General. Clinging to the machine, he used his chain arm’s weight to lodge the hook firmly in the shredder’s mouth. The opposing pulls and the enormous body’s weight finally tore Writ of Execution apart.

What they recovered was not the answer expected from a black box. Inside the core was Mago Group’s Golden Key. It granted access to the office of Nylon, chief executive of Mago Construction. A path had opened, but there was no reassurance. Outside the passage to the office stood several Writs of Execution like the one they had just risked their lives to destroy. The threat they barely overcame was equipment this corporation could deploy repeatedly.

The office data had also already been deleted. When the name Sanabi appeared in a damaged message, the General became angry with Mari. His demand that she stay out of anything connected with that name was excessively harsh, but it was bound to his fear that someone else might suffer the same loss. In reading the information, Mari had touched his wound as well.

The message received after the power failure was far more terrible. It announced that compromised security had triggered the Final Resolution Protocol. It included erasure of VIPs’ personal data and their suicides, removal of the city’s records, and destruction of the central nuclear fission reactor. Mago’s prepared final solution would erase the city and its traces together, rather than save it.

The General tried again to send Mari away. She argued that, having already seen the message, she too was no longer in a position to escape. She even deliberately provoked him by saying she knew their target was on the highest level, making his command to leave alone ineffective. She was someone who stayed despite fear, rather than someone without fear of danger.

He finally imposed conditions: follow his instructions, and find a solution whenever a problem arose. With that, Mari became his companion on the next stretch of the journey. The General pursued Sanabi, while Mari followed him for reasons she had not fully disclosed. Moving in the same direction did not mean they sought the same thing. That difference would grow as they climbed higher into the city.

Sources and Scope of Verification

Focusing on established events in the original main game, we compared the official introduction, developer interview, publicly available gameplay screenshots, and character and plot materials. The atmosphere and descriptions of emotion interpret the characters’ actions and dialogue. The early manipulated memories, actual past, present events, and different ending branches are distinguished; uncertain motives and subsequent events are not added as facts. Illustrations are AI reconstructions based on actual game scenes and designs verified through searches, rather than official images or exact cutscene copies. Codex directly wrote and compared the Korean text and 13 translations; Gemini was not used. Sources checked: October 9, 2026.

Official SANABI Steam page — introduction, supported languages, and purchase

Public SANABI main-game playthrough — view the events and scenes

Wonder Potion developer interview — family story and direction
https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/english/240719a_en

Prologue cross-checked against gameplay screenshots
https://general-store.tistory.com/109

Mago City’s lowest district cross-checked against gameplay screenshots
https://general-store.tistory.com/110

SANABI plot cross-check — research records, family past, and both endings
https://m.namu.moe/w/%EC%82%B0%EB%82%98%EB%B9%84/%EC%A4%84%EA%B1%B0%EB%A6%AC

Cross-check of Mari Gold’s actions and background
https://sanabi.fandom.com/wiki/Mari_Gold

Cross-check of the General and Worker 17287’s background
https://sanabi.fandom.com/wiki/Protagonist