Chapter 67
Ian bolted upright in bed and immediately grabbed the grimoire. The Touch of Re-Creation, gently settled in his grasp, fluttered open, and he laid his hand over the letters floating before his eyes.
“Be reborn.”
Wuuung.
The activated magic interfered with the arrangement of the characters, warping the letters.
For a moment only. The collapsed letters soon returned to normal and flickered before Ian’s eyes.
“……Huh.”
This was the first time the Re-Creation magic hadn’t worked. Feeling an odd chill run down his spine, Ian tried using magic on the cup sitting beside the table.
Creak!
With a sound like something being crushed, the cup’s shape changed into something like a dagger.
It seemed less like there was a problem with the magic itself and more like the bizarre anomaly called a “status window” was ignoring it. It didn’t seem completely immune, but one thing was certain: it couldn’t simply be killed by brute force.
“Hoo…….”
Ian pulled out a cigarette with slightly trembling hands, lit it, and exhaled smoke into the air. Smoking in the room was forbidden, but he didn’t have the luxury of worrying about that right now.
Thanks to the hot nicotine and tar soaking into his lungs, his mind cleared quite a bit. With a cold expression, he sat on the edge of the bed and manipulated this “status window.”
‘Direct touch is possible…… It feels like operating the system of a VR game.’
There’s a genre commonly called game-lit. It refers to stories where you enter a game and move around with a status window, and this scene looked exactly like that.
Then maybe I got dragged into a game too?
“…….”
The thought flashed through his mind, but Ian didn’t jump to conclusions and instead cooled his head.
Since he had encountered an unexpected situation, he needed to move calmly. If he panicked and ran wild, all that would do was narrow his vision.
‘This change probably didn’t happen only to me. It’s safer to assume everyone aboard this cruise ship has been affected.’
He calmly assessed the situation.
According to the status window, Ian’s role was detective.
That role probably hadn’t been assigned without reason. Most likely, because he’d spent all day yesterday running around looking for clues to the case, he’d been given that occupation.
As proof, Seoa, who had been gambling in the casino last night, had been assigned the role of gambler.
The others probably weren’t much different. The captain would be the real captain, and the photographer or detective, and so on, were probably jobs obtained through some specific trigger. Those probably weren’t their actual jobs.
‘Some kind of roleplay.’
Roles assigned based on what happened the day before.
It seemed the mystery had been moving covertly since yesterday. Since he hadn’t detected it, it must be closer in nature to a parasite or a tool than to a mystery that acts directly.
Whichever it was, it was damn annoying. Ian clicked his tongue in irritation and turned his head toward the terrace.
The sun hadn’t risen because of the dark clouds overhead. Night was receding, but it wasn’t a bright morning. Thick sea fog lay over the water, and beneath it he had the feeling that something was swimming.
……Could it just be a fish?
He couldn’t tell. And he didn’t particularly feel like checking right this second. Now wasn’t the time.
Ian stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray, washed up quickly, and left the room.
Seoa was nowhere to be seen. Since he could sense movement in the room next door, it seemed she was still asleep.
Without hesitation, he called to wake her.
[Mm……? Whaaat…….]
A voice badly roughened by sleep leaked through the phone speaker. Ian didn’t beat around the bush and went straight to the point.
“The mystery has started moving. Do you see a status window or anything?”
[Huh……? A status window……? ……Oh, what the hell is this.]
Her voice instantly cleared up. Along with the sound of the blanket sliding down, the faint creak of the bed springs came through.
[Why am I a gambler? I’m a mage!]
“Probably because you made a lot of money gambling last night. Anyway, that’s not the important part. The problem is that we’ve been caught up in a mystery without even realizing it.”
He leaned against the corridor wall and looked around.
“……Uuugh.”
Far off, around the corner, he saw a woman staggering toward him. Feeling the cold weight of the revolver tucked inside his coat, Ian parted his lips.
“Get out here now. If you’re not out in 30 minutes, I’m breaking the door down.”
[Got it. I’ll get ready and be out soon.]
Rather than complain, Seoa answered quickly and hung up. Ian used one hand to operate his phone and launch the GPS app.
[Current location: Fog Sea]
A location name he’d never heard of popped up. Ian frowned hard and zoomed out the map.
A widened world map. The red dot in the center was sitting in the sea between South America and North America.
‘……It’s the Bermuda Triangle.’
Ian wasn’t exactly knowledgeable about foreign coastlines, but he at least knew this was part of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Bermuda Triangle. It was famous enough that he didn’t need to wonder about it.
A place wrapped in all kinds of conspiracy theories and mysteries. Yet if everything had only recently been exposed as fake, then the fact that they’d suddenly been transferred here must also be an information cover-up carried out by the Bureau.
That fact itself wasn’t very surprising. What mattered was that they’d flown from Korean territorial waters to the American continent overnight.
‘Since this is a real location, it probably isn’t trapped in a spatial anomaly. It feels more like we were literally teleported…….’
Teleportation, huh.
A completely unrealistic word, but if mystery was involved, it wasn’t impossible. Ian let out a long breath and turned toward the woman approaching from afar.
“Uuurgh.”
She looked soaked through, as if she’d been dragged up from the water. Yellow pus and discharge dripped from her slack pupils, and blue tentacles wriggled between the three-way split in her right leg.
No matter how you looked at it, she was far from normal. Ian put a cigarette between his lips and threw the paring knife from his pocket straight at her.
Whoooosh!!
The swiftly flying paring knife grazed the woman’s thigh and fell away. The woman failed to let out even a scream or any reaction, and simply scattered into mist.
[Kiiieeek!!]
Three tiny blue worms dropped onto the spot where she had vanished. The things opened their mouths wide and screeched.
Far too disgusting to be called ordinary parasites.
Ian had pulled out his revolver to shoot them dead, but the worms withered away faster than he could pull the trigger.
[Kiiiiiik…….]
They were shriveled up as if all the moisture had been sucked out.
The worms vanished into dust without even managing to attack.
“…….”
Ian quickly put away the revolver he’d aimed and checked whether there were any witnesses around.
Fortunately, no one had seen it. There was a CCTV camera in the middle of the hallway, but since he was with Seoa, he didn’t worry too much about it. As long as he dealt with any direct witnesses, that would be enough.
“……Hoo.”
Ian let out a long breath and lit the tip of his cigarette.
A little while later, Seoa opened the door and came out.
Wearing a light crop top, a hoodie, and long pants, she frowned when she saw Ian smoking.
“Smoking’s prohibited here.”
“Is that really what you want to be worrying about right now?”
Ian lightly brushed off her complaint and stood up.
“I just saw some kind of monster. It looked like a drowned corpse with tentacles sprouting from its split-open leg.”
“A common enough anomaly. Anything else?”
The two of them walked on as they talked.
“When it died, it scattered into mist. And I don’t know whether it was because it still retained a human form or because it had originally been human, but it was still classified as a primate.”
“Oh, did you kill it with that knife?”
Ian nodded and picked up the kitchen knife lying in the middle of the hallway. Seoa sent her guardian spirit into the CCTV.
“It died without even being able to resist, so that’s certain.”
“Just in case, let me ask: what if we’re experiencing hallucinations? What if the thing you killed was a person, and this status window or whatever is all fake? How about that hypothesis?”
“Impossible. If the thing you just killed were human, then even if its disappearance were a hallucination, there’d still be a corpse left behind. But we walked down the hallway without encountering any obstacle.”
Ian glanced back at the perfectly clear hallway and pressed the elevator call button.
“So it’s not a hallucination.”
Seoa nodded.
“I agree. I’ve had plenty of hallucinations myself, so telling them apart isn’t hard. I only said it to rule things out, so don’t worry about it.”
She turned to him and held out the empty bone-dust bottle.
“This. The bone-dust bottle I gave you yesterday. When I woke up this morning, it was already activated. At the very least, it’s certain that the mystery here interfered with the mind.”
“……I’m still fine, though.”
Ian pulled out the glass bottle, which was still exactly the same as when he first received it. Seoa hesitated for a moment, but after checking the grimoire visible between his coat lapels, she nodded.
“The grimoire probably set up a mental barrier for you. You seem pretty well-loved. I’m not sure whether a foreign god’s love is a good thing, though.”
“…….”
Ian looked at the grimoire in his bag with a fresh expression of surprise. The two books in his bag sensed his gaze and gave a brief tremor.
It was as if they were asking, “Did I do well?” He smiled bitterly and stroked the grimoire’s cover.
“There shouldn’t be any major problems. Anyway, if it’s a mental-type attack, did we dodge the first hit? Neither you nor I seem to have gone insane.”
“Probably. I don’t have any memory confusion or anything. You don’t either, right?”
“No. Everything I learned is still in my head.”
“Good.”
While they were talking, the elevator arrived.
Inside the lift was a young married couple. Ignoring the two of them completely, they were pressed against the wall, kissing passionately.
Words floated above their heads.
[Newlywed Couple Lee Taeryeong]
[Newlywed Couple Kim Gain]
Names just like game NPCs.
After confirming that nothing like that was floating above their own heads, Ian and Seoa boarded the elevator.
Unabashed kissing sounds echoed out, but Seoa gripped the awl in her pocket tightly without feeling the least bit embarrassed.
Her aura was so vicious it looked like she’d stab their throats the moment the couple did anything foolish. Ian was no different.
“Mmm, honey.”
“Stay still, okay?”
As the elevator descended, the two of them kept repeating only those lines. Even their movements were identical.
No matter how you looked at it, they didn’t seem like normal humans. It was more believable to think of them as machines with commands input into them.
“……They’ve been devoured.”
Seoa said, glancing at the newlyweds.
“They’re being overtaken by their roles.”
“…….”
“That’s probably what a mental attack looks like. If we’d been hit, I’d be acting like a gambler. You’d be acting like a detective. Just like real game NPCs.”
“……A tricky bastard. A mystery that overlays reality with a game?”
“I’m not sure, but if that’s the case, the way to solve it would be…….”
“To see it through to the ending, I guess.”
Ian answered while smoking his third cigarette.
The cigarette smoke touched the elevator ceiling and then dispersed.
At that moment, the elevator automatically stopped and reached the floor where the restaurant was.
Ding.
With a cheerful chime, the elevator doors opened.