Chapter 42
“Why did an outsider get into the school? Why are you shouting in the hallway?”
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
Just as Red Mask was about to charge at me, a man in a security uniform appeared behind her.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he relentlessly battered the back of Red Mask’s head with a baseball bat.
Unable to put up any resistance against the sudden ambush, she collapsed onto the floor.
She merely flinched a little each time the sounds of flesh bursting and bones breaking rang out.
“Why are you dirtying the hallway? Why aren’t you answering? Why are you lying on the floor?”
Thud!Thud!Thud!Thud!Thud!
The security guard continued asking questions that could never receive an answer as he swung his bat without pause.
Clang!
The bat struck the floor.
It wasn’t a mis-swing.
Because the spot where he swung the bat never changed.
It was only that the head serving as his target had been shattered beyond recognition.
“Hmm.”
The security guard looked at her head, which now had a hole in it, then grabbed one of her legs without hesitation and dragged her away somewhere.
All that remained in the hallway was a bloody trail beginning at the pool of blood and red fragments I’d rather not describe.
With someone’s hand clamped over my mouth, I watched the entire sequence from around the corner.
In the meantime, I tried to resist so I could check who had gotten behind me, but…
“Shhh. Later.”
The voice was so familiar that I soon gave up resisting.
And for good reason: when the hallway fell silent and I looked behind me, what I saw was…
“Team Leader?”
“Honestly, our newbie really doesn’t listen.”
Imina, for some reason wearing a school uniform.
“What’s with that outfit? And I thought it would be quite some time before you arrived….”
“This isn’t the right place to talk about that, so come this way.”
Instead of answering, Imina took my hand and led me down the hallway in the opposite direction from where the guard had gone.
She didn’t let go of my hand until she entered a room marked ‘Duty Room.’
The duty room was a modest little room.
It was a small room where you took off your shoes before entering, with an old television, a wall-mounted coat rack for hanging the security uniforms, a desk with several CCTV monitors, a wardrobe containing several identical security uniforms, and metal bats stained with blood.
If not for that last part, it probably wouldn’t have been any different from the duty room of an old school.
“Phew~ Let’s talk here. This is the safest place in the school.”
Imina let out an unusually long sigh, then looked at me with her usual languid smile.
“You mean in a place where guards like that roam around?”
“They work so hard that they never come here to rest~.”
Imina spoke naturally about the school, as if she had been here before.
I didn’t bother asking whether they never came to rest simply because of their patrols, or because they had something else to beat with their bats.
“But didn’t I clearly message you not to come to the school? You read that, didn’t you?”
Imina tilted her head.
Senior Choi Yu-na once said that it meant someone was really pissed off whenever Team Leader tilted her head.
“Not long after receiving the message, I came to my senses and found myself inside the school.”
“Not long?”
“Yes. It felt like only a few minutes had passed. It was immediately after I checked the Toy Box’s entity report.”
“…Did you leave the recorder on?”
“Yes. May I play it?”
“No.”
Imina took a pair of earbuds from her pocket and held them out to me.
“Listen to it alone and summarize it for me.”
“Huh? Why go that far? Is mental contamination contagious?”
“No. It’s for your sake. Listening to it together would be very difficult for me.”
After placing the earbuds in my hand, Imina moved a considerable distance away.
Her behavior puzzled me, but she wasn’t someone who would do that without a reason, so I connected the earbuds via Bluetooth and checked the recording.
[1:32:24]
The recording was 92 minutes long. It had definitely felt like only a few minutes had passed.
I played the file with a trembling heart.
And I came face-to-face with a truth I never should have encountered.
‘That girl with the big mouth should make for a worthy opponent to my pride.’
‘I’ll kill youuuuuuu!!!’
Over the sound of what seemed to be running, I heard my own voice spewing obscene remarks nonstop, along with Red Mask’s voice clacking her metal scissors and crying out in resentment.
Even when I fast-forwarded five seconds, ten seconds, or one minute.
No matter what part of the recording I played, it was the same.
The only difference was whether I sounded more or less out of breath.
I took the earbuds out of my ears and turned toward Imina without being able to raise my head.
“Was I really like that for an entire week…?”
“It wasn’t quite that bad.”
“That means you know what’s in this recording.”
“Oops….”
The embarrassment was bad enough, but an eerie feeling overwhelmed me even more.
Because in my current condition, surviving until my consciousness returned was a miracle.
Not because of the obscene remarks, but because I had no idea what I might have done during the time I couldn’t remember.
“You said there was nothing particularly wrong with me in the psychological counseling room, Team Leader.”
“…That’s what I said. In fact, that was supposed to be the case tomorrow.”
Imina explained to me, as I sat there with a stiff expression, what had happened to me over the past week and what my condition was.
If I underwent an entity examination in my current state, the probability of suffering permanent mental damage was high.
“What about now?”
“Less than 1%. But as your team leader, I wanted to eliminate the possibility of anything going wrong altogether.”
That was why, using her discretion as team leader, she had decided to exclude me from entity management and monitor my progress until I recovered.
“Is that possible?”
“At the moment, there’s probably only one person at the Gwanak Branch who can do whatever they want to Seong-bin. Of course, it isn’t me.”
They had confirmed at the hospital that physical contact with someone could alleviate the symptoms, but since they couldn’t enter the dormitory, they had made me come to the office during my vacation.
“No wonder all three of you kept coming all the way to my door whenever I said I was going to take a day off.”
“If you’d pushed back any harder, we would’ve had no choice but to have a housewarming party at your place. It was a shame.”
According to the assessment of ‘Rest Easy,’ I was expected to be fully recovered by tomorrow, so she had hidden it from me together with the team members.
The decisive reason was that I wasn’t the first person to experience these symptoms, and in most cases, they worsened when the person became aware of them in the early stages, so they couldn’t tell me.
“Is it okay that I know now?”
“You’ve almost completely recovered, so this is within the range that emergency treatment can handle.”
“It’s only worse because, unfortunately, the entity related to Seong-bin’s symptoms has a close connection to this place.”
Scientist Madnificent again.
The Town Where Time Stopped, the Forest of the Faceless Ones, and the Toy Box.
That made three strikes. Once I got out of here, I felt like I had to find out everything I could about that bastard first.
“Could you explain Scientist Madnificent to me?”
“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you in my own words.”
Imina approached me and reached out to knead my cheek.
“Instead, once we get out, I think I’ll accidentally leave my computer turned on over the weekend, so remember that, okay?”
I nodded.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“Honestly, it’s nice that you catch on so quickly.”
I had almost finished sorting out my questions, but one of the most important things I needed to ask still remained.
“But how did I get out of the Management Bureau?”
If I had remained inside the Bureau building the entire time, this problem wouldn’t have happened.
Why had I suddenly gone outside the building?
“They’re investigating that now. We’ll probably have a better idea by the time we get out of here.”
“Do you have any guesses?”
“I do.”
Imina tilted her head again.
“I’ll tell you once I’m sure. But whoever it is, you’ll probably know them too.”
“I hope it isn’t Manager Kwak Chun-bong.”
“What a joke.”
Aside from the team members, the people who came to mind at the Management Bureau were Manager Kwak Chun-bong, Counselor Cheon Jin-seong, the old security guard, and the suspicious bald man with the cigar.
I felt like I could guess who it was.
But I decided to stop trying to deduce it for now.
As always, I first had to escape this place alive if I wanted to resolve the questions in my head.
“Then can we escape by waiting here for about three and a half hours?”
I had been in the Toy Box for nearly two hours, and Team Leader had been here for one, so if we killed time here, where the guard didn’t come…
“No? Once you’ve entered the school, escaping by method three is impossible.”
In other words, the five-hour time limit for holding out inside the Toy Box did not apply inside Eternal Life General Hospital or Yeondoo High School.
“Do I have to take an exam?”
“That’s right. Before that, we need to find a school uniform for you.”
“A school uniform?”
“Surely you don’t think I’m wearing a school uniform at my age because I’m being shameless, do you?”
Come to think of it, Imina had been wearing a school uniform since I met her.
A navy jacket, a skirt of the same color, and a neatly tied ribbon around her neck.
On her chest was a name tag embroidered with ‘Imina.’
The problem was that it wasn’t loose enough, so it showed off her curves quite a bit, and the skirt was very short.
“…Looks like it belonged to a bit of a delinquent.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Anyway, we need to find a school uniform to take the exam. An outsider can’t take it.”
The required exam score for escaping was 85, huh.
“If it’s you, Team Leader, couldn’t you break through a guard or two?”
If it was her, the ultimate weapon of the Gwanak Branch who could even defeat the director of Eternal Life General Hospital, surely she could handle a guard…
“Unfortunately, right now I’m only about as strong as an ordinary person who’s slightly stronger than Seong-bin~.”
With a sharp “Hup!” Imina flexed her arm in a gesture that showed off her biceps.
“That’s why I told you not to come to the school. If it had been the hospital, I might’ve gone on a rampage?”
I felt like I wanted to beat Park Seong-bin to death for all the obscene remarks he had made in the recording.
In card-game manga, the other me always gets along with me.
I guess I’m just not fated to be like that.
“But what kind of exam is it?”
“You haven’t read the entity report yet?”
“It’s just that ‘I’ only got to the school a moment ago.”
“Hmm….”
Imina suddenly made a nasal sound, took off her shoes, and went into the room meant for resting before sitting down.
Then she tapped the spot beside her with her palm.
“Why don’t you come over here and read it?”
“Suddenly?”
“You need time to read the entity report, and more importantly, if we’re going to escape, we need to reduce the side effects of losing your memory again or saying brazen things, right?”
Grumbling that this was why she hated schools, Imina repeatedly tapped the floor of the room.
I spent some time as her tactile doll while reading the entity report and preparing to escape.
+++
[Entity Report]
Yeondoo High School
Rank: Level 3
Classification - Location-Type
‘Yeondoo High School’ is a location-type entity that appears in ■■ City, Chungcheongnam-do.
The entity maintains the appearance of ‘Yeondoo High School,’ the setting of the game ‘White Day.’
It has been confirmed that running the game using a specially pirated CD causes the player to be dragged into Yeondoo High School.
The Management Bureau is recovering the CDs in question, but has not yet managed to collect them all.
Investigations have found that every being entering the entity is classified as an ‘outsider’ without exception.
According to survivor testimony, targets classified as outsiders lose the ability to use every ability except those of tool-type entities. Exceptions may exist, but none have been confirmed.
This phenomenon has been confirmed to apply to entities as well as humans.
All confirmed cases of escape to date involved passing an exam held in a regular classroom on the third floor.
Only students who score 85 points or higher on the exam are granted the right to leave the school, and no cases of leaving by any other method have been reported.
The exam questions are known to be drawn from the knowledge the student knows best.
For someone who enters the school—in other words, an outsider—to obtain student status, they must wear a school uniform placed on one of the desks randomly arranged inside the classroom.
However, it has been confirmed that wearing a uniform that does not match one’s gender prevents the wearer from being recognized as a student.
Obtaining student status is merely the procedure for being granted eligibility to take the exam, and does not remove the restriction on one’s abilities under any circumstances.
A large number of entities inhabit the school,
but most entities other than the guards remain in special rooms such as the music room, science room, and art room.
The entities tend not to leave their respective areas, but show a highly hostile response toward anyone who enters their territory.
Therefore, when attempting to escape through the exam, entering unnecessary special rooms is not recommended.
.
.
.
+++