Chapter 15
… ─[[ Southwest Seoul Gallery ]]─ …
[Today's legendary incident lol]
The convenience store owner who said he was selling jelly he’d managed to get from downtown at a bargain price
Turns out it was phony jelly
ㄴ ??
ㄴ I thought something smelled fishy, so I didn’t go. Is this for real? lol
ㄴ I was gonna go anyway, even if it was late, but it was a scam?
ㄴ *) He just confessed some more. That fucking anomaly-collaborator was even using people who came to buy jelly as bait for the anomaly
ㄴ *) I saw over fifty people come to buy jelly alone
ㄴ ?????
ㄴ This is legendary lol
ㄴ Is this real?
ㄴ Wow lol
ㄴ Tower Master) ??
ㄴ Tower Master) Wait, is this about Happiness Convenience Store?
Hi, Auntie Rok-hee
ㄴ Tower Master) It’s Rok-hee, not Rok-hi, and I’m not an auntie
ㄴ Yeah, it’s Happiness Convenience Store
ㄴ Come to think of it, didn’t Auntie get sent to Southwest Seoul? Shouldn’t you go check it out?
ㄴ Tower Master) I’m already on my way, damn it
An employee at Loki Office took someone’s request and told her about it.
Tower Master, I think this post on the gallery is about the place you were sent to. Maybe you should take a look?
So I checked the Fixer Gallery and found this situation.
I’d finished the paperwork ages ago and was dozing in my chair, but I was so furious I couldn’t just shake off my sleepiness—I was practically red in the face from all the blood rushing to my head.
“These fucking bastards are still walking around pretending they’re decent human beings…”
Anomaly incidents happened at least once a week as it was.
When you were the head of a fixer office, you knew a lot of fixers, and incidents kept happening to them in rotation, so it could feel like several happened every week.
As it happened, that was exactly Kim Rok-hee’s situation.
It had only been three days since the Window Da-112 incident, and this was already the second case.
There’d been an incident at Loki Office in the meantime, making this the third, essentially.
By the time she arrived at the scene, the convenience store owner—looking as if he’d been beaten in a group assault—was curled up on the ground, coughing.
His face and body were covered in bruises. He looked like he’d paid enough for what he’d done, but Kim Rok-hee wasn’t about to stop there.
She immediately grabbed the man, who’d been lying on the ground, by the collar and lifted him up.
There was no need to get close. No, she didn’t want to get close.
She hated even touching people like this, who betrayed humanity.
Something invisible lifted the convenience store owner into the air.
“Ghk… Cough…!”
“You know how to free the people who got trapped, don’t you? Tell me right now!”
The convenience store owner was swung around in the air so wildly that the people nearby began to wonder if they should stop her.
After spinning him around who knew how many times, the man shouted as soon as he landed.
“I-I do. I know, but…”
“But what?”
“It’s strange! The blood donation bus I knew… it’s changed somehow! I didn’t run away on purpose. I ran because I was genuinely scared…”
“You fucking—! You’ve fed it a hundred people, and now you’re saying you’re scared?!”
“H-huuu…! I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”
“Just tell me exactly what happened.”
This was what the convenience store owner had to say.
The inside of the blood donation bus looked like an abandoned hospital. As you walked around, there was one clean hospital bed that looked completely out of place, and if you lay down on it, needles and tubes would crawl out from somewhere and draw your blood.
And that was it. After a little while, the surroundings would turn back into a bus, and you could simply walk out.
If all it did was prevent people from entering, then assuming it had been classified, its danger level would’ve been 1 (Safe).
“But… it used to be passive. It wouldn’t want blood or anything unless someone actually went inside…”
The owner limped back into the convenience store and unfolded a crumpled piece of paper with trembling hands.
It was covered in blood-written letters that looked like they were imitating human handwriting.
— I’m so hungry I could die
— This isn’t enough
— I need more
— Give me you first
— Human arms human
— Heehee
— Food gives food
— Food that gives food
“Look at this! It’s going crazy, demanding blood! I didn’t think I could handle it alone, so I ran!”
Just like with the Cheong Clan Alliance.
Somehow, it felt like human greed was making anomalies more dangerous.
Kim Rok-hee glared at the convenience store owner, her face turning sour, then swung her fist at him.
She hadn’t wanted to lay a hand on him, but she just couldn’t hold back.
“You fucking idiot!”
“Agh!”
“Of course it got excited when you kept feeding it people! Before, it only ate the occasional person who got lured inside, but now it’s had a feast. If I were it, I’d be demanding more, too! When else would it get to eat its fill?!”
“Ah, aaah… Ugh……”
The owner slid along the ground on his rear, clutching his stinging cheek.
“But… if I didn’t do this, my family…”
Not one of the people surrounding the owner showed any sympathy for his excuse.
Of course they didn’t.
These days, just owning a convenience store that wasn’t a franchise was enough to count as middle class.
Sigh.
Kim Rok-hee sighed and muttered quietly.
“Are any of you fixers? Please reach out to any acquaintances who are familiar with anomalies like this. I’ll contact people too.”
“Yes!”
“Understood! We have to save them!”
About thirty minutes passed like that.
It was just as Kim Rok-hee finally got in touch with a Na-grade fixer who’d dealt with an anomaly similar to this aggressive blood donation bus.
“Yes, yes, understood. So it’s surprisingly vulnerable to external force. We’ll try it right away. Thanks for your help!”
“…How’d it go? They say we should attack it from the outside?”
“Yes, Representative… I mean, Tower Master. They said it’s like the mouth the bus uses to eat its prey, so we should keep hitting it until it spits everything out.”
“Understood. Then everyone, get ready to attack—”
Crack!
A thunderous noise rang out around them.
Startled, the people searched for the source of the sound and spotted the blood donation bus.
“What the hell was that?”
“Did you see that just now?”
The bus’s appearance had changed completely.
As though a giant had crushed it from every direction, it had been flattened to less than a third of its original size.
Everyone looked at Kim Rok-hee at once.
“Did you attack it?”
“…I haven’t done anything yet. I was just about to.”
“Then what’s that…?”
At that moment, another loud bang!
Bang! Bang! Bang-bang! Bang!
The several buses lined up and filling the alley were crushed one after another.
The people looked at Kim Rok-hee again, and she shook her head in denial.
“Something must be happening inside… Oh.”
Then Kim Rok-hee suddenly remembered something.
‘Wait.’
Window Da-112 was located in Southwest Seoul.
Happiness Convenience Store was in Southwest Seoul, too.
And although it turned out to be a lie, the IP address that Anomaly Living Its Best Life had deliberately shown was also in Southwest Seoul, at the Seoul Southern Quarantine Facility.
‘Don’t tell me the person rampaging inside right now is…?!’
The person Kim Rok-hee wanted to meet was definitely inside the bus.
She didn’t know when they’d heard about this and rushed over, but they must’ve taken advantage of the chaos to slip inside.
She never expected to get an opportunity like this less than three days after staying at Baek San-a’s office. What luck!
“Everyone, now! Let’s attack it and make it spit up everything it ate!!”
* * *
Gush, gush, gush.
There’s no way to describe this situation except with the words gush, gush, gush.
If I wanted to exaggerate a bit more, I’d say gush-gush-gush-gush, gush-gush-gush-gush-gush.
The moment I entered the hospital, it all burst.
Every single pipe burst. Not one was left intact.
The buried ones, the exposed ones—everything I could see started bursting, and a torrent of red water poured out, flooding the hospital corridor.
“…That’s strange.”
From evolving from a mosquito, I’d learned that all the blood of a species shared the same source.
And blood-controlling anomalies and abilities all fell into the same category, too.
In other words, the blood donation bus and I were distant relatives, more or less.
But relatives or not, when two kinds of blood met, a clear hierarchy was always established.
Blood always flowed from thinner blood to thicker blood, and the thinner blood had to submit to the higher-ranking one.
“I haven’t unsealed even a single cross. What’s going on…?”
But I had all my blood sealed away.
I’d figured it wouldn’t be strange if the bus sucked my blood as soon as I entered.
Why had the opposite happened?
The blood was being drawn toward me on its own.
Wasn’t the cross doing its job?
“Don’t tell me…?”
Could it be because of the special nature of this space?
Maybe the entire space was made of blood, so it was resonating with my blood on its own?
If so, I could talk to the owner of this space without pulling out a cross.
That was the best-case scenario for me.
And maybe I could take down any blood-bearing life-form I encountered inside an anomaly’s space with a single click.
‘If I just keep moving, the blood will gather around me, and the power sustaining the space will weaken. Then it’ll collapse from the inside.’
The corridor was starting to fill with blood, so swimming would probably be easier than walking.
All right, let’s swim.
“Blood Donation Bus-kun. Actually, I’ve never been to a swimming pool before.”
For someone who spent all day eating, shitting, and working, a swimming pool was a luxury.
It wasn’t that I was trapped by the stereotype that pools were playgrounds for socialites and had never even considered setting foot in one!
“It’s a hospital, so the corridors are wide. Perfect for swimming.”
A human wouldn’t do something as crazy as swimming in a pool of blood.
But I’m a damn mosquito who draws blood to itself!
Heeheehee!
“Oh, oh! It works, it works.”
I swam excitedly down the endless corridor.
At some point, I got used to floating in the blood, and carefully tried swimming on my back, too.
Lying there made me start humming without even thinking about it.
As I got used to the pipes bursting around me whenever I swam past, it started to feel like some kind of cinematic effect.
That pool scene at the Bomb Girl’s school was truly legendary……
About ten minutes passed like that.
The pipes stopped bursting, and the blood that should’ve flooded the whole corridor had gathered into a disc beneath my body.
The corridor, which had been longer than a hundred-meter sprint track, was now short enough that I could see both ends.
It was as if the whole space had been crushed.
“I feel sorry for you, too. If the convenience store owner hadn’t found you, you’d still be quietly hunting in the wild.”
Honestly, I’m not a big fan of people who immediately go, ‘Typical humans! Humans are the problem!’ whenever something goes wrong.
But these last two incidents really do make me want to call humans fucking scum.
“That said, I can’t let you go. The moment you attacked a human, you were branded a Clipa. Someone nearly vanished, too, so you probably won’t become a Sephira.”
Why had I spent the whole year living a life of eating, shitting, and browsing the gallery without showing any kind of purpose?
Because the world today was built on the assumption that anomalies were dangerous by default.
Don’t forget.
You have to be harmless to live in the city—and to make it into downtown, too.
If I want to reach the treasure we’re all after, I can be as stupid as I need to be.
“…Still, I’ll do what I can to clear your name. Compared to the Clipa that just kill humans on sight, you’re a good one.”
Not long after, there came a loud thud, then another.
It sounded as if people outside were pounding on the blood donation bus.
The bus’s territory was breaking, and this place was reconnecting with reality.
White cracks began to spread through the world that had been nothing but darkness, apart from the pool of blood.
As if gravity had reversed, the shapes of people slowly rose from the pool.
Most of the people eaten today floated up toward the sky one by one…
After watching the last person rise, I was left confused.
“…? What? One person’s missing.”
And the one who was missing was the person I was looking for.
Where’d Cheong Harin go?
I slapped the pool of blood, now reduced to the size of a washbasin, with my hand.
“Hey, you spat out one person fewer than you swallowed.”
Slap, slap. Slap-slap-slap.
I slapped the surface of the water as if I were smacking its cheeks…
Suddenly, a hand shot out of the surface.
I grabbed it instinctively and pulled it up.
I thought there was a good chance it was Cheong Harin.
“What? Who are you?”
But the person who emerged was Cheong Harin, yet not Cheong Harin.
The person who’d had black eyes and brown hair, and had never been affected by an anomaly, had suddenly emerged with red eyes and white hair.
The pool of blood vanished completely.
At the same time, the presence of the blood donation bus in the space disappeared.
In a flash, Cheong Harin(?) opened their eyes.
The voice that came out sounded like Cheong Harin’s usual voice mixed with one pitched about three levels lower.
“I am Rubina, the Atonement Servant. I dare to beseech you to accept me as a retainer of the Ruler of All Blood. Please forgive this unworthy blood for failing to bow before the one who would become its parent.”
I told you earlier.
Unless there were special circumstances, the thicker blood always became the ruler.
Usually, the lower retainer obeyed the higher retainer’s commands absolutely, without resisting. But sometimes, they chose to introduce themselves in person to survive.
Those with deep grudges or a reason they had to stay alive fell into that category.
If they simply obeyed in silence, the higher retainer might completely absorb the lower one. That was probably what they were trying to avoid.
…But why had she taken up residence in Ms. Harin’s body of all people?
“What happened…? Did you eat Ms. Harin?”
“I humbly submit that I did no such thing. I wished to address the Ruler of All Blood, but an unforeseen incident occurred along the way, leaving me in this state. The original owner of this body is sleeping, so please rest assured.”
I suddenly remembered telling Ms. Harin to ‘bring back the jelly no matter what.’
Could she have found a way to escape this place somehow?
And that was why she was donating blood?
“…Were you donating blood, Ms. Harin?”
“That is correct.”
Ms. Cheong Harin had recently come close to death and been exposed to my blood for a short time.
Maybe that had increased her affinity with anomalies.
So the only pure human in our office was becoming an anomaly’s underling.
I hadn’t planned on offering blood insurance services on this Earth at all…
Can’t you hear it in your head by now?
The melody I spammed all over the Fixer Gallery whenever I got bored.
“I recommend trying out blood insurance with our 0.99-credit monthly plan….”