Chapter 146 - Godslayer I

1

Lately, I feel I've been dwelling on overly private matters, such as the exceedingly personal relationship (murder) between Workshop Master Noh Doha and myself.

Surely a person ought to talk about the outside world once in a while?

So, to take a breather, let's discuss the times we live in. Namely, the latest trends in the end-of-the-world apocalypse.

In the past, humanity built buildings and wrote literature while debating all sorts of terms like “modernism” and “postmodernism.”

But to the millennials and Gen Z of the world's final days, those words were nothing more than outdated, musty concepts.

The new generation of humanity had evolved to be a little more practical.

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Pardon?”

“I counted the steps in that house you built recently. There are thirteen. Why did you build it that way? Fancy taking a tour all the way down to the bottom of hell when you walk downstairs?”

“No, the local carpenter just built it however he liked...”

“You must have given that carpenter one hell of a grudge against you. Cut ties with him immediately and hire someone else. Reduce the steps to ten, or nine.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“Suit yourself. You're the one who'll fucking die, not me. Well, would you look at that? You've even built a basement? You'd have better odds of survival jumping off a building than living here. You've practically posted a notice inside begging anomalies to come move in.”

Abyssalism.

This was the latest trend sweeping the end of the world.

Abyssalism gave more active consideration to “How do I avoid getting fucked by an anomaly?” than “How can I live comfortably?”

It hadn't been like this from the beginning.

Back when nuclear bombs were flying and civil wars were breaking out, humanity still thought “scientifically.”

People dug solid concrete bunkers to hide in, or cut themselves off from society entirely to enjoy a solo life as a max-level wilderness survivalist.

By scientific common sense, those were the right approaches.

Unfortunately, the anomalies that emerged at the end of the world were mostly math dropouts brimming with humanities sensibilities.

“Waaaah...! Waah...!”

“Good grief. What drove that beggar so crazy?”

“Don't even ask. He used to be a successful executive at a major corporation, and apparently he took his entire family into an underground bunker.”

“What? An underground bunker? That's insane.”

“Yes. Insane. In a single night, a bomb hit the bunker and his whole family turned into ghosts. A complete nightmare, apparently. He was the only one left and barely escaped to Busan, but can you really call that living?”

“Wah...! Waah...! Waaaah...!”

Anomalies weren't particularly fond of scientific approaches or the “laws of cause and effect.”

They preferred “reversed causality.”

Take underground air-raid shelters, for example.

What is an air-raid shelter in the first place? A facility built to prepare for air raids, bombings, nuclear bombs, and the like.

According to humanity's scientific thinking, an air-raid shelter is safer than an ordinary home.

Unless I have a relative named Osama bin Laden, the odds of a missile coming specifically to blow up a concealed shelter are exceedingly low.

But anomalies think a little differently.

It isn't that a bomb exists and gets launched at a bunker.

Because “there is a bunker” there, naturally “a bomb must explode,” too.

In short, from the anomalies' perspective, the question is:

'I mean, why build a bunker in the first place if no missiles are going to hit it? Shouldn't it stay true to its purpose and essence?'

As a result, everyone who built and moved into an underground air-raid shelter was hit by missile bombardments, without exception. The Gimhae Plain was utterly devastated.

That day, humanity underwent a paradigm shift.

“Huh? Someone's calling me?”

“Fuck, don't answer! Never answer! Ignore your smartphone completely unless you're accessing SG Net!”

A telephone? It isn't something for hearing other people's voices. It's “a tool that lets you converse with an unseen being.”

Unless you're a high school student who enjoys spiritual exchanges with ghosts, making or taking calls is profoundly foolish.

“Abyssalist communication studies” does not recognize communication that relies on tools like telephones. Only face-to-face conversation constitutes true human interaction.

“You lunatic! Why did you put a mirror in the bathroom?”

“Huh? Because it's a bathroom...”

“Your expression and the expression in the mirror are different right now! Get rid of it immediately!”

A mirror? That's “a tool that confines a being identical to you in another world.” A monstrosity among monstrosities that must never, under any circumstances, be used as a decorative accessory.

That's right.

Until now, humanity had been far too lazy in its dependence on tools.

On today's Earth, now updated with the apocalypse event, our choices needed to be a little more discerning.

“Well, our elders got along just fine without phones back in the day...”

“Fine, I'll live without looking in mirrors. Except for the bathroom mirror right after a shower, looking at one stressed me out anyway.”

And humanity adapted.

People simply decided to live without telephones, without mirrors, without the conveniences of civilization.

Come to think of it, hadn't our distant ancestors hunted mammoths perfectly well without any of that crap?

Even so, there was one tool humanity couldn't give up until the very end.

A tool that, if we let go of it too, felt as though it would send us straight back to prehistoric times.

Surprisingly, it wasn't the internet.

As I said, it wasn't the smartphone, either.

The tool humanity—and Americans in particular—couldn't let go of until the final moment was—

BANG!

The star of this episode.

The gun.

3

Sometimes, when reading contemporary fantasy—especially stories where “aura” exists and everyone fights with swords—a question naturally springs to mind.

'Why do these primitives obsess over cold weapons instead of using beautiful, magnificent guns? Are they medieval barbarians or something?'

Fiction's characteristic tendency to look down on firearms and other gunpowder weapons has a long history.

When a monster appeared in the hills behind Tokyo-3, the Self-Defense Forces fired every cutting-edge weapon they had at it, without making a dent. The moment someone coolly murmured, “What a waste of taxpayer money,” the fate of gunpowder-based civilization in pop culture was all but sealed.

The anomalies had clearly been deeply impressed by the contemporary fantasy they'd watched, too.

Boss-level anomalies had hides that readily deflected bullets, missiles, and nuclear bombs, yet for some reason turned soft before a bit of sashimi-style slicing seasoned with a spoonful of “aura.”

“Fire! Shoot them all! Those things, those bastards are nothing! Just aim calmly and shoot!”

SKREEEE!

Of course, there were anomalies that bullets worked perfectly well on.

Goblins. Orcs. Firearms were fairly effective against anomalies born from the outset to serve as humanity's experience points.

These village-class anomalies were numerous, too. South Korea, a country with military conscription, got plenty of mileage out of guns immediately after the void arrived.

Even so, firearms rapidly fell out of favor. After Tenlegs enjoyed an omakase mukbang of the Republic of Korea Armed Forces, they disappeared altogether.

Why?

There was an anecdote that neatly illustrated why firearms had died out.

“Haaah...”

One day, Cheon Yohwa came to visit my café and let out a deep sigh.

Even the spoon she used to stir her beloved cream latte moved listlessly.

“What's wrong?”

“Oh, well... Teacher. Our girls have been fighting among themselves more often lately.”

“The girls at Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School? Aren't they always playing mind games with each other?”

For reference, an anomaly called “Yuri Fiction” permanently freeloaded at Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School. It was an earthbound-spirit anomaly of the unique-barrier type, and even I had no way to exorcise it. I had no choice but to leave it alone.

Even I, the Undertaker, wasn't omnipotent.

Thanks to it, vicious dramas of love, hate, and emotional devastation played out at Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School 365 days a year.

For Cheon Yohwa, standing center stage in all that, every day must have felt fresh.

“Of course, I can laugh off a little psychological warfare by now... Hmm, but it feels like they've started crossing the line? The day before yesterday, one of the girls nearly died.”

“Oh dear.”

“I don't criticize them for things like ripping out fingernails. I don't care as long as they keep their drama to themselves and don't hurt anyone else. But if someone dies, that harms our entire guild, doesn't it? Never mind ruining the atmosphere.”

“Hmm.”

“For now, I gave the perpetrator the full water-torture course to knock some sense into her, but she said she hadn't known that would happen either. I kneaded her mind a little, and it didn't seem like she was lying. Teacher. Isn't this an anomaly?”

“An anomaly...”

Coolly assessing whether this was an anomaly was something only an amateur would do here.

The important fact was that the stress level of one of the Korean Peninsula's top two guild leaders had passed the critical threshold.

Physical trauma to a single member of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School had no wider impact. But “The Melancholy of Cheon Yohwa” was a terrifying unknown, with no telling what butterfly effect it might cause.

It would be deeply awkward if she started creating closed spaces and destroying cities to relieve her stress.

You don't know which work that description was parodying? Have you people forgotten Haruhi Suzumiya?

Anyway.

I smiled gently.

“Yohwa. Then how about we visit Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School together for the first time in a while, and I check whether any sectors have been infected by an anomaly?”

“Oh! Really?”

Her face lit up, then grew gloomy again.

“Ah, um. But you're so busy, Teacher. I know that perfectly well, and I'd hate for you to go out of your way just because of us...”

“It's fine. Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School is practically a temple where Gapless is sealed, so it needs regular inspections anyway. Besides, if you of all people sense something strange, Yohwa, that's well worth paying attention to.”

“Aaah... That's my Teacher! Thank you so much!”

Apparently, I'd chosen the right answer.

We headed to Sejong City through Inunaki Tunnel. All the way back to Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School, Cheon Yohwa beamed and chatted with me.

“Wow. It really feels like just yesterday we spent years struggling through the school together, Teacher... Time goes so fast.”

“Those were years only for the two of us. To everyone else, it was just one day.”

“Ahaha. That's right! Which makes it feel even stranger. Oh, come this way, Teacher!”

It had been a while since my last visit, and Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School looked quite different.

All the classrooms had been converted to other uses. Every elevator was closed, and the fourth floor had been cordoned off entirely with no-entry tape.

“This is the perpetrator's private room!”

“Are you sure it's all right for me to just go in?”

“Oh, come on. She nearly killed someone, remember? She's practically a murderer. A murderer. We're still force-feeding her water in the detention room. What has she done to deserve privacy? We've already searched the whole place once.”

Dang Seorin and Cheon Yohwa, the two guild leaders representing this land, both dearly loved water torture. The Korean Peninsula's age-old reputation for fine water remained alive and well.

As expected, the only pillar normal people could depend on was me, the Undertaker, a cultured man of this era.

I searched around the private room.

Yohwa's claim that she'd already searched it apparently wasn't empty talk. There didn't seem to be anything new to discover.

“Hmm?”

But something was odd about the window frame.

TAP TAP.

When I tapped the frame, the plastic rang a little too brightly.

“What is it, Teacher?”

“I think there's a hollow space in here.”

“Eek.”

I slid the window aside and felt around the frame, discovering an artificially made “seam.”

“I'll use a little aura.”

“Oh. Yes! That's fine.”

Ink-dark aura gathered at my fingertips. I cut along the seam in the window frame, and sure enough, exposed a hollow space the perpetrator had carefully concealed.

The moment I saw the item hidden inside, I frowned.

Cheon Yohwa, peeking over my shoulder, also rapidly darkened. Even frontline troops discovering a crawl-sized hole in the barbed wire along the Military Demarcation Line would have looked cheerier.

“... That crazy fuck.”

She muttered darkly.

The hidden item was a handgun.

I immediately picked up the K5 pistol and fired out the window.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

Rapid fire. Gunshots echoed through Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School until all thirteen rounds were spent.

I sensed signs of alarm from the other students in the distance, but had no time to worry about that.

“Whew.”

“Haaah...”

Only after the loaded ammunition ran out could we sigh in relief.

Understandably so, because this “anomaly” was truly dangerous.

Dangerous enough to momentarily put both Cheon Yohwa, leader of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School, and me, a regressor, on edge.

“Wow, I'm so glad I called you, Teacher. If we'd left this alone, at least one person would have died. With bad luck, as many as thirteen...”

“I'm glad I came, too.”

That's right.

Here was why firearms had become useless at the end of the world. No, why they had gone far beyond mere uselessness and become “dangerous.”

Every gun in this world, without a single exception, was inhabited by an anomaly.

[Chekhov's Gun].

That was the name of the anomaly that had dumped every firearm in the world into the shitter in an instant.