Chapter 222 - The Explosion Victim I

1

Long ago, Old Man Scho would often grumble.

“Seriously, Embalmar. Does this world not even have anyone with Teleportation? What the hell does the Earth server have?”

“Hmm... Tutorial fairies?”

“Ptooey! We’re better off without those bastards!”

Before leaving on vacation, Old Man Scho tried every possible way to find someone with Teleport.

His efforts came to nothing, though.

Even after he typed “Quitting this fucking trash game, have fun” into the chat room and logged out, I still refused to give up.

‘There has to be someone with a new ability hiding somewhere. I just don’t know about them yet.’

Unlike that no-show old fossil who pretended to know everything in the world, I, the Undertaker, was a true millennial/Gen Z youth of our times who never forgot to be humble.

And so I roamed all over the place, hitting Busan, then Seoul, Beijing, then Tokyo, and sometimes even Istanbul and Berlin.

“To think I’d share a drink with the renowned Undertaker. One really does see everything if one lives long enough.”

Very occasionally, my travels would lead to drinking sessions like this one with the High Shrine Maiden, the big boss of the Magical Girl Council.

“You don’t exactly look old enough to lament having lived so long.”

“Not on the outside, no. But the spirit I’ve taken into my body is modeled on Daji, the nine-tailed fox. Her backstory says she’s been alive since 2000 BC, and that affects my mental age as well.”

“Oh.”

“Strangely enough, looking at you feels like looking at someone my own age. It’s an odd sensation.”

The High Shrine Maiden narrowed her eyes at me over her fan.

“That’s why I keep slipping into old-fashioned speech whenever we’re alone together. Quite troublesome.”

“Well, for someone who’s lived so long, you don’t speak a single foreign language, English included...”

“Hush. What can I do when my actual self is a born-and-bred Japanese woman? You’re simply too fluent in foreign languages. I’m perfectly average.”

“Thank you.”

CLINK.

We toasted. The High Shrine Maiden swirled her whiskey glass, spreading a tipsy haze through the air.

Mix tipsiness with air, and you get atmosphere. I breathed in atmosphere rather than oxygen as I spoke.

“That’s how becoming a magical girl works, isn’t it? You find a spirit friendly toward humans among the spirits of the Eight Million, then form a contract at a ceremony presided over by you, the High Shrine Maiden.”

“Indeed. You’re well informed.”

She smiled, tapping her chin with her folded fan.

She seemed drunk.

“Of course, it needn’t be particularly friendly toward humanity. A vicious supernatural creature will do. So long as it’s friendly toward one shrine maiden, that’s enough.”

“I see.”

“And it needn’t be a spirit from the archipelago. Other spirits are welcome too. The restrictions aren’t as stringent as you might think...”

Her eyes crinkled in a smile.

“Why, Undertaker? Have you finally taken an interest in magical girls yourself? If so, I promise to make you the strongest magical girl on Earth.”

“I’ll decline. More importantly, I’m curious how you met the nine-tailed fox, High Shrine Maiden. Was she a god you already worshipped?”

“Ah. That happened in the tutorial dungeon—”

Our conversation meandered quietly along.

Nothing helped awakened people get acquainted faster than swapping tutorial dungeon stories. Much like stories about military service or college, they were perfect for building a sense of camaraderie.

“There was a guy named Seo Gyu in our tutorial dungeon.”

Eventually, this subject came up.

“I call him SG Guy. The tutorial fairy tried to kill him as an example to the others.”

“Oh?”

“Apparently, the fairies share a set of guidelines. They say their seniors handed them down, and they explain how to keep humans in line. There are tips like, ‘Blowing someone’s head up as a demonstration is the most effective method.’”

“...”

The High Shrine Maiden hummed and twitched her fox ears.

It didn’t feel as though they had moved toward me. It was somewhere else, somewhere other than here. More like an unconscious tilt as she recalled the past.

“What is it?”

“No, nothing. Your story merely reminded me of an incident.”

“An incident?”

“Hmm. It’s rather too trivial to tell anyone else about. I’m the only one who finds it strange...”

She hesitated to speak.

But this was only a casual drinking session, after all. When I kept encouraging her, she folded her fan with an air of, ‘Well, what harm could it do?’

“It truly was nothing. Like you, and like the other magical girls, I too was dropped into a tutorial dungeon. Naturally, there was a fairy. But...”

“But?”

“There was an explosion.”

An explosion?

I tilted my head.

“You mean someone’s head exploded?”

“Precisely.”

“That isn’t particularly surprising. Fairies pull that stunt in every other tutorial dungeon too...”

“No, Undertaker. It wasn’t the fairy’s doing. A person’s head certainly exploded, but the fairy showed no sign of having anything to do with it.”

?

“Then who blew their head up?”

“No one.”

???

“You could only call it self-detonation.”

“What?”

“Of all the people summoned into the tutorial dungeon with me, exactly one person—though no one had touched her, not even the fairy—had her head explode all on its own.”

2

This was the High Shrine Maiden’s account.

Around a hundred people were forcibly summoned into a tutorial dungeon. They were confused.

[“W-where are we?”]

[“I was on the train just a moment ago...”]

[“Hoe! Hello, everyone! I’m Fairy No. 1675, and I’ll be in charge of you! It’s a pleasure...”]

People being summoned. A fairy appearing.

So far, it was little different from the Busan Station dungeon I had experienced.

The anomaly occurred immediately after the summoning.

[“Aaaaaaaaaah!”]

A horrific scream.

Startled, everyone turned. A woman was clutching her head, writhing and shrieking.

[“Aaaaaaah! Aaaaah! Aaaaaah!”]

Everyone froze.

How many screams could a modern person have heard in their life? Even so, it was immediately clear that the screams pouring out of this unknown woman were anything but ordinary.

The High Shrine Maiden testified:

“It wasn’t an ordinary voice.”

The woman’s voice held the excruciating pain of flesh being torn away.

The pain of her entire body’s living flesh being seared in flames.

The pain of a thousand razor blades slicing gradually through bare skin until they reached nerves and bone.

The pitch of a scream they had never heard before, and a timbre they would hardly ever hear again, paralyzed everyone for an instant.

“That was how horrific it was. A scream that made you shudder just hearing it.”

It was enough to startle even the fairy who was supposed to run the tutorial.

In its bewilderment, the fairy inadvertently forgot its role of guiding the humans.

[“H-hoe? What is it? What is it? Why are you suddenly screaming?”]

[“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”]

Even the fairy’s fussing was buried beneath the scream.

The strange happenings didn’t end there. Faint clusters of light leaked between the fingers of the woman’s hands as she clutched her head.

A change in color.

Her originally black hair was turning white, starting from the tips.

At an extraordinary speed.

“... A typical awakening phenomenon.”

“Ah, yes. Though we call it divine possession. I didn’t know it then, but looking back now, that mysterious woman was awakening an ability.”

Awakening an ability the moment she arrived in the tutorial dungeon put her far ahead of everyone else.

Normally, this should have been the birth of an awakened person for the ages. And yet...

[“Aaaaaah! No, Unn-daah! No! No! Aah! Aaaaah! Stop, please, Unn-daah, no no no no no!”]

For some reason, the woman had apparently done nothing but shriek, rapidly repeating “no” and “Unn-daah.”

“Unn-daah? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know either. Perhaps her pronunciation was simply mangled by the screaming. But she repeated those sounds with such agony that they were deeply etched into my memory.”

“She really did look as though she was in pain,” the High Shrine Maiden added.

“And it wasn’t merely screaming. That woman gripped her head so fiercely that her nails dug into her scalp, and blood streamed down.”

“...”

“Perhaps it would have been different later, once I’d had a taste of the apocalypse. But at the time, I’d never seen anything like it in my life.”

Had about thirty seconds passed?

While the humans stood bewildered and the fairy floundered, the woman’s transformation was nearing completion. The white spreading from the tips of her hair had reached her scalp, blossoming into a brilliant white.

And when the change in color—the sign of an awakened person—was complete...

BOOOOOOM!

An explosive report rang out.

At first, it was difficult to grasp what had happened. Then something fell from the air and landed with a soft splat against the High Shrine Maiden’s cheek.

“It was a piece of that woman’s flesh. Her tongue, most likely.”

“...”

“Do you understand, Undertaker? Immediately after being summoned to the tutorial dungeon, she screamed incomprehensibly for about thirty seconds. Then her awakening was completed, and her head exploded at once.”

“That’s...”

It truly was a strange occurrence.

Just as the High Shrine Maiden had warned.

“Are you certain the fairy didn’t blow her head up?”

“Certain. Even before accepting Tamamo-no-Mae, I was confident in my ability to read expressions. Immediately after the woman died, the fairy was terribly bewildered.”

“...”

“Well, perhaps the fairy was skilled enough at acting to fool me. But I’ve already killed that fairy, so there’s no way to check.”

It wasn’t a particularly pleasant incident, so we soon moved on to other subjects.

Apart from her baffling taste for magical girls, the High Shrine Maiden was quite easy to talk to, and our drinking session continued all night.

But even after the dawn sunlight streamed through the windows, her story of the “mysterious explosion victim” lingered in a corner of my heart like the shadow of the moon.

3

Why was I so bothered by a story that amounted to nothing more than drinking-table chatter?

My heart pounded with an inexplicable unease. That was rare for a regressor like me.

Unable to bear it any longer, I finally called Fairy No. 264 and relayed the High Shrine Maiden’s story.

I asked whether it knew anything.

“Hoee. If that’s what you mean, it would have happened to Fairy No. 1679, not No. 1675, yes!”

As befitted a dream demon whose mind was loosely connected to the others, No. 264 immediately answered my query.

“But Fairy No. 1679 died in the line of duty before completing the tutorial, so the data isn’t intact!”

“Even a rough version will do. Can you play back that mysterious woman’s death cries?”

“Hoe. Maybe I could manage a little if I borrowed Gapless’s power?”

“You have my permission.”

“Just give me a moment! Kzzzt, bzzzt. Zzt. Kzzzzzt.”

Fairy No. 264 closed its eyes and imitated the crackle of radio static with its mouth.

And the next moment...

[“A a a a a a a a h !”]

An altered voice played from No. 264’s mouth, completely different from the voices fairies normally had.

It was the voice of someone I had, for convenience, been calling the “mysterious woman.”

[“A a a a a a h n o a a h !”]

“...”

I listened silently to the last words No. 264 was reproducing as vividly as possible.

Even as I listened, I was inwardly puzzled. Why was I so fixated on a bit of drinking-table chatter? Was it really worth investigating to the point of drawing on the resources of a dream demon and Gapless?

But about ten seconds into the playback...

“... Wait.”

I realized it.

The source of my unease.

“Hoe?”

“Play that section again.”

“Understood!”

The fairy blinked its eyes repeatedly.

A moment later, a voice with an oddly mechanical undertone emerged from its mouth again.

[“A a a h n o U n n d u h t a y k u h n o n o i t h u r t s i t h u r t s i t h u r t s p l e a s e s t o p U n n d u h t a y k u h !”]

“There. Just the last part, again.”

[“U n n d u h t a y k u h !”]

“...”

Just as I thought.

In the silence after No. 264’s playback ended, I swallowed a groan.

The High Shrine Maiden didn’t have Perfect Recall. Nor was she proficient in foreign languages. Whether English or Korean, her conversational skills maintained a strict policy of national isolation.

In other words, she was bound to have misheard.

Those mysterious sounds interspersed throughout the woman’s screams.

They weren’t “Unn-daah.”

They were “Unn-duh-tay-kuh.”

Say it quickly, and you got...

“Undertaker.”

Yes.

For some reason, immediately after the arrival of the void, in a tutorial dungeon somewhere in the Japanese archipelago, far from the Busan Station where I had been summoned—an awakened woman I had never met, a complete stranger...

Had exploded to death while crying out “Undertaker.”