Chapter 49 - Survivors II

4

“Deputy Guild Leader. Could I see you for a moment?”

I first learned of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School in my fifth run, back when I was still living as Dang Seorin’s right-hand man in Three Thousand Worlds.

“Yes. What is it, Guild Leader?”

“Nothing major, just some news. Have you ever heard of a place called Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School?”

With a meow, the black cat our guild kept at the time—a witch’s essential accessory, according to Dang Seorin—rubbed against me on my lap.

“No. I’ve never heard of it.”

“Hmm. Well, apparently there’s a school by that name. The whole place was swallowed by a gate. For almost a year, I think? But it opened last week.”

“A year? Then there must be no survivors.”

Then as now, I based my judgments on sound common sense and a healthy intellect.

Dang Seorin lowered her voice.

“Well... surprisingly, that’s not the case.”

“Pardon?”

“The number isn’t exact, but apparently close to twenty people survived.”

My eyes widened.

Blackie meowed.

“Twenty? Is that really true?”

“Yes... is what I’d like to say right now. But strictly speaking, I don’t know either. It’s still just a rumor. So far, what I know amounts to ‘the gate was sealed for a year,’ ‘there are about twenty survivors,’ and ‘everyone trapped inside was a high school student.’”

“And high school students, at that.”

I couldn’t contain my astonishment.

As I’ve mentioned, even I, a regressor, needed three runs to clear Busan Station. And even then, I was the sole survivor.

Dang Seorin and I could both appreciate how staggering Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School’s survival rate was.

“Guild Leader. If that’s true...”

“Yes. It means there’s someone extraordinarily talented among the survivors—an awakened for the history books.”

Dang Seorin reached out and stroked Blackie’s back. The cat shivered.

“Which brings me to my request. It’s a bit of a hassle, but I’d like you to go investigate personally. See whether the rumors are true, whether there really is an awakened of that caliber, and if there is—”

“We should recruit them into our guild.”

“Yes.”

“Understood. I’ll make sure to secure them before the other guilds start eyeing them.”

“How reassuring. Oh, one more thing.”

Dang Seorin added offhandedly,

“If they have serious character issues, you don’t have to recruit them.”

Thinking back now, our witch might have had prophetic powers.

In fact, a dispassionate look at the situation made the outcome perfectly predictable.

Even physically fit, mentally sound adults came out of the void having changed classes to lunatic. What would happen to high school students at the most emotional age of their lives after a prolonged stint in a real-life horror game?

I began to feel the answer the moment I arrived at Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School’s ‘guild headquarters.’

“... This is the guild building?”

CAW, CAW!

Crows cried.

Just as the Saintess lived in an aquarium temple and Dang Seorin stayed on a train, awakened with peculiar inner worlds tended to have equally distinctive housing designs. Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School was no exception.

Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School was, quite literally, using an actual school building as its guild hideout.

(Congratulations) Two Students Accepted to Seo■ University! (Celebrate)

The banner hanging over the school gates was already in tatters.

The ‘ul’ in ‘Seoul University’ was riddled with holes. Of course, it could have been Sogang or Seokyeong University, so I couldn’t be certain until I observed it.

The schoolyard was pitted with craters, as though it had been showered with meteors. The soccer goal’s net was such a tangled mess that even Alexander the Great would have shaken his head.

The pièce de résistance was the dormitory and classroom buildings, whose walls had collapsed in heaps, leaving their steel skeletons completely exposed.

‘This isn’t a school. It’s an abandoned school.’

I wasn’t the protagonist of a horror game. That meant I knew enough to hesitate over whether I should actually go inside.

“Excuse me. What brings you here?”

“Oh, well...?”

As I stood awkwardly in front of the gates, security guards approached me.

And, uh... the guards looked rather unusual.

To put it bluntly, their heads were smashed open.

“...”

In other words, zombies.

The guard’s skull was fully exposed to the world. Yet he treated me with impeccable courtesy. If he’d been wearing a motorcycle helmet, I wouldn’t have realized he was a zombie.

“I’m sorry, but if you have no business here, please leave. This is a private school. Outsiders may not enter without permission.”

“Uh, um.”

Even I, who prided myself on having accumulated considerable experience as a regressor, couldn’t quite decide what to say in this situation.

Weren’t zombies monsters? Should I beat the shit out of them on sight?

“... I’m here from the Three Thousand Worlds guild.”

“Three Thousand Worlds? Guild?”

The zombie guard tilted his cracked noggin.

“Where’s that?”

“Uh... we are the most influential guild in Busan, you know.”

No, wait. Why was I standing here explaining things to a monster?

With that sudden realization, I composed my expression.

“I’ve come to see the person in charge here. Are they available?”

“Oh, you’re a guest of the young president.”

The young president?

“She’s in class right now, so she can’t come out immediately.”

“In class?”

“Pardon? Yes. This is a school. Naturally, the students are in class at this hour.”

“...”

By this point, I already sensed it.

A very, very familiar foreboding.

It resembled the dread that had swept through my entire body when I accepted Dang Seorin’s recruitment offer and arrived at Three Thousand Worlds, only to hear her suddenly say, [“Oh, by the way, everyone who joins our guild has to wear a pointed hat, no matter where they are.”]

After a long career as a regressor, I had acquired a sixth sense.

The so-called ‘lunacy feeler.’ A sensory organ that manifested exclusively in regressors.

Whenever it detected lunacy above a certain level, a tingling sensation traveled up from my tailbone to my neck. Right now, an alarm was ringing in my fourth cervical vertebra. Considering that meeting Dang Seorin had only made me tingle as far as my sixth thoracic vertebra, this was a troubling degree of lunacy.

‘Should I run?’

Had I been even a little more seasoned, I would certainly have obeyed my body’s siren and retreated at once.

But in my fifth run, I was pointlessly upright. ‘Still, I can’t just abandon a mission Dang Seorin entrusted to me with full authority,’ I told myself, clinging to an utterly meaningless principle.

“... I see. Understood. How long must I wait for class to end?”

“Hmm.”

The guard turned his head to look at a clock.

It was an enormous clock mounted on the school’s outer wall, sporting a design that fit seamlessly with its surroundings. By which I mean its hands were broken and the clock didn’t work at all.

But perhaps the zombie guard had a sixth sense like mine, because he read the time from the broken clock with ease.

“Recess will start in about fifteen minutes. It seems a bit rude to leave a guest standing here... Would you like to come inside and wait?”

“I’ll stay right here.”

I answered instantly. I wanted to avoid setting foot beyond those gates if at all possible. I might not have fled outright, but I was at least taking my spine’s reaction into account.

The guard shrugged.

“Really? Well, make yourself comfortable.”

It wasn’t long before my judgment proved extremely sound.

“Ding, dong, dang, dong.”

“...?”

I looked at the guard.

Please note that I just described that sound effect inside double quotation marks (“”). In other words, this ‘ding, dong, dang, dong’ was not a bell. It wasn’t a bell broadcast over a speaker, nor a bell ringing from a tower.

It was dialogue spoken by the guard—the zombie with the smashed-open head—as he moved his mouth and throat.

“Ding, dong, dang, dong.”

“...”

The moment I saw that, my third cervical vertebra began to tingle.

Just as rats panic before an earthquake, my neck’s premonition proved correct once again. Zombies poured out of the school building—or, more accurately, the abandoned school building.

“Ding, dong, dang, dong.”

“Ding, dong, dang, dong.”

All the zombies wore school uniforms. Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School uniforms, to be precise. And every one of those hundreds of zombies moved its lips, chanting ‘ding, dong, dang, dong.’

“...”

I shuddered.

‘Let’s run.’

But it was already too late.

“You asked to see me?”

A perfectly living human walked out from among the hundreds of zombies, wearing the same white uniform as them.

Her hair was in a ponytail. Dyed orange.

That hair color must have stood out at a private school with a long tradition, and perhaps earned her a certain following among the students all the more for it. She approached me like a student who’d been summoned from class because a visitor had arrived.

“Who are you?”

That was Cheon Yohwa.

“... Hello. My name is Undertaker, and I serve as Deputy Guild Leader of Three Thousand Worlds in Busan.”

“Huh? Guild? Deputy Guild Leader?”

Cheon Yohwa tilted her head. Judging by her words alone, it was quite a cute reaction.

The problem was her eyes.

Her eyes had no focus. It was as though her irises and pupils were indistinguishable. Her eyes were steeped in pitch-black shadow, like wells.

“What’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”

“Uh... I see. Well. A guild is a group of awakened.”

“Awakened?”

“... Awakened is, well, a term for people with special abilities.”

Cheon Yohwa blinked.

My third cervical vertebra switched on its blinker too. Rather violently.

“Special abilities? What’s that supposed to mean? Mister, are you some kind of otaku?”

“No, I... Pardon me, but may I ask your name?”

“Oh, I’m Cheon Yohwa.”

At this, she politely bowed at the waist in greeting.

And that ‘normal-person reaction’ put me somewhat at ease. I couldn’t help it. I’d always had a soft spot for polite people. It had happened with Go Yori too, hadn’t it?

From this point onward, a parade of verbal blunders marched out of my mouth. At the time, I didn’t even realize they were blunders.

“I’m the student council president here.”

“Well. You’ve awakened an ability yourself, haven’t you, Miss Cheon? I don’t know precisely what it is, but that guard, for instance, and the [zombies] roaming all over the schoolyard must be the work of an awakened here—”

“What? Zombies?”

Fatal verbal blunder number one.

“Yes. Your ability is extremely powerful, Miss Cheon. I don’t know whether you’ve turned already-dead [corpses] into zombies or whether you can turn living people into zombies too.”

“... Corpses?”

Fatal verbal blunder number two.

“You and the guild members here could obtain far better living conditions than these. We at Three Thousand Worlds don’t make empty promises. There’s no need to struggle in an [abandoned school] with a collapsed roof and crumbling outer walls.”

“...”

Fatal verbal blunder number three.

“Of course, I’m not suggesting we do anything immediately. If you could simply spare a little time and arrange an appointment, we could adjust our schedule and pay you a formal visit...”

“Please leave.”

“Pardon?”

“Get out of our school right now.”

Only then did I realize my surroundings had gone quiet.

The guard who’d reacted like a living person until moments ago, the zombies crowded into the schoolyard, the actual students scattered among them, and Cheon Yohwa standing before me.

They were all staring silently at me.

“...”

“No. Don’t leave.”

Cheon Yohwa caught my wrist with a firm grip.

“We were short on security guards anyway. Yes. This is perfect timing. Mister, would you like to [get a job] at our school? A security guard. Yes, that sounds good.”

“...”

“Or you could [transfer] here instead. The younger girls in the basketball club have been complaining that there aren’t enough new students lately.”

My second cervical vertebra tingled furiously, developing symptoms of a slipped disc.

Even my fifth-run self, who didn’t possess a speck of social awareness, could recognize that I was fucked. I immediately slapped Cheon Yohwa’s wrist away and fled without hesitation.

I was certain the ‘enemies’ would chase after me. It was a sensible judgment, and therefore a mistaken one.

The beings belonging to Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School did not pursue me.

When I looked back, they hadn’t taken a single step beyond the gates.

“...”

The wall separating the school from the outside had collapsed in places. Yet the zombies never crossed the school’s boundaries, as though an ‘invisible wall’ stood there.

Just behind the gates, just beyond the wall, hundreds of eyes stared silently in my direction, their owners standing like cicadas clinging to a wall.

“Ding, dong, dang, dong.”

“Ding, dong, dang, dong.”

“Ding, dong, dang, dong.”

The bell rang across the abandoned school grounds. The zombies turned around again.

“Oh, recess is over.”

Cheon Yohwa muttered expressionlessly. She, too, mingled with the zombies and trudged toward the school’s main entrance. There were not only corpses but also scattered ‘real humans’ among them, though honestly, I couldn’t tell how they differed from the zombies.

They seemed less like independent individuals than a single interconnected collective.

The schoolyard fell silent in an instant.

When I listened closely, I could hear voices drifting from the distant classroom building. English. From another classroom came the sound of someone teaching math.

To my horror, the guild members of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School—including the zombies—were taking ‘classes’ inside the school.

“... This is fucking insane.”

That was my first meeting with Cheon Yohwa.

First attempt at contact with the aliens: failed.

“They’re crazy.”

Dang Seorin reached the same conclusion upon hearing my report.

“You run into lunatics like that sometimes. What do you think, Deputy Guild Leader? Could they harm civilians too? If so, we’ll have to eliminate them.”

“I can’t say for certain yet, but I don’t think we need to worry about civilian casualties. They’ve nested in that abandoned school and won’t leave.”

“Hmm, really?”

In response to my earnest counsel, Dang Seorin made an eminently reasonable decision.

“Then let’s leave them alone if we can. No need to stir up a hornet’s nest for nothing.”

“A wise decision.”

“Yes. I’m always wise.”

“Pointed hats.”

“An adornment that crowns my supreme wisdom.”

Three Thousand Worlds washed its hands of the matter completely.

But the world wasn’t populated solely by rational people like us.

5

A person’s lunacy is like the king of fruits, the durian.

No matter how tightly you seal it in a box, it still flaunts its overwhelming presence to everyone nearby.

Not long after I returned with my tail thoroughly between my legs, every awakened on the Korean Peninsula began taking notice of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School.

“A necromancer? A mage-type awakened?”

“And she can freely control hundreds of corpses?”

“That’s one hell of a rookie.”

“Recruit her! Whatever it takes, accept any conditions she wants and bring her here!”

The age of humanpunk was upon us, with manpower replacing every other resource.

Even as all other resources went to shit, corpses remained abundantly available. The profession of necromancer was inherently overflowing with appeal.

Of course, I knew that overflowing appeal was no different from Pandora’s box. By which I mean, the moment you unwrapped it, dear old Santa Claus would start delivering disasters all over the world.

“Everyone, that place is a den of horrors, practically a void itself. I strongly advise you not to go inside.”

“Does Three Thousand Worlds fear our guild’s growth?”

“Leave him be. They failed to recruit her, so they’re trying to sabotage us. Ignore him. Just ignore him.”

Foolishly, the guild leaders completely ignored my kindly advice.

The arrival of a top-tier rookie on the market had driven them mad.

“Wow! An actual zombie army controlled by a real necromancer, not some knockoff like the New Buddha virus!”

“Move... everybody move! With a dark mage, we might be able to break Dang Seorin’s stranglehold on the top spot!”

When Three Thousand Worlds, the biggest club of them all, announced it was sitting out this free-agent transfer window, the other guild leaders descended like madmen.

Each carefully selected the envoy with the highest Charisma stat in their guild, sent them out, and enthusiastically mashed the ‘Recruit’ button.

The only difference between those other envoys and me was whether or not they had spinal nerves.

“Uh... why aren’t they coming back from Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School?”

“You too? We haven’t heard a thing from our guild member either.”

No matter how long the guild leaders waited, their envoys did not return.

Eventually, worn out by their own waiting, the guild leaders visited Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School in person—and witnessed an astonishing sight.

“Wait, y-you... why are you working here?”

“Pardon? I’m just an ordinary security guard.”

“Whaaat?”

Every talented individual sent by the guilds had instead taken a job at Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School.

Apparently their skulls had been riddled with holes during the job interview, because every new guard had discharged their memories of life along with their brain matter. They couldn’t even recognize the faces of the guild leaders they’d once served.

Just as the abyss gazes into you when you gaze into it, sending someone to recruit new talent only to lose your existing talent in return was something that could happen at any time. But the guild leaders hadn’t cultivated their characters enough to accept that truth.

“What the fuck... Right, that’s it. Fuck them up!”

And anyone seeking to fuck someone else up must always be prepared to get fucked up themselves.

Every member of the guilds that charged in, declaring revenge on Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School, succeeded in ‘finding employment’ without a single exception. In this era of job shortages, Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School single-handedly carried the team, drastically reducing unemployment on the Korean Peninsula.

“This is fucking insane... What is that?”

“Undertaker was actually right!”

The guild leaders were horrified.

“We absolutely cannot mess with them.”

“Fuck, did you see what they eat in the school cafeteria? Human flesh! They’re sitting there eating human flesh! Crazy bastards.”

“Fuck, that wasn’t forbidden fruit. It was forbidden zombie.”

But it was already too late.

Pandora’s box had been opened.

Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School temporarily reached saturation. Naturally so, given the sudden influx of new security guards. Even for a prestigious high school boasting history and tradition, 136 guards felt a little excessive.

This unplanned increase in personnel inevitably placed a tremendous burden on the school’s finances.

Had Cheon Yohwa been an ordinary corporate CEO, she would have drawn her trusty blades at this point: the three renowned swords of ‘downsizing,’ ‘mass layoffs,’ and ‘restructuring.’

But Cheon Yohwa was a formidable figure in an entirely different league from ordinary people. She decided this was precisely the time to push an aggressive merger policy instead.

“Uh, whaaat?”

“They... why are they growing?”

The ‘school’ literally grew.

More precisely, the school’s territory steadily expanded.

At some point, the buildings originally standing in front of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School became ‘a spicy rice cake shop’ and ‘a convenience store.’ This didn’t mean the shop actually sold spicy rice cakes.

“Hello! Two servings of spicy rice cakes and three fried dumplings, please!”

When a zombie student said this,

“You’re such a lovely student, I threw in an extra fried dumpling.”

The zombie proprietor would reply.

Nothing changed hands between them. The zombie student handed over invisible banknotes, and the zombie proprietor handed over invisible spicy rice cakes. Then they both smiled happily.

That was one of the more normal cases.

Sometimes, after handing over invisible banknotes, a student would even receive ‘human-flesh spicy rice cakes.’

Students’ laughter never ceased at the snack shops outside the school. Business boomed at lunchtime and after school. This was a truly creative economy.

“Hello! I’m Cheon Yohwa, Student Council President of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School!”

“Eek...! P-please don’t kill me!”

“Oh, wait a moment. Our students have been really interested in off-campus experiential learning lately! Would you be interested in working with our school?”

“Not interested! Fuck off!”

“Thank you!”

“...”

One by one, the guilds based around Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School succumbed to its zeal for education.

In less than a year, the Korean Peninsula had given birth to an academy city unlike any in history.