Chapter 126: Dismissal Time (2)

In truth, Du-pal's plan had been to disappear completely and cleanly from reality.

However, considering that most of the Governance agents would be aware of his disappearance, he had tried to erase every piece of information about himself.

Everyone thought they had been indifferent to Du-pal, but if anything, it had been the opposite.

Du-pal had deliberately avoided situations where his personal life might come up and intentionally kept his private interactions with them to a minimum.

No matter how sharp Su-myeon could be inside a ghost story, he was still someone who had never even held a regular job before.

Ju-hee was the only one Du-pal had really been wary of. Other than her, subtly keeping himself hidden from the others had not been particularly difficult.

“I've got plenty of years of workplace experience under my belt.”

Who was better at walking the subtle tightrope of group dynamics than a middle-aged office worker?

In any case, everything had happened according to Du-pal's plan.

Because if Geon-su stubbornly refused to return to reality, Du-pal had not been confident he could persuade him.

The old saying that no parent can win against their child was not wrong.

Besides, wasn't Geon-su's imperfect body from birth all Du-pal's fault?

What could the perpetrator who had passed those genes on do for the victim except....

“Wait, wait. Isn't that way too much of a leap?”

Mi-ae interrupted him in the office, where everyone had gathered to listen to Du-pal's story.

This was not eugenics. There was no such thing as inherently good or bad genes like that.

Within the bounds of humanity, every person was simply born with different traits, and Geon-su had happened to be born with a badly formed heart.

It was difficult to call that his parents' fault.

“...Mi-ae, you try having a kid someday. Then you'll see. Every little thing starts feeling like it's your fault.”

Du-pal answered her with a bitter smile.

In any case, Du-pal carried such intense guilt toward Geon-su that he had reached the point of thinking that way, and because of it, he had chosen simply to disappear together with him.

He had agonized over it for quite a long time.

If he told his colleagues, they would gladly help him.

“But if someone got hurt because that kid refused to budge.... That would... that would really be the worst possible outcome.”

Perhaps it was the selfish heart of a parent, but he had been afraid that burden would become Geon-su's to carry.

An injury would have been fortunate.

What if it had been permanent disability, or death?

He had not been confident he could bear that responsibility.

“Agent Mi-ae must've been put in the most awkward position. I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, well. It's not like I really did anything.”

Mi-ae casually waved a hand at Du-pal's apology.

Maybe it was fair to call her easygoing. She genuinely did not seem particularly bothered.

At this point, one might have expected her to get tired of being the only one left out and want to try entering a ghost story herself.

“Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.”

Because she had been unable to remember Du-pal, Mi-ae had not needed to work overtime and had gone home right on time.

She seemed to think that had actually been better.

If she did not know, she could rest with less guilt.

She was, above all else, an office worker who valued leaving on time and maintaining a proper work-life balance, yet because she still possessed a minimum of professional ethics, anything that did weigh on her conscience had to be dealt with.

That was the kind of agent Mi-ae was.

Su-myeon thought her personality suited the Governance remarkably well.

The more he saw of her, the more he understood why Hwi-yeon had specifically brought Mi-ae with her when she created the Governance.

“Anyway, thank you, everyone. And I'm sorry.”

Du-pal formally bowed his head to the others in apology.

“If you know you're sorry, that's enough. Now, shall we get to work?”

Once Su-myeon brought the mood to a close, the conversation immediately turned into a meeting.

Ju-hee took out the prepared documents and spoke.

“And the bodies recovered after the ghost story ended are going to be buried together. There's no helping it, but holding proper funerals... looks like it'll be difficult.”

There had been certain essential requirements for bringing the ghost story to an end.

It had not been enough merely to get all the students out.

They had also needed to deal with Wendy and the monsters remaining on the athletic field.

“.......”

The moment when they had confronted Wendy while evacuating the students had not been easy either.

Ha-min had driven an anesthetic into Wendy after Su-myeon's gunfire knocked her down, but one dose did not seem to work immediately, and Wendy staggered back to her feet.

While that was happening, Du-pal wedged the grenade Su-myeon had given him between Wendy's twisted joints.

And as it happened, they were directly in front of the third window in the third-floor hallway.

Ha-min, Su-myeon, and Du-pal shoved Wendy's body with all their strength and sent her falling outside.

Wendy exploded as she fell onto the athletic field, and it seemed all the other monsters had been caught in the blast as well.

“....”

It had been an exceptionally clean finish.

The only problem was what Wendy had left behind amid the severed body parts scattered through the carnage.

“...Are you all right?”

A ring hung from a necklace chain in Du-pal's hand.

Ju-hee carefully asked him.

An identical, slightly larger ring was already on Du-pal's finger.

What those rings implied was far too cruel.

Either Wendy had been his wife.

Or Wendy had eaten his wife.

But now there was no way to know the truth.

Wendy's corpse had been completely mangled and mixed together with the remains of countless other things.

“......Yeah. I'm fine. I have to be. It's all over now.”

Du-pal's wife.

And Geon-su's mother.

Du-pal said he had written a separate report explaining how mother and son had both ended up being swept into that place.

Even at a time like this, Du-pal was still the kind of employee who did his job properly.

“Would you like to read it?”

Mi-ae held out the completed report.

It probably contained at least some of the details, but Su-myeon did not particularly want to know more.

What he had already stolen a look at through Du-pal's book in the library had been more than enough.

Everything would be buried beneath the earth now anyway.

There was no reason to dig any further into the lives of those who would finally be laid to eternal rest.

The reports continued after that, covering how well the students who had escaped were returning to their everyday lives.

Since this was the largest number of survivors they had ever recovered, there were many points that required attention.

There were still plenty of parents who thought something was wrong, and among them were even parents who had been aware of their children's disappearance.

Those people had clearly experienced a ghost story themselves, so they would need to be investigated as well.

“Anyway, Chief Han, that doesn't change the fact that you're the one who saved my son.”

After the meeting ended, Du-pal stopped Su-myeon on his way out and thanked him yet again, for what had to be the umpteenth time.

Su-myeon waved a hand as if to say that was enough, but Du-pal spoke again, his expression firmer this time.

“At least until you find your parents, I'll help you even if I have to put my life on the line.”

Not as someone clinging to a rank he had acquired late in life.

But as a colleague who had gone through ghost stories alongside him.

Du-pal's sincerity came through completely.

Faced with a resolve that felt almost solemn, Su-myeon found himself a little grateful as well.

In fact, something had been bothering Su-myeon lately too.

'Exactly when did my parents disappear?'

The others had regained their memories of missing people they had forgotten from the moment they entered Alice Hotel.

Of course, while they were inside the hotel, the urgency of survival had kept most of them from noticing the inconsistency. Du-pal had been the only one to realize it while they were still there.

Most of the missing people had been colleagues, friends, or siblings, so they had not immediately noticed at the time and only realized something was wrong after leaving the hotel.

'In other words, they had already been missing for a while before we entered Alice Hotel.'

But Su-myeon's situation was slightly different.

He distinctly remembered living with his parents right up until just before he entered the hotel.

Then when and where had the two of them disappeared?

“I've actually been thinking about this for a while.”

Su-myeon's parents.

Those two people were also considered extremely important by the other Governance agents.

Ju-hee and Han-su, who had been cleaning up leftover documents and half-finished cups in the conference room, both turned their attention toward the conversation.

“I keep thinking the two of them might be in Alice Hotel too.”

What if they had entered Alice Hotel along with the rest of them?

That was Su-myeon's theory.

Back then, when everyone had emerged from the rooms they had entered amid all the commotion.

“I'm talking about that first hallway. The one where all the identical rooms led out.”

The hallway with yellowed wallpaper and slightly damp carpeting.

The countless identical doors.

“What if there were people inside all the other rooms too?”

What if some of those rooms still contained people who were sleeping?

***

Another ten days passed.

During that time, every member of the Governance went back over all the information they had on Alice Hotel.

They tried to examine every issue they could possibly discuss or consider regarding the ghost story.

One of those was Song Jae-min's footage they had brought back from the data center.

For some unknown reason, surprisingly, some of the data had survived even in reality.

Since the method of escaping Alice Hotel was not simple, someone suggested making audio or video recordings wherever possible so they could preserve a record.

Starting with Plan A, they developed dozens of different plans.

There were so many that memorizing them all was completely out of the question.

Of course, that did not mean nothing happened while they were busy making so many plans.

“What is all this...?”

The first incident was Ryang renovating the underground space.

Was this what people meant when they said it was good for a place to become dokkaebi territory?

Su-myeon did not dislike the underground garden that had suddenly appeared, but it was so abrupt and out of nowhere that he hardly knew what to make of it.

Ryang, of course, proudly showed it off.

She continued helping them as the sort of being you could never quite decide whether to trust, yet somehow kept finding yourself asking things anyway, much like an AI.

...Though perhaps she was a little more trustworthy than an AI.

The second incident was that another Golden Rose had bloomed for Bell.

When Su-myeon visited her castle again with Mu-yeon, he watched an experiment with that rose fail.

Something was confined behind bars twice the size of the cage that had once contained the beasts spawned from the Beast's emotions, the ones Su-myeon had seen during his previous visit to the castle.

Bell carefully soothed the creature and entered the enclosure, then tried to make it ingest the Golden Rose orally, the same way Cheshire had.

“It doesn't work.”

The Beast would not return to human form that way.

Perhaps he, too, needed some kind of mental item.

Su-myeon told Bell about what had happened earlier inside the Infinite School Grounds.

The mental recovery Du-pal had managed through the Guardian Name Tag had been an astonishing sight.

“......I'll try making one.”

Bell had not given up hope yet.

Mu-yeon seemed somewhat disappointed as well after seeing that even a Golden Rose had failed to restore the Beast.

But since he still existed as a furry animal, there had been no opportunity to hear his opinion in any real detail.

“....”

Life at the Governance remained the same afterward.

There were now about ten days left until their reservation at Alice Hotel.

Su-myeon stood before the large whiteboard in the middle of the Governance office, where he had drawn out different possibilities like a mind map, lost in thought.

'Is there something else I'm missing...?'

“Aaaaaagh!”

Suddenly, Mi-ae screamed while researching the materials.

Everyone in the office jumped in alarm and shot to their feet.

“How can this kind of crap show up now, of all times?! Seriously!”

Mi-ae shouted like someone who had just lost weeks of work, and everyone crowded around her.

Since Mi-ae was normally almost absurdly unflappable, they were all immediately on edge, wondering what could possibly have happened.

“I don't want to work overtime....”

Clutching her head, Mi-ae turned around and gestured at her monitor.

Su-myeon, realizing something, looked at her screen.

“Ha, you've got to be kidding me....”

Damn it!

Su-myeon wanted to scream too.

What Mi-ae had found was a new ghost story.

And not just any new ghost story.

It was one that had already existed in the UTG game Su-myeon had played, meaning he had already recorded its data.

It was such an unmistakable ghost story that there was no chance of failing to recognize it.

Su-myeon replayed the video Mi-ae had been watching and pulled out the connected earphones.

The video's audio began playing aloud.

-All right! The third adventure through Tagger. Let's open the app and see what kind of place it'll tag for us today.

-I, Song Jae-min, will follow it all the way to the end!