Chapter 129: Tagger.apk (3)

[3. As the game progresses, the owner within the ghost story develops a sense of self and becomes capable of exerting a faint influence on reality in proportion to the causality it has obtained. Therefore, natural phenomena and unnatural phenomena must be carefully distinguished. It is difficult to clearly document a method for telling them apart, but if something feels ominous, it is recommended that you trust your instincts.]

[Mission successful! Tagging the third location.]

Unlike the cheerful sound that rang out, Jae-min's expression stiffened.

The photo he had just taken with the flash going off in his face.

His two eyes, opened comically wide, and his forehead washed white by the flash took up more than half the screen.

And behind him in the photo, there was a woman walking on all fours.

“.......”

Her enormous eye sockets, staring straight at the camera, were pitch-black, and her mouth was stretched open impossibly wide.

Jae-min swallowed dryly and whipped around.

But when he actually looked behind him, all he saw was a couple out for a run, jogging slowly past him.

'What the hell was that?'

Feeling strange, he checked the photo again.

This time, as though what he had just seen had been nothing more than a hallucination, it was gone.

The photo was filled only with his own face making a grotesque expression.

“...Come on. You guys keep messing with me so much I'm starting to see things.”

Jae-min spoke playfully for no reason as he caught his breath.

I just saw it wrong.

That's all it was....

“.......”

He had the feeling that something was different today, but he could not stop.

[Live] 235 viewers

He had never had this many viewers on a live stream before.

The viewers were clearly feeling the same ominous thrill that was making him uncomfortable.

This was an opportunity!

“All right, all right. Doesn't it really feel like something's going to happen today, guys?”

Jae-min kept talking as though emphasizing the mood even further and held the Tagger app up to the camera again.

The third tagged location, which had been loading, appeared on the screen.

“Then shall we head to the next place?”

***

“We can't take the car any farther than this.”

At Han-su's words after he neatly parked in the Hangang Park parking lot, Su-myeon could feel his irritation beginning to rise.

Oh, come on!

A chase in the real world was unexpectedly harder in some ways than dealing with a ghost story.

They could not use items, and the space was effectively limitless, so reality really was harder after all.

“He already completed the mission. He says he's moving to the next location!”

At Ju-hee's words, Su-myeon roughly took off his glasses and wiped them.

Jae-min was using public transportation, while they had a car.

Su-myeon had assumed they would be faster, but in early-evening Seoul, public transportation was quicker.

Should they switch to public transportation even now? What should they do?

“Is he taking the subway? A bus?”

“The subway. Ah, but.... I don't think we'll catch him even if we head to the station now. Why does this guy walk so fast...?”

There was a reason Jae-min had survived so well at the abandoned data center.

Apparently his knack for scampering around and avoiding things on his own whenever no one was paying attention was proving useful even now.

Thinking that, if nothing else, it could probably be called a skill, Su-myeon let out a sigh.

“We can't keep just chasing after him from behind like this.”

It was time to make a decision.

The third location, which had only been written as OO Mountain Park in the game.

Its actual name had only now been revealed through Jae-min's broadcast.

-Yes, I'm heading toward Inwangsan Park now.

If they wanted to get ahead of him, instead of heading for the third location this late, it would be better to stake out the fourth one in advance.

But the fourth had only been described as being somewhere in the nearby mountain, which made it even harder to guess....

“Ah!”

Something occurred to Su-myeon, and he said to Ju-hee,

“Tell Hwi-yeon to ask Ryang where the fourth location might be.”

***

As always, the office was just as hectic.

The field team had its own difficulties, and the support team had difficulties of its own.

Mi-ae, who had been contacting agents across several different departments, let out a short sigh of relief and said,

“We're ready to block the stream too. Should I shut it down right away?”

At Mi-ae's words, Hwi-yeon made a gesture with her hand.

Given Jae-min's personality, simply cutting the stream would not make him stop.

He was the type who would somehow finish the content to the end and at least turn it into a video afterward.

“No. We still haven't caught him, so let's watch a little longer. If we absolutely can't catch him, just cut it off at the sixth location.”

After saying that, Hwi-yeon checked Su-myeon's message and hurried downstairs.

Mu-yeon, who had been lying flat on his stomach beside her, followed after her.

The medical room was very quiet.

The students who had suffered injuries of varying severity earlier had either been discharged or, for the most part, transferred to other hospitals under their parents' supervision.

She had definitely heard that some kids had come to visit Geon-su, but apparently they had gone home earlier than expected.

“.......”

For some reason, the silence in the ward gave Hwi-yeon a bad feeling.

Geon-su seemed to be asleep, lying there with the blanket pulled all the way over his head.

Even Cheshire had gone along with Su-myeon's group, leaving only Ryang rolling around on an empty bed.

Even though they had gone to the trouble of making a place of her own for her, Ryang kept coming back to the medical room.

Like a lonely cat, she kept coming into spaces where people lived and pressing herself into their company, and no one exactly disliked it.

Dokkaebi or not, it was something of a relief that she showed at least a few traits resembling humanity.

“Lady Dokkaebi. I came because there is something I would like to ask you.”

When Hwi-yeon spoke politely, Ryang stopped rolling around and sat up properly.

Whether it was something peculiar to Ryang or a trait shared by dokkaebi, she loved respectful words that saved face and attention directed toward her.

When Hwi-yeon made her request in appropriately respectful terms, Ryang waved her hand with great generosity.

“Speak, then. I shall answer all that I can.”

Hwi-yeon explained the situation to Ryang in as much detail as possible.

Although Ryang had approached Su-myeon in the form of an AI because she had been trapped in the data center,

after asking her several questions over time, Hwi-yeon had found that dealing with her was not all that different from writing prompts for an AI.

Even if the explanation was somewhat disorganized, giving her as many clues as possible produced more accurate answers.

Ryang listened with considerable concentration as Hwi-yeon went over everything that had happened so far at length.

“So....”

“Thou wishest to know in advance where the fourth location shall be?”

Ryang quickly filled in the rest of Hwi-yeon's thought.

In the end, the request was simply, 'We want to know the fourth location.'

When Hwi-yeon nodded tensely, Ryang answered readily.

“Open a map.”

She was now a dokkaebi deity who had made her home on the land where the Governance was located.

As long as someone fell within the scope of the Governance family, she was more than willing to treat them kindly.

And for her, it was quite an enjoyable thing to do.

“Now then, let us see where that wicked thing hath chosen....”

And if it meant suppressing some filthy, hideous unnatural entity, she wanted to tell them even more.

As much as she pleased, and gladly. Ryang fully intended to abuse her supernatural powers at her own discretion.

An entertaining spectacle that also involved teaching unpleasant bastards a lesson.

What reason could there possibly be not to help?

“Here. I believe it would be best to check this area.”

The moment Ryang looked at the map, she pointed to one spot with absolute precision.

***

Jae-min had just arrived at the third location.

Inwangsan Park was a place with no shortage of foot traffic.

But the exact tagged location was sparsely populated and extremely isolated.

Although there was clearly a maintained path, it was strangely deserted, to the point that weeds and vines had pushed up and grown across the ground.

Something that might have been mosquitoes kept landing on his arms, so Jae-min slapped both of them repeatedly.

“......There really isn't anyone around here at all. Right?”

As he continued farther in for quite some time, the atmosphere grew even more desolate.

By now, the sun had completely set.

There were not even any streetlights.

No, there were some, but their light seemed almost completely blocked by the dense tree branches.

“Maybe it's because it's already nine, but it really is dark.”

Jae-min switched on the flashlight he had brought and took a deep breath.

The tagged location turned out to be slightly off the road and deeper into the mountain.

It was near the water, where he could hear the sound of a stream.

[You have arrived at the third tagged location!]

[This is your third mission.]

Jae-min frowned after reading the message that appeared.

[Knock down the stone tower in front of you, then press the Perform Mission button and record the scene!]

“And this mission is a little different.”

Knock over a stone tower.

That was a new mission, something that had not appeared during either of the previous two days.

Apparently new missions finally started appearing from the third checkpoint onward.

But where was the stone tower....

“Ah. There really is one here.”

When he shone the flashlight around a little more, he spotted a lone stone tower standing there.

The tower, stacked to about the height of an adult man's waist, looked as though someone had carefully built it over a long period of time, which made knocking it over somewhat uncomfortable.

“Huh?”

As Jae-min approached the stone tower, he suddenly felt something was off.

“Come to think of it, are these missions things the developer personally set up?”

How did this game know there would be a stone tower here?

Jae-min looked around again for no particular reason.

Were the tagged locations really random?

-hellokim3: That's true. How did it know?

-O.o: hahahahahahahahaha

-ChickenAndSoju: How do you think it knew?

-PrayingToEscapeOvertime: It's watching you

-sdlkfhj: hahahahahahahaha

Jae-min swallowed dryly as he looked at the chat and scanned his surroundings again.

For some reason, cold sweat ran down his skin.

Was he imagining it, or did the chat itself keep feeling subtly wrong too?

A useless, strange sense of fear seemed to be creeping unpleasantly up the back of his neck.

But he could not stop here.

With an uneasy feeling, Jae-min approached the stone tower.

The stones were interlocked more firmly than he had expected, and it did not collapse easily.

Eventually, he shoved hard against the upper part of the tower, and the top came crashing down.

“......!”

Jae-min lowered his flashlight so he could film the stone tower, then recoiled in shock.

The inside of the tower was hollow and circular, and it was packed with talismans and red threads.

There was also a pile of fingernail and toenail clippings from who knew whom.

On top of that, the gaps between the stones were crawling with countless strange centipede-like insects.

“Ugh.... Ughhh...! Disgusting!”

He jerked backward as though it were merely the filth that bothered him, but in truth, Jae-min was scared.

Something was wrong.

Something was definitely wrong.

He wanted to stop right now, but.

[Live] 444 viewers

With more viewers watching than ever before, he simply could not bring himself to end the broadcast.

His palms were soaked with sweat, but Jae-min forced himself to wipe them against his pants.

“Still, anyway, the mission is technically complete.”

Trying to sound unaffected, Jae-min took a picture of the inside of the stone tower.

“......Anyway, that means the mission's cleared, right?”

Something felt wrong, but Jae-min forced himself to think.

The viewers are all just messing with me.

I'm getting swept up in the atmosphere and seeing things because of it.

Yeah, that's all it is.

There's nothing wrong.

-Ding!

[Mission successful! Tagging the fourth location.]

Inwangsan was not an easy mountain to climb.

Especially not late at night, long after the sun had set.

Jae-min once again began forcing his way along the mountain path toward the newly tagged location.

“Man, I'm dying here. No, seriously, this trail is way too rough, guys...!”

When he pointed the camera at the uphill trail and complained a little, donations came flooding in.

If he added up everything he had received today alone, wouldn't it probably amount to several million won?

There were more and more reasons why he could not give up.

He was going to finish this no matter what.

Money was scary. What was there to fear about some damn ghost or monster?

Even if monsters showed up like last time, all he had to do was hide properly.

Wouldn't those whatever-they-were agents show up and rescue him again, just like before?

And after saving him, they even paid him money to buy his footage.

No matter how he looked at it, there was no way for him to lose.