Chapter 148: Joint Investigation (2)

The monster had appeared pressed right up behind his colleague.

Because it was wearing a worn-out yukata, for a moment Kurosaki wondered whether what he was seeing was some kind of mask.

But he soon had no choice but to confirm with his own eyes that it was not.

“U-Uwaaagh! Uwaaaaagh!”

The monster’s mouth split open with a wet crack, revealing a mass of incomprehensible organs inside.

Instead of sharp teeth, its mouth was packed with strange circular structures resembling suckers, and it swallowed half of his colleague’s head as though sucking him in.

Seeing Sota scream and reach out toward him, Kurosaki sprang to his feet.

At first, he intended to help him.

But then he realized that the roadside was packed with hundreds of beings staring directly at him.

Some resembled that monster.

Others were even more horribly deformed.

There was no time to think about anything else.

Kurosaki turned and began running toward the shrine.

“K-Kurosaki! Kurosaki...! Aaaaagh!”

Sota’s screams rang out behind him, but Kurosaki simply could not bring himself to stop.

If there had only been one monster, he would have hesitated.

Even if there had been two.

Or three.

He might have stopped to save his colleague.

But there were hundreds.

Hundreds.

What could he possibly do alone?

With an excuse bordering on self-justification repeating in his head, Kurosaki ran without stopping until his lungs felt ready to burst.

***

“And as soon as I climbed the steps to the shrine, I lost consciousness.”

Kurosaki finished his story with a somewhat strained expression.

Su-myeon, who had been listening, took a short, deep breath as well.

“If I had hesitated even a little that day, I probably would have died too.”

That was where Kurosaki’s story ended.

After giving a brief, bitter smile, Kurosaki returned to the calm expression he had worn before beginning.

It seemed he had managed to overcome the experience in his own way.

More importantly, however, he had escaped the ghost story by going up the “stairs.”

That was the detail Su-myeon found most important.

This was not exactly the sort of setting that called for consolation, so Su-myeon simply turned toward Rachel.

“Then I suppose it’s my turn now.”

“Whew.”

Rachel took a long breath as though steadying herself, then forced an awkward smile and tried to make a joke.

“This really does feel like we’re taking turns telling scary stories.”

“Should we light some candles?”

Kurosaki responded with an equally awkward attempt at humor.

“Ah, in Japan, when people tell scary stories.... No. Never mind. It’s nothing.”

Kurosaki quickly waved his hands and dismissed the comment, and Rachel gave him another awkward smile.

Her expression stiffened slightly at the thought of digging up old memories, but she carefully began to speak.

“My case was a little different. It happened when I was young. When I was... exactly ten years old. It happened at school.”

The memory was from a long time ago, and because the experience had been so traumatic, what remained of it was even more fragmented.

***

It was probably just after lunchtime.

Rachel had been killing time chatting about nothing in particular with her friends in front of their lockers.

Then, suddenly, a scream rang out somewhere in the school.

Every student immediately fell silent and looked toward the source of the sound.

For that one instant, it felt as though everything had stopped.

Bang!

The moment the gunshot rang out, every student started running.

School shootings were something American students even underwent regular drills for.

But the terror of actually experiencing one was something Rachel had never felt before.

She saw Ms. Emma running toward them from the far end of the hallway.

She was the science teacher Rachel had always been very fond of.

“Everyone, run!”

There was only one reason she was shouting so loudly.

To scatter the children filling the hallway.

And to draw the shooter’s attention toward herself.

Bang!

Just as she intended, the gunman immediately aimed at the loudest and most conspicuous person there.

That day, Rachel learned all too clearly that when people became truly terrified, their bodies could simply freeze.

'Go... run...!'

The bullet had struck Ms. Emma squarely in the upper body, piercing her lung. Unable to speak, she coughed up blood instead.

Then Rachel saw the masked gunman and froze again.

He was a little different from the kind of... shooter she had seen on the news.

No.

There was a shooter like that.

But standing behind him was someone else.

A strange man in green clothes, holding a bow.

He wore a delighted expression as he leaned close and whispered something into the masked man’s ear.

“...!”

At that moment, a hand seized Rachel and yanked her sharply backward.

She spun around in surprise and saw her classmate Sarah.

“Shh! What are you doing...?! Do you want to die?!”

Sarah dragged her into the restroom right beside them.

Everyone inside was desperately trying to break the restroom window.

Someone was swinging the broken half of a mop handle against it, but strangely enough, the glass refused to shatter.

Because it was a restroom, the window was positioned rather high, too high for the girls to see outside from where they stood.

“Why don’t we just open it as far as it’ll go and squeeze through the gap?”

Someone suggested it.

That sounded more realistic than trying to break it.

Rachel, who was the tallest, quickly lifted the smallest girl onto her shoulders.

“Ah...!”

The moment the girl looked outside, that single sound escaped her lips.

Then she suddenly collapsed backward.

“...!”

Everyone barely managed to catch her before she hit the floor.

But whatever she had seen, she was already unconscious, foam spilling from her mouth.

Something was wrong.

Something about the situation was very wrong.

“I-I think something’s wrong.... My phone has no signal....”

One of the girls sitting in the corner clutching her phone said through her tears.

At those words, everyone took out their own phones.

Sure enough, none of them had any signal.

“......!”

Then the students heard footsteps approaching from nearby and rushed into the restroom stalls.

Some stalls seemed to have two or even three students squeezed inside together.

But Rachel, unfortunately, ended up alone.

As fear closed in on her, she stepped onto the toilet so the attacker would not be able to see her feet beneath the stall door.

Clutching her phone tightly in both hands, she held her breath as the footsteps drew closer.

'Please. Please.'

As she repeated the words silently to herself,

the footsteps stopped.

Then came the creaking grind of some thick, taut cord being pulled back.

Thwack-!

A sound even more terrifying than a gunshot.

The snap of a heavy string.

And the sound of something burying itself into flesh.

“Ghk.”

A short death cry.

Then the sound of someone collapsing.

Thwack-!

The next shot must not have been immediately fatal.

Or perhaps there had been another girl hiding in the same stall.

A scream followed.

“Aaaaaagh!”

Then Rachel heard the screaming girl throw open the stall door and run.

The harsh creak of the taut string being drawn back sounded again.

At that moment, Rachel could not endure it any longer.

She did not know what she had been thinking.

Fear had completely taken control of her.

And yet, perhaps the thought that she had to help somehow had still come first.

Thinking that she had to do something, anything she could, Rachel threw open the door.

“......!”

And what she saw in front of her was an enormous monster.

The man who, only moments ago, had merely looked like a hunter dressed in green was grinning.

Except the corners of his mouth had split all the way to his ears.

With one hand, he held one of Rachel’s classmates—probably the girl who had just run out—by the throat, effortlessly lifting her into the air.

“Ghk... kh... haaah......!”

In one hand, he held the girl as she choked and gasped, her airway being crushed shut.

In the other, he held his bow.

So Rachel made her choice.

She ran.

Rachel burst out of the restroom and found herself face-to-face with the shooter in the hallway.

Trapped between the two.

Yet astonishingly, the monster frightened her more than the man did.

Even as the gunman sprayed bullets wildly in every direction, Rachel sprinted down the hallway toward the school exit at the far end.

Bang! Bangbangbang!

The deafening gunfire battered her ears.

Something struck somewhere on her body, making her stumble as pain shot through her, and she fell.

But she could not stop.

She immediately forced herself back to her feet.

She could not even tell exactly where she had been hurt.

The exit was right there now....

“......!”

More than ten children were gathered at the door, crying as they desperately pulled at it.

It would not open.

Rachel immediately understood.

They could not get out this way.

Then what was she supposed to do?

***

“So I turned around and went up the stairs.”

Desperately hoping the man would be caught by the police before he found her, Rachel climbed.

She ran upward without even knowing what floor she had reached until she realized she had made it all the way to the roof.

People like that wanted to kill as many people as possible.

So she thought he probably would not bother coming all the way up there.

She opened the rooftop door.

“And that’s how I got out. Now I’m the only person in that neighborhood who even remembers that school.”

“Everyone else thinks the school had already been shut down years before.”

Silence followed Rachel’s words.

Su-myeon’s expression grew even more serious because her story reminded him of the Infinite School Grounds.

In fact, her situation might have been even worse.

At least most of the victims there had been high school students.

There had been a few teachers and outsiders mixed in, but they had accounted for less than five percent.

Compared to that, the victims in the ghost story Rachel had entered had been far too young.

And the ghost story itself had been extremely aggressive.

'It even resembled a real-world incident almost exactly, and the students apparently couldn’t distinguish the ghost story from their actual school.'

And judging by the fact that an actual mass shooter had appeared as well,?if real incidents themselves served as the trigger that allowed people to enter the ghost story, then the problem was even more serious.

'There must have been a huge number of victims....'

Setting that possibility aside and looking at things objectively, however, one thing had become clear.

“For both of you, just like with our ghost stories, the act of going upward seems to have been the key to escaping.”

Rachel, who had been trying to suppress the old memories while catching her breath, nodded at Su-myeon’s words.

“We noticed that similarity too. Other than that.... We think they may take motifs from famous stories, like fairy tales or folklore.”

Japan had the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons.

America had Robin Hood.

“In Korea, stories that aren’t specifically Korean actually seem to make up a larger portion.”

“Maybe that’s because foreign culture has become so deeply embedded everywhere these days?”

Rachel suddenly added,

“We even have a ghost story with ninjas in it.”

Kurosaki made an expression that was difficult to interpret.

Still, one thing was clear.

Ghost stories did not seem to follow entirely different rules simply because they appeared in different countries.

There was only one issue.

“......But from what I’ve heard just now, I suppose you didn’t know that ghost stories don’t kill people.”

Su-myeon concluded that this, at least, was something the foreign organizations had failed to figure out.

Both of them had spoken as though the other victims who had been attacked alongside them had died.

“Ghost stories fundamentally do not want to kill people. They prefer to make people join them.”

There was a difference between the two.

Su-myeon had originally intended to select which portions of the materials Mi-ae had compiled would be useful to them and which would not.

But it seemed they knew far less than he had expected.

So he simply handed over everything.

“Then before we start seriously discussing the cruise ship we’ll be dealing with, it looks like you’ll need to familiarize yourselves with this first.”

There was no point in making Su-myeon wear himself out explaining causality and every other detail one by one.

“Read through it individually, and let’s meet again tomorrow to continue the discussion.”