Chapter 66: The Witch’s Forest (9)

[4-2. Unless an anomaly occurs, the Witch is always on the second floor of the cabin, guarding both the exit and her cauldron.]

Thirty minutes earlier.

Su-myeon had ultimately discovered the Witch's house before Han-su did.

It was the result of continuing to search north of the lake while offering up five candy houses as tribute.

[#WOLF: I have set my direction north from the lake.]

[#WOLF: Currently searching.]

[#WOLF: The person I'm rescuing is in poor condition, so it may take some time.]

The Heartphone was damn useful wherever you went.

Unsettling as it might be, Su-myeon's teammates were making excellent use of it.

Su-myeon checked the messages coming in from Han-su and continued turning the situation over in his mind.

The maddening hunger kept interfering with his thoughts, but having clarified both the conclusion and the path toward it made things somewhat easier.

"So the snacks are all gone now~?"

Cheshire's voice was thick with dissatisfaction.

It irritated Su-myeon, but he did not have the mental capacity to respond on top of everything else.

At least Han-su seemed to be holding on to his sanity by making use of the item.

Su-myeon dragged his heavy feet forward and carefully peered through the window of the Witch's house.

Since it had exactly the same structure and appearance as the candy houses, it was easy enough to estimate the layout inside.

"Damn it...."

Inside the Witch's house, just as the dokkaebi had deduced, someone was tied up.

The moment Su-myeon spotted the man chained in a corner of the living room, he ground out a curse and quickly ducked back down.

They had found the Witch's house and the missing person at the same time.

The problem now was getting out.

Unable to overcome her curiosity, Ju-hee peeked inside as well.

"That's... a person, right?"

"Probably the son from Room 404, and Seo Tae-hyeon's friend."

The man sprawled on the floor did not move at all, and Ju-hee stared at him gravely for a long moment.

"He's not... dead, at least."

Judging from the slow rise and fall of his stomach, he appeared to be asleep or perhaps unconscious from exhaustion.

Based on the circumstances, that man had remained here in that condition for roughly a year.

If the Witch caught them while they were trying to persuade someone like that to move and break him free of the chain—

"A dangerous situation could break out...."

THUD!

As if to confirm the Witch's presence, an unidentifiable sound came from the second floor of the cabin.

Su-myeon, who knew what that sound meant, reflexively squeezed his eyes shut before opening them again.

"Fwoo.... For now, we have no choice but to lure the Witch outside."

Getting the person they were rescuing out by the safest possible method came first.

Su-myeon suppressed his revulsion and moved away from the cabin.

Ju-hee, pale-faced but stubbornly refusing to let Su-myeon out of her sight, spoke.

"It doesn't seem like it'll be easy...."

"When has anything ever been easy?"

After a moment of thought, Su-myeon raised his phone and opened the Dokkaebi AI.

Naturally, he knew one solution from the game.

But the method used in the game was the worst possible one, so he had not even included it among the safety rules he shared with his team.

'Feed the confections to another person, fatten them up, use them as bait, then go upstairs while the Witch leaves the house to catch them.'

There was no reason to go out of his way to record a method like that.

It was not difficult to arrive at through simple reasoning, and even if faced with death, it was not a choice most people could readily make.

Then what method could he use to lure her outside?

"We need to make her angry enough to come after us."

Compared with the previous method, this one could be dangerous, but Su-myeon had thought of something.

Still, it was only an idea he had imagined before, so he could not be certain it would work.

Especially not here, in a place that could shake a person's mind.

To organize his thoughts and share them at the same time, Su-myeon typed his plan into the phone.

[I'm thinking of resolving it this way — would it produce an effective result against the Witch?]

The Dokkaebi AI, which had received so much tribute that its belly ought to have been fit to burst, replied in an exceptionally friendly tone.

==== Thou hast struck at the heart of it! This One judges the probability that this plan will provoke the Witch to be 99.99 percent! ====

***

Su-myeon's plan, organized with the help of the Dokkaebi AI, was shared with Han-su through the Heartphone as well.

Han-su would rescue the missing people and help them escape, while Su-myeon would take on the role of luring the Witch away to make that possible.

"Ju-hee, why don't you wait here and go back with Han-su?"

But Ju-hee answered Su-myeon's suggestion firmly.

"No. As your noona, I can't take such an irresponsible role. I'll have to go with you."

......She seemed to have become unusually attached to the form of address he had used in passing, simply as an expression of the closeness he had felt toward her.

Su-myeon had no particular desire to go around alone either, so he did not try to stop Ju-hee a second time.

With that decided, the two of them returned to the lake.

Once they made up their minds to head there, the path itself was not particularly difficult.

The lake appeared again so quickly that all the time and effort he had spent trying to get away from it seemed almost absurd.

"......."

The lake had become even more horrific than the last time he had seen it.

White skeletons that had crawled up from the bottom, bracing themselves against one another, were scattered all along the shore.

Only the remnants of flesh around their faces, fingers, and toes remained, bloated and swollen from the water.

Everything else was nothing but stark white bone.

They were so slow that only around ten had managed to crawl onto dry land so far....

'......Is it even right to count them as people?'

Su-myeon let out a quiet sigh as he stared at the things whose forms could no longer reasonably be called human.

From now on, he and Ju-hee were going to......

"We just... kill them, right?"

Ju-hee tightened her grip on the crowbar she had taken from her Heartphone.

Yes.

From this point on, the two of them were going to kill every last one.

[#WOLF: I've found the Witch's house.]

A message from Han-su appeared on the phone at exactly the right moment.

[First, please check the condition of the person confined there.] [If there are no anomalies, quiet him down, hide yourself, and then message me again.]

Su-myeon sent the instructions to Han-su and drew a slow, measured breath.

The lake was full of bones still writhing with undiminished hunger, pursuing the living.

Things that had crawled up from below, neither alive nor dead.

Beings who had probably once been human.

The reason those beings still drew breath in such a state was because they served as a kind of hostage, held by the Witch to sustain this ghost story.

Hostages used to make The Witch's Forest resemble reality closely enough to obtain causality.

The skeletons had been stripped even of ligament and tendon, leaving no way to tell what was moving them anymore.

The Witch had literally eaten them down to the marrow.

"...There's no way to save them, is there."

At Ju-hee's bitter murmur, Su-myeon nodded heavily.

Thinking back on the survivors they had rescued into reality before gave him the answer.

Injuries sustained inside a ghost story did not simply disappear.

There were cases where minor mutations could be reversed, at least to some extent.

But what had been lost did not return.

Wounds suffered there inevitably remained in reality as well.

Then what would happen if they brought these people, stripped of almost all the flesh on their bodies, back into reality?

"They're... already as good as dead."

At best, bringing them back would only turn them into motionless skeletons.

Literally nothing more than corpses.

If that was the case, then perhaps allowing them to reach a peaceful eternal rest was also a form of salvation.

[I've concealed myself.]

The reply Su-myeon had been waiting for arrived from Han-su.

Rather than use the rifle, which was practically his only real weapon, Su-myeon gripped a thick branch he had snapped off near the lakeside.

"Let's do it."

At Su-myeon's words, Ju-hee nodded with a hardened expression and approached the shore.

Guhhhh.

As the two drew near, the skeletons along the lakeside gave voice to a bizarre, hollow wail.

Please.

Let them be in a state where they could no longer understand what they had become.

Ju-hee brought the crowbar down with vicious force.

THWACK.

The iron bar struck a skull squarely and shattered it with disturbing ease.

"Hup...."

Su-myeon heard Ju-hee suck in a sharp, empty breath at the horrific sight.

He swung down the wooden club in his own hands and crushed another skeleton's head.

The skull was absurdly fragile.

As though it had been submerged in water for so long that it had forgotten even its purpose of protecting what lay inside.

It shattered far too easily.

"......."

For no reason at all, Su-myeon swallowed dryly, fighting back nausea.

In zombie movies, there were often scenes where an infected person begged a companion to kill them before they turned into a monster.

The companion would swallow their tears and kill the infected while they were still themselves.

Scenes like that were portrayed as noble acts.

As salvation.

Even though, in the end, they were still acts of killing.

'Those scenes were all bullshit....'

Until now, Su-myeon had thought destroying these moving skeletons was basically the same thing.

During the planning stage, he had genuinely believed that was all there was to it.

But actually doing it carried a mental weight far beyond anything he had imagined.

Su-myeon reached a detached sort of conclusion.

If such a moment ever came for him, he would never leave it to someone else.

He would end it himself.

"Hugh...."

The sound of Ju-hee half sobbing reached him from beside him, and Su-myeon clenched his teeth and smashed another skull apart.

Nausea surged through him.

Forget hunger—he wanted nothing more than to collapse onto the ground where he stood.

After smashing apart roughly ten heads, Ju-hee finally failed to hold it in and began retching.

Su-myeon did not stop.

He continued crushing the skulls of the skeletons crawling onto land.

The ones slowly emerging from the lakeside continued gathering toward Su-myeon in greater and greater numbers.

Almost as though they were asking him to end their suffering too......

"Haah...."

More than physical exhaustion, it was the mental strain that sent cold sweat trickling down his body.

Around the time Su-myeon thought he had destroyed every skull visible on land—

Ju-hee, having finally steadied herself, spoke.

"...It's changing."

At her voice, Su-myeon raised his head.

He could see it too.

The endlessly stretching mystical forest had begun to warp strangely, like a flimsy set built from artificial props.

Even the sky, convincingly stained with violet twilight, now looked awkward and false, as though wallpaper had been pasted over it.

The causality sustaining this ghost story was decreasing.

Its sense of reality was disappearing with it.

At that very moment, another message arrived from Han-su.

[The Witch has left the cabin.]

"Haah...."

Su-myeon drew a deep breath and threw away the club, now smeared into a filthy mess with all manner of things.

His phone was a mess as well, his hands soaked in bloody water.

"......."

Though her own hands were trembling, Ju-hee wiped Su-myeon's phone clean on her clothes and handed it back to him.

[I'll send the rescued out of the ghost story first, then join you.]

A good superior would probably tell Han-su to leave with them as well.

But Su-myeon's hands were shaking too badly to type a response.

The most he could manage was not telling Han-su to come as quickly as possible.

"......!"

At that instant, the entire area plunged into darkness as abruptly as if someone had flipped off a basement light.

Ju-hee hurriedly switched on her phone's flashlight, and Su-myeon grabbed hold of her so they could stand back to back.

SHAAAA.

A sound like leaves brushing together in the wind.

The sound of countless light things sliding against one another.

Again and again, until the repetition itself felt enough to drive someone mad.

They had thought the sound familiar.

But it did not take long for both of them to realize something was wrong.

Ju-hee flinched and pulled the phone she had been holding out to illuminate the distance close against her body.

"......."

Hair.

Thick masses of hair were pouring down from above, surrounding Su-myeon and Ju-hee.

SHAAAA.

The sound of light things sliding against one another was not leaves.

It was strands of hair rubbing together.

"......."

Ju-hee swallowed dryly and slowly raised the phone she had pressed close against her body.

The bright beam climbed upward little by little, following the curtains of hanging hair.

And there—

Two cavernous black eye sockets.

An enormous mouth split grotesquely wide.

The Witch's face was looking down at the two of them.