Chapter 67: The Witch’s Forest (10)

[4-3. The escape route is the staircase on the second floor of the Witch's house. If you can get past that staircase by any means, you can return to reality. As of now, no method of leaving the ghost story other than escape has been identified. (This item is under revision.)]

"Kyaaah!"

BANG!

Ju-hee's scream and a gunshot rang out at the same time.

Ju-hee reflexively yanked Su-myeon toward her, but the moment he fired, she snapped back to her senses.

Once the hair that had hung overhead like a curtain vanished, they could faintly make out their surroundings again.

But it was still dark, making it all the harder to aim at anything and shoot.

Having dropped the crowbar in her shock, Ju-hee instead gripped her phone with both hands and shone its flashlight ahead.

BANG! BANG BANG!

Su-myeon bit the inside of his mouth hard enough to draw blood, tightened his grip on the gun, and took aim.

If he hadn't, he might have screamed just like Ju-hee.

Su-myeon fired several shots at the Witch as she raced through the darkened forest like a wild beast.

The first round had clearly hit its mark, but after that, it was difficult to be certain.

"Hhhhh... aaah... ahahahaha!"

The Witch shrieked, her cries a grotesque mixture of weeping and laughter.

The surroundings were dark, and something impossible to identify was scurrying in every direction on its arms and legs.

It felt as though he might fall into a panic.

"She's lost control."

At that moment, Cheshire, who had been quietly observing everything until now, spoke.

Before Su-myeon could ask what that meant, he realized it himself.

He stopped firing and readjusted his stance.

The Witch wasn't darting around in every direction to confuse Su-myeon and Ju-hee.

If anything, she was the one who had panicked first.

"Hhhhh...... uwaaah...!"

Wailing—the master of this ghost story. The Witch.

Su-myeon and Ju-hee had granted eternal rest to the humans she had hidden at the bottom of the lake, humans who had been reduced to nothing but causality.

On top of that, Han-su had rescued the two remaining missing persons who were still intact and sent them out of the ghost story.

As a result, the ghost story had become severely depleted of causality, to the point that even maintaining the setting of a 'bright forest' had become difficult.

Literally, the Witch could no longer control this ghost story.

"Su-myeon!"

As if to prove that deduction, Han-su's voice rang out.

Han-su strode over and immediately planted himself between Su-myeon and the Witch, shielding him.

The Witch flailed her grotesquely twisted body from side to side and lunged toward Han-su's voice.

"Don't even think about it!"

Han-su swung his hatchet into the Witch's outstretched arm, sending her tumbling helplessly across the ground.

While Ju-hee kept her flashlight trained on the writhing creature, Han-su struck it again and again, as though trying to sever its windpipe.

The Witch squirmed and let out faint wails before finally going still, as though dead.

"What on earth happened here?"

Only then did Han-su properly address Su-myeon.

The Witch's house, which should have been quite some distance away, was somehow right in front of them.

That was the only reason Han-su had been able to reach them so quickly.

"The forest and the lake around us... got smaller."

"I think it's because there are fewer humans left inside the ghost story."

Even the parts of their surroundings that could still be called a forest were gradually disappearing.

Cheshire, who had been listening to their conversation, pulled the phone from Su-myeon's pocket and held it out to him.

Su-myeon was puzzled by Cheshire's unusually proactive behavior, but he took the phone.

At some point, voice recognition had been turned on, and their conversation had been transmitted to the Dokkaebi AI.

Hm. Dost thou mean that the range of thy surroundings has decreased?

If this occurred after a great many of the humans in the lake were dealt with, then it may not be a cognitive illusion—the surroundings themselves may truly have shrunk.

If that is indeed the case, then This One believes it can offer one further proposal!

Dispose of all the remaining humans just as thou art doing, and leave the ghost story.

If thou reducest the causality within the ghost story to zero, the ghost story itself can be made to vanish.

'The vanishing of a ghost story.'

Su-myeon wiped his palm, slick with cold sweat or something else, against his trousers.

It seemed the surroundings weren't the only thing that had changed—his mind, which had been fogged by hunger, had actually cleared.

"There aren't any more moving bones here."

Ju-hee carefully swept her flashlight over the lakeside—no, over the area around what was now little more than a pond.

All the skeletons around them had already had their skulls shattered, so nothing was moving anymore—

THWACK—!

"......Now there really aren't."

Han-su dealt with the last one, a skeleton missing both arm bones that had been writhing through the pond on its torso.

At that instant, even the small depression that had resembled a pond disappeared completely.

All that remained was dry, bare earth and the Witch's cabin, now barely ten paces away.

Su-myeon surveyed his surroundings and drew a deep breath.

Even the air around them, which had once felt like a forest, had become oppressive—musty somehow, closed in on all sides like an old, sealed room.

As though....

'It feels similar to the inside of that apartment building.'

Once that thought crossed his mind, Su-myeon decided it was time to move.

"Now all that's left is for us to get out. Let's go."

Ju-hee and Han-su cast one last look at the skeletons strewn across the ground before turning to follow Su-myeon.

The Witch's cabin was filled with the same suffocating air.

Ignoring the feeling of stepping into a place that had been abandoned for years, its air thick with dust, the three of them headed straight for the second floor.

The inside was every bit as dark as the outdoors, so Su-myeon had to turn on his phone's flashlight as well.

Since Han-su had already been here once, he quickly led the way upstairs.

"Wait...."

But when he saw a scene completely different from what he had expected, he instinctively covered his mouth.

Decomposed, half-melted flesh had mixed with bloody water into a sticky mess, filling the air with a putrid stench.

"It would be best if you kept your eyes on the floor while you follow me."

Flustered, Han-su stared at the devastated surroundings, utterly unlike the clean state he distinctly remembered seeing before.

Enormous weapons and equipment lay everywhere, making it impossible even to guess how many lives had been butchered with them.

Uncleared organs and bloody water covered the second floor.

"At this point, none of that matters."

Despite Han-su's warning, Ju-hee took in the horrific sight with steady eyes as she surveyed the cabin's second floor.

The confirmed escape route.

A staircase leading upward from the second floor of a cabin that had no third floor.

"......If the three of us get out of here, will this ghost story disappear completely? No one else will go missing here anymore, right?"

At Ju-hee's question, Su-myeon looked down at his phone.

Voice recognition was still on, so the dokkaebi answered immediately.

For the time being, that is so.

The wording left an unsettling aftertaste, but an affirmation was still an affirmation, so Su-myeon nodded as well.

"For now, shall we get out of here quickly?"

He didn't want to stay here a second longer.

He was also worried that the Witch might regain consciousness.

At Su-myeon's words, Han-su and Ju-hee started moving again.

With the strange feeling that this was finally the end, they climbed the narrow wooden staircase one after another, and a now-familiar light came into view.

Relief surged through Su-myeon, but he failed to notice something.

One more sentence was blinking on his phone.

But that thing in thy pocket.

Dost thou even know what it is that thou carriest about?

***

Park Ji-hoon, the survivor who had escaped The Witch's Forest thanks to Han-su.

The instant he climbed the stairs, he froze in bewilderment at the familiar scene before him.

This was his own home.

His own room.

THUD!

He flinched violently at the impact sound that had practically become a source of neurosis for him, but quickly realized what it was.

The noise directly behind him had come from the unfamiliar man who had escaped with him collapsing to the floor.

"Wake up!"

Ji-hoon struck the man's cheek, practically slapping him, but the man, swollen up like a blueberry, wouldn't regain consciousness.

His pallid face and ragged breathing, as though he might stop breathing at any moment, sent fear coursing through Ji-hoon.

"H-help...."

He had to call for help!

The instant the thought occurred to him, Ji-hoon scrambled to his feet, threw open the door, and ran outside.

There wasn't so much as a cellphone lying around in the living room.

And since landlines had long since disappeared from most ordinary homes, he headed outside.

"Somebody help!"

Anyone at all!

When he shouted loudly enough for his voice to echo through the apartment stairwell, a woman emerged from the emergency stairs.

"119! Please call 119! There's a man—"

"Did you come out of a ghost story?"

That wasn't exactly the sort of response one expected after asking someone to call an ambulance.

While Ji-hoon stood there bewildered, the woman looked past him and around the area before speaking again.

"What about the other agents!"

A man appeared behind her as she urgently called out.

Since he was wearing a doctor's coat, Ji-hoon blurted out the most pressing issue first.

"Inside that room over there! There's a man who's collapsed!"

The doctor, who had been about to examine Ji-hoon, immediately hurried into the apartment at those words.

Watching him go, Ji-hoon continued answering the woman's question.

"A police officer named Kang Han-su helped me! And, and...."

Han-su had asked him to pass along a message.

Given the state he'd been in at the time, Ji-hoon couldn't remember the exact words. Only the general meaning came back to him.

"He said someone had made himself bait to save us, and that he would come out afterward with that person."

Several different expressions crossed the woman's face at Ji-hoon's words.

"Damn it, Su-myeon went and did it again...!"

"Is he really the kind of person who would do something reckless? Let's wait."

The doctor, returning after checking on the man inside, responded to the woman's words.

The man who had escaped alongside Ji-hoon was in rather poor condition.

"I can't move him by myself in his current state, so for now, let's get you somewhere you can receive treatment and undergo an examination."

Apparently, they had decided to move Ji-hoon first.

Leaving the bewildered Ji-hoon to one side, the man and woman calmly began sorting out the situation.

"Who on earth... are you? How do you know about something this ridiculous?"

At Ji-hoon's question, the woman finally offered a belated introduction.

"My apologies. I should have introduced myself and explained sooner."

She looked no older than thirty, yet there was something in her bearing and appearance that made her difficult to approach.

She continued in a composed voice.

"We are a special agency operated by the government. I am Agent Lee Hwi-yeon of the Unnatural Threat Governance."

Unnatural Threat Governance.

An agency with a name that sounded unreal enough to somehow explain the absurd situation he found himself in.

"From this point on, our agency will assist with your treatment and recovery so that you can return to your daily life."

"I'm Kim Young-cheol, a surgeon with the affiliated medical staff."

With that, the man in the white coat offered Ji-hoon his hand.

"......I'm Park Ji-hoon. Then, for now... I'll be in your care."

To think he was having a conversation like this right in front of his own home.

None of it made sense, but compared with being trapped for so long in that bizarre space, this situation felt almost painfully realistic.

Afterward, Ji-hoon accompanied Young-cheol to a medical facility inside a building that was apparently the Governance's headquarters.

Ji-hoon drank nearly two liters of water by himself on the way there, and as soon as they arrived, he underwent a series of tests to determine whether there was anything wrong with his body.

"Still, Ji-hoon, other than malnutrition, there's nothing seriously wrong with you."

Around the time Young-cheol delivered the test results, Ji-hoon was finally able to hear what had happened in the real world.

He had been missing for roughly one year and two months.

During that time, his father had become mentally unwell, while that bastard Tae-hyeon, who had supposedly been searching for him, had wasted away to half his former size and looked like a wreck.

Eventually, his friend came rushing over in one breath, bawling his eyes out, and Ji-hoon finished a tearful reunion with him. It was a little embarrassing, but he was grateful all the same.

Once that was over, however, Ji-hoon found himself unable to suppress his curiosity.

"What happened to those people, if I may ask?"

Han-su.

And the person called 'Su-myeon' who had made himself bait in order to save him.

Wanting to know whether they were safe, Ji-hoon asked Hwi-yeon.

At that, her gaze dropped, troubled, and she hesitated.

"Ah, well...."