Chapter 79: The Red Cloak…. (4)

[4. Newly updated information on the survivors.]

4-2) The group consists of 132 households, with most households made up of small nuclear families.

4-3) Most are companions who already had ties to one another in reality, but it has been confirmed that some families were newly formed within the ghost story.

4-4) There are beings who were born within the ghost story, though it was difficult to determine their exact number.

***

Seung-min’s movements were swift and without hesitation.

With a single strike, he severed one ankle from the incompletely transformed wolf-like monster.

“Gaaaaaah!”

The voice writhing in pain still sounded closer to that of a human.

Listening to that desperate scream, Su-myeon could neither recklessly approach nor hastily retreat.

The woodcutter, who had turned into a monster, fled as he was, leaving the severed ankle behind.

Because it had been cut off with a blunt weapon, the severed end was ragged and mangled.

“Damn.”

Seung-min’s reaction was so brief it was almost matter-of-fact.

Faced with the sudden situation, Su-myeon quietly looked around, trying to understand what had happened.

The hidden bite wound, the sudden decline in his condition, and then the transformation into a monster.

Wasn’t this the kind of obvious cliché you saw all the time in zombie stories?

“Could it be.... Were all those monsters... originally human?”

At Su-myeon’s question, Seung-min made a strange expression.

He did not look particularly sorrowful, nor was he expressionless.

He simply looked like someone who had grown deeply weary of something.

“That’s a shame. I was aiming higher up.”

“There won’t be anything worth eating from this.”

Su-myeon was left speechless by Seung-min’s words.

Was that really the problem right now?

“He asked you a question.”

Han-su spoke to Seung-min again in a forceful tone.

Seeing their thoroughly hardened expressions, Seung-min shrugged.

“Well, yeah. I don’t know when it happened, but sometimes wolves sneak in and bite the villagers.”

“That’s different from what you told us.”

Baffled by Seung-min’s leisurely response, Su-myeon pressed him.

“You clearly told me those things were imitating humans....”

At Su-myeon’s words, Seung-min’s expression suddenly hardened.

Su-myeon flinched at the abrupt change, only for Seung-min to question him instead.

“Who told you that?”

“That old woman....”

“Then that’s what you should believe.”

Without even letting Su-myeon finish, Seung-min answered firmly and turned his head away.

He shook the blood from his axe and returned to his usual calm tone.

“The logging site doesn’t have an owner anymore, so I suppose you can take it over.”

Something was far too strange.

Even Hwi-yeon, who had gone pale, was gradually furrowing her brow in confusion.

“For now, I’ll let the village know what happened here.”

“So there won’t be any misunderstandings.”

At Seung-min’s words, the three of them had no choice but to tense up again.

A misunderstanding—could he mean the suspicion that they, newcomers who had only just entered the village, had harmed the woodcutter?

It was possible, and this was certainly a situation in which they could easily be suspected.

They were not even sure Seung-min would report the truth properly, but for now, they had no choice except to trust him.

After glancing over the visibly uncomfortable trio, Seung-min spoke meaningfully.

“It’s better not to stir things up too much.”

Was it just Su-myeon’s imagination that he could hear the unspoken words, if you don’t want to end up like that?

But they had no choice except to stir things up.

Their objective was to collapse and terminate this ghost story, which had somehow settled into this strange balance.

Naturally, they needed to dig deeper and pry into every weakness they could find.

“If you’d pretended not to know anything at all, I wouldn’t be asking this much.”

Su-myeon had decided that Seung-min was at least someone they could talk to, so he chose to press further.

“You were the one who first said you knew Lee Mu-yeon, weren’t you?”

“....”

At Su-myeon’s words, Seung-min tilted his head slightly to one side.

Annoyance. Irritation. And anxiety hidden between them.

Those emotions showed through before Seung-min opened his mouth again.

“If someone was here and now they’re gone, isn’t the answer obvious?”

With that, Seung-min left.

Watching his back as he trudged down the slope, Su-myeon turned toward Han-su and Hwi-yeon.

It felt as though Seung-min was deliberately avoiding them.

“I think he’s lying.”

Was it some kind of detective’s instinct?

Han-su also spoke firmly while watching Seung-min grow farther away.

He was definitely hiding something, but they still could not tell what his true intentions were.

It almost sounded as though he was sincerely warning them not to stick their noses into things because he wanted to help them.

Or perhaps even that was part of some larger deception.

“.......”

Hwi-yeon remained silent for a long while and only spoke once Seung-min had completely disappeared from sight.

“But isn’t something strange?”

What remained on Hwi-yeon’s mind was the question of the woodcutter they had called Mr. Jang.

“Didn’t he act like he didn’t know he’d been bitten? At the very least, you’d think he would have tried to hide it, or hide himself.”

The woodcutter had done neither.

He had clearly seemed unaware that his wound had come from a wolf bite.

And then, when the transformation began, he realized it.

“He said, ‘Why me?’ didn’t he?”

Why had he said that immediately after realizing what was happening?

Something came to Su-myeon’s mind.

“Doesn’t that overlap a little with the note we found in the wardrobe?”

[Trust no one. They’re going to offer me to the wolves. Damn it, damn it! I don’t want to die. I said I don’t want to die!]

Someone had been selected, through another person’s scheme, to be transformed into a wolf.

The person who wrote the note had probably realized it in advance, while the woodcutter had not.

They could infer that much.

While Su-myeon worked through the possibilities in his head, Hwi-yeon stared blankly up at the sky.

“Are you all right?”

Han-su, uneasy at the sight, asked her.

Hwi-yeon suddenly rolled up the sleeve of the shirt she was wearing.

A scar on her left arm was revealed.

An ugly scar left behind by something that had pierced straight through it and healed.

It was clearly the injury she had said she suffered inside this ghost story long ago.

“...!”

Realizing something, Su-myeon looked at Hwi-yeon in shock.

Han-su asked,

“Were you bitten before?”

Hwi-yeon nodded at his question.

Su-myeon pressed his fingers to his brow as his head began to ache.

Damn it.

“It might be different since you returned to reality and then entered again. There’s a chance you won’t show any symptoms, but....”

Su-myeon let his words trail off there, but Han-su and Hwi-yeon both understood what he meant.

There was more than enough possibility that Hwi-yeon could undergo the same transformation.

“We shouldn’t stay here for long.”

“Maybe we should put the rescue and termination on hold and focus on escaping first.”

As Han-su and Su-myeon continued, Hwi-yeon let out a long sigh.

After finally getting this opportunity, she was going to have to let it slip away like this.

She felt as though she had suddenly become an absurd burden to the group.

But that only meant she could not afford to despair.

They had to do whatever they could, as quickly as possible.

After collecting herself, Hwi-yeon nodded in acknowledgment and agreement, then gestured toward something.

“Then I think we should check that place first.”

She was pointing at a cabin near the logging site.

It was the only residence nearby, so there was a high chance it belonged to the woodcutter.

It bothered them that Seung-min had left the three of them alone, but even if it was a trap, there was nothing they could do.

If they wanted to learn anything, they had to act.

If they walked into a trap and got caught, then at the very least they would learn who had set it. If they simply stood still, they would learn nothing.

“Let’s go.”

Their first objective was to find out whether the woodcutter had fallen victim to some scheme and been infected by a wolf without realizing it.

“At the very least, we can’t fall for the same trick. Search carefully.”

At Su-myeon’s warning, Han-su took the lead.

The woodcutter’s house was not even locked.

With tension hanging over them, they followed Han-su inside.

The interior of the cabin was fairly dark, though since it was daytime, some light still came in from outside.

The woodcutter’s house was small and dirty.

“We should probably search thoroughly, but be careful.”

Hwi-yeon also spoke cautiously as she began checking the objects scattered across the floor one by one.

Old, worn camping equipment. Hiking clothes.

Other than that, most of the tools were primitive things made of wood and stone.

There was probably an obvious reason why most of the belongings were camping gear.

Objects people had been carrying when they disappeared in the mountains must have circulated from hand to hand, being used until they wore out completely.

Even so, the interior looked surprisingly plausible.

A cabin built by stacking and fitting together wood and stone.

To be frank, it was almost hard to believe that a house and structure like this could be built with tools this crude.

“Come over here.”

Su-myeon, who had been searching the area, called Han-su and Hwi-yeon over.

What Su-myeon had found in a spot piled with belongings like a storage area was a large trap.

“That’s a bear trap.”

Han-su approached and examined the trap carefully.

Since the open trap looked dangerous, Han-su first placed a nearby piece of wood between its jaws.

Crunch-!

With an enormous noise, the piece of wood shattered as the trap snapped shut.

The three of them flinched at how much louder it was than expected.

Only after it had fully closed did Han-su pick the trap up.

When he dragged the heavy, large iron trap out into the sunlight, they were able to inspect it more closely.

The edges of the trap had turned black from blood, mud, and other grime caked together over them.

“......This.”

After examining the sharp edges for a moment, Su-myeon’s expression turned grave.

It seemed the woodcutter had not been bitten by a wolf’s jaws after all, but by this trap.

“Those are teeth, aren’t they?”

The trap’s edges were not made of iron like its body.

Something sharp had been densely attached along them like rows of saw teeth.

They had not noticed at first because blood and dirt had caked over them so heavily that the white color beneath was obscured.

When Su-myeon lightly scraped some of it away with a broken piece of wood, more of the white surface appeared.

White, like the teeth of a predator.

“.......”

If those really were the monster’s teeth, then the situation made sense.

“With something like this, the woodcutter probably mistook it for an ordinary injury.”

Hwi-yeon agreed with Su-myeon and offered her own guess.

The woodcutter must have thought he had simply been injured by a trap.

He would never have imagined that he had been bitten by a wolf.

That was why he had only realized what had happened when the transformation began, and why he had screamed so miserably.

If that was the case....

“Then someone deliberately set this trap to infect another person.”

That unpleasant black aura surrounding this city.

They still could not understand everything about it, but Su-myeon was certain of one thing.

It was filled with malice.

There was something sinister being concealed among the survivors.

Since it did not seem wise to discuss things any further there, the group returned to the cabin they had been given.

Only after confirming that no one was nearby and thoroughly securing the doors did they begin talking again.

“...Wouldn’t it be better if we just looked for the exit now?”

Han-su, who had been thinking about it throughout the walk back, quietly made the suggestion to Su-myeon.

If they had no immediate way to rescue the survivors, then everything they were doing might amount to nothing but wasted time.

They still had not found any definite evidence that justified risking Hwi-yeon’s transformation just to keep investigating.

“Give me a little more time to think.”

Su-myeon once again checked the notes attached to the wooden board inside the wardrobe.

For now, they were among the few clues available to them.

“I’ve been thinking.”

After staring at those sentences for a long while, Su-myeon continued.

“I think we need to find out more clearly exactly what the people in this city think those wolves are.”