The Hell Named School [4]
Kang In-hyuk had been a child with a powerful spiritual gift from the time he was born.
He saw what others could not, and heard what others could not.
But being special was never an unalloyed blessing. Because of that ability, Kang In-hyuk spent his childhood utterly alone — even his own parents found him unsettling, something to be avoided rather than embraced.
The one who saved him was a Buddhist nun living at a small temple in the hills behind his neighborhood.
"Your gift is not a curse. It is a blessing."
The nun was a practitioner of Esoteric Buddhism, and she passed down to Kang In-hyuk everything she possessed. That was the moment Kang In-hyuk — Team 3 Leader of the Paranormal Administration Bureau, Esoteric mage — first set foot into the world of the spirit.
Because his master had been an Esoteric practitioner, Kang In-hyuk knew the state of Korean Esotericism better than most. Unlike Japan or China, where the main temples and lineages had long been firmly established, Korea's Esoteric practitioners had transmitted their arts from individual to individual, with no central seat of authority to anchor them. Thanks to that, Korean Esoteric sorcery abounded with hidden masters whose names no one knew — and, naturally, with just as many disciples who had trained under those anonymous masters.
Kang In-hyuk and the nun who raised him were exactly such a case.
And so, without a shred of doubt, Kang In-hyuk had concluded that Kim Yi-yeon, too, must have studied under some nameless hidden master.
Of course, from top to bottom, it was all a misunderstanding on Kang In-hyuk's part. But it was a perfectly forgivable one.
His master had once told him:
'The Vajrayana is a realm every Esoteric mage yearns for but few ever attain. Naturally, I myself am training without cease even now, in hopes of reaching it.'
'Then how do you recognize one? Does simply becoming good at sorcery make you a Vajrayana master?'
To his dim-witted disciple's question, the master had smiled gently and answered.
'That's not entirely wrong, but... if you ever meet one in person, you will know at a glance.'
'How so?'
'Because when an Esoteric sorcerer beholds the sorcery of the Vajrayana, he feels it. Instantly.'
Once, Kang In-hyuk had doubted those words. Not anymore.
'So this is what you meant...'
Behind Kim Yi-yeon, as he unfolded the Ksitigarbha Ten Wheels Mudra, Kang In-hyuk had seen a halo of golden light. That sacred radiance tore the malice of the anomaly's Inner Domain to shreds, and within it carved out a ground that belonged, purely and entirely, to human beings.
Having witnessed that, Kang In-hyuk could not possibly think of Kim Yi-yeon as anything but a Vajrayana master.
Above all, it explained why a man of such power remained unknown. To reach that realm at that age, he would have needed to hone his arts in rigorous seclusion from childhood — leaving no opportunity to make a name for himself.
'I don't know which departed master raised him, but... this is a tremendous blessing for Korea's spiritual community.'
Every which way, Kang In-hyuk found himself with no choice but to believe Kim Yi-yeon was a Vajrayana master.
'I'm a Taoist, though...'
To Kim Yi-yeon, of course, it was utter nonsense — the rambling of a ghost gnawing on a pile of washed rice. But the water had already been spilled. He decided to make full use of the situation.
"Mr. Kang In-hyuk."
"Yes, sir!"
"Is it possible to contact the outside through the spirit-frequency communicator?"
As the Inner Domain rewrote its environment, the communicators had been drawn in along with everything else.
"Yes, sir. The line to the communicator outside the barrier is holding. However, the connection only extends to the unit on the outside, so..."
"Which means no one can reach us until someone out there grasps the situation at Seonhwa High and comes looking. Is that it?"
"...Yes, sir."
"Then keep a close eye on it at all times. We don't know when outside contact might come."
"Understood!"
And so Kim Yi-yeon left the spirit-frequency communicator in the hands of the Bureau personnel and stepped out of the barrier.
Behind his back...
"Who is that guy, anyway?"
"No idea. But seeing Team Leader Kang use honorifics that extreme, he's probably a top-tier psychic we've never heard of."
"Whew. Honestly, I was scared out of my mind about what was going to happen next. But that guy will figure something out, right?"
Public servants, passing the log to a private citizen — is this really how it's supposed to work? This is exactly why people say taxes are a waste of money!
But Kim Yi-yeon had no intention of shouldering the log obediently either. Why else, in the middle of all that chaos, had he neglected to write Faye Merlion's name on the student roster?
'A log gets smaller the more you split it, you know?'
If he could sneakily toss it along and slip away, so much the better.
Dreaming of a free ride, he headed for Deva's temporary field headquarters.
His expectations, however, shattered the moment he stepped inside the tent.
"Hiiiik! Eeek!"
Faye Merlion was crawling wretchedly across the floor, hiding herself behind the jiangshi to escape the mid-transformation Deva psychics.
"...What the hell is that?"
It was a complete one-eighty from the woman he'd seen just moments ago. Even the oppressive aura he'd felt when they first met was nowhere to be found on Faye Merlion now.
"Wang Lingguan! Take those two!"
But first, he resolved to deal with the transforming Deva psychics. He hammered the half-transformed attackers into submission with measured blows, stuffed them into the barrier he'd stationed the Bureau inside, and moved on.
"Nnnnghhh... huh? Why am I...?"
Fortunately, anyone whose transformation wasn't yet complete recovered upon being placed inside the barrier. After subduing every visible Deva operative and locking them away, he brought Faye Merlion in as well.
Because her name had gone unrecorded on the student roster, she showed no sign of transformation either.
"You... what the hell is going on? You're supposed to be a Deva executive — why were you..."
The absurdity of it all left him unsure what to even ask, and the abstract question made Faye Merlion burst into tears.
"I-I'm not a Deva executive!"
"...What!?"
"I-I'm a body double! The real Deva executive is my master! I'm just the face of the operation — a figurehead who lends out my name, that's all!"
For a moment, his mind went blank. But he quickly pulled himself together and pressed on.
"Hold on — then where's your master? That presence I felt — they should've been nearby."
"O-one of the jiangshi standing at the gate was our master."
"What!?"
"Th-that's because, by feigning death in a manner of speaking, you can evade all sorts of sorcerous attacks. So Master normally disguises himself as a jiangshi and..."
"...And thanks to that, he slipped off the anomaly's radar too. Is that the story?"
"P-probably...?"
Come to think of it, an anomaly had no reason to swallow someone who was already dead.
"Any chance your master is coming to save you?"
"No... Master has plenty of other disciples besides me... I'm just discard number one..."
"Unbelievable..."
Of course. That figures. When had Kim Yi-yeon ever caught a free ride on someone else's anomaly case? It meant, as always, that this was an incident he'd have to resolve himself.
He folded away his pointless hopes and moved straight to the only question that mattered.
"So. Where's the President?"
That's right — the President. Among those who had come to Seonhwa High today was President Lee Jin-seok himself.
"That's... I don't know either, sir. The President returned to the official residence before the advance team departed — scheduling conflicts..."
Everyone who had been inside the school grounds had been dragged into the Inner Domain exactly where they stood. But anyone outside the grounds at the time was simply... gone. Out of reach.
'Damn it. Is the world's first anomaly-swallowed president about to be born?'
It would have been a fun bit of news if it were someone else's country. But if it happened in Korea, things got very serious, very fast.
Just then—
"M-Mr. Kim Yi-yeon! Contact...! We have contact on the spirit-frequency communicator!"
"What!?"
He hurriedly took up the receiver connected to the worn, antique-style apparatus.
"Greetings, everyone."
It was a voice he had never heard before. No — beyond being unfamiliar, it was a jumble of metallic resonance and male and female timbres braided together, barely resembling a human voice at all.
And yet, somehow, a familiar oppressiveness clung to that voice.
"The real Faye Merlion?"
"Calling me that is rather a mouthful. Just call me Gong No-sa."
"So then, Gong No-sa. To what do I owe the call?"
"Well now — I rang to bring good tidings to those trapped in the Inner Domain. I shall pull my disciple Faye Merlion out of this place, along with one other."
"What?"
"Deaf, are we? I said I shall extract one person, my disciple included, from the Inner Domain."
"...And the price?"
"Hahahaha! I do like how briskly you negotiate! You see, the Inner Domain that swallowed you belongs to a rather powerful anomaly, so some preparation is required on our end."
"Preparation?"
"Generously speaking, ten hearts from virgin maidens dead no more than twenty-four hours ought to suffice."
This lunatic...
Was this bastard seriously saying those words out loud? And it wasn't even as if he'd free everyone in exchange — he'd pull out one, a single person. Rambling on like that could mean nothing except sowing distrust, turning us against each other, until we killed one another in here.
"You actually think anyone's going to indulge that demand?"
"Who knows? When it gets desperate enough, won't somebody step up? Heh heh heh heh heh!"
Gong No-sa's repulsive voice echoed through the temporary field headquarters tent. Kim Yi-yeon felt the bile rise and swallowed it down as a question flashed through his mind.
'Why would a man who so meticulously hides his identity and sends his disciple out as a double and expendable shield make an offer like this?'
Shouldn't it be the opposite? Faye Merlion was a walking leak risk — and in fact had leaked his secret — along with anyone who might have overheard it. Leaving them all to die would have been the natural move. Why go this far to pull Faye Merlion out?
His mind raced at blinding speed, and one hypothesis surfaced.
"Faye Merlion."
"Y-yes?"
Faye Merlion answered in a sopping-wet voice, stripped of every trace of the haughty grande dame she'd been at their first meeting.
"You said your master was disguised as one of the jiangshi at the gate, didn't you?"
"Y-yes..."
"Then what's the other jiangshi for?"
"That one holds Master's ritual regalia, and—"
"Faye, shut your mouth!"
"Eeek...!"
"......"
"......"
"Seems our positions have rather reversed, haven't they?"
To his question, Gong No-sa offered only silence.
"......Five hearts — of virgins and virgins, maiden and maiden both. Bring just those five, and I shall manage the rest somehow—"
"Not buying it, you bastard! Line's dead!"
SLAM!
He slammed the spirit-frequency communicator down with a crash.
Then he walked over and planted himself in front of the jiangshi that had followed Faye here.
The thing was unquestionably dead — so was he imagining the cold sweat beading on its forehead?
Imagination or not, it made no difference. Who in the world would cut a golden goblin any slack for sweating?
"Your back — your, no... the regalia. Show me the regalia!"
A top-tier psychic who had buried his existence so thoroughly that he would expose his true identity just to reclaim it — a ritual regalia like that.
His mouth was already watering.
"Hhahk... hhahk...!"
"Mom...!"
"Please... come save us just one more time...!"
The surviving students had abandoned Classroom 1-2, the designated safe zone, the moment they heard the sounds of the advance team engaging the enemy. But their hope shattered into fragments before long.
By the time the students reached the third floor, where the teachers' office stood, the advance team had been holding on — barely — even as their members convulsed through transformation one by one. What truly broke them was the appearance of 'that thing.'
'What the hell is that?'
'Damn it, fire! I said fire!'
"Anomaly reclassification required! Anomaly reclassification required! This is absolutely not Spirit-Sea grade! It's Spirit-Pinnacle! I repeat, Spirit-Pinnacle grade—!"
"GAAAAAAAAGH—!"
A monster in a completely different dimension from everything they had seen so far in the school revealed itself. In a single instant, it annihilated the advance team, who had thrown up barricades in the teachers' office and held out with stubborn desperation.
The students, who had risked everything to come out and meet the team, scattered like startled birds.
Jung Sung-ho was one of them. Along with a handful of other students, he hid in a bathroom on the third floor.
"Damn it... this is why I said we should've gone down to the nurse's office on the second floor... you idiot, Jung Sung-ho... this is all your fault...!"
Of the three students who had fled with him, the girl hiding in the innermost stall was cursing him out.
'Who asked you to follow me, huh?'
He wanted to snap back at her — but he held his tongue. He had good reason: the girl who had just cursed him out was Lee Min-hwa, the granddaughter of the President of South Korea.
And not just any granddaughter, either — so the story went, she was the treasured daughter born after decades to a family that had produced nothing but sons for three straight generations. Everyone at school knew exactly how dearly the President doted on Lee Min-hwa.
'...If he pulls that kind of stunt and doesn't even get a slap on the wrist, then yeah. Case closed.'
"Hey, Jung Sung-ho, this is all your fault, so get out there and scout the hallway! We can't just sit around in here forever!?"
"Stop nagging... I was going out anyway..."
Jung Sung-ho probed for signs of life inside the bathroom, confirmed there were no monsters outside, and stepped out of the stall.
Thankfully, his ears had not deceived him — the bathroom was empty.
"Whew..."
He let out a sigh of relief. The moment he moved to leave the bathroom—
Creeeeak.
Ssssssssssss.
Water began to flow from a faucet no one had touched.
A chill ran down Jung Sung-ho's spine. And naturally, Seonhwa High had its share of bathroom ghost stories too.
'Come to the school bathroom alone after dark, and you'll hear water running from a faucet that isn't even turned on — and whoever hears it fails the entrance exam for their dream university.'
Under normal circumstances, a ghost story less frightening than merely unlucky.
But in a school turned to hell, even a tale like that transcended bad luck and became outright calamity.
KA-CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK!
From the faucet that had been trickling water, body parts began to pour out — a finger first, then more and more pieces of a human body, one after another.
"Haah... haah... haah...!"
Soon the human fragments gushing from the tap filled the sink to overflowing—
Scramble!
"GAAAAAAAAAH!"
Pieces that should never have joined together had fused into a grotesque flesh golem, and it lunged at Jung Sung-ho. He tried to run, but he slipped in the red liquid — blood or water, who could tell — spilling from the sink, and hit the floor.
"MOM!"
The instant Jung Sung-ho felt death coming for him—
BOOOOOM!
CRACK-CRACK-CRACKLE!
Dazzling lightning flashed, and the flesh golem about to engulf him vanished as if evaporated.
"Wh-what...!?"
Jung Sung-ho whipped his head around in shock — and in his eyes appeared the figure of a man with a colossal tiger-headed giant standing at his back.
"You alright?"
There stood Kim Yi-yeon — having just looted the Treasure Goblin dry and finished his preparations to raid the Spirit-Pinnacle grade anomaly.