Hell Train [5]

Anyone with fighting experience will sympathize with this: hitting a human being in the face is not easy. And that's not some physical issue — the target being small, or their guard being solid. Anyone who went through a normal education knows the face is a critical point of the human body, something you're not supposed to strike without reason. People raised on that universal moral conditioning feel a deep, subconscious revulsion at the idea even in situations where it's perfectly allowed.

Which is why this guy was such a treat. He had no face, so I could swing away without a shred of hesitation.

Crunch! Whooooong!

The conductor I'd hammered with my fist went bouncing off toward the far end of the platform, rolled through the darkness and down onto the tracks, then staggered upright, weaving unsteadily on his feet. Clearly he hadn't expected to get socked out of nowhere. But his wobble lasted only a moment — his hand suddenly snapped up, aiming at my face like a pistol.

A wisp of black energy erupted from his fingers and shot straight at my head, moving so fast it was practically a bullet. I snatched it out of the air with my bare hand.

"—!?"

His face was gone, so I couldn't read an expression, but the flustered surprise radiating off him was unmistakable.

"So this is the energy that drove people insane at Gwangjin Station and Dumo Station?"

Crackle. The wisp dissolved between my fingers.

"Is that all the talent you've got?"

"—···!"

Answering my taunt, the conductor whipped his hand through the air — and in that instant, black shapes came pouring out of the tunnel's darkness like a wave. The same black beings that had crawled out at Songpa Station. There I'd only seen an arm wiggling through a door gap, their forms mostly hidden, but in decent light they turned out to be quite the memorable sight.

"Do you people ever even eat?"

They had the classic Hungry Ghost look — skeletal, stick-thin limbs with nothing but a bloated belly bulging out front. And speaking of which, that energy-blast trick made it clear: the conductor could apparently operate every gimmick on every station of this line. I still couldn't feel any Narrative Coercion from him, but on his own, this thing was at least upper Yeongha-grade — the kind of anomaly even an A-rank psychic would struggle against.

The problem was that I wasn't your average A-rank.

"Whooooo."

I steadied my breathing and clenched my fist. The Ksitigarbha Ten Wheels Sutra and the Vairocana Mantra Barrier were already laid down across the train. Wang Lingguan was guarding Yoon Soo-ah. My trump card — the wide-area Esoteric mantras — was sealed, and my usual battle partner was off the front line. But against trash like that, my bare fists would do just fine.

Hah!

POW!

Fwooooom!

My Doryeok-laden fist caught the lead Hungry Ghost dead on, and its entire body detonated in a burst of flame. The Doryeok I'd refined through the True Immortal Fire-Regulation Method was saturated with extreme Yang energy — a power in itself for repelling demons and shattering wickedness. What I'm saying is that anomalies up through the Yeongha grade no longer needed sorcery from me. My fists were enough.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!

Whaling on the swarming black ghosts without mercy, I flicked a talisman out mid-swing with a quick environment-conversion spell.

Tap.

"BANG~!"

"—!?"

KWAAAAAM!

The talisman stuck to the conductor's body, and he went up in an explosion. His remains scattered into wooden splinters, then dissolved into black smoke and were gone.

"Man, that was disappoin—huh?"

Something caught my eye. The prize bottle in my hand had turned into a train ticket at some point.

"Even dying, you made sure to hand something over. Alright, so what's next—"

Either way, the train had stopped. Ideally the anomaly itself would dissolve now that the conductor was dead, but I saw no sign of that. Apparently the conductor hadn't been the core of the Station That Shouldn't Exist — just one part among many. Damn it. Like this, Yoon Soo-ah's sacrifice meant nothing.

"No. No — think differently."

For one thing, she ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wasn't dead yet. She'd only lost consciousness. And even if the anomaly itself hadn't vanished, with the conductor dead the train couldn't depart — which meant the countdown toward that terminus called the underworld had stopped too. I'd bought time. Now I just needed another way to—

Then, from far off, I began to hear the sound of many footsteps.

"Huh?"

They were coming from the stairs up to the concourse. I rushed over to check, and there they were, pouring out of the waiting area — conductors. More than twenty of them, just from what I could see.

"...Right. Of course there's more than one conductor on a subway line."

"Damn it! Fine, come at me, all of you!"

The moment I braced for a rough fight, the conductors scattered — fanning out to dodge me entirely.

"What!?"

My reflexive Jincheon Talisman blew several of them apart, but the rest didn't care. They sprinted for the train.

"Oh, come on! Wang Lingguan!"

"Grrrrrrrr—"

Too late, Wang Lingguan and I struck at their heels, but in the end one of the scattered conductors climbed aboard the engine car. I rushed after him, only for the remaining conductors to block my path.

"Move it, you minnows!"

"Grrrrrrrrr—!"

Wang Lingguan and I finally carved our way through to the train — and the doors hissed shut.

"The doors are closing."

Hah! I slammed a Doryeok-charged fist into the door of the slowly accelerating train. KWAAAAAAM! Flame burst out with the impact — and the door didn't have so much as a scratch on it.

"You've got to be kidding me!"

Narrative Coercion's reinforcement. Apparently the concourse — and the subway cars themselves — had been granted the same protection. Fine. If I couldn't break it, I'd pry it open by force. I jammed my fingers at the seam of the doors.

"How the hell is it sealed THIS tight!?"

Not a crack. Not even room for a fingernail. At the absolute brink, an idea hit me.

Click. I bit down on my finger to draw blood, then quickly inscribed the spiral formation onto both sets of train doors, sprinkled the gem powder I'd brought along over the blood-drawn array, and poured spiritual power into it.

SCREEEEEECH!

The instant I did, the subway doors began sliding open on their own. What I'd drawn was a formation that grants magnetism — I'd turned the doors into super-powerful magnets. And like poles repel each other. Something every elementary schooler knows.

Hah! I wedged my fingers into the hair-thin gap that had opened and heaved with everything I had. My side had the same Narrative Coercion reinforcement working against it, so it was no picnic — but it was a lot more doable than smashing the thing. SCREEEEEECH!

"Got it! Wang Lingguan, inside!"

"Grrrrrrrrrr—!"

I sent Wang Lingguan, Yoon Soo-ah in tow, through first and leapt in right behind them. In the same heartbeat, the train lurched completely free of the platform and plunged into the tunnel. One second later, and the three of us would have been left standing on the platform for good.

"Hah... hah... damn it."

Plan A — killing the conductor — was a bust. The one silver lining was that I had a train ticket now. Though with this, only one person could walk out of here. Shoving the tangle of thoughts aside, I checked on Yoon Soo-ah first. She'd lost a lot of blood, but nowhere near a lethal amount. The problem was 'contamination.' A quick probe with my Doryeok turned up no curses or wicked energy in her body — but that was no reason to relax. I needed to get her out and under a proper examination as fast as humanly possible.

Should I use this ticket to send Yoon Soo-ah out?

While I was wrestling with the question, an elderly woman among the passengers came shuffling over.

"Um... young man, what's going to happen to us now?"

"Don't worry. I'll take care of everything."

I said it with a shake of my streaming phone, dropping the implication that the situation wasn't even worth cutting the live broadcast for. But with Yoon Soo-ah back covered in blood, that particular brand of nonchalance had reached the end of its shelf life. Sure enough, the other passengers had grown restless, jostling and muttering in their anxiety.

Then it happened.

"H-hehe... we're all going to die..."

The self-proclaimed med student — the same guy who'd offered such helpful advice while I treated the knifed street vendor — started wailing. One of the passengers snapped back at him.

"Hey, quit screaming for no reason, you're killing the mood."

"W-what, did I say something wrong? From what I just saw, you gambled on something at this station and failed, didn't you? Right? So you're out of tricks too, huh?"

The oblivious bastard was disgustingly perceptive when it came to this stuff.

"Hey, kid, knock it off. You're scaring people."

"Screw off! Scared or not, it's the truth, isn't it!?"

"Aish, for God's sake, that's enough, you lunatic!"

Before I could step in, a few of the younger male passengers moved in and pulled the med student away. But he showed no intention of shutting up.

"Hehehe, you all feel it deep down, don't you? The world's going insane. The end times, the end times! The world is ending! And if the world's going to end anyway, then dying all together like this isn't so bad, is it?"

"Gag that son of a bitch!"

"That's enough!"

Finally out of patience, the men forced the med student down onto the floor.

Thud!

"Kghk! You bastards! You think this changes anything!?"

Still he wouldn't stop.

"Hehehe, we're all going to die anyway! You, me! All of us!"

"Shut his mouth, damn it!"

"You think terrifying people is fun!?"

"What's so funny, huh!?"

"Hehehe! It's fun! Because~ I was planning to die today anyway!! I fucking failed the medical boards! A test with a NINETY percent pass rate, and I failed it! How the hell am I supposed to live with the shame! So I was going to kill myself today, but dying alone felt too unfair, so I'd been riding the subway around in circles? Hehe! And now look — I've got a whole crowd of companions to die with who aren't even—"

"Shut your mouth, you bastard!"

"Stomp him!"

Wham! Wham!

Out of patience, the male passengers began kicking the med student down into the floor.

"Hold on a second."

I pushed them aside and crouched down next to him.

"Was what you just said the truth?"

"Wh-what was?"

The med student lifted his head, his face mottled red and blue from the beating.

"What you said about trying to kill yourself. Was that real?"

"...The hell would it be, a lie?"

The instant I heard the words — Med Student [Failed the National Licensing Exam] — the tip-off about the Station That Shouldn't Exist came flooding back to me.

The friend in the tip-off had been battling depression. The tip mentioned it only in passing, but given that the police had closed it as a suicide, the reality was probably far more severe than 'a little' depressed. And it wasn't just him — the other 'survivors' Yoon Soo-ah had told me about had all been at a mental breaking point too.

Every last one of them had been psychologically cornered. The Han River, survivors under crushing stress, and a med student who'd tried to kill himself — and in that instant, everything in my head snapped together into a single line.

"Damn it — why didn't I make ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠this connection the second I heard the keyword 'Han River'?!"

The station names tracking the old Han River ferry landings meant that this subway line was the Han River itself. So the question was: what kind of river was the Han River? Seoul's lifeline? The cheat code for inflating apartment prices? A launch platform for algae blooms? None of those were wrong, but none of them mattered here.

A suicide landmark. The Han River is the premier suicide spot in Korea. Why else would people coin expressions like "Is the Han River water a bit warm these days?" or "Heading to the Han River" as euphemisms for suicide? That image ran that deep. And it wasn't just rhetoric — among all of Korea's rivers, the Han boasts the highest suicide-by-leaping rate. It's so bad that loiter on any bridge crossing it for longer than a certain stretch of time, and the CCTV-watching civil servants and police will come find you within minutes. That's how obscenely high the suicide rate on the Han River is.

And that suicide rate, all on its own, gave birth to an anomaly built on the Han River as its foundation — this Station That Shouldn't Exist. The line represented the river; the subway, presumably, its bridges. And because the foundation was what it was, this anomaly preyed on people carrying suicidal impulses. That's why the tip-off's subject and the survivors were so disproportionately people at the edge of a psychological cliff — unlike this med student, bawling about killing himself over a licensing exam.

Looking at their situations, none of them had resolved to die, concretely. They were simply people driven far enough into a corner that they might, at some point, have thought about death. And it was those wounds of the heart that the Station That Shouldn't Exist — no, this Suicide Train — had made its targets.

This anomaly is the negative image of the Han River as a suicide landmark, operating as an urban legend in and of itself.

Origin identified. Now the problem was the solution — and the survivors' afterlives told me exactly what it was.

The Bureau had assumed these people went through a near-death crisis and came out the other side with a sunnier outlook. The truth was exactly the opposite. Only those who, through the trials of the Suicide Train, reclaimed their will and hunger to live were allowed to walk out alive. In other words, this Suicide Train was — in a sense — a rehabilitation camp.

No... even so, that's too much of a leap.

None of those three, nor the tip-off's friend, had ever concretely resolved to kill themselves. They were just people pushed into a mental corner deep enough to glimpse death for a moment. The Suicide Train wormed into those fragile hearts and dragged them into its other side — and only those who shed their suicidal impulse completely during the ordeal were released, in accordance with the legend's script.

If anything, it's a piece-of-shit anomaly that shoves people already struggling enough to contemplate death and tells them to go jump.

What made this thing truly vile, though, was that it dragged in everyone riding the same train as someone with a suicidal impulse. Which tracks — there were over forty passengers on this train alone. No matter how brutal life's gotten these days, there was no way all of them were carrying suicidal urges. Either way, having gotten this far, the solution was simple: eliminate the suicidal impulses of the people the train has marked. Do that, and the red snake would appear at the next station.

The problem was how.

I wasn't a counselor. Was a suicidal person's urge really going to evaporate because a stranger said a few kind words to them? If that worked, would there be a single suicide in the world? And an even bigger question: was the med student truly the only person on this train carrying that kind of impulse? As I said — the world's a hard place to live in lately. Factor in the recent wave of anomaly outbreaks leaving society on edge, and among these forty people, there was no way nobody had thought about death at least once. Maybe, contrary to my guess, every single person here was carrying some small flicker of a suicidal urge. No wonder the survivor lists were so short...

The head-on approach had no answer. Which meant—

I settle this from outside the anomaly's domain. I turn the rules it set against it.

The problem was that pulling this off would be impossible on my own strength alone.

I closed my eyes and recalled the number of someone I hadn't contacted once since that day. Hwang Young-gyu. An executive in Cosmos Corporation's anomaly countermeasures division. With Cosmos's cooperation, I'd have a real shot. The catch was that for all their surface friendliness, Cosmos harbored open hostility toward me. Would people like that cooperate with this plan? Actually... it might go smoother than I think. Hostility aside, Cosmos genuinely wanted anomalies made known to the world. Depending on the terms, they'd accept my offer.

"Looks like I've got no choice but to crash straight into it."

"What?"

"Talking to myself."

I turned to face the passengers.

"I'll be getting off at the next station."

I held up the ticket in my hand.

"With this, you can walk out of here alive."

The passengers' faces shifted all at once. Anger, at the idea that I'd abandon them. Greed, at the sight of a lifeline in ticket form. And fear — of being abandoned by the only hope they had.

"Hehehe! So you didn't want to die after all!? All that high-and-mighty act — serves you right—!"

"Th-that's not it!"

It was Lee ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Ji-woo, my little fan, who cut the med student off — though she didn't sound sure of it herself, watching me with an anxious face.

"Th-that's not what's happening, right!"

"Of course not."

I patted her head. What mattered now was the passengers' will to live. So I packed my voice tight with Doryeok and spoke, enough to drown out their fear.

"Being treated like a villain or an idiot, I can live with that. Being treated like a coward? Not a chance."

I looked into the camera. The broadcast was still ON AIR. With ten thousand fans watching, could I really pull something as humiliating as running for my own skin? And above all else—

"······."

I looked at Yoon Soo-ah, unconscious and laid out across the subway seat. This was a woman who'd staked her life on trusting me. Abandon that and run away, and I might as well die — death would be the less shameful option.

"I'm not getting off to survive alone. I'm getting off to save every single one of you."

At the sound of my voice, steady and hard, the passengers' expressions began to shift, little by little.

"Believe in me. I won't let you down. Not once."

The despair this doomsayer had sown, against the hope I was about to build. Let's find out which one is stronger.

Keh keh keh. I'll make every last one of you want to live, even if it kills you.