3. Five Ws and One H
If I can kill someone, then I can be killed too.
A simple truth. An utterly ordinary fact.
This world, once governed by social norms, law, and order, had suddenly become a concrete jungle.
There were probably plenty of people like me, and that alone would have crippled the police's ability to respond.
That much was easy to predict.
Suddenly, everything terrified me.
I'd been perfectly fine when I killed a man just moments ago, but the moment I considered that I could die too, the fear came crashing in.
Was this the wild? A world of the strong devouring the weak?
Was this what the ones who put message windows in front of people's eyes wanted?
What the hell were they after, sending messages like that and letting people use skills like these?
I had plenty of questions, but of course there was no way to know the answers.
So instead of wasting time on pointless worries, I'd be better off thinking about how to survive.
If I kept surviving—if I made it through—then maybe I'd eventually learn why they started all this.
Though that would mean surviving until they were satisfied.
How to survive. That part was simple.
This skill I'd been given. I'd just use it to strike first and kill every bastard who might kill me.
I got that far, and then I felt something strange again.
Not hide, not run—strike first and kill? Had I really just thought that?
A chill ran through me. Getting goosebumps at my own thoughts was a truly bizarre feeling.
Had I always been this extreme? No matter how I looked at it, I didn't think I was this kind of person.
I don't know. Everything was a mess.
And before long, the idea of striking first and killing no longer felt particularly strange.
The first punch wins. So a preemptive strike matters. That's an eternal, unchanging truth.
Yeah. That's right. No point doubting it. It's the most rational approach.
To do that, I needed to understand this skill better.
I had 1 Coin left. So I could draw another skill with it.
If I had my way, I'd have loved to try a 10-Coin or even a 100-Coin draw. But that wasn't happening anytime soon.
So for now, I decided to draw another skill with the 1 remaining Coin.
More skills were obviously better.
I drew another 1-Coin skill.
Just like before, letters appeared one by one in six blank slots.
Oneself, for 10 minutes, without conditions, the last voice heard, can imitate, if one has not told a lie within the day.
Looking at the drawn skill, I was a bit dumbfounded.
What the hell? Imitate a voice? What kind of skill is that?
It had absolutely nothing to do with killing people. No, before that, I didn't even know what the point of it was.
And the message that appeared below it was even more ridiculous.
[Replace your existing skill with the new skill?]
The meaning of this message was clear. I could only hold one skill.
Compared to the skill I already had, this one was garbage.
Replacing my original skill with this would be a moronic move. There was no reason to hesitate even a little.
So I pressed No. The newly drawn skill disappeared.
Naturally, the Coin didn't come back.
I crouched back down in the toilet stall and thought.
But oddly, I felt lighter than before.
The second skill I'd drawn. It was so pathetic it wasn't even worth mentioning.
What if I'd killed someone, earned a Coin, made a draw—and gotten a skill like that as my very first one?
The sense of betrayal would've been enormous. I'd have every right to rage and scream, What the fuck is this shit?
So honestly, I did feel lighter. I even felt lucky.
At least I hadn't drawn a piece-of-shit skill.
A skill with multiple uses. At least I'd drawn one that could kill people, so I could consider myself fortunate.
While I was thinking that, something suddenly clicked.
These six slots. And what I'd realized after seeing the first and second skills.
This was the Five Ws and One H. Now that I looked, it was certain. The pattern was fully visible.
Who, when, where, what, how, why.
My current skill was: Oneself, for 5 minutes, the moment one's feet are touching the ground, an object smaller than one's palm, can move freely, only when one has a wound on one's body that will not heal within 1 week.
It really was the Five Ws and One H.
The "why" was a little unusual, but it was certain.
The second one hadn't deviated from the same overall framework either, so skills would definitely keep coming out this way.
Now that I understood the system, I started wondering what a 10-Coin skill would look like.
Would it at least be better than this one? That's probably why it cost 10, right?
But to do that, I'd have to kill 10 people. Time had passed, so the bonus 1 Coin from before was probably gone.
Killing people.
Maybe it was because of those incomprehensible message windows, but I'd killed that bastard Manager Kim far too easily.
And I didn't feel a shred of guilt over killing him.
But would it be the same with other people? Manager Kim was someone I had enough of a grudge against to actually want dead, wasn't he?
There was none of the fear or dread from before.
Probably because of the second skill I'd drawn. The fact that not everyone who committed murder would have gotten a good skill like mine.
That meant I was that much safer. Not that I was completely out of danger.
I finished sorting out my thoughts.
Murder. I'd already done it once. One more or two more wouldn't make much difference.
So for now, I'd go through with it. But to do that... I'd need to prepare.
At least, I couldn't use the lighter for this. I needed it myself.
I left the bathroom. Then I saw a glass door labeled Mission Center.
It was a weekday morning, so the place was empty. The door was locked and no one was inside. So I could go in.
The lock wasn't a problem. It was a glass door, so I could just smash my way in.
There was a security company sticker on it, but they weren't going to respond. In a situation like this, would they really come?
I guarantee they wouldn't. So without hesitation, I grabbed a fire extinguisher from the hallway and hurled it at the door.
Crash—the door shattered. I stepped on the broken tempered-glass shards and went inside.
Surprisingly, the interior was intact. I'd assumed a mission center would be somewhere religious fanatics gathered for meetings.
Anyway, I was in, so I started searching for anything useful.
And in the room marked Director's Office, I found a decent set of clothes hanging on the wall.
I didn't know who'd worn them, but they were at least better than a bloodstained dress shirt. So I took off the dress shirt and changed into the button-down.
It was a size too big, so the director must've been pretty built. At least it wasn't too small. Now the clothes were handled.
An object smaller than my palm. An object I could send flying at will. And an object that could kill if it hit.
The first thing I found was a fountain pen. Its length was just barely smaller than my palm. So it could work as a weapon.
I used the skill. The fountain pen floated up and spun in a circle in midair.
Whoa. I could almost whistle at this. Felt like I'd turned into Yondu or something.
Thinking of Yondu's arrow, I moved the fountain pen.
It shot through the air with a whistle and slammed—thunk—into a wooden dresser.
I flinched without meaning to. If that dresser had been a person, it would've been a fatal wound. The flight speed was incredible.
In fact, my skill had no restrictions on speed or anything like that.
So the fountain pen could probably move even faster. It wouldn't just stop at embedding itself in a dresser.
When I thought about pulling the fountain pen back out, it slid free without any resistance.
It had been driven in a full three centimeters. Pulling it out by hand probably would've taken real effort.
Seeing that, I understood clearly. It would probably work however I imagined it.
So I looked around, found a Bible, and picked it up.
A fairly thick Bible. Holding it, I moved the fountain pen and shot it at the Bible.
Thunk! The fountain pen punched straight through the Bible.
It pierced so cleanly that I forgot what I was going to say.
A fantastic movement that ignored the laws of physics.
It had gone through a Bible that thick without any trouble, so piercing a human body would be nothing.
I looked around for something better than the fountain pen. Then I found a nail.
A nail would be sturdier than a fountain pen. It had to be.
So I tossed the fountain pen aside and tried moving a nail.
Five minutes had passed, so the nail moved freely. It punched through several chairs and blew holes in a few shelves.
No, not blew apart. It just made clean holes.
This was broken no matter how I looked at it. For a skill obtained by killing one person... it was too strong.
It had restrictions, sure, but I could manage those with careful use.
So for now, I took the nail with me and stepped outside the mission center.
The problem was that the nail was hot. It must have heated up while piercing through all that stuff.
So after five minutes passed, I had to wrap it in the dress shirt I'd been wearing to carry it.
Now, the question was how to kill people with this.
The method was simple. Just move the nail.
But there was one problem.
The five-minute time limit. Once it passed, I'd be unable to use the skill for the next five minutes.
So I needed to eliminate that risk. The best option was to stay hidden.
There was no need to expose my position. This was something I could do perfectly well from hiding.
So first, I needed to find a good spot.
A place where I could see outside. A place where I could hide my body. A place with no enemies nearby.
If a place like that existed, I could stay hidden and kill people on the ground.