Chapter 87
Chapter 87
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Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 87
Chapter Title: The Coming of the End
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Honk! Honk!
Car horns blared endlessly across every road.
Mingled among the traffic were ordinary office workers, firefighters, police officers, or even personnel from the Tale Management Bureau.
The gridlock that kept everyone stuck in place was a thoroughly boring and grueling ordeal, but no one would argue that it was at least peaceful.
The line of sight raced along the highway straight to the office.
Workplaces, those dens of laborious toil, drew in people regardless of age or gender.
There, dozens or hundreds of jobs hung their names like signs, relentlessly squeezing out money.
That thin paper called money had a nasty habit of tearing easily, ensuring it never piled up no matter how much you earned.
The office workers, well aware of this, could only grit their teeth and scrape together every last coin.
Beyond the workplace, the gaze converged on a single point.
It was an ugly place—a bizarre structure where the world's malice seemed to spew from one lone human.
The rushing sewage broadcast the rot far and wide, its stench wrinkling the faces of everything from ants and rats to dogs and humans.
Anyone who'd worked there long or watched the flow for ages would notice something off about the stream's shape today.
And there was one man amid it all: Lee Young-gil.
A man in his late seventies, his madness softening into an inexplicable melancholy.
Lee Young-gil knew the true nature of this new frenzy, a blend of joy and sorrow.
Blue toilet paper lay scattered on the floor.
It meant the old man's memories had returned.
Summarizing Lee Young-gil's memories in a single word would be a reckless, pointless waste of time.
Yet he boiled them down to just that.
"The End."
The old man murmured softly.
Like Tae-jun reclaiming his terror, Lee Young-gil's aura had shifted.
Anyway, the source of his joy was that recovered memory: 'The End.'
So what was the root of his sorrow?
It couldn't be summed up simply.
How could anyone explain the tangle of countless reasons woven into one emotion?
The memory loss from some young fool's futile thrashing had wasted time, and that wasted time had cost countless opportunities.
"Still, it's all come together now."
Lee Young-gil dropped to his knees, clasping his hands and raising them to the sky.
It was the most crucial part of his consciousness, the piece he'd forgotten.
A dissonant voice scraped at his eardrums.
My faithful servant.
The testimony of a holy life arrived.
The path to ruin draws near, and you shall be king of the new world.
It was the voice of the outer god—or rather, its fragment—that had revealed so much to Lee Young-gil.
The same voice that ordered him to assault Tae-jun, extracted the Bureau's structure through contact with him, and revealed infiltration methods via the time-persistent camera. To Lee Young-gil, it was his god.
He slowly, precisely recalled his memories.
One hundred mashed field mouse hearts, topped with eight fresh human ones spread out atop them.
Those eight might bring screams and wails from eight earthly households.
"This aged servant offers you one hundred lowly hearts and eight bodies—a total of one hundred eight devotions."
Strength gathered in his feeble voice.
"Thus, make this place the dawn of your great will and reconstruct your flesh."
Flames erupted from the grotesque pile of hearts.
Toxic sewer gases filled the space, igniting into a volatile blaze, but it posed no issue to Lee Young-gil anymore.
The blood of beasts and humans mingled, stepping into the sewage.
The End took its first step.
The incomprehensible entity dubbed an outer god by the Bureau descended through its devotee's offering.
It was still weak.
In human terms, only a foot—a single body part—had crossed over.
But its influence was already spreading like a plague.
Now, back to the surface.
Right above where it began, in a single-family home, a child shouted at his widowed mother.
"Mom! The water looks weird!"
The exhausted mother, raising him alone, ignored it and drifted off to sleep—a choice that doomed their home.
"Mom! Don't ignore me, guh... hngh... kgh."
The plague slowly seeped into the streets.
Traffic was jammed as always, but worse than usual today.
One driver, furious, flung open his door and stormed out.
Thud—crash!
"Fuck! I said move it!"
His fist shattered the windshield of the car ahead moments later.
Like cars speeding away, the contamination spread without pause.
The office, forever brimming with rage.
"How long are we supposed to keep working like this? Huh? Is writing the report that hard?"
An employee got chewed out by his boss.
The pains of life—did it really have to matter so much?
A sudden realization hit.
'Ah, if I jump from here, I'll die.'
"What? What the hell are you doing? Hey, stop! Wait!"
The plague circulated along the straight sewers.
One day, when it looped the entire city...
"My god shall achieve full descent..."
Lee Young-gil laughed madly, tears streaming down his face.
Leaving him behind, our gaze followed the sewers—straight, left, right—until it reached the Bureau.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇ "Guh..."
Could this even be called a fight?
It felt weird saying it myself, but it was such a one-sided slaughter that the term fit perfectly.
The first to charge me were Park Se-jin's bullets.
Bullets are fast by nature, but a skilled shooter's aren't any quicker than an amateur's.
My tentacles, already impervious to such things, now had reflexes that turned every gunshot into a joke.
Their panicked faces were amusing enough, but I didn't have the leisure to savor them.
Well, their expressions kept shifting so rapidly there was no time to settle in and watch.
Once I'd swatted all the bullets aside, they surrounded me in a triangle formation.
Park Se-jin and Hyuk Tae-jun fired from both flanks, slowly grinding at my nerves.
Even flies buzzing from two sides are annoying; I didn't hold back and lashed out with my tentacles.
Park Se-jin barely dodged, but Hyuk Tae-jun took a direct hit.
Park Se-jin's face twisted, but she followed his path three seconds later.
They had a plan, though.
Energy warped the surrounding light, gathering at that massive gun barrel.
Looks like Park Se-jin and Hyuk Tae-jun were drawing my attention while Mun Woo-seok lined up a lethal shot.
Not a bad plan, honestly.
It could've been dangerous if it had landed.
But they failed to hold my focus, handing me five fatal seconds.
Knocking Mun Woo-seok aside and wrecking his device was child's play.
After all, the hardest thing in the world is stopping right before death.
Inflicting just enough injury to prevent recovery? That's the privilege of the strong.
And that's why I showed them that luxury.
"You all still alive?"
If those twitches weren't postmortem spasms, I'd done a pretty good job.
If they were... well, condolences.
I approached Hyuk Tae-jun.
His legs looked messed up even at a glance.
In this state, he couldn't be sane—and even if he was, he couldn't do much.
I reached into his pocket.
I heard some mumbling, but couldn't make out the words.
"It should be around here somewhere..."
I knew Hyuk Tae-jun had a wristwatch.
"This pocket?"
I pulled the slightly bulging item from his pocket.
"Uh... so why did they tell me to find this?"
The watch was pretty worn.
Not broken, but the serial number was...
"Hm. Z04S... the rest is completely illegible—"
Then, an untraceable memory burrowed into my brain and took root.
A pounding headache, but I realized I'd remembered something.
And what that memory was...
"Z04SA7B2Z6."
The watch's full serial number.
The air condensed.
Many ways to describe it, but 'condensed' fit best.
The air, time, space—everything compressed toward me.
The innocent tangle of memory and future overlaid my body, summoning nostalgia from some day.
Yes, I knew what this was.
This was my memory.
A letter and salvation from myself to me.
And the start of that salvation was...
"Wh-what? No way... this is the game [Saving the World from Tales of Terror]?"