The Boy's Abyss #2
The moment the status window appeared, I knew this was going to feel exactly like a game. The word ‘Player’ made it even more obvious. But Nightmare Corridor? Just hearing the name sent a chill down my spine, thick enough to make me swallow hard. No matter how I looked at it, this couldn’t be anything good.
Was there really no more detailed explanation?
As I tilted my head in confusion, more text floated up in front of my eyes, this time with greater detail.
One day you opened your eyes to find yourself lying in a dark corridor. From the pitch-black corner came horrible sounds, and an ominous presence drew steadily closer. In this bizarre situation, you had no choice but to start moving if you wanted to survive and escape. In the end, you will reach a horrifying secret and a strange taboo…
…It really did sound like a game description. If I had to pick a genre, it would be horror. The maximum number of players I could select was four. Every name listed in the ‘Player List’ belonged to someone whose face I knew. Was I really supposed to drag four of them into this horror game called the Nightmare Corridor?
My heart pounded with excitement at the unfamiliar situation, and that was only natural. For the past two months I had been desperately waiting for something like this to happen. Something that would completely shatter my ordinary daily life.
The Hypnosis App I’d been hoping for hadn’t appeared, but if I just sat around feeling sorry for myself, I’d never escape my role as the school punching bag. Just the other day, Yang Ju-hui had asked, “Hey Yeong-won, you live alone with your mom, right? She comes home late every day?” while trying to figure out where my house was. The thought of our place turning into a hideout for a gang of delinquents? Absolutely not. I would protect my home and my daily life with my own two hands.
After thinking it over for a long time, I dragged familiar names from the player list and filled the slots.
No matter how I thought about it, these three had to be included. That left one final slot…
I scanned the rest of the names on the list. Among them was the most familiar one of all. After agonizing so hard I thought my hair might fall out, I filled the last empty space.
Ha Yeong-won
It might have been reckless, but if something was going to happen because of me, I wanted to see with my own eyes exactly what would unfold and what the outcome would be. Besides, maybe this would finally reveal why this bizarre Status Window had appeared before me in the first place. The part in the Nightmare Corridor description that read “In the end, you will reach a horrifying secret and a strange taboo…” had been bothering me more than anything.
“Alright… so what happens now?”
There were still twenty minutes left before lunch ended. In that leisurely stretch of time, I scanned my surroundings, paying close attention so I wouldn’t miss even the smallest change. But maybe I had been overthinking it. Nothing happened until lunch period was over.
“……”
There really wasn’t anything unusual. If I had to point out one thing that felt off, it was that after lunch ended and class began, the delinquents from Class D—like Kim Geon-ho and Yang Ju-hui—never showed up. Kim Geon-ho skipping class wasn’t exactly rare, so that wasn’t too surprising… but the strange part was that even Yang Ju-hui and our class president Jeong Sojin were absent. Wasn’t Jeong Sojin ridiculously strict about her grades and school records? And Yang Ju-hui, for a delinquent, had always been pretty serious about managing her scores.
Tap. Tap.
Our Korean history teacher, dressed in a hanbok, rapped the podium with a short bamboo stick and asked, “Does anyone know where these kids are? Try calling their phones. I can understand Geon-ho, but our class president Sojin and Ju-hui skipping my class? That’s completely unacceptable.”
Normally the school collected phones at the start of the day, but ever since a female student went missing at the beginning of the semester, they had stopped confiscating them and simply asked students to use them responsibly. A few kids tried calling the missing students, but no one picked up. Even after the next period and after school ended, they never returned to the classroom.
“Hey, Ha Yeong-won. Did you snitch to the teacher? Told him I was bullying you?”
Smack!
The pain on the back of my head snapped me back to reality. The tiny tyrant Yang Ju-hui was glaring at me with a deep scowl.
“You’re trying to ruin my school record and screw up my entire life on purpose, aren’t you? You perverted bastard!”
“What?! What the hell are you talking about? Why am I a pervert?”
Thud!
Before I could even finish, Yang Ju-hui’s fist slammed into my chest. The air was knocked out of me and a scream tore from my throat.
“Ack!”
Someone might say a healthy male student shouldn’t be acting so pathetic after getting hit by a girl his own age, but that’s only because they’ve never been punched by Yang Ju-hui. I was on the rather delicate side even among the boys—a literature-loving kid. Getting beaten by a delinquent like her and ending up in tears was pretty much inevitable.
“Ha Yeong-won! You’re trying to destroy my life, aren’t you? I know everything! I know it all, you son of a bitch! Give me my life back! My life! I wanted to succeed so I could escape that shitty household!”
Thud. Thud-thud!
Yang Ju-hui kept hammering my torso with her fists. I could barely breathe and had no choice but to desperately defend myself.
“…What are you talking about?! Why would I ruin your life? I didn’t!”
“Really? Swear on everything?”
“Really! I swear on everything!”
Whoosh.
Only then did the merciless fists stop. But Yang Ju-hui still looked furious, like an angry goblin, with horns practically sprouting from her head.
“Still, don’t you think you should take responsibility for my life? Be a man and own up to it.”
“Responsibility? What responsibility?”
“You perverted bastard! You’ve always been staring at my legs! Because of you I feel dirty. You have to take responsibility! You even confessed that you liked me before! You said you liked me, right? Well I like you too, Yeong-won!”
Yang Ju-hui suddenly threw herself at me. The sweet scent of her cosmetics hit me like a wave. After three years of enduring an all-boys middle school, the feminine smell was far too stimulating. At our school, famously known as “Gangster High,” that scent was always thick in the air.
Blood rushed downward in an instant. My whole body felt like it was melting into mush. Yang Ju-hui was hugging me—how could this be happening?! Thanks to that thought, my brain rapidly cooled down.
“Ah, fuck. This is a dream. No wonder it felt weird.”
No, this wasn’t just any dream. It was definitely a wet dream!
“No! If I stay like this I’m really screwed!”
I desperately clung to my sanity. Then, like a submarine that had been submerged deep in the ocean suddenly surging toward the surface at full speed, my consciousness rose up.
“Huk!”
I let out a huge scream and my body shook violently. When I came to my senses, I was lying on a blanket spread across the floor of a dark room.
“Haa…”
My body was drenched in sweat, as if I’d just had a nightmare. But that wasn’t what mattered right now. What mattered was whether or not I had actually had a wet dream. I quickly slipped a hand into my pants and underwear. Thankfully it was only sweat. The feared disaster hadn’t occurred.
“Did I seriously fall asleep without changing out of my uniform? No wonder I had such a terrible dream when I slept so uncomfortably.”
I possessed a talent that let me exert superhuman mental strength to stop myself right before having a wet dream. Honestly, it was an impressive ability. The reason was simple: back in middle school I had one, and when Mom came to wake me up she teased me for a whole week—“Our Yeong-won has become a man, huh? What kind of dream was it? A naughty one? Who appeared in it?”—and that had become serious trauma.
“Ugh, shit. This is the worst… I was too busy yesterday to take care of it, but still… I just did it the day before yesterday and it’s already…”
Don’t guys have a cooldown for wet dreams? Unlike a girl’s menstrual cycle, there’s a certain amount that builds up, right? I thought you didn’t have them until that tank was full. I was genuinely confused that it had filled up again so quickly.
“That was way too close. And of all things, why did I have to dream about that…”
It was probably because I had secretly stared at Yang Ju-hui’s legs up close yesterday.
“That evil girl. She must have shown me her legs on purpose to make me have a wet dream. She definitely shortened her skirt to torment me. What a psycho.”
While cursing Yang Ju-hui like she was my parents’ mortal enemy, I stepped out into the living room. Since I was already awake, I figured I might as well get a glass of water, but—
“What the hell is this—?”
The moment I opened my bedroom door, the entire world had turned into a pitch-black tunnel. The old, cramped two-room villa living room—where cockroaches occasionally appeared—was gone. Instead, a dark corridor greeted me.
“Oh, shit… I’m really screwed.”
For a second I wondered if someone had kidnapped me while I was sleeping and thrown me into some weird room, but I wasn’t an idiot. I immediately understood that this situation was anything but normal. I wanted to figure out exactly what was going on, but that wasn’t the most important thing right now!
Jingle, jingle, jingle, jingle—
The sound of bells coming from far away felt strangely eerie and ominous.
“Advice!”
For now, I decided to use the Advice function from the status window, which could be used up to twice a day. The single point I had saved after opening the shop disappeared, but I didn’t care.
In the Nightmare Corridor, there are hiding spots such as cleaning supply closets and lockers that allow you to avoid monsters for a certain amount of time. I wonder who prepared these things?
Hiding spot!
Tap.
As I felt my way along the dark corridor, my hand touched something like a rusty iron door. This had to be the cleaning supply closet the advice mentioned!
Clank. Creeeeak.
The rotten stench of old mops inside the cleaning closet was so foul it nearly twisted my nose, but that only lasted a moment.
Jingle, jingle, jingle—
Something I could never have imagined began to pass right in front of the narrow iron cabinet where I was hiding.