School (2)
“Is that really what you’re saying right now!”
“I-I’m sleepy... Daejang, what do I do? I think this is it for me... You have to survive and get out of here!”
“What kind of idiot crap is that? Hey, get out of there right now!”
“N-no! My legs won’t move! It’s like they’re glued down!”
At some point, Namgogoedam had ended up seated at the very last desk.
He shoved up on the desktop with both hands, trying to haul himself to his feet, but his lower body wouldn’t budge at all.
Violation of school rules. Punishment.
Namgogoedam, who had failed, was about to get eaten by something now.
Still, this was no reason to act like that. Wouldn’t some freak monster just show up?
I couldn’t lose the first person I’d met in the Backrooms like this.
“Hey, if you can move your hands, grab this.”
“Huh? You’re giving me a sword?”
“I’m lending it to you. Give it back later.”
“L-later...?”
Namgogoedam stared in confusion as he took hold of Black Moon.
“Yeah, you moron. Don’t sit there sniveling with that face of yours. If anything pops out, just swing like crazy. If it’s a monster, the attacks should work.”
“What about you!”
“You forgot who I am? Keep your head on straight and think only about surviving. No, scratch that. Think about killing everything in sight.”
I drew out a long thread of black silk from Arachne and gripped my hammer.
Then, with the click-clack of lunchboxes opening, the students began to eat.
And behind the trembling Namgogoedam came...
Clang- shrrrk-
A locker door flew open, and a huge flesh-colored tentacle burst out.
“Aaaagh! What the hell is that!”
“I told you to swing, bastard!”
I smashed the reaching tentacle with my hammer and bound it with black silk along with the other writhing strands.
Snick-snack. The tentacles, shaped like cephalopod legs, had human mouths where suckers should have been, and they chewed at the silk with wet, grinding bites.
“Ahh, failing... Mom’s going to be mad.”
Another failed student beside us, a monster in human form, had its limbs twisted by a tentacle and torn at by teeth, yet it spoke with complete calm.
Namgogoedam still looked half-dead and shell-shocked, staring at the student beside him before turning his eyes back to me.
“I really do want to die!”
“Uuuh, Aaaagh!”
Black Moon swung in wild, desperate arcs.
A few tentacles were severed and flopped to the floor.
Namgogoedam stared at his own hands in astonishment.
Yeah, that’s it.
For all this monster was, it was nothing before my gear.
“Here comes another one! Keep swinging!”
“Got it!”
The severed tentacles crawled back into the lockers, and this time another locker door popped open and spat out a fresh one.
You weren’t planning to give up until punishment was over?
Fine. I had a plan too.
“Namgogoedam.”
“W-what!”
“You can hold out, right? No, you have to hold out. If you don’t want to die.”
“W-what are you planning?”
“Just blocking them isn’t really my style. I’m going to wreck the lockers.”
“What? Hey, hey! You crazy bastard!”
I left the tentacles to him and headed for the lockers themselves, their source.
Whenever a tentacle intermittently reached for me, I crushed it with my hammer and targeted the locker compartments that had just been severed by Namgogoedam’s swings.
When the tentacles crawled back into the lockers to recover and closed the doors behind them, I smashed the doors flat with my hammer.
I jammed Arachne’s black silk into the crushed doors as they buckled inward, pinning them shut while they shuddered from the pounding.
One down.
“Daejang! It’s working, right!”
“Yeah. Don’t worry about me and keep at it.”
“No! Worry about me too!”
“Why the hell should I worry about some guy? Hey, tentacle’s coming.”
“You motherfucker!”
The second tentacle got sucked right back in.
Same as before: smash it, seal it, done.
Fortunately, Namgogoedam made a fine decoy, so sealing the lockers one by one wasn’t all that hard.
By the time I’d sealed all twenty-nine of them, only one remained.
If I’d known, I should’ve blocked the nearby ones first.
I’d wasted time trying to target only the ones that actually spawned tentacles.
“Just cut down the last one already.”
“...Hoo.”
The last tentacle wasn’t reaching for Namgogoedam.
It was the one devouring the failed student monster.
There was no trace of the student left except a blood-soaked, shredded uniform, but the tentacle was still chewing on something.
Even for a monster, there ought to be limits.
The last tentacle was dragged back into the locker by Black Moon, and the moment every door was sealed, a bell rang.
“Ah, dinner time’s over. What kind of crap is this, making me miss dinner because of you.”
“You can still talk about dinner after seeing that...?”
“Obviously. I was looking forward to finally eating a real meal for once.”
As soon as dinner time ended, the lunchboxes just vanished.
Ugh. My rice. My hot meal.
“Huff... Anyway, seriously, thanks. You saved me.”
“That all?”
“...I don’t know if there’ll even be another cafeteria meal, but whatever lunchbox they serve then, I’ll give it all to you.”
“Nice.”
Namgogoedam had only just managed to pry himself away from the desk and collapse on the floor, but I was already imagining what the next cafeteria side dishes might be.
Sweet-and-sour pork would be fine. Tonkatsu would be nice too.
No, wait. Pork bulgogi would be better.
And if they served hot seaweed soup, I’d drink the whole damn thing.
“There are five hours left until dismissal.”
“Really? Then let’s go back to the computer room.”
“Huh? Aren’t we going to talk about how to deal with the janitor?”
“You said you don’t know anything anyway. More importantly, there’s something I still haven’t asked you.”
“What? If I know it, I’ll answer.”
“......”
“What’s that look for? Hey, are you ignoring me right now? No, I said ask me. I might know!”
“You’re annoying, so if you know, go answer it on the gallery. What does a failed idiot like you know...”
“No! I really was just pushed to the bottom, I’m telling you! Hey!”
Ignoring Namgogoedam’s shrieking, I went back to the computer room and posted an update on the gallery first.
If I hadn’t shown up, the gallery would’ve lost one member today.
No, this useless bastard said he was confident and then proved it by immediately failing.
I had to drag him back from the edge by the collar before he got taken away and died.
His face turned red in real time at the reactions raining down on him.
Ah, this was great in person. Real-time entertainment.
Anyway, that wasn’t the important part, so I found Jemmin.
I told him everything that had happened in the screening room, without leaving a single thing out.
How I’d gone somewhere else, or maybe some hallucination, inside the Backrooms.
How the man had deliberately told us to cut our feet off, as if trying to hypnotize us.
And the movie ticket I’d found after coming back.
An anomaly, huh.
So even if I had a god-tier weapon, I still wasn’t completely invincible.
That was a pretty annoying realization.
It would be great if that movie ticket really was an item.
I’d been worried that that cursed theater was going to show me something else weird, but Jemmin seemed to judge it as some sort of reward after all.
I might not trust Namgogoedam, but I trusted Jemmin blindly.
“Stop fighting and get up. Pick up Black Moon.”
“Hoo... Damn bastards. But why are you suddenly talking about a sword?”
“You need practice. Time to prepare for taking the janitor’s head off.”
“Ah, right! The janitor... We’ve got to deal with him. But wouldn’t it be better to hide and watch him first?”
“I can’t hide like you can. If I hide half-assed and get caught, it gets messy, so it’s better to set a trap and take him there.”
“Ah, got it.”
As expected of a failed idiot, he needed things spelled out simply before he could understand them.
The plan was simple enough for even Namgogoedam to follow.
I’d take a position first, avoiding the route the janitor usually used, and set a trap with Arachne.
While the janitor got caught in the web on his way to grab me, Namgogoedam, hidden nearby with Existence Erasure, would cut his throat.
Since the janitor was supposed to have strong detection abilities, the best option was for me to be the bait and for Namgogoedam to ambush him.
After hearing the plan, Namgogoedam swallowed hard and nodded.
“Don’t screw this up. Take his head off in one clean stroke.”
“Y-yeah, right.”
“Go at it with the mindset that you’re definitely killing him. For now, just practice swinging Black Moon at this desk. Got it? Put everything you’ve got into that one-hit-kill principle.”
“What the hell is a one-hit-kill principle?”
“One hit for you, one hit for me. If you miss, you die.”
“...Damn it.”
Looking miserable, Namgogoedam started practicing diagonal sword slashes against the desk.
While he was at it, I went out into the hallway and set the trap.
The corridor in front of the classroom door.
I linked together dozens of strands of black silk to make a spiderweb, positioning it so that if Namgogoedam was hiding in the classroom, he’d have a clean shot at the janitor’s neck.
“Stay sharp. Remember this: it ends in one strike.”
“Just trust me...!”
Honestly, he wasn’t exactly reassuring, but what could I do?
Namgogoedam’s Existence Erasure was the key to the ambush.
Then the bell rang, and the students started heading down the opposite stairway to leave school. The moment the last student disappeared down the stairs, the lights snapped off.
I gave Namgogoedam a single nod, then gripped my hammer tightly and waited for the janitor to appear, ready for anything.
“...My luck’s just rotten, isn’t it.”
A line of light skimmed past my back.
It was the beam of a flashlight.
Of all places, he’d come out from the far end of the hallway, the one they said he usually never approached.
That was why I hated School.
I’ve got no good memories here, for fuck’s sake.
But it was still fine.
I was immune to black silk, so I could lure the janitor to the other side and go after his head there.
“D-Daejang!”
“I told you to stay hidden, so why the hell are you making noise!”
“I-it’s not that, i-it’s next to you!”
“What?”
The classroom door right beside me.
In the room that should have been empty, the janitor was standing there.
Why was the janitor... another one?
“Daejang!”
The janitor seized both my arms at point-blank range.
The bastard’s eyes curved into a smile as his tongue shot out like a snake and drove toward my eyes.
“Gaaaah!”