Chapter 222
Chapter 222
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: penny
Chapter: 222
Chapter Title: The Self-Exploding Woman
-----------------------------------------------------------------
1
Long ago, Old Man Show used to grumble often.
"Hey, you pickled one. Isn't there even a single teleporter in this world? What the hell do we have on the Earth server?"
"Hmm... Tutorial Fairies?"
"Pfft! We don't need trash like that!"
Before heading out on vacation, Old Man Show had desperately tried to find a teleporter somehow.
It had all been for naught, of course.
Even after Old Man Show typed 'This shit game's done, gg' into the chat and logged off, I still hadn't given up.
'There has to be some new ability user hiding out there somewhere. I just don't know about them yet.'
Unlike that know-it-all fake-elderly no-show geezer who pretended to know everything, I, the Undertaker, was a true MZ youth of this era who never lost my humility.
And so I roamed around, hitting Busan, then Seoul, then Beijing, then Tokyo, and occasionally even Istanbul and Berlin.
"To think I'd get to share a drink with the famed Undertaker. The world really is full of wonders worth sticking around for."
Thus, very occasionally, I'd end up drinking with the Grand Shrine Maiden, the big boss of the Magical Girl Council.
"You don't exactly look like someone who's lived long enough to joke about it."
"Appearances can be deceiving. The spirit I've taken into my body is modeled after a kumiho pendant. It's got this backstory of living since 2000 BCE, which affects my mental age and all."
"Oh."
"For some reason, looking at you feels like looking at a peer, which is oddly disconcerting."
The Grand Shrine Maiden narrowed her eyes at me from behind her fan.
"That's why when I'm alone with you, my old speech patterns keep slipping out. It's a real hassle."
"Well, for someone who's lived so long, you don't speak a single foreign language, English included..."
"Quiet. What can you do when my original self is pure Japanese stock? You're just too fluent in foreign languages. Someone like me is perfectly average."
"Thank you."
Clink.
We toasted. The Grand Shrine Maiden swirled her whiskey glass, spreading the scent of alcohol into the air.
Mix alcohol with air, and you get atmosphere. Breathing in the vibe instead of oxygen, I spoke.
"That's the principle behind becoming a magical girl, right? Finding a spirit among the eight million that's friendly to humans, then contracting it under your supervision as the Grand Shrine Maiden."
"Oh ho. You know your stuff."
The Grand Shrine Maiden tapped her chin with her folded fan and smiled.
She was probably drunk.
"Of course, it doesn't have to be friendly to humans. Even a vicious yokai works. As long as it's friendly to one shrine maiden, that's fine."
"Ah."
"It doesn't even have to be a spirit from the Japanese islands. Other spirits are okay too. The rules aren't that strict..."
The Grand Shrine Maiden gave a sly smile.
"Why, Undertaker? Finally interested in becoming a magical girl? If so, I promise to turn you into Earth's strongest one."
"I'll pass. More importantly, I'm curious how you ended up meeting your kumiho. Was it a spirit you served from the start?"
"Ah, that was in the Tutorial Dungeon—"
Our idle chatter flowed on.
The fastest way for Awakeners to bond was, without a doubt, swapping Tutorial Dungeon stories.
It was like trading army tales or college stories—perfect for building that inner rapport.
"There was this kid named Seo-gyu in our Tutorial Dungeon."
Then this came up.
"I call him SG Guy. The Tutorial Fairy tried to make an example of him and kill him."
"Oh ho."
"Turns out there's guidelines shared among the Fairies. Handed down from their seniors, apparently. It lists ways to enforce human discipline. Stuff like 'blowing one person's head off as an example is most effective'—that kind of know-how."
"......"
The Grand Shrine Maiden let out a soft "hmm" and twitched her fox ears.
It wasn't directed at me. Not at this place. More like absentmindedly glancing around while reminiscing about the past.
"What's wrong?"
"Oh, nothing. Your words just reminded me of an incident."
"An incident?"
"Hmm. It's too trivial to tell others. Just something I found strange..."
The Grand Shrine Maiden hesitated to part her lips.
But it was a casual drinking session anyway. When I kept pressing, she folded her fan with a 'what's the harm' vibe.
"It's really nothing. Like you and the other magical girls, I too fell into a Tutorial Dungeon. Naturally, there was a Fairy. But..."
"But?"
"I blew it up."
Blew it up?
I tilted my head.
"You mean a person's head exploded?"
"Indeed."
"That's not so surprising. The Fairies do that in other Tutorial Dungeons too..."
"No, Undertaker. It wasn't the Fairy. A person's head definitely exploded, but the Fairy showed no sign of involvement."
?
"Then who blew up the head?"
"No one."
???
"It could only be seen as self-detonation."
"Pardon?"
"Among the people summoned to the Tutorial Dungeon with me, one person—without anyone touching them, not even the Fairy—had their head explode on its own."
2
Here's what the Grand Shrine Maiden described.
Around a hundred people were forcibly summoned to a Tutorial Dungeon.
They were confused.
-W-Where is this?
-I was definitely on the train...
-Ho-e! Hello, everyone! I'm Fairy No. 1675, assigned to guide you. Nice to—
The summoning of people. The Fairy's appearance.
Up to here, it wasn't much different from my experience in the Busan Station Dungeon.
The anomaly happened right after the summoning.
-Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!
A horrific scream.
People turned in shock. There, a woman clutched her head, writhing and shrieking.
-Aaaaaaack! Aaaah! Aaaaaaaaack!
Everyone froze.
How many screams does a modern person hear in their life? But this unidentified woman's scream was unmistakably abnormal just from hearing it.
The Grand Shrine Maiden testified.
"It wasn't a normal voice."
The woman's voice carried the agony of flesh being torn off.
The pain of raw flesh being seared by flames.
The torment of a thousand razor blades slowly slicing into bare skin until they reached nerves and bone.
The pitch and timbre of a scream she'd never heard before—and unlikely to hear again—left everyone momentarily paralyzed.
"It was that horrific a scream. The kind that makes your body shudder just from listening."
It was so intense that even the Fairy overseeing the Tutorial was startled.
The Fairy panicked, forgetting its role of guiding the people.
-H-Ho-e? What's going on? What's happening? Why the sudden screaming?
-Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!
Even the Fairy's fussing was buried under the scream.
But the anomaly didn't end there. Faint rays of light leaked from between the woman's fingers clutching her skull.
Discoloration.
Her originally black hair was turning white from the tips onward.
At an alarming speed.
"...A classic Awakening phenomenon."
"Ah, yes. We call it divine possession. We didn't know then, but looking back now, the mysterious woman had awakened to a power."
Awakening right upon falling into the Tutorial Dungeon—an incredibly fast pace compared to others.
Thus, it should have been the birth of a historic Awakener.
But.
-Aaaaaaah! No, I don't want this! No! No! Aaah! Aaaaah! Stop, please, I don't want this nonono no no no!
For some reason, the woman just kept rapidly chanting "no" and "ja-a-ung-sa" amid her shrieks.
"'Ja-a-ung-sa'? What does that mean?"
"I don't know. Maybe the pronunciation got mangled in the scream. But she repeated it so agonizingly that it burned into my memory."
She looked truly in pain, the Grand Shrine Maiden added.
"And it wasn't just the scream. She gripped her head so hard her nails dug into her scalp, blood streaming down."
"......"
"If I'd consumed some apocalypse media by then, maybe. But at the time, it was the first sight of its kind for me."
About 30 seconds passed like that.
As humans panicked and the Fairy floundered, the woman's discoloration had fully progressed. The white that started at her hair tips had reached her scalp, blooming into radiant silver.
And when the Awakener's proof—the discoloration—was complete.
Boom!
An explosion rang out.
At first, it was hard to grasp what happened. But soon, something fell from the air and splatted onto the Grand Shrine Maiden's cheek.
"It was the woman's flesh. Probably her tongue."
"......"
"Get it? Undertaker. Right after being summoned to the Tutorial Dungeon, she screamed gibberish for about 30 seconds, Awakened, and then her head immediately exploded."
"That's..."
Truly bizarre.
Just as the Grand Shrine Maiden had foretold.
"You're sure the Fairy didn't do it?"
"Certain. Even before accepting Tamamo no Mae, I was confident in reading expressions. The Fairy was utterly flustered right after she died."
"......"
"Well, maybe the Fairy's acting was skilled enough to fool me. But I've already killed that Fairy, so no way to check now."
Since it wasn't exactly a cheerful tale, our topic soon shifted elsewhere.
The Grand Shrine Maiden was decent company as long as you ignored her taste in mysterious magical girls, so the drinking went on all night.
But even after dawn's light crept through the window, the story of her 'mysterious exploder' lingered in a corner of my heart like the moon's shadow.
3
Why was a mere drunken anecdote sticking with me like this?
An inexplicable unease made my heart race. Rare for a Regressor like me.
Finally, I couldn't take it and summoned Fairy No. 264. I relayed the Grand Shrine Maiden's story.
Anything you know?
"Ho-e. That's not No. 1675, but No. 1679's case."
True to her dream demon nature with our minds crudely linked, No. 264 consulted immediately.
"But No. 1679 failed the Tutorial and died on-site, so the data's incomplete!"
"Anything approximate is fine. Can you replay the dying words of that mysterious woman?"
"Ho-e. With the power of Avici, maybe a bit?"
"Granted."
"Wait a moment!
Static, zzt. Static. Zzzt—
"
Fairy No. 264 closed her eyes and mimicked radio static from her mouth.
Then, the next moment.
-A a a a a a a ack!
A distorted voice played from No. 264's mouth. Completely unlike the usual Fairy voices.
The tone of someone we'd conveniently dubbed the 'mysterious woman.'
-A a a a a no a a!
"......"
I silently listened to the last words, reproduced with as much on-site realism as No. 264 could muster.
Truth be told, even as I listened, I wondered inwardly. Why was I obsessing over a bar story? Was it worth pulling resources from the dream demon and Avici?
But around the 10-second mark.
"...Hold on."
I realized.
The source of my unease.
"Ho-e?"
"Replay that section."
"Got it."
The Fairy blinked her eyes.
Soon, a voice oddly mixed with machine noise leaked from the Fairy's mouth again.
-A a a no ja a uh ui sa no no a hurts a hurts a hurts please stop ja a uh ui sa!
"There. Just the last part, again."
-Ja a uh ui sa!
"......"
As expected.
In the silence after No. 264's playback ended, I swallowed a groan alone.
The Grand Shrine Maiden lacked Perfect Memory. She wasn't versed in foreign languages either. English or Korean, her conversational skills clung to isolationism.
So, she could only mishear it.
The mysterious pronunciation buried in the woman's intermittent screams.
It wasn't "ja-a-ung-sa."
"Ja-a-eu-ui-sa."
Pronounced quickly.
"Ja-eu-ui-sa."
Undertaker.
Yes.
For some reason, right after the Void arrived, in a Tutorial Dungeon on Japan's islands—far from my summoning in Busan Station—a complete stranger to me.
Had shouted "Undertaker" and self-detonated.