Chapter 36: To the Hall Plain!
Chapter 36: To the Hall Plain!
The transfer was nothing special. I had experienced it hundreds of times, so it barely registered. After arriving at the Inn of Beginnings and stepping into the second-floor corridor, I heard a commotion downstairs. For now, we were supposed to wait for the veteran Users who would come to guide those newly entering the Hall Plain. Most newcomers stayed quiet under the tension until their guides arrived, so the uproar was unexpected.
Once all newly configured Users had finished transferring, the barrier surrounding the inn would dissolve. As soon as it did, veteran Users would enter through the doors and guide the newcomers. That was the procedure. During my first run, I had strongly disliked the Users assigned as guides.
Their attitudes were remarkably arrogant. To use a military comparison, many looked at the newcomers the way a private who had been in the army for a little while might look down on a newly arrived recruit. Of course, they too had survived an earlier Rite of Passage and had once been new Users themselves. I acknowledged that they had worked hard to stay alive afterward.
But listening to them—the guides—was a real spectacle. After adapting to the Hall Plain to some extent, they’d see the new Users and think, “I used to be like that,” which apparently made them feel all high and mighty. For the record, I remember the User who told me that died three months later.
In any case, as much as I disliked it, there was nothing to be done for now. Listening to their explanation and quietly enrolling in the User Academy was the best course of action at present.
While I was on the subject, the User Academy was a genuinely revolutionary system. I did not know who had proposed establishing it, but whoever they were must have been clever. Before the academy, newcomers had simply been thrown in with little planning. After its creation, senseless early deaths among new Users became far less common.
In any case, reuniting with the kids was one matter; deciding what to tell them was another. I considered that and several other problems as I walked down the second-floor corridor. Before I knew it, I had nearly reached the end and was about to open the door ahead.
“Fuck!”
I wanted to meet the kids and clear up the misunderstanding first, even if I had to lie, but the voices leaking through the crack from near the first-floor stairs made me stop with my hand just short of the door. I recognized them immediately—and they came one after another.
“Stop your damn barking, you son of a bitch!”
“Are you being a fucking bitch even when I’m telling you what happened? I saw it with my own two eyes!”
“Your eyes must be fucked! Who do you think you are, running your mouth like that!”
“Crazy bitch. Was I the only one who saw it? Was I? Borim saw it too! Huh? She said she saw the crossbow snapped in half!”
Hearing the name Borim gave me a good idea who the owners of those foulmouthed voices were: Park Donggeol, the resident troublemaker(?). I had not expected him to enter the Hall Plain alive. To be honest, I had almost completely lost interest in them after we separated; deep down, I did not care whether they lived or died. Still, I decided to look at the situation positively. I remembered how obnoxiously he had behaved at the beginning, so perhaps I would get the chance to deal with him personally when the time came.
I recognized the other high-pitched voice at once. Yoojung and Park Donggeol clashed whenever and wherever they met; the two seemed bound by a particularly nasty feud. Clicking my tongue, I quietly pushed the door open.
“Shu—!?”
The door creaked open, revealing a crowd of people. Yoojung had been about to shout “Shut up,” but the sound made her cut herself off and look up. I gave her an awkward smile.
As expected, I appeared to be the last User transferred. The moment I stepped out, an enormous number of gazes converged on me. A rough count showed more than forty survivors crowding the inn. In my first run, the number had barely exceeded twenty. Aside from this group’s generally high level, killing the boss monster on the sixth day had apparently made a significant difference. Under the original course of events, more than half the people here would have died on the final day.
I descended the stairs one step at a time and offered a casual greeting.
“So you’re all alive. Glad you’re all safe.”
Of course they were alive. I had practically wrapped them in cotton before sending them through the Warp Gate. Despite my perfectly ordinary greeting, no one responded. Just as the silence was becoming embarrassing, Yoojung staggered toward me.
“Oppa…?”
“Yeah.”
She raised both hands, placed them against my face, and cautiously felt my cheeks. Her eyes and lips trembled, showing how shocked and overwhelmed she was. And it was not only Yoojung. The sliver of hope they had clung to had become reality before their eyes. Ahn Hyun’s group—and Woo Jungmin, who seemed to have grasped what had happened—stared at my face in disbelief.
Yoojung continued in a voice choked with emotion.
“Oppa… is it really you, Soohyun-oppa? You’re not someone else, right?”
“What, do I look like a doppelgänger? Ow, that hurts. Don’t pull so hard. I said it hurts.”
“Congratulations on making it back alive. I never imagined you’d have survived… That’s incredible.”
I finally managed to remove Yoojung’s hands from my cheeks when a husky voice sounded beside me. I turned and saw, as expected, Woo Jungmin and the rest of his surviving group. He seemed to want to say more, but I gave a slight shake of my head. He understood and closed his mouth again. Behind him, I briefly met Won Hyesoo’s startled gaze; she answered by sharply turning her head away.
Ahn Hyun stared at me with a joyous expression, Yoojung with a mixture of joy and sorrow, and Ahn Sol through gathering tears. For a while, Ahn Hyun’s group and I simply looked at one another. Their lips kept moving as though they wanted to say something, but the words would not come.
It didn’t matter much if they couldn’t speak. For now, I just wanted to escape all this attention. It was already burdensome enough, but if Sol were to burst into tears in a place this crowded, it would be seriously embarrassing.
Soothing Sol, who looked like she was about to start bawling, I deliberately moved toward a corner. In the process, a thoroughly ignored Park Donggeol watched us sit at a table, then huffed and took Lee Borim to the opposite side of the room.
After a little time had passed and the number of stares had dwindled, the kids seemed to have composed themselves. The only thing that bothered me was Ahn Sol; she had plopped down right next to me and had been clutching my sleeve ever since.
I sent Ahn Hyun a look asking for help, but he just gave an awkward smile and opened his mouth.
“Hyung. I still can’t believe it. It’s like I’m looking at an immortal.”
“Haha. Immortal is a bit of an exaggeration. I was just lucky, that’s all.”
Ahn Hyun shook his head. No, more importantly, do something about her. She isn’t a toddler, so why has she been clutching my sleeve this whole time? Whether or not she understood what I was thinking, Ahn Sol answered in a trembling voice.
“No. It’s like I’m witnessing a miracle right now. While I was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, I kept thinking ‘what if’… but every time, Oppa was…”
As she spoke, her grip on my clothes tightened. Seeing Ahn Sol unable to finish her sentence and on the verge of tears again, I felt a sense of helplessness. But the fact that I had to start lying now made me give a bitter smile inwardly.
“Anyway, I’m glad we all made it out alive to see each other again.”
“If you were alive, you should have come sooner! Always making people worr—No. I’m sorry, Oppa. It’s not like you wanted it to happen…”
I tilted my head as Yoojung moved from scolding to apologizing and then to tears. I had not realized the kids cared about me this much, and part of me felt proud. Yoojung clenched a fist, wiped the remaining tear tracks from around her eyes, and continued.
“Oppa. Tell us what happened. According to that bastard earlier, the crossbow you were using was found near the Warp Gate, snapped clean in half. You were gone. And that monster was gone too.”
Ahem. So, it’s finally come to this. I felt a sense of relief that I had burned the boss monster’s corpse in preparation for this moment. However, failing to dispose of the crossbow properly was my mistake. I wanted to just gloss over it, but I felt a cold gaze on me. The owner of that gaze was Kim Hanbyul. I had a premonition that if I just gave a vague answer, it would cause problems with her later.
Kim Hanbyul hadn’t said a single word since I arrived at the inn. Except for when she first saw me, her expression had barely changed. I turned my head and met her eyes for a moment. The instant I read the emotion in them, I felt a little… conflicted.
The overall emotion was relief, but I could also make out faint traces of distrust and suspicion. Kim Hanbyul was no ordinary girl. In some respects, her personality seemed remarkably similar to mine. She did not let the circumstances or emotions surrounding her sweep her away; she always left room for reason. I might never understand her true nature completely, but one thing was certain: a seed of doubt about me had begun to sprout within her.
The inn was no longer as rowdy as it was at the beginning, but it wasn’t silent either. The murmuring voices of the surviving groups could be heard simultaneously. I sighed inwardly. It felt like I’d been sighing a lot lately. In the end, I decided it was better to claim I couldn’t remember than to concoct a clumsy lie.
“Yeah. That’s right. I tried to dodge the monster’s attack… but maybe it was aiming for the crossbow from the start. It snapped right in half. It was pretty grim then. Haha.”
“Is your left arm okay?”
Kim Hanbyul spoke up immediately after I finished. On the surface, it sounded like concern, but to my ears, it sounded like, “Weren’t you wearing the crossbow on your left arm?” I pursed my lips and answered right away.
“It attacked with its tail. I raised my left arm without thinking, and I guess it just grazed the crossbow as it went by.”
“…Then what did you do after that?”
“Well. I honestly don’t know. I guess you could say I don’t remember. At that moment, I really thought I was dead, so my mind went completely blank. I think it was stomping around wildly, and I was rolling on the ground like a madman…”
In a quiet voice, I began my explanation, drastically modifying my actual experience and beating around the bush. The conclusion was that I had used the cover of the thick dust to run for my life and roll down toward the low-lying area of the forest. Everyone nodded in understanding. Everyone, of course, except Kim Hanbyul. Anyone who had faced the boss monster head-on for more than three minutes would immediately know that my story was full of lies and holes.
Kim Hanbyul seemed to be lost in thought and didn’t ask any more questions. It was partly because she hadn’t been there, and also because the prevailing mood was one of celebrating my survival, so she seemed to be holding her tongue. However, the suspicion in her eyes hadn’t faded. I decided to say no more. After all, the purpose of beating around the bush was to buy time.
By then, the barrier outside the window had grown considerably fainter.