The Rats in the Walls
"Hey, what's with that guy?"
A man pinching out a cigarette in the alleyway scrunched up his face and spoke.
"Isn't that Kim Hyunseong?"
He was a cadet lingering at the bottom of Class 1-D at the Academy.
"Ah~ the class dunce? Yeah, that's the guy. Couldn't even land a Constellation contract, but he still came strutting around like he owned the place, so I put him flat on his back."
The cadet standing beside him leaned against the wall, recalling the unpleasant memory.
"The idiot had the nerve to run his mouth at me too, on top of everything else."
From the first semester into the beginning of the second, one nickname had never stopped trailing after Kim Hyunseong.
The Incarnation of Defeat.
So hopelessly weak that he lost to anyone he fought — that was what the name meant.
Put another way, anyone who'd sparred against Kim Hyunseong was confessing, loudly and clearly, that they considered their opponent easy pickings.
A winner is supposed to knock down an opponent openly and bask in the superiority of victory.
But fight Kim Hyunseong, and none of that mattered. The shame of having underestimated him stained everything, leaving not a speck of glory behind, and you found yourself in a strange situation where even winning felt filthy.
That was why the upper- and mid-ranked cadets thought nothing of Kim Hyunseong, while the lower-ranked ones despised him with a passion.
"Hoo..."
The man who'd spotted Kim Hyunseong first was a washed-out failure who had once been in Class F.
He'd clawed his way up to D-rank through sheer effort, only to hit the ceiling of his own talent — unable to advance any faster than the people around him.
In other words, he had arrived at the exact situation Kim Hyunseong was living in.
Growth: impossible.
So because he'd become what Kim Hyunseong was, he hated him with a special intensity, far more than the other cadets did.
"Holy shit — wait, who're the girls next to him?"
"Huh? Damn it."
The man, who had been scowling something fierce, turned his wide eyes toward the two women walking at Kim Hyunseong's side.
Looks that dwarfed even the celebrities on TV.
And those beauties were clinging right to his arms, faces lit up with obvious delight.
"Fuck, what the hell?"
His friend, smoking beside him, was so stunned that all he could do was curse.
But the first man's mind had gone white with rage.
' Fucking hell — I'm out here eating dirt and smoking butts with a bunch of dudes, and that pathetic loser gets to play with girls?'
The first inferiority complex he had ever felt toward the object of his hatred.
It was the final push that sent him — already teetering from alcohol — clean over the line.
[Gnawing Spirit]
He was a shaman who wielded curse-class abilities.
Fueled by fury, he sent a torrent of mana flying in a single motion and latched it onto Kim Hyunseong.
Needless to say, it was a criminal act.
"Hey — hey, fuck... don't tell me you...!"
His friend stared in horror.
"Shut up."
"...Fuck it, I'm not part of this."
Declaring that he wanted no part of the fallout, the friend stubbed out his cigarette and walked away.
'Let's see you chew on that one.'
Kikik.
He snickered.
Never noticing the chaos seeping into his own shadow.
Having finished the meal and returned to the real world, I was smiling with pure mental satisfaction.
Twenty whole stat points, all at once!
On raw stat power alone, that put me at the top of F-rank.
The comparison pool being F-rank made it a modest achievement, sure, but when you remembered it was the product of a single meal, it was a huge deal.
"...How tiresome. The wretched vermin are hurling ants at you."
At that moment, Nyarlathotep — who had been walking along with a firm grip on my right hand — muttered with a displeased look.
Squirm, squirm.
I turned to her in puzzlement and saw some strange white lump thrashing about in her hand.
Crunch.
And a moment later, it crumbled to powder and vanished.
"What's going on? What was that just now?"
"Pay it no mind, dear one. A pitiful creature, blinded by envy, merely fouled itself."
Nyarlathotep extended a finger toward somewhere in the distance and smiled sweetly.
"And I have dealt with it. So think nothing of it."
"...When you say 'dealt with,' I get a little worried."
The two of them might look harmless enough, but they were gods, whatever anyone said.
Cthugha had very nearly blown up an entire city full of her own worshippers, and Nyarlathotep had smoothly sweet-talked her into a contract with me right after.
So when a woman like that said she'd 'dealt with' something, it made me nervous.
"Put it from your mind and let us home, hm? I am rather tired today."
"Gods feel fatigue?"
"It is merely a figure of speech. Now, inside."
Nyarlathotep, knowing full well how shocked he would be to learn what she had done, concealed her handiwork and shoved Kim Hyunseong through the door.
"...Hey. Don't tell me—"
It was then that Cthugha crept up beside her and asked quietly,
"You keep that up, won't the 'System' catch you?"
"Worry not. I merely planted a few 'rats.'"
The System.
It was a kind of helper granted to awakened humanity — and at the same time, an unfathomable mystery that even Nyarlathotep could not comprehend.
What was more, it possessed power beyond all imagination, having displayed its overwhelming authority by placing restrictions on every Outer God and Great Old One alike.
Even Yog-Sothoth, the highest of the Outer Gods, could not slip free of the System's constraints.
'Because of those restrictions, they cannot involve themselves too deeply with humanity.'
In truth, Earth had come within a hair of destruction at the hands of numerous cosmic beings.
It was only the existence of the System — which forcibly shackled such entities — that had kept it safe to this day.
This was why Cthugha hadn't destroyed the city personally and had made her worshippers do it instead.
And what if one pierced the System's restrictions and meddled deeply with Earth?
'Erasure.'
More than a few Great Old Ones had been erased exactly that way.
Nyarlathotep had reached a perfectly rational conclusion about the System:
Simply give up on understanding it.
Accept it as a natural phenomenon that even gods could not defy, and move on.
That was all.
"Hoo..."
The man who had returned home let out a sigh as he changed his clothes.
Kikik.
Just picturing Kim Hyunseong suffering under the curse he'd planted made a smile spread across his face on its own.
Scritch, scrabble.
To explain the curse: it was one that brought catastrophically bad luck.
Scritch, scritch, scrabble, scrabble.
A curse that filled a life to the brim with misfortune until it turned bleak and hopeless.
Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scrabble, scrabble, scrabble, scrabble.
Given its nature, it was not a curse you could cast on just anyone — but since Kim Hyunseong stood below him in rank, he had managed to land it.
Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scrabble, scrabble, scrabble, scrabble, scrabble, scrabble, scrabble, scrabble.
"...I'm hungry."
A sudden wave of hunger came over him, and he walked toward the kitchen.
When he opened the refrigerator, a seething, appetizing swarm of rats came pouring out.
Sssssssssssscritch, scrabbbbbbbbbbble.
He scooped up a double handful of the swarm and shoved the rats into his mouth.
Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!
The rats thrashing in his mouth soon met their end under crushing jaw strength.
"Mmm~ mmm~."
Gray fur wedging thick between every tooth, meat with the texture of chewed rubber, innards flooding his tongue with the reek of feces and stale urine, bones puncturing every corner of his mouth, skulls cracking apart between his molars, and finally a brain with a taste that no word could describe.
"Delicious."
Blood smeared thick around his mouth, he grinned and pulled out the next rat.
Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!
And the swarm, deeply moved by his ravenous hunger, tore straight through the wallpaper and threw itself at him.
Tens of thousands of rats filled the cramped little house from wall to wall, and swarmed him.
They devoured his flesh, then gnawed away at the bone that lay exposed beneath.
The blood that spilled out was licked up, drop by drop, until not a single bead wet the floor.
The rats kept on gnawing and burrowing into him without pause.
His body, wearing down second by second, would have made any onlooker scream in horror.
"Hahahahaha!!"
But he didn't seem to care — only laughing, and laughing.
And so, his entire body eaten through, he met his death.
The next day, the police officers, unable to even look directly at the gruesome corpse, began talking among themselves.
"He died full of holes. Someone must have jabbed into him all over with something sharp, like an awl."
Then, seeing the enormous hole in the skull, they continued.
"Last thing they did was punch straight through his head. Been a long time since I've seen a freak show like this."
"...Um, sir?"
A forensic investigator examining the body alongside them spoke up while looking at the abdomen.
"There are signs the entire body was gnawed on, extensively."
"...That's strange. There are only puncture marks from an awl — no cuts, no incisions. And yet the organs were eaten out? How?"
"I... I really don't know, sir."
A body devoured from head to toe, riddled with countless holes.
Going by that alone, he would have been a poor victim whose stomach had been torn open by some sadistic murderer.
But there were only puncture wounds scattered here and there — not one trace of carving for the purpose of consumption.
And from that point on, this was no longer the domain of ordinary people...
'The domain of the awakened.'
"Give me the victim's details."
"Yes, sir. Name, Lee Seonyoung. Age twenty. Enrolled in Class 1-D at the Academy."
Every awakened person awakened at twenty.
So a twenty-year-old first-year at the Academy meant... he'd awakened and enrolled right away?
'Did he do anything in that one year worth earning a grudge like this?'
"There are also reports that his conduct was poor."
"Not poor enough to end up like this, it wasn't."
He clicked his tongue.
"Start by investigating everyone he met yesterday, from the last hours backward. The only thing that can kill an awakened person is another awakened person. So focus on the awakened."
"Y-yes, sir."
The first case in his career as a detective that made no sense at all.
And for the first time in his life, he felt a fear he couldn't name.
A horrific scene: a body full of holes, eaten away from head to toe.
He was certain this case would leave a lasting mark on his entire career.