A Plan?
The club members who had come down the stairs seemed to sense something off in the air. They chatted among themselves as they descended, then quietly gathered on the living room sofa, and I walked over to join them without a word.
Once everyone had assembled, the member who had volunteered to handle the translations stood up, pulled a notebook from his pocket, and began reading from it as he explained.
"I skimmed through the letters first, but they were all in English cursive, so I couldn't read them! I mostly just skipped over those. Next is what I managed to interpret from the papers—"
Over the better part of several dozen minutes, the story he pieced together went something like this: sometime in the past, a single person had founded a cult.
Strangely enough, most people harbored a deep aversion to the cult—and yet, whenever its missionaries simply passed through a place, a bizarre phenomenon would follow. Within less than a month, the locals would begin to believe.
The religion had been spreading slowly at first. Then the surrounding villages rose up in open resistance, and after one major clash, the number of converts exploded overnight. And then, one day, every single person who had come to believe in the cult vanished in a single instant.
Even more uncanny was what came after. People forgot that the cult had ever existed, as if someone had wiped their memories clean in short order, and they began to believe that those who had converted had simply gone missing or disappeared of their own accord.
In truth, the vanished had all gathered in a single village, where many incidents of ■■ing ■■ to ■■ and performing ■■ took place. At the same time, passersby near the area began vanishing in droves, until the authorities finally decided to seal the village off. And on the day of the closure—
"—the last part was almost completely charred and damaged, so I couldn't make much out! From what I could piece together with the remaining scraps and the sentences I could still read, it seems they performed some kind of grand ritual? When people arrived at the village afterward, they found it completely empty—not a single soul. After that, more... unsavory incidents kept happening, so they demolished the abandoned village, and now it's just an empty lot."
A sudden rattle came from the back door.
Had we been too absorbed in the story?
I leaned over fast and twisted my head toward the rear entrance. Beyond the opaque stained glass set into the back door, two—maybe three—silhouettes were already prowling back and forth.
I checked the windows in a flash. Toward the kitchen, more silhouettes were closing in from beyond the glass.
Fortunately, the living room windows showed nothing.
Running the situation through my head, the intent was clear enough—they were trying to herd us somewhere.
The rattling of the doorknob grew shorter and more frantic with every second.
In the tightening urgency, my thoughts raced.
By my reckoning, the signal should have come and gone by now—and yet everything was still silent.
Something had gone wrong, or the situation was taking longer than expected.
Which meant I needed to buy more time.
Even if the plan fell apart completely...
I swallowed the rest of that thought and stood up.
The female members were already flinching and twitching at the shoulders.
The club president had already leaned toward the living room windows.
I sprinted for the front door and flung it wide open.
"This way! Hurry!"
At the shout that tore out of me, the members who had been trembling at the shoulders came stampeding over on pure reflex.
When you can't see anything and can't find a way out, running toward a voice without knowing who spoke or why is almost instinct. You want out of the situation so badly that survival overrides thought.
Among the members rushing toward me, the president remained leaned toward the window, staring at me with a lifeless, blank expression, frozen in place and unsure what to do.
It was a face the others couldn't see—one meant only for me.
I looked back at him with the same blank expression.
That rigid face, staring as if it couldn't begin to understand what I was doing, filled my vision.
I turned my head and faced forward.
From this point on, whether the president followed or not no longer mattered.
Buying time was already in its final stretch, and things were about to get desperate—there was no room left for games of strategy.
I shouted to the members pouring out through the front door.
"Don't look up under any circumstances! Don't try to look at anything! Don't even try to think—just follow me!"
One member, hearing the words, reflexively started to glance upward. I was about to stop them when the vice president, standing right beside them with a nauseated expression, held them back.
...Unexpected.
That someone could still keep up this well.
In that instant, I saw the dark crimson marks running from the back of the vice president's hand—the same hand that had seized the member by the nape to stop them—continuing all the way up the inner arm. The marks were a clear sign of what state that arm must be in.
Dense, dotted bruises covered the back of the vice president's hand like a second layer of skin.
Rough as it was, even after forcing the member's head toward the floor, the vice president kept squinting hard, staying wary of anything that might enter their field of vision—while with the free hand, they began pinching the back of their own hand and arm in turn.
With someone like that around, we might buy a few more seconds.
And with mental fortitude like that, even if things went sideways, at least one person might—
I shook my head hard, scattering the stray thoughts, shoved a hand into my coat, and roughly yanked something free before hurling it without hesitation toward the members.
The motion was so sudden that no one had time to react as it cut between their heads.
In the next instant, a half-shattered candlestick buried itself almost to the handle in the skull of the killer who had been standing by the kitchen window.
Flesh burst outward from the impact, spraying from the back of the head as the killer's skull snapped backward and toppled.
Even the member who had been about to look at the sky felt their head forcibly locked in place.
Watching the members scramble and thrash for their lives, I gave a single nod and bellowed.
"Stick close and follow me! We run from here!"
The second we had burst through the front door, the aggro was already fully drawn.
There was no need to keep our voices down.
From now on, it was time to run.
"Hhk... hhk..."
"Hah. Hah.. hah."
.
.
Each of us was gasping and heaving past the point where our breathing could get any rougher, pushing the cycle of exhaling and inhaling to its absolute limit.
It had been about ten minutes since we had kicked open the front door.
We had run ourselves half to death.
The killers weren't particularly fast—but the sheer numbers were the problem.
The murderers pouring in from the distance kept multiplying and multiplying until it felt like a grotesque mass of living flesh was surging toward us.
I could feel my senses expanding further and further into something increasingly bizarre.
Using that uncanny perception, I tracked the dangerous entities far ahead, calculating our route as carefully as possible—and for the ones we inevitably ran into—
—kkrrk
In a single motion, the kitchen knife and the hand gripping its handle both drove into a killer's side.
The instant it sank in, I wrenched my hand upward with brutal force.
—!
My arm moved so fast it was nearly invisible from the flank all the way to the shoulder, and in the same stroke the killer's arm tore free from its body and went spinning through the air.
The severed cross-section was jagged and uneven, less like a clean cut and more like something roughly ripped apart.
"Gweehk— gwehk—"
That was the third round of dry heaving I had heard.
Even while running at full sprint, with lungs that felt like they were dissolving in hydrochloric acid and burning without end.
Even while dry heaving threw their breathing into chaos.
The vice president's tenacious figure, still keeping pace, filled my vision.
Fortunately, as the pain kept climbing in intensity, the madness didn't seem to be erupting—it was stacking up, layer by layer, instead.
What would happen to all that suppressed madness the moment we stopped to rest or the pain eased even slightly was still an unknown.
Having cut down another killer in an instant, I gave the hand holding the kitchen knife a light shake, gauging its condition.
It had been a worn kitchen knife from the moment I first picked it up, and the edge had never been sharp. By now the handle was nearly split, spiderweb cracks etched across its surface, and the blade was chipped and blunted in places all along its length.
My strangely heightened senses snagged on an ominous flapping sound high in the distant sky.
At the same time, a pair of twin beams of light came racing toward us from far off.
Straight into the path of our unbroken sprint.
...An old car came barreling in, then lurched and skidded to a stop.
Yeom Sang-hyeon was in the driver's seat.
Oh, this absolute maniac.
One look was enough—Sang-hyeon's condition was a wreck beyond any words that could describe it.
Two fingers were missing from the left hand gripping the wheel. Dark bruises ringed his eyes. Dozens of small, deep, short cuts clustered around his ear. His hair reeked as if it had been dunked in oil.
On top of that, he was clutching his side with one hand—clearly wounded somehow.
And yet he was alive.
This insane bastard had even dragged a car all the way out here.
Looking like he was about to drop dead any second, and still grinning that crooked grin—I was left speechless.
"What are you doing! Get in, hurry!"
I threw open the rear door and the passenger-side door as well.
One of the running members collapsed into the back seat.
Then the vice president, pupils nearly blown, came half-carrying the two members who had been lagging behind even as they looked ready to die—
Just a few steps from the car.
Right in front of our noses.
A black shadow bloomed rapidly across the ground directly above the vice president's head.
What had looked like a speck swelled until it was nearly the size of the car itself, and the two members the vice president had been supporting vanished before our eyes with a grotesque flapping sound.
The vice president reflexively tightened their grip on the hands they had been holding—but all that remained was dry, empty air.
Without thinking, the vice president started to tilt their head back, dazed, following the receding flap of wings—and in that same instant I was already there, slamming the top I had been issued from the escape room down over their face.
I hoisted the vice president onto my back in one motion, ran back, and threw them into the rear seat. I slammed the door, then climbed into the front myself.
Before anyone could get a word out, the accelerator slammed down hard. The tires screeched against the ground as the car lurched forward in a wild, unstable surge.
"Hyung! Can we do it now?!"
"Yeah! You crazy bastard!"
In the middle of the chaos, Sang-hyeon was shouting over the roar of the car and the noise outside, and I found myself shouting right back.
As the car staggered and swerved, I yelled,
"Where the hell did you learn to drive?!"
"Ah! That...! What was it?!... My uncle...!"
"Don't even start with the lies!"
"Okay, fine—I've never learned! But I played some racing games at the arcade!"
For a second, looking at Sang-hyeon's grinning face as he said it, I thought I caught a flicker of madness.
Still facing forward, I shouted,
"Damn it."
With that single curse I twisted around to check the back.
Everyone looked half out of it by now, but at least they had their seatbelts on.
As the car accelerated without end, a house ballooned into view through the windshield in an instant—and Sang-hyeon laughed as he wrenched the wheel hard.
In the end the car couldn't handle the spinning wheels and went into a full spin.
As the scenery whipped past in a blur, a fence suddenly loomed up through the window.
CRASH!
The fence shattered to pieces, and the car came to a stop.
I turned my stiff neck to the side and found Sang-hyeon still grinning.
"There wasn't any parking in the games, you know."
"You lunatic. Can you still run?"
"Well, gotta do what I gotta do."
Sang-hyeon opened the car door and climbed out.
The members in the back tumbled out of the car like they were rolling off a ledge.
The vice president was practically crawling on the ground, retching.
"Bleeeeegh— this Yeom Sang... blech... this crazy son of a bitch..."
I watched the scene for a moment, then gestured to Sang-hyeon.
"What do you want to do."
At the question, Sang-hyeon glanced around for a second before answering.
"...We have to get out."
He yanked open the glove box with a clunk, pulled out a strange-looking letter opener from inside, and held it out to me.
I took the knife and started to bring it toward my own hand—then stopped short.
"Hyung...?"
Sang-hyeon called out to me, looking puzzled at the sudden halt.
I thought it through in a flash.
Then I swung the knife at Yeom Sang-hyeon.