The ■■■ ■■ Class (1)
And so the nightmare that had been club activity day finally passed, and time moved on.
One day. Two days. Three—the days slipped by without incident, smooth and uneventful.
I had been living with my nerves wound tight, but as nothing continued to happen, I began, little by little, to feel relieved.
I still startled every time I caught my own shoulder in the mirror, but as the long stretch of days went on with no letter arriving, no grotesque revelation echoing in my ears, I even started to entertain the lazy thought that maybe the whole thing had been a dream.
I mean—it never even told me what I was supposed to do, and I couldn't remember anyway. What the hell was I supposed to act on?
The memory of meeting that indescribable, ominous presence had been edited almost entirely out of me, left only as a faint blur. The sole fact that still flickered through the fog of forgetting was that he and I had made a contract.
Looking back on it now, calmly, it really had been a completely reckless thing to do.
What kind of person signs a contract without even knowing what it is?
Of course, at the time I'd been operating under an abnormal state of mind, so maybe I'd understood and gone through with it then—but if I'd been that clever, wouldn't I have at least accounted for the possibility that I wouldn't remember any of it once I came back as a human?
Putting off today's homework for tomorrow-me was one thing. I never imagined I could be this stupid. Tomorrow-me didn't even know what the homework was.
Fortunately, just as I'd said, time kept flowing and no omen appeared, so I gradually let myself relax.
Looking back now, I can see how complacent I'd been—enough to make me feel like an idiot. Ominous things always wait until a person has let their guard down, then come bursting in without warning.
And so, believing it had vanished completely from my life, forgetting the nightmare, I arrived at the day one week after the escape room.
A school day.
Same as always, I bolted down a quick breakfast, slung my bag over one shoulder, and ran out the door. Checking the watch on my wrist, I figured that if I just kept up a decent jog, I'd make it without being late.
Under a blue sky, I started running toward school.
Along the way, I took the right turn on my usual route—and only a few steps ahead, Yeom Sang-hyeon came barreling out of his apartment building in a frantic rush. Looking like he'd had roughly the same kind of morning I had, he vaulted the front steps in a single bound and broke into a run.
Yeom Sang-hyeon, who normally played the model student as if he'd been drawn that way on purpose—why was he running this late?
I shouted after him.
"What are you doing out at this hour?!"
Sang-hyeon flinched at the sudden voice, startled, and looked back.
"Ah—Hyung! Good morning!"
Past the bob of his head, I could see faint dark circles settled under his eyes like bruises. Even so, his manners were still impeccable.
Not much had really changed since that incident, but the club members had gotten a little closer—we exchanged greetings when we passed each other now. With Sang-hyeon especially, conversation came easily enough.
I kicked hard off the ground, closed the distance, and fell into stride beside him.
"So what's the deal? Why'd you leave so late?"
Sang-hyeon ran for a moment with a vacant look fixed ahead, then startled slightly at my question and answered.
"Ah… I didn't sleep great."
He mumbled it almost into his mouth, and before I could even think it through, I roughly understood what had happened. The Blessing of Forgetting would have stripped the memories away—but in the unconscious territory of sleep and dreams, there was a real chance of side effects. And more than anyone else besides me, Sang-hyeon had suffered the most.
Careful not to poke at his memories, I steered the subject away naturally. Words bounced and scattered into the air, mixed with the rhythm of our running breath.
"…Been. Working out. Lately? You're. Pretty fast."
"Ah. Yeah. I started training again."
Even at a solid clip, his answer came back more easily than mine. I was privately marveling at his stamina when Sang-hyeon suddenly tossed a question my way.
"Hyung, you wanna try working out sometime? Gym, CrossFit, that kind of thing?"
I wasn't the type who enjoyed exercise, so I was fishing for an excuse to dodge the question when I glanced ahead—and found the school gate already looming right in front of us. Keeping pace with Sang-hyeon had gotten us there absurdly fast.
The moment we stepped through the gate and I let the tension drop, I finally registered that my breathing had gone completely haywire. How fast had this bastard been running?
As I walked on, gasping, Sang-hyeon passed me and said,
"Feels great after a morning sprint, right?! Think about working out sometime! Anyway, I'm heading up first!"
He hadn't been waiting for an answer. He left the question hanging and shot off into the school, taking the stairs two and three at a time.
I made a bold show of following him up the stairs… by not running at all. I gripped the handrail, forced strength into my hands, and hauled my spent legs up one step at a time.
…Seriously. How hard has this kid been training…
He runs all that way and then sprints the stairs on top of it…
My legs had almost nothing left. I climbed with my eyes fixed on the ground. Checking the watch on the wrist holding the rail, I saw we were a full ten minutes earlier than my usual arrival. I let out a breath of relief and started taking the stairs even more slowly, no longer forcing it.
That was when the students appeared—I never saw them coming. They poured in from right behind me, surrounding me, and began climbing toward the upper floors.
And then…
Dozens of students packed onto a single flight of stairs and kept going up. Normally, if someone was climbing in the middle, people would naturally part or go around. These students didn't care what was in front of them. They simply walked forward in silence.
I was shoved along, forced up the stairs.
Second floor.
Third floor.
Past the fourth, past the fifth—and still the students didn't stop. If anything, their pace only quickened.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
They were individual students, and yet they moved like a single organism—the shape of every footfall, every swing of an arm, identical. Because of that, only one set of footsteps rang out, loud and unified.
That mad, perfectly synchronized motion cut through my chest like a blade of pure dread.
I tried belatedly to shout, to force my way out through the mass of unknown students—but my ragged breathing choked the sound in my throat. My voice never made it past my lips. It just circled inside my neck, lost in frantic inhales and exhales.
Their movement had accelerated past anything I could match without outright running. I considered just planting myself and resisting the shove—but it was as if I didn't exist. The crowd bulldozed through me, and after nearly getting trampled under several brutal kicks, I had no choice. I let myself be pushed and jostled and ran up the stairs.
We had already climbed far past the actual height of our school building, but no rooftop door ever appeared. The same stairs repeated endlessly, and we kept climbing.
When my legs finally gave out and I truly couldn't go any farther—whether luck or misfortune—the students herded me off onto a hallway branching from the middle of the stairwell.
The windows set into the corridor, the ceiling, the lights—none of it was our school's hallway. And yet at a glance, it was unmistakably a school corridor.
As I was swept past a window, I looked outside. There was nothing but white.
I didn't even get a moment to take in my surroundings. Shoved and shoved again, I was driven down an impossibly long hallway that stretched toward some unknowable end, past countless classrooms, and finally pushed through the door of one of them.
I thrashed, caught the doorframe as my hand brushed it, and held on with everything I had—but within seconds a force from behind nearly snapped my wrist. My grip broke.
—Bang!
The classroom door slammed shut.
A sharp pain lanced through my shoulder. Every instinct screamed at me to pound on the door, to shout, to force it open somehow—but a gaze stabbing into my back stopped my hand mid-rise.
A gut-drop certainty hit me.
The moment I tried to open that door—
I would die.
I turned as naturally as I could. Every student seated in the classroom was staring straight at me, faces blank.
"…"
I lowered my hand smoothly and walked to the empty seat that caught my eye at the very back. Only then did the faces that had been fixed on me snap forward again—all of them, simultaneously, without a fraction of a second's error.
I looked at the window set into the wall right beside the empty seat. Same as the hallway: nothing but pure white fog.
There was nowhere to run.
…Ah. Fuck.
I cursed inwardly and sat down, my mind fraying at the edges. The oppressive sensation crushing my shoulder, my head, my heart kept driving home the fact I had been denying all this time.
BEGIN.