Variable?
Thud!
Just as I was about to step forward—barely making out the corridor’s outline by the pale, intermittent light filtering through the endless windows, careful of the pockets of darkness still waiting to swallow a foot—something settled onto my shoulder. Choi Ji-hyeon and I both startled so hard we screamed without sound.
"-!"
"-!"
Luckily the shock stole our voices; mouths stretched wide, we spun around and found a male student with one hand planted on a shoulder.
He was a solidly built guy, school uniform stained here and there, face twisted in a scowl.
"Let’s go together."
Without waiting for an answer he slung an arm across our shoulders in a buddy-buddy grip and bodily shoved us straight out of the classroom, then turned and shut the door behind us.
Before we could even stammer a protest we were standing in the corridor, the anxious silence and the darkness filling the space around us.
What now?
Counterattack right away?
Can my body even hold up?
In the space of a heartbeat I asked and answered myself over and over. My body had frozen, yet my mind raced.
"Why so tense? You scared?"
The male student’s voice came from behind us.
I turned, knocked the arm off my shoulder with the back of my hand, and answered at once.
"No?"
It might have sounded cocky, but the guy only nodded as if that were the most natural thing in the world.
"Figures. I saw you not flinch even against that monster earlier—no way you’d be scared of me."
He lifted both arms in a playful, surrendering gesture, showing he had no intention of fighting. The easy confidence sat on him like a second skin.
"Anyway, let’s get out of here together."
I had no desire to keep sparring in a place this dangerous, so I jerked my chin toward the hallway ahead.
"You lead."
He gave a short laugh and started walking.
From inside the closed classroom came the wet, meaty sounds of flesh being torn, mixed with muffled screams—the death throes of the students left behind in the maze. One by one the screams thinned. Putting the male student in front, we set off down the corridor that seemed to stretch on forever, trying to put distance between ourselves and those fading cries.
As we walked the male student laced his fingers behind his head and kept talking.
"By the way, do you two remember how you got here? I talked to a few people back in that classroom—everyone’s memory’s full of holes. Mine’s fuzzy too. Roughly what I can recall is—"
He dragged the sentence out as if fishing for something, then caught the trailing end and continued.
"—not much. Some school, class… or was it arriving for school—no, leaving—anyway, I think I know whose fault this is."
I glanced sideways at Choi Ji-hyeon. She was squinting at the back of the chattering boy’s head with clear dislike.
Learning the background of this Neapolitan horror story is one of my goals, so I might as well listen.
"Whose?"
"Gu Ji-hyeok, obviously."
…?
A name I had never expected. I looked at Choi Ji-hyeon in case she recognized it, but her face only wore the same blank question mark as mine.
"…Is that so? Why?"
"Isn’t it obvious?"
He shot the question back as if I were the strange one for asking. I was briefly speechless, but he hadn’t really been waiting for an answer; he simply kept talking.
"Ji-hyeok’s been acting weird for days. Barely reacting, eyes all wrong. I figured a guy like him couldn’t pull anything off, so I left him alone, but…"
He let the sentence hang again, then finished.
"—whatever. Once we get out of here, he’s a dead man walking."
"Hmm. That so?"
I gave him a noncommittal reply while sliding my left hand behind my back.
Luckily the darkness was thick enough that unless someone stared right at my face they wouldn’t notice what I was doing. I quietly summoned the Rule Book.
Earlier that day I had confirmed it recorded not only my actions but my thoughts as well. I spent a full minute thinking hard and deliberately. When I judged it was enough, I began flipping pages by touch alone, fingertips brushing the paper behind my back.
I could have looked, but finding the exact spot without eyes was possible—I had already tested that. The moment I focused the thought, a tug like someone pulling a nerve ran through my fingertips.
Still walking casually, eyes forward, I opened the Rule Book to the page I wanted with one hand. Then I brought my right hand back as well, adopting a hands-behind-the-back posture, and kept walking.
Riiip.
A tiny tearing sound escaped as I secretly ripped the page free, but I buried it under a question and kept moving.
"So Ji-hyeok did something wrong, then?"
At my words the male student abruptly stopped. His head twisted toward me at an angle that was anything but natural. A sound like bones grinding out of place cracked through the air, yet he showed no pain; empty, sunken eyes fixed on me.
"No. That. Guy. Was. Born. Wrong."
As if invisible hands were forcing his skull back into place, his neck creaked and jerked until he faced forward again. Then, in the same cheerful voice as before, he started chattering once more.
While we talked I folded the torn sheet of paper and tapped Choi Ji-hyeon’s hand with it. She looked at me, puzzled, then noticed the paper pinched between my fingers, wordlessly took it, and slipped it away.
Sharp as ever—same as when we dealt with the Ghost earlier.
The corridor was dark overall, yet we could still make out rough outlines as we walked. Suddenly the hallway simply ended and a staircase appeared. What had looked like an endless stretch of corridor transformed into stairs the moment we took one more step.
Is this the safe radius?
I had been roughly counting paces and estimating distance. From the records of students who had survived this school, interference from other things was minimal while you were being chased by the Ghost. Now that the anomalies had begun, this distance probably marked the edge of the Ghost’s territory.
And I had no intention of going any farther.
I didn’t know how many other things roamed this school besides the Ghost, but keeping a razor-thin distance from the Ghost still seemed better than being hunted by a whole pack of unknowns.
When the footsteps that had been following us fell silent, the nameless male student glanced back and saw me standing still.
"What are you doing?"
"…Thinking about which way to go."
"Ah. That so?"
He tossed the words out and simply waited where he was.
The strange standoff lasted only a few seconds before, far down the corridor we had come from, a sound like an entire tree being smashed to splinters roared out. At the same moment the pitch-black hallway filled with a rapid tick-tick-tick and the fluorescent lights overhead flickered to life.
They blinked on and off without pattern, throwing grotesque, jittering shadows everywhere.
Every student left in the classroom had apparently been killed by the Ghost. Now that the Ghost had stepped into the hallway, the game of tag had simply changed venues.
Heart racing, I looked ahead again—the staircase that had been right there was gone. Only the endless corridor remained.
"So which way are we going?!"
The male student up front shouted as if he meant to grab me by the collar.
"Forward! You and I check the front. And—"
I jerked my chin toward Choi Ji-hyeon.
"—she covers the rear. We keep going until stairs show up again!"
I started moving quickly with the male student, eyes scanning ahead, and glanced back once. Choi Ji-hyeon had already turned her back to us and was walking sideways and backward, watching our rear while she followed.
The male student beside me also looked back, lost interest when he saw nothing special in her movements, and faced forward again.
As we advanced I kept glancing over my shoulder. The male student, looking uneasy, checked every closed classroom door, every window, even the corridor windows, then finally snapped at me for constantly looking back.
"You already put her on rear guard—why do you keep looking behind us?!"
"…Huh? It’s nothing."
I brushed it off quickly, but he seemed to understand and leaned in to whisper.
"Ah… I get it. You don’t trust her, right? There are always people you can’t trust with anything."
The way he kept talking down to her, plus everything he’d said so far, made it clear he wasn’t exactly a model student.
And I wasn’t looking back because I didn’t trust Choi Ji-hyeon.
Even now, whenever I checked, she was walking with her back to us, covering the rear in short, quick steps. Her left hand was oddly shielding her body, but from the angle and the shape of her arm I could tell she had pulled something close against herself. The posture was so subtle that no one who hadn’t been watching carefully would ever notice.
From the tiny downward tilt of her head and the way her hand was drawn in front of her chest, it was obvious: in that back-turned stance she was reading the paper I had given her.
I had deliberately put her on rear guard so she could do exactly that, and even without a single word of instruction she was carrying it out as if she had overheard my thoughts.
Sharp as ever.