Madness Unleashed
Before I could even feel the wind rushing past, I was already over the windowsill, gripping the drainpipe and starting my descent.
The cold metal slipped in my blood-slicked grip.
Beyond the shattered window we'd escaped through, several shapes hung stretched out toward us. They looked ready to snatch us back — but the moment they entered the space that fell within the ghost's radius, something like revulsion seemed to seize them. They clawed at empty air a few times, then withdrew into the window and vanished.
Every time my clumsy hands missed their hold and flailed at nothing, a sensation like my heart dropping out of my chest thudded through my body.
Pale moonlight poured down, casting shadows that writhed and danced along the drainpipe like some grotesque ballroom — and through that landscape, the ghost and the male student tangled in a desperate, thrashing struggle.
I reached the ground fast and kept watch while Choi Ji-hyeon climbed down after me, braced for any danger. Nothing tried to enter the radius of the rampaging ghost and the student.
Fortunately for us, the male student was still fighting the ghost while somehow managing to push toward the main gate, desperate to get off the school grounds. The ghost answered him with pure raw fury — thrashing its legs at the sound and scent of him, pouring out its rage in violent, sweeping arcs.
Even without eyes, those legs swung by pure sensation alone, tearing the air with trajectories that promised death.
"You!"
His eyes had gone past bloodshot now — black and glassy as polished marbles — and he glared at us through the spider's legs as we hit the ground, screaming in a near-seizure.
"Ah. Hello. Fancy meeting you again."
There wasn't a sound place left on my body, but I put on a show of indifference. The male student nearly frothed at the mouth with rage — and in that flash of lost composure, one of the spider's legs claimed his fingers.
The wound born of a single moment's distraction only stoked his fury higher.
"Looks like we're headed the same way. Mind if we tag along for a bit?"
"Get lost! Fuck off!"
"That's a bit harsh."
"I'll kill you!"
"Worry about your own life first."
We threaded the razor-thin gap between the radius of the ghost's wild, omnidirectional attacks and the hunting range that the incomprehensible entities refused to enter — edging, carefully, toward the school gate.
"You son of a bitch!"
He was taking every lethal threat head-on, staking his life with every movement — and Choi Ji-hyeon and I were drawing closer to escape on the back of that very struggle. The male student seethed with pure rage at the sight of it.
He wanted revenge on Han-seong for putting him in this situation, no matter the cost. But he could barely dodge the death skimming past his nose long enough to spare a thought for anything beyond the ghost — and even if he wanted to break free of Lee Han-seong's design, getting out of this place was the absolute priority. So with a feeling like his guts being torn out, he kept putting one foot in front of the other toward the school gate.
Neither too close nor too far. Holding that distance.
Bit by bit.
Bit by bit.
We were closing in on escape.
The male student no longer looked like he wore a human shell. With every new wound and every fresh spill of blood, that foul regenerative power unique to the incomprehensible entities sealed the bleeding under bubbling, festering flesh that burst and closed like ruptured sores.
The ghost answered in kind, cracking its legs through the air like whips.
Choi Ji-hyeon and I followed at a careful distance, scanning every direction as we tracked the ghost and the student locked in their strange standoff across the dark school grounds.
Whether the spectacular battle between ghost and student was drawing attention or not, dark-shaped things began appearing everywhere — not crossing into a certain radius, but starting to watch us all the same.
A grotesque head in the middle of the athletic field. Crimson gazes packed impossibly tight into every gap between the trees — and when you turned to meet them, dozens of arms scuttling back into the shadows. Countless other dark things rising up besides.
Like a fragile candle flame cutting through a writhing, gathering dark, we pushed toward the school gate with the ghost and the male student as our vanguard.
By the time we neared the gate, darkness had swallowed everything. The heavy wingbeats of something invisible thrashing through the air. Vision that barely reached past our own feet. Enormous trees, grown vast in the windless night, swaying with a grotesque wrongness. Mad laughter rising from every direction.
The moment I spotted the rusted iron gate past the male student on the far side of the blind ghost, I grabbed Choi Ji-hyeon's hand and ran.
"Duck!"
As if she knew that missing this chance meant never getting another, Choi Ji-hyeon — who had been trailing after me with no strength left in her body — burned through her last reserves and started running.
A leg swept in first, right at head height.
From the ghost's perspective it was just a casual thrash to clear the space around it — but the sheer bulk of that impossibly thick leg claimed far more space than anything you could prepare for.
We folded nearly double at the waist as we sprinted, and the leg scraped the air above our heads, whipping a few strands of hair free.
The male student saw us charging through, trying to break past the ghost and run — and a twisted, skin-crawling smile split his face, as if he'd predicted the ghost would fixate on us. He spun and bolted.
But he'd turned too fast, too greedy — and a blow he never saw coming slammed into his back.
Then the spray of blood.
It erupted like a fountain, so far beyond anything expected that it barely looked real.
Through the scattering blood, the full horror revealed itself: his waist had been split clean through. Upper body and lower body, separated.
"AAAAAARGH—!"
A raw, animal scream tore out of him as he rolled across the ground.
Even reduced to something closer to raw meat than a person, the male student writhed the flesh that had once been his fingers and started crawling.
Lucky for him, maybe?
The ghost focused on the severed lower half, prodding it with one leg while sweeping the others through the air in a wary perimeter — and the upper body crawled free between the iron bars of the gate without getting caught.
Just before he vanished through, the male student fixed me with a look full of pure curse — then dragged himself across the dirt and disappeared beyond the iron gate.
Choi Ji-hyeon and I locked our focus on the legs still thrashing in a wary sweep around the student's lower half.
A few legs fewer now, the attacks a touch less dense — but death still came from every direction, and every nerve in my body stood on a razor's edge.
I was already past my limit. But failing to clear this meant dying all the same — so I forced myself to concentrate again, stoking that white-hot sensation behind my eyes one more time.
Nerves already overloaded from everything we'd been through had no time to prepare. In an instant they delivered a field of vision and a speed of thought on an entirely different plane.
I sorted the situation in a flash, pulled Choi Ji-hyeon with me, and leapt through the tightening web of attacks.
Watching the ghost's legs, I stacked command over command as if I were reading the future itself.
"Stay low — spin and two steps forward! One step back — no, not that far! You're fine now! Jump in place from that stance! Roll forward — wait! Don't get up yet. Just a little longer. Run!"
She executed every order exactly as given, and every leg swept past as if the ghost were deliberately opening a path for us.
We cleared every swing of the spider's assault — and in the instant we were about to break into a full sprint, Choi Ji-hyeon's leg caught wrong. She staggered for a fraction of a second.
No one's fault. Just the inevitable product of accumulated exhaustion.
Slip.
In that split second, the ghost's attack burned crystal-clear in my eyes.
A future already locked in.
In the slow-motion crawl of time, five seconds from now, Choi Ji-hyeon loses her left hand.
I tried to do something more — but right then, the overheated nerves snapped. A sensation like razor wire exploding inside my skull tore through my arms, my legs, everything.
The full price of forcing that sense past its limits crashed down all at once.
Madness erupted.
Possibilities and voices flooded my head in a chaotic, directionless storm.
Shut up, all of you!
I tried to roar it down, to silence the thoughts exploding inside my skull — but the words were buried instantly under a flood of chaotic noise that multiplied beyond counting.
While the racket of madness hammered inside my head, the leg closed in on Choi Ji-hyeon's hand.
I'd lost control of my body. I didn't even have the presence of mind left to twitch a single finger.
So I watched the locked-in future approach, helpless and empty—
. . .
A hand beyond my control twitched — then moved at a speed that defied every prediction, throwing itself into the path of the ghost's leg.
My mind, still drowning in madness, couldn't even process what was happening.
And through a world that had gone suddenly, utterly still — a sound.
THWACK!
A violent wet crunch of flesh, and blood and meat sprayed in every direction.
I looked down at my left hand, which had moved of its own will — and found only the empty space where it had been, already claimed by the ghost's leg.
Pain that outran every thought crashing through me slammed my mind back into place, crushing the madness flat.
In the sudden quiet of my head, only a dull, steady ache remained.
Whether it was adrenaline tearing through my system, or the madness and the pain canceling each other out — I couldn't tell. But my mind was clear. Clear enough that moving didn't hinder me at all.
Like a last flare of lucidity before the end, I chose instinct over analysis.
The ghost had locked onto something it was certain it had caught. My hand had bought Choi Ji-hyeon free of the attack's trajectory — and without even checking what was happening behind her, she was already sprinting forward, through the gate.
I didn't waste the opening. While the ghost held its focus with absolute conviction on one spot — while it concentrated on the blood-soaked lower half the male student had left behind — I drove off the ground and threw myself through the gap in the rusted iron gate.