You Came Back In?

You came back in?

One day, out of nowhere, a friend sent me a link.

Curious, I tapped the link in the group chat.

A website. The screen showed an eerie city illustration, and front and center was a large image of a pretty woman with a ponytail, fist thrust forward.

What kind of game is this? The thought had barely formed when a pale-faced ghost illustration and a line of text exploded across the entire screen.

"Ah, shit! You scared the hell out of me."

I jumped so hard I dropped my phone.

My heart started hammering like mad.

"You… absolute bastard."

I didn't hold back cursing the friend who'd pulled the prank.

I cannot watch scary things. Not even if you put a bomb collar around my neck and forced me. That was how much I hated them.

Even in college, whenever everyone gathered to watch a horror movie, I'd bail early — even though it was a hangout. And on the rare occasions I absolutely had to sit through one, I hid behind the person in front of me and covered my ears.

A coward, you ask?

Yeah. That's right. I'm a coward.

My reactions were so over-the-top that my friends would occasionally mess with me over it.

Yeah, things had been quiet lately. I should've known something was off. Better delete the link first…

Except the long-press didn't register, and I accidentally opened it again.

"Ah, damn it."

I flipped the phone face-down immediately and mashed the back button.

Then I squinted and carefully turned the phone over for a peek.

The website was still there.

"Ugh."

I closed it again and was about to shut the phone off entirely when, for a split second, I noticed something strange.

That text.

Would you like to connect right now?

The long line that had burst out alongside the ghost image had somehow become strangely short.

…Huh?

Goosebumps prickled up my spine.

In that instant — a flash.

Everything before my eyes went pure white.

The first thing I felt when I came to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was the hard floor against my body.

I'd been lying on a soft bed just moments ago, so the cold, solid surface felt especially vivid.

What the hell? I groped around with my hands and opened my eyes.

The room was dark.

…No. This wasn't my room.

I jerked upright.

It was dark, but… I could roughly make out my surroundings.

First, the floor. Old wooden planks, still damp in places.

Around me, long metal lockers stood in rows. Just like an old changing room.

And by the door… someone was there.

"Wh-wha… AAAAAH!"

The moment I made out the dim silhouette, my heart nearly leapt out of my mouth.

I flailed both hands and scrambled backward.

Then a voice cut through.

"Keep it down."

"GYAAAAH!"

"Hey—!"

Footsteps strode toward me, and a hand clamped over my mouth.

"Mmph…"

A warm palm covered my mouth and cheek all at once.

"Sorry for grabbing you out of nowhere, but this doesn't seem like the time to argue about it, so I'll keep it short. Don't scream."

"Mmmph."

"…I'm letting go?"

I nodded, and the silhouette in front of me pulled her hand away.

I sucked in a sharp breath and looked at the woman before me.

She was closer now, so I could see her face.

A black ponytail. Clean, striking features and sharp, straight eyes. Even in the dark, she was a beauty you couldn't miss.

…I knew who she was.

Any other time I might not have, but I'd just seen her.

The woman standing dead center in the main illustration of that horror game.

The kind of face that belonged to a healthy, athletic type — celebrity looks, almost. The sort of face that wouldn't look the least bit out of place in a sports drink commercial, sweat-soaked athletic wear and all.

…Of course, that wasn't what mattered right now.

What mattered was that this woman was the protagonist of a horror game. And that I was inside that horror game.

…Is this for real?

My mouth fell open on its own.

This has to be a dream, right?

It was unbelievable… no, it was a truth I didn't want to believe.

Cold sweat ran down my temples and the back of my neck. My heart was still pounding like crazy.

Those physical reactions forced me to accept that this situation was vivid, undeniable reality.

Calm down. First, just calm down…

Fortunately, no scream came out this time the way it had before.

It started the moment I realized this was a horror scenario.

After all, dying while doing nothing but screaming is a horror cliché, isn't it?

As much as I avoided the genre, I wasn't completely ignorant of it.

And the game's protagonist was standing right in front of me. Whether she could clear the game safely, I had no idea. I didn't even know if it had a good ending. She was a woman, on top of that.

But looking at myself objectively, there was a high chance I'd end up relying on her a great deal from here on out. She was remarkably calm even in this situation — and she was the protagonist, after all.

Even so, the instinctive embarrassment was unavoidable.

If only this weren't a horror story…

The silver lining, at least, was that she seemed like a fairly polite person.

What had she said earlier?

Sorry for grabbing you out of nowhere?

That felt like a hard thing for a woman to say.

The one thing that bothered me, though — she was speaking casually right off the bat?

Well, given how sudden the situation was, that was possible.

"Um, uh… do you happen to know what's going on right now?"

I stammered, but managed to ask more calmly than before. She looked relieved as she answered.

"I don't know exactly either. I only just woke up. For now, this place is…"

She glanced around.

Metal lockers lined up in the dark, a damp wooden floor. Somewhere, water droplets were falling at regular intervals.

Drip.

Drip.

"It seems like some kind of pool? Or something like that. I haven't gone outside yet."

She explained it all calmly, as if the dread of the place barely registered for her.

She didn't scream or flail the way I had, and the way she clearly distinguished what she knew from what she didn't was reassuring.

All good points. Except—

"…I appreciate the calm explanation, but."

I carefully spoke up.

"The casual speech is a bit…"

I hadn't said it outright. I'd used formal language first, figuring that would subtly get the point across — but she'd been dropping her speech level completely naturally from the start.

No matter how you looked at it, she seemed much younger than me on the surface.

Early twenties at most? She could even pass for late teens.

Even if I had screamed like a girl from the very first meeting.

Even so, I was a guy who'd been working a corporate job… an ahjussi.

Still in my late twenties, but still.

"Ah."

Her eyes widened slightly, as if she'd only just realized.

"Really? You look so young, I just… sorry about that."

"…"

Was that a compliment?

"How old… are you?"

I asked, and she answered.

"Twenty-one."

"…"

Twenty-one, she said.

…Even as a compliment, that was hard to take. A late-twenties office guy getting casual speech from a twenty-one-year-old because he "looks young."

She asked me in turn.

"How old are you? Are you… an adult?"

"Of course I'm an adult…"

I answered as if the question itself were obvious, but something felt off.

It wasn't just that she'd misjudged my age… it felt like the two of us were perceiving something completely different.

Once I started noticing the strangeness, everything felt strange.

My voice was weird. My body didn't feel like my body… something was just off.

I scrambled to my feet.

Han Yuna's face, which had filled my vision, dropped lower in my field of view, and the dark locker room came back into sight — which terrified me all over again. But thanks to that, I realized one more thing.

I've gotten shorter, too.

It wasn't a dramatic difference, but the fact that everything lined up was what mattered.

She stood up as well.

Instinctively, I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠reached out and grabbed her sleeve.

She looked at me with mildly startled eyes.

"S-sorry. I'm just really scared."

"…It's fine. Being scared makes sense."

A woman this understanding would never have spoken casually to me out of nowhere.

My sense of wrongness was solidifying into certainty.

"Is there… a mirror or something around here?"

"There should be one if we open a locker… you want to look now?"

She asked it back with a reluctant expression.

"Ah…"

"I'm a little uneasy about it, honestly."

This was a horror story. Checking a mirror felt somehow ominous.

I understood what she meant.

"Right. I'll… check later."

"Thanks."

"No problem. Do you have a name…?"

"I'm Han Yuna. And you?"

…No matter how I looked at it, my body had clearly changed.

Should I give her my real name?

I didn't know. I had no information right now, and the situation was too urgent to carefully weigh every option.

So I just gave her my real name.

"Kim Seokhun."

"Ah, okay… Seokhun."

"It's just the two of us here, right?"

"Seems that way… but there's something you should know."

"What is it?"

"…"

She hesitated a moment, then asked.

"Are you sure you won't freak out?"

I shook my head immediately. The fact that she was asking that already meant I was going to freak out.

"Wh-why… is it something scary?"

"Then I'll explain it in words, so don't scream."

"…Okay."

Hearing the word "scream" was genuinely embarrassing.

"Someone keeps walking around outside."

"…"

"If you put your ear near the door, you can hear it. Splish-splash — wet footsteps."

"……"

Just hearing about it sent goosebumps crawling up my arms.

Maybe it was my rigid expression.

Han Yuna's words sped up a little.

"I got the sense it wasn't human, but that's not really the important part."

…No, that was absolutely the important part.

She was probably saying it that way out of consideration for me.

"It's come up to this door about three times."

"O-okay…"

"But it seemed to have a set cycle. I don't know the exact timing yet."

I tried to organize the information she'd given me in my head. More accurately, I tried to force myself to organize it.

So this was a locker room in some place that looked like a swimming pool.

Only the two of us were here, and outside, something non-human with wet footsteps was wandering around.

And it approached this door on a set cycle, then moved away. The moment that thought landed, only one conclusion remained.

"…You want us to time it and escape?"

Han Yuna's eyes lit up for a moment — like I'd finally gotten the right answer.

No, don't look happy about that…

Was she not scared of this situation?

"We do need to get out of here eventually. There's no food, and as for water…"

The dampness on the floor. Or water dripping from who-knows-where. Neither of us wanted to drink that.

I understood the part she'd trailed off on without her saying it.

…Ha.

I forced down the deep sigh that tried to escape.

I was scared. Honestly, I was so scared I felt like I could pass out any second.

But I couldn't throw a tantrum in front of someone who'd just proposed a reasonably sensible plan and say I was too scared to go out, no way, never. That would be far too much of a burden on her.

I'd only seen situations like this a few times in movies I'd been forced to watch, or in stories I'd heard secondhand. But the frustrating, dead-weight characters who always did that kind of thing — even outside of horror — were the ones who made everything worse.

But… but still…

Shit, I was so damn scared.

I was terrified and couldn't say it, and putting on a brave face was impossible when my heart was hammering this loudly.

Honestly, the moment we opened that door, I felt like my legs would give out.

I fretted, calmed myself, accepted it, rationalized it — cycling through all of that — when suddenly my gaze drifted to Han Yuna in front of me.

Her eyes were fixed on empty air.

…What was she looking at?

Did she sense my questioning stare?

"Ah."

She quickly turned her head back.

"I was just thinking."

"You don't… see ghosts or anything, do you?"

"No. I can't see them either."

When Han Yuna first opened her eyes in this place, what she saw even in the dark was a blue, translucent window.

Han Yuna skimmed the post titles, then wrote one of her own.

The conversation was completely incomprehensible, so asking directly seemed fastest.

The moment she posted, comments started flying in like crazy.

"…Dead?"

The comments below only confused Han Yuna further, making her wonder if she really had died.

But she hadn't.

Her pulse was clearly beating when she checked, and this unfamiliar place didn't feel like the afterlife or anything of the sort.

It looked like someone's locker room.

And…

As her eyes adjusted to the dark and she scanned the surroundings, she spotted a person collapsed on the floor between the lockers.

A stranger. A man. Black short-sleeved T-shirt and shorts, lying on his side with his eyes closed.

But she could clearly see him breathing… and though it was an entirely inappropriate observation for the situation—

…He's handsome.

Handsome enough that she almost swallowed without meaning to.

Except—

He looks pretty young.

Mid-to-late teens, maybe?

Honestly, the actual age gap probably wasn't that big, but the adult line mattered quite a bit.

Han Yuna shook her head as if to cast off the unnecessary thoughts, then wrote another post explaining all of this. Only after a mod stepped in and confirmed she was still in Seoryeong City did the gallery's mood shift.

Han Yuna checked the most recent post. Comments were piling up fast.

Suddenly the entire gallery's attention swung toward the man in the room with her.

Han Yuna finally couldn't take it and left a comment.

"…Ha."

Han Yuna pressed a hand to her forehead and wrote another post.