Chapter 204: The Terror Live 3
Chapter 204: The Terror Live 3
Every work has certain tropes that carry a particular meaning.
Put in complicated terms, that's what they are. Put simply, they're clichés.
In a horror movie, the moment you let your guard down and think it was nothing, something always happens.
If a helicopter appears in an action film, its role is to explode and crash shortly after.
A furious, muscle-bound bald man is a powerful enemy who threatens even the protagonist,
and whenever some four-eyed little shit is hanging around a detective, someone invariably winds up dead.
Obviously, this gender-reversed world had its share of similar clichés.
That beastkin men seem easygoing but get all bashful during mating season;
that murim-in men wear loose martial arts robes because the big stuff flops around otherwise — and an internet swarming with cyber ghosts, so the clichés tended toward the sleazy and foul-mouthed.
'Those were details I really hadn't wanted to know.'
The ghostly bitches spouting off about the Three Muscles Theory — dick muscle, abs, back muscles — instead of the Singiche Virgin Theory.
But among them all, one cliché had stayed unchanged across my past life and this one.
"Never learned a new trick, but I haven't forgotten the ones I already had."
That a retired soldier, some old-timer, is fucking terrifying.
And that anyone who walks around with their eyes narrowed to slits is dangerous.
Old women embodying every single one of those clichés stood right in front of me.
"That bitch oils up her tongue, not her joints."
"Wish I could suck on a smoke instead of lubricant...."
"Quit your old-lady yapping. If the Bitter-Smoke spreads, the concealment ward's blown."
An ash-haired crone muttered, fiddling with an eye patch.
The reply came from an old man sporting a beard dense enough for a magazine spread.
Scars, a fedora, a prosthetic leg — people with looks so intense you couldn't forget them after a single glance.
The only feature these abruptly appearing elders shared was that they all wore military uniforms.
The moment Lee Ha-rin saw them, she let out a strangled wheeze — kkeu-e-e-ung.
At that seal-like fuss, the old soldiers' gazes bent with faint amusement.
"Heh-heh, see that? We're not all washed up yet."
"Give it a rest, put a sock in it. She knows because she's some Academy bookworm. Step out on the street and not a soul'd recognize us."
"And you talk like that when we're all aging into the same grave."
Every time one of the elders opened their mouth, Lee Ha-rin quivered with rapture.
Her reaction alone was enough to make me curious about who these people were.
Well, Svetlana's old war comrades, obviously.
Even setting aside Lee Ha-rin's gasping fits,
they were all matching in worn white uniforms steeped with years of hand-grime.
But a lingering curiosity still pressed me to speak.
"You didn't all gather here just to talk about that, did you?"
At this point, being a Constellation meant I was dropping casual speech even to people over a hundred like it was nothing.
Feeling the last traces of my past-life K-Confucian boy fading away, I studied their faces.
Wrinkled faces that had transcended the world, untroubled by the fact I was a Constellation.
Or rather, an attitude that apart from revenge, they couldn't care less.
Voices traded in jests, yet their faces were blunt, their emotions reined in.
That alone told me they were special forces — you could feel it in that one detail.
"Indeed. Our remaining years are short, so we're using them a touch efficiently."
The old man in the fedora at the back stepped forward.
A bizarre combination — military uniform, fedora, a long-stemmed pipe — so he drew the eye instantly.
Without the scars, he'd look like someone a web forum would pass around captioned "Old Man Model."
While I was thinking that, something dropped from outside my line of sight again.
It was right in front of me, so why hadn't I seen the sleeve or the forearm beyond it?
Had she pulled it out of thin air with a subspace inventory or something?
"You're not telling me this is the culprit."
"A disposable low-ranker. We heard you've got a hell of a knack for reading what people remember, Constellation. Do you like our gift?"
...So, a person.
※
The old man in the military uniform, a fedora jammed on his head and a long pipe in his mouth.
The crone with a long scar across her cheek, both hands replaced with ice prosthetics.
Another crone on a prosthetic leg, a head taller than everyone else, riddled with scars.
The crone with one eye clouded over and the other concealed under an eye patch.
Add Svetlana to the mix, and you had four women and one man — nearly all-women lineup.
Put like that, it really was a special forces squad straight out of a movie.
Except reality couldn't be called beautiful or fun the way a film was.
"We were coming in on a boat and caught this bitch trying to slip off the island in a diving suit."
The crone cackled; the long scar writhed along her cheek like a snake.
Tap. Every time the flat of a military combat knife smacked a cheek, terror rippled outward.
The woman desperately pretending to be unconscious was starting to look more like the victim here.
'No way they've gone senile and dragged in some innocent person?'
Long brown hair, apricot-toned skin, a face full of freckles.
Based on her unremarkable looks alone, she seemed Western Continent.
She'd been abducted by a scarred-up retired soldier, so she kept up the unconscious act to the bitter end.
But had they really just happened to run into her while coming in by boat?
While I was mulling that over, my eyes met the gaze of one of the elders.
As if she'd read my mind, the eye-patch crone chuckled and spoke.
"Well, the harbor was jam-packed with patrol boats, so we docked at a spot I'd scoped out back when I was young."
"A spot?"
"You know, that, whaddyacallit. In my hot-blooded youth I picked up this and that.... The Academy might reinforce its internal defenses, but it won't alter the island's topography. Anyway, most of the bastards trying to sneak into the Academy use that area to—"
Prod. She got jabbed in the side, coughed a sheepish harrumph, and trailed off.
The Academy was a facility built on a staggeringly huge island, that much was true.
Sure, they monitored every ship departing the continent and every ship calling at the Academy,
but what if someone in a diving suit, like this woman, hooked herself to an underwater propulsion unit in the open sea?
No matter how tight the Academy's security, there'd be no way to catch a single diver out on the boundless ocean.
Instead of the eye-patch crone, who'd clammed up, Svetlana looked straight at me and spoke.
"The cliff formations make a kind of natural harbor. The Academy knows about it."
"Ah. Then why haven't they—"
"Because keeping track of a known vulnerability is easier, so the Academy leaves it be. They use it themselves, in fact — like calling people like us in. So the question you need answered, Constellation, isn't how she got to the island."
"It's not how she got to the island — it's how she got over the Academy wall."
"Yes, exactly."
The Academy hadn't commandeered the whole island, so plenty of empty space remained.
Vacant lots, seaside cliffs, and caves typical of the island,
and, as they'd just said, stretches of coastline usable as a harbor.
So reaching the island itself was easier than you'd think.
The real issue was getting past the Academy's walls, which were monitored under strict guard.
A barrier staffed by espers, with mages on standby and beastkin keeping watch.
And hadn't that Snakeheart bastard already breached it once, leading them to erect additional watchtowers for an even tighter quadruple-layered perimeter?
Hearing about it, the setup felt like an impassable Wall of Lamentation,
yet it'd already been pierced twice in a row. Anyone would be curious how.
"That near-impenetrable barrier — our young junior here waltzed right through it. We couldn't help being curious."
"'Junior'?"
"Ah. We searched this bitch's belongings and found a mark from under the Northern Commander's authority. A spy, wouldn't you say?"
The corners of Svetlana's eyes curved gently, but the killing intent they radiated was dizzying.
Her explanation finished, she gave a light chin-jerk to signal.
Before I or my Incarnations could even react, a spike came down like a lightning strike.
I hadn't even noticed it, but a sharp spike of ice shot from her prosthetic hand
and punched clean through the back of the woman's hand — the one who'd been playing dead while she watched us.
"A-aaaaaaagh!"
"She opens her mouth. Not Intelligence or Special Operations, then."
"If Intelligence and Special Operations have been infiltrated by spies too, we'll have to pay our juniors a personal visit."
"Makes sense, with everything we've set up over the years."
The woman flailing, blood spattering from the back of her hand.
At the sight, I frowned before I could stop myself, and the prosthetic-leg crone went fwoh-hoh — a laugh.
She had the build of a bear but the face of a snake. When I looked at her, she opened her mouth right away.
"For someone like our Constellation, this must seem a little brutal—"
Her tone came off as picking a fight, but the emotion I sensed was unmistakable worry and goodwill.
A bear's body, a snake's face, but apparently the nicest heart — with a mouth like that.
Living life that way must get you misunderstood an exhausting amount.
"I like this table. That spike didn't gouge the table too, did it?"
"E-eh? Hah! Of course not! I poked it in gentle — didn't even touch bone."
The laughing crone twisted the spike, tearing the back of the hand wider. A little blood sprayed, but that didn't matter.
The important thing wasn't the shrieking, bleeding woman — it was my living room table with her hand on it.
Sitting at this table, pointlessly leaving the TV on and drinking milk tea,
had become one of the meaningful routines of my peaceful daily life.
Blood could be wiped away, but a spike mark in the tabletop would've soured the whole mood.
"Constellation, if this one isn't enough, I think we could nab you a few more years' worth...."
"We'll see. Got to crack 'em open to find out."
"Her skull?"
The big-boned crone grabbed the thrashing woman by the hair.
Brown eyes glassy with pain and terror.
Our eyes met, and my magic stirred.
My vision whirled.
The crones watching me with amusement, my Incarnations quietly trying to wipe up the bloodstains.
And within that pain and terror, the brown eyes curled into a faint smile.
A sensation like something yanking the back of my neck — and I was sucked somewhere.
Somewhere that was, unmistakably, not the unconscious mind.