Chapter 205: The Terror Live 4
Chapter 205: The Terror Live 4
Every now and then, the world produces ways of thinking so stupid they defy all common sense.
In my previous life, the most famous figure in South Korea was the independence activist Mutaguchi Renya.
He'd argued that the Japanese were herbivores, so we should march an army into the jungle with no supply lines.
A perfect example of how terrifying a dutiful but incompetent commander can be.
There's also groupthink, Apollo Syndrome—phenomena of that sort.
Groupthink: a group so tightly bonded it narrows its vision and draws irrational conclusions.
Apollo Syndrome: you gather only stubborn, self-important pricks, and they ruin everything with nonstop, unproductive debate.
The reason all this random knowledge from my past life is surfacing right now is simple.
'What the hell did these bastards believe that made them think they could mess with me in a dream?'
I'd been kidnapped in a dream—like a broadcast hijacking.
I braced myself to be dragged somewhere and stirred my mana,
but instead I was moving into someone else's dream, so I just went with the flow.
Technically I had been kidnapped, but I felt relaxed and at ease.
I was sitting comfortably: a stark white room, a white incandescent bulb, a bare metal desk and chair.
Looking around, it was like an 80s interrogation cell with a whitening filter slapped on.
I was relaxed for an obvious reason.
I didn't know why, but my mana was still working.
It's only natural for a Dream Demon to feel at ease inside a dream.
If this was all they wanted, why call me here in the first place?
"How long do you plan to keep me waiting?"
"..."
I could feel their bewilderment seeping through the door.
From the looks of it, the picture was already clear.
Were they trying to seize a psychological advantage by making me wait?
Bam! The door slammed open brutally.
"Don't you understand what kind of situation you're in?!"
"Now, now, we did invite him here to talk."
Enter a sharp-featured woman caked in sheer nastiness,
and a shaggy-haired man with gentle eyes who followed her in, trying to hold her back.
In a situation overflowing with my mana, they weren't frightening—just ridiculous.
From any angle, this was a clumsy good-cop, bad-cop routine.
Back in the apocalypse world of my past life, that had been my favorite tactic, given my own rough face.
once I recalled my old looks and size, this woman was demoted to "cute cop."
"Hello, Constellation."
"Listen, are you two seriously working right now?"
"Why, you think anyone would kidnap a Constellation for a joke?"
The woman shoved her face close, snarling as though trying to intimidate me.
I nearly gouged her eyes out on reflex, but I held back just this once.
I still couldn't tell whether these punks were stupid or their bosses were stupid.
Stupid and incompetent to this degree does pique your curiosity.
A Dream Demon who can wield mana becomes something close to a god inside a dream.
By spending imagination and mana, you can manipulate life and death, time and space at will.
Since this place was made from someone else's mana, the drain was heavier,
but I still had the lump of mana Kim Ha-eun had painstakingly saved and given me.
"So. You're telling me you kidnapped me?"
Even as things stood, if I felt like it I could trap both of them inside a Nightmare forever
and slip back to the Academy alone. Was it really "kidnapping" when I could leave any time I wanted?
"Hey! We've been going easy on you, so you don't get it—AAAAARGH!"
"Wh-what?!"
On the off chance that being able to use mana was just my imagination,
I summoned a thumbtack under the palm she was slamming against the desk.
A cute little flower thumbtack, colorful and buried snug in her thick palm.
As she shrieked and yanked her hand back, she stared at it—
but in the instant she'd screamed, I'd already erased the tack and left no wound.
So I could summon objects, and I could control other people's bodies as I pleased.
What in the world had these bastards been banking on when they tried to mess with me?
"Hey, you guys—"
We're in a dream, so wouldn't something like hypnotism work here?
※
Vacantly dilated pupils, mouths hanging stupidly open, hands folded with excessive politeness.
Under hypnosis, the two morons now believed I was their Constellation and began to talk.
Falling over each other in a loyalty competition, they spilled everything they knew.
"When recruiting, our top priority was mental-interference types—specifically talents related to dreams and the unconscious."
"Those guys have the talents of Southern Continent shamans, and shamanism itself is kind of a minor, unpopular profession, so there's plenty of surplus personnel."
"And?"
"A hundred and forty people with superior-genetic abilities! That number is more than enough to subdue a first-year black-haired Constellation from the Eastern Continent."
"Heh-heh. A black-haired Oriental, sure, but he's still a Dream Demon male, isn't he? As long as we can lock him in the dream world, we can exploit his mana indefinitely."
Listening to them made my head spin.
I'd thought their red-hair, white-skin mania was just a kind of propaganda. I never imagined they were actually swept up in it enough to look down on people from the Eastern Continent.
'They seriously believed that a non-combat Oriental man would just cooperate if they intimidated him?'
Even the reason they hadn't been caught up to now was that simple.
Svetlana and the retired soldiers who'd been chasing them for decades
were all old, tough-looking women—and they were white. So these cultists had never let their guard down.
'They've lost a screw in the weirdest places, these crazy bitches.'
The survival secret of these doomsday-cultist racists was racism itself.
If Herr Adolf from the old Earth that got wiped out by nukes could see this, he'd weep with joy.
Anyway, these two were mental-type ability users who'd been indoctrinated that way.
The real problem? They knew almost nothing about their own organization.
They babbled on and on, but it ultimately came to nothing more than brainwashing and discriminatory propaganda.
The organization had simply used mental-type ability users as expendables, and these two were the best of that lot.
They were bottom-rung grunts who didn't know who their boss was, or where the real-world headquarters was outside the dream.
A lizard cuts off its tail to escape—what good are the prettiest, toughest scales on that tail?
"So, that's all you know?"
"We're sorry!"
I swapped the uncomfortable iron chair I'd been sitting on for a plush sofa.
The desk, the lighting, the cramped white room—all became a much cozier living room.
The space tripled in size, wallpaper and floor changed, and furniture erupted from thin air,
but with their mental abilities polluted by a Dream Demon's mana, the two paid no attention and kept squeezing out every memory,
just to have a bit more conversation with me—their noble Constellation.
Then a thought suddenly struck me.
'Couldn't I just trap them in the dream like this?'
Other Dream Demons brought their own Incarnations into their dreams.
They discard their physical bodies in reality, but inside the dream they become immortal under a Dream Demon's protection.
But flipped the other way... couldn't I just kidnap them without a contract?
They were criminals anyway—guilty of national treason, drunk on racism and doomsday cults.
"You two. Can you call the other Incarnations here?"
"Yes! Just give the order and we'll bring as many as you want!"
"I can bring them! My sensitivity is far better than his!"
The clumsy attempts at intimidation were long gone.
Now the woman shouted, drowning in a loyalty contest as though she'd gladly lick the soles of my feet.
Not to be outdone, the man raised his hand high with narrowed eyes, jockeying for favor.
I'd lazily planted the suggestion "You are my Incarnations" because I couldn't be bothered to craft a detailed hypnosis, and now it was turning into a hassle.
because I'd cast it inside a dream, my hypnosis wasn't all-powerful.
If they woke, the shallow hypnosis would shatter the instant they jolted upright and wondered, Why did I do that? The principle was straightforward: in a dream, the body sometimes moves against your will. More or less.
'If they can wake up, that is.'
It went without saying: if they never woke up, the problem solved itself.
The doomsday cultists had painstakingly gathered over a hundred mental-type Incarnations.
If I simply trapped all those Incarnations inside my dream and then sucked them dry of mana, that would be the end of it.
Seated comfortably on the sofa with my back against the cushions, I gave a small nod.
The instant my chin dipped, the man and woman took their positions.
They were both mental-type ability users, but the way their abilities manifested was clearly different.
"Hngh—!"
"..."
The woman let out a kiai as though performing a martial technique and raised a mana pulse.
It radiated outward from her like ripples from a stone dropped into a pond.
The man, by contrast, brought his hands together as if praying, tilted his head back, and gazed at the sky.
Unlike the woman who emitted mana from her whole body, he was using his fist like an antenna.
'Is that how you do it?'
I tried imitating their mana pulse, but it had no effect worth noting.
Maybe they matched a unique wavelength to communicate, like a walkie-talkie?
While I idly toyed with my mana like that, killing time, someone knocked at the door.
"That's this place?"
"The operation actually succeeded?"
"She was right after all!"
The voices clamoring outside numbered five at most.
Well, it wasn't as if those two could have pulled in a hundred at once with their abilities.
A genuine Dream Demon could summon people into a dream the moment their eyes met,
but the two sweating buckets over there were ordinary Incarnations, not Dream Demons.
"Come on in."
"The Constellation is this cooperative? The Eastern Continent really is nothing special."
These ones were the same type: even though I was leaning back on the sofa, gesturing lazily,
they didn't have a single doubt as they opened the door, grinning and walking straight into my territory.
Four blondes, one redhead—Slavic beauties, or rather Northern Continent stock.
Overflowing with lewd anticipation, they strode briskly toward me.
Then the redhead in the center, who appeared to be the leader of the five, reached out without the slightest hesitation.
"...?"
Straight for my chest.