Chapter 206: The Terror Live 5
Chapter 206: The Terror Live 5
A lecherous hand stretched out and traced slow circles over my chest.
The touch was so soft it almost felt like someone rubbing a stomachache, which only made the whole thing more absurd.
A broad male chest doesn't exactly give you much to grab—was this just how they groped people in this world?
I stared blankly at the redhead, and she let out a greasy little laugh.
"Yes, a man ought to know his place and be demure—"
"You crazy bitch!"
The racist, sexist tirade didn't last long.
Because the rough-faced woman who'd been generating a mana disturbance behind me came charging in.
A clean punch, the kind you'd see on a UFC channel while flipping through TV stations.
Even for a mental-type Incarnation, that heavy fist shattered the jawbone with surgical precision.
So out of a hundred and forty, was that why she was the one who showed up as their representative?
To threaten me by making me feel physical pain inside a dream?
"What the—are you insane—"
"Why—why are you doing this!"
The redhead clutched her blood-streaming face and collapsed to the floor with a wet slap.
The four blondes, slow on the uptake, startled at the sight of shattered teeth fragments—
but the fist sliced through the air faster than those four women could react.
Shwaeek—every time that heavy fist parted the air with a menacing sound,
another jawbone crunched and pale tooth shards dirtied the floor.
"Huff. Constellation. These bastards—something's wrong with them!"
"What is?"
The ones with dislocated jaws, smashed teeth, and blood gushing from their noses and mouths as they lay unconscious?
She was panting, clearly wanting to say something, but she couldn't seem to get it straight.
Instead of the woman fumbling for words, the man behind her spoke up.
"Those guys—they're discard pawns."
I wanted to ask: weren't you all the same?—but figured it would only drag out the explanation, so I shut my mouth and listened.
Hadn't they been boasting just moments ago about trapping me in a mental world of their own making?
The man looked down at the bodies sprawled on the floor and kept speaking.
"Under the original plan, these people would never have made direct contact with you."
"You're the ones who called me. What exactly was the original plan?"
"We linked the mental worlds of 120 people to create a sort of... net. Think of it as a maze, if you prefer. We were told it would hold a Dream Demon like you, Constellation, inside the mental world."
Out of all the hotheaded doomsday cultists nursing various grudges against society,
they picked 120 utterly worthless ones, pickled their brains with drugs, and stitched their mental worlds together.
Naturally, those 120 drugged souls were treated as expendable—use once and throw away.
He approached like a detective or CSI examining a murder scene,
flipped back the eyelids of the fallen women, and kept talking.
Since he was playing the good cop, his voice wasn't bad at least—maybe that was his real ability?
"Anna, that one and I—when we entered the dream, when we entered, when we entered—"
Then he keeled over mid-sentence like a broken radio.
I watched with interest as he clutched his throat and gagged.
Black smoke began seeping from every orifice on his face—mouth, nose, eyes, ears.
I glanced over. The woman who'd been panting with her fists clenched was the same.
She'd slumped to the floor and was now retching out black smoke in hacking convulsions.
No matter how I looked at it, that viscous black smoke reeked of curse or poison.
'Did they expect me to absorb these bastards?'
Every Dream Demon instinct was screaming warnings at me not to touch it.
Which meant even the officers they thought were leading the expendable pawns were expendable pawns themselves.
Even if they sacrificed 120 people as discard pawns, did they really think they could take on a Dream Demon inside a dream?
The 20 who'd thought they stood a chance and attacked were just sacrificial lambs wearing the mask of a special forces unit.
As I sorted through that thought, the black smoke gradually thickened.
'Is it detonating in the order they ran into me?'
Black smoke poured from the five sprawled on the floor with their jaws wrenched sideways.
At this point, I had to admit these doomsday cultist fucks had done their homework on me.
They knew I was the Constellation who, upon entering some Dream Demon's dream, had stabbed agents right in front of their comrades—
the one who'd personally taken the field to hunt down the Incarnation that infiltrated the Academy and the Baemsim Constellation.
A track record that ran completely counter to my image as a benevolent, soul-healing man.
They'd lied to the discard pawns that I was a soft-hearted non-combat Constellation,
but they themselves knew I was the short-tempered type who went around stabbing people.
They'd banked on me being threatened by the bad cop and sexually harassed, then immediately devouring them.
There was only one thing they hadn't accounted for: my laziness.
I couldn't be bothered to read 140 people's memories, so I'd just hypnotized them instead.
Which appeared to have triggered the landmine before I could even imprison them inside my dream.
"Uh, uhh?! What the hell is this!"
"Hey, why is this happening?!"
The door opened and three more women walked in.
They saw their colleagues trampled on the floor and the black smoke,
and immediately started convulsing too, eyes rolling back as they vomited black smoke of their own.
Looks like they were aiming for some kind of chain reaction. In that case, no point in checking on the rest of the sacrificial lambs.
I briefly considered reading their memories now, but I had zero desire to wade into that filthy black smoke.
"Thirteen left... so ten of them aren't even worth looking at now."
I sat on the sofa and closed my eyes.
There was nothing holding me here anyway.
Except for that black smoke.
※
"Ho-oh, is that so?"
"I'm telling you, these bitches were more unhinged than I expected."
When I opened my eyes, I was greeted by a cluster of old men with their heads together.
And between them, a man with a familiar mop of shaggy hair.
His face was so caked in blood it was hard to recognize, but he looked like the man who'd been in the dream earlier.
Why was the guy from the dream out here weeping bloody tears?
The real surprise was that they hadn't just grabbed some random woman.
I'd figured they were hiding somewhere far off, but they'd all been at the Academy.
"What the hell, the Academy gets breached this easily?"
"You're awake."
"Nngh. Constellation, I don't think it was a breach."
Four Incarnations, five old men, each with a messed-up face and a messed-up hand.
The population density had quadrupled or quintupled—it was getting a little disorienting.
Anyway, not a breach? What did that mean?
Had they slipped out and come back while I was passing time in the dream?
And where had they dragged this shaggy-haired man from, aside from the woman in the dive suit?
The moment I opened my eyes, questions flooded my head—and someone picked up on it.
The other Incarnations stayed put, but Lee Ha-rin came straight to my side and spoke.
"Um, Constellation. Could you take a look at this?"
"What's this? A wallet?"
She held out a perfectly plain black wallet and an ID card.
An ID, what looked like a driver's license, a ticket for a ship that had passed a harbor inspection,
an Academy completion certificate, and documents showing they'd cleared every security checkpoint.
When I watched through the screen, I always got the sense of how strict, how rigorous it was—
but seeing physically prepared documents like this, several pages thick, made it feel even more impressive.
I couldn't even guess how many spells were engraved on every single sheet of paper.
"So? Are they forged?"
"They're not forgeries."
"Then... hm?"
"Yes, not forgeries. These bast—ahem. These bitches came in with the full intention of throwing their own lives and identities away."
Her explanation made me instantly understand why the Academy had failed to catch them.
Upstanding citizens with zero criminal records, here for the purpose of watching the tournament.
They hadn't brought bombs; the only thing planted was something inside their dreams, so filtering them out was impossible.
And obviously, this was the kind of thing no ordinary mental fortitude in this world could pull off.
You only had to look at Han Ye-ji's case and shift your perspective a little to see it.
Look at the benefits she received because her late parents were an Incarnation and a former soldier.
A pair of orphaned elementary-school siblings living in a mid-sized city apartment, receiving a formal education,
and even when she contracted a rare disease, free medical welfare sufficient to keep her stable.
The one dumb bastard who'd called her an orphan brat had his whole life crater into the abyss.
'They must've gathered nothing but the most fanatical cultists... do they have brainwashing abilities or something?'
A world where a female teacher abandoned her career and resorted to violence just because someone pointed a finger at a dead Incarnation's daughter.
A world where having a husband like that got you professionally penalized at a major corporation and demoted to the provinces.
Setting everything else aside—wasn't this a world absolutely crawling with terrifying fanatics?
And on a continent where fanatical reverence for Constellations had become common sense,
these people had come to the Academy to commit terrorism against a Constellation, staking their entire lives on it.
It was practically the same breed as those cultist bastards who'd released sarin gas in the subway in my previous life.
"Is there no way to filter them out? I saw something planted in their unconscious minds and dreams."
"No, I'm afraid that's impossible at present. If you went in personally, Constellation, you could find out—but there are far too many, and it's far too dangerous."
"We're heightening security for your sake, Constellation. We can't adopt a method that would put you in harm's way."
Han Ye-ji picked up where Lee Ha-rin left off.
No criminal record. No special flags. Family all perfectly intact on the continent.
No lover or family member sacrificed, no reason whatsoever to hate a Constellation.
Not a single indicator existed to filter them out—
and yet these bastards had entered the Academy to carry out a suicide attack.
The most rational conclusion was that they'd been hit by a genuine brainwashing ability user.
'Are they just going crazy because their bellies are full and their backs are warm?'