Chapter 149
Chapter 149
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 149
Chapter Title: The End (1)
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A woman in a wedding dress walked into the grand cathedral.
As always when she smiled, her pearly white teeth were revealed, harmonizing with her pristine dress to make her shine with a unique beauty.
For once, the man wore a black tuxedo.
The scruffy, bearded man in a leather jacket over a t-shirt was nowhere to be seen today.
His cold expression softened, tinged with shyness.
The moment he took her hand from her father, a look of pure joy spread across his face.
The two looked at each other.
The priest recited the vows, then asked the two of them.
“…Do you swear?”
Do you swear to God that you will love the same person forever, through rain or snow, in youth or old age?
It was a conventional question, and the man answered as if stamping a seal on his words.
“Yes, I swear.”
His grip on her hand tightened.
The man’s eyes curved into a warm smile.
“To love and protect her forever, I swear.”
And so, the bells rang.
A torrent of applause erupted, and the man’s eyes were filled with the image of the woman.
The two of them kissed.
A moment that felt like an eternity passed, and watching it, I sighed.
Perhaps that very vow, made before the name of God, was the reason he was bound to this hell.
* * *
With the first and second acts over, we were finally in the latter half of *Hellic 4*.
Only after finishing the planning could I announce the concept.
“The final act will combine three chapters into one. The chapter divisions are really just for pacing.”
“So the volume is pretty big?”
“Honestly, I’d like to see it go even further, but I think that would drag things out too much.”
If you stray too far from the initial design intent, the scenario starts to feel disconnected.
The density of immersion a player feels while playing the game would drop.
Short, impactful, and linear.
If the early story establishes the man’s identity and the middle act illuminates his past mistakes, then the final act poses the question of ‘why’ and provides the answer.
Up until now, we’ve showcased the entirety of hell by featuring different criminals and bosses in the process. But the entire final act will focus on a single criminal, a single sin, to push the narrative density to its absolute limit.
To put it in terms of methodology, that’s the idea.
“We’re changing the form of the profiling in the final act.”
“Oh? How so?”
“Until now, we’ve figured out the criminal’s methods through objects and clues. But for the last chapter, that won’t be necessary.”
It was true.
The end of the road the man walked in hell was, after all, a reflection on his own final moments.
“Case files.”
“Files?”
“Yeah. This is a boss that will consume the narrative of three whole chapters. The boss’s depth naturally has to be on another level, and we have to express that narrative properly. Plus, that narrative has to be directly linked to the protagonist’s regrets from his life.”
“How will you show that he was connected to the protagonist?”
“That’s what the build-up was for.”
Isn't there a core narrative item in this game?
I paused for a moment, and Han Seo-rim furrowed her brow.
Jo A-yun sat there blankly, seemingly lost in thought, while the dramatic duo were muttering, “Please, please, let the workload be small…!”
It was Myeong-gyu who spoke the answer.
“…The Reverse Scale?”
I nodded.
“Yes, the Reverse Scale.”
The Reverse Scale isn't just an item that sheds light on the man's past.
Its importance in the game stems from its function as a ‘key’ to prepare for the final boss in the actual hell.
“To put it simply.”
*Click.* I changed the slide on the projector.
“You exchange the Reverse Scales you've collected for case files. The Reverse Scales become keys to the case files hidden throughout the map.”
This allowed for a certain narrative element to be expressed.
“The man has met the final boss before. He’s killed him before. The case files are things he hid himself afterward.”
There was only one reason for such an act.
Because this was the Hell of Slaughter, where eternal death did not exist, he couldn’t annihilate him.
“In the end, the option he chose was to kill himself. That’s the gist of it.”
*Hellic 4* was, from the beginning, a story about the man’s suicide.
After finishing his entire journey, the man would meet his end through a certain method, by his own hand.
Not the spiritual suicide he had originally sought, but in a way he could never have anticipated.
We talked for a long time about the general concept, the related map design, and the various mechanics that would run through the entire final act.
“Me! A question!”
Jeon Yu-mi raised her hand.
I nodded for her to speak, and she asked.
“So who’s the final boss?”
Kim Hye-ji chuckled softly and said.
“Come on, isn’t it obvious? It’s the wife. The wife was actually a really dangerous criminal… like a mafia boss, so the protagonist had to kill her. A forbidden love? That kind of vibe.”
“Ooh…?”
“He had to choose between his duty as a cop and his love for his wife, and he regrets choosing his duty, right?”
“Ah! So he came to hell to meet his wife who fell here, which is why the case files are hidden! And that’s why they’re opened with the Reverse Scale!”
“The reason the man was wandering was because his wife had already lost her sanity and become a monster by the time he met her! Just like the other criminals!”
“That’s it! That’s why he’s trying to die the same way!” “Right! What do you think, Yeon-ho, Yeon-ho! Are we right?”
They were really putting on a show.
Their eyes were filled with anticipation.
It wasn't just them; Han Seo-rim and Myeong-gyu, seemingly persuaded, let out sounds of “Oh…,” while Jo A-yun was yawning again.
The most impressive reaction came from Kim Bae-seok.
“*Sob*…!”
He was covering his mouth with his hand, his eyes welling up with tears.
He’s become so emotional lately, I wonder if he’s going through a midlife crisis.
Pushing that unfortunate thought aside, I replied.
“Nope.”
“Huh?”
“Why would his wife be a criminal?”
“She’s not a mafia boss?”
“If she were, do you think she’d be crazy enough to marry a cop?”
That was the wrongest of wrong answers.
Kim Hye-ji, who had first proposed the idea, let out a hollow laugh and asked again.
“Then what is it?!”
What else?
“The wife is the victim. The final boss is someone else.”
“So who is it? And why did the protagonist kill his wife, then?”
It was quite amusing to see them dying of frustration.
But I figured I’d hear an earful if I dragged it out any longer.
More importantly, Jo A-yun’s head was lolling about.
What on earth does she do at night to be so sleepy during every meeting?
Anyway, it seemed like if the meeting went on any longer, it would be a total mess, so I said.
“…The final boss is a serial killer. A truly vicious one.”
And one more thing.
“You got one thing right. His duty as a cop and his love. The protagonist did have to choose between the two.”
There was only one reason it couldn’t be explained by conventional logic.
The situation was just that dramatic.
It was a melodrama, a tragedy.
“The serial killer was stalking the protagonist. He had a rather peculiar standard for selecting his targets.”
I still think about it now.
Of all the hells I’ve seen, I wonder if that killer wasn’t the one who belonged there the most.
* * *
The man’s journey took a long, winding path to the end of the world.
If you were to ask how I was so sure this was the end of the world, I had only one answer.
‘A precipice.’
In the Hell of Slaughter, after walking an immense distance, you reached the edge of the land, where only a vast abyss existed below the horizon.
It was as if the land had simply stopped growing there and been cut off.
At a glance, it resembled the flat Earth that some conspiracy theorists talk about.
No, I was sure of it.
Because it was only later that I saw dust particles clinging to the edge of the precipice, forming new land.
I roughly guessed that the Hell of Slaughter was structured to expand indefinitely as the number of killers who stayed long enough to form their own domains increased.
The man’s gaze would occasionally drift toward the abyss below the precipice.
He would stop in his tracks, as if mesmerized, before finally letting out a sigh and taking a step forward. From this, I could tell one thing.
‘Falling won’t kill him.’
Given the man’s disposition so far, if falling down there was a means of suicide, he would have already done it.
No, he had probably already fallen before, which is why he was certain it didn’t lead to death.
Incidentally, it was around that time that I decided to classify his journey as a soulslike.
Isn’t the Hell of Slaughter a hell where one progresses by killing and being killed?
Methods like falling, starvation, suicide, and being murdered didn’t lead to death.
On the contrary, death only inflicted new pain in the form of revival at a checkpoint.
The concept was firmly established.
In any case, that was the kind of place it was, and the man’s destination was the bizarrely twisting path before the precipice.
He never got lost.
In fact, he seemed to know its structure more intimately than any other place he had been.
And so, after cutting through the strange mummies influenced by this hell, the man arrived at his first destination.
It was a small log cabin.
There, a crimson infant was gnawing on its mother.
*Bang—!*
A bullet fired from the man’s revolver pierced the baby’s head.
The baby died without a sound, but soon began to squirm, preparing to regenerate.
The man paid it no mind.
Striding forward, he went to a wardrobe in the cabin and took out the cigarette and lipstick, his first Reverse Scale.
As the Reverse Scale was placed on the empty wardrobe shelf, there was a *click!*
The back wall of the wardrobe opened, and a file folder popped out.
I soon found out what it was.
The man took the folder, came out of the cabin, and checked its contents.
It was a case file.
It was different from any profiling he had done before.
The man didn't write anything down; he simply collected the folder, his face contorted.
But I knew.
The one who wrote the file was the man.
I could tell from his forceful, scribbled handwriting.
The suspicion that had been growing inside me swelled to its limit.
Meanwhile, the man glanced toward the inside of the cabin door.
The baby, having finished regenerating, was once again gnawing on its mother’s corpse.
A look of disgust crossed the man’s face.
I would later learn that the baby was the childhood form of the killer who had formed this domain.
* * *
“So what about the chapter boss?”
Han Seo-rim asked.
“Hm?”
“How are you going to design the chapter boss? Didn’t you say you’d use the same boss for all three chapters in the final act?”
Ah, that’s what she meant.
“Right, we’ll use the same boss.”
“Reusing the model?”
“Of course not. You don’t usually reuse the boss for the most important part of the game unless you want it to fail.”
The final three chapters, set on the twisting path at the edge of the Hell of Slaughter, were a place to view a single criminal from three different perspectives.
It was essentially just roaming through one criminal’s domain.
However, the reason it would feel so different was because in the actual Hell of Slaughter, that criminal’s domain was vast and bizarre.
Unlike the man’s domain, which was merely an enlarged version of the dead woman’s corpse, the killer seemed to have lived there for countless eons, his entire life embedded in the hell.
The killer’s upbringing was the outer region, his crimes the middle region, and the inner region was an area that personified the killer’s death.
Recalling this, I said to Han Seo-rim.
“The boss for Chapter 11 will be a boy.”
“Huh? Isn’t that a bit too ordinary?”
Ordinary? There was nothing else as grotesque as that.
“Here, it looks like this.”
I handed Han Seo-rim a piece of concept art of the killer that I had drawn right after my regression and had kept ever since.
An impression formed on Han Seo-rim’s face.
“This is…”
“Yeah, a little weird, right?”
“A little? You mean a lot?”
I guess you could say a lot.
The boss of Chapter 11, representing the killer’s formative years, had the form of a ten-year-old boy with an umbilical cord connected to the ceiling and a single, enormous mouth on his face.
The Umbilical Cord Collector.
That was the name the world had given Olson Rick, the killer who had become entangled with the man.
***
CASE B—1
Homicide occurred on the outskirts of the city.
Victim was a woman in the late stages of pregnancy; first discovered by her husband upon returning from work.
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The baby was unharmed.
Appears to have been a post-mortem cesarean section.
No suspects have been identified, and forensics and autopsy results are clean.
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End of record.