Mr. Butcher, Let's Have a Match
And now, yet another rough-and-ready recap of last chapter. Even for someone who had scaled the very Pinnacle of Evasion, there was no escaping the body blow my trusted partner hurled while in a state of Pinnacle of Unconsciousness.
"Guhhk.... Ch...Cheogwi, you bastard... To think you'd shatter our doubly-invincible contract like this... I hereby curse youuu..."
[Ahem... s-sorry? The moment I laid eyes on that target, my rage simply slipped the leash. You know how much I've had to endure, after all.]
"Well, if that's how it is, I'll let it slide. Just this once."
In my defense, I had worn this very shirt back in the game to torment the Chasers more times than I could count—and Cheogwi, naturally, had been one of the victims. After a minute or two of kneading my aching sternum, my condition had recovered to a workable level.
"Whew... there we go, I can breathe again. That said.... Cheogwi, you're feeling it too, right?"
[Yeah, something has awakened. It must have seen that t-shirt of yours.]
Once I'd shaken off the fog clouding my head, the school's atmosphere had changed. The last scraps of evening glow had melted away at some point, and with the sun now fully set, Baeksol High School exuded the air of something glaring dead at me.
Or is it glaring at the center of my t-shirt? I've only fired off stage one of the aggro so far—quite the friend with a short fuse, aren't we.
"Alright. Then, like a proper man's man, shall I enter through the front gate—fair and square?"
Step, step. I strolled toward the front gate.
[Let me say this up front: if it comes to a fight, of course I'll help you... but I won't be betting my life on it, okay?]
I hadn't been expecting that much anyway. We'd only been working together for about a month, and originally, if anything, the two of us had been closer to sworn enemies. The Death Game had simply ended, taking our reasons to fight each other with it.
"Yeah, yeah. Do your part, and if it gets ugly, run. If you go and get yourself utterly erased fighting for no good reason, that's actually more of a problem for me."
Scams live and die on their buildup, which makes them hard to pull off solo. And it's not like recruiting an anomaly coworker is easy, either.
[Good grief....what now? Why the sudden concern...]
In any case, upon reaching the front gate, I made my entrance with a devastating flying kick.
"Special deliveryyy!!"
-CRRRASH...!
Then I launched straight into my prepared lines.
"Hellooo, I'm Han Doyun of AnomalyTV! Today, we'll be exploring the famouuus Baeksol! High School—site of not one, not two, but a whole handful of horror YouTuber disappearances, all thanks to a certain notorious anomaly!
Like and favorite! Subscribe with notifications on! And please show plenty of love for my brand-new membership tier, the DoyunProvides VIP Membership—sign-ups greatly appreciated!
Heyyy, Mr. Anomalyyy!! Are you theeeere????
If you're in, please answeeerrr!!!"
Stage two of the aggro is making absolutely sure they know where I am. Fortunately, a response arrived before I could escalate to stage three.
[SHUT UUUUP, DAI!!]
[Hm? Wasn't that me just now?]
"Even a stranger could tell that wasn't your speech style. Already showing himself from the first floor? Quite the feisty one, isn't he."
-THUD... THUD...!
From beyond that pitch-dark corridor drifted the sound of a heavyweight colossus, closing in with each earthshaking stride.
[Barging into my house and making a racket the second you step inside—and what the hell is that bitch-ass t-shirt supposed to be, dai! Just who the hell are you, dai!!]
"I'm Han Doyun of Han Doyun TV. A horror YouTuber with two subscribers."
One of them was me. The other was Agent Park Jincheol, the man who'd driven me over earlier—he'd watched me create the channel, sighed, and hit subscribe anyway.
[....Han Doyun? The Han Doyun I know? Now that I think of it, that virgin ghost behind you—I remember seeing it on the broadcast too, dai...!]
"Oh... so you were a viewer of the show. What was it called again...? Shocking! Great Horror Escape, was it?"
[It's Shocking! Horror Escape Show.]
A shit-tier name, and a chore to remember on top of that. Is this why Korean movies always give their films two-syllable titles?
[Heh heh heh... watching the Chasers on that show, I always wondered, dai...! How could they flounder about like that, unable to catch a single pathetic human! I... am the Butcher—Eastern 120 Swords, and a devoted ten-year viewer of Shocking! Horror Escape Show—and I shall use my full strength to turn you into pure ground meat, dai!]
"'Eastern 120 Swords'... so if you lump east, west, south, and north together, that averages out to about 480th among blade-wielding anomalies, doesn't it!"
[That's right, dai!]
That was a rather hard ranking to be awed by.
For the record, the Butcher—a colossal anomaly standing a good four meters tall—was a bloated mountain of flesh hauling a human-sized Chinese cleaver. Name and physique alike, it was no wonder that, no matter how hard I tried not to, that guy from the game came to mind.
"Though at that size, my aluminum bat probably won't cut it, will it?"
[If you dedicated your swings to nothing but his knees, you might just manage to make him hobble? Of course, eat even one hit along the way and you die on the spot.]
Truly, an overwhelming wall of unreasonableness. But the extreme of unreasonableness is precisely what makes an anomaly an anomaly—and I had always survived by slipping through its cracks.
"Well then, target confirmed—time to boogiiiie!"
-Badadada...!
As for how to actually deal with that guy—let's think about it while running, shall we? Keep the brain churning, and a method always shows up in the end.
[STOP RIGHT THEREEEEE, DAI!]
The Butcher came after me at a startling clip, one his bulk had no right to possess...!
I tore back out through the front gate I'd kicked open, then faked a hard break to the left!
Claudette-Style Environmental Stealth: activated.
The pinnacle of Claudette-Style Environmental Stealth does not lie in simply melting into darkness.
What matters is escaping the direction your pursuer's unconscious gaze is fixed upon. In other words: locating the blind spot of the mind.
-Scritch-scritch-scrape...!
Using basic parkour, I clung to the brickwork like a cockroach and swarmed up over the roof of the front gate. Front gate, gate roof, second floor—a textbook parkour line, start to finish. Total infiltration time: roughly 2.5 seconds.
And it wasn't until the three-second mark that the Butcher finally reached the front gate in pursuit.
[EEEK...! Han Doyun! Where'd this bastard gooooo, dai!!]
"Losing me in a mere 2.5 seconds... and here you were sneering at the Chasers of the Horror Escape Show. You're nothing special yourself, are you."
Having already slithered into a second-floor classroom, I settled in and enjoyed the show of the Butcher hunting for me, swiveling that massive head in every direction. Only natural, really. Relax, view the situation from a third-person camera, and you're always going to see more than the player actually doing the running.
However high the Butcher flew and crawled, a mere broadcast superfan could never hold a candle to the Chasers who'd run Death Games for decades.
[Heh heh... even I could have chased you for a good twenty seconds without losing you. All that bulk and not a brain cell to show for it, huh?]
"Can't argue with that."
Cheogwi was a Death Game Chaser, after all. If it had been Cheogwi, the instant I vanished from view heading left, the surroundings would've been swept in a full 3D read, and my escape possibilities narrowed to two routes on the spot.
The first and most probable: the parkour line up the wall, across the gate's roof, and on into the upper floors. Or the audacious stealth route—crouching down in the corner just left of the gate and aiming for a psychological blind spot. Those two options, take your pick.
"Alrighty~ then, shall we take a little stroll through the abandoned school? Judging by how the Butcher called this place 'my house' earlier, I doubt there are any other heavy hitters inside, but...."
[My senses don't pick up anything rivaling the Butcher's aura either. At worst, weak little anomalies that bat of yours could swat? But that being the case—what exactly are you planning to do? Fair warning: dumb as he looks, he's stronger than I am.]
"Honestly, if the job were just 'run,' I could hold out about three days without sleeping. But to collect my 500 million won, sooner or later the Butcher has to go down, right? So let's head that way. All you need to do is play support."
An abandoned school is, beyond any doubt, a place of horror and dread for human beings. But once it passed through Han Doyun's hands, it would become the very same thing for anomalies.
Tonight... Han Doyun joins the hunt.
[Damn it... that slippery little loach, dai...]
Having lost every trace of his quarry a mere three seconds after charging in brimming with confidence, the Butcher had sunk into a mild depression. No matter how he combed the area around the front gate, Han Doyun was nowhere to be seen, and not so much as a footprint remained. Which left him no choice but to trudge back inside and go shuffling around the school's first floor in search of his prey.
'I'm an anomaly who bows to no one in raw strength, but this Han Doyun bastard won't even fight me in the first place, so what's the point, dai...'
A four-meter monster wielding a blade? Terrifying, sure. But if it simply refuses to fight and runs instead, that's that. Running away is, quite possibly, the mightiest martial art on the face of the earth!
-KRA-KOOM!
Even smashing a first-floor locker out of pointless spite earned him nothing but silence in return.
That was when it happened.
-...Boom.
[Hm?]
-Boom-tss..! Boom-boom-tss...! Boom-boom-boom-tss!
[Wh-what the—?! What is this beat, dai?! The kind you'd only hear in some nightclub! Is it coming from upstairs, dai?]
A beat was playing. A psychedelic, dance-it-up rhythm echoed down from somewhere above, trickling all the way to the first floor where the Butcher stood.
[Th-this bastard Han Doyun—he's mocking me, that much is certain, dai!!]
If he followed the beat, would Han Doyun be there? For all he knew, it was a scheme—crank the music, bait the fool in. And yet, if it really was that Han Doyun, the man might well be waiting for him right there on the spot.
'That one is a monster who delights in tormenting his fellow anomalies. He will be there, without a doubt, dai.'
On this one point, at least, the Butcher—devoted viewer that he had been—was absolutely certain.
-THUD... THUD...!
And then, having laboriously hauled that enormous frame up the second-floor stairs, the third-floor stairs, and at last the fourth, what unfolded before the Butcher's eyes was the science lab—its lights flicking off and on every 0.3 seconds, radiating a strangely festive party atmosphere.
-Click-click-click-click-click
A phone was strapped to the microphone at the back of the lab, music saved for offline playback pumping out of it.
-Boom-tss, boom-boom-boom-tss...!
[Hah...hah... wh-what in the hell is this dog-shit stunt supposed to be, dai?]
"Ahhh, so you finally made it? Been waiting for you, Butcher. Come on in—welcome to my Soul 'Science' class."
And, of course, there stood Han Doyun himself, click-clicking the light switch on and off.