The existence of an elevator functioning perfectly in a building filled with nothing but darkness was far too incongruous.
At a glance, it felt like an obvious trap… but what choice did we have? The only option given to us was to thrust ourselves into the tiger’s jaws.
We kept watch on our surroundings and even finished what safety tests we could before boarding the elevator.
Whirrr. The elevator doors closed, and it began to vibrate.
As I felt the floating sensation of it slowly rising, Yu Inha spoke up.
“…It feels like an old urban legend that used to be popular…….”
“An urban legend? What kind?”
“The one about a way to go to another world…….”
Ah, that one. I knew it too.
It was the urban legend that if you performed certain actions while riding an elevator, you could go to another dimension.
As if he didn’t know the story, Old Man Owlbear asked,
“What exactly is this other dimension?”
“Mm, it’d be fastest to describe it as a place with no one in it. It’s like the real world, but there are no people.”
“Huh. Well, now…….”
Though Old Man Owlbear trailed off, I could tell he found it extremely coincidental.
Our circumstances were somewhat similar, after all.
Ahead of us lay things that imitated people, yet were not human.
I suddenly looked at the mirror.
A mirror that produced an infinite space. And my reflection within it.
For a moment, I had the illusion that, among those infinite versions of me, I had met someone’s eyes.
…It must have meant I was that tense.
‘That aside, why the hell is this elevator so sluggish?’
It was taking an awfully long time just to move up a single floor.
Then again, it wasn’t as if we could expect a normal speed…….
Ding.
The elevator arrived on the second floor.
“Prepare for combat. Be ready for an ambush.”
The heavy doors opened, and the scenery of the second floor was revealed before our eyes.
I instinctively gripped the Glock at my waist and scanned outside.
‘…There’s nothing?’
To be precise, there was nothing trying to ambush us.
We had truly entered the second floor without any interference at all.
If anything, didn’t this feel more like… being invited?
Swallowing that question, we looked around.
Remembering the dreadful chaos and thick darkness of the first floor, we braced ourselves for whatever grotesque sight might unfold this time.
What entered our view was not so different from the first floor—no, if anything, it was a horrific pandemonium even more deeply soaked in the stench of blood.
Most of the lights in the ceiling had been smashed, and the only thing pushing back the heavy darkness was the halo above my head.
Where the light reached, I could see a wide, half-collapsed U-shaped desk.
On the wall behind the desk, a blood-spattered acrylic sign had been split in half and was hanging by a thread.
[Precision Examination · Gynecology Specialty Center]
On either side of it, call monitors for waiting patients lay shattered on the floor, broken beyond recognition.
“This is the expanded outpatient gynecology floor. It was where sensitive procedures like transvaginal ultrasounds, hysteroscopies, or simple curettage were concentrated.”
Captain Kim whispered in a low voice as he sharply examined the ruined surroundings.
“In places like this, separating patient traffic and protecting privacy are top priorities in the architectural design. That’s why the patient waiting lounge and central station are pulled widely out toward the exterior, while the inner corridors containing the actual examination rooms and recovery rooms are thoroughly blocked off with soundproof walls and double partitions. The entry path is bent so that the inner treatment area can’t be seen from outside at all.”
“You know quite a lot about it.”
“…It wasn’t a place I had no connection to.”
But nothing Captain Kim said was wrong.
However, what truly drew our attention was not the interior that had been smashed to pieces.
“……The smell is strange.”
Min Aji covered her nose and took a step back.
“It’s the smell of disinfectant mixed with the stench of terribly rotten blood… but that’s not the problem. Over there, look over there…….”
The place Min Aji pointed to. Inside the U-shaped desk of the half-collapsed central nursing station.
Something wearing a nurse’s uniform was standing there.
Tap, tap-tap.
On the broken desk, in front of a shattered monitor that didn’t even have power.
A mimic beast draped in a nurse’s uniform was busily tapping at the fragments of a broken keyboard with fingers whose flesh had been torn away until the bone showed.
Of course, there was no way all their skins could still be intact.
This was a place soldiers must have come and gone from several times already.
Unlike those monsters with immortal bodies, fragile human skin had long since been torn away.
But what was even more grotesque than that was…….
“Records… confirm……. Reception…….”
A bizarre, deflating voice leaked from between its torn lips.
And that was not all. On the sofas of the waiting lounge, soaked in blood and bodily fluids until they hung in tatters, sat more than a dozen mimic beasts.
One had a woman’s skin draped over itself, stroking its own belly as it stared into empty space with vacant eyes, while another pretended to flip through a blood-soaked magazine whose shape was no longer recognizable.
Some were even chattering to other nearby monsters in incomprehensible squeaking noises.
“The mimic beasts…… are imitating the actions of the living, as if this hospital were still functioning normally.”
Captain Kim’s voice was thick with shock.
That grotesque sight sent far greater chills down my spine than if they had simply rushed at us in a frenzy to attack.
In the ruins wallpapered on every side with blood and chunks of flesh, they were doing more than simply wearing human shells; they were blasphemously imitating the actions the owners of those skins had once performed here.
I rubbed my face dry for no reason.
Those damned things… weren’t merely defiling the dead anymore. Now they were trying to replace them.
I felt a terrible malice from that.
A dreadful premonition that those things had appeared to take humanity’s place.
Even if they finally hid themselves among mankind and completely conquered us…….
‘It would look as if humanity had been preserved. From the outside.’
Because they would imitate the actions of the living.
Even though, beneath those skins, immortal monsters that coveted human flesh would be hiding.
To prevent such a thing, we had to keep our wits about us all the more.
“…Commence engagement. Throw grenades.”
Since we struck first, their response was bound to be sluggish.
No matter how immortal a monster was, a few bullets lodged in it would still incapacitate it.
When we launched a surprise attack with the ample supply of grenades we had brought, they had no time to withstand it.
“…Clear. Let’s move.”
Holding back the cold sweat running down my spine, we entered the corridor beyond the broken soundproof wall.
On both sides of the corridor, doors to consultation rooms and examination rooms lined up, some ripped from their hinges, others stained with blood.
Old Man Owlbear cautiously pushed open the half-broken door of the first room.
[Pelvic Examination Room 1]
At the sight visible through the crack in the door, I had to force down a retch.
On the obstetrics and gynecology examination chair, dyed red and clotted with blood, lay a mimic beast in the shape of a lump of meat with its lower body crushed, its legs spread apart.
Of course, that was not all.
Another mimic beast draped in a bloodstained doctor’s gown was holding transvaginal ultrasound equipment with its wires severed.
We pushed several grenades inside.
That alone was enough to deal with them.
“…We’ll check the inner rooms as well. We need to find whether there’s a gap that leads to the floor above.”
We passed through four to six pelvic examination rooms in succession. Beyond the shattered partitions, grotesque acts of imitation were taking place in every room.
The next place that appeared was the [Hysteroscopy · Colposcopy Room].
Magnifying observation equipment and biopsy equipment, caked in blood, lay smashed across the floor. Amid those ruins, a mimic beast in a nurse’s gown was repeatedly pretending to hand a scalpel to empty air.
We pushed several grenades inside.
Afterward, we found nothing unusual within.
Next was the [Minor Surgery Room].
A room where curettage or simple tumor excisions were performed, equipped with local anesthesia devices.
On the operating table where rotten blood had pooled lay the unidentifiable remains of someone, and a mimic beast holding a rusted scalpel was cutting into those remains, conducting a surgery of their own.
Our response was the same as before.
“This way is the [Recovery Room].”
Yu Inha carefully pushed with her tail and pointed to the gap in the open door.
A recovery room with three or four half-broken recliner beds, their springs jutting out.
There, mimic beasts with their skins half-peeled off lay as if dead, the ends of monitoring equipment with torn-out wires wrapped around their bodies.
The machines had been broken long ago, but they imitated peaceful expressions and made wheezing breathing sounds.
We, likewise, pushed several grenades inside.
“This is the last room.”
Captain Kim, pistol in hand, pushed open the half-torn door to the [Consultation Room] at the very end of the corridor.
A space for the most sensitive conversations, where biopsy results were explained or preoperative guidance was given.
Inside, two mimic beasts sat facing each other with a desk split in two between them.
The one wearing a doctor’s gown pointed at a blood-soaked blank sheet of paper that was impossible to recognize and mouthed silently…….
The patient listened to those words that could not even be called language with a horribly expressionless face.
And after seeing all of that, Captain Kim’s face twisted violently. It was an expression I had never seen on him before.
“…You sons of bitches, how dare you…….”
But even as Captain Kim said that, he could not bring himself to easily toss in the grenade he held in his hand.