[Notice: The ‘Fighter-Exclusive Roller Coaster’ has been damaged and is currently out of service. Guests wishing to use the roller coaster are kindly asked to seek other rides. We repeat: the Fighter-Exclusive Roller Coaster is currently…]
A clear voice emerged from the theme park speakers, which until then had only been blaring sirens.
But soon after, they again spat out Ian’s name along with a wailing siren. Yuna and Kim Yul walked toward the restaurant, talking.
“I-Is Ian going to be okay? They’ve been calling his name for a while now… I-I know it’s part of the plan, of course, but…”
“As if a newbie would go down easy. He’s so strong that if there were no civilians around, he could wipe this theme park off the map by himself.”
Kim Yul clasped her hands behind her back and stared at the white restaurant building that had come into view. Yuna gripped her staff tightly with both hands.
“I-I know that too. But even knowing it, I can’t help worrying.”
“Hmm. If you’re that worried, let’s quickly round up the survivors and get out. Did you see the display board earlier? How many survivors are left?”
“Uh, uh-huh. 76 in total…”
Yuna subtly turned her eyes to the display board mounted askew at the top of the clock tower.
[Current Remaining Personnel – 76]
A board with no other information, displaying only the survivor count. She didn’t know why it showed nothing else, but it didn’t particularly matter.
What Yuna and Kim Yul had to do was gather as many non-resisting civilians as possible and escape the theme park. There was no need to know anything else. Just knowing the number of survivors made the work far easier.
“Excluding Ian and us, that’s 72 people, so let’s try to quickly gather about half of them first,” Kim Yul said.
With each step she took, the glass bottles at her waist clinked together, producing a sound like bells. Yuna squeezed Yuri’s[1] hand tightly and nodded.
Shortly after, the two arrived at the restaurant and without hesitation yanked the door open and went inside.
At that moment, the ceiling gaped open and a woman with a centipede body dangled her head down.
“Welcome, guests! Welcome to the restaurant! May I show you to a table?”
The woman’s face was extremely beautiful. But with a centipede attached below her neck, she didn’t inspire any sense of beauty. She was simply disgusting and grotesque.
Moreover, her skin and organs were all transparent, so everything she carried in her stomach was plainly visible. As if she felt no need to hide it, finely chopped and sliced human bodies slowly squirmed within her.
“….”
Had she eaten humans inside the restaurant, or outside?
Either way, it was clear she was not a human-friendly being, so the three immediately refused her offer.
As if disappointed, the centipede flicked her tongue and crawled back into the ceiling. A faint rustling sound came and then faded away.
“…Let’s go in.”
The party moved deeper into the restaurant.
The restaurant was bigger than expected. It was similar to a rest-stop cafeteria overall, with the same self-service setup.
All sorts of food stalls were packed against the walls; you simply ordered and picked up your food.
Unexpectedly, the food sold here was quite normal. She had thought they might be selling human meat, but ordinary dishes like pork cutlet, udon, stew, and ramyeon were being prepared inside.
If it weren’t for the mascot dolls that were chewing on human-meat skewers while cooking, the party would have taken a breather here too.
Ignoring the wafting smell of food, they moved through the restaurant to find survivors.
True to its name as a safe zone, they found a group of survivors eating inside the restaurant.
They were wolfing down their meals with their faces buried in their plates. The menu varied: samgyeopsal lunchboxes, rice bowls, pork cutlet, spicy stir-fried pork, and more.
Kim Yul spoke to them.
“Hi, we’re here to rescue you. Eating is fine, but can we talk for a moment?”
“….”
“…Hey, kids?”
No reply came. Only the clatter of utensils colliding, the sound of tearing into food, and the smacking of lips echoed in the quiet restaurant. Kim Yul tilted her head with a hum.
“…What is it? Have they lost the ability to speak? Or can they not hear?”
“Th-They’re definitely still human. How about we try p-poking one?”
“Poke them?”
Kim Yul looked back at Yuna. Instead of answering, Yuna scurried over, grabbed a chopstick, and jabbed a man in the side of his ribs while he was eating.
Squish!
At that moment, the man’s rotted flesh caved in, and the food filling his stomach gushed out. Yuna sprang straight up on the spot.
“Hyaaaah!”
“As expected of Daughter Yos. You do things I could never do so nonchalantly. Bursting a person’s side open—you’re unexpectedly tough, huh?”
“I-I didn’t do it! It just burst on its own!”
“You poked it with a chopstick.”
“N-No, I mean, I did do that… b-but look! Something’s strange!”
She looked.
Indeed, as Yuna said, the man with the burst side had quite a few oddities.
First, even though his side was literally crushed, he let out not a single scream. He still had his head buried in his bowl, shoveling food into his stomach. Though the food was spilling out from the lower part of his stomach wall along with gastric juices, he just kept chewing on his grilled fish, munch, munch.
Second, no blood flowed from the man’s body. Instead, a black mucus dripped out.
Yuna immediately recognized what the liquid was.
“T-Tar.”
“Tar? The stuff in cigarettes?”
“Th-The tar in cigarettes is very different from this tar. It’s just as bad for your health, though…”
Tap, tap.
Yuna tapped the sticky liquid with the end of her staff and frowned.
“I don’t want to explain what tar is, and there’s n-no need to, so let’s skip that. The important thing is that this c-came out of a person’s body.”
“Human bodies don’t produce tar. Got it.”
Kim Yul clicked her tongue.
“Skin that has rotted and collapsed. Tar flowing instead of blood. Yet they maintain human form and show excessive obsession with food.”
“H-Hmm.”
“These are Aberrations. The transformation has already finished.”
The number of survivors—no, Aberrations—currently eating in the restaurant was thirty. Not a single one of them had responded to Kim Yul and Yuna’s conversation. Every one of them just buried their heads in their bowls and stuffed food into their maws. When a bowl emptied, they simply fetched another and wolfed it down again.
Probably those trapped for a long time in the theme park, unable to eat properly, had been unable to bear the hunger and ordered food as a result.
If the food’s appearance had been grotesque, the survivors might have held deep reservations about ordering it, but the dishes made in the restaurant looked fairly decent. At least not something a person crazed with hunger could just ignore.
“They couldn’t have all thirty turned into Aberrations at once. One person started eating normally, and then everyone else put their heads in too.”
“….”
“Well, it’s a tragic thing, but it’s good news for us. Right, Daughter Yos?”
Kim Yul grinned and looked at Yuna. Yuna gave a little laugh too.
“Since the number of survivors we need to f-find has dropped by nearly half. W-We were right to come to the restaurant first.”
“Still, since we’re not sure if they’re counted in the remaining survivor total, let’s test it first.”
“S-Sure.”
Kim Yul and Yuna dragged the man with the burst side out of the restaurant and burst his head.
Ding.
The survivor count on the display board dropped by one.
“They count.”
“Th-That’s a relief… So should we just deal with all of them? Ah, to make it easy to tell them apart…”
“Let’s. Their skin is so soft we don’t even need magic; we can just bring them out and kill them quick—”
Just as Kim Yul said this while roughly brushing the tar off her clothes,
“Inside the restaurant!!!”
Kaboom!
The closed restaurant door burst open, and a giant man in a chef’s uniform walked out. Dozens of hands on his back writhed, gripping kitchen knives, and the goat head attached to his chest opened its maw, spewing flames. He stared directly at Yuna and shouted in a frenzy.
“Violence is prohibited!!!!”
Thud!
He charged straight at Yuna. It was because she had violated the no-combat rule inside the restaurant by jabbing the man with the chopstick.
Boom-boom-boom-boom!
The floor shook with every step the chef took. But before he could arrive, Kim Yul hurled a water bottle and chanted a spell.
“Origin of life. At my command, become a thin blade.”
Crash!
Cold water streamed from the shattered glass bottle in midair. It immediately spread thin and compressed.
A water film so thin it was almost invisible to the naked eye.
If you looked down from above, you could see the characteristic shimmer of a water surface, but from the front, it couldn’t be seen at all. As a result, the chef continued his charge without sensing anything amiss.
“Uoooooh—”
Then the moment he touched the water film,
Slice!
The chef’s body split into ch/ef. His severed upper body shot into the air, and his lower body crumpled helplessly, twitching. Tar poured from the immaculately clean cut.
“Nothing special, just a loud voice.”
Kim Yul kicked the chef’s trembling head. But the impact was stronger than expected, and a stinging pain shot up her toes.
“Ow-ow-ow!”
Kim Yul clutched her toes and hopped up and down. Watching this, Yuna subtly curled the corners of her mouth.
“You du-dummy…”
Shortly after, the two found fifteen survivors hidden in the restaurant’s storage room.
*
The top floor of the tower.
Splitting the manager’s belly open with his axe, Ian rummaged around inside for the first time in a long while. Then he let out a deep sigh.
“Nothing inside, as expected.”
The manager’s abdominal cavity was literally empty. Only a heart sat alone in the center of his chest.
When he’d crushed his head last time, he thought brain matter and skull fragments had definitely flowed out, but the body was utterly hollow.
“Sigh, so I found nothing after all.”
Ian sat in the least blood-soaked chair in the gore-splattered office and tilted his head back.
He hadn’t found anything special on the 5th and 8th floors that Silf had told him about.
More precisely, he had found something, but not what Ian wanted. Just a horde of clowns that endlessly spawned Aberrations.
He’d wondered why Aberrations kept swarming, and they’d simply been producing them on their own. Naturally, he’d killed them all on the spot.
The 13th floor, which he had just climbed to, was similarly empty. Just the manager sitting alone, processing meaningless documents.
“The ‘peculiar thing’ Silf mentioned must simply have been the manager himself. Not even surprising.”
Ian sighed and placed the heart in his hand onto the table.
Once, he would have fought tooth and nail to get this, but now he could easily handle it with just a snap of the Conveyer.
Considering pure lethal ability, the Abyssal Record was overwhelmingly superior to other grimoires, so it was only natural.
[Bwoong!]
Reading Ian’s thoughts, the grimoire vibrated briefly. If he had to interpret, it meant ‘There’s only me, right?’ Ian smiled wryly and stroked the grimoire’s cover.
He sat for a moment, burning a hand-rolled cigarette to rest, then casually tossed the butt aside and turned the pages of the grimoire.
The list of summons.
Starting with the Conveyer and ending with the Precursor, the catalog of Outer Sea creatures. He read through the description of the one he had noted earlier.
‘An Outer Sea hunter with a highly peculiar method of ingesting prey, and which takes a very long time to eat.’
While other creatures could consume prey immediately upon summoning, this particular one required an enormous amount of seawater. Thus, when summoned somewhere other than the sea, it caused rain to fall from the sky.
Then, once the rainwater had pooled sufficiently, it would reveal itself from within the puddle and chew up and swallow the entire area where water had gathered.
In simple terms, it needed a build-up phase.
It wasn’t suited for urgent situations, but for times like now, when he had to wait for survivor rescue or something else, it was a fairly decent choice.
‘Rather than staying in the theme park to draw a magic circle and wait for the summoned creature to destroy everything, it’s better to set it up in advance and finish things in one go. My movements will be freer, and I won’t have to worry about getting caught up in it.’
Having concluded his thoughts, Ian nodded and pulled the pen from his pocket. Then he began drawing a magic circle on the empty office floor, scratch scratch.
A rather large magic circle. He sprinkled blood over it and placed twelve Aberration flesh pieces. He had resupplied his materials on the way up, so he had more than enough to spare.
“Ahem.”
He cleared his throat once, then extended his hand toward the magic circle and chanted:
“O child dwelling at the bottom of the Outer Sea. O child who longs for a mother’s love and favor, for a father’s affection and touch. O child who embraced eternal solitude in place of eternal hunger.”
Pat.
A single dark droplet falling from the sky struck the window. Watching the raindrop trickle down, Ian continued his chant.
“I call your name. Break free from the shackles of solitude and come into my embrace.”
Pit-pat, pat-pat-pat.
The falling raindrops began to multiply. The red clouds drifting in the sky were engulfed in a dark, greenish-blue hue as they spewed rainwater.
“Deprivation-Child (缺乏子). I shall grant you what you desire.”
The moment the chant ended, the Aberration flesh pieces placed on the magic circle simultaneously evaporated.
And then,
Woooooosh!!!
Rain began to pour from the sky. The dense raindrops collided with the window right next to Ian and streamed down in bizarre directions.
Top to bottom. Bottom to top. Diagonally. In curves.
Defying the laws of physics, the rainwater drew every kind of line—straight, curved, and more—onto the window and fixed them there. Soon, it formed a picture.
[♥]
No matter how you looked at it, it was a heart.
A bitter smile lingered on Ian’s lips.