“Was that the problem?”
*
After somehow calming Evandel down, I left the dormitory and headed toward Cube Park.
I had several appointments that evening.
“······Over here~”
Yu Yeonha, who had been waiting for me in a secluded part of the park, waved. Even though it was evening, she was wearing sunglasses.
Today’s appointment was the suitcase placed beside her.
As I approached, Yu Yeonha held out the suitcase and said,
“Here. The bullets you mentioned back then. Since the magazine holds forty-five rounds, I just put in 900 rounds.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“Ah, wait a moment. There’s one more thing.”
Instead of a magazine, Yu Yeonha held out something that looked like a wrist guard.
“······What’s this?”
When I tilted my head, Yu Yeonha grinned.
“A wrist protector. Monday was your birthday, wasn’t it? When I thought about it, the most vulnerable part when firing a pistol was the wrist. It’s pretty expensive, so use it well. I wanted to give it to you on the day, but as you know, everyone was busy with the exams, right?”
“······Ah. Uh, thanks.”
I accepted it for now and put it on my wrist.
“Oh.”
It clung tightly to my skin, almost as if it were bare flesh, and felt like it was protecting my wrist.
Yu Yeonha watched me with a satisfied smile before turning around.
“Then, I’ll be off.”
“······Yeah. See you.”
I waved to her as she walked away.
Now it was time for my next appointment—the karaoke room.
At Cube’s grounds, themed areas had been established for the cadets’ healthy recreation. Karaoke rooms, PC cafés, billiard halls, bowling alleys, and other entertainment facilities were gathered there, and immediately after the exams ended, most of the cadets flocked to the area.
When I arrived, the others had already gathered and were waiting for me.
“Hey~ Kim Hajin~”
Jin Hoseung waved.
Everyone was dressed in casual clothes, while I was the only one wearing my cadet uniform. Rachel stood out in particular. Her pink sweater and blue jeans suited her beautifully.
“What, the main character makes a late entrance?”
“Ah, sorry. I had another appointment beforehand.”
Maybe it was because we were at a karaoke room, but my shoulders naturally rose with pride. After all, my sweet voice was still lodged in this throat.
“Now that Hajin is here······ s-shall we, go?”
Rachel bashfully pointed toward the karaoke room.
“Yes. Let’s go~ Come on, come on~”
Jin Hoseung took the lead.
As expected, the karaoke room was already bustling. The voices of all sorts of cadets singing reverberated loudly throughout the place.
“······.”
Rachel blinked as she surveyed the scene. She looked fascinated by it all.
Jin Hoseung handed his cadet card to the clerk at the counter.
“Six people.”
“Yes. Please proceed to Room 17.”
Having overheard that, Rachel advanced through the karaoke room, muttering, “Room 17, Room 17······.”
Room 17 appeared soon enough. Rachel entered first, and just as I was about to follow her in—
The door to Room 16, directly in front of us, suddenly opened.
“Huh?”
The person who came out of the room opened her eyes wide when she saw me. I did the same.
“What the hell? Kim Hajin. You came here to have fun too?”
“As you can see.”
Through the half-open door of Room 17, Chae Nayun glanced at Rachel. She gave a slight nod with a somewhat displeased expression.
“Well then, have fun······.”
“Right. You’re going on that Jinseong Foundation field trip this time, aren’t you?”
“Huh, what? Oh, yeah. I’m going. Why? You’re going too?”
“I didn’t have anything else to do, so I applied.”
As we were talking, someone tugged at my sleeve from the side.
It wasn’t Rachel, but Tomer.
“······What?”
“······.”
Tomer spoke with her eyes.
“Ah~ Okay. We’ll talk about that later. Hey, I’m going in.”
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
Chae Nayun waved her hand.
After entering Room 17 with Tomer, I found Jin Hoseung holding the remote and trying to queue up a song. For some reason, Rachel was holding two tambourines, one in each hand.
“Okay. As we decided in the group chat, I’ll be doing the first song. You know Rachel’s up next, right?”
Rachel flinched. Her shoulders trembled.
Chrrr. The tambourines clenched in Rachel’s hands trembled along with them.
Jin Hoseung’s song began.
“Let’s~ ride~”
The lively rock music made our shoulders bob instinctively.
He only sang the first verse. Jin Hoseung said as much, then turned off the song.
Since it was Rachel’s turn next, Jin Hoseung handed her the remote with a sly smile.
Rachel pondered for quite some time with an extremely nervous expression before reserving a song. Soon, the song began, and we held our breath as we listened to her sing······
“Whe, when the wi─nd bri─shes pa─st me”
“······.”
Rachel’s singing echoed through the room.
Her voice was pretty.
Only her voice was pretty.
Ignoring both the rhythm and pitch, she enunciated every syllable as if she were giving a speech······
Pfft. For some reason, I heard someone snickering. Outside the room, Chae Nayun was clutching her stomach and laughing at Rachel’s singing.
“Phew······ I-I’ll only do one verse too.”
At last, the song ended. Fortunately, she had the decency to stop after the first verse.
Rachel wiped the sweat from her forehead and handed me the remote with a genuinely satisfied expression that I could not understand at all.
Did this person think she had actually sung well?
“Here.”
“Ah······ yes.”
I accepted the remote for now. After reserving a song and setting the remote down, Rachel quietly took it back. Perhaps she had gained confidence from her recent performance and intended to reserve another song······.
That day,
Rachel sang a total of six songs, causing considerable torment to the ears of every team member, myself included.
* * *
The following Thursday.
At last, ‘that day’ arrived.
It was the field trip arranged by the Jinseong Foundation, as well as a turning point in the main story. The attendees were exactly the same as in the original, including me.
“······Nice weather.”
At noon, beneath the clear autumn sunlight, I arrived at the Seoul Portal Customs Office without being late.
“Hey. Kim Hajin’s here.”
The five people who had already arrived and were chatting spotted me and waved. I ran over to them.
“You’re two minutes late.”
Shin Jonghak said this while looking at his watch. I glanced at my own watch as well, and indeed—
The current time was 6:02.
I clasped my hands together and replied,
“Sorry.”
“······.”
Shin Jonghak waved his hand without a word. Looking ahead, I saw that a limousine had already arrived.
The six of us boarded the limousine one after another.
The interior of the limousine was spacious and luxurious, just as expected. A high ceiling and long seats like those I had only seen in movies······ I sat down wherever.
“Hajin. Want some?”
Kim Suho, sitting beside me, held out some jelly.
“No, I······.”
“Then give it to me.”
Chae Nayun snatched the jelly I had declined. As she chomped down on the bear-shaped jelly, Chae Nayun asked Shin Jonghak,
“Hey. But what are we doing there?”
“There’s plenty to do. Baram Mountain itself belongs to Jinseong. We’ll climb to the summit and meditate, do some sparring, and so on.”
Today’s destination was Baram Mountain, an 800-meter-high mountain located on the outskirts of Seoul.
Baram Mountain was one of the country’s more famous scenic mountains. It had been formed by the aftermath of the magical explosion during the Outcall, which meant that its mana concentration was exceptionally high.
“Oh, right. It was. Sounds fun.”
I didn’t know about fun, but it would certainly be spectacular.
I slowly looked around the limousine.
Kim Suho, Chae Nayun, Yu Yeonha, Shin Jonghak, and Lee Younghan.
Everyone was gazing out the window with silly grins, as if they were going on a picnic.
Sigh. In the original, they were destined to suffer while struggling for drinking water and food······ You should know that you survived thanks to me.
“Ahem.”
I deliberately put on airs and crossed my legs. The duffel bag slung over my shoulder had never felt so reassuring.
“······What are you doing?”
Yu Yeonha happened to meet my eyes and asked with a puzzled expression. I merely smirked and even folded my arms. For some reason, Yu Yeonha’s brows furrowed deeply.
*
[Outskirts of Seoul, Entrance to Baram Mountain]
The black limousine slid to a stop before the mountain trail. Its appearance was entirely out of place with the mountain, but soon the driver’s-side door opened and the chauffeur stepped out first.
When the chauffeur opened the rear door, five handsome and beautiful youths appeared, along with one ordinary-looking man.
“Haaah~”
Chae Nayun was the first to get out. She stretched broadly and breathed in the mountain air.
“It feels like we’re going on a picnic. Don’t you think?”
Then she lightly patted Kim Hajin on the shoulder as he stood beside her, quietly yawning.
“······I suppose.”
Kim Hajin’s response was dry. Rather than merely being emotionless, he swept his eyes over the mountain with an aloof gaze, making him look strangely arrogant.
“······Pfft. What’s with you? Did Shin Jonghak’s disease spread to you too?”
“Huh? No, that’s not it.”
He immediately returned to his usual self.
Just then, the secretary who had been speaking with Shin Jonghak stepped before the cadets and said,
“There is a detached residence prepared inside the mountain, so please proceed uphill. The master invited by Jinseong will arrive late tonight.”
“Oh~ There’s a master too? Who is it?”
At the question, Shin Jonghak answered with a grin.
“You’ll be surprised when you meet him later. Let’s climb the mountain first. We need to reach the summit by three at the latest.”
And so, the hike began.
The order of the group was as follows:
Lee Younghan · Yu Yeonha ─ Shin Jonghak · Chae Nayun · Kim Suho ─ Kim Hajin
Rustle, rustle. The six advanced upward, stepping on the leaves spread thickly across the mountain. The slope was somewhat steep, but it was easygoing for cadets, so the conversation and smiles never ceased.
“Ah, the air is so nice. So this is why a high mana concentration is good. It feels like magical power is accumulating in my lungs.”
“Ahem. Hey, Chae Nayun. If you stay with me, you can experience something even better than this······”
“Oh! A dragonfly!”
Ninety minutes passed as they climbed the mountain in a friendly atmosphere.
By now, they should have been nearing the summit, but the group was still walking. It even felt as though they were going around in circles.
The conversation among the group died out, and they continued hiking in silence for another thirty minutes.
The current time was 2:30 p.m.
A strange sensation wrapped around them.
“······Hey. Doesn’t it feel creepy?”
Unable to bear it any longer, Chae Nayun muttered. Yu Yeonha, who had been walking ahead, quietly slowed her pace and joined the main group. The hairs on her arms were already standing on end.
Yu Yeonha asked in a trembling voice,
“J-Jonghak, does it normally take this long?”
“······I’m not sure. It’s not as if we took a wrong turn.”
Shin Jonghak looked around.
Whoosh— The leaves rustled as the wind blew through.
Something was strange.
Something was very strange.
The low timbre of Kim Suho’s voice explained that strangeness.
“······We’ve been walking across flat ground for the past thirty minutes.”
At that instant, everyone in the group stopped. Not even the sound of their breathing could be heard. The dissonance they had all felt subconsciously seemed to transform into tangible anxiety, crawling over their entire bodies.
He was right.
They were clearly in the mountains, yet at some point, they had begun walking across flat ground.
And no one had noticed until Kim Suho pointed it out.
“······It’s fine. Baram Mountain has a high mana concentration. A natural spell might have occurred.”
“Wait.”
Kim Suho cut Shin Jonghak off.
He hurriedly looked around, then spoke with a frightened expression.
“Hajin. Where did Hajin go?”
“······What?”
The rest of the group hurriedly looked before and behind them, to the left and right.
But just as he had said, Kim Hajin was nowhere to be seen.
“What······? He, he’s really gone.”
Yu Yeonha muttered. Her face had already gone deathly pale.
“Hey! Hey! Stop fooling around and come out!”
Chae Nayun’s shout did not return to them. There was no echo, which should have been a matter of course in the empty mountains. That emptiness became a hollow silence, completely choking the space between them.
One person had vanished, leaving five instead of six.
The remaining five stood there blankly, unable to move any farther.
End
The group remained still for a long while. They merely glanced around from time to time, as though their bodies and thoughts had both stiffened at once.
The mountain suddenly became flat.
And Kim Hajin disappeared.
To make matters worse, another bizarre event occurred. As if time had begun fast-forwarding, the scenery on the horizon started changing at an incredible speed.
The sun that had hung high in the sky vanished as though it had plunged beneath the earth, and before anyone knew it, darkness had clung to them like a shadow. Such an utterly incomprehensible supernatural phenomenon aroused terror and fear, leaving the group with no choice but to huddle together.
“······Eek.”
Yoo Yeonha was in especially bad shape. Tears were already hanging from the corners of her eyes. She had never even looked at the poster of a horror movie, and for someone like her, a bizarre phenomenon such as this was torture beyond endurance.
“For now······ let’s calm down.”
Kim Suho was the first to regain his composure, and Shin Jonghak promptly stepped forward with a serious expression.
“Calm down. That Kim Hajin fellow is so hopelessly inept that he might simply have fallen behind. Or perhaps he discovered something and went off to claim it all for himself. This is Baram Mountain, after all.”
“Not Kim Hajin. Kim Hajin.”
Baram Mountain was, strictly speaking, private property. Therefore, no one could enter without Jinsung’s permission. That meant there was a high probability that fairly valuable medicinal herbs grew there in secret. Kim Hajin must have happened upon some such treasure and had his eyes spin······
“No, hey. Then what’s this supposed to be? Fine, let’s say the mountain suddenly turned into flatland. But why did the sun suddenly disappear?”
Chae Nayun raised both arms and gestured around them.
In the thick darkness, long, dense weeds completely surrounded the group. They looked to be at least eighty centimeters tall.
“That······.”
Just as Shin Jonghak was unable to answer carelessly—
Rustle─
Something moved within the bushes.
Yoo Yeonha shrank back like a frightened rabbit, while Kim Suho and Shin Jonghak aimed their weapons in that direction.
Sss─ Sss─
The weeds swayed as something approached them.
Gulp.
They waited tensely for three minutes.
At last, the figure that emerged from the bushes, shining a flashlight······
“What the? I thought you were mountain beasts, but you’re just kids?”
It was a man who appeared to be in his mid-forties.
The man wore navy-blue trousers and a loose, old-fashioned dress shirt. To put it another way, he was dressed like an office worker from the 1970s or ’80s, the kind often seen in movies.
“What’re you all doin’ here?”
He asked in a rustic dialect. The group examined him without answering.
The middle-aged man, in turn, looked over the group—especially the women—in detail.
“······Huh? Why ain’t you sayin’ anything?”
When the middle-aged man urged them on, Shin Jonghak stepped forward.
“Hey, you. This place—”
Kim Suho hurriedly cut off his rude tone.
“Excuse me, sir. Where is this place?”
“······Huh?”
The man looked at Kim Suho with an incomprehending expression, then suddenly let out a short laugh.
“Where else? Seoul, of course. Gwangmyeong, Seoul. More importantly, follow me. This is a dangerous area, so you never know when a mana explosion might occur.”
“······A mana explosion?”
Kim Suho murmured quietly. Mana explosion was a familiar term.
[A phenomenon in which dangerously condensed mana explodes. It occurred frequently during the three years when the mana on the surface was unstable immediately after the occurrence of the Outcall.]
That was the dictionary definition of a mana explosion he had seen in a textbook.
“That’s right. If one goes off while we’re here, we’ll all be dead, so come on.”
“······”
Yet the man spoke as though the phenomenon—virtually extinct in the modern era—still occurred regularly.
Kim Suho quietly thought it over.
A mana explosion.
A mountain turned into flatland.
And the man’s anachronistic clothing······
“Let’s follow him for now.”
To understand the current situation, it seemed necessary to follow this man first.
The others apparently thought the same, for they nodded with uneasy expressions.
Shin Jonghak looked at the man and said,
“Lead the way.”
“······Huh?”
Kim Suho pushed Shin Jonghak aside and corrected him.
“Ahaha. Please lead the way. It’s our first time here.”
“What the hell, Kim Suho? Are you provoking me even here?”
“Be quiet······.”
“Enough. Just follow me.”
And so the group followed the man.
They pushed through the tall weeds and passed the strange cries that occasionally echoed through the darkness. At last, the scene of a city began to come into view in the distance.
That is, if the sight unfolding before their eyes could be called a ‘city.’
“What is this······?”
The group came to a halt. They stared blankly ahead.