In Korea, the one with the louder voice wins. As long as an anomaly exists on Korean soil, it can’t escape that unchanging law.
The biggest reason Korean civil servants are so drained? There are too many enraged complainants making a scene. The place is full of people who bellow that they’re right no matter what, so how could you not get fed up? The guide for dealing with complainants kept at public offices isn’t really all that different from an anomaly rules sheet.
When there are this many loud, unreasonable people, the normal reaction is to think, Ah, I should be a polite democratic citizen and always speak gently. Before I got dragged into anomalies, I used to think that too.
But as I watched those children shooting BB pellets at a dog—again, I need to stress that this only looks like a dog; it’s actually “Minsu”—those children—actually not children, but ordinary entities inside an anomaly—something in my DNA as a loudmouthed menace snapped both eyes open.
{Why is it talking? It talks! It talks!}
{Sca ry. It’s an adult. Ad ults scold people!}
{Should we kill him? Let’s kill him so he can’t scold us!}
At the words Bring your parents here, the faces of the children holding the BB guns all turned into triangles. One of them even turned into an inverted triangle, and even without human facial features, I could tell they were displeased and angry.
Minsu, tucked in my arms, whimpered. If those children attacked me, it looked like he’d lunge at them that very instant.
But maybe if “Minsu” were in human form it would be different—now that he had appeared as a black dog, I had no intention of letting him get so much as a scratch. Humans could die if they had to, but dogs were not allowed to get hurt.
“This is exactly what happens when home education is this much of a disaster. Teaching collapses, society collapses....”
{It talks! It’s talking a gain!}
{Sca ry. Adults are sca ry!}
“Go ahead. Just try shooting. I’ll find out where you live and file a damages claim against your parents.”
Without backing down before the children’s momentum, I barked, “How old are you brats!” and two out of the three flinched. Only the leader, the one who had originally had a round face, kept egging the others on to just shoot me.
Thankfully, maybe being yelled at by an adult was still scarier for them, because so far the only one actually firing BB pellets wildly was the leader. When one of those BB pellets made of hydrochloric acid hit my thigh, it hurt like hell, but if I gave ground here, those insane children were obviously going to swarm me, so I endured it while pretending I was perfectly fine.
“All of you, come here!”
Kids always look down on adults who run away from them, but an adult who tells them to come over here and go to the police station together is terrifying.
When I didn’t even budge after being hit by the BB pellet—it actually hurt like hell—the children were visibly flustered. Even to me, the sight of my melted flesh rapidly healing back over was pretty disgusting. If I were them, I’d find a talking Mr. Gregor with fast regeneration kind of terrifying too.
I was worried the frightened children might just start firing wildly, but thankfully, startled as they were, they did the opposite when I told them to come here and bolted away.
{Mom! Mom! This man is bullying us!}
{Mom! Mom, mom!}
Those insane little believers in the evil view of human nature.... I haven’t even done my military service yet, so I’m not an old man, I’m an older brother.
Watching the children run off shrieking so loudly it felt like my ears would burst didn’t make me feel great either. No matter how many arms they had and no matter if their faces were geometric shapes instead of features, scolding children who were barely half my size was never going to feel good.
But what exactly was I supposed to do when those children were shooting BB pellets at my “Minsu”? I checked “Minsu’s” body all over. Thanks to me holding him tightly the whole time, he didn’t have a single injury.
When I set “Minsu” down on the floor, he started licking at the hole in my thigh left by the BB pellet with little wet laps of his tongue.
“Hey. Gross. Don’t lick it.”
{Should I kill them all?}
“Can you speak a little more nicely when you’re talking about children?”
{But... you got hurt, Iru.}
“BB pellets these days really do hurt like hell.”
{Then should I kill them after all? Should I eat them?}
“Could you maybe not pick a serious fight with elementary school kids?”
It really looked like if I left him alone, he’d chase after the kids who had run away and actually erase them, so I picked “Minsu” back up again.
“What is this, a dog or a boulder? Why are you so heavy?”
{I chose a four-legged creature so I could walk around on my own, but I’m happy that you’re carrying me.}
“Don’t just be happy. Is there any way to make yourself lighter?”
{I think the influence of my main body gets converted into weight... so this is as reduced as I can make it.}
“Our “Minsu” has insane influence.”
Holding “Minsu,” I climbed the apartment building through the emergency stairwell. I had read the rules sheet pretty carefully, in my own way—what unit on which floor to watch out for, which residents were dangerous—but the dog was so heavy I couldn’t think about any of it.
After that screaming match with the insane children, I felt completely drained. It was great that I’d driven the kids off, but whenever you get into a full-force serious fight with children, something even worse usually shows up afterward, so I couldn’t let my guard down.
I mean, even in elementary school, after kids fought with each other, older siblings or parents would often show up afterward, wouldn’t they?
“By the way, “Minsu.””
{Yes.}
“What exactly did you do to me?”
I knew perfectly well that “Minsu” had done something to me at Dowon High School under the pretext of healing my injured leg. That was why even after getting hit by a BB pellet made of hydrochloric acid, only my clothes were a little damaged while my body recovered just fine.
Instead of answering, “Minsu” stuck out his tongue and licked me all over again. I grabbed his muzzle and pulled him away from me. Well, for now it didn’t seem like there was much risk of tetanus even if I got scraped up somewhere, so I decided not to press the matter. It didn’t seem like I’d get a proper answer even if I asked.
{Who made our son cry!}
This wasn’t really a situation where I had the luxury of hearing an answer anyway. Just like I’d expected, something had immediately come after me. Those little believers in the evil view of human nature had done exactly what I asked and brought their parents.
A mass of flesh so bulky it nearly filled the apartment corridor from wall to wall found me from above the emergency stairwell. It looked like several lumps of meat crushed together, and it was the most horrifying thing I had seen since the tentacle teacher on the fourth floor of Dowon High School.
{Kids can do that kind of thing sometimes.}
{Our precious son! My son!}
{When they’re little, aren’t they supposed to run around and cause trouble?}
{This is child abuse. Child abuse.}
It seemed to be a single entity, but several voices were speaking from it. Buried deep between the fused lumps of flesh, I saw an inverted triangle. The moment I felt that our eyes had met, the “lump,” presumably the parent of the leader child in the group, began crawling toward me.
“Is that the parent?”
{Should I eat it?}
“Do you never eat before you go out? Why do you keep trying to eat everything? Gross, okay? Dogs aren’t supposed to eat things like that.”
{Fundamentally, I’m not really a dog, so it’s fine.}
“You’re a dog right now!”
The “lump” moved slowly, thick acidic-looking slime dripping from it. If I ran down the emergency stairwell right this second, it looked like I could shake it off easily enough.
But I had no intention of climbing all the way back down the emergency stairs after hauling “Minsu” up here with such effort. If that “lump” was a resident of Baekju Apartments, then this was actually good news for me.
If a resident and an outsider got into a fight inside the apartment building, then naturally “the caretaker” would show up, right?
I set “Minsu” down on the floor. If things got dangerous for me, then “Minsu” could “eat” the “lump” at that point. “Minsu” looked unhappy that I intended to deal with the “lump” myself, but he couldn’t really disobey me further and only whined while rubbing himself against my leg.
{A dog! That person must be raising a dog!}
{Inside an apartment building with no leash. And it’s a large dog, but there’s no muzzle either.}
{So ru de. Throw them out of our apartment right now. They don’t match the class of our apartment at all.}
{Isn’t he not a resident?}
{If he’s an outsider, kill him! Kill him so no bad talk comes out!}
“Excuse me.”
{It talks.}
{It talks?}
{That thing can talk.}
Apparently they’d been saying kill him right to my face because they had assumed, naturally, that I couldn’t understand them. The moment I opened my mouth, the “lump” started muttering among itself.
{If it talks, we have to kill it even more. It’s obvious it’ll go around saying bad things.}
{Should we kill it and divide it up? We were just short on side dishes for dinner.}
“Excuse me. Could you stop holding a self-conversation in front of a person for one second? Are you aware that your child shot BB pellets at my dog?”
Strictly speaking, they hadn’t shot “Minsu.” The one hit had been my human thigh, not dog-shaped “Minsu.”
{Kids can do that kind of thing sometimes.}
{Our precious son! My son!}
{When they’re little, aren’t they supposed to run around and cause trouble?}
“What do you mean, they can do that kind of thing? Honestly, this is exactly why families collapse and society collapses....”
I thought hard about what I ought to say to make the “lumps” furious enough to lunge at me, cause a disturbance, and bring “the caretaker” out. I wasn’t sure what kind of words would get under the skin of parents raising children who subscribed to the evil view of human nature and never listened.
So I just said whatever came to mind.
“I was wondering who your kid took after, and wow, he’s a perfect copy of his parents. Must be nice, right? Looking exactly like your child.”
I had never dealt with parents before, so I doubted a comment that weak would really make them angry, but would you look at that?
{Kill it, kill it, kill that thing!}
{What a rude little bastard!}
{It damages the dignity of our apartment!}
The “lump” flew into a rage over something that wasn’t even much of an insult.