Life had thrown plenty of twists at me over the years, but this was the first time I had ever met a teacher whose upper body was made of tentacles.
I was probably not alone in that.
Compared to the ones who either froze up or ran the second the “teacher” appeared, I was staying relatively calm. But even I was nowhere near rational enough to think through an escape route while looking after everyone else.
My hands were shaking. My mouth was bone dry. I could not even look straight at the corpse in a guard uniform skewered on the end of those tentacles. It was the first time in my life I had seen a dead person from that close.
Honestly, I wanted to collapse on the spot.
But if I lost my head too, we were all going to die. Park Jihye, who had bolted immediately, might have a chance. But me, Lim Jinsung, and Kim Jihoon were all likely to end up impaled.
If I was going to die anyway, wasn’t it better to at least try something first?
It was too late to run, and fighting back without a weapon would have been suicide. I could not exactly stand there and pray helplessly either. I was not religious to begin with. If I had known it would come to this, I should have listened when my parents told me to go to church with them.
At this point, the only thing left was to start talking.
That “teacher” seemed able to communicate, horrifying appearance aside. Not that being able to talk meant it would spare us, but I had nothing to lose.
“I’m not a student at this school, but...”
My mouth moved before my brain did.
“My younger brother Minsu goes here.”
I made up a name that would be common enough to belong to at least one student in any school.
I personally knew three different people named Minsu. Surely there had to be one Minsu at this anomaly school too.
Trying to scam a monster that was not even human, with my life on the line, made my heart pound so hard it hurt. But once I had started, I could not stop.
Kim Jihoon seemed to have recovered enough to glance at me. He looked like he had no idea what I was even saying.
“Minsu said he was sick, so I came to pick him up. But then I realized I don’t know what class he’s in.”
{...}
“So, um... could you find Minsu for me?”
There was a joke my classmates used to make.
If you cannot find a job after graduating from philosophy, Iru, you should just become a con artist. You would make more money, and it would suit you better.
I had always laughed it off, but at this point, maybe they had been right.
The longer the lie went on, the steadier I became. My hands stopped shaking. Even my heartbeat, which had been hammering so hard I could feel it in my neck, started to settle.
After a short silence, the “teacher” waved its cluster of tentacles around. The one with the corpse hanging from it made the sight especially unpleasant, but if it had been human, I would have said it looked like it was thinking something over.
{So you’re family of one of our students! What grade is Minsu in?}
“Second year.”
{Oh dear, I’m the first-year homeroom teacher. I’ll call a second-year teacher for you.}
“Uh... yes. Thank you.”
{May I have Minsu’s last name?}
“Kim. Kim Minsu.”
The Kims, Parks, and Lees were probably common here too, right?
After Kim Jihoon, Lim Jinsung also turned to stare at me. I only signaled to him with my eyes. While that “teacher” was inside the staff room, we had to run and get off the first floor somehow.
The “teacher” told us to wait there for a moment and disappeared into the staff room. The door, which had been locked and would not budge during our earlier exploration, opened smoothly with a single sweep of its tentacles.
There was no time to wonder what else might be inside or who the second-year teacher might be.
The second it vanished, I ran.
Whether there really was a student named Minsu at Dowon High School or not, I had just claimed to be his older brother. I had to get out before the lie was exposed.
Thankfully, Lim Jinsung and Kim Jihoon started running after me. Both of them, faced with mortal danger, could run just fine. No one gave a proper signal, but all three of us took off at once.
We fled like mad up to the third floor and hid in the men’s restroom at the far end.
Before all this, Lim Jinsung had read the rules sheet and said the only way to escape the school was to get to the rooftop. The problem was that the fourth floor, which connected to the roof, contained the third-year classrooms.
Even in an anomaly like this, it seemed high school seniors were completely insane, because Lim Jinsung strongly stopped me when I tried to keep climbing the stairs. According to him, if you so much as breathed wrong after stepping onto the fourth floor, your throat would be slit.
“How do you know your throat gets slit?”
“It says so in the rules.”
Only after we had taken cover in the men’s restroom did Lim Jinsung tell us what the rules actually said.
Besides warning us not to go to the annex because the chairman’s office was there, the sheet listed a ridiculous number of things you were not supposed to do. Entering the fourth floor was one of them.
“You said we have to get to the rooftop to escape. There’s no way to do that without going through the fourth floor.”
“It says you can go up if you hold your breath and don’t run.”
“Then can’t we just do that now?”
“The hallway length is random.”
“What?”
“No one knows how long you have to hold your breath before the rooftop stairs appear.”
Lim Jinsung pulled out the rules sheet and showed it to me. Just like he said, it claimed the fourth-floor hallway might end in three seconds, or might not end for more than three days. It even added, helpfully, that if your luck was bad, you should just enroll at Dowon High School.
I had no idea who made rules like these, but considering the entry about the “teacher” had turned out to be real, I could not dismiss the rest of it outright.
Although the line that said to run at full speed if you met a “teacher,” or else enroll at Dowon High School, seemed a little questionable.
“There is one other way to get to the roof.”
“What is it?”
“Cross the skybridge to the annex. Then go to the roof from there.”
“You said we’re not supposed to go to the annex.”
“If we don’t run into the chairman, it might actually be safer than the fourth floor.”
“Isn’t that basically the same as praying the fourth-floor hallway ends in three seconds?”
Lim Jinsung and Kim Jihoon kept arguing over whether we should go through the main building’s fourth floor or move to the annex.
Either way, it was dangerous, and either way, we would probably end up running for our lives, so I leaned against the sink and tried to rest while I could.
Part of me wanted to suggest splitting up so at least one of us might survive. It was a game of odds, after all.
But none of the three of us had the nerve to insist on going alone in a situation like this.
“Kang Iru.”
“What.”
“How did you do that earlier?”
Because he and Kim Jihoon could not agree on where to go, Lim Jinsung gave up arguing and turned to me instead.
“Do what?”
“That tentacle thing. That disgusting thing.”
“Yeah.”
“You were talking to it. In some weird language.”
Weird language?
We had been speaking perfectly normal Korean.
“Seriously. How did you understand it? You suddenly started answering it.”
“It was just speaking Korean. The voice was strange, sure, but it wasn’t impossible to understand.”
“No, it definitely...”
Kim Jihoon looked like he wanted to ask more, but we did not have time.
We heard footsteps very close by.
Step. Step. Step.
Whoever it was, they were making no effort whatsoever to hide the sound, almost as if they wanted us to hear them.
We had made it to the third floor without meeting anything besides the “teacher,” but there was no guarantee our luck would hold.
If the “teacher” had followed us from the first-floor staff room to the third floor, that was a problem. If some completely different thing was walking into the third-floor restroom, that was also a problem.
I looked around for anything that could be used as a weapon, but there was not even a mop in the restroom.
The footsteps kept getting closer, so we stayed frozen in place, holding our breath so we would not make a sound.
It did not matter.
The footsteps stopped right in front of the men’s restroom.
The metal door groaned open with a sickening sound, and something stepped inside.
It was too dark to see clearly, but thankfully, it was not the “teacher” with the tentacle body.
“Hyung.”
Unlike the “teacher,” the thing that came through the door spoke like a person.
Compared to that revolting creature, whose mouth I had not even been able to locate, this one looked completely human.
Two eyes. One nose. One mouth. Two hands. Two feet. A school uniform. Nothing warped. Nothing twisted.
And yet the moment it called me hyung, I knew instinctively that it was not human.
“I heard you came to see me.”
To begin with, no ordinary human could be that handsome.
“Oh, it’s Minsu.”
“Iru, that’s your younger brother Minsu.”
As I already said, I did not have any younger brother attending Dowon High School. The three people named Minsu I knew were all in college.
And more importantly, Lim Jinsung and Kim Jihoon had not understood a word I said to the “teacher.” Just moments ago, they had been asking how I had done it. The fact that they now recognized a Minsu who did not even exist was wrong from the start.
“Please come with me. I’ll take you to the exit. The school is so large that people get lost all the time.”
The self-proclaimed “Minsu” smiled at me.
Kim Jihoon and Lim Jinsung, both apparently out of their minds again, actually thanked him.
A face so beautiful it made you feel humble just looking at it. A kind manner. An offer to guide us safely to the exit.
If the rules sheet had not included a warning, I might have followed him without thinking too hard.
7-1. The chairman of Dowon High School resides in the chairman’s office in the annex, but frequently wanders through the school. The chairman may enter any place within the school. The chairman knows everything that happens inside Dowon High School.
7-2. The chairman is the only being in Dowon High School with a completely human appearance, and the moment you see him, you will recognize him as someone you know. If you feel a sense of familiarity toward him, congratulations on your enrollment at Dowon High School.
“Minsu.”
“Yes?”
The moment I called the name, “Minsu” turned to me naturally.
He looked human from every angle. Even looking again, he was completely different from the “teacher.”
“Minsu is the one I called. So why are you answering?”
Unfortunately, that was not a person.
Of that much, I was certain.
If it wanted to pass as human, it should have made itself a little less handsome. That face did not suit the name Minsu at all.
“You’re not Minsu.”