A ghost that cries is third-rate, and a ghost that laughs is second-rate. Then what is the most horrifying first-rate ghost of all?
It’s a ghost that pretends to be human.
Anything that comes close pretending to help instead of doing harm is dangerous as hell, whether it’s human or ghost.
It was just something I’d picked up from internet horror stories, but I thought that classification was pretty convincing. A monster or ghost pretending to be human? Isn’t that even more devious than just attacking outright?
The fake “Minsu” didn’t reveal his true nature right away, even after I denied him. His neat, upright face stayed exactly the same, but if anything, he looked more flustered than I was.
“You said you came looking for Minsu.”
“I did. But you’re not Minsu.”
“……”
“The Minsus I know don’t look like that.”
It was true that I’d run my mouth to buy time so we could escape from the teacher, but the “Minsu” I said I was looking for wasn’t him.
I glanced sideways at Lim Jinsung and Kim Jihoon. Those two already looked like they were under “Minsu’s” spell. When “Minsu” showed a flicker of confusion, they turned on me instead, acting like I was the strange one.
“Hey, what’s your problem with Minsu? Minsu’s trying to help us.”
“Exactly. Who knows this school better than Minsu?”
Oh, I’m sure he knows it well enough. If the rules sheet was right, that wasn’t Minsu. It was the chairman of this school.
While I was still trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with the idiots I’d dragged to safety, only for them to start acting weird the second they ran into the chairman, “Minsu” strode straight up to me.
“Are you not human?”
That face appeared right in front of me without warning, so perfectly symmetrical it didn’t feel human at all. I’m not the one who isn’t human. You are. The words rose all the way to the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t get the chance to spit them out.
“Why does it work on everyone else, but not on you?”
“Minsu” reached a hand toward me. I threw every last bit of reflex I had into dodging it, then bolted out of the restroom.
It bothered me that I was leaving Lim Jinsung and Kim Jihoon behind and running off alone, but they weren’t in any normal state. There was no way they could have escaped with me.
Without looking back once, I sprinted full speed up to the fourth floor. I knew that on the fourth-floor hallway you weren’t supposed to run, and you weren’t even supposed to breathe carelessly, but I didn’t exactly have options.
The rules sheet had said that if I opened the locked rooftop door and jumped down from the building, I could escape the anomaly. Which meant I had to get to the rooftop through the fourth floor before “Minsu” or the teacher caught up with me.
The moment I reached the fourth-floor hallway, I stopped running and switched to the fastest walk I could manage. The hallway, lined with classroom plaques marking each homeroom, was dead silent, as if there were truly nothing there at all.
But I wasn’t a lucky person.
The rules sheet had clearly said that at minimum, the stairs to the rooftop would appear within three seconds, but even after a full minute, I still hadn’t seen a single step leading up.
Human beings are animals that breathe. We have to breathe to stay alive. No matter how strongly the rules sheet emphasized not to, if you’re human, you can’t hold your breath past a certain point.
Like surfacing after staying underwater too long and bursting for air, a sound slipped out of my mouth no matter what I did. If anything, because I’d been holding it in for so long, the breath that escaped came out even louder.
{Who made a noise during study hall.}
{Shut up!}
{Teacher! Someone’s talking outside!}
{There’s some?thing? in the hallway.}
{What? What? What? What? What?}
The instant I exhaled, the old classroom doors and windows rattled all at once. Something clung all over them, shaking them violently, and in an instant the fourth-floor hallway exploded into noise.
{It’s not even break time, so who’s out there?}
Whether that was bad luck or good luck, the uproar didn’t last long. From behind me came the sound of something dragging across the floor, followed by a man’s voice booming out as if he’d swallowed a train whistle.
{Instead of studying like you’re supposed to… class time extended by ■ minutes!}
Even as I kept running without stopping, I reflexively turned my head. Most of the things plastered against the doors and windows vanished the moment they heard the man’s voice. Judging by the several pairs of bloodshot eyes still visible through the gaps in the windows, not all of them had obeyed the thunderous order extending class time.
The eyeballs stuck to the window gaps followed me obsessively, as if they were eagerly waiting to see what would happen next. Or maybe they were watching that “man” chasing behind me.
The teacher I’d met in front of the staff room on the first floor had tentacles for an upper body. The “man” I met on the fourth floor had tentacles for a lower body.
At this point, shouldn’t the place be called Tentacle High School instead of Dowon High School? His upper body was human-shaped, sure, but his features were twisted, and he had four hands, which was enough to make my stomach turn just looking at him.
On top of that, some of his tentacles had blades attached to them. It looked like his attack pattern was to lash those blade-tipped tentacles at anyone far enough away, hook them, and drag them in.
No matter how long I ran, the fourth-floor hallway kept repeating. As if they wanted to watch me collapse and die from exhaustion, the eyes stuck in the window cracks had already multiplied by several more pairs.
How the hell did things end up like this?
Who could’ve guessed that agreeing to film a YouTube video just to get some past exam materials would put my life in danger? The longer I ran, the more my legs started to shake. The “man” chasing me at a constant speed was a monster, so he probably didn’t get tired, but an ordinary person was bound to slow down after running long enough.
The problem was that even after enduring all this, the stairs to the rooftop still hadn’t appeared. By my own sense of it, I’d been running for over ten minutes, and the fourth-floor hallway was still nothing but classroom windows crowded with bloodshot eyes.
“Ugh—ah!”
The “man” didn’t miss the moment I slowed down. A blade-tipped tentacle wrapped around my right calf and yanked. The blade bit into my flesh and blood spilled out. The jeans I was wearing were dyed red in an instant.
Because my leg was injured, my balance gave out and I crashed onto the hallway floor. The “man” dragged me toward himself with the tentacle wrapped around me, shouting at the closed classrooms to get back to studying. His voice was so loud that just hearing it made my skull ring.
{You were trying to skip evening study hall, weren’t you? This little bastard isn’t even wearing a school uniform.}
If I was going to die like this, I should’ve lived even more recklessly.
{A third-year brat and you still haven’t come to your senses!}
“Aaaagh!”
The blade attached to the tentacle crept up toward my neck. Only now did I understand why the rules sheet said that if you ran or made breathing noises in the fourth-floor hallway, your throat would be slit and you’d die.
{Third-years who skip evening study hall deserve to die!}
Isn’t that a little harsh on third-years?
“This is—ugh—student rights abuse! Abuse, I said!”
{What?}
“I’m already a college student!”
{What are you saying?}
“To begin with, our high school didn’t even have evening study hall, so what the hell! Don’t you know mandatory evening study hall got abolished? Isn’t your school way too out of date?”
Wasn’t this supposed to be an age where if a teacher harmed a student, they got reported for child abuse? I twisted my neck away from the tentacle blade and ran my mouth with everything I had. Teacher authority had already hit rock bottom ages ago.
“I’m reporting you to the Office of Education!”
No matter how much of an anomaly this was, Dowon High School was still a school inside this country. And this was Korea, a country where the loudest bastard always wins, and an overwhelming pain in the ass can squeeze out at least one more thing.
As I thrashed around yelling that I was going to report him to the Office of Education, even the tentacle constricting my leg loosened. The “man” looked absolutely furious at my screaming about student rights abuse, but he stopped harming me.
“Bring someone higher up than you!”
It seemed my final line, straight out of an enraged parent making a scene, had an effect on the “man.”
{Student rights¿}
{Abuse? Abuse? Abuse?}
{Mom I want to go home class never ends I don’t want college I don’t want to go}
{Teacher! Teacher! The teacher broke the rules! The teacher broke the rules!}
The eyes stuck to the hallway windows multiplied again at an exponential rate. The tightly shut classroom doors started rattling too, as though someone inside was trying to open them.
The “man” hesitated for a moment, seeming to think something over, then stretched his tentacles toward me again, like he was trying to destroy the evidence. In my injured state, dodging the blade-tipped tentacles was impossible.
This time I’m dead for sure. I squeezed my eyes shut, but I never felt the blade dig into my flesh. Instead I heard classroom doors collapsing and windows shattering.
{Mom I’m not going to school anymore the teacher is bullying me I don’t want college anymore mom please save me}
I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes. Slick, cold things were brushing past my body. The “man” started screaming at the top of his lungs, so loud it felt like my ears were bleeding too.
{Teacher, so please let us grad}
{Class never ends I want to go home how long do we have to self-study}
{Abuse? Abuse? Abuse? Abuse? Abuse?}
The sound of multiple things tearing into and chewing on one thing mixed together with that abnormal speech.
{Can we eat this too?}
{The cafeteria’s too far. We don’t have time to go to the store.}
{Teacher tastes very bad}
At least as far as I remembered, the rules sheet hadn’t said anything about the third-year students escaping their classrooms and eating the “man.”
Which meant I had no clue what the hell I was supposed to do about the third-years noisily asking if they could eat me too. My leg was injured, so I couldn’t run anymore, and unlike the teacher or the “man,” the third-years didn’t seem like the sort I’d be able to talk to.
“I came because you told me to bring someone higher up….”
If my throat had been slit by the blade, it probably would’ve hurt less than being torn apart by a crowd. I was in the middle of regretting that when I heard a familiar voice.
“You seem close with the students.”
“Help me.”
“……”
“I’ll say you’re Minsu. Just save me, older brother.”
The owner of the voice was, of course, “Minsu.”