I don’t remember how I ended up all the way in the chairman’s office in the annex. I remember “Minsu” yanking me right out of the middle of those third-years like he was pulling up a radish, but after that I blacked out for a while from blood loss and the shock.
The moment I forced my eyelids, heavy as stones, back open, “Minsu” was right in front of my face. For a completely different reason than when I’d faced the teacher or the “man,” my heart dropped straight to my feet.
The only reason I didn’t scream and shove his face away was that I had no strength left. The leg that had been cut by the blade-tipped tentacle was throbbing, and I was so dizzy from blood loss I could barely think.
The fact that none of this was a dream, that it was all real, and that I was still inside Dowon High School, was horrifying enough. But more shocking than all the pain and despair was “Minsu’s” suspiciously beautiful face.
The tentacles attached to the upper or lower body had felt monstrous enough, but an exterior that was flawless, without a single asymmetry, was just as inhuman. If plastic surgeons saw him, they’d probably cry with emotion.
“Minsu” was no longer wearing a school uniform. He had changed into regular clothes. He hadn’t exactly looked like a student even in the uniform, but dressed like this, it was impossible to guess his age.
He was clearly wearing nothing more than an ordinary black shirt and black pants, yet there was still something strange about him. It was different from the fear I’d felt facing the teacher or the “man.” More like a sense of dissonance.
It was like how a completely distorted image doesn’t really make you think much, but an image warped into something almost like reality drops you straight into the uncanny valley.
“You’re awake?”
“Where am I?”
“The chairman’s office. In the annex.”
“……”
“You don’t need to be afraid just because you’re in the annex. The rules sheet isn’t completely right.”
In “Minsu’s” hand was the rules sheet, its corners crumpled to hell.
Seeing the chairman himself, the one the seventh section warned about in huge letters, holding the rules sheet in his own hand made me start doubting whether following it was really the right thing to do. Who the hell even makes something like that in the first place?
To begin with, I’d had my doubts from the point where it said there was no option but to run for your life if you ran into the teacher. But the rules sheet was the only thing that had any escape method written on it, so I’d followed it blindly.
I tore my gaze away from the rules sheet and looked around. The chairman’s office was so wide and comfortable it was hard to believe it was inside an abandoned school. The sofa I’d been lying on was soft, and the wooden furniture gave the place a clean, polished feel.
“I treated it, but with your leg injured like that, you won’t be able to move around right away.”
“You’re the chairman, aren’t you?”
“You said Minsu.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you say you’d call me Minsu if I saved you? I saved you.”
“Is that really what matters right now?”
“Giving something a name is always important.”
The leg that had been deeply slashed by the blade had in fact been given emergency treatment, just like he said. There was no sign that anyone else had been here, so “Minsu” must have treated me himself.
It didn’t seem like he was going to hurt me immediately. If he’d wanted to kill me or eat me, he would’ve done it already.
“Minsu” sat on the armrest of the sofa and watched me. He looked like he was enjoying the sight of me forcing my half-dead body upright and frantically scanning the chairman’s office.
“You’re human, right?”
“Me? Or you?”
“You.”
“Obviously I’m human. What are you?”
“That’s hard to answer.”
“……”
“It’s been a really long time since I talked to a human being, even if you are a little injured.”
His hand cupped my cheek. The sudden contact caught me off guard, but it wasn’t easy to brush away that cold body temperature. As if he wanted to hold my gaze on him, “Minsu” kept my head turned in place.
“How are you able to communicate with the other entities? Do you come from a line of shamans?”
“My parents are devout Christians.”
Like a five-year-old who’d gotten hold of a fascinating new toy, he fiddled with my face for a long while. The feeling of it was so strange I wanted to pull his hand away, but my body refused to cooperate.
“You got rid of one of the teacher entities.”
“One of the teacher entities?”
“The thing you saw on the fourth floor. It vanished completely. It didn’t just die. It ceased to exist, to the point that it can’t even be restored.”
“……”
“So I thought maybe, despite appearances, you weren’t human, or maybe you were some kind of controller… but you’re neither. You can talk to the entities, and even being around me doesn’t make you lose your mind.”
He kept throwing one-sided questions at me, but there was nothing I could answer. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t understand a single thing he was saying.
“As it happens, we’re short a teacher right now, so would you happen to be interested in a teaching position?”
If I say yes to that here, I’m fucked.
There was only one thing I understood for certain. Even if “Minsu” had saved me and treated my wounds, as long as he was the chairman of Dowon High School, he wasn’t something that would actually help me.
“Would you want to teach students who rip teachers apart and eat them?”
Even at my cold rejection, “Minsu” smiled brightly, as if my answer had been exactly the right one.
***
After entering Dowon High School, I ended up locked in the chairman’s office for about three days.
I don’t know exactly how many days passed. My phone was still dead, and I wasn’t wearing a watch. The body cam Kim Jihoon had given me was already broken too, though I had no idea when it had gotten smashed. I only guessed it had been around three days because I’d repeated the cycle of falling asleep and waking up about three times.
“So when exactly do I get out of here?”
“When we find a new teacher.”
“And when is that?”
“If you accept the teaching position, then right now.”
“If I become a teacher, I won’t be able to leave, will I?”
I raised my middle finger at “Minsu.”
According to him, since the teacher entity on the fourth floor of the main building had vanished, trying to enter the fourth-floor hallway right now was suicide. Apparently the students were out in the hallway now, so I’d get torn apart before I could even find the stairs to the rooftop.
To shove those students back into the classrooms, they needed a teacher. Which was why “Minsu,” as the chairman, kept using every spare moment to try to recruit me into becoming one.
Every now and then I almost deluded myself into thinking that being a high school teacher wouldn’t be a bad career path for someone from the philosophy department, but thankfully I still hadn’t gone completely insane yet. I still didn’t want to spend my life teaching at this lunatic school.
“Then how about principal instead of teacher?”
“Do you think I’d do it?”
“If you don’t want to be principal, then vice principal?”
“Do you think I’d do that?”
One good thing, if there was one, was that you didn’t get hungry inside the anomaly. I could sleep from sheer mental exhaustion, but even if I stayed awake for two nights straight, I didn’t get dizzy or start nodding off the way I would outside the anomaly.
If I’d had to deal with hunger or thirst in here too, my situation would’ve gotten a lot worse. Since this was still technically a school, there had to be a cafeteria and a store, but considering it was inside an anomaly, the odds of them selling anything normal felt pretty slim.
Would students who tore apart and ate teachers the second they stepped into the hallway really be eating normal school lunches?
The rules sheet didn’t mention the cafeteria or the store even once, which made them seem even more dangerous. The really dangerous places are the ones where everyone who goes there dies, so nobody ever lives to tell you what’s inside.
I mean, that’s what survivor bias is, right? If the ones who wrote the rules sheet were human, then there probably weren’t many people who’d gone through the anomaly and made it out alive. So if a place inside the school wasn’t mentioned in the rules sheet at all, then it was one extreme or the other. Either it was safe enough that nobody needed to write it down, or everyone died there and nobody knew what was inside.
By the time I got that far, I wanted out of this deranged high school as fast as possible.
“You can get to the rooftop through the annex too.”
“Yes.”
“Then just let me go already. I’ll go up to the rooftop and jump.”
“Your leg isn’t healed yet.”
“If I can run, it’s healed enough. It’d be faster to escape first and go to the hospital after.”
There were exactly two reasons “Minsu” had locked me in the chairman’s office. First, because outside had become dangerous after the teacher entity on the fourth floor of the main building vanished. Second, because my leg was injured.
Even with the entire school going completely insane, “Minsu” alone was excessively kind to me. When I’d asked, just in case, whether the classmates who came in with me were alive or dead, he’d told me he’d sent Kim Jihoon and Lim Jinsung outside the school.
I didn’t know whether “outside the school” meant outside the anomaly or literally just outside the school gate… but either way, “Minsu” answered most of my questions.
“Be honest. You’re just keeping me here because you’ve been alone this whole time and you’re bored.”
“……”
“There’s no other explanation. You let the others go, but not me? That makes no sense.”
Thanks to the fact that “Minsu” hadn’t harmed me once in those three days, my guard had gradually started to come down. At first I’d felt awkward even asking him things, but by now I could throw out questions like that without hesitation.
“Were you just a human before you became the chairman?”
“Minsu” was usually kind enough to answer most of what I asked, but when it came to what had happened to this school or what he actually was, he stuck to the same response every time: silence and a smile.
Still, after three days inside an anomaly, you start picking things up. By now I could roughly read that smile of his as a yes.
“If you’re trapped here too, then just leave with me.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“If I leave, then the other things in this school will leave with me.”
“The fact that you’re saying something like that means you don’t really like being here either.”
“……”
“Don’t you want out? No matter how nice the chairman’s office is, it’s boring as hell.”
I decided to try using “Minsu” to get out faster.
“Even if you can’t leave completely, you could at least step out and get some fresh air, right? Am I wrong?”