Had I lost my balance to the something that had seized my forearm and was pulling me?
I hurriedly twisted my hips and threw one foot out wide. THUD. My foot did more than tread on the ground; it pressed weight into the earth as though crushing it. Room to resist the pulling force was created.
But even in this moment the force leading my arm was unyielding. I had to advance a few more steps semi-forcibly.
WHOOSH!
The instant I passed through the arched doorway like that, the air changed entirely. If the smell of the testing site had been cool with something stifling about it, this side felt on the whole mild and refreshing.
"Let...... go!"
Of course I had no leisure yet to concentrate on that scent.
Only at the point of being dragged two or three more steps was I able to bring my lurching upper body fully upright. My resisting force had become almost equal to the force hauling me along.
Skrrt, skrrrt.
My lurching body regained stability. But the pulling force was so strong that my feet dragged across the grassy ground.
The weeds tangled into the ground were crushed and overturned as they struck the toes of my shoes.
In the middle of it, the identity of the binding force I managed to check was something like a black tentacle.
Keeping the strength in my thighs and waist, I put my other hand on the seized arm. It was a relief, at least, that only one arm was caught.
CRRRACK!
The captured hand pulled back on the tentacle wound around me in reverse, while the relatively free hand tore at the part coiled about my forearm.
Doing that much even stopped the dragging completely. Seizing that opening, I somehow unwound the tentacle coiled around my forearm.
'......An electrical cord?'
Only then did I realize the tentacle's identity. It was an electrical cord.
Groaning with the effort, I worked loose the metal skein wrapped in black rubber. Whirl. The cord finally came away from my forearm.
I backed off immediately. It had come loose for now, but there was no telling when that cord might lunge again.
'The arched doorway——'
Behind me, where I had backed away to, there was, as if it were only natural, no arched doorway.
Holding back the sigh trying to burst out, I eyed the cord and my surroundings sidelong.
For now the cord showed no sign of moving any further. I checked its maximum length and widened the distance a little more.
The surrounding scenery I checked in the meantime was plainly of a different kind from the inside of the testing site. Meaning that a far more expanded concept than the atmosphere recalling a cloister garden surrounded me on all sides.
"......Ah, please, no."
Do you know the post-apocalyptic genre? Or failing that, works set in an age where the world has ended and humanity has fallen?
The scene I was looking at was exactly that sort of thing.
An annex left untended for decades or centuries, so that part of its outer wall had collapsed and part had been overrun by moss and vines. Crumbled interior finishing visible beyond the collapsed wall, and weeds grown up thickly through it. Insects made of light flying above that.
Somewhere between the artificial and the natural, where you would not find a human being even if you washed your eyes out and looked.
It was the sort of sorry state I imagined the annex would take if it were left untended for a few decades from the point at which I had been sitting the examination. At least that was the impression I got.
Think it over a hundred times, this was not reality.
'Don't tell me I really have entered the Rear World? Not the artificial one, but the real, actual back side of the world?'
〈Rear World〉. It was a space on the back side of the world where Phantasms dwelled. Clearly connected to the reality where humans lived, and at the same time a separate, dissociated world.
But since it was the back side of the world, this place was directly affected by the front-side world. That was why the annex remained, even if in a slightly altered form.
A world different from reality yet the same, the same yet different. That was the Rear World.
'No, but. Ya-hwi entering the Rear World is something that happens in the spring of his seventeenth year.'
Isn't it going far too far for my entry into the Rear World to be moved up merely because I sat the third examination? The deviation from the original plot that I had wished for was not supposed to be like this, so why on earth!
'This is maddening, seriously.'
Still, grasping the situation comes first.
Keeping my guard on the cord, I turned my head over quickly. What I was mostly thinking about were episodes from the comic.
'What was the Rear World countermeasure that came up in the comic again.'
There were only a few episodes where the Rear World was the main stage. So compared to the other world, not much information had been released. It went about as far as inferring from what the protagonist 〈Baek San〉 went through.
'A rescue team came. For him.'
I remember the plot being that after going through all sorts of things in the Rear World, a rescue team came belatedly.
Good thing you did not die, how did you get into the Rear World, why did you wander around and make yourself hard to find. I think there were lines of that sort too.
'Then is it better for me to hide somewhere suitable around here too?'
Considering that a rescue team came and that there was a line with the nuance of 'why did you wander around and make yourself hard to find,' waiting nearby seemed right.
'And inside a building seems a bit safer than outside one.'
It was a relief that it was not as urgent as the Sudden Dimensional Gate incident. In an already bleak situation, if I had not even had the leisure to think it would have been far harder.
I entered the annex in the direction away from the cord. There was no need even to look for a door. All I had to do was go in through the collapsed wall.
"It's a good thing the season is different from reality. If it had been winter here too it would have been horrific."
At present I was wearing only a relatively thin tracksuit — the winter set. It was because there was a regulation that examinees had to change clothes unconditionally for the sake of a fair examination.
Thanks to that, I was now in a state of having truly nothing. No padded coat to preserve warmth, no drinking water or food, no weapon for self-defense.
Not even the Swiss Army knife I had brought away without thinking while killing the Lizard Man was with me now. The cause was that I had put it in a cabinet along with the clothes I had come in.
It was a truly sad situation.
'When exactly will the rescue team come, I wonder.'
Since I had vanished in the middle of an examination, the Hwadam Army would grasp the situation quickly enough. But would that make a rescue team be assembled quickly too?
'......Just in case, maybe I should secure food and water, no, even a hiding place?'
It would take at least a few hours until a rescue team came, or in the worst case more than a day.
Leaning my body against an interior wall, I supposed a few situations up to the arrival of a rescue team. With that, the minimum things I had to do were naturally secured.
'This is the Rear World. Phantasms are definitely going to be walking around.'
Basically, secure drinking water and food. It is cool autumn weather now, but the temperature is likely to drop at night, so I have to prepare against the cold as well. Just in case, I have to allow for the possibility that no rescue team comes at all, and also.......
'Can this space protect me from Phantasms?'
I looked at the annex of the Rear World.
The annex, closer in appearance to a gymnasium, had its ceiling and walls pierced here and there, so it felt a little precarious. It also felt somewhat exposed.
'Mm. Finding a narrower, more sealed space than this would be saf——'
CRASH!
Then a roar that chilled my spine came driving into my ears.
My body, which had been sitting leaning against the wall, reflexively lifted its rear. So that I could stand and run forward at any moment.
Thud, thud, thud.
Before long a sound of a slightly different grain from the roar of a moment ago came. If the sound heard earlier had been something like an impact, this sound was like something heavy passing over the earth.
'......Speak of the tiger and it appears, is that it?'
Was worrying about Phantasms enough to make a real Phantasm come?
I moved with my body lowered as if crawling along the floor. Reaching the pierced wall took no time at all. My eyes were poked out through the hole.
"Ah."
The being I thus came to see was exactly one. A monster equipped with an elephant's trunk, a bear's torso, and a tiger's tail.
'......It really is hard to live.'
Judging roughly by eye, the bastard's bulk was on the level of two one-ton trucks stuck together. Smaller than a house and overwhelmingly larger than a passenger car.
I pulled my head back for a moment and washed my face with dry hands. Of course, even in that moment I did not stop thinking. Hard to live did not mean I did not want to live, so that was only proper.
'It looks like an individual that didn't appear in the comic or the fan book. What Phantasm is that?'
In the comic 《Codename: Baby》, the setting was that Phantasms are based on tales and legends.
Their beginning might have been the human mouth, but a mystery granted life in the Rear World and thereby made to actually exist — that is precisely a Phantasm.
'Was there a tale featuring a creature shaped like that?'
Also, most of the Phantasms appearing in 《Codename: Baby》 were based on Korean tales.
Whether it was because the author was Korean or because they wanted to work in a patriotic angle, I could not tell. But I do remember that they filled in the plausibility with the setting that, because the Rear World is connected to reality, the Phantasms born differ by country and by region.
For instance, in Korea many appear based on Korean tales, in Japan on Japanese tales, in China on Chinese tales.
'A Korean tale, and a monster with that appearance...... could it be a Bulgasari?'
In any case, applause for my past self, who, in the name of enjoying the comic more, went beyond buying the fan book to taking an interest in all sorts of tales of apparitions, monsters, and strange beings.
Thanks to that I was able to guess the identity of the thing before me, however uncertainly. My eyes narrowed a little.
'If it eats iron, that will make it certain.'
Bulgasari. Or Hwagasari.
It was a monster said to have swelled its bulk by eating scraps of metal until it went so far as to bring a nation to ruin. The origin of the name was Bulgasari, from being impossible to kill, or Hwagasari, from being killable by fire.
Thud, thud, thud.
While I hid in the annex and held my breath, the Phantasm presumed to be a Bulgasari went about poking at the objects nearby.
CRASH! Then its foreleg struck a metal railing near a flowerbed. The railing, torn away in a single stroke, sprawled on the ground, and the Phantasm's trunk gripped it and lifted it up.
CRUNCH.
The broad, flat teeth revealed when its snout opened crumpled the metal that had entered its mouth and then shattered it like glass.
Crrrunch. The metallic sound tormented my ears.
'......With this, it's certain it's a Bulgasari.'
Is it not eating scraps of metal most deliciously? There was no way something like that was not a Bulgasari.
Crunch, crrrunch.
After confirming that the bastard's attention was taken by the steel railing, I quickly surveyed the escape routes nearby.
There was no helping it. A Bulgasari's staple food is iron, and the majority of modern buildings had rebar used in them as a matter of necessity during construction.
In other words, if I were careless there was a chance I would get to watch the bastard demolish the annex in real time. And from inside the annex, at that.
'Better to be careful early than to be negligent and end up unable even to run.'
A human being generally had one life. There was no harm in being thorough.
After checking the Bulgasari's position one last time, I moved to a hole in the exact opposite position.
The inside of the annex was full of weeds grown up to my waist, so there was no need to go around. I only had to pass through the undergrowth.
'The problem is where to take shelter.......'
Maybe because it was a military facility. This place was on the whole an open composition. Meaning there were not many buildings and they were not packed closely together.
Also, as I said earlier, most of the buildings had rebar used in them. Meaning I absolutely had to assume that every building could become the Bulgasari's target.
Therefore, if I meant to take shelter inside a building, I had to go at least as far as somewhere the Bulgasari could not come right away. Naturally, every building in this vicinity was eliminated as a hiding-place candidate.
'Should I not have slept on the bus.'
If I had at least remembered which road the bus took, I would have known which direction the city center was in. A shame.
For now I moved stealthily on the single resolve of getting away from the Bulgasari.
Fortunately the annex blocked the Bulgasari's field of view. It had the drawback for me too that the Bulgasari was hidden by the building and invisible, but since its footsteps were loud that was not so large a problem.
My legs ran carefully along the paved road.
『Save me! At this rate I'll be eaten! I'm going to get eaten!』
Then, from a parking lot near the entrance of a guard post, someone's desperate voice came.
『Where the hell has my damned partner gone! The iron-eater bastard is right nearby!!』
Naturally, the first thought that came to me the moment I heard that shout was exactly one.
'A person? No, there's no way there's a person in this place.'
This was the Rear World. There was no way a human existed. And even if one did, there was a high chance it was the Hwadam Army, come in deliberately to rescue me or to search.
『Is there really nobody!? Please, someone save me! I don't want to be eaten! I don't want to get torn apart by the iron-eater!!』
But would someone belonging to the Hwadam Army carry on that flightily? Surely not.
Therefore that too was probably not human. If I had to pick an identity, it would be a Phantasm equipped with enough intelligence to use language.
'......What do I do?'
It was not that I had no leisure at all to save it. The Bulgasari was still back there.
But was it all right to approach an unknown Phantasm at will? What about the chance that that Phantasm attacked me? The chance that even that call was a trap?
『Waaaah, a life that's already lost its partner. And now it loses its very life too! And in the sorry state of being torn apart and eaten by an iron-eater!!』
What settled the direction of my hesitating steps was a single thought that occurred right after.
It is in a parking lot. It can be torn apart and eaten by an iron-eater — probably referring to the Bulgasari. It is unable to move on its own. In that case, what is that Phantasm's identity?
'......A vehicle?'
My legs swerved toward the parking lot.
『If I was going to die, I wanted to die crashing into one of those box trucks...... waaah, my flower of a bike life.......』
"A bike?"
『......Hm?』
The prediction landed exactly. The other party was a Phantasm, and it took the form of a two-wheeled vehicle. In other words, it was an object-type Phantasm.
『One of my kind......? No, a human? Ah, no? One of my kind?』
"I'm in a hurry so I'll ask quickly. Do you have any intention of cooperating?"
Running on two legs is slower than running with a bike. At a point where I had zero capacity to resist a Bulgasari, opening the distance even a little faster was more helpful to my survival.
『Cooperating...... yeah, yeah! I do! Absolutely I do!』
"Can you carry me? I mean, you do work, right?"
『Of course!! I can't move on my own without someone to drive me, but if you get on and drive I can go as far as you like!』
On top of that the other party had the intention to cooperate, and cooperation between us would benefit us both. This was worth joining hands over.
I put my body on the bike immediately.
"This is my first time on a bike......!"
A means of transport I had never once ridden, had never even had occasion to ride.
But the moment I got onto the bike, my hand moved on its own and found the bike's start button.
Kchik.
The engine turned over and a pleasant vibration supported my body. My rear slid as far back on the seat as it would go and my legs found the angle that was most comfortable. My hands and waist too settled at an angle with less strain.
『Are you ready for me to put on speed? Ready enough that you wouldn't notice if your head got cut off?』
"......I'm ready, but my head getting cut off would be a bit of a problem!"
『Ahaha! Then let's go, quickly! Before the iron-eater bastard comes, hurry!』
I kicked the kickstand away with my heel and pulled the throttle. Right after, the bike shot forward like a fired bullet.
VROOOOOM!!
"Wait, this sound——!?"
『Let's gooooo!!!!!!』
And along with it, an enormous exhaust note rang thunderously through the entire military facility.
Grrhng?
Loudly enough, in fact, to touch the mood of a certain someone who had been demolishing a building and pulling out rebar to eat.