HONNNK—!
A horn that rattled my head and headlights that blotted out my entire field of vision spread out before me.
"Hoo."
The chill of early winter made white breath.
The murmuring around me and the worried voice of the person hurriedly getting out of the driver's seat registered belatedly.
"Hey, are you all right? Uh......, you're b-bleeding?"
Standing in the middle of a four-lane, two-way road, I turned my gaze to the cars that cursed roughly and drove past.
Having just come out of the Other Side, the senses I had raised would not settle.
"I'm fine."
"Huh? Uh, well. That...... I think you need to go to a hospital......."
"It's nothing much."
"You weren't...... hit by a car, were you?"
"My apologies."
I waved him off, left the road, and stepped up onto the sidewalk.
The driver, startled on my account, tried several times to follow me, then, at the horns blaring behind him, pressed a business card into my hand and hurried off.
With blood streaming down my forehead, his alarm was fair enough.
The destabilized Other Side had apparently judged for itself that its life span was over, and it mass-produced Other Side monsters.
Normally the order of things was for those Other Side monsters to be spat out into reality and make a mess, but I could not leave that alone.
And I had to deal with them anyway in order to get out.
Fighting the monsters that rampaged as I made my way out cost me an arm at the end, but I reattached it before coming out.
Apart from my shoulder blade being a little stiff because of it, it was an unremarkable return to reality.
Holding on to the sensation of the split flesh slowly healing, I scanned my surroundings.
"And where is this?"
Because the connection to reality had been cut, I could not come back out into Room 404 at Number 11, where I had entered.
There was no time to be picky about location when I was about to be eaten and deleted along with it, so I had squeezed out through whatever gap I could.
"Not a completely wrong place, at least."
I turned on my phone and roughly checked the map; it was three or four blocks from the hotel.
What I needed to find out now was whether the protagonist had appeared at the hotel at Number 11.
Tilting my head, I looked up at the moon shaved down past half and twisted the corner of my mouth.
The plan had failed, the easiest road now had to be taken the long way around, the method for fixing a body whose side effects only worsened was still distant, and the weather was cold and I was barefoot of all things.
"What a pitiful state, truly."
First I had better go to the Ability Office.
***
There was no harvest.
The Ability Office's lights were out and the mood of the street was quiet.
It was odd that it was quieter than usual, but it was an unremarkable evening scene.
"Haha......."
Leaning against the windowsill of the darkened office, I sighed and rubbed my dry face.
"It isn't flowing entirely as the original work did."
The protagonist escaping intact had in fact ruined one of the big pictures in my plan. And in that situation, if the protagonist had dropped into the hotel along with me, that would have been good rather than bad.
Yet I ended up feeling a little relieved.
At the hope that my future could change.
"Relief, what relief. Get a grip."
With a time limit on finding a protagonist who had fled who knows where and removing him before he grew, getting drunk on useless sentiment was not on.
Such was the fate of one who had never considered a plan like gently coaxing the protagonist into an ally.
"Even if I'd left him alone, he wouldn't have looked on me favorably."
The protagonist and I were a bad match anyway.
He is not my natural predator for nothing.
When a protagonist and a villain become friends side by side and laugh together, the one who ends up with a knife in his back is always the villain.
"Even as a military cadet, his information access is quite......."
Recalling the protagonist's family and his backing, I shook my head.
Killing him is the right answer after all.
Shaking off the stray thoughts, I scanned the empty office.
"These guys are the problem first."
The Ability Office.
They were bastards I had paid a fair amount of attention to in the original work. One of my so-called favorites was among them. Seen from the side they were a delightful bunch, so life with them was bound to get entertaining.
Perhaps I might even get help curing the experiment's side effects.
Being here was also advantageous for approaching the Styx Company, which held a fairly vast store of material, and if I meant to settle and live in the Black Zone, using everything usable was the right call.
"But the wall is faaar too solid."
Even trying not to read the room, I could not help it. It showed far too plainly.
A delightful welcome party, an entrance test, laughs all around.
What use was any of it.
"When they don't allow me a single bit of internal access. Doting on me, my foot."
All that time I had merely played the oblivious bastard and laughed along. I had to wait for the protagonist, and above all, if things went wrong, I had to prevent them from siding with him.
With the Captain, who had yet to come, possibly digging into my background, I had meant to cut my losses and leave once I dealt with the protagonist.
"It's ruined."
As long as there was no way to know where the target had bolted, I had to keep staying with them and put up a barricade.
Together with bastards who could turn enemy at any time.
"Ah, I don't like this."
Being dragged around did not suit my constitution.
"Should I just throw them into the Other Side?"
Just as I was considering it seriously.
From a little way off came a "Wagh!"
Precisely, from between the desks deep inside the darkened office.
"Seo Mok?"
"Ah, tch."
Seo Mok, who had apparently fallen off a chair, stood up dusting off his backside and raked his eyes over me with his brow furrowed.
"Did you hear that, by chance?"
"What. The part about not liking someone and wanting to throw them into the Other Side?"
"Ah......."
"Who? Ah, is it that little shit?"
Seo Mok pointed at Ichi, beaming broadly over at the café across from the office.
It was fortunate he had not heard the earlier muttering, but.......
"Why doesn't it occur to you that it might be you?"
"Ha? Your character, seriously......."
"As if that's news."
Leaving the grumbling Seo Mok behind, I casually turned on the office lights.
The instant I squinted at the harsh light, Seo Mok came at me with a grim expression.
"The state of you......."
Seo Mok raked his eyes over my appearance, the bloodstains not yet wiped away, and the nagging came next.
"It was absurd enough when you bolted out of here without warning, but is your career ambition to die somewhere out on the road?"
"Haha......, hardly."
"Why did I even make an alibi for a bastard like this."
Seo Mok raked hard at his shaggy hair, instinctively went to light a cigarette, stopped, and pressed me.
"So. What is all that?"
"Mm......."
"Don't want to talk?"
"Because it's nothing much."
I shrugged and let myself be buried in Seo Mok's nagging.
I could hardly say that this place is inside a boys' comic, that I had been possessed into the villain, and that the protagonist appeared so we had a little meeting.
"Oh? Was young Do Hae here as well?"
Ichi, coming in through the office door belatedly, struck the back of the head of Seo Mok, who had finally lit his cigarette.
"No smoking in front of a patient."
Ignoring Seo Mok's protest that he had not managed a single drag, Ichi smiled and handed me a drink. It was a fruit smoothie, not a beverage to enjoy in this weather.
"I heard you were ill, and you do not look particularly better even now?"
"Me?"
"The sight of Mister Seo Mok lying awake with worry because young Do Hae was ill is still vivid......."
"Shut up and drink your damn coffee."
Seo Mok poured hot coffee into Ichi's mouth and, with a look of relief, took the smoothie from me.
"And this is mine."
"Ho-ho."
"A bastard who won't tell me anything properly and only grumbles can go buy his own."
Ah. He heard from that far back?
I curved my eyes at Seo Mok, who spoke as though the wall were being put up by me and not by them.
Mutual, is that it?
"By the way, you."
Seo Mok, who had not so much as touched the smoothie he took, picked up the butt that had fallen on the floor and spoke casually.
"Is there no chance the Room 404 Other Side shows up again?"
"What?"
"I'm asking if that's not why you ended up in that state."
"Uh......."
"If you're done using it, dispose of it properly. Don't leave it to swallow some innocent person."
I took a hit.
I had thought I hid it perfectly, going as far as bringing back the missing people for the entrance test, but his instincts alone are terrifying.
Thinking back now, his moving his lodging to Room 402 had been strange as well.
I looked at the sullen-faced Seo Mok and tilted my head.
He seems to have caught on to more than I expected, so why is he not showing it?
It looks like reason enough to grab me by the collar right now and ask what kind of little shit I am.
"You knew?"
At my stupid words, Seo Mok smirked and answered.
"Duuuumbass."
Seo Mok rose triumphantly with a victor's expression, poured the smoothie into Ichi, who was cooling his mouth and complaining that it was hot, and strolled off.
The abandoned Ichi cursed Seo Mok, and my tension released all at once and I laughed hollowly.
I had not found out a single thing about the Ability Office family, and yet I was the one being shaken down.
Just how far had they all intended to leave me alone, as much as Sophia's grandly promised introduction.
I thought I had them thoroughly figured out from the original work, but I had overlooked that they were bigger madmen than I expected.
"Did you know too, Ichi?"
"Not only I."
Ichi shrugged, slurped at the smoothie he had not spilled even in all that, and plopped down on the nearest chair.
"There is the Styx cruise ship incident. Mister Seo Mok may be as he is, but he writes good reports."
"What did he write?"
"Something to the effect that it was refreshing to see the cruise ship's administrator get what it deserved?"
This is a situation where I am suspected of having an ability as well, isn't it?
The Captain's outing running long looked to be in the same vein. If I were merely a former laboratory employee who buried the Laboratory Director and hijacked a commission, he would have returned already.
"Ah, and the entrance test being an Other Side......."
It was to expose my ability.
I stared hollowly at Ichi, who had curved his eyes and was noisily sucking at a straw with nothing left in it.
A silent yes.
"You people really......."
"Ah! To add, since you seem to have misunderstood."
"Misunderstood?"
"We have no interest in what ability young Do Hae has. The entrance test Sophia led was, that is to say......."
Ichi found and pulled several documents from his own desk and continued.
"It was a test of whether or not young Do Hae kills people easily."
"What?"
"You killed the Laboratory Director, did you not?"
The material Ichi handed over was a simply organized report.
Precisely, the autopsy report for the director of a secret research facility under the government.
"Death presumed to be from excessive bleeding and necrosis occurring throughout the body, though there is no way to explain the sudden increase in internal water volume, blah blah......, cause of death unknown."
The hand holding the document began to tremble.
I forced the corner of my mouth up.
So they knew everything, how I came to this place, why I came, even what lies I told―
'No, not that far.'
This is them sounding me out with limited information. It is the question of what kind of little shit I am.
I decided to be shameless.
"Good that he's dead. He deserved it."
"Indeed. When Mister Seo Mok said he would fetch that human on the Styx Company's commission, I tried to stop him and go myself, but things got tangled."
"If you had, would I have died there?"
"Need you even ask?"
"Haha......."
Ichi's sharp eyes turn toward me.
That is exactly why I do not know what to do about the Ability Office.
I am the one putting up a wall? Who is putting up walls here. These shameless bastards.
"Now! That is not the main point. Young Do Hae, do something with me."
I hope that is not an invitation to kill someone together.