Ch.167167 – Floor 3.5 2

# 167 – Floor 3.5 # 2

The appearance of the woman who saved me was utterly creepy.

She wore a mask with enormous eyes painted on it and held a bloody butcher knife that was dripping with blood.

This woman started to say something but then closed her mouth.

“You…”

I wondered what she meant while simultaneously feeling a chill.

I need to get out of here quickly.

“I’ll be going now. Thank you for saving me.”

Grab-!

But this woman grabbed me by the collar and wouldn’t let me go.

“…let go.”

“What! What! Stop this!”

“Let go! Stay here! Something smells of blood! Something hard!”

The woman began frantically searching through my pockets.

“Stop it! I’ll hit you too!”

“I can hear the sound of blood! Don’t try to hide it! I can hear the blood!”

What sound is she talking about?

She was completely insane.

While I was feeling dizzy, not knowing what she wanted from me, something thick fell from my pocket onto the floor with a thud.

It was a nameplate. What? Why do I have this?

“There it is! It’s there! You’re lucky! So lucky!”

The woman quickly picked up the nameplate.

Then she shouted at me.

“This is mine!”

Grab-!

The woman reached out with her cold hand toward my neck and squeezed my windpipe.

“Gaaack!”

“Die! Hahahahaha!”

Is this a woman’s strength? Is this even human strength?

I’m really going to die.

Just as I thought that, something lunged at the woman.

“Yeongwon!”

Thud-!

The woman fell over as if hit by a car.

“Ouch!”

When I came to my senses, Dahui was pinning the woman down.

Dahui held the nameplate in her hand and repeatedly struck the woman’s head.

Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-!

It happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to stop her.

After being hit multiple times, the woman writhed like a stepped-on worm before going limp.

Crack-. The wooden mask she was wearing split in half, revealing her face.

I thought she was a middle-aged shaman, but now I could see she was a young woman.

About the same age as Ms. Hong Miri.

She’s dead.

“Yeongwon, are you okay?”

Dahui asked me with blood splattered all over her face.

I was glad to see Dahui, but at the same time, I couldn’t adjust to the sudden turn of events.

“I’m fine, but…”

Drip, drip drip-.

Blood dripped from the nameplate in Dahui’s hand.

The red blood seeped into the engraved letters, making them glow red.

“Pastor Cheon Aesu”

The red letters looked particularly ominous and eerie.

The drops of blood flowing down Dahui’s pale face were terrifying too.

“I’m fine.”

I tried to calm my racing heart.

If Dahui hadn’t helped me, I would have died.

I can’t afford to overthink things. I need to find Yang Juhui.

Yang Juhui must be lingering somewhere around here.

“Have you tried talking to Juhui?”

Dahui had a trait called “Whisper.” It meant she could speak to others telepathically, even if they were far away.

Wiping the blood from her face with her sleeve, Dahui said:

“I tried, but it doesn’t seem to be working. She must be on a different floor.”

Let’s go to the basement and get the talisman first.

With that thought, we headed to the basement.

When we got there, Gu Hyena was trembling violently.

“Hey, Hyena. Why are you so scared?”

“…There are so many shamans on the first floor. The shamans are trying to catch me!”

Gu Hyena said she had been attacked by shamans who were targeting her.

I could understand her feelings well, having just been attacked by that woman who went crazy after seeing the nameplate.

Even that scary high school ghost girl was being treated like a Pokémon that needed to be caught now that there were many crazy shamans around.

Poor thing.

“I’ll take the talisman. Don’t go up to the first floor, just hide here in the basement.”

“Okay. You guys be careful too. There are so many people on the first floor. The school itself seems to have gotten bigger. The width of the first floor is strange. Unknown spaces have appeared. People are killing each other.”

“Unknown spaces have appeared?”

“Like a maze.”

Gu Hyena said that this nightmare corridor had been changing recently.

She said there were paths where there should be walls, and strange classrooms had appeared.

She also said that unfamiliar humans and ghosts were wandering around everywhere.

Everything’s a mess since we opened the third floor.

“Alright Dahui, let’s go up.”

I went up to the first floor with Dahui.

Finding the first floor talisman wasn’t too difficult.

Because Dahui had a paper crane.

“I’ll fly the paper crane. Whoo-.”

The paper crane, carried by the wind, floated up and flew around the first floor corridor.

The problem was, as Hyena had said, there were many unfamiliar people on the first floor corridor.

“Yeongbok, is there nothing in that faculty office?”

“Nothing. Nothing. It’s a bust. Someone already cleaned it out.”

“Ah, shit, we’re screwed.”

It was a group of men holding broken chair legs like clubs.

There were three of them.

Judging by their rough language, they didn’t seem like friendly people.

“Should we go upstairs?”

“Are you crazy? We’ll all go insane if we go there.”

“I saw a shaman woman with a bell wandering around earlier. Let’s kill her and take everything.”

“Is she pretty?”

“You idiot, is that important in this situation? She was wearing a mask so I couldn’t see her face. But she seemed like a young woman. She looked inexperienced.”

“Hehehe, we’re going to kill her anyway so she won’t remember, should we just do her? Let’s see her face first.”

They looked like robbers or thieves at first glance.

If we were discovered by these people…

It wouldn’t be strange if they went crazy like the shaman who lost her mind after seeing the nameplate.

Tip-toe, tip-toe-.

We moved through the corridor with extreme caution.

It was fortunate that I could see well in the darkness without any light thanks to my “Owl Eyes.”

# # #

The first floor talisman was in the women’s restroom.

When we acquired it, a loud rumble- shook the school as if it would collapse.

“Where is Yang Juhui?”

I wanted to get out of this strange corridor quickly.

With so many people and evil spirits wandering the corridor, it had become like a dungeon in a game.

People were actually killing others and stealing their possessions as if they were farming a dungeon.

“Hey, Yeongbok, look at this woman. She has a talisman in her pocket.”

“Is it an escape talisman?”

“No, just some useless talisman. Better than nothing though. Let’s strip her completely. There might be more. But… who killed this woman?”

As we were moving around trying to get to the second floor, we saw those men from earlier stripping the body of the shaman we had killed.

It was an act without any respect for the dead.

‘Of all places, they’re blocking the stairs to the second floor.’

This place wasn’t reality.

A nightmare without law or morality.

Everyone seemed to have no qualms about killing others and stealing their possessions.

In fact, we were no different.

Even though I almost died, we had taken down a shaman and stolen her butcher knife.

The bell that Dahui was holding was the same.

Suddenly, I remembered Wang Jahyeon’s story about how they had been guarding this corridor.

He also said they were the “mild” ones.

If that story was true?

It made me think deeply in many ways.

“Hey, who’s there?”

Just then, someone shined a flashlight at us.

Damn, I must have been watching the men for too long.

‘Dangerous. We’ve been spotted.’

I didn’t know what those men would do to us.

And I didn’t know what Dahui would do to them, so I made a decision.

“Dahui, when I give the signal, run straight up to the second floor. Now! Now!”

“Okay!”

Patter-patter-patter-.

Dahui started running to the second floor.

The bell in Dahui’s hand jingled as she ran.

Soon the men shouted.

“That’s a bell sound! A shaman’s bell! Catch her! Catch that girl!”

“Get her!”

“Don’t let her escape!”

“F-fuck off! I’ll kill whoever comes at me first!”

I shouted like an angry lion.

I didn’t forget to swing the butcher knife around.

The men flinched at the sharpness of the knife.

But soon they burst into laughter.

“Hey, little girl. That butcher knife is a blunt knife. It’s for catching ghosts, not humans.”

“Getting hit with that will just give you a bruise.”

Really?

I didn’t know.

The important thing was that Dahui had already run up to the second floor.

I had stalled enough time, so I just needed to go to the second floor too.

Unfortunately, the men were blocking the stairs to the second floor.

“Come here.”

“Are you a student from Yeongji High? I heard Yeongji High students have been involved in this for a long time.”

“Come here. Uncle will help you and that other girl get out of this school.”

The men chuckled.

Their promise to help us get out surely meant they would kill us.

Do I look like a fool?

What should I do?

While I was contemplating-.

Kyaaaaaaak-!

A piercing scream rang out.

Soon, the high school ghost girl Gu Hyena, who appeared from somewhere, pounced on the men.

“Ahhh!”

“What is this! Yeongbok! Help me! Help!”

“Eek!”

Gu Hyena, who was supposed to be hiding in the basement, why is she here? Did she come to save me?

I never thought I’d be touched by a ghost.

“Hyena, thank you!”

I seized the opportunity and ran toward the second floor with all my might.

When the men were talking, they seemed afraid of the second floor, and that must have been true because they didn’t readily follow me up the stairs.

“Damn! We lost her!”

“Shit!”

“Idiots!”

I hurled insults at the men and fully entered the second floor.

Actually, it was too early to breathe a sigh of relief. In some ways, the second floor was more treacherous than the first.

“There will be evil spirits on the second floor.”

Looking at Dahui, who didn’t hide her concern, I fell into thought for a moment.

We had two talismans.

That was enough for Dahui and me to escape.

“I think Juhui is on the third floor. I’ve been thinking about why she might be lingering, and this is what I came up with.”

Those who enter the third floor are burdened with a “quirk.”

That day, Yang Juhui and Jeong Sojin were definitely on the verge of reaching the third floor.

But unlike Jeong Sojin who died for some reason, Yang Juhui must have entered the third floor.

“When you enter the third floor, you accumulate one quirk.”

Yang Juhui with one quirk.

For Yang Juhui without a talisman, there was no way to escape except through “death.” But for Yang Juhui who already had one quirk, death foretold a terrible transformation like Kwon Suho.

So Yang Juhui chose to remain on the third floor rather than die, right? Even though I don’t know exactly what that method is, this was the best guess I could make.

“Let’s chase after them, guys!”

“To get out of here, you either die or get a talisman!”

“Let’s go! Go!”

Just then, I heard the men rallying on the first floor.

Are they planning to come up to the second floor?

Flustered, I thought we should quickly break through the second floor and go to the third floor.

“Tick-tock, tick-tock-.”

The problem is that the Rhythm Ghost is waiting for me on the way to the third floor.

“Let’s go up! Let’s catch those kids and take everything!”

“Yeongwon, are you here? Teacher knows your smell. You’re here, aren’t you? Yeongwon, shall we have a counseling session with teacher?”

Murderous men behind me and the Rhythm Ghost in front.

It was truly a dilemma, and as I was deeply contemplating what to do, Dahui’s chest suddenly began to swell.

Bulge-bulge-.

“Whoa, what the hell! Dahui, what’s that!”

“I don’t know! My chest is growing! What is this!”

Bulge-bulge-.

I’m not lying, Dahui’s chest was swelling like a balloon.

A high school girl’s growth spurt? No, it was far beyond that level.

As I was bewildered looking at Dahui’s school uniform vest that was about to burst-.

Pop-!

Something popped out from inside Dahui’s school uniform vest.

—Boom-boom-pow-.

“Th-this sound?”

Giganoto!

So Giganoto was with Dahui!

Soon, Giganoto, running quickly on four legs, lunged at the Rhythm Ghost!