NOVEL WEB Chapter 83
“It was too late by the time I sensed something snatching at me in the darkness.”
I had intended to sacrifice the Hunter who was supporting me instead, but in an instant, my body felt like a ghost, passing right through the Hunter and being sucked into the darkness.
All I could do while being dragged to ‘somewhere’ was to store a bit of white phosphorus inside my suit.
If something popped out the moment I was pulled in, I’d ignite it with the phosphorus.
After being jostled around and hitting what could have been a wall or the floor a few times, I finally realized I had arrived at ‘somewhere’.
The reason I insist on calling it ‘somewhere’ is that this place had no name. If I had to name it, I could call it a rift.
After everything was said and done, the analysis team at Heros Company referred to it as a rift drift caused by a monster.
But more than anything, it was dark. The complete absence of any light source felt like a nightmare for someone with nyctophobia.
“This isn’t my story… but…”
I was used to the dark. Although this level of pitch black was a bit unfamiliar, I didn’t particularly feel scared.
Instead, it almost felt comforting. I couldn’t tell if that was the nature of Cat Ain or my own nature.
Since lying around wouldn’t get me anywhere, I steadied myself and stood up from the floor.
Just as I was about to take out the white phosphorus I had neatly stored inside my suit, something bumped me hard and flattened me.
In the blink of an eye, I couldn’t even make a sound before being crushed by an unknown ‘entity’. Yet soon after, I sensed a strangely familiar smell.
It was Minho’s scent. So, the one on top of me was… Minho. It seemed he was dragged along too.
Since I didn’t smell Katyann at all, that meant she hadn’t been pulled here. Ha, this is how it really turns out.
Suddenly, something touched my chest, so I threw a punch at Minho, the one I suspected the most. I let out a low growl to confirm if it was really him.
“…What are you touching?”
“Blanca? Why are you here… No, more importantly, where the heck is this?! What did you just touch?!”
It was definitely Minho. I wasn’t sure if he was clutching his side, but hearing him emit a small groan made it clear.
Since it was pitch dark and I was touching something, there was a chance of misunderstanding. I’d let it slide just this once.
“You don’t have to know. And don’t ask me. I was pulled in just like you.”
Understanding how awkward it would be if he told me what he touched, I crushed the white phosphorus I had tightly held in my hand.
Then, I dragged it along the ground.
White phosphorus, which ignites on its own if left alone for a bit, caught fire with the little friction and illuminated the surroundings.
And what became visible was-
“This looks… like a pigpen. Wait a second, Blanca? Blanca?! Where did you go! Can you hear me?!”
I had awakened in the isolation room for experiment subjects.
There was no trace of the white phosphorus I’d scraped along the floor. The black slime suit covering my body was gone as well.
All I could see was a bizarrely emaciated arm and Minho, who was desperately searching for me.
The mysterious green glow from the light beyond the window. The clean, white corridor unlike the isolation room. The poorly maintained metal cages that could prick or cut if you got caught, and also…
Ain. Excrement. Blood. Screams. Odors.
All the details I recalled were rendered painfully vivid.
My breath trembled. If Minho hadn’t been there, I might have thought everything I’d experienced so far was just a dream.
“So… this is the way it is…?”
I shook off the unpleasant thoughts with a forced laugh. My abilities— I couldn’t use them. Ha, I didn’t even have the slime suit. The magical response was faint.
My body had returned to that era.
I was truly in a corner.
…Alright, fine. Somehow I felt the story writer wasn’t going to leave me alone. So this is how it turns out.
“Minho, can you tear through those metal bars?”
If this place was the embodiment of my greatest fears, then I’d break it apart spectacularly.
“Blanca…? Is that you? You seem a bit… smaller…”
“So what? A girl is trapped in a cage, and you’re just going to let it be? Whether I’m Blanca or not, if I dream of being a Hero, shouldn’t I save at least one girl?”
“It is you, Blanca. Hold on a sec. My abilities won’t come out, so it might take a bit. So… how do I open this…?”
As soon as Minho heard my sharp words, he seemed to grasp who I was and quickly started figuring out how to open the cage.
“So, Blanca, what’s with your appearance? Is this your childhood self?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Just… suddenly you’ve changed and here you are, locked in a cage. Naturally, I got curious.”
I watched Minho struggle to tear off the cage, exhaled a long sigh, and finally admitted that I did look like my younger self.
“I just didn’t eat enough.”
“I see… oh, wait. Got it. I opened it, Blanca. You can come out now.”
As we talked about our appearances, Minho quickly tore down the cage and set me free.
As soon as I was released, I got up in a daze to check all the cages in the room. I couldn’t find Ain screaming anywhere.
…I definitely saw her. She was there until just before I got caged. Where could she be?
All I could find was a severed thigh bone belonging to someone.
I had no idea whose it was. A few people should have been missing their legs by now. It didn’t feel like mine.
I had seen my own bone. That one wasn’t this big.
I picked up the femur and focused the little magic I still had left into my fingertips, sharpening the broken end of the bone.
This should be enough to kill someone. After sharpening the other half, I handed it to Minho and told him to kick it into the partition wall.
“This is a partition wall?”
“That’s right. Be careful. As soon as the partition breaks, the guards will show up. They probably won’t kill you; they’ll just have a baton, but… if you get caught, it won’t end well.”
In the lab, there had been occasional attempts by experiment subjects to break out.
Those attempts were thwarted by guards in the hallway.
“Got it. More importantly, Blanca. You seem to be really familiar with this place.”
As if I’d been here before. Minho, with a chill down his spine, kicked down the partition wall.
As soon as he did, the green lights turned red, and guards appeared at the end of the hallway.
“Those are definitely guards, right?”
The guards were normal from the torso down, but their faces were distorted grotesquely, looking like a human face spun in a foamer.
“Regardless of what they are, let’s just kill them.”
I glared at the guard charging toward me with a baton.
The guard’s movements were clumsy and slow.
Even with this weak and fragile body, using whatever little magic I had left might just work.
I waited until the guard was right in front of me and seized the opportunity when the abomination attacked, catching it from behind.
And then, I leaped and stabbed the back of its neck with the bone.
Strangely enough, despite its odd appearance, it was no different from a human inside, as the guard collapsed helplessly to the ground.
I pulled out the bone and put some more force into it, creating a few additional holes in its skull, then looked over to Minho.
He seemed to have caught the other guard without much trouble, picking up the baton it had dropped and slamming it down on the ground repeatedly.
“I’ll wait for you. Charge it quickly.”
Since the stab was more familiar to me than the baton, I just tucked it away and waited for Minho to finish charging.
“Blanca. This might be a rude question but…”
“If it’s that kind of thing, don’t.”
“No, I really have to ask. Blanca, this place… you know it, right? This is… the place where your past is being manifested?”
Minho, fumbling with his feet to charge them up, finally asked me.
As in, is this your past?
I glanced at the bone spear in my hand.
Even if my body had shrunk, I hadn’t forgotten how to kill people. No matter how tough it might be, I could probably manage somehow.
Minho also possessed a bit of magic, but with that level, it would barely enhance his physical abilities for a fleeting moment.
…But if I removed him.
What would happen then?
I couldn’t predict how much chaos this world would fall into.
After weighing the world against my secrets, I finally opened my heavy mouth.
“What makes you think that?”
“I thought maybe this place was a manifestation of someone’s mind. It’s definitely not my memories… You’ve changed, and you act like this place is familiar to you.”
Ha ha. Maybe I should have pretended to be oblivious. I fired up my head for no reason and ended up doing something foolish.
“Ha, you got it right.”
“Then… that means the story you told about your past was a lie.”
“Right. Do I have to go into detail?”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“Why did you lie to everyone?”
Minho, with genuine curiosity, asked me without any other emotions.
“Because I don’t want it known.”
“What is?”
“My story.”
“So, you lied to me and all your friends?”
“…Yeah.”
“So we’re friends, right?”
Minho hesitated for a moment, then asked me that.
“Yeah.”
No.
“That much is true.”
Even that was a lie.
“I get it. I didn’t want to ask more; I feel like I’d annoy you. And my charge is complete now. So where do we go from here? But do you know where we should head, Blanca?”
Minho asked me as if now that he’d heard enough, he was one step back.
Right, we needed to escape first.
“Of course. The exit is on the opposite side of the isolation room, so if we go straight this way… we should reach the staff lounge…”
“The Chamber of Truth?”
For some reason, a name that felt ominously wrong popped up.
I didn’t have a good feeling about it and wanted to turn back, but the path I came from had vanished without a trace, leaving only the way forward.
Anger, disbelief, fear, and anxiety made my eyelids twitch.
“It looks like we have no choice but to go, Blanca.”
………
Ha.
“I see it now…”