I looked at the student.
A teenager with bleached hair and piercings.
Inside this ghost story—a high school one can enter only on the night of the new moon—he was a being that killed when unseen and froze when watched.
And yet, if you knew how, you could communicate with him intelligently, even emotionally.
A human being.
The high-school students who had been trapped inside Se-gwang Special City.
My mind reeled.
Then all those entities that, every new-moon night, were dying over and over at the hands of Baekilmong employees and SDRA agents—
......
I touched the school uniform I wore.
The contamination caused by Segwang Industrial High School didn’t fill me with fear so much as hold me in place, as though something had taken me over.
Without the trigger of anger, I remained fundamentally hollow.
It was a relief.
It kept the dizziness manageable.
And I could keep asking questions.
How are you moving right now?
Everyone else is lying on the floor.
Because of you.
Because of me?
Yeah.
The ill-tempered student shot me a glance, frowned, and wrote on the paper:
You moved me to the infirmary, remember?
Since then, even when it’s not graduation day,
I’ve been waking up.
...!
I’d moved this classmate to an empty bed in the infirmary for treatment.
And borrowed his uniform.
That affected the system.
Maybe because that action didn’t exist in the “In the Black Shadow” game’s code, or maybe because an intruding error registered as a new “student” and created a gap.
Wait—
Are you the only one who can move?
Maybe there were others.
But right now, it’s just me.
Between the students lying on the floor—there were gaps.
Were those where the ones who could move used to be?
Could be.
Sometimes there are scribbles left in the library—
names and stuff.
Have you ever seen those students after the graduation ceremony starts?
The rough-looking student wrote steadily, without hesitation:
No.
When the ceremony starts, those kids are in the auditorium—
as corpses.
......
Swallowed by the Hanbit Library.
The ones who failed to leave kept wandering the stacks, looking for nonexistent clues—until they triggered a rule violation and died. All those students...
A sharp pain hit my chest.
Like the grief of losing a close friend—mutual hatred turned into shared rage.
The collective mourning of Segwang Industrial High School’s students.
No.
I forced myself not to be swept away, took a slow breath, and asked the core question.
Why did this school end up like this?
How should I know?
If I did, do you think I’d still be stuck here?
Anything suspicious then?
Any warning signs before it happened?
No clue.
I just came to school the day before graduation—that’s it.
Then... I don’t know.
Class started, I fell asleep...
And when I came to, it was night, and graduation was happening.
Then the teachers—turned monsters—killed everyone.
And it repeats.
The student’s eyes were sunken and dark.
That steady, hollow calm didn’t match the delinquent appearance.
Anyway, once graduation starts again, I’ll forget this too.
......
You don’t remember any of it?
I remember being trapped.
That it repeats.
That’s all.
He pressed the pencil hard against the page.
So, transfer student—just leave.
His eyes shifted to the book I was holding—
Masterpieces of 2000s Horror Anthologies.
You found that one too, huh?
Doesn’t matter how many times you read it—nothing changes.
Change.
...
Wait.
Do you know I handled the graduation differently once?
I killed the teacher.
What?
Think carefully. After that ceremony I appeared in—
did anything change?
The student’s pupils widened slightly, as if comparing memories of past ceremonies.
Then—
Yeah.
...!
The teacher leaves the auditorium sooner now.
The teacher.
“To penalize students who failed to attend, the teacher is now departing from the auditorium.”
The amalgam of upper bodies and organs from every teacher in the school—
a monster straight out of the final boss stage of a horror game.
It left the auditorium earlier?
That’s a bad sign.
I swallowed hard.
And...?
And this might be coincidence,
but since then, it’s never entered the infirmary.
...!!
The teacher doesn’t enter the infirmary.
And the infirmary—was the only room with a window leading to the rear garden.
......
Wait.
Does that teacher have a piece of paper?
Paper?
Like a book loan card—torn in half—with a talisman drawn on it?
Never checked.
The student met my eyes.
If you want, I can check now.
The teachers are around the auditorium.
......
Let’s do it.
Please.
Okay.
Follow me.
The student stood up from the infirmary floor—
Thud.
A black silhouette seized him.
...!
I almost attacked on instinct—then realized.
The Wolf Leader.
Of course.
To me, the Wolf Leader appeared as one of the black silhouettes.
Like a shadow.
Just like how, on the new moon, explorers who entered the school by error were seen as intruders.
There was no anger or violence in me this time—just the sense of something alien.
Dangerous.
Outside.
Incommunicable.
So that’s why he tried to run.
Of course he did.
I forced myself to suppress the reflex to dodge and showed the Wolf Leader the paper we’d been writing on.
I added one line beneath it:
We intend to investigate around the auditorium.
Area is dangerous—exercise caution.
The black silhouette restraining the student dissolved.
...Whew.
The student stepped out of the infirmary, and I followed, the dark outline of the Wolf Leader trailing behind us.
......
We climbed the stairs slowly toward the fifth floor.
As we passed the fourth, rows of motionless seniors lay along the corridor—
with many empty spaces between them.
The student stepped lightly, used to the sight.
I pressed through the stabbing ache in my chest and kept going. Up to the fifth floor.
And then—
[Oh, my.]
The moment we stepped onto the fifth floor,
I understood why the student had said teachers, plural.
[Quite an aesthetic arrangement, I must say.]
It wasn’t students arranged across the fifth-floor corridor.
They were adults.
And in this school, there was only one kind of being that still had an adult form.
Teachers.
...Teachers.
But they didn’t look intact the way the students did.
......
Melted upper bodies and exposed organs.
Faces half-dissolved or skeletal, bodies too ruined to be alive—laid neatly on the floor with their eyes open.
As though each one had been separated and preserved from the larger “teacher” mass.
Some were reduced to scraps of flesh, a single eye, a heap of hair, or tangled entrails.
...As a student of Segwang Industrial High School, instead of nausea I felt a rising wave of horror—and grief.
Do they ever wake up?
No.
They never move from the floor.
Then I noticed.
They’re holding hands...
Every body that still had hands clasped them tightly together.
As if bracing against something.
......
The fifth floor looked the same as before—walls smeared with flesh and talismans—but the flesh had dried out, the slime gone, like the desiccated throat of a mummy.
And the talismans—
When I saw their pattern, I was sure.
That’s the same one.
The torn half buried under the broken glass lantern in the rear garden—here was its complete form.
I reached toward one of them.
If a properly trained SDRA agent were here, they could probably read the script’s meaning.
I could only recognize the completed shape at last.
A brush-stroked, distorted Chinese character:
護
The character for protection.
[Hmm. Doesn’t that look familiar, Mr. Roe Deer?]
...!
Memory surfaced.
Something spilled out from what had covered my body.
Transparent beads—like they could be loaded into a glass hand-cannon.
Oh, right—this is the end-chapter clear reward!
Those glass beads bore the same character.
When I’d killed the teacher, completed the graduation ceremony, and cleared In the Black Shadow with an A-grade—
those beads had rolled across my bed as the reward item.
......
Which meant—
They really were meant to load into the Glass Hand-Cannon.
They must have belonged to the SDRA agents who buried the lanterns here to protect the students—or at least were linked to them.
And when someone cleared the ghost story by saving the students, the same object appeared outside as a reward.
......
Could these be essential for the rescue itself?
I’d have to confirm it.
Talk to the agents once we got out.
But first—gather every clue and focus on escape.
Breathing slowly, I scanned the fifth floor again.
And I saw it.
...That.
At the far end, in the dim light.
The auditorium doors.
Heavy double doors smeared with handprints and blood—and something was hanging from them.
An arm stretched out of torn flesh.
A grotesque upper body dangling there.
Not a student.
No uniform.
But at this distance, I couldn’t make out what it was wearing...
Think that’s a teacher too?
No idea.
Can’t check, can we?
Can’t go near it?
I thought maybe it was just hesitation, so I cautiously stepped forward, placing my foot on the dried patch of flesh.
And instantly—
...!
A violent recoil shot through my body.
What—
And then I understood the source.
The talismans.
The ones plastered over the fifth-floor walls—they were warding charms keeping students from coming up here.
......
I stepped back.
Can’t see any paper notes on the teachers.
The delinquent-looking student glanced toward the end of the corridor and scribbled fast:
If that thing’s a teacher too,
check again during the graduation ceremony.
Then hesitated—
remembering, maybe, that once the ceremony began and the ghost story In the Black Shadow activated, he would forget all this again.
I wrote carefully in reply.
Then write it on your palm.
My palm?
Yeah.
If you write it there, maybe when you wake up on graduation day it’ll still be there.
He looked down at his own hand.
Might stick in my head, then. Worth a shot.
Yeah.
He agreed surprisingly quickly.
For a moment he almost looked hopeful—but the feeling faded fast, as if he refused to let himself expect anything.
......
Then he wrote, flatly:
You’re not really a transfer student, are you?
No, I’m not.
Then why’d you come to our school?
That question carried a faint, wary curiosity—
as if he thought I might say I’d come to save them.
......
Honestly, I don’t know.
It just happened in a dream.
He gave me a look of disbelief.
Still, I wrote, I’ll try to figure this out—end it if I can.
For the honor of Segwang, right?
I tapped the uniform I was wearing.
You lent it to me, after all.
The student gave a small, soundless laugh, like air escaping a punctured tire.
Whatever.
Then he asked:
So what’s your name, anyway?
......
Speaking your real name inside a ghost story was usually taboo.
But—
Segwang Industrial High required you to enter your name upon entry, and earning this student’s trust could be crucial for uncovering the truth.
So I wrote:
Kim Soleum.
Weird name.
And yours?
You saw my badge.
Lee Gyeol, Class 1-4.
All right, Lee Gyeol. I’m counting on you.
And that was how we properly introduced ourselves.
***
Back in the infirmary, I pressed the contamination drawn from my heart tattoo back into place and returned to my normal form.
“Phew.”
Even if I look like that black silhouette—could we still communicate on paper?
As he’d promised, the student only stared at me, expressionless—
but didn’t run or attack.
The Wolf Leader, meanwhile, had shed the shadow and stood once more in his usual form.
“I read all the notes. Calm, thorough questioning. So, the new-moon phenomenon brings out a special state in this darkness, huh? Care to explain?”
“...Yes.”
I gave him a careful summary of Segwang Industrial High School.
But what caught his attention most was how I’d suddenly become a resident of a high-school ghost story.
“Interesting trick. You’re using contamination, right?”
“......”
“I expected the company to refine techniques that way someday.”
His masked eyes studied me, fingers stroking his chin.
“Still, progress is progress. Right now it’s basically a game of chicken.”
“...Who succumbs to contamination first, or who claims their wish first—that’s what you mean?”
“Exactly. Smart of you, Agent Yong.”
A faint smile curved under the wolf mask.
“Of course, the clever ones learn how to cheat even within those rules.”
“......”
Meaning himself, no doubt.
“All right. Let’s head back to the library. That student seems to know the way—should make escaping easier.”
“...Yes.”
I asked Lee Gyeol for directions to another section of the Hanbit Library—
specifically, the one with Masterpieces of 2000s Horror Anthologies.
This way.
Following the willing guide through the school library, we discovered how to pass from this campus space into another corner of Hanbit Library.
“Pretty straightforward method, huh?”
“...Yes.”
And suddenly, a thought struck me.
What’s the Wolf Leader’s wish?
He’d called the wish-system a “game of chicken.”
If I asked now, he might actually answer.
But somehow, asking felt discourteous—like insulting the Guard Captain himself.
So I kept walking in silence.
Until at last we returned to where we had started—
The passage lined with tangled strands of yarn, three of them now overlapping.
The Hanbit Library corner where Masterpieces of 2000s Horror Anthologies was shelved.
I bent down to check the space where the book had been.
“Now we just put it ba—”
My words stopped.
“Shh.”
“...!”
The Wolf Leader yanked me back, hiding us behind the shelf’s corner.
He traced letters against my back:
Another entity is coming.
“...!”
And then—
From the opposite corner, someone appeared.
“......!!”
I froze, staring. It was—
“So this is where the yarn’s thickest...”
The Guard Captain.
And beside him—
Well done.
The Golden Mascot.
It was me.