Chapter 102 - You Die (5)

I dismissed the Gnomes and drew the curtains over the windows again before returning to the center of the living room.

Kim Yong and Kim Dok-seo had calmed down, at least.

Cha Do-won, who had been part of the now-dead Kwon Do-yun's group, spoke with his head bowed.

"Do-yun... I was technically in his group, but we weren't exactly close. It was a streamer-editor relationship."

More than a self-introduction, though, it was him thinking out loud to settle his own scrambled thoughts.

"He was always late paying me for editing his abandoned building exploration videos, and whenever I asked for money he'd turn it around on me, saying 'Have I ever not paid you?' He treated his editor like a personal manager, dragging me around and making me run errands."

Cha Do-won stared at Do-yun's body, covered by the white tablecloth.

"There were times I wished he'd just drop dead. That's why I was planning to quit as his editor after this Mountain Lodge shoot. I never thought he'd actually......"

Cha Do-won trailed off blankly, then snapped back to his senses and hurriedly added,

"No, wait! I thought it'd be nice if he dropped dead, sure! But I never thought about actually killing him!"

"Hmm~ I wonder about that."

Kim Cha-ryeo set down the opened bottle of wine and the silverware she'd brought from the kitchen onto the living room table.

The wine was the same one Kwon Do-yun had drunk before dying.

"I already checked this on my own earlier, but let me show you all."

She poured wine into a glass and dipped a silver spoon into it.

The silver spoon gradually darkened, staining and discoloring.

It was the classic poison detection method using silverware, straight out of old mystery novels.

Well, silver also tarnishes from egg yolks or onions, but...

That wine was hardly an onion wine.

A poison that turns silver black.

My eyes narrowed.

It meant arsenic containing sulfur had been mixed into the wine.

A colorless, odorless poison. In the 19th century, it was fed so often to wealthy elderly who wouldn't hurry up and die that it earned the nickname "inheritance powder."

On top of that, the silver-based detection method was discovered around the same time,

which made it a staple murder method in mystery novels of that era.

When poison shows up in a mystery novel, it's almost always arsenic.

Soo-ah glanced at Kwon Do-yun's body with an indifferent expression and said,

"We've got eyes too, so we can tell he was poisoned."

"True. But the important thing is that he wasn't killed by some unknown occult poison, but by a real, existing one."

Kim Cha-ryeo smiled coldly and turned her gaze to Cha Do-won.

"Isn't it possible that someone who knew Kwon Do-yun's careless personality laced the wine with poison in advance?"

Cha Do-won's eyes went wide with alarm.

"I, I didn't do it! This is my first time here in the first place!"

"I know. You're not the most suspicious person here right now."

Kim Cha-ryeo's slender index finger extended, pointing straight at me.

Everyone's eyes naturally followed, landing on me with surprise.

My face was expressionless, but I was surprised on the inside too.

".........."

I didn't even know, am I the culprit? ...As if.

In any case, Kim Cha-ryeo continued.

"If someone is steering the mood to prevent us from finding a murderer who used a modern poison, by calling it an Anomaly Incident, wouldn't that person be the real killer?"

Kim Dok-seo cut in with a puzzled look.

"Hold on. You can't say it's not an Anomaly Incident when the windows didn't break. Isn't that strange?"

"There is such a thing as reinforced glass that can withstand even bullets."

Kim Cha-ryeo answered the question simply.

"Doesn't reinforced glass make more sense than some absurd Barrier?"

"Well, that's..."

"Here's what I think. The one who set up this insane game at the Mountain Lodge is that man called Yo-han, hiding among us while pretending to be a guest."

[Oh~ Now that's more like it! Finally, the real detective, indispensable to any murder case, has made her entrance! It's always people who kill people! Blaming it on an Anomaly to derail the investigation is a classic move by murderers in mystery novels.]

A tense atmosphere settled over the living room.

Cha Do-won, Kim Cha-ryeo, Kim Yong, Kim Dok-seo.

Under the weight of their stares, I thought to myself.

'Hmm~ If she pushes this angle... am I really going to end up a serial killer here?'

Obviously a messed-up joke.

I hadn't killed anyone here yet, and I had no plans to.

The moment I opened my mouth to argue back,

"Yo-han-ssi is not that kind of person!"

Ellie stepped forward before I could, speaking up. She put strength behind her gentle eyes as she defended me.

Though......

"Yo-han-ssi's house burned down and he had nowhere to go, so he's staying at our church! He doesn't have the money to set up a fancy lodge like this!"

...Accurate, but a little embarrassing.

Ellie stepped in front of me with a resolute look in her eyes, standing protectively.

"Above all, he would never treat human lives as a game."

Well... that was true.

Barring a few accidents, I had always killed my opponents with one hundred percent genuine, full-power killing intent.

I'm not a psychopath. I don't kill people for fun.

Still, just as I was about to step in and stop Ellie,

"Ellie..."

"That's right!"

This time Soo-ah jumped in to defend me.

"He doesn't even have any savings! He even asked me to buy him a laptop!"

Kim Dok-seo looked at me cautiously and said,

"Uh, so you have no house, no savings, you're mooching off Sister Ellie, and you asked a student to buy you a laptop?"

My eyes sank low.

"Yes... my house burned down, and there were... various circumstances."

The way people looked at me shifted from viewing an unidentified dangerous mastermind to viewing a freeloader living off a woman's kindness. Dangerous in a different sense.

Kim Dok-seo glanced between me and Kim Cha-ryeo, reading the room before stepping in.

"Let's all calm down for now. There's no solid proof that Yo-han-ssi is the lodge's owner, and fighting among ourselves isn't going to help."

Kim Cha-ryeo furrowed her brow slightly and sat down on the sofa without a word.

".........."

In any case, the tension deflated anticlimactically and the mood shifted.

Ellie smiled brightly, and Soo-ah grinned triumphantly as she said to me,

"Yo-han-ssi, I'm glad the misunderstanding is cleared up!"

"You know that's thanks to us, right? Grateful?"

"Yeah... thanks."

I answered halfheartedly, then addressed the group.

"I still believe this is a murder caused by an Anomaly Incident, but as Cha-ryeo-ssi said, there may be a lodge owner orchestrating all of this."

I picked up the blackened silverware and explained.

"What bothers me is that the murder weapon was specifically arsenic containing sulfur."

I'd seen it in a manga, not a technical book, but still.

The reason arsenic is detected by silver isn't because silver reacts to arsenic itself, but because it reacts to the sulfur mixed in as an impurity during the arsenic extraction process.

In the 19th century, science hadn't advanced enough to fully separate sulfur when extracting arsenic from ore, so silver could detect arsenic in food,

and it became known as a classic poison detection method.

Arsenic was called a colorless, odorless poison in the past.

In the modern era, however, it's become a substance used in preservatives and various other applications, and scientific progress has made it possible to completely remove sulfur from arsenic.

That's right. Thanks to advances in science, modern arsenic, unlike its historical counterpart, actually cannot be detected by silver.

"And yet the lodge's owner went out of their way to obtain 19th-century arsenic loaded with sulfur, which is harder to find nowadays, and laced it in the wine."

I looked at the black stain on the silverware.

"And they even thoughtfully left silverware in the kitchen so we could figure out the wine was poisoned."

A beat of silence. Then I deliberately set the silverware down on the table with an audible sound.

"I don't know the lodge owner's exact objective, but..."

Clack-.

"It looks like they're trying to create a scene straight out of a mystery novel, making us suspect each other and play detective."

A momentary hush fell over the living room.

Fortunately, the others seemed to follow the logic, more or less.

Kim Cha-ryeo's model-like face hardened.

"...So what exactly are you suggesting we do from now on?"

"I'm not asking everyone to blindly trust each other. Just that we stay together as a group in the living room like this. Acting alone in this situation is dangerous."

I gestured toward the wine with my eyes.

"Also, we should avoid the lodge's food. Let's share whatever food we each brought and hold out until morning."

Kim Dok-seo asked in a trembling voice.

"...Will morning make any difference?"

I played the calm expert and reassured her.

"Let's think positive. Try not to worry too much."

And behind that Yo-han, Kim Cha-ryeo watched coldly.

[...Acting on his own again, derailing the others' deductions. What a wicked player. Blocking everyone's proper reasoning and trying to change the genre on his own. It looks like Detective Kim Cha-ryeo is about to make a move, and I think I'll need to help just a tiny bit. In a moment.]

They ate a simple meal from the food they'd brought and sat idly in the living room, resting.

"...Mister, I'm sleepy."

Soo-ah said, sprawling against the sofa.

"Then sleep. I'll wake you up later."

I spoke to the others as well.

"Anyone who's tired, go ahead and sleep now. We'll take turns resting in shifts."

Soo-ah leaned her head against Ellie's lap.

"Hehe~ I'll sleep on Ellie unnie's lap. ...Hm?"

She rubbed her head side to side against Ellie's thigh for a moment, then sat up.

"Unnie, what's this paper in your pocket?"

"Paper?"

Ellie tilted her head and reached into her pocket to check.

"-!?"

Out came a piece of paper Ellie had never put there.

[Second Victim]

It was the same kind of paper that had come out of the dead Kwon Do-yun's role envelope, the one marked [First Victim].

A piece of paper that announced a murder, designating the victim.

Soo-ah was even more startled than Ellie, panicking.

"Wha, unnie-!?"

Bong– bong– bong–!

The grandfather clock rang out its somber chimes, announcing midnight.

And then.

Whoosh-.

Every light in the Mountain Lodge went out at once.

Even the fire in the hearth died, and darkness flooded in.

I immediately shone my phone's flashlight toward where Ellie had been sitting.

Thankfully, she was still there.

"Haha... I'm fine."

Ellie stroked the head of Soo-ah, who was clutched against her, and spoke in a soft voice.

"Yo-han-ssi, this paper... it's not just an ordinary piece of paper, is it?"

[Second Victim]

"Given the situation, probably not."

"...I see."

Ellie nodded and spoke to Soo-ah.

"Ellie unnie..."

"Soo-ah, don't worry too much. I'm strong, remember? I'll be fine."

She was right. Ellie had learned the Breathing Technique, and thinking back to how she'd gone on a rampage against zombies at the campsite before, she was strong.

She wouldn't go down easily.

Even so, Ellie's composure was both gentle and resolute.

".........."

In any case, the second murder notice and the sudden blackout couldn't be a coincidence.

"Everyone, let's go check the circuit breaker."

Cha Do-won's voice trembled.

"Uh... all of us?"

"Yes. Acting separately in this situation is dangerous, so we all move together."

The breaker was outside the living room. I hadn't confirmed its exact location, but it was along the corridor leading to the Basement entrance.

We lit our way through the dark lodge with our phone flashlights and arrived at the breaker.

Ellie examined it and looked confused.

"That's strange... there's nothing wrong with it, but the lights won't come on."

"So it's functioning properly, but the lights just won't turn on?"

"Right. Could it be an Anomalous Phenomenon?"

[Hoho~ The survivors are in quite a panic. Their only lifeline is the feeble glow of their phones, and as they worry about an unknown killer emerging from the darkness, they begin to suspect one another...]

"Enough. If anything, this makes things easier."

If it were a technical problem, there'd be nothing I could do, but if it was an Anomalous Phenomenon, I could counter it with magic.

Daoist Arts from <Baopuzi>.

I formed a Hand Seal and chanted the incantation.

"Bae cheong-o-roe dae-won-su, sip-pal-dae-ok je-bu-myeong, ok-ji-myeong-roe jeong-ho-ryeong..."

I placed my hand against the breaker.

"Thunder Summoning."

I couldn't generate lightning from my hand and blast it out, but.

Crackle-.

The Daoist Art of harnessing lightning forced electricity throughout the entire lodge.

Flash- flicker-!

The ceiling lights flickered, then came on fully, and the lodge was bright again.

The people around me were stunned. Soo-ah's eyes sparkled as she said,

"Mister! You can use ninjutsu too? Are you a ninja!?"

"I'm not a ninja. It's Daoist Arts, an Eastern magical tradition."

And as I was speaking, I noticed something off in the now-lit corridor.

"......?"

Currently in the corridor, there were a total of six people.

Me, Ellie, Soo-ah, Kim Dok-seo, Kim Yong, Cha Do-won.

...Kim Cha-ryeo was gone. Vanished.

[...I didn't think he'd be able to act this recklessly. Normally I wouldn't intervene directly, but that self-proclaimed ghostbuster has crossed the line. Time to cooperate with the Man-eating Ghoul here.]

A chill crawled up my spine. I raised my head and looked at the ceiling.

"-!"

There, clinging to the ceiling and looking down at us with razor-sharp bestial fangs bared, was Kim Cha-ryeo.

Could it be that Kim Cha-ryeo was the lodge's serial-killing Anomaly?

I judged that she'd go after Ellie, who'd been designated the [Second Victim].

"Ellie-!?"

I tried to warn Ellie, but I was wrong.

"Kim Yo-haaaan!"

Contrary to my expectation, Kim Cha-ryeo, whose ambush had been foiled by the lights coming on, leaped down without hesitation and lunged straight at Yo-han.

I moved to dodge, but.

Lurch, lurch~!

The corridor floor heaved and rippled like ocean waves, buckling my stance.

'What the-!?'

The corridor writhed like a massive living creature, launching my body into the air to meet Kim Cha-ryeo.

The murder mystery game at the lodge wasn't the Anomaly.

A monster house that kills people. The Mountain Lodge itself was the Anomaly.

From above, Kim Cha-ryeo stretched both arms toward me, razor-sharp claws grown from her fingertips, jaws wide open.

From behind, the Basement entrance relocated on its own, gaping wide like a monster's maw, waiting for me and Kim Cha-ryeo to fall in.

It all happened in an instant.

I made a split-second decision and shouted to Soo-ah.

"Barrier!"

With that, Yo-han and Kim Cha-ryeo plunged into the Basement.

CRASH-!

The Basement door slammed shut.

Soo-ah stared at the closed Basement door with wide eyes.

".........."

Ellie had been marked as the Anomaly's target, and Yo-han had fallen into the Basement with Kim Cha-ryeo, who had transformed into a monster.

A chaotic situation.

She was scared, but...

Soo-ah let out a deep breath and made a quick decision.

Yo-han hadn't told her to help him.

'Barrier.'

He'd told her what she needed to do while he made his way back.

Soo-ah pulled out the notebook where Yo-han had organized and written down spells from inside her cardigan.

'A magical Barrier cast with bread and wine.'

It was a spell Yo-han had recently taught her.

Soo-ah shouted to the others in the swaying corridor.

"I'm going to set up a magical Barrier! Head to the kitchen, right now!"

Ellie nodded, and the others were bewildered but broke into a run toward the kitchen.

Not as bad as before, but as they ran across the lurching floor,

Kim Yong nearly tripped.

"Aah!?"

He made a big leap, stuck the landing, and sprinted on.

Dash-! Running alongside him, Kim Dok-seo said,

"Writer-nim, I probably shouldn't point out that you run a lot faster than you update."

"I-it's an emergency, cut me some slack!"

***

I glared at Kim Cha-ryeo as we fell into the Basement.

The height wasn't particularly great, but the space felt warped somehow, making the hang time feel longer than it should.

And as I looked at the face of Kim Cha-ryeo, lunging at me with her mouth ripped wide open like a beast...

I realized where I'd seen it before.

I hadn't seen her in person. It was a face I'd seen on a university student ID after Grizzly killed her, but the resemblance was unmistakable.

The daughter of Chairman Kim, whom I had killed.

The Cannibalistic Wizard who had run a wizard's workshop disguised as a weekend farm, killing and devouring people.

"...Kim Mi-ryeo."

At the name that left my lips, Kim Cha-ryeo's eyes snapped wide for an instant before her face twisted into something savage.

"DIIIIIIIIE!"

My own face contorted as I glared back at Kim Cha-ryeo.

Judging by her appearance, she was likely Kim Mi-ryeo's older or younger sister.

This was absurd.

It wasn't as if I'd killed Kim Mi-ryeo while she was minding her own business living peacefully.

Kim Mi-ryeo, that damned Man-eating Ghoul, had tried to kill me and take my Grimoire and eat my flesh, and she'd gotten herself killed by her own doing.

And now her sister followed me all the way to this lodge for revenge?

Being on the receiving end of that kind of tantrum-

Kim Cha-ryeo's outstretched arm seized my shoulder, gripping tight, and she opened her jaws wide to bite into my skull, closing the distance.

I didn't look away from Kim Cha-ryeo's blazing eyes.

-Not a chance.

I headbutted her square in the face at point-blank range.

The impact sent Kim Cha-ryeo reeling.

"Gahk!?"

"That's right! I killed Kim Mi-ryeo!"

I grabbed Kim Cha-ryeo's arms in return and twisted my body midair, flipping our positions.

"The one that killed Kim Mi-ryeo-."

Seizing the top position, I thrust my arm out and summoned my Grimoire.

"Have a taste of my Grimoire!"

The steel-bound Grimoire, <De Vermis Mysteriis>, smashed into the Man-eating Ghoul's jaw.

WHAM-!