Editor’s Survival Guide — Chapter 16
Chapter 16. Episode 4. Welcome to the Special Management Bureau (1)
When I opened my eyes, I saw a white ceiling.
It was a sight I had seen once before.
“Rescuees Number Twelve and Number Thirteen have regained consciousness.”
Likewise, it was a voice I had heard once before.
When I turned my head, I saw a person in a protective suit.
“Rescuee, are you coming around? Can you see this?”
The protective suit asked while waving a ballpoint pen in front of my eyes.
The motion remained as perfunctory as ever.
I stared for a moment at the pen bobbing in front of me, then, somehow offended, smacked it away with the back of my hand.
“Ah.”
Tap, clatter-clatter—
The pen flew away and rolled across the floor.
The protective suit stared at the fallen pen for a moment, then took out a new one and scribbled something down.
“Optic nerves normal. Musculoskeletal response normal as well…….”
Damn it…….
The protective suit was a broad-minded individual who could shrug off a rescuee’s petty spite.
Resenting that—and overcome by the sorrow of this déjà vu—I squeezed my eyes shut.
* * *
“I’m sorry this was so sudden, Editor-in-Chief. Ah, physically, I’m fine, but…… No. Yes, yes……. Thank you. Then I’ll contact you as soon as the test results come back.”
I ended the call and released a long breath.
Then I looked at the men across the table.
Two people sat before me.
One was Cha Si-eon, whom I had still failed to strangle.
The other was, remarkably, a young blond man.
The blond stranger was the first to smile and speak.
“You must have a lot of questions, right?”
I feigned surprise at his question.
I had never seen his face, but the voice was familiar.
It belonged to the protective suit.
“Yep, that’s me. I’m Gwak Jae-gyeom of Response Team 3.”
The protective suit—Gwak Jae-gyeom, now that he had introduced himself—looked to be in his early to mid-twenties.
His face wore the same bright, cheerful smile as his lively voice, and his hair had been spectacularly bleached blond.
Both in appearance and demeanor, he was the complete opposite of the gloomy Cha Si-eon.
Then Gwak Jae-gyeom’s eyes suddenly lit up, and he leaned toward me.
“Rescuee, may I call you hyung?”
“……All of a sudden?”
“Yes. Really. I mean it!”
What was with this sudden declaration of brotherhood out of a clear blue sky?
As I stared in disbelief, Gwak Jae-gyeom continued at high intensity.
“The truth is, we were watching everything again this time. Wow, though, none of us expected you to take off your mask there. You did that to save Sa-ra Noona, right? Seriously, we never imagined it at all.”
Ah. So that was what this was about.
“Did Baek Sa-ra and Han Ji-su make it out safely?”
“Yes, both of them came out fine. They were injured a little, but nothing life-threatening.”
“That’s a relief.”
When I sighed, Gwak Jae-gyeom grinned and began chattering again.
“Anyway, honestly, even when you took off your mask, Hyung, we didn’t expect much. To tell you the truth, we thought you would die immediately. But then you held out surprisingly well, and everyone got more and more excited and started swearing at the rescue team for not going in faster…… I’m telling you, it was unbelievable.”
Gwak Jae-gyeom made a tremendous fuss, but I was in no mood to join him and merely sat there with discomfort.
So Gwak Jae-gyeom advocated his case even more passionately.
“I’m not exaggerating. Almost no one in the Bureau can hold out alone once that gun monster goes berserk. But you did it unarmed, wearing nothing but an otter T-shirt? Of course everyone went wild! Every field and support department is on alert because of you now. We even formed the ‘Save the Otter Campaign Headquarters’ yesterday!”
The Save the Otter Campaign Headquarters…….
Wasn’t that mockery?
And why was I already *Hyung*?
No, before any of that—
Did the Bureau bastards all sit together watching Special Zone situations like sports broadcasts?
Come to think of it, Baek Sa-ra had already known me too.
“Anyway, both during the 「Railway Station」 incident and this time, everyone had an incredible amount of fun thanks to you, Hyung. And because your response to the 「Moving Gun」 will be included in the manual, the Bureau will provide separate compensation for that part.”
“No, wait.”
I interrupted Gwak Jae-gyeom’s ever-lengthening speech.
Most of it was good news, but I needed to address a more urgent problem first.
“Before that, what in the world is going on? Why are you saying I can’t go home?”
Namely, the matter of my personal freedom.
Earlier, I had taken an open-ended medical leave from the company.
The reason was lingering aftereffects from my previous traffic accident.
Of course, that was a fabricated excuse, and the real reason was something else.
These bastards had informed me that “I would be unable to return home for some time.”
Being dragged back into a Special Zone and put through hell was absurd enough. Now they said I couldn’t even go home.
Compensation or not, I needed an explanation.
As though he had been waiting, Cha Si-eon beside us began,
“First, I will explain what a Special Management Zone is.”
“Why……?”
But I interrupted with a question of my own, and Cha Si-eon looked at me when his words were cut off.
So I challenged him again, this time precisely.
“I asked why I can’t go home. Why are you suddenly explaining that instead? Last time, you told me to put aside my pointless interest and devote myself to returning to daily life.”
At my criticism, Cha Si-eon’s gaze abruptly drifted into the distance.
What was this? Why were you avoiding my eyes?
“The situation has changed. I will explain it in sequence.”
This was ominous.
I had a very bad feeling, but no choice except to listen.
Read only on MUGEX
“First, a Special Management Zone, hereafter referred to as a Special Zone, is a dangerous space governed by principles that have not been identified. The primary characteristic of a Special Zone is a hostile reaction toward humanity. It operates with the objective of drawing specific or unspecified citizens inside through unknown means and either killing or assimilating them.”
It was nothing new by now, yet I still wondered what kind of bizarre nonsense this was.
An unidentified space hostile to humanity.
It sounded like an urban legend, and even in an author’s manuscript, it would have made me tilt my head. I had never imagined hearing it described as reality.
“Citizen entry into Special Zones has been observed nowhere in the world except the Seoul Capital Area of the Republic of Korea. The point at which this phenomenon first occurred cannot be confirmed, but the government became aware of Special Zones and began an official response eight years ago.”
“Eight years?”
I had been listening in silence, but interrupted in surprise.
“Didn’t you say the rulebook for the 「Hospital That Hunts Humans」 was still being produced?”
Didn’t that mean they had only recently begun investigating it?
In fact, the mission Baek Sa-ra and the convicts had been carrying out looked like an early-stage exploration.
Yet they had already been responding for eight years?
When I looked puzzled, Gwak Jae-gyeom beside him explained.
“Well, there are more Special Zones than you’d think.”
“How many?”
“Thirty-seven that we’re currently monitoring.”
That had to be a lie.
“And over the past eight years, we’ve closed around ninety Special Zones.”
In that case, I would accept it.
I had been horrified at the number under monitoring, but learning how many had been closed restored my peace of mind.
In any case, it meant our government was stronger and steadily eliminating them.
Long live humanity.
Optimistic entirely on my own, I asked,
“Then you’ve eliminated quite a lot, and there aren’t many left now?”
“Uh, no. It’s a little different. This was before I was appointed, but the Bureau’s original policy was total war.”
“Total war?”
“Yes. Whenever they discovered a Special Zone, they would finish a preliminary exploration, then people like Team Leader Cha would all rush inside and smash everything to pieces.”
Right. They did say exorcism was fundamentally physical.
Besides, it seemed to work in practice too, didn’t it?
Remembering the moment the 「Moving Gun」 had been blown apart, I asked,
“You don’t do that anymore?”
“No. No matter how thoroughly they destroyed one, an identical zone appeared again before long.”
“It appeared again?”
“Well, even if you cut off and eat the upper parts of things like lettuce or green onions, they keep growing back as long as the roots are intact. Whether Special Zones have separate roots like that or something, apparently they kept returning no matter how many times they were destroyed.”
“Huh…….”
“So in the end, they gave up. Our losses during the Total-War Period were severe, and whenever a new Special Zone appeared, we had to identify its characteristics and patterns all over again…… Most decisively, the number of Special Zones never increased beyond thirty-seven, so two years ago, we changed policy from destroying them to managing them.”
I had begun from the wrong premise.
It wasn’t that roughly 130 Special Zones had originally existed and the government had beaten them down to thirty-seven.
There had originally been thirty-seven, and after the government spent eight years doing every imaginable thing to eliminate them, there were still thirty-seven.
In other words, they had begun with eradication as their goal, but because it was like pouring water into a bottomless jar, they had compromised on management.
Humanity was weaker than I had believed. Damn it…….
Moreover, after hearing this explanation, I had no choice but to ask,
“Then how many people are pulled into Special Zones?”
“It varies somewhat each year. Based on last year’s figures, approximately 4,500 citizens entered Special Zones, and 208 of them returned alive.”
The figure was shocking, yet not surprising.
In the 「Railway Station Where the Siren Wails」, I had personally witnessed four people die.
That many had perished in the space of only an hour or two.
If dozens more spaces like it existed, the figure Gwak Jae-gyeom had just given was not preposterous.
“You hid it remarkably well when so many people disappear every year…….”
“Uh, that’s a little different too. Rather than hiding it, the disappearances aren’t conspicuous in the first place.”
At my complaint, Gwak Jae-gyeom answered with an awkward smile.
“The population of the Capital Area is around thirty million. If you include residents without registered addresses, it’s much higher than that. Out of so many people, 4,500 isn’t a number conspicuous enough to notice when they disappear. It’s a little higher than the annual number of traffic-accident deaths and far lower than the number of deaths by suicide.”
Gwak Jae-gyeom’s calculation was quite coldhearted.
At the same time, it was realistic, and reminded me of something Author Na Bit had said.
How would the world look to an existence from a dimension higher than humanity’s?
Flames soaring beside people peacefully drinking tea.
A child’s bicycle passing next to a person burned black and dead.
Author Na Bit’s imaginings had not been mere fantasy.
In any case, I seemed to have learned enough about Special Zones.
“So Special Zones are unidentified spaces that draw people inside and harm them; they were first discovered in this country eight years ago; there are thirty-seven in total; they reappear even if destroyed; and of the 4,500 people pulled inside last year, only about two hundred made it out alive. Correct?”
“Yep, exactly.”
“Then why can’t I go home?”
After traveling in a great circle, we had finally reached the main point.
……But what were the two of you doing? You’d been at it for a while now.
At my question, Cha Si-eon and Gwak Jae-gyeom glanced at each other.
They exchanged meaningful looks, then turned back to me as though reaching a decision.
Seriously, stop this. Why were you becoming so solemn? It was making me anxious.
When I met their gazes warily, Gwak Jae-gyeom began again.
“I’m sure you understand by now, but the probability of an ordinary citizen entering a Special Zone is truly tiny. It’s about the same as the probability of being killed by lightning. But for one person to fall into Special Zones twice in succession? That’s genuinely astronomical. Yet you’ve already experienced precisely that, Hyung, so probability is no longer important to us.”
Why was this rambling preamble so long?
At a sense of impending doom, I simply asked directly.
“What’s the conclusion?”
“It looks as though you’ll continue being pulled into Special Zones from now on.”
At this point, even God owed me an apology.
Of course, I had no intention of accepting it.
Never.