I staggered backward.
Outside the old Baekilmong office, in the corridor, a black figure was butchering the rag doll of 130666.
Its eyes were staring at me.
The Baekilmong mascot character.
Originally a classically deformed yellow dragon, it was now a grotesque mess, every part of its arms and legs and head and features distorted as though shattered and clumsily sewn back together.
As if a child had badly, crookedly stitched together the pieces of a mascot suit that had been smashed to fragments!
In every split and crack of that warped doll, I saw something writhing.
Tiny bugs.
Things like earthworms squirmed in clusters, wriggling out through the outside of the mascot suit.
Nausea rose in me and gooseflesh broke out over my skin.
That black Baekilmong character was drenched head to toe in the dark golden liquid that had burst from the mangled body of 130666 like blood.
For an instant, in the glitter of that liquid, I saw it.
Something was attached to that shape’s chest too, just like mine.
Those were….
Objects.
A bow tie, glasses, a cat’s tail, fragments of a childcare teacher’s training manual, a uniform name tag, a silver badge, a tattered barcode….
My contaminations and my statuses.
Symbols of my identities, hanging there like medals, smeared with that blackish-yellow liquid.
The realization of that split second.
It was hunting me down one by one.
The identities in me that were a Good Friend.
Me, embodied as those stuffed dolls.
Scratch.
A split second passed.
The office scissors in the Baekilmong mascot character’s hand plunged deep into the center of the rag doll’s chest.
A fountain of blood sprayed up.
The rag doll of 130666 threw up its hand as though giving a death scream.
And then.
It fell.