Surviving Every Worldview

Chapter 44: The Academy’s Most Wanted (3)

It was a dark sky because the sun hasn’t fully risen and under that sky the pure white buildings of the Academy, with all other lights off, reflecting only the red glow of the emergency lights.

The sight of the entire city turning red was enough to send anyone into a panic.

“Uh…what should I do, Seon-woo, Seon-woo……?”

“Get behind me!”

“Oh, okay!”

I pulled a gun from my inventory and aimed it at the android’s head.

I can’t believe this is going to happen as soon as I enter another building.

No matter what, they noticed it too quickly.

[Confirming the identity of the escaped student…….]

BANG!

As soon as the word identification was uttered, the bullet went through the glass window and destroyed the Android.

But still, the beeping showed no sign of stopping.

What the hell happened?

“Me, is it me……?”

“I didn’t think they’d realize we were out as soon as you opened the door. Don’t say that.”

I soothed Seol Do-yeon and assessed the situation.

The android had completely stopped working and slid easily into my inventory.

The red light only flickers around this building, but the beeping itself was spreading throughout the Academy.

It means that the Academy’s security system will be mobilized to capture us alive.

No matter how much I want to investigate, I can’t stay here!

“Let’s get out of here before someone comes. Stick with me.”

“It’s not uncomfortable…No, I get it- Ugh!!!”

Seol Do-yeon squirmed and was carried on my back, and at the same time, I sent the wire flying toward a nearby dormitory building.

Luckily, the wire was strong enough to hold the weight of two people.

It’s harder to carry a person on your back than you think, and even harder to fly while doing so.

Boom-boom-boom.

A pure white car drove up to the front of the cafe we’d come out of and stopped, ignoring the designated path.

Out of the car stepped three men and women who appeared to be professors.

I recognized the familiar brimmed hat from the practice matches.

It was Professor Witch.

“You’re not going to fall off, are you okay!!!”

“I’m fine!”

“Uh, uh, where are we going? You’re supposed to tell me!”

“We’re going back to the dorm room we came out of, just go back through the screen door!”

“But, Seon-woo, I don’t know if I should tell you something important at a time like this…….”

Seol Do-yeon said, holding me tighter in case I fell off.

“That robot you shot earlier. You shot it because it wanted to run a background check, right?”

“That’s right.”

“In other words, the android didn’t have a seizure because we opened the door!”

Seol Do-yeon blurted out but I think I got what she was trying to say.

If they hadn’t even checked to see what kind of students we were, they would have immediately set off the alarm…….

“Are you saying that whoever opened the door would have set off the alarm?”

“Exactly, why would a robot do a background check twice?”

The first time the alarm went off, we assumed it was because it was “us” who opened the door.

In this world we can’t get back out the normal way.

The moment we’re caught outside, we’re likely to be tracked. That’s what they did.

But what if it wasn’t?

What if, as Do-yeon said, an “ordinary student” other than us had opened the door, and the alarm would have gone off?

If that’s true, then there’s no way the average student could have gotten out.

Why?

Why did the academy make such preparations for its facilities?

Even if escape was a priority for now, I had to find out.

“Just get ready. We’ll be right inside.”

“Yeah……!”

The open window of my room, which I had left on, glowed like an escape hatch in a horror game.

I stepped closer, jammed the wire into the window frame, and pulled the trigger again.

The recoiling wire pulled me forward 10 meters before I hit the wall.

[An incident has occurred near the current dormitory.]

[For the safety of the students, the dormitory will be briefly sealed off.]

Soon, however, the roof of the dormitory opened and the cage began to descend.

The bars came down roughly and quickly, almost scratching the exterior walls.

It was bad timing, as if they were trying to stop us from going inside the window.

“What if we can’t get in? We’re stuck here!”

“It’s okay, we can get in!”

I pulled the trigger again and again, speeding up the wire retraction, hoping that the cage descending like a guillotine was slower than us.

“Hold on!”

The moment we were close enough to the building, I put my foot forward, let go of the wire, and let the momentum carry me.

Without even stepping on the window sill, I was inside through the open window and-!

Drrrrrr!!!

The bars came crashing down, cutting off the connection between us inside and the red warning light outside.

We slid across the floor of the dorm, bumped into the wall, and stopped.

“Hmph, ha, haaah…….”

Seol Do-yeon, who was being carried on my back, was out of breath and was shedding tears that had been welling up in her eyes.

“I was so, so…scared…….”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to fly anymore.”

“Well, after you said that…I’ll really cry if you try to run away on the wire again…….”

Seol Do-yeon staggered to her feet.

Her legs wobbled and she fell back down.

I held out my hand to her, and she hugged my arm, barely able to stand.

“Now…what do we do? This isn’t over yet, is it?”

“I’ll think about it. Give me a minute.”

I checked the time on my phone: 7:44 am.

The closed iron bars didn’t seem like they would open right away. The Academy probably didn’t know where we were going.

But if we tried to get out the front door right now, we’d be stopped by guards.

So when would it be safest to try to escape?

The answer to the question I asked myself quickly formed in my head.

In this time frame, roughly……

“You can take a short break but we’ll have to move more, so just sit down for a bit. Relax.”

“Are you…okay? Am I wasting your time?”

“It’s not about waiting for you, it’s about timing. Just wait 10 minutes.”

“I don’t know what you’re really thinking…….”

Seol Do-yeon’s messy hair made a question mark.

“……Okay, I understand.”

* * *

“Let’s get out of here.”

Exactly ten minutes later.

As I walked out into the dorm hallway, Do-yeon scrambled out of her chair and followed closely behind.

“Be careful from now on. Not everything here is human, so don’t hesitate to attack.”

“When we fight with a student?”

“Yeah. Think of them as zombies, not people.”

“Oh, okay.”

I scanned my card key on the recognition device and came out to the study room.

It was still more than an hour before my first class, so I didn’t see many people in the morning, only two people.

The first was a student who came out of his dorm and we were chatting.

“Did the loud noise wake you up too?”

“Yeah. I could have slept for another hour, but why did the alarm suddenly go off?”

“You don’t know? Why did it go off?”

“That? How could I…….”

As we followed the two students to the lobby, eavesdropping on their conversation, one of them looked back at us.

“Huh?”

The boy’s eyes turned meaningful.

Had we been caught?

I shot at a robot to prevent identification, and now we’ve been seen by students?

……I don’t recall seeing a notice like that in the dorms?

“Hey, didn’t they come out the same door?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see them. How could they come out together when the dorms are so strict about the opposite sex?”

“Am I mistaken? Why is he wearing that weird mask again……”

…..It’s not a big deal.

Just a little misunderstanding, that’s all.

-Beep-beep-beep

Just as the confrontation was about to end, our cell phones rang at the same time.

It was an emergency alert from the academy.

I grabbed Do-yeon’s hand and ran forward.

We had to get as far away as possible before they checked their notifications.

……A moment later, I heard a boy’s shout from behind me.

“Get him!”

“After all……!!”

We sped up and raced through the cloud bridge to the learning center.

Our destination: the main entrance on the first floor, where we could return to reality.

Grabbing Do-yeon’s hand, I sprinted down the stairs and down the hallway.

“Didn’t you stop them before they could verify our identities!? Why are we suddenly being chased as if we were wanted?”

“It could have finished your search a long time ago, since it’s an Android! And you would have been caught since you didn’t cover your face!”

“What kind of a crime is it to go into a cafe!”

“I don’t know!”

After making it down to the ground floor, I ran to the front door to escape the chase from upstairs.

The magical spheres chase after us, one step ahead of the students.

Poorly aimed spheres flew at us, tearing up the hallway, but our uniforms glowed with each impact, cushioning the blow.

It was a protective feature I remembered from the duel but our rejoicing was short-lived.

Suddenly, a blue circle of magic appeared in the middle of the hallway, blocking our path.

“You’re later than I thought. I was expecting you.”

A voice echoes through the hallway.

A woman in a wide-brimmed hat stepped out of the circle.

Her eyes were always half-open, but this time there was tension in them.

“I see you often, Professor.”

“Seol Do-yeon, and… I can’t tell who you are because of the mask, but you have the nerve to do something that could cause an emergency for the entire Academy.”

“I don’t know if it was so wrong to go outside, really.”

“……It is true that there was an emergency at the Academy, though I can’t go into details.”

Professor Witch averted her eyes slightly.

“More than that, the android that was placed in the building has disappeared. How did you do it, you two?”

“Oh, that…….”

I know the whereabouts of that broken machine.

I pulled out what I had in my inventory and snapped my fingers.

[Puppetry of the Dead]

[Androids as automatons!]

The android awoke with the power of the story and crawled on all fours toward the professor.

It craned its neck in a horrifying motion characteristic of humanoid creatures as it approached.

But the professor pointed a single finger at the machine, and the spinning head stopped dead in its tracks.

A second later, poof, the bullet-holed android’s head fell off and rolled across the floor.

“Hmph…….”

The professor approached me, not even bothering to look at the machine.

The android stopped moving.

“Starting today, Seol Do-yeon will be detained in a separate location until the end of her training. You, who are next to me, will also be subject to the same measures after confirming your identity.”

-Tadadak!

While the professor blocked our way, the students who were chasing us also descended and blocked our path.

Next to me, Seol Do-yeon prepares to fight back with a megaphone-type weapon.

……It must be getting late.

The front gate is close, so if he comes, he’ll find us right away.

There’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to defeat the episode’s main character if we’re spotted.

For now, we can only stall for time.

“Ham…just stay put, don’t move, and I’m not responsible if you get your face ripped off.”

The professor pointed at me, and I felt an invisible hand grab my mask.

A telekinetic force tugged at my mask.

I held on to my mask with my hands, but the force grew stronger and stronger until my body was dragged along with it.

However, I must not give away my identity yet.

I jumped in place, still clutching my mask.

I swung my baton at full power as the force pulled me toward the professor.

“…I tried.”

But the baton sliced through the air.

Stepping back slightly, Professor Witch laughed and grabbed my mask with her own hands.

“What are you doing? Are you all-?”

It was then.

Someone was thrown onto Professor Witch’s back, his voice slurred and lengthened by alcohol.

“Wait, who……?”

“Didn’t you know my name yesterday, by the way…what are you doing now?”

“Get out of my way. I don’t have time for another word right now.”

A drunken Seorin appeared behind the professor.

In her hand, she carried a pair of scissors, a normal-sized pair unlike the ones she usually carried.

“Really-? You’re busy.”

“Busy. So……!”

She twirled the scissors and held them in reverse.

She swung it like a knife and stabbed the professor roughly in the back.

“Ugh……!!!”

The sharp blade tore through her robes and lodged firmly in her skin, blood soaking her clothes.

With the scissors still embedded in her back, the witch professor summoned her magic circle and shoved Sister Seorin away.

“……Don’t do that to my junior. Professor.”

“Lee Seorin, why would you……?”

“Professor!”

Students, surprised that their professor had been counterattacked, flocked to her.

No one blocked the hallway anymore.

Realizing this, Seol Do-yeon was one step ahead this time, grabbing my hand and running toward the front door.

“Run to the front door, sis!”

“What do you want me to do as soon as I get here-”

She grumbled, but followed along.

I pointed my gun at his back to make sure she didn’t follow, but for some reason, she didn’t try to chase us.

…Why?

But it doesn’t matter why.

I opened the front door and led everyone out of the deceptive building.

And just like that, we were at……