Reborn as a Prophet in a Horror Movie

#192Reader Mode

#192

Luciel’s jet-black eyebrows gave a small twitch as she settled comfortably against Brown’s shoulder. She tilted her chin up just slightly, her voice slipping into something measured and composed.

“Dennis, I am quite alright now. You need not worry.”

The deathly pallor that had drained her face when Samantha attacked her had mostly faded, a faint flush creeping back into her cheeks. Maybe it was the absence of an immediate threat. Seojun’s gaze drifted anxiously toward the elevator anyway.

But Luciel wasn’t the only one who’d found her footing again. There was one person whose eyes were practically crackling with cold hostility and it didn’t take much guessing to figure out who.

Dennis.

He swept a sharp, withering look over everyone in the corridor. Everyone except Luciel. The heaviest of those looks landed squarely on Brown, and it wasn’t subtle. Dennis looked like he physically couldn’t stomach the sight of Brown supporting her. The envy was right there on his face, raw and unguarded, and then he opened his mouth.

“Brown!” His voice came out clipped, almost offended. “Luciel is a being of immense power. She is an angel who carries the very word of God! The one who grants us revelations the likes of which this world will never see again! You should be humbled just to touch her. It should be a sacred honor, something your bloodline carries for generations!”

“…Generations,” Brown echoed faintly.

Dennis’s fanaticism was so thoroughly unhinged that even Brown — who was generally too easygoing to let much get to him, and currently drenched in sweat on top of that — let a flash of naked exasperation cross his face.

“It’s only because the time isn’t right that we’re even in this situation,” Dennis pressed on, undeterred. “If Luciel were to unleash her true power, she would step forward and wipe out these petty little servants of evil without a second thought—”

Behind his glasses, his hollow eyes burned with something unsettling as he ranted. Seojun felt a chill crawl down his spine. The state Dennis was in… it had gotten worse. Even in the short time they’d been apart, something in him had slipped further, tilting toward a place there was no easy name for.

After watching that sorry little display, Seojun finally understood why Kira had gone straight to attacking without stopping to ask questions. Because what she had for backup was, generously speaking, a disaster. There was an injured person, someone whose entire job was managing that injured person, and one spectacularly useless individual who was doing everyone a greater service by staying out of the way than by actually trying to help. The weight of knowing she was essentially on her own must have been crushing.

Kira caught his pitying look.

“Oh, Lord.” Sarcasm dripped off every word. “Have mercy on us all. Doomed to fight for our lives with this damn idiot by our side.”

She was spinning her folding knife between her fingers with practiced ease. That, in itself, said something. Kira’s anxiety was apparently bleeding into her choice of weapons, too. When that same blade had been hurtling toward his throat, it had felt horrifyingly lethal. But stepping back, a folding knife wasn’t exactly ideal against undead Nurses. Had Samantha or Pete ever so much as flinched when stabbed? Winced? Reacted in any way that suggested they could feel pain at all? Sure, it could cut flesh. But that was the ceiling.

Against opponents who didn’t even blink when you drove a blade into a vital spot, a folding knife had one glaring, fatal problem: the reach was just too short. To land a hit, Kira would have to step squarely into their kill zone. And while she was busy trying to nick them with a three-inch blade, the Nurses were fully capable of killing a living person at least three times over in the same window.

The sight of that short blade made Seojun’s mouth go completely dry. His thighs were shaking as he pushed himself to take a step forward, keeping a firm grip on Johan at his side. There was something genuinely reassuring about having Johan there— those long limbs, that raw strength, the cold ruthlessness he switched on the moment someone became an enemy. In a situation like this, that was worth a lot.

But he and Johan couldn’t make a straight line for the elevator. Brown was making his way over with Luciel, and the man was not exactly built for speed. What Brown lacked in agility, he more than made up for in sheer physical mass. Seojun wasn’t about to just shoulder past him like he was a traffic cone.

“Seojun—wait, where’s McCullan? Wasn’t he with you?”

“Ah.” Seojun paused. “McCullan.”

Of all the names to come up right now. Because really, what were you supposed to think when only one person came back from a group that had fled together from Samantha? The math didn’t exactly look great.

Seojun wanted to stay on decent terms with the occult website crew, at least until they dealt with the doctor who apparently treated human bodies like a hobby project. He kept quiet for a moment, and that silence was apparently enough. Brown’s grip tightened around Luciel’s hand, and he let out a slow, unsteady breath.

“Did… did something happen to him?” His voice came out careful. Careful and already braced.

“No. Nothing like that.”

Seojun met Brown’s wavering eyes and said it plainly, without hesitation.

“In that case… oh! Did he leave the hospital? That would be so like McCullan.”

Brown let out a relieved breath and managed a soft smile. But Seojun shook his head again.

“No, that’s not it either. Unfortunately, this hospital is completely sealed off. McCullan confirmed it himself. There’s no way out.”

“W-wait. We can’t leave?”

“Right.”

That bad news landed like a stone. Dennis went rigid. Even Luciel, who had recovered a fair amount by now, let the composure slip from her face. Kira muttered something sharp under her breath and kicked the floor.

“If there’s any silver lining here,” Seojun went on, “it’s that McCullan is probably alive and doing just fine. Because he turned tail and ran while me and this guy were tied up dealing with one of the nurses.”

Seojun hitched his thumb toward Johan, who flashed him a wide, carefree smile in return. He was the only one here who could manage that right now. Across from them, Kira was already yanking at her short hair, something between a groan and a scream scraping out of her.

“How is any of that good news?!”

Internally, Seojun quietly reclassified McCullan’s standing in the group to somewhere around persistent nuisance. Nobody even questioned the part about McCullan abandoning them and running, which said everything.

“He might come in handy eventually. Who knows. Either way, he’s probably with Levi. A woman who introduced herself as Californiponi.”

They say your reputation precedes you.

Seojun chose to conveniently overlook the fact that his own reputation was currently somewhere near rock bottom, because the group in the basement had already moved on to a completely different objection.

“Californiponi? Californiponi actually showed up here?”

Brown stared at Seojun like he’d just said something in a foreign language. Luciel blinked beside him, equally thrown.

“Yeah. According to Levi, she said she was the real ‘surprise’ Mina had planned, which is why she assumed nobody else would know she was coming.”

“That does make sense. Californiponi never came to any of our meetups.” Brown let out a slow sigh. “Still surprising, though. And honestly, pretty unlucky for her.”

Kira pushed off the wall and walked over.

“So that’s what Mina was being so mysterious about? Actually, forget that for a second. Where the hell is Mina? I haven’t seen her once since I came in here with this guy.” She paused, then her expression shifted, like something unpleasant had just resurfaced. “And that’s bad enough on its own, but— God, I thought I was losing my mind!”

Kira’s agitated hand shot out toward Johan. Johan burst out laughing and waved it off.

“That really was quite a shock, wasn’t it, Kira? Look on the bright side, though. Now you know that there are corpses out there with enough stubbornness to keep going even when they’re down to just their upper half. Your worldview has genuinely expanded!”

“What.”

“Stop. Stop. Don’t bring that up again. My stomach is doing things it shouldn’t be doing and I feel like I’m about to throw up everything I had this morning. God! If you hadn’t done that to that guy’s gut—”

Seojun was deeply curious about whatever Johan and Kira had been through together, but given that Kira was visibly gagging and looked moments away from actually being sick, it didn’t feel like the right time to ask. Kira wiped the corner of their mouth, looking suddenly ten years older.

“I don’t really know Californiponi either. But I’m pretty sure she and Mina were close. So what did she say? Did she manage to meet up with Mina?”

“Mina…”

This time, the color drained from Seojun’s face. What Levi had told him about Mina’s final moments was genuinely horrific. A firsthand account so vivid it still felt like it smelled of fresh blood. Seojun struggled to open his mouth. There was an unwanted weight pressing down on his shoulders, the kind that came with being the one who had to say the thing nobody wanted to hear. Not even Johan, who was always ready to step in for him, could take that particular burden off.

“It sounds like there really is a deranged ghost doctor haunting this place.”

“A ghost doctor?”

Kira looked up at him with a frown. Seojun glanced down at her and let out a low sigh.

Hadn’t he been acting all high and mighty about smoking once they got out of here? And now here he was, about to say something that would snuff out whatever small spark of hope was still flickering in the place. The future felt like it had gone dark in front of his very eye.

Seojun laid it out at an even pace — not too fast, not too slow — the story of the sadistic doctor, exactly as Levi had told it to him. When he finished, a brief silence settled over the basement corridor like a held breath.

Brown was the first to speak. He let out a long, dragging sigh and pressed a hand to his forehead.

“So that’s why the Nurses were so… wrong.”

Most of them went quiet, the weight of it sinking in. One person, however, reacted in the complete opposite direction.

“At last! At last! The true enemy has finally shown itself! Luciel! The great and magnificent Luciel! This is the real enemy worthy of you!”

“Uh… yeah.”

Dennis grabbed Luciel by the shoulders and started shaking her, her twin ponytails whipping around wildly. It probably would have gone on for a while if Brown hadn’t shot him a look of such naked annoyance that it functioned as its own warning. Seojun watched the chaos unfold, and despite everything — the dread, the exhaustion, the weight of what he’d just said — the corner of his gloomy mouth twitched into a smile.

Fortunately, since everyone down here had already run headfirst into something paranormal, nobody called him a liar or waved it off as nonsense. Still, anxiety had started creeping in anyway. The slow, insidious kind, like something tickling its way up from the soles of his feet. Seojun couldn’t put it off any longer. He ran his tongue over his dry lips and opened his mouth.

Johan’s gaze fixed on those soft lips and stayed there, completely silent.

“More importantly… did you guys hear anything from the elevator side? Right before we came down? Something like… something falling?

“Funny you should ask. That’s exactly why I’m standing out here right now.”

Kira didn’t bother unfolding her arms. She just tilted her chin once toward the far end of the corridor. Every gaze followed. There was nothing down there. Only the dark, deep and total, folding over itself. Seojun barely wrestled the hiccup back down his throat.

“So. Here’s the thing… through a series of, uh, unavoidable events… Johan and I may have, accidentally, caused the Nurse — the one with the blades, on her hands and feet — to, uh. Fall. Down the elevator shaft.”

Only now did Seojun truly understand why Johan had been leaning so hard on the word coincidence earlier. It was a flimsy excuse. He knew that. He just didn’t have anything better to dress it up with.

Silence.

Brown pursed his lips into something pained and stared at the dark elevator without a word. Those round, usually gentle eyes had gone cloudy. He was probably picturing Samantha’s scalpel hands and feet, because his face looked absolutely terrible.

Kira, on the other hand, just stood there with her mouth hanging open, blinking rapidly.

“Hold on. Hold on. You’re telling me there’s a Nurse with blades on her hands and feet and she’s somewhere down here. And that thud we heard? That was her?!“

Kira had stopped pretending to hold it together. She got halfway through bringing her folding knife up to her mouth before her brain caught up with her hand and she jerked it back fast. Johan observed all of this, then gave a calm, easy shrug.

“It wasn’t our fault. She was really scary.”

Not a trace of sincerity anywhere on his face.