Reborn as a Prophet in a Horror Movie

#193Reader Mode

#193

With just a glance, Seojun could already see the cracks forming in his new “unbreakable friendship”, thanks to Johan. The guy’s casual, almost effortless way of sabotaging things was starting to feel deliberate. With a quiet sigh, Seojun looked away. There were far more urgent matters to deal with right now. Hoping Brown’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness by now, he cleared his throat.

“Anyway, that’s not what we need to focus on right now. Do you remember the ID badge the Nurse was wearing?”

Strictly speaking, it was absolutely what they needed to focus on. But since dragging that particular topic into the light would only make things awkward for him, Seojun decided to gloss over it. Whether Brown believed his little deflection or not was anyone’s guess. The man had already drifted into thought, eyes fixed on a vague point somewhere in the distance. He tilted his round head slightly before finally replying.

“I remember seeing something on her neck… but why? Is it important?”

“Very. It’s not just a standard ID badge. It’s a keycard. One that opens the emergency stairwell, if I’m reading things right. The access level changes depending on the card, though.”

Brown frowned, his round face scrunching in confusion. “Wait, hold on. A keycard? And the security system’s still running? But this place is abandoned.”

It did sound ridiculous, even to Seojun. He could see the disbelief plastered all over Brown’s face. Seojun gave a calm, unbothered nod.

“Brown, let’s stop pretending any of this makes sense, okay? The lights are on, rooms lock themselves—it’s a haunted hospital. Logic doesn’t apply here anymore.”

Perhaps it was the freezer incident back at the Happy Pig Factory that had recalibrated everyone’s ability to tolerate the bizarre. Either way, convincing Brown wasn’t much work. The man, who had looked seconds away from a full existential crisis, visibly adjusted. Luciel, quietly listening nearby, seemed to have made her peace with it even faster. Seojun decided to count that as a win and press on before anyone could hit him with more questions. He turned to Luciel, who still wore that same grave, thoughtful expression, and steered things toward what he actually needed to say.

“Speaking of which… Luciel, any chance I could get the pepper spray back?”

“Hm?”

Luciel broke free from whatever thoughts she’d been lost in and looked up at him— wide-eyed, attentive, completely without judgment. Which almost made it worse. She wasn’t the type to scold or chastise him; Seojun knew that much. But asking for something back he’d flat-out refused earlier? That came with its own unique kind of humiliation. Seojun’s hand moved unconsciously, fingers absently brushing against his lower lip.

“Didn’t you say you didn’t need it?”

“Well…”

Seojun did say that. He absolutely said that.

But if he wanted any hope of surviving a confrontation with the sinister doctor that was undoubtedly waiting at the top of this hospital, a little embarrassment was a price worth paying. What was the alternative? Push Luciel out in front and let her deal with it instead? Her, who was younger than him. By how much, Seojun wasn’t sure, but still young enough to make the thought unthinkable.

Sure, he had made a personal commitment to ditch his conscience and live an easy life, but even he had lines he wasn’t willing to cross.

Back when Seojun still had both his eyes, Christina had burned herself into his memory in a way he suspected would never fully fade. That slender figure, running headlong toward a monstrous tangle of writhing tentacles with all the self-preservation instinct of someone who’d never once considered their own mortality. The image of it would likely remain etched in his memory forever.

She’d been framed by fire. Flames warm and alive in the cool forest stillness, streaking the night sky with hues of gold and dark crimson. Almost pretty, if you ignored the part where a girl was about to die. And Seojun, watching from a safe distance, had felt nothing. Less than nothing, actually. He’d pointed her at certain death the way you’d casually point a stranger toward the nearest exit, and somewhere in the quieter, uglier corners of his mind, he’d even felt something close to satisfaction. Neat. Efficient. Problem delegated.

But life wasn’t a movie, and Christina wasn’t the protagonist of anyone’s story. She was just an ordinary girl with a pretty face.

So whatever this was — this feeling making him dig his heels in right now — Seojun wasn’t going to pretend it was righteousness, or some sudden burst of heroism. He didn’t deserve words like that. No, this was far less flattering: stubbornness, plain and simple. The kind of stubbornness that came from knowing something and refusing to unknow it. He ran his tongue over his dry lips.

“That’s because… I think the doctor is the same one from Brown’s ghost stories. The male doctor. If both urban legends are about the same guy, then what worked before might still work now. Which means the pepper spray might actually be his weakness.”

“You’re saying both ghost stories are about the same spirit?”

Luciel’s brows knitted together, her confusion quiet but tangible.

“Probably. I’ll admit it’s mostly just a guess. But think about it. The way we handled the Factory Manager back at Happy Pig, it’s not all that different from what I’m suggesting now, is it? If ghosts are fundamentally shaped by how they died, then this doctor should, at least in theory…”

Seojun was still in the middle of building his case, still carefully dismantling the wall of Luciel’s skepticism brick by brick, when something snagged his attention.

A sound. Faint, at first. Coming from somewhere along the wall.

At first, Seojun dismissed it. The building had been filled with enough ambient creaks and groans that his nerves had been inventing dangers out of thin air all day. But this noise didn’t fade like the others. It lingered. Stretched. And then, quietly, it shifted from background noise into something with direction, something with intention —

Not louder. Closer.

Click. Scrape. Click.

The conversation died the way conversations did when everyone in the room heard the same thing at the same time and nobody wanted to be the first to acknowledge it. The silence that replaced it was somehow worse.

Nurse Samantha was coming up through the elevator shaft.

Part of Seojun wished they hadn’t noticed. Ignorance had its uses, and a few extra seconds of not-knowing might have been worth something. But that sound… that sound was hers. Unmistakable, the way a fingerprint is unmistakable. The dragging shuffle of her steps, the unrelenting rhythm of her march—her refusal to stay where she’d been left behind.

Seojun clamped his mouth shut and swallowed back a small avalanche of curses.

For one fleeting, not entirely proud moment, Seojun had entertained the idea of just taking the bag. Skip the conversation, skip the convincing, handle it the efficient way to get what he needed.

The violent impulse passed.

They weren’t close enough for that. Not the kind of close where you could skip the explanations and trust that the other person would fill in the blanks charitably. And this wasn’t exactly a low-stakes environment where a little friction could be laughed off later over dinner. They were in a hospital that had long since stopped being a hospital, navigating the territory of a deranged body-modification doctor and his horrifying staff, and the handful of individuals Seojun could—generously, loosely— call his allies were the only buffer standing between him and a very bad outcome. Start manhandling their belongings without explanation and he wasn’t just creating an awkward moment. He was pulling a thread that could unravel the whole arrangement in ways he couldn’t predict or afford in advance.

Above all else, Luciel had shown him nothing but genuine goodwill since the moment they’d met.

Brown’s voice cut in before Seojun could chase that thought any further. The color had drained from his face, his gaze fixed on the far end of the dark corridor, though he spared a glance at Luciel before landing on Seojun with an expression caught somewhere between hope and barely-held dread.

“Seojun, you came down here specifically to get that ID badge off the Nurse. Which means you actually have a way to stop her… right?”

Brown jaw was tight enough that the words came out clipped, scraped clean of any warmth. Seojun, who had been holding his breath, gave a short, sharp nod.

“I’ll need a couple of things in place first. But yes. I have something.”

“Good. Then that’s what we do. Dennis!”

It was remarkable, really. The way Brown’s whole bearing changed in the space of a breath. His round cheeks flushed, and that quiet, gentle look in his eyes hardened into something with a spine behind it. He placed a steady hand on Luciel’s shoulder and guided her firmly toward Dennis, who hovered nearby, looking awkward and unsure of what to do.

“Lucy. Upstairs, now. It’s not safe down here.”

“B-Brown!”

She called after him. He didn’t look back.

“Dennis, please. Keep Luciel safe.”

And Dennis… well. Whatever flashed across Dennis’s face in that moment was something else entirely. Before the fear had time to seep in and twist his expression into what it would eventually become—something else surfaced first. The corners of his mouth twitched, just a flicker, a brief upward pull. Something that, stripped of all generosity, could only be called delight.

It barely lasted half a second before reality came crashing back. Fear and dread quickly muscled in to complicate the picture, masking whatever had momentarily appeared. But it had happened. Seojun had seen it happen.

Dennis’s lips curled into a sneer, and he closed his hand around Luciel’s arm with a scoff.

“I don’t take orders from you! Let’s go, Luciel.”

The bite in his tone startled Luciel into motion. Her hands flew to her bag strap, fumbling to pull it off her shoulder, but Dennis’s iron grip on her arm made the angle impossible. It didn’t matter. Dennis was already moving, hauling her toward the stairs with the single-minded energy of someone who had decided, on a foundational level, to never look back. It was the kind of behavior that probably deserved a laugh, or at least a raised eyebrow. Brown, however, just sighed and turned to Kira, nodding once.

“Kira. I’m trusting you with Luciel. Look out for her.”

“Huh? Me?”

Kira pointed to herself with the folding knife clenched in her white-knuckled fist. Her nerves must have gotten the better of her, because the end of her question came out higher-pitched than she’d probably intended. Brown looked at her with the desperate, weary expression of a man who had run out of options, and Kira’s cheek twitched in response. She glanced around, stalling.

“You sure you’ll be alright without me?”

“The three of us will be enough, Kira.”

Seojun cut in before Brown could answer, his voice firm. Johan, catching Kira’s eye at that exact moment, offered her a serene, almost beatific smile.

“Well. There you have it.”

Truthfully, more hands would’ve been better. Seojun wasn’t about to deny that. But leaving Luciel alone with Dennis didn’t sit right with him either. Apparently, Kira had reached the same conclusion. She dragged a hand roughly through her short hair and muttered something under her breath that definitely wasn’t fit for polite company. Then, clicking her tongue, she shot all three of them a sharp look.

“Shit. Fine. But every single one of you better come back up alive, or I swear I’m gonna be stuck having nightmares about this.”

With her decision made, Kira didn’t waste a second. She took off up the stairs in great, bounding strides, skipping three or four steps at a time. She was already shouting by the time she neared the first landing.

“Hey, moron! You trying to rip her arm off? Slow down!”

Seojun watched as Kira’s silhouette dwindled into a dark blur, then disappeared entirely. And, of course, that was precisely the moment his brain decided to serve up the one critical detail he hadn’t accounted for.

Pete.

“Kira! Not the second floor! Avoid the second floor completely! Just wait on the first floor!”

His voice echoed up the stairwell, quickly swallowed by the endless darkness. They were all gone now, completely out of sight. Seojun stood there as his mind ran an unwelcome simulation of what might happen if any of them accidentally set Pete free. A cold sweat prickled along his neck.

Nothing that unlucky will happen. Probably. Almost certainly.

That was the last thing they needed. Seojun sent up a quiet, fervent prayer that Pete would stay exactly where they’d left him until Samantha was dealt with and they could regroup.

The plan itself was straightforward, all things considered.

Do what they did with Pete. Run the same plan.

Pete and Samantha were built wrong in the same essential ways. Unnatural hands and feet. Bodies that were dangerous precisely because of what had been done to them. But that same unnatural edge came with built-in limitations to their design. Which meant going toe-to-toe with either of them was the wrong approach entirely. Far easier, and more practical to trap them somewhere and block the way out behind them.

Granted, Samantha had already shown she was perfectly willing to destroy a door if it got in her way—case in point, the first-floor emergency exit situation. But there’d been a cost. The fingers she’d left behind in the process made that clear. Seojun’s gaze flicked toward the room where Mina’s fake corpse had been strung up.

Get the ID. Get her in the room. Get out.

Simple enough in theory. The room Seojun had in mind was the operating room-turned-storage space they’d first entered after coming down to the basement. Luciel’s hiding spot was out of the question. Two doors and a window had too many variables, and Seojun had learned enough tonight to avoid handing fate any extra chances. The morgue McCullan had picked open seemed promising structurally, but Seojun hadn’t been inside it, hadn’t seen the layout with his own eye, and this was not the moment to gamble on unknowns.

Scrape. Scrape. Click. Click.

The sound grew louder now, filling the tight spaces between the walls in a way that made it harder to pretend it wasn’t exactly what they knew it was. Whatever grace period they’d had was quietly expiring.

“Johan.” Seojun kept his voice low. “We’re doing what we did with Pete. Lock Samantha in that room. You understand?”

“I think that’s a fantastic idea.”

Johan’s overly enthusiastic praise felt somewhat like flattery, which ironically made it seem less sincere. However, they didn’t have the luxury of wasting time bickering over such trivial matters, so Seojun turned to address Brown.

“That room where you three were hiding, what’s in there? Don’t filter anything. Just tell me everything you remember.”

“That room?” Brown’s expression asked a question he was polite enough not to say out loud — namely, why on earth does that matter right now — but he answered without missing a beat, which Seojun appreciated more than he could reasonably express at this moment. “Let’s see… there’s the bathroom scale Luciel threw, a metal bookshelf, a desk, a chair, a medical cart, some twine, plastic storage bins, a moth-eaten blanket, an overturned trash can… honestly, it’s like someone emptied a junk drawer in there.”

It was detailed, thorough, and earnest. Of all the people who could have stayed behind in the basement, it was a stroke of luck that it ended up being Brown. Luciel, already hurt, was out of the question. And Dennis… well. Seojun’s mind took one step toward imagining that particular conversation and immediately turned around and walked back the other way.

He tightened his grip, the bouquet of flowers crinkling softly in his hands. “Good. That room has everything we need.”

Seojun let his weary eye fall shut for just a moment. One breath. Cold and damp with the musty air of the basement. He drew it in slowly and released it even slower. When he opened his eye again, his gaze lingered briefly on the monkey wrench nearby. Then, with some effort, he parted his already dry again lips.

“Johan. I need you for this. Are you with me?”

“Jun.” Johan said his name like it was its own complete sentence, warm and unhurried. “You know I love it when you ask me for things. All you ever have to do is ask.”

Johan’s eyelids dipped slightly, blue eyes retreating behind long lashes, and the smile that bloomed across his face was like standing in front of the rising sun. Johan laughed as he said yes, easy and bright, like the situation hadn’t fully reached him or had reached him completely and simply failed to leave a dent.

Seojun tried to smile back, to find the muscles responsible and return some piece of that warmth.

It didn’t happen.

His gloomy face, it seemed, had other plans.

The effort crumbled before it could form anything recognizable. What was left was the kind of expression that happens when the inside and outside decide to stop cooperating entirely. He let it be. Stopped fighting it. And then, from somewhere behind that blank, unreadable mask of his, he spoke again, so quietly it was almost like he was saying it to himself.

“Alright. Let’s go and put our lives on the line together.”