Bailonz Street 13-Chapter 249.1
Roughly ten days after an unprecedented incident in which, out of the blue, two members of Black-Tortoise Team 1, two Daydream employees, and one unidentified supernatural disaster all appeared unconscious at the Disaster Management Bureau headquarters.
The principals of the incident gathered at a barbecue joint.
The slightly shabby place seemed like a long-beloved spot in an office-district, buzzing with diners, but at the corner table where they sat a weary hush prevailed…
They had only just regained a fragile calm.
“……”
“……”
Sizzle.
Meat hit the grill and began to cook. Three haggard faces traded polite encouragements.
“Please, eat up.”
“Yesyes, thank you.”
Agent Choi briskly grabbed a piece off the grill and popped it into his mouth.
You wouldn’t think of him as someone who had spent a full week surviving only on water and liquid foods just to barely recover because he couldn’t swallow anything.
It was a similar case with Assistant Manager Eun Haje as she cracked open a soju bottle.
“Can’t even let you quit drinking, this job.”
“Eh-hey, no matter what, a government agency can’t be the one to serve alcohol. But at least the treatment was free, right?”
“If I start in on taxes here I turn into a real nuisance, yeah?”
“You do know your stuff, huh?”
Back when she was a newbie, she’d had her personal info exposed by an agent she ran into inside a ghost story, so thanks to that, even in a grandma getup she’d been identified as a Daydream employee.
After several days of interrogation and treatment, she’d been granted leave on condition she accompany the agents.
Her gear had been confiscated by the bureau, but she’d been humanely issued replacement equipment to fill her empty hands. Wearing gloves so there wouldn’t be any electrical shocks, she picked up the tongs and flipped the meat.
“Come on, Sir Highborn Geezer, you too.”
“……”
Of the group, the one who looked the least worn-out was Agent Bronze, or rather Ryu Jaekwan. He accepted the hanwoo with a complicated expression.
He probably wasn’t just calculating whether the bill would skate under the anti-graft law’s threshold. More likely, he was at a loss for how in the world to handle this situation.
Indeed.
Every one of them had died. They were noosed and hanged at Sekwang Station, and then woken up, and only just recovered from brutal aftereffects to the point of being barely functional.
But they were still tormented by nightmares and eerie auditory hallucinations, and only now were they properly taking stock of what on earth had happened.
Because even inside the bureau it was difficult to talk openly about Sekwang Special Metropolitan City.
“…It’s damn hard to collect intel on ‘that area’. You agents turn up anything?”
“You dig into that the wrong way and your memories will literally get blown away~ You could say the way things are now is, for the moment, the best-case scenario.”
“By ‘the way things are now’ you mean…”
“The bureau has classified our state as contamination. …Since we went through a well that hadn’t had safety checks in ages, we’ve been officially judged to have been contaminated by an unidentifiable supernatural phenomenon,” Agent Bronze explained.
In other words, a vaguely stable condition.
Basically, they seemed to think Agent Choi had once again pulled some reckless stunt and they’d ended up in an ‘anyway, we escaped’ state…
Even for Daydream employees, the fact they weren’t being thrown straight into the Glass Prison but allowed to live in this awkward, lax limbo probably owed something to that view.
They were seen as having been dragged into it.
“We benefited a bit from the problem-child reputation on your side.”
“Eyy~ sometimes things happen when you’re trying to save civilians. ‘Challenging’ is such a nicer word. No need to be so harsh.”
“Right, right. Please, have plenty of beef.”
Then Assistant Manager Eun Haje flicked a glance to one side.
Not just her. Everyone’s eyes drifted the same way.
To the one presence at the table who couldn’t eat beef.
“…Next time, let’s make sure you get some.”
Conditional acceptance
That would be me.
A being in the shape of a supernatural disaster, going by the codename 130666.
Amorphous flesh inside a gas mask, unable to put even a perfectly grilled bite of hanwoo in its mouth…
For the record, the only reason I could even be here was because Black-Tortoise Team 1’s team leader, the Elder, was using a dokkaebi trick to distort the other diners’ line of sight in this restaurant.
The human body I’d gotten back in Sekwang Special City was nowhere to be seen.
Because it had been a dream to begin with.
‘Ha……’
So how am I still thinking like a person, you ask?
‘They worked me to death to bring me back in line…’
Luck helped, too.
Thanks to the relief I now felt, even missing out on premium beef didn’t feel bitter enough to make me cry.
‘So… they said it was about three days after everyone woke up.’
Agent Bronze said that’s when he first heard about my condition.
About me, returned in a state of having completely lost my humanity.
Salt Goblin
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