Theatrical Regression Life - Chapter 15

In the original novel, the main story begins with the death of Chief Kang Mina.

She got separated from her group and went over the rail. Since no one caught her, but rather ran away, she fell.

It would have been better if she had died as it was, But she was torn apart by the monsters and left with no flesh to speak of.

He was able to easily guess her end from the countless spider legs that followed them, and he saw it with his own eyes as they exited the building.

It didn’t take long for the group’s morale to die, and it didn’t take long for them to get murderous.

The death of a close colleague. A cruel end. Efficiency and humanity.

It wasn’t until he met two students much younger than him that he came to his senses.

Jung In-ho overcame the death of his colleague with the responsibility of an adult.

Of course, it was too drastic and dry to say ‘overcome’, but at least it allowed the main character to make a rational decision.

Although he lost his former colleagues, who willingly accepted death by losing their minds, he met new lives to take responsibility for.

However, Jung In-ho now has not suffered the death of any other person.

There is no weak person to take responsibility for, and Manager Lee Jaehun saved all of them and comforted their spirits, which should have been shattered.

Will Jung In-ho now have the time to deal with the death of others?

“…….”

Needless to say, none of them welcomed death.

Of course, Dr. Ha Seongyoon could be familiar with death as it was his job. However, that did not become a reason to love death itself, and more than that, Jung In-ho was unfamiliar with it.

It’s unfamiliar, and it’s scary. He hates it to the point where it feels like being locked in a steel room where everything is gray.

Just imagining it makes all the nerves in his body quiver with unpleasant, painful, and stuffy sensations. That was the concept of death.

Because he was Jung In-ho, he could intuit the death of others before anyone else.

“… Go, go.”

“…….”

“I have to go.”

And he had never, not even once, been prepared for it.

Jung In-ho straightened his grip on the Monkey Spanner and immediately ran out.

You could see how agitated he was by the way he threw away all the twigs he had picked up, and such agitation also spread to Dr. Ha Seongyoon and Boss Yoon Garam.

They stood still in the wake of Jung In-ho’s quick run, but soon realized what was happening and instinctively began to move their legs as well.

As Jung In-ho ran ahead of them and fought his way through the oncoming monsters, he realized something strange.

‘… Why did we come so far… ?’

The place where the four of them started and the place where they were now was too far away.

The reason Jung In-ho left his party was to arrange time for them to talk, but he had no intention of going any farther than that.

Wasn’t he just here to pick up tree branches in the first place?

There were plenty of those around near the group. No, no, no. That means, Jung In-ho did not even notice that he had gone so far away from the group.

But he could recall the process if he had to.

They hadn’t spoken as they searched for branches, and Jung In-ho took this silence for granted as they weren’t close to each other at the time.

So, if he had to guess the cause of the current situation, it would be….

“…….”

He remembered the hypothesis that Dr. Ha Seongyoon had suggested earlier.

The hypothesis that mental strength is important in this world.

The moment he looked back on it, Jung In-ho realized.

They had come this far by their own volition, but as Dr. Ha Seongyoon said, they came this far without thinking because their mental strength was low.

In other word, this happened because he spaced out.

Jung In-ho suddenly felt goosebumps rising up to his fingertips.

He had thought he was in control, but in this world, even that was arrogant.

Dr. Ha Seongyoon called him after biting his lip.

“Jung-in, Mr. Jung In-ho… !”

“…….”

“We must move together! It will be more troublesome if we split up!”

At the words of Dr. Ha Seongyoon, Jung In-ho looked back at the two.

“Then, hurry, run faster.”

“… Mr. Jung In-ho.”

The doctor with a distorted face continued.

“I understand your urgency, but. Rather, if we go we might make things worse.”

“How could it get worse… ? There is no one there to fight with right now.”

“But Mr. Lee Jaehun… .”

“The scream you just heard belonged to a woman!”

In the end, Jung In-ho, who lost his composure, shouted.

Boss Yoon Garam is with them, so the only ones left are Chief Kang Mina and employee Kwon Yeon-hee.

Chief Kang Mina was too timid to scream, and no matter how simple employee Yeon-hee Kwon was, she wasn’t stupid enough to not know that screaming in this situation could bring another monster together.

‘One of them screamed?’

If they couldn’t think that much, they wouldn’t have come to their senses at the company in the first place. In a situation where two rational people would scream, there was only one thing he could think of.

“It means that they can’t judge, they’re on the verge of dying right now… .”

Jung In-ho gritted his teeth and said.

“It means that this Lee Jaehun you’re talking about is in a situation where he can’t protect one of them, if not both of them.”

“…….”

“Then how could it get worse… ?”

At the very least, manager Lee Jaehun would be incapacitated, and one of the women in the group had screamed herself to death.

There were only four people present, so it wouldn’t be strange if they all died.

Could it get any worse than this?

“Those people, all of them, I… They are my co-workers.”

The people I’ve been with for how long.

Chief Kang Mina often spent time eating with him, and intern Roh Yun-seok shared many worries with him.

Employee Kwon Yeon-hee is a face that he sometimes saw while walking in and out of the hallway, and manager Lee Jaehun is, yeah.

He was a man who was now someone worth talking to.

All those people were going to die, and he had already guessed that one of them had.

How can Jung In-ho, who hated death, regain his composure?

He wasn’t that kind of a monster.

“… Please run quickly.”

“…….”

“Because if I’m late, I’ll be really, really insane… .”

He didn’t think he had it in him.

* * *

Fortunately, it wasn’t too difficult to find the way they came from earlier.

In their group, there was Ms. Yoon, who said she usually took a walk in the park, and she led the way through trees that all looked the same.

“Uh, have we… come this way before?”

“…….”

“No, sorry. I said something strange.”

Just like Jung In-ho, the fact that they came all this way without thinking seemed to be a creepy fact even to Boss Yoon Garam.

She had a nauseous look on her face over the fact that she hadn’t remembered coming this way, even though it was clear that she had come by her own will.

Perhaps it was because she felt how threatening this world was to them.

Yes, this world harbored many malicious intentions.

The trees in the park, which should have been only a few meters tall, towered over them like those in the jungle, blocking the sky, and the trunks of the trees, unlike what they knew, didn’t feel alive.

It felt foreign, as if it had been painted on Styrofoam or cement.

A world where simply living and even breathing felt uncomfortable and burdensome.

A world where even when he moved of his own volition, it didn’t feel like it, and he felt uncomfortable, like he was being observed.

That’s where they were.

Squish.

“…….”

Jung In-ho frowned at the vine he stepped on without even realizing it.

There weren’t many monsters approaching aggressively like this, but that wasn’t the only problem.

What the hell was that sound, it’s just a sound… .

‘How can it be so revolting’

He breathed out sharply as a feeling of nausea rose.

Tears welled up in his eyes as if someone had put their hands around his throat and shook him. A daze overtook him.

He felt like if he stopped running for even a second, he might grab a tree and throw up.

In fact, Jung In-ho was not the only one who showed this kind of reaction.

Dr. Ha Seongyoon, who was running alongside them, was also running with a silent frown, and it seemed that his pale face was not simply due to a wound on his side.

Suddenly, he remembered intern Roh Yun-seok, who was throwing up as soon as they exited the company. Perhaps Yun-seok felt the same way at the time. This….

“… Ugh.”

Feels like cockroaches crawling through your stomach.

It was a terribly vivid, alien sensation.

Fortunately, the condition of Boss Yoon Garam did not look too bad.

Rather, she was guiding them where they were supposed to go with her quick movements to the extent that Jung In-ho had reasonable suspicions of her.

Jeong In-ho recalled the ideal of the flower shop that Lee Jaehun had pointed out.

“Ah, here. Here, yes. We need to go here.”

“… All right.”

In front of her flower shop, tree roots protruded like old tree-lined roads.

What did that really mean? Why was the path of the flower shop and the park connected?

And as soon as Lee Jaehun came out of the company, he looked around and pointed it out. What was Lee Jaehun thinking when he approached it alone?

So far, all of Jung In-ho’s judgments have been wrong, so he couldn’t guess what Lee Jaehun was thinking.

What on earth was he thinking alone when he held the pipe in his hand in this world?

Why did he not even resent anyone while shedding so much blood alone?

“It’s all here, here, if you break it here… !”

“…….”

“… be… ?”

Jung In-ho could not understand him.

“… … .”

“… … .”

“…Kang, Kang Mina…ssi.”

[Note: ssi means mr/ms, usually I put Ms/Mr if they use ssi without any other title, but I though I should add it here because of the way it was written.]

Boss Yoon Garam’s voice trembled terribly.

Right before reaching the place she arrived at as she guided her, the first thing that caught her eye was a large wall-shaped sculpture.

There was none other than Chief Kang Mina, who had fallen red and collapsed.

Her eyes were staring into thin air.

“… uh.”

“…….”

“Uh, uh… .”

At that moment, there was no sound other than “uh”.

His breath escaped like a thick iron pressing down on his lips, but his stiff tongue was unable to form words.

Perhaps the lips did the work for this idiot who forgot to breathe.

Breathing out through his mouth, his eyes were searching for a sense of reality in the sight he was seeing for the first time in his life.

To be honest, he could think of similar situations like that in movies with a R19 label, but somehow the feeling was completely different from what he saw on screen.

The books always say that the sword bleeds, and he realized now why they used that ridiculous phrase about the liquid soaking into the metal.

Whoever came up with the phrase must have killed a man himself, for where Chief Kang lay, the wooden planks were soaked with red as if it were water.

The person who spewed the blood was staring into the sky, profusely, like a doll.

It was so lifeless, mannequin-like, or like something that could not be human. He even wondered if it was really the person who had spilled this crimson blood.

Her shirt, which she usually wore neatly, was tattered as if it had been ripped out by tens of thousands of teeth, but it still looked quiet like an ornament on the set.

It was too foreign and unfamiliar to be the shape of a person he knew.

The round left eye and the distorted right eye were strangely unrealistic.

“… Go, Kang, Kang Mina. Mina… .”

“…….”

“No, no, no, why… .”

Flop.

Boss Yoon Garam sat down on the ground.

Perhaps she had developed a friendship along with employee Kwon during that short period of time.

Since she was the first person of the same sex she met after falling into a world without a place to turn to, she was devastated by her death.

Jung In-ho recalled the smiles they had when they first met under the urging of employee Kwon.

He soon turned his gaze away from Boss Yoon Garam, who was looking at Chief Kang Mina, unable to approach or hold her hand.

Jung In-ho noticed that Dr. Ha Seongyoon was staring somewhere else.

And at the end of it, there was intern Roh Yun-seok, who was stuck in a big tree.

“…….”

Oh.

So this is what it means to be speechless.

“… Yun, Seok.”

Still, he let out a breath.

That was all.

There were too many things swirling around in the pockets of his mind.

The figure of Yun-seok’s leg in the distance or a piece of meat that looked like a broken doll. And the bloody tree and the thick hand holding it were mixed here and there.

But after getting it out of his mouth. Ah.

“…….”

What he was seeing really was a corpse.

People say that death in an instant is something that happens under the sky. He realized that what he was looking at was really a murder scene.

“… Ha.”

He laughed.

How can you describe this as ‘death’?

___________________________________________________

End Note:

These chapters are so exciting,

even though I’ve read it before.