Floor 27, Roteis's Hospital (1)
Escape from Roteis's Hospital within the time limit.
Time remaining: 7 hours 58 minutes.
"It's because Dobby isn't here, isn't it? I couldn't believe it at first, but he really didn't come with us."
"Huh? You predicted that?"
"Dobby is an apostle of a deity. His intuition is second to none."
"Now that you mention it, it does feel a lot like an escape room trial…" I could see where Ha Heijeong was coming from. There were times his instincts failed him, sure, but more often than not, the answer lay wherever Dobby wanted to go. In an escape-room-style trial like this one, his knack for finding clues was almost laughably overpowered.
Still, with Ha Heijeong at my side, it didn't really matter. She was a regressor—she had to know the clear route already.
"Anyway, since you know the strategy, losing Dobby isn't a real problem. So? Feeling up for a speedrun?"
"Huh? What are you talking about? I don't know any of that."
"Wait, what? Why wouldn't you know it?"
"Ah… right. The 27th floor randomly assigns one of six themes."
Six themes, assigned at random to the climbers who arrived? Which meant the theme we'd been given wasn't the one Ha Heijeong remembered. She must have read the surprise on my face, because a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
"That's what I've been saying—it'll be fun. I know one of the six themes, but the odds of getting it were low."
"Then this is no time to be lounging around. We should be hunting for clues—"
"Hey, with you and me together, what's there to worry about?"
She said it with total confidence. Huh. So… was this actually not that hard? I'd been to an escape room café a few times back on Earth, but I'd figured a trial handed down by the Tower had to be on another level of difficulty entirely. And my stats were restricted here, on top of that.
"Don't sweat it. Like I said, this is one of the fun floors."
"I just assumed a Trial Tower would make things tougher. Stats are capped, after all."
"Honestly, there aren't many planets out there with education as universal as Earth's."
"Huh? Oh… so you're saying this'll be easier for us than most."
A difference in education levels. Even facing identical problems, we'd find them far easier than most. Earth's schools were hardly uniform across the board, granted—but among all the worlds I'd seen since entering the Tower, none had been more developed than Earth.
Though surely there were more advanced worlds somewhere out there.
Still, on average, our schooling left us far better prepared than people who'd spent their whole lives in a medieval backwater. That much was simply true.
Out of nowhere, Ha Heijeong said something that caught me off guard.
"Come to think of it, this place is Roteis's too."
"Roteis?"
"The place I got locked up in during my first run was a prison. It was Roteis's Prison."
"Hmm."
There seemed to be something behind this Roteis business, but I couldn't put my finger on it yet. I'd need to explore the floor at least a little before anything clicked. Maybe thinking along the same lines, Ha Heijeong steered the conversation elsewhere.
"Well, that doesn't matter right now. Let's just focus on getting out."
"Right. So the stat restrictions mean brute force is off the table, I'm guessing?"
"Yeah. Just treat it like a real escape room—they always tell you not to force your way through, right?"
"Fair point. Okay, so first we find clues…" I turned my gaze back to the room.
A gloomy, lightless hospital ward. A small ore embedded in the ceiling gave off a faint glow. Bloodstains smudged the walls here and there, and discarded medical instruments littered the floor. The only furniture was a single blood-soaked hospital bed.
Taking it all in slowly, I had to admit the atmosphere was genuinely creepy. Huh. This feels less like an escape room and more like a horror game.
A door sat in the corner of the cramped ward. That was presumably our way out—but it was an escape room, so it wouldn't open without a fight. I approached and pulled the handle, and sure enough, the door rattled and refused to budge. Through the gap of a short chain looped across the door, I could see a padlock latched onto a hook on the other side.
Wondering if force might work after all, I grabbed the chain and yanked—no luck there either. Somewhere in this tiny ward, there had to be a key that opened that lock.
Thump—
At the sound behind me, I turned to find Ha Heijeong flipping the ward's mattress over.
"Door's locked. Anything turn up over there?"
"Nope. I checked under the bed too, nothing worth mentioning."
"Hmm."
There wasn't even an intact shelf in the room, so the bed was the only real place to search—which, perversely, made it the least likely hiding spot. This was the domain of a mad doctor and his test subjects. If someone had been confined in this ward, there was no way they'd have left their escape clues somewhere the enemy could find at a glance.
If I had to guess—the ore in the ceiling, behind the bed, or some concealed spot in the walls…
The moment the thought formed, my eyes went straight up. The mana stone set into the ceiling's recess. I gripped it, pulled, twisted—but it didn't so much as twitch. It clearly wasn't meant to be removed by hand.
Searching the walls would take ages, so checking behind the bed first made more sense. I looked over—and found Ha Heijeong tearing the mattress open, her hand buried in the stuffing.
She was searching with real dedication, but the odds of anything being in there were close to nil.
"Heijeong, hold on a second."
"Mm? What?"
"Let's pull the bed away."
Wheels on the bed frame meant no loud scraping and no real effort. Faded white wallpaper. Nothing looked unusual at a glance, but something about it itched at me. I stared at the wall for a while. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the faded paper slowly sharpened into focus—and sure enough, a faint rectangular seam was scored into the wall behind the bed.
"Heijeong, do you see it?"
"Uh… yes! Mm! The square thing, right? Oh—Kwon Suhyeok! Hey, how did you know that was there?"
"Just a hunch. Question is how we get it out. There's got to be a trick."
"Maybe you push it in?"
Ha Heijeong laid her hand against the wall panel and pressed hard, but it didn't budge.
Hmm. So not a push-button. Was there a trigger somewhere else?
The moment the thought crossed my mind, the square panel slid smoothly out of the wall.
"Huh? What—how did you do that?"
"Mm? I pulled it with mana. Why?"
"Ah… so that's how." Old memories of escape rooms on Earth had me thinking only in textbook solutions. While I stood there gaping like an idiot, Ha Heijeong stifled a laugh.
"This is exactly why I told you not to become a mage. Your body will try every trick in the book, but the second anything involves mana, your brain just… fails to connect the dots."
"Ahem—"
"Anyway, let's see what we've got." As I cleared my throat, Ha Heijeong pressed on. Peering into the recess in the wall, we found a thin lockpick, a pencil, and a faded notebook tucked inside.
The lockpick was presumably for the door… "So the notebook's our lead on escaping?"
"Probably."
Ha Heijeong pulled out the lockpick and handed me the notebook. It was far too dark to read where we stood, so we moved beneath the ore's faint glow. Shoulder to shoulder with Ha Heijeong, I opened the notebook. Whether the Tower had translated it for us or not, mercifully, it was written in Korean.
I came here chasing rumors of people vanishing near a strange ward in a remote mountain village.
The sinister building was obviously not normal by anyone's standards, but it didn't seem like a threat to an investigator like me. And it didn't take long for that assumption to shatter.
The modified test subjects were far more powerful than I had imagined, and my own strength was heavily restricted in this place. The one mercy is that they merely locked me up without doing me harm—yet. The hospital's doctor is presumably absent, though I can't confirm whether that's actually true.
Fortunately, before they captured me, I managed to grab two lockpicks and a small notebook from my bag. When the chance comes, I will attempt my escape.
If I fail to resolve this affair, I leave this journal and a single lockpick behind for whoever ends up confined here as I was.
One thing remains vivid in my memory: the golden key hanging around a test subject's neck. That key opens the front entrance. Whether I can wrest it from them, I do not know.
First, I must recover my bag, left in the second-floor bathroom.
P.S. — Beware the light.
It was the journal of a man named Rekum, who had once been trapped in this ward just as we were. For someone in his situation, the writing was remarkably level-headed—he must have had nerves of steel. Or maybe he was a fictional figure invented just to hand us hints.
Setting aside the obvious—that we'd need the lockpick to get out of this room—three things in that journal matter.
First, Rekum's bag was stashed in the second-floor bathroom. He might have recovered it during his escape, but honestly, I doubted it.
Second, the golden key hanging around a test subject's neck. Without it, the front door was out of reach. The variable was how powerful the test subjects were—normally that wouldn't faze me, but our restricted stats and skills were a genuine concern.
"Heijeong, do you know how strong the test subjects actually are?"
"Yeah. Think average stats around 80 for the enemies on this floor. They hit harder than us, but we've got skills, so if we fight smart, we can win."
"Then the test subjects aren't much to worry about, huh?"
"Nope. Just steer clear of the boss mob."
I nodded at her words. The mad doctor. The message had flagged it as untouchable, so as long as we stayed careful around that thing, we'd be fine.
And finally, third: beware the light.
No telling what that meant yet, but my best guess was that it was some kind of omen—a sign the mad doctor was about to appear.
That was enough of a summary. The remaining clues would have to be found outside the room. I closed the journal and looked back at Ha Heijeong.
"I saw a padlock on the outside of the door earlier. We can pick it and head out. Ready to move?"
"Hold on—let's search the room a bit more first. There might be something else."
Escape from Roteis's Hospital within the time limit.
Time remaining: 7 hours 52 minutes.
We ransacked the ward from corner to corner, but nothing else that looked like a clue to escape turned up. Wandering the hospital unarmed wasn't an option, so I grabbed a scalpel and a pry bar off the floor. No idea what a pry bar was doing in a hospital… but my best guess was torture, or maybe surgery.
I tried to hand the pry bar to Ha Heijeong, but she refused point-blank, so I ended up with the pry bar while she took the scalpel.
"You sure about this? I can take the scalpel, you know."
"Doesn't matter—I'm casting magic anyway."
"Still, a scalpel counts as melee for me too."
"Ugh, enough. Just carry the pry bar."
I offered one last time before we left the room, and predictably got shot down again. Ha Heijeong grinned teasingly, needling me.
"You're going to protect me either way, aren't you? What, don't tell me you can't?"
"I can."
"Great, then. Let's go."
She gave my shoulder a light push from behind. Holding a lockpick in each hand, I stepped up to the door. I stretched both arms through the gap over the chain and took hold of the padlock. The chain's window sat awkwardly high, and my posture was cramped.
As I gripped the lock and worked the two picks into it, a thought suddenly struck me.
"Hey, Heijeong. Isn't this part kind of a death sentence for most other people?"
"Hm? What do you mean?"
"I only know how to use a lockpick because I've done escape room cafés. How many climbers do you think can say that?"
"Oh, come on. There weren't many deaths on this floor, right? Then they must've found another way out, lockpick or not."
"Hm. I suppose?"
"There was even a pry bar in the room. Swing it with everything you've got and you could probably smash the door down. The real problem would be the noise drawing every test subject in the building…"
"Oh…?"
Clang—
At the sound of metal hitting the floor, Ha Heijeong's voice cut off. When she spoke again, her voice was trembling.
"Suhyeok. You… didn't just drop the lockpick, did you?"