Roteis's Hospital (3)

At the central staircase of the corridor we'd been walking through, we confirmed that our current position was the third floor. There were no stairs leading any higher, so the third floor was the top. Just three floors in all.

Given that a test subject had appeared on the third floor, there was bound to be one on the second as well — and that ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠one would be carrying the other half of the key. It really did feel like a stage straight out of a horror game.

The second floor, unlike the third, let in not a single speck of light, which made the atmosphere all the more sinister. Medical equipment and old documents lay strewn across the corridor floor.

"Seriously, where's the bathroom now?"

From the middle of the second-floor corridor, Ha Heijeong grumbled under her breath. Her expression didn't look too good either. She was forcing herself to hold back her fear, but it was obvious she wanted out of this place as quickly as possible.

Seeing that face, a bit of mischief crept into me before I knew it. "Want to split up and search? I'll take the right side."

Ha Heijeong glared at me without a word, a flicker of betrayal crossing her face — and then she pinched my side, hard. Our stats were identical thanks to the restriction, so the pain was considerable.

"Ack! Okay, okay, I get it!"

"Die. For real."

Only after I doubled over in pain did she finally let go of my side. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠She glanced once toward each end of the corridor, then shoved my back. "Let's try the right first."

Clutching my throbbing side, I turned around.

There was no bathroom down the right corridor. There were rooms that looked like medical supply storerooms, but nothing in them seemed worth salvaging. So it was back to the left, and at long last we found the second-floor bathroom.

An unisex, shared restroom with no gender division. A musty, stagnant smell hung in the air of the rusted room. A row of sinks stood by the entrance, urinals lined the left wall, and toilet stalls ran along the right.

"So where's the bag?"

The floor held nothing but shattered tile fragments; Reklem's bag was nowhere in sight. We checked the stalls one by one, but came up empty.

"You think the test subjects collected it?"

"Hmm, maybe?"

I stood there a moment, turning the problem over in my head. If this were one of the escape rooms we used to do back on Earth, Reklem's bag would be stashed somewhere in this bathroom. But since this was a Tower trial, I couldn't rule out the possibility that a test subject had retrieved it.

Hold on. If I were Reklem... The fact that he'd gathered lockpicks and a journal meant he'd had some breathing room before he was caught. A bathroom that the test subjects might wander into — he would never have left the bag somewhere easy to find. And the one place in a bathroom built for hiding something is the water tank behind the toilet.

"Heijeong, I think it's in one of the toilet tanks."

"The toilet tanks? Oh."

"Let's start with the closest one."

We checked the nearest tank first. But it was full of nothing but rusted water ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠— no bag. It's fine. There are five more.

The second and third tanks yielded nothing either. Then came the fourth.

The moment I lifted the tank's lid, a pale-faced ghost stared back at me — less a living creature than some kind of spirit. The sudden appearance froze me solid.

"GYAAAH!"

"KIEEEE!"

Ha Heijeong shrieked and stumbled backward just as the spirit burst out of the tank with a piercing wail. At the same moment, more spirits came punching through the bathroom walls.

Chilling shrieks reverberated through the room as sharp claws came raking toward me — but before I could loose a bolt of lightning, flames licked across the spirits' bodies. A scorching gust of heat washed over my face; Ha Heijeong had grabbed my arm and yanked me back.

The spirits that had erupted from the stalls burned within that narrow space and vanished into thin air. Ching— A single key dropped from the empty air and clattered onto the bathroom floor.

"Ugh, seriously... so annoying. I nearly lost my soul back there."

"Wh-what was that?"

From the way things had played out, that ghost-thing seemed to have been the test subject guarding the second floor — but it had vanished into the flames before the notification window even had a chance to appear.

"Hoo. Looks like it was the test subject guarding the second floor. Hic. I guess fire was its weakness, huh."

She was so rattled that she hiccuped mid-sentence. I gave her back a few slow pats. Honestly, this time I'd been startled too — you open a toilet tank and there's a ghost staring at you. My heart was still pounding.

We'd defeated the mysterious test subject, but we still hadn't found Reklem's bag. Perhaps the journal's mention of a bag had been nothing more than a breadcrumb leading us to the bathroom in the first place.

Not that it mattered anymore. We had every key now; all that remained was to go down to the first floor, open the front door, and get out.

The first floor below was thick with a misty, waterlogged smoke. Between the acrid stench and the blurred visibility, I could just make out an admissions counter at the center of the lobby before the stairs — and beside it, a doorless room with light leaking through the gap. It was the brightest light we'd seen anywhere in the hospital.

The journal's warning to beware the light floated up in my memory, and I lowered my voice to a whisper. "That's gotta be the doctor in there, right?"

Instead of answering, Ha Heijeong clamped a hand over my nose. When I looked at her, puzzled, she pointed at the mist with her finger. She wanted me to stop breathing — apparently that waterlogged fog had struck her as suspicious.

Well, I figured it was probably some kind of paralytic poison at worst.

Not that it matters — my poison resistance is pretty hi...

The instant I tried to say I was fine, I remembered that my skill levels had been locked at 5, and I promptly held my breath.

Ha Heijeong calmly pointed toward the front door. I nodded, and we moved forward carefully. The mad doctor was not an opponent we could face — which meant we had to stay cautious right up until the moment of escape.

The front door wasn't far, but moving slowly, it took a fair amount of time. Unable to hold our breath the whole way, we rationed our breathing in the smallest sips we could manage.

A heavy iron bar was latched across the center of the thick steel door, with a padlock hanging above it. All we needed to do was unlock it with the key and slide the bar aside. I carefully undid the padlock with the keys we'd already joined together. The problem was what came next.

There's no way this thing comes off quietly, no matter how gently I pull it.

The mad doctor hadn't responded to all the commotion on the second and third floors, but down here on the first, who could say. Ha Heijeong's face had gone red from holding her breath. Talking beat gesturing every time, so I blurted it out quickly.

"This thing is going to make noise no matter what. The second it's open, we run."

Ha Heijeong gave a small nod, and at the same moment I shoved the bar roughly aside.

CLANG! BRAAANG!

The crash of metal was deafening. I immediately threw my shoulder into the front door. Through the widening gap, the outside came into view — a garden with the feel of an abandoned graveyard.

And in that instant, lights blazed to life behind us.

A brilliance almost too bright to bear. Getting ready to bolt, I threw a quick glance back. The hospital's gloom had vanished entirely — the whole building glowed as if every single light inside had been switched on at once.

The door to the room beside the lobby, the one that had been shut, now stood wide open. The sudden brightness made everything hazy, but I could make out something like a golden sphere floating within. The moment I tried to focus my vision on it, a figure loomed in front of it.

"Heh heh heh. And where do you think you're running off to..."

That grotesque voice — the mad doctor revealed himself in the doorway. His white hair shot skyward like Einstein's. His bulk was about the same as mine, but what caught the eye were his sinuously writhing four-meter arms and the eyeballs jutting a full thirty centimeters out of their sockets.

Forget whether he could be fought — he provoked sheer disgust and terror. I heard Ha Heijeong's sharp intake of breath, crystal clear beside me.

"RUN!"

I kicked off the ground with the word still in the air. The moment we burst outside, I spotted a portal at the far edge of the garden — about a hundred meters away. Even with our current stats, that was a distance we could cover in under eight seconds.

I flicked my head around to check our rear. The doctor was chasing fast, but I didn't think he'd catch us before the portal.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

For a 27th-floor trial, this feels way too easy. Sure, our stats and skills were restricted, but even accounting for that, there hadn't been any real difficulty. They called the doctor unbeatable, but as long as you didn't foolishly try to fight him, he'd never catch your back.

If anything, it felt less like a trial and more like a hyper-realistic haunted house experience. Even granting that this is one of those occasional breather floors, I'm sure there's something more to it...

Roteis's Hospital, and Roteis's Prison. A gut feeling pressed on me hard: there was something here we hadn't found.

Forty meters to the portal. Then, all at once, I remembered the golden sphere in the doctor's room. What if something was inside that?

"Heijeong! Keep running!"

"What?"

I left her blinking after me and wheeled around.

"Hey!"

Her shout rang out sharp and clear — and the mad doctor was right in front of me. That bizarre arm, over four meters long, came lashing down like a whip. It swept in from a diagonal angle, and its sheer length left me almost no room to dodge.

I tightened my core and yanked my upper body back — a sliding fall, damp grass scraping across my waist as the doctor's arm whistled over my head.

"You little rat!"

Driving power through my right arm, I rose straight out of the slide and threw my body to the right. In a blink I was past the doctor — then I leapt clean over his other incoming hand and sprinted back toward the hospital.

The mad doctor spun to give chase. "Where do you think you're going!" His panicked bellow chased at my heels, and in that instant I knew my hunch was right. There was only one reason he'd chase me instead of the fleeing Ha Heijeong: something in that room was precious to him.

"____!"

Ha Heijeong's cry tore out just as a blast of heat surged past my back — she was buying me time. The doctor smashed straight through the wall of flame and kept coming, his burning body looking all the more grotesque for it.

But that brief opening had already bought me a wide lead.

"Ughhhn!"

The doctor's room was right there. My breath came ragged; the musty smoke of the first floor sank deep into my lungs, but I didn't slow down. The instant I crossed the threshold, with no room to spare for anything else, I seized the golden sphere in my hand.

And at that moment, everything before my eyes shattered and fell away — just like when I'd snatched the gremlin on the 8th floor.

Through the vision of the hospital dissolving into powder, what lay in my hand wasn't a golden sphere at all. It was a tiny fairy.

So it was all an illusion. No wonder. The trial's structure, pieced together like a horror game, had felt far too easy. In truth, the point had never been the escape — it was capturing this fairy.

It made sense that no one in Ha Heijeong's first regression had ever uncovered this hidden mission. Nobody could bring themselves to charge headlong at an opponent they couldn't hope to fight. They'd all simply thought the trial easier than expected, and left it at that.

"Eek! Eek!"

The fairy thrashed inside my grip. It flapped its tiny, finger-length wings furiously, but I had no intention of letting go.

"You little—! How did you catch on?"

"Dunno. Maybe your illusion was just too sloppy?"

"Eek! It was NOT! My illusions are PERFECT!"

Somewhere along the way, the surroundings had become a forest clearing. Ha Heijeong, who hadn't gone to the portal, caught up to me belatedly — wearing a slightly irritated expression.

"So this little pipsqueak was playing with us the whole time?"

"WHO ARE YOU CALLING A PIPSQUEAK! I am a FAIRY, I'll have you know!"

Ha Heijeong nodded slowly, apparently having just checked the notification window that had popped up, and let out a long breath. "Roteis... so that's what this was."

Then she rounded on me, eyes wide. "Wait, what the hell? Are you insane? How on earth did you figure this out?"

Faced with her undisguised admiration, I offered an awkward grin.

That said, even with the fairy in hand, the floor still hadn't ended. What now? Did we have to kill it?

As I was puzzling over it, Ha Heijeong spoke to the fairy. "We saw through your illusion. Now hand over the rewards and let us go."