Sky
Honestly, he hadn't expected much.
There couldn't be more information here than what the Backrooms Compendium already held.
Yet surprisingly useful details came tumbling out.
"They say you can't find a way to escape the Backrooms on the 1st Floor. You have to climb to the upper floors before those methods unlock one by one—and even there, the competition is brutal."
"What methods?"
The man shook his head, face twisted with fear.
"I-I don't know. That's all they said."
"Who?"
The man checked Hina's expression for a moment, then turned to Minel and spoke in a low voice.
"There's one of the prey. Looked like a survivor who'd lasted a long time."
In that instant Hina's face froze solid as ice. Murderous intent flooded her eyes, and her grip on the gun tightened until her knuckles whitened.
"Hina. What's prey?"
"People they kidnapped. They catch them and wring every last bit of use out of them until they die. That's why they called them prey."
Hina had received relatively decent treatment, yet in the end she too had been nothing more than "prey" to that party. Feeling a sharp kinship of shared suffering, she asked at once.
"Where is he?"
The man hesitated, then finally spoke.
"We've locked him in a room nearby."
Someone who knew about the next floor might know even more. Rescue them first, then decide whether they could be trusted. But before that, they still had to finish the reason they had come here in the first place.
Minel walked toward the vending machine.
"Hina. Watch him for a second?"
"Try anything funny and I'll kill you."
"……."
Hina leveled the muzzle at the man with a look cold enough to freeze blood. He scowled and glared back, but she never so much as blinked, staring him down with perfect, glacial calm.
Minel peered into the machine. Fewer drinks remained than in the last one. Clear signs that many people had already passed through. Then, on the very bottom row, one bottle caught his eye.
Yellow lettering on the label. Cost: ten Blood Crystals, same as always. Nothing else left—just this one bottle sitting alone. Why had no one taken it? Because it was only a support combat skill?
"Turn around."
"What? Just like that?"
"Hina."
Before he finished the sentence, Hina shoved the barrel closer. The man glanced between gun and girl, then turned his head in resigned defeat.
Minel bought the skill drink and checked the back of the label: Shield Generation. He pulled out the Backrooms Compendium and focused on the bottle in front of him.
Support Combat Skill: Shield Generation
Extend a hand toward a chosen target to grant them a protective shield. The shield withstands a considerable impact once; for that duration the target takes no damage at all.
Any force exceeding the skill's power is reduced by the maximum limit before the shield vanishes. Power, duration, and cooldown scale with skill level.
A support combat skill. Minel already possessed a combat skill, so he could not learn it. If Hina took it, it would help—yet learning a support skill permanently locked out combat skills afterward. He could not force the choice on her.
"That's a skill drink left, right? You're not drinking it, so it isn't a combat skill?"
"Support combat skill."
Hina answered without the slightest hesitation.
"I'll learn it."
"Why?"
Hina carried a heavy debt of gratitude toward Minel. Leaving that debt unpaid was something her personality simply could not accept.
"You're already the combat member, so I don't need to become another one. But having an extra support combatant isn't a bad idea."
The man looked utterly dumbfounded. A skill cost ten Blood Crystals. In this place, people murdered each other over one or two crystals—because crystals bought food and bullets.
The idea of learning even a "lousy" skill just because it was available was completely beyond him. Minel and Hina paid his reaction no attention whatsoever. To them, monsters were now welcome sources of crystals, and crystals were simply something you collected.
"Once you decide, you can't change it."
"That's why I'm learning it. From now on, whenever a support combat skill shows up, I'll take it. Learning this one can't hurt."
"……."
"If we waste any more time, it'll go past a minute."
If that was how Hina saw it, there was no reason to stop her. Minel drew Noise and kept the man covered while Hina drank the skill bottle.
"I don't feel anything… How do I even use this?"
"Reach toward the person you want to protect. Concentrate while you do it."
Without the Backrooms Compendium they would have spent a long time experimenting. Hina blinked once, then raised her hand toward Minel.
Vwooong—!
A translucent spherical barrier of hexagonal lattice flared into existence around him, then vanished just as quickly. Hina quietly studied her own hand and murmured,
"It's a lot like opening the inventory. You focus while performing a specific action."
"You'll have to time it exactly for the moment I take a hit. I trust you'll pull it off."
A perfect marksmanship score meant every sub-category was perfect. For Hina, matching an enemy's attack timing and raising a shield would be trivial.
Minel turned his gaze on the man. When fear flickered across the captive's face, Minel gave a cold order.
"Lead us to that prey. I'll hear the information myself."
The man rose awkwardly and began walking, blood still dripping from his soaked sleeve. He kept stealing glances at Hina, full of bewildered suspicion. The Hina he knew used to clap her hands over her ears and curl into a ball whenever anyone screamed nearby—so fragile the leader had been able to drag her around without worry. The woman beside him now felt completely different. She looked ready to pull the trigger even faster than Minel if he tried anything.
"Did you use the Arcade?"
The question was aimed at Hina. She answered in a flat, quiet voice.
"Shut up."
"……."
Hina had no desire to exchange even a single word with him. Minel's thoughts, however, ran elsewhere. He wanted to measure exactly how much the Arcade scores had improved their physical abilities—and for that he needed the average of other people.
"What scores did you all reach?"
The man answered with careful politeness.
"I got around three hundred on most of them. Highest was five hundred."
"That so? What about the soldier?"
"Big Brother was somewhere around six hundred, I think."
That day the man had taken serious damage from the ambush. If his score had been higher, his reflexes might have made even that surprise attack useless.
"Why stop there?"
The man turned to stare at Minel as though he could not believe the question was serious.
"They said anything higher is extremely dangerous. Big Brother told us his previous party members pushed higher scores and every last one of them turned into monsters."
"……."
Couldn't you just suppress Wildness even if the score was high? Or was there some other problem?
"Uh… if you don't mind me asking, how high did you reach?"
"Have you ever seen anyone stronger than that?"
Minel cleanly ignored the question with another question. The man had no choice but to answer.
"Two or three people so far. We had to ambush them together just to kill them."
Minel had scored in the 970s on every machine. Maybe his Wildness resistance was simply exceptional; maybe alternating with Hina had been an unusually efficient strategy. There was still far too much he did not know about Wildness. He would have to stay careful.
"How many people have you seen so far?"
The man fell silent for a moment, then spoke as if reciting.
"About fifty…"
Hina ground her teeth. The man shut his mouth at once, watching her warily.
If only two or three out of fifty had been stronger than that soldier, then on the 1st Floor Minel would have almost no real rivals. He felt a measure of relief, yet a strange thought also crossed his mind. In the real world, anyone who murdered more than fifty people would land on the front page of every newspaper and go down in history as a serial killer. Inside the Backrooms, people like that simply walked around as if it were nothing.
"This way."
The door the man indicated was shut tight. Large letters above it read "Conference Room," and desks and chairs had been stacked with precise care so the door could never open from the inside.
Minel began clearing the furniture one piece at a time. When he was roughly halfway finished, urgent pounding came from within.
"Is someone out there? Hello?!"
A voice raw with desperation—the kind only someone who had seized a single thread of hope out of pure despair could make. Minel immediately sped up. Thanks to his enhanced body he could haul chairs and desks one-handed without the slightest fatigue. Still gripping Noise in his left hand, he yanked the door open and instantly stepped back.
Creeeak.
A man appeared in the doorway. Blonde, Caucasian, roughly Minel's age, wearing ordinary twenty-first-century clothes and glasses. He looked like someone you might pass on any city street without a second thought.
The man stared blankly at Minel, then saw the Noise in his hand and flung both arms skyward in panic.
"P-please spare me! I'm no threat at all! B-but…"
He scanned the hallway, and his face suddenly lit up. Seeing blood still dripping from the captive's arm, he understood everything at once.
"Y-you came to rescue me!"
"Something like that."
"Th-thank you!"
The man dropped flat and began slamming his forehead against the floor. No Caucasian man from twenty-first-century Earth would ever do that. Completely different cultural background. A small flicker of disappointment crossed Minel's mind just as the captive behind him sneered.
"Don't be fooled by that clueless act. That guy's from the 2nd Floor."
The words were barely out before the blonde man waved both hands frantically.
"No, no! You've got it wrong! I've only been here a week! I really don't know anything!"
"Hah. Stop lying. You definitely came down from the 2nd Floor."
The blonde man kept shaking his head and launching into endless excuses. One of them was definitely lying. Which one? Frankly, it did not matter to Minel in the slightest. All he needed was useful information. If the man really had come from above, that was even better.
Minel stepped closer. The blonde man flinched, thick distrust clouding his eyes.
People don't care who you actually are. They only judge by how they feel when they're with you. If they feel good and comfortable around you, they become your ally.
Minel looked him over quietly, then spoke in a low, even voice.
"Drop the formal speech."
"Huh?"
"We're about the same age."
"Ah…"
Minel asked casually, voice soft.
"Name?"
The blonde man scanned the approaching Minel with nervous eyes, then answered quietly.
"S-Sky. I mean… Sky."