The Living Stairs
Light seared across his vision in endless, merciless bursts.
With every flash came the raw, animal urge to tear his own eyes from their sockets.
It was a pain beyond anything he had ever endured—as if someone had forced two suns straight into his skull.
Minel could take no more. Clutching both hands over his eyes, he sank to the floor where he stood. He squeezed his lids shut, covered them with his palms, even stripped off clothing to wrap around his head. Nothing blocked the glare.
The world was bright—too bright. Contrast itself had vanished; everything felt crushed flat into a single plane. He had the sickening sense of having arrived somewhere he was never meant to be, of having seen something he was never meant to see. It made him feel filthy, unclean, like an impurity that did not belong in this place.
“Minel! Are you all right? Minel!”
A voice echoed from far away. He could not tell whose it was. His father, the one who had taught him standards? Or Suye, the one who had taught him love? He did not know. Yet without thinking he clung to that voice.
“Stay with me! Minel!”
In the world drowned in pure white, something stirred. Minel forced his eyes into slits and stared toward it. A figure stood inside the light—the schoolgirl whose life he had once saved.
“H-Hina…?”
“Yes. It’s me.”
“……”
“We promised we’d escape the Backrooms together! Please—come back to me!”
Escape?
Right. They didn’t need to climb all the way to the ten-thousandth floor. Find an exit item first and leave. The moment that thought took hold, color began to seep back into the white world. The haze of light receded like a thinning veil, and the real landscape reasserted itself.
“Hah… hah… hah…”
Minel dragged in ragged breaths, rubbing and blinking hard. Thankfully his vision was returning. He lifted his head and met Hina’s worried gaze looking down at him.
“Are you okay?”
“Y-yeah. I’m fine. Probably.”
“……”
In that instant Balan’s warning rose again in his mind. Do not peer into the Mystery of the Backrooms carelessly. Slowly. A little at a time. Only as much as the mind can bear.
The truth that the Backrooms rose higher than ten thousand floors was no mere piece of information. It was a supernatural shock that shattered the spirit. The eye-pain he had felt earlier had been nothing but a trailer—a single sliver of light leaking through a crack in a door. What he had just experienced was the real thing. If Hina had not reached him in time, Minel might well have lost his reason and gone mad.
The one hopeful note was that they did not have to climb all the way. Balan himself had left three times along the way; opportunity might arrive sooner than expected.
Minel rose carefully. He opened his inventory, took one of the items Balan had given him, and held it out to Hina.
“Put this on. We’re going straight to the second floor.”
“What? Right now?”
“Yeah. Right now.”
Hina wanted to stop him, wanted him to rest properly even for a little while. But Minel strode forward without the slightest hesitation. In that retreating back she felt a hard certainty—that the danger had passed. She put on the item he had given her. It fit as if it had always been made for her.
“Did you figure something out?”
“Yeah.”
Minel stepped into the emergency stairwell—and the sight that met him stole the words from his mouth.
“……”
The stairs were alive.
Countless eyes had sprouted across the walls. They blinked without pause, quietly watching Minel and Hina. He raised a careful hand and pointed.
“What do you see?”
“E-eyeball drawings.”
“……”
“They’re a little creepy, though.”
To Minel they were not drawings. They were living, blinking eyes—and they were studying him and Hina with open interest, glancing back and forth between them. Some stretches of the staircase were solid cement, but most of it looked like living organic matter. If he watched closely, it rose and fell in the faintest of rhythms, as though it were breathing.
“The stairs?”
“The stairs? They’re just… stairs. Why? Do they look different to you?”
Minel stared hard at the breathing steps. They looked like open mouths waiting for someone to step into them.
“Hold on.”
He stepped outside, fetched a chair, and set it on a cement section. Nothing happened. Then he lifted the chair and carefully placed it on a living section.
In an instant the stair slammed shut like a mouth and crushed the chair to splinters.
CRACK!
The sudden noise made Hina flinch and press herself against him. She stared at the stairs with frightened eyes.
“W-what just happened?”
“How did it look to you?”
“The chair on the stairs just… shattered all of a sudden.”
She had not seen the mouth close. Anyone who simply walked up those stairs would have been reduced to a handful of bloody pulp. So this was what it meant for Mystery to accumulate until the truth of the stairs became visible. The abnormal things were the safe ones—just as he had been told.
“I met Balan earlier.”
“Balan… the Arcade ranking number one?”
“He said if you experience Mystery, the truth becomes visible.”
Hina held her breath.
“That’s why you kept asking me what I saw.”
“And that’s why I’m thinking. Whether I should let you see it too.”
Hina took a quiet moment to steady herself before speaking.
“How do I see it?”
“……”
Until now the Backrooms Codex had let him approach the truths of this place more easily than anyone. Even the fact of the ten thousand floors would have remained hidden Mystery without it. But accumulating Mystery was not purely good. The risk of losing one’s reason grew with it. If the mind could not bear the load, the pain would sweep a person under and leave them insane. Was there any need for both of them to carry the same risk? What had to be seen, he could see alone.
“Better if you don’t.”
“……”
Minel narrowed his eyes at the living stairs and muttered,
“Want a piggyback for now?”
He sat down. After a brief hesitation Hina trusted him and leaned against his back. Holding her firmly with both hands, Minel set his foot carefully onto a cement step—never a living one.
Thud.
Still fine. Reassured, he climbed boldly, choosing only the cement sections. The staircase itself was not long. It rose like any ordinary commercial building stair and soon the exit to the second floor appeared ahead. Yet that was not the end of the stairs. Looking up through the central gap, he saw them continue quite high—third floor, fourth, maybe even fifth.
“Should we keep going up?”
Balan had said that if you can climb floors, don’t dawdle—go up. There was probably some veteran reason for it. But Minel had no intention of climbing further. Among the stairs leading above the second floor, not a single one looked dangerous.
“Up is a trap.”
“It is?”
“Too hard right now.”
There was plenty to do on the second floor. Stop by the Arcade and check whether they could break a thousand points, learn better skills from the vending machines if possible. Above all, Hina’s Digital Vein was still level 1; they needed a solid grasp of item enhancement before going higher.
“Then we’ll head out on the second floor?”
“Yeah.”
Emerging from the second-floor exit, Minel started to set Hina down—only to freeze in place, mind blanked by the scene before him.
Backrooms, second floor. A landscape utterly different from the abandoned offices of the first.
Incandescent bulbs flickered weakly in the ceiling; the entire corridor was washed in a mix of orange and white light. The passage was narrow and stiflingly close. Endless machinery and thick pipes tangled along both walls, while devices that looked like rusted hunks of scrap metal occasionally groaned out low, humming notes. From a distance the sound was dull as a heartbeat; up close it thinned into something like quiet breathing. Some of the equipment connected to pipes that vented fluid or gas; smoke drifted out without destination and vanished into the air. A light chalky residue clung to the walls, the texture of old concrete crumbling to dust. Here and there were traces of careless passage—snagged fabric in a tight stretch of corridor, even smears of blood.
“……”
“……”
They held their breath and studied the surroundings for a full ten minutes before returning to the stairwell. Sitting beneath a large pipe, Hina spoke half to herself.
“At the corners the corridors branch into as few as two and as many as eight. Directions are only the four cardinal ones and the diagonals between them.”
“Yeah.”
“And every corridor at a corner has a switch. Looks like a light switch, but we should check properly.”
Minel nodded, walked carefully to one of the light switches, and flipped it down.
Click.
The entire corridor in that direction plunged into absolute black. Yet something was deeply wrong. No matter how dark a corridor became, light from the others should have leaked around the corner. The darkness should have graded softly. Instead it was as if someone had sliced the light off with a knife right at the corner.
“Eek…!”
Hina gave a short cry of surprise. Minel flipped the switch back up. The corridor reclaimed its original lighting; the awkward mix of orange and white spread through the passage again.
“Strange.”
“Yeah… it didn’t feel like the lights went out. More like someone suddenly painted it with black paint.”
“That’s not all.”
Hina swallowed dryly.
“What else was there?”
Only for an instant, but Minel had clearly seen something writhing in that darkness. In the Backrooms, “dark” did not simply mean blocked vision. On the first floor the danger zones had always appeared together with black fog that smothered the fluorescent light, and the monsters moved in packs inside that dark. Perhaps here on the second floor the switches let someone deliberately create a danger zone.
“Monsters will show up.”
At his explanation Hina’s voice turned anxious.
“There’s almost no cover either. The only things you could hide behind are these thick pipes along the walls…”
On the first floor desks and chairs had been infinite and walls appeared often enough. Here, once you stepped into a corridor you were completely exposed. With an environment this different, the shape of every fight would change completely. How large was the second floor, really? Wider than the first, most likely.
“Let’s make a map.”
“That’s the first step, right? I’ll use the paper and pen we picked up on the first floor.”
For the next two days the two of them wandered and mapped. The layout turned out to be surprisingly intuitive, with few forks, so sectioning it off was far easier than on the first floor. Nothing of note happened in that time. No monsters, no people. Thirst and hunger they managed with what Sky had given them. The immunity drinks from the bathroom party they saved as a last resort.
Looking at the food made him think of Sky. Had the man simply not known about the threat of the stairs? Or had he known and chosen not to say?
Just then Hina called out loudly.
“An Arcade!”
Where she pointed, the entrance to an Arcade was visible. Even up close it looked like a perfect copy of the one on the first floor.
“Let’s go in.”
“Okay.”
Weapons drawn, the two of them stepped into the second-floor Arcade.