Yellow Eyes in the Oil
As they stepped out into the corridor, a damp wind brushed across their faces.
Minel scanned the surroundings first; Hina and Chori followed close behind him.
"The air… feels sticky."
Chori drew a breath and wrinkled their nose. The unfamiliar humidity offered nothing but a thick, clinging discomfort.
The 3rd Floor felt like an endless valley of iron. Towering metal pillars stood packed one after another, while pipes and cables tangled overhead in a vast spiderweb.
Minel narrowed one eye and traced the cables with his gaze. Sparks leapt with intermittent crackles, and each flash briefly revealed the shape of the corridor.
He slowly brought his hand toward a cable. A spark jumped at once; lightning raced over his body, yet he felt only a brief tingle. Electrical resistance spared him any real pain—but the threat was unmistakable.
"Don't get close, Chori."
"Ah—yes."
Hina halted and ran her fingers across a control panel set into the nearest wall. Dust and oil had clumped together until the surface gleamed. The needle trembled minutely; a red warning light flickered without any pattern.
"It isn't completely abandoned. Something's still running."
Minel lowered his eyes to the floor. Black, dried oil stains stretched in trails; in places the oil mixed with moisture and glittered faintly. He prodded a puddle with the tip of Silence. The oil spread, and something whose shape he could not make out stirred weakly inside. Even though he had pushed the blade all the way to the floor, it sank deeper still.
"Watch the oil puddles too. You'll sink right in."
"…."
From the ceiling a broken pipe belched scalding steam. At the hiss—pssshhh—Chori instinctively stepped back. When the vapor brushed past, the sweat on their skin heated in an instant.
"It's so… loud. And my ears hurt."
Chori grimaced and clapped both hands over their ears. The corridors of the 2nd Floor where they had lived had held almost no noise at all.
Hina stroked Chori's hair once, then continued surveying the area. Now and then she stopped and pressed a palm to the floor, feeling for vibration. Far away, the rhythm of turning turbines traveled through the metal structure.
"Want to make a house?"
"Yes."
Chori laid a hand on a blank stretch of wall and easily opened an entrance. Then something unexpected happened.
"Huh? All the entrances disappeared."
"The ones from the 2nd Floor?"
"Yes. When you climb a floor, every other entrance seems to vanish. I didn't know that."
Fair enough. The ability was already unfair enough; if it also let them hop freely between floors, it would be outright broken.
"Let's look around more first."
The three of them stepped back out onto the 3rd Floor. They explored the Backrooms of this level at a measured pace until they found, for the first time, an open zone.
"…."
"Whoa! I-it's huge!"
"The humidity's better here too."
In height and width it was roughly the size of a basketball court. In the real world it would have felt indoor; in the Backrooms it counted as genuinely open space.
Simply looking at it left Minel with the sensation that something inside his chest had cleared. For two months he had stared at nothing but ceilings that never rose above three meters—claustrophobic and relentless.
A smile rose unbidden to Hina's face as well. Chori's eyes went round; their head darted this way and that like a woodpecker. A strange pleasure welled up, different from the joy of good food. Two weeks of accumulated stress seemed to scatter in a single breath.
When it all feels like too much, endure with good food, fine scenery, and fun diversions.
Balan had not said those words for nothing. Delicious food, beautiful sights, and entertaining pastimes might well be matters of survival itself.
"It could still be dangerous, so let's examine everything carefully."
At Minel's words Hina's and Chori's expressions grew serious again. They steeled themselves and began a slow inspection of the space.
In the center three massive generators and a conveyor belt had been left to rust. Two of the generators stood completely still; one turned at a lazy pace, occasionally producing a metallic scrape. Around the belt and the machines lay scattered scraps of metal, as though someone had begun a project and simply abandoned it.
Chori peered into a gap between machines in one corner. Something stirred faintly in the darkness—a rat, or something more dangerous; there was no way to tell.
"There's… something in there."
Minel approached, but the lights only flickered at irregular intervals. In the dark even silhouettes refused to resolve.
Tick. Tick.
Water droplets fell from the ceiling onto steel plate. Yet within that regular rhythm another sound slipped past—something scraping metal.
Hina dropped low at once and turned her gaze toward the noise.
"This looks like… something melted and ran."
Broad drag marks scored the wall and floor. Minel slowed his steps in front of them.
"There's no dust."
"…."
"…."
The three exchanged a brief glance. The marks were recent.
"Probably a monster's trail."
Minel's low voice rang with unusual clarity in the heavy air. They followed the marks. The trails did not run in a single direction; they forked and spread across the entire space. At each end lay entrances leading outward—except one.
"It's a ladder."
Beside Hina, half-hidden behind a giant turbine, stood a rusted ladder. Even the first rung sat high enough that Minel had to stretch his arm to reach it. Above it an irregular walkway of rebar and steel plate ringed the vast chamber like temporary scaffolding from a construction site, plates and rods lashed together in haste.
Minel pulled himself up by arm strength alone and set a foot on the first rung. The ladder swayed and creaked.
"…."
When he reached the top, the whole space lay open beneath him. The makeshift floor was so poorly joined that every step sent an unpleasant tremor through the metal. Through the gaps Chori's voice rose from below.
"Are you okay, Minel oppa? It looks really unstable up there. Like you could fall any second…."
Even this scaffold—barely worthy of being called a second story of the chamber—had entrances leading off in every direction. Unlike the natural openings below, these were cracked, broken, collapsed; someone had forced them open.
"So the walls of the 3rd Floor can be breached…."
Just then Hina lifted her face toward him and called out loudly.
"There are footprints here too, not just the melt marks!"
Minel leapt lightly from the scaffold and landed in front of her.
"Looks like there's a person as well."
The prints were shoe-shaped. Size and depth pointed to an adult man. No old dust had settled in them; they were no more than a few days old.
From another corner Chori called Minel over.
"There's something covered with cloth over here."
Where Chori pointed stood a battered workbench. On it lay a stained work uniform and a pair of frayed gloves, neatly arranged. The smell of sweat and dust still clung inside the pockets.
Minel surveyed the area once more, then narrowed his eyes.
"Someone is definitely using this place."
Traces of habitation kept appearing: a water bottle dropped on the floor, an old bag hanging on the wall, empty cans piled carelessly beside it.
Chori stood still for a long moment.
"…At this rate, doesn't it mean someone is living here?"
At those words Hina glanced around almost without thinking. Somewhere in the dark it felt as though eyes were watching them. The resonance of the metal structure and the faint vibration rising through their feet intertwined until the building itself seemed to be observing them.
Minel checked the entrances again. Corridors and inter-level passages branched in every direction. Not one of them could be called safe.
"It's a structure that invites encirclement."
Once his words settled into the air, the wide-open space no longer felt refreshing. The endless corridors and open doorways seemed to tighten like an invisible net.
Hina slowly raised her head toward the ceiling. At some point the hiss of steam had diminished; a damp, low metallic sound—clunk… clunk…—had taken its place. It did not come from a single direction but sounded from all sides in turn.
Chori stepped back without realizing it. Their toes brushed an oil puddle and a faintly warm sensation traveled up. The pool looked at least three times larger than moments before.
"Was this… always this big?"
Minel fixed his gaze on the puddle's edge. Just then the surface had rippled—very slightly.
At the same time the metallic sounds from afar drew nearer, as though something were crawling across the floor and brushing against the structure.
In that instant the oil puddle moved like flowing water. When it touched a screw lying on the floor, a sizzling sound rose—metal corroding.
Chori flinched and scrambled toward Minel.
"Minel oppa…."
One side of the puddle heaved; a black mass rose a little. When the intermittent light grazed it, the surface gleamed as smooth as glass. Inside, a pair of small yellow points of light locked onto Minel.
Around it, tentacle-like things began to climb slowly upward.
There was no longer any doubt. The oil puddles were monsters.
Minel raised Silence at once. The blade's tip punched into the black pool. In that instant a blue light flared around the edge and ice crystals exploded outward. The once-fluid surface hardened in moments. The glass-smooth texture became rough ice; the yellow eyes inside flashed wide as if in surprise.
Krrrrrk—!
The surface cracked rapidly. Expanding ice tore the monster's tissue apart; the viscous fluid within turned white. The flowing tentacles snapped in mid-air like broken twigs. The yellow pupils gave one final shudder, then were sealed inside the fractured ice and slowly lost their light.
The moment Silence withdrew, the mass shattered with a sharp crack. Amid the broken ice on the floor lay a single Blood Crystal.
Where the sticky stench and corrosive aura had been, a cool stillness spread.
Minel turned his gaze on the other oil puddles. On each surface a pair of yellow points glittered and shifted.
"So they're all monsters…."
He looked toward the nearest entrance, searching for safe ground. But the surrounding floor was already thick with pitch-black oil pools—and they were flowing inward.
Hina drew a sharp breath and cried out.
"They're at every entrance!"
In no time the entire space had been claimed by the black masses.