The Sea of Sludge
◈ Special Effect: Stabbing a target definitively inflicts the Agony status effect.
◈ Agony: Greatly increases electric resistance, but increases Wildness when taking electric damage.
The blade is short and thin; a fragment of an old prayer bead is carved into the hilt. Though used only in electricity-based rituals, the moment it first drinks blood the edge takes on a faint dark-red glow and produces a strange tremor. This is no mere weapon but a chain that enforces the oath of faith and the bonds of blood, allowing it to guarantee the Agony status effect that the electricity of the 3rd Floor only probabilistically bestows.
“Agony status effect, huh…”
Status effects were a common feature in games—negative conditions that inflicted all manner of harm, much like poison. Judging by what he had seen, the Agony status was what caused Wildness to accumulate among Urare’s followers.
The Backrooms were not reality. Game-like elements ran thick through everything. Even recovery from illness would be solved in an instant by some item effect rather than any complicated treatment.
“Could this be related to that medicine…?”
But that was none of Minel’s concern. He slipped the Ritual Dagger into his inventory and descended once more to the 3rd Floor. He already knew the location of the emergency stairs; now it was time to fetch Hina and Chori. The bribe must have been generous enough—the two combatants were still nowhere in sight. Minel left in a hurry.
He bypassed the Grand Chapel entirely and headed straight for the generator room where Hina and Chori waited. Isil crossed his mind, yet for the moment he had no way to save the android. If the chance came before they climbed to the 4th Floor, he would take it.
Pushing his pace, he reached the generator room in a single day. What greeted him there, however, was only an unfamiliar void.
“……”
Neither Hina nor Chori was in sight. Worse, not a single shadow remained of the cultists who ought to have been thrashing about in their madness. Instead the entire floor lay buried under a black mass. Steel beams and wiring had already lost their shapes, sunk into the sludge like the bones of some enormous corpse. Where machines should have stood, a thick oil-sheened liquid filled the ground like a lake, and countless tentacles crawled indifferently across its surface. Somewhere metal clanked and meshed—clack, clack—and a stench clung stubbornly enough to sting the nose.
What had happened here? Where had Hina and Chori gone?
“Minel!”
He turned toward the voice. A hole had been blasted through the wall two stories up, wide as a doorway, and Hina was calling to him from inside. Too far for a single leap. Minel drew Silence. Residual light thinned along the blade’s edge and sliced through the dark as he moved. The moment his foot left the ground, the black sludge-like mass writhed as one and flung tentacles toward him.
Ordinary cuts were meaningless. Even when the blade tore a chunk free, the mass simply reconnected and rolled like an oil puddle. But Minel already knew their weakness. In the same instant, pairs of bright-yellow eyes snapped open across several of the masses. His arm moved without hesitation.
Shrrk—!
Silence’s tip drove precisely between a pair of eyes. The sludge convulsed once, lost its center, and after the core shattered the whole body collapsed and soaked into the floor. Immediately another sludge reared its head beside him. The instant the yellow eyes appeared, Minel thrust as though hurling the sword.
Shlk.
The core burst; dark ripples spread again across the floor. Minel’s stride never faltered. With every step a new sludge rose, yet he aimed only for eyes and cores, never breaking form. Tentacles swarmed; he stabbed lightning-fast and sprinted onward. Not a single wasted motion. Counting lightly as he cut them down, he carved a path through the black sea.
“Hooo…”
Reaching the wall, he caught his breath and glanced back. Only a sunken black pool and the Blood Crystals the sludge had left behind remained. He had no time to collect them.
“This way!”
Minel tested the floor with a toe, then launched himself at the wall. As though climbing stairs, he kicked lightly off the surface and, with two or three bounds, caught Hina’s outstretched hand. Below, tentacles stretched after him in slow motion, far too sluggish to threaten. Hina pulled him up; Minel slipped cleanly through the opening.
“Where’s Chori?”
“She’s asleep.”
“Already bedtime?”
“I was sleeping too—I only came out on a hunch. I’m so glad I did.”
Minel gave a small nod and studied the corridor of the house. Completely empty.
“The cultists?”
At the question Hina’s face darkened.
“Exactly as you feared… a huge disturbance broke out.”
Minel understood at once.
“They tried to take it.”
“We should have managed their Wildness carefully by rationing the electricity… Just when I thought things were under control, they suddenly rushed us…”
Once fanatics crossed that line, nothing could hold them back. Short of handing over the Shocker’s Heart itself, they would never have been satisfied.
“And then?”
“I tried to lead them up onto the newly built temporary structure and evacuate them to the 2nd Floor. But a great many…”
Deep guilt washed over Hina’s expression. What followed was obvious. The sludge had gathered, and the cultists, drowned in frenzy with nowhere to run, had all been devoured. That was how the sea of sludge had formed. Being a cult leader was clearly not a job for just anyone. Even if Minel himself had stayed, the same end would likely have arrived.
“You did everything you could. It was never your responsibility, Hina.”
“……”
Hina kept silent, clearly still crushed by guilt. Since it was not truly her fault, she would eventually shake it off.
“Wake Chori.”
“What?”
For a moment Hina could not understand. One of the most important rules in the Backrooms was to sleep properly, on schedule, every single time.
“This is urgent. We have to leave immediately.”
“We can’t. We need to sleep.”
“If we delay we won’t make the 4th Floor.”
“Even so, we have to sleep. You didn’t rest yesterday either.”
“……”
Strong resolve shone in Hina’s eyes.
“Once you compromise, that’s the beginning of the end. You saw the people addicted to electricity. This is no different. If you abandon sleep once because of a crisis, you’ll abandon it again, and if you keep abandoning it you’ll end up just like them. We even have a safe house. If we start giving up sleep despite that, there will be no going back.”
Hina had explained it many times to Minel and Chori—what became of those who failed to sleep properly. The reason her old party had managed to hold together, however precariously, was that they had guarded sleep with iron discipline.
Minel understood exactly what she meant. Inside the Backrooms, where survival crises never ceased, everyone found it easy to forgo sleep—for food, for water, for a fight, to flee a monster. Immediate survival never required sleep. Precisely for that reason, sleep had to be protected. In the mental stress the Backrooms inflicted, the habit of skipping rest bred every sort of mental fracture, and that road led only to death.
“I understand. We’ll do it your way.”
Hina exhaled a long breath of relief. Had Minel pushed harder she would ultimately have yielded to him, even knowing it was a path toward death. That was why she had wanted him to listen all the more, and he had not disappointed her.
“It’s already been thirty minutes. Let’s go sleep.”
Minel followed Hina into the main bedroom. He lay down in his usual place and forced himself to rest, then opened his eyes at the appointed waking hour. His body had been too tense; he did not feel as though he had truly slept. He woke Hina and Chori in turn.
“Mmm… M-Minel oppa? Wh-when did you get here?”
“Last night. Can you get up for a bit?”
Once both of them were sitting, Minel sat them down facing him and carefully explained everything that had happened the previous day, from beginning to end. Hina listened with bated breath; Chori’s eyes sparkled as though she were completely absorbed. When the story reached the meeting with Urare, both pairs of eyes widened at once, surprise and doubt flickering across their faces.
“What do you think?”
Minel had of course been asking for Hina’s opinion, yet Chori spoke first.
“Millions of people all turning into sludge… I really hate that.”
Her voice was small but firm. Having witnessed people being eaten by sludge with her own eyes only made the revulsion stronger.
Hina hesitated a moment before adding quietly,
“Would seizing that doll be extremely difficult? You said no one was guarding it.”
“I don’t know about now.”
After Minel’s brief reply, Hina studied his face for a while. Confirming that his eyes held no wavering, she whispered,
“What do you think, Minel?”
“You already know.”
“Ignoring the request and going up to the 4th Floor? But shouldn’t we also consider future relations with Urare?”
Weight rested on those words. If they discarded Urare’s request after using only the help she had given, a price would certainly come due later. She might have seemed powerless now, yet neither her position nor her connection to Balan could be ignored. Even so—
That was true only under the assumption they would meet Urare again.
“We’re escaping from the 7th Floor anyway.”
“……”
Hina answered with silence instead of words. Within that hesitation Minel read her heart and, without circling around it, asked straight out,
“You want to keep the promise… don’t you?”
Hina quietly nodded.
“Of course you only said you’d do your best, so I don’t think we absolutely have to keep it. But at the very least… shouldn’t we show some sincerity?”
Minel closed his eyes briefly. Honestly, ignoring Urare’s request and heading for the 4th Floor was the most rational course. Yet if that cracked the trust between him and Hina, that was a problem of an entirely different order. Morality always felt like an annoying shackle. But he knew better than anyone that the same shackle could sometimes become a lifeline. Hina was someone who valued trust. That was exactly why he could trust her in return.
“I’ll at least check the same place.”
At Minel’s answer Hina’s face brightened noticeably. Chori asked carefully,
“And if it’s not there?”
Hina answered for him.
“Tracking the doll’s location and seizing it would be far too difficult. If it isn’t there, we have to assume the doll is already complete. In that case we’ll have no choice but to go to the 4th Floor.”
Hina was no stranger to reality. Agreeing with her, Minel summed it up shortly.
“It’s decided. Let’s move.”
Hina and Chori nodded, firm resolve in their eyes.