The Sky That Hung Too Low
The moment they crossed the threshold of the 4th Floor, still washed in a lingering blue glow, the world opened wide before them and every inch of their vision filled with rich, living color.
As if a space that had been holding its breath for ages had finally exhaled, an endless prairie unfurled into the distance without end.
Soft grass tangled in layers underfoot; with every step, delicate blades brushed against their ankles. The hills rolled in gentle curves, and from afar they looked like the calm waves of a sea frozen mid-swell and turned to green. Scattered across those rises sat houses with low roofs, as if someone had casually sprinkled them over the landscape.
None of the houses were large, and none were ornate. Their modest size and quiet arrangement gave off an impression of peace. Sunlight slipped slowly through the clouds and wrapped the walls and roofs in a soft sheen, thin beams of light slanting through air so clean that not a single mote of dust floated in it.
When they lifted their heads, the sky was vast and high beyond measure. That empty, brilliant blue seemed to climb to heights no human could ever reach, and the horizon below had been pushed impossibly far away. No matter how hard they strained their eyes, they could not find its end—leaving them unable to tell whether the space before them was real or some endless optical illusion.
The light coolness of the wind against their clothes and the soft chorus of grass blades touching one another conjured a peacefulness that felt as if it belonged only in a dream.
"Wow…!"
Chori burst out in pure wonder. A smile spread across the child's face at once, and her eyes sparkled as they turned toward that endless sky. It was the complete opposite of the cold, damp metal pillars and the smoke-belching power plants they had known on the 3rd Floor.
"Is that the sky Mom told me about? Right? That's the real sky, isn't it?"
A child who had spent her whole life with only the dark walls of the Backrooms and the mechanical drone ringing in her ears was, for the first time, facing the freedom of light and color.
Even Minel's eyes softened without his meaning to.
"To think a place like this existed in the Backrooms…"
He admitted the wonder honestly. After walking through countless monsters, lonely ruins, and grotesque machinery, this scenery was warm and peaceful beyond belief. The open prairie seemed to sweep the tightness from his chest, as if every burden on his shoulders had been set down for a moment. The stress piled up in his mind felt as if it were completely unwinding. The sudden rush of reality was almost frightening.
Was this the reward for surviving the hell of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Floors?
"Hina? How…"
Minel started to ask, glancing beside him, then stopped. Hina was already answering with her expression alone.
"Something's wrong."
Her face had gone cold and hard. At first she, too, had been captivated by the magnificent scenery. But as the moments passed, an unnatural sensation seeped into her sensitive skin. The sun shone brightly, yet her sharp observational instincts soon caught the strangeness.
"That sun. It's too low. And even looking straight at it doesn't dazzle me at all."
She spoke as if a chill had run through her. Chori didn't understand, so Hina went on.
"Normally, something that size and angle should be impossibly far away, somewhere at the edge of the sky. But that thing is more like a light fixture hanging over a mountain at best."
Minel's gaze turned upward. Looking carefully, even the clouds moved strangely. They appeared to float far away, but when he focused, they looked more like a painting on a shallow curtain, drifting slowly only around the sun.
"Definitely… artificial."
His voice had dropped. Hina bent and brushed the grass at her feet with her fingertips. Examined coldly, the texture was too cold and far too uniform. When she applied a little more pressure, the blade tore as easily as a thin membrane, and instead of real sap, something like transparent slime clung to her fingers.
"The grass is fake too. Real grass doesn't all look identical like this. And it's strange that there isn't a single insect. In a place this lush, you should easily see at least one."
The curvature of the distant horizon also differed from Earth's. Even the endless sound of the wind was identical over and over, as if a recording were being looped. The houses around them looked like warm, humble cottages, yet somehow their interiors remained completely invisible.
Chori's smile slowly hardened.
"You're saying… none of this is real?"
Minel felt his heart begin to pound heavily again. The tension that had loosened returned in full. The thought that the vast prairie and the brilliant sky might all be nothing more than a world someone had deliberately constructed set every nerve in his body on edge.
"Stay close for now."
His voice was lower and harder than before. The subtle wrongness seeping into the peace was dragging all three of them back into tension.
"This can't be outside the Backrooms."
Minel looked back. In the middle of the hill, a cave-like opening jutted up from the ground, and the door leading to the 3rd Floor hung there loosely. From the outside, the space above was completely empty—yet through the crack of the door, the stairs they had come down were still visible climbing upward. It felt as if spaces had been forcibly stitched together.
Minel closed the door and opened it again to check. The emergency stairs they had passed through reappeared exactly as before.
"Chori. Try making a house door next to it."
Chori brought both hands to the wall around the entrance. After fussing with it a few times, she turned her head.
"The wall surface is too small. It needs to be big enough for a door to fit."
For Chori to create a house door, she needed a Backrooms wall. But the 4th Floor was different from ordinary Backrooms—no matter how hard one looked, there was no Backrooms wall to be found. It was open in every direction, with visibility for dozens of kilometers, yet nowhere looked like a wall.
"But there should be edges, right? If we keep walking in one direction, we might find one."
At Hina's words, Minel shook his head. Inside the entrance jutting from the floor, emergency stairs climbed upward. In other words, this place did not follow ordinary spatial laws.
"There might not be any boundaries."
If it was a space with curvature like the surface of the Earth, walking in any direction would only keep circling the same place without ever reaching an end.
Chori stretched out one hand and pointed at the nearest house.
"What if we try with the walls of that house?"
That was the most promising option. But there was no guarantee those houses were safe either.
"Hina. How do the houses look to you?"
"They look dangerous—but everywhere on the 4th Floor feels dangerous to me."
"Not especially dangerous?"
"Right. Maybe we should just go back to the 3rd Floor if we can. I've never felt this level of danger before."
Hina shuddered once from head to toe. This was the first time he had seen her this afraid.
Should they go back to the 3rd Floor? Now that they were Level 4, fighting might be easier. But that didn't mean he was confident they could survive against an entire cult. Balan had said it too—if they got soft on the comfort of the lower floors and became quitters, he would come find them and kill them himself. It might have been a joke, but the meaning behind those words was clear.
"It's like giving up on sleep."
"What?"
"Going back to the 3rd Floor, I mean."
If you turn back just because it's dangerous and hard right now, you'll end up dead eventually. Wise Hina understood him at once.
"Then we'll have to head for the houses first. If Chori can open a door with a house wall, that would be ideal. I'll go first. Minel, please wait here with Chori."
Hina volunteered without hesitation. Minel shook his head.
"No need for that."
"But someone has to. You did so much on the 3rd Floor, so on the 4th Floor I should move fir—"
"I've got someone I can order around."
When Minel flicked his fingers lightly, a thin crack somewhere in the air rattled open like a seam. Sparks of electricity leaked from the gap, and a dazzling blue flash spread for an instant.
Crackle-crackle-crackle.
From within lightning-split streaks of light, a doll gradually revealed its form. As if lines were being drawn on a blueprint, it was sketched stroke by stroke in midair, and soon a sleek body fitted itself together. The frame of metal and wire held a precise yet casually assembled mechanical beauty. Pale lightning flowed between the black outer shell, pulsing like a heartbeat, and in place of a face a smoothly carved mask held glass eyeballs instead of eyes. Not a machine—more as if lightning itself had taken human form. An overwhelming presence.
Hina instinctively took a step back, then her eyes went wide.
"I-is that the puppet you seized? It's incredible!"
Beside her, Chori clasped her hands and her eyes sparkled. To young eyes that hadn't experienced much, Isil's majesty simply registered as something amazing and mysterious.
"Wow… it's so cool! It really looks like lightning moving like a person!"
Neither of them felt the pain of mystery while looking at Isil. As the android had been completed, all of its potential had been fully contained within.
Isil looked at each of them once. It lifted a finger slightly and pointed at them in turn as it spoke.
"Should I kill them?"
Chori and Hina gasped. Minel answered at once.
"No."
"Then what are my orders?"
"Check that house for danger factors."
Isil smoothly rotated its head to look at the house Minel indicated. Then, without warning, it lifted its body into the air and began flying that way.
"It can fly…"
"W-wow… wh-what is that?"
Isil closed the distance in an instant, circled the house several times with one eye wide open scanning the entire structure, then returned to Minel.
"Danger factors. Two humans. Level 4."
It had fixed a power plant in no time, and it could do this too? Looks like it had quite a few more functions than he had thought.
"Monsters?"
"None."
At that moment, as if to prove Isil's words, the house door slammed open violently.
Bang!
A woman burst out of the house. Short, neatly kept dark brown hair. A combat jacket steeped in the smell of dust and gunpowder. A lean build, but well-balanced. Ammunition belts and gear hung densely at her waist and shoulders, and in her hands she held a massive shotgun that looked bigger than she was tall. The barrel was thick and short. Judging by the marks everywhere, it had been modified. Clearly not a simple firearm.
The woman skillfully pressed the stock to her shoulder. A stance without hesitation. Familiarity was written in every movement of her hands. The muzzle pointed straight at Minel's chest. Her eyes gleamed sharply.
"Who the hell are you!"
Even as she shouted, the finger on the trigger didn't tremble. Tension. Wariness. But behind her, another woman appeared—clutching the one in front with trembling hands, as if terrified. The two looked like sisters living peacefully in a rural town from a Western film.
And for a moment, Minel felt as if he were some thug who had barged into that peaceful scene and stirred up pointless conflict.