A Person, a Labyrinth
My aunt was a horrifying woman.
"Because of your father, I've spent my whole life cleaning up his messes. My dreams, my life—all of it thrown away for him. And now you're telling me I have to take responsibility for that little bastard too? Your father, that human being, really did screw me over right until the end. Died just so he could keep ruining his sister's life even from the grave, the audacity! ......You parasite. Why on earth should I have to feed you and raise you? Why should I have to look after someone else's brat now? What did I ever do to deserve this? Am I not pitiful at all?"
My aunt was a pitiful woman.
Strangely enough, those two propositions coexisted as truths within a single soul—and perhaps the two of them were, in the end, one and the same thing.
"I...... why, why do I have to live like this...... Why does everyone do this to me, and only me......"
The person who pitied my aunt more than anyone else in the world was none other than my aunt herself.
"Why do I have to be the one living like this? Why......!"
My aunt always thought of herself as pathetic.
And that pity became the fangs of a beast that never dulled, biting and tearing at everyone around her.
In the end, she became a person who could only gnaw at living flesh, reopening old wounds, unable to lick anyone's scars clean. Not even her own.
That was the kind of person she was.
A single, pure conglomerate—self-pity condensed into a single point.
It was through my aunt that I learned what happens when any feeling attains absolute purity: no matter how vile it is, it becomes beautiful in a way so grotesque it defies belief. I still remember the temperature of the tears that slid down my cheek.
"You'd love it if I just dropped dead, wouldn't you?"
I pitied that woman.
And I pitied her for being so desperately, unbearably sorry for herself that she had forgotten how to love.
"You think I don't know? I know everything......"
But you know nothing, and that is what makes you pitiful.
Some things were undeniably my aunt's fault.
"No. Auntie, no......"
But not everything was her fault.
That fact made me furious.
It disgusted me. It frightened me. It tormented me.
And in the end—it made me lonely.
"What do you mean, no? You're turning into your father in every last way......"
Not once, not for a single moment, had I ever been "me" to my aunt.
My aunt only ever saw my younger brother in me.
The father she so despised—my father.
A father I could barely remember anymore.
To my aunt, I was simply a "something" that resembled my father. Small, young, weak.
Not once did she ever look at me properly.
Not even in those moments when she poured everything she was onto me and stared into my eyes, stained with pain.
From the day my aunt entered my life, standing before her made me a lost child. Lost hearts, searching for her, were always wandering somewhere inside me.
"You should have died with them that day too."
I couldn't only hate her. That was the path that killed me.
"You think I'm a joke too? You really want to turn me into some wretched old bitch? Study, stop screwing around. I'll cover your first semester's tuition, that's it. After that, you're on your own. Bust your ass, sell yourself, whatever. Just go out into the world and see. See how little people think of you without some pathetic college diploma."
I couldn't only pity her. That was the path that killed her.
"Hey! You! Why aren't you answering your phone! They said there's a rupture near your area, do you have any idea how I—! I really, I, you...... Then I...... What am I supposed to......"
I couldn't only love her. That was the path that killed us both.
"I'm sorry. It was my fault, Auntie......"
So where else could I have gone?
"I'm right here. So......"
I was tethered. Bound. Caged.
In a labyrinth called my aunt.
Some labyrinths are people.
Some people are labyrinths.
"......Auntie."
That day was my birthday.
My nineteenth.
The last birthday before I became an adult.
"What. Spit it out. Stop dawdling."
"No, it's nothing. I just thought you might be eating dinner out tonight......"
"Hey. Do I look like I have money to spare for that? Eating out isn't exactly pocket change, is it? Your school lunch fees went up again this year, on top of everything else. Anyway, that place isn't even serving anything special, and they still collect their money on the dot, every single time."
"......Oh, then—"
"—Ah! I'm out of time! If I leave now I'll miss the bus! Why do you have to start up about pointless things......!"
"......I'm sorry."
"Ha, honestly. Anyway, don't go wandering around somewhere. Stay home. I'm coming straight back after work."
"......Okay. Bye."
I decided I had to kill my aunt.
I had to kill her.
"Hello? ......Yes?"
That day, my aunt truly did die.
Not at my hands, waiting for her to come home. But between slabs of steel in a factory that treated her as less than a machine.
Then what about me? Me, robbed of even the chance to kill her? Me, who had let slip the chance to end her with my own hands? Me, who had lost my only chance to escape her? Who was I, without my aunt?
She had locked me away inside herself, then smashed the door and left. At the very moment I was reaching for it.
That cruel woman! That filthy woman! That vicious woman! That damned woman! That bitch who deserved to die! That woman I could chew up and swallow whole and it still wouldn't be enough!
I knelt before her portrait and cursed her through the night.
In truth, almost nothing of that time remains.
Only, after a brief blank, the memory of staring vacantly through the glass at the cremation furnace is still vivid.
And after another brief blank, I was back home.
Holding the remains of my aunt, shrunken small enough to cradle in my arms.
It was just burnt garbage. Not my aunt, not anything. Nothing but dust, cold and long since gone.
My aunt had been so much heavier than that, so much hotter, so much more...... alive.
That's why I couldn't shake her off for so long. Why I never dared touch her. Why I couldn't bring myself to kill her.
And then, once more, a very long blank follows.
The day the last winter break of high school began.
I gathered up the shards of the urn that barely preserved her name and boarded a train.
A long-sleeved t-shirt, jeans, sneakers.
I had a mountain to climb, so I dressed as light as I could.
I wanted to bury that name in my aunt's hometown.
In the place where that woman's horrifying, pitiful life had begun.
......Yes.
Dalumul-ri. That was its name.
"Why on earth would 'the Executor's Stage' be here...... This is an invasive-type labyrinth. Why would a contest-type......"
I forced the old memories away and looked at Jeon Yeonggwang. I couldn't decide whether it was surprising or expected that he'd said contest-type instead of contact-type.
"I suppose it's because the Agent Team handles Red Weavers, and Red Weavers are the ones who resolve contact-type labyrinths."
"No, but, see here."
Kim Heesook spoke up, bewildered.
"'The Executor's Stage'—Red Weavers can't enter it, can they......? Like the invasive types......"
That was right.
That was exactly the point that didn't sit well.
"This is, that's the one...... where one person gets to torture and kill that person—no, that thing......"
Precisely that vicious rule had earned this newborn labyrinth a place in the hall of infamy of the labyrinth world.
Exactly one of the trapped people becomes the "Executor," and the Executor must put the "Convict" provided on the stage to a painful death.
In other words, "the Executor's Stage" was an exceedingly rare labyrinth that did not kill the humans trapped inside by rule.
The Convict is not human.
......There is, admittedly, a school of thought that calls it human—but to argue that we'd eventually have to wade into metaphysical debates stretching back to antiquity, so it's classified for now as a monster rather than a person.
No one knows what the Convict's true form is. Or perhaps, who.
Because the Convict is perceived differently by each person.
According to interviews with survivors of the "Executor's Stage" labyrinth, the Convict manifests as "the person you most want to see come back alive."
The person you miss most. The person you long to meet again but never can. There are many ways of expressing it, but in the end it comes down to two conditions.
One. The person must be dead.
Two. Of all the dead, they must be the one you most wished would come back alive.
"Then, we have to carry out the...... execution...... to get out......?"
Thud. Thud.
The theater doors, of course, were locked.
"It seems that way. We...... have to do it."
At those words, the faces of the other three collapsed as though each of them had personally been handed a death sentence.
"Ah. Ahhh...... Suheon's dad......"
"M-, Mom......"
"Ha, dear Lord...... What......"
I quietly studied the middle-aged internist standing between Kim Heesook and Yoon Geonmin, each of them searching for a husband and a mother.
The way he sighed and dragged a hand down his face, like a man washing himself without water, somehow grated on me.
They said it looked like a schoolgirl. Not his daughter, then? A sister, maybe—someone who died long ago?
Well, that wasn't the pressing question right now.
"We need to decide who becomes the 'Executor.' You're all aware, but that thing is just...... a puppet. It's not a person."
"You think we don't know that......? Then why do you think those people all killed themselves, if it was so easy to know?"
A labyrinth where no one has to die—so what's the problem?
That was precisely the problem.
"The Executor's Stage" boasts the highest survival rate of any labyrinth—and a suicide rate among survivors to match.
How many people could torture someone else and carry out an execution, and come out of it unscathed?
How many could sit in the audience seats and watch another human being tortured to death, and remain whole?
Especially when that human wore the face of the very person they had most wished would come back alive.
"I— I can't. Ahh...... What do we do......"
Kim Heesook turned her head away, choked with tears.
"Me neither, ugh, urk......"
Yoon Geonmin had started dry-heaving, the mere thought of it too much to bear.
All that remained now were Jeon Yeonggwang and me.
"Ha...... I don't...... want to do it either. Not at all. This is, no matter how you look at it, this is...... What do you think, Mr. Seon Yuhan......"
I quietly gazed up at the profile of the Convict, barely visible beneath the stage.
"I—"
I just......
It was shameful.
Not killing that woman shamed me to death.
I wanted to become a criminal, to kill someone and be locked away.
I wanted to stain my hands with blood and be freed from her.
The small room where I should have been imprisoned. The freedom I should have won inside it. The numbers that should have become my name.
I was ashamed of being robbed of all of it. And by the hands of that fucking machine, of all things!
I hated "clean" hands, hands that had committed no crime.
I hated myself for failing to become even a criminal.
Just because society, the law, the state recognized me as innocent didn't mean I became good, or whole, or a normal human being.
I wanted people to see me.
The real me.
The me who could never be good, never be whole, never be normal.
I wanted them to flay my skin open until it festered, to peer inside and dissect the organs laid so hideously bare, to unravel the tangled skein of what was inside me, and finally......
I wanted you to make me disappear.
From this world.
Just like you.
Forever.
Me.