Have We Met Before?
"Ghh, aaagh...! Ugh, wh-why..."
I am not sorry.
"Kehk! St-stop..."
I'm not sorry.
"Ghhk... ugh..."
As if I could ever be sorry.
"Ugh... ugh..."
So this was nothing but a physiological nausea, plain and simple — the kind you feel toward a revolting monster wearing human skin.
"Ha. Hah..."
3:50 PM.
The book club never began. Not a single human had died. No one had been forgotten.
At last.
Silence came to the library.
"Oh my? Hello there!"
"Ah, Seon Yuhan-ssi...! You're safe!"
"What took you so long? Jeez, I honestly thought you'd ditched us and run!"
The moment I stepped into Uri Saenal Daycare, a doll monster and two humans greeted me one after another.
I checked that Jiho was resting safely against the wall, and only then did I relax. Next, I fished Jiho's bag of spare clothes out of a locker.
...
Inside the toy box hidden behind the false wall, the 'dismissed' teacher had been tidied away, crumpled up tight. As expected.
"Seon Yuhan-ssi, what are you doing over there?"
Judging by how Jaeha and Juyeon — who had arrived long before me — showed no sign of knowing the teacher existed, it must have happened right after the building turned.
"Come on, hurry up! And don't just stand there! Can't you see I'm slaving away over here?"
With the Goose Teacher having ruled those two as fellow guardians, I joined in on the 'slaving.'
That 'slaving' turned out to be one tier up from the clack-clack rhythm show I'd put on earlier — ball play folded into the routine.
"Whew... this is how I used to play with my nephew back when he was little, and let me tell you, little kids have ridiculous stamina. If you want them asleep even a little faster, whew, you seriously have to..."
Human or toy, it made no difference — the creak of straining joints filled the daycare to its corners. Two men with faces gone dark as soot, dancing in perfect earnest to children's songs alongside a crowd of toys, and not a shred of it was funny.
"By the way... there was no one in the library at all?"
The moment Juyeon's accompaniment stopped, the ball game kicked off.
"No. That's why I was late — I was searching other places besides the library."
"Ah... then where did they go..."
The piano instructor's face darkened, both hands resting motionless on the keys.
"My guess is they're gone. Relocated somewhere else, whether they wanted it or not."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I was in the middle of my own interview, so I was with my interviewer — and she suddenly vanished right before my eyes."
Pop!
I said it lightly, flicking away the ball that had rolled to me.
"Seeing as there are no other kids here either, I'd guess that once the building became a labyrinth, the people all turned like that at almost the same moment."
"No children, you say?"
Out of nowhere, the shabby-looking goose doll cut in, snapping in a high-pitched voice.
"Our children are right here, running and playing as bold as brass!"
As if a bucket of cold water had been dumped over the room, every expression froze. Juyeon's. Jaeha's. Even Jiho's — the color drained from their faces.
"Don't tell me these toys are all...?"
"Don't believe it."
Not particularly bothered, I snatched the ball from the robot and knocked it toward Jaeha.
"There's no need to take a labyrinth monster's word as gospel. Lying is these things' hobby."
"Hey — hey. Why would you say that, right to its face..."
Jaeha gave my shoulder a nudge, looking distinctly spooked, and shot a glance at the Goose Teacher.
"Ah, this much should be fine. All the same, my apologies for startling you."
The last time I'd said something along these lines, the Goose Teacher hadn't seen fit to stop me. Hadn't argued back, either. Sure enough — under this place's rules, these toys currently had no means of killing me. Grating on the Goose Teacher's nerves was no problem at all.
Which meant the clearance condition for Uri Saenal Daycare was... to keep the children company, healthily and safely, until the toys wore themselves out — all while remaining something other than a total stranger with no ties to the daycare. That much, I figured, was close enough.
"Then... those children aren't all... never mind. It's not something like that, right?"
Juyeon's fingers began to move again. For such bright, cheerful lyrics, the accompaniment was heartbreakingly sad.
"I doubt it."
I listened quietly for a while to the children's song the toys were singing, then set my limbs moving again.
"The labyrinth doesn't much care for people dying."
"Sorry? What do you..."
"What kind of nonsense is that?"
The instant the music cut out, the ball went bouncing every which way again.
"What the labyrinth likes is people wandering lost inside it. And to wander, first you have to be alive."
The goose doll's ink-black pupils were fixed on me.
"So it would never do something so wasteful as killing that many people in one stroke — not without even granting them the chance to wander first."
Jaeha nodded along, looking convinced — then whipped his head around to gape at me.
"Hold on. What is it you actually do, that you get to act this sure of yourself? You said you came here for a Yuwi Guild interview — don't tell me you're a Red Weaver? No, wait — do Red Weavers even sit through interviews? Like office workers?"
"No, I'm just—"
The absurdity of it wrung a laugh out of me.
"Someone who's won the lottery twice."
"Huh? For real? You're lying!"
"Yes. I'm lying."
"Aigoo, seriously. Unbelievable."
A strangled pfft of suppressed laughter reached my ears. I turned my head to find the freelance magician fighting down a smile, her mouth pulled into a thin line that wasn't fooling anyone. Jaeha pulled a sulky face, but in the end his own mouth corners began to quiver too, and Juyeon struck the keys with a face working hard to scrub every trace of laughter away.
The labyrinth is a strange place. No — humans are the strange ones. Even boxed into a situation where there is plainly nothing to laugh about, the moment something laughable happens, they laugh anyway.
And so — the instant I realized what expression I was wearing, something like ice closed over my heart, and I froze exactly as I was.
The labyrinth must never become a place where you can laugh. The labyrinth should be a place that holds nothing but painful memories. If there is laughter in it — if there are happy memories — wouldn't you stop wanting to escape it? Wouldn't you start wanting to come back?
And so I...
"...and the child remains all alone..."
The toys abandoned their ball game and lay down on the floor, swaying gently to the lullaby's quiet melody. Before long, a drowsy little snore came drifting up — doro-rong, doro-rong.
"Thank you for playing so nicely with our children. Goodbye, guardians. Goodbye to you too, Jiho."
And that was how we escaped Uri Saenal Daycare.
9. When you must play with the children, engage in active play such as ball games or rhythmic exercise.
"Let's try heading down. Rescuing Jiho may well have been the condition."
The moment we stepped out of the daycare, I steered the group toward the emergency stairs as naturally as I could. I'd handled the cleanup, but it was crude work at best — I needed their attention nowhere near the library.
"Ah, right. That could be it."
"Jiho, are you tired? Can you walk?"
At Juyeon's question, Jiho bobbed his small head up and down. Watching him, something suddenly occurred to me as well.
"You don't need the bathroom badly or anything, do you? Going now and back wouldn't be a bad idea. You could change your clothes, too."
Unless the floor directly beneath us was Floor 1, there was no telling how much farther we'd have to go. The floors being scrambled and Floor 1 drifting out of reach was itself evidence, I figured, that Floor 1 was the labyrinth's exit. The problem was that from here, there was no telling whether we'd reach it by going up or by going down. For now, the plan was to pick a direction and keep heading down — and if Floor 1 never showed itself, to turn around and try climbing back up.
"Aw, come on, the bathroom can wait till we're outside, no?"
Well — if it were truly desperate, that would be different. The accountant tacked that on, defensively.
Jiho shook his head as if to say he was fine, and pointed at the emergency exit. Judging by his face alone, I couldn't tell whether he was anxious simply because we were trapped in a labyrinth, or just reading the adults around him.
"Uh, I don't exactly want to light a candle either, but..."
"Then don't."
"I'm sorry?"
"Every single time you suddenly turn serious like you're about to say something, I'm scared half to death. I think it's given me trauma."
The hulking accountant began shaking his head, both ears clamped shut.
"Aaaaah, not listening, aaaaah!"
Wow. I was, quite sincerely, overwhelmed — by the sorry spectacle of a man who had lived long enough to know better. People who exchange business cards inside a labyrinth really are a different breed altogether.
I stood there opening and closing my mouth for a moment, then quietly turned my gaze to Juyeon and Jiho and spoke.
"There's no guarantee the floor below this one is... Floor 1."
In the end, I had to light the candle. Rather than letting them know nothing, letting their hopes climb all the way up, and then smacking face-first into a pitch-black Basement Floor 5 — wasn't it kinder to let them take the hit in advance?
"In a labyrinth of this scale... just in case, I think you should brace yourselves."
But looking at their faces, I felt as though I'd just read out a death sentence. It was hard to meet their eyes. As if it were all my fault. Had the police officer who told me my parents were dead felt like this too?
"Haah..."
Juyeon let out a long, deep breath and said nothing for a moment.
"Well, it is an invasive type... so it won't be easy, will it. I understand what you mean. There's nothing to lose by preparing early. If we come out on Floor 1, that's just a pleasant bonus. Right?"
When the freelance magician gave the now empty-handed Jaeha a light poke, his sulky face crumpled.
"Hah, uuuugh... of all the days for a bolt from the blue... no. No, it isn't one."
Jaeha's head snapped up.
"It's not confirmed yet, is it? We won't know until we actually go down and look. Yeah? Right?"
The accountant lightly ruffled Jiho's hair, fishing for agreement. The boy, who had only been rolling his round eyes back and forth, tilted his head in a way that committed to nothing.
"See? You think so too, don't you? That friend of ours is way too negative."
And so, all together, we opened the Floor 1 emergency exit door —
"Basement Floor 5? No. No, this isn't right..."
— and the optimist Jaeha proceeded to deny reality.
"But it's this dark because of the blackout, right? Even with every flash going, it's claustrophobic."
"Jiho, make sure you hold my hand tight."
"If walking gets hard later, tell me. I'll give you a piggyback."
We had barely set foot on Basement Floor 5 — everyone's phone flash switched on, our first steps just taken — when—
"Huurk... bleugh..."
"Wh-what was that? Who's there?"
From somewhere, the sound came again, small and faint — a stomach with hardly anything left in it being emptied. I had a pretty good idea who it was.
"Um — is someone there? Are you alright?"
"Ahem. Quite alright."
As I approached slowly, angling my light toward the voice, I made out the figure of a man shading the glare with one hand.
"Oh — that person..."
As expected.
CEO Yu Hyeonjae.
"Let's finish our introductions first, then bring those lights down to a minimum. With this many of us, extinguishing them entirely would be more dangerous, wouldn't you say?"
That was what Yu Hyeonjae said the moment he came face to face with the four of us.
"Understood, sir."
When I answered with crisp formality, Yu Hyeonjae's reddened eyes drifted over and settled on me, quite naturally. As if he were parceling out time in scraps — lingering long enough to make even the briefest glance feel stretched thin.
Yes. Just like...
"Have we met somewhere before?"
...as if he were searching for me inside his own memories.