A Grave of Unsolved Problems
Choi Jaeha took the lead, guiding the way.
"No, I'd just never heard the name Samadhi Courier before. It struck me as kind of novel, so it stuck with me. The delivery companies the tenants in this building use are all fixed contracts, you see."
Director Yu Hyeonjae, who had searched the same zone as Choi Jaeha, showed no particular reaction.
Well, of course. This was hardly a man who needed to know what logistics firms came and went from a building.
"Yep, this is the one. Samadhi Courier."
Bae 9502. White box truck. Spot E02. On the off chance it mattered, I noted the vehicle's details and location this time as well and committed them to memory.
"Mind if I open the cargo compartment?"
"It isn't locked?"
"Right. The lock seems to have come undone."
Just as Hwang Juyeon had said, a simple pull on the latch-like handle looked like all it would take. Rather than the driver of this suspicious truck happening to leave it unlocked today, it made far more sense to see the whole thing as the labyrinth's handiwork.
"Then I'll open it. Please be careful—something strange could come jumping out."
At that, Choi Jaeha and Hwang Juyeon stepped slightly aside, shielding the child's eyes. Director Yu Hyeonjae, looking a little tense yet visibly intrigued, took up position behind me. I hadn't expected him to help with the door anyway.
Clack.
I gripped both handles and pulled.
Creeeeeak...
As the doors swung slowly open, the faint glow of our flashlights crept through the gap, stealing into the dark cargo hold. And the moment the light reached its deepest corner—
"Ah...!"
A startled sound escaped me before I could stop it.
"Wh-what's wr—mmph...!"
"It's all right. It's just a doll."
There stood a flesh-toned doll the size of a person, its joints twisted at grotesque angles. Its mannequin-like silhouette sent a chill crawling up my spine.
I did my best not to think of the mannequin with the golden scale for a head. Nor of the equation that had added and subtracted my weight, part by body part.
"This is a dummy."
Creak. Yu Hyeonjae climbed into the cargo hold without a shred of hesitation and began examining the doll.
"A dummy?"
"Yes. A crash test dummy. See the round mark here by the temple, yellow flecked with black?"
At those words, I forced down my brooding, climbed up into the hold, and drew near the doll. Its limbs were bent and flung out every which way, the pelvis and thighs twisted especially badly.
No matter how I looked at this...
"It looks like it was hit by a car. Badly."
I can calculate exactly what it takes for a person to end up like that. The type of vehicle. The distance between it and me. Its speed. The moment the driver registered my presence, and their reaction time after. The braking point. I can run the numbers for every one of those conditions.
It is a very old habit. So old it has been carved into my bones. Or old enough that I can no longer clearly recall the faces of the parents who died in an accident.
"Hit badly, was it... That's likely another clue as well. Does anything come to mind?"
"Yes."
Granted, this dummy wasn't built to adult male specifications and stood shorter than I did, and we were missing other clues—but I did have a suspicion.
"Those skid marks we saw earlier. At a speed that would leave a mark like that, this is exactly what could happen."
"So these are pieces of evidence from the scene of an incident."
Yu Hyeonjae nodded, understanding at once.
"An incident? Not an accident?" Choi Jaeha, unable to bring himself to climb in, leaned his upper body into the cargo hold as he asked.
"But surely you don't mean this actually happened, Director?"
"Who can say. It may not have. But if it were a real incident, then it would be an unsolved one."
"Unsolved...? Why would that be?"
The guild director, a man who made his living off labyrinths, curled his lips upward as though Choi Jaeha's question were some feeble punchline.
"Because a labyrinth is a graveyard of unsolved problems. And those problems wait for nothing more than someone to come along and solve them."
It was a poetic way of putting it—and an endlessly blunt one. Only then did I understand: Yu Hyeonjae didn't merely sit in a plush office chair, reading labyrinths written in ink. He was looking, clear-eyed, straight through those documents at the labyrinths of the real world.
"Hm? Jiho, what is it? What's over the—AAAGH!"
A scream rang out suddenly from outside.
"Ms. Hwang!"
"Are you all right?"
I hurried out of the truck and found Hwang Juyeon sitting slumped on the floor, teeth clenched. Jeong Jiho crouched beside her, his face crumpled to the verge of tears, fidgeting helplessly.
"What happened?"
"Nngh..."
Hwang Juyeon rolled up one pant leg and groaned. Blood was welling on her ankle in fine beads, trickling slowly—as though someone had pricked two dots there with a needle.
"A s-snake... a snake..."
"A snake?"
"Agh, th-there..."
She was pointing beneath the truck. And there, true enough, a snake lay coiled, watching us.
"Gah—it really is a snake!"
Choi Jaeha recoiled in horror and backed far away, while I hastily stripped off my tie and wound it above the wound, binding it tight like a tourniquet.
Current time: 4:17 PM.
It didn't look like a venomous snake—but this was a labyrinth, so I couldn't be certain. I needed to see how long the bleeding took to stop. ...And if the monster came, how long that took, too.
"B-but... I'm not going to die... am I?"
The numbers on the small screen at Hwang Juyeon's wrist were leaping about. She seemed to be fretting over the scream she'd just let out.
From experience, I was certain the fake Buddha came not for screams but for heart rates—but I didn't declare that to them as fact. No one would have believed me in that state anyway.
"Don't worry about the screaming. Just calm down for now. If that monster comes to the sound of a heart, you should still be fine."
Come to think of it, we'd all been startled plenty of times before, and the Buddha hadn't come running every single time. Even when it did come, it hadn't appeared the instant a heart rate spiked—it had shown up only after some time had passed.
"The fact that it doesn't come right away, even with your heart pounding like this, means there's another condition tied to time, beyond heart rate alone. So set your mind at ease and breathe deeply."
"Haa, ugh..."
But Hwang Juyeon's heart rate kept swinging between roughly 110 and 125.
"The blood—ugh, the blood won't stop...!"
"What?"
Startled, I looked down at her ankle. By now the bleeding had more or less stopped; a single drop of blood was all that beaded over the two fang marks.
"Th-that thing—it's a venomous snake, isn't it...! I've been bitten by a venomous snake...!"
"No, it isn't venomous. I don't know what you're seeing, but you're mistaken...!"
Hwang Juyeon was looking at a hallucination spun by the labyrinth.
"Ms. Hwang, Seon Yuhan is right." Yu Hyeonjae chimed in as he soothed Jeong Jiho, who had caught her anxiety and was trembling alongside.
"It's an ordinary snake. Venomous ones have triangular heads, or so I hear."
"Ugh, don't lie to—"
—Clank.
"Damn it. Ms. Hwang, please. Calm down, please..."
"Seon Yuhan, it's already too late. You have to get away."
The blood-reeking Buddha was closing in.
Yu Hyeonjae's hand hauled me, half against my will, behind the pillar across the way. Choi Jaeha and Jeong Jiho were already hidden, curled up as small as they could make themselves.
Crunch... splat...
"Ngh—AAAAAAAAAGH!"
I stood numb behind the pillar and watched every second of it. Without closing my eyes. Without covering my ears. Without muffling my mouth.
…
My heart, which had been hammering so noisily, slowly found its way back to its own rhythm. It was an utterly, skin-crawlingly unreal sensation—and yet so peaceful I ached with longing for it.
The feeling of that instant when, unable to endure horrific violence a moment longer, the bodiless self called "I" is wrenched from the flesh of reality—forced apart to slip free of the pain. Strange to say, that seemed to me the most human thing of all. And, at the same time, the most alive.
"Seon Yuhan. Seon Yuhan?"
"Ah. Ah..."
When I came to, everything was already over. The white box truck had been dyed red, and the monster was gone.
"Seon Yuhan, are you all right?"
"Ah... yes..."
I stared blankly down at my phone.
4:19 PM... 4:20 PM.
Setting aside the time it took to approach and the time until actual death—from the moment Hwang Juyeon was bitten to the first sound of footsteps...
"Somewhere between a minute and a half and two minutes, then."
The murmur slipped out of me unbidden, like the droning of a prayer. And yet, somehow, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd heard those words somewhere before.
"Huh? Um, e-excuse me—Director, Seon Yuhan...! The snake's out...!"
Choi Jaeha's sudden shout snapped me back to my senses. The snake that had slithered out from under the truck had begun moving off somewhere.
"Seon Yuhan, if you're exhausted, you're welcome to rest here with Jiho. We'll follow it." Yu Hyeonjae said, casting a glance toward Choi Jaeha.
"Huh? Y-you mean me?"
"No. I'll go. I'd like you to look after Jiho, Mr. Choi."
"Oh—uh, sure, of course. I've got a nephew; I'm really good with kids."
Leaving Choi Jaeha behind to gather the trembling child into his arms and soothe him, I went after the snake with Yu Hyeonjae. It wasn't moving all that fast, so we were able to trail it at a comfortable remove.
"Don't tell me—that car?"
At the sight of the car the snake had stopped in front of, Yu Hyeonjae wore a strange expression, as if he couldn't decide whether to laugh.
"Oh...!"
Snap—!
The snake, which had been staring at the two of us, abruptly sprang into the air and vanished into the car's emblem. In other words, a snake the length of a man's arm had slipped into an emblem smaller than a palm and become a painted serpent.
"That brand's logo does have a serpent on the right and a cross on the left... hm, never mind. It isn't important."
Seo 8102. Red sports sedan. Spot A11. While I memorized the vehicle's details and position, Yu Hyeonjae rattled off a bit of trivia before giving up on it.
"Let's try the doors first."
Click. As expected, it opened without resistance.
I settled into the driver's seat and rummaged through the sun visor, the door pockets, the console box—nothing turned up.
"Oh."
Yu Hyeonjae opened the glove box on the passenger side and drew something out.
"There's a catalog in here. A car catalog."
It was a catalog laying out the various models of some domestic brand.
"Now, is there a clue in here about the next car..."
The moment Yu Hyeonjae spread the catalog open—
SLAM!
CLICK!
Both doors shut at the same instant and locked themselves at once.
"Ha..."
Damn it. I barely swallowed the curse and pulled the handle anyway. Useless, of course.
"Then it seems this isn't a hallucination only I'm having. Mine won't open either."
And then—
Kzzt... kzzt-kzzzzt... The radio crackled to life, spitting static.