14th Floor — NeoSoft

"Seon Yuhan?"

"Hey, where are you going all of a sudden! What the—what's wrong with him?"

"Don't run! Your heart rate—!"

I have to get away. Anywhere at all.

I have to escape. However I can.

"You ungrateful wretch."

A voice I couldn't possibly ignore.

I can't—I absolutely can't—defy it.

"You filthy little beast that doesn't even know its blessings."

"Please…"

I ground my teeth and simply ran. I knew my heart couldn't possibly slow down any further. Not while that voice kept coming. I knew ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠my heart would be stolen from me. Not unless I got off this floor.

Which meant there were exactly two things I could do right now.

First, hope that restoring the name Bae Seowoo to the ossuary was, in fact, the condition for escaping the basement's fifth level.

Second, on the assumption that the above wish came true, get out of the parking lot before the 108 seconds ran out.

Emergency exit, where's the emergency exit…

"Look at you, thrashing about just to stay alive."

Found it.

My breath jammed all the way up into my throat as I sprinted, and the moment I spotted the emergency exit sign, I threw myself through it without a second thought and started charging down the stairs.

"Seon Yuhan, that emergency exit—!"

Hold on.

The instant Yu Hyeonjae's urgent shout rang out behind me, a single question surfaced in my mind.

Wait—I'm going down right now?

This is already the lowest floor.

'As if things weren't strange enough, a small emergency exit I'd never seen before appeared on that level. When I opened it, there was nothing inside but stairs leading downward. B5 should have been the lowest floor, so I assumed the floor layout had shifted.'

So it was that very same emergency exit Yu Hyeonjae had mentioned.

Damn it.

In the split second before my foot reached the next step, my thoughts whirled taut like a bowstring. There was no time to stop and deliberate—if I stayed on the stairs longer than five seconds, I'd fall. Should I climb back up right now and head to the second floor through the emergency exit I'd originally come down? Would I still have time left out of the 108 seconds? And what if something got in my way during that dash to the other exit? …What if I had to hear that voice again?

Clunk.

Deliberation over. I opened the emergency exit door, the one with no floor number written on it.

* * *

The moment the door swung open, I was greeted by something almost obscenely ordinary: a typical office corridor, the pale light of early evening slanting in through the windows.

I made it out.

Out of that parking lot where not a single ray of light had reached.

The first thing I did was check the floor number written above the sealed emergency exit door. The fourteenth floor. Two floors below ground, then B5, and now the fourteenth. I'd known it already, but this place was a genuine hodgepodge.

Before moving an inch, I drew the Jaerae Diary from my pocket and flipped to the front pages to check this floor's information.

A software company, apparently. Either way, it seemed to be one of the external tenant floors in the Jaerae Building—like the Howol Accounting Firm where Choi Jaeha worked.

Hold on.

I stopped mid-motion, halfway through sliding the diary back in. Until now I'd only ever pulled it out to check the floor information on the front pages—but come to think of it, if I wrote something in here, would the contents persist even after I died and came back? The diary itself was in my arms every time I restarted, after all. If the writing stayed too… had I never needed to memorize all those vehicle details in the parking lot?

…Hm.

I forced my thoughts to settle and first jotted down the actual order of the floors I'd confirmed.

[3, 2, B5, 14]

A wry part of me was glad I'd grabbed a ballpoint pen on the off chance I'd need it for the interview today—and then another, larger part of me thought, if I'd never sat that interview in the first place, none of this would be happening. I calmed the nausea churning back up in my stomach and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠moved the pen again.

[Bae Seowoo]

I stared at that name for a long while—and then, belatedly, a question struck me from behind.

So who was the culprit, exactly?

Was the identity of the person who killed Bae Seowoo just not something I needed to know? Was finding the name of someone who'd died unjustly and paying respects to her spirit really all it took? Normally, you'd think a case like this only counts as solved once the killer is found too, wouldn't you?

"…"

If unsolved problems really are just sitting there, waiting for someone to solve them—like somebody once said.

Then maybe I would end up solving this one too. Right here, in this labyrinth.

Just as that odd, crawly premonition settled over me—

Clunk!

The emergency exit opened behind me, and four figures came spilling out in a rush: Choi Jaeha, Hwang Juyeon, Jeong Jiho, and Yu Hyeonjae, in that order.

"Gah—where the hell is this now? Huh? Fourteenth floor?"

"Wow, we actually made it out of the parking lot. Thank goodness…"

"Ah, Seon Yuhan is here too. What a relief. We waited and you never came back, so I'd assumed you'd arrived on a different floor."

"Yeah, right, that's exactly it, Seon Yuhan. What do you think you're doing, bolting off like that? We thought something else had happened—we were scared out of our minds."

"Ah, I'm sorry. I… had a rather chilling hallucination."

The moment I apologized, Choi Jaeha's face cleared as if nothing had ever happened. People really were wonderfully simple.

"Huh. So you do know what fear is? Honestly, I was starting to wonder if you were some kind of cyborg. You just bellow at the top of your lungs like screaming won't summon any monsters—not a single blink."

"Anyway, Seon Yuhan."

"Yes."

I ignored Choi Jaeha's remark and looked at Yu Hyeonjae instead.

"What is that notebook?"

The owner of the Jaerae Group tipped his chin toward the Jaerae Diary in my hand.

"Oh, I just picked it up here a moment ago."

Lies ride on momentum.

"I saw it and thought it might be good to write down the things I know, so I've been taking some notes. If it's useful to you, I'm happy to tear out a few pages and share."

"Before that, may I take a closer look?"

Yu Hyeonjae had said the diary belonged to me wherever and whenever I wanted it. Even if it were taken, there was nothing to worry about.

"Ah, yes. Of course."

I handed over the russet leather diary with practiced nonchalance. Yu Hyeonjae turned it over this way and that with the delicacy of a jeweler appraising a gem, then leafed through the pages one by one as cautiously as a scholar handling a rare antique text.

"You said you picked it up here just now."

"Yes. It was lying on the floor."

"Mm."

Don't tell me he saw through the lie?

My brain kicked back into overdrive. Insist it wasn't a lie? If so, how to make the insistence convincing? Or explain why I'd lied? If I explained, truth or falsehood? If truth, what would happen then…

But all that frantic calculation came to nothing. Yu Hyeonjae handed the Jaerae Diary back without hesitation.

"Keep this diary on you at all times, Seon Yuhan. If you ever wish to give it to someone, hand it over whole. No damage—no tearing out or separating pages."

"Uh, hm… understood?"

I hadn't been worried to begin with, but things were going even more smoothly than expected, and I felt oddly adrift.

"Do you know what this diary is?"

What does this guy know, exactly?

"Um… it's a Jaerae Group diary… isn't it? That's what it seemed like inside, anyway."

The CEO of Yuwi Guild smiled faintly.

"I was asking whether you know it's a relic of the labyrinth."

"A… relic? This? But how could you possibly know that? It looks perfectly ordinary from the outside."

Of course I knew. How could the thing the labyrinth itself so graciously advertised in that grand auditorium as a special limited-edition item—one purchase, and it follows you beyond death like a curse—possibly not be a relic?

"Well, there's no diary like this among ours. Not in any year, going all the way back."

Ah.

So that's how he'd caught on.

"If production is running a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠little ahead of schedule, this would be around the time next year's design drafts have been narrowed down to a few candidates. But I've heard no report of that, so we're probably not even at the sampling stage yet."

In other words: no physical copy of this design could exist, therefore this was a relic. That was the conclusion.

"Ah…"

The more I looked at him, the more I thought it. This man really was something else. Not everyone could so swiftly gather the information they happened to know and deploy it exactly where it was needed. And by neither damaging a relic of unknown properties nor trying to snatch it away, he minimized his own risk while casually banking my goodwill on top.

"If it weren't for you, sir, I never would have known. I'll handle it with care."

"I trust that you will."

Choi Jaeha, Hwang Juyeon, and Jeong Jiho watched us with looks of quiet fascination, as if this were their first time seeing a relic in the flesh.

"Then, shall we get moving? If there are people here, they'll be this way."

Yu Hyeonjae pointed down the left-hand corridor. A glance told me the fourteenth floor followed the same hollow-square layout as the rest of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the building—the left half housing NeoSoft's office, the right half apparently vacant.

[NeoSoft]

We stopped in front of the door. To the right of the company sign hung a logo shaped like a crossword puzzle, the letters of NEOSOFT arranged in little square boxes.

"So what does this company actually do…?"

Yu Hyeonjae had been glaring intently through the frosted glass door at the invisible interior before he said it.

Damn it.

A bad feeling, and it's already starting.

I looked around at the faces of my companions and weighed it: take all of them in together, or split the group?

Dying where I can see it. Dying where I can't.

"…Let's go in."

I already knew which was better.

I'd known for a very, very long time.

The inside of NeoSoft was dark and silent.

"There's nobody—huh, wait. Isn't someone over there?"

A faint glow of monitor light leaked from a corner of the darkened office. Someone was there. The whole place carried the gloomy—yet, paradoxically, peaceful—air of someone left alone after hours, quietly grinding through their work in an office everyone else had gone home from.

"Ex—excuse me…?"

We advanced one careful step at a time, and the face hidden behind the cubicle partition gradually came into view.

"Uh… oh…"

A bald man in a hoodie soaked through with sweat was staring at his monitor, his face the color of ash. He was leaning so far forward, neck craned, that it looked like at any moment he'd be sucked in—whether into the sea or into the screen, hard to say.

Simply rendered pixel art, flavor text, and choices.

"Are you all right?"

"Excuse me—can you hear us?"

"Huh… wha…?"

Only after several more calls did the man finally pull his neck back and turn to look at us.

"Um—do you happen to know that this building has been turned into a labyrinth?"

I gave him a brief rundown of the route we'd traveled and our current situation. All the while, the man blinked his bloodshot eyes a few times and tapped away at the phone on his desk, jotting rapidly into a memo. I followed the lines as they appeared.

For all the content of that message, the tone was bizarrely light. Serene, even.

"Ha, it really locked down… didn't expect that at all…"

Choi Jaeha, who had darted off to try the doors, came back exhaling a sigh. He seemed to have been tempered somewhat by our experiences at Uri Saenal Daycare and the parking lot.

Just as the bald man was about to type something more—

Ding!

"Happyland…? You insane little—wait, hold on!"

The moment I grabbed the man after reading every word of that deeply ominous message—

【Invitation complete!】

His hand had already finished the click.