A Wager With No Equal Stakes
Wasn't this just a scam?
"When you say 'this place,' what exactly do you mean? Don't tell me it's this 11th floor? Because if I win, all I get back is what I already had."
At my question, Do-ssi began to spin in a jaunty rhythm, and its twenty-one eyeballs bent all at once, as if the flesh around them itched.
It was laughing. Without a sound.
"You would make a fine gambler."
Thanks a lot. Exactly what I wanted to hear right now.
"I mean, of course, this very Jaerae Building — the labyrinth in which you are all trapped. I shall let you leave it."
"What?"
"What... did you say? Really?"
"Seriously?"
The crimson cube tilted to one side, like a head cocked in curiosity.
"You doubt me?"
"Of course I do. You're telling me you'd just hand us the way out of the labyrinth? That sounds too good to be true."
Like a lie, in other words.
"Too good to be a truth — and because it is too good, you must stake everything — and because you have staked everything, it becomes true."
A stern gravity settled into the blood-red dice's eyes and voice alike.
"That is what gambling is."
Do-ssi's eyes converged on me.
"And. When did I ever say I would let you out easily?"
A luminous fury simmered beneath that voice, the kind that could drag a person bodily toward it.
"The only stake you may lay against me is your life. I never treat a life as a light thing — and therefore I never treat a contest lightly."
Which meant we had no right to treat it lightly either.
With our lives on the line.
Ridiculous. Absolutely absurd.
We'd been forcibly drafted into a lethal gamble the moment the labyrinth swallowed us in the first place.
"Of course, if you refuse, there is no obligation to play at all."
"Huh...?"
"If we don't play, we can't leave anyway, right?"
"Not at all."
Do-ssi's eyes swung left and right like a pendulum, click, click, click — the way a human might shake their head.
"You may open that door right now and walk out, if you wish."
Yeah, right. As if.
As if it would really let us off that easily.
"However. Should you decline to face me in a contest—"
Ah, right. Always listen to the end of a sentence.
"—as the price, I will take from you a single stroke of good fortune that lies in your future."
"Take our luck? What does that even—"
"It means that an event in which things go terribly wrong will be guaranteed to occur. Something you might have slipped past by pure chance."
Inside a labyrinth, even the smallest stroke of misfortune can lead straight to death.
But... that, too, belonged to the realm of probability.
There was still a chance it wouldn't end in a fatal accident.
"As for the game."
Yu Hyeonjae raised his left hand with impeccable composure and spoke up.
"I'll take the liberty of choosing, shall I?"
This man makes me nervous.
"CEO, don't you want to think that over a little more?"
"Why? Isn't it worth a bet? Besides, I happen to be an extremely lucky person."
Which is exactly why you make me nervous.
Yu Hyeonjae has a documented history of dying the instant he opened his mouth — his entire skeleton evaporating on the spot, right after saying exactly this.
This man is not lucky. Not even a little.
"Still, considering the opponent, I'd think the odds would balance better if someone else picked the game."
"I shall grant the right to choose the game to you. However, the finer rules will be subject to some adjustment."
Summarized simply, it came to this:
Each of us could choose the game for our one-on-one contest with Do-ssi.
If we lost, we died.
If we won, we escaped the labyrinth.
And if we forfeited the game, we could walk out of this office unharmed — but sooner or later, misfortune would come for us without fail.
"Could it be... that the reason there's no one else here is because everyone's already escaped...?"
I heard Choi Jaeha whisper the question to Hwang Juyeon.
"He said we were his first customers."
"Ah. Ah, right...? Of course. Right..."
He was clearly wrestling with it.
And no wonder.
"I'll play. Me."
How could I possibly let this chance slip by?
"Wait, seriously? You're going? Just like that?"
"Isn't that decision a little too fast...?"
"I'm fine."
I brushed past their startled looks and turned my head toward the dice.
"I'll do it."
"Enter."
Do-ssi rolled its eyes at me with a rumbling sound, then pivoted sharply and glided into the separate private office beyond.
"Well then, I'm off. Jiho, bye."
"No, this is— this is way too sudden... You have to win. Promise we'll meet again out there."
"...Good luck, Seon Yuhan. Either way, I owe you a lot. Thank you."
"I hope you win, so we can meet again afterward. It was good to meet you, Seon Yuhan."
What was with all of them?
Getting such solemn farewells honestly made me want to laugh.
These were people I'd be seeing again the moment I died, anyway.
"Oh."
Right. This was their first goodbye from me.
And, naturally, it was supposed to be my last one too.
My stomach lurched.
That belated realization kicked me from head to toe, like a foot against my whole body.
Something churned and seethed inside me.
"Yes. Thank you, all of you... "
I wrung the words out of my throat by force.
Come to think of it, I'd never given a proper goodbye either.
It had always been sudden.
My deaths, and theirs.
"I hope every one of you makes it out."
Hoping, for my own sake too, that this would be the last farewell, I stepped into the gambling den—
"You have no right to sit at my table."
"You—"
Looked like I was going to die before I could even throw a punch.
"Wh—why not? So what, I'm just supposed to die?"
The owner of the gambling den gave a hollow laugh at his customer's complaint.
"If you are to die. Then you may die."
Oh.
"You... you know, don't you. That I can't die."
"It is not a matter of knowing. It is a matter of seeing. What use is an eye that cannot appraise the value of a stake?"
Do-ssi's eyes froze in place, boring straight through me.
"A life is singular. Within the world called 'I,' the agony of birth and death comes but once each — and that is why the gamble called life can exist. You violate that rule. The most sacred of all rules."
I had suspected there might be beings capable of recognizing that I regress.
The Happy Land commemorative photo I'd received this time had held images of me from previous loops, after all.
"If you possess many lives, how can you claim to have staked your 'everything'? If there is ground left to retreat to, how can you call it the edge of a cliff?"
Now I understood.
"So that's why you hate me?"
I was a being for whom a single, once-in-a-lifetime wager over my 'life' was impossible.
As long as I couldn't die even when I died.
"Yes. I despise you. Your very existence is a blasphemy."
Great. A dyed-in-the-wool orthodox purist of the gambling world, apparently.
"So, what — since I can't die even if I die, you won't let me escape even if I win?"
"The weights do not balance. Death sits upon your side of the scale like a breath, while escape sits upon mine like a sin."
Balance again, huh.
If I have to look at one more scale, I'm going to be sick.
"...Then what about a wager where I stake someone else's escape?"
The eyes set into three of the dice's hovering faces fixed on me for a long, long moment.
The fact that I wasn't rejected outright was a good sign.
"Jeong Jiho. The kid out there. How about if I win, you let him escape?"
"Then let us begin the negotiations."
Only then did Do-ssi usher me toward a white table with a single chair.
"Ah. Before that, one thing I need to check. If I get the kid out, and then I die and come back — what happens to him? Does he come back too?"
Because if so, this whole contest would be meaningless.
"No. He will not return."
When I sat down and looked up at the die, Do-ssi — which had been floating across from me — came to a stop.
"My rules are not so flimsy as that. This labyrinth shall never dare to lay hands on one who has stepped beyond its laws."
Rules are sacred.
Among the countless whispers the labyrinth's entities let slip, if there was one thing you could believe without a shadow of doubt, it was anything concerning the 'rules.'
They might withhold things. But they never lied — not about the rules.
"Or what if I walk out and the kid's already dead out there?"
"My. Rules. Are. Not. So. Flimsy. As. That."
"Okay, okay. I'm just allowed to ask, aren't I?"
So even if I regressed, Jeong Jiho would remain fixed outside this labyrinth, alive. Permanently.
That was enough for me.
"More to the point — should you not first consider what happens if you lose? You would be taking the life of that young, quiet one."
"...Can't we just say I die? Even if there's a way back, dying is still dying. And I really, really hate dying."
Reading the expression of a lump of flesh that was nothing but eyeballs was no easy task.
Do-ssi kept its eyes closed, rotating slowly, slowly — then opened them at last.
"Accepted. If you lose, only you shall die."
"Permanently?"
"Do you think that possible?"
"Can't it be?"
"Some rules stand above even mine."
"...Fine. But are you really sure that's enough for you? I'm grateful you're letting me off, but you hated this precisely because I can't stake my life, and that means the gamble can't properly exist, didn't you?"
"Do you truly not know? Or do you wish not to know?"
When I stared up blankly, all twenty-one eyes wrinkled with itchiness, and the inside of each eyeball curved into a smile once more.
"Your death will suffice. You will come to understand."
"One matter requires clarification. This is the first and the last chance you shall ever have to stake that 'singular' life of yours against me. Though I hold no memory of meeting you, my eye is more than capable of appraising the worth of your life."
In other words: Do-ssi couldn't recognize that I was a regressor — but it could recognize the value of my life.
Which meant I couldn't deceive it into granting me a rematch.
That was fine.
That was never the plan to begin with.
The moment Do-ssi's words settled, two objects appeared on the table.
One was a jet-black gas mask shaped so that it did not cover the eyes — the kind of design you'd expect to see in some near-future science fiction story.
The other was a die.
This time it was a genuinely ordinary, cubic die.
Made of flesh like somebody, no. A tiny, weightless, ivory-colored die, each of its six faces marked not with eyeballs but with small round crimson dots.
"This is all we need? A gas mask and a die?"
"If a mere cube of painted dots were not absurd enough to decide life and death, how could it be a gamble at all?"
If that was the logic, then I could understand calling life itself a gamble.
Life is a thoroughly absurd phenomenon.
At least, it is for me.
"Put it on."
Following the instruction, I fitted the gas mask over my face.
It covered half my face, so I'd expected it to feel suffocating.
Strangely, it didn't. It wasn't heavy, either.
It felt like breathing itself.
Something invisible to both eyes.
Something with an endlessly lethal poison hidden inside.
"Therefore, should a proper judgment fail to be rendered, the price appropriate to that failure shall one day be paid in full."
...This gas mask.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a mask for releasing poison, not for blocking it. And straight toward me, at that.
"The number is always read from the uppermost face."
With that, the tiny die rolled across the table of its own accord.
"When the die is cast, one of six events occurs with a one-in-six probability. If a one is rolled—"
On the uppermost face of the die that had come to rest, a single red eye gazed up at the ceiling.
Rrrroll.
It rolled again.
"—or a two."
This time, a pair of bloodshot eyes.
"—or a three."
Eyes shaped like the vertices of a triangle.
"—or a four."
Two pairs of eyes lying aslant.
"—or a five."
A red cross, waiting for the condemned.
"—or a six."
Holes that could never be a Star of David.
"When one of these six 'events' occurs, I, as the witness, shall offer my 'testimony' regarding it. Shall we try a demonstration?"
Tock, rattle-rattle.
The sound of the die rolling across the table rang out, then fell silent.
Uppermost face: six.
"An event has occurred. Testimony begins."
In that instant—
A white sheet of A4 paper materialized in front of me.
Testimony x:
Then—
"Kyaaaaaagh!"
Suddenly, a young woman's voice tore its way out of Do-ssi.
"What I saw was the first and most perfect of numbers!"
I flinched and snapped my gaze to Do-ssi.
At the same moment, writing appeared on the testimony sheet.
Testimony x:"Kyaaaaaagh! What I saw was the first and most perfect of numbers!"
So that was how it worked.
The number of the event that had occurred was six.
If something called six "the first and most perfect of numbers," that would be because six is the smallest perfect number.
It could be endlessly easy — or endlessly hard.
"But you're not going to swap out the testimony sheet or the die later, or pull any tricks like that, right?"
"A gamble without deceit does not exist."
Was this bastard seriously announcing, out loud, that he intended to cheat me?
"Ah."
"Therefore, that truth shall be indubitably truth, and falsehood indubitably falsehood — guaranteed by the supreme rules of the labyrinth."
In other words: don't worry, there'll be no dirty tricks like changing the die's face mid-roll or rewriting the testimony after the fact.
Which meant...
There was a real chance I could win this.
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
Gambling — maybe it really was worth a try after all.