The Two Who Did Not Die
[Testimony c: "Hey, you know I really thought of you like my own little brother, right? Mom and Dad did too—they said having another son made them feel that much more secure. So before I became... this, if anyone had asked how many people were in our family, I would've held my hands out just this wide and answered exactly that many."]
Bang!
A red brand of doubt was seared into the white paper.
"Doubt not."
One, three, six, ten, fifteen, twenty-one—the beautiful eyes fixed on me itched, itched, itched, itched, itched, itched, and laughed.
The judge's breath seeped into me, another swallow.
"Kehk, ugh...!"
The world before me went red. The whole of it rippled and roiled like crimson heat haze. I had seen a scene like this once, when I was very small. The world turned over. My parents died. I was bleeding far too much.
White. My eyes went white.
I collapsed onto the cold floor, and a white ceiling swam into view above me. On some days, instead of the ceiling, it was my aunt I saw. A woman who sometimes smiled, often wept, raged daily, and pitied herself every single day. I looked up into that blinding light.
Black. My eyes went black.
I closed them, just for a moment. The die had twenty-one eyes. Or perhaps I was taking a long nap. Ever since the day at school I'd jolted awake from one with a scream tearing out of me, I had never dozed off again. I opened my eyes.
At last—there was nothing to see.
"Ha—khup, kgh...!"
The laughter kept coming.
My eyes were gone; my lungs felt packed with blood instead of air; something was jabbing at my guts like kindling struck again and again; and yet another death was reaching for my fingertips—and still the laughter kept coming.
Because he had died thinking of me as family, right to the very end.
Because in that short span of time he had truly counted me as one of his own.
Because fools like that no longer existed anywhere in the world.
Because every last bit of it was my fault.
It was so absurd I couldn't bear it. Absolutely unbearable.
"The incident has been concluded."
Even Do-ssi's strange, glassy contralto barely reached my ears anymore.
Something scalding was leaking out of them too, leaving them stopped up and muffled.
"Hh, uhhn......"
I dragged myself upright and lowered myself back into my seat.
Thock—clatter!
I heard the die tumble across the hard table and gradually grind to a halt.
Naturally, with eyes that had gone too far to see, I couldn't make out the number on its upper face.
"By hand... I can confirm it... by hand, can't I."
"Permission granted."
Ah. How tender it was—and how merciless.
Do-ssi must have known this would happen all along.
Known that I would willingly repeat the verification in pursuit of the truth until I lost my sight.
Which meant that if touching the die had been forbidden from the start, my victory would already have been sealed at this point.
Because obviously I would have chosen Accept every single time.
Think about it—if I couldn't see the number on the die's upper face, then no matter how desperately I wanted to verify a testimony, verifying it would tell me nothing, since the number itself would remain unknown.
In other words, Do-ssi wanted me to learn the number rolled in each incident.
Only then would I yearn to know whether the testimony bound to that number was true or false.
Only then would I claw my way to verifying it, even at the cost of my own death.
"Four...?"
Feeling my way cautiously across the die's surface, I counted the recessed pips.
"Ah—no, it's five."
Upper face: five.
"An incident has occurred. The testimony begins."
[Testimony d: ]
"Ohh, I have been waiting for you on the floor that matches the number of these pips."
A voice somehow reminiscent of Do-ssi and yet far more masculine, wearing a soft, singsong courtesy.
"I have prepared any number of games to delight you. However, the final game does have a minimum number of players required to enjoy it together, you see. I find it less upsetting when a quarter of the friends who play my games die than when half of them do."
That's a matter of ratios—doesn't the absolute number of the dead come out exactly the same either way?
"So if you wish to play through to the very end, you simply must bring more friends along. That way, over the course of the game, the odds of the friends you cherish just a little more being the ones to die will drop, if only slightly. Of course, you believe that so long as you alone crawl out alive, the rest hardly matters—and yet, even so, you also believe that saving someone, if it lies within your power, would be a good thing, don't you?"
A vast, sprawling mass of testimony.
But there was no need to overthink it.
Truth is, invariably, truth; a lie is, invariably, a lie.
Truth and falsehood cannot coexist within a single testimony.
If even one of those sentences was true, then all the rest were true as well—and if one was a lie, then every sentence of it was a lie.
"Accept."
And there was at least one of those sentences whose truth I already knew.
Bang!
The sound of a seal slamming down onto the deposition.
That was surely what the Accept and Verify fields of this deposition looked like right now.
"The incident has been concluded."
What a relief.
I'd been worried that this round, too, might force a verification on me.
If the two remaining incidents could be sailed through the same way, so much the better.
There were still people I needed to save—more than I had so far.
"Kgh, mm...!"
Even sitting perfectly still, a wet, blood-laced cough kept bursting out of me.
I was so sleepy.
The whole world was dark.
Maybe I was simply sunk in a drug-induced sleep somewhere, and all of this was nothing more than a hideous nightmare....
Smack!
"Ghh—augh...!"
Snap out of it.
Conclude all six incidents, then endure just six more minutes—even in a wreck of a body like this, that was all it would take to send Jeong Jiho out of the labyrinth.
"Hurry up... and move on."
"A contest with an eager opponent is a pleasure."
Thock—clatter.
The sound of the small die tumbling stopped.
This time, too, I slowly stretched out my hand and stroked the die, counting the pips.
"Two... no, three."
Upper face: three.
"An incident has occurred. The testimony begins."
Shff.
I heard a fresh deposition settle into place before me.
[Testimony e: ]
That was what it would say.
"This is the weight of the death you erased from your own name."
This time it was simply Do-ssi's own voice.
A voice I could listen to forever and still never capture its shape—neuter and beautiful, the kind of voice that could hold you spellbound if you lingered too long.
"You should never have done such a thing."
"Spare me... the sermon."
"This is a deposition of the incident that befell you. You intend to go on living with the lives of others loaded into your own name—at the very least, this many of them."
A voice that spoke as though addressing something perfectly pathetic and beneath contempt.
What line were the corners of Do-ssi's eyes tracing at this very moment?
"My cowardly, witless adversary. Even were there no twisting of time at all, you would have no right to sit at my gambling table. For not a single handful of your own share remains in the letters that make up your name. That your life holds no worth as a stake—of that, I am well aware. Just as you are."
"...Accept."
Bang!
The brand seared down onto the deposition.
Why was this thing spouting such pointless nonsense?
Had it given up on actively sabotaging my acceptances?
One incident remained, and if I got through it safely and held out for six minutes, I won—didn't I?
Or did it think that, having swallowed two breaths already, I'd just wheeze myself into the grave on my own?
"The incident has been concluded. Now only the sixth incident remains."
Or... was the last blow still waiting to fall?
"Conclude the incident as you have done, and you may send that small, young opponent of yours out of this labyrinth. You will not live long, but then, six minutes is not such a long while. It should not be difficult."
Tap—rrrl...
With some sinister premonition creeping up from the tips of my toes, the sound of the rolling die stopped.
I reached out and slowly stroked its upper face.
The recessed pips—one... two....
"It's two."
Upper face: two.
"An incident has occurred. The testimony begins."
Shff—the sound of a document marked 'Incident ⑥ – 2 — Deposition' appearing before me.
And then....
"The number of people I wanted, so desperately, to kill—and could not."
My own voice, sounding somehow like a stranger's.
Two people.
Wasn't one not enough? Or no—had even two not been enough? Would two be enough to satisfy it?
I didn't know.
Whether it was true or not didn't matter.
I had to accept it—had to—conclude the incident, and move on.
"Accep—"
"...What?"
What did that—
"Wha—ugh, what is that... supposed to mean...?"
I tried to lurch upright and my strength gave out, dropping me back down.
By now I could barely even feel the pain.
"Th-they didn't die? That there are two of them—what are you saying? Say it again. Keep talking... ugh, say it...!"
Only silence came back from Do-ssi, wherever it was.
"Me. Not me... someone else survived. That day... surely, on that day, there were... bodies...."
There had been no body.
His body had not been there.
To be precise, he had vanished immediately after the moment when his death should have been absolutely certain.
It had been incomprehensible—but then, the labyrinth had never been anything but incomprehensible.
And yet, if he hadn't died....
Of course, I was no longer young enough to be fooled by the labyrinth's word games. Medically speaking, he was almost certainly dead.
But if, in some sense, he was alive.
▶ Did you forget?
That voice, waking me at the single happiest moment I had ever known in Happy Land—could it be.
"Really. Really...? Is it true?"
"I told you, did I not. What you choose to believe, and what you choose not to—that is what matters."
Do-ssi no longer wore the imitation of my voice.
"Ah, ah...."
As if the entire universe had been compressed, in an instant, into a single point, everything fell silent.
The warmth of the blood running down beneath my jaw, the agony of the membranes searing away inside me, the ringing that clamored through my skull—all of it converged, like the pips painted on the die, into one tiny point.
Within that one-point world there were only two things: me, and the truth I had to face.
Only in this blindness—where not an inch ahead was visible—could I, at last, look Do-ssi's every eye dead-on.
"Verify."
I.
I... wanted to know the truth. I had to know it.
If it cost me the future of that seven-year-old child, then so be it.
No—if I could manage it, I would pay the futures of every human being in this place.
"Doubt not."
And so, at the price of abandoning the child's future, I gained the truth—
"Ha."
—and willingly breathed in the final swallow.
"If it were possible to turn back time, what would you do, Seon Yuhan?"
One thing was certain.
I would never be forgiven.