The Taste He Left Behind
"A man opened a refrigerator door, then closed it again. A few minutes later, the man was dead. What happened?"
I'd been twisting the problem into knots in my head. And all along, it was a question so easy it was almost insulting.
"Maybe..."
Nahyeon's mouth opened slowly.
"Is the person inside the refrigerator this man?"
Hosu's lips drew a curve once more. A smile so magnanimous it was unsettling.
"Yes."
The man had climbed into the refrigerator, shut the door behind him, and suffocated.
"Haah... Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid... It was such an obvious trick..."
Nahyeon heaved a groan of regret and thumped her forehead with her fist.
"Nnngh... but it wasn't even his own house, so, hmm..."
Hosu had answered that the man had not killed himself in his own home. Which meant he had climbed into somebody else's refrigerator and died there.
"Was the man perhaps being kidnapped? Or chased by someone?"
"Yes."
"The answer...!"
With three question chances still in hand, Nahyeon shouted out that she had it.
"Yes, Ms. Nahyeon. Please state your answer."
"The man was being kidnapped, or chased by someone, and... it looked like he couldn't run any farther? So he climbed inside a refrigerator and ended his own life!"
The host's head tilted slightly. His black rectangular pupils stayed parallel to the floor.
"There are a few small gaps, but I'll count it as correct. Ms. Nahyeon has solved the first case."
"Yes! Thank you! You're such a good sport, seriously. So what was the real answer?"
The woman who'd been ripping her hair out was gone; her energy restored in an instant, she was already checking the back of the card.
"Huh? Oh—so he was inside the refrigerator from the very beginning. He opened the door and stepped out, and then there were all these other refrigerators, so... Ugh. Wait, this actually happened? Not in our country, right? It's from way back, right?"
"..."
Hosu kept his mouth shut, offering only that faint, unchanging smile.
"Second: I do not answer questions that are unnecessary or irrelevant to finding the answer. Discerning the subject at hand is an immutable virtue, you see. I know the truth—but I cannot tell you."
Sly bastard.
"Ms. Nahyeon. Shall you continue on to the next case? Or would you like to stop enjoying True Stories here?"
"With just this one correct answer, roughly how big does that Life fragment get?"
"I'm afraid I cannot say until the game is over."
"That is so mean."
Pouting, Nahyeon stepped forward, heaved a deep sigh, and shook her head.
"Dunno. Screw it—might as well give it a shot."
And here I'd taken her for the type to play it safe. After all, back at the Singye Daily, she used to sit on an article for nearly an hour, all by herself, before finally sending it out.
Still, apparently she delivers when it counts. Maybe a little confidence had gone to her head. If I were in her shoes, I'd probably have stopped right here.
"A wise choice."
If anything in the labyrinth is easy to solve, be suspicious of it. But as expected, I had no intention of talking Nahyeon out of it now. For one thing, there was no telling whether the rules allowed a spectator to interfere with that decision—and for another, as far as I was concerned, the more information I could gather, the better.
"Now, the second case!"
Even if she died, it would be fine. As long as she didn't die somewhere I wasn't. Because only by knowing why someone died could I make sure it never happened again.
"A woman drank the same tea every day. One day, she drank a different tea for the first time—and then killed herself. Why?"
The card showed a teacup filled with red tea, and a woman hanging from a rope tied in an Evans knot. With no background to speak of, the cup and the woman floated on it separately, and the picture alone gave no hint of any connection between them.
"Huh? Why is the question count... hck—"
Don't tell me the question chances carried over. They didn't reset with each case? Come to think of it, the Life fragment you earned as a reward grew the more correct answers you gave—of course they were never going to hand out unlimited chances.
The whole group was staring at Nahyeon's ashen face, her reddened eyes, her lips pressed into a hard line.
"Ms. Nahyeon. Your question, please."
When the silence stretched too long, the host issued his warning in a mild, docile tone.
"Um, uh... uhh... D-did the tea she drank every day, or the different tea she drank for the first time, have poison in it?"
In the end, Nahyeon managed to force a question out. It had to be one she'd agonized over desperately, knowing she had just three exchanges to drag the whole truth of the case into the light.
"No."
Which meant the woman had drunk ordinary, poison-free tea every day as always—and the tea she tried for the first time on the day she died had no poison in it, either.
"Ah... then... did the woman know the tea had changed, before she drank it?"
Hosu smiled.
"No."
Meaning the woman hadn't known anything had changed until the moment the tea touched her lips. Which meant the fact itself—that the same tea she drank every single day had, for the first time, become a different tea—was directly tied to the woman's suicide.
Only one question chance remained. Nahyeon wasn't even tearing at her hair anymore.
"Ms. Nahyeon. Your question, please."
"...Was the tea she drank every day connected to someone close to her?"
The last question. A question that laid bare the direction of Nahyeon's reasoning.
If the tea the woman drank every day was tied to someone dear to her, then its turning into a different tea could prove that something momentous had happened—to that person, or to the woman herself. Something grave enough to make her take her own life.
"Yes."
Fortunately, that line of reasoning appeared to be sound. It would have been nice to have more chances to ask.
Now it was Nahyeon's turn to declare her answer.
"Ms. Nahyeon—"
"—The answer...?"
Just before the host could issue his third warning, Nahyeon declared it.
"Yes, Ms. Nahyeon. Please state your answer."
"Um, the tea the woman always drank was connected to someone close to her...? And one day she noticed the taste had changed, and realized something had happened to that person... and the shock of it drove her to kill herself...?"
That was probably the best she could have done. There was far too little information to get any more specific, and if she improvised something and got it wrong, she'd be in a real bind. Then again, I doubted an answer that vague would be accepted as correct, either.
"Ms. Nahyeon."
The host's mouth opened wide. As if silently howling with laughter. Terrifyingly wide.
"Incorrect."
The sentence declaring her failure to solve the case fell like a death sentence.
"Ah. Ah..."
With trembling hands, Nahyeon flipped the card over.
The woman, trapped in the labyrinth, had soothed her longing each day with Nectar.
Nectar.
A relic of the labyrinth that shows the drinker the taste they long for most.
The Nectar the woman drank had always tasted of the tea her husband used to brew. Then one day, when she drank her Nectar as usual, it tasted not of her husband's tea, but of an entirely different kind. The woman realized she had been trapped in the labyrinth so long that she had let go of her will to live—so far that she had even forgotten her longing for her family—and at last, she took her own life.
"What kind of... what kind of answer even is that! How were we supposed to guess something like this?!"
"..."
The host did not answer.
No wonder Nahyeon was ready to lose her mind.
In the first case, we had at least been able to confirm whether the labyrinth was the setting. This time, she'd simply lacked the chances to do the same.
And that was what the labyrinth was, fundamentally. A place where anything was possible, given enough chances. And a place where those chances could never be enough.
"Please wait just a moment."
Hosu, paying the outburst no mind whatsoever, rose from his seat and left the arcade at a calm, unhurried pace. We all traded glances and quietly filed out after him.
The host's destination was the lounge right next door. We couldn't quite bring ourselves to follow him in, so we watched through the lounge's glass wall to see what he was doing.
Hosu set a cup beneath the coffee machine tucked into one corner of the lounge and pressed a button.
Beep, click, whirr.
Out came a drink, steam rising off it in waves.
Judging by the color, it wasn't coffee—but it wasn't plain water, either. It was clear and transparent, yet shimmered faintly with vermilion.
"Don't tell me that's... What do I do, I think he's going to make me drink tea full of poison...!"
Visibly terrified now, Nahyeon seized Hwang Juyeon's arm and held on tight.
Swish.
Teacup in hand, smile in place, Hosu stepped out of the lounge.
"I hadn't realized you were waiting so eagerly you'd come out to meet me like this. Ms. Nahyeon. Drink."
The host, eyes fixed squarely on Nahyeon, finally held the teacup out to the defeated—
"N-No! I'm not drinking it!"
—and Nahyeon bolted full-tilt in the opposite direction.
"Ms. Nahyeon. Drink."
"No no no! I won't! I don't want to drink it!"
In many ways, a truly admirable and fascinating human being.
"Ms. Nahyeon. Drink."
"No! I! Won't!"
Nahyeon sprinted laps around the corridor's hollow-square loop, and the host walked after her, his expression never changing. His stride was neither especially long nor his pace especially quick—and yet the distance between Nahyeon and Hosu never widened. Far from falling behind, he was, if anything, drawing closer. The surface of the tea in Hosu's cup was still—so still it raised the hairs on your arms.
"Ms. Nahyeon. Drink."
"Um, hold on a sec—"
"I said I won't drink it—waaah!"
When I cut into the middle of the chase and waved a hand, Nahyeon jolted violently and shrieked.
"Wh-what? What do you want?!"
"You hold on a second, too."
I planted myself in the path of the host, who had tailed her to within a few steps.
"I can use this right now, can't I? Ms. Nahyeon is still alive."
One "Life" token—the very one I hadn't been able to spend on Choi Jaeha earlier.
It wasn't that I particularly wanted to save Nahyeon badly enough to go this far.
And besides...
"I see—so it can be used on someone who is still alive."
Yu Hyeonjae had taken the guess I'd kept strictly inside my own head and aired it out loud, manufacturing an unspoken consensus. One that said: if a situation like this ever came up, then obviously