The Scent of Burning Rubber
"That's a fire alarm going off, right?"
"Wait, is this floor actually on fire? I swear I can smell burning rubber or something!"
"Just in case, keep low and cover your mouth and nose!"
Buried beneath a fire alarm so loud it made our ears ring, our voices barely carried.
Going back through the emergency exit and returning to the arcade was no longer an option. Now that we'd arrived on a different floor, the only way out was to figure out this floor's escape condition.
"Let's head over there for now! Toward the fire extinguishers!"
We crouched down in a line beside the pillar where the extinguisher was mounted and took stock of the situation.
Riiiiiing! Riiiing—!
Back on the earlier floors, the fire alarms would go off and then shut themselves off after a while. Apparently, some floors didn't. There had to be a reason the alarm refused to stop on this floor alone. And it wasn't as if it had been blaring before we opened the door—it had started a few seconds after we stepped inside. Whatever the reason was, it certainly wasn't for our benefit.
"I don't see any smoke!"
"Right! The burning smell won't go away, but nothing actually looks like it's on fire!"
Then where was that burning smell coming from, and how, and why? If nothing was on fire, why was the fire alarm still ringing?
"Oh! My car's in here!"
The accountant shouted, his face scrunched up—whether from the din or something else.
"Sorry?"
"My car! I parked it here! On the third floor of this garage!"
"Which section is it in?"
"Section? Uh, I didn't memorize the section number! I just remember where it is! Over there! Parked right up against the wall!"
The spot Choi Jaeha pointed to was on the complete opposite side of the floor from where we stood.
"Then let's go check it out!"
It had been the same on B5 when we followed a clue, so this wasn't exactly the same pattern—but we had to go somewhere regardless. Sitting inside a car had to be faster and safer than wandering around on foot, didn't it?
Of course, that was assuming getting into a car wasn't itself a rule violation.
"For now—the two of you, Jiho, you're in the middle here! And Choi Jaeha, you take the front!"
"Uh... me?"
"Well, how else are we going to find your car? I'll be right beside you too! Don't be too scared!"
"When did I ever say I was scared...?"
"I'm sorry? What was that?"
"No—I said I wasn't! Fine, I'll do it!"
Anyway. Once you learn how to coax him along just right, he quietly does whatever you tell him to.
Though I couldn't help noticing that the longer this went on, the better I seemed to get at handling the accountant.
The formation came together quickly: Choi Jaeha and me in front, then Lee Nahyeon, Jeong Jiho, and Hwang Juyeon in the middle, and Lee Jinsu and Yu Hyeonjae at the rear. Two, three, two—three lines, and we started moving.
Riiiiiiiiing!
The longer I listened to that ceaseless fire alarm, the more my head began to ache. My pulse quickened; my nerves sharpened. Which was, after all, the whole point of an alarm—to make you register danger instantly and react to an emergency.
"The car key should be around here somewhere... I can't hear a thing..."
"Sorry? What was that?"
Stuck in a pitch-black underground space where we had to rely on our phone flashlights, listening to noise loud enough to drown out the voice of the person right beside us—it wasn't long before I started losing track of where I even was. As if my eyes and ears had simply gone blind and deaf. Nothing felt quite real. It was almost like being inside a dream.
"Oh! Something just glinted over there! Isn't that Jaeha's car?"
"Where?"
"There! Something flashed for a second, over that way!"
Lee Nahyeon pointed diagonally to the right with the hand holding her phone.
"Huh? Over there...?"
Choi Jaeha frowned beside me.
"But I parked it over here...?"
"Sorry?"
"I said it's over here! Not that way—this way!"
The place Choi Jaeha was pointing to was diagonally to the left.
"Then what I just saw was..."
An unpleasant chill crawled up the back of my neck, and at the same moment that acrid, revolting smell stung my nose even harder than before. You'd think your sense of smell would go numb from breathing the same odor over and over...
And then—
"AAAAAH!"
A deep, guttural scream slammed into the back of my skull. For an instant, my only thought was, who?
"Mr. Lee Jinsu!"
"Ack! Aaaagh!"
It was the first time I'd ever heard Lee Jinsu scream that loud. Everything happened so fast that there was no time to help or do anything at all.
Thud!
Lee Jinsu's body pitched forward and sprawled to the ground.
Shhk—.
Scraping along the floor, he was dragged into the darkness.
Chiiiik, chjjj...
"Aaagh! U—khh...!"
Woven through the smell of burning rubber was another smell—meat cooking.
"What the—what IS that thing?!"
"I don't know! Just run! Where'd you say the car was?"
Formation, nothing—everyone scattered in a blind panic, sprinting for their lives. But exactly one person turned back and ran toward Lee Jinsu to grab him.
"Mr. Lee Jinsu!"
Yu Hyeonjae.
I simply stood there, watching the monster that had taken Lee Jinsu's leg in its mouth.
"..."
It looked less like anything human and more like a massive, four-legged beast draped in a black veil. Strands of something far too thick and long to be fur covered its entire body like a cloak, hanging down in heavy coils.
Tires.
It looked like a monster stitched together from tires—shredded haphazardly into strips and crudely joined piece by piece. And those tire fragments were melting, ever so slightly, ever so slowly. As if hot flames smoldered beneath that hide of black rubber.
"Khh—uuhk..."
The monster dragged Lee Jinsu over to an empty parking space, inspected him like it was appraising merchandise, then clamped down on his thigh a second time. The curtain of hanging tire strands hid its head and mouth entirely, so all I could see was the black rubber pieces writhing—which made it look less like a beast feeding and more like a mollusk, a snail or an octopus, at dinner. Somehow that was worse. Somehow that was more grotesque.
"Hgh—ack, AAAAH!"
Every time Lee Jinsu's scream rang out, the monster shook its body irritably, his leg still clenched in its grip. As if to say, shut up. Quiet.
...Wait. What was that?
Something long and pale was clinging tightly to the monster's pitch-black torso.
"Representative, let go now! It's dangerous!"
I stepped in closer to get a better look at the monster, taking hold of Yu Hyeonjae's shoulder.
And I realized what the 'glinting' thing Lee Nahyeon had spotted really was.
"A leg...?"
A leg was attached to the monster's murky flank. A human leg—just one, hanging there like an ornament. The trousers had been shredded away on their own, and a silver sneaker, the one part that hadn't come off, was what had caught the light. A left leg, surviving from thigh to toe, belonged to someone. The cut surface of the thigh was seared black-red—singed through, as if it had been slow-rendered by heat until it came apart.
The same thing that was, right now, happening to Lee Jinsu's right leg.
Was it collecting legs? Was a leg some kind of means of locomotion for it? Was it the part of the body that corresponded to a car's wheels?
"Let's move! We might be next!"
Having gotten a rough read on the situation, I grabbed Yu Hyeonjae again and pulled him back.
"..."
Lee Jinsu wasn't screaming anymore.
Yu Hyeonjae—who, at some point without a flicker of hesitation, had expelled Lee Jinsu from the ranch to his death—had finally let go of his arm. He'd been trying desperately to drag him free of the monster, it seemed.
I didn't think that was a contradiction, or hypocrisy.
'Even if he has a hidden purpose, that doesn't make his visible purpose a lie, Seon Yuhan.'
I believed those words. Save someone if you can; kill them if you must. Those two things can coexist.
"Aaagh!"
"Wh—hagh!"
Then, from somewhere, another scream cut through the fire alarm. Anyone could tell it was Lee Nahyeon and Choi Jaeha. I'd thought they'd run off safely in the opposite direction, but apparently something had happened over there too.
"This way."
I mouthed the words to Yu Hyeonjae and moved toward the rest of the group, hugging close to the parked cars so we could duck out of sight at any moment.
"Oh—Representative! Seon Yuhan!"
"Where did you two go?! We thought something had happened to you...!"
"We found Jaeha's car!"
But when we actually got there, nothing seemed to be wrong. Lee Nahyeon, Jeong Jiho, Choi Jaeha, Hwang Juyeon—all four of them were fine, not a scratch on them. They'd even found Choi Jaeha's car intact and were just opening the door.
"Is everyone all right? We heard screaming!"
"Ah, ah..."
"Um... so..."
Lee Nahyeon, with a troubled expression, gingerly pointed at one spot.
"Ah."
Following the tip of her slender finger, I found a human corpse. Naturally—if that was even the right word—missing its left leg. There was no question whose it was: the owner of the leg that had hung like a decoration on the black tire monster's flank.
I walked a few steps closer and examined the body carefully.
"Ugh, why are you standing there staring at that thing, it's gross! Get in already!"
What was the exact cause of death? Exsanguination? Shock? Both were possible—assuming that monster hadn't done anything that defied ordinary, out-of-labyrinth common sense. It had sliced through the thigh, where the femoral artery runs, with no anesthesia and no blood transfusion. Odds were the man had died of pure physical trauma and nothing else.
Clack.
I walked back to Choi Jaeha's car and opened the rear door.
"Please sit here...!"
"Yes."
Thump.
"Jiho, want to sit here with me? I think that'd be better."
With the door closed, the alarm finally dropped to a muffled murmur, and conversation got easier. Jeong Jiho's expression, as he climbed onto my lap, looked visibly relieved too. The alarm had clearly been stressing him out—it was hard on even the adults' ears.
"S-so, um... where's Jinsu...?"
Yu Hyeonjae lowered his head in the passenger seat, and I gave a small shake of mine toward Lee Nahyeon beside me.
"Th-then, um, how are we supposed to get out of here?"
Choi Jaeha gripped the steering wheel tightly, glancing anxiously at Yu Hyeonjae.
"Has anything about this car changed in any way? Anything special at all?"
"Ah—no, not really... Though it did seem a little different from the B5 garage."
The moment I heard that answer, I was quietly impressed. A man who couldn't have cared less about labyrinths was now factoring in floor-by-floor pattern differences. Remarkable progress. Not that I thought that was necessarily a good thing.
The labyrinth is a place where, if you could go your whole life without knowing, you'd be better off not knowing.
"S-so... that thing that dragged Lee Jinsu away... do we have to kill it?"
Hwang Juyeon spoke up.
"You two got a proper look at it, right? What it actually looked like?"
"To an extent. It looked close to an animal wearing something like a cloak made of tires, so we couldn't tell what was underneath."
"I thought it was a horse."
The Yuwi Guild representative added.
"A horse?"
Come to think of it, the silhouette—a massive body shrouded entirely in a curtain of tire strands—did resemble a giant horse.
"Yes. The shape of it, and horses were a means of transport too, like cars. Besides, we still measure an engine's power in horsepower."
It made sense. I was mulling over the possibility that the monster was modeled on a horse when—
Riiiiiiiiing—!
Riiing.
"Huh?"
"Hmm?"
Click.
The fire alarm that had been shrieking loud enough to split our skulls abruptly cut out.