Horseman
I held my breath and approached with careful, deliberate steps.
Toward the spot beyond the car where the headless grotesque figure was visible.
"......"
The moment I finally reached the car and checked the seat right beside it,
I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep the laughter from bubbling out of me.
A massive horse stood utterly motionless, as if draped in a cloak of black tires.
With Choi Jaeha's torso—head and limbs severed—laid across its back.
There was no doubt it was Choi Jaeha's body. I could tell from the suit shirt and tie, both arms shredded to ribbons.
From a distance, it looked as though some nameless corpse's legs and Lee Jinsu's legs had been stitched onto Choi Jaeha's torso.
Exactly like a knight without a head or arms, mounted on horseback.
Which meant this monster wasn't collecting legs at all.......
"Hah......"
It was a hangman.
Not a hangman descending from head to legs, but one climbing from legs to head.
Once complete, the finished figure would be riding atop that monster's back.
Like a horseman. Or a knight.
Click.
I took the photo with the shutter as muffled as I could manage, then immediately turned away.
There was no telling when the alarm might go off.
......Come to think of it, that fire alarm.
The sudden thought stopped my legs in their tracks.
I was the one who set it off. Every time the loop restarted.
So then—what would have happened if I hadn't triggered the fire alarm on the third floor?
Would the monster have stayed asleep forever, never waking?
"......"
It was entirely possible.
A labyrinth is a place where you can die because of other people's trivial choices—even the split-second decisions of total strangers who aren't even in the same place as you.
If that were the case, then in the end, they'd all died because of me.
That nameless person with the severed left leg.
Lee Jinsu, with his severed right leg.
Choi Jaeha, reduced to nothing but a torso.
I had killed them. With a single press of a button.
It suddenly occurred to me that I'd killed far too many people.
The thought that every moment I'd lived was, in equal measure, a moment in which someone died.
The thought that I'd killed more people than I'd died.......
But grief was not mine to claim.
I couldn't shed tears for these people, couldn't offer prayers for their souls.
It was too far off.
Before their turn would ever come.
"Oh, Yuhan-nim, you're back."
"Thank goodness. Nothing went wrong, I hope?"
When I returned to the others, everyone looked to be in better shape than before.
"I'm fine. Is everyone all right? And the CEO?"
"I'm all right. Jiho's woken up, too. The monster's asleep, as expected?"
"Yes. And it turns out the monster wasn't just collecting legs."
I angled the screen so the child couldn't see it clearly, and showed them the photo.
Hwang Juyeon drew in a sharp breath, and Yu Hyeonjae lowered his eyes with a quiet sigh.
"Ugh, that startled me......!"
Lee Nahyeon squeezed her eyes shut at the photo suddenly thrust in front of her and shook her head, as if to shake the image loose.
"Could you maybe warn us before you show us things like this, Yuhan-nim......? So we can brace ourselves a little......?"
I showed it to you so you could brace yourselves.
Because this might be coming for us soon enough.
"Hah...... So, Seon Yuhan-ssi, you're thinking the head comes last, then? In that case...... it's less a hangman and more like a knight, isn't it."
The real question now was how to get off this floor.
"Right. So I think either we deal with the monster before it's complete, or we find something—some escape condition."
"Ah...... Like the fifth-floor parking garage, you mean?"
"Yes. Except with something like a time limit layered on top."
Truthfully, there was one more path I could see, right here and now, beyond all that.
Completing the monster's horseman ourselves.
That, too, was a possibility I had to keep in mind—that it might be the escape condition.
For that, all we'd need to avoid sacrificing was the torso and the head.
Honestly, even the legs were risky.
Pain I could grit through, somehow or other, but arterial hemorrhaging was beyond anything I could handle on my own.
The severing seemed to sear the flesh closed as it cut, so some clotting did occur—but still.
"If we have to search for something, we'll need to split up a bit, won't we?"
"But what if it turns out we have to kill the monster instead? The thing that crumples cars like paper?"
"Hard to say. I did consider ramming it properly at full speed this time. Hitting it from both sides, repeatedly—I thought there might be a chance that way."
Even as I answered, the hangman-completion simulation never stopped running in the back of my mind.
Say there was a chance of surviving the loss of a leg—losing an arm would still be the better outcome.
If this were the last floor, maybe. But if more floors waited above, I'd be climbing up and down those stairs over and over, and one solitary leg simply wouldn't cut it.
I'd lost all manner of lower-body parts back in Happyland—toes, calves, thighs—and the loss of mobility had proven a far more fundamental penalty in this labyrinth.
My companions had propped me up and carried me every single time.
But that kindness couldn't last forever, and I didn't want to keep depending on it either.
I'd only need to watch out for shock and infection—surely that would be enough.
If this floor truly demanded a completed horseman for escape, then I'd have to confirm the exact order of the pieces and settle for losing an arm.
And if it didn't have to be me at all, even better.
"There's one thing I'd like to point out."
The man who'd been resting in silence alongside the child until now finally opened his precious mouth.
"There's no law that says the head must come last."
"Sorry?"
Has he been thinking about the horseman's completion this whole time?
We'd already moved on to the question of what to do before it's finished?
"Please elaborate."
But it was worth hearing out.
This man wasn't just a lunatic—he was a lunatic in direct proportion to his competence.
"It could be a headless horseman. Like the fairy from Celtic myth."
"......Ah."
A Dullahan, he meant.
"Oh? Then the time left until it's complete just got shorter, didn't it......"
"It's better to assume the labyrinth will take the worse option, I find."
He had a point.
And yet, if completing the monster's knight turned out to be the escape condition, that would actually be good news.
Two arms, a torso, two legs.
Excluding the head, only five people would need to be sacrificed.
And one of those five had been settled long before we ever arrived on this floor. That nameless someone.
"Hmm......"
I touched my lips thoughtfully, hiding the corner of my mouth.
As I'd suspected, after all.......
My mind was leaning a little further toward the possibility that completing the horseman was the escape condition.
On the previous floor it killed people for not meeting the minimum headcount, then let all of us through to the next floor alive—only to hack half of us apart the moment we arrived?
One look and you could tell it was exactly the kind of thing a labyrinth would do.
Damned labyrinth, through and through.
Riiiiiiiiing—!
Without warning, it began to wail.
The siren that announces death.
"O-oh no, what do we do! We haven't even decided yet, what we're going to do......!"
Let's test it.
What happens when it's completed.
"Run, all of you! I'll carry Jiho! There won't be time to try the car doors or anything else!"
While the alarm was silent, things might have been more complicated—but from the moment it started blaring, this floor was very, very simple.
So simple there was barely a rule worth deciphering.
Run for your life.
That was all there was to it.
Just a game of tag. A slightly violent one.
"Jiho, hold on tight! Don't let go!"
And perhaps that game of tag was the cruelest part of all.
Because if everyone ran, then who got caught, who died, would be decided by......
"A-ack......!"
Wholly at the tagger's discretion.
"Aaagh......"
A searing heat blazed across my left shoulderblade—so ferocious it turned, paradoxically, ice-cold—and my whole body was dragged away with brutal force.
Instinct took over; I thrashed and twisted to break free, but the only thing that grew stronger was the sensation that my arm would tear off first.
The child, fallen from my arms, stared at me, helpless and terrified.
"Go......! Quickly, ugh!"
The acrid, rancid stench of tire rubber melting in the heat.
The smell of my cheek and hair cooking where those black strands had touched them.
The fishy reek of blood seeping out as my shoulder was gnawed off—slowly, methodically—by that iron-lump of a mouth hidden beneath the tire hide.
"Ngh, ugh......"
That vertiginous sensation of the world going black and blindingly white all at once.
Deafeningly loud and yet muffled into near-silence.
That achingly familiar feeling that nothing remained in this world but me and the pain—just the two of us.
"......Ah."
And finally, that sensation of my sweat-and-blood-soaked body growing heavier even as it grew lighter—lighter by exactly the weight of one arm.
Collapsed limp on the floor, I looked up at the monster through my swimming vision.
The monster, apparently having lost all interest in me, had carried my left arm away in its teeth as it moved off.
So docile, so demure—as if it hadn't just charged over and torn a man apart moments ago.
Riiiiiiiing!
I couldn't tell whether it was the deafening alarm or simply the monster's nature, but it made not a sound as it went.
I wanted to follow. I didn't have the strength to rise.
The world was still spinning in circles.
I'd wanted to see how the body was being assembled.
"......"
Every ounce of strength drained from me, and my eyes closed on their own.
Still, I didn't think I was dying.
See? I told you—if something had to be severed, an arm was the best possible option......
Riiiiiiing—!
Ring-ring.
Before long, the alarm fell silent.
Soon after, a faint flash of strobe light approached, accompanied by the tap-tap-tap of leather heels on pavement.
"Seon Yuhan-ssi?"
I forced my upper body up to look—and there, sure enough, was Yu Hyeonjae.
"You were alive."
Did he mean he was surprised I'd survived? Or that he'd known I would?
"Thank goodness."
......Ah.
Or perhaps it simply meant he was glad I'd lived.
"Your wound......."
The CEO of Yuwi Guild examined my left arm and gave a slight frown.
"Even I can't tell what further treatment it requires."
The flesh had been seared and torn to shreds—skin, vessels, and muscle all cooked through, then mashed and fused back together—and the bone at the severed stump had lost its original white, turned the brown of char.
"I suspect the only people who could answer that are an ER doctor and a hand surgeon."
At my deadpan joke, the CEO of Yuwi Guild lifted the corners of his mouth, faintly.
"Please rinse off whatever dust and debris you can with some of the saline I used on my hands earlier, then wrap it in gauze."
I'd just finished that rudimentary treatment when—
"Oh, Yuhan-nim......!"
"Yuhan-ssi......!"
Lee Nahyeon and Hwang Juyeon came running up.
The child was with them, so they'd clearly managed to find each other on the way.
"Are you okay? Oh no, what do we do......"
"I feel like I might throw up a little, but I'm fine. I'm alive, after all."
"You burned your face, too......!"
"Take this first."
"Keep it damp and hold it against your face. You're supposed to do this under running water, but there's no bathroom on this floor."
Hwang Juyeon handed me a water bottle and anti-inflammatory painkillers; Yu Hyeonjae passed me a handkerchief soaked in water.
Swallowing pills one-handed was no small inconvenience.
Not that my remaining right hand was in any better shape, what with the pinky I'd lost back in Happyland.
But the annihilation of my left arm hurt so overwhelmingly that I couldn't spare it a thought.
"We'll move you over between those pillars so you can rest properly."
Yu Hyeonjae said as he helped me to my feet.
"The monster's unlikely to hunt the same person twice, and we can hardly push you any harder. Is there anything you can tell us about the monster?"
Well, now.
My guess that completing the monster's horseman was the escape condition?
What would happen if I told them?
If the horseman was headless, one more person would have to be sacrificed from here on. If it had a head, then two.
If I voiced my theory in a situation like this, what would these people do?
How would they act, all of them fighting to survive?
I couldn't say for certain. But one thing I knew for sure.
'I don't dislike people who struggle to survive. Do you?'
That this man, too, was surely thinking the exact same thing I was.