The Doll's House
"You ran into that monster? You're not hurt anywhere, are you?"
When Hwang Juyeon asked anxiously, Lee Nahyeon nodded, her face crumpling all over again.
"Yeah……. I swear I almost blacked out. I genuinely thought I was going to die……. But then it just walked right past me. Whether it didn't see me or whatever, I don't know……."
"I doubt a monster like that would fail to see a person it was meant to hunt and simply pass them by."
The man who had just lost his right arm spoke in a low, sunken voice.
"I'd guess the hunt was simply over. The knight was complete, both arms included, wasn't it?"
The knight—assembled piece by piece from two legs, a torso, and two arms collected from different people.
The only person who had seen that grotesque thing up close wrinkled her face at the memory.
"Yeah……. Everything but the head……."
"Then it might actually be good news. If its behavior pattern has changed in this situation, we can attribute it to the headless knight being a finished form."
"Oh, so then……"
"Yes. Let's try the emergency exit."
Lee Nahyeon's expression brightened visibly.
Hwang Juyeon's brightened faintly, then dimmed again.
Whether it was out of courtesy toward two bastards who had each, so amicably, lost an arm apiece, or out of bad expectations for the next floor, I couldn't tell.
Jeong Jiho's face had never been particularly bright to begin with.
Yu Hyeonjae, well. What can you do.
"Whoa."
Lee Nahyeon, who had been heading for the emergency stairs first, stopped short.
"It's already here……?"
At the borderline of light and shadow where the faint flashlight glow barely reached, the outline of a black monster took shape.
Two arms likewise torn clean off, the shredded cuffs of its sleeves worn around its wrists like bracelets.
A blood-soaked shirt—or rather, a torso wearing nothing but the vest.
A headless mound of patchwork corpse, mounted on a knight like an honor guard, was walking down the hall.
Strutting, as if in triumph.
And at the same time, so silent it turned the stomach.
Even though a massive hunk of metal draped in black rubber was passing by, it made not the smallest sound.
The instinctive wrongness and revulsion that came from that contradiction in perception.
"……"
All of us, as if under an unspoken agreement, fell silent and backed away.
So that it could pass.
So that we would not obstruct its path.
"……Let's go."
Only after the black knight, reeking of blood and scorched rubber, had passed us entirely could we move again.
Fortunately, nothing happened on the way to the emergency exit.
"Ugh."
Without thinking, I tried to reach for the door with my left hand instead of my right, ring finger and all, and earned nothing but pain for it.
I no longer had a left arm.
It wasn't as though I'd never been without it before, but in those loops I usually died of blood loss not long after it was severed at NeoSoft.
"Are you okay……?"
Thunk.
Lee Nahyeon hurried over and opened the door for me.
"You need to get to a hospital fast……. God, I really hope the next floor is the first floor……."
I sincerely hoped so too.
Right now I was alive, sure—but if I didn't get proper treatment as quickly as possible, prognosis be damned, sepsis could kill me yet.
"Please, please, please……."
We'd been lucky in a lot of ways.
"Oh! It's bright……!"
Because this was the first time I'd ever made it out of a floor without dying once.
19. Complete the Headless Knight.
"Ah, but……"
There was no luck beyond that, however.
"We're on the seventh floor."
[RED WEAVER SUPPORT DEPARTMENT | AGENT TEAM 3 | AGENT TEAM 4]
'Why did you apply to the Red Weaver Support Department?'
I suddenly found myself recalling that interviewer with the dim-witted yet upright look about her.
The Team 4 Leader of the Red Weaver Support Department at Yuwi Guild.
Which meant the office visible just ahead was also the place I would have been reporting to every morning—if none of this had happened today and I'd been lucky enough to pass.
Not that I had any idea what meaning that held anymore.
"Sir."
There was no time to lose in reflection, anyway.
"Let's hit the bathroom first. We need to get our faces under running water."
In the process of having our arms torn off, Yu Hyeonjae and I had both had that tire fragment brush our faces, burning us.
Even now, we had to cool the heat under running water.
"Are the rest of you fine without a break?"
At Yu Hyeonjae's question, Lee Nahyeon shook her head vigorously.
"Honestly, I've been dying to go……."
"Then go ahead. Let's rest a moment while we're at it."
The co-CEO of Yuwi Guild gently coaxed the group along.
"What about Jiho? Shouldn't he go too? Even if it's not urgent, I think it'd be better for him to try."
The small, round head bobbed up and down.
"I'll look after Jiho with Nahyeon. You two are uncomfortable enough as it is……. Go on."
Thanks to Hwang Juyeon's consideration, Yu Hyeonjae and I—who between us possessed one complete pair of arms—went straight to the sinks, turned on the taps, and bent our faces under the running water.
The water couldn't be too cold, and the pressure couldn't be too strong.
"So…… how long do we, um, have to keep doing this?"
"T-twenty, twenty minutes or so?"
"My back is going to hate……this."
Awkwardly bent at the waist, faces buried side by side in the sinks, we were getting mouthfuls of water every time we tried to talk.
"By the way, you had your agent interview…… today, didn't you."
"I did. But let's—mmph—talk about that after all of this is over."
"……"
For a while after that, the bathroom held nothing but the sound of running water.
"It's quiet, isn't it."
Yu Hyeonjae spoke up again.
He didn't seem the type to be incapable of silence, the way Lee Nahyeon was.
"Yeah. It is."
Creak.
The moment I gave him a half-hearted reply, Yu Hyeonjae abruptly shut off the tap and straightened up.
"That's not what I mean. Isn't it too quiet?"
Only then did I rise as well and shut off my own faucet.
We stood still, looking at each other for a moment, and listened.
"……"
The women's restroom across the hall.
"There's not a sound."
Three people had gone in.
It was long past the time they should have finished and come back out to the corridor.
Yet not a single sound reached us.
"I could understand it if it were Hwang Juyeon or Jiho, but……"
"Right. Not even hearing Lee Nahyeon's voice is……"
Click.
We rushed straight out of the men's room.
The women's restroom door was shut fast.
A sweep of the corridor showed no sign of the three anywhere.
Thud, thud.
"It's locked. I doubt those two would have latched the door."
Bang! Bang!
"Hwang Juyeon! Lee Nahyeon! Jiho!"
"……"
Not even an answer came from inside.
"Could Jiho going in have been the problem?"
"That's one possibility. Jiho is a small child, but a labyrinth is not a place generous enough to make allowances even for that."
I swallowed down a sigh.
I hadn't thought of that. I'd been too busy thinking about my own wound.
For that matter, in all those countless loops, this was the first time I'd ever even entered a bathroom.
"But it may not be that at all. There's another difference between them and us, after all."
I waited in silence for Yu Hyeonjae to finish.
"We haven't used the toilets yet."
Quietly peering into the half-open men's room, I parsed what I'd just heard.
Profanity climbed all the way up my throat.
You have to know when to stop with the bullshit.
So what, I'm supposed to get cystitis?
Or commit some godforsaken public urination?
"Don't tell me every bathroom on every floor is like this."
"Hard to say. I'd guess probably, yes."
Then again, it didn't seem likely this disaster would coincidentally strike only on this floor—the very first one where I'd ever set foot in a bathroom.
"So what do we do? If we investigate the toilets a bit more, we might figure out a way to help them. Or else……"
I understood the other, unsanctified option slipping out of Yu Hyeonjae's mouth.
Giving up on them and going to search the Red Weaver Support Department offices instead.
"I'd say……"
Truthfully, there had been plenty of chances to use bathrooms on the earlier floors.
We could have gone on the third floor, where the loops even began.
Whereas the chances of making it down here to the seventh floor had been few.
The process required to meet those conditions had been impossibly grueling.
"I think the office is the better call."
If we could get rarer, seventh-floor-specific information right now, then that was what we ought to do.
"I knew you'd say that, Mr. Seon Yuhan."
The corner of Yu Hyeonjae's mouth lifted slightly.
The burn made the smile look a little warped.
"You did it on purpose, didn't you."
"……Pardon?"
What is he on about. Out of nowhere.
"My right arm. You cut it off on purpose, didn't you?"
The co-CEO of Yuwi Guild glanced sideways at me as he walked down the corridor.
Unbelievable.
I knew it. He read my lips.
"But I wonder how you knew, Mr. Seon Yuhan. That I was the kind of person who could do such a thing."
Here we go again with this bastard.
"I figured if you had the presence of mind to stay conscious through getting your arm torn off, it was possible."
"Ahh."
He looked surprisingly convinced.
"Then how did you hold up through it, Mr. Seon Yuhan?"
"I'm used to pain. I grew up getting hit."
"Ah. So did I."
I know.
"Oh, right. Sir—what did you grab at your first-birthday party? The doljanchi, where the baby picks something?"
I blurted out whatever came to mind to change the subject.
Yu Hyeonjae needed a topic so utterly out of left field that it would sever the thread before the conversation could flow backward through time, smooth as water.
"Hmm. I don't quite remember. Why do you ask, all of a sudden?"
"No reason. Really. I just figured you must have grabbed somebody by the collar, or by the hair."
Sometimes, when a person spouts whatever comes to mind without thinking, the truth leaks out with it.
"……We never actually had a first-birthday party, you know. We weren't in any position to do such things."
"Ah. I see."
I hadn't known that.
Considering the neighborhood he'd lived in during middle school, or the high school he'd come from, his family couldn't have been destitute.
Maybe things had been different when he was even younger.
"Let's go in, then."
The moment that somewhat one-sided exercise in rubbing salt into someone's wounds ended, we arrived at the door of the Agent Team 3 office.
Swoosh.
"Ah."
The moment the door opened—a bizarre scene that looked nothing like an office.
"This place is……"
Objects floating in midair as if gravity had been hideously warped, or stuck haphazardly to the walls and ceiling.
Furniture and fixtures far too small or far too large, as if someone had botched the size on a purchase order.
An interior decorated with a cutesy charm, like the toys children use when playing dolls.
"It's the Doll's House. I've only ever seen this one in images myself."
The Doll's House.
A labyrinth of a very famous pattern.
That is to say—one of the contact-type labyrinths entered through the fissures.