Fleeing From the Light
“You're saying it's avoiding us?”
Rather than the itch behind my eye, I focused on the sensation of water lapping at my toes as I asked back.
“It's, it's not exactly the same, but…… at Happyland, the roles were reversed too, remember. Monster and human. The player played the monster……”
“That's right.”
A delicious meal that made me happy.
I was the monster.
“Um…… I don't know if you've ever tried this, but……”
Even without him saying it, now that my body was soaked while I was barely clinging to life, my body temperature seemed to be dropping fast.
“Ah, that makes sense.”
A good shift in perspective.
It wasn't simply toying with us — rather, it might be unable to approach us at all.
“But then the manpower problem still stands. We'd need as many people as possible watching in every direction at all times.”
“Ah……”
“Which means.”
We only had to take that perspective one small step further.
“It's not exactly us — us humans — that it's avoiding……”
BANG—!
Just then, another burst pipe echoed from somewhere beyond our sight.
I stared quietly into that distant darkness.
Into the shadows the faint flashlights couldn't reach……
“Light.”
The places this light in our hands couldn't touch.
If whatever is trying to drown us is hiding there—
“Maybe what it's avoiding is the light.”
“Ah, aah……. Yes, that could be it……! If it can only move in the shadows, something like that, then driving it off with light might actually work……”
“Then the crux becomes how to produce a light strong enough.”
At Yu Hyeonjae's single remark, we all had to take yet another splash of cold water to the face.
“He's right……. We should have grabbed flashlights or something.”
“Did you have flashlights?”
The NeoSoft employee's bloodless face darkened further, and he hurried to backtrack.
“No — I wasn't trying to blame anyone. I was just wondering where they might have been.”
If we knew where they were, then even if I died this time, I could grab one on the next go.
“Uh…… I remember there being a few in the convenience store. They were really tiny portables, but……”
“Ah, on the fifth floor.”
The corridor across from the arcade was a food court of leased storefronts, and there had been a convenience store among them.
We'd scraped meals together there and hoarded emergency meds, bandages, and the like.
We hadn't known there were flashlights there too.
“Well, regretting it now doesn't do any good……”
No.
It means something to me.
I have a next time.
“Seon Yuhan, Lee Jinsu. Before long, the emergency exit won't open for us anymore.”
Splash.
The water had already climbed close to our knees. Cradling the boy in his arms, Yu Hyeonjae spoke.
“Aside from that, I see no way off this floor. And we have nothing capable of producing light strong enough to hold back whatever is waiting in that darkness.”
“That's, that's true, but……”
Fall, or drown.
Desperation rose on the pale faces of people who would have to choose one or the other.
“B-but, Seon Yuhan, you're really…… going to stay here?”
“Yes. I'm staying here.”
“You'll…… drown, though……. Why?”
It was better to gather as much information as possible and buy time to think.
Since I was going to die anyway.
“At the very least, staying alive longer beats dying from the fall on impact.”
Lee Jinsu didn't seem entirely satisfied with my answer.
“Then — what will you do, sir……?”
“I intend to stay as well.”
Why not just fall and die instead?
Wouldn't that be better?
Or did he still suspect me, and plan to stay just to keep watching me?
“And — then — the, the kid……?”
Lee Jinsu looked at Jeong Jiho, tucked in Yu Hyeonjae's arms, with an expression full of some emotion he couldn't put into words.
The boy had his arms looped around Yu Hyeonjae's neck, clinging to him tightly.
It looked less like attachment to Yu Hyeonjae as a person, and more like raw terror of falling.
From a person, into the water, either way.
“What will you — what will you do with the child……?”
I could see exactly what thoughts were surfacing in Lee Jinsu's head.
Should he make the child choose between falling to his death and drowning?
And if he chose, were they obligated to honor that choice?
“I will look after Jiho until the very end.”
I understood the implication wrapped inside that kind, gentle sentence.
“……Ah. Ah.”
Perhaps Lee Jinsu understood it too.
The fact that there was, in truth, one more option.
“Could I, maybe, also…… no, no, never mind. I'm sorry.”
At that, Yu Hyeonjae gave Lee Jinsu a smile that seemed almost fond of his cleverness.
“Quite right. That much, one should manage on one's own.”
Was that a twisted kind of person, or an oddly straight-laced one?
I started to shake my head, then stopped.
Twisted or straight, it was unmistakably off the true path.
The path that man walked.
“Ah!”
Lee Jinsu, who'd been rolling his eyes this way and that, cried out once more.
“If — if the floor of the emergency stairwell were to collapse…… couldn't we send the water down through there……?”
“Ah……”
Yu Hyeonjae's reaction, of course, was lukewarm.
Mine too.
“It's not a thought I haven't had, but no matter how I turn it over, it falls into the realm of a cheap trick…… I doubt it would work.”
It really wouldn't.
Even in the one-hour memory I'd gained last time, there was a scene of that experiment being tried.
Whether the water from the machine room could be poured down into the abyss beneath the stairs.
“If you want to attempt it, I can help, but……”
“Oh — then could you help us……? We should at least try……”
And so we had to go through that whole circus one more time.
“Ugh, let's go again on three……. One, two……!”
Excluding the one-armed patient and the seven-year-old, the two able-bodied men had to throw themselves against the iron emergency-exit door and force it open against the ever-strengthening water pressure.
“Oh — it really won't work……. I'm sorry, this is my fault…… I made you waste your strength…….”
“Haah……. It's fine.”
I didn't want to ignore the plea of a man searching for a way to live.
“So, Lee Jinsu — what will you…….”
I held the door, barely still open, and let my words trail off.
I couldn't bring myself to ask whether he wasn't going to walk out that door after all.
“I — then — I'll just stay here too……. Me too, even if it's only a little longer…….”
Could this, too, be called courage?
Choosing a slower, more painful death over a faster, easier one?
Because, in the end, it was another desperate way of clinging to life by the fingernails?
“Let's head over there, then.”
THUD!
The emergency exit closed behind us, and we waded slowly through the water.
Splash.
We climbed atop a machine whose purpose we couldn't begin to guess and huddled together in a tight cluster.
“……Back then, when my arm was cut off — that's when I thought it. So this is how it happens. Finally. This is what dying is like.”
Lee Jinsu began, sniffling.
In a place where we waited for a death approaching with glacial calm, there was something strangely campfire-like in the air.
“But then this feeling just — hits me, that I don't want to die like this. All of a sudden. Even though honestly, I'd been wanting to die. Weird, isn't it……”
“Not at all.”
“……So, even so, I didn't die — I survived — I made it, and so I started wanting to live a little longer. The human heart really is shameless.”
So what if it's shameless. Staying alive is all that matters.
“But in the end, like this……”
Lee Jinsu, his eyes rimmed red, clenched his one remaining fist.
“If only the power hadn't gone out, then maybe……”
“Such hypotheticals are meaningless. The blackout was surely part of the design, factoring in this floor as well.”
A bucket of cold water — but not wrong.
This building had lost power when it turned into a labyrinth.
Of course, strictly speaking it wasn't a true blackout — there were things the labyrinth selectively kept running, like the registers in the shops or the lighting in the grand hall.
“……Actually.”
I opened my mouth carefully.
“Was there, all along, a way to restore the power?”
It was distinctly possible that the solution was to turn the lights on in the machine room and drive the darkness away — and I needed to keep that possibility in mind.
If even stockpiling flashlights wouldn't work, we'd have to go down an entirely different road.
“There wouldn't have been.”
The master of the Jaerae Building answered flatly.
His tone was like someone stating the obvious fact that water is wet — there wasn't even a trace of helplessness in it.
“There was no electrical room along any of the routes we've traveled.”
What?
That casually dropped remark jolted me wide awake.
“The electrical room……?”
That's right. Come to think of it—
Flip. Rustle.
I hurriedly pulled out my diary and flipped it open to the front page.
[Floor 19 | Electrical Room]
“There will be an emergency generator there, as far as I know.”
If we could get the emergency generator running, could we restore the power that the labyrinth had forcibly cut?
Had the labyrinth made even that into a problem?
Into a single puzzle solvable through the electrical room's emergency generator?
In the end, we'd have no way of knowing until we went and found it.
Not knowing where it was was already a problem in itself.
And of course, first we'd have to check whether flashlights alone could do the job.
And if that failed, we'd have no choice but to make for the electrical room.
“By the way, Seon Yuhan — you said you passed through the second floor.”
“Yes. The floor immediately before I met you, sir, was the second.”
My body went rigid in an instant.
'I'm on my way to you'
Trauma is a strange thing.
I had been through countless severances by now.
Enough to bore me.
Of course it still hurt, and of course I still never wanted to go through it again —
But it didn't frighten me.
Not the way it had the very first time.
“……Yes. I never went there.”
And yet, I was still terrified of that place.
Shall we begin the installment repayment?
The mannequin dressed in black techwear — and the golden, blood-red scale resting upon its neck — terrified me.
“Is that so? What a shame. There's a Labyrinth Survival Kit there, you see. Flashlights inside it too.”
So.
Next time I die and come back to life, I'm supposed to go there and grab a flashlight?
And if the flashlights don't work, head to the electrical room and fire up the emergency generator?
So this is how he uses his suspicions about the regressor.
“Well, I suppose. What good would thinking like that do, anyway? Not unless one could actually turn back time.”
The expression of the man peering straight into my one and only eye as he asked, Right? — was utterly dripping with falseness.
“You're telling me……. It really would be nice if that were possible.”
Go ahead. Probe all you like.
As if I'd ever tell you that I came back from the dead.
“I have one confession to make.”