Please Be a Good Teacher
I flipped through the seminar evaluation sheets one by one.
It's a shame you didn't take me/us/our-kind's hand, but your mental fortitude in trying to see the seminar/rite/greeting through to the end is admirable. That, too, is something I/we/our-kind ought to learn from.
……So it could have been a seminar. Or a rite. Or a greeting.
What kind of rite? What kind of greeting?
1. Didn't-flee-outside
2. Welling-up-from-experience
3. Sincere
4. Lying
5. Has-something-to-teach-as-a-human
So not running out of the conference room at the start was the right call after all.
And apparently lying was fine.
Are there seriously still teachers who talk down to their students these days? I mean, I honestly have no idea lol; And what's with the profanity? Telling a student to buzz off, to shut up...; A teacher like this should fail;
What the hell is this?
I never told anyone to shut up.
wanna hear this teacher's seminar again
Shut up.
So you're all friendly one second? Then suddenly super stiff when you answer? You're way too all over the place? Is that any way for a person to be?
That's exactly what being human is. I was playing the anomaly.
I like your name, sucks that they said I can't have it. Still, you answered well, and above all, just staying until the end instead of walking out earns you a passing grade. So when you return to permanent deactivation, could we split the name between us, teacher?
I want to say no…….
But that much won't be my right anymore. Not once I'm fully dead.
Y o u r . F i n a l . L i e . W a s . S o . M o v i n g !
…….
You play favorites and think no one can tell, huh^^
What is this lunatic on about now?
Favorites? What favorites?
I hate all of these things equally. No—honestly, they all look identical anyway. The only differences are their clothes and hairstyles.
You started out awkward and standoffish, but watching you slowly seep into us/the-archetype/the-blank-page was fun. But how did you refuse us/one/all's offe
There are a lot of lunatics here.
What is this.
This is…….
…
…
…
…
…
…
Just like that, I kept flipping until I'd gone through all thirty-odd evaluation sheets.
Rustle.
Finally, the last page.
[Overall Seminar Evaluation]
Beneath another Gulim-font heading, an evaluation followed, paired with a star rating.
[★★★☆☆]
Three out of five.
A delicate score. Ambiguous enough that they could kill me if they wanted to kill me, spare me if they wanted to spare me.
Looking over the students' individual evaluations, most fell somewhere between three and five, with the occasional one or two sprinkled in—which was probably how the average had landed there.
Depending on the question topic, some answers lacked expertise and substance, and the attitude shown leaves something to be desired in an educator.
That said: not cutting the seminar short but seeing it through dutifully to the end as a teacher; handling answers that were truthful and false at once with skill; and at times becoming one with us to teach with genuine sincerity—the students could stand to learn from such conduct.
Accordingly, Seon Yuhan, the education officer of this special seminar, The Secret of Well-Being, is hereby marked PASS.
I didn't feel a shred of joy.
Not knowing where to start picking it apart—was it the part where I'm not an educator? Or the part where I wandered in by accident and got strong-armed into playing teacher?
……Ah. Well, this much is a relief.
"Congratulations on passing, teacher!"
Something was pressed into my hand as I stood there in a daze.
A small, circular gold badge.
At its center, a flower was engraved—dark red, the color of blood.
Don't tell me that's a carnation.
"So what happens if I fail?"
"……."
These damned things go stone-faced and clam up the instant I ask them anything.
Can a teacher not even ask the students a question?
"Hmm, then……."
I'd started to leave, then stopped, fiddling with the badge. For some reason, the insolent look in those things' eyes felt like too much to bear.
Pin.
In the end, I fastened the badge to the breast of my jacket.
"Goodbye, teacher!"
"……Yeah. Practice smiling a little more, you lot."
Click.
I hurried out and shut the door behind me as if fleeing, stepping into the corridor—doing my best to shake off the afterimage of the monsters' bright, grotesque faces.
22. Please be a good teacher. A good teacher draws the line cleanly with their students.
3:52 PM.
The moment I left the conference room I checked the time, and fearing I might run into that creature who asked about it, I headed straight for the emergency stairs.
Clunk.
If playing teacher at that bizarre seminar and receiving a passing mark was the condition for escaping the third floor, then I should be able to go up a level now.
Thump, thump…….
Holding the railing so I wouldn't topple over backward mid-run, I climbed one step at a time, steadily.
Clunk.
"……No, the ajumma, she……."
The moment I opened the door, a young man's voice came washing down the corridor like a low hum.
"……So, like, uh, just now……."
A woman's voice followed, then trailed off—and a chill silence settled over the hallway.
I saw no reason to rush over, so I stopped in front of the elevator and checked the floor first.
12th floor.
Management Support Dept. ｜ Finance & Accounting Team ｜ HR Team ｜ General Affairs Team ｜ Computer Room ｜ Information Support Team
On the directory, "Management Support Dept." and "Computer Room" were printed in bold.
As I'd suspected, this alone told me nothing about how the floor had labyrinthized.
Pad, pad…….
While I stood there lost in thought, a deliberately hushed set of footsteps drew closer.
The two from before were coming this way, it seemed.
If you want to erase your presence, you ought to at least go to the trouble of taking your shoes off, like some people do.
"……Um, excuse me."
"What—whoa, are you actually a person……?"
At last, two heads peeked out tentatively from the corner of the elevator area.
A middle-aged woman in a deep navy cleaning uniform, her hair tied back low and loose beneath it. And a man about my age in horn-rimmed glasses and a black backpack, wearing a suit that looked just slightly off in size.
Both wore employee ID badges around their necks—and given our current location, they were presumably Yuwi Guild staff.
"Hello."
I bowed my head politely.
"……."
Why are these people so much worse at greetings than those monsters earlier?
"My name is Seon Yuhan. And the two of you are?"
"Ah. Ah!"
The woman, who looked somewhere between her late forties and fifties, brightened first, as if waking from a dream.
"You're a person? Oh dear, you startled me. I, uh, I'm Kim Heesook—I do the cleaning here."
Kim Heesook, Cleaning Team 2, Facilities Management Department.
"A pleasure, Ms. Kim Heesook."
Greeting her, I stepped a pace closer—and sure enough, that was what her badge said. The face in the photo matched, too.
Considering the Kim Gilyeong case, an employee badge could be forged easily enough inside a labyrinth.
"I'm Yoon Geonmin, from Yuwi Guild's HR Team."
Yoon Geonmin, HR Team, Management Support Department.
The badge this man proudly held out looked unremarkable as well.
"But Mr. Seon Yuhan, where did you come from……?"
"The third floor. The floor directly below this one is the third. The floors appear to have gotten mixed up."
"I'm sorry? The floors got mixed? No, wait—what I asked was where you're from. You don't seem to be one of ours……."
Is he slow or something?
Working in HR, I'd assumed he could at least infer what kind of interview schedule the third floor might be running at this hour.
Why wouldn't he know a schedule that even the company's CEO had memorized?
Or maybe he simply doesn't know because he isn't part of Agent Team recruiting.
"There were agent interviews on the third floor today, so I came up from there. I don't belong to any particular department."
"Ah. Aaah……."
A voice blending equal parts dawning realization and a faint laugh. A strange expression surfaced on Yoon Geonmin's face, then vanished just as quickly.
"Oh, is that all. And here I was wondering."
A murmur that sounded like talking to himself but was clearly meant to be overheard.
Those two eyes lifted over the rim of his glasses—I had a feeling the problem went beyond a simple difference in eye level.
Ah.
Pretending to fuss with my lip, I hid the twitch at the corner of my mouth.
People like this are easy to read, which makes them pleasant.
Someone who doesn't doubt his own social skills for a second while being utterly transparent from the outside—someone entirely honest with himself.
People like that aren't hard to dislike-love. They don't, at the very least, go around serving up their own lives to others.
"But how did you get up here? No matter how far I went down the stairs, they were blocked."
And right on cue, the register flip.
Seriously, what a candid guy.
"I answered the students' questions in one of the conference rooms, and it brought me up here."
"Students? Questions?"
"Ah—no, they weren't exactly normal students, of course. Anyway, you two are aware this place has become an invasive labyrinth, right—"
"—Oh, obviously. What kind of guild employee wouldn't know that?"
……Candor is all well and good, but it's a problem when you get snippy about every single thing.
Swallowing my irritation isn't hard, exactly.
If this feels like too much of a waste of time, I could always just…….
"Ah, right—hey, here's the thing."
At Kim Heesook's sudden voice, I turned my head.
"We were just debating whether we should peek into the offices or not. So we were thinking—Mr. Seon Yuhan, why don't you come along with us……?"
Kim Heesook, with her easy, warm face, softened the mood at a leisurely pace.
"Sure. Let's all go together."
"What did you say? I'm not going."
I brushed that off lightly and fixed my eyes on Kim Heesook.
"So you haven't been inside any of the offices yet, then?"
"Ah, well, the HR—"
"—HR's got nothing in it. Nothing worth going in for, anyway."
The HR employee's brusque voice cut in.
"Other than everyone suddenly vanishing, nothing special."
"That's what I heard too……."
Kim Heesook murmured, nodding slightly.
"Then shall we start somewhere else?"
I wouldn't write off the HR office entirely—we'd get to it eventually.
Given that Yoon Geonmin had made it out of the HR office unscathed right after the labyrinthization, chances were good there was nothing seriously wrong in there.
But you never know.
"Hmm, then this way?"
Kim Heesook pointed down the right-hand corridor. The side with the computer room.
"Yes. Let's go."
On my own, I'd have started with the left.
"No, wait, so you're really going in? Both of you?"
As Kim Heesook and I set off, Yoon Geonmin scrunched up his face and grumbled from behind.
"Wait—Ms. Kim Heesook, you were cleaning the twelfth floor just now?"
"Ah, yeah, that's right……."
"Are you people insane? Do you want to die……!"
Figuring we couldn't hear him and that was why we weren't answering, Yoon Geonmin's voice, hovering at a stop behind us, grew louder still.
"Ugh, fine, do whatever you want. Die or don't……. Honestly, no matter how much I help, people just won't listen."
Using his muttering as background music, I stepped into the corridor toward the computer room—and there sat a cleaning cart, abandoned all on its own.
"Oh dear, look at this. I was so out of my head with everything that I just left it any old way……."
Squeeeak.
With a sheepish look, Kim Heesook slid the cart aside where it had been half-blocking the computer room door.
In a disaster situation, leaving things strewn about however was only natural—I couldn't imagine why she felt embarrassed about it.
"Then…… I'll go in first. Please step back for a moment."
There was no telling what fresh strangeness might be waiting inside this one.
The third floor's seminar had been a children's game by comparison—but that kind of luck wasn't going to keep holding.
Tap.
I could feel a faint sheen of sweat on the hand gripping the door handle.
Swoosh.
Carefully, I opened the door to the computer room.