No Employee Number
"..."
I stood a moment on the threshold of the computer room, letting my eyes absorb the visual information pouring in.
"Ugh — good grief, what in the world is all this?"
Wires.
Between the thick black cables that blanketed everything, slender red, yellow, white, and blue lines bloomed like fine roots.
"Oh my! Aigoo..."
"Please watch your step."
Kim Heesook, following me in, snagged her foot on the bundle of cables that ran right up to the door, wobbled wildly — and somehow managed to find her balance again.
I lowered the hand I'd reflexively thrown out and swept my gaze over the powered-down office instead.
It was a little before four in the afternoon. The sun hadn't set yet, so a fair amount of light still filtered through the windows. And in one corner of the dim room, a single workstation sat with its monitor glowing — the only lit spot in the office.
I was just about to head that way when —
"But, um, those wires... they seem to be coming from over there. Do we really have to go in there...?"
Kim Heesook pointed a finger off at something.
Follow the lines as they sprawled senselessly across floor and wall, and every last one of them traced back to a single point: a door set into the office's inner wall. The door hung wide open. Cables clung tight around its frame like overlapping scales and fanned outward from there, narrowing the passage until one person could barely squeeze through. From the darkness beyond it seeped a faint, pale blue glow.
Ziiiiiing...
Along with the small, low hum of enormous machines at work.
"Why don't we split up and search, then? I'll take a look at that computer for now, so please check over there first, Ms. Kim Heesook."
"Ah — umm, sure, let's do that...?"
She sounded a touch uneasy, but accepted with surprising meekness.
Did she simply not know much about invasive labyrinths? Was that why she felt no fear?
I was sending her in first, after all — to confirm whether stepping through that door meant dying or not.
"Oof, aigoo... it's hard just to walk in here..."
The cleaner picked her way forward, planting her feet only on the stretches bare of cables.
"Oh — this is..."
Kim Heesook reached the door the wires poured from and leaned her upper body in slightly to read the plate on it.
"The server room! It's the server room, Mr. Seon Yuhan...!"
"Ah."
The server room.
No wonder the office had felt too small for a computer department that size seen from the outside — so the Information Support Team's office and the server room were joined here. That explained it. These wires, too.
"Hmm..."
Kim Heesook, apparently still reluctant to step right in, was poking just her head past the threshold.
I used the opening to check the monitor at the one lit desk in the corner. In the middle of a screen — Yuwi Guild's internal intranet portal, or simply an imitation the labyrinth had cooked up, there was no telling — floated a single square window.
Ah. That was a mistake.
"Ms. Kim Heesook, hold on just a—"
"—AAAAAAAAAAGH!"
"Ack, s-sa... gkkh...!"
Had she set foot inside the server room in the split second I'd spent on the monitor? No sooner had I looked up than Kim Heesook's scream tore through the air.
Kzzt.
"Hm?"
What even is that...?
Ah.
403 Forbidden.
"..."
The screaming cut out.
Krrzzt.
With a burst of static, another error window popped up over the first.
410 Gone.
Kim Heesook appeared to be dead.
There was definitely something deep inside that server room, then...
What a waste, in any case. I should have thought it through a little more carefully.
Judging by the demand for an employee number, the system seemed to want a member of staff.
The problem was that I didn't have one. Naturally — I hadn't even finished my interview, let alone gotten hired.
"Hmm..."
But the labyrinth was a kind and equitable place, so surely it kept rules in reserve for outsiders who weren't employees. The way Uri Saenal Daycare had let anyone in, so long as they came accompanied by someone affiliated.
Or — if the screening here ran a little looser...
Click.
I turned on my heel and walked straight back out of the computer room.
Helping myself to somebody else's ID would work just as well.
"Yoon Geonmin?"
Conveniently, there happened to be one more employee around.
"..."
Now where had this one gotten off to?
The corridor was dead quiet.
"Yoon Geonmin?"
No answer came back. Only my own voice struck the walls and echoed, low.
A full circuit of the twelfth floor turned up not so much as a shadow of the man.
...Don't tell me he'd gone into the bathroom?
Clunk.
"Anyone in there?"
The men's room, at least, stood empty.
Well, of course — if Yoon Geonmin had stepped inside and something had gone wrong, the door would have locked itself shut in the first place. The way it had back when Hwang Juyeon, Lee Nahyeon, and Jeong Jiho went into the women's restroom and got trapped.
He hadn't wandered alone into one of the Administration Support Department offices, had he...
No. No way.
I stood quietly staring at the Financial Accounting Team's door for a moment, then shook my head. A man who knew the worth of his own neck might dawdle around outside the computer room, but I couldn't see him barging into anywhere on a whim.
Still — if, against all odds, he had, I'd have been in a proper bind.
"Hah..."
Would turning the HR office upside down do me any good?
Ah. And really, wouldn't I need to bring an HR employee along for that, ideally?
People truly were useful anywhere, so long as you picked them up and kept them.
Well — a shame, but I'd make a point of that next time.
Shhk.
Even so, I had to at least look inside the HR office.
"Yoon Geonmin?"
I called out on the off chance. As expected: nothing.
The inside of the HR office was strewn and empty, exactly like an office at the height of lunch hour. Stationery sprawled across desktops. Chairs shoved out at careless angles. Light jackets slung over chairbacks. Workstations nobody had tidied. The traces of people who had evaporated mid-shift, without so much as a goodbye.
"Hmm..."
Still — people normally closed their drawers before they left, didn't they? Hoping that at least one of them might have jotted down an employee number and password somewhere, I combed through every single desk. And something felt off.
Why were so many drawers left half-open? And the higher the rank of the desk's owner, the worse it got.
"..."
Something about it didn't sit right.
Sure, a labyrinth was a strange place by definition — but even a labyrinth's strangeness was supposed to follow a strange logic all its own.
This was something else. Sleazy, almost. Or — human.
For now, I made a mental note of the names on the desks with open drawers and moved on. I had my guesses — but it could just as easily be a genuine labyrinth anomaly, after all.
Tap.
Ah — the pantry here beat Neosoft's by a mile. A wider spread of drinks and snacks, too. And no corpses.
Slide.
I drew a small bottle of water and a can of sports drink out of the big refrigerator and pocketed one of each. I'd liked being able to stash extras in that kid's daycare bag — a shame. I idly considered borrowing a bag from here, then gave up on the idea. Nearly ninety runs through this labyrinth had taught me one thing: this was not a labyrinth that demanded items with that kind of bulk. At least, not when I was alone. Portable food and drink, painkillers, bandages — carrying nothing more than that was plenty. For now.
Rustle.
I peeled open an energy bar and chewed through it while giving the office another sweep.
Honestly, Yoon Geonmin's desk was the strangest of the lot. The desk was clean. Far, far too clean. Not one sticky note on the monitor, the desktop, or the partition. The drawers held nothing but a stray cable — no work planner, no documents, anywhere on the desk. Not even a single abandoned takeaway cup with nothing left in it but melted ice.
Fine. Say he'd packed up his personal things on his way out earlier. But could a workspace really be this devoid of life? Put differently: none of the things an ordinary office worker would keep at their desk were anywhere on Yoon Geonmin's — as if the desk had never had an owner at all.
Don't tell me this one wasn't human either?
But that reading didn't fit either. It was too......
I thought back to the commuter bag on that brusque-faced man's shoulder. Even with the building swallowed whole by an invasive labyrinth, rifling through the desks of vanished superiors — wasn't that an eminently human thing to do? Practically a sublime height of humanity no monster of the labyrinth could ever dream of imitating?
And if he really were a monster, that would be chilling in an entirely different way.
"..."
Strange, all of it. That was the sum total of my search of the HR office. Unfortunately, every computer was powered down, and not one careless employee had left personal information lying about. They were HR, after all — maybe security simply ran in their blood.
That left Financial Accounting and General Affairs. Security-wise, those two teams would be no slacker than HR.
...No — come on. This was beyond reason. How could there be this much nothing?
Who had drilled these people to be so damn thorough about clearing everything away? I'm sure somebody up top was thrilled there wasn't a scrap of information to leak. Never mind that someone was about to die for it, right this minute.
Not that I couldn't understand it, given an industry where astronomical sums changed hands over Red Weavers' field contracts and relic trades......
Clunk.
General Affairs, of all places, had its door locked — I couldn't even get inside. Financial Accounting and HR had locking mechanisms too, but opening them had posed no problem. This was the labyrinth's handiwork rather than any human's, which meant that with the right conditions met, the door would open. Perhaps there'd even be a clue in the computer room — some mechanism where the General Affairs door required it.
And so, turning away from the locked door, I brought my tour of the Administration Support Department to an end. With absolutely nothing to show for it.
Truthfully, even now, there was a way: go down to Basement Level 5 and tear the CEO's employee number out of them. But I didn't care to extend my hand that far.
Asking for the employee number would mean revealing the regression first. I wasn't in a dying-panic this very second — and once that lunatic knew, there was no predicting what he'd do.
Whatever happened upstairs, I wanted settled upstairs. If I could help it.
I turned back toward the computer room, thinking I'd try everything I could first — and that was when.
Clang — vrrrum......
My footsteps stopped dead.
What was that sound?
No. I knew exactly what this sound was.
And I knew it was a sound that had no business sounding right now.
Vrrruum......
I turned, slowly.
This sound —
B5… 2… 3…
— was the sound of an elevator in motion.
The very elevator that had plummeted with Choi Jaeha and me —
It was moving.
It was coming up.