The Shopping Mall (1)
“Ah, don’t fuck with me.”
They say it’s supposed to be a good sign if you wake up staring at an unfamiliar ceiling.
Maybe you end up in some fantasy world for a weird little adventure.
Maybe you get sent to a tower so you can smash everything to pieces and climb your way up.
Or maybe you go back in time, buy a winning lottery ticket or some stock, and become a hidden-chaebol bastard.
Or you TS and become a...
Actually, no, scratch that.
Point is, wasn’t it supposed to be something like that?
“This is the Backrooms even if I look at it doing a goddamn backflip!”
It had been six hours since I started walking down a corridor that looked like it belonged in a shopping mall.
No matter how far I went, this cursed hallway never ended.
Even if I took the escalator, another identical corridor was waiting for me.
It felt like I’d been turned into a hamster running on a wheel until my brain was about to leak out of my ears.
I’d realized I was trapped in the Backrooms a while ago, but actually accepting it had taken much longer.
Why the Backrooms? Why me?
“At least make it the men’s clothing floor, for fuck’s sake...”
Delicate women’s clothes hung in neat rows all around me.
The problem was that I’d been abducted while sleeping, so I was still down to my underwear.
That was why I was still wandering around like a complete pervert despite the cold.
Fuck. Getting kidnapped because I watched one movie is way over the line.
Games, comics, novels, there were tons of those.
If it had been one of those, at least I’d know the basic plot and could maybe do something about it. But the Backrooms? This shit was just a horror story with absolutely no answer key.
“...I’m hungry.”
After walking for six straight hours, that made sense.
My stomach aching from starvation, I stopped walking and started checking the stores one by one instead.
I’d glanced through them in a hurry as I walked, but this time I searched every corner carefully.
Food, water, or hell, even a hidden camera!
If it was just some prank show, I’d still be pissed, but at least I wouldn’t be this hopeless.
Though kidnapping some ordinary office drone while he slept at home was already horror-movie behavior.
“No staff snacks or anything...? Hell, I’d settle for water at this point...”
I searched ten clothing stores and finally reached the largest one.
It looked like some high-end brand place. The difference was that where the other shops had only torso mannequins, this one had full human-shaped mannequins.
Having nothing but mannequins in an empty space was kind of creepy.
“Oh... almond water? And these are energy bars.”
Thank fuck, there was food!
I immediately downed half a bottle of almond water and shoved an energy bar into my mouth. I tucked the remaining bottle and the other two bars into the pocket of a cardigan beside me for later.
Hah. With something in my stomach, I actually felt a little more alive.
I threw the cardigan around my waist and sat down to gather my thoughts.
1. There is no exit in this fucking shopping mall.
2. This is all the food I have; if I can’t find a way, I starve to death.
3. I still haven’t seen any monsters called entities.
4. So what the hell is this hammer for?
As soon as I thought about the hammer, a heavy blacksmith’s hammer was already in my hand.
Blacksmith
▶ Hammer: You can craft equipment.
And with it, a tiny status window appeared.
At first, when I saw that translucent blue box, I’d been thrilled. Then I realized it was a non-combat ability and immediately wanted to die.
A blacksmith in the Backrooms? What a joke.
And despite the name, it wasn’t even all that useful.
I smashed up a store display, picked up the wooden board it left behind, and tried striking it, but it just crumbled into dust. Nothing was made.
The aluminum rail from the clothing rack only got crushed and torn apart.
Glass and clothes just got wrecked by the hammer too.
At this point, maybe it was only good for splitting skulls.
The only real upside was that I could summon at least one weapon to fight entities with.
But there’s no secret passage here either... mannequins, clothes, a card reader...
Wait. A card reader?
The lights were on, which meant there had to be electricity, right?
I jumped up and searched for the power button on the register.
The other stores only had tiny card terminals, but this place was big enough to have a proper POS machine.
And a POS machine usually meant one thing-
“I’m saved!”
As soon as I confirmed there was a network signal, I turned on the internet.
That should let me install a chat app or post on some community board and let people know what was happening to me.
It wasn’t a normal situation, but maybe there had been similar cases, or maybe someone out there had found a way to deal with it.
Still, this POS machine was apparently ancient as hell, because the internet only came up after the loading icon spun in circles for ages.
“...What the hell, the Backrooms Gallery?”
Are you kidding me?
I typed Naver, Google, anything into the address bar, but after the loading screen it just dumped me back into the Backrooms Gallery.
I wasn’t asking for a site this similar.
Out of all the posts, I clicked the one with the most attention and the most comments.
Yeah, this was definitely a gallery.
The sight of a post with a smell I vaguely recognized made me oddly glad, so I left a comment.
These people didn’t seem to have a way out either, but maybe there was something I could still learn from them.
Or at least some useful information.
But the second I commented, a reaction I hadn’t expected came back.
A creepy bastard? An entity, maybe?
Whatever it was, I needed to clear up the misunderstanding.
I hurriedly tapped my anonymous nickname and changed it, then wrote a new post.
These fucking bastards.
Just from their reactions, I could tell my ability was trash.
Wasn’t I screwed?
If even these Backrooms veterans didn’t know, then there was no answer.
Overwhelmed by the rising gloom, I tore my eyes away from the monitor.
Was I really going to starve to death like this?
They probably couldn’t escape either and were stuck doing this garbage too. Just what the hell kind of place was this?
At this rate, should I just use the hammer to smash every wall I could find?
If I got lucky, maybe I’d uncover a hidden passage.
Then, all at once, music started spilling through the entire shopping mall.
♪ Thank you for using our shopping mall today as well ♬
A flat, mechanical voice rose from nowhere, and it was somehow even more unpleasant for being so emotionless.
Closing-time announcement?
I listened blankly for a second, then sprang to my feet and typed in a comment.
Mannequins!
Grateful to JamminKid for handing me such an AI-level answer, I grabbed the hammer and moved toward the mannequins.
Thwack!
The hollow mannequin shattered instantly under the weight of the hammer.
Could something like that even come alive?
It might have been pointless, but “dolls moving” was a pretty common horror trope, so I decided to smash first and think later.
Just in case they could move, I kept every mannequin in sight and hammered away with everything I had.
By the time I’d broken about half of them, the closing music pouring from the speakers suddenly stopped, and the yellow overhead lights turned red.
Why the hell red of all colors...?
“Shit, what now-”
Kiik-
At the strange sound right in front of me, I yanked my eyes back down from the light.
“...Hello?”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
I made eye contact with a mannequin that had clearly been facing away from me until now.
