Ice — What?
Ice... what?
“Damn it, the Gallery’s acting up too...”
I should have double-checked the camera mode right away instead of switching to it on the spot.
[ ]
The camera mode still worked fine, but the moment I tried to bring up the Gallery page, it hung like a loading error and greeted me with nothing but an empty screen stretching down into blankness.
I grabbed the book fluttering beside me and asked it.
“Did you see anything?”
Letters slowly appeared across its open pages.
[Didn't see]
“Damn it...”
The headless ice figures crowding the area around me were grating on my nerves, too.
I decided I needed to move somewhere else. This place, it seemed, was squarely within the monster's reach.
So where would be safe? Where was the thing, exactly?
It was definitely carrying a head, heading downward...
Down a floor? If it went down from here... going by the layout, that would put it around the library?
“Don't tell me it's the book again?”
Ge-ek—
When Yagwang-i and I both shot the book a suspicious look, it twisted its body left and right as if to say no.
“Right... surely it wouldn't pull the same trick twice.”
Either way, I had to get as far away as possible from that something I couldn't hope to fight.
Time to move to another part of the second floor. There were still plenty of places I hadn't explored.
Heading down the corridor toward the unexplored side, drifting from spot to spot, I stumbled onto what felt like a clue.
“On one side, the ice figures have claimed more than half the space. On the other, they're scattered pretty sparsely.”
The closer I got to the far ends of the second floor, the fewer ice figures there were.
Maybe the sparse side meant I was out of the thing's range.
No — wait. The fact that even the rooms at the far ends had at least a scattering of headless ice figures meant the range already reached everywhere, didn't it?
I had to accept it: it was toying with me completely.
So it wasn't about attack range so much as distance from its main body? That had to be the right way to read it.
There were staircases at both ends of the second floor as well.
If strength faded even near the stairs, then the stairs had little to do with its range.
More likely it was a spherical radius that ignored walls and floors entirely...
“Honestly, most of the inside of this ice castle is already within its attack range...”
If the thing treated me as a plaything — or whatever it was doing — and had no intention of finishing me off quickly...
“Then right now might actually be the perfect moment.”
I found myself thinking that even charging in now would be reasonably safe.
“Let's think. Where would it be?”
I took the stairs right in front of me down to the first floor.
Unlike the sparse far ends of the second floor, the density of ice figures here was high.
That alone answered one question: it wasn't on the second floor.
So — the first floor. Or the basement...
One more flight down, and I reached the basement.
If the far end down here was as sparse as the second floor's ends, it was on the first floor; if not, it was in the basement. That was the hypothesis.
And down here —
“There you are.”
Headless ice figures, packed absolutely solid.
The floor was so choked with the heavy figures that I had to walk practically stepping on their shoulders to get through.
Given how the ice figures had clustered around the center of the second floor too, I expected the thing was positioned at the center of the basement.
To prepare properly, I took out the book, then reached for my pickaxe —
“Would it even matter?”
I hadn't wanted to believe it, but I'd seen it with my own eyes: the hand that had been tearing apart the small ice-chunk head was made of that same pale ice.
Maybe it made more sense to set the pickaxe aside and focus on evasion instead.
“...No.”
Still, I couldn't just keep retreating.
It might at least buy me time, standing in for the book.
Taking out the pickaxe was the right call.
Pickaxe in my right hand. Flashlight in my left. Yagwang-i on my arm. The book floating in the air. Backpack and oxygen tank on my back.
This was my full battle kit.
“...Let's go.”
Ge-ek—
Flap—
Let me drape even that small bit of glory over my life.
No one might ever know, but at least I would remember it. Right — and the Gallery folks would remember it too, wouldn't they.
I'll be the lion that comes to answer your long waiting, monster.
I advance toward the heart of the basement floor.
The basement seemed to have been used as a prison or the like — ice bars and torture implements lay shattered and strewn about everywhere.
When a place shows this many signs of heavy use, and the castle is full of such traces, one conclusion practically draws itself.
“I assumed the ice castle itself had been copied as a model for the sealing — but maybe that wasn't it. Maybe when the monster invaded, everyone evacuated the castle first, and then they sealed the whole thing, castle and all?”
How monstrous must a creature be, for people to abandon an entire castle and seal it whole?
“Now, then...”
I could feel I was nearly at the center.
Open that one sealed door ahead, and the thing would almost certainly be waiting.
What the sentries had said kept nagging at me. The more you learn about it, the harder it becomes to fight. What on earth was it?
“Book first. Get ready so you can attack the instant I say so.”
One last thorough check before opening the door.
Maybe this place would become my final destination.
One who explored the unknown without end, meeting their end inside an unknown no one would ever know.
That's what the sentries' words meant.
That no one could know you died in a place like that — that no one would come looking.
“Shame it won't make it onto the Gallery, though.”
If it had, I'd have poured out all my terror and complaints by now, then posted a photo of Yagwang-i asking everyone to cheer me on.
Ge-ek—
“It's nothing. Let's go.”
Kaga-gagak—
The heavy ice door ground roughly against the frozen floor as it slowly swung open.
What flowed out through the opening was a frigid pressure that bore down on the whole space — and from that alone, I could feel that something existed within.
My flashlight beam swept into the fully opened interior, and what it caught was —
...
“Me?”
No. It looked like me, but it wasn't.
Only the head was black, which startled me — but the rest of it was all blue ice.
Black hair, the face, the pickaxe and flashlight it held, the backpack and oxygen tank on its back, even the Yagwang-i on its arm — identical in shape, but in 2P colors.
No... I was starting to understand a little of what the sentries had meant.
For me, it was just something that resembled me, since I wasn't made of ice. But to those figures, it must have looked like a monster copying them perfectly.
Maybe they'd even believed it went beyond that — that it was there to truly kill them. That could be why they'd said it.
Kudeudeudeuk—
The thing swung its arm, and from the floor a swarm of skeletal, bare-bones hands surged upward.
“Well, at least there are no ice figures in here!”
Tatak!
Thanks to that, I could move a little more freely.
And I clearly confirmed it — the thing wasn't frozen stiff like the ice figures. It moved.
“Book! Now!!”
Dodging the sweeping long arms, I gave the book the signal.
Flap!
The book dove straight forward.
As it closed in on the Ice-thing —
Shuk!
The thing vanished on the spot.
Trapped inside the book, presumably.
“Yes! With the book, anything's...!”
Hwoong!
But the long arms came swinging again.
“What...! It's not finished?!”
Somehow, the frigid pressure hanging over the space felt even stronger than a moment ago.
“That wasn't the main body...!?”
The instant the words left my mouth, the cold intensified again.
What did I miss?
...Wait. Am I not supposed to speak?
Again, relentlessly, the cold grew stronger still.
Why?
...Why?
Think again.
Then — is it hiding beneath the basement floor, the one sprouting all these arms?
At that thought, the cold came flooding toward the floor.
Could it be... no way...!
At the sight, that no-way feeling wiped my earlier hypothesis clean from my mind and a new one surged up in its place.
“There's more than one of it...!?”
The moment I said it, ice clumped together up ahead and took my shape.
“Right. I knew it...!”
Multiple copies? Honestly, the possibility had never even crossed my mind.
But I deliberately voiced the meaningless hypothesis — deliberately, as if it had only just occurred to me.
Only then did the thing make its move.
Yes.
Think about it. It had been toying with me from the very beginning.
Or at the very least — that's what I felt, and so that's what I thought.
And it was unmistakably still playing with me, even now.
And so —
That's why it showed me, openly and deliberately.
Just as it showed me the fact that it was playing with the me I had 'thought' into being.
Only now did the sentries' words come back to me.
The more you learn, the harder it gets.
That, in itself, was the thing's nature.
How you thought about it. How you deduced it. All of it became the thing's power.
If I'd heard more specifics from the sentries — what it had been like, what it could do — it would simply have become an even greater existence to match.
Why did its attacks never stop?
Of course. Even that body mimicking me was only imitating my thoughts.
The thing's true identity was the thought inside my own head — nothing more, nothing less.
A monster that devoured my knowledge and swelled itself larger.
And here, even the thought that it was toying with me became truth.
So right now, it would be 'perfectly off its guard.'
And 'in my mind,'
the way to destroy it was for the thinking subject in this space to cease to exist.
“Book!! Take me in!!”
Yes. If I went inside the book —
'It will almost certainly be dealt with completely.'
I sealed that conviction within myself, too.
Flap!?
“Hurry!!”
...Flap!
The book seemed to hesitate for a moment, then flew toward me — and I moved toward it as well.
Gaunt ice arms sprouted ever faster from the floor, reaching for me as if to block my path.
But... too late.
My fingertips touched the book's pages.