Where's the Exit from Engineering Building 5? (2)
I reflexively threw a hand up to cover my mouth, but the sound that had already slipped free wound through the black corridor and came rolling back as an echo.
Tap......tap.........tap... clack..........
Layered over the cry I had let out, an ominous noise rose from far down the far end of the hallway. I dropped into a crouch on pure instinct.
Even in the photograph you would have needed the phone brightness cranked to maximum just to make out the corridor. Standing inside it now, I could not see an inch ahead. It felt exactly like going blind.
I stretched a hand into the dark, found the floor, found the wall, and only then managed to claw back a scrap of direction. School had been dark in its own way, but this was another dimension entirely. Sight was sealed; the only way forward was to feel my way by touch alone.
The thought of switching on the phone flickered for a second and died just as fast. The darkness was blinding me, yes—but it would also be blinding whatever was making that unidentifiable sound. The phone could not be checked in the corridor.
I sorted my thoughts and kept moving, trembling, into the pitch that swallowed everything. The short arc my sweeping arm could cover was my entire field of vision.
Tap.... tap..... tap..... tap...
A sound of unknown origin began somewhere beyond the dark. Because I had shouted? The continuous noise like someone tapping tiles stretched on, threatening to break yet never quite stopping, drawing steadily closer. That slow, relentless rhythm was a noose tightening around my breath.
Rulebook or survivors' records—none of it mattered if I could not see. What the hell was I supposed to do in a situation this goddamn absurd?
My hand thrashed desperately through empty air and, by pure luck, found the wall.
Engineering Building. The post I read definitely said Engineering Building. It has to be a university.
Back in first year of high school I had been lucky enough to visit a university as part of experiential learning. Unlike elementary, middle, or high school, the sight of several massive buildings standing in solemn grandeur had felt so alien to every school image I knew that the disconnect had been dizzying.
I let the majestic memory surface for a heartbeat, then shook my head hard.
No! Not that—something useful for survival!
Inside the university I had seen the endless corridors lined with doors packed tight against one another. The guide who led us that day had called them lecture rooms, I think.
.
.
.. Yes! Lecture rooms!
There had to be countless ones here too. First find a lecture room, get inside, put distance between myself and that unknown sound, then assess the situation!
Plan set, I began advancing with one hand sliding along the corridor wall. The compulsive tap-tap of tiles grew more urgent by the second, but I forced myself calm. It's nothing. The thing is moving extremely slowly. No need to panic.
I had been crab-walking in a half-crouch; after only a few steps the thigh and calf muscles that had already run all day felt ready to snap. I had no choice but to straighten up and walk upright.
The moment I stood, the hand pressed to the wall sank into a hollow, and something with a texture utterly different from plaster met my fingers. I groped until I found a doorknob.
—Clack!
I put force into the turn. Whether locked or merely stiff, the handle only barked once and refused to move.
Tap..tap..tap..tap
As if the sound had given away my exact position, the rhythm of the tile-tapping accelerated. At this rate it was going to be razor-close.
In the split second of deciding whether to try the door again or simply run, I chose the door. Even if I fled, I could not see where to go. At best I would be sprinting with one hand on the wall, and neither body nor mind was whole right now. What if there was an obstacle? What if another incomprehensible thing waited ahead? Checking the route closer to the starting point looked like the better option.
I gripped the handle and turned.
—Clack!
Tap.tap.tap.tap
Once more!
—Clack!
Taktakak.
Tap.
I spun away from the door that would not open. The sound was right behind me. Too late to run, door still sealed. At the very least I had to learn the monster's identity or snatch some scrap of a clue. Facing death, I steeled myself and thrust a hand forward.
"..."
"..."
Nothing touched, nothing felt. Only empty air—
Swish—
A cutting sound that, heard casually, could have been nothing more than wind. At the same instant a strange weightlessness took me. Because I was drowned in darkness? Like drifting in the deep sea, spinning without direction, floating in slow circles. The sensation lasted only a heartbeat.
—!
A heavy impact smashed into my cheek, as if a cold brick had been pressed hard against one side of my face. A dull thud followed; thin rods pressed the other cheek. Then wetness began to soak into the brick against my skin.
Incomprehensible sensations and events stacked one after another until I simply hung there, dazed. A beat of silence. And then—
Pain that felt as though it would incinerate everything erupted from my throat and roared all the way to the crown of my skull. I tried to open my mouth wide to scream, but I could not scream and there was no longer any reason to bother opening my mouth.
My head had already been severed; it was rolling alone across the floor. The brick crushing my cheek was the cold floor itself. The thin rods were the fingers I had been moving only a moment earlier. The wetness circling my face was the sticky pool of blood pouring from my own body.
In the white-hot agony that felt as if my brain were burning to ash, I still tried with everything I had to scream, throat full of bubbling blood.
"!—...."
The instant I returned from death and reclaimed a mouth, the agony of that death remained as phantom pain, clawing to escape. I clamped both hands over my lips with desperate force. Whether the frantic gesture actually mattered or not, even after I spent a long stretch crouched and motionless, the eerie tile-tapping never came.
Still curled tight, I forced my mind to work. The situation was catastrophically bad.
The mental capacity needed to wield the forbidden physical abilities I had taken from 666 Village—the joker card that had flipped entire Neapolitan horror scenarios—had improved only a hair since the morning check, and the difference was negligible. My mind still felt ready to shatter at any second.
Damn it! Had I pushed the mental acceleration too hard for no good reason back in the real world?
Deaths at school usually arrived wrapped in madness and psychological shock, so regression often came with erased death-scene memories or stacked mental trauma. Here, at least, the death had not been one where madness burrowed into the skull; the accumulation of mental fatigue was lighter. That could count as a hopeful variable. After all, you need to understand what is killing you before the fatigue truly piles up. In a blank white-out like this—seeing nothing, knowing nothing—the death penalty seemed weaker.
That did not mean the restrictions had vanished. The vivid pain of dying still writhed inside me as phantom agony and living memory, tormenting every nerve.
Mental stats aside, physical stats were scraping absolute bottom thanks to the all-day running drills with Yeom Sang-hyeon. The Body Sense obtained in 666 Village was, of course, unusable. Strength had fled every limb; the leg muscles in particular left me wondering whether I could even walk properly, never mind run.
I had no idea how to claw through this. Everything ahead was pure black.
Still... I had to move. Staying still was not an option.
I waved a hand with extreme care, advancing in near silence, and found the wall exactly as before. Palm sliding along it, I soon stood once more in front of the lecture-room door where I had died.
"..."
After a moment's thought I passed that door, kept my hand on the wall, and walked on into the dark. I had not taken more than a few seconds of steps before another door met my fingers. I groped until I located the knob, heart hammering, and turned it with infinite caution.
—Cree...ak....
The knob gave a stifled metallic groan, yet the motion was so glacial that the sound shredded into scattered fragments and never announced my presence to the corridor. Cold sweat ran down my back as I continued the slow turn—so slow I could no longer tell whether I was actually rotating the handle or simply crushing it in a death grip. At last the knob stopped, blocked by something solid.
Only then, as if remembering how to breathe, did I draw one deep breath and push. The door swung open smoothly.
I forced the excitement down and slipped inside. Once through, I closed the door at the same painstaking crawl. Minutes later, door finally shut, I leaned against it and simply collapsed to the floor.
As expected, the lecture room itself was drowned in the same dense darkness.