ep13. Blood Rains (8)
"Even so, the reason Zone A never comes up is that every zone we've broken through is a separate space in its own right."
What was that supposed to mean?
"Right after I was isolated, I marked the time on the wall beside each exit every time I broke through a zone, hoping to signal my position to the rescue team."
When I gave him a puzzled look, Cha Si-eon explained.
"But when I re-entered those zones, the marks I'd left were gone. At first I assumed the spaces simply restored themselves quickly — until, on my eighty-third attempt, in Zone H, I found one of my old marks for the very first time."
Come to think of it, I had wondered what the "☆ Duplicate 1" scrawled next to the H meant. So that's what it was. But in ninety-two trips through, a duplicate only once?
"So the conclusion I reached was this: the spaces we'd taken for the same zone were in fact identical-looking, entirely separate spaces — and there are countless of them."
"Hold on a second."
I barely managed to swallow the honey cookie in my mouth before cutting in.
"I thought this place was made up of ten rooms, and that breaking one dealt us the next at random, like a spinning roulette wheel. And you're telling me that's wrong?"
"The structure itself is correct. It's only that the rooms coming up at random number far more than ten — and the odds aren't evenly weighted."
What on earth was he saying?
"So what you mean is, it's still a spin of the wheel, but Zones A and J — the ones that never come up — have winning slices so narrow we've never even laid eyes on them?"
"Yes."
"And in exchange, the remaining zones take up far more of the wheel proportionally — not as one wide slice, but as a scatter of tiny slivers?"
"Precisely. Looked at that way, it explains both why a space has duplicated only once and why A and J have yet to appear at all."
Good grief...So what we'd been playing all this time wasn't an ordinary roulette but a gacha with utterly insane odds?
Cha Si-eon had broken through ninety-two zones on his own. Thirty-four more while dragging me along. And after a staggering one hundred twenty-six pulls, Zone A still hadn't shown itself.
Then just how lopsided was the ratio between A and everything else? One in a thousand? One in ten thousand?There was no fathoming it. This was, quite literally, a needle in a haystack.
"And your plan was to just keep smashing through zones until you happened to find Zone A?"
I asked, flabbergasted. Cha Si-eon answered, somehow sounding as though he were making excuses.
"The odds are low, but they aren't zero. I judged it worth continuing to try."
"..."
"There was also the purpose of having you learn how to clear each zone, Seo Do-woon."
So that was why he'd run that body of his half to pieces. Playing the rational one all by himself, and then pulling a stunt this boneheaded...
When I stared at him in disbelief, Cha Si-eon — perhaps feeling a touch awkward — averted his eyes.
Fine. Let's chalk all of it up to nerves frayed by sleep deprivation and an empty stomach.
"Okay, I get the rescue part. But then why has everything turned into such a jumble? It didn't used to be like this."
Mere chance? Some kind of defect born of the downgrade?Somehow, I doubted it was that simple.
"Zone J never comes up either, just like A. And J is the Big Cat's stronghold, right?"
"It is."
"Then the only two zones with reduced accessibility are Zone A, which holds the Bureau's passage, and Zone J, the Big Cat's stronghold."
And that was supposed to be a coincidence?
"The Big Cat is a rather peculiar entity in many respects..."
When I broached it slowly, Cha Si-eon studied me in silence.
"Ant Hill stopped working the moment it touched a fragment of the Big Cat. In that case, couldn't we suppose the thing holds some kind of authority to operate the special zones?"
"One could speculate as much."
"That the Big Cat had a rough time of it during the Concentrated Suppression Week, and that after the second reorganization its stronghold became harder to enter — those are established facts."
"..."
The Big Cat normally kept to Zone J and only roamed the other zones when the Blood Rain fell. Whether that was simple habit or the product of some constraint, I couldn't say. What was clear was that after the second awakening, access to both Zone A and Zone J had become extremely difficult. Zone A I could understand, connected as it was to the Bureau's passage — but why Zone J?
"Would it be so wrong to read this as the Big Cat being scared?"
During the last Concentrated Suppression Week, Squad One had failed its mission. And yet neither had the Big Cat won. The downgraded Island. Two Mercenary Entities blasted apart. And Ant Hill, gone dead. Every one of those could be counted a failure of the Big Cat's — especially considering how desperately the thing had thrown itself across our path.
"You said you ran into the Big Cat at dawn. How did you get away?"
"I still had a rifle then. I ran dry partway through and made do with my pistol and knife, and the Big Cat bolted the moment I put a blade into it around the chest."
"If a wound like that is enough to put it to flight, couldn't we put it to flight again?"
"As of now, the entirety of my armament is a pistol with a few rounds left in it and a knife."
"But look, Team Leader. Even as it fled, you were standing there with nothing but a knife. If it's the one doing the running, there's no call to be this afraid of it."
"Do not underestimate it so carelessly. Get run over by a dump truck driven by a child, and you die just the same."
"I'm not underestimating it. I'm saying we shouldn't operate on the assumption that meeting it means we die."
"..."
"Setting the fall of the Blood Rain as our deadline — that's because of the Big Cat too, isn't it? But does it have to be? Is shaking it off, steering clear of it, or driving it back truly so impossible that we can't even entertain the idea?"
Cha Si-eon swept a hand down his face without a word.
"Of course, you could call it a dangerous gamble. But the same holds for the alternative. If your being eaten by the Big Cat guaranteed my survival, then I'd wish for your sacrifice all the same. But everything after that point would be an unbroken chain of uncertainties — and in that case, my odds are better with the two of us moving together than with me moving alone. And above all—"
I stopped for a beat and met Cha Si-eon's eyes.
"..."
At my question, the look in Cha Si-eon's eyes deepened. He dropped his gaze as though wrestling with something, then murmured, almost like a sigh.
"Understood. I will follow your judgment, Seo Do-woon."
Well, what do you know — for once he wasn't digging in his heels. When I stared at him in wonder at how readily he'd conceded, Cha Si-eon added, his voice catching:
"I knew it would come to this from the moment you learned how to talk."
The tone was one of long-suffering exasperation. What? When had I ever steamrolled him like that?...Though come to think of it, things had mostly gone my way, hadn't they.
While I was busy with that small act of contrition, Cha Si-eon hesitated, unlike himself. Then, gaze turned aside, he intoned:
"And — I'm sorry about earlier. Acting as I did without weighing the circumstances, whatever my reasons, was my fault. I apologize."
Huh? I doubted my own ears. Was this real? Had I genuinely just heard that right?
Half in disbelief, I looked at Cha Si-eon — but he had turned away from me, wearing a distinctly sheepish expression.
Well, well. Live long enough and you'll see anything. Who knew the day would come when this man apologized to me.
I watched the unfamiliar sight for a moment, then spoke.
"Team Leader."
"Speak."
"Since it's come up — back at the beginning, did you honestly take me for a fake?"
Cha Si-eon fell silent for a moment before answering.
"Honestly? I judged the possibility low."
"Then why did you hurl me the instant you saw me?"
"There is no harm in being careful. And even if you had been real, I judged it would have made no difference."
Why, this guy...?
"You don't feel even a little sorry about that?"
My question was met with silence once more. He seemed to weigh it in earnest, then nodded and answered.
"No. That one I'm fine with."
...I really do need to live a good while longer. At least until Team Leader Cha becomes a better person than this.
Touch the Blood Rain, and the human body melts. Which meant that once night fell, we had to secure a safe space before it began to fall.
The garden was out from the start, its sky wide open. The outdoor zones were no better — Zone A: Square Lounge, Zone H: Outdoor Amphitheater, Zone I: Forest of Amphibians, Zone J: Island Walkway.
The rest were at least indoors, but we still had to prepare for the Big Cat, which emerged whenever the Blood Rain fell. So the long, corridor-shaped Zone D: Gallery 1 and Zone E: Gallery 2, with not a shred of cover between them, were obviously out — as were places like Zone B: Indoor Concert Hall, where we'd have spent the whole night frantically dodging one hazard after another.
Run every condition through the wringer, and the best place to spend the night here was Zone C: Citizens' Bookshelf.
"Oh."
I let out a small sound of admiration at the scene beyond the door.
"Thankfully, it came up right away."
At my relief, Cha Si-eon nodded along beside me.
The space we'd arrived in was laid out as a duplex. One wall of the wide hall was a floor-to-ceiling window with an unobstructed view of the open garden, and the duplex section beside it held a library on the first floor and a café on the second. Tucked in beside the staircase linking the two floors was a modest exhibition space for artisans' work. All told, it looked like the sprawling café of a resort — a place made for resting easy.
It was 12:45 in the morning. We had reached Zone C: Citizens' Bookshelf right on cue.
"Let's finish the cleanup first. I'll take the first-floor exhibition space."
"Then I'll take the core."
Cha Si-eon and I split up briefly on the first floor. While he beheaded the Faceless Things that kept popping out around the exhibition space, I made the rounds of the room, hunting down the heart marks and moving every last one of them.
With the hazards dealt with, we built a mound out of Cha Si-eon's outer layers and planted it near the window wall, and there I hid the heart-stamped objects I'd collected. After that, we settled in beside the staircase with the window dead ahead — where, as it happened, a number of plush beanbags were sitting. So we spread those out and sat down too.
We'd be holding out through six hours of falling Blood Rain with our eyes open, so this much comfort was only fair.
The trouble was, once we'd dug in and taken cover like this... hmm.
Was it the stars strewn thick across the night sky beyond the glass? Or the beanbags being simply too cozy? One or the other, and I had drifted into a calm far too deep for the circumstances.
Sleep was starting to creep up on me, so I dug through the plastic bag and fished out a can of coffee. For all we'd already put away, the snack bundle Yu-ju had packed us still wasn't running dry. She must have spent a small fortune on it — and it struck me all over again that every crumb of it was devotion aimed at Gwak Jae-gyeom and no one else.
So I asked the man seated beside me.
"Are those two dating?"
"They're close, certainly. But they are not dating."
"How can you be so certain?"
"Office romance is banned on our team."
Oh dear...Don't tell me this heartless rule is what gave birth to a pair of star-crossed lovers.
"Ha Yu-ju certainly worries over Jae-gyeom a great deal, though."
"A woman's kindness usually doesn't mean a thing."
"Speaking from experience?"
"From observation."
Cha Si-eon said it like a man who had ascended to some higher plane of understanding, then drained the last of his coffee.
We were in the middle of topping off our caffeine when it came.
Tap. Tap—
Like scarlet paint flung against the glass.
SPLAT-SPLAT-SPLAT-SPLAT—!
And from the heavens, the Blood Rain began to pour.