Blood Rains (10)
The Crow……?
The pitch-black bird that had come crashing through the window was fluttering its wings on the floor.
It flailed helplessly, unable to take flight again, and something about the sight looked almost desperate.
I exchanged a hurried glance with Cha Si-eon.
A crow that wandered through the Special Zone—more specifically, the one that kept circling around me.
This bird had to be that guy. But what now?
Should we catch it?
Just as I was looking back and forth between the Crow and Cha Si-eon—
Kaek—!
The Crow threw its head back and suddenly vomited blood.
Was it injured somewhere?
Cha Si-eon gave me a small nod.
It meant: we capture it.
Right. Once we had it, we could examine it or treat it, whichever came first.
Cha Si-eon stripped off his combat shirt.
Apparently he intended to use it like a net.
I took off my work jacket and spread it out as well.
We slowly closed in on the Crow from two sides, widening the gap between us.
At last the Crow was positioned between us, and we exchanged another glance, ready to pounce in unison.
The Crow had stopped flapping and was sitting quietly on the floor.
Was it telling us to just take it?
Then, our eyes met.
"……."
It was staring at me with eyes black as coal.
Not at Cha Si-eon, who had come in closer—but only at me.
"Hold on, Team Leader!"
I shouted before I knew it.
At my interruption, Cha Si-eon stopped dead, mid-lunge at the Crow.
"Don't catch it."
I said it again.
It was pure instinct—no reasoning, no purpose behind the words.
"Why shouldn't I catch it?"
"If we catch it, we'll never learn why this Crow came here."
Was that really something I'd thought through?
I didn't think so.
Even I only understood the reason after the words had already left my mouth.
Right. We needed a hint.
And for that, we had to leave this bird alone.
Whether he'd accepted my reasoning or not, Cha Si-eon lowered the shirt he'd been holding spread wide.
I set my jacket aside as well and studied the Crow.
The Crow stared at me for a moment, then staggered to its feet.
It beat its wings with the same labored motions as before.
Managing a single leap at last, it flew straight up to the second floor.
We followed it up the stairs.
But by the time we reached the second floor, the Crow was gone.
In its place, the space itself was broken.
"Hah……."
It was a sight I had never seen in my life.
A fissure in midair, like shattered glass.
And beyond it, a completely different space was visible.
It looked as if someone had roughly cut out a photo of another world and slapped it onto the empty air.
"Isn't that the thing from video games?"
"It shows up in movies fairly often, too."
Right. I'd seen it plenty in games and films.
The thing they called a portal—a hole in the dimension itself.
"That looks like a passageway……"
"Perhaps."
"Did it make that so we'd go in?"
"Hah……."
At my question, Cha Si-eon let out a long breath.
I felt exactly the same way.
Seriously, what were we supposed to do? Look, you feathered bastard—flinging something like this at people already exhausted from days adrift, what were you thinking?
Then Cha Si-eon put his shirt back on and spoke.
"I'll go in and take a look. Agent Seo Do-woon, wait out here."
"You're going in there?"
Just like that? Without even knowing what it is?
I asked in astonishment, but Cha Si-eon didn't say it twice.
Like a miner descending into the pit, he hooked a wire to his belt.
Then, leaving the wire case with me, he stepped through the fissure.
The crack was as big as a doorway.
And the space beyond was pitch black.
So black I couldn't tell whether it was darkness or the deep sea.
Cha Si-eon switched on his searchlight and went in, and I watched from outside.
At some point, his light vanished from view.
The wire kept paying out, so he must have turned sideways somewhere and gone deeper.
The wire unspooled smoothly.
About ten minutes had passed, maybe.
Then the wire stopped moving.
Two more minutes passed.
Crack—!
……A gunshot?
The sharp, distinctive report of a pistol struck my eardrums.
It hadn't come from far away, but from quite close—from inside that fissure.
Immediately after, the wire began reeling in at high speed.
Was he coming back? But this was way too fast?
Don't tell me the line snapped?
I watched anxiously—and then Cha Si-eon emerged from the darkness.
He sprinted straight out of the fissure, and once outside, stood catching his breath for a moment.
"What is it? What's in there?"
At my question, Cha Si-eon wiped his forehead.
As if he'd just seen something truly troubling.
When I looked at him in bewilderment, he spoke.
"That place in there is laid out like a maze. But the shape and texture of the space didn't look like part of the 「Island」. No—it didn't feel like a Type 1 Special Zone at all."
Not like a Type 1?
Having only ever been inside Type 1s, I couldn't quite grasp what that meant.
I had read about it in the manual, though.
That each form of zone carried its own distinct atmosphere, its own texture.
And that the defining trait of a Type 1 Special Zone was how closely it resembled reality.
"And?"
"Deeper inside, there's a fairly large chamber. The 「Big Cat」 was there."
"……I'm sorry, what?"
"It appears to have been attacked by something—its outer shell is damaged. Far more so than when I last saw it."
What is he even saying, the 「Big Cat」, out of nowhere?
A dozen thoughts shot through my mind at once.
The roars that had echoed all night.
The Crow, injured, suddenly coughing up blood.
The passageway that same Crow had opened for us.
And the 「Big Cat」 lying in there…….
"Did it see you, Team Leader?"
"Yes. It nearly caught me."
So that's why he fired and ran…….
"Did it chase you?"
"The passageway is too narrow for the 「Big Cat」. It seems to be trapped in there."
I started to nod, then caught the contradiction and asked again.
"Then how did it nearly catch you, Team Leader?"
"I approached to secure a fragment."
"……."
This guy. Making all that fuss about the 「Big Cat」 being dangerous, and then—
The moment he saw it, he went in thinking about hauling out a fragment?
"So did you get one?"
"No. Its nerves are on edge—I couldn't get close enough."
Not a surprising result.
Approaching a wounded, cornered named Hazard Entity—he was lucky to come back alive at all.
Boom—! Boom boom boom boom—!
Gunfire rang out again.
From this far away, there was a high probability it was the rescue teams from the Bureau.
Things had gotten quite strange.
The rescue teams were hurrying toward us to save us, while the 「Big Cat」 sat trapped in there as if telling us to come take its fragments.
"We should…… grab those fragments, right?"
"Yes."
"Obviously it's too dangerous with just us, so joining up with the rescue teams and going in together would be best."
"That's true."
"The question is whether that passageway will still be there when the rescue teams arrive."
"That's also a fair point."
Cha Si-eon cut off his agreement mid-sentence and went to drag two chairs over from the café.
It wasn't consideration for me to sit.
He placed one chair at each end of the fissure—left and right.
Then he went to the bookshelf along the café wall, swept the books off it, and stacked them on the chairs.
Finally, he split even an intact book clean in half, adjusting the pile until its height matched the height of the fissure exactly.
"Agent Seo Do-woon, what time is it?"
"9:20."
"I'll measure the size of this fissure every five minutes from now on."
Right. That was about all we could do for the moment.
But even this was only half a response.
If this fissure had a time limit, we had no way of knowing whether it would shrink gradually until it vanished, or blink out all at once at some instant.
Cha Si-eon knew that as well as I did, but he'd at least established a baseline.
Then he came back over to my side and said, almost as an aside:
"For reference, we estimate this Special Zone contains roughly 8,400 rooms."
"8,400?"
"I calculated it this morning. The zones here are assigned with replacement. Setting aside the categories A through J, if we've exceeded 129 passes and only seen a single duplicate zone, then the probability of any given room repeating here works out to a mere 0.77 percent."
"……."
"Plugging our pass count and that duplication probability into a birthday-problem formula matching our current situation and back-solving for the parameter gives us roughly 8,400."
"……?"
When I fell silent and just stared blankly at him, Cha Si-eon asked:
"Any objection?"
"No, none."
Honestly, I hadn't understood a word of it.
So—he used some kind of math formula?
Team Leader Cha. I never would have guessed, but you were a math and science guy, huh……
As a humanities man through and through, I decided to humbly accept Cha Si-eon's logical estimate.
And so I ran headlong into a new problem.
If this place held roughly 8,400 zones, how long would it take the rescue teams to reach us?
Boom boom boom—! Boom boom boom boom—!
Judging by how faintly the sound carried, they had no intention of playing by the rules.
If they were just blasting through everything, even then it'd take at least five minutes per zone, wouldn't it?
A crude estimate, but 8,400 zones times five minutes……
42,000 minutes. 700 hours. 29 days.
Of course, that was only if the rescue teams reached our zone dead last; they'd arrive faster than that.
At least faster than 29 days…….
"Some agents will have banked their rest time by now. The rescue teams will keep growing in size, and the search time will shrink accordingly."
"That's a relief."
"The problem is that even between the rescue teams, there's no sharing of information between early and late arrivals. With the communication issues, coordination and resupply will be difficult."
"I see."
"They should still manage to clear each zone without trouble. The other agents will quickly notice this particular zone has been downgraded."
"That's a relief."
"The real problem is if the rescue teams reach the zone holding this Special Zone's core before they reach us. If they break the core, we'll all be released."
"Understood. Team Leader, five minutes have passed."
When I called the time, Cha Si-eon walked over to the fissure.
He drew his knife and began measuring the change.
"It's shrunk about 1.5 centimeters in width on each side, and in height."
Ah, these people, always making the humanities guy do the math.
"So every five minutes, it loses 3 centimeters in width and 1.5 in height."
"This fissure is about 3 meters wide and 2.5 meters tall."
"It'll close faster on the width, since it's shrinking from both sides."
"Time until the width closes completely: 500 minutes. 8 hours and 20 minutes."
"But there's no guarantee it's closing at a constant rate, though."
"The closing speed may be proportional to area rather than distance. And for a person to pass through, we'd need at least a 30-centimeter clearance."
"30 centimeters—isn't that a problem for you, Team Leader?"
"It is, admittedly."
"……."
"……."
Cha Si-eon and I exchanged gloomy looks.
It was as if each of us could read the other's mind perfectly.
About twenty minutes later.
We were hurling ourselves through the fissure, cursing under our breath.