Apartment, Survivor Rescue (3)
The door shuts, and the dolls begin to move.
The hourglass on the ceiling drains, grain by grain. At this rate, maybe five minutes until it's empty?
"The dolls… don't seem to be doing much of anything."
Yoon Seohee, who'd flinched at their sudden motion, catches on just as fast that they aren't attacking. Neither of us is new to anomalies like this. We both take a calm look around the room.
The still holding the beakers has a tube feeding liquid in from somewhere. Following it leads straight to a shredder.
The layout is familiar—something I once saw in a report. I can't recall the entity's name, and the details are hazy, but one point stuck.
"…We have to put the dolls into the shredder."
Feed a doll in and it liquefies, travels up the tube, and fills the beakers. Keep a certain volume of liquid in those beakers for the duration of the timer. That was the procedure. What the dolls themselves are is another matter.
"What happens if we put them in… No. You're the Director. I'll just do what you say…!"
So Seohee and I set about catching the dolls that were darting every which way through the room. The space itself wasn't large, but the things were blisteringly fast.
"Heeheehee! Slow! So slow!"
"Hooheehee! Catch me! Catch me!"
They taunted as they scrambled up walls and even shelves.
"Ugh… you little bastards…!"
Thud—
I hit the floor lunging for one.
Bang—
I slammed into the wall. The timer kept running, the liquid kept dropping, and snaring even a single doll was proving brutally hard.
"Aaaah! Got one…!"
Seohee was first.
"Aah! Caught! I'm caught!"
Just as she moved toward the shredder, I finally managed to grab one myself.
"Let me go! Let me go!"
"Hah! Filthy fast…!"
While I was still wrestling with mine—
"Kyaaaaaaaaa…aa…aagh…!"
A scream tore through the room. I spun around. The doll Seohee had fed into the shredder was shrieking in something close to pure agony as it was ripped apart.
Crunch… grind…
Blood sprayed. Bone crushed. A moment later, a strangely colored liquid poured into the beaker on the still.
"Ugh…!"
"…"
The sight was enough to seal our mouths shut. Not that we were frightened—we'd seen far worse, countless times. An ordinary civilian with no idea what they were looking at might have screamed.
What the hell are these dolls…?
Something about it sat wrong. …Anyway. I'd caught one, so it had to be processed.
"This is horrifying… hah."
"What choice do we have? Catch more, fast. Those beakers can't run dry."
I tightened my grip on the brown-haired doll and stepped toward Seohee by the shredder.
"Got it. Director, you put that one in too."
I was just about to shove the doll in headfirst when Seohee's brown hair brushed past the edge of my vision.
"Agent Seohee… wait."
"Huh? Why so formal all of a sudden? Calling me like the old days."
She looked at me. Through the mask of her yellow hazmat suit I studied her face—brown hair, brown eyes… and above all, the scar that ringed her neck.
This doll. It looked exactly like her.
I held it up for her to see. Seohee stared for a beat, then spoke with a face gone pale with shock.
"This is me, isn't it? A little uglier, but… wait. You don't mean…?"
A chill ran down my spine. What if the one she'd just put through the shredder had been me? My doll? What would have happened?
"Looks like… we need to be careful. We shouldn't catch any that look like each other."
The dolls racing around the room all seemed roughly alike at a glance. Did that mean we had to examine every single one?
Seohee studied the ones nearby more carefully.
"Now that I'm looking… some of them resemble survivors who disappeared before."
"…Meaning if we don't get out of here, we end up like that too."
"Probably… Or maybe putting our dolls through the shredder is what turns us into that. Or both."
Whatever the truth, one thing was certain.
"…We'll have to look carefully."
"Yeah. I don't want to end up like that."
I let the Seohee-doll go and went after more.
"Idiot! Idiot! Eek!"
I barely managed to snag another one that dodged as if mocking me.
"Aaaaagh! It hurts! It hurts…!"
I forced it into the shredder. It vanished screaming. The whole business left a bad taste.
"…This one. It's wearing a kid's hat?"
There were clever traps among them, too. One wore Seohee's face, but a wide-brimmed hat covered enough that I'd nearly fed it to the shredder without a second look.
"…This is pretty vicious."
So we kept grinding the screaming dolls through the shredder, steadily filling the beakers. By the time the limit ran out, they were full.
Seohee wiped the sweat from her face.
"Whew…! That should do it, right?"
"Probably…"
Then the ceiling opened. The hourglass vanished, and a fanfare completely at odds with the room's grim atmosphere blared out.
Congratulations!
A prize is being awarded.
A male voice with perfect diction—clean, and yet somehow unnerving. With it, a bottle dropped from the ceiling with a dull thunk.
Inside was a liquid mixed of red and flesh tones, similar to what filled the beakers. I'd never seen the item before, but the mark on it was familiar: a smiling yellow emoji, mouth torn wide and painted blood-red.
"That's Smile Corporation's mark…?"
Seohee came over and inspected the bottle.
"You mean that company that just churns out weird crap? Especially stuff shaped like candy kids eat or toys they play with."
Smile Corporation. A place that built terrible, dangerous things out of the language of childhood innocence.
"Right… Attractions like this are one of their main products."
"So this is basically some kind of amusement ride…?"
I asked as she looked around the room.
"Was there anything related to these guys in the other rooms?"
"No… First time seeing it."
She shook her head.
"So one of the places the apartment swallowed just happened to be their facility…?"
"Seems that way. This apartment doesn't only stitch apartments together. Some of the rooms are convenience stores, butcher shops, that kind of thing."
"What a headache…."
The apartment wasn't far from our base. Leave it alone and the base itself could be at risk. Our objective this time was rescuing survivors—but we needed a plan for the apartment as soon as possible.
"For now… let's head to the next floor."
I stowed the bottle—handed over like a prize—into my bag. Seohee made a face of pure distaste.
"You're taking that with us? It's from those lunatics."
"They have their own clear rules. Something given as a reward for a game doesn't harm you."
"That's true, but it still feels wrong… Well. If the Director says so…"
She nodded, reluctant.
Still… what's the bottle even for?
I'd never seen it, and I had no idea what it did. I'd have to find out later—once someone knowledgeable in the field joined us, or once we installed an analysis lab module at the base.
Pretty expensive module… and not high enough priority to install right away.
If it truly seemed useless, I could always turn it in for points.
We climbed emergency stairs much like the ones before. Following Seohee, I found my eyes drawn to the scar on her neck.
"…That thing on your neck. Is it all right?"
"Ah, this? I'm fine. No real problems. Just itches sometimes."
The scar was the mark of a special Administration procedure she'd received after a severe injury years ago. The procedure had been unstable enough to worry me, but it seemed there was no lasting trouble.
"That's a relief, then."
"That's it? You're not curious how I've been doing all this time or anything?"
"Well… now isn't the time for that kind of talk, is it?"
"Still the same. Yeah, you're right."
Seohee laughed it off with a soft snort. After that brief exchange, we reached the third floor.
An identical corridor stretched ahead. This time, none of the doors stood open.
"Is this just a free pass?"
"No. There's one thing to remember when you come up from the second floor. The floor after two isn't three."
"…What do you mean?"
"Director, look over there."
Seohee turned and pointed at the stairs continuing upward. They hadn't been visible right after we arrived—but looking back now, they had appeared.
"…What happens if you just walk up that way?"
"When we explored the apartment, we tested things by throwing objects and rolling balls. First time here, it was a ball. We kicked it hard enough that it should have reached the emergency stairs—but it never made it."
"Once you enter, you can't get out?"
Seohee shrugged.
"No idea. Maybe you just can't reach the end, but you can still turn around and come back."
…Meaning they hadn't risked anything dangerous to find out. The Administration would normally have sent in so-called lab rats—unprotected personnel—just to settle the question. For a group of ordinary survivors, though, her caution was the only sensible call.
"So do we head into the fourth floor as is?"
"To be precise, this isn't it—the next one is the third floor. This place is just a trap. When you go up, the next landing even says 3F."
I followed her up the stairs. Just as she'd said, the next landing was marked 3F.
This time the corridor wasn't a straight line. An emergency stairwell still stood ahead, but forks opened left and right in the middle.
"…You said we have to go somewhere else from here?"
"Yeah. Pass through a certain room and you can reach the thirteenth floor. We need to take that path first."
"Is the corridor safe?"
"Nothing unusual happens in the corridors here either. The doors aren't open, so if you want you can just keep climbing. But… we're using the shortcut that takes us straight to thirteen."
Seohee moved forward at a measured pace. At the center of the corridor she turned right. The right-hand hall ended in a blank wall. The third door on that side was marked 13F in red marker. There had been no such markings on the second floor.
"Ah—curious about that? The second floor is a section that resets after a set time. Room order changes, and any traces you leave vanish. Spaces like this one persist."
"Complicated."
Looking closer, plenty of the other doors had similar markings scrawled on them.
"The third floor is useful. There are doors where you can get food. Well—they don't open every day."
Seohee waved me after her and opened the door marked 13F.
Creeeak—
Unlike the doors on the second floor, it groaned with a rusty, skin-crawling sound. It didn't reset—which meant it aged, too.
I peered in from outside. Beyond the threshold stretched a dark, cave-like passage running wide left and right. Somewhere, water dripped in a slow, steady cadence, and damp humidity clung to the skin.
The floor feels… soft somehow….
Faintly glowing winding lines ran along the ground, lighting and dying every few seconds.
"How do we proceed here?"
"First: walk along the light down the middle of the floor. Second: when the light dims, something will open its eyes—stop walking then. The light can shrink fast without warning, so don't even think about rushing across."
"That's it? What's the something?"
"I don't know either. Just a huge… eye thing. The Director won't jump at something like that, right? Think of it like Red Light, Green Light."
Seohee stepped in first. Following her, I felt the path writhe underfoot as if it were alive. We walked slowly along the lit line. A humid wind breathed past from somewhere in the dark.
Then the light thinned, and went out.
Seohee looked back and carefully pointed at the ceiling.
Something opened its eyes and looked down at us.
