Marionette
With a rattle and a heavy slam, the iron doors rose as one and crashed up into the ceiling.
Had another administrator come in?
"Who else has a key?"
"......I'm the only one with a key."
The chief fidgeted anxiously with the key in his hand.
"Copies?"
"I had some made, but I'm holding all of those too."
"You sure you hid them well? They weren't stolen?"
"Last time I checked, they were all still there. Strange......"
The grave look on his face soon settled back into calm.
"We were going to have to raise the iron doors to get out anyway. Didn't even have to lift a finger. The door opened on its own—must've been a mechanical malfunction!"
"You say that like it has to be a malfunction."
"Don't pour cold water on it. Still, I'd better check whether the thing works properly."
The moment the chief moved to slot the key into the hole in the wall—
Beep!
A warning tone, and for an instant red lights flared all around them, then died.
"And what is this now?"
"Hmm."
"This a malfunction too?"
"I've got a bad feeling about this......"
The chief inserted the key and turned it, but—
"......"
The iron door did not come down.
When he froze like that, Mr. Myeong shoved him aside and cranked the key furiously.
Clack. Clack.
A machine with no intention of working at all.
"Damn it! Why won't it work!"
"You'll snap it doing that."
"At this rate a monster could come charging in, couldn't it?"
"Look on the bright side."
"How am I supposed to look on the bright side of this!"
"Better than the iron door being stuck shut. We'd have been trapped with no way out."
"That's... well. You're not wrong."
Off to the side, the chief was fiddling with the various fixtures, trying to pin down the problem.
The emergency-power battery had probably gone dead. Now and then you ran into facilities that ran on batteries instead of cores—enormous batteries, charged with a power core. Put that way, it sounded like busywork. Charge efficiency is never a hundred percent, so some electricity is always wasted moving core energy into a battery.
The reason for the busywork was simple. Owning a power core didn't mean you could fire up old-era equipment on the spot. These days a machine was designed from the first bolt to run on a power core, but machines built in the old era weren't. They had to be converted, so if something needed to run immediately, you hung a battery on it as a stopgap.
When the chief had said a power core "hadn't been placed yet," he hadn't meant there was no core. He'd meant the conversion wasn't finished.
"Hss. Looks like something's wrong with the battery after all."
As expected.
"Dead?"
"Can't be...... I charged it recently."
So it had broken.
"Doubt a monster would come all the way here, but either way we'd better hurry. Doctor, wait here a moment. I'll be done with my business in no time."
A cabinet sat in a corner of the platform. What the chief had come to retrieve was three cores.
"Follow me. This way and we'll be out quick."
He hurried on ahead. So the subway tour ended here.
"Woo Jungkook."
"Mm?"
"What are you going to do once we're out?"
"About what?"
"Are you really going to run? Before the Waste Disposal Squad gets here."
If we wanted to finish this job clean and get back—and if I wanted to get Mr. Myeong back in one piece—running was the answer. But—
"What do you think?"
It wasn't a choice I liked.
"This is more serious for you than for me, so you decide."
"Mmm......"
"We've still got time. Think it over."
I said that, but I didn't actually expect there'd be much time to think. He'd said it was a short walk to the passage. Once we hit the surface, I'd have to give an answer on the spot.
But this damned subway never seemed to go the way you expected.
In the end, we were given all the time in the world to think. This underground space was not about to let us go easily.
"Chief."
"What."
"You look pale."
"Must be the dark playing tricks. Do I look like something's wrong?"
"Don't tell me you're about to say the door won't open."
"Tsk. You know me too well."
The passage that was supposed to take us straight from B6 to the surface. A thick iron door blocked the way ahead, and for some reason this one had not retracted into the ceiling.
"This one's a slider. Different structure from the doors that go up—and it's frozen shut."
"You're saying we're trapped?"
"Regrettably."
Was that something you said out loud?
"Want a taste of what real regret feels like?"
"You think I got trapped because I wanted to? It's not my fault."
"If you're the master of this place, show a little responsibility."
"Hmm."
The chief seemed to ponder for a moment, then gave the innocent iron door a few light taps with his toe.
"Come to think of it, Postman, opening doors is your specialty."
He meant the kind that opened in three kicks.
"Can't you get this one open somehow?"
"I'm a lot more specialized in cutting throats than opening doors. Which would you like to see first?"
"I'm the stationmaster, so I suppose the responsibility falls to me. Leave the door to me after all."
Might as well check. While the chief carried on with his deeply responsible deliberations, I set a hand on the iron door and tried to read it.
It was a simple lump of metal, so the probabilities came fast—and as expected, there was no way to force it open. Even the Backscratcher, that universal key, gave me the same answer. I wondered whether an armor-piercing round through the lock might do it, but the probabilities said that emptying every armor-piercing round I carried still wouldn't be enough.
The chief does have three cores.
I didn't know what they were for, but if I could get my hands on them, I could invert the odds. Combined with the spare cores I was already carrying, that would be enough for one use of the ability. A single armor-piercing round would open the door then.
There was no guarantee that man would hand them over, though, and dumping that many cores just to open one door was the height of waste. Our lives weren't hanging on it yet. The ability could wait.
"A way...... Ah! No, a way......"
While the chief muttered to himself and tore at his hair—
"Jungkook."
"What. Don't get familiar."
"I'm not running."
Mr. Myeong had finished his own deliberations.
"All right."
"You're not going to ask why?"
"Not curious."
"If I don't run, you stay too, right?"
"I've got no reason to run."
"Then that's a relief......"
Head-on, then. Mr. Myeong didn't think he'd done anything wrong. Run, and it would look as if he were guilty. He didn't want that.
"Well...... I'm already causing you plenty of trouble as it is, but if we ran together I'd be an even bigger nuisance."
"I said I wasn't curious."
"I can just go back to headquarters and never come out again. I'll be safe in there. But you have to keep going outside. Every time you run into the Waste Disposal Squad out there, it'll put you in an awkward spot."
"So you won't run because you don't want to be a nuisance to me?"
"Yeah......"
Had I ever seen goodwill this presumptuous.
"Getting ahead of yourself."
"Huh?"
"You think anything you do is going to so much as inconvenience me? Wake up. That much won't even leave a scratch."
"Uh, then—"
"I figured it out! There's only one way!"
The man in charge, being in charge. He seemed to have a little less hair than before, but he'd found a way, so that was fine. It wasn't my hair.
"We go back the way we came! The passage they just bored. That side only has doors that open upward, so the way should still be open!"
"The path with the monster standing guard?"
"There's no other way!"
"......You're saying that out loud."
"There's no guarantee the monster's still there, is there? It might already be gone."
"What's gone is your sense of responsibility."
"If you think about it, this happened because you dawdled sightseeing on the platform. Joint responsibility, shall we say?"
"Shall we say, my ass."
What to do. Maybe I should just take the cores and open this way instead.
"Those three cores you took out of the cabinet earlier."
"Getting those back to headquarters is my mission."
"How about investing them in me?"
"Investing......?"
"It's complicated to explain, but with those I can open this iron door."
"What are you talking about?"
"Just trust me and hand them over. You'll see it with your own eyes."
"......I don't understand."
There was no way to make him understand.
"You just have to watch. Forgot how I pulled that key out for you earlier?"
"Mm...... Even if that's possible, it's a problem. If I burn these cores on my own say-so, what do you think headquarters will say?"
"You'd be lucky if getting fired as stationmaster was the end of it."
"Right. So no."
"Better than dying here, isn't it?"
"Why would I die! We just have to get out alive."
"Sure we will."
"Fail the mission and it's not much different from dying here anyway. Going back the way we came is the best option."
Flashlight thrust out in front of him, the chief started off in long strides.
"What are you standing around for? Hurry up."
The man's momentum, at least, was a work of art.
"Jungkook......?"
"For now we don't have a choice but to foll—"
Thud!
"Oho. A welcome sound."
Was the chief losing his mind.
"Postman, you said that sound is what the monster makes when it moves, right? Which means the thing isn't still holding that same spot!"
Relentlessly positive.
"If anything, not knowing where the monster is means we should be even more on edge."
"Thanks for the advice."
Maybe I should just beat him down and take the cores.
"You think I'm charging in with no plan at all? I've thought it through. Here. This way."
The place he led us to was a shabby space like an abandoned storeroom. Set against the rest of the station, it was so filthy you had to wonder whether it was even the same station.
"This space didn't exist in the old era. I built it."
"Ah. Really."
"Didn't notice a thing, did you?"
"Really."
A cord of uncertain purpose hung from the center of the ceiling, down to the chief's eye level.
"Not sure you've heard of signal fires."
"Lighting a fire to send a message?"
"Sharp. A technique that was old even by old-era standards. Pull this line and something similar happens."
"A pillar of fire shoots up to the surface?"
"There's something even better. Fireworks. They fly up and burst. I'm going to send a request for support with this."
Primitive, but effective. There was a problem, though.
"Every unspecified person in the area is going to see it. You all right with that? Someone might come over wondering what's going on."
"That's a risk we'll have to take."
"Future Tech didn't issue you a radio?"
"Ah, you don't know? This far underground, core comms don't get through."
"Mm?"
That was news.
"I'm not lying. Shame I don't have a radio on me to show you."
Well. About that.
"......What. Why are you carrying two radios?"
I switched both of them on.
"Oh no. Found a core warehouse, but there are so many I can't carry them all."
I spouted nonsense so outrageous that ignoring it should have been impossible. Nobody answered.
"See? Told you it was real."
"Why?"
"What kind of amateur question is that? You ever seen a core answer to 'why'?"
So communication cores didn't work this deep underground. First I'd heard of it. Not many people had come down this far, so it made sense the fact had never gotten around.
"Pulling it, then."
Rattle. Clank. Clank.
I'd thought he would pull once. He kept pulling. A gear train run on manpower.
A moment later—
Fweee!
A high, raucous whistle, receding fast.
Boom......
An explosion echoing far overhead.
"The support request goes to Future Tech?"
"No. The former hunter I mentioned will come. Good with cold weapons, strong in the dark—you could almost say he was born for today."
"Even so, fighting a boss-class specimen one-on-one is hard. Destroying its body alone is absolutely impossible for one person. The tentacles will regenerate while he's smashing it."
"We don't have to win, do we? Cut off all the tentacles and it's tied hand and foot for the moment. We run in the gap!"
Hmm. That actually made sense.
......ju......
"Hm? Was that the doctor?"
"No? What was that just now?"
......still alive... ju......
This voice.
I stepped outside, and there he was. One of the sentries.
"Am I... still alive, ju......?"
A face covered in blood. His right arm had wrenched the wrong way around, and the humerus looked broken. His legs didn't match in length—the pelvis was shattered too. And in that state, he was somehow still coming closer. A grotesque gait.
"Y-you're alive!?"
The chief, at a complete loss.
"Am I alive, ju......?"
"What a relief! Earlier, I didn't leave you behind on purpose—"
"Stop."
Don't go near him.
"What are you doing! We have to help him! Doctor, you too!"
"Ah, uh."
"Stop!"
Alive, and yet not alive.
"Two steps back. Slowly."
"What on—"
"Now!"
"......"
"Two steps back."
The sentry's abdomen was strangely swollen. For a moment I thought it might be ascites, but it didn't seem to be that. Something had packed itself in under his clothes.
"Everyone, keep the light fixed on his face. Don't shine it anywhere else."
"Ugh, it's bright, ju......"
Click.
I took out the flashlight I'd switched off to save the battery, shaded the lens with my hand to cut the output, and lit the sentry's ankle. So it wouldn't react to the light.
As I thought.
Around the ankle, barely there if you looked—a tentacle was wrapped tight.