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Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈

Episode 13: Rest, The Hotel Basement - 'The Living Pool' (2) Final

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[User: Han Ga-in (Wisdom)

Date: Day 3

Current Location: Basement Level, Swimming Pool

Sage’s Advice: 3]

Wriggle.

Wriggle.

The floor suddenly rippled. Had I stepped on something? Just as I wondered that,

“Eeeeeek!”

“What the fuck is this, you fucking piece of shit, aaaaaah!”

Screams and curses filled the swimming pool.

Something, something strange, things rose up.

Lips suddenly burst from the floor, walls, and ceiling.

Enormous lips opened, as though someone had torn the lips off a giant human mouth and stuck them there.

Tongues as thick as forearms. No, could things that stretched out that far really be called tongues?

A frog’s tongue stretches out like that to catch flies.

The problem was that we were the flies.

Crash!

I lost my balance in an instant.

When I looked down at my right leg in panic, a tongue rising from the floor had wrapped itself around my ankle.

I thrashed my leg and tried to peel the revolting tongue away with my hands, but it was no use.

It held on tight, like a thick rope wrapped around my leg!

Screeeech!

A cry I couldn’t believe had come from a human mouth. What was that?

I turned toward the sound and saw one of the lips twisting as though it were screaming in pain.

Jin-cheol really was different from the rest of us. He had simply ripped the tongue off with brute force and thrown it aside, making the lips scream!

That monster could feel pain too. Just like a human tongue.

After tearing through a couple of tongues with his bare hands as though they were ropes, the others seemed to get scared and stopped coming after Jin-cheol.

He moved quickly after that, and in less than a minute, Eun-sol, Seung-yeop, and I were free.

But the situation was only beginning.

“Gasp, gasp, huuurk, cough! Please, please, aaaaah!”

At the worst possible time, Elena and Song-i, who were in the water, couldn’t get out.

The moment I approached the pool and looked inside, I was speechless.

Lips. Giant lips. Enormous lips.

They were on a completely different scale from the lips that had risen from the walls and floor outside the pool.

Wasn’t that the size of a whale’s mouth?

The tongues coming out of it were on another level too.

The other tongues were about as thick as a slender forearm, but these were as thick as a person’s leg.

And there wasn’t just one, but two.

Before I could do anything, Jin-cheol rushed over.

He’d find a way to deal with it. Over the past few days, I’d seen his absurd strength more than once.

Even if those tongues were as thick as human legs...

Someone strong enough to crush concrete with a punch should be able to do something.

The situation didn’t go the way I had hoped.

“Ugh, why the fuck is this thing’s mouth so huge! Ga-in! Come help me pull!”

I ran over without thinking. Jin-cheol had been putting on some kind of strength act, pulling Elena with one arm and Song-i with the other, but he let go with one hand. I used every ounce of strength I had to pull Song-i.

As I pulled, something felt strange.

The tongue was strong, but it was still just a tongue. It wasn’t hard as steel.

It felt soft even to me. With the strength Jin-cheol had shown so far, shouldn’t he have been able to tear the tongue apart?

I had watched him snap the smaller tongues while rescuing the others as easily as rotten ropes, one after another in a second or two. I thought even a bigger tongue wouldn’t be difficult.

Only when I got close and began pulling Song-i did I understand the problem.

As soon as things went wrong, Song-i and Elena had both tried to get out of the pool, but they were too late. More than half their bodies were still underwater. Naturally, the tongues grabbing their legs were underwater too.

How could someone who struggled just to stay afloat enter the water and tear those tongues off?

Even if you were a good swimmer, it was still a problem.

Being strong was one thing, but unless you could ignore the laws of physics, it was hard to use your strength properly underwater when there was nothing to brace yourself against.

Little by little, Song-i and I were dragged toward the bottom of the pool.

Craaaack!

The mouth on the pool floor opened.

The water swirled and was sucked into the enormous mouth. The pressure made it even harder to hold on.

Ah... the mouth! That mouth! Countless disgusting teeth gleamed inside it.

At the very least, if we went in there, we weren’t going to die peacefully.

Compared to dying inside that thing, freezing to death in Room 101 had been merciful.

When the mouth opened, Song-i’s screams and sobs became twice as loud. My ears were ringing now.

Clink, clatter.

Something metallic fell beside me.

A Silver Dagger.

It was the decorative dagger we had found in the corridor on the morning we decided to enter Room 101. I hadn’t even been able to use it in Room 101, but I had kept it afterward.

It was so flashy and expensive-looking that I’d planned to keep carrying it around. I remembered fooling around with it alongside Seung-yeop and Jin-cheol.

We had treated an obvious work of art worth tens of millions of won, maybe even hundreds of millions, like a toy.

I heard Seung-yeop shouting something.

He must have taken the dagger from my clothes and thrown it to me.

I understood what he meant. Grabbing the dagger, I drove it into the tongue with all my strength.

This tongue was strong, not hard as steel. There was no way it could withstand a blade!

Shhk!

Just as I expected, the dagger sank into the tongue.

It felt like cutting through incredibly tough meat.

A nauseating stench rose along with spurting blood.

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

An enormous scream filled the swimming pool, drowning out every other sound so completely that even my muffled ears seemed to clear.

At last, Song-i and I were free.

“Oppa, oppa, thank... ptooey, thank... cough, no.”

“Save that for later and catch your breath.”

“You save that for later and cut this tongue too!!!”

A booming shout rang out.

I ran over in a panic to cut the tongue around Elena’s ankle.

[Get down on the floor immediately!]

What? Why was this suddenly... Then I flew through the air.

It was the first time in my life I had ever been flung completely off the ground.

My view shot upward, and my body flew seven or eight meters through the air like a bird before slamming into a wall.

“Aaaaaah! Fuck! Aaaaaaaah!”

My whole body felt crushed.

From head to toe, it felt like someone was beating me with a hammer.

Only afterward did I realize it. That insane tongue had flown at me like a shot put and smashed into me.

Ah, that was why the warning had told me to duck.

But what was I supposed to do?

Couldn’t it at least see the future and warn me in advance? By the time I saw it, it was already too late...

Ah, even in the middle of this, I understood something about how that warning worked.

Sage’s Advice only appeared once danger had actually become reality, when a crisis was just seconds away.

The reason Sage’s Advice hadn’t activated while we explored the hotel facilities or entered the swimming pool was simple.

That mouth hadn’t appeared in the pool yet.

Even after the mouth appeared, the warning didn’t come immediately. It only appeared when its tongue was about to beat me half to death!

Only then did I realize that this Advice had far more weaknesses than I’d thought.

But wasn’t it already too late?

I felt like I was going to die.

This had to be beyond what a human body could endure.

Was this what getting hit by a truck felt like?

It hurt so much. So much that the pain itself made it hard to lose consciousness.

Then I saw red liquid spraying from somewhere.

What was that? Even in this situation, I was curious. Eun-sol was swinging some strange container around, spraying liquid everywhere.

Strangely, it showed power that was practically magical.

Every time the liquid touched a tongue, it did more than make it recoil in surprise. The tongue collapsed and trembled on the ground. Even the larger tongues were no different.

When she poured the liquid onto the large tongue as though she meant to empty the entire container, the tongue that had struck me and the tongue holding Elena lost their disgusting vigor in an instant. They simply rolled on the floor, shaking violently.

What kind of miraculous magic potion had Eun-sol gotten her hands on? How could she neutralize monsters like that so easily?

The mouth closed.

The whirlpool in the swimming pool stopped.

At last, when the chaos settled and the tension drained away, I lost consciousness.

* * *

“Sis, sis, sis, oppa, oppa, oppa, what do we do? Ga-in oppa won’t wake up. He won’t wake up. Ga-in oppa? Oppa?”

“Song-i, you’re making me dizzy, so please stay still. Jin-cheol, you said you worked out, right? Can’t you do first aid or something?”

“I’m doing it now. His arm... His arm is completely crushed. His arm absorbed the impact, which is why he survived this well. If it had hit his stomach, he’d already be dead.”

“His arm... I’m not a doctor, but this... This doesn’t look like just an arm injury, right? He flew... I saw it too. Ga-in flew ten meters and crashed into that wall!”

“I saw it too. You don’t even need to look to know his insides are all fucked up. This, this... It’s not something I can fix by putting on a splint. We need a doctor. You fucking hotel bastards, we need a doctor!!!!! Can’t you hear me?!”

“Noona. Shouldn’t we buy something from the market? Isn’t there a potion or something?”

“The market only sells ordinary, real-world items. There aren’t even guns, so why would there be potions? Even if there were, it wouldn’t matter. I already bought Capsaicin, and the bandages we’re using now used up all three of this week’s purchases.”

Voices. Voices. They were so loud that I faintly came to.

Ah, so that miraculous magic potion had been Capsaicin. Thinking about it, they were tongues.

With concentrated Capsaicin being poured onto them, it would be stranger if the tongues could endure it.

This wasn’t a question of how strong or weak the tongues were.

Eun-sol’s quick thinking, coming up with Capsaicin in that chaos, was incredible too.

At some point, something was pressed against my arm, and everyone was bustling around.

A girl was crying. She didn’t need to.

A young woman stood there, trembling as though she’d lost her mind.

Seeing such a beautiful woman worry about me, I guess I hadn’t lived a wasted life.

A boy was running around. Why was he running?

He seemed so out of it that he didn’t even know what he was doing.

Then, in one corner of my vision, a notification flashed.

[Return to Room 105 immediately.]

Room 105, the Rest Room.

Did “rest” mean more than simply providing food, drinks, and somewhere to sleep?

Thinking back, in the games I played as a child, staying at an inn restored all your health and mana when you woke up...

I used every last bit of strength I had to say two words.

“Room 105. Room 105.”

That was all the strength I had left.

Footnotes:

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