WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈
Episode 155: Room 201, Curse Room - ‘□ □□’ (4)
──────
- Kim A-ri
Under the Nightmare Butterfly's power, the gorilla began suffering from overwhelming drowsiness and mental agony.
Mook-seong and I ran over, gasping for breath, and kept pouring bullets into the gorilla's twisted flesh.
--- Bang!
Elizabeth again! Mook-seong clutched his shoulder and staggered at the gunshot.
We hurriedly moved into a position where we could use the gorilla's body as a shield.
Fortunately, the gorilla was half incapacitated now. We had an invisible person on our side too!
On one side of the pure white space, we poured bullets into the gorilla to finish it off. On the other, a bizarre bloody battle between invisible people had begun.
“Why the hell is this bastard so tough? We've put more than fifty rounds into it, haven't we? It's still twitching!”
Mook-seong endured the pain and rose with a grim expression.
“I think it'll die eventually even in its current state. Still, the finishing blow should go into its head.”
Mook-seong went over to the gorilla's completely collapsed body, shoved the barrel into its eye, and pulled the trigger.
Only then did the gorilla finally stop twitching. What disgusting vitality!
When I sighed and turned around, the invisible people's fight was going more comically than I'd expected.
Unable to find Eun-sol's position, Elizabeth kept wasting bullets in empty air. Eun-sol only held on by taking deep breaths whenever Elizabeth was looking in the wrong direction.
Eun-sol, on the other hand, seemed able to locate Elizabeth even while she was invisible through the power of her eye. But she simply wasn't a very good shot, so the fight dragged on.
That sort of uncertain balance always ended when allies joined in.
As Mook-seong and I surrounded Elizabeth from a distance and narrowed the invisible person's range of movement, Elizabeth suddenly revealed herself and took off her helmet.
--- Bang!
One gunshot ended the chaotic battle.
“Ptooey! You fucking-”
“Mook-seong. There are kids here.”
“Ahem. That crazy bitch put us through hell. Jin-cheol will be disappointed again.”
Eun-sol was checking on Song-i and Seung-yeop, who had collapsed on the floor.
When she hurriedly removed Song-i's bulletproof vest, several dark blue bruises the size of an adult man's palm covered her upper body. Song-i sighed and got up.
Seung-yeop's condition was worse once his Protective Suit had been removed. Even with it on, it couldn't completely absorb the impact of the gorilla's devastating punches.
He panted for a long time, barely conscious, before finally beginning to move sluggishly.
There was no hope of clearing this room now. Still, we had to escape somehow.
Thinking of the Escape Button put my mind at ease. If it came down to it, we'd survive once with the Escape Button.
Eun-sol came back.
“A-ri, you were right.... I'm sorry.”
“It's fine. Next time, let's torture Elizabeth right away.”
“Let's take her gun first. She killed herself immediately, so we couldn't learn anything.”
Looking around, I saw that this strange space had three exits, including the door we'd entered through.
It'd be best to let Seung-yeop choose again, right?
Eun-sol asked, sounding curious.
“This room was a dud, wasn't it?”
“Yeah. Which means the rooms we'd gone through were unexpectedly the right answers. We mistook them for wrong answers because there was always a monster, but compared to this room, they were heaven.”
Song-i approached with a tired expression.
“A-ri! I'm sorry....”
“It's okay. It was an understandable mistake.”
Separate from everyone's apologies, I gave it some thought. This group basically had a tendency to avoid conflict.
That tendency had clearly contributed greatly to keeping the party from falling apart, but wasn't it also what made them hesitate when they needed to make a ruthless decision like this?
That was probably why they hadn't agreed with my opinion, which must have felt extreme to them.
To begin with, my judgment had been based on instinct, so I hadn't been able to offer proper grounds for it.
I could understand their side, so I didn't feel particularly resentful toward the others.
Still....
--- Smack!
I bonked Mook-seong on the head as he paced nearby and sent him a private message.
Kim A-ri: You should've taken my side!
This bastard had survived outside because of my instincts more times than I could count, and he still didn't listen to me?
If this guy alone had backed me up, the others would've thought, Is there something to it? and followed along!
Mook-seong was old enough to know better, yet he just chuckled it off.
“Still, there's something scary I need to tell you.”
“This situation is already scary enough, but go on.”
“That gorilla had a kind of ‘master.’”
“...”
“You said that after Affinity was enhanced, you could read a Chaos Entity's thoughts to some extent, right?”
“It didn't seem like the gorilla was very friendly toward you.”
“I'm telling you, it had a master. It even seemed terribly afraid of that master. When the butterfly got it and it collapsed, it strongly thought of ‘someone’ and was terrified it would be punished. That terrifying master must've ordered it to kill everyone who entered.”
It was frightening, and truly exhausting.
A being that used even such an overwhelming monster as a servant.
It had to be an Adversary. What kind of bastard was it, and where did it live?
At this point, shouldn't it at least show its face once?
I sighed and turned around.
Seung-yeop, who had been hurt far worse than Song-i, was still only gasping for breath. He couldn't even stand properly on his own.
Just as I thought we should rest a little longer so he could recover, words appeared on the walls around us.
MOVE!
Should we follow that? Looking around, the others seemed just as unsure.
Song-i finally asked what everyone was thinking.
“Who do you think is writing those words? At first, it felt like some kind of hotel notification, so we all naturally followed it. But the hotel doesn't seem like it would put up notifications in a place like this.”
Mook-seong had initially objected because he didn't want to be led around by the enemy, but he got up without protest.
“Well, even if it weren't for those words, we should move now. We need to move while our guide can still guide us, before he completely passes out.”
Our guide.
Seung-yeop was clearly not in a condition where resting would make him better.
Without proper treatment, staying still wouldn't help him recover. He might die.
Even if he only lost consciousness rather than dying, that would be a huge problem in a situation like this.
As Mook-seong said, if Seung-yeop passed out, we'd have no guide.
Seung-yeop weakly waved a hand that barely rose into the air, then tossed a coin.
--- Ting! Clatterrrrr.
After rolling for quite some time, the coin struck one of the doors in the wall.
This time, Mook-seong put on the Protective Suit and carried Seung-yeop on his back as we started moving again.
* * *
In a short time, we passed through the fifth mansion and then the sixth mansion.
Along the way, we destroyed a toaster that spat out living slices of bread and a wardrobe hiding a murderer.
Once we established how to deal with the Mimic Rooms hiding monsters, they weren't terribly difficult to clear.
But no matter how many we cleared, another mansion simply appeared.
Eventually, exhausted, we smashed a moving clock in the seventh mansion and collapsed.
Seung-yeop seemed to have reached his limit as well. He fell asleep as if he'd passed out.
“What are we supposed to do?”
“It feels like there's no end if we keep going like this. This is already the seventh one. If we get past it, it'll be the eighth, then the ninth.”
Song-i and Eun-sol spoke, both worn out.
In the middle of it all, I thought about Luck.
A power harder to explain than anyone else's blessing.
According to Seung-yeop, his Sponsor was a god like a young child.
Luck had many characteristics, but one important keyword stood out.
Faith.
The stronger someone's self-confidence, the more actively and effectively they could use Luck.
Paradoxically, Luck was also the blessing that was hardest to believe in.
After all, it made choices based on nothing but a feeling, without any logic.
If Seung-yeop started getting one or two answers wrong, he'd begin to doubt himself. Once he started doubting, Luck became powerless too.
Another problem was that even the person using the blessing didn't know whether it had activated.
I thought back to what had happened in the Gate Room's Jekyll and Hyde Game.
Was it the second round? Or the third? At some point, Seung-yeop had felt pressured and didn't choose Hyde.
He himself understood it as not making a choice, and so did we.
But looking back after time had passed, even that act of not choosing had been a choice.
Because Seung-yeop himself had been Hyde, he couldn't choose someone outside himself.
Still, how could we possibly have understood a choice made that way at the time?
From the future, when we knew all the results, we could say, Ah! Luck's choice had been right then too!
But in the present, we couldn't even know whether Luck had activated.
I was reminded of the prophet from Greek and Roman mythology.
Cassandra, the prophet who gained perfect foresight but was cursed so that no one would believe her prophecies.
Luck was strangely similar to that power.
A blessing that emphasized faith more than any other was, absurdly, the kind of power that was hardest to believe in.
... As I continued that line of thought, something suddenly occurred to me.
What if even now...
What if this was a situation created by Luck?
Like in the Jekyll and Hyde Game, what if even being unable to choose the next room because he had passed out was a choice?
Or was I simply forcing an explanation onto everything after the fact?
I watched my companions wrap bandages around Seung-yeop and tend to Song-i, then stood up to look around.
* * *
- Park Seung-yeop
Ah.... It was hot.
My entire body was burning.
It had been a long time since I could even think about what hurt and how.
At some point, instead of pain, the first thoughts that came to me were that I was exhausted and sleepy.
Grandpa Mook-seong seemed to take off my Protective Suit and examine my body from all sides, but in the end, he pushed me back into it.
I forced my mouth open.
“Grandpa....”
“Don't open your mouth. Drink this.”
Grandpa handed me a syringe filled with red liquid.
“Is this A-ri's blood, the miracle cure of the century that Ga-in kept looking for?”
“... From the way you're talking, you're still alive and well.”
“I think you should just leave me behind and take the Protective Suit back.”
It was a waste for someone who couldn't even move to be wearing such a powerful item.
“Don't say that. Have some confidence.”
“I can't even move, so what confidence am I supposed to-”
“Your Heavenly Luck still hasn't sent a signal, has it? It didn't even activate in front of the gorilla. I think you still have one more chance to shine.”
“...”
After saying that, Grandpa put the Escape Button he had been carrying into my hand.
Where did that unwavering belief come from?
Heavenly Luck hadn't activated every single time I was in danger, had it?
Honestly, it felt like Heavenly Luck activated whenever my Sponsor wanted it to.
Was it because I drank the miracle cure of the century? For some reason, I felt a little more energetic.
I'd heard that when A-ri was healthy, her healing power wasn't all that strong. Still, it seemed it wasn't completely ineffective.
Or maybe it was the placebo effect.
As I lay there blankly, I felt like I could understand Grandpa's state of mind.
The truth was, we were in a pretty hopeless situation.
We had lost most of our fighting strength, everyone was exhausted, and we had no idea how to escape.
In that situation, Grandpa's last hope seemed to be my Heavenly Luck.
Maybe it wasn't so much that he believed in it as that he wanted to believe in it.
Somewhere nearby, there was a loud crashing sound, as if something had broken.
Grandpa jumped to his feet in surprise.
For the first time in a long while, a notification appeared on its own.
[Heavenly Luck activated! The energy of the universe protects you.]
Heavenly Luck was a name A-ri came up with on her own....
Grandpa called it Heavenly Luck too, but had you decided to call it that now as well, Sponsor?
The message changed every time too. Before, it was something like 777! This time, it was the energy of the universe.
Ah, whatever.
The energy of the universe was protecting me, so things would work out somehow!
I just closed my eyes in peace.
I felt jealous of Ga-in, who had been asleep for ages already.
* * *
- Kim A-ri
As I looked around, I continued my earlier train of thought.
Let's say Seung-yeop being down itself meant that some kind of choice had been made.
Then why hadn't Luck chosen the next room?
...
Because this room was the right answer!
Holding onto that faint hope, I looked around.
I touched the objects around me one by one and examined the walls and dining table.
Nothing felt particularly unusual.
Was I wrong after all?
As time dragged on, familiar letters appeared on the mirror by the sink.
Move!
Who on earth was sending this?
The group was already mentally and physically exhausted. More than anything, Seung-yeop, who served as our guide, was struggling even to stay conscious.
I couldn't follow this instruction any longer. Drawing on Old Blood, I wrote:
‘No!’
...
...
...
Really? Then let's play!
--- Crash!
A hand shot out of the mirror like a blade and pierced straight through my body in an instant.
Footnotes:
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