Escaping the Mystery Hotel - Chapter 369

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈

Episode 368: Room 205, Curse Room - ‘Absolute Master’ (17)

──────

- Park Seung-yeop

I looked down at a world filled with pain and despair.

People were impaled like fish on the tips of countless skewers, dying in agony.

What was happening on the ground was even stranger.

Though they knew they would become the demon's toys, the people who had lived within the walls were walking into iron cages of their own accord.

It was like pigs rubbing spices over their own bodies before climbing into a frying pan.

How cruel must things have been for the people's will to resist the Phantom Demon itself to be broken like this?

The thought alone terrified me, so I simply closed my eyes.

"Open them."

"..."

"Should I open them myself? By piercing them open with a needle?"

"N-no!"

"You're an emperor. Shouldn't you see what suffering your people are going through?"

"Do you seek revenge? B-because the former emperor helped seal you away?"

"Mm..."

"I, I, I-"

"If you keep stuttering like that, I might tear your mouth apart."

"... If you hate my father, why not smash his grave and burn his corpse?"

"Wow! He's still your father, isn't he? You're openly telling me to desecrate his corpse?"

"The living have to live! The former emperor must be burning in hell-"

"Sorry, but I don't believe in an afterlife. The Fire Cult's god? Just an incredibly powerful demon."

"..."

"What can I do to that dead emperor bastard? I've given up on him. Death let him escape my hands. But you're still here, aren't you?"

"Hic!"

"Don't worry. I'll keep you firmly in my grasp. For a very... long time. Let's have fun together. So-"

Just as I wished I would pass out from the suffocating fear, the Phantom Demon suddenly tilted his head and stood.

"Oh? My benefactor is here?"

Benefactor?

"The one who freed me from that damned prison on Mount Cheonjang is here!"

What bastard had freed the Phantom Demon?

The Phantom Demon smiled brightly and walked toward someone I could barely see.

I...

I wanted to rest now.

If there was a god in heaven, I begged for rest. Please, just let me rest.

That was why I could smile when golden lightning, as though it would burn the entire world, appeared in the sky.

At last, I knew the time had come for me to rest in peace...

This was my final memory.

--- Rumble!

* * *

The moment the hand pointed to midnight, the girl realized it.

Using the Time Lender's power to summon her own past was fundamentally different from summoning another person.

Her old body, mind, soul, memories, and power, or perhaps the entirety formed by all of them mixed together, overlaid the present.

Having regained her purity, the girl saw another future she had once possessed, or one that was yet to come.

She saw herself joining the Management Bureau after losing her friends in the Christmas Nightmare. She saw the endless secrets of the world she learned after becoming an agent, and the countless decisions she had made along the way.

The girl who had returned by turning back time saw the pure possibility she had lost.

She saw herself joining the hotel with someone's help before she lost her friends, and companions who had forged an ideal relationship with the existence known as her daughter.

At the end of it all, Mi-ro awakened.

At the same time, a mysterious vision filled her sight.

A robed woman pressed down on Mi-ro with an overwhelming presence.

"It's been a long time."

"..."

"Now it seems I have received a different blessing. But when I recorded myself in the Time Lender, my blessing was Justice."

"Do not dare speak the word Justice with that mouth. It is self-righteousness and violence."

"I remember having this discussion quite a few times. Are we doing it again?"

"... Ah."

A golden wave descended from the sky.

Mi-ro found that power familiar and unfamiliar at once.

It was familiar to one of the two awkwardly merged girls, but the other had never experienced it before.

Then a flustered voice rang out.

"This is? The First Apostle's power? I definitely killed the First Apostle just a few days ago! What the hell are you-"

"... I..."

"What?"

"I have destroyed countless vermin like you."

Feeling an intense pressure, the Phantom Demon unconsciously took a step back.

"This time will be no different."

The golden tide of Mi-ro's Justice surged skyward like waves.

At that moment, the Phantom Demon used the finest response he had learned through his long clashes with the Fire Cult's First Apostle.

He immediately retreated and hid among the innocent people within the walls.

He did not simply hide one body he controlled. He split his spiritual body itself and seeped into the terrified civilians.

Mi-ro thought it was a fairly effective response.

Elena, for example, would not have been able to indiscriminately harm innocent citizens whose bodies had been taken by a demon.

Even a superhero with the righteous character seen in movies might have been completely helpless in this situation.

Why?

Because their justice was the universally valid morality of humanity.

‘Better to let ten criminals go than punish one innocent person.’

Was that not one ideal humanity had reached after long consideration?

...

Here, there was another, different justice.

‘Even if ten innocent people must burn, do not let one corrupt person escape.’

The ignorant would see that logic not as justice, but as madness and violence.

That was not so.

In fact, it was a logic humanity knew very well.

It was simply the logic of quarantine rather than law.

When foot-and-mouth disease breaks out in a certain area, all the pigs and cattle there must die.

Whether each individual had committed a crime, or whether they had even been infected, was not taken into consideration.

They had to die to save more livestock, and ultimately, humanity.

Mi-ro believed that the Management Bureau's conviction was the same.

The demons, ghosts, and monsters spreading among people, collectively called Chaos Disasters, were similar to a great epidemic.

Not because they considered humans insignificant, but because they wanted to protect humanity.

Their loyalty was not to individual humans, but to humanity as a whole.

That was why Mi-ro could sentence all 37,892 people within the walls to death without the slightest hesitation.

* * *

Lightning struck.

A single blow.

The power of judgment Mi-ro had created crushed the entire wall.

A vast silence soon descended over it all.

The people trapped in iron cages awaiting death, those impaled on skewers and groaning in pain, even the young emperor hanging from a pole and trembling in terror.

Equal rest had come to them all.

The next moment, the silence broke.

A man burst through the pulverized rubble, radiating blue energy.

His body was unbelievably huge and sturdy.

Even the burns covering his body were regenerating in real time.

"That's Cha Jin-cheol's body? Its durability is incredible."

Three more people had survived by using Cha Jin-cheol's body as a shield.

They were all the Phantom Demon's puppets, though, so whether they had truly survived was another matter.

"Y-you, you, you crazy bastard! Do you have any idea how many people you just killed?"

"As many as necessary."

The calm answer left the Phantom Demon speechless for a moment.

"No... You, you, you-"

"You can't protect humanity if you're afraid of sacrifice."

"You bastard! Even if I added up every person I've killed over centuries, it wouldn't come close to the number you just killed!"

"A human life is lighter than a feather..."

"Please have some love for humanity, you son of a bitch!"

Mi-ro suddenly realized that she had no power of Justice left.

She must have exhausted all the power her Sponsor had granted her when she created the lightning.

My Sponsor also seemed to have grown sick of me after what had just happened.

It did not matter.

The power of Justice was only one part of Mi-ro's strength.

Blood Flow accelerated.

The boiling power of Old Blood granted her superhuman physical strength.

Next, a pitch-black spear appeared in midair.

The Spear of Mortality awoke and began pouring out endless hatred for the living.

Finally, the hand of the Time Lender began to tremble strangely.

At that sight, the Phantom Demon thought for the first time that today might be the end of his long life.

The next moment, Mi-ro kicked off the ground and flew forward.

The Phantom Demon, in contrast, pulled all his puppets back and pressed his palms together.

As three puppets muttered ominous words and formed hand seals, their bodies twisted like clay and merged into one.

Three heads, six arms, and six legs.

It was no longer human, but a monster unlike any in this world. It was no different from the incarnation of an Asura summoned by the Phantom Demon.

The Asura charged Mi-ro head-on.

At the same time, the Phantom Demon moved Cha Jin-cheol's body into position behind her.

He was confident in this assault.

The Asura he had summoned by pouring in more than half his strength was a peerless monster, unmatched throughout the ages, that not even Yi Ja-seong or Jo Won-hong could handle.

That was not all.

The Big Dipper Grand General positioned behind her was, the Phantom Demon would swear, the martial artist born with the greatest physical body in human history.

"Graaaaaah!"

A lion's roar that shook heaven and earth burst from the Asura's mouth.

Its power would rupture a human's eardrums and melt their corneas, even if they were a master!

Yet the Phantom Demon could only doubt his own eyes at the strange sight before him.

‘What in the world?’

Mi-ro's body suddenly seemed to blur, then she escaped the lion's roar as if nothing had happened.

The Asura vented even greater fury at Mi-ro.

In an instant-

The Asura's six hands blocked every direction available to Mi-ro.

At the same time, the massive spear in the Big Dipper Grand General's hand blocked even her retreat.

Not even the greatest master under heaven could imitate such an assault, given the structure of the human body, nor was there any way to block it.

Even Yi Ja-seong, the foremost expert in close combat, would have been the same.

The Phantom Demon could be certain because he himself had defeated Yi Ja-seong.

Then, in a place beyond the Phantom Demon's sight, the second hand of the pocket watch in Mi-ro's embrace trembled.

Mi-ro's body vanished from that temporal layer.

The Asura's six weapons and the Big Dipper Grand General's spear cut through empty air.

Even a sword swung by an invincible master could not cut down an enemy who did not exist.

It was the same method she had used to evade the lion's roar.

An utterly incomprehensible, bizarre movement. No, could it even be called movement?

How could vanishing from the world and reappearing be some kind of footwork or martial art?

It would have been easier to understand if she had sent the massive Asura flying with absurd strength, or endured its assault with ridiculous durability.

"What kind of power is this?!"

Unable to bear it any longer, the Phantom Demon shouted.

Instead of answering, Mi-ro thrust out her pitch-black spear.

Infinite malice surged.

Infinite hatred for all living things pierced the Asura's enormous body.

"Kwaaaah!"

A child's scream rang from the Asura's mouth.

The demonic beast, formed from three sacrifices and most of the power the Phantom Demon had accumulated over thousands of years, began to collapse like ice melting in boiling water.

"Guh!"

It tore apart.

It crumbled.

It vanished.

What that ominous spear had destroyed was not only the monster called Asura and the Phantom Demon's power contained within it.

It had destroyed something more fundamental.

The Phantom Demon's soul itself dwelling within the Asura, and part of the source of his immortality.

The Phantom Demon remembered the distant past.

It was a memory from so long ago that even he had forgotten it. No, a memory he had believed he had forgotten.

The emotions from when he, too, had been a lowly mortal.

Fear and despair.

Pain and sorrow.