WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 133: Raising Children
──────
Smack!
I was the first to find and pick up one of the six syringes scattered around.
Once trapped in a Labyrinth, there was no such thing as yielding.
So the “concessions” I had made to Yu Mi-rae until now could only be called a deception less meaningful than child’s play.
Or perhaps they had been postponements of death, no, of killing.
I no longer understood what the concessions Yu Mi-rae had made to me meant, either.
Was it simply the feeling of enjoying a game with extra hearts left?
Even though Yu Mi-rae was not even a playable character with those hearts, but only an NPC whose memories reset completely with that character’s death?
“I... understand.”
The syringe in my hand trembled, unable to pierce Yu Mi-rae’s skin.
Apparently Yu Mi-rae had not lied about having no feeling in the right arm. Gripping my wrist with the left hand as if to twist it, Yu Mi-rae drove a leg hard into my inner thigh.
Thud!
I nearly dropped the syringe.
“So I’ve never won?”
“No.”
I lunged without hesitation.
“And I’ve never lost, either.”
Yu Mi-rae did not dodge.
I couldn’t be fooled.
Yu Mi-rae was ready.
“Every time... I inhaled the gas and died. The time ran out.”
Pretending to swing the syringe, I raised my right arm high and drove my left fist upward.
Crack!
That white face snapped up.
“Ah.”
Then it sprang back into place and faced me head-on again.
Damn it.
It hadn’t connected properly.
I had meant to knock Yu Mi-rae unconscious with a blow to the jaw.
In that brief instant, Yu Mi-rae had pulled back just enough to avoid it.
Snap!
Retreating quickly, Yu Mi-rae kicked another syringe off the floor with the tip of a shoe and caught it out of the air.
Then Yu Mi-rae darted back into my arms.
Thunk.
“Ah, ngh...”
A burning heat spread through my abdomen.
Crunch!
The moment I twisted Yu Mi-rae’s wrist, the 100 cc syringe fell to the floor.
Thankfully, it hadn’t all been injected.
Now it was my turn.
“Ha...”
At some point, even quiet speech died away.
Ragged breathing. Clothes brushing together. Skin colliding, being pierced, tearing apart. Bones breaking. Blood and sweat falling.
Only the sounds of trying to take one another’s lives could be heard.
Beep, beep, beep!
Hiss...
“Mmph, urgh...”
“Ah. Ngh...”
And, in the end, only the sound of life being taken away...
* * *
“If it were possible to turn back time, what would you do, Seon Yu-han?”
I didn’t know.
Maybe I should send Yu Mi-rae to the Sales and Marketing Division first, then wait for Yun Geon-min and go in with him this time.
It seemed that the time I entered the Sales and Marketing Division and the people in the office affected the “sale.”
Whenever I entered with Yu Mi-rae, we were sold to Bleep-Bleep and trapped in the maze without fail. It might be better to leave an appropriate gap in time and be sold to a different “owner.”
I had never taken Yun Geon-min with me before, so it was worth checking.
Perhaps waiting would pay off.
“Seon Yu-han?”
Looking into the Interview Administrator’s somewhat vacant yet steadfast eyes, I remembered eyes entirely unlike them.
“What do you want to do with me, Representative?”
At the beginning, when Yu Mi-rae first asked which time this was, I had asked that in return.
What did Yu Mi-rae want to do upon meeting someone who had experienced time regression?
“What do I want to do? Hmm.”
Yu Mi-rae’s answer was simple.
“I have something to ask. One thing. Or three? Four? Anyway.”
There were some questions to ask.
It was almost absurdly modest.
Unlike Yu Hyun-jae’s plan to experiment on me, even if it meant locking me in the Labyrinth again.
“What questions?”
“Hm? Why would I tell you that now?”
“What? Then when are you going to ask?”
“When you get out. Then.”
For some reason, those words, which took my escape for granted, left me speechless.
I remembered Yu Hyun-jae’s calm response when I said I had interviewed with Uiwi Guild today.
“Did it go well? I hope it did.”
Those people really had screws loose.
Maybe that was why.
Their words lodged in my memory and never came loose.
* * *
“Really? Then how many times have we had this conversation?”
“Twenty times.”
Yu Mi-rae’s delighted laughter continued, then abruptly stopped.
“Seon Yu-han.”
An endlessly gentle voice, like one used to soothe a child.
A boundary drawn with my name.
I felt as though that was cheating.
In a world where only rules held any meaning.
“Why are you doing this here, like an idiot?”
I knew what Yu Mi-rae meant.
“You said it yourself. We aren’t close.”
Yu Mi-rae knew why I was doing this.
“Find another way.”
“But if I do...”
If that path truly led to escape.
“You will probably be dead by then, Representative.”
Yu Mi-rae would certainly die someday.
And I had the will to walk that path.
“So? People die.”
Maybe I wanted to kill Yu Mi-rae.
Or perhaps.
“You said there was something you wanted to ask me. That you would ask once we got out of the Labyrinth.”
Maybe I wanted us to get out alive together.
Those two desires could coexist. They were not even contradictory.
Save Yu Mi-rae if I could.
If I couldn’t, accept death. Even if I had to stain my own hands.
“I don’t remember anything like that.”
“You know what I mean...”
My face suddenly snapped sideways with a thud.
My left cheekbone throbbed.
“Don’t act like you know everything!”
Clear tears streamed from Yu Mi-rae’s left eye, thin blood from the right.
“What do you know! You don’t know. You don’t know anything... anything at all!”
Yes. I didn’t know.
I didn’t know what had made Yu Mi-rae so angry and sad again.
Yu Mi-rae hadn’t even cried when I stitched those eyelids shut with a needle.
You should have cried then, at least.
It was not pleasant to see a companion so accustomed to physical pain that they knew how to separate their mind from their body, or to unknowingly prod another person’s invisible wound and make it ache.
“Representative.”
I barely managed to restrain Yu Mi-rae, who was struggling wildly, and calm them down.
“Next time, I’ll try another way. So let’s stop this now... and move on. To the next room.”
And so, Yu Mi-rae and I moved forward again.
Down a path whose end I already knew.
* * *
“If it were possible to turn back time, what would you do, Seon Yu-han?”
This time, I would wait until Yun Geon-min was released, too.
* * *
“Isn’t that woman a total psycho?”
The moment Yu Mi-rae left the Legal Affairs Office alone, Yun Geon-min complained.
“Don’t say that...!”
Hyeon Je-won cried out beside him.
Unexpectedly, Hyeon Je-won had not followed Yu Mi-rae out.
When I said that I, having also received a not-guilty verdict, would remain here, Hyeon Je-won watched Yu Mi-rae’s reaction and said they would stay as well.
“Representative Mi-rae, you go on ahead...”
After all, Hyeon Je-won had never wanted to leave Kim Hee-sook and Yun Geon-min behind.
Though separate from that, Hyeon Je-won seemed somewhat lacking in personal affection for them.
“It is true that Representative Mi-rae has no reason to wait for either of you...!”
“Even so, is it normal to just leave like that? How can someone be so selfish...”
“Yun Geon-min.”
Yun Geon-min blinked and looked at me.
“Does it look like I’m staying here because I’m ‘normal’?”
“...Huh?”
“I won’t leave anyone behind and go on, so stop it.”
Only then did Yun Geon-min’s mouth, which had been running on about Yu Mi-rae’s choice, close.
“Get some sleep, all of you. We don’t know what we’ll find upstairs.”
* * *
An hour passed in an odd silence.
Kim Hee-sook, Yun Geon-min, Hyeon Je-won, and I left the Legal Affairs Office together for the first time and opened the door to the Sales and Marketing Team office.
“...Representative Mi-rae?”
“Damn it...”
“Oh no, how could this...”
Representative Yu Mi-rae remained there as a pale corpse, with no obvious wounds, just as when I had first seen Yu Mi-rae in that white room.
It seemed Yu Mi-rae had been sold alone to some entity other than Bleep-Bleep and died.
From the contents of the notes, that maze prison had clearly been designed with at least two participants in mind.
“What the hell happened here...?”
Yun Geon-min looked anxiously around the white room.
“Is there something here...? There’s only us.”
Yes. There was only us.
This time, Chae Jae-ha was not here.
Not even the corpse.
Every time I entered this place, I would start in surprise and look over at him.
Would one of the “owners” not discard even a dead body?
...They could at least return the corpse. Then there could be a funeral.
I preferred seeing Chae Jae-ha dead in front of me to knowing he was dead somewhere out of sight.
“Wh-what, what do we do...? Representative Mi-rae... why... What do we do? I, I should have come with...”
“Hyeon Je-won, breathe. Look at me, slowly. One, two...”
The moment the third breath left.
A fucking unfamiliar ceiling came into view.
* * *
I cautiously sat up and climbed out of bed.
Bunk beds. Four lockers.
It looked like a shabby shared dormitory room.
I had been lying on the lower bunk.
No wonder the ceiling had seemed so strangely close.
“Mmph...?”
“Where are we...?”
Kim Hee-sook and Hyeon Je-won sat up in the bunk bed opposite mine.
Thud.
“What the hell, ah, damn...”
Yun Geon-min, who had been in the upper bunk above me, tried to sit up in a hurry, hit his head on the ceiling, and climbed down.
“What is this place supposed to be...? Huh? Why are our clothes like this?”
“Our clothes have all changed...!”
“Don’t these look like prison uniforms...? And the numbers, too...”
All of us had been dressed in plain ivory-colored uniforms, each with a three-digit number written on the chest.
Yun Geon-min was 545.
I was 546.
Kim Hee-sook was 555.
Hyeon Je-won was 756.
“I don’t know for sure, but I think we were all sold together...”
As I read the numbers one by one, an uneasy feeling came over me, and I faltered without realizing it.
The locker nameplates also bore numbers instead of names.
“Sold...?”
“Yes. This is the Sales and Marketing Division. Maybe we’re the merchandise...”
Something scratched at my mind.
The black numbers kept bothering me like insect legs left in my mouth.
Clunk.
I hurriedly opened the leftmost locker, marked “545.”
“Why? Is something in there?”
A necklace hung inside.
It was a metal identification tag necklace, slightly larger than average.
Clatter.
The moment I read the words engraved on it, I stopped breathing for a moment.
―――――――――――――――
Individual Number｜545
Rescue Location｜Jaelae Building, 12F Human Resources Team
Special Notes｜A timid, aggressive, simple, and coy child
Health Status｜Health screening passed, meal provided (see: labtube.com)
―――――――――――――――
I had seen that number before.
A long time ago.
“Oh! The anonymous buyer has purchased 545.”
At the arcade.
Footnotes:
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