WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

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◈ How to Die in the Office Labyrinth ◈

Chapter 67: A Hungry Hamster Is Better Than a Satisfied Socrates

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Clunk.

I was still staring at the arcade machine, not even able to meet Yu Hyun-jae's eyes.

Clatter.

"Oh, a coin's coming out!"

A familiar metallic sound rattled from inside the machine, and something gold shot out of the coin slot.

"Ah..."

"Congratulations. Yu Hyun-jae-nim, you've obtained a Fragment of Life."

It wasn't one coin.

It was a wedge-shaped fragment of a gold coin.

"Looks like exactly one-quarter of one."

Yu Hyun-jae murmured, examining the small shard.

"If you'd answered more correctly, would it have been bigger? Five questions right and you get one-quarter, so..."

If that logic held, you'd need to answer twenty questions correctly to complete a single gold coin.

Impossible. Getting twenty answers right in twenty-one seconds is physically impossible. Even if you dragged in some genius who could answer any question, they still couldn't do it. Reading a question and voicing an answer out loud takes time.

"But does this one have no penalty...?"

Hwang Ju-yeon asked quietly, almost to herself.

The machine showed no reaction, and the host wasn't doing anything either.

Did the oracle itself count as the penalty being carried out?

"Wait, then maybe I should've played this one too. What about you, unni? What if you played this? It seems like the safest bet."

"Hmm... but the questions looked really tricky. Honestly, I think I'd get the first one wrong."

The freelance magician rubbed the back of her neck, a little sheepish.

"There might also be a system where you get penalized for not answering a single question correctly..." Lee Jin-su said quietly, and Hwang Ju-yeon nodded.

"Right. That's what I was worried about."

While Hwang Ju-yeon fell back into deliberation, I was still thinking about Project Delphi.

If I were to play Project Delphi.

What oracle would be given to me?

Would a proper oracle even come out?

Even knowing that whatever answers you gave, correct or wrong, the first letters combined to form the oracle?

If the oracle still completed itself even when you deliberately twisted your answers in resistance...

That would mean there was truly no changing that future.

It would mean it had foreseen even how I would twist my answers.

In that case, not attempting it at all might be the wisest move.

Once I heard my future, I'd bind myself to it.

Even if the oracle had no real credibility and was nothing more than an indiscriminate curse with roughly the same content for everyone.

But...

"I'll just go with this one."

While I was mulling it over, Hwang Ju-yeon had apparently finished her deliberations. She pulled out a board game box.

It was a shorter box than the True Stories one, about the size that would fit a standard deck of poker cards with a little room to spare.

[Idle Hamster]

The name sounded more suited to a mobile game than a board game.

"It seems to use poker hands in an unusual way. I've at least played some poker before."

The freelance magician, who was comfortable with cards, tapped the description on the back of the box.

"Hwang Ju-yeon-nim. Would you like to play Idle Hamster?"

"Yes. Let's do it."

The host guided Hwang Ju-yeon to the table and sat down across from her.

"Let me explain briefly."

Hosoo opened the box and took out the cards.

Inside were two decks. One was a standard poker deck, and the other had hamsters printed on it. The hamster card deck was considerably thinner.

| #845 |

Each hamster card had one hamster drawn on its face, and each looked slightly different from the rest.

| Trait: 845 has black fur with white patches mixed in like a mottled pattern. Has a wary personality. |

Individual traits were written out for each hamster separately. From the description, the number printed below each hamster appeared to be its individual identification number.

"Idle Hamster is a game about raising these little ones well and selling as many as possible."

"Oh...? You have to sell them?"

Hwang Ju-yeon tilted her head, and the host offered the same faint smile as always.

"Yes. What would be the point of raising them otherwise? Why raise them at all if not to sell? For reference, these little ones are better suited as pets than as food."

Of course, there was no way a Labyrinth game would be straightforward.

"What Hwang Ju-yeon-nim needs to do is feed these little ones well, groom them well, and tame them well. Simple enough, yes?"

Hosoo laid two cards face-down on the table, then drew six more and dealt three to each of them.

"Hwang Ju-yeon-nim and I will each use our three cards plus the two shared cards on the table, five total, to compare hands and determine the winner. Naturally, the stronger hand wins."

The hand rankings followed Texas Hold'em, as listed on the back of the box.

"So there's no... betting? No drawing extra cards, anything like that?"

"No, none of that."

No betting, no drawing. Cards were dealt and immediately revealed to determine the winner. Pure luck.

"We'll call the process of comparing hands to determine the outcome a negotiation. Once a negotiation begins, Hwang Ju-yeon-nim checks her hand and must choose one of the little ones from the breeding pen and place it in the cage."

The host placed the hamster card that had been sitting on top of the hamster deck, the breeding pen, next to the two shared cards.

At that, a white rectangular border appeared around the card. Like a cage.

| #845 |

"And if Hwang Ju-yeon-nim wins the negotiation, you may perform one of three actions on this little one."

Feed, Groom, Tame.

Feeding lowered the Hunger stat. Grooming raised the Prettiness stat. Taming raised the Obedience stat.

"A little one who isn't fed well will eat the others. One who isn't groomed well won't sell. One who isn't tamed well gets abandoned by its owner."

The piano teacher and freelance magician's brow furrowed slightly.

"What happens if you lose the negotiation?"

"I'll immediately take that little one and put it in the market. I'm the dealer in this game of Idle Hamster, after all."

Game dealer and hamster dealer, then.

"The pretty ones will sell quickly. Unsold inventory that sits too long naturally must be disposed of."

There was a certain talent for making people uneasy with a purely imaginary game.

"All you need is for them to sell. Don't worry about the ones who get abandoned after being sold. The more little ones you sell, the larger your Fragment of Life grows."

But a game is a game.

If things came down to it, you could just give up on the Obedience stat and manage only Hunger and Prettiness.

"...So what does the Prettiness stat need to be to sell? And how low does Hunger need to stay?"

"It varies by the preferences of potential buyers. Statistically speaking, staying above 5 is advantageous. It varies by the personality of the little one. Statistically speaking, staying below 5 is advantageous."

| #845 |

The hamster card currently in the cage for the demonstration looked just about ready to sell right now.

Prettiness was above 5, and Hunger hadn't crossed 5 yet.

"But doesn't that mean the hamsters sold early are mostly at a disadvantage?"

Hwang Ju-yeon pointed out.

Hamsters with no chances to be fed, groomed, or tamed wouldn't sell properly, would they?

The host-dealer's head tilted to one side.

"I don't follow. If you don't want to sell an unprepared little one, you simply need to win the negotiation."

Various rules and mechanics aside, the short version was this: win with a higher poker hand, then distribute stats to the hamsters appropriately and sell them. That was the goal.

And it was a game decided entirely by the luck of the cards, with no particular strategy or mind games involved.

"Idle Hamster doesn't end until all the little ones in the breeding pen have been put on the market. Whether they sell well or not is another question."

Of course, the people trapped in an invasive-type Labyrinth, with odds as long as winning the lottery, were the ones who lacked luck most of all.

In that sense, a game of pure luck might actually be the hardest game of all.

"Now then, let's begin Idle Hamster. Straight into the negotiation."

The host placed the two shared cards beside the cage and dealt three cards to each of them.

"Hwang Ju-yeon-nim, please choose a little one from the breeding pen and place it in the cage."

"I'll keep this one."

| #845 |

After checking her hand, Hwang Ju-yeon set the card from the rules demonstration directly into the white cage outline without much thought.

A reasonable choice. Whether it sold now or not was fine either way.

"Shall we see the result of the negotiation."

With no card swapping or betting, once the cards were dealt and the hamster card placed in the cage, everything was revealed immediately.

Shared cards. ♠8 ♥3

Hwang Ju-yeon's hand. ♦6 ♣3 ♣10

Host's hand. ♠2 ♦J ♥9

"Hwang Ju-yeon-nim, one pair of threes. Dealer, nine High Card."

Hwang Ju-yeon had ♥3 and ♣3, a matching pair. Not a strong hand, but stronger than the dealer's High Card. A High Card meant not even making one pair.

"Hwang Ju-yeon-nim wins the negotiation."

One might wonder what difference this was from each person rolling a die and comparing numbers, but there's a real difference between dice and cards.

No matter how many times you roll a die, you can't predict what number comes next.

Cards, you can predict.

A standard deck has 52 cards. Early on, prediction is nearly impossible, but as the game goes on, you can figure out what cards remain and what hands can be made from them. Including your opponent's hand.

"What action will you take with 845?"

"Feed."

You could control which hamsters to sell now and which to hold back and keep managing.

If your hand looked like a loss, you put in the former kind. If it looked like a win, you put in the latter.

The question was whether Hwang Ju-yeon could count cards.

...She probably could, to some degree. Her, at least. Not perfectly, but some.

From what I remembered, Hwang Ju-yeon had once played poker against Doi in a life-or-death gamble and had kept it going for quite a while.

"845 looks full now."

| #845 |

The Hunger stat on the hamster card had changed.

By now, of course, nobody present was naive enough to be surprised by numbers on cards changing on their own.

"But that... I feel like the numbers will change again over time..."

Lee Jin-su muttered, more to himself than anyone, and Lee Na-hyun turned to look at him.

"Hm? What changes?"

"Oh. Um... I just have a feeling the Hunger stat will go up or the Prettiness stat will go down, things shifting around like that..."

"That does seem likely."

Leaving cards with decent starting stats untouched could cost you the whole game. A hungry hamster in the breeding pen would eventually trigger a cannibalistic tragedy among its own.

Footnotes:

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