WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

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◈ How to Die in the Office Labyrinth ◈

Chapter 78: Balance Game

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Rustle.

In the library, I reviewed the diary's records and thought about things that had "never happened."

"You...... what exactly are you?"

I'd always thought I was decent enough at reading people.

......How many lies had I walked right past without noticing?

"Ah."

In that moment, I understood.

"Y - o - u - c - a - n - n - e - v - e - r - l - e - a - v - e"

Yu Hyun-jae had understood that oracle.

He had simply pretended not to.

"How."

Every time I'd looked into those eyes that seemed to know nothing, the vague unease I couldn't quite name, that was the dissonance of knowing there was no way someone like him could fail to decode even a straightforward oracle like that.

That the lunatic shepherd, maddening as he was, had so much truth locked inside him.

And that some of that truth was terribly, grievously sad.

And that he could act as though none of it mattered.

"How can anyone do that."

I still couldn't manage it.

No matter how used to hiding things, to pretending, I became.

When I heard Aunt's voice my heart pounded like it was trying to tear itself loose, and when I heard my brother's voice my lungs seized up like they were shutting down.

If I had received an oracle like that, I never could have done what he did.

Even if I dismissed it as a Labyrinth's lie, my face would have gone rigid.

......When had he gotten like that, anyway?

Something in me felt, all of a sudden, like too much time had passed.

Since the days when the concept of a "Labyrinth" was nothing more than a space in myth.

Swish.

I left the library, the librarian's body behind me.

After that, I died exactly three more times before filling out the seven again and reaching the Future Arcade.

Lucky, all things considered.

* * *

"Welcome, Seon Yu-han-nim, Yu Hyun-jae-nim, Lee Na-hyun-nim, Lee Jin-su-nim, Jeong Ji-ho-nim, Chae Jae-ha-nim, and Hwang Ju-yeon-nim. I'm the host. Please call me Hosoo."

"Oh! This one is real too? So what game should we start with? Yu-han-nim, what did it say over there?"

Lee Na-hyun pointed at the reddish-brown notebook in my hand.

Since coming back after being slaughtered because of the shepherd, I had been showing the diary to the group.

Up until then, I had kept it hidden because I worried the conspiracy-theorist co-representative of Uiwi Guild might begin to suspect that a time-looper could exist in this Labyrinth.

Turned out to be pointless.

"Let's set it on the table and look at it together."

I opened the diary and set it down, glancing around at the group.

Being careful not to let my gaze linger on Yu Hyun-jae any longer than necessary.

"Seon Yu-han-ssi. You haven't been experiencing time regression, have you?"

That man had suspected me even without knowing the diary existed.

Picking up the underground parking lot's rules quickly, clearing Neosoft's Happyland game in one go, things like that must have been the clues.

I had been careful to come across as someone who simply had good luck and good instincts, but apparently that wasn't quite enough to rule out the possibility entirely.

"You look like someone who's living because they can't die. Seon Yu-han-ssi."

......My unconscious attitude was apparently a problem too.

And now, on top of everything, if I also cleared all the arcade games without any trouble?

That was basically advertising myself as someone who'd looped.

In that case, it was better to just be the person who'd lucked into an artifact at Chaekbang Ollae.

[......Fu-t-u- ◈ A-r-c-a-d-e......]

At least this diary, which "sustains natural damage during its special delivery process," bore none of my handwriting.

Any part that might have given the impression of being written by a person, I had torn out and rewritten.

"I think we should start with this game. Everyone memorize the answers in advance."

I went over to the board game shelf and pulled out a small box.

[True Stories | True Stories]

The number of problems in True Stories with answers written in the diary was twenty.

Getting all twenty-one correct earned a full one coin of "Life."

Given that True Stories always presented the same problems in the same order no matter who played, it was the perfect game for collecting multiple gold coins.

We wouldn't get all seven, of course.

A seven-year-old could hardly be expected to memorize every answer.

Writing the answers in a notebook only went so far.

"But why isn't the twenty-first problem written down here? That one's the last piece."

Why?

Because in the three loops before this, I had never made it this far.

So I had to solve it myself this time.

"I'm not sure...... I don't really know. Maybe the diary means for us to at least try that one. It's the last question, after all."

"I mean, fair enough. It is a Labyrinth artifact, so it's not like it's unconditionally on our side, right? The other descriptions were kind of vague and weird in places anyway."

Good. It seems I wrote it well enough. Not too much like a person.

"May I be the one to solve it?"

"Whoa, Yu-han-nim, you already have them all memorized?"

"Yes. Short-term memorization is something I manage well enough."

They had moved into long-term memory a while back.

"Which is also why we should hurry. I'll forget them quickly."

"But have you played this kind of thing before? The turtle soup game?"

"Yes."

Probably more than enough.

"Seon Yu-han-nim. Would you like to play True Stories?"

"Sure."

And so, unanimously, I became the one to solve it.

From their perspective, none of them wanted to take the risk of tackling an unknown problem themselves.

"Let me explain the rules briefly."

I let the host handle the rules explanation on his own and checked that the bandage on my right hand was sitting properly.

Coming out of Happyland, I had lost a bit of my ring finger.

Not much, just the tip of it, the kind of clean bite a small animal might take, right up to the nail.

"......Please note, by the way, that every case is based on a true story."

It hurt. But this much was, well.

"Where's the fun if you already know all the answers?"

What?

I snapped my eyes to the host's face.

He wasn't going to change the problems on me now, was he?

"Where's the fun if you already know all the answers? Where's the fun if you already know all the answers? Where's the fun if you already know all the answers?"

"It's plenty fun."

"Seon Yu-han-nim."

Maybe I pushed too far.

I was watching Hosoo carefully, because his voice had sounded a little flatter than usual, when the scene that followed hit me like a blow to the back of the head.

"Fun, there is -none. To know -everything...... is a sad -thing."

A strange, broken cadence, as though the sentences had never been stored inside him and he was splitting apart phrases he did have and piecing them together to produce something new.

His left eye spinning in its socket, shedding tears, the way you might look at something pitiful and dear.

"You......"

I was Hosoo's little lamb.

In that moment, at least.

"What are you -"

"- Now, the first case!"

The host, back to his cheerful self, held out the first card.

[Problem: A man opened a refrigerator door, then closed it again. A few minutes later, the man was dead. What happened? (Questions remaining: 21)]

The problem hadn't changed.

The rattling broken-machine act had just been his own brand of petulance. A reminder not to play the game joylessly.

"Correct."

And so I worked through all twenty cases without asking a single question.

"Now, the twenty-first case!"

[Problem: A woman and a man died. What happened? (Questions remaining: 21)]

"Ha."

"Wait, why is the difficulty like that...... That's way too broad."

You have to be kidding.

What kind of cheap, dirty question is this.

The card didn't even have a picture on it.

The space where there should have been an illustration was completely blank, and the problem sat alone beneath it, written out.

Even for a final question, this was something else.

"Are the woman and the man in a Labyrinth?"

Hosoo smiled brightly.

"Yes."

A Labyrinth as the setting made it harder.

In a Labyrinth, you had to take all manner of bizarre phenomena and monsters in stride, because anything could happen. Which Labyrinth it was could open up endless possibilities.

Contact-type Labyrinths followed broadly similar patterns, so I could make rough guesses, but still.

"Did both of them die for breaking a rule of the Labyrinth?"

Two people meant I had to check whether they had died for different reasons.

I couldn't rule out death at human hands, either.

The story might use a Labyrinth as its backdrop while the actual cause of death was another person.

"No."

"Did only one of them die for breaking a rule?"

"Yes."

Then the other one had died for reasons unrelated to the Labyrinth's rules, whether by murder, suicide, or accident.

[Problem: A woman and a man died. What happened? (Questions remaining: 18)]

"Was the woman the one who died for breaking a rule?"

"No."

So it was the man who had broken a rule and died.

The woman was something different.

"Then, was the woman murdered?"

Hosoo smiled.

"Yes."

"Was she murdered by this man?"

"No."

I probably didn't need to identify the unknown third-party killer.

The previous twenty questions had only required getting the general circumstances right.

[Problem: A woman and a man died. What happened? (Questions remaining: 15)]

Was this even solvable in fifteen questions? Including the reason the rule-breaking man had died?

If it was unrelated to the Singyae Daily's articles, I had no choice but to feel my way through.

Was there any clue I was missing?

Was there something similar in what I already knew?

A Labyrinth......

For some reason, a murdered woman, a man who died for breaking the Labyrinth's rules......

What kind of relationship did these two have......

Friends? Colleagues? Strangers? Lovers? Family? A married couple......?

"Ah."

Could it be.

"What were her last words?"

"......I'm waiting. I'll be right back."

I still didn't know.

"Is this Labyrinth one that appeared ten years ago?"

How she had died.

I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

I had to cremate her not knowing. Just not knowing.

Everyone said it must have been an accident, or that those things had gotten to her.

But we had considered another possibility.

The possibility that some person had killed her. Whether on purpose or by mistake.

Which kind of death was the better death?

Dying by accident? Killed by the Labyrinth? Killed by a person?

I had my own answer, and that answer hadn't changed.

I didn't know what Uncle and my brother would think of it.

But I wanted her to have been murdered. By a person.

At least that was something I could understand.

Accidents and Labyrinths are essentially the same phenomenon.

They hold no malice.

And so they cannot be understood.

That's why I......

[Problem: A woman and a man died. What happened? (Questions remaining: 15)]

I wanted the woman in this problem to be her.

"......"

Time moved slowly.

The host smiled for just a brief moment, letting the pause stretch, and then opened his mouth.

Footnotes:

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