WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

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◈ How to Die in the Office Labyrinth ◈

Chapter 79: As Then, So Now

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"No."

...So that's a no.

I couldn't tell whether what I felt in that moment was disappointment or relief.

In the end, I would have to go on living without ever knowing why she died. Offering up a prayer I couldn't even confess aloud, begging that a person had been the one who killed her.

At least with Uncle, I know the reason he died.

[Problem: A woman and a man are dead. What happened? (Questions remaining: 14)]

Fourteen questions to piece together how two unidentified people ended up dead.

"Was the woman killed on impulse?"

Inside a Labyrinth, emotions build and churn over the smallest things. And a space where society's laws physically cannot reach has a way of stoking people's worst impulses.

"No."

Premeditated murder, then?

That's unusual.

A planned killing implies there was some meaningful relationship between victim and perpetrator, and it says something about a killer who was thinking ahead even while trapped in a Labyrinth.

"Did the perpetrator who killed the woman believe they could get out of that Labyrinth?"

It was possible they had deliberately brought the woman into the Labyrinth to commit the murder, taking advantage of the fact that crimes inside a Labyrinth are notoriously difficult to prosecute.

It wasn't just urban legend, either. Cases like that had happened, rarely but really. Though that was before the current system had fully taken hold, when even Red Thread agents, whose livelihood depended on resolving contact-type Labyrinths, had to go through their guilds as intermediaries and negotiate with the Labyrinth Management Bureau just to enter.

"......"

Silence from the host.

Strange.

The setting is a Labyrinth, so why would that question be irrelevant to solving the problem? It makes no sense.

The most pressing question for anyone trapped in a Labyrinth is whether or not they can get out. That uncertainty is what breaks people. Violence, suicide, murder, mass slaughter... all of it, every kind of brutality and suffering, was a secondary problem branching from that one central question.

"Wait... did the perpetrator not even know they were inside a Labyrinth?"

The host's mouth began to open, slowly. Wide enough to see the red of their uvula.

"Yes!"

"How is that..."

How is that even possible?

A person with the cognitive capacity to plan a murder, and yet completely unaware they were trapped in a Labyrinth?

Because it was an invasive-type? Would that be enough to explain it?

Was this from the early days, when people still barely understood what Labyrinths were?

But even then... could someone really not know?

Still, the premeditated nature of the killing made sense now. Not knowing they were in a Labyrinth, they would have needed a plan to protect themselves afterward.

"Did the woman also not know she was inside a Labyrinth?"

"No."

Stranger and stranger.

The one who was killed knew. The one who killed didn't.

I had to dig deeper into the circumstances of their deaths with that in mind.

...What would I have done, if I were in the woman's position?

Trapped in a Labyrinth, with someone nearby who had no idea they were trapped.

What would I need to do? What would I need?

And what could I have possibly done to make some unknown perpetrator want me dead?

"Did the woman threaten the perpetrator first?"

The host smiled at that.

"Yes."

Supplies, weapons, information. Those were the only things that mattered in a Labyrinth. And sometimes all three were the same thing.

There were many ways to get your hands on those survival essentials, but the kind of action that gets you killed in return is almost always a threat. Not a physical one, though.

The other party didn't know they were in a Labyrinth. Hard to believe, but true. Which meant, as far as they were concerned, calling the police was always an option. Or at least, that was what they believed.

To keep the information advantage, the woman would have needed to preserve that belief. So the pressure she applied would have been psychological.

[Problem: A woman and a man are dead. What happened? (Questions remaining: 9)]

Planned murder implies she had something truly damning on them, enough to extort them, something so cleverly crafted that the other party couldn't dare go to the police.

And at that level of leverage, pure survival, food and shelter, probably wasn't the goal.

Weapons or information. That was what the woman wanted. The kind that couldn't be reached through ordinary channels, something powerful enough that a person would go as far as murder to protect it.

"Did the perpetrator who killed the woman hold a high socio-political position?"

"Yes."

So that was right.

"The woman threatened the perpetrator to get access to a weapon or information they possessed, and was killed because of it?"

Hosoo's lips curled up at the corners.

"Yes."

Good enough. The woman's side of things was mostly sorted.

[Problem: A woman and a man are dead. What happened? (Questions remaining: 7)]

Now I needed to figure out which rule the man had broken.

"Was the man aware of the rule he broke?"

"Yes."

It wasn't suicide, so knowing the rule and still breaking it meant it wasn't something he could control.

Anomalies that triggered without warning, monsters fast enough that escape was impossible, conditions that couldn't be met no matter how hard you tried. Plenty of possibilities.

"Did the man break the rule by accident?"

"No."

Not an accident, then, which meant it wasn't the kind of violation he had any power to prevent.

"Did the man fail to keep someone alive, and die because he couldn't satisfy that condition?"

Like, for instance, the woman from the problem dying before he could meet it.

"......"

The host fell silent, still wearing that unreadable smile.

Unsatisfying, but I moved on. This wasn't the time to fixate on things that wouldn't help me reach the answer.

[Problem: A woman and a man are dead. What happened? (Questions remaining: 4)]

"Did the man die because of something with no physical form?"

"......"

What does that silence mean?

"Did the man die because of something or someone that could be physically touched?"

"......"

Silence again.

Was the manner of the man's death simply not important?

But how was I supposed to figure out what rule he broke without knowing how he died?

"...Could it be that the rule itself, the one that got the man killed... that breaking it means death, no matter what?"

Hosoo finally smiled, bright and clear.

"Yes."

A rule where breaking it means dying, by any means.

That meant wherever the man had been inside that Labyrinth at the time, something in that space would have killed him.

Wherever he was, however it happened, a death that would find him regardless...

What kind of rule could do that?

Even just within this Jaelae Building Labyrinth, every floor had its own completely different set of conditions and rules. I had never once seen the same monster appear across multiple floors. Not so far, anyway.

[Problem: A woman and a man are dead. What happened? (Questions remaining: 1)]

A rule that applied to every space, that you would inevitably break no matter where you were. What existed in every space, without exception?

Everything had it.

"Time."

That was it.

"The man broke a time rule. Right?"

Hosoo's eyes finally curved into a gentle arc.

"Yes."

[Problem: A woman and a man are dead. What happened? (Questions remaining: 0)]

I had scraped all twenty-one chances down to nothing.

"Correct."

"Yes, Seon Yu-han-nim. Please give your answer."

It wasn't the most satisfying answer, but with no questions left, I had no other choice.

"The woman threatened a high-ranking political figure in order to extract information she needed to survive and escape the Labyrinth. The figure responded by devising a plan to eliminate her and carried it out. The man, in the meantime, died after inadvertently violating the Labyrinth's time limit."

Whether the woman's goal had been a weapon or information, that ambiguous part, I had just guessed and narrowed it to one. Leaving it vague and broad could have gotten the whole thing marked wrong.

Hosoo tilted his head slightly to one side.

"There are a few gaps, but I'll count it as correct. Seon Yu-han-nim has solved the twenty-first case."

"Ha..."

"Thank goodness..."

Sighs broke out from all directions.

"You worked so hard...! That one really looked brutal!"

"Seon Yu-han-ssi, seriously, good work. Thanks to you we can all finish."

"Well handled. I don't think I could have solved it myself."

Everything out of that person's mouth is a lie.

I tried to peel the shepherd's heavy hand off my shoulder and gave up halfway through.

...Whatever.

They had their reasons. It would be harder not to have a backstory, given where we were.

"So what's the actual answer."

The moment I read the first line on the back of the card, heat shot up my spine and all the way to the top of my skull.

[The woman sought to expose a weakness of a certain politician known to have close ties with the head of an intelligence agency, in order to find a way to access that agency...]

"You seriously expected anyone to get that? What is this, a movie script?"

"......"

Ha. Fine. Let it go.

Honestly, with this level of detail, the host had clearly been doing me a favor by counting that as a correct answer.

[...The rattled politician, on the pretext of sharing information that night, lured the woman into a car and had a hired hand waiting in the backseat who killed her...]

"Is this actually from a Labyrinth?"

"......"

For something like this to happen inside a Labyrinth, you would need a space the size of at minimum a district, possibly an entire city.

A city-scale invasive-type Labyrinth had never occurred. If one had, the whole world would know about it.

But a space that large would be the only way it made sense for the perpetrator not to realize they were inside a Labyrinth at all.

Was this really something that could happen someday? In the future?

Like the Draft articles from the Singyae Daily?

[...The man sought a way to escape the Labyrinth, but was unable to avoid exceeding the set time limit and died as a result.]

The moment I read the last line of the answer, another question surfaced in my mind.

Did this Labyrinth have a time limit too?

The longest I had ever been here, if I remembered right, was somewhere between seven-thirty and eight in the evening.

"Representative."

"Yes."

"Do you happen to know what time this building closes? Is there a set time when the building shuts down entirely?"

"It's open twenty-four hours. Even if there were a time limit, I would think we'd be fine until midnight."

Exhausting to deal with in some ways, but easy in others when someone actually followed what you were saying without needing it spelled out.

Midnight, though.

If the Labyrinthification started around three-thirty in the afternoon, that meant this Labyrinth was theoretically solvable within eight and a half hours?

"Seon Yu-han-nim. Would you like to continue solving cases? Or would you like to stop enjoying True Stories here?"

"Stop."

The host smiled cheerfully and kept going.

"In honor of Seon Yu-han-nim being the first to solve all twenty-one cases, we've prepared a special bonus problem."

"Sure, I'll pass."

Who knew what would happen if I agreed. I had been through this enough times to know better.

"Just give me the gold coin."

"I promise you won't suffer anything sad even if you get it wrong. We won't tell you the answer, but you'll still receive one coin of 'Life' regardless."

"...Sworn on the Labyrinth?"

"Yes, I swear by the supreme rules of the Labyrinth."

That changed things.

"And if I get it right?"

"Something good will happen."

"Fine. I'll do it."

Nothing to lose, everything to gain. No reason not to try a bonus round.

"Wise choice. Now then, a special problem, exclusively for Seon Yu-han-nim!"

Thud.

Hosoo lifted the hand that had been resting on the table, and a new card appeared. Like magic.

I read the problem written on the front.

[Problem: You, on the verge of escaping the Labyrinth, killed yourself. Why? (Questions remaining: 0)]

And I stood up from my seat and hit the host in the face.

Footnotes:

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