WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

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◈ How to Die in the Office Labyrinth ◈

Chapter 85: The Headless

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"You actually ran into that monster? You're not hurt, are you?"

Hwang Ju-yeon asked, and Lee Na-hyun nodded again with that same deflated look.

"Yeah...... I almost fainted. I genuinely thought I was going to die...... But it just walked right past me. Maybe it didn't see me, I don't know......"

"I doubt a monster like that would simply miss someone it's supposed to hunt."

The person who had just lost their right arm said this in a low, flat voice.

"My guess is the hunting was already finished. The knight had both arms completed at that point, yes?"

A rider assembled piece by piece from two legs, a torso, and two arms, each taken from a different person.

The only one who had seen that hideous thing wrinkled their face in disgust.

"Yeah...... Everything except the head......"

"That might actually be very good news. If its behavioral pattern has changed under these circumstances, we can assume it's because the headless knight is now complete."

"Oh, so then......"

"Yes. Let's try heading toward the emergency exit."

Lee Na-hyun's expression visibly brightened.

Hwang Ju-yeon's brightened faintly, then darkened again.

Whether out of some sense of solidarity with the two who had each lost an arm, or from grim expectations about the next floor, I couldn't tell.

Jeong Ji-ho's expression hadn't been particularly bright to begin with.

It had lifted slightly when he spotted the arcade machines back on the 5F Arcade floor. Maybe.

As for Yu Hyun-jae, well.

"Whoa."

Lee Na-hyun, moving toward the emergency stairs ahead of the rest of us, stopped short.

"Already here......"

At the edge where the faint flashlight barely reached, right at the boundary between light and shadow, the silhouette of a black monster came into view.

Two pale bare legs, one noticeably longer and thicker than the other, with nothing on them but shoes.

Two arms similarly mangled, wearing only the torn wrist cuffs of their sleeves like bracelets.

A torso dressed in nothing but a blood-soaked shirt, or rather, a vest.

A massive black beast carrying a headless, ragged corpse astride it like a knight, walking down the corridor.

Triumphant, almost as if marching home in victory.

And at the same time, terrifyingly, completely silent.

That enormous mass of iron wrapped in black rubber passed through without producing so much as a whisper of sound.

The instinctive wrongness and revulsion that came from that dissonance of perception.

"......"

All of us fell silent as if by agreement and stepped back.

To let it pass.

To stay out of its path.

"...... Let's go."

We couldn't move again until the blood-and-char-reeking black knight had passed us entirely.

Fortunately, nothing happened before we reached the emergency exit.

"Ugh."

Without thinking, I reached for the door with my left hand instead of my right, which was missing its ring finger, and got nothing for it but pain.

I no longer have a left arm.

It's not as if I've never been without one before, but on those occasions I'd always died from blood loss not long after losing it at Neosoft.

"Are you all right......?"

Clunk.

Lee Na-hyun rushed over and opened the door.

"You really need to get to a hospital...... I really hope the next floor is the first floor......"

I hoped so too, genuinely.

Right now I was alive, but without proper treatment as soon as possible, never mind the prognosis, I could die from sepsis.

"Please, please......"

I'd been lucky, in several ways.

"Oh! It's bright......"

This was the first time I'd made it through an entire floor without dying even once.

* * *

19. Complete the headless rider.

* * *

"Oh, but......"

That was the limit of my luck.

"Floor seven."

[Red Thread Liaison Department | Agent Team 3 | Agent Team 4]

The words on the directory sign beside the elevator.

"Red Thread Liaison Department" was printed slightly bolder than the rest.

"Why did you apply to the Red Thread Liaison Department?"

I found myself thinking of the Interview Administrator, that blankly intense, upright face.

Head of Agent Team 4 at the Uiwi Guild Red Thread Liaison Department.

Which meant the office just ahead was, if things had gone differently today and I'd been lucky enough to pass, where I would have been coming to work.

I wasn't sure what any of that meant anymore.

"Representative."

There was no time to dwell on it.

"Let's find a bathroom first. We need to get our faces under running water."

Both Yu Hyun-jae and I had taken burns to the face when those tire fragments hit us during the process of losing our arms.

We needed to cool the heat with running water, even now.

"Is it all right if the others don't come?"

At Yu Hyun-jae's question, Lee Na-hyun shook her head vigorously.

"Honestly, I've been desperate to go this whole time......"

"Then please go. Let's take a short break while we're at it."

The co-representative of Uiwi Guild said it gently, easing everyone along.

"What about Ji-ho? Shouldn't he go too? Even if it's not urgent, it might be better."

A small, round head bobbed up and down.

"Ji-ho will come with me and Na-hyun-ssi. We're both going to be uncomfortable enough as it is...... You two go ahead."

Thanks to Hwang Ju-yeon's consideration, Yu Hyun-jae and I, between us possessing a grand total of one pair of arms, went straight to the sink and shoved our faces under the running tap.

The water couldn't be too cold, and the pressure couldn't be too high.

"How long...... do we have to, um, stay like this."

"About, twenny, twenty minutes?"

"My back is going...... to hurt."

Hunched over awkwardly side by side with our faces buried in the sink, water kept getting into our mouths every time we tried to speak.

"By the way, you had your agent interview today...... didn't you."

"Yes. But can't we just...... talk about that after all this is over. Pleath."

"......"

After that, for a while, the bathroom held nothing but the sound of running water.

"It's quiet."

Yu Hyun-jae spoke again.

He wasn't the type who couldn't stand silence the way Lee Na-hyun couldn't.

"Yes. It is."

Squeak.

I gave a vague answer and Yu Hyun-jae abruptly turned off the tap and straightened up.

"That's not what I meant. Isn't it too quiet."

I turned my tap off and stood up alongside him.

The two of us stood still and looked at each other for a moment, listening.

"......"

The women's bathroom across the hall.

"There's no sound at all."

Three people had gone in.

It had been well past the time they should have finished and come back out into the corridor.

Not a single sound.

"You might expect that from Hwang Ju-yeon and Ji-ho, but......"

"Right. For Lee Na-hyun-ssi's voice to be gone too......"

Click.

We came out of the bathroom in a hurry.

The women's bathroom door was firmly shut.

Looking up and down the corridor, there was no sign of the three of them.

Rattle, rattle.

"It's locked. I wouldn't think either of them would lock the door from inside."

Bang! Bang!

"Hwang Ju-yeon-ssi! Lee Na-hyun-ssi! Ji-ho!"

"......"

Not even a reply from inside.

"Could it have been a problem that Ji-ho went in?"

"That's possible. Ji-ho is a young child, but the Labyrinth isn't generous enough to make allowances for that."

I swallowed a sigh with effort.

I hadn't thought of that. Too caught up in my own wound.

And for all the loops I'd gone through, this was the first time I'd ever set foot in a bathroom.

"Though it might not be that specific issue. There is another difference between them and us."

I waited quietly for Yu Hyun-jae to finish the thought.

"We haven't used the toilet yet."

I stood looking into the half-open men's bathroom, working through what I'd just heard.

Every profanity I knew rose right to the tip of my tongue.

Give me a break.

What, were we supposed to get a bladder infection?

Or relieve ourselves in the hallway like animals?

"Do you think every bathroom on every floor is like this?"

"Probably. I'd imagine so."

Well. It didn't seem likely this would happen by coincidence only on this floor, the very first time I'd ever gone into a bathroom here.

"Either way, what should we do. If we investigate the toilet situation further we might find a way to help them, or......"

I understood the other option Yu Hyun-jae had left unspoken.

Give up on the three of them for now and go investigate the Red Thread Liaison Department offices.

"I think......"

Bathrooms were available on plenty of earlier floors, after all.

Even on floor three, where the loop starts, there was access to one.

Opportunities to get down here to the seventh floor, on the other hand, don't come easily.

One of the basic escape conditions for the 5F Arcade, two floors above this one, was gathering a minimum of seven people.

The process of satisfying that condition was nothing short of grueling.

"I think we'd be better off checking the office first."

If there was information unique to floor seven that I could get right now, that was what I should do.

"I knew you'd say that. I knew Seon Yu-han-ssi would."

The corner of Yu Hyun-jae's mouth lifted slightly.

The burns made that smile look a little crooked.

"It was on purpose, by the way."

"...... Pardon?"

What? Out of nowhere.

"My right arm. Letting it get cut off was on purpose."

The co-representative of Uiwi Guild glanced at me as we walked down the corridor.

So.

I knew it. He'd read my lips.

"But how did you know? That I was someone who could do that, Seon Yu-han-ssi."

Here we go again.

"Someone with the mental fortitude to stay conscious through losing an arm, I figured they might be capable of something like that."

"Ahhh."

Surprisingly, he looked convinced.

"So how did you stay conscious through yours?"

"I'm used to pain. I grew up getting hit."

"Oh. Me too."

I know.

"Oh, right. Representative, what did you grab at your doljabi?"

I threw out the first thing that came to mind to change the subject.

I needed to cut off whatever Yu Hyun-jae was smoothly steering toward on the topic of time reversal, and throwing out something completely random was the only way to do it.

"Hmm. I don't really remember. Why do you ask, suddenly?"

"No reason. I thought you might have grabbed someone by the collar or the hair."

Sometimes when people say whatever comes to mind without thinking, their real feelings slip through.

"...... Actually, I never had a doljabi ceremony. We weren't in a position for something like that."

"Oh. I see."

I hadn't known that.

Thinking about the neighborhood he'd lived in during middle school and his high school background, the family couldn't have been completely without means.

Things must have been different when he was even younger.

"Let's head in."

We'd barely finished that somewhat one-sided detour through someone else's wounds when we arrived at the door to the Agent Team 3 office.

Swish.

"Oh."

The moment the door opened, a strange scene spread out that looked nothing like an office.

"This is......"

Objects floating in midair or stuck to the walls and ceiling as if gravity had been horribly warped.

Furniture and fixtures either far too small or far too enormous, as if someone had placed the size order wrong.

An interior decorated with fussy, charming detail, like toys laid out for children playing with dolls.

"A 'dollhouse.' I've only ever seen images of one."

A dollhouse.

One of the most famous Labyrinth patterns there is.

That is to say, among contact-type Labyrinths accessed through a Fissure.

Footnotes:

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