WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

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◈ How to Die in the Office Labyrinth ◈

Chapter 91: Let There Be Light

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"It avoids us?"

I focused on the sensation at my feet, submerged in water, more than the itching feeling behind my eyes, and asked again.

"Well, it's not exactly the same, but... in Happyland, the sides were flipped too, right? Monsters and humans. The player played a monster..."

"That's right."

Humans are a kind of "mob" I have to kill. In that game. Tasty prey that makes me happy. I'm the monster.

"I'm not sure if you've ever played something like this, but..."

The Neosoft employee sat perched on a pump and shivered slightly.

Already barely alive, and now soaked through, their body temperature seemed to be dropping fast.

"In some games... there are missions where you have to sneak past enemies or mobs without being spotted. Getting through without entering their line of sight, that kind of thing... Could it be something like that? The monster avoiding us the same way...?"

"That's a reasonable point."

A good shift in perspective. Not that it was simply toying with us, but that it couldn't even approach us at all.

"But that still comes back to a numbers problem. It means we'd need as many people as possible looking in every direction."

"Ah..."

"So."

Just push a little further from that angle.

"Not exactly avoiding us, the humans..."

Crack!

At that moment, from somewhere beyond our field of view, the sound of a pipe bursting.

I stared quietly into that distant darkness.

Into the shadows where the faint beam of the flashlight couldn't reach...

"Light."

The places where the light in our hands couldn't touch.

If something trying to drown us was hiding there.

"Could it be avoiding the light?"

"Oh, oh... yes, that could be it...! If it can only move in shadow, if that's its nature, then maybe light could actually work against it..."

"Then the question becomes how to produce enough light to matter."

Yu Hyun-jae's one sentence threw cold water over all of us.

"You're right... We should have brought a hand flashlight or something..."

"Was there a hand flashlight?"

The Neosoft employee's bloodless face darkened further, and they hurried to add something.

"No, I wasn't asking to blame anyone. I was just wondering where one might be."

If I knew the location, even if I died this time, I could grab one in the next run.

"Um... I think there were a few at the convenience store. Really small portable ones, though..."

"Ah. 5th floor."

The hallway across from the arcade was a food court with outside vendors, and there was a convenience store. I'd eaten meals there, stockpiled emergency medicine and bandages. I had no idea they also sold hand flashlights.

"Well, it's pointless to regret it now..."

No. For me, it isn't.

I have a next time.

"Lee Jin-su-ssi, Seon Yu-han-ssi. Before long, we won't be able to get out through the emergency staircase anymore."

Splash.

The water had risen almost to their knees already. Yu Hyun-jae adjusted their hold on the child and spoke.

"Other than that, I don't see a way out of this floor. We don't have anything strong enough to stop whatever's in that darkness right now."

"That's true, but..."

Fall to your death or suffocate. One or the other, no escaping the choice. Despair surfaced on the pale face of a person with no other option.

"But, Seon Yu-han-ssi, are you really... going to stay?"

"Yes. I'm staying."

"Even though you'll... drown... Why?"

Better to buy as much time as possible to gather information and think.

If I was going to die either way.

"At least I'll be alive longer than if I fell to my death right now."

Lee Jin-su didn't seem entirely satisfied with my answer.

"And what about you, Representative...?"

"I'll try staying too."

Why not just fall and die, then. Wouldn't that be easier.

Or was he still suspicious of me and planning to stay to keep an eye on me?

"Wait, but then... what about the kid...?"

Lee Jin-su stared at Jeong Ji-ho, cradled in Yu Hyun-jae's arms, with an expression that held emotions impossible to name.

The child had both arms wrapped around Yu Hyun-jae's neck, holding tight. It looked less like attachment to Yu Hyun-jae as a person and more like sheer terror of being let go. Of being separated from someone, or being dropped into the water.

"What are you going to do about the kid..."

What was running through Lee Jin-su's head was plain to see.

Should they make a child choose between falling and drowning? And if the child chose, were they supposed to honor that choice?

"I will take care of Ji-ho until the end."

I understood the implication buried in those gentle words.

"...Ah. Oh."

Maybe Lee Jin-su understood too.

That there was actually one more option.

"Could I maybe... no. No, I'm sorry."

At that, Yu Hyun-jae gave Lee Jin-su an almost approving smile.

"That's right. Something like that, you have to do yourself."

Hard to say whether that was twisted or, in its own way, principled.

I started to shake my head and stopped.

Twisted road or straight one, it had clearly deviated from any righteous path.

The road that person was standing on.

"Oh!"

Lee Jin-su, eyes darting around, spoke up again.

"If the floor of the emergency staircase collapses... couldn't we drain the water out through there...?"

"Ah..."

Yu Hyun-jae's reaction was lukewarm. So was mine.

"I've thought about that too, but no matter how I look at it, it feels like cheating the system... I don't think it'll work."

It actually doesn't work.

In the hour of memory I'd gained last time, there was a scene where I'd tested exactly that. Whether I could drain the water from the Mechanical Room down into the abyss beneath the stairs.

"I can help you try if you'd like, but..."

"Oh, would you really? We should at least give it a shot..."

And so we had to go through that whole ordeal one more time.

"Ugh, let's go again on three... one, two...!"

Excluding a one-armed patient and a seven-year-old child, the two of us had to throw ourselves at the heavy emergency door and force it open against the water pressure that kept growing stronger.

"Oh, it really doesn't work... I'm sorry, I made you waste your strength for nothing..."

"Ha... It's fine."

I hadn't wanted to ignore someone trying to find a way out.

"So, Lee Jin-su-ssi, what are you going to..."

I gripped the barely-still-ajar door and let the sentence trail off. I couldn't quite bring myself to ask outright whether they were going to step outside or not.

"I think... I'll stay here too then. Just a little longer..."

Could this be called courage, too? Choosing a slower, more painful death over a faster, easier one? Because it's still, in the end, some stubborn attempt to hold onto life?

"Let's move over there now."

Thud.

The emergency door slammed shut, and we waded slowly through the water.

Splash.

We climbed up onto some machine of uncertain purpose and huddled together.

"...Earlier. When my arm was getting cut off. I thought, this is it. I'm finally dying."

Lee Jin-su started, voice breaking.

There was something strangely campfire-like about sitting there, waiting calmly for the death coming toward us.

"But then I had this sudden feeling that I didn't want to die like this. Out of nowhere. Even though I'd honestly been thinking I wanted to die. Strange, isn't it..."

"Not at all."

"...And then, because I survived anyway, because I kept living, I started wanting to live a little longer. The human heart really is fickle."

So what if it's fickle. Living is enough.

"But in the end, still this..."

Lee Jin-su's eyes had gone red. The one remaining hand clenched into a fist.

"If only the power hadn't gone out, maybe..."

"That kind of speculation is pointless, I'm afraid. The blackout was almost certainly planned with this floor in mind."

A cold thing to say, but not wrong.

This building had gone dark the moment it Labyrinthified.

Of course, not in any strict sense, since things like store checkout registers and the main auditorium lights still worked, things the Labyrinth chose to run selectively.

"...Actually."

I opened my mouth carefully.

"Was there ever a way to restore the power, all this time?"

Lighting up the Mechanical Room to drive the darkness out, that was still a real possibility, one I needed to keep in mind. If stocking up on hand flashlights wasn't enough, I'd need to try a completely different route.

"Probably not."

The owner of Jaelae Building answered flatly.

The tone was like stating that water is wet, so matter-of-fact that I couldn't even feel hopelessness in it.

"The electrical room wasn't anywhere along the path we traveled."

What?

Those words, delivered so casually, snapped me to attention.

"The electrical room...?"

Right. Come to think of it.

Tap, flip.

I pulled out the diary in a hurry and opened the front pages.

[19F | Electrical Room]

"There should be an emergency generator there. As far as I know."

If I ran the emergency generator, could I restore power to a building the Labyrinth had forcibly blacked out?

Had the Labyrinth already made that into a puzzle too? One problem with a solution in the emergency generator at the electrical room?

I'd have to actually go there to find out.

Not even knowing where it was right now was the first problem.

And of course, the first step was to check whether hand flashlights would do the job. If not, then visiting the electrical room was the only way forward.

"By the way, Seon Yu-han-ssi. You said you came through the 2nd floor."

"Yes. The floor right before I met you was the 2nd floor."

"Did you stop by TARAE? Our merch store."

My body went rigid for a moment.

"I'm on my way to you."

Trauma is a strange thing. I've been through countless "severances" by now. Enough to be sick of them. Still painful, still not something I want to experience. But I'm not afraid.

At least not the way I was the first time.

"...No. I didn't."

And yet I'm still afraid of that place.

"Would you like to start the installment payment?"

The mannequin in black techwear, and the golden or blood-red scale resting on its neck.

"Really? What a shame. There's a labyrinth survival kit there, you know. Comes with a hand flashlight too."

So. After I die and come back, go get the hand flashlight from there? And if that doesn't work, find the electrical room and get the emergency generator running?

So that's how you make use of suspecting someone can do time regression.

"Well. What's the point of thinking about any of this. It's not as though we can turn back time."

Unless you can, right? they said, watching my one remaining eye directly, and the expression on their face was utterly and completely insincere.

"I know... If only we really could."

Go ahead, test me all you want.

I'm not telling you I can do time regression.

* * *

"There's something I have to confess."

Footnotes:

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