WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

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◈ How to Die in the Office Labyrinth ◈

Chapter 93: Children of the Labyrinth

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Whether or not I was cursing him under my breath, Yu Hyun-jae opened his mouth.

"Actually."

No. I don't want to know, so please don't go confessing secrets.

The words just shut up and die quietly with the rest of us clawed all the way up to the tip of my tongue.

Nothing good had ever happened when this man started running his mouth like this.

"Our father was, in a sense, like a Labyrinth."

Yu Hyun-jae produced a sentence nothing like what I'd expected and added, with a bitter smile:

"In the way he was very good at trapping people."

An absolutely rotten joke.

Only the person it happened to has the right to laugh at something like that, so I didn't laugh with him.

"Ah......"

I felt like I finally understood the shape of the shadow I'd glimpsed in them all those years ago. Fully, at last.

Only now, more than a decade later.

Even back when we'd gone to the same middle school, I'd only vaguely known they were being abused at home.

"Locking us inside and starving us was routine. Being fed meant we'd be dealt with shortly after. And of course, it was the same even when it wasn't a school break."

They had been kids who were absent a lot.

"It's been more than ten years since Father passed. But part of us is still stuck in those days. Even now."

Ha ha. Yu Hyun-jae laughed faintly, as though embarrassed, and rolled his eyes to glance around the room.

Chae Jae-ha and Lee Na-hyun were both silent, as if they didn't know how to respond.

Or perhaps they'd simply stopped caring at this point.

They'd be drowning in a few minutes anyway.

"Unexpected?"

Not at all.

"No."

Whatever past this person carried, it wouldn't make me like or dislike him any more than I already did.

It had nothing to do with me.

"Everyone has a past they can't shake."

"I suppose so."

Yu Hyun-jae pulled up the corners of his mouth.

A smile, hazy as mist.

"Seon Yu-han-ssi is the same as us, then."

I didn't want to hear that.

But...

I knew there had been a time when I had wanted to hear exactly that.

It made me feel oddly embarrassed, so I dipped my head slightly and raised it again right away.

Now if I didn't lift my chin a little higher, the water would reach my mouth.

"Hk, mm....... Mom......"

Lee Na-hyun was the first to break, finally crying, and Chae Jae-ha silently raised the water level by a few drops.

"Please, both of you, don't be too afraid."

The co-representative of Uiwi Guild patted the shoulder of the other company's employee, who was sobbing wretchedly, and said:

"I expect it won't take long. You'll lose consciousness in under a minute, and after that there's nothing."

The crying only got louder.

"Besides, Seon Yu-han-ssi is experiencing time regression, which means in one sense there is an afterlife, and in another sense it means we'll all come back eventually. You won't remember it, but still. Doesn't that put you somewhat at ease? That there's a next time?"

It didn't seem to put them at ease at all.

"Hmm. Well, this is quite the problem."

Yu Hyun-jae apparently gave up on trying to comfort the two of them that way, given how poorly it was landing, and changed the subject.

I was willing to play along with his version of being kind.

"Is there a bigger problem than us dying in a few minutes?"

"Of course."

Yu Hyun-jae raised his left hand in the water and pressed it to the ceiling.

The silver ring on his little finger glittered like a star in a night sky.

The tiny red gemstone set at its center looked just like a drop of blood.

I knew someone who wore an identical ring.

"If Yu Mi-rae were to find out that I'd died."

Yu Mi-rae.

I hadn't expected that name to leave his lips.

He had always slipped past it so naturally.

Even at the Future Arcade, the arcade run under Yu Mi-rae's co-representative oversight, he had never mentioned her directly.

No wonder even Chae Jae-ha and Lee Na-hyun, faces still wet with tears, looked over at Yu Hyun-jae at that.

Still, if not in a moment like this, when else would he say it. The name of the one person who was both family and partner.

"......Come to think of it, is Co-representative Yu Mi-rae also in the building?"

"Yes. I heard she came in before me. So she's somewhere in here."

Though whether Yu Mi-rae was in this particular Labyrinth where we were, that was another question.

"She's here. Definitely."

Yu Hyun-jae said it with certainty.

That Yu Mi-rae was in the same place as us.

As though reading my thoughts.

Or as though he could see clear through this Labyrinth.

Or maybe just as though he hoped it were true.

"If you head upward next time, you might run into Yu Mi-rae."

"Yes. Well. Maybe."

If Yu Mi-rae really was here, exactly.

And if she was still alive, not dead somewhere in this Labyrinth.

Being a co-representative of a guild, she might not die so easily.

"But is there a reason she shouldn't find out you've died? Co-representative Yu Mi-rae."

What disaster could come of her knowing that much?

Even if the two of them got along terribly.

Didn't she at least have the right to know whether he was alive or dead.

Not even knowing if someone is alive or dead, how painfully exhausting that is.

"Yes. Obviously."

Did he hate his sibling that much.

"I don't want her to see me dead."

He didn't even show his living self to her, for that matter.

I barely swallowed the question that had risen to the tip of my tongue.

There was no need to pry into someone else's family affairs.

Wanting to know something doesn't mean you have to.

"......Representative."

I thought about the courage it took to confess a secret so freely, knowing that after your death you'd still be remembered by the person you told it to.

"I can make sure Co-representative Yu Mi-rae doesn't find the body. If you want. Within what I'm able to do."

"Yes. Please do that. No need to push yourself too hard."

Yu Mi-rae's stingy yet considerate older sibling drew his lips into a faint smile.

"Then...... shall we say our goodbyes. Chae Jae-ha-ssi, Lee Na-hyun-ssi. It was good to meet you. Please don't be too afraid. It'll only be a moment."

After those last words to the two of them, Yu Hyun-jae tilted his head, which he had raised close to the ceiling, slightly toward me.

"Seon Yu-han-ssi. It was good to see you again after so long. And I'm sure we'll meet again soon."

Shhhk.

"Huh......"

"Are you serious......"

Yu Hyun-jae simply bent forward and sank beneath the water.

I was the only one who wasn't surprised.

Not that it stopped being admirable, even after seeing it multiple times.

Bubbles rose immediately from under the water.

He hadn't held his breath for even a few seconds before pulling in a lungful of water, and his body had reflexively convulsed in its fight for survival.

"......"

The sheer force of will it took to overcome those spinal-level instincts and hurl yourself toward death, I genuinely found it astounding.

"Hh, ugh, what do we do, what do we do......"

The bubbles that had been rising to the surface stopped.

Yu Hyun-jae had sunk completely.

The same was coming for us.

I waited, patiently.

I didn't want to throw myself at death just to shorten my own suffering.

"......Kk, ugh."

Before long, the water reached the top of my head and poured down my airway, filling my lungs entirely.

Kak, krrgh.

Bubbles rose.

Even the pain of stinging eyes and a burning nose felt like a luxury now, and the awful sensation of water spilling past my throat and filling my stomach only proved the miserable fact that I was still not dead.

But this too would pass quickly.

A few seconds.

Just a few seconds, and...

I can't breathe.

I have to go on living.

* * *

"If turning back time were possible, what would you do, Seon Yu-han-ssi?"

I will leave the Labyrinth.

I need to leave the Labyrinth.

I want to leave the Labyrinth.

I can't leave the Labyrinth.

There's one last thing I want to ask.

"Interview Administrator-nim. I......"

When will I be able to leave this Labyrinth?

* * *

Bang!

After parting with the Interview Administrator in the third-floor corridor, the first thing I did was watch the elevator fall.

Krr-boom, CRACK, BANG!

Chae Jae-ha, who would have been startled half out of his skin by that sound, was not beside me.

Somewhere down below, probably.

Right now I didn't feel the need to bother keeping him alive.

Chae Jae-ha wasn't a difficult person to handle once I got the knack of it, but even then, I needed to hold an information advantage and build some trust to do it comfortably.

In a state like right now, where I knew nothing at all about what lay ahead in the Labyrinth, I'd be stumbling around just as much as anyone, and in that condition I'd struggle to make a convincing impression on Chae Jae-ha.

Besides, I didn't actually need Chae Jae-ha right now.

Not unless another pattern requiring a minimum number of people came up, like the Future Arcade on the fifth floor.

CRACK, thud!

So I'd decided to just let him die for now. Far less trouble that way.

That said, if I wasn't going to save him anyway, why had I bothered coming to the elevator instead of just taking the stairs down with the Interview Administrator? Nothing special about it.

Just habit.

Pure unconscious habit, built up from saving that person so many times that it had carved itself into me without my even noticing.

"......"

We'd meet again.

When I restored the building's power in the electrical room and had to head back down to the Mechanical Room below.

No idea when that would be.

* * *

Clunk.

Step, step.

Footsteps echoed through the emergency stairwell.

The act of climbing stairs felt deeply strange.

This was the first time I had climbed the stairs in this building.

Step, step.

What floor came above the third?

Not the fourth.

The reason the floor below the third was the second seemed to be purely because the two floors were connected through the main auditorium.

......Wait.

I nearly stopped mid-step at that thought, barely caught myself, and kept climbing one step at a time.

I didn't go back down.

There was something I needed to check.

The emergency exit door was getting closer.

Up until now, going from the third floor down to the second had never required any conditions.

Whether I saved Chae Jae-ha or didn't, whether I let the Interview Administrator go down first or didn't, whatever I did on the third floor, I could always get down to the second.

I figured that, too, was because the two floors were connected through the main auditorium.

Of course, there could be conditions entirely beyond the grasp of human understanding, and I might have been satisfying them without knowing it, but that was the same as those conditions not existing at all.

So the question I'd just landed on was...

Clunk.

"Ha......"

Might there be separate conditions I needed to meet to go from the third floor up to the floor above it?

I looked out at the familiar view beyond the door and lowered my head.

The main auditorium. The interview rooms.

The place I had just climbed up from.

This was the third floor.

Damn it.

To go higher, I'd needed to find some kind of escape condition here on the third floor first.

Ah.

Here we go again. Again.

Footnotes:

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