Chapter 26

Chapter 26.Heavenly Prison HUB

Choi Jaeha took the lead and guided the way.

“No, I had never heard the name Sammae Delivery before, so I thought it was strange and remembered it. The delivery companies used by the tenant companies here are all fixed.”

Director Yoo Hyunjae, who had searched the same section as Choi Jaeha, showed no particular reaction.

Well, he was someone who had no need to know what logistics companies entered and left the building.

“Yeah, this is it. Sammae Delivery.”

On the square cargo compartment Choi Jaeha pointed to, the words “Sammae Delivery” were written in large orange letters.

Bae9502, white box truck, E02.

Just in case, I took a photo of the vehicle information and location this time too, and memorized them.

“Can we open the cargo compartment?”

“Is it not locked?”

“No. It looks like the lock is released.”

Just as Hwang Juyeon said, it seemed like it would open if we simply grabbed and pulled the latch-like handle.

Rather than thinking that the driver of this suspicious truck had happened to leave the door unlocked today, it was right to see all of this as the Labyrinth’s work.

“Then I will open it. Please be careful. Something strange might jump out.”

At that, Choi Jaeha and Hwang Juyeon slightly stepped aside while covering the child’s eyes.

Director Yoo Hyunjae stood behind me with an expression that seemed a little tense, yet also intrigued. I had not expected him to open the door beside me.

Tap.

I grabbed both handles and pulled.

Creeeak…….

As the door slowly opened, the faint flashlight beam invaded through the crack of the dark cargo compartment.

And the moment the light reached all the way to the deepest part.

“Ah……!”

A startled sound escaped me without my realizing it.

“Why, why are you, mmph……!”

“It is all right. It is only a dummy.”

Inside was a peach-colored doll the size of a person. Its joints were grotesquely twisted.

Its mannequin-like appearance sent a chill down my spine.

I tried not to think of the mannequin with the golden scale head. Or the formula that added and subtracted my body weight by each part.

“This is a dummy.”

Creak.

Yoo Hyunjae entered the cargo compartment without hesitation and examined the doll.

“A dummy?”

“Yes. A dummy for vehicle crash tests. Do you see the round mark mixed with yellow and black near the temple here?”

At those words, I forced my thoughts away, climbed into the compartment, and approached the doll.

Its arms and legs were bent and stretched out haphazardly, and its pelvis and thigh area in particular were badly twisted.

No matter how I looked at it, this was…….

“It seems to have been hit by a car. Badly.”

I could calculate what would have to happen for a person to end up like this.

The vehicle model, the distance between the car and me, the driving speed, the point when the driver recognized me and the reaction speed that followed, the braking point, and so on. For every condition.

It was a very old habit.

So much time had passed that it was engraved into my bones. Or that I could hardly remember the faces of my parents who had died in an accident.

“Badly hit……. This is probably a clue too. Do you have any guesses?”

“Yes.”

Although this dummy was not built to adult male specifications, since it was shorter than me, and although we lacked other clues…….

It was not as if I had no guesses.

“The skid mark we saw earlier. If the speed was enough to leave a mark like that, this could happen.”

“So they are evidence from an incident scene.”

Yoo Hyunjae nodded as if he immediately understood.

“An incident? Not an accident?”

Choi Jaeha asked while only leaning his upper body into the cargo compartment, unable to bring himself all the way inside.

“But are you saying this was really an incident that actually happened, Director?”

“Who knows. It might not be. But if it was a real incident, then it would be an unsolved case.”

“Unsolved……? Why is that?”

The guild director, who made his living from Labyrinths, lifted the corners of his mouth as if Choi Jaeha’s question were some bland joke.

“Because Labyrinths are the graves of unsolved questions. And those questions wait for someone to release them.”

It was poetic, and yet infinitely direct.

Only then did I understand that Yoo Hyunjae did not merely sit in a soft office chair and look at Labyrinths written in ink, but clearly saw the real Labyrinths beyond those documents as well.

“Hm? Jiho, what is it? Is there something there, aaagh!”

A scream suddenly came from outside.

“Ms. Hwang Juyeon?”

“Are you all right?”

When we hurried out of the truck, we saw Hwang Juyeon sitting collapsed on the floor with her teeth clenched.

Jeong Jiho was crouched beside her, nearly in tears and fidgeting anxiously.

“What happened?”

“Ugh…….”

Hwang Juyeon groaned as she rolled up one pant leg.

Blood had gathered in droplets on her ankle and was trickling slightly. As if two dots had been made with a needle.

“A snake, a snake…….”

“There is a snake?”

“Ahh, over, over there…….”

The place Hwang Juyeon pointed to was beneath the truck.

There really was a snake coiled there, staring this way.

“Gasp, that really is a snake!”

Choi Jaeha was horrified and retreated far away, while I hurriedly loosened my necktie and tied it above the wound, applying pressure.

The current time was 4:17 p.m.

It did not look like a venomous snake, but this was a Labyrinth, so there was no certainty. I had to check how long the bleeding would take to stop.

……And if the monster came, the time until then too.

“B-But, am I going to…… die?”

122, 116, 109, 113, 120…….

The numbers on the small screen on Hwang Juyeon’s wrist bounced wildly.

It seemed she was worried about the scream she had just let out.

I was certain from experience that the fake Buddha came after hearing heartbeats, not screams, but I had not stated that to them definitively.

There was no way they would have believed me in that situation.

“Do not worry about the scream. Please calm down first. If that monster comes after hearing heartbeats, you should still be all right.”

Looking back, everyone had been startled several times, but the Buddha statue had not necessarily appeared every time.

When the Buddha statue did appear, it did not come immediately the moment the heart rate spiked, but after a certain amount of time had passed.

“The fact that it does not come immediately even with your heart beating this fast probably means there is another condition related to time in addition to heart rate. So relax and breathe deeply.”

“Hoo, ugh…….”

However, Hwang Juyeon’s heart rate kept moving back and forth between about 110 and 125.

“The blood, ugh, the blood is not stopping……!”

“Pardon?”

Startled, I looked at Hwang Juyeon’s ankle.

By now, the bleeding had mostly stopped, and only a slight bead of blood had formed over the two bite marks.

“I, that, I got bitten by a venomous snake……!”

“No, it is not venomous. I do not know what you are seeing, but that is an illusion……!”

Hwang Juyeon was seeing the Labyrinth’s hallucination.

“Ms. Hwang Juyeon, Mr. Seon Yuhan is right.”

Yoo Hyunjae supported me while soothing Jeong Jiho, who was trembling anxiously too.

“It is an ordinary snake. I heard venomous snakes have triangular heads.”

“Ugh, do not lie—”

—Clank.

“Damn it. Ms. Hwang Juyeon, please. Please calm down, I am begging you…….”

“Mr. Seon Yuhan, it is already too late. We need to avoid it.”

The blood-reeking Buddha statue was approaching.

“What you cherish, what you fear, and what makes you bleed. I come from the gaps between all of them.”

Yoo Hyunjae forcibly pulled me behind the pillar on the opposite side.

Choi Jaeha and Jeong Jiho were already hiding while curled up tightly.

“You fail to realize that your mind is bound by the 108 afflictions. How, then, can you sever them, and how can you escape them to reach perfect enlightenment?”

Crunch, splatter…….

“Ggh, aaaaaagh!”

I stood blankly behind the pillar and watched all of it.

Without closing my eyes, without closing my ears, without covering my mouth.

“…….”

My heart, which had been pounding loudly, slowly returned to its proper pace.

It was a sensation so horrifyingly unreal, and yet so nostalgically comfortable.

The feeling of escaping pain by forcibly separating the substance-less self called “me” from the body of reality when I could no longer endure terrible violence.

Strangely, I felt that was the most human thing of all. And at the same time, the most alive.

“Mr. Seon Yuhan. Mr. Seon Yuhan?”

“Ah. Ah…….”

When I came to my senses, everything was over.

The white box truck had been dyed red, and the monster had left.

“Mr. Seon Yuhan, are you all right?”

“Ah, yes…….”

I stared blankly down at my phone.

4:19…… 4:20.

Subtracting the time it took to approach and the time until the actual death, from Hwang Juyeon’s snake bite to the sound of the first footstep…….

“About one minute and thirty seconds to two minutes.”

The mutter slipped out of me like a Buddhist chant.

But for some reason, it felt as if I had heard something similar before.

“Huh? Uh, over there, Director, Mr. Seon Yuhan……! The snake came out……!”

At Choi Jaeha’s sudden shout, I snapped back to my senses.

The snake that had come out from under the truck began moving somewhere.

“Mr. Seon Yuhan, if you are exhausted, you may rest here with Jiho. We will follow it.”

Yoo Hyunjae spoke while sending his gaze toward Choi Jaeha.

“Huh, m-me?”

“No. I will go. I would like Mr. Choi Jaeha to look after Jiho.”

“Uh, sure. I have a niece, so I am really good with kids.”

Leaving behind Choi Jaeha, who was soothing the trembling child in his arms, I followed the snake with Yoo Hyunjae.

It was not very fast, so we were able to follow while keeping a proper distance.

“Do not tell me it is that car?”

Seeing the car the snake stopped in front of, Yoo Hyunjae wore a strange expression, as if he did not know whether to laugh or not.

“Huh……!”

Tap―!

The snake, which had been staring at the two of us, suddenly leaped up and entered the car emblem.

In other words, a snake as long as a person’s arm entered a flat emblem smaller than the palm of a hand and became a picture of a snake.

“The logo of that car brand originally has a snake on the right and a cross on the left……, mm, that is not important.”

Seo8102, red sports sedan, 11.

While I memorized the vehicle information and location, Yoo Hyunjae started talking about trivia and then stopped.

“I will open the door for now.”

Click.

As expected, it opened easily.

I sat in the driver’s seat and searched through the sun visor, door pocket, console box, and so on, but nothing came out.

“Oh.”

Yoo Hyunjae, who had opened the passenger-side glove box, took something out.

“There is a catalog. A car catalog.”

It was a catalog explaining various cars from a domestic brand.

“Is there a clue to the next car among these…….”

The moment Yoo Hyunjae opened the catalog.

Slam!

Click!

Both doors closed at the same time and immediately locked.

“Ha…….”

Damn it.

I barely held back a curse and tried pulling the handle, but it was useless. Naturally.

“It does not seem to be my hallucination alone. This side will not open either.”

Then.

Bzzzt, bzzzzzt…….

The radio turned on, and static began to play.