Chapter 38

Chapter 38. Gambling Addiction Counseling: 1336

What a lowlife.

Win the game, and it'll let you leave this place?

"What exactly does 'this place' mean? Surely not just the eleventh floor here? Then winning would barely break even."

At my question, Mr. Do whirled around in a cheerful rhythm, all twenty-one eyeballs crinkling at once as though they itched.

It was laughing. Without a sound.

"You will make a fine gambler."

Calling that a compliment.

"Of course—this Jaerae Building. I mean I shall let you leave this Labyrinth in which you are all trapped."

"What?"

"What...... did you say? Really?"

"Truly?"

The vivid-red cube tipped to one side. As if cocking its head.

"You doubt it?"

"Of course. You'll let us out of the Labyrinth that easily? It's too good to be true."

As if it were a lie.

"Too good to be true; and because it is too good, you must stake everything; and because you have staked everything, it becomes true."

Gravity weighed in the blood-colored die's eyes and words.

"That is precisely what gambling is."

Mr. Do's pupils gathered toward me.

"And—when did I ever say I would let you out 'easily'?"

A fierce wrath lay in the voice that seemed to drag a person in.

"The only stake you can wager in a gamble with me is your life. I do not take life lightly, and so I do not take a contest lightly."

Which meant we, too, had to do the same.

To wager our lives.

It wasn't even funny.

From the moment we were trapped in the Labyrinth, we'd already been forced into a life-or-death gamble.

"Of course, if you would rather not, you are under no obligation to take part."

"Huh......?"

"We don't have to play the game?"

"But if we don't, we can't get out anyway, can we?"

"Not at all."

Mr. Do's pupils swung left and right like a pendulum. Tick, tock. As a human shakes their head.

"You may, if you wish, open that door and leave this instant."

Surely. No way.

No way it'd let us go that simply.

"However—should you decline to contend with me."

Right. With Korean, you always have to listen to the very end.

"In exchange, I shall take one stroke of the good fortune you are due to receive."

"What do you mean, take our fortune......"

"It means an event in which something goes unluckily wrong is guaranteed to occur. Even where you might have slipped by on good luck."

In a Labyrinth, even a trifling misfortune could lead straight to death.

But...... that, too, was the realm of probability.

There was a chance it wouldn't necessarily lead to a fatal accident.

"As for the event."

Yoo Hyunjae raised his left hand mildly and broached the subject.

"I take it I may choose it?"

He worries me, this man.

"Director, how about giving it a little more thought?"

"Why? Isn't it worth a wager? And I happen to be quite lucky."

That's exactly why I'm worried.

Yoo Hyunjae had a track record of dying with every bone in his body vanishing the instant he ran his mouth like this.

This man is not lucky in the slightest.

"Still, given the opponent, I ought to pick the event for the balance to hold."

"The right to decide the event I shall grant to you. The finer rules, however, will be subject to some negotiation."

To put it simply, it came to this.

The one-on-one contest with Mr. Do—each of you may choose your event.

Lose, and you die.

Win, and you escape the Labyrinth.

But forfeit the contest, and you walk safely out of this office for now, while later, without fail, some unlucky thing befalls you.

"Could it be that there's no one here because they all escaped......?"

I heard Choi Jaeha whisper the question to Hwang Juyeon.

"It said earlier that we were its first guests."

"Ah. Ah, right......? I see......"

He seemed torn.

Understandably so.

In a situation where there was no telling how much farther we'd have to go to escape, winning a single game meant escape, then and there.

"I'll do it. Me."

How could I let a chance like this slip by?

"Wha—really? You're going? Just like that?"

"Isn't that decision a little too quick......?"

"It's fine."

I let their flustered looks slide past and turned to the die.

"I'll do it."

"Enter."

Mr. Do rolled its pupils toward me, then spun sharply around and went into a separate, private office.

"Well then, I'll be off. Jiho too. Bye."

"No. This is so, so sudden....... You have to win....... Let's all get out and meet again."

"......Do well, Mr. Seon Yuhan. Anyway—I owe you a lot, too. Thank you."

"I hope you win, and that we meet again afterward. It was good to know you, Mr. Seon Yuhan."

What's gotten into them?

Receiving such earnest farewells, I honestly found it funny.

These were people I'd see again if I lost, anyway.

"Ah."

For these people, this was their first farewell with me.

And, naturally, it would be their last.

Something churned inside me.

That belated realization, kicking at my whole body.

Something seethed.

"Yes. Thank you, too......"

I forced the voice out.

Come to think of it, I'd never once given a proper goodbye myself.

It was always so sudden.

My death, and theirs.

"I hope you all make it out."

Praying that this would, please, be my last farewell, I stepped into the gambling den......

"You are not fit to join my table."

"Fu—"

Looks like I'm going to die without even getting to start.

"—ck, why? So I'm just supposed to die?"

At the customer's complaint, the proprietor of the gambling den let out a dry laugh.

"Die, you say. Are you even able to?"

Ah.

"You—you know. That I can't die."

"It is not that I know. It is that I see and come to know. What use is one who cannot recognize the value of a stake?"

Mr. Do's eyes fixed on me as if seeing straight through me.

"Because life is one. Because, in the world that is 'I,' the agony of birth and death comes always but once. That is what makes the gamble called living possible. You are breaking that rule. The most sacred rule of all."

I'd guessed there might be beings that perceived I was regressing.

The Happyland visit commemorative photo I'd received this time had held an image of me from a previous run, after all.

"If life were manifold, how could one say 'everything' had been staked? If there were a place to retreat, how could it be called the brink of a cliff?"

Now I understood.

"So that's why you hate me?"

I am a being for whom a single life-staking gamble is impossible.

So long as I die yet cannot die.

"Yes. I hate it. Your very existence is sacrilege."

A traditionalist of the gambling world, born and bred.

"So—because I die yet can't die, even if I beat you, you can't let me escape?"

"The weights do not match. To you, death is light as a breath, yet escape is heavy as guilt."

A matter of balance again.

I'm sick to death of scales.

"......Then—what if I wager someone else's escape?"

The pupils set in three faces of the die, hanging in midair, regarded me steadily.

That it didn't reject me outright was a promising sign.

"Jeong Jiho. The kid outside. How about—if I win, you let him escape."

"Let the negotiation begin."

Only then did Mr. Do guide me to the white table with a single chair.

"Ah. Before that—there's something to check. If the kid escapes and then I die and come back, what happens to him? Does he come back too?"

If so, this contest would have no meaning at all.

"No. He will not return."

Taking the seat and looking up at the die, I found Mr. Do bobbing in the air across from me before going still.

"My rules are not so light. This Labyrinth shall not dare interfere with a being who has slipped free of its rules."

A rule is a sacred thing.

If there's one thing among the countless tales the beings of a Labyrinth whisper that you may believe without doubt, it's whatever concerns a 'rule.'

Even if they hide things, they do not lie. Not when it comes to rules.

"Or—would I come out and find the kid already dead?"

"My. Rules. Are not. So light."

"Got it. I can at least ask, can't I."

So even if I regressed, Jeong Jiho would stay fixed, alive, outside this Labyrinth.

That was enough.

"More to the point—shouldn't you first consider the case where you lose? You'll be taking the life of that young, taciturn opponent."

"......Couldn't we just make it me who dies? Reversible or not, dead is dead. And I really hate dying."

Reading the expression of a lump of flesh with nothing but eyeballs is no easy task.

Mr. Do closed its eyes for a long while, rotating slowly, then opened them again, little by little.

"I accept. Should you lose, you alone shall die."

"Permanently?"

"As if that were possible."

"It isn't?"

"Some rules take precedence over my own."

"......Right. But are you sure that's really enough? Thanks for accepting and all. You hated it because I can't stake my life, so the gamble can't hold—that's what you said."

"Do you truly not know? Or do you wish not to know?"

When I looked up blankly, the twenty-one eyes curled, itching, laughing again from within.

"Your death is enough. You will come to understand."

***

"Let me make one thing clear. Your chance to stake that 'one and only' life of yours against me is the first and the last. Though I hold no memory of meeting you, I have the eye to recognize the worth of your life."

So Mr. Do, even if it couldn't recognize the regressed me, could recognize the worth of my life.

Meaning I couldn't trick Mr. Do into another contest.

"Also—the event must be played as I decide."

That was fine.

I'd intended as much from the start.

Given the opponent, the odds would be about the same whatever the game.

"Now then. Let me explain the game you'll play. The game's name is—'Breath of Judgment.'"

The instant Mr. Do finished speaking, two objects appeared on the table.

One: a pitch-black gas mask of a kind that left the eyes uncovered.

A design you'd only see in some near-future SF work.

The other: a die.

This time, a truly ordinary cube of a die.

Not made of flesh like a certain someone, and instead of eyeballs, round red pips were carved into its six faces—a small, light, ivory-colored die.

"Is this all we need? A gas mask and a die?"

"If life and death were decided by something as absurd as the number of pips drawn on a mere cube—how could that be a gamble?"

By that logic, regarding life as a gamble made sense, too.

Life is a deeply absurd phenomenon.

To me, at least.

"Put it on."

At the instruction, I donned the gas mask.

I'd expected it to feel stifling, sized to cover half my face.

Surprisingly, it wasn't uncomfortable. Nor heavy.

"Breath of Judgment. The name is grand, but it is a very simple game in which you judge whether the other party's statement is true or false. Truth and falsehood are......"

Like a breath.

Invisible to the eyes.

Things in which an endlessly fatal poison lies hidden.

"And so, if you fail to render a correct judgment, you will, in time, pay a fitting price."

......This gas mask.

I'm starting to think it isn't a mask that defends against poison, but one that releases it. Toward me, no less.

"You always read the number on the top face."

At that, the small die rolled across the table of its own accord.

"Throw the die, and with a probability of one in six, a total of six events occur. Either a 1 comes up."

A single red pip on the die's stopped top face gazed up at the ceiling.

Drrk.

It rolled again.

"Or a 2 comes up."

This time, a pair of blood-red pips.

"Or a 3 comes up."

Pips like the vertices of a triangle.

"Or a 4 comes up."

Two pairs of pips lying aslant.

"Or a 5 comes up."

A red cross awaiting a sinner.

"Or a 6 comes up."

Holes that could never form a Star of David.

"If one of these six 'events' occurs, then I, as witness, shall 'testify' to it. Shall we try a demonstration?"

Tak, ta-rak.

The sound of the die rolling across the table, then quiet.

Top face: 6.

"An event has occurred. I begin my testimony."

In that instant.

A white sheet of A4 paper appeared before me.

[Case Ⓝ - 6 Statement]

[Testimony x: 　　　]

Just then.

"Kyaaaaaaah!"

Suddenly, a young woman's shrieking voice spilled from Mr. Do.

"What I saw was, first and foremost, the perfect number!"

I flinched and looked at Mr. Do.

At the same time, writing appeared on the statement.

[Testimony x: "Kyaaaaaaah! What I saw was, first and foremost, the perfect number!"]

[Accept｜Verify]

So that's how it works.

The number of the event that occurred was 6.

If you called 6 'first and foremost the perfect number,' it would be because 6 is the smallest perfect number.

In other words, it was a kind of riddle game.

A game of checking whether the event's number and the testimony that obliquely described that number matched.

It could be endlessly easy, or endlessly hard.

"By the way—you're not going to pull some trick later, like swapping out the statement or the die, are you?"

"There is no gamble without trickery."

Is this jerk seriously planning to pull a bullshit trick right in front of me......?

"However—trickery that undermines the very foundation of the game's rules shall likewise not be permitted."

"Ah."

"And so the Labyrinth's supreme rule shall guarantee that what is true is always true, and what is false always false."

So no bullshit tricks like changing the die's pips midway or going back on its word—that was its way of telling me to rest easy.

In that case......

Maybe I really can win this.

A laugh slipped out of me despite myself.

Gambling—maybe it really is worth a shot, after all.