Chapter 144: Branch Point (2)

Han-su was still staring at Alice with a grave expression.

Chang-sik, the writhing black mass, went, “Ooh, ooooh,” in admiration.

The clown kept blowing his horn with a loud, “Pwooo—.”

And Alice wore a bright smile.

The surroundings were still changing around the table where the four of them were seated.

“Come now, we don’t have much time. Are you planning to bore me?”

Are you confident you can handle what comes after?

Han-su glared at Alice’s insolent words, still lost in complicated thoughts.

Suppose he wagered a part of himself.

Would Chang-sik be happy if he heard about it?

Even if Han-su got extremely lucky, lost only one or two parts of his own body, and won back Chang-sik’s entire body, he would never be happy about it.

He wasn’t even sure whether it was still right to call that childlike thing Captain Yoon.

But he was certain Chang-sik would hate it if Han-su did something like that.

Still, he needed to buy time.

Han-su chose the safest possible stake.

“Then I’ll wager my left arm.”

“Not bad. Fine.”

Behind him, Su-myeon’s shadow could be seen frantically waving both hands in refusal.

“Then shall we play roulette?”

At Alice’s words, mice appeared, heaving and straining as they dragged something over.

But that wasn’t a very good way to buy time.

“Poker.”

Alice shrugged at Han-su’s answer.

“As you wish. You don’t trust your luck?”

“To be precise, I don’t trust that machine.”

“And you trust a card game?”

At Alice’s words, Han-su fell silent again for a moment.

What would Su-myeon have said?

He would have drawn Alice’s interest with some flexible answer.

Han-su regretted not having that kind of ability.

Alice, who had been watching him expectantly as though waiting for a reply, eventually shrugged.

“Hmm. Maybe next time you come, I should keep Su-myeon around a little longer. You’re no fun at all.”

Alice frowned and gestured again, and the mice who had worked so hard to bring over the roulette wheel started moving once more.

This time, they brought a poker table.

How long would it take Su-myeon to get back up here?

After his left arm, what would be the safest thing to wager next?

Would it be better to wager one eye like Su-myeon?

If so, should he wager his right eye, the one with worse vision?

With thoughts that would have made Su-myeon ask whether he had lost his mind, Han-su sat down at the poker table.

“Then, let the game begin.”

Alice took the dealer’s position.

Han-su glared at Alice’s delighted expression and was just about to carefully reach for the cards.

Ding—

“.......”

Along with the strangely clear sound.

“Why the hell does this damned hotel take so long just to make one elevator?”

At the sound of Su-myeon’s grumbling voice as he appeared, Han-su’s and Alice’s expressions reversed completely.

***

The VIP lounge had somehow changed until it looked as though it had been coated in gold, and the clown was clapping.

And beyond him were Han-su and Alice.

Looking at them, Su-myeon stepped back into the lounge.

'So she can move locations after all.'

Several strands of Alice’s hair were still stretching all the way up to the ceiling.

She seemed to have become integrated with the interior of the hotel to some degree.

But judging by the murderous expression on her face, she apparently hadn’t expected him to return this quickly.

Su-myeon approached while provoking Alice with a deliberately trivial remark.

“Why don’t I take over that game instead?”

As Su-myeon approached, Alice’s hand gripping the poker table trembled violently.

Seeing Alice’s rage practically written across her face, Su-myeon thought for a moment.

“Why? Just because it’s your hotel doesn’t mean you’re the only one allowed to make rules.”

He prodded her slightly, partly to confirm what exactly she was angry about.

Alice snapped as though he had hit the mark.

“How dare a mere human tamper with the rules of my hotel?!”

As though unable to contain her rage, her head suddenly swelled as if it were about to burst.

Her outer skin tore apart, exposing flesh and muscle, and Alice began touching her face as though trying to put it back in order.

She pressed down hard with her palms as if compressing it, rearranging the additional facial features and bones that had swollen out through the surface.

Su-myeon spoke.

“I’d recommend not trying the same trick again. Unless you want to spend your time trading word games with me while we write more than a hundred rules for this hotel.”

If that happened, Su-myeon would get confused, and Alice’s hotel would end up filled with indiscriminate rules.

Of course, Su-myeon didn’t actually know what that meant for Alice.

But apparently it was a more serious problem than he had expected, because Alice became so furious that even her body began collapsing.

“How could you say something like that...? How could you ruin my hotel like this!”

Alice screamed.

Her body was no longer that of the deceptively pretty little girl she had fashioned for herself, but was becoming closer to the monster he had first seen.

By then, additional heads and mouths had burst out all over her body, unable to withstand the pressure, and they all screamed at once.

“Did you really think I needed your permission to bring you here?! Huh?! Shall I bring every last one of your other companions in right now too?! Do you want to find out just how far I can go?!”

Alice had abandoned the relatively well-behaved way she had been pretending to speak and was now screaming like a nasty child throwing a tantrum.

Except dozens of mouths were shouting at once, giving her an entirely different level of oppressive force.

Watching Alice turn back into a gigantic monster, Su-myeon frowned.

“Uh, this could be a bit of a problem.”

Mu-yeon barked loudly, wary of Alice’s transformation.

“If the story stops being interesting, then you, me, all of us are finished anyway.”

Nobody pays attention to a boring story.

The same goes for a story bloated with unnecessary rules and explanations.

That was something that shook Alice’s very nature, beyond mere causality.

Listening to Alice scream, Su-myeon spoke with his brow still furrowed.

“......So?”

Of all things, a ghost-story entity rambling on about its circumstances was the least meaningful thing to Su-myeon.

Whatever they protected, however they lived.

If they had evolved in a way that threatened beings in reality, then Su-myeon had no reason to go out of his way to listen.

Boom!

Alice’s enormous body reached toward Su-myeon as though trying to seize him.

Instead, that moment felt like an opportunity to Su-myeon.

He backed away from Alice, who was as sluggish as her huge body suggested, dodged the hand trying to snatch him—

and immediately began climbing up using that very hand as a foothold.

Of course, Alice’s hand wasn’t a single organ.

It was several hands tangled together and fused into one.

Every time Su-myeon stepped down, multiple smaller hands grabbed at his ankles.

Grrrr....

Whenever that happened, Mu-yeon, who had climbed onto Alice after Su-myeon, savagely bit them away.

After barely managing to climb a few more steps up Alice’s body, Su-myeon used the dagger he carried to cut through the strands of hair connecting Alice to the ceiling.

“Aaaaah!”

At first, Alice flailed around in confusion, unable to understand what he was trying to do, but then she began screaming.

And immediately afterward, Su-myeon looped a rope around one of Alice’s necks.

[The Sun and Moon’s Rope]

[The fastest and surest rope for ascending to the sky. No matter where you are, it will lift the user to the highest reality. However, the user must never let go midway.]

As though carrying out a hanging.

One of Alice’s necks was caught inside the rope, which had been tied into a firm loop.

When Su-myeon released the opposite end of the rope, it shot upward into nothing but distant darkness and connected somewhere above.

The rope pulled taut and began dragging Alice upward.

“W-what is this?! What is this?! N... no! No! Not this!”

As Alice began thrashing wildly, Su-myeon and Mu-yeon, who had been on top of her, were thrown off helplessly.

Su-myeon reflexively tried to stab his dagger into Alice’s body for support, but that was the kind of thing that was only easy in movies.

“...!”

The dagger failed to sink in properly and slipped away.

As Su-myeon fell, Han-su slid underneath him, caught him, and the two of them rolled across the floor together.

By then, Chang-sik and the clown were also watching the scene, flailing around uselessly without actually doing anything.

How they were interpreting this situation—

Su-myeon had absolutely no idea.

[25. Do not use items that smell of filthy beasts on hotel employees.]

[26. Proper etiquette must be observed in the VIP lounge....]

[27. Alice absolutely remains inside the hotel.]

His phone began vibrating urgently as new rules appeared one after another.

And Alice, bound by the rope, was already halfway off the floor.

Then, with a scream, Alice was dragged upward into the darkness filling the ceiling.

“.......”

Silence settled over the area.

Su-myeon hadn’t expected to use this item like this instead of for escape.

In the suddenly quiet lounge, he let out a small sigh of relief.

But either way, a place whose owner had disappeared like this would begin to distort, just as the Infinite School Grounds had.

At the very least, its influence wouldn’t grow any stronger.

“Han-su.”

When Su-myeon called him, Han-su took a device out of his inventory.

“.......”

It was a bomb detonator.

The machines Su-myeon had left behind on one side of every floor he had visited until now were bombs connected to the device Han-su was holding.

“I left one on Basement Level 9 too. Even if we can’t blow up the middle floors, that should still count for something.”

They had no way of knowing what kind of penalty the final rules Alice had added before disappearing would bring, so the two of them hurried.

The detonator was set to one minute.

That was more than enough time to run to the exit visible behind where Alice had been standing.

“...Would you like to come with us?”

At Su-myeon’s suggestion, Chang-sik and the clown looked at each other.

They didn’t seem to understand exactly what he meant.

“I’ll go... with my friend.......”

Chang-sik nodded, while the clown continued doing nothing but blowing his horn.

Watching them, Su-myeon gave a bitter smile and nodded.

There was no reason to hesitate, so Su-myeon and Han-su soon ran toward the exit.

It was the same exit they had already used once before.

But this time, there were far too many uncertainties for them to know what the result would be.

Could Captain Yoon Chang-sik make it back to reality alive?

And who exactly was this clown?

Boom!

Boom!

Amid the violent sounds of something exploding behind them, Su-myeon threw himself into the exit flooded with white light.

***

“Haa... haa....”

Su-myeon woke from sleep, breathing so hard that it felt as though he had been underwater for a long time.

When he hurriedly looked around, Han-su and Mu-yeon were in much the same condition.

They hadn’t even run that far, yet their bodies were strangely exhausted, and they were so short of breath that their lungs hurt.

“.......”

After barely catching his breath, Su-myeon looked around further.

But aside from the three of them, there was no one else in the room.

What about Chang-sik and the clown?

Had they failed to return to reality?

Or had they awakened at the places where they had originally disappeared?

How could they contact them?

His head was a mess, and he was exhausted.

“...I’m going to lie down for a little while before I get up.”

Overwhelmed by the exhaustion, Su-myeon immediately tried to lie back down.

He could send a text to the Governance people who were probably worried about them....

“You’re back!”

Just as he was about to do that.

Hearing Ju-hee’s voice as she threw the door open and rushed inside, Su-myeon sighed.

Ugh. So much for getting any rest.

Giving up on lying back down, Su-myeon looked at Ju-hee.

With an expression he couldn’t quite understand, she said,

“It looks like Alice Hotel has been successfully concluded.”