Fivefold Damage, One Choice

I stopped moving for a moment when I saw new information I hadn’t seen before and read it carefully.

‘So it means I won’t get hurt here, but when I go back, the damage hits five times harder.’

Like when I entered Jaeyul’s dream, this didn’t seem to be my real body, but I still had to be careful not to get injured.

More than that, though, there was something I wanted to check.

‘Situation terminal!’

I pulled the situation terminal out of my pocket and tapped the screen with my finger to activate it.

The communication function on the terminal still wasn’t active.

Even if it did activate, how communication would actually work was still unknown.

I skipped past the unusable functions and opened the map.

It was the same map that had once shown Jaeyul’s location.

Back then, Jaeyul had been the only living being there, so of course only his position had appeared.

But this place contained the child I had to rescue, multiple staff members and guests, and even the queen bee entity.

With my heart pounding, I checked the map.

‘There it is!’

Just as I’d hoped.

The child right next to me was marked as a pitch-black dot.

When I slid the map slightly to the side, I could also see the positions of the staff members walking nearby.

[General Staff]

The locations of the two staff members Won-gyeong and I had seen earlier were displayed, along with their ranks.

If I used this terminal to avoid the monsters and make it back to the suite where Won-gyeong was, I could clear the objective.

If I was lucky, I might even encounter an entity that wasn’t a ‘general staff member’ along the way.

Then later, I could deal with that entity together with Won-gyeong.

[Detailed objectives have been generated based on the sub-scenario.]

[Primary Objective: Disable the door locking mechanism.]

After confirming the objective, I looked around.

There was no keyhole on the door holding the child, only a card-tagging device.

This rift was absurdly modern.

All the modern civilization had supposedly been destroyed, yet here it was.

‘How are monsters even using this kind of modern technology?’

If a card was required, did that mean I had to steal one from the staff walking around upstairs?

I clenched and unclenched my fist as I thought it over.

Even with my increased strength, dealing with two humanoid entities would be tough.

[TIP! Physical force can sometimes be an effective method. With the player’s current strength, forced entry may be possible.]

As I gauged my strength, the system chimed in.

Alternating my gaze between the system’s message and the flimsy-looking lock, I made my decision.

‘Alright. I’ll break it.’

Even if I caused a bit of noise down here, staff upstairs wouldn’t hear anything unless they had hearing like mine.

I looked around for something I could use as a tool, but there was nothing.

I hadn’t been expecting a steel pipe or anything, but this was so empty it made me wonder how I was supposed to open it.

[[TIP! A fist is an excellent tool!]]

…My fist?

I looked down at my hand after reading the system’s irresponsibly cheerful suggestion.

It was a small, completely unimpressive fist.

My slender fingers looked fragile enough to snap with just a bit of force.

“With this…? Really…? Is this right?

Do I need a different fist or something?”

The system offered no reply, as if that idea was ridiculous.

It really was telling me to break it with my bare hands.

Even if my strength was five times higher, wasn’t my body’s durability still the same?

[TIP! Within a Hidden Field, the player will not feel any injuries!]

“I know that already. You told me earlier.”

I let out a long sigh.

[TIP! The ‘child’ will not be able to hold on much longer.]

When I saw that message, a chill ran down my spine.

I didn’t know how long the child had been trapped here.

Even at a glance, the child’s condition was severe.

They looked like they could die at any moment.

In the end, I had to choose.

If you asked anyone whether ‘life’ or ‘injury’ carried more weight, the answer would be life.

I wasn’t a particularly righteous person, but I wasn’t so emotionally numb that I could ignore a dying child right in front of me.

‘I’m always stuck in the middle.’

It would have been easier if I were cold enough to turn away from a scene like this.

Since I wasn’t, I moved.

To minimize the pain once I returned to my real body, I took off my outerwear and wrapped it tightly around my fist.

Holding up my absurdly wrapped fist, I took a deep breath.

‘Seriously…What if it hurts…?’

I squeezed my eyes shut and threw my punch.

Bang.

A loud crash echoed through the room.

When I cracked my eyes open, I saw the terminal sparking and crackling with electricity.

It didn’t look like it had opened yet.

I was more concerned about my hand than the half-broken terminal.

It didn’t hurt at all.

I put even more strength into my arm and punched again.

A louder crash shook the room.

The child’s small body jerked and trembled.

Click.

With a sharp sound, the damaged terminal disengaged the lock.

I hurried over to the child, unwinding the cloth from my hand.

My fist was completely uninjured.

I hoisted the child onto my back, their breathing so faint it felt like it might stop at any moment.

The child’s arms kept slipping, unable to hold on properly, so I pressed them firmly against my shoulders and wrapped my outerwear around my waist to secure the child tightly to me.

Everything I was doing felt unreal, like a distant dream.

In a way, it really was a dream.

I stood up with the child on my back.

The child was lighter than I’d expected.

I didn’t even stagger.

‘If only my real body could move like this…’

I muttered lightly and pulled out the situation terminal.

[Primary Objective Completed! As a reward, ‘Single-Use Dagger’ has been generated.]

[Secondary Objective has been generated.]

[Secondary Objective: Escape the ‘Management Center’ without being detected by staff.]

[TIP! Using the situation terminal allows you to track staff movement. Staff in this area cannot perceive anything outside their forward-facing direction.]

I knew it.

I knew these guys were kind of stupid.

If they couldn’t see anything outside their forward-facing direction, escaping wouldn’t be that hard.

Using the terminal, I watched the staff move around.

Those idiots were patrolling the same routes in circles at a fixed speed.

When I opened one door with the child on my back, I saw a monster that looked like the ones from the rift maze.

It had chains wrapped around the necks of several other monsters.

Most of them looked like they were dying.

Some had limbs torn off, as if they’d been bitten by other monsters.

It seemed like they had tried to eat each other.

They weren’t behind bars but restrained by chains, so I searched for a path through.

‘It doesn’t look like the chains reach the center…’

Frowning, I checked the route and moved quietly so as not to wake the half-asleep monsters.

The center seemed to be a path the staff used.

The chained monsters probably couldn’t reach it.

There was no splatter of monster slime there either.

But just as I was passing the midpoint, I spotted thick, sticky slime splashed across the floor.

If I went straight through, I would definitely slip.

If I were alone, I could crawl along the floor, but carrying a child made that impossible.

I turned my gaze to the side.

There was a section I could pass through without slipping, though it meant straying from the path.

But that area was clearly within reach of the monsters’ chains.

And the monster beyond that spot was crouched low, its eyes gleaming.

It was waiting for me to pass.

Waiting to hunt me.

‘…Am I really going to make it out alive?’

***

Won-gyeong gently stroked Doya’s hair again and again as she slept, as if she’d passed out.

He was exhausted from constantly caring for Jaeyul.

Shadows cast by her long lashes lay beneath Doya’s peacefully closed eyes.

Won-gyeong quietly turned off the light above the bed and stood up.

‘It’d be dangerous to keep looking.’

Ever since they’d been affected by the curse here, Doya had seemed unbearably lovely.

Whenever her perpetually moist golden eyes turned toward him, his breath would catch.

Her delicate nose, her rose-colored lips that curved slightly upward.

Her softly curling hair tracing fragile lines.

The strange scent lingering in the air around her.

Around Doya was a freshness completely out of place in a rift.

The scent and presence he’d noticed in the bunker hadn’t come from some ventilation system.

It had come from Doya herself.

‘Doya really is an ability user.’

Thinking that, Won-gyeong turned off every light on the ceiling as he left the bedroom.

He sat down on the sofa in the living area and took out the coin he always carried, looping it around his finger.

It was the same coin he’d used when he first met Doya.

Back then, she had told two lies.

When she’d entered the bunker.

And how long the person she claimed had died had actually stayed there.

They were lies, but nothing critical.

Few people told a complete stranger the full truth.

If someone did, it would be more suspicious.

An ability user unaware of her own power.

Thinking of the strange energy Doya had shown when she entered Jaeyul’s body, Won-gyeong let out a short sigh.

Mental-type abilities were especially hard for others to identify.

He could forcefully restrain her and find out, the way Jeong Iheon had done once she became aware of her power…

But he didn’t want to.

Part of it was not wanting to be hated.