2―8. Escape
“Ah, huk. We have to escape quickly! But… how are we supposed to call the rescue team?”
“Right…. I thought we could get out if the rescue team came. I didn’t know we had to call them ourselves….”
Just then, something glittered below the feet of the researcher lying far away. Seo Sihan, not missing that moment, slightly pushed the researcher’s leg side.
“This is… a key?”
“A key? …Ah!”
Jeong Minha, as if truly realizing the truth this time, pointed with his finger at the door on the back side of the safe zone building.
“Try it there! Right before I shot earlier, this person was trying to open that door.”
“Oh, really?”
Seo Sihan approached the door marked as an emergency exit holding the key. And when he inserted the key into the doorknob and turned it, it made a click sound and the door opened.
“Wow, I must be a genius!”
When Jeong Minha admired it alone, Seo Sihan also clapped beside him and chimed in, saying right, Minha is a genius.
Inside the door, befitting an emergency exit, some stairs extended long. The two, with not much time remaining, hurried up the stairs. There were no floor indicators or other doors, so they just kept going up without knowing how many floors they’d climbed.
As Seo Sihan, whose stamina had dropped, gradually fell behind, Jeong Minha, who had been running up ahead, slowed down.
“That’s why I told you earlier to eat a lot too, hyung.”
“I don’t think that’s the problem….”
It was a situation where they’d been continuously running around for over 4 hours without almost any rest. It would be strange not to be tired. Rather, for Seo Sihan, his stamina was much better than average. It was just that Jeong Minha was a competent athlete who exercised all day every day.
“We’re definitely eating meat for dinner tonight.”
“Yeah….”
Hyung needs to eat more, exercise with me, how about jogging every morning starting now, hyung? As Jeong Minha’s nagging continued, Seo Sihan gritted his teeth and climbed the stairs. If he said let’s rest here for a bit, he would be forced to participate in jogging from the next morning. Seo Sihan, who wanted to sleep in as much as possible, kept his mouth shut and just moved his legs diligently.
After running up the stairs for about 4 minutes like that, a door finally appeared.
It’s not locked, is it? Jeong Minha glanced back. He was worried because Seo Sihan following behind looked too exhausted.
If it’s locked, game rules or whatever, I’ll just break it. Jeong Minha vigorously turned the doorknob with the momentum to really break it. Fortunately, the door was unlocked.
“Uh…?”
However, unlike the abandoned buildings they’d seen until now, inside the room was packed with strangely arranged miscellaneous items. Various letters, numbers, pictures, and models made up a jumbled room. It was a scenery he’d seen a lot somewhere.
“Don’t tell me this is… telling us to escape the room? In this situation right now?”
When Jeong Minha grabbed his head, a warning notification rang out again.
[Warning: 15 minutes remaining until detonation.]
Seo Sihan, who sat down for a moment as soon as they arrived in the room and emptied an entire bottle of water, stood up from his seat again. He cleared his throat while looking around inside the room.
“Deduce from the clues… and escape from the room format?”
“Right. With 15 minutes left…. Should we just break it?”
“N-no. We can do it….”
Jeong Minha, tired of using his brain, lifted up the long sniper rifle and showed it. Seo Sihan hastily stopped him while laughing. Having no choice but to look around the room together, Jeong Minha sighed and said.
“I don’t know what’s what even looking at it. Room escape games are what I’m worst at. Honestly, isn’t this too much forcing things to match? They said everything I interpreted was wrong every time.”
“Then… maybe those people made it wrong.”
“Thanks for saying that at least.”
While Jeong Minha grumbled and roughly looked around, Seo Sihan stopped walking at a desk in the middle of the room. Then he picked up a paper placed on the desk and briefly examined the pictures drawn inside, then lifted one of the many frames on the wall side.
Then the bars on the opposite side of the entrance suddenly rose with a rattling sound.
“Uh, huh?! What! How did you do that?!”
Genuinely surprised, Jeong Minha approached close to Seo Sihan’s side with sparkling eyes. Seo Sihan explained while showing the paper to Jeong Minha.
“First, the room’s lighting is shining centered on this desk, so I thought it meant to come here…. And on the desk was this paper….”
“Ooh, yes.”
“If you look carefully at the pictures drawn here, they’re similar to the pictures of the frames on the wall side, right?”
“Wow, they are?”
On the paper, pictures were drawn jumbled within a five-by-five grid. The number of frames hanging on the wall side was much more, but the pictures drawn on the paper definitely existed too.
“Do you see the dates written under the frames?”
“Yes. Is it the date they were drawn?”
“I don’t know about that, but…. And, if you look at the paper again, it’s written small at the very bottom, ‘Arithmetic operations.'”
“Uh… uh…. A-arithmetic?”
“Yeah. Something to do with that here… since the date format is ‘year-month-day’, add the years and subtract the months and days….”
“…….”
“So if you calculate only the dates of the twenty-five pictures on the paper among these many frames….”
“…….”
“When you calculate everything, it comes out exactly to 55555? So I lifted the fifth frame from the left among those frames. I also thought maybe, and it seems to be the correct answer, so I’m relieved….”
When Seo Sihan smiled as if it was nothing, Jeong Minha asked in an absurd tone.
“It’s amazing that you figured that out…. What, twenty-five? Are you saying you just calculated all those many things at once by mental arithmetic?”
“I didn’t have time to write on paper, so I just roughly tried it….”
Jeong Minha clapped abruptly. As expected, I had to come with you, hyung. Even if I somehow got here, I would have ended up trapped here, or just broken the door and gone out and gotten sued. Jeong Minha kept listing Seo Sihan’s praises one after another.
Seo Sihan laughed as if embarrassed, saying Minha is more amazing, being able to enter here was also because Minha shoots so incredibly well… and listed Jeong Minha’s praises again.
The heartwarming atmosphere continued in that state but ended quickly. Because a familiar warning notification rang.
[Warning: 5 minutes remaining until detonation.]
This crazy game! No matter how he thought about it, having a break time every hour wasn’t just to prevent over-immersion, but really seemed to be because they might collapse from exhaustion.
The two hurried and ran outside the bars. The path leading to a long corridor gradually darkened.
“……!”
“Ah, I can’t see!”
Jeong Minha ran while holding hands together in the darkness, worried about losing Seo Sihan following behind. He could hear by footsteps too, but this was more reassuring. When they ran to the end, before they knew it, only 3 minutes remained.
“There’s a telephone over there!”
“Can we call the rescue team?”
Jeong Minha immediately picked up the old-fashioned telephone. However, only beep, beep, mechanical sounds were heard and there was no sign of the call connecting.
“Do we really have to dial this number plate to call? With what number? Don’t tell me 112? Ah, or is it 119?”
“…Come to think of it, there was some emergency number written in the room earlier….”
“What? What was it?”
“Sorry…. It didn’t seem related to the room escape, so I didn’t look carefully…. What should we do? Should I go back and look now?”
“I’ll go and come back!”
Jeong Minha, whose actions were faster than words, was already running back in the middle of the corridor. When Seo Sihan was restless with apologetic feelings, from far away, the sound of Jeong Minha shouting while running could be heard.
“Hyung―! But where is that written―!”
His voice was really loud too. Seo Sihan remembered the location where the number was written, so he shouted with all his might to Jeong Minha who was moving away in real-time.
“Above the clock―!”
Fortunately, whether it was because the voice echoed due to the corridor’s characteristics, Jeong Minha, who heard safely, shouted Yes―! and moved away.
After that, Jeong Minha, who passed through the bars again and arrived at the room, looked for the clock first.
Clock, clock, where is it? After hastily looking around the room once and coming back to the bars side, he let out an empty laugh. Something like a clock tower was erected right next to the bars. Jeong Minha, who had unnecessarily wasted time, immediately looked up above the clock.
But whether it was because it was too high, the writing above wasn’t clearly visible. Sihan hyung must have seen it right away because he’s tall, thinking that, he pulled over a chair that was nearby. On the chair cushion, a footprint picture was drawn. As expected, it seemed to have been hidden in a position visible only by stepping on this.
While Jeong Minha was finding the number like that, Seo Sihan looked at the countdown continuing in the corner of the device screen.
Before he knew it, only 1 minute remained. 60, 59, 58…… His heart pounded at the two-digit seconds decreasing in real-time.
Then when 40 seconds remained—
