By Zephyria 
Park Jun-yeol decided that everyone else in the group, besides himself, was a useless idiot. Couldn’t they even read between the lines of the Procedure Manual?
The cabinets were safe? A cabinet is a cabinet, no matter how wide it is. How many people could possibly fit inside? One or two at most. This meant that even if all eight—no, seven, excluding that damn nurse—safely reached the locker room, they would have to weed some of them out again.
Not a single person pointed out this obvious fact. To believe they would be safe just by reaching the locker room; they were all morons.
In that sense, he felt no great guilt about abandoning Yoo Jiha in front of the Aberration and running away. That soft-hearted brat would have been kicked out of the locker room anyway.
‘Don’t resent me too much. It’s your own fault for being too stupid to realize.’
It wasn’t that he had disliked the guy from the start. Even at twenty-one, his round, youthful face wasn’t particularly irritating. It was simply that the guy he had ignored and disregarded had suddenly started offering opinions and acting like he was something special once caught up in this insane phenomenon; that pretentious attitude was what grated on him.
‘No matter how much you babble with that arrogance, it’s the smart ones like me who survive.’
Walking briskly with the intention of being the first to arrive and lock the locker room door, Park Jun-yeol suddenly caught a thick scent.
A pink figure, enveloped in a perfume so dense and sweet it made his head throb, was approaching. As it twirled, voluminous frills fluttered and a tiara sparkled brilliantly.
「Oppa~ Play with Soon-ieeee♥」
A coarse voice burst into a giggle.
“Jiha, who hurt you?”
The cold voice awakened a suppressed fear. It wasn’t just the terror that the man before him might be a monster.
〈Why is this thing so fussy? You should have lived quietly, hiding as if you didn’t exist.〉
The blaming gazes that greeted him when he returned home injured after playing, the chilly pressure that had stifled him as a child—those memories revived from the far reaches of his mind. He curled his trembling fingertips into a fist. A reality he hadn’t fully recognized crashed over him with a chill.
Though it was a minor injury, he was still wounded. It was an obvious fact that he would be a burden in escaping this place. He would naturally be in the way. He would be a nuisance. He would be an eyesore.
〈Get out of my sight immediately. I can’t stand the look of you.〉
His heart, stimulated by old trauma, fluttered with anxiety. Yoo Jiha carefully opened his lips, making sure his voice didn’t shake. He only needed to say one thing. That it was okay to leave him behind. It was fine. It wasn’t the first time he’d been abandoned.
However, what returned, as if enveloping even his tremors, was that same cold voice.
“Is it a human, or an Aberration? Is the one who hurt you here?”
Yoo Jiha looked up with a blank stare.
…No. No. This man wasn’t trying to blame him. The man’s coldness was directed elsewhere. Toward the thing that had harmed him. As if he would punish it on his behalf if he knew its identity.
Suddenly, the tension vanished. His limbs, which had been stiff with strain, slumped loosely onto the floor. Now that the fear had faded, he could see the man’s face clearly. The emotion in the man’s gaze was not reproach, but worry.
It was the first time he had received such excessive concern for a minor injury like a sprained ankle. Not knowing how to respond, he found himself flustered.
“Can you stand up?”
“Ye-Yes! I just tripped while running, so… Whoa!”
Suddenly, his vision spun. His legs floated in the air, and the face of a man much taller than himself appeared right before his nose. For a moment, his heart shrank, thinking the man had finally entered the preparation stage to butcher his prey, but that wasn’t it.
He had never experienced this even as a child, let alone now as an adult. While Yoo Jiha’s brain struggled to recall the term ‘princess carry,’ Jeil Heon walked forward without hesitation.
“W-Wait a second! I can walk!”
“If you leave a sprained ankle untreated, you’ll keep injuring the same spot. Let’s get out of here and go to a hospital first.”
“I’ll go, I’ll go! So please, put me…!”
“If being carried like this is uncomfortable, should I carry you on my back?”
“I’m really okay!”
He was embarrassed and flustered to be scooped up like a child when he wasn’t even seriously hurt.
At his pleading, Jeil Heon finally set him down.
“We’ll walk slowly, but be sure to tell me if it’s too hard.”
“Ye-Yes.”
He was completely dazed. Though he was small compared to the man, he was still an adult male; how had the man lifted him so effortlessly? …Thinking about it, it could have been a blow to his pride, but he didn’t feel that way because of the carefulness emanating from the man who worried about his injury.
As he tried to compose himself and stand, Jeil Heon, who couldn’t take his eyes off the injured ankle, suddenly took off his field jacket. Then, he took off the sweatshirt he was wearing underneath and tore the bottom hem into long strips. While Jiha watched with wide eyes, wondering what he was doing, Jeil Heon removed his sneaker and began to skillfully wrap and secure the ankle like a bandage.
“….”
Seeing him tend to the injury while wearing only a thin short-sleeved T-shirt, a strange resonance spread through Jiha’s chest. A school Sunbae he had been on decent terms with had tripped him to save his own skin when their lives were in danger, yet a man he had just met was sincerely worrying over a trivial injury.
Just how long had he known him to care for him like this?
His cheeks flushed, and his heart tingled. While he aimlessly clenched and unclenched his fingers, the first aid was finished.
“…Thank you.”
“It’s nothing.”
With an indifferent expression, Jeil Heon lightly tapped the top of his foot. After shoving his foot—now thick with cloth—back into the sneaker and walking a few steps, it felt much better than before.
And the fear he had felt toward the man diminished as much as the pain had.
The muscles in Jeil Heon’s arm rippled delicately as he swept back his messy hair with one hand. He had felt that the man had a good build even when he was wearing the field jacket, but with only a thin T-shirt on, his solidly muscled physique was revealed without filter.
After staring blankly for a moment, Yoo Jiha hurriedly handed him the field jacket. Jeil Heon took the jacket but instead draped it over Jiha’s shoulders.
“As you can tell by what I’m wearing, I’ve been here since late autumn. It’s summer now, right?”
“Yes, it’s June.”
“It might be a bit hot, but do you want to wear it instead?”
“…?”
Though puzzled, it wasn’t a difficult request, so he obediently wore the jacket. Since it belonged to a man who differed in both height and build, the shoulders and sleeves hung loosely. In the strange feeling of being like a child wearing an adult’s clothes, he looked down at his hands.
A child wearing an adult’s clothes.
‘Huh?’
A sudden, alien sense of déjà vu surged within him.
“Let’s go, Jiha.”
However, before he could parse the single thread of intuition that had bloomed, Jeil Heon gestured, and the déjà vu quickly dissolved. Jiha. Only the sound of his name being called lingered faintly in his ears.
In the hallway, the remains of Aberrations trampled by the alcoholic lay sprawled like frogs that had died with burst bellies. Fixing his gaze only on Jeil Heon’s broad back as he led the way to avoid the sight, Yoo Jiha spotted a set of stairs. They were stairs he hadn’t noticed while being chased by the alcoholic earlier.
The stairs, appearing upside down on the hallway ceiling, even had a door attached. He realized that the door was not a simple door but an Aberration because strange characters—which Jeil Heon described as True Eye Text—appeared above it.
[Basement ■ Entrance ■ Cannot ■ ■ Block ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Open ■ ■ ….]
He unconsciously muttered while interpreting the True Eye Text.
“Is it talking about the basement?”
Hearing the monologue, Jeil Heon turned his gaze.
“Did you see an Aberration blocking the door to the basement?”
“Yes, yes! Over there, over there. Do you have the true eye too, Mister?”
“I don’t have it now. What do you think the True Eye Text says?”
“Uh… there are some characters that are hard to see here and there, but I think it means they’re blocking the entrance to the basement.”
“Correct. That’s exactly how you use the true eye. The characters read through the true eye differ slightly from person to person. Since it’s hard to interpret with just one person, we usually combine what several people have read. Even if it’s possible to open it from the inside, an Aberration is blocking the stairs so the door won’t open, so there’s no need to go into the basement, right?”
“Aha. That’s why in the Procedure Manual…”
Because Jeil Heon wore an expression as if he found him incredibly admirable, Yoo Jiha felt a bit bashful. He felt as if he had just received a ‘Very Good’ gold star sticker.
‘Ah, but how did he know it opens from the inside?’
A question flashed through his mind, but he soon found the answer himself. Since the man had stayed here for a long time, he probably knew other hidden details.
More than that, there was a problem that occurred to him belatedly.