The distance between us and him feels longer than it actually is. That's fear doing the measuring, not my legs.
Areum's already ahead of me, closing on the mascot's far side, cutting off whatever direction it might have planned to bolt in. Jung-su's boots hit pavement somewhere behind me, faster than a man his age should be able to manage, and I don't look back to check on Yuna because I already know she's moving too — I can hear it, the particular rhythm of someone who's decided waiting is no longer an option she's willing to consider.
The man's still smiling up at it when I reach him. Whatever it's telling him, wherever it's taking him in his own head, he looks more at peace than anyone on this street has any business looking tonight.
It doesn't let go when I reach him. I didn't expect it to.
My hands close around his shoulder and the mascot's arm at the same time, and the arm doesn't yield so much as it simply refuses to acknowledge I've touched it at all, foam-gloved fingers still spread gentle across his back like a hug that's never once considered ending.
"Hey." My voice doesn't reach him. He's smiling up at it, glassy, distant, the specific faraway look of someone listening to a voice only he can hear. "Hey, look at me."
He doesn't. Whatever it's telling him, it's better than anything I've got to offer.
I pull. Hard, both hands, my whole weight behind it, the same way I'd pull a stranger off a subway track.
Nothing. Not resistance exactly — it doesn't fight me for him. It just doesn't notice I'm there at all, the way a wall doesn't notice you're leaning on it.
Jung-su hits its other side a half-second later, boots skidding on the bright tile, staff braced against the foam arm like a crowbar. He puts his whole back into it. The arm doesn't move a fraction of an inch.
"It's not strength," he says, breathing hard already. "This isn't a strength problem."
"Then what is it a problem of," Areum calls, circling to the mascot's blind side, voice tight.
Nobody has an answer. I try anyway — different angle, both hands under its elbow this time, trying to lever the joint the wrong way. It gives about as much as the wall did.
The man doesn't even flinch at any of it. Whatever's happening to him, our hands on the mascot's arm aren't reaching him at all.
Up close, the wrongness of it is worse than it looked from thirty feet away. Its fur isn't fur so much as a suggestion of fur, texture without the actual give real plush would have under a grip this hard. Its painted eyes don't track either of us at all, fixed forward on him alone, glossy and huge and utterly, patiently content.
Areum tries next, coming at it from the front, both hands braced against its chest, throwing her whole weight backward like she's trying to topple a vending machine. It doesn't rock. It doesn't so much as register the shove, foam-gloved arms still locked gentle around a man who's stopped being anything but a shape it's decided to keep.
"This isn't working," she says, breathing hard. "Whatever we're doing, we're doing the wrong thing to it."
"Copy that," Jung-su says, already circling for a different angle, staff braced like he's looking for a seam that isn't there.
* * *
"It's not isolation it needs in general," a voice says, close, urgent, accented, English cutting through Korean without apologizing for it. "It's *his* isolation. Specific to him. You're pulling on the wrong variable."
I don't know who's talking. I don't have time to look.
"English, please, shorter," Areum snaps, still circling.
"Get everyone touching him. All of us. At once." The same voice, faster now, like the idea's still assembling itself as he says it. "It can't have alone and crowded in the same second. Pick one and force it to be true."
"That's a guess," Jung-su says, not stopping what he's doing.
"Sixty percent, maybe higher. I don't have time to be more honest than that."
"Sixty percent isn't a plan," Areum says. "It's a coin flip with extra math."
"Most of the good ideas I've ever had were coin flips with extra math," he says back, not slowing down. "Ask me again if it works."
I don't understand the math. I understand *now* is the only time we've got left to try it.
"Everyone," I say, loud, and Areum's already moving before I finish the word, and Jung-su's hand finds the man's wrist instead of the mascot's arm, and Yuna's arm wraps around from the other side, and for one absurd second the five of us are just holding a stranger at once, a knot of bodies too tangled to read as anyone standing alone.
The mascot's head tilts, wrong, a half-degree too far, like a machine recalculating an equation that no longer balances.
Its arms loosen. Not gently. All at once, mechanical, a puppet whose strings just got cut mid-gesture.
We pull him clear in the same motion, all five of us stumbling backward together, and the man comes with us gasping, blinking, already crying in the specific way someone cries when they surface from something they didn't know they were drowning in.
"What—" he says. "What was I—"
"Later," Areum says, already turning him, angling her body between him and whatever's happening behind us. "Move first."
* * *
The mascot doesn't chase Su-min. Its head rotates toward the people who pulled him free, the smile split wide enough to expose the black gums underneath.
We broke its hold. Now it has to fight us.
The mascot drags him off the shards and bites into the side of his skull while he is still trying to breathe. Its teeth close through his temple.
The familiar heat arrives.
HUMAN ECHO ABSORBED
STR: 40 → 44
VIT: 32 → 36
I am stronger than I was before it killed him. That makes stopping it feel less like revenge and more like spending what it just gave me.
Areum screams. The note hits it broadside and buckles the costume head.
She checks her wrist on the breath.
DAMAGE: 35
"Thirty-five," she calls. "It felt clean."
Jung-su goes low. His staff caves in one plush knee and dark fluid bursts through the fur.
DAMAGE: 71
"Knee," he calls. "It has joints under the costume."
"The neck seam," the English voice shouts. "Every time it bites, the seam opens. That's structural, not decoration."
The mascot swings at the voice. I take the hit instead. The paw lifts me off my feet and throws me through a display rack.
Pain lands before the bracelet does.
HP: 420/420 → 319/420
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Twenty-two points for one hit. I cannot take four more.
Light gathers in my hands as I stand. STR does nothing for this distance. INT does.
I wait until the mascot opens its mouth again. The neck seam spreads.
The light enters through the gap and burns out through the back of its costume head.
DAMAGE: 640
The number is higher than the 390 I dealt to the Choir. INT rose from sixteen to thirty-five, and the bracelet finally makes the difference visible.
The mascot staggers but stays upright. Level four does not mean fragile.
"Crowd it," the English voice says. "Isolation is its weapon. Make proximity ours."
Mrs. Bae gets Su-min and the children back. The rest of us close from every side. Jung-su pins the damaged knee. Areum holds the mouth open with another note. Yuna grabs the surviving arm and refuses to let go.
I drive both hands into the split neck and release everything the light will give me.
COMBINED DAMAGE: 1,090
The costume head ruptures. Black flesh, teeth, and clotted pieces of the boy it ate spray across the storefront. The body runs three blind steps before Jung-su breaks the other knee and it collapses.
The bracelet strikes once against my wrist.
TARGET: TERMINATED
TARGET STATUS — THE FRIEND: DEAD
CLEAR CONDITION MET: STAGE 5 COMPLETE.
The mascot remains dead in the street. No retreat. No second victim.
Su-min stares at the corpse, one hand over his mouth. "That was holding me."
"Not anymore," Areum says.
* * *
"Sorry," the English voice says, once the street's gone quiet enough to hear anything at all. "That was — I talk fast when I'm doing math out loud. Bad habit."
He's tall, the same man I heard switching between Cantonese and English, the same face I've half-recognized in two rooms already without ever getting a name to put to it. Up close he's younger than I expected, glasses pushed up into dark hair, still holding a phone with no signal like he forgot to put it away.
"You've been in the last few rooms," I say. "I've seen you."
"Probably. I've seen you too." He offers a hand, oddly formal given everything that just happened. "Vincent. Sorry — should've led with that instead of yelling variables at you."
"Hyunmin." I shake it. "That thing back there. You knew what it needed before any of us did."
"I didn't know. I guessed." He says it plainly, no false modesty in it, just fact. "Sixty-one point four percent confidence, maybe. Good enough odds when the alternative was watching and doing nothing."
"Sixty-one point four," Jung-su repeats, arriving beside us, staff still loose in one hand. "That's oddly specific for a guess."
"I do math when I'm scared. It's better than the alternative." Vincent shrugs, like this explains everything necessary about him. "Diu lei — sorry. Cantonese. Comes out when English isn't fast enough for what I'm actually feeling."
"What's it mean?"
"Nothing you need translated." He almost smiles. "Faaidi sei la. Die faster, roughly. I was talking to the mascot, for what it's worth. Not you."
Areum's crouched by the rescued man a few feet off, one hand steady on his back while he gets his breathing under control. "He's not hurt," Areum calls over. "Just shaken. Says he doesn't remember agreeing to anything. Just remembers feeling safe, for a second. Safer than he'd felt all night."
"That's the whole design of it," I say, and hate how true it sounds out loud. "It wasn't lying to him. That's what made it work."
Nobody has anything to say to that. It's true enough on its own that adding to it would only make it heavier.
"Su-min," the man says, quiet, once his breathing's evened out enough to manage a full sentence. "My name. In case anyone needs it for — " He doesn't finish that thought either, glancing at the wall already opening at the end of the street, at whatever comes next that he clearly understands he's now part of.
"Hyunmin," I tell him. "This is Areum, Jung-su, Yuna. Mrs. Bae's the one who'll feed you before she asks you anything hard."
"Accurate," Mrs. Bae says, not looking up from checking the man's pulse anyway.
Su-min laughs, short, disbelieving, like he's surprised his own body still remembers how. "I was buying my sister a birthday present," he says, to nobody, to all of us. "Twenty minutes ago I was standing in a shop deciding between two shades of the same lipstick. That was my whole problem twenty minutes ago."
"Nobody's problems make sense here," Areum tells him. "Give it time. You get almost good at it."
"Almost," Jung-su echoes, dry. "Never all the way."
* * *
"You're fast at that," Jung-su says, watching Vincent a beat too long. "The math. Under pressure like that."
"Practice." Vincent taps his own temple, wry. "I've had a lot of practice being the person doing the math while everyone else does the actual fighting. Cheap way to feel useful when you're not the one holding a weapon."
"You held your ground back there," I say. "That's not nothing."
"I held a phone with no signal and yelled percentages." He says it lightly, but something under it doesn't quite match the joke. "Different thing entirely from what the rest of you did."
Yuna crouches down to check the scrape on Vincent's forearm — foam claw, or something under it, must have caught him in the scramble, though he hasn't mentioned it once. "You're bleeding and you didn't say anything."
"It's not much."
"That's not the same as nothing." She presses two fingers gently against the edge of it, the same instinct that had her steadying strangers since the night she landed. "You did good work back there. You don't have to also pretend it cost you nothing."
"Noted." He looks almost embarrassed by the attention, glancing anywhere but at her. "I'm better with numbers than with people fussing over me. Fair warning."
"I'll try to fuss less, then." She says it warm, easy, no weight behind it at all, and moves on to check Su-min instead without waiting for him to respond.
"How many rooms have you been in," I ask. "Actually. Not counting tonight."
"Four, including this one." He says the number like it costs him something to say out loud. "I keep ending up near the same handful of faces. I don't think that's a coincidence anymore, for what it's worth. I've run the numbers on it twice."
"Welcome to the club," Areum calls over, not quite joking either. "Nobody's cracked that one yet."
"I know. I've tried." He almost smiles again, tired around the edges of it. "Give me a few more rooms. I like a problem that stays unsolved long enough to actually be interesting."
Mrs. Bae's already herding the shaken man gently toward the rest of the group, murmuring something too quiet to carry, the same unhurried authority she's used on every frightened stranger since the first room. The man goes without protest, still holding that shopping bag looped over one wrist, the ordinary errand she never got to finish.
"You're safe now," Mrs. Bae tells him, in the same voice she's used on every child she's ever herded into a corner. "Breathe. Nobody's going to touch you again tonight."
The man nods, doesn't quite believe it, breathes anyway. It seems to help regardless.
* * *
My wrist buzzes, low, the whole street answering it at the same half-second.
STAGE 5 — CLEARED. RANK ASSIGNED: 2 OF 41. POINTS AWARDED: 95.
CASUALTIES: 6.
LEVEL UP! LEVEL 10 → LEVEL 12.
STR: 44 → 50
INT: 35 → 43
VIT: 36 → 40
AGI: 44 → 49
WILL: 37 → 43
MAX HP: 460/460
TOTAL ATTRIBUTES: 225
The mascot took one hundred and one HP with one hit. VIT thirty-six kept my ribs from folding. The new maximum does not make the damage smaller; it gives me enough body left to stand back up.
Six. Lower than any stage so far, and I don't know yet if that's because we did something right or because this one simply wasn't built to take as many of us as the others were.
Names scroll past, quick, most of them strangers, gone before I can hold them. I don't recognize any of them. That doesn't make it easier. It just makes the grief harder to aim.
"Two of forty-one," Areum says, reading her own wrist, something almost like surprise crossing her face. "That's the best we've placed yet."
"Doesn't feel like winning," Jung-su says.
"No," I agree. "It never does."
Seven people now: Jung-su, Areum, Mrs. Bae, Yuna, Vincent, Su-min, and me. Seven faces I need to notice if one goes missing.
Su-min's already being folded gently into the group by Mrs. Bae, given a water bottle from somewhere, walked toward the wall like this is routine instead of only his second Room. Maybe that's the kindest thing any of us can actually offer a stranger here — not answers, just the specific competence of people who've already survived long enough to make surviving look almost procedural.
Somewhere down the block, past the storefronts that have already stopped disagreeing about which way is forward, I catch a glimpse of a different cluster of survivors moving with purpose — a dozen or so, organized, someone at the front already directing two of them toward a side street before anyone asks him to. He's maybe our age, unhurried in the way people only get once they've stopped being surprised by their own competence, and the group around him moves like they've had real practice trusting whatever he tells them to do.
He doesn't look our way. Whatever room he's been surviving, he's been doing it well enough to still have that many people willing to follow him this far in.
"That's the third time I've seen that particular group," Vincent says, following my eyes. "Different faces each time. Same guy in front."
"Reshuffle's not random," Jung-su says, like it's the least surprising thing he's heard all night. "We already knew that."
"I know we knew it. I just like watching the proof happen twice. Confirmed data feels different than a suspicion, even when the suspicion was already correct."
"Only a mathematician would need to say that sentence out loud," Areum mutters, not unkindly.
"Guilty," Vincent says, and doesn't seem bothered by the label at all.
I don't know the man's name yet. Something tells me I will, eventually, and that whatever brings us into the same room properly is going to matter a great deal more than a glance across a dying street.
The wall at the end of the street is already opening, patient, unhurried, exactly the way it always opens, and beyond it — for once — there isn't screaming waiting on the other side. Just quiet, and the particular ache of a street that's about to stop pretending to be beautiful.
"Whatever that was," Vincent says, all the fast math gone out of his voice, "you killed it because everyone supplied a different part of the solution. That's useful data."
"Useful will have to do."
"Usually does," he says.
We walk toward the wall together, seven of us instead of five. Behind us, the mascot remains where we killed it, its broken costume soaking black into the bright Myeongdong pavement.
Su-min falls into step near the back of the group, quiet, still gripping that shopping bag like letting go of it might be the thing that finally makes tonight real. Nobody rushes him. Nobody makes him talk before he's ready to.
I glance back once, at the street, at the gold light already dimming behind the storefronts, and I let myself hope, for exactly as long as it takes to cross this threshold, that whatever's waiting for us on the other side gives us more than three days before it asks anything else of any of us.
It's a small hope. Small hopes are the only kind this place has ever once honored, and even those, only sometimes.