"The second match. Begin."
Gong-
"......."
"......."
Even with the second match begun, neither I nor the man moved — we simply stood facing each other.
The man must have been as tense as I was; he wet his trembling lips with his tongue.
"I bring a lump that has lost its life, and you bring the egg of the land, big bro. Then I answer that your cure is a lump that has lost its life."
"...Then what about me?"
"You also answer that my cure is a lump that has lost its life."
In other words: I would guess his answer correctly, he would deliberately guess wrong, and we'd square the score at one to one.
'He's certain I could never kill a rabbit.'
He wasn't wrong, of course.
I hadn't so much as attempted to put the dagger to a rabbit's belly.
My hesitation must have shown despite myself, because the man hurriedly went on.
"At the end, we both give wrong answers — and then we go up to the fourth floor together."
"...Why rig the board for a draw like this?"
"Sorry?"
"There's no gain in it for you at all."
Supposing I believed everything the man had said so far....
The Curator had given him the chance to study this quest in advance.
He held an overwhelmingly favorable position — so why lay everything bare to me?
Why rig a drawn board, at the cost of inviting suspicion?
"Gain? I just hate the idea of climbing to the next floor by sacrificing someone."
The man wiped his fogged glasses on his shirt and forced a good-natured smile.
The look on his face — straining by any means to win me over — was almost pitiful.
Listening to that frail, quavering voice, my heart softened just a little.
'He could simply be someone like me, someone who doesn't want a needless sacrifice.'
Was I taking a proposal that favored me far too warily?
Wasn't this the moment to set suspicion down and join forces?
The way it had been with Go Gyu-min and Jang Si-woon-
"It's too cruel.... Not even simple erasure — making you smash your head against the rock, three whole times."
Wait.
"Byeoljubujeon or whatever it is — copying that story for this is just too cruel."
The man let his eyebrows droop, wearing a sorrowful expression.
He even nodded along, as if certain I felt exactly the same.
I barely reined in my wavering pupils and spun my thoughts fast.
The quest text I'd read earlier.
And the things the man had said.
'It seems....'
Every time I tried to trust this person, he showed me another glimpse of shadow.
I was growing weary and worn down too.
But I forced the corners of my mouth up and made the kindest face I could manage.
I have no confidence in acting — but restraining my emotions, that I could do passably well.
"Yes. I was at a dead end, so if you'd grant me a draw, I could only be grateful."
"Hehe, great! The game just got easy!"
The man and I even exchanged a formality of a handshake before turning our backs.
I sat down and busily pretended to dig up crops.
Digging furiously at the soil with dagger and hand together, it looked convincing enough.
After all, my cure was invisible to the man anyway.
'Earlier, when the man drew his sickle, I couldn't see his leaflet.'
He'd suddenly pulled a sickle from nowhere — so I'd been able to infer it came out of his leaflet.
If cures and leaflets are equally hidden from the opponent.
Then perhaps items already acquired and stored inside the leaflet can serve as cures too.
Fwish-
[Material]
Name: Fully Rotten Fish.
Description: Long dead and foul of stench — yet this, too, was once a life.
I pressed the rotten fish drawn on my leaflet.
The words 'this, too, was once a life' caught my eye.
'Crops that come from the ground were called the egg of the land. And the liver was....'
-One is the egg of the land.
-One is a lump that has lost its life.
'Now I think I see why they twisted it into metaphor.'
A living thing obtained on this map — it should qualify.
No — I had no choice but to believe it would.
I took the fish out of the leaflet and held it in my hand.
The squelching give of the rotted mass against my palm made my skin crawl.
On top of that, the fish's hideous stench of decay stabbed straight up my nose.
Gong-
"Come hither."
"Place the miracle cure upon the dish."
The Dragon King summoned us in his solemn voice.
The man and I each placed our cures upon the dish.
"The Byeoljubu standing on the right."
"Declare what thine opponent's cure is."
This time it was my opponent's turn to deduce my cure first.
"Uh..., um...."
But the man — who by all rights should have answered instantly — for some reason pressed his lips shut and rolled his eyes.
He knew my character, that I couldn't harm the rabbits, and we'd coordinated the plan besides.
There was no reason for him to deliberate like that.
'Shouldn't he be certain I brought the egg of the land?'
Either he distrusted me so much he was hedging for nothing — or this, too, was an act.
"The egg of the l-la-land...?"
Just before, the man had clearly promised to deduce my cure wrongly on purpose — to hand me this round.
'But he didn't say a lump that has lost its life.'
The man had chosen the egg of the land only after agonizing. That naked bewilderment didn't look like acting.
If there was anything in this situation that could genuinely rattle the man, it was probably this:
'The board is unfolding differently from the one he designed.'
"The Byeoljubu standing on the left."
"Declare what thine opponent's cure is."
"The egg of the land."
I answered instantly, leaving myself no room to doubt my own decision.
This man had broken the plan first, so I discarded my trust in exactly the same way.
In truth, whatever trust there was had already evaporated during our earlier conversation — so nothing resembling guilt stirred in me.
'Please, please....'
I prayed desperately for the Dragon King to turn his head toward me — and then.
Gong-
"The true and loyal vassal is the Byeoljubu on the left."
'Yes!!'
The Dragon King's gaze settled on me.
The man had lied about bringing a lump that has lost its life, and had in fact dug up an egg of the land.
Contrary to the plan, we had each brought the exact opposite of what we'd declared.
"H-how did you do it? Did you use the knife?!"
The man glared at me with the sharpest eyes he'd shown yet.
Had he been certain that he could stab me in the back, but that I never could?
If so, he'd hesitated far too long over his own choice.
"No. I brought the rotten fish."
The darkness lifted from the black lumps of data set upon the dish.
The rotten fish I had brought — and the potato the man had.
The moment the cures showed their true forms, the man hurriedly pinched his nose shut. It seemed the stench had been unsealed along with the reveal.
"...Haha. What remarkable creativity.... No one would ever think of a method like that."
'No one,' he says.... It wasn't nearly ingenious enough to warrant that kind of certainty.
The man clacked his teeth together and gnawed at his fingernails.
Now that I'd matched his cure and brought us to one-to-one, his agitation was written all over him.
"But the fish was created on this map..., so it doesn't fall outside."
"...?"
Doesn't fall outside of what?
The man let the muttered words slip out between his finely chattering teeth.
His unease must have bypassed his brain entirely — the murmur came out unfiltered.
'Doesn't fall outside?'
I recalled the man during the first harvest, eyes flicking my way, so conscious of me.
The gaze of someone calculating. ...Those eyes, rapidly checking whether things had strayed outside his calculations.
I called back the cures of the first round and the second.
'My harvests: one egg of the land, and one lump that has lost its life. The man's, in reverse: one lump, then one egg.'
And then there was his face during this second round, agonizing over the choice.
The expression of someone suspecting I'd submitted a harvest other than the egg of the land.
Why? Had he decided I'd suddenly grown bold?
'Or else....'
He must have caught the flash of light in my eyes, because the man let out a resigned chuckle.
"Hah.... You've caught on, more or less, haven't you?"
"......."
"That's a relief, honestly. Keeping it hidden was hard on my heart too...."
The man heaved a great sigh and rubbed both hands against his shirt.
Wiping his sweat-soaked palms, his face looked a good deal lighter than before.
Was it because he got to drop the useless act before the third round — the one that mattered most?
As if a fraction of the weight had left his heart, he kept letting out small, deflating laughs.
"Don't tell me the number of harvestables is fixed for each?"
"Quick on the uptake too, aren't you. I'm the stupid one, so.... Still — I did figure it out a little faster than you."
There he went again, needlessly flogging himself and squirming.
Scratching hard at his head, he trailed off in that unconfident voice — then, soon enough, the corner of his mouth curled up again.
Had he found his confidence now that circumstances let him claim the upper hand over me?
Even his limp voice carried some faint, fragile force in it now.
"The eggs of the land and the lumps that have lost their lives you can gather on this map — three of each, total, no more. You didn't know at first, did you?"
"......."
When I gave no answer, the man wore a thin smile at the edge of his mouth.
And this time, the mouth he'd clamped shut at every crucial moment opened freely, and he went on.
"If the rounds break your way, then by the final round, you can't help but know your opponent's hand."
Only then did I understand.
The man wasn't merely drunk on a sense of superiority — he had certainty about the outcome.
That was why he was bothering to lay it all out so kindly.
'At the point he harvested the potato in round two, only one egg of the land remained.'
"Honestly, your hand was obvious, so I just play-acted at digging. Hah.... A potato thunks right into my hand. Dumb—ss...."
The man glared resentfully at the potato as its data splintered and its shape dissolved away.
That blunder was why he'd agonized over his choice earlier.
Because he'd been forced to deduce whether I would play my lump that has lost its life this round — or save it for the last.
"If you've got no muscle, it's a game you absolutely have to win on brains and luck by the second round."
Through the man's suspicious behavior and slips of the tongue, I too had belatedly realized that only three of each cure spawn on the map.
For all his endless playing at weakness, it turned out the man had known the rules from the very start.
"I should have won it — this, this...!!"
Then, suddenly, the man began huffing furious blasts through his nose.
His breath fogged his already-cloudy glasses even further, yet his eyeballs glistened vividly through them.
Enraged, veins standing out, the man shoved his face toward mine.
He came close enough that his glasses frame nearly touched the tip of my chin, venting his fury.
"Whatever happened to being so grateful?! And now you knife me in the back like this...?!"
"And who struck the first blow to whose back?"
Unbelievable, honestly. Who was supposed to be angry at whom here?
At no more than a click of my tongue, the man's momentum snapped, and he retreated a step.
"You lied too, pal. You said you'd bring a lump that has lost its life."
"Th-that's because — you clearly didn't trust me, pal!"
"Of course I don't. It's been nothing but lies plastered end to end from the start."
"...What are you talking about? I told you earlier. The Curator gave me the trial-"
"Did the Curator also give you a trial run of what happens to an eliminated visitor?"
At my question, the man's shoulders shrank sharply inward.
Even while acting as though he'd confessed everything, there was a secret he'd kept buried in the dark. The man had witnessed the moment a visitor was eliminated.
I traced back over the things that had snagged at me in our earlier conversation.
'It's too cruel.... Not even simple erasure — making you smash your head against the rock.'
'Byeoljubujeon or whatever it is — copying that story for this is just too cruel.'
"How do you know the head is smashed against the rock?"
"......."
"You said you barely knew Byeoljubujeon."
The man had stated, plainly, that the eliminated are made to smash their heads against the rock.
And he knew that in that same manner, the terrapin of Byeoljubujeon met the very same end.
One of the tale's many variant endings.
After the rabbit escapes, the terrapin, wracked with self-blame, dashes his own head against a rock and dies.
"It's written — in the quest! That's how I know...!"
"But the quest says: 'the treacherous vassal who spoke falsehood shall have his head split upon the boulder.'"
"...?!"
"I assumed it was a figure of speech for smashing one's head... But you?"
This was the man who, listening to the Curator's explanation, had only barely dredged up fragments of the tale.
The man's fingers wouldn't stay still — they kept fidgeting restlessly.
"Th-that's a stretch. What other way is there for a head to be split on a rock...! Fine, there might be some, but obviously smashing is the first thing anyone would think of-"
"......."
'True. It's a deduction short on evidence.'
Ambiguous reasoning like this could be denied endlessly. The man might even be telling the truth.
"Dragon King."
I turned my body toward the colossal Dragon King.
At my sudden move, both the Dragon King and the man blinked.