Doors are used in many places as a device for connecting other worlds or other locations. The original work made frequent use of door-related anomalies, after all.
"Haha, so this is the one that shows up here?"
Even so, this is not right.
That earlier unease had been an instinct like a warning. Only after gripping the dry doorknob do I, stupidly, remember that Other Side vividly.
An Other Side that had not appeared until past the middle of the original work had burst out now.
And in the very place where the protagonist appears, of all places.
"Coincidence?"
No chance.
This Other Side had its moment when a villain who was doggedly chasing the protagonist fell into a trap.
The villain faction, dragged in without having learned the method for beating it, only got out after suffering considerable losses in manpower.
What happened after that, again?
The villain who barely escaped was chased by the protagonist waiting ahead, then got played politically by another villain and ended up completely forgotten within the work.
It did not quite amount to a satisfying payoff, but how refreshing it was to have a character I did not want to see stop appearing.
"Was this a plot seed?"
The protagonist's injuries, cause unknown.
The setting of him collapsing in the hotel lobby of all places.
The Other Side that appeared before a troublesome villain afterward.
"Did he do it in himself? By devouring the Other Side here?"
That was why the Room 404 disappearances never appeared in the original work.
Whether it was scattered for later use, or the author forgot and moved on without collecting it, or it was pulled in to hastily patch a setting. Whatever it was, it had become reality and appeared in front of me.
I tugged up the corner of my mouth.
Since it has come to this, may I be the one to eat it first?
Leaving the door behind, I searched the room and looked for food first.
I swept up a few biscuits from the welcome kit and drinks and a chocolate bar from the mini fridge.
The clothes strewn carelessly on the bed and the gold bars nagged at me slightly, but no one was going to come anyway.
The existing missing people would all be lost and wandering, and Room 404 had been processed as a long-term stay until I resolved this and came out.
Lastly I took the fountain pen stuck in the bedside table, then opened the door.
A dry hot wind gusted in and grains of sand began piling at my feet.
"Ah....... Not here."
I humbly shut the door.
***
The trick to Room 404's Other Side was very simple.
Find the Other Side Administrator and go back through the door together, and it is done.
The places the door connected to numbered five in all.
A subtropical island ringed by reefs, a gorge menaced by dizzying cliffs, a desert with hot sandstorms, a mountain range piled with pure white eternal snow, and the middle of a city center crowded with thousands of people.
I suspect the existing missing people all leapt into the city center, that fond everyday of theirs, and every one of them died.
Part of the villain faction was wiped out for making that same stupid choice, too.
So where had the Other Side Administrator hidden?
"Nobody would dare come into a place like this."
The sensation of the moisture in my body being yanked out and then forcibly poured back in choked me, and my vision spun round and round.
This was a jungle on some uninhabited island. A damp, filthy one, brimming with the unpleasantness of the Other Side's world.
Given the nature of this place's Administrator, it tends to prefer somewhere humid and warm with a variety of hiding places for concealing its body.
In practice the answer was already out, with no need to pick among the options.
"Of all places."
The large leaves dripped unpleasant water, and the vines sprawling around the thick trees were packed with leaves I had never seen before.
The rocks thick with green moss were slick and sodden, as though proving that water had once filled this place, and even when I lifted my head, the sky was so hidden by plants that it could not be seen at all.
"I'm dying."
Clutching my nose as something hot ran down it, I withdrew the ability I had been maintaining all along.
Perhaps because there was so much moisture around, overload came the whole time I was detecting.
Thick fog every morning, then, after a while, squalls pouring down like madness, and since the ground had once been a swamp, water squelched wherever I set my foot, and it was so overgrown that it blocked the sun, so that moisture never dried properly.
Haa.......
But it hid faaar too well for me to go without detecting. Its own territory, that is why.
After a short rest, my blocked breathing eased somewhat.
My smoldering reason feels as though it is settling too.
I had entered the jungle out of necessity, but this was an extremely disadvantageous place for me.
If the ability is water-related, isn't lots of water a good thing?
Not at all.
If you cannot control it, it is worse than not having it.
There were too many targets to specify for me to move the moisture on all sides as I pleased, and with my current experience, fine control was impossible as well.
It was one of two things: evaporating everything at once, coughing up blood, and collapsing, or sweeping it all away in a flood.
The Administrator, which had run and hidden well enough when my detection first caught it, seemed to have noticed my condition and came out aggressively.
Which means that when I withdraw my detection and catch my breath like this, the emboldened Administrator soon pokes its head in.
"Found you."
Part of the empty air rippled, and only the head of a tidy-looking man popped out.
Spiky green hair, and yellow eyes slit vertically, glistening.
"Tired? Let's play again. I found you, so now you're it."
Its beaming face was glossy with whatever it found so delightful. Meanwhile I was half dead.
"Don't you get bored hiding in the same place every time?"
"Huh? But you can't find me."
"......I wasn't failing to find you. I wasn't looking."
"Whaaat?"
The reason I had played along with the thing's games until now was that I meant to head off any accident that might occur.
Namely, if I killed the Administrator now, might the protagonist not appear?
But my food was gradually running out, and it was time to stop.
Catching and eating it first and then waiting for the protagonist is not a bad plan either.
I got up from the tree stump I had been sitting on.
"I'll give you a chance to hide while I count to ten."
"Huh? Now?"
"One, two......."
"Ahaha. Hide, hide well! Or your hair will show!"
The bastard vanished from sight in an instant by sticking its head back into the boundary it had emerged from.
"Isn't that my line?"
It behaved like that and then attacked every time as though experimenting with how a person might be killed, so once I finished counting, it would come chasing after me in excitement again.
Counting slowly, I widened the range of the detection I had been using to the point of tedium.
In an instant, the space within a radius of dozens of meters was carved into my head exactly as it was. Even the cool stream in a valley quite far off.
Having kept it up nearly all day long, isn't it fairly respectable for only a few days?
Only after cramming all of it into my head did I count the last number.
"Ten."
At the same moment, all the moisture within the range I perceived came away.
The withered vines crumbled and poured down like rain, and the once-green leaves all shriveled. The slippery moss died pitch-black, and the flowing valley water answered the call and swirled in midair.
This process flustered the Other Side Administrator hiding in the crack of the boundary.
The bastard never went far, watching me from inside the crack and then pulling pranks that fell just short of lethal.
The Other Side Administrator sticking its head out without realizing while it watched was the worst possible choice.
"I told you to hide."
The moment our eyes met, I seized the scruff of the bastard's neck as it tried to hide again quickly.
I told you it was not that I could not catch you.
"I counted all the way to ten, and you couldn't hide?"
The range of moisture I was taking naturally included the bastard as well.
Its once-glossy skin cracked like parched earth.
SCREEEEEEEEECH!
The more moisture I took, the more the thing shriveled and shrank, thrashing and flailing.
A few vines crumbled and grazed past my cheek, but they were not wounds worth minding. When I turned my head, the rippling fissure had already vanished.
"Don't hide anymore. Understood?"
When I gazed steadily into the rustling thing's eyes and coaxed it, I felt its will go limp in my grip without resistance.
A sign of assent.
The moment I let go, the thing made a fuss and rolled its body on the ground. Not content with that, it scratched at itself with the long vine-hands that had pestered me all along.
Blue blood flowed from skin split wide open like the vines that had crumbled away.
"Th-that, that thing."
Rubbing itself blue all over, the thing soon tipped its head back and looked up at the enormous mass of water gathered in the air.
Its trembling hands clasped tightly together.
This place's Other Side Administrator was a composite of a chameleon and a vine plant, a bastard for whom water was essential.
In a dry place it could not endure at all, to the point of crumbling apart on its own, but in a place full of humidity it played to its specialty and hid where even detection could not find it.
Waiting on nothing but a fissure that opens bit by bit — how badly that frays a person's temper.
I am telling you, they all died of nervous exhaustion, not hunger.
"Want some?"
"Huh? Yeah, yeah!"
The thing shot upright and flapped about as if it would leap into the water.
"But my control isn't quite there yet."
"Huh?"
On top of already holding back blood from the detection's side effects, a headache was pounding away in my skull, so the enormous mass of water already condensed in the air had ceased to have anything to do with my intentions.
But as with all water that is kind to me, the enormous mass poured down exactly where I had wanted it.
"GYAAAAAH!"
Oof.
Barely holding out against nearly being swept away by the current, I could not help bursting into laughter at the sight of the Administrator after it took the water bomb.
Changed from the form of a sturdy adult man into that of a child of about ten at the most, the thing wore a prim expression and a head of kelp-like hair.
"Pfah, your state is really...... pretty cute, isn't it?"
"Ha? A form as perfect and cool and artistic as mine turned into this, and what? Cuuute? You're being sarcastic, aren't you? Are you vicious?"
If Sophia knew, this form would get plenty of doting, but the reaction here is heated.
Ignoring the thing's grievances, I looked around at the surroundings, left bare because the water had swept everything away.
I spotted broken branches of a suitable size and gathered them up one by one.
All the while, the thing flapped its small body and circled around me, seemingly drawn instinctively to the smell of water left on me.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm done sleeping outdoors."
On the ground, more or less washed clean, I made a rectangular frame out of the branches. When I added a doorknob from a long stone to stand in for a handle, it looked roughly like a door.
The method for returning to Room 404 was simple.
1. Stand in front of a door.
2. Possess an object brought from Room 404 in its original form. (= the fountain pen)
3. Open the door.
When I mimed grasping the doorknob, the crudely lashed-together branches pushed out a handle in three dimensions. Without hesitation I took the handle and pulled it upward.
With a PATTER the remaining moisture spilled down, and the scenery of the other side spread out over the ground.
The same pitch-black window as when I had entered the Other Side, and the clock still pointing to midnight.
"Let me ask you one thing."
"Huh?"
I seized the scruff of the thing's neck as it stared at the scenery beyond the door with eyes full of curiosity, and spoke.
"Do you want to be eaten by me, or do what you're told?"
The thing flinched and answered with a slight stumble in its pronunciation.
"I...... d-don't taste good, though?"