Chapter 30 - The Explorer II

“Aryeon. Hold the elevator doors open for a moment.”

“Sorry?”

“Your Guild Leader has something to check.”

I immediately climbed the elevator wall. Sim Aryeon let out an “Eek!” as though she had spotted a giant spider, but I casually ignored her.

I infused the edge of my hand with aura, then sliced through the ceiling as though cutting soft tofu.

SZZZZT

Sparks flew from my hand as if I were welding. Before long, I had made a nice, neat hole in the elevator ceiling. Such was the power of a skilled aura user.

“G-Guild Leader. What are you...?”

“Shh. Keep your voice down and wait.”

With a heave, I poked my upper body out of the elevator. I seemed to remember a scene like this in Mission: Impossible.

“Hmm.”

The wind was fierce.

Outside the elevator, everything was pitch-black. There were no lights, but even accounting for that, it was far too dark.

To be more precise, it was “crude.”

There were cables attached to the elevator car, but that was it. Apart from the main cables, I could see none of the essentials an elevator ought to have, such as governor ropes or a car-door drive mechanism.

Even setting all that aside, the construction itself was far too shoddy for an elevator operating in Sauron’s Tower. In a skyscraper this tall, they hadn’t even given the elevator capsule streamlined curves?

‘That settles it.’

The mental image that had given birth to this anomaly hadn’t come from experts.

It had come from ordinary people with vague preconceptions and impressions of this hotel... In short, average Koreans.

‘At least we’ve avoided the worst-case scenario.’

I chuckled softly.

That would make things easier.

“Hup!”

I dropped down from the ceiling with a thump.

Despite my instruction to hold the doors, curiosity seemed to have gotten the better of Sim Aryeon in the meantime. She was peeking out of the elevator.

“Guild Leader. Th-the people are alive and perfectly fine... My goodness, their clothes aren’t even wrinkled. They’re spotless... Oh no. Our footprints have made a complete m-mess of the carpet...”

At that instant, the gazes of the “beings” gathered in the hotel lobby swung toward her. Pitch-black eyes all stared at Sim Aryeon at once.

“Eek.”

“Quiet.”

I immediately covered her mouth before she could scream. She flinched with a muffled “Mmph,” and I quickly whispered into her ear.

“Don’t speak carelessly. Avoid eye contact as much as possible, too. The employees and the other guests are all anomalies.”

“Mmmph?”

“More precisely, they’re parts of an anomaly. Parts... or perhaps ‘terminals’ would be a better word. There’s a very good chance this entire hotel is a single anomaly and void. If you draw their attention, you ultimately draw the attention of the ‘whole hotel.’”

“Mmph. Mmmph, mm...?”

“Of course, Aryeon, if you were an awakened who could use aura as easily as breathing, like me, you could tell them all to fuck off and smash the place. But our objective is exploration before extermination. We’re here to learn how this void works in as much detail as possible and record it. It might help humanity. Understood?”

“...”

She timidly raised and lowered her chin in a nod. The saliva on my palm was rather gross, but I did my best to ignore it.

“Now I’ll show you how an experienced awakened explores a void. Aryeon, don’t say anything while they’re around. No matter what I say, just look around with those bright, wide eyes of yours. Can you do that?”

She nodded.

“Good.”

I released her mouth, and we walked to the check-in counter together.

With every step I took, the anomalies—or the anomaly’s terminals—shifted their eyes in precisely corresponding increments, staring silently at me.

An ordinary person—in other words, a novice with little experience dealing with anomalies—would probably have begun to despair right about here.

But who was I? A regressor who had tangled with anomalies long enough for the East Sea to dry up and Mount Baekdu to wear away.

I approached without batting an eye.

CRRRAAACK

The employee behind the counter parted its lips. Its mouth was as black as a bottomless pit. Beyond its teeth, not even a tongue was visible.

It imitated a human.

“Hello, welcome. Have you made a reservation at our hotel? If so...”

“Good morning.”

The employees all froze.

Paying them no mind, I continued fluently.

“I have a reservation at this hotel. I’m a travel YouTuber. Could you check me in, please?”

“Ah, uh. Hmm?”

The employees were visibly flustered. Naturally.

After all, I was speaking German.

The reception staff at a luxury hotel can speak English and handle Japanese or Chinese relatively easily. But unless they have prepared in advance, they can’t immediately accommodate German, French, Spanish, Russian, and so forth.

Naturally, anomalies native to the Korean Peninsula had exactly the same sensibilities as average Koreans when dealing with foreigners. In other words, they became utterly helpless.

“Ah. Um, I’m sorry, sir. Could you perhaps speak English? Reservation? Reservation, please?”

“Come now. In this global age, you can’t rely on English alone.”

“Pardon?”

“I am sorry. I can’t speak English. Deutschland. Germany. Okay?”

“Ah, Germany. ... What do we do? I think he’s German. Ah, we’re sorry, sir. Please wait a moment.”

Faced with my perfect German pronunciation, the anomalies instantly shrank into flustered little wrecks.

Sim Aryeon was watching me with, well... eyes as round as someone who had just witnessed a giant hamster performing a handstand.

It might have seemed ridiculous, but this “No Korean, oh, no English either” strategy worked quite well in voids. It was especially effective in voids like Sauron’s Tower that imitated ordinary buildings.

The anomalies whispered among themselves.

“Can’t you reach the person in charge?”

“No. They’re not answering.”

“Why now, of all times...? We need to ask whether he has a reservation first, but we can’t communicate...”

“Now, now. Let’s calm down. First, show them to the lobby sofa. We can’t keep our guests standing here. Bring them welcome tea, too.”

If this had really been a hotel, they would have responded promptly.

But I could guarantee these anomalies were receiving their first German guest since opening for business.

A department for foreign guests? There was no way the anomaly had prepared something that elaborate. Naturally, no matter how many calls they made, nobody would answer.

“Excuse me, sir? Please? Could you come this way for a moment?”

“Hmm? What did you say?”

“Ah, just a moment, if you could sit here on the sofa and wait. Yes. Right now, phone. We can’t reach anyone. Yes. We’re sorry.”

The employee employed every imaginable gesture in an effort to make us understand. Naturally, I sat on the sofa with a slightly offended expression, while making it clear that I had no particular intention of causing trouble.

“M-my goodness.”

As soon as the employee walked away, Sim Aryeon pressed close and whispered.

“Guild Leader... Wh-what just happened?”

“It’s a tactic with a practically unbeatable success rate against anomalies that imitate people, at least on the Korean Peninsula.”

Of course, this strategy worked particularly well only in Korea. You should never use it in the Netherlands. Far too many people there were good at foreign languages.

“Y-you can speak foreign languages, too?”

“Of course. English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Italian—I can speak most major foreign languages. Why do you think Perfect Recall is so overpowered?”

“Wow... I thought you only ever liked b-boomer stuff like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but I suddenly see you in a whole new light...”

“...”

This little shit. A void newbie who would have gone straight to the afterlife banging on those glass doors before we even got into the elevator if not for me...

Anyway, no dungeon posed a problem, however dangerous, as long as you knew how to handle it.

I took a camera out of my travel backpack. A Polaroid camera—in other words, an instant camera that produced a photo right after you took it.

“Huh? Why the camera all of a sudden...?”

“Ah, relax. It may not look like much, but this is precious. A treasure among treasures I received as payment for helping the magical girls in Japan last time.”

“...?”

The model was a Polaroid OneStep (Land Camera 1000), released in 1977.

Normally, it would require Time-Zero film designed for the SX-70... But fortunately, the camera itself was a kind of anomaly, so it needed no film.

CLICK

I photographed the hotel lobby. A flash flared from the model’s distinctive oversized head. Before long, a pure-white print emerged.

“You can have it. Don’t scream.”

“What? What is it...? Eek!”

Sure enough, the lobby captured by my camera looked very different from the luxurious scene before our eyes.

Marble floors covered in dust. Broken lights and porcelain scattered everywhere. Even a corpse hanging by the neck behind the counter, swaying.

“Ah, eek... Hhh...”

There was even a corpse in military uniform right beside the sofa the employee had shown us to, its eyes wide and its mouth open. Sim Aryeon struggled to breathe.

“Amazing, isn’t it? This is a genuinely valuable camera. It’s called the ‘Paranormal Camera,’ and it was a fairly well-known anomaly in Japan. I’d had my eye on it for ages, but I only managed to get it out of the magical girls after clearing Inunaki Tunnel last time. They have two more similar cameras from the Nikon F series, so I don’t know why they played so hard to get.”

“Guild Leader, eek. Guild Leadeeer...”

“Oh, come on. Don’t be such a scaredy-cat. Once you learn to enjoy this, it gets fun. There’s something satisfying about testing just how far those idiots can take their human act, you know?”

“You’re... the only person... in the world who finds anomalies fun, Guild Leader...!”

While I was teasing Sim Aryeon, the hotel even brought us welcome tea.

A little later, someone who appeared to be in charge came out and desperately deployed English and body language.

“We’re terribly sorry, sir. At present, we have no way to accommodate you.”

“Hmm.”

My chin rose twenty degrees, and in inverse proportion, the employee’s dropped twenty degrees.

“If you could wait just a little longer, we’ll find some way...”

“Hmmm.”

At this point, I subtly shifted the weight of my deliberations from exterminating this anomaly toward leaving it alone.

Most anomalies reveal their true colors around this stage.

But judging by how things were going, these ones seemed serious about running a hotel. In other words, unless we gave up our “guest” cosplay first, they wouldn’t abandon their “hotel” cosplay either.

Pass.

“It’s all right. Okay, okay. I’ll just have a look around the area and do some sightseeing, so I’ll leave things in your hands until I return.”

“Pardon?”

“Here, please hold on to my backpack. This is my phone number. Okay?”

I removed only the important items from the backpack and handed it to the employee. Apparently understanding at last, the employee beamed and said, “Ah, okay! Thank you so much!”

The employee kindly escorted us all the way to the elevator. We rode comfortably back down to the first floor.

Sim Aryeon, who had been trembling nonstop since seeing the spirit photograph, spoke.

“Um... Guild Leader, can we r-really just leave like this?”

“Probably.”

“B-but the doors wouldn’t open before, remember?”

“Unlike before, the hotel has given us permission to leave this time. They might have stopped us if I’d said we were leaving for good, but I implied we’d be coming back.”

“Oh. So that’s why you deliberately left your backpack...?”

“Exactly. When exploring a void, you need to figure out the personality unique to that space as quickly as possible, then adapt to it. No matter how dangerous the void, as long as you follow its rules properly, the chances of it attacking me first are... only about fifty percent.”

“That’s half the time!”

Which is why you need to build up enough strength to slap an anomaly silly the instant it lunges at you. Tsk, tsk.

The elevator opened when we reached the first floor. As a test, I took a photo of this floor, too.

CLICK

“Hmm.”

“Wh-what did it show...?”

“I’ll tell you in a little while.”

In the photograph of the first floor, corpses lay in literal mountains.

Twenty human figures with half-eaten heads stood near the glass doors. Around a hundred corpses were pressed against the glass, scraping it with their palms.

Even the structure that looked like a beautiful chandelier to my eyes was merely a spectacle of hanging corpses in the photograph.

“Let’s get out first.”

“Okaaay...”

As expected, this time the glass doors opened smoothly when I pushed them. Rough outside air rushed into my nostrils.

Sim Aryeon collapsed to the ground.

“I-I was so scaaared...! It was terrifying! Guild Leader, please! This is bad for my heart, so don’t drag me into things like this!”

“Here, the first-floor photo. A souvenir.”

“A souvenir? What do you... Aaaaaah!”

Sim Aryeon promptly fainted.

For the record, I was satisfied. This was why she was so much fun to travel with. Such great reactions.

Of course, my satisfaction was halved when I saw the shitpost that went up on SG Net the following day.

-Goryeojang: Just dropped by ‘that tower’ in Gangnam, Seoul lol.

-Goryeojang: Isn’t this supposed to be some famous dungeon? Went there and there wasn’t shit. Those awakened assholes are always swaggering around, and this piss-ant dungeon is what’s killing them?

(Photo of the seventy-ninth-floor lobby)

(Photo of the first-floor elevator)

-Goryeojang: Got a psychic item, so I took proof pics too. Look closely and see if your mommy or daddy’s face is in there lol.

Naturally, the proof photos that villain Goryeojang posted were none other than the instant photographs I had given Sim Aryeon.

Responses poured in like wildfire.

-Anonymous: Where is this?

└BookishGirl: Obviously Sauron’s Tower.

└Anonymous: ?? This bastard solo-raided Sauron’s Tower and came back in one piece?

-[Three Thousand]Historian: Seriously, what is up with that Goryeojang villain? Is this deranged troll actually a master in hiding?

-[Hundred Flowers]HighSchoolYear6: Eeeek. >_<);;

-Anonymous: Daaamn lol. Our boy Goryeojang the GOAT, strong as fuck lmao.

-[Contentment]CookingQueen: How very interesting.

Hmm.

I turned my head slightly to look at Sim Aryeon, who was playing with her phone in the guild lounge.

“Heh, hehe...”

Sprawled on the sofa, she looked happy. Very happy.

Perhaps that was what a true anomaly looked like?

4

Epilogue.

In the very next run, after picking up Seo Gyu to go from Busan Station, I researched Sauron’s Tower online.

Civilization had only just begun its headlong charge toward destruction. It was easy to find an image file of a hotel accommodation voucher circulating on the internet.

Then I used that image to forge a voucher.

Why? What? The barcode came out all wrong, but it wasn’t as though the anomalies could actually check barcodes anyway, was it?

And so, armed with this voucher—for a top-tier presidential suite, 145 m², meals included, regular price eight million won per night—I visited Sauron’s Tower once more, this time alone.

The result?

“Yes, your reservation is confirmed, Mr. Undertaker. We’ll provide you with the finest service.”

“Oh...”

Amazingly, the reservation worked!

Thanks to that, I enjoyed dinner at a first-class restaurant for the first time in ages that evening, and even took a bath while gazing down at Seoul’s beautiful nightscape through the window.

Naturally, wherever I went in the hotel, the staff greeted me with friendly, beaming smiles.

‘What a sweet fucking deal.’

The next morning, I took a test photograph of the breakfast laid out on the table.

CLICK

While waiting for the photograph to develop, I enjoyed my seaweed soup. Then I looked down at the picture that finally emerged.

“Hmm...”

I won’t reveal what appeared in that photograph here.

I’ll merely add that I resolved to choose someone with a very, very strong stomach if I ever brought a companion here for fun.

Oh.

Obviously, I won’t be coming with Sim Aryeon.

- The Explorer. End.