As Decker's boots faded, the cave settled into an uneasy hush. At the rear, the trench-coated figure exhaled; tension poured off his shoulders in a single sigh. Tang-Ji, still reeling, drifted towards that quiet composure—a still point in the swirl of their chaos.
"Um, excuse me." Barely above a whisper, the words had to be pushed out.
"Yes?"
"I—I just wanted to say… thank you. For helping us and… for talking to me now. I'm not very good with new people, but for some reason I feel okay talking to you."
A small warmth answered. "It's no problem. I'm glad I could help. Don't worry about being shy; it's normal. We're all trying to navigate this strange situation."
"We should move, or we'll be left behind."
They walked. A furrow gathered over his brow. "The map function isn't working here. This feels like a trap." Fingers traced the air; a pop-up flickered and died.
She nodded, anxiety rising. "Y-yeah. Suspicious…"
"You can call me Creed, by the way. I know how Japanese honorifics work—just Creed is fine."
"Okay, Creed-san… I mean, Creed." A smile escaped before she could stop it.
For a while, only the underground answered. Dripping water. Scraping stone. Someone far ahead calling for the others to hurry, then fading back into the cave's throat.
Creed glanced at her, not directly enough to corner her, only enough to offer the question room to land.
"What are you going to do?"
Tang-Ji blinked. "Do?"
"When you get out of the game."
The question stopped somewhere inside her.
Not because the question was shocking. But rather, it was ordinary.
A normal conversation, almost. The kind people had when they believed there would be a tomorrow waiting somewhere beyond the next tunnel. Here, people asked where the next enemy was, how many health points remained, whether the exit was real, whether food would respawn, and whether the dead stayed dead.
No one asked about 'after'.
When was the last time someone had asked her something normal? She tried to remember and found only fragments: classroom noise, a kettle boiling, someone's laugh through a half-open door. Nothing whole enough to hold. Not that people had ever made much effort to speak to her in the first place.
'After' belonged to people who still believed the tunnel had another end.
Her fingers brushed the cave wall. Cold grit caught under her nails.
"I don't know," she said eventually. "Go back to school, probably."
Creed waited.
"And after school hours? Holidays?" he asked. "What would you want to do then?"
Tang-Ji opened her mouth. But nothing came out.
The question should have been easy. Too easy. A normal question for a normal student. Club activities. Friends. Convenience store snacks. Going to the beach. Maybe even visiting a festival, something she hadn't done since she was a child. Or just walking home while the sky turned orange. Small answers people gave without thinking.
"Even if I wanted to do something else, I don't think I could bring myself to... My family isn't wealthy. We've been lucky so far. My dad got a job with V.I.R.M. and everyone acted like that was a good thing."
She swallowed.
"Now I'm starting to think maybe it was a bad omen."
The tunnel seemed narrower then. The name hung there in the damp air, familiar and poisoned.
"Second year of high school," she murmured. "I thought it would just be exams, homework, maybe clubs I wouldn't join. Instead I might have to spend all of it in a death game."
A faint, humourless breath left her.
"That's ridiculous, isn't it?"
"No," Creed said. "It's unfair."
That was worse, somehow. Kinder. Harder to answer.
Tang-Ji looked down at her boots moving over broken stone.
"I wanted to travel once."
The confession startled even her. It had slipped out too easily, a small bird through an open window.
Creed's gaze shifted towards her.
"But that always felt selfish," she continued. "If we had enough money for something that big, it should go to my parents. They worked too hard for me to spend it on myself just because I wanted to see somewhere pretty."
The cave opened slightly, enough for a wide pool of black water to sit beside the path. Their reflections trembled in it, stretched long by the dim light.
"So I read instead," she said. "A lot. That was cheaper."
Creed's expression changed. Not surprise exactly; interest, clean and immediate.
"What kind?"
"Fantasy. Science fiction. Classics too. Old ones." Her shoulders lifted, embarrassed. "The ones people my age don't usually touch unless school forces them."
"Jules Verne?"
Her eyes widened. "You know him?"
"Around the World in Eighty Days. Journey to the Centre of the Earth." Creed's mouth curved faintly. "Hard not to admire a writer who turned curiosity into geography."
Tang-Ji's face brightened despite herself. "I read both. And The Odyssey. Gulliver's Travels. The Count of Monte Cristo. Sometimes I didn't even care about the plot at first. I just wanted the places, the ships. Islands. Cities. Roads. Anywhere that wasn't my room."
"Kids these days still read those? I'm honestly impressed."
She shot him a small look. "Some do."
"Not many," she admitted. "Outside of school, reading feels… old-fashioned now. There are games, videos, streams, and virtual places where people can feel present without sitting with pages for hours. I understand why people choose those. Books ask you to slow down. Not everyone wants that."
"Do you?"
"Yes." No hesitation. "When I read, I can leave without really leaving. No money needed and no burden on anyone."
A drop of water fell somewhere nearby, precise and small.
Creed listened to that answer longer than most people would have. It made Tang-Ji nervous and calm at once.
"What about you?" she asked, before silence could become too intimate. "What would you do if you got out?"
Creed's eyes moved ahead, following the tunnel where it curved into deeper shadow.
"Travel."
The answer came quickly. Too quickly for it to be improvised.
"Every country, if I could."
Tang-Ji glanced at him.
"Are you trying to copy me?"
Creed's mouth shifted, almost amused.
"Coincidence," he said. "Seems like we have the same dream."
Tang-Ji looked at him properly now. Her eyes lit with a quiet envy she couldn't hide.
"Every country?"
"Eventually." His gloved hand brushed against the side of his coat. "Not for work. A long holiday instead. Walk through streets in your own skin. Eat terrible or delicious food from cheap stalls. Get lost. Learn how different cities sound at night."
"Why?" she asked.
Creed was quiet for a few steps.
"An old friend inspired me."
The cave carried the line forward and thinned it.
"She had this way of talking about the world." Creed's voice lowered. "She made it sound wide. Not safe, exactly. But worth seeing. She once told me that staying in one place too long made people confuse survival with living."
Tang-Ji held that carefully.
'Survival with living.'
It settled near all the other things she had been collecting without knowing why.
She noticed it. Noticed the way his shoulders shifted after saying it, the slight closing of his hand, the grief tucked away before anyone could name it.
And that was when the letter returned to her mind.
"Um, Creed… About that letter. You seemed really upset. Did you know the person who wrote it?"
A shadow crossed his face, then the long breath of someone setting down a weight. "The person in that letter was a colleague of mine. The initials were his."
Her face fell; his answer steadied it. "It's okay. Not your fault. Thank you for keeping it—otherwise I'd never have heard his wish."
"I'm sorry." The cavern took her apology and thinned it to a thread.
Death had been at her shoulder since the game began. Fear returned in waves: 'if you die here, you die.' Another's body already proved the point. Yet the truth under the fear—this edge was not so different from living; feeling nothing would be closer to being gone. She stood at the precipice between dream and waking. To feel nothing would be to be dead. Logic scattered, then reformed.
She understood—memory was not a ledger of grand deeds. You don't need the most thunderous act to be held. To live is to be remembered—but by the girl standing here, not the ghost she cannot reach. Let them keep the present name, not the old one lost to fog.
Dread burned, but another hunger burned brighter: to know who she was, to pry open the hollow life that waited outside this maze. She knew she would return to ordinary days without answers unless the answers lived here. Each step since meeting Kazami had brought her to the verge of something once found and lost. The key—buried in this world, and she would not leave without it.
'No, I shouldn't be thinking this way.'
Nothing more than selfishness outside of danger. Protection made the wish possible; protection she hadn't earned. 'Be grateful, not greedy.' She was dead weight—her judgement, and it stuck.
Still, beneath the resolve to live and to keep the others living, a labyrinth opened: a yearning to live her own life fully, not just survive.
In the end, no one can escape its grasp, no matter how desperately they try. Whether it came swiftly or lingered on the edge of consciousness, death is the great equaliser that renders all fears and ambitions meaningless in its wake. They all lead to the same path of abandonment, leaving everyone behind to go into another world, much like this one.
Perhaps our fate had already been sealed from the start. It would just be better to die a painless death inside a video game where everyone can be buried by the illusion of the game's excitement and adventure.This girl also has the same thought, which really surprised me. It seems like our minds are still somewhat in sync.
Tang-Ji's fingers twisted the hem of her skirt, her pulse fluttering against her ribs as questions raced behind her calm facade.
Across from her, Creed's lips curved into a knowing smile. He let out a quiet chuckle—part amusement, part pity—and he could trace every worry in her posture, every unspoken doubt flickering in her eyes.
"I can tell you are still very attached to reality. That's good. Hold onto it and don't ever let go." He made a sad expression.
His voice echoed softly through the cave, the sound absorbing into the damp, rock walls. As they walked side by side, the distant glow from ahead flickered, casting faint shadows across their path.
"Death is natural," he continued, his words steady, but his eyes distant. "And while it feels like our loved ones are gone, remember... the dead stay dead. Mourning won't bring them back."
A small breeze stirred the air, carrying the faint scent of damp earth and stone, mingling with the quiet hum of dripping water from above. His gaze shifted, searching for something in the shadows.
"But as long as we keep them in our hearts," his tone softer, "they'll continue to live on through us. We're all seeking something in this life. Let the spirit of the dead be a guide—a lesson—to lead us to the end of our journey."
Tang-Ji walked in silence for a moment, the weight of his words lingering in the air, the sound of their footsteps muffled by the cave's hollow interior.
"I-I'm sorry for bringing up your friend." She apologised nervously; she was caught off guard by what he had said.
It was strangely profound, but she still found it out of character for him, even though she only knew him for a day. The fact that a complete stranger had understood something her old classmates had never even bothered to notice.
Now that she thought about it, she had been feeling a strange sense of ease around everyone here. The odd feeling has continued to linger inside of her ever since her first encounter with Kazami.
It was as if the hardened jade stones that were sealing her heart together were finally cracking; every new face she saw after him seemed to bring forth the human expression she had previously believed she was incapable of expressing. She still vividly remembered the face she would make through the mirror heart in her room every day before going to school.
"Dull doll," "expressionless nerd," "ice queen," "basic freak," she still remembered all those insults that people threw at her, which didn't really bother her.
She didn't even know how to react to those comments; the feeling of loneliness would be the closest thing she had felt; however, even then, she would just immerse herself in reading and forget about it the next day.
'What face am I making right now?'
He shook his head, his gaze gentle. "It's alright. You don't have to keep apologising. Let's focus on finding out who orchestrated this fucked-up game instead," his determination clear.