A white room.
No… not quite a room. An octagon.
We had fallen—
Hard.
The drop was close to 50 meters. You'd think the worst part was the impact, but no. The worst part was the time it took—because we didn't die instantly.
Both our legs snapped like twigs. And honestly, we should've died there.
But at the very last second, our Clarion activated.
It wasn't fast. It wasn't painless. Rebuilding bone with the Clarion of Touch isn't like snapping Lego pieces together—it's hell. And I'm the one who had to do it. Because only a touch user can.
It took both of us a while to recover, and even then, every step was like walking on nails.
Then what?
I used my Clarion. Ran a scan. It confirmed.
We were inside an octagonal structure.
Seventy wells.
Where there should've been a single intersection.
We walked. For an hour. No end. Just an endless looping corridor.
Every 5 km, there was a small turn. We marked them. Counted them. Ran at full speed.
Eventually, we returned to the exact point we fell from—
I knew because my blood was still there, dried and cracked like old paint.
We were trapped.
A perfectly closed octagon. The only escape? Filling five specific wells.
Five out of seventy.
And we only had five buckets of water.
We found them near the third turn. Just sitting there like part of a twisted setup.
How did I figure all this out?
Because in the original visual novel, this was a trap.
An unwinnable trap—
Unless you were her.
The Protagonist.
She has the ability to counter it perfectly. That's why the male lead trusted her despite his fight with her. She saved him in an impossible scenario.
Each turn was a 5 km stretch.
Now? Wanora was on the other side, testing every well she could find. And I was here...
---
I had no idea what to do.
Every theory I came up with led to a dead end.
If we poured even one drop into the wrong well, it was over. The water was limited—exactly enough to fill five. Not a drop more. Not a drop less.
I clenched my fists. Then slammed the wall with my foot.
"Why does a deity have puzzles in his body anyway? This is stupid."
No signs. No markings. Each well identical. Heide couldn't tell either.
My vision had improved ever since we left the chapel, but even that wasn't the problem.
The problem was—
THUD
Wanora turned.
And saw something.
Something that didn't belong in this world.
Not a monster. Not a beast.
A consequence.
The punishment for using the Clarion beyond its threshold making the body notice us.
The system recognized us as pathogens now.
The countermeasure had arrived.
It looked like a lump of blue flesh, formless, sagging—its movement wet and unpredictable.
It had no eyes. But it listened.
Even the faintest sound would draw it in.
Wanora could kill it
But doing so would mean death in a few hours.
More would come. Always more.
"WHAT THE FUCKKKKKKK"
Heide's scream tore through the octagon. He'd seen one too.
The blue mass twitched. Then, without legs, it moved towards heide's voice.
Fast. Unnaturally fast.
Wanora's voice rang out, desperate and sharp:
"HEIDE GET THE BUCKETS TO A SAFE LOCATION! IF WE LOSE THIS WE ARE DONE FOR!"