Escaping the Mystery Hotel-Chapter 269: Room ???, Cursed Room - ???? (7)

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- Han Kain

A space where an impenetrable curtain of darkness had descended, yet within the shadows, I could feel countless living beings breathing.

The whispering hum of insects tickled my ears, the melancholy screeches of bats that only began their day in the dead of night, the sticky, writhing annelids that had never known the difference between light and dark as they slithered through the soil.

Even the sweat trickling down my skin seemed to make a sound.

Within this suffocating darkness, my sense of hearing and smell had sharpened to an unnatural degree—so much so that I could no longer deny it.

I was changing.

Is it the aftermath of Descent?

The power of the Grimoire?

I didn’t know.

But this was not the time to dwell on it.

I moved cautiously, slipping behind a nearby tree, doing my best to suppress the sound of my footsteps.

Not out of fear of being discovered—but the fear of drowning out the noises I needed to hear.

After all, I had been noticed by all things in this world long ago.

“Something’s watching us.”

Jinchul-hyung finally broke the silence, unable to hold it in any longer.

I had no intention of scolding him—I felt it, too.

“Should we move down the mountain?”

“We came all this way, and you want to leave empty-handed? Let’s just check a little more. This is the legendary mountain range. Even if we have to run, we should at least see what we’re running from.”

It was as if Jinchul-hyung was summoning every last ounce of courage from within himself, his voice tinged with reckless determination as he pressed forward.

– Kiiiiek!

At the sudden screech, my head snapped in the direction of the sound—

And what I saw left me speechless.

It… it’s not a monster!

No matter how you look at it—

A mechanical whirr cut through the air.

The “thing” turned toward us—

A robot.

More specifically, a turret.

And it had locked on.

“RUN! RUN!”

- BOOM! BOOM BOOM!

I threw every last shred of strength into my legs, sprinting as fast as I could!

Behind me, deafening explosions erupted, shaking the ground.

The roar of trees shattering, the panicked cries of creatures fleeing in all directions.

And then a shadow rushed through the air, slamming into the solid rock wall of a cave.

Or rather, what used to be a cave.

Within seconds, it had been reduced to nothing but a pile of rubble.

Byrktlik: Gwiitkip? Lurtink Timmrlya

The hell?

A Chat Window?

What the hell is—

“This way! If you get past the ‘boundary,’ it won’t chase you!”

Then, an all-too-familiar voice called to us.

It was the voice of the doctor.

And just like that, our frantic escape came to an end.

And we were reunited with two more of our comrades.

***

It was more apparent than ever—our reunion was never something that could be taken for granted.

We were stranded in a vast, primitive world.

Scattered across its endless expanse, all we had to rely on were the tribes of prehistoric humans.

With our past experiences surviving the Cursed Rooms, it was easy enough for everyone to reach the conclusion that we needed to go beyond the mountain range, as spoken of in songs and myths.

But the mountains were massive.

There weren’t any 21st-century hiking trails neatly laid out for us.

Everyone had simply moved toward the mountains from wherever they had been scattered, hoping to reach them.

How could we possibly find each other?

Logically, it would have made more sense if we were all scouting the mountain range from different positions.

And yet, Grandpa and the doctor had somehow found us from afar.

“Because you brought the tribes with you,” the doctor explained. “How many people is this, exactly? Five thousand combined? With such a massive group moving together, the dust cloud you kicked up was visible from miles away. I followed it for an entire day just to confirm, and here we are.”

“Huh, I never thought about how dragging an entire tribe along would leave such an obvious trail. I guess it worked out in our favor,” I mused.

“A happy accident. Anyway—welcome to Hell’s Mountain Range!”

At the base of the mountains, where the primitive tribes had set up a sprawling camp, we spent a long time catching up.

We talked about what each of us had gone through, the monsters we’d fought, and how we’d all arrived at the same conclusion—that we needed to reach the mountains to uncover the truth.

Looking back, we’d all come so far.

The Hotel had dumped us in a prehistoric world, basically in the Stone Age, and basically told us to lead a tribe and kill monsters—and somehow, all four of us had actually pulled it off. freewebnσvel.cѳm

To be fair, Jinchul-hyung and I had an easier time than most.

With my Grimoire and his superhuman strength, we could handle combat far better than others.

But when we got to the part where Sanghyun had fended off monsters by setting up booby traps, even Grandpa—who had already heard about it—couldn’t help but be impressed.

And then… the mood shifted.

Jinchul-hyung spoke, his expression heavy, “So… you left the tribes behind and came here alone.”

“Yeah. What else were we supposed to do? We had to get to the mountains, but the damn tribe members were saying they’d rather die than go. What choice did we have?”

Neither Grandpa nor the doctor was being accused of anything.

After all, I had considered doing the same.

Jinchul-hyung had been right all along—forcing an entire tribe to march into the mountains was something only he and I could do.

A sinister mage who could possess bodies and a Hercules of the Stone Age who could punch monsters to death—we had the power to make it happen.

But for Grandpa and the doctor?

It had simply been impossible.

Jinchul-hyung opened his mouth, looking like he wanted to say a thousand things at once, but in the end, he only said one sentence, “I thought… after everything we’ve endured in the Hotel, you all would have realized something. That, in the end, what we do in the Cursed Rooms is about saving people.”

The doctor responded without hesitation, “I know that. And I do intend to save them—in order to do so, we need to first gather information through multiple escape attempts. Right now, we don’t have enough information to solve this. We need to prioritize survival first.”

That was my cue to step in before this turned into an argument.

“Ahem. Alright, let’s move on. Like the doctor said, this is all part of the process. The end goal is still to resolve the Room, after all.”

“Y-yeah. My bad,” Jinchul-hyung muttered.

“Anyway—what the hell were those things in the mountains? They weren’t even monsters—they were robots!”

Just like that, the topic shifted, and everyone began speaking freely again.

“No doubt about it. Robots,” Grandpa confirmed.

“The tribes don’t have the knowledge to call them that, so they just think they’re some kind of great beast. Those ‘countless eyes’ they mentioned? Cameras. That ‘thunderous power’? Machine guns.”

“That settles it—this place is not normal. If we’re going to cross the mountains, we have to get past those robots,” I said.

Silence fell over the group.

Jinchul-hyung, looking grim, muttered, “Did you see those machine guns? Even just grazing a tree made it explode. If one of those bullets hits us, we won’t even leave a corpse behind. Honestly, it’s a miracle we made it out alive.”

“It’s not that we were lucky,” I corrected. “It’s that they held back. The robots were making warning shots. The distance wasn’t far enough for them to miss—they were deliberately aiming to scare us off.”

“Warning shots? So what, we survived because the robots took pity on us?”

The doctor interjected, “The robots in the mountains follow a fixed behavioral pattern. For instance, they never leave the mountain’s perimeter. If those things started rampaging outside the mountains, the tribes, and even the monsters would be helpless against them.”

“They do stay in one area… and they immediately backed off the moment Kain and I crossed a certain boundary,” Jinchul-hyung noted.

That was good.

But it didn’t help us, considering we had to go in.

We needed to find another pattern to exploit.

I thought back to our encounter…

“It’s not exactly a pattern, but… I felt something watching us before the attack started. The moment we got close to the mountain, there was a strong sense of being observed.”

Jinchul-hyung nodded in agreement.

That was when the doctor suddenly slapped his knee.

“Aha! I’ve got an idea. Kain, Jinchul—you both brought your entire tribes here, didn’t you? Then why not put them to use?”

My heart stopped.

I had briefly considered the same idea, only to immediately dismiss it.

But if the doctor had reached that conclusion as well.

“Let’s not do that.”

“Huh?”

“I did think about it for a moment, but… that would be crossing a line. We’re still human. One day, we have to go back to our real lives. We shouldn’t resort to needless sacrifice—“

“Sorry, but what exactly did you think I was suggesting?”

“…You were going to say we should send the tribespeople into the mountains first, right? Let them die to the robots while we slip past?”

Grandpa and the doctor both gawked at me.

“Are you Stalin?! What the hell kind of penal battalion are you trying to run here?! What, are we the NKVD now?!”

“Kain, absolutely not! And besides, no matter how excellent you and Jinchul’s leadership skills are, there’s no way the tribes would just accept that plan. They’d revolt immediately.”

“Then what was your plan?”

“How about something I like to call ‘Operation Ring Around the Rosie’?”

The doctor’s idea was simple, yet undeniably effective.

The robots never left the mountain’s perimeter.

And when someone entered the mountains, they would first be observed before the robots would eventually fire warning shots.

In other words, entering didn’t mean instant death.

So, what if we spread over 5,000 tribespeople in a thin but wide formation along the mountain’s boundary, making them continuously weave in and out of the perimeter?

The robots would be forced to spread out to monitor and react to many intrusions.

If we could dilute their numbers, the Hotel Party could then find a relatively weak area in their formation and break through in one concentrated attack!

“What do you think?”

Grandpa, who had been nodding along, finally responded, “It’s a solid idea, but there are two issues. First, the tribespeople are terrified of the mountains. Even asking them to loiter near the boundary will be difficult. We need to convince them that staying near the edge is safe. On top of that, this world doesn’t have any communication devices. If we’re going to coordinate thousands of people effectively, we’ll need training.”

“It’s something we can solve with time. Of course, that’s assuming we have the time…”

“Second, and this is the bigger issue, suppose we successfully split the robots apart, what happens when we encounter one? Even just one of those things… can we take it down?”

Silence fell over the group.

We’d been through a lot in the Cursed Rooms, but sometimes, we were painfully vulnerable to brute force.

If it were a supernatural monster or a spirit, I could do something with my Grimoire.

But a high-tech AI war machine firing 30mm autocannon rounds?

Nothing I had could counter that.

Finally, Jinchul-hyung broke the silence, “We need reinforcements.”

“…”

“At minimum, we need someone who can take down at least one or two of those machine-gun-wielding robots. I can’t do it right now—my blessing is still weakened…”

The doctor let out a deep sigh before speaking, “That kind of firepower? Someone like that… is already on their way to us.”

***

The next day, a massive cloud of dust began approaching from several kilometers away. At first, people rejoiced, thinking it was the arrival of new allies, but their faces soon turned pale.

The “Legion” was approaching through the sky.

***

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