CH 92

Act 14

…Thankfully, the door led to an open space. I didn’t see anything that could threaten my life up there. Still, I checked the area thoroughly. After feeling around the floor with my hands and seeing that there was nothing there, I stepped foot into the attic.

“Lucky b*stard.” Seogeung clicked his tongue in disapproval when he saw that I made it to the top in one piece. Then, he also climbed upstairs. He pulled Raehee with him as well. Unlike me, who didn’t have a flashlight and couldn’t do anything because I was concerned for Raehee, Seogeung looked around leisurely.

“Well, would you look at that?” He burst out laughing. He slammed the trap door shut and stood on top of it. He flashed his light around the room full circle, telling me to see. Upon observing the area, I swallowed nervously.

“It’s wide,” Seogeung remarked.

The door that looked like a simple attic door took us to an unexpectedly vast and empty place. This wasn’t a typical room; it was as spacious as the top floor beneath our feet.

No, was that truly the uppermost floor? Seeing this floor made me doubt that.

The ceiling was extremely high, and there were no doors or other rooms—it was just an open arena-like space. It was a walled-off, dark, unsettling arena. It looked reminiscent of the place loved by Roman Empire nobles, where convicts on death row were thrown in with wild beasts.

Raehee also seemed surprised by the vast space. She checked out her surroundings, completely speechless.

“I can’t believe there was a place like this here,” Seogeung said.

I followed Seogeung with my eyes as he looked around, vying for a moment of vulnerability. If he put his guard down at any point, I was planning to pull out Raehee or at least snatch the knife from his hands. In the worst-case… I felt my pants pocket. The object inside chilled the blood in my veins.

“These f*ckers…!” Seogeung shouted and stomped off, seemingly having discovered something. He was so agitated that he momentarily forgot about my presence. Surprised, I quickly followed. Seogeung stood and flashed his light at a corner. For a moment, I forgot that I was going to aim for his weak spots.

“What is this?” Seogeung asked.

…There was an elevator door on the wall.

It wasn’t the elevator that Woorim and I found. It was the one that was on the floor below us—the one with the corpses of the staff. Judging by the location, this door had to be the one connected to that elevator.

Seogeung bellowed furiously, “These f*cking b*stards—top floor they said?! Isn’t this the top floor? It is! This was the highest floor of the building! How dare they trick us!”

Seogeung’s anger was justifiable. I also stared dumbstruck at the elevator door. Our dorm floor truly wasn’t the uppermost floor. There was one more above our heads. It was an empty floor with no rooms, doors, or furniture.

That implied so many things.

“They said that the elevator only took people to the uppermost floor!” the other man hollered.

When we were taken up by the elevator, what did the staff say? They said that the elevator took everyone to the uppermost floor only. However, the floor that we arrived at wasn’t the top floor of the building. What else would that mean?

“Doesn’t that mean this can take people downstairs?”

It meant that the elevator that we took upstairs wasn’t specially made for this building. Just like any other regular elevator, it could go up and down. We trusted the staff too much and naively believed that we couldn’t use the elevator that took us to the top floor. Due to that, none of us thought of using it.

If we had known this on the first day, we could have tried to guess which floor the exit was on using the time it took for the elevator to make a round trip as Hyehyun had suggested. Then, we wouldn’t have needed to suffer by wandering around this damned building. After all, we wouldn’t have needed to use the stairs…!

“God damn it!” Seogeung uttered profanities in front of the elevator for a while and struck the button on the wall with his fist. A green light came on the elevator button. Then, mechanical whirring sounds filled the room. I immediately came back to my senses.

The most crucial piece of information had slipped my mind due to the shock of discovering the elevator.

“Ah! Wait, no!” I yelled without a second thought and ran toward Seogeung. Raehee swallowed back a scream. I froze mid-run. Seogeung sneered. I groaned—that face told me that whatever I said, he would never listen to me.