A Korean Office Worker Who Became a Nuisance Villainess in a Zombie Story - Chapter 55

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Calculating roughly the rate at which sand falls from the hourglass absorbed into my palm.
“Even so, it seems like it’ll take a full day before all the sand runs out?”
Even if my palm splits the moment the last grain falls, at least I have a day’s worth of time.
“My lady….”
I remain composed, yet my companions grow increasingly solemn.
‘Truth be told, I’m not entirely unafraid either.’
What good does it do to show anxiety here?
I’ll say it again—anxiety solves nothing whatsoever.
Better to spend that time obtaining the sacred relic and escaping, even if it’s just one second faster.
“What if we abandon the sacred relic and escape?”
“I’m in favor of that!”
“Then we retrace our steps? The iron bars….”
“We should be able to create at least one opening to slip through somehow.”
We briefly discussed the possibility of turning back like this, but.
Clang.
“….”
The moment Cyprus uttered those words, iron bars descended once more into the passage we’d just escaped from, forcing us to abandon that plan.
“If we’d remained standing there any longer, we would’ve been trapped.”
“Is someone really listening to everything we say from somewhere?”
“Sigh.”
So be it.
Now we have no choice but to push straight ahead.
“Yujein.”
“Yes, my lady!”
“I apologize, Yujein, but it seems the God of Light and I simply don’t get along.”
I spoke in jest, though half of it was sincere.
‘The God of Light.’
He arbitrarily wagered my very soul, refused to grant reincarnation to someone, and now he’s embedded a clock in another’s palm?
This deity truly tests my patience.
“Ever since we arrived here, troubles keep befalling you, my lady.”
Cyprus nodded in agreement.
Praha, who has been hovering anxiously beside me since earlier, now wears an expression bordering on devastation.
The weight of self-reproach—for having included me in the Investigation Team—seemed to press down upon his broad, sturdy shoulders.
Praha, who had been rubbing his face with his hand, exhales as if sighing.
“I feel utterly incompetent.”
“All of a sudden?”
“Because there’s nothing I can do to help.”
While you were trapped alone in the labyrinth, cursed by the clock, I could only stand helpless….
‘Yet it’s supposedly divine power, and he treats it as a curse.’
Truth be told, I consider it a curse as well.
Yet watching someone as handsome as Praha furrow his brow in anguish was genuinely difficult to bear.
‘Perhaps it’s a sense of responsibility that comes with being someone who can appreciate beauty.’
I cut off Praha’s self-reproach.
“Why do you say there’s nothing you can do?”
I spoke to that handsome face, which had flinched and turned toward me.
“Smile for me.”
Everyone knows that when a beautiful man smiles, the world brightens around him.
“There was once a king who tore silk just to see a beauty’s smile and nearly destroyed his kingdom. A curse is a bargain by comparison.”
“….”
“So please smile. When Your Majesty is melancholy, it breaks a woman’s heart.”
Especially mine, who harbored unrequited feelings for you not long ago.
“If you don’t want to smile, that expression with your eyes wide open is lovely too. You’re adorable.”
I poked the dazed Praha and walked ahead.
Tangerine sidled up beside me and whispered.
“My lady! Can I use that line next time I’m trying to seduce a man?”
“That wasn’t meant to seduce him! No, wait—besides! I don’t think anyone would fall for something like that…!”
“Why not! It was amazing! ‘When a handsome man cries, a woman’s instinct is to comfort him. So stop your tears and smile for me, my adorable little puppy.'”
“That’s not what I said at all?!”
“I have to tell Dazling too!”
Tangerine bounded forward excitedly, her feet practically flying.
“Tangerine!”
I reached out to catch her as she disappeared ahead—
“It’s my fate.”
I simply gave up.
“Sigh.”
[SHOCKING! The Real Reason Lady Yusara Has Never Had a Boyfriend: Terrible Pickup Lines!]
As long as this doesn’t end up as a newspaper headline, I’ll count my blessings.
‘I need to get out of this insane place quickly.’
Fortunately, the labyrinth was a straight path with no branching routes.
‘Labyrinth’ seemed like a misnomer.
Praha and Cyprus, who could grab Yujein and me and bolt if needed, walked beside us, while the swift-footed Tangerine dashed ahead alone, then returned to report her reconnaissance findings.
“Tangerine, aren’t you tired? You’re moving twice as much as the rest of us.”
“No! It feels like I’m conquering new territory—it’s fun!”
Tangerine the Conqueror.
We walked according to Tangerine’s directions, rested, and replenished our water.
After walking for quite some time.
At last, something that actually resembled a labyrinth appeared.
“A door?”
An enormous door that opened on both sides.
Before it stood five levers with the God of Light’s seal carved in relief.
Suddenly, the warning I’d glimpsed earlier flashed through my mind.
“If you place your hand upon what is not correct….”
You will die.
As if to underscore that very threat, scratch marks and bloodstains were carved around the lever.
They appeared to be the marks of desperate struggle.
The thrashing of challengers long since turned to dust by the passage of time, their very corpses erased from existence.
Tangerine spoke.
“Among these five handles, there’s one correct one, and the rest are wrong, yes?”
“Touch the wrong one and you die.”
“But which one is right?”
I don’t know.
I answered, my gaze fixed upon the levers.
“It might not be just one. We don’t know if only one of these five handles is correct, or two, or perhaps all five.”
Even if only one were correct, the odds would be one in five—but factoring in such variables, the probability of success plummeted dramatically.
“And if we assume there’s a specific order to pull them in.”
“Assume?”
“Then we’re finished.”
It’s essentially a death sentence.
I glanced around desperately, but there were no clues to be found.
“I should have brought the knights of House Promé!”
“And what would you have them do, Tangerine?”
“Test the handles with their hands!”
“But they’d die if they touched the wrong one?”
“Exactly!”
“Eek!”
Praha, listening from beside me, shook his head silently.
“What about this?”
Cyprus, who had been surveying the surroundings, produced a creature he’d deftly caught from somewhere—an insect.
It was one of those creatures that had been sporadically clinging to the walls, startling me each time.
‘Whether it’s a bat or an insect.’
I’d kept my eyes narrowed and deliberately looked away ever since that dark thing first entered my field of vision, so I couldn’t say for certain.
“The warning said your hand would die, not that the attempt itself would fail.”
Cyprus, having secured the group’s tacit approval, placed the insect resting on his index finger against the first lever.
“Your Highness, are you certain you don’t mind touching the insect?”
“Yes. We have many such creatures in the Southern Region where I grew up. The weather is warm there.”
And in that very moment.
A crackling sound.
The insect burst into flames.
Black ash scattered through the air….
“….”
“….”
Cyprus raised both hands awkwardly.
“Is there perhaps someone here who loves insects?”
“….”
“….”
“Doesn’t seem like it. Thank goodness.”
Tangerine watched with bright eyes as the massive insect, now reduced to charred ash, tumbled to the floor with a soft thud.
“What if we continued catching insects this way and placed them on the handle?”
“Unfortunately, there was only this one nearby.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It was clinging to my bag.”
“What?!”
“I considered removing it, but I thought you’d be terrified.”
Cyprus smiled at me with his eyes crinkling.
“Either way, thanks to it, we found a use for it. Lucky, isn’t it?”
“Excuse me!”
Since when did he start being so considerate of me?
Cyprus chuckled softly as he caught my wrist as I lunged at him in indignation.
After that, we each searched for insects, but.
“There were so many before, yet I don’t see a single one now.”
“Isn’t that because I was only half-opening my eyes while searching?”
“It was for my mental health.”
I didn’t want to see the insects clearly.
“What if we threw something like a stone to test it? To see if it catches fire or not.”
“I already tried that earlier, but it didn’t work.”
“Should I try firing holy power?”
“Unfortunately, everything around here is stone. If lightning strikes, we’ll all be electrocuted.”
“I see…. I didn’t know that.”
Watching Yujein’s spirits sink, I racked my brain.
Still, someone must have escaped from here before, so the Ancient Labyrinth would have been known to the outside world.
There must be a way.
Think harder.
“I think it’s one of these or this one.”
“Why do you think so, Yusara?”
“If you touch the wrong handle, you die instantly, right? So there wouldn’t be time to pull with force. But these two look rather worn.”
“Then.”
“Yes. These two handles won’t kill you even if you touch them.”
The traces left by people who entered this labyrinth, pulling the levers with force over hundreds of years, wearing them down.
The problem was that I had no evidence—it was merely my deduction.
And choosing between the two was another problem.
“If we search every nook and cranny, we might uncover even a single more insect. Shall we look around a bit more?”
As I spoke, the hourglass continued to glow softly in the palm of my hand against my forehead.
Praha, who had been watching me intently, whispered something to Tangerine.
He walked over with heavy footsteps to examine the two levers, then grasped one without a word and pulled it down.
“Wh—!”
At the same moment, Tangerine, who had been standing by, quickly poured water from a flask onto Praha’s hand.
But no flame ignited, and soon a sound echoed as the door began to open.
Praha shook the water from his hand with a pat-pat and spoke.
“The handprint on this side was considerably more distinct.”
“Still, even so, to be so reckless… Wait, what is that?”
I gazed beyond the wide-open door.
There was a cliff.
More precisely, there was a cliff, and on the opposite side, another cliff as well.
A river flowed between them.
A cliff? Here? So suddenly like this?
“It appears we must cross that bridge.”
“That bridge that looks like it’s about to collapse?”
That wooden bridge, clearly built when the Ancient Labyrinth was created and never repaired even once?
I followed the others hesitantly toward the cliff’s edge.
Tangerine, standing precariously at the cliff’s rim and peering down, spoke.
“At this distance, we could just jump across, couldn’t we? Oh, wait. There are sharpened stakes embedded in the riverbed. If we fall by mistake, we’ll become skewered meat.”
“Just don’t fall… Ugh.”
Cyprus, who had been speaking as if it were nothing, suddenly caught an arrow that flew at him from the opposite side without warning.
“Oh. A barbed arrow. If it hits, it would strip the flesh clean off.”
“…Let’s dodge quickly, shall we?!”
We retreated immediately.
We pressed ourselves behind the wall where the lever had been.
Cyprus, peering out only with his head to gauge the source of the arrows, spoke.
“I’ll cross first. Once I’m across, I’ll destroy the firing mechanism.”
“What about the arrows coming at us while you do that?”
“That’s nothing.”
Cyprus shrugged and looked at Praha.
Why was he looking at Praha?
“…You can shoot down the incoming arrows and make them fall?”
“Yes.”
“That’s insane!”
At my exclamation, Praha’s ears turned red.
“It’s nothing special.”
“It absolutely is!”
Praha, is your surname perhaps Ko?
Goojumong?
[Ancient Labyrinth: Before the Cliff]
– Yusara, Praha, Insect Slayer Cyprus, Yujein, Tangerine (Alive)

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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