Editor’s Survival Guide - Chapter 134

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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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Editor’s Survival Manual, Chapter 134

ep19. Expedition! The Timeless Hotel! (7)

“To the stairwell!”
Kwon Mu-seop called out in a low voice and spun around.
The problem was that the balcony where we stood was packed with people.
The people who had been walking normally just moments before were now sliding toward us with only their toes touching the ground.
Ah—ah?
Ah, ah, ah? Tsk?
Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.
Meaningless sounds flowed endlessly from their mouths.
Watching dozens of them make those noises as they approached felt maddening.
The one mercy was that they moved as slowly as the drifting pollen around us.
But there were so many of them that I couldn’t see an escape route.
What do I do? Can I just push through?
That’s when it happened.
“Everyone, careful!”
Kim Sun-woong called out sharply and hurled something.
……It was the Director’s left arm.
Whoosh—!
Pop—pop—pop—
The Director’s left arm flew through the air like a boomerang with tremendous force, colliding with the people.
Then the people burst like soap bubbles and vanished.
And…….
Splurt—!
The Director’s left arm exploded lightly, scattering blood everywhere.
If that touched you, it was the end…….
“Run!”
That’s when Kwon Mu-seop shouted urgently.
Kwon Mu-seop was already running as he yelled.
Toward the spot where the Director’s left arm had exploded.
Where the explosion had occurred, a wide passage had been blown open.
We sprinted at full speed, seizing the chance that would never come again.
Thud—!
“Ugh……!”
But an ominous sound came from behind us.
Turning back, I saw the Director flailing on the floor, having slipped in blood.
Kim Sun-woong turned to retrieve the Director.
But Kwon Mu-seop shouted.
“It’s too late!”
As for how the Director and Kim Sun-woong reacted to those words, I couldn’t tell.
All I could see—keeping my eyes fixed on Kwon Mu-seop—was two things.
Pop—pop-pop-pop-pop-pop—
An explosion erupted immediately after Kwon Mu-seop’s shout.
Splurt—! Splash—splash—!
What followed was the sound of water—or rather, the sound of blood and flesh spraying.
I felt someone’s death and clenched my teeth.
The entrance to the stairwell appeared in sight.
Bang—!
Kwon Mu-seop threw his entire body against the door, and I rushed inside.
Just as another person came running in behind me,
Boom—!
the iron door slammed shut again.
“Gasp, gasp…….”
I turned around, breathing hard.
There were Kwon Mu-seop and Kim Sun-woong.
But Kim Sun-woong was holding something.
It was a human arm.
“It fell in front of me, so I grabbed it. It’s the left arm again. Kwon, what’s the time now…….”
Bang—!
As Kim Sun-woong asked the time, a door opened forcefully from above.
We flinched and looked up, discovering a man gasping for breath.
……It was Go Hong-sang.
Aside from his disheveled clothes and hair, surprisingly, his limbs were intact.
“Gasp, gasp, gasp…….”
That Go Hong-sang sat on the stairs catching his breath, then saw us and leaped to his feet.
He came striding down the stairs as if to join us,
then swiftly—
slapped Kwon Mu-seop across the face.
“Too late?”
Go Hong-sang struck Kwon Mu-seop and muttered bitterly.
“Don’t you understand the hierarchy of your own organization? If the Director is in danger and you say it’s too late—that’s the end?”
“I apologize. It was an unavoidable situation.”
Unlike the Director, who was boiling with rage, Kwon Mu-seop remained composed even after being struck.
Go Hong-sang, further provoked by that attitude, raised his arm to strike again.
“Director, please calm yourself. It was my fault for not being able to assist you.”
Kim Sun-woong stepped in, catching the Director’s arm and pulling it down.
When Go Hong-sang glared at Kim Sun-woong, he held out the arm he’d been carrying.
“I did manage to preserve your remains…….”
“Get that away! Put it away!”
Go Hong-sang’s face turned ashen at the sight of his own arm.
It was a spectacle that looked like his sanity was scattering to the wind.
After cooling off somewhat that way, we sat down on the stairs.
“So now there are three watches.”
“And again, there’s a thirteen-second difference…….”
Kim Sun-woong and I compared Go Hong-sang’s wristwatches lined up side by side.
The wristwatch Go Hong-sang was currently wearing ran thirteen seconds slower than the previous Go Hong-sang’s watch, and twenty-six seconds slower than the original one.
If you die here, do you Resurrect to a state from thirteen seconds before?
Is this limited to Go Hong-sang, or does it apply to all of us?
And more than that—why specifically thirteen? It felt unsettling…….
“Why did those people suddenly change like that?”
“What stands out to me is the phrase ‘Haven’t you found the Core yet?'”
Kwon Mu-seop answered my question.
Go Hong-sang flinched slightly at that.
“When we were talking, there was no problem. So it’s highly likely that mentioning the Core was the trigger.”
“If you had that kind of prediction, you should have warned us beforehand. You’ve been doing this for nearly ten years, but is your thinking really so shallow?”
Whether he truly thought so or was just having a guilty conscience,
Go Hong-sang immediately began criticizing Kwon Mu-seop.
At this point, I felt I needed to examine something.
Why was Go Hong-sang acting like this?
I understood that he was on edge because this was his first time entering the Special Zone.
I understood that it was frightening to see ‘his own severed left arm’ through someone else’s eyes.
But why was he directing his hostility specifically at Kwon Mu-seop?
As if there were some grudge between them.
Wait, now that I think about it…….
When Cha Si-eon was stranded on The Bleeding Island, didn’t Kwon Mu-seop crash into his superiors?
That superior was probably this one.
Ah, so Go Hong-sang’s pride was wounded over that incident?
That was plausible.
Come to think of it, even when we were in the Director’s office, Go Hong-sang had openly nitpicked Kwon Mu-seop.
Aside from opposing the special operation at the Train Station, he seemed genuinely determined to suppress the idea that everything Kwon Mu-seop said was wrong and that Kwon Mu-seop himself was at fault.
With this context, Go Hong-sang’s current behavior made sense.
He had disliked Kwon Mu-seop from the start.
Someone might say, “Who vents personal grudges when they look like they’re about to die?”
But I saw it the opposite way: he was acting like this precisely because he looked like he was about to die.
A bag stays intact so you can pull out what you need as needed.
Once a bag tears, its contents spill out everywhere.
Go Hong-sang’s mental state had shattered, and he was mindlessly unleashing the malice he’d been carrying all along.
In situations like that, you need to step back and take a breath…….
“Director, please calm down. You seem too agitated.”
“Who said I was agitated? Am I saying anything wrong right now?”
Since he was such a high-ranking official, normal restraint had no effect on him.
A person of power with a broken mind was no different from a child holding a bomb.
He didn’t just hurt himself—he dragged those around him into danger.
So I wondered if things would be all right,
and as if answering my anxiety, Go Hong-sang began actively hampering our progress.

* * *

The third Go Hong-sang had just died.
Thirteen seconds and ten minutes before the third Go Hong-sang’s death.
We caught our breath and went back out to the Lobby.
At that moment, the Lobby floor was covered with mesh, and blood was flowing beneath it.
This space remained unstable and fluid, as always.
That’s why opening and closing doors revealed entirely different situations.
We were deliberating whether to push through or avoid this brutal scene
when the third Go Hong-sang carelessly touched the mesh, awakened all the corpses below it, and was devoured.
We fled to the stairwell in that window, and shortly after, the fourth Go Hong-sang returned to us.
“You call yourselves field specialists, but you can’t control the situation? How many times is this now? Let’s go out and take a look. I know exactly how badly you’re all bungling this……!”
And the moment he returned, Go Hong-sang began censuring Kwon Mu-seop.
As the Director spoke, he coughed a few times and tugged at his tie as if his throat felt tight.
When Kwon Mu-seop didn’t react much, Go Hong-sang vented his frustration at the empty air.
“I wish someone would bring me something to drink!”
To whom was he speaking?
Regrettably, there was no one here to say “Yes, Director” and attend to his needs.
Kim Sun-woong played a similar role, but he couldn’t exactly conjure water out of nowhere and present it.
Unhappy with this unresponsiveness, Go Hong-sang finally turned directly to me.
“I asked for water—why are you just sitting there?”
He spoke while staring at my canteen.
Then Kwon Mu-seop stepped in front of me, blocking Go Hong-sang.
“We cannot touch this water yet. Please forgive us, but I ask that you bear with it. At fifteen hundred hours, I will distribute water to you.”
“Distribute?”
Go Hong-sang’s mood soured at the word ‘distribute.’
The Director let out a hollow laugh to himself, then abruptly walked out into the Lobby.
“Director……!”
Ignoring Kwon Mu-seop’s attempts to stop him, Go Hong-sang walked out briskly.
We had no choice but to follow, but fortunately, this Lobby had a normal layout like before.
“Director, if you move about alone like this…….”
“Ah, what does it matter! I’ll just come back to life anyway!”
When Go Hong-sang shouted, the people in the Lobby turned to look at us.
I flinched in surprise and examined the state of those people.
Fortunately, their eyes weren’t pitch-black and fixed on us like before.
It seemed more like they’d simply been startled by the loud voice.
“Please calm down and come back inside…….”
“Calm down? Never! Why should I be the one crawling around in this godforsaken place! That’s your job, not mine!”
Go Hong-sang was not in his right mind.
Fuming, he shouted at Kwon Mu-seop, then turned on the people looking in our direction.
“Aaagh!”
“Why are you doing this!”
Go Hong-sang, now truly a madman, began grabbing and ripping at the hair of the people in the Lobby.
“Ah, let go! Ah!”
“You wretched things—not even human, yet pretending to be……!”
“……Why’d you say that, you crazy bastard?”
A woman whose hair Go Hong-sang had grabbed suddenly composed herself and muttered coldly.
“Ah, you crazy bastard, ah ah, really this crazy bastard…….”
“Uhhh, uhhhhh……!”
The woman sighed as if she’d suffered a terrible loss, and her head and Go Hong-sang’s hand began merging into one.
Go Hong-sang’s right body swelled in an instant, becoming a mass of flesh.
Though Go Hong-sang cried out in agony, the other people in the Lobby pretended not to notice and hurried past.
“Oh no, Director……!”
Kim Sun-woong, as if trying to save Go Hong-sang, shoved the Director’s left arm into the point of fusion.
Squirch—squirch-squirch—!
But that arm too melted and fused; it was insufficient to separate the two.
And the Director and the woman’s bodies, increasingly intertwined, swelled to a grotesque degree.
As if about to explode at any moment.
“Back to the stairwell!”
“Director, Kwon!”
When Kwon Mu-seop ordered a retreat, Go Hong-sang reached out toward him.
Unable to control his now-heavy body, Go Hong-sang collapsed.
But the Director writhed desperately, and managed to grab Kwon Mu-seop’s ankle.
“Don’t go! Don’t go—you come with me……!”
Crack—!
Kim Sun-woong kicked the Director’s head hard.
Go Hong-sang’s neck snapped, he released Kwon Mu-seop, and we ran into the stairwell.
Splat—!
A sound like tomato pulp came from behind us.
And something rolled past our feet, spinning.
……It was Go Hong-sang’s left arm again.
“Is this because I’m the Director’s right arm?”
Kim Sun-woong murmured as he picked up Go Hong-sang’s new left arm.
What kind of right arm does that to its owner…….
I felt my mind slipping, but I held it together and entered the stairwell.
And in the stairwell, the fifth Go Hong-sang was already waiting for us.
“…….”
“…….”
The Go Hong-sang we’d just left had created unnecessary danger and tried to drag Kwon Mu-seop into it as well.
After making that mess, he stared at us shamelessly.
Even Kwon Mu-seop couldn’t do anything about Go Hong-sang, who’d tried to outright kill him; he could only endure.
Because we had to bring Go Hong-sang out alive if we wanted to save Lee Sol.
This wasn’t going to work if things continued like this.
Thinking we’d reach an impasse if we didn’t do something, I finally spoke.
“Kwon, are we sure that’s the real Director?”
I felt Go Hong-sang’s gaze on me.
But I ignored that stare and spoke to Kwon Mu-seop.
“The Director already died at the beginning. That might be an anomaly obstructing our progress.”

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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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