Grab the Regressor by the Collar and Debut - Chapter 428

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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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428. A Horror Experience
Let’s Go on a
Trip! (5)
-How far can you trust each other?
According to what Dan Ha-ru and Ju Eun-chan discovered in the hint video on Floor 4, this was the message written there.
The explanation that followed stated there was someone who had designed all of this, hoping to shatter their unity and trust, and that person was subtly obstructing their escape.
“So basically, if we want to escape safely, when we answer three questions at the entrance of the final building, we have to correctly identify who the spy is. That’s why Eun-chan and I decided to search for clues among ourselves first….”
“Wait, but there’s no guarantee that the two of you aren’t the spy in the first place?”
“Oh, we found this together too.”
In response to my objection, Ju Eun-chan hurriedly pulled out another clue he had tucked away in his small bag.
【’He’ is at least twenty years old.】
While all the clues we had found so far allowed us only to infer or speculate about the situation indirectly, this one presented hints quite directly, much like the question cards.
I thought it was unavoidable that this would be the most intuitive way to provide hints about the spy, but something inexplicably felt off, and it pricked at my instinctive senses.
“Right. If this is correct, then the two youngest members are definitely ruled out.”
“Yeah. …If this is correct.”
I felt Lee Yu-gun glance up at me as if asking what I meant by my meaningful remark, but I said nothing more and closed my mouth. Soon, Seo Tae-hyun stepped up one more flight toward where the youngest members were and spoke.
“Anyway, to find out who the spy is, we all have to go down to the first floor. For now, let’s find more clues quickly. If we can’t escape the building before midnight, we’ll all be trapped here forever. Did you two search the entire fourth floor?”
“No, Eun-chan and I only checked the room we were locked in, but then we heard someone chasing us, so we ran.”
“Hyung, then let’s hurry up and search the fourth floor. We really don’t have much time left now.”
Seo Tae-hyun, unusually for him, was urging us on and demanding faster progress. Normally, I would have thought he was just being his stubborn self, trying to complete this shoot successfully within the time limit….
But now that I knew a spy existed, I couldn’t help but become sensitive to every small change in the members’ behavior.
‘It’s strange how fearless he seems….’
Sure enough, I felt Lee Yu-gun’s and Lee Do-ha’s gazes following Seo Tae-hyun as he led the way up the stairs. I pretended to follow Seo Tae-hyun but deliberately slowed my pace and naturally positioned myself between the Lee Brothers.
“Tae-hyun hyung…. It’s not you, right?”
“It’s not me. Really, it’s not. But you two, how did you manage to destroy the set again?”
“No, we really tried hard to find the key and the escape method, but we couldn’t figure it out. Then we noticed it was shaking a little, so we got frustrated and just ripped it apart….”
“…Let’s go find the key to your handcuffs first. It should have been in the room you were locked in. Which way?”
“Over there.”
“Hey, hey, go slowly…!”
“Hyungs, hurry up!”
Seo Ju-dan, having finally regrouped with us, switched back into his reckless charge mode and quickly ran toward the room where the youngest members had been locked up. Eun-chan, gripping Ha-ru’s hand tightly with the iron bars between his arms, and Tae-hyun following behind him, soon disappeared into a room.
I began searching the other rooms in the hallway with the two cowardly Lee Brothers, who were still startling at every small sound and shadow, and casually broached the subject.
“What do you two think? Who do you suspect is the spy?”
Lee Yu-gun, trembling with fear yet diligently searching through the room with his hands and eyes, let out a small groan before answering.
“I’m not sure, but if I had to say…. Isn’t Seo Tae-hyun a bit suspicious?”
“Why?”
“I’ve felt it since earlier—he seems to know the building’s structure really well. And he’s been the most proactive in uncovering the reason Shim died.”
“Couldn’t that be because we’re too scared to find clues?”
“…Well, I suppose that’s possible.”
Lee Yu-gun, having already been thoroughly fooled by Seo Tae-hyun’s villainous antics in the previous episode of Today’s Kairos, was the first to put him on the suspect list the moment the word “spy” was mentioned.
I carefully observed Yoo Gun’s words and Do-ha’s attitude as I continued speaking.
“But do you think that hint is trustworthy? It was so different from what we saw on the third floor.”
“If we start doubting everything, there’s no end to it. Shouldn’t we first question whether there’s even a real spy in the first place?”
“That’s possible too. For example… they never said the spy had to be one of our members, right?”
This style of ‘finding the culprit’ plot had been recreated and reinterpreted countless times throughout human history.
Touch High had also conducted dozens of broadcasts adopting this mafia game format, and naturally, among them were various twists hidden to keep the content from becoming stale.
“When you think about it, Shim sent us here, so the spy could be Shim. Or conversely, there might be no spy at all, and it could just be a trap to make us suspect each other.”
“They’d go that far with psychological warfare? Isn’t that too intense?”
“That’s why we need to find more clues. But honestly, if we assume ‘there is a spy,’ Tae-hyun does seem a bit suspicious to me right now.”
Is there anything else in this room?
I stood up while surveying the first room, which seemed to yield nothing despite rummaging through various things. My gaze naturally turned toward Do-ha, who was lifting the curtains on the opposite side.
“Do-ha, what about you?”
“Huh?”
“What do you think? Why haven’t you said anything since earlier?”
He’d been quiet ever since we entered this building, but after it was revealed there was a spy, Do-ha had become even more taciturn. I approached him and tapped his shoulder.
The tension seemed to have eased compared to before, and as his muscles relaxed slightly, Do-ha rubbed the shoulder I’d tapped with his other hand and spoke flatly.
“Oh, I was just thinking about something for a moment.”
“So what were you thinking about? In a situation like this, we need to share even the smallest clues.”
“It might not be anything significant, but….”
Do-ha’s brow furrowed slightly. The guy, whose eyebrows twitched whenever he was pondering something, continued speaking.
“I was wondering if I’d heard something about being trapped in this building forever if we don’t escape by midnight.”
“…I’m not sure? Did he say that? But well, if we can’t get out of this building, we’d be trapped.”
“Tae-hyun said it like that earlier. I was just thinking whether there was such an explanation.”
The stack of suspicion regarding Tae-hyun naturally grew by one more.
I too clearly remembered Tae-hyun saying that earlier.
Whether he’d simply mentioned the fact that we needed to escape by midnight casually, or whether the spy had actually made a slip of the tongue, seemed to require further investigation.
That was when it happened.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa―!?”
“…What now, again?”
“Isn’t that the youngest members’ voices?”
Along with some loud noise, Seo Ju-dan’s voice began to ring out from far away.
The three of us rushed out of the room simultaneously and ran toward where Seo Ju-dan was, and there we found three people with blank expressions staring in the same direction.
“What’s wrong? What is it, again?”
“Well, I found the keys to the kids’ handcuffs and freed them… and I was touching things here and there wondering if there was anything else in the room, when suddenly that place over there….”
Behind the two prison walls where Ju Eun-chan and Dan Ha-ru had been trapped, a secret staircase leading upward was revealed at the spot Tae-hyun pointed to with a bewildered expression. It seemed like a similar production to when Sanchez and I had found the secret passage in the study room earlier.
Finally freed from the iron bars and handcuffs, Ju Eun-chan carefully lowered the iron bars he’d been holding in one hand to the floor.
“Oh, Si-woo hyung might be up there too. While Ha-ru and I were trapped there earlier, we kept hearing voices coming from somewhere, so we thought it was strange!”
“Really? Then let’s go up quickly.”
“Man, but it really doesn’t look like a place you’d want to go up into….”
“If he was trapped in a place like that, I understand why he couldn’t escape on his own.”
When I speculated about Jeong Si-u’s whereabouts—assuming he’d be the first to escape and playing around with bandages—every member in the room nodded in unison and agreed.
‘We’d need contraptions like that to stop our Ha-jin’s eldest brother from taking the easy way out.’
I was marveling at the Production Team’s insight in placing Jeong Si-u in the most difficult location when Seo Tae-hyun approached me and spoke as if he’d figured something out.
“Just now, while freeing Eun-chan and Ha-ru, I realized something—I think this whole thing works on the principle of all the members gathering together to rescue each other. We all escaped through shortcuts, but looking at Eun-chan’s situation, it seems like exactly four people need to divide the roles and solve the puzzle for that passage to open and the prison door to unlock.”
“Ah… but our youngest members found that frustrating and just smashed through the set door instead?”
“…I swear, there’s nothing that isn’t metal with us.”
Seo Tae-hyun’s argument that the members were distributed evenly across each floor, and that the intended route was for me to climb from the first floor up one level at a time, rescuing members in order, made considerable sense.
The escape of Lee Yu-gun on the first floor had been the easiest, and from there on, the effort required to escape was steadily increasing—that was the evidence.
The problem was that our impatient members couldn’t wait for a white-horse-riding prince to rescue them, so they just drew their swords and smashed their way out of whatever coffin or prison or whatever it was…
“Are we really supposed to go to a team-building retreat to strengthen unity and teamwork, only to come back with nothing but increased individual combat power?”
With such idle musings, we climbed that mysterious staircase to find our final member, Jeong Si-u.
Worried there might be another surprise trap, I positioned our youngest members—the tankers with good charging power—at the very front, followed by me and the cowardly trio of brothers, with Seo Tae-hyun, who seemed to possess the most courage among us, bringing up the rear.
“Hyung.”
“Yeah?”
We were climbing the fairly tall and dark staircase slowly, leaning on each other, when Seo Tae-hyun, hesitating at the very back, called out to me in a quiet voice. Even as I was glancing at the camera angles mounted on the walls, before I could even turn my head, I felt Seo Tae-hyun slip something into my left hand.
“…?”
“Found it in the room where the kids were. Just look at it yourself.”
What Seo Tae-hyun handed me was an old scrap of paper.
It wasn’t cleanly produced like a question card, but rather had something scrawled on it in hasty handwriting, as if someone had frantically torn a page from a notebook.
I slowed my pace so the members walking ahead wouldn’t notice, and relying on the meager lighting, I read the note.
【Don’t trust Shim Yak-hae】
“Hey! It’s Si-woo hyung!”
The moment I finished reading the note, Ju Eun-chan, who was walking at the front, cried out.
As we hurried up the stairs, the scene that unfolded beyond the members’ shoulders came into view.
“Uh… uh…”
“Whoa… whoa…”
“What the hell is that…?”
And we all froze in shock.
“Guys, help me…!”
Beyond the terrifying array of puzzle devices and laser beams, beyond an enormous water tank, Jeong Si-u was wearing an expression I’d never seen before, crying out in despair as he was genuinely trapped behind real iron bars!

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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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