Chapter 6
I strode forward.
There was no time.
The mascot followed anxiously behind me.
It was waving its hands like crazy, so I could tell it wanted to say something to me, but...
"Leave it to me this time."
"...!"
The mascot frantically waved its hands and stared at me in alarm.
Well, saying it looked alarmed wasn't quite right.
Its gestures were alarmed.
But it was fine.
This time would be different.
Thinking that, I continued walking without stopping.
First, let's organize the information.
The mascot didn't retain memories through my regressions.
However, when it came to instinctively sensing this damned place, it was better than me.
In other words, the mascot had a clearer sense than I did of which places were safe and which were dangerous.
And the path it had stared at before...
Had been the only passage where no steam was coming out.
"You said you don't know anything about this place, right?"
The mascot nodded.
"But maybe you can recognize something when you see it?"
"?"
"...Never mind. Just follow me for now."
Seeing it firsthand would be better than explaining it a hundred times.
I grabbed the arm of the mascot, which was practically radiating anxiety, and pulled it along.
I couldn't feel an arm or bones inside the costume.
It felt like I was simply holding the soft arm of a stuffed toy.
We continued through the maze of pipes.
"I've been thinking about this a lot."
"...?"
The mascot walking beside me looked at me curiously.
I met its gaze and continued.
"There are rules in this place to begin with."
People disappeared.
There were monsters that snapped my neck without mercy or crushed me to death.
Even so...
"Something about this place feels... strange."
Maybe dying several times had given me enough breathing room to start questioning things.
"If I think about the things that exist here, then honestly, I shouldn't even be able to take a single step."
If I'd faced the monsters from the first floor head-on, would there have been any way for me to survive them?
At least with my physical abilities, I couldn't imagine one.
"But this place always gives us... a method."
A strategy.
Or rules.
By following those rules, people had managed to survive and climb to the next floor.
"This floor should be the same."
I opened the notebook in my hand.
[147. Ran like crazy and finally found the path. My muscles are killing me.]
"It's strange that this floor supposedly has no rules."
"..."
"So I think there must be one."
I continued speaking while dodging steam hissing from a nearby pipe.
"First, there are three major problems with this place."
"...?"
The mascot tilted its head at me.
Its reactions really were great.
It almost made explaining things enjoyable.
"First, the room keeps getting hotter as time passes."
That was the biggest problem.
It was what made this maze deadly.
Once the temperature kept rising, you eventually died.
A normal human body could only endure so much.
"Second, these pipes."
If the steam touched you, your body melted.
Which meant you couldn't simply rush around.
If you moved too quickly and got hit by the steam, everything would be over.
"And finally, the second floor itself."
The floor was one enormous, complicated maze.
And that wasn't all.
From what I'd learned through regression, the layout changed every time.
So memorizing the route didn't work either.
Those were the three problems.
"...Yet after wandering around so much, not a single person found even one real clue to solving them. That's the strange part."
Even I had assumed that blindly wandering around was simply the intended answer.
"...If you hadn't shown me otherwise."
"?"
The mascot pointed at itself as if asking, Me?
I nodded.
"Yes. You."
"...?"
It tilted its head repeatedly.
"This time, we're going to deliberately follow paths where no steam comes out."
"...!"
The mascot nodded vigorously.
"..."
Before taking another step, I remembered what had happened before.
When I'd asked the mascot to kill me, it had gestured that it couldn't.
Then, when it finally had killed me, I'd heard something right before dying.
Violation, wasn't it?
"Hey."
The mascot turned toward me.
"If I ask you to help me, you'll help, right?"
"..."
The mascot thought for a moment.
Then...
"...!"
It nodded hard.
"Then can I ask you to kill me?"
"!"
It immediately shook its head.
Absolutely not.
The mascot shook its head over and over.
Interesting.
Killing me wasn't allowed.
Helping me was.
Was there some standard I didn't know about?
Even if I asked, it probably couldn't explain.
What a headache.
I pressed my fingers against my temples and looked at it.
"Anyway, if you find a path where no steam is coming out, let me know."
"...!"
The mascot nodded, then stepped ahead of me.
It was always strangely cooperative with things like this.
Not long afterward...
"!"
It quickly found a passage where no steam came out.
The mascot slapped my back several times as if proudly saying it'd done well.
I endured the pats and looked down the passage.
"..."
All around us, steam burst loudly from countless pipes.
Yet this one path alone had no steam at all.
Before, when I'd been desperately thinking only about how to escape, I hadn't noticed it.
