Holy Idol [EN]: Chapter 517

◈ 517. This Time, You Can’t Leave Easily

—You are an indecisive person who is swayed by the words of others.

—You always follow the majority. Your opinion is whatever most people agree with.

Shin Jo-woon frowned.

He usually had clear opinions and a strong sense of self, and he often took on leadership roles, so he had never considered himself an indecisive person.

But now he had to play the role of someone with absolutely no opinion of his own.

Then, Shin Jo-woon suddenly suspected that the roles might not have been assigned randomly, but that someone had deliberately set it up this way.

‘The Pig definitely said so. This kind of thing happened in the school dungeon too.’

He remembered a demon named Warion deliberately assigning roles that didn’t suit the group, or so he claimed. He’d heard it was a mess.

‘Is it like that again this time?’

* * *

The next day. When he woke up, a set of clothes was laid out in the closet, the closet door standing wide open.

A piece of paper was placed on the dresser next to the closet.

Rembrary got out of bed, picked up the paper, and read it.

The content was much shorter than the instructions he had received yesterday.

—Breakfast is served between 7 AM and 9 AM.

‘Another notice?’

—You can eat in the dining hall.

—Skip lunch.

“!”

Rembrary was skimming through the notice, thinking there was nothing special, when he discovered the shocking part and flinched. Skip lunch?

—Dinner is served between 5 PM and 7 PM.

—Water will be provided outside of these hours as well.

Rembrary was so surprised by the part about skipping lunch that he couldn’t even focus on the rest of the content.

Rembrary put down the notice and took a deep breath.

‘This can’t be happening.’

To make matters worse, this isn’t a place where you can escape quickly by working hard. You have to stay for a week.

Of course, it would be possible to escape in the shortest amount of time if he quickly caught and executed the culprit, but the problem was what if the culprit was among the group?

In that case, only the group member playing the culprit might be left here while the rest escaped.

‘First… let’s take action.’

Anyway, Rembrary thought that nothing would come of just standing here, so he went into the bathroom to wash up, changed his clothes, and approached the door.

Unlike yesterday, the door opened smoothly when he turned the doorknob.

Rembrary looked back and forth between the doors lined up along the hallway and the stairs, and instead of knocking on the door next door, he went down the stairs.

‘Let’s first figure out the location of the living room and then find the dining hall.’

He had a week to find the group, but he had to find the dining hall within two hours.

* * *

From the entrance, if you go into the hallway, the living room and kitchen are at the very ends, and the dining hall is next to the kitchen.

Rembrary checked his watch and confirmed the locations of a few places in that manner, then looked at his watch again.

‘There’s still some time left.’

It was still a while before 7 o’clock.

Rembrary hesitated whether to look for people or go to the dining hall, but this time he chose to go to the dining hall.

He thought about the possibility that the people he was looking for might have already gone to the dining hall.

Wouldn’t everyone be moving around quickly on the first day?

But when he actually went to the dining hall, no one was there.

Rembrary took a seat in the center of the long table.

As he was sitting there, someone in a chef’s uniform came in through the archway connected to the kitchen, and let out a small shriek when they saw Rembrary.

Wondering what was going on, he turned around, and the person quickly ran back into the kitchen, then reappeared a moment later and brought Rembrary an apple.

Puzzled, he accepted the apple, and the person giggled and went back to the kitchen, but soon after, he heard someone scolding, “Why are you giving away food without permission!”

“But that person is so handsome!”

A protesting voice followed.

Rembrary recalled yesterday’s notice that everyone here was a real person.

‘They follow the rules, but they have their own will within a certain range, huh.’

His brow furrowed involuntarily.

If that statement was true… Rembrary was worried about the people who would be left behind after he escaped from here.

Not the people who had just entered the dungeon like him and were playing this role-playing game, but the butlers or the people in chef’s uniforms like that person earlier.

Even if he and his group endured for a week and escaped, wouldn’t those people still not be able to escape?

‘No. Wait a minute. It was definitely said that everyone could escape if the culprit was killed, right?’

Even the word ‘everyone’ was specially emphasized.

‘Could it be that if you kill the culprit, the people held as staff can also leave?’

‘They’re really doing everything they can to cause discord among people,’ Rembrary thought, clicking his tongue inwardly.

Isn’t this a role-playing game that makes it easy to sacrifice the few for the sake of the many?

They even gave the role of culprit to that minority and ordered them to attack people, so that people would feel less guilty about sacrificing that minority.

‘That’s why Noir….’

At that moment, the door connected to the hallway opened and someone came in.

Rembrary turned his head.

* * *

Noir: Everyone, watch what I do carefully.

Noir: I’ll be on a different level than Warion.

Warion: You’re saying my level is low?

Warion grumbled to himself, feeling wronged.

When he was defeated by the High Priest, they were just chattering about all sorts of things, even irrelevant things. But when Noir fought the High Priest, no one said a word.

Rather than ignoring him, everyone seemed to think that Noir would do well anyway, so there was no need to say anything.

Warion couldn’t tell whether he should feel wronged about this, or whether Noir was in a frustrating situation.

All that was certain was….

“You won’t be able to escape this time, High Priest. You’ll be held back by your own position.”

* * *

The person who came in was someone he didn’t recognize.

When the person discovered Rembrary, who was already there, they nodded briefly and sat down in one of the seats across from him.

That was it. They didn’t seem to want to mingle, so Rembrary greeted them with a smile.

“Good morning.”

He had to see this person’s face for a week anyway, so there was no harm in greeting them.

Besides, Rembrary had to find out who the culprit was among the people here and take their side.

“……”

However, the person didn’t even acknowledge Rembrary’s greeting.

“My name is Youngsoo.”

Rembrary, who was still introducing himself, was surprised after speaking.

“Huh?”

He had clearly meant to say his name was ‘Rembrary.’ But the name that came out was Youngsoo.

“Why is this happening?”

As he was wondering, the person who had been indifferent to Rembrary suddenly asked.

“Youngsoo?”

It seemed that they also heard Youngsoo.

“No, my name is Rembrary (but it’s being heard as) Youngsoo.”

Rembrary corrected himself again, but it was still heard as Youngsoo.

‘Why is this really happening?’

As he was wondering, the person across from him said again, “What on earth is going on? Youngsoo, huh.”

As if they knew someone named Youngsoo.

‘Why are they doing that? Do they know Youngsoo? But if you look at their face, you can tell they’re different people, right? Were they supposed to meet someone named Youngsoo in the dungeon, but they don’t know their face?’ Rembrary was even more puzzled by the other person’s strange attitude.

As he was thinking, the person got up and moved to the seat across from Rembrary and asked.

“Why are you saying your name is Youngsoo? You *are* Youngsoo.”

“?”

Wondering what they meant, he looked at them, and the person put their hand to their mouth and muttered blankly.

“Oh my god. Youngsoo? Youngsoo? Youngsoo?”

They seemed a little crazy. As he watched them and clenched his jaw, the person waved their hands and urgently pointed to themselves, saying.

“Hey, it’s me. Minsoo.”

“……”

They still seemed a little crazy. As Rembrary stared with his mouth open, the person let out a hollow laugh and muttered.

“I’m going crazy. I’m Minsoo?”

Rembrary pointed at him and told him.

“You seem a little crazy.”

Then, Rembrary realized the situation a beat late.

“Ah! Perhaps your name… is something else, but when you say it, it’s heard as Minsoo?”

He wondered if the same was true for the other person, just as he said Rembrary but it came out as Youngsoo.

Minsoo nodded.

Rembrary carefully retraced Minsoo’s reaction.

When that person first came in here, they only greeted Rembrary once, but after Rembrary spoke to them, they acted like they knew Rembrary.

Even though they were clearly distant when they first saw his face.

‘Then doesn’t that mean they don’t know my face?’

In the meantime, even the name is heard wrong, so why did they suddenly act like they knew who I was?

“Do you know me?”

Since he couldn’t figure it out even after thinking, Rembrary just asked in the end. Minsoo nodded.

“How do you know me?”

Minsoo opened his mouth to answer.

“I’m beep—”

However, in the middle of speaking, Minsoo’s words changed to a ‘beep’ sound, like when profanity is edited out on television, and couldn’t be heard.

Both Minsoo, who spoke, and Rembrary, who listened, were taken aback. Minsoo stroked his mouth and asked, “Lip shape?”

He must mean, can’t you understand even by the shape of my lips.

Rembrary shook his head. It was a kind of hallucination, but when the ‘beep’ sound was heard, the other person’s lips hardly seemed to move.

Even when Minsoo said he was Minsoo, he must have said his real name, but what he saw was really the lip shape of pronouncing ‘Minsoo.’

“The lip shape also looks like it’s changing like the sound.”

Minsoo cursed softly and said.

“It seems that introducing each other or finding out who we really are is thoroughly blocked.”

It seemed so. As Rembrary crunched on the apple, Minsoo sighed heavily and continued.

“I’m beep— The reason I recognized you is because of your *mal-tu* [manner of speaking, speech pattern], and your face too… Your face now is not the face of the Youngsoo I know.”

‘Ah. I see, they recognized me because of my *mal-tu*,’ Rembrary nodded.

More than that, when he looked in the mirror in the bathroom, it was his own face. When did his appearance change again?

“Are we close?”

“Beep— Damn it!”

It seems like they can’t even answer whether we’re close or not.

As his words were covered by another beep sound, Minsoo repeatedly cursed softly, as if he was tired of talking.

While watching him, Rembrary wondered if Minsoo was someone he knew, or someone who had learned about Rembrary through broadcasts or social media.

‘Could he be one of the missing Nakru people?’

What was certain was that he wasn’t Sagamjae. Because it wasn’t Sagamjae’s *mal-tu*.

Then Rembrary came up with a good plan. He would just say the names he knew here.

Then the names of those people would also change, so he could know the changed names in advance.

Rembrary said the names Sagamjae, Woosungwoo, and Shin Jo-woon in order.

“Beep. Beep. Beep.”

“What are you doing?”

“It doesn’t work.”

“What did you do?”

“Besides my name, I said the names of my group members. I was going to find out the changed names in advance. But it’s all being beeped out. It’s useless.”

He thought it would work because the other person seemed to know Rembrary’s identity but called his name Youngsoo.

“Can’t you call them by their real names until you match their faces and names?”

“It seems so.”

Minsoo sighed.

“It’s going to be more difficult than I thought. It seems like they’re trying to thoroughly block teamwork.”

However, the moment Minsoo said those words, unexpectedly, Rembrary realized who he was.

He couldn’t be sure, but he had a sense of it to some extent.

And just as he was about to say this fact, someone else walked in.