THE LOCKER ROOM

“I don’t know what to do, guys,” Seungcheol sighs over the speakers. “We can’t risk another trap, and definitely not all of them. But we only have six keys.”

The countdown is at one minute, forty-five seconds. Everyone feels the pressure, and Seokmin goes through every possible angle even though he knows very little of what’s happened while he was unconscious. Junhui has no help to offer—he is cradling the still deathly pale and motionless Minghao in his arms.

“Quickly, everyone who has a key, say it,” Jeonghan calls. “We might have counted wrong.”

Sunyeong, Seungkwan, Junhui, Seungcheol, Jeonghan and Jihun all confirm. That’s when a thought hits Seokmin, a vague memory of that short time he was awake and feverishly trying to get out of the Interrogation Room. He thinks he had something in his hand when he collapsed on the floor...

“Sunyeong-hyung, Seungkwan-ah! Look on the floor, I think my key is supposed to be there!”

Almost immediately, Sunyeong calls out in celebration. “Found it! That’s seven keys!”

“And guys, I got it!” Mingyu exclaims. “The switchboard in the Classroom, we could turn the power off again.”

“You sure about that, hyung?” Seungkwan asks.

“Do it,” Seungcheol orders. “Sunyeong-ah, you and Seungkwan are the only ones who have enough keys to do it. So go!”

THE INTERROGATION ROOM

The stress is so high that Sunyeong’s still hurting wrists make his fingers tremble. He inserts his own key into the door to the Corridor and is about to bawl his eyes out when it breaks inside the lock. But the door clicks and opens as if it’s not the key but some signal inside it that controls the lock. He doesn’t stop to think about it, but shoots across the Corridor with Seungkwan on his tail, and does the exact same thing with the Classroom door and Seungkwan’s key. It opens easily and the key breaks.

“Thirty seconds, hurry!” Seungcheol tells them.

“The panel above the front door, the one by the teacher’s desk,” Mingyu directs them.

Using a chair and some quick thinking, Sunyeong forcefully pushes the ceiling panel aside right above the door and finds a small, metallic panel with three switches on it. They are marked but he doesn’t read them—with one clean motion he flicks them all together, and everything around him dies.

Three seconds of dead silence pass, long and anxious, before the doors in the Corridor squeak open one by one. Seungkwan fumbles in the dark, finds Sunyeong’s hands and helps him down from the chair.

“Guys, where are you?” echoes Seungcheol’s voice.

It’s so pitch black that it disorients Sunyeong completely—he can’t even find the door he was right next to a second ago. But soon the light of Mingyu with the touchpad comes to their rescue, and they hurry after him.

THE EXIT ROOM

It takes two people and a whole lot of blind struggle to get Minghao through the busted-open coffin and into the Exit Room. But once he’s safe and hanging unconsciously from Junhui’s back and everyone else is gathered in the small space, Mingyu shines the light of the touchpad on the metal panel in the wall. Junhui, Jeonghan, Seungcheol, Seokmin and Jihun present their keys, the last five remaining, and insert them into each of the five keyholes.

Together, nervously, they turn the keys. They snap off, almost simultaneously.

A sound like a stone slab being moved punches their eardrums, so loud and close that it makes them duck their heads on instinct. Mingyu turns the touchpad upwards, and once the sound ends everyone looks up too.

Seokmin whistles in awe. “The exit is in the ceiling...”

A square opening, just as pitch black as the rest of the house, has opened above their heads. He doesn’t make sense that it would have moved on his own if the power was out—did someone pull it away? Anxious to get out of there before any new surprises come to get them, Seungcheol makes a stir-up with his hands and helps s reach the hole and climb up one by one. They all help to get Minghao up too, who shows no sign of waking up anytime soon. Lastly, Mingyu and Hansol grab Seungcheol’s arms and pull him up.

They can’t see because it’s so dark, but they can hear from the echoes that the new space is very large. Seungcheol takes the lead with the group behind him and the touchpad in hand and starts creeping forward slowly. He doesn’t trust this...

Suddenly the lights come on all at once, so bright that it reminds him of a concert stage. All eleven of them cover their hurting eyes, blinder now in the light than in the darkness.

When Seungcheol finally manages to squint a little, he immediately sees the three figures that are standing some distance away from them. Two middle-aged men and one older one in the middle. They look ordinary, plain, not scary, but the older one is smiling creepily.

“No way...” Sunyeong breathes.

“You have to be kidding me,” Junhui follows.

“You’re the... those guys from the game show,” Chan finishes.

Seungcheol’s memory struggles to put the pieces together, but he’s not fast enough. One of the middle-aged men, the taller of the three, lifts his hand towards the group. There’s something in it that Seungcheol can’t identify while still squinting.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he says. “Welcome to Level 2.”

The object in his hand is a gun, and he fires it without hesitation or even a change in his expression.

Seungcheol flies backwards onto his friends, hand covering the hole just created over his heart.

THE RECORDING STUDIO

Absolute chaos erupts instantly, as several of the shrillest screams imaginable fill the large studio. Chan and Hansol both run towards the three men like rabid dogs, but stop when the tall man turns his gun on Chan. Jeonghan and Jihun are on their knees on either side of their leader, putting pressure on the wound that is bleeding fast.

“Seungcheol-hyung! Stay awake now! Don’t move, we got you!”

The three men don’t seem to care about the panic, the crying or the blood spilling on their floor. They seem untouched by what they just did—just like they were untouched by what they did to Jisoo and Wonwoo.

“You self-important rats don’t even remember our names, do you?” the older man says.

“You were the director of that game show we were on two years ago,” Chan says with a trembling voice and rage full tears in his eyes. His hands are raised against the gun still aimed at his face. “This is the studio we recorded in, hmm... Kook...eun...”

“Lee Hanryuk,” the oldest man introduces himself. He points to his two colleagues. “Kook Kangho and Kim Yeongdong. A pleasure to see you again, Lee Chan. It’s been a long time.”

The tall one, Kim Yeongdong, doesn’t lower the gun even a centimetre. Last time his aim was this focused on Chan, there was a camera involved instead of a weapon.

“Why!?” Sunyeong exclaims from behind them, looking away from Seungcheol’s bleeding form with red-cried eyes. “How could you do this to us!? How!?”

“You made us lose everything!” Hanryuk roars suddenly, spit flying. “Everything we built and dreamt and hoped for! Gone! Because THAT BRAT-“ He points a finger at Minghao, unconscious on the floor behind Junhui, “-got a scratch on his leg!”

“So you killed people!?” Mingyu roars back. “You killed our friends because of that!? You’re insane!”

“I know...” Hanryuk says, surprisingly calm, with a creepy smile on his face. “How else could I think this is fun?”

Chan and Hansol don’t dare move. Seungcheol is bleeding out fast and has lost consciousness in Jeonghan’s arms, his friends gathered around him and calling his name desperately. Several of them want to storm the men—after all, they are ten to three, but all they can see is the barrel of the gun aimed at their youngest, and it locks them in place.

“It will be the grandest show ever aired!” Hanryuk boasts loudly as if to a huge crowd. “The members of Seventeen all fighting for their lives against actual danger, their fans glued to the screens hoping that their favourites make it to the end. It’s genius, and never done before!”

This continues, the heartbroken and frightened Seventeen members losing hope and sanity by the second just listening to the monologue. They were kidnapped, struggled for their lives, lost friends and almost died themselves because of a game... and they were filmed doing it? It’s more than they can handle...

The situation is so otherworldly and cruel that nobody notices the movements in the back of the group. Slowly but surely, the commotion has woken Minghao up, and through the haze and the weakness of his body, he understands what has happened. This is Level 2. This is the round they won’t win, the one that the kidnappers told Minghao about when they dragged him through the Recording Studio and locked him in the Small Room.

This is where we get rid of the evidence. This is where you all die.

No. Minghao can’t let that happen. He won’t. So even though he can hardly stand properly, he crawls away from his friends and disappears behind a piece of the obstacle course that surrounds them. He finds the place he’s looking for, a climbing wall, and uses the ladder on the side meant for the camera crew to get all the way up. Nobody sees him, not until he has dragged himself all the way to the edge of the platform and peeks out over it.

Junhui sees the movement out of the corner of his eye, and he catches Minghao’s eyes with his own. He shakes his head discreetly, sends mental messages to his younger that pleads with him not to do what he plans to do. They’ve seen the results of this jump before, and it’s not pretty.

This is the exact same ledge he jumped from when he was playing their game—the original game. If you think about it through facts only, the reason they’re all here now is because Minghao failed at this jump two years ago.

He won’t fail this time. Whatever he does, he will stop these horrors once and for all.

SHOULD MINGHAO TAKE THE JUMP

or

SHOULD HE CREATE A DISTRACTION?

(Winning option marked in bold font.)