Three.

To Our Worlds

They spend a week and 100 gold training with their weapons. By the end of the week, Mihyun is decently comfortable with basic hand-to-hand combat and Jaehyun seems satisfied with his handgun. “Remember,” the instructor reminds them as they head out for the day, “if your weapon is considered historically inaccurate, you will be unable to use it.”

It sounds like an omen, and Mihyun suppresses a shiver. “There’s no way it could be that coincidental, right?”

Jaehyun shrugs, but he looks slightly nervous as well. “I guess we’ll see once we get there.”

That night, neither of them has much of an appetite. Mihyun pushes food around on her plate and Jaehyun cuts his meat until it falls apart. Finally, he shoves his chair back with a screech and disappears into the kitchen. Mihyun starts, the worst possibilities running through her head. He cracked under the pressure, he’s going to stab himself, then he’s going to stab me, her brain babbles. Neither of us are going to make it out alive, it’s like Inception, he thinks it’s just in his head so he has to kill us both to get out— 

The sound of ceramic brings her back to reality. Jaehyun sets down a mug full of hot chocolate, steaming and sweet. “Hey,” he says casually, “don’t worry so much about it. We’ll get through. They even said it, didn’t they? We’re not supposed to be dying.”

“Sure.” She’s not entirely convinced, but at this point, there’s not much they can do but accept their fate. “Thanks.”

He shrugs, a hint of a smile tugging at his lips. “I’m going to sleep. You should rest too. We have a long, hard world ahead of us.”

 

***

 

The ‘world portal’ is a swirling vortex of sky-purple and located beside a normal-looking streetlight. Mihyun gazes into it and finds nothing but fear.

“We have to jump into that?” she asks incredulously. Jaehyun’s face is pale as well. “This can’t be right.”

“Oh, newbies?” a voice says from behind. Mihyun whirls around, coming face-to-face with a tall man with a bright red mullet. “Watch and learn, newbs,” he says, stepping up to the vortex. “Watch and learn.” 

And jumps.

Mihyun watches the purple void swallow him and can’t help but take a step back. “Holy…” 

“I mean,” Jaehyun says, hesitating a bit, “we don’t have a choice.”

They really don’t. Mihyun swallows. “Fine,” she says. “Together?”

“Together. On one,” Jaehyun says, closing his eyes. “Three, two… one!”

The first thing Mihyun thinks is, ‘wow, this doesn’t feel too bad.’ The second thing she thinks is, ‘wow, it’s really dark.’ The third thing she thinks is, ‘holy , I’m going to die.’ Her eyes fly open, only to see nothing but darkness. She can’t feel anything but silky coolness, but somehow she knows that the world is tumbling head over heels, and she’s going along with it.

Then her knees hit the floor, hard.

The room falls silent. “Ouch,” someone says. “That must have hurt.”

“Newbies, lol,” someone else says. Mihyun holds back the strong urge to roll her eyes. Who the says ‘lol’ out loud? “Don’t even know how to land.”

“Mi—!” That’d be Jaehyun. Thankfully, he catches himself before shouting her full name, but unthankfully, it was loud enough that everyone else had already heard.

“Me?” Red-Mullet looks like he’s holding back a laugh. “That’s a weird way to announce that you like to talk in the third person.”

Jaehyun’s face flushes a deep beet red, but Mihyun glares at him before he can fire back any retorts. After settling that mess, she finally takes a deep breath and looks around. 

They’re standing in a large marble lobby, the floor and columns shiny and sparkling. Mihyun has a feeling that this is a castle, or at least a very large mansion. Accordingly, there are eighteen people here, all dressed in typical sorcerer clothes, complete with cloaks and pointy hats. Mihyun reaches up to touch her own hat; it seems glued to her head.

But the worst part is that she can’t use her dagger. It shows up gray in her inventory, and judging by Jaehyun’s expression, he can’t use his weapon either. However, beside the weapon, there’s a new box glowing brightly. Mihyun can’t imagine what a green ball would mean, but everything makes sense once she clicks in and reads the description.

Magic. It seems like this game assigns each player a magical ability, and that’s the only ‘weapon’ that players can use here. However, abilities aren’t necessarily all offensive… For example, Mihyun’s ability happens to be healing.

Healing?? Really??!?! Are they going to be duelling the other teams? Is that why she’s a healer? Because otherwise, healing is a really stupid ability to have.

She desperately wants to ask Jaehyun what his ability is, but there are other people around. In particular, Red-Mullet keeps glancing at them, a smile playing on his lips. Mihyun turns away; she doesn’t need some weird stranger to be psychoanalyzing all her actions.

“Greetings, players!” a voice suddenly booms out from thin air. Almost everyone jumps—though not Red-Mullet, Mihyun notices—then curses under their breath. “Welcome to the Pogfarts School of Magic! Though the school is closed during the summer, you naughty students have broken in for an adventure and are now trapped inside. Thankfully, there is a magical portal that leads to the outside world…”

“So we just find that, huh?” a young-looking boy with chubby cheeks interrupts. “Easy!”

The voice continues to speak over him, as if it doesn’t even know that there are people here. “The portal, of course, is hidden—safety precaution, you know—so you must team up in groups of three and explore the school, solving the challenges left for you by the great and mighty Headmaster. There are seven challenges, and you may solve them in any order you wish. Your only hint is this: Teamwork makes the dream work!”

The cheerful words ring in the silent marble hall. Then, the boy who’d spoken turns to the two people closest to him. “Hey, let’s be a team!”

“Wanna be a team, lol?”

“Can I join too?”

“Hey, wait for me!”

Silently, Mihyun and Jaehyun turn to each other. “This is bad,” he says gravely. “We don’t have another person, and I don’t trust anyone here.”

“What, not even me?”

Mihyun spins around to Red-Mullet’s mysterious smile. Jaehyun takes a step back. “Especially not you,” he mutters, much to Red-Mullet’s amusement.

“Oh, come on,” he says, sweeping his arm out. “Everyone else already has a team, so it’s just us now. Take it or leave it, as they say.”

As he says, everyone else is already in a team, each shrouded faintly in a different color. “Six teams…” Mihyun murmurs. “ROYGBIV… we’re purple, then.”

“Of course,” Red-Mullet chimes in. “We’re the last team, after all.”

Jaehyun scowls, crossing his arms. “Fine,” he spits, “but try anything shady, and I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” Red-Mullet’s smiley gaze slides to him. “Strangle me with your super-strength?”

In an instant, Jaehyun’s tough-dude demeanor deflates. “Wha—”

“She’s healing.” Red-Mullet nods at Mihyun. “I’m fire. Teamwork makes the dream work.”

“How did you know?” Mihyun demands, but Red-Mullet sets off towards the grand staircase in the middle of the lobby. “Wait! How did you know?”

“Our priority right now is finding the puzzles,” the man says, cloak swirling around his legs as he opens door after door. “Hm, interesting decor. Not often do you see black candles, animal skulls, and pentagrams in the same place. Call me Yuta. Ah, here we are!”

Mihyun and Jaehyun exchange a glance. Neither of them know what to make of this Yuta. He’s mysterious, chatty, and knows their private information. But, he did lead them to their first puzzle, so maybe he’s trustworthy for now?

“Come on, guys,” he calls, wizard hat flopping on his head. “It’s a three-way pressure plate. Just stand on the other two plates and we can be done.”

“Not before you tell us how you knew our abilities,” Jaehyun cuts in before Mihyun can do anything. “That information was only known to ourselves. I didn’t even know Mihyun’s, so how come you knew both of ours?”

Yuta rolls his eyes. “I’m a very perceptive person,” he says with a wink. “Now hurry up, let’s solve this and move on.”

 

***

 

Through their combined intelligence and abilities, Mihyun, Jaehyun, and Yuta quickly proceed through two more puzzles—a scavenger hunt and a torch-lighting puzzle. “Thank god your ability is fire,” Mihyun puffs as they race up another flight of stairs. “Otherwise I don’t know how we would have been able to light those torches. I mean, super-strength and healing? Really?”

Yuta chuckles, not out of breath at all. “Teamwork,” he repeats, throwing himself at a heavy metal door. He blinks. “Teamwork—”

Behind him, Jaehyun reaches out and touches one finger to the door. It swings open with a loud creak. Mihyun cackles, and Yuta rolls his eyes. “Teamwork makes the dream work,” he finishes with a sigh. “Alright, what have we here?”

In front of them are five pictures on the wall. In the pictures are a group of people doing various difficult group poses. “Trust tests?” Mihyun asks, leaning close. “Oh no.”

Oh no indeed. All of the pictures—every single one—features at least four people.

“There’s no way we can do this alone.” Jaehyun throws up his hands in frustration. “Even if I can easily lift the two of you on my own, I’m still only one person. The game definitely wouldn’t let us pass.”

Yuta takes a deep breath, but before he can speak, someone knocks on the hard marble wall. “Excuse me,” a boy looking vaguely like Donkey from Shrek says, two teammates in tow. “We looked at this puzzle before but were unable to complete it on our own. Do you mind if we join you?”

“I mean like, teamwork makes the dreamwork, right?” His teammate, a pink-haired girl, says with a shrug. “Like, that was the point of this whole thing, lol.”

Mihyun exchanges glances with her own teammates. “Yeah, sure,” she says, “let’s do it.”

Together with Hendery, Chenle, and Jungwoo, they quickly pose in the weird positions that the pictures show. Mihyun has no idea why anyone would ever willingly do these trust/friendship/loyalty tests, and she hopes she never will again.

“Hey, uh.” Chenle, the pink-haired, internet-lingoed girl, tugs at Hendery, Donkey Boy. Beside them, tall and quiet Jungwoo only blinks. “Do you think we can, like, stick together now? There are probably more team tests like this and, I don’t know, like, it would be so much easier with all of us.”

“Which puzzles have you already done?” Yuta asks quickly, before anyone else can react. “We may not have the same ones left.”

Turns out, Hendery’s team doesn’t have a single fire user, so they can’t light the torches in one of the first puzzles that Mihyun’s team passed. Yuta makes an executive decision and sends Mihyun and Jaehyun off to find the next puzzle while he goes and helps Hendery and company clear the torch puzzle.

Jaehyun, notably, is pissed about this decision.

“Why does he get to call the shots?” he sneers, shoving open doors like they’re leaves in the wind. “He’s not even in our team, our team is you and me, he doesn’t have the right—”

“Jaehyun.” Mihyun holds out an arm, preventing him from entering the room. “He was right to do it. If Hendery’s team hadn’t helped us, we never would have gotten through the pose game. It’s only fair that we help them get through the torch puzzle too. I would have made the same decision, and I know you would have too.”

Like a balloon, Jaehyun deflates. “Well, yeah,” he grudgingly admits. “But it was wrong of him to decide that on his own.”

“Sure, yeah.” Mihyun’s not in the mood to argue, and when she finally gets a good look at the puzzle awaiting them, she doesn’t even want to talk anymore.

“Oh god,” Jaehyun whispers, looking at the collection of bottles in front of them. “Is this…”

“Oh!” an excited, familiar voice pipes up from behind them. “Is this a real puzzle?”

With a smile, Yuta sweeps past them and picks up the parchment lying on the table. “Hmm, a riddle…”

 

Danger lies before you, while safety lies behind,

Two of us will help you, whichever you would find,

One among us seven will let you move ahead,

Another will transport the drinker back instead,

Two among our number hold only nettle wine,

Three of us are killers, waiting hidden in line.

Choose, unless you wish to stay here for evermore,

To help you in your choice, we give you these clues four:

First, however slyly the poison tries to hide

You will always find some on nettle wine’s left side;

Second, different are those who stand at either end,

But if you would move onwards, neither is your friend;

Third, as you see clearly, all are different size,

Neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides;

Fourth, the second left and the second on the right

Are twins once you taste them, though different at first sight.

 

“Well,” he says, turning back to them with yet another brilliant smile. “I hope you all have some intelligence in your stats. Because I sure don’t!”

Upon finishing his sentence, Yuta grabs the first bottle and downs it. With a gasp, his face falls for the first time, paling and the bottle drops to the ground and shatters. “P-p…” he stutters, eyelids fluttering. “Poison…”

“YUTA!” Mihyun and Jaehyun leap forward at the same time, Jaehyun catching him before he collapses, Mihyun desperately tapping at her magic to heal him. Green light emanates from her fingertips, flowing into Yuta’s body, and slowly, his pale face regains color, and he opens his eyes weakly. He parts his lips, but Mihyun shushes him.

“That was so dumb,” she chides. “We could have figured it out, even with our base intelligence stats. You shouldn’t have risked your life like that.”

“We’re teammates,” Jaehyun adds, eyes red. “We’re supposed to figure things out together.”

A laugh shakes Yuta’s body, and he pats at Jaehyun’s shoulder. “Come on,” he says in a raspy voice. “I can stand now. And I wasn’t expecting the very first bottle to be poison.”

But it was, and it fits exactly with what the riddle says. They quiet down, each trying to solve the riddle alone, but suddenly, Jaehyun speaks up.

“What does it mean when it says only two will help us? And what does it mean by move ahead and go back? We’re just in a room, right? The door’s still open, we can leave whenever we want…?”

Yuta looks at him thoughtfully. “That’s a good question. From my experience, it seems like the gamemaker simply copied a riddle from elsewhere and gave it to us without changing the parameters. But don’t worry, I think we can pass as long as we find the correct bottles and drink the potions inside.”

Jaehyun doesn’t look convinced, but he’s distracted by Mihyun suddenly taking two bottles out of the lineup. “These two,” she says. “I’m pretty sure.”

“I trust you!” Yuta agrees immediately. “And you can always heal us if we’re wrong.”

“Not if she dies herself.” Jaehyun snatches the bottles, tossing one to the other boy. “Come on, drink up.”

Anxiously, Mihyun watches her teammates chug down the potions. Simultaneously, each does a little shudder.

“How is it?”

For once, Jaehyun and Yuta exchange a look of agreement.

“Awful,” Jaehyun concludes. “But correct.”

 

***

 

The next puzzle is a light-em-up game, with a checkerboard floor. When they step on a certain tile, some other tiles light up. When they then step on another tile, some other tiles light up, and some lit ones go out. They have to light up all the tiles in order to win.

Since none of them chose to upgrade intelligence, they spend a long time here just brute-forcing the answer. Eventually, through Yuta’s perceptive abilities and a of luck, they manage to pass after twenty minutes.

“That was horrible.” Mihyun doesn’t think she can look at checkers the same way again. “I never want to do that again. I don’t even want to see a checkerboard ever again.”

“Come on now, guys,” Yuta says, a long way ahead of her and Jaehyun. “Only one more puzzle to go. We can go back soon!”

“HEY!” someone suddenly yells from behind them. Mihyun whirls around to see the chubby-cheeked boy pointing at them. “They’ve only got one more puzzle left! We’ve got to stop them before they steal our portal!”

“What?” The word is barely out of Mihyun’s mouth before Jaehyun grabs her arm, grip vice-like, and runs. “Wha—”

“Yuta!” Jaehyun yells, but he doesn’t need a reminder, already sprinting ahead to find the last puzzle they need. “They’re definitely going to try to fight us for the puzzle. We have to finish before them.”

Mihyun can’t even speak past panting for breath. “Wha—who—why—”

“I don’t know why, but it’s useless trying to reason with them.” Jaehyun’s face is set and grim. Suddenly, Yuta’s pointy hat pokes out from a doorway. “In there!”

As soon as they enter the room, Yuta shoves Mihyun towards the ball of blue light hovering in the middle of the room. “You answer, we fight!” he says in a rush before grabbing Jaehyun. “Call us when you’re ready!”

Mihyun has a lot to say, but the boys have already disappeared. Urgently, she turns to the blue light, which says, slowly and serenely, “Welcome, Player Mimi#544763. Please listen and answer this riddle: A man walks into a bar, and asks the bartender for a drink of water. The bartender pulls out a gun, points it at the man, and it. The man pauses, before saying ‘Thank you’ and leaving. What happened? You may only ask me questions resulting in the answer yes or no.”

What? The? ??!?!? How should she know what happened??!? Loud noises make their way through the door. Mihyun knows she doesn’t have much time. She takes a deep breath and racks her brain for something useful.

“Was the bartender angry?”

“No.”

“Was the gun real?”

“Yes.”

“Did the two men know each other or have any interactions before this encounter?”

“No.”

“Did the first man mean it when he thanked the bartender? Was he genuinely grateful?”

“Yes.”

Something suddenly slams into the door, accompanied by a shout. Mihyun jumps, recognizing the voice as Jaehyun’s. She needs to speed up, needs to figure out the answer soon.

“Was the man’s request for water strange in some way?”

“Yes.”

“Was the man’s pause significant to his gratefulness?”

“Yes.”

“Did the man have any other business at the bar?”

“No.”

A spark ignites in Mihyun’s brain. For a moment, she only stands there, combing through the logic, then blurts out, “The man had hiccups, and he asked the bartender to scare him!”

“Correct. Congratulations, Player Mimi#544763. The portal has been opened.”

The blue light transforms into a swirling vortex of purple, black, and blue, but Mihyun doesn’t see it. She spins on her heel, dashes to the door, and pulls it open. “Jaehyun, Yuta!” she yells. In the midst of wrestling with a mean-looking boy, Jaehyun doesn’t look back, but Yuta does. His eyes widen, then he rushes to Jaehyun, pulling the mean-looking boy off of him, and shoves him back. As if in slow-motion, Mihyun watches his lips move, then curve in a smile, before he turns back to the opponents. Jaehyun, a dazed look on his face, stumbles backwards towards Mihyun.

“Go!” he yells, but Mihyun can only watch the red glow emanating off of Yuta. “Mihyun, go! Jump in the portal!”

But Yuta , she wants to say, before a huge explosion shoves her words back into her body and her body back into the room. Flung into the air by the shockwaves, Jaehyun lands right next to her. But he wastes no time in scrambling up, grabbing her arm and dragging her into the portal. Immediately, the portal closes, and the last thing Mihyun sees of Yuta is the flames that swallow him whole.


the potions puzzle was, of course, from harry potter, and jaehyun and yuta bring up a very good 4th-wall-breaking point about how i was too lazy/tired to change the riddle to make it fit the situation LOL (it's 4:17am i'm way too tired to think).

the portal puzzle was a situation puzzle, and in fact, i lifted it right from the wikipedia page for "situation puzzle". yes, lazy, but again, i'm so so tired and can't be bothered to think any more than i need to.

i had originally planned for the chubby-cheeked boy to be tbz's q (and his teammates to be hyunjae and eric), but the situation to identify them never arose. still, i thought it would be fun to mention it, especially since hyunjae and jaehyun's names are so similar lol.

anyway, our first death! despite how the system said deaths were uncommon! yeah well, i'm taking inspiration from 'infinite flow' novels, there have got to be some deaths lolll.

please do not expect the next chapter soon. as it took pretty much a year between ch2 and ch3, i'm expecting about a year between ch3 and ch4 too lol. this is smth i work on when i have time to spare, which i don't usually, so updates are, as warned, few and very far between. thank you for reading, though!

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astralhoe
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