They walked in silence for a while, the maze offering nothing but more identical stone, more flickering torches, more branching corridors that all looked exactly the same as the last dozen they'd already passed through. The exhaustion from the earlier fights had settled deep into Jin's limbs by now, a dull, persistent ache that no amount of forward motion actually seemed to ease.
"This feels like it's stalling us on purpose," Do-yun muttered, glancing down yet another featureless passage.
"Everything the system does has been on purpose," Areum said. "Don't see why this would be different."
"Just once I'd like something to actually be an accident," Do-yun said.
Jin kept his hand loose near the katana's hilt, some old, familiar instinct prickling at the back of his neck, the same low, warning hum he'd learned to trust across the last month more than any conscious thought. Something was close. He just hadn't seen it yet.
"You feel that," he asked quietly.
