The third day, the air on the 108th floor had grown thick and rancid.
The carbon dioxide exhaled by six pairs of lungs mingled with unventilated despair, filling the penthouse with a cloying, sickly-sweet stench of stagnant saliva and fear.
Min-ho drifted back to consciousness, a metallic, acidic tang burning his tongue. As the oxygen dwindled, his brain began to scream.
Black dots swarmed like a restless army at the periphery of his vision, writhing and pulsing.
His fingertips, used to each endless sequences onto the cold marble, were raw and bleeding. Each stroke of his nail against the floor produced a sickening, scratchy friction—a sound that seemed to pierce through his very eardrums.
“Shut that noise up!”
Team Leader Park’s voice was a jagged convulsion, sharp and laced with a desperate, metallic edge. He was blind to everything but the flickering blue ghost-light of his tablet screen. His fingers hammered at the code with a dry, rhythmic clicking—a sound of plastic hitting plastic that echoed his frantic heartbeat. A sour heat radiated from his body like an overloaded machine on the verge of total meltdown. Recalling the backdoor address he had promised the rival firm’s engineer, he bit his lip until a bead of dark crimson hit the floor.
In the corner, Director Jo had abandoned all pretenses of dignity. He lay sprawled across the crates, using a food box as a pillow. He tapped the cap of a water bottle rhythmically with a sharp metal shard.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
The monotonous percussion gnawed at the nerves of everyone else, a slow-motion torture designed to snap the last threads of their sanity.
Jo’s predatory gaze never left Yuna, his eyes gleaming with a greasy, unmasked greed. From his neck, a pungent miasma of sweat and stale grease wafted through
the room.
Yuna sat by the glass wall, staring not at the horizon, but at her own fading reflection. To drown out the hunger, she pressed a tube of discontinued lipstick to her nose, inhaling the artificial rose scent like a drug. But even that floral ghost couldn’t mask the musty, choking dust of their tomb. She chewed a single biscuit crumb—a meager bribe for Director Jo’s favor. The crunching sound exploded in the silence, and for a terrifying second, every head turned. The others watched the corners of her mouth with the hollow, unblinking eyes of starving beasts.
Professor Park stood by the panoramic window, his silhouette etched against the ghostly, pale nightscape of Seoul. From this height, the city below appeared distorted, shimmering like a feverish heat haze. He pulled the collar of his worn coat up to his nose, desperately seeking the faint, lingering scent of his old study—
the smell of aged paper and quiet thought. But as he inhaled, a darker memory surfaced: the acrid stench of burning circuits that Chairman Kang had emitted from that university computer lab decades ago.
“Team Leader Park,”
the professor’s cracked voice sliced through the frigid, thin air.
“That ‘backdoor’ you’re so obsessed with... have you considered that it might be a digital honeypot? A trap laid by Kang before you even touched the first line of code?”
The words had barely left his lips when the clinical white of the room vanished.
The penthouse was suddenly bathed in a violent, rhythmic crimson. Emergency strobes flashed with a predatory intensity, and a piercing, high-pitched siren—
the herald of oxygen levels dropping below the critical threshold—tore through the 108th floor. It wasn't just a sound; it was a physical assault on their eardrums.
Director Jo, who had reigned over his small kingdom of food crates, scrambled in a blind panic. In his desperation, he knocked over his water bottle.
The precious liquid spilled across the black marble, washing away the agonizingly calculated sequence of numbers Min-ho had spent hours carving into the floor.
As the water hit the dust and blood, the only hope they had for a code dissolved into a meaningless, dark blur.
