The darkness lasted only a few seconds.
After stepping through the door, light rose from below—not fluorescent light, but the glow of fractures. The floor was some kind of translucent metal grating, pale blue light seeping through the gaps, illuminating about a meter around each person's feet. Everything beyond that was black, but as contestants filed in and stepped on more panels, the grating lit up section by section, and the shape of the space slowly emerged.
Two platforms.
Suspended over a chasm.
Each platform was square, roughly ten meters on a side, with no railings at the edges. The gap between them was less than three meters wide, but when you looked down—
There was no bottom.
The blue light couldn't reach whatever lay beneath. As far as the eye could see, only darkness, like a wound torn open in the flesh of the world, leading somewhere unknowable. Cold air pushed up from the rift, carrying the damp mineral smell of deep underground rock.
One thing connected the two platforms. A rope. Thick hemp, maybe ten centimeters in diameter, strung from an anchor point on one side to an anchor point on the other, its middle section suspended above the abyss. A red cloth marker was tied to the exact center of the rope, aligned with the midline of the chasm.
Tug of war.
The intercom began reading rules:
"Game three: Tug of War."
"Two teams will stand on opposite platforms. The team that pulls their opponents past the center line wins."
"Each team: ten players."
Ten. His team had nine.
Jiang Han was turning this over when someone walked up to him. Medium build, face so generic he'd vanish into any crowd within three seconds. Tracksuit number: 333.
"I don't have a team." 333's voice was flat. No begging, no embellishment. "You're short one."
Jiang Han looked him over. No room to be picky—a ten-player format with only nine would mean automatic disqualification. "Stand at the back."
333 nodded and took his place at the end of the line without another word.
The intercom continued:
"Additional rule one: every forty-five seconds, the rope will be electrified for three seconds. A buzzer will sound five seconds before electrification. All players must release the rope during electrification. Re-grip the rope after electrification ends."
"Additional rule two: after each electrification, the center line will shift randomly by up to one meter."
"The losing team's platform will collapse."
"You have three minutes to prepare."
Those people back in the dormitory who'd laughed at his team should be shutting up right about now. These rule modifications were practically designed to neutralize brute force. The electrification turned the match into a series of forty-five-second rounds, each requiring a fresh grip and a fresh stance. The random midline shift made raw power accumulation pointless—you could strain every muscle to pull the line one meter your way, and the next round it might jump a meter back toward you. Wasted effort.
Reaction speed and strategy mattered more than tonnage.
Jiang Han turned to his team. Three minutes.
"Listen. This is not a strength contest." His voice was low, for his people only. "The critical moment is the instant after electrification ends—when everyone re-grips the rope. Whoever grabs it first and pulls first controls the next forty-five seconds. So: when the buzzer sounds, let go, but don't move your feet and don't pull your hands back. Stay in your gripping stance. The second the buzzer stops, the front three grab the rope and yank hard. Everyone behind follows. We use the fraction of a second while the other side is still reorganizing."
Ma added from the front: "Positioning. Everyone turn sideways, feet staggered front and back, weight on the rear foot. Don't face forward—side-on pulling gives you better leverage than straight-on."
He had tug-of-war experience.
Park pushed his cracked glasses up. "Is the midline shift random, or is there a pattern?"
"Unknown. Treat it as random for now. If there's a pattern, I'll find it within two rounds."
001, the old man, stood at the very back of the line, listening to all of this, wearing that trademark faint smile that put a chill down the spine. He placed both hands on the rope and tested his grip—those thin, age-spotted hands closed around the hemp with a steadiness that had no business belonging to a man past seventy.
Then Jiang Han saw it on the system panel.
Red text. A marker flagging one specific person on the opposing team.
[ANOMALY DETECTED]
Player #444 — Corrupted Entity (D-level)
Physical enhancement: ~3x normal human
Warning: Will not follow normal human limitations.
Three times.
The other side had a thing in their lineup whose strength was triple that of a normal person, disguised among ten. It looked like a regular middle-aged man—slightly overweight, buzz cut, same green tracksuit as everyone else. But when Jiang Han stared at it for two seconds, something was off. Its stance was too stable. Its feet didn't rest on the platform so much as they were nailed to it. Center of gravity unnaturally low, like a tree stump with roots sunk deep underground.
The opposing team didn't seem to know. 444 was just "one of their stronger-looking guys."
The whistle blew.
Ten on ten. The rope went taut.
Jiang Han's palms wrapped around the coarse hemp fibers, his feet locked into the gaps of the metal grating. He stood in the middle of the formation—Ma and two young men at the front, then himself, then Yoon Seo, Park, the middle-aged woman 200, the stammering college student, and at the tail end the old man 001 and 333.
Pull.
Everyone heaved at once, bodies leaning back, feet driving into the floor. The vibration of the rope traveled from palms to arms to shoulders to the full length of the spine—the other side was pulling too.
Something was wrong.
The opposing force was clearly stronger. The red cloth marker was drifting centimeter by centimeter toward the other side. Jiang Han's feet slipped on the grating—he gritted his teeth, regained footing, dropped his center of gravity lower.
444.
That thing's output wasn't on a human scale. It alone was doing the work of three, and showed no sign of fatigue—breathing steady, facial muscles relaxed, like it was warming up.
"Lock your feet! Weight back! Rope against your hip!" Ma bellowed from the front. His commands were professional—tug of war wasn't about arm strength, it was about body weight and ground friction. The rope ran along the hip, hands only held it in place, real power came from legs and core.
The team stabilized. But the red marker kept creeping toward the other side, bit by bit.
Forty-five seconds.
The buzzer shrieked—a sharp, rapid beeping.
"Let go!" Jiang Han shouted.
Everyone released at once. The instant palms left the rope, a blue-white arc of electricity snaked along the hemp fibers, crackling and hissing, the smell of scorched material filling the air. For three seconds the rope became a glowing electric serpent, writhing above the abyss.
Three seconds. The arc died.
The red marker had shifted—the midline moved about half a meter toward Jiang Han's side. Unfavorable.
"Grab!"
Jiang Han's palm slapped the rope the instant the buzzer cut out. Ma and the two young men at the front beat him by a tenth of a second—three hands gripping in unison, hauling back hard.
The other side was still reorganizing their grip.
That fraction-of-a-second gap was lethal. Jiang Han's team pulled back nearly a meter before the opponents had all ten hands on the rope again. The red marker swung back to near the original midline.
It worked.
But 444's hands were on the rope again.
Second forty-five seconds.
444 started pulling for real.
Jiang Han could feel the nature of the force change through the rope—what had been a steady, predictable drag became something intermittent and violent. Like someone was slamming a sledgehammer against the other end, each impact jolting his entire arm numb.
The red marker accelerated its drift.
The team was dragged forward half a step. Then another half.
The platform edge was less than three meters ahead. The abyss's cold breath was hitting his face now.
"Can't hold!" One of the young men at the front, voice cracking.
The buzzer. Second electrification.
Release. Arc. Three seconds.
The midline shifted toward the opposing side this time—about seventy centimeters in their favor. Lucky. But that advantage wouldn't last long against 444's output.
Electrification ended. Re-grip.
When the third round began, Jiang Han made a decision.
In the gap between pulls, he spoke in a voice only the two or three people nearest could hear:
"Next time the power cuts—everyone keeps their hands on the rope but don't pull. Just hold it loose."
Yoon Seo turned her head a fraction.
"Five seconds. Just five seconds."
Ma half-turned at the front. He didn't question it—the third principle from the briefing: someone gives an order, you execute, you don't ask why. But doubt lived in his eyes.
"Trust me."
Ma bit down on his jaw. Turned back.
The third forty-five seconds ground past in agony. 444's force dragged the red marker to within two meters of their platform edge. One more round and they'd be at the lip of the abyss.
The buzzer.
Release. Arc. Three seconds.
Midline shift—thirty centimeters toward their own side. Worse.
The arc vanished.
"Don't pull." Jiang Han's voice was cold enough to frost glass.
His hands rested on the rope. Not gripping. Not pulling. Beside him, Yoon Seo held the rope loosely. Behind them, Park, 200, the college student—everyone followed. Ten people with their hands on the rope, not one of them pulling.
The opposing team didn't know.
They re-gripped and hauled with everything they had the instant the power died—
And met no resistance.
Ten people pulling a rope with full force against zero resistance is ten people yanking themselves off their own feet. Momentum threw their collective center of gravity backward. Several stumbled two steps back. One sat down hard on the platform. And 444's three-times-human strength became its worst liability—its own massive output, meeting nothing, wrenched its body backward. Even it couldn't fight its own inertia.
The entire opposing team lost their balance in half a second.
"PULL!"
The word came out of Jiang Han's throat like a bullet.
Ten people clamped down, leaned back, drove their feet into the grating—in the instant the other side was still sprawled across their platform scrambling for their center of gravity, the rope snapped back like a drawn bowstring. The red marker flew past the midline, past the chasm, racing toward their side—
People on the other platform were dragged to its edge.
They screamed. They thrashed. They tried to reorganize—but it was too late. Regaining a lost center of gravity took at least two seconds, and in those two seconds the rope had already been pulled through. 444 tried to anchor with brute force, its feet gouging two deep furrows into the metal grating—but the other nine had already been hauled over the line. One entity couldn't hold the dead weight of nine sliding bodies.
A massive metallic crack.
The opposing platform split down the middle, like a cracker snapped in half. Both halves tilted toward the abyss and fell—and the people on them tumbled into the black like beans spilled from a jar.
Screaming from below.
Growing fainter.
Growing smaller.
Then gone.
On the platform.
Ten people knelt or sat, gasping. Nobody spoke.
The silence wasn't calm. It was the blank spot in your head when your brain needs time to process the fact that you just sent a group of people into an abyss with your own hands.
200, the middle-aged woman, was on all fours, dry-heaving over the edge of the platform. The college student crouched in a corner hugging his knees, lips moving without producing a complete syllable. Park sat on the floor, cracked glasses askew on his nose, staring at the empty, broken remnant of the opposing platform with an expression that had passed beyond fear into something vacant.
Yoon Seo leaned against the rope's anchor post, arms raised in front of her. Her hands were shaking. Not from fear—muscular spasm from sustained high-intensity gripping. She stared at her palms. Deep red rope burns, blisters already torn open.
She didn't cry.
Ma walked up to Jiang Han. His right leg was trembling—the old injury pushed past its limit by the strain. But he was standing. He clapped a hand on Jiang Han's shoulder hard enough to nearly buckle his knees.
"That strategy—let go and then pull—how'd you come up with it?"
Jiang Han took a deep breath and pushed the adrenaline back down.
"An old trick."
This was true. The strategy was old—it was the one the old man 001 had taught the protagonist in the original Squid Game, during the tug of war. Release the rope at the last second, use the enemy's momentum against them, then pull before they recover. But in this world, the old man hadn't taught him. He'd pulled it from a TV show he'd watched on a couch.
He turned to look at the back of the line.
001 stood quietly, not a single rope burn visible on his hands—or if there were marks, they were impossible to distinguish on those wrinkled, age-spotted palms. His breathing was steadier than anyone else's. He'd barely broken a sweat.
He was looking at Jiang Han.
The look wasn't a grandfather watching a younger person with warmth. It was an appraiser studying a stone—deciding whether the material was worth the cut.
Jiang Han didn't avoid the gaze.
The two of them held eye contact across seven or eight meters for three seconds.
Then the old man gave a slight smile, lowered his eyes, and looked away—like an exam proctor deciding not to announce the scores just yet.
Back in the dormitory.
The overhead display scrolled a number: Remaining players: 98.
From four hundred and fifty-six to ninety-eight. In fewer than three full games, nearly eighty percent gone.
The system panel refreshed:
GAME 3 COMPLETE
Survivors: 98 / 456
NP Earned: +200
CORRUPTED ENTITY ENCOUNTERED
Bonus NP for surviving non-human threat: +50
NOTE: Corruption is accelerating.
Game 4 projected corruption: 35%.
The corruption was accelerating. Twelve percent to twenty-eight to thirty-five.
Jiang Han sat on his bunk and silently asked a question the system might not answer.
"That 444—why was there something non-human mixed into the game?"
The system responded. New text materialized on the panel:
Narrative corruption creates anomalies.
As a world's core story degrades,
entities that do not belong to the original narrative appear.
They are echoes — broken fragments of narrative
condensed into physical form.
"Will there be more?"
Affirmative. Corruption is not static. It grows.
"I'm just an ordinary person. No abilities. If the corruption keeps getting worse—"
Survive.
That is your only task.
The panel dimmed.
Jiang Han stared at the afterimage of the text for a long time.
Survive. With an ordinary body, in a world that was breaking apart, against things that weren't human and were only going to multiply.
Easy for you to say.
He was about to lie down when he felt a gaze.
Across the dormitory. Kang Dae stood there, arms folded, staring at him.
The expression on his face was no longer contempt.
Kang Dae's team had also won game three—but barely, losing two members in the process. Jiang Han's "trash squad" hadn't lost a single person and had won cleanly.
That bothered him.
A man he'd rejected as "too scrawny," leading a group of the old, the weak, and the broken, had won a game he believed could only be won with strength.
Kang Dae's eyes narrowed.
Not contempt. The expression of a predator recategorizing its prey.
Jiang Han looked back, face blank.
They held the stare for five seconds. Then Kang Dae turned and walked away.
But Jiang Han knew—from this moment on, he'd been moved to a different spot on Kang Dae's list.
From "irrelevant" to "needs to be dealt with."