~ The last key to success is to let go of the past and embrace your true self. Get rid of everything that's restraining you and you will realize what you need to reach your dreams. Don't be a glitch in a perfect system, only be yourself, and remember the importance of your journey, because after all it's your true gift and what builds you up ~
———
"Level nine, Levanter. The fifth level of your second chapter of your journey, clé 3 : Levanter"
I noticed a detail in the elevator. The last button wasn't covered anymore. Just as I read out the text that stood next to it, I heard the same words coming from the speaker in the elevator; "step out of clé"
"Guys, I'm pretty sure this is the last level" I told them and inspected the tenth button a bit more.
I tried pressing it, but it wouldn't be pressed down, not yet at least. But all we should need to do then should be to find the elevator again and then we were out.
I felt a gush of hope fil up my body.
"I think so too" Chan agreed with me.
"Finally, I was starting to think it would never end" Hyunjin said and rolled his eyes from the annoyance.
"Yay, back to real life" Minho said.
Everyone was getting their hopes up now, even Felix seemed to get a bit brighter.
"Don't get your hopes up too much now, we can't be certain" I tried warning them.
"I think we all need a bit of hope to continue, even if it's not the last level it's better for us to think it is" Changbin said and he had a point.
"Can't argue with that" I said and stepped outside the elevator. My foot was feeling better. It wasn't completely healed, but I could walk on it now, kind of at least. I must've been healed slightly during the elevator ride because it wasn't this good before I stepped into the elevator.
"How's your ankle?" Felix asked worriedly as he saw me walking.
I flashed a smile. "Much better, see I can walk" I said and showed him how I was walking:
He looked happy for me, but also a teeny tiny bit disappointed. Was it because he wouldn't get to continue carrying me around? Can't be.
Once we were all outside the elevator we had a look around.
We'd been dropped off on a sidewalk between two roads. On the sides were railings separating the roads for the cars with our walkway.
For the fists time the city seemed somewhat alive. The sky was navy blue with brights stars shining in constellations and the two moons, both the regular one and the reddish one, but despite the fact it was night, the city was lit up by thousands of lights, unlike the other levels. It looked like a normal city, except there were no cars and no humans.
The elevator we'd stepped out of wasn't the same we'd entered. This one wasn't rusty, it wasn't old. At first it was almost hard seeing the elevator and I couldn't decide whether it was transparent or made of mirrors. The whole elevator reflected the lights and buildings around us, but what had fooled me was that we weren't reflected in it.
I went closer to it and could now see my own reflection vaguely. Although it wasn't really my reflection. I looked too perfect. I didn't like it. It wasn't me. It was what I would have been if I'd stayed in the first level for too long.
What I reacted on though was the fact my reflection was holding something. It looked a pyramid made from glass or a similar see through material.
I felt a strong wind grab a hold of me, pulling me backwards slightly.
"We should get going" I said, not liking my reflection.
We didn't exactly know where we were going and we were all already tired from the last level, but we followed the road forward, the same way the wind had blown in.
At some point we took a break by a convenience store. There was nobody working there and the food hadn't passed it's due date, so we took some things to eat. Call the police on me for stealing. I was hungry and this game had already stolen part of my life.
Felix and Chan were sitting by a table outside the store when I went outside with my gimbap in one hand and a soda in the other. They were talking and I suddenly seemed to hear my own name and froze to the ground, kind of hiding behind the door.
"You don't happen to perhaps like Nora now do you?" Felix asked Chan with worry in his eyes.
Chan just let out a chuckle. "You see me as competition?" He wondered. "Not in that way, no" he said to Felix with a smile.
"Really" Felix said and looked happy about what Chan had told him. Then he realized how ecstatic he'd looked and cleared his throat as he got back a casual face. "I mean, oh, really" he said more casual.
Chan now laughed. "I know you like her Felix" he said and I felt my heart flutter.
"I don't" Felix tried denying, but his face showed he was lying, making my heart flutter even more.
"Yeah right, you should stop calling her stupid and she might actually like you back" Chan said.
Felix sighed. "Why is it so hard to like someone?" He asked Chan, and now my heart was doing flips and shit.
"Yah Nora why are you just standing there?" Seungmin asked as he walked past me.
Felix and Chan both turned and saw me.
My face was red, and so was Felix's.
"I just got here, what are you talking about?" I asked Seungmin with pleading eyes hoping he'd get the hint.
"But..." he begun but since his sentence begun with a but, I figured it wasn't something I should let him say, so I slapped my hand over his mouth and led him back inside where I stayed with him and the rest for a while, until everybody were ready to go outside and sit down to eat.
Felix was definitely avoiding eye contact. I was too though so it had like the opposite effect. Instead we accidentally looked at each other all the time.
"You two are weird today" Jeongin said and looked between me and Felix, completely ignoring the tension in the air.
We didn't say anything, we didn't even react to what he said, so he thought we were even weirder today, but we had the right to feel awkward. I kind of just got my answer to the question I'd been having for quite some time now and Felix accidentally confessed his feelings to me.
"We should get going now" Chan said, who hadn't ignored the tension, and stood up once we were all finished eating.
I felt a strong wind trying to pull me with it again and looked around to see the others had also been bothered by it, but we started walking again.
The atmosphere was quiet and a bit awkward, but we continued the journey along the road.
After some time the road went down into the ground and we were suddenly inside a tunnel. This part of the city was different from what it had been outside. Up there was abandoned, but at least it was clean and empty. Down here were broke down cars that had been abandoned and taped with silver tape, piles of garbage and a hundred rolls of toilet paper had been rolled out and covered the place.
Along the roof was a line of lights, but non of them were working properly. The lights were switching on and off, they kept blinking and giving me a headache. This was the wrong moment to film one of those 'you turn me on like a light switch' tik toks, and I also didn't have a working phone to do it. Such a pity.
The walls were made of shiny tiles, pink at the bottom and then white up towards the roof. Rectangular pillars with the same tiles divided the two lanes from each other, but didn't stop us from seeing over to the other side.
Walking through the tunnel it felt like we were back in a ghost town, like the aftermath of a civil war, much like the one in the level miroh.
"Look, this doesn't seem like garbage" Changbin said.
I turned around and saw him pick up something from the ground. My heart stopped beating for a second. It was the glass pyramid I'd seen myself holding.
"You should put that down" I said.
"Why? I kind of like it" he argued and held it up to his face to examine it further.
He put it up to his eye too look through it, but I saw on his face what he'd seen scared him. He froze for a second and dropped the pyramid to the ground. The sound of glass hitting asphalt was heard, but it didn't break.
"What did you see?" I asked him.
"Nothing" he said and started walking again.
The others looked at him with a frown but started walking too.
We kept walking for a long time through that tunnel.
My ankle definitely wasn't completely healed. It was starting to hurt even more as I was walking.
"Can we take a quick break?" I asked the boys.
Felix looked at me with worry. "Sure, what's the matter?" He asked.
I faked a smile. "Nothing, I'm just a bit tired" I said.
"How's your ankle?" He then asked and looked at it with worry.
"The ankle's good" I lied.
He nodded but I couldn't tell if he'd bought it or not.
I sat down on the lower wall between the pillars that separated the two lanes. Felix came and sat down next to me in the same hole. It was just wide enough to fit us both so our shoulders were touching slightly.
Non of us said a word but I felt something strange inside of me. Almost like my heart was doing a flip.
"So last level now huh" Felix said casually to start a conversation. He seemed almost nervous.
"Mm, not far left now" I said.
He nodded. "So what are you gonna do once you get out?" He asked.
I felt like a proud mother somehow. Felix hadn't said if we get out, like he was now certain we would get out. Even Felix had hopes of getting out, and believed in us.
"Don't know, maybe call my brother and say I'm okay" I said. "You?" I then asked him.
"Don't know either, call my sisters would be nice" he said.
"Right, you also have siblings" I said when I remembered the two girls from his memories. I realized I didn't actually know that much about Felix. I'd seen some of his memories, but that was all.
"You should meet them some time" he said but avoided my eyes. I felt my heart skip a beat.
"You should meet my brother too, you two would probably get along well" I said. Knowing my brother, the two of them could definitely match well.
"The fake version of him seemed pretty cool at least" Felix admitted.
"He is, he's a good brother" I said. Thinking about my brother made me miss home. I just wanted to be with my family.
Suddenly a voice was heard behind us. "Felix and Nora, sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G" Jeongin was singing.
I felt my face heat up. "Yah shut up Jeongin" I said to him.
Felix cleared his throat. "Should we continue now?" He asked and rose up.
"We should" I said and we started walking.
Me and Felix happened to end up a bit behind the others. We were walking side by side and I noticed Felix hand kept brushing past mine. Every time it felt like electric sparks went through my body. This is bad.
Non of us said anything, but it wasn't awkward, it was just a comfortable silence, except my heart didn't like this, or maybe it did, a bit too much.
I wanted to start a conversation, but I had nothing to say. What do you even say to start a conversation? How do you talk? I don't know.
I felt a gush of wind coming from behind, but it wasn't as strong as the other two times, maybe because we were underground. It was weird the wind had just reached us down here. The wind still managed to send shivers trough my body though. Then I got a feeling something wasn't right.
Suddenly I heard a rumbling noice behind me. I turned my head around and what I saw made me panic.
The ground was crumbling to pieces and falling deep down into the abyss, creating a big gap and it kept opening up. It looked to be a long way down of we fell down and we certainly couldn't get up.
My eyes flew open and I acted out of impulse. I grabbed Felix's wrist and pulled him with me as I started running.
Felix was startled and didn't understand why we were running. I realized the falling ground was catching up with us and soon we would both be swallowed whole. The gap wasn't going all the way out to the sides so I tried getting out to the side and pulled Felix with me. I pulled him hard so he crashed into me and I embraced him to keep him away from the gap.
The noice ceased and everything went silent. I was embracing Felix with my arms around him and my face buried in his shoulder so I wouldn't witness our death.
Everything was still. We were standing on a solid piece of the road, but Felix was standing right on the edge. If the road had just fallen a centimeter further we would have gone down.
We were both still breathing heavily, but something on the others side of the gap caught my attention. It looked like me, but it wasn't me. It was the same person I'd seen in the reflection of the elevator. She was holding the glass pyramid again, the one Changbin had left.
"What was that?" Felix asked and looked over his shoulder to see the gap. Immediately the girl vanished and I saw the pyramid dropping to the ground and staying there.
The others had stopped too. The gap hadn't reached them, but they'd been terrified when they saw we were about to fall down.
"I don't know" I said, completely shaken. My legs felt like spaghetti and my hands were shaking. I hadn't quite processed what had happened. My brain just couldn't grasp it.
I knew I had one life left to lose without dying, but if I'd died here and had to go all the way back I would probably have given up. No way I could make it back alone, especially knowing Felix wouldn't wake up with me in the elevator if he'd fallen down too.
I'd moved my arms away from Felix so now we were just standing face to face when I couldn't hold back the tears. It was from the shock, and thinking about what could have happened.
Felix saw my red and wet eyes and once again embraced me into a hug, a hug of comfort this time.
"It's okay, we didn't die" he said to calm me down. "You saved me Nora, like you always do" he continued with a deep yet soft voice.
"You almost died" I sobbed, burying my face in his shirt again.
"I didn't die, don't think about that" he said.
I don't know why I was suddenly feeling so fragile, but I just couldn't help it. I didn't like looking so weak in front of them all, I wasn't weak, but this game was really starting to tear me apart now.
"I don't know what I would have done if you died Felix" I said, still crying my eyes out.
"I said don't think about it, we're both still alive, let's be thankful for that instead"