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Trials are not about making friends. While her fellow survivors haven’t figured that out yet, Yun-Jin boasts a long streak of escapes due to her adept understanding of how this realm works: doing whatever it takes to make it out alive.
New survivors—most of them, at least—are persuaded by the others urging them to make friends, and they fade to obscurity like everyone else, blurred faces of teammates that matter so inconsequentially little that she can’t even identify many of them by name. Trials are transactions, like all business is, and business is cruel.
So when the two fresh meat arrive at the campfire, dazed and scared, she isn’t particularly interested. Her and her bubble of survival remain untouched by Thalita and Renato Lyra, whose names she knows now, but will inevitably forget.
The next trial Yun-Jin finds herself in is on the Eyrie of Crows, much to her annoyance—each step she takes sinks her heel into the sand, making movement a challenge that isn’t so easily conquerable. Her mood is further soiled when she hears a sadistic chuckle in the distance, trick knives pinging off the stone surfaces.
Of course she’s stuck in a trial with HIM .
Yun-Jin crouches next to a generator hidden by a large boulder, the weird stone obelisk alight with an orange orb crackling behind her, keeping her on edge with its footstep-esque sound. She’s constantly checking over her shoulder, listening intently to her heartbeat, watching and waiting for the neon-clad star to spot her and proceed to relentlessly pursue her the rest of the trial—like always.
Yun-Jin sighs. One generator pops to life in the distance, and shortly after a guttural scream as a survivor hits the sand, no doubt pelted by a dozen of iridescent knives. She keeps working even as the person is put on the hook, and she keeps working even as another generator finishes, and even as her generator finishes, and as Yun-Jin searches for her next conquest she spots Thalita Lyra struggling against the Entity, strung up on a meat hook.
Thalita looks at Yun-Jin pleadingly , grunts mixed with pain and effort escaping her mouth. Blood seeps into her multi-colored crop top, sliding down her torso and onto her short-shorts. No wonder she didn’t last very long, Yun-Jin notes, judging by the casualness of her aura: a girl who's never worked hard a day in her life.
Begrudgingly, Yun-Jin grabs the woman by her shoulders and takes her off the hook. She yelps when fresh blood spurts from her shoulder blade; she heaves as she falls to the ground like her knees are magnetic and the sand is aluminum.
“O que eu faço agora?” Thalita mumbles, wiping the tears from her eyes and streaking sand on her cheeks.
Yun-Jin recognizes the language: Portuguese—as she’s spent time in Brazil before—but she can’t speak much of it. She can’t understand it barely at all, but she can vaguely recall how to say one thing:
“Eu não sei falar português,” Yun-Jin replies, likely flubbing the pronunciation—‘I can’t speak Portuguese.’
Thalita, despite her pain, chuckles quietly, shaking her head. The motion reminds her of her gaping wound, and she suddenly flinches, clutching the puncture and groaning.
It’s pitiful. The cries, the stuttering, grabbing hands. Yun-Jin rolls her eyes and opens her medkit roughly, unrolling some gauze with a loud rip.
With her free hand, she beckons Thalita closer. Thalita shimmies up to Yun-Jin, and the latter lifts the former’s upper arm and starts to wrap the wound haphazardly, just enough to stop the bleeding. The Entity tends to patch them up properly even when the healing isn’t great, and Yun-Jin isn’t interested in making it look pretty, she’s interested in being efficient .
When she’s done, Yun-Jin snaps her medkit shut and walks off, wiping her blood-streaked hands on her pencil skirt and searching the sky for the flashing lights of an incomplete generator. One sits nearby, without progress, so she kneels in the sand (unhappily) and pulls some of the wires from within the machine to kickstart a reaction.
To her surprise, Thalita kneels at the spot next to her, following her lead—she tests wires until they start to spark, and then weaves them together with the elegance of someone with practice. Yun-Jin isn’t exactly fond of repairing generators with people—more hands means more chances for mistakes. She glares at Thalita, unable to bark orders at her like she can to others (at least, not in a way she can understand), so she’s left with only her eyes and mouth to communicate—both of which send a signal that is starkly unfriendly.
Thalita either ignores this, or doesn’t notice. She carefully continues to test wires and Yun-Jin rotates different sectors of the machine without even looking, a practiced dance of tugging and clicking. She wants to get this done fast, get out of the trial before the Trickster (even her inner thoughts spit his name with venom) spots her. No chases, no game of cat and mouse. Yun-Jin wants to leave.
By the time the generator finishes, two others have traded hooks, and from beyond the metal she’d seen the Trickster pursuing his victim, yet not spotting her or Thalita. His tunnel vision, for once , is helpful.
There must be another generator with progress, she thinks, but she wouldn’t be exactly shocked if she learned her teammates had got nothing else done while she and Thalita worked.
Speaking of, the woman in question stands at attention, tapping her foot rhythmically on the ground—she’s wearing sandals, at least someone gets appropriate footwear for this realm—as if waiting for something. Does she expect Yun-Jin to coddle her? Absolutely not.
“가서 유용한 사람이 되십시오,” says Yun-Jin, forgetting for a moment that Thalita isn’t going to understand Korean. She shoos Thalita, trying to send a message that she should buzz off so that Yun-Jin can work, and that seems to make her take the hint. She smiles wearily and runs toward the center building, disappearing into the walls of the morbid art gallery and the skyward nest.
Yun-Jin surveys the nearby area, walking quickly to the nearest generator and starting to progress it. She isn’t going to waste time on trying to find where her useless teammates tried to do the objective. Someone has to do some good work here.
Thalita edges into her thoughts, unwarranted. Perhaps a placebo, but she feels like the image of her makes her work faster, until all four pistons of the generator make it roar to life, and she escapes another trial alive, unscathed, and, most importantly, alone .