In this work we introduce a novel soft-decision decoding algorithm for high-rate short error-correction codes. Our results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves over the state-of-the-art algorithms, including recently proposed Ordered Reliability Bits Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (ORBGRAND), in terms of latency and decoding complexity. Specifically, we demonstrate that the ability of the proposed algorithm to find multiple candidate codewords with a reduced number of low-complexity queries makes it an efficient component decoder for iterative decoding of product-like codes.