The arcade was submerged in a sickening light.
The space was pitch-black, with only the red and blue neon lights from archaic gaming machines casting elongated shadows across the floor. The electronic music played in a murky, static hum, stretched out and distorted like a broken cassette tape.
The group of four dashed through the densely packed rows of arcade cabinets. The thudding of their footsteps blended with their racing heartbeats.
But the further they ran, the more Kairi felt that something was... off.
He glanced to his right. A claw machine with a bunch of pale yellow teddy bears inside. Ten steps later, he took another turn. Right at the corner, there was that claw machine again. Still the same pale yellow teddy bears, piled on top of each other at the exact same, unshifting angle.
Kairi looked up at the dim wall clock in the distance. The second hand was twitching. 10:42. A minute later, as he slipped past a row of shooting games, he glanced back. It was still 10:42.
There was no glaring physical distortion. No cracked walls or inverted space. Just a smoldering sense of displacement creeping into every neuron, gradually eroding trust in his own eyesight.
"This way," Kyouya spoke up, severing Kairi's train of thought.
His voice was still cold. But Kairi perceptively noticed that Kyouya's breathing had grown erratic. He pointed toward an emergency exit emitting a faint green glow at the end of the corridor. The group rushed over.
Kyouya turned the doorknob. Locked tight.
He froze for half a second. The hand gripping the knob clenched until his knuckles turned white. "Change of direction. Left corridor," he immediately ordered, spinning around and walking off at once.
No panic. No cursing. Kyouya tried to maintain an almost perfect composure. But that very overcompensation made him look more terrifying and insecure than ever. He was like a machine desperately trying to hide a critical system error.
The group turned left, but barely ten steps in, the faint sweeps of tactical flashlights grazed the wall ahead.
"...Lock down the east corridor. Team C, keep your distance." A static-filled radio voice broke the silence.
Kyouya immediately backed away, pressing himself flat against the wall, sweat beginning to bead on his forehead.
Kairi narrowed his eyes. What the hell was Nostra doing? They heavily outnumbered them and were armed to the teeth, yet they showed no intention of rushing in to shoot or capture them immediately. Their footsteps echoed steadily, unhurriedly.
"Don't close in." "Keep the targets in sight." "Force them to circle back to the center."
Kairi clenched his fists. They weren't hunting them directly. They were herding the group. Like herding sheep to the slaughterhouse. They were deliberately blocking the exits to force his team to move along a predetermined trajectory.
But before he could analyze it any deeper, a sharp pain shot through Kairi's temples. Déjà vu.
An image suddenly exploded in his mind. Cruelly vivid. Kairi "saw" a red laser sweep across Ginji's chest. He "heard" the sound of shattering glass from the floor above. A sniper bullet pierced the darkness, driving straight into Ginji's head. Blood splattered across an arcade screen.
The experience was so intensely real that Kairi's muscles reacted before his reason could intervene.
"GET DOWN!"
Kairi screamed, lunging to grab Ginji's collar and violently tackling him to the dusty carpet. The two tumbled, rolling into a blind spot behind a racing game machine. Yume and Kyouya, startled, dropped to a crouch as well.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds passed.
Only the static hum of electronic music. No sound of breaking glass. No laser sight. No gunshot whatsoever.
Ginji shoved Kairi off, clutching his shoulder that had just slammed into the ground, his face dark with murderous intent: "Are you crazy?! What the hell was that?!"
Kairi sat dazed on the floor. He stared blankly at his trembling hands. He had clearly "seen" it. He had "lived through" those few seconds already. Why didn't anything happen? What was wrong with his mind? Kairi swallowed hard, a chill running down his spine. He was beginning to lose faith in his own perception.
Yume was the only one who didn't voice a complaint. Since earlier, she had been continuously observing their surroundings, her sharp investigator's eyes refusing to miss a single detail.
She turned her head to look into the distance—where the dark silhouette of the masked assassin still stood motionless on the mezzanine, his gaze locked onto their area from above.
Every time she accidentally looked directly at him for more than three seconds, the surrounding space seemed to stretch. The arcade machines looked grotesquely distorted. But as soon as she blinked and looked away, everything seemed to regain its natural physical sharpness.
"Don't look directly at him," Yume whispered, pulling Kairi and Ginji to their feet. "Just keep your heads down and run. He's messing with our perception. The more we look, the more lost we'll get."
She didn't know the exact mechanics of that ability, but the rule was clear enough.
Kyouya, now leaning against an arcade cabinet, darted his eyes around. He muttered to himself, calculating routes, eliminating dead ends. Suddenly, his eyes lit up. A rare certainty returned to his pale face.
"I see it. There's only one path left," Kyouya said quickly, his voice resolute. "This way is safe. Move!"
He took the lead, weaving through the gap between two large gaming zones, heading straight for a set of double doors meant for maintenance staff in a hidden corner.
"No cameras this way, and their radio signals are jammed in this area. The doors aren't locked from the inside," Kyouya said as he reached out to grab the crash bar of the door. His confidence had peaked. Every variable pointed to this being Nostra's blind spot. This was their only path to survival.
He shoved the doors hard.
Clack. The doors flew wide open.
The space inside was pitch-black. But the very moment the doors opened, four beams from tactical flashlights simultaneously flared to life from within, shining straight into Kyouya's face, blindingly bright.
Four Nostra members had been standing in a horizontal line, waiting there all along. In their hands, stun batons crackled with jagged, electric blue sparks.
Silence. A silence so suffocating it was oppressive.
Kyouya stood petrified. His hand remained on the door. His eyes behind his glasses were wide open, his pupils constricted in sheer terror. He didn't step back. He didn't even breathe. He just stood there, frozen by a shock that far exceeded the limits of his mind's endurance.
Something he had believed to be absolutely certain was dead wrong.
Standing right behind him, Kairi stared directly at Kyouya's violently trembling shoulders. In that moment, the fog obscuring Kairi's eyes completely dissipated.
He hadn't seen the future at all. If Kyouya truly was The Seer, he would never have thrown himself headfirst into such a direct trap. He was just an ordinary human desperately clinging to some sort of calculative intellect, and right now, that ability had been manipulated to the point of being crippled.
"It's over," one of the Nostra goons spoke, stepping forward and raising his stun baton, aiming it straight at Kyouya.
Flick.
The sound of a coin spinning into the air. The very next second, a deep, muffled THUD echoed from the main control room.
The entire backup power system of the 7th floor was completely severed. The whole mall plunged into a thick, pitch-black darkness. The flashlights of the Nostra squad flickered and abruptly died due to an unbelievable short circuit at that exact moment.
The enveloping darkness instantly shattered the line of sight of the assassin, The Distortion, up on the mezzanine. The twisted, suffocating feeling in the air and the hallucinatory spells of déjà vu immediately popped like a punctured soap bubble.
"Now!"
In the pitch-black darkness, a hand grabbed Kyouya's collar and violently yanked him backward. Ginji growled. Luck had just been traded.
Taking advantage of the hunters' few seconds of blindness and chaos, Ginji dragged the group, veering straight into the nearby outdoor sports display area. Without a second thought, he forced everyone's heads down, shoving them one by one into a large display camping tent, and yanked the fabric flap shut.
The Nostra squad's footsteps thundered out of the doorway, their curses ringing out right outside the thin fabric of the tent. "Fuck! Where did they go?!" "Split up! Fan out to the lower floors!"
Inside the cramped, dark space of the tent, the four of them held their breath, listening to the fading footsteps. No one said a word to anyone. But deep down in Kairi's heart, the truth about "The Seer" was officially settled.
Now, not only were they being hunted by the enemy, but they were also dragging along a ticking time bomb that had completely lost its bearings.