Chapter 30: I Just Want to Live!
The wooden door groaned, the sound of stressed timber grating on the nerves. A continuous, heavy pressure was being applied from the other side, and the frame shuddered with each passing second. The mermaid, it seemed, was trying to crush the door with its sheer body weight.
Fortunately, the door was sturdy.
After a long, tense moment, the pressure vanished. A wet, dragging sound followed, scraping against the floorboards before fading down the hall.
Yotsuya Miko let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. Just as her lips parted to whisper, a hand clamped firmly over her mouth. Her eyes shot wide, finding Haruto already awake beside her. He pressed a single finger to his own lips in a universal sign for silence, then slowly, deliberately, pointed toward the thin crack of light beneath their door.
Miko's gaze followed his finger. Her breath hitched in her throat. A viscous, murky liquid was slowly seeping in from the hallway, pooling on their floor.
'Is that... the mermaid's slime?'A cold dread, sharp and sudden, pierced through her.'That thing never left!'
As if in direct response to her unspoken terror, a heavy, wet weight slid down the exterior of the door. The sound returned—a sickening patter, a wet rustle—of something heavy and slick crawling away. It lingered for a moment before finally receding down the corridor for good this time.
Haruto's finger traced a line through the air. A thin, dark slit tore open in the fabric of space beside him.
His control over the Gap was still rudimentary; he couldn't traverse vast distances at will. But for a simple peephole? That was well within his capabilities.
The view through the Gap revealed the pitch-black corridor. A massive creature, easily one and a half times the size of a grown man, crawled into frame. As the image sharpened, the pupils of all three onlookers constricted in unison. They finally understood why its movements were so faint.
It wasn't walking. It was crawling.
On its hands.
The mermaid was dragging itself across the floor, its palms splayed wide, pressing firmly into the dusty floorboards as it heaved its body forward in an alternating, laborious motion. The rustling came from its lower body—a grotesque fish tail, crudely fashioned by sewing its legs together. The makeshift appendage dragged limply behind it, leaving a winding, viscous trail on the floor. And the final, subtle scraping sound? That was the noise of long, peeled strips of skin being pulled along the ground.
The sight was stomach-churning. The visual impact was simply too much. Even Miko, who had witnessed so much horror, felt a wave of physiological nausea rise in her throat.
The mermaid crawled to the last guest room on the corridor. If Haruto remembered correctly, that was the room assigned to Liu Wensong's team.
'Talk about bad luck,' Haruto thought wryly. With two newcomers and one guy who seemed utterly unreliable, those probably weren't teammates Liu Wensong had chosen himself. They were likely a randomly assigned group.
Through the Gap, they watched the mermaid arrive at the door. It hauled itself upright, pressing its entire body heavily against the wood. Slime oozed down the grain of the thick door, eventually overflowing through the crack at the bottom.
Click... click-click...
A pair of gloved hands reached out, fumbling with the doorknob, trying to twist it open. But the people inside had locked it tight.
'Gloves?' Haruto thought, confused. He manipulated the Gap, zooming in on the detail, and his blood ran cold.
Those weren't gloves.
The snow-white color was unmistakably the skin of a young woman. Its owner was surely the newcomer who had been skinned alive on their first day.
Scrape... rustle...
The mermaid slowly slid down from the door. It pressed its hands hard against both sides of the doorframe while its tail—or rather, its legs—rubbed and dragged against the floor, creating the distinct illusion that it was leaving.
Seeing this, Miko felt a chill of residual fear. If Haruto hadn't covered her mouth just now, she would have fallen for the exact same trick.
Liu Wensong, having cleared two or three instances on his own, naturally had some skill. He must have realized the mermaid hadn't left, as not a single sound came from inside his room.
Unfortunately, this time the mermaid didn't move on. It remained clinging to the doorway, showing no sign of departing.
"Should we help?" Kaguya asked in a hushed voice.
Miko didn't speak, her gaze turning to Haruto. He pondered for a moment before giving a slight nod.
This wasn't an act of overflowing kindness. It was a pragmatic decision. They couldn't afford to have them die right now.
If they didn't count the night they first arrived, this was only the first full day. Losing too many teammates at once would be a disaster.
Haruto sliced open a second Gap, this one leading to the main entrance of the Mermaid Pension. He was just about to set an alarm on his phone to create a diversion when a sudden change shattered the silence.
Ding-ling—Ding-ling-ling—!
A piercing alarm suddenly blared from the guest room to their left. In the dead quiet of the night, the sound was exceptionally jarring. It instantly seized the mermaid's attention.
Haruto and Kaguya both frowned.
Without a doubt, that was an alarm clock someone had intentionally placed there. The people who went out to find food wouldn't have had time for such a scheme. The only ones who could have done it were the three who had stayed behind.
The tall woman, Ryoko, was King Chen's teammate; she wouldn't harm her own people. The answer was painfully obvious.
In an instant, the mermaid lunged toward the door of King Chen's room. The shrill ringing seemed to have utterly enraged it. It abandoned all pretense of testing the door and began to crash its massive body against the wooden panel, again and again.
Even when Haruto sent his phone through the Gap to a nearby corridor and set off another alarm, the mermaid ignored it completely, its focus now locked onto its target.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Though the wooden door was solid, it couldn't withstand the creature's relentless assault. Within moments, it was forcibly smashed open.
Haruto didn't continue watching. He took a deep breath, lay back down on the bed, and whispered to Miko.
"Go to sleep."
Miko's eyes were slightly red. Both King Chen and that woman Ryoko had been kind to them. "Brother Haruto, didn't you give them two Talisman Cards?"
"I did," Haruto's voice was unnervingly calm. "But in an instance like this, the power of talismans is suppressed. They can wound it, but whether they can escape... that's up to them."
Intuition told him there was more than one ghost in this place. He continued, "I could help, but the risk is too great. The instance has only just begun."
Having said his piece, he fell silent.
There was, of course, another way to survive. They could have run over and broken down the doors of the other rooms. As long as the number of targets increased and the scene descended into chaos, the odds of survival would rise dramatically.
But clearly, neither King Chen nor Ryoko was that kind of person.
Miko bit her lip, her expression conflicted, but she eventually lay back down. She quietly hugged Haruto from behind, burying her face in his back. As the violent sounds from the next room gradually subsided, her delicate body couldn't stop trembling—whether from fear or from sorrow, it was impossible to tell.
The next day, Miko was jolted awake by a violent knocking at the door.
The sound was very close. But it wasn't their door being knocked on; it was the one to their right, the guest room of Liu Wensong's team.
Miko hurriedly woke Haruto.
When the three of them opened their door, they saw King Chen pounding on the other room's door like a madman. A deep gash on his left arm was carved down to the bone, the white of it faintly visible.
Click—
The door swung open.
Liu Wensong's face, initially lit with relief at seeing King Chen, immediately soured as he registered the man's deranged state. Before he could even ask what happened, King Chen had already thrown a vicious punch at Liu Cangzhen, the man standing behind him.
The blow sent Liu Cangzhen sprawling to the ground. King Chen pounced, straddling his body with a ferocious expression. Without a single word, he began raining down punch after brutal punch.
Liu Wensong was stunned for a moment but made no move to stop him, a grim understanding dawning on his face. It wasn't until King Chen looked ready to beat the man to death that he finally intervened, grabbing his arm and turning to the pale, thin man on the floor.
"Was that alarm clock your doing?" Liu Wensong demanded, his face dark. "Didn't you swear to me yesterday that you hadn't tampered with anything?!"
Liu Cangzhen spat out a mouthful of blood, his gaze fixing on Liu Wensong like a cold, venomous snake.
"It was me! So what if it was!" he roared, his voice distorted by pain and fury. "In this damn game, who the hell can guarantee they'll survive to the end?! If they didn't die, it would've been us dying yesterday! I just made the most correct choice! What did I do wrong?! I just don't want to die!"
He grew more and more agitated, the resentment in his eyes practically overflowing as he glared at Liu Wensong and the terrified newcomer beside him.
"Do you know? You two should be the ones thanking me! If it weren't for me, you would have died yesterday! How can you stand there with everyone else and criticize me?!"
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