Third-person point of view:
They walked cautiously, the air inside the small shopping center's corridor thick, humid, and silent, as if holding its own bated breath. The rope binding them tautened under Ayanokōji's right hand, and his eyes constantly scanned the line of companions behind him, ensuring no one fell behind. Every creak of the wooden floor echoed like a reverberation in the dimness.
"We're here..." His voice was barely a whisper, yet it pierced the silence and reached everyone's ears.
He pushed open the door to the camping store. A stale, metallic odor greeted him, mingled with a nauseating scent he couldn't quite place. Hirata's flashlight beam swept over the cash register and the coffee table, revealing a scene straight out of a nightmare: eggs of varying sizes, some greenish and glowing with a sickly sheen that faintly illuminated the darkness.
The walls were covered in cobwebs. Not mere spider webs, but dense, sticky nets that seemed to trap the very air. Among their strands, human-sized cocoons hung like silk-wrapped corpses, suspended in grotesque silence. Each sweep of the flashlight beam seemed to stir a hundred invisible eyes.
Hirata's heart pounded fiercely. Terror coursed through him from his feet to his head. It wasn't just fear; it was a pressure in his chest that left him breathless.
"Ayanokōji, you..." His voice cracked, the fear cutting off the rest of the sentence.
The brunet, behind him, had discreetly untied the knot in the rope. He observed every detail, every shadow, every potential threat. The rope, which had been a simple safety measure, would now become a deadly trap if someone panicked and tried to flee.
The air hummed with a low, dull buzz. Hirata felt his throat tighten, his lips moisten with tears he didn't want to shed. No human is prepared to behold the horror of seeing two classmates suspended, their clothing and flesh torn, while cat-sized spider creatures devoured them and deposited eggs inside their bodies. Every detail, every sound, every movement of the monstrosities filled the store with an echo of despair.
Ayanokōji advanced slowly toward Hirata, calculating each step, preparing his hand to cover the other's mouth. If Hirata screamed, the entire place would react. Every creature, every shifting shadow, would swarm them. Time had stretched; every second mattered.
Suddenly, a viscous liquid began seeping through the floorboards' cracks, a stench of death and rusted metal filling the air, heightening the sense of confinement, of inevitability. The store was transforming, slowly, into a living trap.
"I suppose I'm sorry, ### ###..." Ayanokōji thought, with a calm that bordered on absolute coldness. With a precise movement, he knocked Hirata out and, with a gesture to the others, urged them to retreat toward the safety of the supermarket. Every second spent there was one second closer to madness, to death.
The flashlight beam trembled, the shadows seeming to move of their own volition. The fog filtering in from the street began to invade the interior, mingling with the stench and the terror, and Ayanokōji knew that this was merely the beginning.