Chapter 5: Shouldn't Horror Movies Start with a Safe Period?
In the narrow hallway, aside from Kaito and Kaguya who had just stepped out of their room, there were already five others present: four men and one woman. Aside from the perpetually unfortunate Maki Shijo, only the young Black guy looked to be around 20 years old. The other three were middle-aged men, at least in their 30s.
The portly executive and the Black guy both wore obvious expressions of tension and confusion. If they weren't faking it, they were likely first-time participants in this death game, just like Kaito and Kaguya.
In contrast, the tall White man also seemed nervous, but with an added layer of wariness toward the others and poorly concealed fear. Kaito couldn't yet determine the reason for this reaction. Instinctively, though, he sensed this man might not be a new player—or perhaps he'd seen something terrifying that the others hadn't, explaining his unusually intense demeanor.
As for the man with the backpack, he seemed calm and collected, exuding the reliable vibe of a seasoned player. The others had gathered around him, except for the White man and Maki Shijo. It seemed that while Kaito and Kaguya had been dawdling in their room, this man had already managed to earn some trust among the players.
Ironically, this made him someone Kaito found particularly worth being wary of. After all, they were likely trapped in a supernatural death game. Who knew how low someone's morals might sink to survive?
To summarize: two obvious cannon-fodder types, one side character with a minor arc, one potential human antagonist or a secretive veteran, and then there's Maki—a 2D beauty who perfectly fits Kaito's preferences, so she's exempt from his snark.
As Kaito and Kaguya sized up the people before them, the gazes of those who had arrived in the corridor earlier simultaneously fell upon the two of them.
Among those looks were some filled with confusion, some with disappointment, some with indifference, and others whose emotions were difficult to discern.
The temperature in the hallway was chillingly low, as if an eerie wind were silently brushing past.
Under the pale fluorescent lights, Kaito could see the couplets and "fortune" characters pasted beside Room 203, all of which had faded and grayed, leaving only a few barely legible words.
The floor was littered with peeling wall paint and shards of broken glass, which would emit a distinct crunching sound if stepped on carelessly.
He couldn't immediately locate the stairwell. After a closer look, he confirmed that the stairs should be at either end of this narrow hallway. However, due to the distance, he could only vaguely discern the outlines of the staircases, unable to make out the details.
Room 204 was situated slightly to the right of the middle section of the building. If they encountered something they couldn't handle in the hallway and needed to flee, the staircase on the right would likely be closer. Still, something felt slightly off—the structure of the stairs seemed somewhat abnormal from afar. Hopefully, it was just his imagination.
Observing and thinking took only a few seconds.
Naturally, those few seconds were enough for the people in the hallway to take in Kaito and Kaguya as they stepped out.
"Two students? Great, just what we needed—two more deadweights..."
The tall Caucasian man muttered under his breath, his expression clearly displeased.
This man seemed particularly averse to cooperating with others. After his muttered remark, he turned and retreated into his room, locking the door behind him. Kaito noted that the room he entered was Room 209.
"Hello, you can call me Old Guo. We all woke up in one of the rooms here. Did you find a printed sheet with some writing in the room where you woke up?"
The middle-aged man with the backpack took a couple of steps forward, introducing himself to Kaito and Kaguya. His tone was calm, and his smile gave off an air of trustworthiness.
Maki Shijo didn't step forward to greet them. Instead, she stood silently at a distance, scrutinizing Kaguya with a glance.
"You mean the Shirakawa Apartment Living Guidelines? So there's one copy per room?"
Kaito didn't brush off Old Guo's question. From the moment they stepped out, he had noticed that both the Black man and the middle-aged man were holding identical printed sheets. Though he couldn't read the contents from a distance, a quick glance at the bold, red headings confirmed that the documents were identical.
So, had someone named Kyosei—mentioned in the printout—made multiple copies and left one in each room?
"So everyone got one after all? Seems we're lucky this time. This should be a low-difficulty Twilight-level game."
The man who called himself Old Guo smiled, his expression relaxing slightly.
A low-difficulty Twilight-level game?
For some reason, seeing Old Guo with that "I'm an experienced veteran" look on his face, Kaito suddenly felt like he had become one of Cao Cao's defeated soldiers, fleeing with this man. Then, when they reached a valley, Old Guo would suddenly stop, burst into laughter, and recite something like, "I laugh at Zhuge Liang's lack of strategy and Zhou Yu's shallow wisdom. Had I commanded the troops..."
"More on that later. Trust me, everyone will be fine. The difficulty of a Twilight-level game usually isn't too high."Of course, Old Guo had no idea what Kaito was silently complaining about." He just briefly exchanged a few words with Kaito and Kaguya before turning his attention back to the house where the scream had come from.
"Still going on about this... what game, what nonsense..."
The somewhat overweight middle-aged man, who looked like a corporate executive, frowned upon hearing Old Guo's words, his expression growing increasingly distressed.
He seemed to be in a bad mood—earlier, when Kaito and Kaguya had stepped out, it was this man who had given them a disappointed look. But after hesitating for a moment, he cautiously approached Kaito, forcing a somewhat friendly smile.
"Hello, are you also Chinese? I'm Sun Dajun, an executive at XX Group. Uh, do you know what's going on here? Is this some kind of reality show?"
Perhaps it was because Kaito's shirt had Chinese characters printed on it that the man recognized him as a fellow countryman. Though Kaito suspected the dried red-and-white stain on his clothes—which he still suspected might be his own brain matter—was more noticeable.
As for Sun Dajun, though his voice tried to remain calm, the faint tremor in his tone betrayed that he already understood, at least subconsciously, that this wasn't some [reality show]. He just didn't want to believe it yet, clinging to this delusion to comfort himself.
"I don't know, but I really wish it were a reality show. Did all of you suddenly wake up in a random room too? By the way, I heard a scream earlier—does anyone know what happened?"
Kaito shook his head slightly, doing his best to appear ordinary and adopting a somewhat timid tone as he asked.
So far, nothing unreasonable had appeared to start slaughtering everyone.
Barring extreme scenarios—like them all already being driven insane by some severe mental contamination from the start, rendering them unable to perceive danger—Kaito tentatively concluded that they were still in a safe period.
Just like in horror games or movies, where the protagonists are happily setting off on vacation at the beginning, everything still seeming normal until someone opens a door they shouldn't or does something they shouldn't, triggering the descent into chaos. The time before that, by convention, is the "safe period" meant to ease the audience into the story.
After all, according to the rules, between 8 AM and 9 PM, this place called Shirakawa Apartments should generally be safe. As long as no one did anything stupid, they wouldn't encounter any danger here.
So for now, it's best to appear as weak as possible and try to stay on the sidelines. Maybe this way, I can gather more information and avoid becoming some expendable character who triggers a death flag and gets eliminated first.
Thinking this way, Kaito acted like a timid and inexperienced young man. Behind him, Kaguya, who had initially seemed cold and aloof, now showed subtle changes in her expression and body language, giving off the impression of a frightened little girl who shunned interaction with others—her performance was even more convincing than Kaito's.
She didn't even need to speak to pull off such an act. Kaito thought it was a waste that this girl wasn't acting professionally. Still, thanks to their behavior, Sun Dajun, who had already pegged them as unreliable, only managed to mutter a few half-hearted words of encouragement like, "We should all be fine," before turning his attention back to Room 205.
And at that moment, everyone in the hallway heard the sound of stumbling footsteps coming from inside the room.
BANG!
The door to Room 205 was flung open violently.
A young woman with bleached blonde hair, wearing a tank top and shorts, and sporting a heart-shaped tattoo on her arm, stumbled out and collapsed onto the floor. Her eyes were wide with terror as she screamed incoherently, "D-dead! Someone's dead! Dead!"
Her shrill voice was piercingly loud. Even when she had been inside the room, her screams had been audible throughout the entire floor. Now that she was out in the hallway, Kaito had no doubt the whole floor could hear her.
Hmm, let's assess her appearance. On a scale of one to a hundred, she'd score a 60 at most—no higher. For reference, Kaguya would be a 95, while Maki Shijo would be a 96, probably because the latter's more approachable demeanor made her more pleasant to look at.
Anyway, she didn't seem like a character from any anime, manga, or movie—probably just an original expendable character.
Under normal circumstances, wouldn't a loud, panicking side character like this be the first domino leading to a total party kill? Feels a bit risky. Maybe I should just retreat to my room for now?
Just as Kaito entertained the thought of playing it safe, Sun Dajun and the buzz-cut Black guy, who were standing closer, stepped forward to help the woman up. She was trembling uncontrollably, clearly terrified by whatever she had seen.
"Hey, hey, are you okay? You said there's a body in the room?" Sun Dajun asked, wiping sweat from his forehead as he cast a nervous glance at the open door of Room 205.
There's a corpse hidden in this room? Damn it, why the hell was I dragged into this nightmare? What the hell is this place?!
Sun Dajun's frustration was written all over his face. Meanwhile, Kaito, who had already taken a step back and was ready to retreat to his room at any moment, noticed Kaguya tilting her head slightly, her ear turned toward the right side of the hallway, as if she had heard something.
At the same time, Maki Shijo, who had been silent nearby, and the kind-looking middle-aged man with a backpack both showed subtle reactions. The former, like Kaguya, tilted her head slightly, clearly having heard something, while the man's movement was far more discreet—only a slight shift in his pupils. If not for Kaito's unusual mindset, which had led him to pay special attention to the man as if he were some veteran player from an infinite flow novel, he would never have noticed such a minute action.
Is someone coming up or down the staircase on the right?
Without any enhanced hearing abilities, Kaito could only speculate based on the others' reactions.
The air seemed to grow slightly colder.
For some reason, a faint stinging pain suddenly shot through his left hand.
Looking down, Kaito examined his left hand—specifically, the strange black watch he hadn't bothered to remove in his haste to investigate the current situation.
Just now, it had felt as though a needle inside the watch had pricked him, causing that faint discomfort.
What's going on?
The blonde woman who had been helped up was still muttering things like, "There's a dead person in the room, under the bed." Wearing a tank top, her arms were exposed to the air, and now goosebumps were visibly rising on her skin.
Maki, who was standing closer to the right staircase, hesitated briefly before stepping toward Kaguya.
Meanwhile, the kind-looking backpack man had fully turned his gaze toward the staircase entrance, openly adopting a guarded stance.
"Oh, god, what's up with this lady? She smells worse than my ex-girlfriend's dreadlocks after six months without washing—like if you tossed 'em in a pond, they'd hatch a whole nest of xenomorphs. What the hell is this place?"
The Black guy muttered under his breath, his speech bizarrely mixing Mandarin and American English. Even though this eerie place had granted everyone the ability to understand all languages and read any text (or at least any legible script), his strange way of speaking still made everyone slightly uncomfortable.
"Let's take her to my room. Room 210 is bigger and not damaged, so she can rest there for now. Would anyone be willing to come with me to check the room this lady ran out of? Since we're all trapped here, we need to figure out what's going on."
Old Guo turned and walked a few steps, opening the door to his room.
Up until this moment, nothing in the hallway had seemed particularly out of the ordinary.
But Kaito had already noticed something: while Old Guo claimed he wanted others to take the panicked woman to his room, he was really just using that as an excuse to position himself near his door. Kaito saw that Old Guo's room was 210—the closest to the right staircase, and thus the closest to the approaching footsteps.
Was he positioning himself there to get a firsthand look at whatever was coming?
As he was thinking this, Kaito saw Old Guo standing at the door, facing the staircase. With one hand in his pocket, Old Guo paused for a moment before pushing the door open and stepping inside, then immediately closing it behind him.
"Hey, what are you doing? First, you ask us to help carry her in, and now you shut the door on us? What's your deal?"
"Huh?"
Sun Dajun, who was supporting the woman, shouted in annoyance, while the Black guy next to him also looked confused.
Witnessing this scene, Kaito felt the chill in the air grow even more intense than before.
He still couldn't hear any footsteps from the staircase. He only deduced that someone—or something—was approaching based on the reactions of the three people who seemed to have noticed it.
Who was it? A man or a woman? What did they look like? What were they?
He had no idea about any of it.
But at this moment, seeing Old Guo—who seemed like an experienced player—act so decisively, Kaito instinctively felt a sense of impending doom. He immediately knew what he had to do: get back into a room.
The closest rooms to him and Kaguya were Room 204, with its broken lock that couldn't secure the door, and Room 209 across the hallway—the one the unfriendly-looking white man had locked himself inside.
Room 204 couldn't be properly locked, only left slightly ajar. If whatever was coming up the stairs was dangerous, there was a risk it could barge right in. Room 209 was already locked from the inside, and the tall man inside looked like a hardened criminal—hardly someone easy to deal with. Knocking for help now wasn't a good idea either.
Room 205, next to 204, had just seen a terrified, incoherent woman flee from it.
That left only Rooms 203 and 208 in the opposite direction, both equally close.
Kaito spun around, scanning the two rooms, and quickly locked onto 208—the one with its door slightly ajar, unlike 203, which remained firmly shut.
In his past life, people often said he was overly paranoid. He liked to observe and let his imagination run wild based on what he saw, earning him a reputation as an oddball during his school days. Back then, he knew his thoughts were just delusions, so he eventually channeled that tendency into writing fiction, turning his quirks into a creative outlet.
Back then, he was certain his paranoia was just that—paranoia. Not real.
But now, he couldn't be sure whether he was just imagining things or genuinely sensing the signs of approaching danger.
The only thing he could trust was this: he didn't have a second life to gamble on whether his fears were real or not.
"You…"
Kaguya, who had heard the unusual sounds but lacked Kaito's thought process, remained frozen, unsure of what to do.
The moment Kaito dashed toward Room 208 without hesitation, Kaguya was momentarily taken aback, unable to comprehend his reasoning.
But in the next instant, recalling Old Guo's similarly strange behavior earlier, the sharp-witted girl's pupils contracted slightly as she realized a troubling possibility. Without delay, she glanced toward Maki Shijo nearby, signaling her with a look before immediately turning and sprinting toward Room 208—even faster than Kaito, reaching the door so swiftly that he was left momentarily stunned.
"Go in."
Kaguya, gripping the doorknob and pushing the door open, didn't step inside immediately. Instead, she spoke to Kaito. Meanwhile, Maki was already hurrying over, clearly waiting for her before entering.
This meant that even if Kaito rushed inside, Kaguya wouldn't shut the door right away.
Admittedly, though Kaito had always considered himself an otaku who adored moe-centric works and 2D beauties, at this moment, he briefly entertained the thought of shoving Kaguya aside, locking himself in alone.
But the idea lasted less than a tenth of a second before he decisively strode past Kaguya and entered without hesitation.
Well, first, she was faster—she could've easily pulled the villainous protagonist move before him, yet she didn't and even made way. It'd be downright dishonorable to retaliate now (not because he'd probably lose). Second, she was a composed, rational beauty—not the typical horror movie deadweight—so having her help would boost survival odds (not because he'd probably lose). Third, his dream had always been to be a harem protagonist in moe works, not some edgy dark hero—that role could go to anyone else (not because he'd probably lose).
Alright, fine—truth was, if he tried anything, he'd be instantly subdued. In the 2D world where brute strength mattered less, the Ice Princess Kaguya's combat skills, while not as absurd as her maid's, still far surpassed anything a 3D otaku like him could handle. Outmatched in reflexes, strength, and speed, picking a fight with her would be sheer idiocy.
Inside, the layout mirrored Room 204—hallway to the left, bathroom to the right—just slightly larger.
Kaguya stood at the doorway, brows furrowed, as Maki sprinted over at breakneck speed, leaving Sun Dajun (supporting the blonde) and the black guy bewildered, shouting questions at Kaguya. Sun Dajun had already let go of the blonde and was approaching.
"She's coming…"
Kaguya murmured, hearing the footsteps landing in the second-floor hallway.
Maki, moving swiftly, reached the door and rushed inside without pause, nearly colliding with Kaito in the hallway.
The moment Maki Shijo burst in, Kaguya didn't hesitate to immediately close the door.
Click!
With the crisp sound of the lock, the three people inside were abruptly cut off from the hallway.
"What did you see?"
Kaito had been watching Kaguya's expression closely. He'd noticed the change in her face just before she shut the door, so he asked without hesitation.
"..."
Kaguya, standing by the door, didn't respond.
She simply made a silencing gesture toward Kaito, then lowered her head and pressed one ear against the door, listening intently to the sounds outside in complete stillness.
So Kaito also fell silent, standing motionless against the wall. His nerves inevitably tightened, and he even slowed his breathing. Beside him, Maki Shijo did the same, though her expression appeared calmer.
1001 seconds, 1002 seconds…
Kaito silently counted the seconds in his mind.
1051 seconds, 1052 seconds…
Everything around them was so quiet—so quiet that only the faint, deliberately suppressed breaths of the three of them could be heard.
1599 seconds, 1600 seconds… Ten minutes had passed.
Kaito had counted 600 seconds in his mind, and in all that time, he hadn't heard a single sound.
Not hearing any sound meant that the voices of the people in the hallway, which had still been audible when the door was closed, had now completely vanished. Despite the thin metal door, the sounds from the corridor had disappeared entirely. And for a full ten minutes, no one had come to knock or even ask a single question.
Outside, everything had fallen into silence.
Kaito remained quiet.
He noticed that Kaguya's body remained tense, without the slightest relaxation.
So now, he wouldn't break the silence by asking questions out of impatience. Instead, he continued to wait quietly.
But he couldn't help wondering—was there something wrong with the door of this room? Had closing it cut off all sound from outside?
Could it be that they had chosen the wrong room? That this lockable room was actually the trap, the place they shouldn't have entered?
Once such thoughts took root, they were hard to suppress. Kaito had always been prone to overthinking, and now, trapped in this agonizing silence, his mind raced even more wildly.
Until he heard it—a clear, unmistakable sound of a door opening.
From outside. From the hallway. Judging by the direction, it had to be the door of Room 204 swinging open.
Kaito tilted his head slightly, glancing at Maki Shijo standing beside him.
From the way she also tilted her head, she must have heard it too.
So, there was no soundproofing. They could hear everything in the hallway perfectly clearly.
Which meant the outside had simply... gone quiet.
At that moment, Kaguya pulled out an old-fashioned cell phone from her clothes. Earlier, she had claimed her outfit had no pockets, so it was unclear where she had been hiding this relic. She tapped a few buttons, then turned the screen toward Kaito and Maki.
It displayed a draft message, its contents brief:
[I saw nothing.]
That was all.
But both Kaito and Maki understood exactly what Kaguya was trying to convey.
Before closing the door, at the very last moment, Kaguya had looked toward the stairwell. She had heard footsteps reach this floor—but had seen nothing emerge from the stairs.
Oh, come on...
Kaito felt his heartbeat quicken.
From waking up in this place to hiding in this room, only about half an hour had passed.
So far, he hadn't witnessed anything truly bizarre or supernatural.
Yet now, an indescribable pressure weighed on him, along with a deep, nameless fear of those unseen footsteps.
Director, where's the promised safe period? Who starts the game like this?!
Of course, even now, his habit of sarcastic internal monologues remained unchanged.