Room 105.
Shirogane Kei jackknifed upright from the bed, her heart hammering wildly.
She had heard that scream just now — brief as it was, she recognized the voice.
It was the Programmer.
Something had happened to him.
On instinct, Shirogane Kei hugged her knees to her chest, curling herself against the headboard and scanning the room with wary eyes.
In the darkness, everything looked alien and strange.
She thought of what Shido Makoto had told her.
“Starting tonight, be careful.”
“No matter what you hear or see inside your room, do not leave.”
“Remember — stay in your room until dawn.”
At the time, Shirogane Kei had already suspected he’d guessed something.
Now it was clear his premonition had come true.
The Programmer must have broken the rule — “don’t leave your room.” Something had lured him out, or frightened him out, and then… he was dead.
The thought sent a chill crawling up from somewhere deep in her bones.
Then, all at once, she smelled it.
A thick, cloying odor — sweet and metallic, like rust.
Blood.
That was the smell of blood.
Every nerve in Shirogane Kei’s body snapped taut.
She lifted her head immediately, trying to locate the source of the wrongness in the dim room.
Where was it coming from?
Drip.
A drop of liquid fell onto her forehead.
Shirogane Kei’s entire body went rigid.
She could feel it sliding down along her brow bone, tracing a cold, slick line across her cheek.
On instinct, she looked up.
The ceiling — once white — looked as though someone had hurled a bucket of fresh blood across it.
It had turned a deep, dark crimson.
Viscous liquid seeped steadily through the cracks, gathering into fat droplets that fell one by one.
Drip.
Drip.
Blood fell onto her bed, onto her blanket.
The walls began to change as well.
The surface seemed to come alive, rippling and undulating, swelling into pustules of varying sizes.
They bulged larger and larger until, with a wet pop, they burst open — spattering a foul-smelling yellow discharge in all directions.
Twisted human faces rose out of the walls, mouths open, screaming without sound.
The entire room had become a living hell of flesh and blood.
Shirogane Kei’s breath caught.
The next instant she was digging her nails into her own arm, biting down on the sound rising in her throat, refusing to let even a whimper escape.
Don’t move.
Don’t scream.
Don’t look.
“No matter what you see, do not leave your room.”
This was a trap.
Just like the voice that had lured Xiao Hui to open her door the night before — everything happening in this room was designed to drive her out through sheer terror.
The moment she ran, she would die in the corridor, just like the Programmer.
She kept repeating it to herself like a mantra, but her teeth chattered on regardless.
She could feel the viscous blood soaking into her hair, trickling down the back of her neck and into the collar of her shirt — that slippery, crawling sensation raised goosebumps across every inch of her skin.
It was as if she could hear the faces in the walls wailing right beside her ear.
The fetid, nauseating stench kept assaulting her nose, sending wave after wave of revulsion through her stomach.
It was unbearable.
Shirogane Kei could feel her mind being gnawed away piece by piece.
Her grip on reason could shatter at any moment.
She threw herself into thinking of other things — anything — desperate to anchor her attention elsewhere.
She thought of her father: that apparently unreliable man who nonetheless always managed, clumsily, to prepare a gift for her birthday.
She thought of everyone in the student council.
And she thought of… him.
Her senior.
He had said they would survive this together.
I cannot die here.
A surge of strength rose from somewhere deep inside her chest, its source unknown.
The arms hugging her knees pulled tighter.
She began reciting the multiplication table in her head.
“One times one is one.
Two times two is four.
Three times three is nine…”
The most mundane method she knew — forcing her mind to focus, using it as a wall against the fear.
Time crawled by in agony.
She didn’t know how long it lasted.
Ten minutes, perhaps.
Or a century.
By the time Shirogane Kei had recited the multiplication table from beginning to end a dozen times over — and thrown in the periodic table of elements and the classical physics formulae for good measure — she noticed that the wrongness around her seemed to be retreating.
The rancid smell had faded.
The dripping had gone silent.
The wailing faces in the walls were no longer audible.
She hesitated for a long time before slowly, trembling, raising her head.
Carefully, she opened one eye.
The room had returned to normal.
The ceiling, the walls, the desk and chairs — everything was exactly as it had been when she first walked in.
Her forehead, her hair, her blanket — not a trace of blood.
All of it dry, as though nothing had ever touched her.
The horror that had just consumed the room might have been nothing more than a nightmare.
A long, shuddering exhale escaped Shirogane Kei before she could stop it.
The strength drained out of her all at once, and she collapsed back onto the bed. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
She had… survived.
…
At that same moment, in Room 106.
Shido Makoto lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling with an expressionless face.
He had heard the Programmer’s scream, of course.
As expected.
A man who could deceive his own teammates purely for self-preservation — expecting him to hold on to his sanity in the face of real terror was the kind of fantasy only a fool would indulge.
He just hadn’t anticipated the reckoning would come quite this quickly.
He was mulling over what effect the Programmer’s death would have on their plans going forward when a faint sound reached his ears.
“Hff… hff…”
Long breath.
Short breath.
Perfectly rhythmic.
The source of the sound…
Was from beneath the bed.
Not a single eyebrow on Shido Makoto’s face so much as twitched.
Something almost like amusement stirred inside him.
Here we go.
He had even already mapped out what would happen next: first, strange sounds from under the bed; then, a disturbing discovery; finally, the terror driving whoever was in the room to flee into the corridor — straight into the vengeful spirit’s hands.
A sequence engineered to dismantle psychological defenses and force the door open.
That was almost certainly what the Programmer had walked into as well.
Shido Makoto remained flat on his back.
Motionless.
He even had the leisure to analyze it in his head.
The under-bed entity clearly operated in phases.
The first phase — the breathing — was designed to build psychological pressure.
If the target showed signs of panic at this stage — rolling out of bed to check, or making a noise — the trigger condition for the next phase would likely be met immediately.
It would drag itself out from under the bed, delivering a close-range visual shock to deal the finishing blow.
If the target still didn’t take the bait, it would probably emerge anyway — but most likely in combination with other methods, such as sounds in the corridor to lure them out.
The Programmer had probably panicked at the very first phase, then been swept away by the combination that followed.
As for himself…
Shido Makoto closed his eyes.
He didn’t even have the interest to look.
Some creature that could only cower under a bed pulling petty tricks — too frightened to even show itself — what on earth was there worth looking at.
What he needed to do right now was rest.
Conserve his strength.
Tomorrow there were more important things to attend to.
The rhythmic breathing from beneath the bed — to Shido Makoto’s ears, it worked better than any lullaby.
Accompanied by that eerie cradle song, he actually, gradually, fell asleep.
The night passed without incident.
…
____
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