Shido Makoto took the keys the maid held out to him.
He noted that the six rooms were arranged in facing pairs along both sides of the corridor — 101 opposite 102, 103 opposite 104 — while his and Shirogane’s rooms, 105 and 106, sat at the far end of the hallway, deepest in.
Once the keys had been distributed, the maid’s lips parted slightly:
“Dinner has concluded.
Please be advised, guests: after ten o’clock in the evening, you must not leave your rooms, nor wander freely in the corridor.”
“You must not.”
She repeated the phrase once more.
With that, she gave no one any opportunity to ask questions.
She turned and walked toward the far end of the corridor, her figure quickly swallowed by the darkness.
Only six living people remained in the hallway.
“She — she just left?” Xiao Hui’s voice trembled as she clutched Artist’s arm.
“So what do we… what do we do tonight?”
Wrench looked around.
The dim wall sconces stretched each person’s shadow long and thin, lending everything a deeply unreal quality.
“How about we all stay in one room together?
Six people has to be safer than one, right?”
The suggestion met with immediate agreement from Xiao Hui and Artist.
Programmer gave a nod as well, then looked toward Shido Makoto and Shirogane — clearly seeking their opinion.
In an environment like this, huddling together for warmth was basic human instinct.
But Shirogane Kei shook her head.
“No.”
“Why not?” Wrench looked genuinely puzzled.
“If we’re all together, at least we can watch each other’s backs if something happens!”
Shirogane Kei glanced at him and said, “The maid went out of her way to assign each of us a separate room.
That itself may be a hidden rule.”
“If we gather in one room on our own initiative, there’s every chance it would be judged as failing to comply with the arrangement — and trigger some unknown penalty.”
Her words were enough to extinguish any remaining flicker of wishful thinking.
This wretched place was riddled with rules at every turn.
Who could say with any certainty that gathering together wouldn’t become the fuse that wiped them all out?
Shido Makoto agreed with her reasoning.
“She’s right.
Until we’ve worked out every detail of the rules, the safest approach is to follow its stated instructions to the letter.”
“One person per room.
No leaving after ten o’clock.
Those are the only safety guidelines we can confirm right now.”
With even Shido Makoto saying so, the others raised no further objections.
“Well then… goodnight, everyone?” Programmer gave a wry smile, unlocked the door to room 101 with his key.
Behind the door was solid darkness.
He hesitated for a moment, then stepped inside anyway and quickly pulled the door shut behind him.
The others followed suit.
“You… you all be careful.”
Xiao Hui said it to Artist through tears, then shuddered her way to door 102, slipped inside, and was gone.
Wrench and Artist each returned to their own rooms.
The corridor was quickly reduced to just Shido Makoto and Shirogane.
Their rooms were at the very end — doors facing each other.
Shirogane Kei looked at Shido Makoto.
Her blue eyes were uncommonly bright in the dim light.
She seemed as though she wanted to say something, but in the end only pressed her lips together, fitted her key into the door of room 105, and opened it.
“Knock if you need anything.” She left those words behind before closing the door.
Shido Makoto gave a small nod and watched her door shut in front of him.
He turned, slid his key into the lock of room 106.
He turned the key; the cylinder gave a soft click, and the door swung open.
The smell inside the room was not pleasant — the colloquial description would be that the place lacked the warmth of human habitation.
Shido Makoto didn’t go straight in.
He stood at the threshold first, scrutinising the room’s interior.
The furnishings were extremely sparse — sparse to the point of being austere.
A single wooden bed, a cabinet at the head of it; against the opposite wall, a writing desk and a chair; and in the corner, a door leading to the bathroom.
Everything was coated in a thin layer of dust.
Clearly no one had stayed here in a long time.
The walls were papered in an old-fashioned pattern; in places, the paper had already peeled away to reveal the bare plaster beneath.
The room’s only window had been nailed shut from the outside with several wooden boards, leaving only a narrow crack.
Through it, the howling wind outside threaded in, moaning as it went.
Once he had confirmed there were no immediately visible dangers in the room, Shido Makoto stepped inside and dead-bolted the door behind him.
He walked to the writing desk, drew out his black mobile phone, and glanced at it.
The time displayed in the upper right corner read 20:31.
An hour and a half remained before Rule Four came into effect at ten o’clock that night.
Should he take the opportunity to go out and explore while he still could?
The thought flickered through Shido Makoto’s mind and was gone.
The manor was large.
So far they had only seen the entrance hall and the dining room on the ground floor.
What was the situation upstairs?
Were there any key clues to be found?
Or, more to the point — was there any possible means of escape?
The unknown was always full of temptation, especially in a game where life and death hung in the balance.
Information was everything.
But Shido Makoto quickly suppressed the impulse.
His [Rollback] ability had already been spent back in the dining room.
The ability wouldn’t reset until midnight.
That meant for the next three and a half hours, he was an ordinary person — one life, nothing more.
With no idea what dangers might be lurking on the second floor or in any other unexplored part of the building, heading out to scout without a safety net was plainly unwise.
The scenario had given them seventy-two hours.
Less than half a day had passed.
There was still ample time.
Those who rushed headlong forward were usually the first to die.
With that settled in his mind, Shido Makoto moved to the window and pressed his ear toward it, listening.
The wind was fierce, drowning out almost everything else.
He could make out nothing of the scene outside.
Shido Makoto abandoned the idea of exploring and resolved to begin by going over this safe room carefully.
He knocked on the walls — solid.
The floorboards felt firm underfoot, with no sign of give or looseness.
He stepped into the bathroom.
Inside: an old-fashioned toilet, a washbasin, and a shower head mounted on the wall.
He turned on the tap.
What came out was a yellowish liquid carrying a heavy smell of rust.
Finally, he turned his attention to the bed.
He crouched down first and checked carefully beneath it.
Under the bed was nothing but accumulated dust and a few cobwebs — empty otherwise.
He lifted the mattress next.
Beneath it: bare wooden planks.
Satisfied that the bed itself posed no immediate problem, Shido Makoto sat down on it.
He leaned against the headboard, closed his eyes, and began turning the events of the day over in his mind.
The source of everything was almost certainly that black mobile phone — and the origin of the phone was…
‘Wait — that’s wrong!’
Shido Makoto’s eyes snapped open.
A sudden anomaly had come to him.
In his memory, the Kasugano couple had died in a traffic accident — but before the accident, they had said some strange things to him and Sora.
The gist of it was asking whether he felt confident he could look after Sora on his own.
And one night when he had gotten up in the small hours, he had dimly caught the sound of muffled weeping coming from their room.
At the time he had simply taken it for the ordinary anxieties of adults — work troubles, the pressures of life.
But thinking back on it now, there really had been something not quite right.
So… at that point, had they in fact already been drawn into the Cycle Game?
If so, then their deaths might not have been a simple traffic accident after all — in all likelihood, they had died within this game.
“…”
The Cycle Game.
The manor.
The rules…
Wrench’s strangled cry at the entrance to the dining room.
The painting Artist had almost touched.
The eerie puppet-people at dinner…
And Shirogane Kei.
This girl’s powers of observation, her capacity for analysis, and her command of her own emotions all far exceeded what one would expect of someone her age — in fact, they surpassed even the adults in the group.
Having a teammate equally capable of staying calm and thinking clearly was, in these circumstances, no bad thing.
Time passed.
The wind howled beyond the walls; within them, dead silence.
Shido Makoto sat quietly, conserving his strength, keeping his mind at its sharpest — waiting for ten o’clock to come.