Shirogane Kei’s room was number 105.
Unlike Shido Makoto, she did not check every corner of the room after stepping inside.
Instead, she turned and locked the door behind her, then slipped off her shoes, climbed onto the bed, and curled her small body into the very centre of the mattress.
She drew her knees up to her chest, wrapped both arms around them, and rested her chin lightly on top.
Her long silver hair tumbled down and draped over her slender ankles, and in that posture — small, tightly folded, radiating a profound lack of security — she simply stayed still.
From the moment they had entered this godforsaken place, she had kept herself composed, even a little aloof.
Whether facing the bizarre rules or the mannequins in the dining room, she had not lost her composure once.
But it had all been an act.
At the end of the day, she was just a girl who had only recently started her second year of middle school.
A few hours ago, she had been fretting over the student council accounts and what to make for dinner at home.
Her life was supposed to revolve around studying, part-time work, and looking after her father — a man who had a talent for doing foolish things.
How could she not be afraid?
She simply did not want to show weakness in front of strangers.
Whether it was pride or habit, she had long since learned to protect herself behind a mask of coldness and sharp words.
What worried her more was home.
If she simply disappeared like this… what would happen to her dad?
He would fall apart.
She was sure of it.
That man — who seemed so easygoing on the surface, who scraped by on odd jobs, who needed her to look after him most of the time — actually cared about her more than anyone else in the world.
He would report it to the police.
He would search for her like a man possessed.
He might even do something reckless.
Shirogane Kei pressed her lips together more tightly.
She was always complaining about her father out loud, but deep down, she truly admired him.
After her mother had left, he had clumsily held the household together on his own, giving her a childhood that was poor but whole.
If… if she really did die here…
She didn’t dare let the thought go any further.
She only hoped that her foolish old dad would go on living, and living well.
Amid the swirl of her scattered thoughts, a figure drifted into her mind.
The boy who called himself Student.
Unlike her own carefully maintained composure, Shirogane Kei could sense that his calm was genuine.
His eyes had been completely still from start to finish — whether he was analysing the rules or facing down the prospect of death, he remained like an observer standing entirely outside the situation.
How enviable.
If only she could be like that.
While Shirogane Kei’s mind wandered, an extremely faint sound crept into her ears.
Voices?
Someone was whispering in the corridor.
Shirogane Kei’s eyelid twitched, and the arms hugging her knees instinctively tightened.
It was well past ten o’clock.
Who was out there?
Were they out of their mind?
She did not move.
She thought of the maid’s warning.
She thought of the analysis the group had worked through together regarding the rules.
When the situation was unknown, obeying the stated instructions to the letter was the safest course of action.
She had made up her mind: no matter what happened outside, she would not go out — she would not even look through the peephole.
The voice drifted through the corridor for a while, as though checking on something.
After a minute or two, it seemed to lose interest, and gradually faded away.
The corridor fell silent again.
Shirogane Kei quietly let out a breath, and the tension in her spine eased just slightly.
But she had not even fully exhaled before a piercing scream split the air just beyond her door.
That… was Xiao Hui’s voice!
Immediately after came the sound of frantic footsteps, and then a heavy bang — like a door being flung shut with full force.
Shirogane Kei’s brow furrowed instantly.
She had heard it clearly: after that scream, there had been no sounds of a struggle, no sounds of an attack — only the footsteps and the slamming door.
That college girl had left her room after ten o’clock, despite the warning?
Why?
Had she been lured out by the whispering from before?
But that voice hadn’t seemed to carry any power to bewitch the mind.
It had merely been an enticement at most.
Or had something happened inside her room — something that made bursting into the corridor feel like the safer option?
Shirogane Kei’s heart sank.
She hesitated.
Logic told her that the right thing to do now was to stay in her room and pretend she had heard nothing.
Whether Xiao Hui lived or died was none of her business.
Opening the door rashly would only drag herself down too.
And yet…
That scream would not leave her ears.
She stood up.
Her long silver hair slid down with the movement.
Barefoot, she stepped onto the floorboards and began walking — slowly, one step at a time — toward the door.
She only wanted to… confirm.
…
Shido Makoto sprang from his chair at almost the exact moment Xiao Hui let out her scream, and darted on the balls of his feet to the back of the door.
There was no need to hesitate — information was always the most valuable thing, in any situation.
Through the peephole, he saw the door to room 102 shoved open, and Xiao Hui’s terrified face flashed past.
She moved as though a vengeful spirit were chasing her from behind, half-scrambling and half-stumbling as she threw herself into the corridor — and then, without a backward glance, she hauled the door shut behind her with a crash.
Shido Makoto’s brow creased.
That behaviour was deeply abnormal.
Before he could work out what it meant, something even more bizarre unfolded.
Xiao Hui, now in the corridor, did not do what one might have expected — she did not run to another guest’s room for help, and she did not flee toward the far end of the corridor.
She stumbled forward two steps and stopped dead.
Her body went rigid, her eyes locked in a glassy, unblinking stare on the stretch of darkness ahead that the corridor lights could not reach.
Her mouth was hanging wide open, as though she wanted to cry out for help, but no sound would come.
There was something in that darkness.
Shido Makoto held his breath and pressed his eye closer.
The next instant, he saw it: a hand.
A gaunt, spindly hand, its skin drawn tight around the bones like dried tree bark, shot out from the darkness and clamped down on top of Xiao Hui’s head.
Splut——
The sound was like a tomato being squeezed until it burst.
Shido Makoto’s eyelid twitched.
He watched, helpless, as Xiao Hui’s skull exploded in an instant.
Red, white, yellow… fluid and matter splattered across the wall behind her.
The headless body swayed once, and then crumpled softly to the floor.
The hand, having done what it came to do, withdrew back into the darkness — as though it had never existed.
Everything returned to the way it had been.
All that remained in the corridor was a headless corpse and a wall painted in ruin.
Shido Makoto immediately stepped back from the peephole, pressing his back against the door.
A violent wave of nausea surged up from his stomach and straight toward his throat.
He forced the urge to vomit back down, and kept breathing — deep, steady breaths.
He made his way to the chair and sat down, compelling himself to be calm.
Fear solved nothing. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
He closed his eyes and let his mind race back through every detail of what he had just witnessed.
First: the whispering.
He had heard it earlier as well.
The voice had been unsettling — it had called him by name.
But he had paid it no attention whatsoever.
He would never take bait that obvious.
He hadn’t even considered leaning forward to look through the peephole — for all he knew, there was a pair of eyes on the other side, waiting for exactly that.
What he couldn’t fathom was Xiao Hui’s behaviour.
That college girl came across as somewhat vain, somewhat foolish — the very image of the first girl to die in a horror film.
And yet she had survived this far, which meant she was at least no complete idiot.
After the incident in the dining room, she should have understood how important it was to follow the rules.
The whispering from before had held no power to cloud the mind — at most it was a lure.
A normal person’s response would have been nothing more than a cautious look through the peephole.
So why had she screamed like that — and why had she thrown herself out of the room without a second thought?
Shido Makoto reconstructed the timeline.
The whispering starts… continues for a minute or two, then stops… a little while passes… then the scream comes from Xiao Hui’s room… and finally she bursts through the door and is killed.
The scream had come after the whispering had already ended!
That meant Xiao Hui’s terror had not originated from the voice in the corridor.
It had come from inside her room.
The deduction sent a chill crawling through Shido Makoto.
He could see two possible explanations.
First: after the whispering stopped, Xiao Hui — out of curiosity or some other reason — had looked through her peephole and seen whatever was lurking in that corridor darkness — perhaps that withered hand, concealed in the shadows.
The sight had shocked a scream out of her, and in the grip of blind panic she had lost all reason, flung the door open, and rushed straight toward the danger.
But this possibility seemed unlikely.
Human instinct, upon seeing something dangerous on the other side of a door, was to recoil — to back away, to press deep into the room.
No one’s instinct was to do the opposite and run toward the threat.
Which left only the second possibility.
Shido Makoto felt his heart plummet.
Xiao Hui had encountered something inside her room — something she found more terrifying than the danger of stepping into the corridor.
Something so awful that she had preferred to hurl herself into a hallway she had been explicitly warned against, rather than remain in her own room one second longer.
“You must not leave your room after ten o’clock at night.”
The implication of the maid’s warning was that the rooms were safe.
But what if that premise was wrong?
What if the rooms themselves were the trap?
The moment that thought surfaced, Shido Makoto felt the temperature in the entire room drop several degrees.
But… it didn’t add up.
If the rooms weren’t safe, then what was the point of this game?
Was it purely to slaughter the players for sport?
To lock them in inescapable rooms and watch them be slowly tormented to death?
He didn’t believe that.
Every game had rules.
Every game had a way out.
The Cycle Game had given them seventy-two hours — which meant it had been designed with the assumption that the players could survive.
Setting up an unavoidable death trap on the very first night ran contrary to all logic.
He still leaned toward his original reading: provided the rules were followed, the rooms were relatively safe.
At least safer than outside.
As for what exactly Xiao Hui had encountered in her room… the clues were too few to draw any conclusion.
But one thing was certain.
Until daylight came, no matter what happened, he would not set foot outside this room.