Everly took Mark’s phone and tried it a few tis, only to find that it was already blacked out and broken. There was no way to tell what he had been trying to do with it before he died.
She tossed the brick-like phone aside, still hopeful, and searched Mark’s body again. In the end, aside from a set of keys, she found nothing.
“I’ve entered Mark’s house now. The power is out, so it’s pretty dark inside. I’m about to start searching the basent. Everything is normal so far,” she reported to the group through her Bluetooth earpiece.
Considering that in Arican horror movies, nine out of ten villains do their dirty work in basents or underground facilities, the first thing Everly did after examining the body was to explore the basent.
She searched very carefully—tapping on the walls, looking for hidden chanisms, even closely inspecting the floor—afraid there might be so concealed space hidden within. But after a thorough search, she found absolutely nothing.
It was just an ordinary basent, filled with all sorts of clutter, with nothing suspicious at all.
Just as Everly was focused on her search, Misha, who was monitoring from outside the police station, suddenly spoke up:
“Everly, sothing’s happened at the station! The Dumpsy you told to watch suddenly acted like he was possessed while working—he stood up, started shouting, even drew his gun and fired a few shots into the air. Then his head exploded, and he dropped dead.”
“After Dumpsy died, more screams quickly ca from inside the station. I heard several people shouting Charlie’s na—I think Charlie may have also been attacked by a monster.”
“Understood.”
Everly glanced at the ti: 17:05. There were 14 minutes left until 17:19.
No ti to waste in the basent—she needed to check other areas.
17:09
“I’ve returned to the first floor. No useful items or information found.”
17:13
“I’ve reached the second floor. There’s nothing here either.”
As the ti drew closer and closer to 17:19, Everly’s breathing beca increasingly rapid.
17:14
“I’ve entered the attic now. It’s…” Everly looked around the dust-covered attic. There was no need to even begin searching—the thick layer of dust on the floor made it clear that no one had been here for a long ti. “Everything here is normal as well…”
“Oh, damn it!” On the other end of the call, Orff slamd his fist against a chair and let out a cry of despair.
Everly ignored him.
She quickly exited the attic, running downstairs while thinking at the sa ti.
Don’t panic. Stay calm. Think—what did I miss…?
Mark was the one in the group responsible for handling corpses. When he was at ho, he wore a lab coat, which ant he must have been secretly conducting so kind of research on those bodies. There had to be a place in his house used for research, sowhere containing evidence…
That’s it—the car!
An old man like Mark wouldn’t be able to move corpses from the ranger’s cabin to here on his own. He must have used so kind of vehicle. She hadn’t checked his garage yet!
Because Mark’s body was found in the detached house, Everly had been completely misled, focusing her search on the house itself. For a mont, she had forgotten that behind the house, there was also a separate garage!
Wasn’t Old John’s shelter the sa? There had been a separate passage to the shelter inside the garage.
Everly broke into a run and reached Mark’s garage through the back door.
17:15
The rolling shutter door of the garage was pulled down. Everly tried several keys before finally finding the right one and getting inside.
17:17
“I used the key with the triangular rust mark on the handle to enter Mark’s garage… I found a hidden door at the very back of the garage. It’s concealed beneath a storage cabinet—move the cabinet and lift the carpet, and you can see it. I’m about to enter the hidden passage.”
“Bzz… bzzz…”
…
In the twenty-fifth cycle, Orff’s voice began to tremble as he spoke:
“After entering the basent, we quickly lost contact because there was no signal. I didn’t know what you, Everly, were seeing down there. I was completely panicked. Watching ti jump backward again and again, I prayed in my heart that the monster would only go after those harmful people and would never appear in front of … but clearly, my prayers didn’t work. At 17:19:23, I heard a familiar scream coming from the nearby walkway…”
Just like in the previous cycle, Abel was killed by the monster.
After Abel, it was Orff’s turn.
The monster, as in the previous cycle, hovered over Abel’s body for a while. Only when the school security officer arrived, dispersing the students who were watching and filming, did it finally make a “zzzz” sound, snowflake patterns appearing on its body as it teleported right in front of Orff.
Before dying, the previously severed communication finally reconnected. Orff heard Everly on the phone, sounding extrely anxious:
“Listen, the monster is afraid of—”
And then the words abruptly stopped.
Amid the explosive pain, Orff experienced the twenty-fifth cycle—this very cycle.
…
“Uh, that’s awful,” Everly couldn’t help but sigh after listening to the full twenty-four previous cycles.
“Waaah…” If she hadn’t said anything, it might have been fine, but this small comfort suddenly made Orff feel a sharp pang of grief.
He covered his face with his hands, tears streaming, sniffling miserably like a complete ss.
“Hey, don’t be so down. Look, in the previous cycles, we actually did pretty well. Just after three cycles, we almost figured everything out. I have a feeling that maybe this cycle we can finally put an end to it all,” Everly reassured him.
“Really?”
“Of course. Everly never exaggerates,” Misha said confidently, jumping in to answer for her.
Everly smiled helplessly, grabbed her notebook, and began sketching and jotting notes:
“Almost there. In the previous cycles, we’ve already gathered a lot of intelligence. First, we can confirm that no matter whether Orff hacks into the newly built dark web today, the monster will target him. At the sa ti, we now know the location of Mark’s secret basent—it likely holds clues related to the monster. What we need to do next is use this cycle to investigate everything thoroughly.”
“But you only have twenty minutes. Even if we figure out why the monster appears, we might not have enough ti to find a solution. Does that an I’m going to die again…”
“Who said it’s only twenty minutes? Do you rember the cycle where you survived the longest? How long did you live that ti?”
“My longest…?” Orff rarely survived past the afternoon in the first twenty-one cycles, so it didn’t take long for him to recall. His longest survival had been the ti he escaped to a neighboring city by taxi. He had stayed in the cab all the way until 18:03, when a truck crashed him into the river, freezing him to death.
“That… that’s…”
“That’s right. See, the monster’s attack timing changes based on your actions. In the twenty-second cycle, it killed you around 17:00. In the following cycles, it only appeared after 17:19. I suspect this difference is related to your location. Look—”
As she spoke, Everly pulled out the map of Dalami City she had bought earlier, placed it on the front passenger seat of the Grand Cherokee, and spread it out. Using a pen, she circled four locations: the ranger’s cabin in Birchwood Forest, the city police station, Mark’s house on Tombstone Alley, and the university.
On the map, their positions looked like this: if the police station is the center point, the ranger’s cabin lies to the northeast, Mark’s house on Tombstone Alley to the southeast, and the state university roughly 15 degrees west of south.
“The flesh-and-blood monster doesn’t take much ti to kill its victims, but between killing Mark and then you and Abel at the school, there’s nearly a twenty-minute gap. Could we assu that it can’t teleport infinitely and actually needs ti to travel?”
As she spoke, Everly took out a black pen and drew straight lines connecting the four locations.
“Look at the map. Suppose the monster first appears at Mark’s house. The nearest point from there is the police station in the old city, about 20 kiloters away in a straight line. The school and the ranger’s cabin are both farther than the station. At 16:58, the monster finished attacking Mark’s dog and left the house. By 17:05, it appeared at the city police station, killing Dumpsy and Charlie in sequence.”
Everly, a college student with an obsession for stationery, swapped for a red pen and quickly drew a line between the two locations she had just ntioned.
“Considering that the monster has no physical body and can pass through walls, let’s assu it moves at a uniform speed in a straight line. Covering 20 kiloters in 7 minutes ans the monster’s speed is just under 3 kiloters per minute.”
“The police station is old, located in the historic district. It’s 13 kiloters from the ranger’s cabin in the suburbs. The university is in the newly expanded city area, 17 kiloters from the station. If the monster went straight to the university after the station without delay, it would take at most 6 minutes—arriving by 17:11. But in reality, it didn’t get there until 17:19, which clearly ans it visited sowhere else in between. We can assu it first went to the ranger’s cabin…”
Everly grabbed a blue pen, traced the route from the police station to the cabin, and then drew the straight-line route from the cabin to the university in blue as well.
“The trip from the police station to the cabin takes a little over 4 minutes, so that would be around 17:09. The straight-line distance from the cabin to the university is about 29 kiloters, which would take roughly 10 minutes. See? That brings us exactly to 17:19—the timing fits perfectly!”
“So… so what does that an?” Misha, not very good at math, had her eyes practically sparkling with confusion. “The monster went to the cabin first and then the school—what’s the point of knowing that?”
Everly pinched Misha’s cheek affectionately. “Of course it’s useful. Haven’t you noticed? The monster’s attacks actually follow two rules: first, its targets are people who have watched the torture videos or directly participated in filming them; second, it chooses the order of attack based on distance.”
Orff’s expression brightened with understanding. “I get it! You an, if I stay sowhere far away from all the targets when the monster appears, and keep moving in a direction away from where it is, I can delay the ti it takes to catch !”
Everly snapped her fingers. “Exactly.”
In fact, if they were even more precise, they could constantly adjust the positions of the three operators and Ronald, further delaying when the monster appears.
For example, after the monster kills Mark, they could imdiately alert Sawitt to move Charlie further north in the city. As long as Charlie remains the closest target to the monster among the remaining people, it would have to travel a much longer distance to reach him.
Once the monster kills Charlie, they could then move the “Butcher” and Abel (and Ronald) each farther away in opposite corners of the city. No matter whether the monster kills the Butcher or Abel next, it would have to traverse a long diagonal to reach the next target…
With enough people and a carefully planned strategy, this thod could buy a lot of ti.
But after working in the horror movie world for so long, Everly knew one truth very well—“No plan survives contact with reality.”
The more complex the plan, and the more people involved, the higher the chance that sothing would go wrong during execution.
These “sothing-goes-wrong” scenarios could include, but weren’t limited to: accidentally dragging hatred onto soone else, causing the monster to change targets to unlucky Orff; a human decoy suddenly waking up and wreaking havoc on everyone; a helper of the human decoy (if there was one) intervening and ruining the plan; or bumping into a new dark web user mid-transport, drawing the monster’s attention away and causing the team to lose sight…
The possibilities were endless, and just thinking about them gave her goosebumps.
After considering all this, Everly abandoned the plan of “using a few operators as human decoys to buy ti for Orff” and instead went with the simpler, more direct approach: get Orff to start driving southwest as early as possible.
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