Skybridge
"It could just be a coincidence, you know."
The one who broke the silence was, of course, the middle-aged man in the suit.
"Excuse me?"
"Announcements going off on the hour is perfectly common. You can't conclude anything from that alone."
The eyes that had been on me a moment ago all swung toward the man in the suit.
The woman who'd been counting people spoke up.
"So you're saying she's lying?"
"I didn't say she was lying. I'm saying there's a chance she just got lucky."
He looked around at the others as he went on.
"In a situation this chaotic, you shouldn't be so quick to put your faith in one person. That goes for all this talk about rules and status windows, too."
He wasn't wrong. He wasn't... but.
No matter how I look at it, this guy just has it out for me, doesn't he?
The woman who'd been jotting everything down on her phone dragged over a whiteboard that had been standing in one corner of the lounge. She found a marker somewhere, popped the cap, and started writing in large letters.
◈ Existing Residents may be present on each floor. (Monsters, probably?)
◈ The Skybridge is prohibited from 00:00 to 05:00.
◈ Announcements at 09:00 / 12:00 / 15:00 / 18:00 / 21:00
"I figured we should write everything down."
People clustered in front of the whiteboard. There were still skeptics like the man in the suit, but most of them figured there was no point taking unnecessary risks by breaking the rules. I could see them wrestling with what to do next, plain as day.
Not that any of it had anything to do with me.
I claimed a sofa in the corner of the lounge, watched them huddle up and start debating the rules, and opened the Ghost Story Gallery.
Trust is like food, huh.
Cool line. Shame this goddess doesn't have so much as a single grain of rice's worth of credibility yet...
I refreshed the board.
It was hard to believe these were the same people who'd been talking about life and death a minute ago. The shitposts just kept coming.
Wallpaper that grows back is weird enough. Why the hell are you eating it.
I was curious, but asking would probably get me a very long story, so I held off. I wrote a post of my own instead.
What a circus.
Watching them talk about ghost stories and other worlds like it was nothing made this place feel like just another ordinary internet community. Of course, sandwiched between the posts were things a few dozen light-years away from ordinary. A dead family member waving from outside the window. Dozens of zombies banging on the front door every day.
Just thinking about it again made my head spin.
...Meanwhile, something resembling a division of labor was taking shape in the lounge.
The whiteboard now had the total headcount of twenty-four, the food inventory, and the fact that every phone showed a different time. People came over and asked about my phone's time too, but they dismissed it since it didn't match the wall clock.
Dinner was one pack of ramen per person. The ramen was just ramen. Completely ordinary.
Between eating, browsing the gallery, and people-watching, time passed surprisingly fast.
It was already almost nine.
At 8:59, the lounge went quiet. The man in the suit stood with his arms crossed, staring at the wall clock. The Tattooed Man and the two guys with him had drifted back from the Skybridge at some point.
The second hand ticked past the last mark.
Ding-dong—
The current time is 21:00.
Called it.
People's eyes gathered on me one by one. The look in them was different from before.
"It was real."
The young man who seemed to know web novels muttered under his breath.
"Then the rest of the rules..."
Every pair of eyes moved to the whiteboard at once.
The woman who'd been counting people came over to me.
"Has anything new been added to the rules?"
"One second."
I opened the Individual Notice and scanned it top to bottom, but nothing had changed. Number 15 was still blacked out.
"Nothing's different."
"Then what we can do right now is..."
"Check out the West Tower."
The Tattooed Man. He was standing at the Skybridge entrance with the two men he'd been hanging around with. One was a big guy with shoulders like a refrigerator. The other had a short sports cut and was wearing a gray tracksuit. Just looking at them, you'd figure they used to work as gangsters, or organized crime, or something along those lines.
"You're going now?"
The woman who'd been counting people asked.
"The rules are real, right?"
The Tattooed Man tapped the Skybridge restriction written on the whiteboard.
"The Skybridge can't be used from midnight. Which means, conversely, we can use it now, doesn't it?"
"There's still no reason to go at night. We could wait until morning."
"What night? What morning?"
The Tattooed Man pointed past the floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside had been pitch black since the moment we woke up.
"And we're just gonna look at the connecting floor and come back. No stairs, no elevator. If anything weird's over there, we turn around immediately."
"What time will you be back?"
"Eleven."
"You have to come back. Based on the wall clock here, not your phones."
"Yeah, yeah, I got it."
The Tattooed Man waved her off like she was being a nag.
The burly man pushed open the glass door of the Skybridge. As it opened, a cool draft slipped in, different from the lounge's warm air. The glass-enclosed bridge was longer than I'd expected. White lights were set into the floor at regular intervals, and the three men's shadows stretched long across them.
The three of them passed through the West Tower door without incident. ...Nothing happened.
"See?"
The Tattooed Man's voice drifted faintly from the far side of the bridge.
"Told you it was nothing."
With that, the three of them disappeared into the West Tower hallway.
No clock other than the East Tower lounge wall clock was recognized as an official means of confirming the time.
Those three had heard that too, obviously. But had they actually understood what it meant? What if the West Tower clocks ran slower than the East Tower lounge? What if their phone times suddenly drifted?
The thought of chasing after them to warn them flickered through my mind for a split second—
Then I shook it off and sank even deeper into the sofa.
Nope. Absolutely not.
My own life coming first is the most obvious thing in the world. They're adults. They heard every rule. They can take responsibility for their own choices.
Ten o'clock came and the three of them still hadn't returned.
Ten-thirty. Still no word. The West Tower hallway across the Skybridge remained empty of even a single human shadow.
When eleven o'clock — the time they'd promised — came and went, the mood shifted.
"You don't think something happened?"
"Shouldn't someone go check?"
"Who's going, then?"
"Not me."
"But there are three people over there..."
They said that, but nobody actually headed for the Skybridge. Even the man in the suit didn't step up. He just kept glancing anxiously between his wristwatch and the wall clock.
Eleven-thirty.
The woman who'd been counting people closed the Skybridge door. There was no lock. Someone suggested wedging a chair under the handle, but that was shot down on the grounds that the three of them might not be able to get back in.
Eleven-fifty.
Not a single person in the lounge had gone back to their room. Everyone was gathered in front of the glass, staring at the West Tower. I sat on the sofa by the window and pulled my knees up. The ticking of the wall clock's second hand sounded unnaturally loud. That wasn't just my imagination.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Eleven fifty-nine.
"There!"
Someone shouted.
Light flickered in the West Tower hallway. The light shook wildly as it came closer, and then the three of them appeared at the end of the corridor, phone flashlights on.
But they looked nothing like they had when they left—
The Tattooed Man's T-shirt was soaked in blood from shoulder to stomach. The sports-cut guy had lost a shoe. The burly man's forehead was split open, half his face a mask of blood. The three of them were running without looking back.
Whatever was chasing them from behind wasn't visible. Because the hallway lights were going out one by one, starting from deep inside the West Tower.
Darkness was hunting them.
"Hurry!"
"Run!"
People pounded on the glass and shouted. The Tattooed Man slammed the Skybridge door open and the three of them burst onto the bridge.
The darkness that had swallowed the West Tower hallway stopped at the entrance to the Skybridge. Whatever had been chasing them apparently couldn't come onto the bridge. Was I supposed to call that lucky.
"Faster! Run faster!"
Their feet hammered the glass floor.
Thud-thud-thud-thud—
The sports-cut guy was past the halfway point, the Tattooed Man right behind him. The burly man was running with a limp. A dozen meters left to the East Tower door.
Then the wall clock's second hand ticked into the final mark.
Click.
Midnight.
The white lights set into the Skybridge floor all went out at once. A moment later, blood-red lights began switching on one by one, starting from the West Tower side.
Clunk.
Somewhere, a massive metal mechanism locked into place.
It happened in an instant.
The sports-cut guy, running in front, suddenly lost his right arm. The arm sailed through the air — it kept the momentum of his sprint and slammed into the East Tower door.
Splat.
The palm hit the glass, fingers splayed wide. Thick blood sprayed from the severed stump and fanned out across the entire pane. The sports-cut guy ran two more steps and stopped. He didn't seem to have registered yet that his arm was gone.
"Uh...?"
The moment he looked to the side, his body tilted. His upper and lower halves slid apart as if they'd never been connected. Red viscera and yellow globs of fat spilled from the severed waist all at once — the intestines that tumbled out hit the floor and slithered, and his still-moving upper body pitched forward, arms pressing down on his own guts.
"H-help..."
Bloody foam burst from the sports-cut guy's mouth. His remaining arm crawled across the floor, nails scraping the glass with a grotesque sound.
Clunk.
The second red light came on, and the sports-cut guy's head split vertically. A line started between his eyebrows, ran through his nose and lips, and down to his throat. Both halves of his face peeled apart, exposing white bone and red meat inside. His eyes rolled in opposite directions.
A grid of cuts carved itself into his entire body, and blood poured from every severed plane.
Thud.
Pat-pat-pat.
His head, his chest, his hands lost all shape and spilled onto the floor as chunks of meat.
"AAAAAAHHH!"
The Tattooed Man behind him screamed at the scattered flesh, then stepped in the blood and lost his balance. Further back, every time a red light clicked on, the burly man's arms, legs, and torso were sliced away one after another.
"Open it! Open the door!! Fuck!!!!"
The Tattooed Man, who'd barely reached the glass door, yanked on the handle. The door didn't budge.
The people in the lounge rushed to the glass. The woman who'd been counting people grabbed the handle first and pushed, but — the door didn't move.
"It won't open!"
"Let me try!"
The man in the suit and the young man who knew web novels shoved the handle together. Still nothing.
The Tattooed Man pounded the door with both hands.
"Open it! OPEN IT!!!"
BANG! BANG! BANG!!
His face twisted with terror. Snot, tears, and blood ran together down to the corner of his mouth.
"Please!! Please save me..."
Splat.
The left hand he'd been pounding the glass with dropped to the floor.
"—GAAAAAHHH!!! AAAAAHHHH!!!!!"
The Tattooed Man clutched the stump of his wrist and screamed. Blood geysered from his left wrist, soaking his chin, his chest, the glass door in succession.
"I-I was wrong!!! O-open the door. Please..."
His remaining right hand clawed at the glass. Even as the flesh at his fingertips mashed to pulp, even as the nails tore out, the right hand kept scraping.
Clunk.
The cries for help no longer formed words. From the neck where his head had been, only blood poured.
The Skybridge went quiet.
Under the blood-red lights, there was nothing left but blood and finely minced flesh. And blood dripping from the transparent ceiling like rain.
"Bleurh—"
Someone in the lounge who couldn't take it anymore threw up. That sound set off the screaming. People collapsing in tears. People running away.
The man in the suit had gone white as a sheet and couldn't say a word. The woman who'd been counting people was frozen with her hands still on the handle. Right on the other side of the glass, mashed scraps of flesh were plastered thick.
—I couldn't speak. I wanted to scream but no sound would come out.
My legs gave out. Something rose as far as my throat and I forced it back down. A sour taste filled my mouth.
I fled the lounge without even managing to open the gallery. I don't remember if I walked or ran down the hallway. When I came to, I was in front of Room 1924.
I went inside, shut the door, and locked it.
The little guest room was exactly as it had been when I first woke up. But outside the door, people's screams were still coming through.
I sat down with my back against the door. When I closed my eyes, I saw the Tattooed Man's hand scraping at the glass.
"Ah, ah, ah..."
This was not a convenient world where some overpowered protagonist went around killing anomalies.