The Room That Turns
DAY 1 -5-
As soon as we stepped into the next room, a familiar face stood bathed in sunlight. A beautiful girl with her black hair neatly tied back. It was Maria.
“What do you want?”
Maria looked at us with wary eyes and snapped the journal she’d been reading shut with a loud thud. She seemed to have already finished her investigation and was about to leave, but Terin stopped her.
“Wait, Maria.”
“…What?”
With a hint of irritation on her face, Maria glanced down at the hand gripping her wrist, then yanked herself free.
“Don’t touch me. It’s disgusting.”
“Ah, right. Sorry.”
“Hmph.”
Terin stared blankly at Maria’s retreating back as she left without so much as a glance behind her, then gave an awkward laugh.
“I guess I got too close.”
Seeing Terin awkwardly rub her own cheek, Lea spoke in a blunt tone.
“…I don’t think we need to drag someone like her around with us.”
“Huh?”
“You were about to suggest we stick together, weren’t you?”
“How did you know?”
Terin blinked in surprise. Lea let out a small sigh and explained.
“In this situation, it’s the obvious thing to say. If we all move in a group, we won’t become targets for murder, and we’ll have alibis too.”
At Lea’s answer, Terin gave a small, sheepish laugh and looked back and forth between me and Lea.
“Well, it’s not just for that reason.”
“Then?”
“I just… wanted to get closer to everyone?”
“…”
“Anyway, everyone gathered in this Rose Pavilion is someone we could’ve become friends with, right?”
“What if that girl Maria turns out to be the eighth?”
At those words, Terin fell silent. She was right. Setting aside the murders, the eighth person—the one who had created this entire situation—definitely existed. An uninvited guest who had entered without an invitation. Whether she knew about this situation or not didn’t matter. Everything had begun because of what she had done.
The mood grew heavy, and Terin closed her mouth. Lea, paying no attention to that, rummaged through the bookshelves. She seemed to be checking whether there were any hidden mechanisms here as well.
Leaving the two of them to their own devices, I picked up the journal Maria had left behind.
Children aged 11 to 16. The children had grown a lot. And then, starting with the oldest ones, they began to disappear one by one. The person in charge of this experiment, Rayon, only said that the children had grown up and been sent away. Since none of the children had ever been found as corpses, the mages seemed to believe him. But I cannot trust him. The seed of doubt I had harbored last time has fully sprouted. Last time, I saw him take Henry—a boy who had just turned sixteen. After that day, Henry was never seen again. However, a child who had been close to Henry once brought something that belonged to him. A locket stained with blood. Inside was a drawing of Henry and his friend. Since Henry loved to draw, it was the kind of thing he would have owned. But that alone wasn’t enough to prove what Rayon was doing. Around this time, I began to understand the nature of the experiments taking place in this mansion.
The rest of the content had, of course, been erased. It looked like the actual details of the experiment would have come after this, but now we couldn’t see it.
“Is there no way to restore this?”
“Probably not. This was written with a secrecy-type magic.”
“Ah, I see.”
So that was it. I had thought the person who wrote this was meticulous because the erased parts were painted over so thoroughly and cleanly, but it turned out to be magic.
“Still… I don’t sense any mana.”
“That’s because secrecy magic doesn’t leave any mana behind. If it did, it wouldn’t be able to keep the secret, would it?”
“That makes sense.”
If mana remained, anyone would immediately try to undo the spell. But how had this been done without even a trace of mana?
Lea must have noticed my suspicion, because she rubbed the back of her neck.
“Before I came to the Rose Pavilion, I went through some rough stuff. In the back alleys.”
“Ah.”
If that was true, it explained why she had been so quick to notice things until now.
Come to think of it, Terin had gone quiet. When I glanced at her, she was looking around the room with a strange expression.
“Terin, is something wrong?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t this room feel… off?”
“What do you mean?”
When I looked where she was pointing, there really was a window, just like she said. But it was tiny and placed ridiculously high up. How were you even supposed to look out of something like that?
“Hmm, maybe I should check it out.”
“Will you be okay?”
Ever since we entered this room, I had thought it felt far too gloomy. The only furniture was a single bookshelf, and the surroundings were desolate. It was so barren that it was hard to even call it an experiment room. There was nothing to stand on to reach that height.
“It’s fine. This much is nothing.”
Lea leaped up lightly. She jumped nearly three meters, grabbed the windowsill with one hand, and used the other to push the window open.
Creeeeak—
The distinctive sound of a window that hadn’t been opened in years echoed through the room, and dust cascaded down from above.
“Ugh, ptooey.”
“Lea, are you alright?”
“…Yeah. I’m fine. Just swallowed some dust.”
Lea let out a small breath, then stepped fully onto the windowsill. Living in the back alleys must have taught her skills like that. It was honestly impressive.
“Hmm… There’s nothing special.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s exactly the same view we can see through the windows outside.”
With that, Lea jumped down and landed with a graceful roll. The way she tumbled once before standing showed she had learned proper falling techniques.
“Lea, are you from a guild?”
“Mmm.”
She closed her mouth as if she didn’t want to answer, but that reaction was confirmation enough. A back-alley guild. She must have had a hard life. Unlike normal guilds, back-alley ones were easy to enter but almost impossible to leave. In modern terms, they were basically like gangs. It felt a little dissonant to think of a girl like Lea coming from a place like that, but after seeing her movements earlier, it made sense.
“That’s enough about my past. Shall we head to the next room?”
Seeing how obviously she changed the subject, Terin smiled faintly.
“Yeah, let’s go quickly.”
Terin linked arms with Lea. Lea looked at her with a flustered face. It was only natural. When someone with Terin’s voluptuous figure pressed up against you like that, it would fluster anyone—man or woman.
“Ugh…”
Lea’s face turned bright red, but she didn’t shake Terin off.
That was the moment the two of them stepped out of the room first.
Rumble rumble rumble—
A sudden roar shook the entire space. Startled by the noise, Terin screamed and buried herself in Lea’s arms.
“Kyaaaaa—!”
“Terin!”
“…Huh?”
In an instant, both Terin’s and Lea’s faces whipped around. No—it wasn’t their faces turning. The room itself was rotating.
I desperately reached for the door to get out, but in the blink of an eye the two of them vanished from sight, and a wall filled the space where they had been.
I slowly lowered my outstretched hand and stared blankly at the wall now blocking my view.
The room has rotated. The exit is now sealed by a wall. You are isolated.
Rumble rumble—
The noise finally stopped, and the room’s rotation came to an end. After confirming that the rotation had finished, I realized what had happened.
“…I’m trapped.”
Had the other girls in the different rooms ended up like this too? Or was it only me? Honestly, it felt incredibly unfair. Why did the mechanism have to activate at that exact moment? And we had only one room left, too.
Frowning, I first examined my surroundings. Getting angry wouldn’t change anything. It was one of the things I had learned in my previous life.
The room’s structure itself was the same. The gloomy atmosphere, the ridiculously high window. And the wall visible through the now-open doorway. Damn it.
“Just what the hell is going on…”
I muttered to myself, but of course there was no one to answer.
The one silver lining was that being trapped here meant I probably wouldn’t be killed by another person. The downside was that everything else was terrible.
Standing around doing nothing wouldn’t help, so I walked over to the bookshelf and began running my hands over it, just as Lea had done. Nothing had happened when she checked, but now that the mechanism had activated, maybe something had changed. There might be something here. The chances were slim, but still.
After several futile attempts, I let out a small sigh. As expected, there was nothing.
“…The only thing left is…”
I glanced up at the high window. Since the room’s structure had changed, maybe that window now showed something different. But there was no way for me to look through it. My Memory Magic wasn’t the kind of magic that could help in a situation like this.
Of course, there was another way. It would take a long time and be exhausting, but it was possible.
I pulled books from the shelf. Then I pushed the entire bookshelf over. I began stacking the books on top of the fallen shelf. Once I had piled them all up, it was just barely high enough for me to climb and look out.
“Ugh…”
It was a little scary. If I fell and cracked my head open, I could die instantly. Even if I didn’t die, it could lead to serious injury.
After taking a deep breath, I slowly began climbing the makeshift staircase of books.