"I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I'm almost certain this isn't an archive room."
Tomás nodded silently. Around them, various torture devices lined the dark, bloodstained walls, matching the floor, which had a drainage hole in the middle. The worst part was that several of those devices were occupied.
In front of Tomás, two students younger than him hung from an "X"-shaped torture cross, their arms tied at the top, shirtless and covered in lash marks. On the other side, a girl was suspended on a stretching rack, hanging in the air by all four limbs. Several others lay with their heads hanging down from a medieval pillory. An iron maiden watched them from the back, closed, with a thin trickle of dried blood running from its base toward the aqueduct.
"Are they... dead?" Tomás tried to examine them and realized that, due to some strange effect of the lighting, none of them had distinguishable faces.
"My dude, don't worry. Yeah, it's a horrible scene, but this is Cat's Dimension," Hugo replied confidently. "I mean... It's not like our school has a torture chamber... Right?"
"Why would Cat imagine this?"
"That's exactly the right question. If it were Sarah, I'd think she was presenting us with a challenge, but..."
They heard several iron bolts slide and slam at the back, in the direction of an enormous black door with a closed viewing window at the top. The only door.
Then, heavy footsteps filled the hallway, muffled by the same door but still perceptible in the sepulchral silence.
"It's coming this way," Hugo whispered, getting into a fighting stance with his spear in... There was no spear.
He looked himself over more carefully and found that there was no armor either. Neither he nor his companion were Dragoon and Cleric. They were just Hugo and Tomás. Not the legendary heroes of the Adventurers' Group, but merely high school students. All of Hugo's confidence and courage went down the same drain as the room's blood.
The door began to vibrate as the thunderous sound of the bar releasing it filled him with terror.
"I demand an explanation for what is going on!" exclaimed the old, short professor with gray hair and a gray mustache, whom Jacob now had pinned against the wall with one hand covering his mouth, right beneath his round, hairy-nostriled nose. The professor was red with anger.
"I need you to calm down, Mr..." Jacob said, waiting for a name.
"Professor Levchenko! I'm your fucking Professor Levchenko! And I order you to let me go! You juvenile criminal!"
"Professor," the boy continued, ignoring the name. "I need you to calm down and..."
The door at the end of the hallway opened, revealing an intense, undulating orange light that penetrated even through the crack of the door to the dark bathroom where they were hiding.
Just a few minutes earlier, right after Mica informed Cat that they had found the archives, the setting had changed drastically. Everything began to look old and deteriorated, and the lights dimmed until the bulbs burst. The paint on the walls peeled away, revealing damp stone walls covered in mold.
The worst part was that it wasn't just Mica and Jacob who had been transported to the Dimension. The professor whom Jacob had just convinced to go to the teachers' lounge was there with them as well.
The other two worrying details were that neither Mica nor Jacob had their Adventurers' equipment. They weren't Swordsman or Rogue. And from the other end of the hallway, where the teachers' lounge had been moments before, came a chilling chant and uproar.
As soon as the setting changed, Jacob acted quickly and shoved the professor into the bathroom, then immobilized and gagged him by pressing his hand over his mouth against the wall. Mica, a little more concerned about the situation, took a few seconds to reach them and close the door.
The bathroom was dark and reeked of rot, but otherwise, there seemed to be no threat.
"Mr. Levchenkooo," a sing-song voice called from the hallway. "Misteeeer Levcheeeeenkooo."
"Anab...!" the professor began to answer, but Jacob covered his mouth again.
"Be quiet. You don't understand the danger we're in. That's not Professor Anabel," Jacob explained in a whisper, trying to compete with the professor's muffled attempts to speak.
"Oh, Mr. Levchenko. Are you in the bathroom? Do you need help? You're about to miss the rituaaaal," the voice said, still singing.
Neither of them answered. Even the professor seemed to understand that something strange was happening after hearing the word
ritual
.
"All riiight," the voice sang again. "If you want to play hide-and-seek, I'll come find yooou."
The professor's eyes, now wide with fear, turned toward Jacob and then Mica. Jacob asked him to stay quiet by putting a finger to his lips.
"Oooone."
Jacob released the professor and nodded toward one of the stalls at the back.
"Twwwwo."
The two young men and the professor moved with all the care in the world to avoid making a sound, each hiding in a stall and leaving only one empty.
"Three!" the voice exclaimed while simultaneously slamming the door open.
The dancing light of what had to be an enormous bonfire flooded the bathroom, but none of them were in sight.
"Oh, Mr. Levchenko. If I don't find you, playing won't be fun."
The unknown woman advanced, dragging one of her feet across the disgusting bathroom floor. When she passed in front of his stall, Mica could see through the gap beneath the door that one of her legs was thin and skeletal, the flesh almost green in color. The other, the one she dragged, looked more like an elephant's leg. Enormous and shapeless. To make things even more unsettling, one of her hands hung low enough for Mica to see long, bony fingers ending in long, neglected nails.
"Mr. Levchenko?" the creature asked again. "Oh, well, I suppose he's not here," she said before turning around to retrace her steps and leave the bathroom with the same slowness with which she had entered, humming an unintelligible chorus that blended perfectly with the one coming from the teachers' lounge.
When the bathroom door closed, Mica resumed breathing, letting out a sigh and realizing that he hadn't breathed at all since the creature entered.
Trying to release some of the stress, he leaned back, expecting to rest against the wall, but instead of finding the bathroom wall, his back hit something soft and deformed.
"How daring of you, darling," a raspy voice whispered into his right ear, and when Mica turned around to see what it was, he found a deformed face, as if it were a freshly wrung-out rag, with two empty sockets where the eyes should have been and yellowish teeth of irregular sizes, all sharp.
Mica screamed in terror and moved away as quickly as he could, but hands with elongated fingers grabbed one of his arms, preventing him from leaving the stall.
Desperate to break free, he looked behind him and watched as the creature straightened itself, revealing an anatomy that bore no resemblance to anything human and instead looked more like a snake with several scrawny arms, their hands as long and bony as the one holding him. However, its elongated body had pieces of a schoolteacher's uniform here and there, suggesting that it might have been human once.
The creature's jaws opened at an impossible angle and lunged toward his face, but at that exact moment Jacob appeared beside him and, with a knife he pulled from somewhere, wounded the monster by placing its blade in the path of the attack.
The supposed woman growled and shrieked, recoiling and taking the knife with her, but also releasing Mica.
"Run!" Jacob ordered both him and the professor, who looked like he was about to faint at the sight before him.
The two fled the bathroom with Jacob right behind them. Mica turned left without thinking about the fact that it was a dead end. He had only one thought in his mind: don't go toward the place of the aforementioned ritual. The professor followed him, but they both stopped as soon as they saw the supposed Anabel at the end, standing in front of the school plaque that had previously displayed the teachers' portraits.
Anabel's figure had its back to them. The moment she heard them, she turned toward them. But she didn't turn her whole body. Only her head did, twisting in an impossible rotation of the neck.
"I found you, Mr. Levchenko!" the creature exclaimed, its face very similar to that of the monster from the bathroom, but with messy, tangled blonde hair.
Before they had time to react, Anabel launched herself toward them and began advancing on all fours with incredible speed.
Mica and the professor didn't even think about it. They turned around, only to find Jacob coming out of the bathroom at that exact moment, while the female monster that had attacked them there was tearing the doorframe apart as it tried to get out.
As best he could, Mica dodged the half-dozen arms reaching for him, giving the professor a chance to slip past him as well.
The three ran terrified toward the orange light, with no safer path to take, and what they saw as they crossed the doorway terrified them even more than the two figures chasing them.
"What happened?" Cat asked aloud, not caring whether Rose heard her.
"I... I don't... I don't know. Someone..." Rini was trying to answer her, but her voice sounded weak and distant, like a phone call with interference, if such a thing could happen with a voice inside her mind.
"Cat, we have to keep moving," Rose urged, crouched beside her and grabbing her arm to try to move her.
Cat broke free with an elbow.
"Rini... What's happening? Why can't I close the bond?"
"It found us... hunter... I can't..."
The little color remaining in Cat's face vanished at that confirmation.
"I've been an idiot," she told herself.
"Cat, I don't know what you're talking about. But we have to leave now. It'll be back at any moment."
Right after Hugo and Tomás jumped into the hole leading to the archives, it closed, and the setting around them transformed. Cat felt such a sharp headache that she dropped to her knees and, when she opened her eyes, found herself in a horrifying version of the first-floor locker hallway.
Before either girl could say anything, all the locker doors began opening, and a child in an elementary school uniform emerged from each one.
Cat and Rose were startled by the sight, but terror overtook them when they tried to stop one of the children by asking what was happening and realized that he had no face. None of them did.
Within two minutes, the bell signaling the end of recess rang, and the children began running in terror, crashing into one another and mercilessly trampling those who lost their balance and fell amid the chaos.
Suddenly, a teacher appeared at the other end of the hallway. Except it wasn't a teacher, but her gigantic head—or rather, a horrifying version of it with enormous fangs and yellow eyes riddled with bloodshot veins, darting around at an abysmal speed.
When the head opened its jaws, they encompassed almost the entire hallway, and it lunged at the children.
Rose reacted quickly and grabbed Cat by the arm, pulling her toward the exit beside them. And it was incredibly lucky that they happened to be standing there, because the moment they left the hallway, the head rushed past, leaving behind a pile of children's bodies torn in half and carrying many others away between its teeth.
Only about ten minutes had passed since that event. The two girls had managed to escape by entering the science lab, and now they were hiding behind one of the worktables at the opposite end of the room from the hallway door.
"We have to escape, Cat. We have to get out of the Dimension," Rose whispered, afraid that the head, which had already patrolled the hallway outside the classroom a couple of times, might hear her.
"I can't, Rose. Don't you understand? I can't."
"Well, last time, with Sarah, it worked when I said I didn't want to play anymore, right?"
"I shouldn't have thought I could handle this on my own. Who did I think I was?"
"Cat..."
"I condemned us all. The Hunter arrived, and we can't fight him. I can't."
"Cat!" Rose exclaimed, keeping her voice low as she slapped her.
Cat stared at her, on the verge of tears, as if she were seeing her for the first time.
"Last time, we got out of the game when I said I didn't want to play anymore, right?"
Cat nodded.
"All right, then... Then I don't want to play anymore, Cat. I don't... Please, get us out of here."
Nothing happened.
Rose's eyes also grew moist for a moment, but when she realized it, she held herself together and stood in front of Cat.
"If you can't get us out, then I'll find a way out myself," she said, approaching the window. "Oh..."
Outside, there was no school courtyard, no street, nothing from the outside world.
Outside, there was only absolute darkness.