They passed through the pitch-black cave.
Carefully advancing toward the direction from which the light was coming.
Takumi bent down and cautiously passed through a tunnel section only about 1.3 to 1.4 meters high, avoiding the protruding rocks, the hanging stalactites, and the stalagmites rising from the ground, before arriving at another, larger cavern.
Between the swaying lights, Fujiwara Chika cautiously followed behind Takumi, also bending at the waist as she moved forward with care.
Before long, the two of them saw the object from which the light was coming.
It seemed to be a guard booth.
This type of structure is very common in schools and government institutions—a small building set at the main gate, usually used by security personnel to stand watch and control entry and exit. Some relatively better guard booths are permanent structures made of brick, tile, or concrete, with the more luxurious ones even equipped with air conditioning. The poorer ones are prefab cabins, or in extreme cases, are merely thrown together with a few glass frames. As for interior facilities, some guard booths are completely empty, while others are fully furnished with desks, chairs, and beds, requiring guards to stay overnight inside to keep watch.
At this moment, the guard booth appearing before Takumi and Chika was a simple prefab cabin. It looked as though it had been abandoned for a very long time—abandoned on the scale of years.
Most of the glass in the booth's windows had shattered, and the color steel panels used to construct it were heavily rusted, with some sections even having collapsed.
Behind the collapsed door of the guard booth, they could see a small table placed inside. The table was likely wooden in structure, but in the damp underground environment it had already rotted beyond recognition, with white mushrooms growing on top of it. On the other side was a single bed, with moss growing across the bedding. Aside from that, there did not seem to be anything else in the small room.
What was strange was that, despite being damaged beyond recognition, the light in this guard booth was still on, emitting a dim, yellowish warm glow that guided anyone who reached this place.
"How could something like this exist inside this kind of cave?"
Chika was extremely confused. Although she had already accepted deep down that she was currently inside some kind of Horror Story driven by supernatural forces, suddenly seeing such a situation that so blatantly violated common sense still made her instinctively try to think it through using her everyday knowledge.
"Spatial distortion. This is a very common Horror Story phenomenon. Time, space, the mind… all common sense can be altered within rule-based Horror Stories. What we need to do is leave this place before those changes reach the point of no return."
Takumi had already grown numb to this kind of unreasonable, eerie situation. While explaining the circumstances to Chika, he looked around, observing the area.
There was no corpse standing in a shadowy corner, staring at him.
There was no ghost doll giggling as it ran up, one that would use mental contamination to make him think it was a cute little girl.
There were no sudden footsteps, nor anything else out of the ordinary.
At least for now, everything seemed fine.
"Your observation skills are good. Help me keep watch on the surroundings while I check this place."
After a brief hesitation, Takumi gave the girl her assignment.
"Okay, task accepted."
The girl nodded with a serious expression in response, then widened her eyes and began frantically scanning the surroundings, as if she had turned into a human surveillance device.
Previously, in that large area, Chika had been able to notice that one voice had suddenly gone missing from the conversation between Takumi and the other party. It was likely because she had been inside the cave and, with some distance between them, could not clearly hear what the other side was saying, and thus had not been affected by the eerie power. Even so, being able to quickly realize that "something might be wrong" and immediately rush over to warn him showed observation, reaction speed, and decisiveness that still left Takumi quite satisfied, which was why he made this arrangement.
Come to think of it, this was clearly only his second time participating in a dungeon run, yet his mindset was already completely different.
Recalling his experiences over three runs in the Shirakawa Apartments, and then looking at his current state, Takumi could not help but reflect inwardly on how people grow and change. He then grew somewhat worried about Maki and Kaguya, before once again forcing himself to calm down and focus his attention on the exploration at hand.
Inside the already-collapsed guard booth lingered a stench that made one uncomfortable.
Takumi stepped inside the booth, waved a hand in front of his nose, then tried to pull open a desk drawer—only to tear half of the drawer straight off.
Inside was nothing but a pile of garbage rotted beyond recognition, completely impossible to identify.
He then moved over to the bed, reached out, and lifted the filthy blanket.
On the bed was a human-shaped stain, like dried sweat, or as if something else had been mixed into it.
Hidden beneath the blanket was a black security uniform, looking filthy.
Takumi had originally not planned to pay attention to this uniform, but thinking about the connection between the attire and identity rules of the Explorer, he still pulled it out, dusted it off a bit, folded it up, and packed it into his backpack.
He did not find any new rule sheets or readable documents.
That was only to be expected. In a place like this—abandoned for who knew how long and situated in a damp environment—paper would naturally have no chance of surviving.
However, just as he was about to leave, Takumi took another look around the room and then noticed that, in a corner of the room, beneath a collapsed color steel panel, there seemed to be something there.
[Creak—creak—]
He lifted the heavily rusted, broken panel.
Takumi reached out, dragged the object out from underneath, and then grabbed it and propped it upright.
It was a map.
A framed map that had likely once been hung on a wall, bearing the label "Red Nut Grey Cave Tourist Map."
Takumi did not look at the map right away.
He clearly remembered that, in the information he had obtained from the man called Kogawa, it had been mentioned that the areas beyond the attraction known as the "Big Slide" were absolutely forbidden zones—high-risk areas that must not be explored, or even known about. All players who had ever wandered into those areas were no longer able to enter the Red Nut Grey Cave instance again, because the information and knowledge they possessed would bind them to those hidden regions, causing them to be thrown directly into the most dangerous areas as soon as they started.
This map looked very old.
It might even be a complete map—one that showed the entire internal area of the Red Nut Grey Cave.
Once he saw what was on it, this thing might bring him very serious trouble.
He set the map down and stuffed it back into the place from which he had taken it.
Takumi straightened up, turned his head, and looked toward Chika, who was still carefully keeping watch not far away—and at a silent figure that passed in front of her, dressed in black firefighter gear with yellow stripes, head lowered as it moved forward slowly.
"…"
Takumi made no reaction at all. As if he could not see that thing whatsoever, he walked over to Chika in a completely normal manner.
"Hey, hey, Takumi, did you find anything useful?"
The girl blinked. Seeing that he had finished exploring so quickly, she asked with a hint of curiosity.
She did not see anything appear.
And Takumi, for his part, did not sense any goodwill or hostility from that silent firefighter either. There was no way to confirm whether it was human or not.
Had the blessing failed to take effect because it was merely a nonexistent phantom?
"We should keep moving. We need to find a way to lea—find a way toward the heart."
As he said this, Takumi chose to move in the direction opposite to that firefighter and stepped into another cave.
Based on the situation inferred from that rule sheet containing a full nineteen rules—so long it seemed deliberately designed to make people unable to remember it—he and Chika, acting under the identity of Explorer, had to successfully explore all the way to the deepest part of the Red Nut Grey Cave, the "heart," before they could normally return and proceed back toward the surface.
However, faced with this intricate, tangled cave system—one that was already clearly nothing like the Red Nut Grey Cave's proper terrain—how to find a way out was an extremely troublesome problem.
Takumi passed through several caves and walked for roughly more than ten minutes, yet still did not see any path that looked like it could lead them out of this area.
Instead, more and more unsettling traces began to spread.
Such as dark red bloodstains on the rock walls, splattered droplets of blood, claw-like bloody gouges as if left by talons, and bloodied handprints of varying depth.
There were also fragments of clothing torn apart by stalagmites and rock walls, most of them stained with blood, scattered throughout the caves.
It seemed that, as they continued to go deeper, these caves were gradually beginning to reveal their abnormal side.
"Takumi… this place…"
Even someone with thick nerves would grow tense when faced with such scenes.
Chika, who had been following behind Takumi the whole time, shrank back in fear and instinctively moved a little closer to him.
He could smell the scent of her shampoo—clearly a different kind from Maki's or Kaguya's.
Unfortunately, there was really no room to appreciate that right now, because Takumi had already begun to see some dark red, twisted writing—like final messages left behind by people trapped here.
[I want to leave. I want to get out.]
[Don't leave me here.]
[What have we all done?]
[This should never have happened.]
[Even if you can no longer hear it, I love you.]
…
The bloodstains, already congealed, had taken on a pitch-black color.
Many of the words were distorted beyond recognition, spelling errors appearing again and again, as if illustrating the despair and pain of those who had written them in their final moments.
Chika, who could clearly read these words, grew even quieter, while Takumi's brow furrowed ever tighter.
He vaguely felt that he seemed to be heading into a place he should not be going.
Yet no matter which direction he chose, these bloodstains, these fragments of clothing, and these twisted messages continued to increase, with no sign of diminishing at all.
As he turned back and walked in the direction he had come from, Takumi noticed that the path ahead seemed somewhat different from how it had been when he first arrived.
Was the terrain of this disordered cave system actually changing constantly?
In this train of thought, Takumi crossed through another section of the cave, eventually reaching a place he hadn't been to before.
It wasn't that he hadn't been here, but this was still just another cave—a tunnel with almost no difference from the others.
The only distinction was a light yellow safety rope.
The rope, which stretched out parallel to the ground, was fixed in place with nails, extending endlessly toward some unknown destination.
In the darkness, Takumi looked to both sides of the safety rope but could only see it extending infinitely along the cave walls, with no end in sight.
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