Hiding inside a completely sealed hospital ward, reading the harrowing diary left behind by the dead — the very instant he closed it, the terrifying scenes described within materialized before his very eyes.
Scissors could no longer keep up the pretense. He was convinced that anyone in this situation would break.
The narrow glass window was crowded by several ashen faces. Separated by a single door, Scissors could see every expression on those faces with perfect clarity.
"They're staring at me!"
He couldn't breathe — it felt as though a pair of icy hands had reached into his chest and seized his windpipe. His body had no strength left; he was about to collapse.
"Found you." That sinister voice echoed once more. Scissors' calves trembled. His entire attention had been fixated on the faces beyond the door, and it took him a long moment to realize — the voice hadn't come from outside at all.
Fear surged through his nerves like jolts of electricity. Scissors' eyes went wide, and almost on instinct he glanced behind him.
Crouched inside the very cabinet he'd just been hiding in was a man in a hospital gown.
The man wasn't tall. Both legs were encased in plaster. His left eye had been pierced clean through by a pencil, his nose bridge was crooked, and all ten fingers were hidden inside his sleeves.
There were still shoe prints and bloodstains on his gown — Scissors' own, from earlier. The man had apparently been "sitting" in that cabinet the entire time.
"Found you." The tone was ice-cold, mechanical, like a puppet. His expression was peculiar — the way someone looks when they've discovered a new toy, carrying a hint of excitement and a kind of joy no normal person could ever comprehend.
The ghost had been inside the cabinet all along. The thought of having spent so long in that pitch-black, suffocatingly narrow space with it so close made Scissors' skin crawl.
The person described in the diary as having been left behind by "the patient next door" was now standing right before him. By all rights he should have been dead for a very long time.
Scissors stood between the diary's author and the ward's door, trapped in an impossible dilemma. The situation before him was harder to resolve than being caught between wolves in front and tigers behind.
"Stay calm. Don't panic. I've watched over a dozen horror movies and played dozens of horror games before coming here. I'm fully prepared. I will find a way out."
His brain churned at full speed, but neither horror games nor horror movies had ever presented a scenario like this — cornered in a hospital room, forced to choose between one ghost and a whole pack of them.
Cold sweat dripped ceaselessly from his forehead, his heart hammering: "There's a ghost behind me and a crowd of them in front. Normally it'd be safer to stay inside the room, but if I don't get out, it's a slow death — I'll lose all initiative completely, and when the time comes, I won't even be able to die if I wanted to. Just like the diary's owner — eyes gouged out, legs broken, then forced to stay here forever, playing with the other ghosts."
The thought that what was written in the diary could actually happen to him sent a shiver down Scissors' spine: "While I still have the ability to move, I have to get out."
His heaving chest gradually steadied. He held his breath and stared at the window in the door: "I'm going all in! I'll charge up to the third floor and jump out through a window!"
Scissors felt he'd made the right call in this desperate situation. Gripping his scissors, under the watchful gazes of the patients, he let out a sudden shout and sprinted toward the ward door with a wild scream.
As he made his move, something fortuitous happened — from the other end of the corridor came the sound of footsteps.
They seemed to originate from the second-floor stairwell, somewhat chaotic, and more than one person was coming.
His sudden shriek froze the other group of people who'd been heading his way down the hall. By the time he reached the door, he heard a middle-aged man's voice roughly six or seven meters outside.
"Damn it! The ghost is in here! Run back! Run back!"
The faces on the glass scattered instantly. Scissors no longer cared about anything. He brandished his scissors and burst out of the ward like a maniac, heading straight for the third floor.
His arms, his thighs, his shoulders — he felt several pairs of hands grabbing him all at once!
"Let go of me!"
He drove the scissors straight into his backpack, plunging them deep. Something inside the bag was pierced, and a flood of dark crimson blood gushed out.
Like a manic episode in full swing, he flung the blood from his bag in every direction — at his surroundings and at himself — until he was drenched from head to toe and the floor was slick with it.
Spraying blood and laughing maniacally at the same time, Scissors had to admit that in terms of sheer presence alone, he had already overwhelmed the "patients" at their own game of hide-and-seek.
Having emptied the blood, Scissors didn't waste a second — he charged toward the third floor. But when he arrived, what he found crushed his spirit.
The third-floor windows had no security grilles, but every single one had been boarded shut with planks.
Ripping out the planks would take time at the very least, and the monsters inside the hospital were never going to give him that time.
"If I stop, those things will definitely make their move. They'll think of every possible way to keep me here and force me to play along. And if I resist — well, that patient with his eyes gouged out and his legs broken is probably a preview of my fate."
Scissors forced himself to calm down. He glanced behind him. The floor was covered in bloodstains, and the hospital looked far more menacing than before — though most of it was his own doing.
"Who knows — maybe the black dog's blood actually works? A while back I saw someone on a forum post a short video asking for help after encountering a ghost. He was standing in a bathroom playing summoning games in front of a mirror. Some expert in the comments said black dog's blood is the bane of restless spirits…"
Bang!
The sound from below made Scissors' blood run cold. He looked toward the second floor. On the still-liquid black dog's blood, a trail of footprints had appeared.
Footprints only — no visible person. As for whose they belonged, that was already painfully obvious.
"Thank goodness I still have other cards to play." Scissors consoled himself by force, dragging his backpack as he ran deeper down the corridor. "The ward windows are all locked. I don't know if the storage room and the bathroom have been sealed too. They might overlook places like those."
Clutching at this last sliver of hope, Scissors ducked into the bathroom at the far end of the hallway.
The moment he stepped inside, he was met with a bizarre sight: all five stall doors were closed, and four of them displayed signs that someone was inside!
"Don't screw with me like this!" he wailed silently. He looked up at the bathroom window, and a faint spark of hope reignited in his chest.
The bathroom window hadn't been boarded over. Perhaps because someone else had tried to escape this way before, two of the planks had already been pried loose.
"Just one more plank — I should be able to squeeze through!"
He rushed to the window, wielding the large scissors to pry at the remaining plank, but the ghosts in the hospital seemed determined to toy with him. Suddenly, rapid footsteps echoed from the corridor, closing in fast.
"Hurry!"
Racing against every second, Scissors threw every ounce of strength he had into prying the plank loose. His entire attention was fixed on the window — he never imagined that in only a few seconds, the bathroom door would be smashed open.
The crash made his heart seize. His grip faltered, and the large scissors wedged between the plank and the window frame slipped and plunged straight down!
"Damn it!"