The stall door wasn't fully closed.
Time seemed to slow down. A head-on confrontation was seconds away.
After what felt like an eternity, the red figure's body began to lean toward the partition, and at the same moment, Chen Ge raised his tool hammer.
The crimson shadow in his pupils touched the door, accompanied by the creaking groan of a door being pushed open. Every nerve in Chen Ge's body was stretched to its breaking point.
Before the door had even swung fully open, the red figure's body was already tilting inward. Faced with a potential threat, survival instinct drove Chen Ge to react in the most direct way possible.
He brought the tool hammer — raised high above his head — swinging down in a full arc onto the red figure's intruding body, then kicked the stall door wide open!
"Bang!"
The old bathroom stall door couldn't possibly withstand that kind of punishment. The bottom hinge flew off and skidded across the floor, and the entire door slammed into the red figure, which hadn't had time to dodge.
The red figure outside the stall had never expected such a sudden turn of events. Its form turned faint and translucent as it rolled across the ground and fled out of the bathroom.
Chen Ge panted heavily. He'd braced himself for a vicious fight, but the other party turned out to be even more afraid than he was — his sudden charge had apparently terrified it.
"Forget what it is or something?"
Hammer in hand, Chen Ge didn't let his guard down. While the red figure fled, the sound of a child crying echoed from the fifth stall. Those two kids — suspected to be the scrawny black-haired woman's children — were still in the bathroom.
"Stop crying!"
Countless horror movies had featured scenes just like this: eerie weeping drifting out of a bathroom stall. It should have been a terrifying moment, but after Chen Ge bellowed "Stop crying!" with a hammer in his hand, the crying from inside the stall actually stopped.
He stood in front of the fifth stall door, murderous aura practically radiating from him. The two children stood with their hands clamped over their mouths, their pale faces filled with terror.
"What are you two playing the victims for!"
His nerves had been stretched taut by the red figure, and Chen Ge's emotions were slipping out of control. His voice came out a bit too loud, and coupled with the swinging tool hammer, the two kids in the stall were absolutely terrified. Clinging to each other, they scrambled and crawled out of the bathroom in a panic.
"Was I a little too harsh just now?" Those two children were very likely
The two kids ran incredibly fast. Chen Ge chased after them at full speed, and they quickly left the teaching building, darting into the office building next door.
Chen Ge followed close behind. Once he ran up to the second floor of the office building, the two children suddenly vanished.
"How did they just disappear?"
The internal layout of the office building was completely different from the other two structures at Muyang High School. The fire hadn't spread here either, and the surroundings looked relatively clean.
Chen Ge casually pushed open a nearby door and peered inside. The room held two desks and a bookcase, with flowerpots filled with soil sitting on the windowsill.
"They vanished in the blink of an eye. Where could they possibly be hiding?"