amaotonovel Chapter 4655 Desperate Escape (27)
Chapter 4655 Desperate Escape (27)
Chapter 4655 A Deadly Escape (Twenty-Seven)
“I have a feeling we’ve missed some very important information,” Bruce said as he climbed the ladder on the wall of the passageway. “We shouldn’t have rushed. If we had waited, there would have been some interesting developments.”
“What do you want to see?” Schiller asked.
“I wonder if they’ll fix it if the mechanism breaks down,” Bruce said thoughtfully. “That might lead to some backstory.”
“Then we should hurry up and leave,” Schiller said. “If I’m not mistaken, the background will be mentioned in the next room.”
Bruce asked, somewhat puzzled, "How did you know?"
"This instance isn't primarily story-driven; it's mainly about escape rooms and traps. However, if there's no backstory at all, it would feel very forced, so the instance designer might write a simple story. You'd better not have too high expectations."
“Even a simple story is a story, let’s take a look.” Bruce used his hands to support himself at the entrance of the passage and climbed up. Schiller also climbed up, and Bruce pulled him up as well.
After walking a short distance down the corridor, they entered a new room. It was still an empty room, except that a cage was hanging from the ceiling. Bruce was about to go forward to investigate when he suddenly tripped over something, and then the floor in front of him collapsed, causing him to fall directly inside.
“Oh, damn it, what is that!” Bruce’s voice came from below. Schiller peered down and found he had fallen into a slanted hole. There were no walls, just dirt. There were also some broken bricks at the bottom.
The small space below was just big enough for one person to fit in. The room was lit, allowing a vague view of what was below. When Bruce came out, he was carrying a piece of bone.
“There’s a skeleton down there,” Bruce sighed. “It looks like a middle-aged man in his forties or fifties. The marks on his ribs indicate a chest injury. His ankle also looks sprained. More importantly…”
Bruce held up the bone in his hand. It was a very thin bone, clearly not an arm or leg bone. The most conspicuous features were the metal ring fastened in the center of the bone, the iron chain connected to the ring, and the iron spike at the end of the chain.
“He’s holding this.” Bruce pulled out a notebook, which was the corpse’s diary. Since people don’t usually write their names in their diaries, Bruce gave him the code name “Andrew.”
Bruce opened the notebook and, by the light of the fire, read its contents, learning that Andrew was an Afghan veteran suffering from PTSD.
“This character is a bit cliché,” Bruce said. “I bet there are hundreds of movies whose plots are driven by Afghan veterans.”
"It's precisely because the storylines of Hollywood blockbusters are so widely known that level designers use such classic identities. This way, players from all over the world can easily immerse themselves in the game," Schiller explained.
Bruce continued reading. The earlier entries were written with a pen, and they were about how he often thought of his comrades, felt very sad, and lived a life of poverty.
Turning the pages, they finally arrived at the main event. The subsequent entries were all written in blood. Schiller took a look, then said, "It should be blood from the collarbone wound, not blood from the fingertip."
"You can tell that?" Bruce was somewhat surprised. He had indeed never written with blood before, but in his memory, most people who wrote with blood would bite their fingertips to draw blood.
Schiller nodded and said, "If you bite your fingertip, the pain will make your fingers less forceful when writing, and the turns of the strokes will be different from other situations. But if it's fake blood, or blood from other places, it will be much smoother."
Bruce thought about it and agreed that it made sense. The idea of biting your fingertip and using the blood to write was a bit too idealistic. Firstly, the human body has platelets, so the wound wouldn't stop bleeding quickly, and even if you rubbed it vigorously on the paper, you wouldn't bleed much.
Secondly, biting your fingertip hurts so much! While it hurts, you still have to write on paper, so your strokes will definitely be different from usual. Writing a little is fine, but writing too much will not only run out of ink, but your handwriting will also become distorted.
“This can be used to verify whether a blood-written letter left by a victim is genuine,” Schiller said. “It is different from a letter written by the victim himself who bit his finger and had it written by the murderer with his blood.”
“I haven’t encountered a case like this before,” Bruce said. “It sounds like you have, Professor?”
"I am the one who writes with other people's blood."
“I shouldn’t have asked.” Bruce slapped his forehead. How could he have thought Schiller was speaking from a detective’s perspective instead of a murderer’s?
They turned their attention back to the diary and were quickly drawn in by its contents. Andrew had rambled on for a while, but he had only mentioned two things. One was that he had noticed the dungeon was man-made and even heard people walking in the staff passageway, but his partner, his girlfriend Susan, didn't believe him, thinking he was hallucinating due to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Another plan is that Andrew has a scheme to hide in a room, wait for the cleaning staff to appear, and then launch a deadly sneak attack to escape from this terrifying secret room.
Clearly, his plan failed. He did hide in a room, but he probably didn't wait for the employees to arrive and instead waited there to die.
“However, if, as you say, he has a chest injury, then he was probably injured by a steel needle at the door earlier, and he probably won’t live much longer,” Schiller said.
"How could he dig such a big hole?" Bruce glanced back at the hole.
But then he realized what he meant and said, "He wouldn't happen to have the same problem as you, Professor, would he?"
“Post-traumatic stress disorder is indeed a very serious mental problem,” Schiller said. “When it flares up, it is possible to break muscle restrictions. His diary says that his condition was very serious and that he would have an attack whenever he faced death.”
"His girlfriend Susan is dead?" Bruce thought for a moment and said, "Could she have been stabbed to death with a steel needle?"
"Very likely. His girlfriend, Susan, died in the previous room. He escaped by sheer luck, but became ill after witnessing the death. With that brute force, he dug open the floor tiles and made a hole to hide himself."
"But why didn't he wait for the employees? Was the so-called employee passage and the sound of footsteps just his illusion?"
“There are two possible reasons why the employee didn’t show up,” Schiller analyzed. “It’s possible that Andrew didn’t break the rules; he just dug a hole and hid himself, but he’s still in the room. It’s just another way of failing, and the mastermind behind it doesn’t need to interfere.”
“That’s true.” Bruce glanced at the hole again. “No one stopped you when you were digging up the floor tiles. That proves that the secret room doesn’t seem to prohibit destruction.”
“Destruction is not a good choice,” Schiller said, shaking his head. “It is very likely a high-speed train to death. Because it consumes too much energy and is not necessarily effective. Once you are exhausted and have not achieved anything, you will surely die.”
“You could even say that allowing destruction is a trap in itself,” Schiller sighed. “Actually, I’m not very strong anymore. If I hadn’t skipped that hurdle, I might be having trouble moving right now.”
“If it weren’t for your strength, we wouldn’t have been able to get past that hurdle.” Bruce seemed quite optimistic. He said, “Getting through it the normal way wouldn’t necessarily have taken less effort. They might have chosen an even less strenuous method.”
Bruce looked at the diary again and said, "What's another possibility?"
"The staff had already arrived, but Andrew was unable to subdue him. He was killed and thrown back into the pit. The staff filled in the paving stones and ignored him."
“That’s interesting,” Bruce said. “It’s not surprising that the employee was able to subdue and kill Andrew. After all, he was already quite weak, and the manic episode only lasted for a short while. Besides, the employee might have a gun, and even great strength might not be useful. The key question is, why did he leave the body here? It couldn’t have been just to give us a clue, could it?”
"First, let's rule out the possibility that he still has a conscience. If the mastermind behind this is an organization, they wouldn't let a novice do the job of collecting corpses. And those who can do this kind of work rarely have any compassion. Even if they do, it's better to take him out for a proper burial than to leave him here."
"Deliberately throwing it here as a demonstration?" Bruce wondered, but quickly dismissed it. "If they really wanted to demonstrate, there was no need to throw it in the hole. They could just hang it from the ceiling. That would give people a fright."
“If it was neither a sudden pang of conscience nor a deliberate act, then there is only one possibility left,” Schiller said: “It’s not that they didn’t want to take it away, but that they couldn’t.”
Bruce looked down at the iron rod in his hand: "This one belongs to Andrew. This one is rusty." He gently peeled away the rust layer and found something that looked like dried blood.
“It seems like a lose-lose situation,” Bruce said. “The employee killed Andrew, but Andrew also stabbed the employee. His life was more important than collecting the body. He probably rushed off to leave the treatment room, and the body collection wasn’t even finished. But who put Andrew in the hole and then covered it with bricks?”
Bruce continued flipping through the diary. Actually, there wasn't a line at the beginning, but as he continued, he saw a word written in blood on the second-to-last page—"blood".
The word was written rather wildly, with the last stroke erased. Bruce suddenly realized: the two had attacked each other; the employee was injured, and Andrew was also injured, but neither of them died. The employee ran away, and Andrew climbed back into the hole and covered it with tiles, seemingly trying to hide.
“He wasn’t just hiding his own body,” Schiller said, “but this diary, his own speculations and clues. He wanted future generations to continue the investigation.”
"What a brave man," Bruce exclaimed. "But if that employee failed to collect the body, was there no one else? He injured the employee, and nobody came after him?"
"It's highly likely that they didn't have long to live, so there was no need to send people in to kill him. And when they finally remembered that they should have sent people in to collect his body after he died, they had all forgotten about it."
"This is such a shoddy job," Bruce shook his head and sighed. "They just left this body here and are going to abandon it?"
"You're only just realizing they're a makeshift operation?" Schiller sneered. "Anyone with a brain wouldn't use stone bricks when designing an escape room. Would there be so many problems if they used a single piece of steel?"
Bruce was speechless. The monitoring room fell silent as well. Mephisto rubbed his forehead: "Why did we use bricks again?"
Everyone looked at Greed, because he was the one who decided on the art style. Greed scoffed dismissively and said, "What does Arrogance know? High-difficulty dungeons require points to buy tickets. If you don't use models with higher polygon counts, render them more beautifully, reflect the style, and create the atmosphere, and instead just show repetitive steel plates all the way through, who will buy tickets next time?"
Everyone suddenly realized. It's true what they say: you laugh at him for not understanding escape rooms, and he laughs at you for not understanding how to make money.