Mai Mingle had never heard of a Nest, much less what these so-called "residents" were, or how dangerous they might be.
'But,' she thought, 'no matter how bizarre things seem on the surface, everything must still obey its own internal logic.'
The hospital in the Nest seemed to operate on the same principles as a real one: press the call bell, and a "nurse"—or rather, "something disguised as a nurse"—would come. And the target of whoever came would be the person who rang the bell.
It was just that in a real hospital, nurses came to care for patients. As for what the "nurses" here were for... she didn't let herself think about it.
'If I can't escape this room, I'll be experiencing the answer firsthand soon enough. Why waste energy thinking about it?'
To escape, she needed to create a few evenly matched competitors for the patient in the next bed.
One truth remained constant, whether inside the Nest or out: an opening only appears when multiple blades cross and clash. A single blade would just cut straight through her without a second thought.
'The real question is: can I squeeze through the narrow gap between the blades?'
Apparently, the red-haired man also understood her intentions behind ringing the bell.
The moment he got his footing, he slammed a heavy kick into bed #2. The locked wheels scraped harshly across the floor, sending the bed and its occupant crashing into the cabinet and bedframe behind it. Amid the crash, he roared without looking back, "Even if you wanted to leave an Illusion, you didn't have to fucking press the bell four times!"
He had a point. To be honest, Mai Mingle was feeling a little regretful herself.
She had just tried to roll off her bed again, hoping to use the opportunity the red-haired man had created to land on the other side of bed #1 and run for the door. But Mai Mingle froze mid-motion, one leg still over the bed.
On the other side of bed #1, a nurse was already standing there.
In her line of sight was the hem of a light-colored nurse's uniform.
She lay frozen on the bed, staring at that patch of fabric. She realized that in just a few seconds, the room had become crowded with people.
Humanoid shadows, far more than four of them, stood silently in the dim ward like a forest that had sprouted from the floor.
In her peripheral vision, she couldn't make out their faces, only the vague shapes of perfectly round, massive, identical heads. Every single head was turned toward the corner of the room where the two breathing, living people were.
'Why are there so many?'
"...Everyone is so enthusiastic. I'm actually feeling much better," she said dryly. "How about a few of you go back?"
As the "nurse" by her bed slowly lowered its neck toward her, Mai Mingle shut her mouth.
A flurry of fragmented, terrifying guesses flashed through her mind, but she never expected that when it lowered its head, she would see a normal, healthy face.
"Where are you feelin' uncomfortable?"
It was a young, soft, round face. It—or should she say "she"?—spoke with a slight Southern drawl, like a new hire who hadn't yet shed her hometown accent.
If she only looked at the nurse's large, slightly downturned eyes, ignoring the round heads in her periphery and the slender, three-to-four-meter-tall black shadow rising in sections behind the red-haired man, Mai Mingle might have believed it was all an illusion—a dream she was having in a hospital bed.
"Get away from that nurse!" the red-haired man suddenly shouted.
Mai Mingle flinched and instinctively glanced in his direction. The red-haired man was somehow halfway up the wall, looking like a bootleg Spider-Man who hadn't quite mastered his powers, his legs dangling awkwardly.
With him on the wall, what was behind him was now exposed: the slender black shadow, its head scraping the ceiling, was walking step by step toward Mai Mingle.
There were residents to the left and right of her bed. The only way out was the foot of the bed—
As if the heavens had heard her thoughts and decided to grant her wish, Mai Mingle's ankle was suddenly seized by something and yanked hard. She fell helplessly back onto the bed, the nurse's face and the ceiling flashing past as she was dragged straight toward the foot of the bed.
Cold and hot sweat broke out all at once. Mai Mingle frantically shot out her hands and gripped the edge of the bed, but all it did was make her palms burn with pain; it didn't slow her down in the slightest.
The thing under the bed gripping her ankles and pulling her toward the end had a strength no human could match. Forget Mai Mingle, even a Marine wouldn't have stood a chance. In her desperation, she yelled, "My ankle!"
The nurse tilted her head.
"My ankle hurts!"
In the space of those few words, most of Mai Mingle's body had been dragged off the bed, her feet nearly touching the floor.
The slender black shadow from the next bed was now standing at the foot of her bed, waiting for her.
Contrary to what she'd expected, it didn't seem to care where she was being dragged. As she was pulled off the bed, her nightgown rode up, revealing her stomach—and the Snake Belt coiled around it.
The slender black shadow reached a hand toward her abdomen.
"Oh?" The young nurse's voice, full of that long, Southern drawl, sounded quite enthusiastic. "Well, if you ain't got an ankle, it can't feel uncomfortable anymore."
Every swear word she had ever been taught a proper lady shouldn't say ran through Mai Mingle's mind.
At the same time, the slender black shadow touched her stomach.
The instant its cold fingertips brushed her skin, Mai Mingle nearly lost consciousness.
It felt as if the fibers of her skin, her blood vessels, and her fascia had all been twisted and contorted into knot after knot by that single, cold touch. Her brain couldn't handle the agony from her gnarled nerve endings, and darkness already clouded her vision.
The little nurse wasn't stopping the slender black shadow, her ankle was about to be done for, and at the same time, she was still being pulled under the bed...
Just as Mai Mingle gave in to despair, in that split second, she heard a howl from under the bed.
The emotion that howl stirred in a person was nearly indescribable. To make an analogy, it was like watching your winning lottery ticket fall into the toilet—that gut-wrenching feeling as you watch it spin away with the piss and shit was roughly what it felt like to hear that howl from under the bed.
But in any case, her feet were finally free.
The little nurse let out a "Hmm?" It had been standing by the side of the bed a moment ago, but now it had moved to the foot and was leaning over to examine Mai Mingle's ankle.
"There's something on your ankle," the little nurse said. "I didn't poke all the way through. Let's try again."
As it spoke, it raised its hand—and for the first time, Mai Mingle got a clear look at it. Sprouting from its wrist was not a hand, but a dense cluster of thick, shining steel needles.
'In that instant, she thought she understood.'
'The nurse tried to stab my ankle with the needles, but there was a pair of hands gripping it. So the needles must have gone into those hands instead...'
Mai Mingle understood, but even though she was no longer being pulled, she was propped up on her elbows with her feet on the floor, barely able to keep herself from collapsing. She couldn't move—the slender patient was standing right in front of her, bent in half, its long fingers peeling off the Snake Belt bit by bit.
The knot-tying agony where it touched her made it impossible to even breathe, let alone run away.
"My stomach," she looked at the dense cluster of needles and forced out the words. "My stomach hurts now... stab my stomach..."
The little nurse either couldn't see the other residents, or it saw them and paid them no mind. It looked down at Mai Mingle's abdomen, raised its syringe-hand high, and stabbed downward.
The slender patient finally stopped trying to remove the Snake Belt. It suddenly whipped its arm toward the little nurse, its limb unfurling in sections as if it had countless hidden joints. It sounds slow, but in the blink of an eye, it pulled a privacy curtain out of thin air, blocking the little nurse and its steel needles behind the fabric.
'What kind of weird tactic is this?'
Mai Mingle didn't dare to just sit there and see if the little nurse could get past the curtain.
She seized the opportunity, scrambling to her feet, darting around the slender patient, and dashing for the door. Only a few seconds had passed since she first saw the nurse, but it felt like the ordeal had taken years off her life.
"You can do it," said a round-headed figure standing in the gloom.
'Like I need your encouragement?'
"You should duck," another round-headed figure said flatly, without moving.
'Who would duck at a time like this—'
Mai Mingle screeched to a halt and dropped into a crouch. She immediately felt a gust of wind whip past her head as something slammed into the doorframe with a THUD.
She was only five or six steps from the door, but she was forced to turn back. Frustrated, Mai Mingle shot a quick glance back and saw what looked like a pale hand on the doorframe, attached to an extremely long arm.
Spiderweb cracks spread across the wall around the doorframe.
If she hadn't ducked, that hand would have hit the back of her head, splattering her against the doorframe like a fly.
'Wouldn't you know it, I actually did need their encouragement.'
"Hey, kid!" Mai Mingle called out as she ran toward the group of motionless, round-headed figures. "What's the deal with these big heads?"
Behind the round-headed figures, a shadow suddenly moved. Just as Mai Mingle was startled, she heard the shadow speak, hissing as if in pain. "I've never seen this type of resident. I don't know either."
It was the red-haired man. He had come down from the wall at some point and seemed to have been injured in the process. He'd probably moved toward the group of round-heads in the center of the room to avoid the slender patient, and was now separated from her by a few of the figures.
Mai Mingle badly wanted to ask him what kind of residents he *had* seen and what residents even were, but now was clearly not the time. The slender patient had already turned its head in their direction, its crown scraping against the ceiling with a SHH-SHH sound.
As if terrified of it getting close, the red-haired man quickly slipped between the round-headed figures. His face was ashen and slick with sweat as he sidestepped through the crowd toward the door, careful not to touch any of their bodies.
Mai Mingle followed his lead and quickly entered the forest of round heads.
The moment she got a clear look, it felt as if her internal organs had lost their support and plummeted into the pit of her stomach.
The reason she'd thought they were all identical was because in the dim light, each head had been a perfectly round, monstrously large silhouette. But up close, she saw that the round-heads were male and female, old and young, with distinct faces.
It was just that their once-normal human skulls and facial bones had been separated into pieces. Something like a ball of gas from underneath had then inflated the skin, forcibly stretching the shattered bones and human flesh into a standard sphere. The shapes of the fragmented, scattered bones were still visible under the skin, reminiscent of tectonic plates drifting on the Earth's surface.
Their eyes, one on the left and one on the right, were embedded on opposite sides of their skulls like two blisters on the flesh, and they swiveled to follow Mai Mingle's movements. Their nasal bones were split down the middle, creating two crooked, elongated nostrils stretched across their "faces."
Their mouths, however, were normal. Beside the corners of their lips and all over their faces were long, deep-purple, sunken lines—stretch marks from where the skin fibers had torn.
A sudden guess surfaced in Mai Mingle's mind. 'Were these things originally human?'
The red-haired man bypassed the last round-head, left the crowd, and was now striding toward the door. "Sorry, you're the resident's target. There's nothing I can do. If I ever see your corpse, I'll bring it back to Blackmoor City for you."
He really wasn't the target. He was almost at the door, and the slender patient was ignoring him completely.
The nurse was still standing blankly behind the privacy curtain, only its shoes visible. The two hands that had reached out from under the bed were also motionless.
Only the slender patient paced slowly in front of the group of round-headed figures, as if waiting for an opportunity to strike at Mai Mingle.
"It can't get in," the round-head standing to Mai Mingle's left said suddenly, almost as if to comfort her.
The one on her right said, "We'll surround you,"
A round-head behind her finished the thought: "and walk to the door together. Then you can get out."
'They may be ugly, but they're unreasonably nice, and their idea isn't bad either.' Mai Mingle lowered her head, stared at the floor, and a thought from a short while ago flashed through her mind again.
'No matter how bizarre things seem on the surface, everything must still obey its own internal logic.'
She snapped her head up and yelled, "Hey, kid, stop! Don't you dare walk out that door!"