Ava acted surprised. “Which Janice? Janice Miller? I didn’t know she was a student… how did she even get in the building?”

Mia’s face went blank, her eyes cold and lifeless, like a dead fish’s. “You don’t know Janice? Weren’t you the one who praised her for being hardworking, since you always see her going back to her room from the first-floor library just minutes before curfew? How… how could you not know her?”

Ava glanced at Mia’s face and caught the signal: she was ready to stab with the fork she was tightening her grip on. The students around them, somehow moving in unison, froze and stared at Ava with those same dead eyes. Even the employees holding plates paused midair. Ava realized this wasn’t a simple confrontation—if she didn’t give a satisfactory answer quickly, she could be seriously injured… or worse.

Ava brought up the nonexistent ‘Janice Miller’, pretending to mix people up, but it turned out that breaking character wasn’t very safe.

“I… I was talking about Janice from my work. I really don’t like her; she keeps finding problems with everything I do. Which Janice are you talking about? My brain’s freezing—I can’t quite remember. Was it Jane that I met the other day? Turns out… not sleeping enough really affects the brain.”

For a second, if a pin had fallen to the ground, it would have been heard. Then her surroundings returned to normal. Students and employees continued with what they had been doing earlier, as if nothing had happened. Mia’s face slipped back into the previous sad expression as she spoke.

“I was talking about Janice Gill, Professor Gill’s daughter. You really should consider cutting down your work hours. It won’t be good if it starts affecting your grades.” She paused briefly, then continued, “Anyway, I was saying that one of the patrolling staff found her four days ago at five in the morning. She was passed out on the floor, blood covering her. Some of the boys who rushed out after hearing the staff member scream said she looked pregnant. She always wore oversized hoodies, but when she fell down the stairs, her clothes shifted.”

Mia lowered her voice. “All the boys denied having anything to do with it, but who knows. Why would she, the perfect honor student, be visiting the fifth floor if not to meet with the father?”

After a while, Ava excused herself, saying she had forgotten about some assignments she needed to finish. As she walked back toward the dormitory, she glanced at the building bathed in warm sunlight. Despite its ordinary appearance, it carried a deeply disturbing presence. The moment one stepped inside, the pressure was immediate and suffocating.

What she had gathered so far by nearly losing a life, being almost violently killed by more than a hundred NPCs was this: Janice was a student living on the second floor, known for being diligent and hardworking. She spent most of her time studying, determined not to let her grades slip, terrified of embarrassing her father or being removed from the program. She rarely interacted with boys. Yet five days ago, she had been found at the brink of death in the stairwell leading to the male foreign students’ floor.

No one had noticed she was pregnant. But the school year had only started two weeks ago. For witnesses to recognize a pregnancy just by looking at her abdomen, she would have had to be at least four months along. That meant the relationship began before the summer break.

Professor Gill was almost certainly the man in the black suit she had seen in the cafeteria.

Janice never returned to school. According to her roommate, who had gone to visit her, Janice was in a coma due to severe traumatic brain injury. Nothing was said about the pregnancy.

The security cameras were still down for maintenance. A virus had been planted in the system a week ago, and the administration was still trying to untangle the damage.

Determined to gather information about the infant, Ava headed to the second floor. She found a group of girls gathered in the laundry room. Acting quickly, she returned to her own room, grabbed the empty laundry basket from the bathroom, dampened a few clothes, and hurried back down the stairs.

She entered the laundry room casually. An empty dryer sat in the corner. She stuffed the clothes inside, leaned against the machine, and began scrolling through her phone as if she had nowhere else to be.

One of the girls whispered, “I swear, I know I wasn’t imagining it. I saw it. I just don’t know if it’s part of some disgusting joke or if it’s really a—” She stopped mid-sentence and rubbed her arms.

Ava looked up. “Sorry to meddle, but are you talking about… you know, the cries at night?”

The girls stared at her in silence.

“I’m Ava, from the third floor,” she added lightly. “The only empty dryer upstairs seems to be broken. I hope you don’t mind me using this one.”

They waved it off, muttering that it was fine.

Ava pressed on. “I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Earplugs make my ears hurt, but when I take them out, I keep hearing these noises. Do any of you know who’s doing this? Seriously, they need to stop. It’s so messed up.”

One of the girls gasped. “That’s exactly what I said. This is too much. I thought I was attending a university full of adults, not hot-headed teenagers who can’t tell when it’s completely inappropriate to joke around.”

The girl who had been whispering earlier spoke again, her voice barely audible. “But what if it isn’t a joke? What if there really is a ghost?”

Ava gave her a silent thumbs-up in her heart. Useful NPC. This was an opening she could dig into.

She frowned, knitting her eyebrows. “What makes you think it’s real? It is scary, sure, but voices and noises can be broadcast through the hallway speakers if someone has the skills.”

The girl hesitated.

“Not just noises,” she said quietly.

Another girl cut her off sharply. “Stop. You’re only going to scare her for nothing. You were probably still influenced by that movie we watched that night.”

The first girl shook her head. “No. I know what I saw with my own eyes.”

She turned to Ava, her expression serious. “You should never, and I mean never, go out at night.”

The laundry room went silent.

“The night of the incident, I tried to sneak out to use the toilets at the end of the hall because Miss Princess here was taking her sweet time in our room’s bathroom. I opened the door, and just as I was about to step outside, a loud, rolling sound came down the corridor. It seemed round, but uneven.”

Her voice trembled. “I froze, thinking I was about to get caught. Then something worse happened. Slowly, a round, bloody thing rolled into view, stopping right in front of my door. I’m sure I wasn’t hallucinating. And it’s not like that was the first horror movie I’d ever seen.”

She swallowed. “When I looked closer, I realized what it was. Brace yourself. It was a baby’s head, lying on the floor.”

One of the girls let out a sharp breath.

“I couldn’t scream. I just froze. I noticed its lips were moving, I had my headphones on and whatever it was saying was so quiet that I couldn’t hear a thing. I was convinced it was chanting a curse at me. That thought gave me a sudden surge of energy. I slowly pulled my legs back inside and closed the door, pretending I hadn’t seen anything at all.”

If Ava could have clapped for her, she would have. Great survival skills. Who doesn’t know that going to the bathroom alone in a shady place is an open invitation for disaster, even if it’s not nighttime? Yet this NPC had survived to tell the story to the players. If it had been a player in her place… they wouldn’t have stood a chance.

The dryer chimed, announcing the end of the cycle. Ava pulled out her clothes, pretending to be startled, and left, claiming she had assignments to finish.

There were arms, not attached to anything. Of course there would be a head. But how was a head supposed to kill her? Bite her to death?

The cries were definitely coming from the head. It was not chanting a curse at the student, but it was not crying either. She had said the lips were moving. But why would it cry at all? What triggered it?

The cries were brief, singular sounds, never lasting more than a minute. And the girl had never stepped outside her room.

Was that the key?

Did it only cry after someone left the safety of their room? Was the head making noise to signal the other limbs to gather? The first arm she had encountered had only restrained her. The other arm must have rushed in afterward, meant to tear out her heart, but only after receiving some kind of signal.

Tonight was going to be a disaster. Four lives remained.

She did not want to use her cards while she still had an advantage in remaining lives. She needed a perfect plan, one that would cost her as few deaths as possible. Maybe she could even carry the remaining lives of this level into the next.

A naive thought.

She had no idea what the night was preparing—not just for her, but for all the players.