Dark, damp, closed. Eyes open, consciousness returning. Erik had just regained consciousness when he felt a sharp pain in his right shoulder.
He turned his head and saw an iron ring as thick as two fingers pierced through his collarbone, the chain rusted, with the other end nailed to the wall. The iron pin had deeply embedded into the wall, though slightly crooked, it was unbreakable.
The chain was less than a meter long, his right hand couldn't fully extend, and he could only sit against the wall. Within the reach of his left hand, he could only touch one leg of the bed.
"Damn it..."
He couldn't help but mutter to himself. Just slightly turning his head would tug at the muscles in his shoulder, causing him so much pain that he felt dizzy, barely able to concentrate.
Erik took a deep breath and started analyzing what exactly was going on at the beginning of this situation. He scanned the room with his eyes, and upon seeing the iron bars on one side of the wall, realized he was in a cell.
There was no light source inside the cell, only a torch on the wall outside to the right, but the flame was weak, only illuminating the area near the bars. After his eyes adapted to the darkness, he could barely make out half the room.
Erik discovered he was fixed to the right wall of the room, positioned in the middle, with a bed on his left, and to the left of the bed was a small bedside table, and nothing else.
Using his intact left hand, he slowly felt around the damp floor until he grabbed the bed leg. His index finger touched some uneven areas on the inside of the leg, as if something had adhered there.
Erik pulled his hand back, sniffed his fingertips, and smelled an unusual putrid scent. He thought, the leg was metal; even in a damp environment rusting shouldn't produce such a scent, it was more like the smell of decaying food.
He was familiar with this smell. Back in the concentration camp, he salvaged edible scraps from the slop thrown away by soldiers countless times to fill his stomach. In his childhood, he knew the stages and scents of food decay intimately, though those years had long passed, and his memories were now faint and unclear, but picking up this scent again brought the past rushing back.
But how could food be stuck to the inside of a bed leg? Whether the character he was playing had been locked here before or not, getting food to that spot was completely illogical. Under such harsh conditions, not a morsel of food could be wasted. Erik had seen too many people fighting over food like dogs.
He continued to endure the pain and shifted his body, trying to stretch the chain to its limit, leaving more room for his left hand to move. Erik had always been able to endure pain, not entirely due to his childhood experiences, but because he always wanted too much, and physical pain couldn't take up any space in his mental anxiety.
Erik took a deep breath and continued to feel around the bed leg, scratching at the uneven place with his fingernail.
He felt something fall, and the surface of the bed leg showed a distinct indentation.
He continued to scratch forcibly until he finally felt a large lump fall off, resembling tightly packed bread. When he reached out to feel again, a hole appeared where the unevenness had been.
"Ah, a common trick." Erik leaned against the wall, struggling to lift his eyelids, allowing the sweat from pain to flow down the sides of his eyes, "In Virginia prisons, inmates would hide important items inside table legs, usually using the handle of a hidden spoon to hollow out the inside of a table leg, thus easily evading the guards' eyes."
Erik searched the hole but found nothing inside. So, he felt the lump of bread. After crushing the bread, he found a small key that felt like the cell door key.
Unfortunately, even with the key, he couldn't escape because he was nailed to the wall. Due to the height restriction of the chain, he couldn't even stand up; he was at least two meters away from the cell door.
This wasn't supposed to be a death trap. Erik began feeling the range of the wall his left hand could reach, the floor covered in fine gravel, scraping his skin painfully, yet he found nothing. He turned to look at his right side, and in the faint light outside the right side of the cell, he saw at the end of the wall there was a brick that seemed different.
Erik flipped around, facing the wall, reaching out with his intact left hand, trying to reach that brick. But he found even with the chain stretched to its maximum, he was still one palm short of the distance.
This distance wasn't exactly long nor particularly short. There was no way he could reach it by pushing his body to the limits. Erik didn't want to immediately lose one side of his collarbone, so he had to use a tool.
But within sight, he saw no tools he could use. There were no cushions or mats on the bed, and nothing under the bed. The metal bed frame was very heavy, simply impossible to lift.
Erik looked at the key in his hand again. In typical puzzle games, the initial tool you get always has some use besides solving the final puzzle. Thinking along this line, the key must have some other function besides opening the door.
This was just an ordinary key, with a metal loop bent out of the top and key teeth below. Erik rubbed the key teeth and discovered the tip of the key was triangular, and quite sharp at the base.
Erik immediately realized. The entire cell was made up of bricks about the length of an adult's forearm, with gaps between them, but perhaps due to age, they weren't filled with cement or anything like that, just ordinary dirt. This meant with some effort, the bricks could be pried out.
In the basement of a Balkan Peninsula forest village, he had once used this trick to ambush militias, simply loosening the dirt between the bricks; when someone was kicked into the wall, the entire wall would collapse, burying the person. When taken by surprise, even armed enemies were powerless to fight back.
Erik didn't choose the brick closest to his left hand because his arm couldn't extend fully and his digging speed wouldn't be fast enough. He chose the brick to the left of that one, the distance was suitable, and his arm could exert force easily.
Erik began digging along the bricks. The soil filling the gaps wasn't exactly loose, but it was workable. Judging by the feel, the bricks weren't very thick either, and he estimated he could dig it out in about ten minutes.
But Erik felt things weren't that simple. Even though he started out by getting his collarbone pierced and had to endure severe pain to deduce and do this and that, he felt that the current difficulty was still a bit too easy, not even comparable to when he was being hunted by an arms dealer in Honduras and had to escape from a shipping container.
What about Charles? Where did Charles go? They both entered the scenario together, it didn't make sense for him to escape here while the other could just sit back and enjoy. Charles was probably facing a lot of danger too.
With this in mind, he decided not to conserve his strength and began digging as fast as he could. Counting seconds in his head, by around the seven-minute mark, the bricks were already movable. At the ten-minute mark, he finally managed to dig out a brick.
The brick was quite heavy, and when he turned around, he had to stretch out his arm and lift the brick to reach another brick. Having just gone through a long excavation, his hand was already a little sore, and he attempted several times without successfully touching it.
Erik took a short rest for several seconds, breathing heavily, with sweat soaking through his gray T-shirt. He gritted his teeth, lifted the brick again, and smashed it toward the unusual brick. With a "bang," that brick was dented in.
Erik let out a sigh of relief; his thinking should be correct.
"Bang, bang, bang." After striking three or four more times, with a "clang," the brick surprisingly fell to the other side. Then, a large amount of water burst out from the gap.
Is the other side a water prison? But something still seemed off. Erik strained to turn his head and look up; the wall he was leaning against was definitely thicker than this. If there were only one layer of bricks, his previous hammering would have been enough to collapse the wall.
As Erik pondered what exactly was going on, a hand brushed through the gap left by the fallen brick and extended through.
Erik was initially surprised, his eyes widening, but soon he made out in the faint light from outside the door that it was Charles' hand, he recognized it.
The other person made a gesture toward him, which Erik immediately understood. He himself had one shoulder injured, and it was very likely that the other couldn't speak, indicating that he might be submerged in water. Unfortunately, within this scenario, his abilities were restricted, and Charles had no way to communicate with him telepathically.
Soon, an object extended through the gap left by the fallen brick. Squinting, Erik took a careful look and realized it was a crowbar. But what was it meant to pry open?
Erik looked around and suddenly remembered that the corner of the bed where he had previously gouged out a piece of bread had a hole; the remaining connecting part wasn't very strong. He just needed to fit the curved front of the crowbar into the hole, and he should be able to break off the bed leg.
But this was irreversible. Erik needed to know the purpose of breaking off the bed leg. Nothing above the bed seemed to provide any clues, so Erik strained to look underneath the bed. His collarbone twinged with pain, but more so with numbness. Seeing Charles gave him a mental boost, and the dopamine almost made him forget the pain.
At this moment, Charles' hand reached in again and pointed toward the head of the bed. Erik roughly understood, and after observing carefully, he discovered that the bed originally only had three legs.
Now, the leg on the lower left had a hole dug into it, and the upper left one didn't have a leg at all. Three legs could barely provide stable support, but if the lower left leg also broke, the whole bed would topple to the left. But what was the point of collapsing it?
Just then, Charles made another gesture—"Hurry!"
A red alert went off in Erik's mind. He knew Charles very well; if it wasn't a matter of life and death, Charles would never rush him to solve a puzzle. His most frequent phrases were "Take your time," "Don't rush, Erik," "Things will get better soon"—something must have happened on his end!
In his anxiety, Erik noticed in the darkest corner, which was the upper left corner of the bed, something like a lever that was now raised. If the bed fell, it should hit that lever, which must be connected to something.
Erik no longer hesitated, picked up the crowbar, hooked it into the hole, and began to pry outward forcefully. The bed leg was slowly bending, but the speed was too slow. Erik couldn't wait any longer, gritting his teeth and with a fierce determination, he pounded on the bed leg.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
In just three strikes, the bed leg collapsed entirely. With a "bang," the bed crashed down to the left. The moment the lever was struck down, filthy and muddy water gushed from a nearby gate, spraying for dozens of seconds before finally stopping after almost flooding the room's floor.
Since he was not far off, Erik was drenched, but he heard a low exhalation from the other side.
"Are you okay, Charles?" he leaned against the wall, gasping for breath, and asked.
"I'm okay, I was just trapped in the water prison, only my hand could move, and the water level was rising. Had you been ten seconds slower, I might have drowned." The other person's breathy voice carried a moist chest sound but was still gentle.
Erik let out a long sigh of relief; luckily, he was quick enough. Every decision he made was done swiftly and executed resolutely; had he been any slower, his teammate would have been killed right out of the gate.
Both men fell into silence for a second, realizing simultaneously just how difficult this game would be.