Takumi walked into the guard booth.
The place was clean and tidy, clearly cleaned on a regular basis.
He saw a table, a bed, a tattered security guard uniform thrown on the floor, and a map on the wall.
The moment his gaze brushed over that map, Takumi had already sensed something was wrong and quickly looked away, so he did not see the map in its entirety.
He took a few steps forward to the table. Lowering his head, Takumi looked at the tabletop before him and saw a sheet of printed paper pressed beneath the glass panel. It originally seemed to have some text written on it, but the words were blurred and impossible to make out.
After a brief moment of thought, Takumi reached out and grasped the edge of the glass panel. He easily lifted the glass panel—at least dozens of pounds in weight—with one hand, then took out the printed sheet beneath it and flipped it over to the back.
...
[I'm in the guard booth. The rules say I cannot leave the Plains, I have to check the lockdown wall once every thirty minutes, I can't go to the Gentle Slope, there is only me, and everything is very new, as if nothing has happened yet…]
The ballpoint pen found inside the guard booth did not have much ink left. After a bit of thought, Fujiwara Chika wrote down her situation on the back of the rules sheet she had only just managed to pull out from under the glass panel, then stuffed it back in.
Because the ink was insufficient, what the girl wrote was fairly brief, but it more or less summarized the rules she had received and some basic details of her current situation.
She did not know whether he would be able to see it.
A trace of unease rose in Chika's heart.
However, that man named Takumi was very capable. He had been able to recognize the assimilation effect of the Explorer outfit on his own, and had continued to investigate and act without fearing any strange phenomena. After realizing that they had been separated, he would certainly think of a way to look for the guard booth—to look for the place where a [security guard] ought to appear.
So if he came looking while she had to go out on patrol later, perhaps the contents written on the paper could help him. And if things were as Chika suspected, then the abbreviated rules she had written down might also prove useful to him.
Fujiwara Chika was a girl with a knack for unconventional thinking.
Born into a family with extremely strict discipline, she had not been allowed to come into contact with video games or other games from a young age, and her recreational activities had been tightly controlled. Yet the naturally playful girl had not been crushed by such upbringing. Instead, in her ongoing battle of wits with her parents and family, she kept searching for loopholes in the rules, eventually becoming a tabletop game expert with deep familiarity with all kinds of word-based games and niche games.
For this very reason, from the moment she encountered rule-based Horror Story phenomena, the girl had been constantly working her mind, thinking about what in these rules could be analyzed and interpreted. However, with only a single set of rules, it was difficult to extract anything truly useful—especially since the rules themselves contained riddle-like phrasing and deliberate gaps, which made her thinking even more difficult.
But at this moment—after putting on the security guard uniform, and after observing that the [Plains] area outside clearly looked as though it was regularly cleaned by people, and that the bedding inside the guard booth was brand new and hardly used—Fujiwara Chika immediately connected these observations to the idea of a division in time and space.
Perhaps Takumi-kun and I are now in two different time–spaces?
After that thought occurred to her, the girl decided to leave her own notes on the rules sheet, to see whether she could leave behind some kind of clue.
She guessed that perhaps she had arrived at an earlier point in this cave's timeline, but it was also possible that the two of them were simply separated into different spaces, still able to sense each other and maintain some form of indirect contact. That was why she had seen someone wearing yellow-striped clothing who looked very much like Shinomiya Kaguya appear.
Next, after searching the room thoroughly, Chika found a total of nine flashlights, each equipped with a large-capacity battery and extremely long endurance. She then sat down on the edge of the bed, looked up at the wall clock in the room, and after confirming that there were still more than ten minutes until ten o'clock, simply sat there quietly waiting on the bed.
Meanwhile, Takumi had already put down the printed sheet.
"Is she in this place?"
His gaze swept over the wall clock in the room—the damaged clock whose hands no longer moved.
After a moment of silence, Takumi reached up and gently adjusted the Rescue Team Badge worn on his shoulder, then summoned the rescue team member he was able to call forth.
"Put on that torn security guard uniform. There's someone who needs rescuing and may be in another space. This uniform might be the key to finding her."
Without hesitation, Takumi issued the order. The rescue team member—whose true nature was itself something strange—immediately moved to comply, picking up the dirty, damaged security guard uniform. After pausing briefly, seemingly somewhat repulsed by it, he finally put it on.
In the next instant, the rescue team member vanished directly from Takumi's field of vision.
...
In her shock, Fujiwara Chika lifted her head and saw the security guard uniform in the corner of the wall swell out of thin air. Then, directly from inside the uniform, a person grew out—a figure wearing a rescue uniform, immediately stretching the already somewhat damaged security guard uniform larger, with indistinct facial features.
"Eh—eh—eh?!"
Having never expected such a sudden situation, the girl instantly shrank back into the corner of the wall, staring in extreme terror at the figure as it approached step by step.
Were those rules wrong?
Or did my attempt trigger some kind of punishment?
Powerless to resist, the girl watched as the tall figure walked up to her, then straightened its body and gave her a slight nod.
[The trapped person has been located. Please wait. I will formulate a reasonable rescue plan together with Captain Takumi, and will definitely rescue you from here.]
Eh?
[For now, please act in accordance with the security guard rules. The rules sheet within the instance has its own special significance. Unless it has already been confirmed that the rules contain serious problems, it is best to follow the rules first to avoid danger.]
Eh—eh?
[I will now read the rules and then leave the guard booth to explore the cave within this time–space. If you encounter any abnormal situation that you cannot handle, please call for rescue immediately. I will arrive at the first possible moment to carry out a rescue.]
Eh—eh—eh?
After saying this entire string of words to her, the figure simply turned and walked away on its own. It went over to the desk to glance at the rules sheet, then walked to the guard booth door, opened it, and went out. In the process, it casually took one of the flashlights Chika had found, then politely closed the door and left directly.
...
"Very good. As long as it can be reasonably explained as a [rescue] action, I can basically fully control that individual's actions."
Inside the guard booth, Takumi sat down on a chair, frowned slightly, and, sensing the actions of the summoned individual under the power of the Obsession Item, felt a subtle sense of relief in his heart.
Wearing different clothes meant possessing different identities.
Originally, he had thought that this rule might only be aimed at players—at humans.
However, now it seemed that even anomalous entities could use this rule to transform their identity, and could even layer it like nesting dolls. As long as the outermost layer of clothing could still be used for identity determination, there was no need to care about what was inside at all. That meant that the rescue team member controlled through an Obsession Item could now freely switch at any time between the two identities of security guard and rescue personnel, freely entering and exiting the different spacetime layers where Takumi and Fujiwara Chika were located.
Since anomalous entities could change identities in this way, were there other methods to exploit the rules as well? For example, could two people hug each other and wear a single, relatively large piece of clothing to obtain the same identity? Or could repeatedly switching among multiple identities suppress the assimilation effect?
These ideas merely went around once in Takumi's mind; he did not actually try to put them into practice.
He turned his head to look at the three new players waiting eagerly outside. After thinking for a moment, he still stood up. Through dual-threaded control, he issued commands in his mind to the rescue team member inside the dark cave, while at the same time speaking with the three of them.
"Mr. Sato, your mental state is still relatively normal, so you'll stay for now. As for you two, you've already started to show signs of forgetting your identity. In other words, you can no longer continue holding the identity of rescue personnel; otherwise, you will definitely forget yourselves completely and never be able to leave. So I need to 'change your clothes.' But changing clothes means changing identity. When that happens, you'll very likely be transported to an unfamiliar area. So think it through—are you willing to take the risk and change the clothes you're wearing?"
Takumi gave a serious warning to the two players who had already forgotten their own names.
Although they were still pure newcomers who had never participated in the game, both of them nodded without hesitation, clearly aware of their current situation.
"Alright then. I hope you can survive. After all, I have many ideas that will only have a chance of succeeding if you help me verify them."
As he said this, Takumi silently took out the Blood Puppet from his watch.
After being cautious for such a long time, it was now about time to take more proactive action.
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