At 11:50 p.m. sharp, Natsume pressed the doorbell of Utaha's apartment.
Opening the door was still that black-haired, black-stockinged upperclassman beauty, but she no longer had the poise and dominance she had shown at school that afternoon when she had publicly declared her claim. She was now dressed in loose loungewear, and the face that usually carried a faint, knowing smile was tight with barely concealed tension and pallor. In her hand she clutched the protective talisman she had bought from Natsume earlier that day. Right now, that scrap of paper was the only thing keeping her steady.
"You… you came," she said, her voice carrying a faint, involuntary tremor.
"Yeah," Natsume replied with a calm nod.
He changed into the house slippers and stepped into the stylishly modern apartment.
He did not pause in the living room. Instead, he walked straight toward the bedroom that was exuding an ominous presence. The moment he stepped over the threshold, his pale blue Six Eyes opened fully, carefully examining the cursed energy woven through the room.
In his vision, this carefully arranged, tastefully decorated bedroom no longer looked anything like it had originally.
A cold, viscous force filled with malice and murderous intent was spreading outward like a spiderweb from the laptop on the desk, covering every corner of the room. Those cursed threads intertwined and resonated with the space itself in an intricate pattern, forcibly "peeling" this bedroom away from the real world and turning it into a sealed, independent barrier.
The dimensions of the entire space were being subtly warped. The edges of walls, ceiling and furniture seemed to ripple behind a thin layer of trembling water, producing a faint but very real sense of unreality. The laptop that served as the source of the curse pulsed with a sinister red glow, beating rhythmically like some twisted heart.
"This is the place…" Kasumigaoka followed behind him, her voice taut. "This room… it all happens here…"
Her eyes were filled with deep, unmistakable fear. Her body unconsciously leaned closer to Natsume, as though only by staying near this boy could she feel even the slightest trace of safety.
"I tried getting away… it did not work…" She sounded like she had fallen back into a nightmare, words tumbling out. "Last night, I tried running to the living room, but it was no use. When the clock struck twelve, some invisible force dragged me back into this room. It was like being grabbed by an unseen hand. No matter how hard I struggled, it… it did not matter at all."
That discovery had been the final blow that broke her resolve.
This was an execution chamber with no escape route, no place to hide, where all you could do was wait helplessly for death to arrive.
"Standard barrier technique. Nothing special," Natsume commented, his tone calm to the point of cruelty.
He glanced at the ornate European wall clock. There were three minutes left until midnight.
"Sit on the bed. Keep your distance from the laptop." He gave a brief instruction.
At this point, Utaha obeyed him without question. She hurried to the far end of the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, hugging her knees tightly to her chest like someone waiting for an inevitable verdict.
Time ticked by, second by second.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The crisp rhythm of the clock's hands now sounded like the footsteps of death itself. Every tick tightened the knot in her chest.. Her breathing grew shallow and rapid. Her heart was pounding violently, as if it would spring out of her throat at any moment.
In stark contrast to her mounting panic, Natsume remained utterly, perfectly calm.
He stood in the middle of the room with his hands buried in his pockets, those pale blue eyes fixed indifferently on the laptop, as if he were simply waiting for some scheduled, tedious play to begin.
Finally, the hour hand, minute hand and second hand overlapped perfectly on the number twelve.
Midnight arrived.
A low hum vibrated through the room.
At that exact moment, the laptop, which had been shut down, flicked on by itself. The screen flared to life.
A blood-red pop-up window suddenly filled the entire display, leering at them like the grin of a demon.
[Do you like… the red room?]
That mechanical, icy, emotionless synthetic voice seeped from the speakers and began to loop through the room like a chant.
"Do you… like… the red room?"
"Do you… like… the red room?"
"Ah…!" Utaha let out a strangled cry.
More terrifying than the voice, though, were the very real changes overtaking the bedroom.
As the curse activated, the entire space began to twist violently in ways that could be seen with the naked eye. The walls swelled and sank as if they had become living flesh. The ceiling light began to sway like the pendulum on a clock. The entire room turned into a warped abstract painting tossed into water.
That sticky, ominous red light exploded in intensity, flooding the room completely and dyeing it the same color as hell.
The fear finally snapped the last of Utaha's composure. She could no longer endure this unnatural horror. Her mind went blank and, driven by instinct, she sprang up from the bed and bolted toward the only figure in the room who made her feel safe, reaching out desperately to grab his arm.
Her fingertips were just about to brush his sleeve when it happened.
A soft yet absolutely irresistible invisible force gently blocked her.
It did not feel like hitting a solid wall, but more like plunging into a mass of incredibly dense air. No matter how hard she pushed, she could not move forward even a fraction of an inch. She was forced to stop less than ten centimeters away from Natsume.
The automatic barrier of Unlimited Void.
Utaha froze. She stared at her hand suspended in midair, unable to touch him, then back at the boy who stood untouched at the center of the warped space, completely unaffected as if he stood outside the chaos entirely. Shock flooded her eyes.
Natsume did not even glance back at her.
All of his attention was focused on the true core of the curse, hidden within the flow of network data.
"Found you."
He spoke three quiet words, then slowly raised his right hand and extended his index finger, pointing at the laptop screen that kept flashing that dreadful red window.
The next instant, he invoked Cursed Technique.
"Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue."
There was no earth-shaking explosion, no world-rending shockwave.
The change took place inside the screen.
On the LCD display, the red pop-up window began to twist and collapse inward from a single point. Every pixel, every speck of light was pulled toward an invisible black hole, spiraling into a deep, spinning vortex.
A tiny gravitational singularity, created by Natsume's cursed energy, formed within the two-dimensional space of the screen.
A shrill, piercing scream burst from the laptop speakers, a horrifying mix of digital static and human hatred.
In Utaha's stunned gaze, the core of the "Red Room" curse revealed itself. It was a disgusting mass of writhing crimson data streams and pitch-black resentment, a cursed amalgam that was being forcibly dragged out of the network world by that irresistible inward pull.
This was not some ghostly, intangible emergence. It was a physical, violent tearing.
The moment the cursed body was dragged clear of the screen, gravitational forces stretched and distorted it, ripping off countless fragments of corrupt code that sprayed out like morbid confetti. It screamed with a sound full of pain and rage, but even then it could not resist the pull of infinity.
Finally there was a soft popping sound.
The repulsive digital-red mass was yanked completely clear of the laptop screen and left hanging in midair.
A manifestation that defied all common sense, shattered every rule she thought the world operated on, something that only a god should be able to do: turning virtual data into a real, physical entity.
It crashed through Utaha's carefully built world of logic and science like a shock she couldn't process.
She stood there, motionless. Her wine-red eyes were opened as wide as they could go, frozen in absolute shock. Her mind was completely blank. Thought itself had short-circuited.
Natsume only gave the struggling, screaming curse a disinterested glance, a trace of faint annoyance flickering in his eyes.
He lifted his other hand and slowly closed his fingers toward his palm.
There was no explosion, no thunderclap.
The curse that had tormented Kasumigaoka Utaha for two whole nights, the powerful, deadly spell that had claimed so many lives in those internet rumors, collapsed like a water balloon being crushed.
It shrank inward, compressing tighter and tighter until it became a tiny black dot, then vanished entirely, collapsed and vanished completely.
As casually as swatting a fly.
With the curse gone, the warped room snapped back to normal. The hellish red light vanished in an instant.
The cursed pop-up disappeared from the laptop screen, replaced once more by the familiar desktop wallpaper featuring illustrations from Utaha's own novels.
In less than ten seconds, the world had been dragged from hell back to the ordinary.
Silence fell, heavy and complete.
Kasumigaoka Utaha turned her head stiffly, staring at the boy who was lowering his hand with the same calm expression as always. For a moment, she genuinely wondered if this was all some absurd dream she had written for herself.
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