Horror Game Developer: My games aren't that scary!

Chapter 675: Walking Disaster [5]

The monitoring room was far different from what I had originally expected. I had thought it would be filled with monitors displaying every detail of the facility, but that assumption turned out to be wrong.

The room itself was fairly large, about the size of a tennis court, with several people moving across it.

At the center stood an enormous metal table, its surface dark and smooth, projecting a detailed map of the entire facility in cold blue light. Scattered across the map were numerous red dots, clustered in dense groups along certain corridors and thinning out toward the edges.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw them, but I quickly relaxed once I realized they marked the positions of cameras and monitoring devices. As my gaze moved across the display, the captain walked ahead.

“We’re here, sir. If there’s anything you’d like to check, please let me know or inform the engineers. We’ll work quickly to help you find the root of the issue.”

“Mhm.”

I nodded faintly and followed, scanning the room as I went. The personnel here didn’t strike me as particularly dangerous. Ordinary staff, from what I could tell, without the kind of presence that signaled real combat capability. The only one that gave me pause was the captain, and even then, I placed him at roughly my level.

That was only my assumption, though.

I couldn’t afford to treat assumptions as facts.

Not here.

Not with this much at stake.

I needed to understand the room fully before I made any decisions, which meant I needed time, and that wasn’t something I was sure I had.

“Let’s see. The room of interest was Sector 3, Patient Room 57.”

The captain stopped at the edge of the table and pressed his palm flat against the surface. The map shifted smoothly, folding away to make room for something else, and a holographic log bloomed upward above the table in a column of pale light.

“Have a look, sir.”

I stepped forward and studied it.

Most of it was dense with technical notation I couldn’t understand. Layered timestamps and system codes that meant nothing to me on the surface. But I could still pick out certain things.

Patterns.

Breaks in the pattern.

And there, near the middle of the log, I spotted an anomaly. Three seconds where the data simply stopped.

Those were the three seconds where I had made my move.

“As you can see, there was a three-second gap where the recording device failed,” The captain said, his voice even as he scanned the log.

Pointing at it, he continued.

“This outage didn’t occur anywhere else in the facility. Only in that room.”

He paused.

“That alone is what prompted our investigation. Of course, isolated failures do occur from time to time. But it’s always better to be cautious.”

“Mhm.”

I nodded again, my eyes still scanning the log. I wasn’t going to understand all of it standing here, but I committed as much as I could to memory. Its structure. The way the timestamps were formatted. Where the gap sat in relation to everything around it. I needed to understand how this system worked before I touched anything.

“Let’s review the footage inside the room.”

All of a sudden, the captain moved, his fingers stretching as the log expanded before our very eyes.

“A before-and-after comparison should reveal any discrepancies.”

My mind jolted upon hearing his words, but before I could even respond, he had already begun playing the recording, and the entire scene unfolded in holographic form for everyone to see.

My back straightened just a little.

I was confident I hadn’t left anything obvious behind. I had been careful. But confidence didn’t mean anything, and the longer that footage played, the more I became aware of how little margin of error I had.

A single overlooked detail was all that was needed for everything to fall apart.

Despite all of this, I still remained calm.

I had already run the entire scenario inside my mind multiple times.

From the corner of my eye, I tracked an approaching figure.

He wore a dark suit, neatly ironed. Several of the staff here were dressed similarly, blending with everyone else in the room. His eyes were fixed on the tablet in his hands, fingers moving across it in small, absentminded gestures.

He wasn’t looking around and wasn’t paying attention to anything beyond whatever was on that screen.

Just another person doing their job.

‘I think he should do.’

I tapped my foot on the ground. But for another reason, as I quickly connected with Mirelle.

That was the exact moment something changed.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Several beeps erupted across the room in quick succession, cutting through the silence in the surroundings. Around me, heads raised, and fingers froze over their displays.

Alarms layered over one another, each one feeding into the next.

The captain’s head snapped up at the same time.

“Again?”

He swiped his hand across the table in a single fluid motion, dismissing the footage and pulling up the live logs. The hologram shifted rapidly, columns of data cascading upward as the system updated in real time. His eyes moved across it quickly, scanning, and then stopped.

His head turned toward me.

“It’s happening again, Enforcer.”

His voice was tight while he shifted his attention back and forth between me and the logs.

“We’ve lost connection with room 57.”

The room had gone very still.

Every pair of eyes had now shifted towards the main table, staring at the message error.

I kept my attention on the logs, letting my expression settle into something grave as I began barking orders of my own.

“Tell the people waiting by the door to enter immediately and check what’s going on inside.”

My voice came out lower than I meant it to, but I quickly recovered as I stared at the captain while taking a small step back.

“In the meantime, have everyone present look at the logs. I want to know if this is isolated to room 57 or if it’s spreading elsewhere. Quick!”

I clapped once, and everyone got busy at work. That was also the moment I turned back to the man I had eyed before and pressed my hand against his shoulder.

“Hurry up and get to your station. Every hand is crucial.”

I opened my hand.

A small red ball sat in my palm. The man’s eyes dropped to it, and his entire body froze mid-step, expression going slack. He simply stopped, like something had been switched off behind his eyes.

The room carried on around him.

Nobody noticed.

I nudged his shoulder and placed the ball right onto his breast pocket.

He snapped out of it and continued walking without a word, as though nothing had happened.

I closed my hand and moved back towards the captain as he communicated with the comms, his voice reaching my ears.

“What do you mean, nothing?”

The captain’s voice had dropped, but the tension in it hadn’t. He pressed two fingers against his ear, listening as his brow furrowed at the response coming through.

“You’re saying there’s nothing inside?”

There was another pause.

“Osvald is still there?”

He swiped across the table, pulling the live feed back up. The connection had restored itself, the data flowing cleanly again as though the interruption had never happened. His eyes moved across it rapidly, searching for something.

“I’ve got the monitoring service back on. I can see everything. You’re right. There’s nothing. Are you sure nothing happened? How is this⎯!!”

He was never able to finish his words.

A loud, smashing sound tore through the room, causing several people to flinch visibly.

BANG!

As all heads turned, they focused on a single individual.

He had both hands wrapped around the back of a chair, his knuckles white, and before anyone could react, he slammed it down onto the control panel with everything he had. The impact was brutal. Sparks erupted as the station shattered apart, startling everyone present.

“⎯⎯!!”

“Y⎯!”

But before anyone could say a thing, he brought his chair up again and smashed down.

BANG!

Another thunderous crash echoed through the room. As I stared in his direction, I brought a hand to my lips, feeling a headache begin to creep in.

‘Ah, this is really hard on my nodes.’