Her eyes shot open… At first, all she saw was darkness, but when her eyes adjusted, she saw there were wooden boards above her… No, that was the bottom of a bed. She was in a bunk bed, on the bottom.
Takina Inoue sat up. She was dressed casually in a shirt and knee-length shorts made from jersey fabric. Where was she? She tried to remember, but she couldn’t. Her brain felt foggy, maybe because she’d only just woken up. She looked around the room for clues.
“It looks like…a log cabin?”
It seemed so, with all walls made of logs. There was a window with the curtains drawn. Faint light was shining through the gaps—moonlight, Takina guessed. She thought she might remember where she was if she looked outside, and she pushed the covers off to get up from the bed when, suddenly, an upside-down head dangled in front of her.
“Takina, you awake?”
It was Chisato, looking down at her from the top bed. Takina pushed Chisato’s head aside and got off her bed. The wooden boards felt cold to her feet, and she wished she had sandals to put on. Looking around, she saw two pairs of sneakers lying on the floor—one pair hers, and the other presumably Chisato’s. She got her sneakers and put them on her bare feet.
Chisato, her head still dangling from the edge of the bed, grabbed the side of the bed frame and flipped onto the floor. Then she put on her sneakers, too.
“What is this place again?” Takina asked her.
“Huh? What’s the matter, Takina? Are you still half asleep? We’re in… Er… This is funny… I can’t remember?”
Chisato was also in her loungewear—a camisole and shorts. She had her hair in pigtails. If they’d been sleeping in that unheated cabin dressed so lightly, it must have been warm when they went to bed, but it wasn’t quite summer yet… At least, Takina didn’t think it was summer, but she wasn’t too confident. Her memory seemed so unreliable that if someone told her it was summer, she would have readily believed it.
“Hmm… Where are we, indeed?”
“Have you been awake all night?”
“Nah, I only woke up just now, when I sensed you getting up.”
“I’m sorry I disturbed your sleep.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that… But this is weird. Why can’t we remember anything?”
Chisato pulled the curtains open. Pale light from the moon poured into the room. They looked out the window. It seemed they were in the woods.
The situation was becoming stranger and stranger. Takina couldn’t remember coming to this log cabin or even going to a forest.
Chisato opened the window and leaned out of it to take a better look around…and she suddenly dished out her powerful right straight punch at someone who had appeared just outside. Without a second’s delay, she stepped back, away from the window.
“Crap, that was a reflex…!”
The person outside groaned indistinctly when Chisato attacked, then disappeared from view…probably having sunk to their knees.
“Uh… Are they okay…?”
“You didn’t hold back with that one…”
“I felt like it really went in, in a gross way.”
It sounded like she thought she might’ve broken the person’s vertebrae.
Chisato fearfully approached the window… She wasn’t afraid of the stranger outside, but of the fact that she might’ve done something really bad without thinking. She looked down and froze in place, beckoning Takina to come closer.
Takina lined up with Chisato and looked out at the ground below…where a large man in tattered clothes was crawling.
Making no sound, Chisato pointed with her finger at something down below—a nata as long as a sword…no, a machete was stuck in the ground.
“Is that…?” Takina began, but, as if on cue, the large man grabbed the hilt of the machete, pulled himself up to standing, and swung the blade at Takina and Chisato, who were watching him from the window.
“Whoa!”
Both girls leaned back to dodge the slash, after which they promptly withdrew farther into the room.
“Chisato! We’re under attack! We need to get our gear… But where is it?”
Takina looked around the room, but there was nothing besides their sleepover kit bag, which they normally kept at Café LycoReco. Their satchels with all the Lycoris equipment were nowhere to be seen. Takina checked their beds, even looking under the pillow, but she couldn’t find their guns.
“Chisato! This is really bad!”
“Nah… Looks like we’re safe for now.”
Takina turned around. Chisato was leaning so far out of the window, Takina could see only her legs and bottom.
The man with the machete had run off into the dark forest. Chisato pointed in the direction he’d gone for Takina to see. The log cabin was in a small clearing, but the woods around it were dense and pitch-black. The man had completely disappeared in the darkness.
Chisato withdrew back into the room and crossed her arms pensively.
“You know what this reminds me of…?”
“Horror movies about killers?”
“Exactly!”
“…Why are your eyes sparkling with excitement?”
“Why? Takina! We have a log cabin in the woods, and we have a psycho killer! This is what every girl has dreamed of at least once!”
“…I don’t think that’s a true statement.”
“Wait, what?! When watching a movie, did you never think to yourself, ‘In their place, I’d do this,’ or ‘They could’ve done that instead’?”
“I did sometimes feel frustrated with the characters. With the bad choices they’d make.”
“Like, ‘I’ve got enough of this! I’m going back home!’”
“They’re earmarking themselves as the next victim.”
“No, that’s more of a giveaway that they’re the killer!”
“Ah, yes, there were movies like that. Well, anyway, where were you going with that?”
“I was just saying, it can be so annoying how characters act in the movies. You can’t help thinking you’d do better than them, and this is it, our chance! We finally get to be in that situation ourselves!”
As Takina watched Chisato get overly excited, she finally made sense of what was happening.
“Chisato, I think this is a dream.”
“Exactly, that’s what I’m saying!”
Takina was fairly sure there could be no other girl in the whole wide world besides Chisato who’d think being targeted by a killer while unarmed was a dream-like situation. Normal people would at best be confused by a dangerous situation like this. At worst, they’d give in to despair.
“You misunderstand. I meant a dream as in what you see when you’re sleeping. I think we’re really asleep right now.”
“Yeah, I guess this can’t be real. We can’t remember how we got here, for starters. But anyhow! That’s fine by me!”
“I don’t see any positives in this.”
“You should! Dream or not, let’s make the most of it!”
“But it’s just a dream…”
“So? Do you want to just let the killer get you?”
“That…doesn’t sound very appealing.”
“See, it doesn’t matter if it’s a dream or reality. But there’s no point in being so negative! Listen, there are two patterns for slasher movie endings. The protagonists either manage to escape from the killer or defeat the killer.”
Even if it was a dream, Takina didn’t entertain the thought of dying, and if she didn’t want to get killed, she’d have to fight back or run away. She’d be acting the same as in real life.
“By the way, what is a ‘slasher movie’?”
“You don’t know? A type of horror where a killer hunts the protags.”
“How is that different from the splatter movies Kurumi likes?”
Takina was slightly more familiar with the term “splatter movie.”
“Oh, that can be a little confusing, but basically…”
Chisato explained that slasher movies were named so after the slashing action performed by a serial killer. The distinctive feature of splatter movies, on the other hand, was blood gruesomely splattering left and right.
“So there are a lot of movies that fit both categories, but if there’s only mild gore, with the killer cutting up victims without much blood shown on the screen, then that’s not a splatter movie.”
“The two categories indicate differences in content but belong to the same genre?”
“Yeah. It’s like with ramen. Jirou’s ramen and Hakata’s pork bone broth ramen are both ramen, but different types.”
“Both slasher and splatter movies are heavy on the violence…”
Now she understood the difference, Takina thought the fact that the splatter category existed meant there was an audience craving to see that sort of gore. People were strange creatures. How could they enjoy that sort of content…? But then it occurred to Takina that maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the splatter category existed so that people who wanted to see scary movies about killers but didn’t like gore would know which movies to avoid.