A single, sputtering lamp cast shadows against the clutter of medical supplies, half-empty bottles, and half-labeled vials.

  Beneath the pale light, Tinope Res lay on a narrow cot, his shirt cut away to reveal layers of bandages across his abdomen. His face was sunken, breath ragged, on the brink of consciousness.

  Ives, frozen at the entrance, tried to take in every detail of the man who, not that long ago, had been nothing more than a phantom “murder victim.” Now, she could see that he hadn’t actually died—yet.

  Ace closed the door behind them, exhaling only once, short and controlled, as his gaze swept the room. No words passed between him and Ives. They took in the scene: The tubes taped haphazardly to Tinope’s arms, the disorganized pill bottles scattered by an old desk, the brittle hush of machinery that apparently tried—and failed—to sustain him. Tinope looked too far gone for questions; each shallow breath sounded too weak to keep him tethered to life.

  Tammy lingered a few steps away, pressing himself against the wall as though wanting to vanish from sight. Ives saw him glance at Tinope, then at Ace, and give a minuscule, submissive nod. She took a shaky breath and found her voice.

  “Now, tell us what happened,” she said, voice steadier than she felt.

  Tammy hesitated. “I…”

  “You’re not exactly in a state to refuse.”

  At her words, Tammy snuck a glimpse at the white-haired man behind her, then sighed in resignation.

  “As you may know, I became the Crisis Team’s leader barely a month ago. The old leader was fired due to mismanagement and confidential leaks, so I took over after minimal experience on the team,” Tammy said, his voice coarse. “It was a sensitive time for me.”

  His gaze landed on the man lying on the bed, whose body was hooked up to all sorts of tubes and lines.

  “Wanting to impress the bosses, I decided to stay after hours last night to finish analysing some documents. My work cubicle was a few floors below the Mister Res’s office, and when I finished the work, it was already past midnight,” he continued. “Normally, I would have gone home and just given the papers to him tomorrow, but the company event was coming up, and things were bound to be busy, so I decided to place it in his office so it was the first thing he’d see the following morning.”

  The consistent bleeping of the monitor echoed throughout the room.

  “The founder’s office is on the top floor. To get there, I had to switch elevators on the 46th floor, which also has a mini-lab built for private experiments. The mini-lab is closed access, available only to the two founders.” Tammy breathed out from his nose, lips quivering. “In order to get to the office, I had to pass by the mini-lab.

  “That’s when I saw it.”

  “The argument?” Ives asked, but Tammy shook his head.

  “The crime scene.”

  Ives’s face stiffened. Unaware of her reactions, the man continued.

  “It was already half past three in the morning, so my first reaction was that an intruder had made their way into RESOLVE to steal data. We’ve been having some security issues with other rival companies, you see.” Tammy pursed his lips. The pale light reflecting off his face made him seem like a senile old man. “But when I got closer, I heard Mister Res’s voice. He sounded like he was in pain.

  “I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew I had to help somehow. So I rushed into the room—the door was surprisingly unlocked, he probably didn’t have time to lock it—and saw him leaning against the counter with a knife deep into his stomach.”

  As he spoke, Tammy’s voice grew heavy, as if reliving the scene. He wiped the cold sweat off his forehead.

  “My mind blanked immediately. All I could see was the red liquid pouring onto the floor and the life leaking out of the man. But then, I recall vaguely hearing another voice,” he said shakily. “I forced my eyes away from the blood to the source of the voice. That's when I noticed it—a second person in the room.”

  Under their gazes, he slowly turned his head towards Ives. His brows furrowed together, bold creases forming on his forehead. Ives knew what he was going to say next.

  “It was you, Miss Ives.”

  The room was still, so quiet that the only thing Ives could hear was her own heartbeat.

  She grabbed the edge of a nearby table for support. Ace, noticing, hooked a hand under her collar in a brusque but steadying gesture, silently asking if she could stand. She nodded, forcing a thin smile.

  She cleared her throat.

  “I remember now. Tinope Res—he wasn’t just a philanthropic CEO.” She let her gaze rest on Tinope’s unconscious face, and in a flash, she remembered the night she arrived at his mansion. “He adopted me from the orphanage. But not because he wanted to give me a normal life.”

  She blinked over and over, the images sharper now. The scandal around RESOLVE was real, but few knew how deep it went.

  Tinope had used her as a test subject in secret.

  Thinking back now, she could see the beep of machines in a hidden lab, the prick of a needle, him calling her precious in a voice that was half paternal, half… something else.

  Closing her eyes, she could see Tinope reading her a story in his office, hear his gentle tone by her ear. He’d stopped experimenting on her for a while now, perhaps due to some belated sense of conscience or his own distorted feelings.

  That night, he had led her into the mini-lab, intending only a check-up. But then she saw herself, gripping a knife—a scalpel maybe—suddenly lunging, driving it into his torso. The hot sting of blood on her hands.

  Ives shut her eyes, fighting back a wave of nausea.

  Ace advanced, his calmness wildly contrasting with the air in the room. He scanned the tubes leading into Tinope’s bandages.

  “So you decided to keep it secret all on your own?”

  A flicker of guilt played on Tammy’s features.

  “I had no choice. Everything happened so quickly. He—Tinope Res—was on the ground, bleeding non-stop. But I knew that he’d saw me as well.” His words shook, betraying a fear that still lingered. “I was just unlucky. I’d already overheard the argument between him and Masen in the main office a few days ago. Masen demanded that he stick to the plan, not vanish on a whim, and hand the company over. Tinope was furious… I heard them shout. Then, Masen stormed out.

  “After that, Tinope spotted me. He promised me I’d be safe if I stayed quiet—hinted that if I told anyone, I might lose more than my job. And then, this.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Tammy dropped his hands to his side.

  “I was just…in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Suddenly, Ives’s heart lurched. A wave of recollection flooded her, and her knees quivered.

  “He talked about rebranding the whole company… Renaming it to something else altogether. He had planned to leave everything to Masen and Carrie, then disappear with you.” He looked at Ives with an apologetic look. “That was the announcement he’d planned to unveil at the event, but…”

  “But the night before it, I stabbed him.” Ives finished for him. “The serum side effects… I lost control.”

  Tammy’s voice wavered as he continued. “But what’s worse, even after all this, the founder refused to let me call an ambulance.”

  He pressed his lips into a thin line, stifling a cough.

  “He told me to take him down here, where he’d spend his final moment. I complied. I was too scared to question it.”

  A hush settled over them, the beep of the equipment sounding eerily loud.

  Tammy shifted uneasily by the bedside, glancing from Tinope’s near-lifeless form to Ives, who stood rooted in place. His words came haltingly, tinged with a mixture of guilt and pity.

  “Everyone at RESOLVE knew how fond the founder was of his adopted granddaughter,” he began, pressing the back of his hand against his forehead in obvious stress. “I’m sure no one suspected his feelings to be… so twisted. Even when you lost control and stabbed him”—he swallowed—“he refused to let the authorities or hospitals know. He insisted I keep it a secret, maybe out of some warped affection for you.”

  Ives lowered her gaze. “And you’re telling us this only now?”

  Tammy gave a wary smile, more out of shame than anything. “I was startled to see you this morning after all this, especially because you acted like you remembered nothing. Then I realized you’d blocked it out—must have been a traumatizing experience for a little girl.”

  He trailed off, casting a reluctant look at Tinope’s bandaged chest.

  “I debated on telling the police anyway that night, really,” he muttered, “But only when I saw you the next morning did I realize it had to be done. For the little girl who had to endure all that, I… well, thought it had to be done.”

  Ives clenched her fists, eyes pinned to Tinope’s pale face, which now left her with nothing more than the feeling of pure nausea. She took a deep breath, then quickly scanned the countdown on her [PROFILE].

  “The ones outside… Jaymes, Masen, Carrie—should we go warn them?” She turned to Ace, voice subdued. “They might be losing themselves to assimilation, but maybe—”

  “They’re not real players.”

  Ace stood near Tinope’s bedside, his expression guarded, as though measuring every detail in the dim glow of a single overhead lamp.

  She blinked, feeling a pang of confusion. “We confirmed their status from the start, though. They mentioned the [MAIN QUEST], the [ROLES]—no native Labyrinth dwellers should know these terms.”

  Ives jerked his chin at Tammy, who blinked back in confusion.

  “Like him!” she said. “He’s perplexed whenever we reference Labyrinth specifics. But the others never are.”

  “That knowledge can be fed,” Ace replied. “An outside force, illusions or something else, gave them enough knowledge to pretend they had [ROLES], to lull the real players into a false sense of collaboration.”

  Ives blinked. “That’s… possible?”

  “Did you send them the [PROFILE] invitation at the beginning?”

  “No, but…”

  Ives thought back to how the three had casually thrown around Labyrinth jargon from the moment they’d appeared. She’d never felt the need to send them an invite like they did back in MW Academy, because they seemed to already know.

  She turned back to Ace. A chill skated up Ives’s spine at his words, summoning a memory of how, indeed, Masen and Carrie never once mentioned or used any cards, never did they bring up any specifics about the countdown and [MAIN QUEST]. The more she turned it over, the more the logic took form.

  She let out a tight breath. “So… they were never players?”

  Ace’s face remained impassive. “Probable. Could be illusions meant to ‘help’ or hinder. It’s more plausible than them having truly assimilated at an impossible pace.”

  He fixed a look on Tinope Res, who lay deathly pale, chest hardly moving beneath the bandages.

  “Either way, now we’re here.”

  Ives’s heart twisted. She gazed at the battered man, her adoptive grandfather—a label that now filled her with hollow dread.

  He was on the verge of dying, but no one would help him now.

  Ace walked closer to Tinope’s bedside, his stare impassive, as though weighing Tinope’s final role in the Labyrinth’s demands. He didn’t reach for the tubes or bandages. He had no intention of rescuing the man. Ives found herself sharing his resolve—this was how the Labyrinth must end.

  If the Labyrinth demanded someone kill Tinope, it was plain he was the architect of his own demise.

  So they watched Tinope’s shallow breathing, listened to the mechanical whirr of half-broken IV drips. A short, shaky exhalation from his lips signaled how close he was to slipping away.

  Ace did nothing, and Ives mirrored him, some part of her almost relieved by the Labyrinth’s grim neatness. The illusions demanded a murder, but Tinope had delivered it by his own twisted hand.

  Ives took one last look around the dark room, catching on the battered shelves lined with diaries and half-labeled pills.

  In the faint glow, she noticed pictures pinned to the wall: Tinope in his younger days, smiling among friends and colleagues. Others showed the man’s triumphs in building what was once a powerful company, now overshadowed by scandalous secrets. Ives’s brows furrowed upon seeing intimate close-ups of her sleeping face—images she never knew he’d taken.

  Her gaze then snagged on one older snapshot, making her breath hitch.

  Tinope, perhaps in his mid-twenties, stood before an ornate gateway. He wore a graduation robe, face shining with youthful ambition..

  However, it wasn’t the Tinope himself that was catching her eye, but the maroon sign on the the campus arch behind him:

  MW ACADEMY.

  The Labyrinths were connected?

  Ives’s blood ran cold. She instinctively turned to Ace, only to see the man staring at the same thing. He didn’t comment, but she saw the faint flicker in his eyes that confirmed he, too, recognized the place.

  While Ives stared, Tammy stepped forward, eyes fixed on Tinope’s slack face.

  “So he’s… truly gone, isn’t he? Even if we wanted to save him, it’s too late.” His voice had a note of finality, as though he just realized Tinope’s last breath was near.

  She parted her lips, though her mind was no longer paying attention to the scene at hand. It was clear the man had zero clue about Labyrinths or illusions. He was just another piece in Tinope’s puzzle, forced to remain ignorant.

  “Then… what about the company?” She asked half-heartedly.

  Tammy gave a subdued shrug. “Tinope Res had already signed over everything. Name changed, ownership transferred to Masen and Carrie. The announcement never happened, but the forms were done. The brand’s changed to ‘Archive X,’ so they said.”

  “Archive X,” Ives echoed, tasting the word. She glanced at Ace, who stood impassively, arms folded.

  Tammy noticed her unsettled look and blinked in confusion. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” she murmured, letting the conversation end.

  Before any further thought, a sudden spike of frantic beeping shattered the quiet. Ives flinched, turning to see Tinope’s heart monitor flicker. His chest gave one final spasm, breath halting. The lines on the monitor flattened.

  Ives stared down at the man, face pale, while Ace watched with cool detachment.

  The Labyrinth demanded that they “Find out who killed Tinope Res.” But seeing him now, it was impossible not to notice: Tinope himself orchestrated every step of his downfall. She wouldn’t rescue him from the fate he himself had chosen. And Ace, apparently, saw no reason to do so either.

  They let the hush speak for them, both silent as they prepared to leave. In that instant, the overhead lamp flickered once, and all around, the tension that bound the environment together began to ease.

  The message filled up the entirety of their [PROFILE], releasing a harmonious melody unfitting with the current atmosphere: