Beihan was bandaging a wound on his arm; removing the bullet had been a bit of trouble, but luckily, he had managed to get it out. The injured area, tightly wound in bandages, no longer hurt as much.
He sighed inwardly but quickly got up from the ground. However, just as he was about to leave, he smelled a strong scent of blood coming from the central air conditioning vent.
He walked briskly out of the bathroom, heading towards the small sitting room in the dim light. But as soon as he turned the corner, he saw a pair of dead fish eyes staring at him from mid-air in the hallway.
Even as Batman, he couldn't help but pause at the sight. Two seconds later, he realized that it was a corpse hanging upside down from an air duct above his head.
The corpse had no arms, and its eyes were bulging out almost falling from the overstuffed eye sockets, due to being inverted. Blood was running up from its mouth and eye corners, presenting a wildly horrific sight.
Beihan took a deep breath. He knew that under normal circumstances, anyone who turned the corner to such a sight would be scared out of their wits and run away.
That was why Beihan forcibly steadied his steps instead of turning around. He slowly backed up to the end of the hallway and started to sidle toward the stair entrance.
But at this moment, two figures walked up the stairs. Beihan didn't have time to stop them before they saw what was in the corridor.
"Ahhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
A woman's high-pitched scream rang out. Beihan, with quick reflexes, grabbed Amanda, who was about to turn around, pulling her so her back slammed against the hall's end wall, then he blocked her with his arm.
Oliver glanced back at Beihan, and after Beihan gestured in a circular motion with his finger, Oliver immediately turned his head back and also slowly backed up against the wall beside a panic-stricken Amanda.
Amanda's chest heaved with unrestrained fear, her face still showing terror as her eyes were glued to the corpse hanging from the vent.
However, Oliver recognized the corpse from a scar below its eye corner and said, "It's 'Black Gun,' a former gunman for the Pirate Organization active in the Caribbean Sea Area, later recruited by the Penitent Cartel, one of the killers who has been after me."
"How did he... he..." Amanda was becoming incoherent; the emotional shocks she had endured recently were too much.
Amanda Waller had always been an enforcer of law and order, otherwise, she wouldn't have chosen to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she always wanted to seek revenge through legal means.
She indeed wanted the killers to pay, and upon seeing Flamingo, her rage was uncontrollable.
But the manner of Flamingo's death threw a cold bucket of water on Amanda, chilling her from head to toe.
What truly frightened her was that she saw beauty, almost artistic in nature, amongst that bloody spectacle.
A murder case should've made her scream, vomit, bellow with rage; the death of her enemy should've brought cheers, touched her heart, moved her to tears, yet her foe's death left her only with shock, dizziness, and then endless fear.
Sometimes being able to completely break down is a stroke of luck, but after experiencing something akin to an illusion so different from the world she knew for decades, most people's brains replay those details over and over, becoming more scared the more they watch, and eventually, it becomes an eternal incubus.
Amanda felt she would never forget that fireworks display for as long as she lived.
At the sight of the corpse hanging in the middle of the corridor, another kind of fear jolted Amanda awake. She stood rooted in place, her body tense, grasping the wall with her hands and breathing rapidly. Turning to Beihan, she said, "What's going on? Did you kill him?"
"Obviously not," Beihan said gravely. "It's Shiller. This is a trap set by Shiller."
Oliver also looked toward Beihan, sensing that the young man before him must know something, especially something about Shiller.
"He wants you to feel fear and then turn around and run."
"Why would he want to scare us off?" Oliver felt he was close to grasping the key, close to finding Shiller's anchor.
"The key is not in running away, but in turning around." Beihan focused on the corpse as he spoke: "If I'm not mistaken, the personality trait controlling Shiller's body right now is called 'Hunting.'"
"One of his personality traits once explained to me that each of his morbid traits is very mad and vicious, but they all have different characteristics. If you grasp these, it's relatively safe."
"What's the characteristic of Hunting?" Oliver asked.
"He only chases prey that exposes their back to him," Beihan said, visions of his hallucinations, especially Hunting's partial memories, flashing before his eyes—the process of Hunting a woman—he began to describe them as they occurred.
"Shiller might have a unique form of morbid vision, which is not uncommon. Many schizophrenics or those with brain injury and damage exhibit different visions from normal people. In their eyes, things in reality become distorted and don't look the same as what normal people see."
"Shiller might be the same, when he's in a certain state, he can see illusions, his field of view changes."
"Hunting's vision is usually blurry, extremely narrow, with black edges. The central part is constantly rippled with numerous waves, which greatly affects his visual ability. In short, when he's hunting, he can hardly see anything clearly."
"But there is one exception," Beihan took a deep breath and said, "When someone turns their back, and Shiller sees their silhouette, the ripples in his vision would calm down from the very center, until they disappear completely."
"The center of the vision becomes clearer and clearer, and once it is fully restored to normal, as soon as Shiller's eyes focus, the prey showing their silhouette will be marked as a priority target for the hunt, and then he will relentlessly pursue them until they are dead."
"His method of execution usually carries an artistic beauty, which I guess might be because hunting and art often appear together."
"From this, one can speculate that art seeks a special method of execution to make the vision of death more aesthetically pleasing, and that is one of its characteristics."
Beihan sighed and said, "The focus of the hunting vision takes time, but once the focus is complete and the prey is locked on, the hunter's physical ability, speed, and strength will greatly increase."
"A brief exposure of one's back will attract his attention, but it won't be locked on; once it is locked on, escape is almost impossible."
Oliver and Amanda exchanged a look, recalling their own past encounter. Oliver had passed by Shiller several times without inciting any aggressive behavior, but as soon as Amanda turned to run, Shiller almost immediately noticed her.
"So, just don't show him our backs, right?" Amanda breathed a sigh of relief and asked.
But Beihan shook his head and said, "It's not that simple."
"Why did he hang that body up there?" Beihan looked up at the body in the center of the corridor and answered his own question, "He deliberately made the body very frightful, so as to scare the people coming up into turning and running, and even if you are aware of this rule, the inherent fear of the human race is very difficult to avoid."
Amanda's face turned pale in an instant, and if Beihan hadn't grabbed her, she would have almost turned and run away in fear just now.
More importantly, Amanda couldn't be sure that the next time something like this happened, she would be able to hold back. As Beihan said, fear is a basic human instinct, and it is an emotion that requires the utmost willpower to control.
Anyone seeing a face with blood flowing from all orifices, eyes bulging, floating upside down in the air in pitch darkness with only a dim light, would not be able to calmly stand still. Fear and the instinct to survive would urge them to run away as quickly as possible; that was Shiller's trap.
Now Oliver understood that things were indeed tricky.
He had thought Shiller had an anchor point, which if he could find, would not necessarily mean beating him outright, but at least it would improve his state, and he might snap out of it soon.
Now he realized that Shiller had evolved into an impregnable state; his anchor point was not his weakness, but the rule of his attack.
And the most outrageous part of this attacking rule was that it was not just a rigid rule, but it also allowed Shiller to exercise his own initiative.
In a game, when players encounter a certain death condition, they naturally try to avoid it, but if at this moment, the game designer exercises their initiative, designing traps for players to trigger that certain death condition.
Moreover, not just setting one trap, but countless along the way as the players try to pass through; and if the player falls for it just once, the certain death condition is triggered, and then it is completely over; such designers would rightly be criticized severely.
But reality is even more illogical than a game. The hunter could see nothing but silhouettes on his back; he wasn't a completely irrational madman and could still use his wisdom to create traps. You don't show your back, I force you to show your back. I can make countless mistakes, but you can only make one."
"Is there any solution?" Oliver looked at Beihan and asked.
Beihan shook his head.
"Do you think it's possible, after one person is locked and pursued, to have another person expose their back to attract Shiller's attention, so that he pursues this one instead, thereby holding him off?"
Beihan shook his head again and said, "I was just about to tell you the unfortunate news: Shiller's progress in focusing and locking onto his prey is cumulative."
"What does that mean?"
"He needs time to focus. Let's say it's 5 seconds; if you show your back the first time and he focuses for 2 seconds, and the second time you show your back he focuses for another 2 seconds, then the third time you show your back, he would only need one more second to focus, and you would be locked on instantly."
"God!" Amanda said through clenched teeth, "Can there be anything more absurd?"
"There is more, ma'am," Beihan said, looking at her. "If I'm not mistaken, you are the lady who was wearing the Gunfish mask previously."
"...I indeed was, what about it?" Amanda remembered only she was the woman among those seated at the Gunfish's table, so it was easy to distinguish.
"Your time is probably running out."
Amanda looked at Beihan with wide eyes.
"What I mean is, there were several times before when Shiller tried to get behind you. No one knows how many times he succeeded, but even if it was just once or twice, your progress bar for being locked on by him is almost full..." Beihan repeated, "Your time is running out."