Chapter 12 – Smith's Report
Down near the evacuation zone, Detective Nash Martinez was already being eaten alive from the inside by doubt. She stood stiffly among the flashing emergency lights, her jaw tense, her eyes sharp, her mind tearing through every detail she'd gathered so far like a blade through fabric.
Her assistant, Smith, approached at a hurried pace, returning from the maintenance door that led down to the boiler basement. His face looked wrong—pale, almost sickly, and his eyes were wide, unfocused, as if struggling to process something he couldn't quite describe.
"Detective… I'm back," Smith said, his voice tight, strained, trembling slightly.
Martinez turned toward him with impatience born not from annoyance, but from the gnawing suspicion blooming poisonously in her gut.
"Well? Smith? The boiler door. Did you find anyone hiding?" Her tone demanded truth.
Smith swallowed hard before answering. "No, Detective. No one was there. But…"
He hesitated, lifting a shaky hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead. "…Detective, the electronic high‑security lock is destroyed. Completely destroyed."
Martinez's face didn't move, but her eyes narrowed. "Destroyed how?"
"It… it looks like there was an internal overload. Like someone burned it from the inside. A short‑circuit—intentional. Not accidental." Smith exhaled, trying to steady himself, but his voice kept shaking. "And there was blood, Detective. Not much, but fresh. Trailing out from the emergency‑stair area."
A cold shiver crawled down Martinez's spine. Electric overload. Fresh blood. None of it fit the story she'd been fed by those four students. Titus had claimed panic and a fall against a railing. Cristal had claimed they hid quietly in the basement. Yet reality was painting something far darker.
"Blood from where, Smith?" she asked, slipping a latex glove onto her hand. "Human or animal?"
Smith's lips pressed together, his breath trembling through his nose. "Human, Detective. Droplets. And the metal frame of the door has a streak… like something heavy was dragged across it."
Dragged. Not dropped. Not splattered by accident. Dragged.
Martinez felt her heartbeat slow—not from calm, but from the chilling precision of fear. She crouched and inspected the fragment Smith suddenly extended toward her.
"And this," Smith whispered, as if the object itself frightened him. "A micro‑camera receiver. I picked it up near the stairs."
Martinez froze. She knew that technology. She knew exactly who used those devices.
"Yes, Smith," she said, her voice going cold, "I know who uses those cameras."
Smith took a sharp breath, as if expecting her to deny it. But she didn't. She couldn't. She straightened slowly, her hand closing around the metallic fragment until the edges pressed into her glove.
This wasn't panic. This wasn't teenagers running blindly. This wasn't even—
The Campus Shutdown
The school was completely evacuated. The police, special forces, and rescue teams thoroughly searched every corner in pursuit of the attackers and the Beast, which had vanished without a trace into the wooded area.
Testimonies piled up, almost all identical: "We were in class, then explosions, screams, shattered glass. The strangest thing was the roar, like some kind of beast. The teachers locked us in, security arrived and evacuated us, and then the police questioned us."
While the police controlled the perimeter, the bullying group emerged from the rooftop. Ken and the rest of the bullies, bruised and humiliated but recovered from Bruno's brutal Sambo and Cristal's headbutt, had hidden behind the ventilation ducts. That's where they discovered the exterior emergency stairs that allowed them to descend without being seen.
Melanie was the last to go down. She stopped at the edge of the rooftop, glaring with rage at the chaos of sirens below. She was furious.
"I will get revenge on those three," she hissed, referring to Bruno, Cristal, and Titus.
With a wicked smile that made her look even more like the witch she was, Melanie looked toward the horizon. She saw the trail of the Beast's escape: how it had leaped from the second floor, and how the black‑clad mercenaries had chased after it.
She reveled in the horror, feeling that the chaos gave her power.
The Detective's Frustration
Detective Martinez, while coordinating the processing of the bodies in the Teachers' Lounge and the search for the mercenaries, retraced her steps to question once again the four students from the "boiler room area."
When she arrived at the ambulance zone, she found it empty.
Titus, Cristal, Bruno, and Walter were gone. Vanished. The paramedic could only shrug, indicating they had slipped away with the rest of the evacuees.
A surge of frustration hit her with the strength of a punch.
"Damn it!" Martinez growled through clenched teeth. "I'll find you. You four know more than you said. You're involved in this somehow."
And the more she replayed the sequence of events in her mind—the destroyed lock, the fresh blood, the micro‑camera receiver, the frightened student testimonies—the more that frustration twisted into something heavier… something colder.
Paranoia.
She looked around the ambulance zone as if the four might be hiding behind one of the medical tents. They weren't. But she imagined them slipping away, blending into the crowd, walking calmly past her while she was distracted with questions and sirens and paperwork.
The idea burned her from the inside. She paced tightly, boots grinding against the gravel.
Everything about them had been wrong. Titus with his torn uniform and that dazed, empty look in his eyes—like he'd been hit by something far worse than a railing. Walter barely able to stand, trembling, limping, helpless—yet somehow involved. Cristal with that unnatural calm, that serenity that didn't belong on a teenage girl amid a massacre.
And Bruno… the tall one… with that watchful, controlled posture that screamed training. Teenagers didn't move like that. Teenagers didn't lie with that kind of precision. Teenagers didn't emerge from a restricted basement during an attack and walk away as if the world didn't scare them.
Martinez's muscles tightened. Something was wrong with them. Something dark. Something dangerous.
She walked deeper into the empty zone, scanning every angle, as though expecting to find a hidden clue—a footprint, a smear of blood, anything. But the area had already been trampled by dozens of evacuees. They were gone.
She yanked off her latex glove with a snap, her jaw tightening. "They're not slipping away from me," she muttered. "Not a chance."
Because deep inside, beneath the procedural logic and police training, something whisper‑thin tugged at her—
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Hook: But the next minute would bring a truth he was not ready to face…
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