"I could swear I smelled the sweet, fishy scent of blood coming from somewhere."
"Hurry, hurry, hurry..."
Then came a sudden thud, and Fiore's heart lurched. No, it was nothing. It was the clock. It was sixteen hundred hours; merely the chime of a grandfather clock in some room. Her opponent was a serial killer, after all. Silently approaching a target was surely what she did best...
"My arms have to move..."
Fiore shifted her arms. The commands sent from her brain through her nerves seemed to respond far more slowly than usual.
Thud! ...The clock again. Right, since it was sixteen hundred hours, it would chime four times. That meant this was the second chime. The second? It was only the second? No wonder she was moving so slowly. Time itself seemed to have stretched enormously.
Stay calm... stay calm... Thud! Ah, honestly! It was too loud to concentrate! Since the grandfather clock chimed at one-second intervals, this was already the third second.
How long did it usually take her to cross these thirty meters? At full speed... probably around two minutes. Her room was through the door on the left. Opening doors from a wheelchair was difficult, so she had long ago set up an unlocking spell. All she had to do was recite a single phrase.
Thud! The fourth chime. After that sound rang out, nothing else happened. The surroundings were simply dim and quiet.
"Huh?"
Fiore looked around in astonishment. It was dark! Far too dark! It was only nearing evening; there was no way it should have been this dark!
Fiore looked out through the hallway window... white.
"What in the world is this...?"
Everything outside was white, as if broad strokes of paint had covered the world, yet it was not bright at all.