Chapter 279: Transcript — Cannon Fodder Perspective
Jonathan’s consciousness drifted in darkness.
Pain surged in from all directions like a rising tide. His frail body became a small wooden boat trapped at sea, tossed helplessly through stormy waves—plunging, rising, and rolling without rest.
Half-asleep, half-awake.
In his dazed state, chaotic sounds kept forcing their way into his ears.
Very close to him, a phone rang nonstop. A deep, buzzing tone filled the space, irritating and impossible to ignore. Not long after, sharp sirens approached from afar, slicing through the quiet. People came and went. Angry shouting and curses swelled around him like a storm of voices, making his head feel like it would split open.
Then, at some unknown point, the noise faded.
In its place, he heard fragments of conversation.
“…we… police… report…”
“…joke… all fake… sorry…”
The female voice replying sounded vaguely familiar—cold, clear, and somewhat arrogant. It reminded Jonathan of the wealthy girl who had dumped him. A surge of disgust rose in him, and he strained to listen more carefully.
“…yes… it’s all my fault… I swear I won’t… prank anymore…”
“…alright… not the mastermind… this is your statement… confirm… remember to… sign…”
A rustling sound followed, and the voices gradually faded away.
Replaced instead by slow, approaching footsteps.
Tap. Tap.
They stopped right beside him.
“It’s too late, I have to go now. Goodbye, Jonathan… and, by the way, I’m sorry I messed everything up.”
The female voice leaned close to his ear, speaking in a deliberately artificial tone.
After that, the footsteps gradually receded.
Jonathan was still trying to make sense of what she had said when suddenly someone grabbed his shoulder and shook him firmly.
“Jonathan… Jonathan…”
The drowsiness gradually faded. The fog-like heaviness that had trapped his consciousness dissolved into nothing.
Jonathan’s body jolted.
He suddenly opened his eyes.
Looking left and right in confusion, he found himself in a somewhat familiar room. In front of him stood two people in police uniforms.
“Hello, Jonathan Hopkins. Let me introduce myself—I’m Mike, and this is my colleague Sharon. We’re officers from the Dwight State Police Department. While patrolling a nearby interstate highway, we received an anonymous report about a major homicide at this hospital…”
The older male officer, with streaks of gray in his hair, introduced himself.
Hospital. Mike. Homicide.
The keywords triggered fragments of memory in Jonathan’s mind. Scenes of blood and horror flashed rapidly before his eyes.
His body trembled violently, and his expression shifted into panic almost instantly.
“Help! There’s a ghost! There’s a ghost in the hospital! AAAAAAH!”
The two state troopers exchanged a glance, each showing a hint of helplessness.
“Mr. Jonathan, filming has already ended. You don’t need to keep acting anymore.”
Officer Mike raised his hand and patted Jonathan on the shoulder. The force was a bit heavy, making Jonathan’s thin body sink downward—but he didn’t notice at all.
His attention was completely captured by what Mike had just said.
“W-What do you mean… filming has already ended? No need to act anymore?”
As he spoke, his last memories before fainting surfaced in his mind.
Remembering the places where the female ghost had stabbed him with a folding knife, his face turned deathly pale.
His hands began to shake uncontrollably as he reached up—first touching his neck, then his chest, abdomen, and lower back…
Everywhere hurt—painfully so.
It felt as if he had been stabbed dozens of times with a cold, razor-sharp blade.
Cuts through flesh and tendons, deep enough to reach bone beneath. Even the slightest touch from his fingertips made his whole body nearly convulse.
And yet—strangely—whenever he overcame his fear of pain and carefully pressed those areas again, he discovered something impossible.
There were no wounds.
Everything was intact.
Aside from dried, filthy blood on the surface, there was nothing underneath at all.
When his hand reached between his legs, Jonathan’s fingertips came away slightly damp.
A faint, foul smell lagged behind and drifted into his nose.
Only then did he remember—he had lost control of his bladder out of sheer terror.
His expression twisted further in disgust and embarrassment.
What the hell had happened?
Why wasn’t he dead?
Why wasn’t he injured?
“Your accomplice, Everly, has already confessed everything to us. There’s no need for you to keep hiding it anymore,” the female officer, Sharon, said from the side.
At the word “no need to hide,” a completely different set of images surfaced in Jonathan’s mind.
He thought of the bodies lying in the basement, on the 18th floor, and outside the surveillance room door.
After the massacre, he had contacted people from the black market gang to handle the cleanup.
But for some reason, when he woke up, the ones who appeared before him were police officers—and not even local city police, but state troopers from Dwight State.
What had happened to those dead people?
The corpses? The bloodstains on the floors and walls?
Had the gang members actually come? Had they really cleaned everything up?
A flood of questions filled his mind. Fear and guilt tangled together until his thoughts nearly froze.
Because he was too preoccupied with his own schemes, it took him a while to process what the female officer had just said.
“W-Who…? Who did you say my accomplice is? That woman named Everly?”
Of course he knew who Everly was.
During the day, while idling at the front desk, he had briefly encountered that attractive girl who had come to visit a patient.
He had only intended to flirt a little—but to his surprise, the girl was extremely cold and arrogant. She barely acknowledged him, humiliating him in public.
Her attitude reminded him of his ex-girlfriend.
That same condescending, superior air.
It had only been a drunken slap—an accident, really—but that damn woman had flipped the table over it, made a scene that spread everywhere, and even ruined a marriage alliance between two powerful families. In the end, she made him a complete laughingstock in their social circle.
Jonathan had always hated women like that—those who relied on their family background and looks to act superior and look down on everyone else.
Being rejected had left him bitter.
And thinking back to tonight’s original filming plan, an idea suddenly formed in his mind.
So, using his status as the “young master” of the Hopkins Hospital family, he forcibly obtained the visitor registration log from the front desk—and found the name of that cold, arrogant girl.
Everly.
Decided.
He would make that obnoxious woman the target of their prank livestream, humiliate her in front of countless viewers, and punish her for her arrogance.
And so, ignoring all objections, Jonathan—or rather “Dr. J”—abruptly changed the target of the prank stream.
The livestream was scheduled to begin at 20:30, and visiting hours in the inpatient building ended at 21:00. To ensure the girl would still be in the hospital long enough, his team went to considerable lengths—bribing doctors, intimidating nurses, and even coordinating with the MRI department.
Richard alone prepared six or seven backup plans.
Fortunately, Hopkins Hospital belonged to his family. Even if the staff were dissatisfied, none of them dared disobey him. Otherwise, the plan would never have gone so smoothly.
Everly had clearly been the result of half a day’s careful planning by the entire livestream team, finally “pulled into” the prank broadcast.
Yet for some reason, the version presented by the two police officers described a completely different and baffling chain of events:
The state troopers told him that Everly had personally admitted she was an accomplice he had hired in advance. According to her statement, everything that happened that night was a solo “prank operation” orchestrated by Jonathan himself—its purpose being to reverse-prank his own livestream team and capture their most authentic reactions in the face of life-and-death fear, ultimately producing a never-before-seen prank film.
“Everly showed us the chat logs between you and her. She said she only agreed because she found the idea interesting, and she wasn’t aware you hadn’t told the rest of your team that it was all acting. After the police arrived, she publicly apologized to those who were frightened and obtained their forgiveness. We determined that she wasn’t significantly involved in the core situation, so we let her leave first.”
“What did you say?! The others… the others are still alive?”
The older officer frowned slightly, as if sensing something, and said in a subtle tone:
“Of course they’re still alive. Otherwise, if they had actually died according to the script’s design during the performance, that would be a completely different matter. It would become an unprecedented major criminal case…”
Jonathan’s scalp tightened.
He immediately realized that what he had just said had already aroused police suspicion.
Although he still had no idea what had actually happened, to avoid unnecessary trouble, he decided to go along with their version of events for now and admit everything.
Otherwise…
What was he supposed to say?
That he didn’t even know anything about that woman’s so-called “reverse prank plan,” that he thought she had really gone out of control and killed the entire team, and that he had tried to use his connections to cover up multiple deaths and suppress the incident?
Only an idiot would admit something like that.
“Yes… sorry. Earlier during filming I accidentally fell and hit my head, so I’ve been a bit confused mentally.”
“That’s exactly what Everly said. To make the footage more realistic, I secretly planned a reverse prank without telling the rest of the team. Some people may have taken it seriously and got scared enough to call the police. I’m very sorry about that—I’ll definitely be more careful next time and won’t do something like this again.”
“I see… so it really was just a misunderstanding.”
Officer Sharon flipped through her notepad and smoothly defused the situation.
“Since it’s not a serious issue and no real harm was caused, we’ll just finish the statement here on site and consider the case closed. Okay?”
This outcome was exactly what Jonathan wanted.
He nodded repeatedly.
After that, the three of them spent some time completing the written statement. Once Jonathan signed to confirm, the two officers got into their patrol car and left the inpatient building.
Only when the red-and-blue police lights turned the corner and disappeared down the road did the weight in Jonathan’s chest finally drop.
He turned around and returned to the surveillance room—the team’s temporary base of operations.
As expected, the rest of the livestream crew was still there.
Just as the officers had said, everyone was alive. No missing limbs, no serious injuries. If anything, aside from their clothes being stained and messy with blood, they looked completely normal.
The unfortunate part was that they all seemed to believe Everly’s version of events.
To them, the entire “nightmare escape” had been a staged performance between Jonathan and Everly.
As a result, their attitude toward Jonathan was extremely hostile.
The moment he appeared, more than one person stormed up to him, angrily calling him a selfish bastard—and firmly announcing that they were quitting.
The remaining crew members, pressured by livelihood concerns, didn’t dare openly vent their anger at Jonathan. Instead, they gave him cold, distant looks.
He was used to being the center of attention wherever he went, so this sudden shift in treatment felt deeply uncomfortable—an unsettling reminder of how uneven the world could be.
“So what exactly is going on? Can anyone answer me?”
“Stop pretending! The police already figured it out—it was all your plan!”
“Btch! Son of a btch! Go eat shit!”
The moment he asked, he was met with “enthusiastic greetings” in the form of middle fingers from several resigned staff members.
Jonathan’s veins bulged at his temples. He clenched his teeth so hard it looked like he might break them.
For a split second, he even wanted to pull out a gun and shoot every single one of them.
But that was only a thought.
In reality, he couldn’t afford to act rashly.
Not after just causing a major incident serious enough to attract state police attention.
Others might not know it, but Jonathan himself did: because of the failed marriage alliance earlier, his standing within the family was already precarious—on the verge of being discarded.
If he were to cause a real homicide now, the family might indeed step in to clean up the mess for the sake of reputation.
But that would also mean one thing: they would completely abandon him.
From then on, he would lose all access to family power and become nothing more than a hollow shell with a bit of money and nothing else.
Not worth it.
Absolutely not worth destroying his future over a bunch of trash.
Forcing himself to calm down, Jonathan shifted his dark, narrowed gaze toward the lip-pierced man beside him.
“Richard, you answer!”