Chapter 313: An Unlucky Vacation (12)
The situation was even worse than Everly had imagined.
According to her original calculations, Gary’s helicopter shouldn’t have caught up to the speedboat until twenty-seven minutes after it departed. That meant if she could stall for just thirteen more minutes, UII’s rescue team would arrive—assuming, of course, that the thirty-minute ETA they had promised hadn’t changed just because her coordinates had.
Yet less than twenty minutes after the speedboat set off toward the northwest, the gloomy sky suddenly brightened. The rain pelting the boat grew lighter and lighter until it disappeared altogether.
Looking around, she found herself beneath a brilliant blue sky. Sunlight glittered across the sea, and the warm, humid ocean breeze streamed through the shattered window, brushing against her face and body. The pleasant warmth erased the goosebumps left by the cold, but it also quickly brought a fine sheen of sweat to her forehead.
The storm wasn’t over. The torrential rain was supposed to last for three days.
This sudden change simply meant that her speedboat had successfully escaped the area covered by the tropical storm.
For Everly, that was anything but good news.
Gary’s helicopter had a top speed of 200 km/h. Earlier, the storm had forced him to keep it down to around 120 km/h.
In other words, the moment Gary flew out of the storm, he’d accelerate.
Everly briefly considered turning back into the storm. But on one hand, the rough seas would also make the speedboat’s speed fluctuate wildly. On the other, she had no idea what angle her current course made with the edge of the storm. If she changed direction recklessly, she might end up doing more harm than good. She could accidentally take a sharp-angled route while Gary flew in a straight line, leaving him with a much shorter distance to catch up.
After weighing her options, Everly had no choice but to grit her teeth and continue northwest.
As she steered the boat onward, she silently prayed that Gary’s helicopter would run out of fuel before it reached her.
That way, Gary would crash into the ocean before reaching her.
Everly had a boat. Gary didn’t.
Without any other means of transportation, he’d have no choice but to swim. If that happened, she might be able to shake him off without lifting a finger.
Unfortunately, dreams were one thing, reality another.
About three minutes later, as the speedboat continued racing across the sea, Everly caught another sound beneath the roar of the engine—a distant, low, rhythmic thump-thump-thump.
A sense of foreboding washed over her.
She turned around and looked through the observation windows on either side of the cabin door. Sure enough, only a dozen or so meters behind her, a helicopter bearing a bright red cross came into view.
What bitter irony.
A merciless harbinger of death, cloaked in the universal symbol of life and salvation.
The distance between the helicopter and the speedboat closed rapidly. In the blink of an eye, the helicopter’s shadow had already fallen across the deck.
Everly looked up through the window and saw the helicopter slow until it matched the boat’s speed. At the same time, it began descending gradually, its spinning rotor whipping up fierce winds that churned the surrounding sea into towering sprays.
The speedboat was far too small for a helicopter to land.
Everly guessed that Gary intended to jump aboard.
He reveled in the terror and screams of people facing death. There was no way he’d pass up the chance to enjoy the spectacle from up close. Especially after Everly had sunk him to the bottom of the lake twice, Gary undoubtedly hated her with every fiber of his being. Rather than killing her from the helicopter, he’d much prefer to board the boat himself, torment her in every way imaginable, and only then finish her off.
But that also presented Everly with an opportunity to seize his restraining item.
It was an item called the Asylum Surgical Wristband.
A surgical wristband from a mental asylum in the 1940s. The wearer will have the privilege of becoming a patient, personally experiencing Dr. Walter’s accelerated “ice-pick therapy.”
“…severing abnormal neural connections and removing diseased tissue, restoring the deranged, agitated, and violent patient into your pure, docile, obedient little lamb once more.
Are you ready to witness the greatest revolution in the history of psychiatric surgery?”
The surgical wristband was modeled after a medical practice from the last century.
During the 1940s and 1950s, a procedure known as the lobotomy became widely popular in the United States.
Psychiatrists at the time believed that mental illness was caused by faulty neural connections between the brain’s frontal lobe and other regions. If those connections were severed or destroyed, they reasoned, the patient could be restored to a normal mental state.
The ice-pick method was one form of lobotomy. The doctor would insert an ice-pick-like instrument through the patient’s eye socket into the brain, then stir and destroy parts of the frontal lobe. Because the operation took only five to fifteen minutes, and because patients often became unnaturally quiet afterward due to the damage inflicted on the frontal lobe, the procedure was enthusiastically embraced soon after its introduction.
The item’s effect was straightforward.
Fasten the wristband securely around a person’s wrist—it had to be properly worn on the wrist. Simply touching the wrist, or slipping it over a finger or the hand, wouldn’t activate it.
The moment it was worn correctly, the target’s consciousness would be dragged into an illusion.
Within that illusion, the wearer would become a psychiatric patient lying on an operating bed, forced to undergo Dr. Walter’s infamous ice-pick therapy.
The surgery’s duration was random. Some experienced it for as little as five minutes, while others endured the full fifteen. There was no pattern to it; it was purely a matter of luck.
Each person could experience the procedure only once in their lifetime. Once the illusion ended, the wristband would automatically fall off.
There was one important caveat.
Aside from some psychological trauma, the wearer would suffer no physical injury whatsoever during the experience. Furthermore, the asylum placed great importance on patient safety. To avoid any potential medical disputes, while the wearer remained trapped inside the illusion, their physical body would be placed under the asylum’s protection, rendering it completely immune to any harm from the outside world.
Strictly speaking, then, this item could be used both as a restraining tool and as a rather unconventional defensive item.
What Everly needed was the brief period of complete helplessness while its effects lasted.
During her escape, she had continually refined her plan. At one point, she had even entertained the idea of hiding beneath the sea to evade Gary.
After thinking it through, however, she realized it wasn’t very practical.
If she hid in shallow water, Gary could simply dive down and find her. If she hid in the deep ocean, he could just stay above, clutching the Yarn Ball and waiting patiently. Once her psychic power ran out and she was forced to surface because she couldn’t survive the deep-sea environment, he could simply catch her then.
After considering every possibility, Everly settled on a final plan.
First, use the item to immobilize Gary.
Then, while he was unable to move, tie a heavy object—such as the boat’s anchor—to his body.
Finally, create a whirlpool to drag him down into the depths of the ocean.
Not a single step could be omitted.
The continental shelf off the west coast of the United States is relatively narrow, generally only 10 to 50 kilometers wide. Although the speedboat had been at sea for just over twenty minutes, the seabed beneath her had already transitioned from the continental shelf to the continental slope and then to the continental rise, giving way to the vast abyssal plain of the deep ocean.
The water here averaged roughly 900 to 1,200 meters in depth.
Take a depth of 1,000 meters as an example.
If a living person is thrown into the sea while there’s still air in their lungs, they’ll naturally float on the surface. (That’s why, if you fall into calm water, the best thing to do is lie on your back and avoid struggling. The air in your lungs will provide enough buoyancy to keep you afloat while you wait for rescue.) Only after the lungs fill with water does the body begin to sink.
As it descends, the increasing pressure causes the body’s density to approach that of the surrounding seawater, slowing its rate of descent until it eventually reaches what’s known as its terminal velocity, continuing downward at a constant speed.
A human body takes roughly thirty to fifty minutes to sink from the surface to a depth of 1,000 meters.
Even if the restraining item’s effect lasted the maximum possible fifteen minutes, it still wouldn’t be enough time for Gary to reach the deep ocean floor.
Tying an anchor to his body would dramatically speed up the descent.
Unfortunately, the anchor on a civilian boat could only weigh so much. It wasn’t heavy enough to reduce the sinking time to under ten minutes.
Everly had Lucas’s novel to thank for knowing all this. If he hadn’t written about a killer disposing of a victim in a similar fashion, she never would have become so familiar with all these figures.
The anchor was already the heaviest object she could find aboard the boat.
To make absolutely certain her plan succeeded, she’d have to rely on an external force to accelerate the descent even further.
That external force was, naturally, the giant whirlpool.
As for why she didn’t simply use the whirlpool to deal with Gary directly…
She certainly wanted to.
The problem was that Gary might not cooperate.
In the latest installment of the Bloody Camp film series, Gary had been strengthened over the course of the previous movies until he had become virtually impervious to bullets and blades, possessed monstrous strength, and boasted a body far beyond human limits. To someone like that, a whirlpool might be little more than a particularly powerful current—something he could escape simply by swimming hard enough.
Because of all the butterfly effects that had altered this world’s events, the Gary aboard the helicopter might not yet have reached the overwhelming power level of his late-series counterpart.
Even so, he was probably not far off.
There was no guarantee a giant whirlpool would actually be able to swallow him.
Unlike Gary, Everly’s psychic power was limited.
In the short term, she had enough strength to summon only one giant whirlpool.
She couldn’t afford to play her trump card immediately. Instead, she had to take the safer route, using the restraint item first to maximize her chances of success.
In short, every part of Everly’s plan was indispensable.
The restraining item.
The boat’s anchor.
And the giant whirlpool.
None of them could be omitted.
Once Gary was dragged down into the deep sea, the moment the wristband’s effect expired, he would find himself trapped in one of the most hostile environments on Earth, under one hundred atmospheres of pressure.
It would be a prison created by nature itself.
An ordinary person would have their lungs crushed, their chest cavity hemorrhage, and their body compressed into a solid mass of flesh under that kind of pressure.
Even if Gary had evolved into the Legendary Unkillable King Pro Max Edition, climbing back to the surface from the deep sea would be anything but easy.
Pitch-black darkness.
Freezing temperatures.
Crushing pressure.
Lack of oxygen.
Decompression sickness.
One obstacle after another would be waiting for him.
He could look forward to an endless cycle of dying, reviving, and dying again.
Even if he somehow defied all reason, conquered those impossible conditions, and stubbornly fought his way back to the surface, it certainly wouldn’t happen quickly. By then, UII’s reinforcements should already have arrived.
After finalizing the plan, Everly went over it once more.
The more she examined it, the more feasible it seemed.
There were only two real challenges.
She had to obtain the Asylum Surgical Wristband.
And she had to get it onto Gary’s wrist.
If she failed at either, the entire plan would collapse.
Click!
As Everly pondered her next move, the helicopter descended until it hovered about four meters above the speedboat. The cabin door slid open, revealing Gary.
He wore a bloodstained white T-shirt on his upper body and a pair of brightly patterned men’s swim trunks below. Clenched between his teeth was a slightly worn pink ball of yarn, making for an utterly bizarre appearance as he stepped into the doorway.
“Hi, Everly. We finally meet again~”
The moment he spotted her below, he spat out the ball of yarn. His eyes curved into crescents as he flashed a bright, innocent smile—so guileless that he looked like an unsuspecting child.
If not for the gleaming machete cradled in his arms, the smile might have been a little more convincing.
As it was…
Seeing that grin, Everly didn’t find it charming in the slightest.
Instead, it felt as though she’d been thrown naked into a patch of thorn bushes. Every inch of her body itched with irritation, and her fists itched just as badly, seized by an overwhelming urge to beat him senseless.
Her hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that the veins on the backs of them bulged grotesquely beneath her skin.
Gary, apparently, had no awareness whatsoever that people might hate him.
When Everly ignored him, he remained perfectly at ease. Slinging the machete across his back, he spread his arms, lifted one leg, and leaped gracefully toward the speedboat’s deck with an almost stylish flourish.
Everly had been expecting exactly that.
The instant Gary’s feet left the helicopter, the speedboat—which had been charging straight ahead—suddenly veered off course.
With a sharp ninety-degree turn, the boat swerved violently to port.
The speedboat was highly maneuverable. Whether turning or making a U-turn, it could change direction with remarkable speed. Barely a second or two passed between Gary’s leap and his landing, yet by then the boat had already shifted away from its original position, causing Gary to do nothing more than brush past it.
Splash!
A tremendous splash erupted as a towering plume of white water burst across the sea.
Gary had successfully fallen into the ocean.