I Caught the Killer!

Chen Ge scrolled through the message log, dates glaring back—each "Save me!" dispatched one day apart, stamped at midnight's witching hour. A perfect mirror to Wang Qi's tale, yet the precision iced his veins with terror. How's a corpse, cemented stiff, texting nightly like clockwork?

Supernatural rot? If a vengeful specter wielded such might, how did those tenants—graverobbers of her rest—still draw breath? Something's off—way off. He sifted the clues, a dark tapestry unfurling in his mind. The one pinging Wang Qi each night? His fiancée's killer—and the arsonist who torched Fu An years back.

A name crystallized, stark and chilling. Wang Qi. Standing in the wooden shack's fetid gloom, Chen Ge pieced it together. The tenants peg him a nutter—landlord boots him out on sight. Yet tonight, he's the lone soul I've crossed who's no resident. Still, he haunted the apartment's orbit too often—his real den's close, has to be. The landlord's smug boast echoed: no lodging for miles 'round. No flats, no inns—then this shack's his lair, where he holes up between plastering those notices.

If he's the tenant here… The puzzle snapped into place, grotesque and grim. The pitiful sod, trudging daily, wailing for his lost love—her murderer all along! Chen Ge's gut churned—he'd swapped woes with a killer, their chat a dance with death. His throat tightened, fear blooming raw. This lunatic's cracked—hoarding her rags, texting himself from her phone each night. Trauma's spawn, maybe—or a second soul, slinking out when he sleeps.

The deeper he dug, the more the cabin's air thickened, pressing like a shroud. He thumbed the phone again, hunting more threads. Fingerprints galore—prime evidence. Gotta guard it tight. The screen's glow bathed his face, jittery nerves—or something else—playing tricks. A girl's shape flickered there—eighteen, nineteen, clad in a school uniform stained crimson with blood.

He blinked hard, rubbing his eyes to sharpen the blur—when a chill grazed his neck, a whisper of touch, like ghostly fingers brushing his skin. Chen Ge jolted, spinning round, heart hammering as the dark loomed back, silent and vast.

The air in the wooden shack turned to frost, a stillness so sharp it could cut. Chen Ge's heart clawed at its cage, nearly bursting free as he whirled—only to freeze. The door hung ajar, swung silent as a phantom's breath, and there, two meters off, loomed Wang Qi. Bloodshot eyes gleamed like cursed rubies, his axe rising slow and deliberate—a reaper's pendulum in the dim.

Time congealed, a heartbeat stretched to eternity. Their gazes locked—Chen Ge's wide with primal fear, Wang Qi's ablaze with unhinged fervor. Neither twitched, statues in a grim tableau. "So close…" Wang Qi rasped, voice a jagged shard, stripped of the weary drone Chen Ge knew. Madness unfurled, raw and wild, a beast unleashed from its cage. Chen Ge's knuckles whitened around the mallet, a lifeline in his grip. Thank the specter—her chill saved my skull from rolling.

"Such a waste," Wang Qi crooned, stepping forward, axe swaying like a charmed snake. Chen Ge snapped the mallet up, a shield against the lunacy. "Ease up—you've peeked at the phone's guts, eh?"

Chen Ge's jaw clenched—what's this nutter playing at?—guard unyielding as stone.

"Truth is, I've not spun you a single lie," Wang Qi said, lethargy shed like a snake's skin, replaced by a feverish glee. A stranger wore his face now, not the broken soul from noon. "Back when you first jawed with me at the apartment, didn't I say my fiancée's tucked inside? No fibs there, see?" He hooked the axe's blunt edge under her clothes, lifting them like a grim trophy. "I sealed her in that wall myself—my own hands."

His tone twisted, a storm of rage and anguish bursting free, as if a wound tore wide. The axe slashed down—crack!—splitting the fabric in twain, threads fluttering like severed lifelines. "I did no wrong—she's the one who erred! She wanted to bolt, so I had to keep her—did my damnedest, didn't I?" His voice cracked, eyes glinting with a manic sheen as he stared at the butchered cloth. "Didn't want to—you get that, right? Didn't mean it…"

Chen Ge tuned out the ravings—murderer's words, hollow as a ghoul's promise. Wang Qi'd snuffed more than one life; excuses were dust. Slipping the dead woman's phone into his pocket, he fixed on the door—his escape hatch—mallet poised, mind racing for a gap. Wang Qi barred it, axe swaying like a metronome of doom.

"I'm loathed—everyone says it," Wang Qi rambled, voice spiraling shrill, a mind fracturing like brittle glass. "No, they don't say it—I feel it, their hate seeping through. I know." He muttered to shadows, trapped in a labyrinth of his own skull, pacing a madman's waltz with no exit.

Chen Ge shifted—slow, subtle—angling his stance. Escape flickered in his head: chuck something, divert the lunatic? But the shack's cramped guts mocked the notion—too tight, no clutter to wield. Wang Qi's voice climbed, a shrieking crescendo, sanity splintering with every word.

The longer Chen Ge lingered, the tighter the noose of peril cinched. Gotta move—now. Simulations fizzled—useless in this suffocating den. Every sinew in him coiled, taut as a bowstring. Wang Qi teetered on a razor's edge, his voice a shrieking gale, axe slashing the air like a mad conductor's baton. An opening gleamed—Chen Ge seized it. He surged forward, a cornered beast unleashed, slamming into Wang Qi with the force of a bludger gone rogue.

Never underestimate a rabbit with its back to the wall. In twenty years, this might've been his gutsiest play—facing a serial killer, he turned wilder than the lunatic himself. Shadows cloaked the shack, dulling Wang Qi's wits a heartbeat too slow. The axe wavered—too late—as Chen Ge's mallet arced, a blunt thunderbolt aimed at his skull.

Bang!

The strike landed, a sickening crunch of flesh and bone. Sticky warmth splattered Chen Ge's hand—blood, he knew—but he didn't falter. A savage kick drove into Wang Qi's gut, folding him like a snapped twig. The madman wheezed, clutching his middle, and Chen Ge blasted past, bursting through the door into the night's maw.

He tore into the forest, legs pumping, breath ragged. This time, he tracked his path—trees thinning, ground leveling beneath his boots. Yet danger clung like a hex; pursuit dogged him—flashlight beams flickered erratic through the dark, branches snapping in a relentless chase. He's still coming! Chen Ge didn't dare pause, fear a whip at his back, driving him through the undergrowth.

Only when his soles slapped cement—a blessed, solid road—did the sounds fade, swallowed by distance. "They've cleared off," he gasped, staggering hundreds of meters more, lungs burning like fiendfyre. Then—a wail pierced the night: police sirens, faint but swelling. Headlights flared on the horizon, twin beacons cutting the gloom.

"I'm saved!" Chen Ge leapt, waving like a madcap in the road's center. "It's me—I called you lot! I nabbed the killer from four years back!"