Close your eyes, and slowly let your body relax.
Ignore, as much as possible, the instinctive rejection your body feels toward the surrounding environment.
Ignore, as much as possible, that figure constantly lingering around you, giggling endlessly.
Little by little, Takumi slowly allowed himself to sink into sleep.
For players, finding a place to sleep and rest inside an Instance was actually an extremely dangerous thing.
Leaving aside how difficult it already was to find somewhere safe enough to rest peacefully, even the act of dreaming itself could easily lead to problems inside the Instance world. In some Instances, players had even been silently replaced in their sleep, transformed into incarnations of those aberrations without anyone noticing.
Because of this, many players absolutely refused to sleep inside Instances, instead forcing their bodies to endure it or relying on special Obsession Items to push through.
That approach could indeed avoid certain risks to some extent—but only if the Instance itself didn't last too long.
For short Instances that could be cleared within a few hours, it was manageable.
But once the duration stretched to over a day, or even several days, that was no longer something everyone could endure.
At least for Takumi right now, he still needed proper rest.
"Then… good night, Senpai."
Lying not far away beside him, Miko softly spoke to Takumi before also closing her eyes.
The place where the two of them rested was an empty area behind the courthouse.
Takumi himself was lying atop a table, while Miko had pushed several chairs together into a small makeshift space to lie down on.
Before deciding to rest here, Mai had specifically searched the surrounding area to ensure no aberrations wandered nearby before finally relaxing. Even then, she still left "Gotō No. 1" standing guard on standby here, constantly monitoring the surroundings in case of unexpected situations.
As for Mai herself, she planned to stay awake through the entire night.
According to her own words:
"As a former corporate slave whose physical abilities have been enhanced across the board, staying awake for just one day and one night is totally trivial."
At least, that was what she claimed.
Maki had already disconnected from the mental link. There were simply too many matters demanding her attention, and coordinating with a group of top-tier Red Moon-level players was no easy task.
Chika, however, was still connected.
But because she hadn't joined the Watch's spiritual link, and because ordinary mental links could potentially become contaminated by anomalous powers, Takumi didn't dare connect her directly either.
As a result, there was no way for him to communicate with her right now. He could only lie there alone with his eyes closed, letting his thoughts wander aimlessly.
He had originally assumed it would take him a very long time to fall asleep.
Or perhaps that he wouldn't be able to sleep at all.
But Takumi's mental condition seemed to be better than even he himself had expected.
Not long after lying down, he successfully drifted off to sleep.
…
Somewhere within the haze, he felt the sensation of falling.
A dream.
Vaguely, he could tell that this was a dream.
Ahead of him lay Fujihana Middle School, already reduced to ruin, devoid of any remaining trace of life.
He saw a figure holding white flowers, slowly walking toward the school.
Then he saw another figure…
He saw himself.
In his own hands was a red candle, and he too was walking forward.
[You didn't come last year. I originally thought you wouldn't come this year either.]
The figure standing beside him spoke softly.
[…These are the last batch of red candles. The year before last, I thought I'd already used them all up, so I wasn't planning to come anymore. But later on, I found there were still some left over.]
Takumi saw himself speaking.
He heard his own voice—flat, calm, almost entirely devoid of emotional fluctuation.
[Whether the red candles are here or not probably doesn't make much difference, right? After all, you didn't come last year, and nothing happened when I came in alone. Everything at Fujihana Middle School is already over. Even without those red candles, nothing's going to crawl out and attack us anymore.]
The figure beside him continued speaking, his voice carrying a trace of wistfulness.
[Maybe. But for me, the only reason I come here is to find a suitable way to use up the things left behind back then.]
Takumi's own voice remained flat, devoid of emotion as he calmly continued forward.
The Athletic Field was overgrown with weeds. The lines of the courts and running track had long since faded into near invisibility.
The roof of the Swimming Pool had collapsed. Rainwater had accumulated in the pool, only to later be choked over with algae. Even from a distance, the stench was unbearable.
The Teaching Building and the Dormitory Building were blanketed in dust, worn down and half-ruined everywhere one looked. In some places, traces of homeless squatters could still be seen.
He simply set the candles down—lighting them separately in the athletic field, the swimming pool, the teaching building, and the dormitory building—before turning and leaving.
Those candles had been refined from the blood of students, a byproduct created by the researchers of Fujihana Middle School. To a certain extent, they could suppress the activity of Aberrations. After the school collapsed, he had taken away the red candles stored there. Then, over the following years, he gradually brought them back and lit them within the school grounds, returning that blood to these ruins.
The young man walking beside him placed down white flowers, solemnly leaving them behind within the school.
Did any of this have meaning?
He didn't know.
Just like he didn't know what meaning there was in destroying those candles.
After Alice lost control, the entire school had been utterly destroyed. The survivors who escaped were then swept into Japan's defeat in the war, followed by the chaotic years afterward.
By the time everything had finally stabilized, when he and that student had risked returning to the school together, the place had already become nothing more than ruins—an abandoned land that nobody cared about anymore.
All the corpses, all the bloodshed, had vanished without a trace.
Even the traces of Alice herself could no longer be found. Perhaps because the school had been destroyed, the thing had lost the very foundation needed to sustain its existence.
He had cautiously confirmed it over and over again. In the end, he concluded that the school's original research data had been almost entirely destroyed during Alice's rampage. Although both the military and, later, the United States forces that took over afterward had searched this place, all they managed to recover were fragmented scraps of incomplete material. Recreating the bloody experiments of the past had become essentially impossible.
Not only that, but the project at Hayadate Elementary School had also been abandoned. The school itself had even disappeared entirely, leaving behind no trace whatsoever.
By comparison, Yoruyama Middle School was still operating. But after investigating it, he discovered that the school had basically stopped experiencing supernatural incidents altogether. It seemed to have become "normal" again.
Which meant…
It was all over.
This entire nightmare, steeped in sin and madness, had finally reached its end.
He bid farewell to his student.
Then he left alone, returning to the crude little house hidden deep within the mountains, far from civilization.
It seemed that his story should have ended there.
But there was still one person silently watching everything from the sidelines.
So he turned around.
And Takumi saw her—the Alice who had remained hidden in the shadows from beginning to end, quietly laughing to herself.
[Teacher, could you help Alice?]
[Help Alice find a body that can leave the school.]
[If it's you, Teacher, then you can definitely do it, right? After all, you already know those research materials. You already know the methods needed to fulfill the conditions, don't you?]
Darkness swallowed every scene whole.
Takumi could no longer see what happened afterward, but he already understood.
The body of "Idol Alice" had most likely been created by that final surviving researcher. Takumi didn't know the exact method, but it was probably related in some way to that flesh-fusion machine. In any case, there was no way all of this had been accomplished without anyone dying.
After Alice obtained a body capable of moving freely, Fujii Hiroshi—the son of Fujii Goro—was lured into Fujihana Middle School.
At first, Alice may have intended to reopen the school. But perhaps she found it too boring, or perhaps it would have taken too long and she grew too lazy to continue. In the end, she changed her mind and chose to become an idol instead, setting off the nationwide idol phenomenon that followed—one that nearly spiraled into a catastrophic disaster.
Then…
What exactly became of that teacher in the end?
After Alice's death, Fujii Hiroshi was unable to resurrect her. The research materials he obtained were inevitably incomplete. Which meant the postwar Japanese authorities had only possessed incomplete data as well.
And that also meant the knowledge held by that teacher had never been passed down in the end.
Hirano Sōsuke never realized his teacher was already dead. He simply believed the man had continued living in seclusion somewhere in hiding. The two of them even seemed to have maintained occasional correspondence through letters…
I see…
Takumi finally understood the teacher's fate.
Those reply letters received by the man named Sōsuke during those final years had apparently all been written personally by Alice herself.
She had completely absorbed both the teacher's flesh and personality, then impersonated him—writing letters to the only student he had ever truly cared about, maintaining the illusion of peaceful passing years.
Most likely, even if Sōsuke had never taken action because of the victims' families asking for help, Alice would eventually have sought him out on her own anyway. She would have revealed the truth to him, delighted herself by watching him collapse in despair, and then killed him.
She simply never expected that before she could do any of that, he would make the first move himself—causing her to lose everything instead.
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