The bullet had taken effect, knocking a student to the ground.
That person lay curled up on the ground, reaching out to clutch his leg, writhing and twitching in obvious pain.
Looking at the dark red blood flowing from between the other party's knee, Takumi could not help frowning. The fact that a firearm attack could produce an effect completely exceeded his expectations.
One had to know that with something like an Aberration—even if a living person was in the gradual stage of transformation—they could basically already ignore firearm attacks. For example, Kawano, whom he had encountered in the second run of "Red Nut Grey Cave," after the Obsession Item on his body went out of control and caused an Aberration to possess him, had been able to withstand gunfire and several consecutive attacks sufficient to be fatal to a person while grappling with him. He had even taken several bullets to the head without dying.
Were those students outside, standing with their backs to him, actually just ordinary people? Merely driven by some kind of force to stand there with their backs facing him?
If that were the case, then by knocking them all to the ground, perhaps he could find a way to escape from the window…
[Hehehe—someone is about to become a Bad Kid~]
Before Takumi could take further action, he heard, by his ear, the sound of what seemed like a girl's low laughter.
Snap!
The living room lights went out in the next instant.
Darkness engulfed the entire living room in a split second, covering everything.
Clearly, it had not yet become night outside—it was still at dusk—yet no light at all shone into the living room. It went completely dark in an instant.
Takumi heard footsteps.
Exceptionally clear footsteps, like those of a human, walked directly in from outside the living room door.
The other party's gaze had already locked onto him.
That intense malice and inhuman aura were enough for Takumi to understand what was happening at this moment.
Boom—
A violent explosion swept through the entire living room in the next instant.
Scorching flames burst outward in all directions.
Before the explosives detonated, Takumi had already pulled Miko down with him to the ground and, in one motion, kicked over the sofa to use it as cover.
In the firelight, the wall separating the living room and the hallway collapsed with a thunderous crash, and the window glass shattered along with it. But after the glass completely broke, what appeared outside the window was not the street, but a pitch-black corridor—so dark that even the flames of the explosion could only illuminate it for a brief instant, unable to light up the end of the corridor. One could only see darkness stretching outward, almost infinitely.
Ignoring the coughing of the girl beside him, who had been choked by the smoke, at the very instant the explosion ended, Takumi had already sprung up violently, dragging her as he rolled into a corner of the living room where flames were burning.
A small, blood-soaked hand brushed past Takumi's body, almost grazing him, and directly tore open a bloody gash more than ten centimeters long across his back. Then, just before reaching the area illuminated by the firelight, the small hand silently withdrew and vanished.
Takumi knew where it had been just moments ago.
When he threw Tanaka's explosives—at the instant they detonated—he clearly saw it: a student standing in the middle of the living room, dressed in a filthy sailor uniform.
Mm. No head. The place where the neck should have been was already a shattered mass of rotten flesh. It was this thing that had rushed in the moment the lights in the living room went out and had immediately charged straight at Takumi himself. The explosion just now had only slightly stalled its movement. If Takumi's reaction had been even a fraction slower, he would probably already be dead.
"So it's a senpai, huh."
Takumi looked into the darkness ahead and spoke softly.
That thing had not stopped because of the explosion—it had stopped because of the light.
It seemed that only in complete darkness would the Aberration regain its ability to move. Therefore, creating a sufficient light source could restrain it.
It sounded like the type that would be easy to guard against, but…
"Can it still turn on?"
Takumi looked at Miko beside him and asked.
"…No. It won't light up at all anymore."
Miko fiddled with the flashlight in her hand for quite a while before finally shaking her head regretfully.
After that sudden phenomenon of [Lights Out] just now, the flashlight had been unable to turn back on. The instant the flashlight in Takumi's hand went out, he had already realized the problem. Without hesitation, he threw out the explosives he was carrying—sponsored by Tanaka—using the burst of fire from the explosion to recreate a source of light.
He picked up a wooden table leg from the tea table that had been blown apart.
He tore down a burning curtain and wrapped it around the wooden leg.
A crude torch was barely formed.
Takumi then repeated the same process, making another torch and handing it to Miko.
After that, he took the torch and moved forward first—
—and saw that the entire living room was filled with headless upperclassmen.
"While I've always welcomed people coming over to my place as guests, isn't this a bit too impolite?"
Looking at these students without heads—whose necks were almost all severely deformed, rotten beyond recognition—Takumi's mouth twitched several times, unsure what to say.
Judging from the shape of the wounds, their heads seemed to have been severed by repeated blunt-force blows.
The number of these students… one, two, three… twenty-six in total. In a place like Japan, that was roughly the size of a single class.
The style of their uniforms was identical. These students should be from the same school. Could they even be from the same class?
"What do we do now?"
Having already suffered too many shocks today, Miko was now forcing herself to stay conscious through sheer willpower. With just a slight glance downward, Takumi could see the girl's legs trembling nonstop—she could barely even stand steady.
"Don't be afraid. The more afraid you are, the more dangerous it becomes. When facing these things, you have to stay calm."
Takumi first spoke seriously to Miko, then took the torch and cautiously walked up to one of the students.
That student did not move at all, standing stiffly in place like nothing more than a corpse.
A faint stinging pain came from the wound on his back. However, under the power of the blessing, the gash across Takumi's back had already stopped bleeding on its own, a layer of scab forming over it. Within two or three days at most, a wound that would normally take over ten days for an ordinary person to recover from would be completely healed for Takumi.
But that was not the focus right now. Standing before the headless student, Takumi fell silent for a moment, then placed his hand on the watch he was wearing, intending to try taking out a surgical scalpel to cut through the student's body and see what would happen.
…He couldn't take it out.
The moment Takumi formed the intention to take out the scalpel Obsession Item from the black watch, he was forced to abort the thought.
Because if he did so, what he would take out would not be a scalpel, but an Aberration emerging from the scalpel.
The instant it was taken out, it would immediately lose control. There was no second possibility.
Takumi was one hundred percent certain of this. The premonition brought to him by the black watch would not be wrong. In fact, he had already learned from other players that [Dusk-level Obsession Items will instantly lose control in a Red Moon-level Instance].
So if [Campus Horror Story] still possessed the ability to "instantly cause Dusk-level Obsession Items to lose control" even after descending into the real world, then wasn't this Instance, in truth, completely Red Moon-level? Then how the hell did the organizers of this damned Sacrifice Game downgrade this thing to Dark Night-level? Honestly, what part of this Instance qualifies as Dark Night-level? Were they completely not planning to leave him any way to survive?!
Bang!
Takumi lashed out with a fierce kick, directly sending five or six students crashing to the floor. As those students rolled along the ground and collided into others, the two of them watched as headless students rolled all over the floor.
"This…"
Miko, who had just been scared half to death by these Aberrations, felt her entire worldview shaken after seeing Takumi's clean, decisive kick.
"When dealing with Aberrations, the first key point is to understand that these things all act according to certain rules."
Retracting his foot, Takumi looked at the students, who showed absolutely no intention of resisting, and spoke to the stunned Miko beside him.
"Once you violate a rule, they'll go crazy and launch attacks at you. Sometimes you won't even know how you died."
"But as long as you haven't violated the corresponding rule, no matter what you do to them, they won't do anything to you."
"This is the absolute number-one principle. Remember it well—you'll be using it often in the future."
Hearing Takumi's serious instruction, Miko nodded instinctively. As she understood why he dared to act so roughly toward these entities, she silently committed the principle to memory.
Wait…
Only then did the girl belatedly react.
'I'll be using this often in the future… Wait, what does that mean? Things like this… dealing with these terrifying things—does that mean I'll run into them many, many more times in the future?!'
"We're leaving."
Grasping Miko's hand, Takumi, torch in hand, passed through the headless students and arrived at the corridor he had previously never stepped into.
At this moment, the corridor was already clearly different from the one in Takumi's memory.
The floor was covered in pools of black, filthy blood. The walls were streaked everywhere with smeared bloodstains, along with marks that looked like they had been left by something sharp tearing and cutting.
Drip—drip—
Blood dripped down from the ceiling.
Takumi raised his head and saw a boy, who did not look very old, hanging upside down from the ceiling. Iron wires were tightly wrapped layer upon layer around the boy's body. His head had been completely deformed; one eyeball had already been squeezed out. Brain matter and blood mixed together, seeping out through the gaps in the wire. It was hard to imagine what kind of force had manipulated those wires to crush his skull and turn him into this state.
Holding the torch, Miko turned her head to look back—only to see that the twenty-some headless students were following behind her, all standing silently in the darkness, visible the moment the torchlight swept over them.
"Can we… get out of here?"
In her fear, the girl could only look toward Takumi—the only person she could trust and rely on.
"There's a high probability we can't. Better prepare to die here and call these people brothers."
At Takumi's honest reply, the girl's expression immediately froze, and she had no idea how to respond.
What she did not know was that Takumi had already learned another piece of information from Maki: that the location of his home had been observed by more than one player, and a blood-red full moon had risen into the sky above it.
In other words, the Instance's encroachment upon the real world had already reached its final stage. Theoretically, Takumi now had at most one hour left to escape the house he had lived in for over a month. Otherwise, he and Miko would be directly teleported into the [Fujihana Middle School] Instance—and during a period when the Instance was not active—where they would have to remain inside for more than ten full days until it opened.
His one-month vacation as a player had only just passed a little over ten days, hadn't it?
It hadn't even been half a month, and he was already facing something like this. Was his luck really that bad?!
Though he very much wanted to roar aloud, Takumi kept a calm expression on his face. Just like that, he led Miko forward step by step along the corridor, gradually arriving at the stairwell.
Takumi saw the staircase extending upward, with the light of the setting sun filtering down from above.
And he also saw something he had never seen before today: another staircase extending downward, toward the underground, stretching into darkness.
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