[When I was at my most beautiful]
[The people around me were dying in great numbers]
[In factories, on nameless islands, in the ocean]
[And I also lost the chance to dress up my youthful, blossoming years]
…
The sound of reading was ringing out.
The candlelight swayed slightly, flickering on its own without any wind under the ghastly white light.
The students sitting at their desks were reciting the text in their hands.
Expressionless.
Stiff and wooden.
Sounds came from mouths that had been hollowed out, from nothing but blood-soaked cavities.
And along with those reading voices, other sounds also rose up.
The voice trembled.
It sobbed and sniffled.
It was almost on the verge of collapse, yet it could only keep reading on—sentence by sentence, with great difficulty.
They were not allowed to stop reading.
Because that thing was standing right behind them.
And the girl who stopped reading—who stopped for only one second—her headless body toppled onto the desk, and her head was held in that thing's hand. She was clearly already dead, yet she was still letting out wailing cries, as if she were still alive.
[You must study hard…]
[You mustn't… be a disobedient bad kid…]
A dull woman's voice sounded from within the sheep head hood.
Blood was dripping down.
The students who had had their facial features dug out continued to read the words on the page.
The students whose heads had been crushed also sat quietly in their seats, bloodwater and bubbles surging nonstop from their tracheas, as if they were reading aloud.
And that severed head being held in its hand—until this very moment—was still making sobbing sounds.
[Teacher… I'm sorry…]
[I was wrong… Don't… tell my mom and dad…]
[They… work so hard… please… don't…]
In that murmuring voice, the girl's eyes, nose, mouth, and ears all began to bleed.
That thing wearing the sheep head hood began to move—step by step—along the gaps between the desks.
It walked the whole way.
The head it was holding cried the whole way, bleeding the whole way.
Students with torn-apart, incomplete bodies also sat at their desks.
Students who had been dragged out of the classroom, their spines snapped, also sat at their desks.
In this brightly lit yet eerily sinister classroom, more than half of the students sitting at their desks were no longer human, were already dead—yet under the light they rose again, returned to their seats, and began reading.
Tap—
Her high heels landed on the tiled floor with a crisp sound.
The thing holding a human head slowly walked up to a shivering girl.
[Save you… save me…]
The head that had been crying just now suddenly screamed like it had gone mad.
It abruptly began to struggle violently. Blood sprayed out from the head in a gush, splattering all over the girl in an instant.
The girl, her face covered in blood, trembled all over, yet the sound of reading still did not break—it continued to ring out without stopping. Even though her face had gone pale and tears kept streaming from the corners of her eyes, she still did not stop.
So after the thing came to a slow halt, it started walking forward again, then stopped in front of the next student.
As if it really were a conscientious teacher, carefully checking each student—checking whether they were studying properly.
Takumi was also sitting at his desk.
After he saw the sheep head hooded figure appear, after he sensed that intense malice that it made no effort to conceal, and after he noticed that the candle on the desk of the Aberration student in the classroom next door had stopped burning, he quickly brought Miko back to the previous classroom. He then immediately discovered that the Aberrations that had appeared earlier had all vanished, and that the desks and chairs that had been a complete mess in the classroom had all returned to normal.
Next, he decisively sat back down in his own seat, and found a textbook placed inside the desk. When the other girls saw that Takumi and Miko were sitting obediently in their seats, they followed suit, copying them.
As a result, in the chaos, one girl sat in the wrong seat—she sat in the seat of a girl who had already died. As for the outcome…
Takumi shifted his gaze slightly and saw that thing piled together, no longer even recognizable as a human shape.
The girl who had originally been in that seat had been torn into seven or eight pieces by something in the corridor. Just now, those chunks of flesh had wriggled on the floor, then suddenly sprang up and landed on the girl who had taken the wrong seat, forcibly fusing together with her. Now the girl in that spot had two heads, along with arms and legs tangled together, and writhing internal organs hanging off her body. The sight made Takumi think of a certain Tomerry from Project Moon, though judging from the reactions of those two heads, the two of them were probably not very harmonious yet.
But that wasn't the main point right now.
Takumi's gaze turned to the candle he had placed to one side of his desk.
At this moment, the candle was burning at a fairly rapid pace—at least three times faster than it had been burning earlier in the lights-out state.
In the lights-out state, a dead person's candle burns faster; once it burns out completely, the dead person will transform into an Aberration.
In the lights-on state, a dead person's candle stops burning; a living person's candle burns faster. From the looks of it so far, it probably wouldn't hold out for long.
And once a living person's candle goes out, they will immediately be attacked by the Aberration hiding inside the candle. That thing moves extremely fast, and aside from Miko, no one can see its movement trajectory at all. Trying to dodge the attack is almost impossible.
Therefore, they must find someone else's candle and attach it to their own; otherwise, it is impossible to survive.
There are two choices.
One is to seize a living person's candle—take the candles from these female students and attach them to one's own.
If this is done, it can be certain that the girl whose candle is taken will die. And because there will be no candle left to sustain its burning, the dead girl will undergo corpse transformation at a very rapid speed, becoming one of the school's Aberrations.
The second choice is to take the candles from those students in the classroom. Although he had only observed briefly at the time, Takumi was certain that the Aberrations' candles were the same as those of living people—they could overlap with each other.
But the problem with this option is even more obvious.
Previously, when no one had entered that classroom, all the Aberrations remained completely motionless, sitting in their seats without the slightest sign of being activated. Yet once Takumi appeared in the classroom and was seen by those things, they all turned to look at him, and their candles began burning rapidly along with it.
It was clear that the red candles restricted the movements of those Aberrations. Only after the candles burned out or were extinguished could those Aberrations gain freedom and launch attacks on the living.
So, taking those Aberrations' candles would activate all of them.
At this moment, Takumi clearly felt the intense malice of this [Alice's Grand Adventure Game]. Even though everything had only just begun, and the entire game had been going on for barely around ten minutes, he had not even fully managed to leave this classroom to confirm the situation outside.
[Daytime] had already lasted for about fifteen minutes. It was unclear how much longer it would continue. But after roughly recalling and calculating, Takumi was certain that the previous [Night] had lasted about twenty minutes. Accordingly, [Daytime] might also last twenty minutes, switching back and forth through lights being turned off and on as the medium.
When the next [Night] arrives, they must attach new candles to the red candles belonging to both himself and Miko. Whether taken from the living or from the Aberrations, they must attach one; otherwise, it would be very difficult for them to survive the next round of [Daytime].
Takumi's gaze turned toward the hole in the wall that he had just smashed open.
In that classroom, there were still twenty-five red candles that had burned to about halfway.
Since he had already activated the Aberrations in that room, he might as well go all the way—take all the candles from that room. After all, even if he did not do so, once [Night] arrived, the Aberrations in that classroom would all be activated very quickly anyway.
But even so, how long could they hold out?
And he had merely smashed through a wall at random and entered the adjacent classroom—yet he encountered twenty-five Aberration students.
Then how many classrooms are there in this Teaching Building, and how many such students are there in total?
Could it be that every single classroom here is filled with these things, and that in each classroom these things will activate once a living person enters—accelerating the burning of their candles before swarming out and running rampant throughout the entire Teaching Building to attack the living?
Or even… is it possible that, even without entering the classrooms where these things exist, those candles would still slowly burn, and once a certain point in time is reached, all the [students] in the entire Teaching Building would be mobilized to attack the living who have strayed into this place?
Takumi had a very bad feeling.
He felt that his deductions were not rigorous, and that the probability of them coming true should not be very high.
But at the same time, he vaguely realized that the situations he had imagined were very likely all true.
If things continue like this… how exactly is he supposed to find those five items? And how is he supposed to find a way to break the situation without "completing the game and becoming Alice's friend"? Just dealing with these endless ghostly things was already almost impossible. After all, he could barely use a single Obsession Item right now—it was equivalent to entering a high-difficulty Instance with no equipment.
Takumi frowned. The sound of reading from his mouth did not stop, yet in his heart he had already begun to faintly realize that he was starting to feel anxious.
Don't panic.
It's not the point of despair yet.
Hasn't he always been like this? Struggling nonstop in dangerous and harsh environments, struggling all the way until now.
The current situation was merely one where he might struggle in an even uglier manner.
Tap—
As he was thinking this, the high heels stopped at his side.
Takumi slightly raised his head and looked toward the sheep head hood.
At first, he had thought that the hood was merely a rather realistic plush sheep head.
But now, upon close observation, he realized that it seemed to be a real sheep's head—a freshly severed, unevenly cut, rotting sheep's head stitched together with a human neck. It had been forcibly sewn together with needle and thread, with staples, with iron wire and steel nails.
In the sheep's eyes, he could vaguely see maggots wriggling beneath the skin. A huge eyeball marked with a black horizontal stripe bulged outward and rotated toward Takumi.
A foul stench rushed into his nose.
And in that thing's hand, the blood-drenched human head was slowly lifted.
Amid the continuous recitation, the young girl's head turned to face Takumi.
Its mouth opened slightly. A large amount of blood poured out from its mouth, spilling onto the floor, onto Takumi's desk, and splashing toward his body and face.
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