The pain was especially clear at this moment.
Blood sprayed all the way out, splattering across the floor, across the walls, and across Miko's body—which was also Alice's body.
The entrails that had been ripped out fell to the ground. With his chest and abdomen almost hollowed out, Takumi swayed on the verge of collapse, and only stayed upright because Alice reached out and held him.
[There, there. It doesn't hurt, it doesn't hurt. It'll stop hurting very soon, okay?~]
The girl gently patted Takumi on the back, and there was actually a hint of tenderness in her voice.
"Cough, cough… urk…"
Takumi couldn't speak.
At this moment, his throat was already clogged with blood. The intense pain had numbed his senses, leaving his thoughts hazy and muddled.
Though for the current Takumi, pain at this level was basically nothing worth mentioning.
He grinned.
Even after suffering a fatal injury, there was not the slightest trace of pain on Takumi's face at this moment. On the contrary, he wore an extremely delighted smile.
He could feel it.
At this very moment, the Alice embracing him was holding a bone staff against her body.
To ensure the safety of the Obsession Item, this thing had very obviously kept the most crucial Obsession Item in its own hands. That choice was naturally the correct one, but only on the premise that she had not embraced Takumi while he was covered head to toe in blood.
[Teacher, actually, this girl really likes you.]
Alice's low laughter drifted into his ear.
[She feels that as long as she stays by your side, she'll definitely be safe. She depends on you a lot. She trusts you a lot.]
[Even though Teacher can't become my friend, you can definitely become Miko-chan's friend, right? So I had her kill you. Won't Teacher be very happy? Don't worry. In a little while, I'll teach her properly how to make dolls too. I'll definitely turn Teacher into a beautiful, pretty doll.]
Forcing his eyes open.
Blurrily, he saw Miko's tear-filled, pained, despairing gaze, as well as the faint curl of her lips.
So that's how it is. Because I'm not one of Alice's friends, this thing can't use aberration power to erase me or carry out my execution. But the Miko it's possessing has a physical body, so if it manipulates Miko's body to hurt me, then it doesn't need to obey any rules at all. That's why it could rip out my guts. Maybe when this thing killed Yoshino Rika in the first loop, it used the same principle. Tch, what the hell is this thing? This ghostly freak actually knows how to exploit rule loopholes too?
And this bastard actually had Miko do this while keeping her fully conscious?
Takumi could feel his consciousness growing blurrier and blurrier.
He was about to die.
If he did nothing, then yes, he really was about to die right now.
So…
Bang!
With a muffled thud, one of the Rescue Team members came sprinting from the far end of the corridor, slammed into Alice, then reached out and caught Takumi.
Immediately after that, a sheep-head doll appeared in Takumi's hand. In an instant, every wound on his body was transferred onto that doll, turning the doll itself ragged and ruined. Takumi, meanwhile, was restored to a completely uninjured state at that very moment. Even the sheep-head hood he had been wearing fell off with it, returning him to his human appearance.
[Eh? This doll is…?]
Sitting on the floor, Alice stared at the doll in Takumi's hand in surprise, looking somewhat puzzled.
Takumi himself had already started running forward without the slightest hesitation, and while doing so, he did not forget to throw another out-of-control Obsession Item into that flesh monster.
This time, what he threw was the medicine bottle that could heal injuries, tossing it directly into the pile of flesh. After swallowing yet another Obsession Item, the flesh-and-blood monster's movements immediately became even slower. Takumi then easily moved forward alongside the Rescue Team member beside him, who had come down from the sixth-floor disposal room—having jumped down through the passage in the disposal room that was used to discard corpses directly into the cremation furnace.
From the moment he realized the situation had turned bad, Takumi had already begun directing the Rescue Team members inside the Teaching Building to speed up their actions, and in the end they arrived just in time. Everything had happened within only a few minutes.
Though one crisis after another kept coming, at least for now, Takumi was still one step away from death.
Whoosh—
In the blink of an eye, Takumi had already sprinted a long distance forward.
In his field of vision, there was a concrete wall ahead of him.
But in the field of vision of the Rescue Team member beside him, what lay ahead was a normal passage.
Alice's illusion power clearly could not affect aberrations, so Takumi charged straight through, successfully passing through the nonexistent wall. Relying on the shared vision of the Rescue Team member to keep moving normally, he quickly escaped this area.
That flesh monster was still slowly lumbering after him.
But Alice, possessing Yotsuya Miko, merely sat on the ground and made no attempt to follow.
[No matter where Teacher plans to go next, Alice already knows, you know. Running like this won't let you escape.]
The girl only called out to Takumi from afar. From the tone of her voice, she already seemed certain of what was going to happen next.
Takumi did not run very far before finding a room and stopping. He inserted the Blood Key into the door lock and opened it, then returned to Class 15 of the second-year division—the classroom where the students were.
Mm… there are already no living people left…
At this moment, all that remained inside the classroom was a writhing mass of flesh, barely recognizable as the fused result of those girls.
Takumi could more or less guess what had happened. Most likely, that Alice had used illusions to mislead them, causing all the girls to sit in the same place when the Daytime phase began, and that was how they ended up like this.
They were still alive.
Though being alive like this was no different from being dead. If anything, it was even worse than just dying.
"Another total wipeout, huh? No idea whether those two girls managed to escape…"
Takumi did not know what to say about the situation before him. He merely pulled out the Blood Key, closed the door, and then looked at the Rescue Team member beside him.
Without saying a word, the Rescue Team member took out a bloodstained notebook and handed it to Takumi.
This was what the sixth-floor Rescue Team member had found inside the biology classroom. It had been pulled out from inside the belly of a human anatomical model.
It looked like a small booklet bound together with a stapler. Inside, it recorded a great deal of research information, including several of the Class 1 sacrifice records Takumi had seen before, as well as sacrifice records from the dormitory building, the swimming pool, and the athletic field.
Each of the four areas of Fujihana Middle School had its own underground observation facility. For some unknown reason, the information on the swimming pool and athletic field facilities had been completely blacked out, making it impossible to see what had originally been written there. But the information related to the Residential Wing and the Teaching Building remained. From the facility details recorded there, it was clear that the experimental methods used in this school were extremely primitive: they simply kept accumulating the power of resentment through torment and death. More than half of the pipes in those underground bases were even used to transport corpse fragments and sludge. To ensure the effectiveness of the research, the researchers would even bring in corpses from outside, grind them up, and fill the underground areas of the school with them.
As for the information on Alice, there was not much written about her. It merely mentioned that the organizers of the research institution had found a method to ensure that all of a dead person's resentment would be concentrated into a single individual.
What exactly that individual was, where it came from, and what kind of method was used to make resentment gather onto it—none of that was included in these materials. It looked as though that part had been deliberately removed. At the very end of the materials, the owner of the documents claimed that they had to be granted protection, otherwise they would not hand over the rest of the information. But honestly, the handwriting in these materials looked no matter how you saw it like the neat, elegant script of a girl. It did not match Teacher Turtle's rough, burly appearance in the illusion in the slightest.
Was it the result of a trap designed by Alice? The fact that someone was able to write down those words proved that, by that period, Alice had already begun to possess the ability to affect reality. Had she done it by possessing some student and making them carry out the act?
Walking out of the classroom, the eerie student-things in the corridor quickly converged around him.
Now that Takumi had lost the hood, those things naturally would no longer obey his orders. Of course, Takumi had no need to command them anymore. Drawing his machete, he hacked a path through them and went straight to the stairwell, beginning to make his way downstairs step by step.
The place he wanted to go was the second floor of the Teaching Building—though the first floor would also have worked. His objective was to find the passage that linked the Teaching Building and the Residential Wing. With the key Obsession Item on the Teaching Building side already in a blood-splattered state, there was no longer any reason for Takumi to remain here. Getting to the next area as fast as possible was the most important thing right now.
Of the four areas of Fujihana Middle School, two had already been sealed off, and one more would be sealed off at the very start of the next loop. That meant only the final area remained: the Residential Wing. As long as he could successfully get hold of the key Obsession Item in the underground area beneath the dormitory building, then the surface layer of Fujihana Middle School would no longer be able to keep functioning at all.
As for what this school would become at that point, Takumi was honestly a little curious himself.
Of course, before that, he still had to keep this life of his going as long as possible.
Takumi moved downstairs step by step, and quite quickly.
Fourth floor, third floor, then second floor.
The second floor of this Teaching Building was not classrooms, but the cafeteria. The entire second floor had been divided into four different dining areas—high-grade, mid-grade, low-grade, and garbage zone. Only students who matched the corresponding rank were allowed to enter the matching dining area and eat there. The high-grade and mid-grade cafeterias shared one kitchen, while the low-grade cafeteria and the garbage zone shared another. The map of this place was fairly simple and clear. Though the layout was somewhat distorted, compared to floors five through seven, it was nothing more than child's play, not even in the same league.
"The garbage zone… they're literally eating the slop from the regular cafeteria. This school really is inhuman in every possible way."
After seeing with his own eyes the so-called food set out in the garbage-zone dining hall, Takumi could not help curling his lip, feeling a little sick.
He quickly crossed the corridor, intending to leave this place as soon as possible.
But as though something had already sensed his goal in advance, just when Takumi could already see the passage leading toward the Residential Wing, there suddenly came a soft click, and the lights in the corridor where he stood flicked on, exposing him all at once in the brightness after all that darkness.
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