Under the bright light, the originally dilapidated corridor instantly returned to a clean and intact state.
All traces of damage vanished without a trace.
And at that same moment, an extremely intense sensation of being watched by something became abruptly clear.
So, it's here?
Takumi already knew what it was that had locked onto him at this moment.
Principal Elephant—the thing he had not yet confronted head-on since entering Fujihana Middle School. Yotsuya Miko had always harbored a deep fear of this thing, so Takumi had chosen to be cautious when dealing with it, trying as much as possible not to provoke it. And yet, in the end, he still had not managed to avoid it.
Turning his head, he looked toward the far end of the corridor.
What Takumi saw there was Alice watching him, with one hand resting on the light switch.
If I still had the pistol, from this distance I could easily—no, now's not the time to get hung up on that. I have to evade it immediately, disappear from that thing's line of sight as fast as possible!
Now that he no longer had Miko's help with visual perception, Takumi could not even confirm what direction that thing was in. No, he still could confirm it, because at this very moment, three screens in the principal's office on the seventh floor of the Teaching Building had already lit up, and on those screens, Takumi himself could be seen clearly.
It was the right decision not to withdraw the second Rescue Team member from the principal's office. So now I absolutely have to—
[Guidance Office report: Student Takahashi Takumi of Class 015, Year Two, report to the Punishment Room immediately!]
A clear broadcast rang out at that moment.
Every movement Takumi had been making was forcibly cut short.
Like a puppet being manipulated, he stiffly turned around and began walking back the way he had come, toward the stairwell.
He could no longer control his own body.
His breathing became as regular as a preset program, completely unaffected by his own thoughts.
Even his mind was growing dull, as though apart from carrying out the order, he could no longer think about anything else.
One step, then another, then a third—each stride exactly the same length.
Through the chaos, from the corner of his vision, he seemed to be able to see a figure following behind him.
[How pitiful, Teacher. Do you know what's going to happen to you next?]
He heard the other party's voice, laughing with undisguised malice.
[Teacher already knows that's Principal Fujii, right? After all, you seem able to establish some sort of mental link with those two things. Are they your puppets? Your slaves? Or something else? A teacher who can command that sort of thing actually turns out to be some champion of justice—how disgusting. Don't tell me Teacher is the sort of person who says one thing and does another?]
[No, no, that's not right. Of those two things, the weaker one was originally a complete scoundrel, so commanding it doesn't really count as evil. As for the very strong one, it really does seem to be a good person. And it willingly let Teacher command it, didn't it? My, my, that makes it even more disgusting. For the sake of some so-called righteous cause, even after dying and becoming that sort of thing, it still refused to give up. It would rather let its own self-awareness fade away and leave behind nothing but a shell, and even then it still refuses to stop. Honestly, Teacher, don't you think that's all terribly boring?]
He heard the other side's voice, sounding almost emotional.
Alice hated Howard.
After Takumi exposed her true nature and saw what she really was, Alice no longer bothered to hide that malice in the slightest.
She loathed people like Howard with exactly that much intensity—people willing to give up their lives to save others, people who turned the deepest obsession in their hearts into hatred toward evil and sin, who would rather be shattered to pieces themselves if that was what it took to take revenge, to crush the darkness apart.
Why did she harbor such intense hatred toward someone like that?
Suddenly, Takumi thought of the corpse he had seen underground, the one lying beside the platform.
That dead person had apparently been one of Alice's fans back when she was still an idol.
From what he had seen, idol-era Alice regarded all of her fans as her friends. It was easy enough to imagine what sort of things she had done behind the scenes to those adoring fans beneath that surface friendliness.
But that fan had been shot dead.
The bullets had entered the body from behind.
Two shots to the head, one to the chest—possibly a Mozambique drill.
Someone with a gun had broken into the underground base beneath the abandoned Fujihana Middle School and shot one of Alice's fans?
Who was that person?
Could the kind of person Alice hated be that mysterious gunman?
Takumi wanted to force himself to think.
But his thoughts were growing slower and duller, less and less able to continue. It felt as if all that remained in his mind was the instinct to obey orders.
This can't go on.
I have to… break free of this control…
I can still stay conscious. I haven't reached the end of the road yet. I have to do it immediately—
Alice reached out, took the Rescue Team Badge pinned to Takumi's chest, opened the window, and threw it outside as casually as if she were tossing away a piece of trash.
The moment he lost the strengthening effect of the Rescue Team Badge's aberration power, Takumi immediately felt his thoughts grow even duller, while his body seemed to no longer belong to him at all. He even began to lose the sensation of his own flesh, as though spirit and body were slowly drifting apart.
Am I about to die already?
Takumi could now only barely tell that he was heading downstairs, making his way down through the stairwell.
[Alice], possessing Miko, stayed by his side, softly humming to herself as she skipped along lightly.
The song she was singing was very familiar to Takumi. He had already heard it many times before.
[Stepped on a kitty~]
[Stepped on a kitty~]
[Stepped on a kitty taking a nap~]
Hearing that voice, it was as if he could truly see the scene.
As if he were really seeing Alice—with her long golden hair and that perfect beauty no human being should be able to possess—grinding a kitten's head and body beneath her shoes, happily dancing and singing in a pool of blood.
He saw the incomparable delight on her face as she took life away.
She was completely different from all the evildoers Takumi had encountered up to now.
At this moment, Takumi actually sensed a certain kind of "purity" from [Alice].
A pure enjoyment of the process of bringing death to life.
A pure enjoyment of other people's pain and despair.
A pure… enjoyment with no other desire mixed into it, unrelated to greed for money or wealth, unrelated to material pleasures or any such worldly thing. It could not even really be called excitement, or any other kind of spiritual craving. It was simply that… doing this made her happy. It was nothing more than pure joy.
Within his hazy consciousness, he saw something deeper.
He saw [Alice] walking through countless mangled corpses.
He saw [Alice] silently watching one slaughter after another.
He saw [Alice] from the very beginning to the very end of this school's existence. He saw her spend an entire childhood—from birth to growth—in this hellishly twisted, insane place, and he saw the final shape this thing had taken, molded by these countless cruel and savage souls.
[You saw it, didn't you, Teacher? Even if not as clearly as Miko-chan and me, you must have seen it very clearly, right? If it's you, Teacher, then you can definitely see those scenes now, definitely see what Alice went through, right?]
The girl beside him was still laughing softly.
[Alice is that kind of Alice, you know. The idol everyone likes, the Alice who wants to become friends with everyone.]
[It's really such a shame that I couldn't become friends with you, Teacher. Why did you have to become that kind of very uninteresting person? Most people wouldn't choose that, you know?]
As she laughed, she circled around Takumi, giggling as she went on speaking.
[When they see someone else in trouble, they pretend not to notice. If it affects them, they scold the other person for causing trouble. But when it's their turn to cause trouble for someone else, they think they've done nothing wrong and that it's the world that's wrong. This person envies that person for having something they don't. That person hates their neighbor because the neighbor's child got into a better school.]
[When they need to say something, they always have a thousand, ten thousand excuses. Even if the person in danger is right beside them, they can still blame the firefighters who came to rescue them for disturbing the neighborhood in the middle of the night, saying those firefighters never stopped to think about others or put themselves in someone else's shoes.]
[In the end, everyone is really just doing things for their own benefit, just for themselves. To give something for people who have nothing to do with you, when there's no personal stake involved—something like that is obviously wrong. People like that are obviously the odd ones out, the ones who are different from everyone else. And people who are different have no way of becoming friends with others. They can only live on all alone, and it's even hard for them just to keep living.]
[People like that are obviously very uninteresting. And Teacher, you weren't even originally that kind of person, right? You clearly have strong desires. You like young, pretty girls, and you also have a fair amount of controlling tendencies. You can also be ruthless toward people who threaten your personal safety and interests. A teacher like that should obviously have been one of the majority, so why did you say those things to Alice? Why did you have to become that kind of uninteresting person?]
[Could it be that you only said those things on purpose to make Alice angry, just so you wouldn't become Alice's friend? If that's the case, then Alice can forgive you, you know. After all, it's not really that big a deal.]
Within that stream of words, Takumi could vaguely see the girl gently reaching out to stroke his cheek, her voice filled with tenderness, as though she were forgiving one of his little acts of willfulness.
What floor had they reached now?
Takumi could no longer see his exact location clearly, but after carefully thinking back over the speed at which he had been moving earlier, he guessed he should already have reached the first floor, and that now they might be heading underground.
Click—
The girl beside him seemed to press something on the wall.
Takumi's stiff body kept moving forward into a deeper, darker place.
He had originally thought the underground floors could only be reached by elevator, but it turned out there was also a hidden door in the stairwell? Tch. He could not see clearly what exactly she had activated, but it did seem that an additional flight of stairs leading underground had now appeared.
He could not keep going like this… he had to resist… had to find some way to resist…
He could not activate the power of his blessing.
Takumi had already lost the ability to control his own body.
Just keeping his consciousness awake was already the result of struggling with everything he had.
The power of [Principal Elephant] was terrifying to the extreme. Takumi estimated that even if his sheep-head hood were still on, he still would not have survived. The "Principal" of Fujihana Middle School most likely had a priority second only to Alice. In this instance, any identity obtained within it was unsafe in front of that thing.
Step by step, Takumi entered the underground level.
Dim yellow lights came on.
Cold chains were slowly drawn upward.
Takumi's body had already been hoisted into the air. In the darkness, only the light directly above his head was on, illuminating the spot where he hung.
[Student Takahashi Takumi, for failing to participate in class according to student regulations, is hereby given one personal warning punishment: 20 strikes.]
Amid that icy voice, a heavy iron rod came crashing down onto Takumi's body.
Once, twice… after only five blows, the flesh on Takumi's back had already been torn apart, and blood was beginning to seep out.
But the iron rod did not stop. It gradually began to shift targets, from his back, to his chest, to his abdomen, to his legs and feet.
By the tenth blow, more than half of Takumi's ribs had already been broken.
After the fourteenth strike, one of his knees had been smashed apart, while the ankle of his other leg had been crushed.
His head also took an extremely heavy blow, so heavy that one of his eyeballs bulged out, blood continuously pouring from it.
After all twenty strikes were finished, all four of his limbs had been broken, most of his ribs were fractured, his internal organs were bleeding, and he had already lost half his vision.
"Cough… urgh…"
He still was not dead.
Even after suffering twenty savage blows from a solid iron rod, Takumi still had not died.
It seemed he had barely recovered a trace of control over his body.
At this moment, Takumi's consciousness was already on the verge of collapse. The severe trauma to his head had dealt a devastating blow to his ability to think. Amid the intense dizziness and pain, he could no longer even tell whether he was still inside Fujihana Middle School, or trapped within some long, unending nightmare.
He struggled forward, dragging himself ahead with his arms for a single step.
Then, it seemed a small foot stepped down onto his back.
[Even like this, Teacher still hasn't died, huh? Your vitality really is quite tenacious.]
[But even so, Teacher, you have no way of surviving anymore. No human could live through injuries like these. Continuing to struggle for this last bit of remaining time… is there really any possibility that it could change anything?]
[But if it's Teacher… maybe you really could do it. After all, you secretly stole Alice's friend without anyone noticing, and even took out a little thing that Alice had never seen before—something that, by all logic, you shouldn't have been able to possess.]
Amid her soft laughter, the girl slowly lowered herself down, lying across Takumi's back. She rubbed her cheek against the side of his face in an intimate gesture, completely unconcerned with the blood smeared across her own face. Then she lowered her head further, bringing her lips close to his ear, and spoke in a whisper, as if blowing gently into it:
[Hey, Teacher.]
[Can you tell Alice how you did it?]
[If you tell Alice, then Alice will let Teacher live, okay~?]
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