Third floor of the academic building. Chemistry lab.
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka pressed himself flat against the door frame, one eye to the gap, scanning the darkened corridor beyond.
Nothing. No footsteps. No wet, dragging sound of something pulling itself along the floor on broken limbs. Just the intermittent buzz of a motion-sensor light down the hall, its circuit shorting out in the dark.
He pulled back and gave the two behind him a short, quiet signal.
"We're safe. For now."
Only then did Hirata Yousuke finally let himself breathe — long, ragged gulps of air, propped against the lab bench with his back. His face was chalk-white. His right hand was clamped hard over his left arm, pressing down on a strip of cloth torn from his shirt, already soaked through and gone dark red.
"Sorry..."
Hirata let out a pained, self-deprecating laugh, a cold bead of sweat tracing down his temple. "I pushed too hard after all. In the end, I didn't save anyone — and I dragged everyone else into it with me."
"Don't say that, Hirata-kun."
Amikura Mako was scrolling through her phone trying to reach a teacher, but she paused and looked up at him.
"That Kabane that came crawling up the wall out of nowhere — it was carrying two katanas, and it moved faster than a monkey. Against something like that? Making it out alive is already everything anyone could've done."
The memory still made her skin crawl.
That twin-blade Kabane — it hadn't just been fast. It had known how to parry. How to slash. It had technique. If Hirata hadn't thrown himself at it and shoved it off the ledge, all three of them would've been just another pair of bodies in the corridor.
"But still..."
Hirata Yousuke still looked wretched. He raised his head and looked at Ayanokoji Kiyotaka.
"If Ayanokoji-kun hadn't grabbed me in time — and used the fire extinguisher spray to blind it — I think I would've ended up one of them."
"I only made the most basic call."
Ayanokoji shook his head, tone flat.
"And besides — from what I've observed, the situation may not be as bad as you're thinking."
"The students who got bitten didn't mutate the way they do in movies. Their bodies dissolved into blue particles and vanished."
"I don't know whether that counts as death. But at the very least — it means this place operates under a set of rules we don't fully understand yet."
"Rules?"
Amikura Mako blinked. Then something seemed to click, and she looked between them with open surprise.
"Wait — you two don't know about the Black Sphere trials?"
"Black Sphere... trials?"
Ayanokoji and Hirata exchanged a glance. The term was completely foreign to both of them.
"Oh — it's what the teachers have been calling the 'special exam'!"
Amikura Mako quickly dug out the long summary image that Ichinose had compiled earlier, and held the phone out to them.
Ayanokoji took it and skimmed the screen.
GANTZ. S-Points. Mission objectives. Hidden targets.
Line by line, the text landed against the framework of guesses he'd already been quietly building — and slotted into place.
...So that's how it is.
When he finished, Hirata Yousuke pressed his fist tight against his knee. Something raw moved across his face — anger he couldn't quite contain.
"What the hell kind of 'trial' is this... using the academic building as a slaughterhouse? Putting this many innocent students' lives at risk — does the school administration actually condone this?"
Condone it...
He thought of Chabashira Sae's carefully noncommittal attitude, and the answer came to him quietly.
But he didn't say it out loud.
He handed the phone back to Amikura Mako. Then he walked over to Hirata and helped him to a more concealed corner of the room, settling him down and gesturing for him to close his eyes and rest.
Once that was done, Ayanokoji turned back to the side window. His gaze seemed to pass straight through the dark.
"According to what Ichinose posted — as long as the 'qualified participants' clear out the monsters, the exam ends."
Amikura Mako watched him with a thread of unease in her voice.
"So you're planning to...?"
"Wait, obviously."
He said it like it was the only answer that made sense.
"Even if I wanted to find antiseptic and antibiotics for Hirata, I'd have to wait until Horikita and the others clear a safe path before we move."
"From what Ichinose described, these things are not something we can handle bare-handed."
Though privately — Ayanokoji was confident. Even against that twin-blade Kabane that had severed Hirata's arm with contemptuous ease, give him a decent weapon and he was fairly certain he could put it down.
But the 'hidden targets' mentioned in Ichinose's notes made him cautious.
There's an old saying: in a zombie apocalypse, you don't need to outrun the zombies — you just need to outrun the person next to you. Not exactly a moral principle to live by. But in an environment this saturated with unknown variables, tipping your hand too early was simply not smart.
He was still turning it over when —
Amikura Mako, who should have been watching the corridor, suddenly let out a sharp, startled yelp.
"What is that?!"
Every muscle in Ayanokoji's body snapped taut. His head whipped up.
And found himself looking at a face that was just as blank and confused as he felt.
Amikura Mako blinked at him.
"...What? Why are you looking at me like that?"
"..."
Ayanokoji's pupils contracted — just slightly.
That hadn't been a hallucination. The yelp was real.
Amikura Mako had definitely seen something. And in the span of less than a second — she had gone completely blank. Like a hard reset. The memory: gone.
A crawling wrongness moved up his spine and into his scalp.
He didn't answer her. He swept the room instead — fast, methodical.
His gaze stopped.
Corner of the lab. Behind a row of specimen cabinets. The dark gap where the backlight didn't reach.
Something was standing there.
A figure in a black suit. Skin the color of old wax. Its face — an unholy fusion of Munch's The Scream and the alien Greys from every UFO conspiracy ever filed — stared back at him with features that were almost-but-not-quite human, blurred at the edges as if reality itself was unsure how to render them.
It had tilted its oversized head to one side.
It was watching them.
Ayanokoji blinked — and pressed his thumbnail hard against the inside of his lip until it broke skin. Pain. Anchor. Real.
He believed Amikura Mako. She had seen it.
The reason she'd forgotten — that was this creature's doing.
So this was some kind of... cognitive kill-switch? A rule built into its very existence?
The question then became: what now?
Strike first?
Or... pretend he hadn't seen it at all?
...
At that same moment. The other end of the third-floor corridor.
Fwish —!
Steel sang through the air and split a lunging Kabane clean through the midsection.
Ryuuen Kakeru flicked the blood off the blade, eyes bright.
"Not bad. This thing's a damn sight better than an iron pipe."
He turned and looked back at Shiina Hiyori.
"Status? How many survivors left?"
Before Shiina could answer, Ichinose cut in, her voice tight with urgency.
"It's bad. Worse than we projected."
"Three people are clustered together and holding on for now — but the rest are too scattered. Just now, two more green dots went out."
She bit her lip. She couldn't keep the look off her face.
Yamada Albert, who had been keeping his head down and doing his job without a word, pushed his sunglasses up. His brow creased.
"How many were there at the start?"
Shiina Hiyori answered quietly from her rear-guard position.
"Ten originally. Three remaining."
"What the...?"
Yamada Albert actually swore — a rare occasion — and his expression went hollow.
"That's it? Seven dead? Our score is just going to be wiped out?!"
"Tch."
Ryuuen's face had gone dark.
"Even being generous — one deduction per person — we're already seven points in the hole..."
Of course. Of course. The one time the setup actually favored him, the rules had to pull some bullshit out of nowhere. Was any of this remotely fair?
He tightened his grip on the sword hilt and spat under his breath.
"Doesn't matter."
"Find those last three people now. If we kill every last monster in this building and still lose the survivors — we've done this whole thing for absolutely nothing."
"Move!"
Ichinose Honami fell in right behind him.
Though her reason for the urgency had nothing to do with points.
She stared at those three green dots clustered together on the screen — the ones that represented survivors still breathing — and she prayed.
Please let one of those be Mako.
Please. Please be okay.
Running at the tail of the group, Shiranami Chihiro's thoughts were considerably simpler.
She kept both hands locked around the Y-GUN. Her eyes stayed fixed on Ichinose's back, never straying.
She was in genuine danger right now. She knew that.
And yet, buried somewhere under the fear — a tiny, traitorous flicker of relief.
Thank god I didn't get grouped with that guy this time.
If I'd ended up in the same team as Chris...
The moment that thought surfaced, the rest arrived right behind it uninvited.
That guy — the one who'd saved Ichinose's life, and who Ichinose had clearly gone to see about something that had obviously Happened — just thinking about him made Shiranami Chihiro's stomach do an uncomfortable little twist.
If he'd been assigned to the same group as Honami-chan — in this environment, of all environments — the suspension-bridge effect cranked all the way up — and then he'd go and pull some heroic rescue act, play the dashing knight two or three times over...
The image that followed was frankly unbearable to contemplate.
By the time the exam ended, Honami-chan's heart would be completely stolen. And Chihiro would be relegated to playing the flute sadly from the sidelines!
Ugh! Why was her imagination this vivid?! What was wrong with her?!
No! Absolutely not! NEVER!!
Perhaps this was the nature of a girl caught somewhere between childhood and something she hadn't named yet — her hopes and worries as small and earnest as they were real.
After all, for Shiranami Chihiro, it really was that simple.
She just needed to empty her head and trust Ichinose Honami without conditions. That was enough.
And trust — real trust — didn't need a reason.
As long as she could stay at Honami-chan's side, even hell would feel like somewhere she could bear to be.
——End of Chapter——
P.S. Recommendation: "Dead Men's Chat Group — Goal: Win the Resurrection Match"
Lin Yuan died. After dying, he got added to a group chat.
Something felt off, though.
What did it mean that this was a chat group only the dead could join?
Looking around at his fellow members — every last one of them already deceased — Lin Yuan raised a deeply confused voice:
"So... our current top priority is winning the Resurrection Match?"
"Hold on — holy crap — you actually didn't tell me it was possible to WIN a Resurrection Match?!"
...
Many years later, after everyone had been brought back.
[Jonathan Joestar: DIO, don't think escaping to Egypt puts an end to this. I came back from the dead to collect.]
[David Martinez: Vergilius went all the way to Night City and I still haven't respawned — what gives?]
[Jie: I've been gone so many years... I wonder how everyone back in the Great Yan Empire is doing... Huh? What do you mean, I can come back to life?]
[Simmer: The Age of Simmer's Death? Already over!]
[Kiritsugu Emiya: What do you mean it's already the Fifth War — and now I have to run a Resurrection Match?]
[Carmen: First priority is getting down there and manually steering the Photon Cannon to launch properly.]
Looking around at all his chat group members who had already been revived, Lin Yuan prodded at his own body.
"Year after year after year — I've been at this so long I'm practically a Lich. When is it my turn to come back?"
____
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