When everyone returned to the Black Sphere Space.
Except for Shiina Hiyori and Shiranami Chihiro — who had never set foot on the rooftop — every single face in the room wore the same expression for a brief, disorienting moment.
Blank. Completely, utterly blank.
Same as always, really. The sun rises, and yesterday's pain gets scrubbed clean without a trace.
It passed quickly. Their expressions cycled back to normal within seconds.
And honestly? Setting aside the abysmal kill count — the Silence's ability really was something else. Look away for even a second and the memory dissolves. Passive cognitive rewriting, built right into what they were.
Even Chris had only managed to hold on because GANTZ had been feeding him a private cheat sheet the whole time. Without that advantage, without leaning on any items at all — he'd have been just as vulnerable.
Thankfully, those 'Silence' were as fragile as wet paper and about as sharp as a bag of hammers. Genuinely, catastrophically stupid.
Give that skill set to something with a functioning brain, and you'd have a full-blown miniboss on your hands in under five minutes.
"Is it already over?"
"That's... strange."
Sakayanagi Arisu was the first to shake it off — and she didn't let her guard down just because they were back. One hand rested against her chin, her eyes already working through it.
"Why do I have absolutely no memory of how it ended?"
The moment she said it, even the slowest person in the room felt it — something was wrong.
And the people in this room were anything but slow.
A collective memory gap like this was the anomaly. That was the whole point.
"A problem with our memories?"
Shiina Hiyori ran back through what she could recall — and noticed that only Shiranami Chihiro, who like her had stayed off the rooftop, showed no sign of confusion.
She offered her theory quietly:
"Maybe it has something to do with this exam's hidden target?"
"The verification is simple enough, actually."
"We just compare the points we remember earning from the Kabane kills against whatever GANTZ tallies at settlement. If there's a gap — that's our answer."
"After all, standard Kabane units can't be worth that much. The math will show it."
Ryuuen Kakeru ran a quick mental replay of the exam.
"Our group — by the time we'd finished clearing the Kabane... I got three kills. Albert got two. Shiranami got one."
"Ichinose grabbed five, plus that twin-blade Kabane variant."
He paused. His gaze shifted to Chris.
But before Chris could say anything, Horikita Suzune cut in, clearly unable to wait:
"Our side — Chris got two, Sakayanagi got three, I got three, and Kamuro Masumi... got zero."
"Were you pooling kills too?" Ryuuen raised an eyebrow.
Horikita glanced at Kamuro.
She'd assumed Sakayanagi Arisu had some kind of leverage over Kamuro — that she was donating kills under duress. But it was tactics?
Kamuro Masumi: ...
It wasn't tactics. Those two scheming bastards just ganged up and locked me out of every kill!
She raged internally — but kept up the cool, aloof front on the outside, turning her head away and declining to explain.
Ryuuen didn't push it.
"GANTZ! Start the tally!"
The surface of the Black Sphere rippled with light. White text materialized, line by line:
[A total of ten friendly units were seeded into this trial. Seven were eliminated (death/infection). Three survived.]
[Bonus: +1 point per survivor. Penalty: -1 point per casualty.]
[Therefore: all participants receive a base adjustment of +3 points, offset by a deduction of 7 points.]
[Individual score rankings are as follows——]
[1st. Ichinose Honami: 7 points (cumulative: 12 points)]
[2nd. Chris: 4 points]
[3rd. Horikita Suzune / Sakayanagi Arisu: 2 points each (cumulative: 4 points each)]
[4th. Yamada Albert: 1 point]
[5th. Ryuuen Kakeru: 0 points (cumulative: 3 points)]
[6th. Kamuro Masumi: -1 point (cumulative: 1 point)]
[7th. Shiina Hiyori: -2 points]
[8th. Shiranami Chihiro: -3 points]
...
[Class Rankings and Bonus Points——]
[Class A: 1035 (1030 + 1 × 500%) — All Class A students receive a bonus of 500 consumer points each.]
[Class B: 732.4 (702.4 + 4 × 750%) — All Class B students receive a bonus of 3,000 consumer points each.]
[Class C: 505 (515 − 1 × 1000%) — All Class C students are docked 1,000 consumer points each.]
[Class D: 150 (90 + 6 × 1000%) — All Class D students receive a bonus of 6,000 consumer points each.]
[S-Points may be spent at a 1:10 ratio to supplement Class Points.]
"Wait — I thought the penalty would be some kind of percentage cut at most. I didn't think they'd actually dock us per head!" Chris said, genuinely surprised.
"And when we arrived at the academic building, those students were already scattered everywhere. There was never any realistic way to save all of them... and they're doing us this dirty anyway?"
Ryuuen Kakeru's face had gone ugly. He came dangerously close to grinding his teeth down to the nerve.
He'd fought his lungs out, and what did he have to show for it? A personal score of zero — and a class bill he'd be paying out of pocket?!
"Heh. Very GANTZ of it," Sakayanagi Arisu said, tone even, composure untouched. She even had the bandwidth to theorize:
"I imagine when points are scarce, deductions are applied as flat points. When points are plentiful — it switches to a percentage. Scales with the target."
Chris gave a quiet mental nod. Sharp. Called it.
Sakayanagi continued:
"But looking at these rankings — even after the penalties, everyone's scores are overflowing in ways that don't quite add up to the Kabane kills alone."
"Which means the hidden target's point value was considerable. Possibly... significant in number, too."
"Something capable of disrupting our cognition would have to be worth that much, at minimum," Horikita Suzune agreed, arms folded, voice cool and clipped.
Honestly, she was deeply frustrated.
This feeling of having clearly won something — while having absolutely no idea how — was like an itch in the exact spot she couldn't reach. Maddening.
Unlike Horikita, Shiina Hiyori's concerns were considerably more practical.
"If cumulative scores drop into the negatives..."
"Beyond docking class points — for those of us personally sitting in the red, what else does that mean?"
As if responding to her question on cue:
[As a qualified participant, a negative S-Point balance constitutes disqualification.]
[Any qualified participant who remains in disqualified status for three consecutive cumulative tallies will have their survival rights revoked and be subject to 'termination processing.']
"Termination...?"
Shiina Hiyori instinctively followed up: "What kind of termination?"
The Black Sphere: [You're a smart girl. Feel free to use your imagination.]
Every spine in the room went cold.
In a place like this — what other interpretation was there?
Aside from physical elimination in the most literal sense, none of them could think of a second option.
"How can this be..."
Ichinose Honami looked at Shiranami Chihiro and Shiina Hiyori — both of them gone sheet-white — and felt something lurch hard in her chest.
She snapped her gaze to the Black Sphere:
"GANTZ! Can scores be transferred?"
"Is it possible to give some of my points to Shiranami and Shiina? Even just enough to bring them back to zero — please!"
[Nothing brings me more joy than saying this to someone who thinks they can fix everything — NO!!!]
Ichinose Honami pressed her lips together, her chest heaving. Her eyes went red at the corners almost immediately.
"It's okay, Ichinose."
Shiranami Chihiro forced a smile — bright, cheerful, and thoroughly unconvincing — and tried to play it down:
"It's only negative three. We've still got two more chances. We'll grind it back next exam — it'll go fast, you'll see!"
"That's right, Ichinose-san," Shiina Hiyori added, her voice soft, her face still a little pale — but her logic as clear as ever:
"Even if transfers were allowed, giving your points away would leave you without enough to upgrade the suit. And I'd imagine the suit had a part to play in why Chris-kun and Horikita-san placed where they did this round, didn't it?"
Chris, suddenly referenced, decided to go with the flow.
"Probably, yeah. The suit's a solid piece of kit."
He couldn't exactly attribute everything to it — but you couldn't say it had contributed nothing, either.
Horikita Suzune stayed quiet.
She didn't have a choice. She couldn't even remember what had happened at the end. What was there to say?
She wasn't about to play cute and claim, 'Even without the suit, I would've wiped the floor with all of them!'
That would just be embarrassing. She had no social awareness — she wasn't actually an idiot.
At that point, the usually reticent Yamada Albert cut in without warning:
"Three survivors left... so it sounds like Hirata's going to be fine."
"But — what about the students who died during the exam?"
Ichinose Honami immediately pulled out her phone and shot a message to Amikura Mako.
A few seconds passed. She looked up, and some of the tension in her face eased:
"Mako says they're all alive. They've just lost their memories of anything that happened during the exam."
"And Hirata-kun's injuries — they healed the moment the exam ended."
"Figured." Ryuuen Kakeru let out a cold snort. "I knew it'd be something like this."
"GANTZ... truly terrifying."
Sakayanagi Arisu murmured, something like genuine feeling threading through her voice for once:
"And this was only the third exam. It caused this much chaos — and yet in the end, it smoothed everything back to zero without a wrinkle. Like flipping a switch. The world just... goes quiet again."
"A god with this kind of power, and this kind of... whimsy... What comes next from something like that?"
Two seconds of silence.
Fear of what was coming. And the quiet, helpless weight of knowing exactly how small they were.
"Tch."
Ryuuen Kakeru clicked his tongue, turned on his heel, and walked straight out of the Black Sphere room without another word.
But his silhouette as he left was a little lonely. A little bleak. The kind of image that settled somewhere uncomfortable in your chest.
Sakayanagi Arisu watched him go, shook her head lightly, and turned her attention to Kamuro Masumi — who was still standing there, staring at nothing in particular.
"Kamuro-san."
"...Huh? What?" Kamuro Masumi startled.
"I'm sorry."
Sakayanagi Arisu's tone was, for once, genuinely sincere:
"I didn't anticipate that a negative score would trigger a termination clause like this."
"Pulling you into this — and leaving you to carry a negative balance — that was my mistake."
"We got lucky this time. Nothing irreversible happened."
She paused. Then, quietly:
"You don't have to participate in the next exam. Going forward... I won't force you into this again."
"...What?"
Kamuro Masumi went still.
She stared at Sakayanagi Arisu — who looked, for all the world, completely serious — and felt genuine, unguarded surprise bloom across her face.
Wait...
Had she been wrong about Sakayanagi Arisu this whole time? Was she actually... a decent person who actually cared about the people under her?
Were those three points actually a genuine gift?
No. No, absolutely not.
Kamuro Masumi's eyes slid sideways to Chris, then back to Sakayanagi.
She'd rather believe those three points were Chris's way of currying her favour — feeding her kills to get in her good graces — than believe Sakayanagi Arisu, of all people, had suddenly grown a conscience.
This woman. The type who squeezes every drop out of a person and then walks away without looking back. There was no way she'd just changed.
No. She was too weak right now. The kind of small fry who'd just roll over the second someone pushed. That's all this was.
This was definitely a strategic retreat. Feign goodwill, lower the target's guard — then advance.
Kamuro Masumi settled into that conclusion with total confidence, wholly convinced by her own deduction.
She knew Sakayanagi Arisu too well.
If she actually bought this act — she'd be paying for it for a long, long time to come.
Sakayanagi tilted her head ever so slightly — that little face of hers scrunched up in an expression caught perfectly between adorable and genuinely annoyed.
This woman. What on earth is she imagining right now.
...She's not saying something terrible about me, is she?
——End of Chapter——
Monster Point Values:
Kabane: 1 point
Wazabane (Skill-Corpse variant): 2 points
The Silence: 3 points
Scoring Formula:
Kill Points + Survivor Bonus − Casualty Penalty = Round Score
Round Score + Previous Cumulative Score = Total Cumulative Score (may go into debt)
____
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