Chapter 200: Interesting Soul

Through the reflection of the Mirror World.

Amikura Mako watched the "masterminds" on the screen, their faces going dark now that the negotiation had fallen apart, and let out a long, long breath.

'Thank god… Yotsuya and the others didn't let these sanctimonious frauds talk them around.'

Sure, the fat man had spent the whole time draping himself in grand words — "for all of humanity," "to stop the Evil God from ending the world."

But in the gaps between, Amikura Mako had seen it, clear as day.

These people stood there with champagne in hand, smirking, treating Miko and the rest like gladiators laid on for their entertainment!

They'd even wagered on those lives — who would die first, whether terror would push them into killing each other just to survive!

What kind of justice was that supposed to be?

True, once word came that the Neon Branch's sacrifice had failed, once they realized the world's last hope now rested on Yotsuya Miko and her band of "Intruders," their attitude had swung a full hundred and eighty degrees.

But as far as Amikura Mako was concerned, no matter how magnificent a reason they wrapped around it, nothing could scrub away what they were underneath: people who treated human lives as a game.

And more than that. For the sake of some other world's so-called peace, were they obligated to step forward, throw themselves away, hand over their lives?

'Don't make me laugh… a salvation built on trampling other people's lives is nothing but hypocrisy.'

Amikura Mako's fists tightened.

As Honami Ichinose's closest friend, she treasured life as much as anyone. But before she ever learned to treasure life, she'd learned to know which side she was standing on.

And there was no doubt at all. She stood with Yotsuya Miko, with Nanase Tsubasa, with her friends.

Beside her, Hiyori Shiina caught the swell of feeling running through Amikura Mako and offered a quiet reminder.

"Amikura, as long as you put your hand on it, we can touch the image and send our voices through to the world on the other side."

"Maybe… we can use that to give Yotsuya and the others some help. Information, at least."

Amikura Mako nodded hard. "Shiina — thank you!"

…

The Cabin in the Woods instance.

Inside the grim, half-wrecked cabin.

Nanase Tsubasa, Ryuji Kanzaki and the rest had just resolved to fight the arrogant bastards to the bitter end.

Then a voice, slightly warped, dropped into their ears out of nowhere.

"Nanase! Yotsuya! Those people watching you from behind the scenes — they're right under your feet, underground!"

"They've still got plenty of horrible monsters they haven't released yet. Please be careful!"

Nanatsura Tsubasa froze for a beat, then caught on. "Amikura-senpai…?"

"It's me." Amikura Mako made a small sound of confirmation. "We're with Chris, in the extra instance the Instance Card opened up. Through the mirror surface, we can see everything on your side."

"I'll keep feeding you information from here on, and we'll find a way to help as fast as we can… From what I can see, the failed sacrifice has driven that crowd down there a little insane. Whatever you do, be careful!"

Hearing the intel Amikura Mako had passed along, Ryūji Kanzaki pushed up his glasses and let out a cold laugh.

"Of course they've gone insane."

"Because every word about the 'Evil God ending the world' is true. The Black Sphere spelled that out in the opening rules." He shrugged. "But what does that have to do with us?"

"We're already dead. We came to this damned extra instance with exactly one clear condition: 'stay alive.'"

"Their survival requires our deaths. Our clear condition requires us to walk out breathing… We and those people are natural, irreconcilable enemies."

On the far side of the mirror, Amikura Mako fell silent for a moment.

Inside the room, though, Yotsuya Miko and Nanase Tsubasa were already moving.

The masks were off for good now, so there was no reason left to be polite.

With the heightened senses granted by Ripple and by vampire blood, they had no trouble at all finding the microphones and pinhole cameras tucked into the corners and crushing every one of them.

Freed from the weight of being watched, Chie Hoshinomiya couldn't hold the question back.

"So do we win if we're still alive after this so-called Evil God wakes up? Or does it only count if we're still breathing after the Evil God finishes wiping this world out?"

Shiranami Chihiro shook her head. "Not sure."

"The Black Sphere's first hint was that if we could 'break away' from the exam zone alive, we'd be granted new life. I honestly don't know how the judgment works."

Ryūji Kanzaki picked up from there.

"If I'm remembering correctly, the exact wording was: 'From now on, so long as you can leave this test alive, you will shed these cursed spirit bodies completely and be reborn.'"

Nanase Tsubasa pressed her lips together, thinking.

"Alive… leave…"

"It really doesn't seem to define an exact end point for us. No hard requirement to kill some specific monster, either."

"Listen… what if the Black Sphere meant it literally? What if it wants us to break away from this world under our own power?"

Chie Hoshinomiya clicked her tongue, half out of her mind with frustration.

"How is that even possible? It's not like we've got some item that can bend spatial dimensions. That's a dead end, isn't it?"

Feeling the mood turn heavy again, Yotsuya Miko drew a deep breath.

She was an ordinary girl who had barely escaped the torment of her Spirit Eyes before tumbling into an even bigger nightmare, and deep down she was more frightened than anyone here.

But right now, Yotsuya Miko refused to let that mood swallow everyone up.

She clapped her hands together lightly.

"Don't lose heart, everyone!"

"The Black Sphere's presiding god may be vicious, but it has never once handed us a test with no possible answer — a test we simply had to die in."

Miko's gaze steadied. "So maybe this 'leaving' condition isn't as strict as we're imagining."

"For example… if we can find something like the Mirror World from the [Blank Card Box], or the Kingdom of Shadows from the [Shadow Mask] — some subspace passage that can temporarily sever our physical link to the world we're standing in… wouldn't the system rule that as 'successfully leaving'?"

The others stared at her, caught off guard.

Shiranami Chihiro thought it made sense, but she still frowned.

"Except… we don't have any items on us right now. Are we just supposed to sit in this cabin in the woods and wait for Amikura-senpai and Chris to come pull us out?"

Ryūji Kanzaki pushed his glinting glasses up, having already grasped what lay under Yotsuya Miko's words.

He stepped in to smooth it over.

"If the Black Sphere won't hand us a guaranteed death, then the key to cracking this has to be hidden somewhere in this exam zone."

"And if they're keeping world-ending monsters locked up underground…"

"…then down there, there might just be a supernatural item good enough to get us out. Or an escape route."

Nanase Tsubasa knit her brows and thought it over for a moment.

Then she let the argument drop.

She turned and followed Yotsuya Miko, and together they began searching the shattered wreck of the cabin for the real entrance to the organization below.

It didn't take long.

With her five senses massively sharpened, Nanatsura Tsubasa picked up a faint mechanical hum beneath a heap of clutter in the storeroom next door.

One kick smashed the floorboards apart, and the hidden tunnel to the underground opened up in front of them.

The reaction below was predictable.

Having watched these students carve through horrors like they were slicing vegetables, the staff downstairs weren't about to stay as lazy and complacent as their counterparts in the original film, letting the prey stroll right into the den.

Elevator power cut. Alloy isolation door sealed.

Naturally, that kind of obstacle meant nothing to people holding Black Sphere war swords.

The Black Sphere war sword cut through all things; slicing that steel door open was no harder than cutting paper.

The elevator shaft dropped away into blackness, but with vampire immortality, Ryūji Kanzaki and the others weren't remotely bothered.

Only Yotsuya Miko hadn't converted, worried that the bloodline would clash with her Ripple.

So she made do with her Combat Suit, grabbed the elevator cable, and slid down in one heart-stopping but uneventful descent.

…

When they finally set foot inside the underground core facility.

When they got a clear look at what was in front of them — even braced as they were, every one of them sucked in a cold breath.

Spread out before them was an enormous circular chamber rising through multiple levels.

Inside cube after cube of transparent reinforced glass, packed wall to wall, were caged horrors of every imaginable kind.

A mutant Witch covered head to toe in swollen boils. A colossal blood-crazed Werewolf. A Treant wound together out of roots and dry bones. A masked Ogre gripping a circular saw…

There was even a pale ghost drifting in midair.

"So what you're saying is, if we hadn't gotten lucky and run into Yotsuya at the start…"

Chie Hoshinomiya's mouth hung open, and she murmured with her heart still hammering, "…we'd have been tortured to death by these things, one after another, in shifts?"

The thought alone put ice in her veins.

Yotsuya Miko and Nanase Tsubasa, however, didn't let their guard slip an inch.

As they'd come down, Amikura Mako had already warned them: the staff inside were scrambling at their consoles, working on something. Clearly nothing good.

And it played out exactly as Amikura Mako had said.

While they were still sweeping the room, a row of incandescent lights snapped on deep in the black corridor ahead.

Behind a transparent glass wall.

A woman in a tailored ladies' suit — unmistakably one of the organization's senior directors — stood there, cold as stone.

Behind her waited a squad of fully armed guards, weapons ready.

The director lifted a microphone, and her voice rolled out of the corridor speakers.

"Take a look around you, children."

"Every one of those things is the deepest fear in the long river of human history, given a body. What you faced upstairs isn't even a hair off an ox."

"If I released all of them, they would tear you into scraps without effort. But believe me — compared to what sleeps beneath this earth, these monsters are nothing."

The director paused, and her tone turned suddenly sorrowful, almost pitying.

"Exactly as the broadcast told you. An ancient Evil God truly does sleep in this world."

"We need regular offerings of blood to buy humanity a little more borrowed breath. Whatever choice you make, if no one gives themselves up, you'll simply die along with the rest of this world in the end."

"So why not sacrifice the small self, and become a real hero who saved the world?"

The director laid out her last chip.

"I can guarantee you this. Apart from the five fated to serve as the offerings, every last one of the rest of you will be kept safe. We'll see you out of here in one piece."

"As for the staff who hurt you earlier — I'll answer for that as well. They'll be punished."

If she'd said all this the moment they first arrived?

Someone in the group might genuinely have stepped forward, out of principle or out of grim necessity, and offered themselves up.

After all, most of the people standing here were "losers" who had already died once inside a Black Sphere exam.

They knew exactly how brutal these tests were. Trading a handful of lives for everyone else clearing the exam — cornered like that, it wasn't entirely unthinkable.

But now?

You looked down at us from your balcony and played us like clowns for hours, and only now, with a blade at your throat, only now that you can't win, do you come out and lecture us about the greater good?

On top of that, with Amikura Mako watching and relaying, they'd known for a while exactly why these people's attitude had flipped.

Theirs was the last sacrifice site left on the planet. This crowd had simply run out of options.

In other words, they hadn't realized they were wrong.

They'd just realized they were about to die, and it had finally scared them.

Facing hypocrites who'd been sneering down at them all this time, would any normal person with a pulse of anger left see the slightest reason to negotiate?

And unlike these fools sitting around waiting to die, Kanzaki and the others were working with a far wider picture.

It wasn't only Amikura Mako and her group hunting for a way to fish them out. They'd never stopped looking for their own way through, either.

Under those circumstances, why on earth would they walk into the net?

Still, reason told Ryūji Kanzaki something else.

If they wanted a clean escape within the time they had, the fastest route was still to squeeze what they needed out of the officials who held the world's secrets.

So practically speaking, the right move was probably to play along for a while, get the information, and turn on them afterward.

But…

The clock wasn't only pressing on them. For the organization members on the other side of the glass, hanging by a thread, it was pressing just as hard.

And while Ryūji Kanzaki was still turning over how to word things, how to keep her calm and draw the intel out of her —

The director behind the bulletproof glass watched these students, who showed not the faintest intention of lowering their weapons or even talking it over.

A woman used to controlling everything, she finally stopped pretending.

"Since you'd rather not drink the toast, you can drink the forfeit… don't blame me for what comes next!"

Her hand came down on the red button on the console.

Clack! Clack! Clack!

Alarms shrieked through the entire circular hall.

All around Ryuji Kanzaki and Nanase Tsubasa, every glass door holding back every caged monster swung open at once.

Her intent was obvious enough.

Knowing these students healed absurdly fast and wouldn't die easily, the director meant to grind their stamina down to nothing this way.

Then she could step out later and take control of the situation herself.

Unfortunately, she'd miscalculated one thing.

These students had walked through life and death several times over inside Black Sphere exam zones.

They would bend to a soft hand. Never to a hard one.

If she'd held the line she'd taken in the negotiation, given ground to gain ground, Ryuji Kanzaki and the rest might genuinely have sat down and "talked."

But since she'd been the one to flip the table?

Then nobody could complain when they stopped being reasonable.

Even Nanatsura Tsubasa, who clung to justice harder than anyone, had reached the end of what she could stomach.

Or rather — to a girl with that strong a sense of justice, an organization that treated human lives as worthless deserved to be torn down.

Rage carried her arm up in one violent motion.

Driven by will alone, the Black Sphere war sword stretched out in an instant, endlessly.

Distance meant nothing to it. The blade punched clean through the high-grade bulletproof glass across the hall.

Then Nanase Tsubasa twisted her wrist and dragged the edge upward…

With an ear-splitting shriek of splitting glass, the entire tempered wall came apart into slabs and collapsed with a roar, shards raining onto the floor in a bright, brittle clatter.

In that moment, the smiles froze solid on the faces of the director and her guards in the control room.

And out in the corridor, the monsters that had just wandered free of their cages, still dazed and confused, finally understood something.

They were loose. They were free.

So after a brief, breathless silence — every demon in the place started dancing.

Witches, Werewolves, Xenomorphs, Treants, all of them packed with years of caged resentment, went utterly berserk.

They lashed out at anything in sight that moved. There was none of that film logic where the monsters only ever hunted the humans outside.

Monsters don't sort people into official personnel and civilians.

Whoever's closest, whoever looks easiest to kill — that's the first target.

And on top of that…

Plenty of these things — Witches, the Hell Lord, even the Zombies — were themselves "humanoid" in shape.

Whereas on Nanase Tsubasa's side, apart from Yotsuya Miko who still hadn't converted, everyone else had put on a Stone Mask to save their own lives and turned into honest-to-god vampires.

To a monster's senses, prey like Yotsuya Miko — surrounded by a pack of vampires — hardly smelled as sweet as the panicking guards and researchers in the glass box.

The tide of monsters came surging in.

Ryūji Kanzaki cut a lunging zombie in half before it could reach Yotsuya Miko, then turned his head toward Nanase Tsubasa and shouted, "Nanase! Forget the small fry!"

"Go drag that woman in charge back here! Do not let her die in some monster's jaws — if the intel dries up, we're stuck!"

"Got it!" Nanase Tsubasa nodded hard.

With vampire blood and her Combat Suit stacked together, the girl moved like nothing in that hall could touch her.

She slipped sideways between a knot of Werewolves locked in a death match with an Ogre, ignoring the chaos boiling behind her.

Her eyes stayed locked on the director, who was being hustled along by a handful of guards toward the emergency exit at the rear.

She missed one thing entirely.

Directly along the path she had to take.

A pale man with a metal puzzle cube dangling from one hand and circular saw blades driven all over his skull.

He simply stood there, unmoving.

Gazing thoughtfully after the direction she'd gone.

'What an interesting soul…'

____

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