Chapter 275: The Anomaly Game
Sora opened her eyes again. She was still in the classroom.
She looked around, bewildered. The room was bathed in bright, warm sunlight.
Outside the window, the leaves of the plane trees rustled in a gentle breeze.
In the third row, Rin was slumped over her desk, a small puddle of drool forming
near her elbow. In the back row, a tall boy sat hunched over, covertly tapping
away at his phone, the screen's glow reflecting off his focused face. At the
lectern, Master Vahn was explaining a complex mathematical theorem, the chalk
making rhythmic, sharp clacks against the board.
Everything was so... normal. It was so ordinary it made her want to weep.
"Sora?"
A voice whispered from beside her. Sora turned to see Vivi sitting next to her,
looking perfectly intact, a mischievous grin playing on her lips.
"Look at you, spaced out again. Did you pull an all-nighter watching those
Talking Manga?" Vivi nudged her with an elbow. "Listen, I have a secret. Kael
from the next class confessed to me yesterday. Do you think I should say yes?"
Sora opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Her internal processors
were a chaotic mess of fragmented data.
The Anomaly Game... Rule-Based Scenarios... Rin's finger... Vivi's heart...
The images flashed through her mind like high-speed slides, but they felt
distant, as if viewed through a thick layer of gauze.
"What's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost. Do you need to go to the
infirmary?"
"I..." Sora tried to grasp a thread of logic, but her response defaulted to a
standard script. "Kael is a decent guy. You should give it a try."
The moment the words left her lips, she froze. That wasn't what she wanted to
say. But she had said it anyway.
"Really? I thought so too! I'll go find him after the final bell!"
The bell tolled.
Students surged out of the classroom, the sound of laughter and playful shouting
filling the corridors. Sora sat at her desk, watching the exodus. She felt a
nagging sense of "Dissonance"—a logic error in her reality. But she couldn't
localize the source.
The days bled into one another.
Sora found herself integrating into this world. She went to the kiosk with Vivi
to buy carbonated sodas, walked across the sports field at sunset, and debated
which movies were worth their silver coins and which boys were the most
"High-Tier" handsome. She listened to the lectures, completed her assignments,
and began preparing for the end-of-term examinations scheduled for the following
month.
She even found herself looking forward to the weekend, the summer break, and the
prospect of attending a university in a larger city after graduation.
It was a beautiful life. A life so perfect it felt like a dream she never wanted
to wake from.
But every night, as she lay in bed awaiting sleep, a voice would whisper to her.
It was faint, sounding as if it were being broadcast from across the Multiverse.
"Sora..." "Wake up..." "Do not forget..."
As the cycles passed, the voice grew thinner. Eventually, it became a mere ghost
of a vibration, nearly undetectable.
She began to forget.
She forgot why she used to wake up screaming in a cold sweat. She forgot that
she had once been terrified of the dark. She forgot that this world was never
meant to be this kind.
She began to enjoy the illusion. She cherished every sun-drenched morning. She
savored every laugh with her friends. She surrendered to the false, yet
intoxicatingly real, warmth.
Until the day it broke.
It was an ordinary afternoon. Mathematics.
Master Vahn was at the board explaining quadratic functions, chalk dust dancing
in the beams of sunlight. In the third row, Rin was covertly pulling a bottle of
nail polish from her pocket, carefully painting her nails under the cover of her
desk.
She had just finished her left pinky when Vahn spotted her.
"Rin! Cease the non-academic activity immediately!"
Vahn strode over, snatching the bottle away. Rin stuck her tongue out playfully,
extending the hand with the single painted finger as she grumbled.
"I shouldn't have bothered. I only managed to get one done before getting
caught."
The finger caught the sunlight, shimmering with a pale pink gloss. Slender.
Intact. Finished with a single coat of polish.
Sora stared at that finger. Her pupils contracted violently.
In the dark of her mind, a suppressed memory detonated. A finger on a desk. A
single, severed finger. Coated in pale pink polish. Rin's finger!
BOOM.
Sora lunged to her feet, her chair clattering backward. She began to murmur, the
words a frantic, rhythmic loop.
"The Anomaly Game... This is the Anomaly Game..."
The entire classroom turned to look at her.
"Sora? What's wrong?" Vivi stood up, reaching out to steady her.
Sora recoiled, avoiding the touch. She scanned the room with a predatory focus,
recalculating the environment. She saw the "Logic Errors" everywhere now.
The clock on the wall: the hands were permanently fixed at 2:15 PM. The tree
outside: every leaf was in the exact same position it had been the day before.
The expressions on her classmates' faces: the angle of their smiles was a
perfect, unchanging constant.
"Why is there no system prompt...?" Sora realized.
She snatched a fountain pen from her desk and broke into a stumbling run toward
the door. She had to leave. She had to extract herself from this simulation.
But the moment her fingers brushed the handle, the world began to warp.
The classroom walls began to run like melting wax. The sunlight outside turned a
bruised, angry crimson. The faces of her classmates began to stretch and
distort, their features melting into a grotesque slurry.
Sora didn't hesitate. She threw the door open and sprinted into the corridor. It
was an infinite tunnel, stretching beyond the reach of her vision. Doors to
other classrooms swung open in a rhythmic thud-thud-thud, vomiting forth
silhouettes in school uniforms. Their faces were featureless voids, save for
mouths that opened and closed in a buzzing chorus.
"It is peaceful here..." "Why would you depart...?" "Stay and share the
Evernight with us..."
Sora offered no response, pushing her legs to their absolute limit. She raced
down the stairs, through the ground floor, and toward the main gate. The iron
bars were right there. If she could just clear the perimeter...
"Sora."
Master Vahn's voice echoed from behind her. Sora instinctively looked back.
Vahn stood at the entrance of the building, flanked by a dense host of students.
Their expressions were no longer gentle; they were filled with the righteous
fury of the betrayed.
"Why would you seek to dismantle this world?" Vahn asked, taking a measured step
forward. With every pace he took, the students followed in lockstep.
"What is lacking in this reality?" "There is no pain here. No death. No terror."
"You could be with your friends eternally." "You could live forever in your
finest hour." "Why choose to wake? Why return to a reality that only seeks to
harvest your heart?"
Vivi stepped from the crowd, tears streaming down her distorted face. "Sora,
please stay. We can be together. Just like it was before."
Rin followed, holding up her polished hand. "Exactly. It's perfect here. No
Anomaly Games. No Rules. We're all still breathing."
More and more of her classmates closed in, their reaching hands forming a web to
snag her.
"Stay..." "Please, stay..." "Do not abandon us to the Void..."
Clutching hands seized her clothes, her hair, her limbs. Sora was being
methodically dragged back into the heart of the distortion. She thrashed,
stabbing at the featureless hands with her pen, but the steel passed through
them as if they were mist.
As she closed her eyes, nearing a state of total surrender, a voice from the
"Real World" resonated in her mind. Master Vahn's final lecture.
"Maintain hyper-lucidity." "Always identify the enemy!"
Sora's eyes snapped open.
She looked at the twisted, familiar faces. She looked at the reaching hands. She
looked at this false world built from the scrap-heaps of her own desire and
memory.
"I see..." she whispered. "From the beginning... there was only ever one enemy."
She raised the pen, her grip white-knuckled.
"And it was me."
In the next micro-second, Sora wore a smile worthy of a desperate gambler. She
drove the sharp nib of the pen directly into her own throat.
"DIE!"
Crimson sprayed. The world around her shattered like a mirror, falling away in
jagged, crystalline shards.
A duration of unknown length passed.
Sora opened her eyes. This time, she was in a room she didn't recognize. It was
cramped—a bed, a desk, a chair. The singular window was sealed with heavy,
blackout curtains that permitted zero light.
Sora sat up, realizing she was on the bed. There was no wound on her neck. Her
clothes were clean.
Just then, a cold, mechanical female voice broadcasted through the room.
[WELCOME TO THE ANOMALY GAME: MAMA'S LULLABY]
[PROTOCOLS ARE AS FOLLOWS:]
1. [THE CURRENT SECTOR IS DESIGNATED AS 'MAMA'S ROOM.']
2. [MAMA POSSESSES TOTAL AFFECTION FOR YOU. SHE WILL PROVIDE FOR ALL YOUR
NEEDS.]
3. [EVERY EVENING AT 20:00 HOURS, MAMA WILL ARRIVE TO PERFORM A LULLABY.]
4. [UPON PERCEIVING THE LULLABY, SEAL YOUR VISUAL RECEPTORS. DO NOT OPEN THEM.]
5. [IF VISUAL CONTACT IS ESTABLISHED, IMMEDIATELY STATE: 'MAMA, I LOVE YOU.']
6. [MAMA HAS PREPARED AMPLE SUSTENANCE. CONSUMPTION OF ALL FOOD IS MANDATORY.]
7. [FAILURE TO CONSUME WILL RESULT IN MAMA EXPERIENCING 'SADNESS.']
8. [IN A STATE OF SADNESS, MAMA MAY PERFORM ANOMALOUS ACTIONS.]
9. [DO NOT INDUCE SADNESS IN MAMA.]
[GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR SURVIVAL.]
☆☆☆
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