"What? I'll die? But I just graduated from school and finally have freedom after studying like a madman! I can't die here! I won't!"
"My children are waiting for me back home... If I die here, what would happen to them?"
"HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! SWEET! WHATEVER THIS IS, IT'S BETTER THAN GETTING THROWN INTO PRISON! I'LL DEFINITELY GET THAT SYSTEM AND FREE MYSELF!"
"Woahhh!!! This is just like those video games I played! How cool!!!"
"God, please... Save us. Protect me and my family. Give me strength and courage to pass this trial."
"Arghhh no!!! Today's supposed to be my meeting with Mr. Chen!!! My business will go bankrupt at this point! I should finish this and come back immediately!"
Different thoughts and emotions mixed inside the room, clashing and overlapping from every type of person who had been summoned here—students, parents, criminals, believers, businessmen. Fear, excitement, desperation, greed, faith—all swirling in the suffocating white space.
An hour passed. No one dared to start.
The reason was simple. Whether it was conscience or something else, one thing was clear: the person who killed someone first would be the first one targeted by the others here.
The logic was cruel but easy to understand. It's better to kill someone who has already killed than to stain your hands by killing a completely innocent person. It would ease their guilt—or perhaps they just wanted to avoid being in the spotlight and becoming the common enemy of everyone else.
So they waited.
Watching. Calculating. Breathing in the same air as the people they might soon have to kill.
They began observing each other. Every room was the same. No one dared to make a move yet.
The room didn't give them weapons. It was just them. If they strangled anyone to death here, that would leave their back open and they would get killed first instead. That was just too risky. The calculating types had already distanced themselves from the crowd and tried to be as unnoticeable as they could. That strategy would give them a higher survival rate.
A prisoner broke the silence with a heavy thud—the sound of a body collapsing onto the white floor after he suddenly killed her by twisting her neck backward in one brutal motion. The crack echoed faintly in the vast room. She died with a shocked expression and open eyes, her body lying unnaturally still against the spotless ground.
The person who started the killing was a prisoner who had been summoned here. He killed the girl so precisely, so efficiently, it screamed that he had experience in killing people before.
He wore an orange jumpsuit with the number 001 written on it.
Single-digit numbers were given to prisoners who had committed massacres or multiple murders and were about to be sentenced to death.
After one fell, no one dared to step up and aim at him. Forget morality—they didn't even know the girl. Why would they charge at this maniac thoughtlessly?
The room, once filled with noise, became suffocatingly silent again.
"Ha... This is why you should kill criminals immediately instead of throwing them in prisons." A tall guy with a buffed body that showed he was experienced in fighting, wearing a military uniform, stepped up. "I thought I could finally be discharged from war, and now I'm here? How bothersome."
From his waist, he pulled out a gun.
Others exclaimed.
"How is this FAIR???! A GUN??? Prolly an American."
With one trigger pulled, the prisoner who killed the girl lay flat on the ground, a clean hole in his head visible as blood slowly spread across the white floor.
The gunshot echoed sharply before fading into ringing silence.
The guy didn't kill anyone after that. Instead, he went to the wall and sat there, his back against it, the gun resting steadily in his hand. As if saying, you can come or kill each other—I don't care.
The crowd fell into silence.
Two corpses now lay inside this room. And obviously, that military man was the strongest presence there, the last one who made a move. With a gun and a dagger at his side, his victory already seemed certain.
No one dared to test it.
The other rooms were in a worse situation as serial killers and prisoners went berserk and started killing randomly.
Unlike the first room, there was no military man there to stop those people. Screams echoed without pause, and the white walls were quickly stained red. In the second room, the one left standing was a prisoner who had killed most of the people there, his breathing heavy, his body splattered with blood that wasn't all his.
In the last room was a normal office worker, a fork still in his hand from the meal he had been eating before he was transported here.
He was a cunning one.
Hiding beside the bodies of the dead, he smeared blood onto his clothes and face, controlling his breathing, pretending to be lifeless among the fallen. When the last person standing—exhausted and barely able to lift his arms after the brutal brawl—staggered past him, the office worker suddenly moved.
In one swift motion, he struck the fork into the man's neck.
The exhausted survivor collapsed, choking on his own blood, unable to react in time.
"Don't underestimate normal office workers, you dumbasses~" he said, a crooked smile forming on his face.
As the last person in the room, the quest ended automatically.
The floating words appeared once more.
And the white room fell silent again.
CONGRATULATIONS, PLAYER ETHAN JONES!
CALCULATING YOUR REWARDS AND CLASS!
CALCULATING....
CALCULATION ERROR!
CALCULATING AGAIN.....
ERROR! ERROR! ERROR!
AGAIN.....
THE SYSTEM IS EXPERIENCING AN ERROR..... AN INTERFERENCE IS OCCURRING..... RUNNING ANOTHER CALCULATION....
CALCULATING....
DING!!!
YOU HAVE RECEIVED YOUR REWARDS AND CLASS
STATUS WINDOW
Name: Ethan Jones
Title: Villain: The Grand Instigator
Class: Instigator
Level: 1
HP: 100/100
MP: 50/50
Skills: WHISPERED PROVOCATION (E), SEED OF DISCORD (E), FALSE NARRATIVE (E), CHAIN REACTION (E), SMOKESCREEN TRUTH (E), READ THE ROOM (E), PANIC SPREAD (E)
STRENGTH: 8
AGILITY: 10
VITALITY: 10
INTELLIGENCE: 5