The moment the weightlessness vanished, a cool night breeze swept across their faces.
They opened their eyes.
Not the mold-reeking tatami room — what greeted them instead was the school's commercial walkway. A stretch of road they all knew by heart.
Streetlamps cast their dim amber glow. The vending machine nearby hummed its low, familiar drone. Further down the strip, a 24-hour convenience store blazed with warm, steady light.
"We're... we're back?"
Ichinose Honami turned in a slow, bewildered circle, the rigid tension in her shoulders easing just slightly. "This is the school's shopping strip? We... are we safe?"
She reached into her pocket, searching for her phone to call a teacher.
"Ahaha — Ichinose-san, I'd suggest you take a look at your right hand first."
The voice was soft, tinged with quiet amusement.
Sakayanagi Arisu sat on the cold concrete pavement. Without her cane, she still held herself with perfect composure.
She raised the X-GUN. The weapon's sleek, sci-fi metal frame caught the streetlight, throwing off a cold gleam that felt completely alien against the mundane backdrop around them.
"Since this absurd weapon is still in my hand, that means the exam has already begun." Sakayanagi stroked the barrel, her gaze unreadable. "Unless, of course, you believe Advanced Nurturing High School has secretly developed virtual reality technology sophisticated enough to fool all five senses?"
"That's... there's no way."
Nearby, Kushida Kikyo pressed her lips together. Her voice trembled — fragile, like a startled fawn:
"If we're back at school, shouldn't we just call the police? Or find Chabashira-sensei... A creature like that — it's completely beyond anything we can handle. That 'annihilation' the black sphere mentioned has to be some kind of sick prank, right?"
"Call the police?"
Ryuuen Kakeru stood in the shadow of a streetlamp, the black blade gripped tight in his hand, his expression curled into open contempt. "Figures. D-Class really does have mush for brains, doesn't it."
"If they can teleport us across the island in an instant, what exactly do you think the cops — those useless tax-funded parasites — are going to do about it?"
Kushida, on the receiving end of that verbal lashing, felt her eyes sting. On instinct, she drifted closer to Chris, the soft warmth of her arm pressing against his.
Chris didn't pull away. His gaze drifted out toward the distance.
Out there, a small cluster of ordinary students were walking past — just a few meters away — grocery bags from the convenience store swinging in their hands, chatting cheerfully about tomorrow's club activities. Completely oblivious.
"Calling the police is a valid idea," Chris said, picking up the thread of the conversation in an easy, measured tone. "But gambling with our lives on it feels like a risk I'm not comfortable taking. Maybe... we could ask those students passing by to make the call for us?"
"More witnesses means they'd have to think twice before acting rashly, right?"
"I'll go!"
"Yes — that's Hamaguchi-kun from Class B! I'll flag him down!"
Ichinose Honami lunged at the idea like a lifeline, breaking into a run toward the edge of the pavement.
"Hamaguchi-kun! Help us! There's something—"
The instant her foot crossed over the curb, a ring of visible blue ripples bloomed through the open air — spreading through nothing, like a wave disturbing still water.
THUD!
The force of the invisible barrier flung Ichinose backward. She hit the ground hard.
She stared, disbelieving, and stretched out one hand. Her fingertips brushed against empty space — and the ripples surfaced again, fanning out in soft, liquid rings.
"An... air wall...?" The color drained from Ichinose's face in an instant. "We're — we're locked inside a box?"
"Tch. Idiot."
Ryuuen snorted, then spotted the nearest object within reach — a solid wooden bench — and gave it a casual swing.
The blade passed through it like a hot knife through butter. The bench slid apart in two clean halves, the cut surface as smooth as a mirror.
His eye twitched. He kept his expression flat anyway.
"Since this is supposed to be our exam, there's no way those oblivious idiots out there were ever going to be allowed to interfere."
Ichinose returned to the group, resignation settling over her features. She forced herself to think out loud: "If this is happening on school grounds — or within whatever rules the black sphere has defined — then it probably isn't designed to actually kill us outright. Not students."
"Exactly!" Kushida Kikyo seized on the opening, her voice picking up, trying to push some air back into the suffocating atmosphere. "Didn't the sphere say the points we earn can be converted into Class Points at a set ratio? Maybe this whole thing is actually some kind of 'special project' set up by the school administration — just... with a very dramatic presentation."
"And besides..." Ichinose continued, as though talking herself down from a ledge, one hand clutching the fabric at her chest. "The sphere said everyone gets three chances, didn't it? So even if we fail, it probably won't actually kill us. Worst case, it counts as expulsion, right?"
"And when all three chances are gone?"
Chris cut in, unhurried, almost offhand: "Is it actually death... or just expulsion?"
Every breath in the group went still at once.
In the rules Chris himself had designed, a player who died three times — or posted a zero score across three consecutive missions — would trigger the black sphere's cleanup protocol. And just as Ichinose had guessed: it would end not in true death, but in the erasure of relevant memories and a medical patch-up, concluded quietly with an expulsion notice.
But in this sealed island that was Advanced Nurturing High School — cut off from the outside world, a self-contained universe unto itself — in the minds of every player standing here:
To lose the right to exist on this island was, in a very real sense, no different from death.
Perhaps even more terrifying than death itself.
"Tsk." Ryuuen fixed his glare on the shopping strip ahead, his voice coming out sharp and vicious. "You don't actually think we have a choice here, do you? What's in front of us is a sixty-minute hunt. And our target... hasn't even shown its face yet."
"Ryuuen-kun is blunt, but his situational awareness is commendable."
Sakayanagi Arisu rested her cheek on one hand, tilting the X-GUN upward to examine the precision display screen along its side.
"But rather than arguing over expulsion versus death — don't any of you want to actually study what's in your hands? If a Parasyte jumps out right now, we might be wiped out before we can even fight back."
At that, everyone dropped their gaze.
"What's this?" Ichinose Honami noticed the LCD screen mounted on the grip of her Y-GUN. A red dot blinked steadily on its display. "Is that our target?"
"Ha? So the one with the knife just has zero intel, is that it?"
Ryuuen scowled, his irritated gaze sliding toward the ordinary X-GUN in Chris's hand.
Sakayanagi, without hesitation, flipped her weapon around and angled the screen toward Ryuuen. "For everyone's safety, I'd suggest keeping a level head, Ryuuen-kun. Look at the screen. It's getting closer."
Ryuuen glanced at the rapidly closing distance reading on the display — and spun around.
At almost exactly the same moment, the automatic chime of a motion-sensor door rang out from the side entrance of the convenience store just ahead.
"Welcome—"
A store clerk stepped out, hauling two bags of garbage. He was lean, unremarkable — the kind of face you'd forget the moment you looked away. He rubbed at the back of his neck, the tired gesture of someone who'd been pulling overtime.
He looked so utterly ordinary.
Then he turned his head. He saw Ryuuen in the darkness, blade raised. He saw the others, weapons leveled.
The honest, forgettable expression on his face vanished.
"That's him?"
Ryuuen lifted the black blade, every muscle in his body snapping taut — the involuntary, primal tension of a predator that has just registered a natural enemy.
The clerk tilted his head. When he spoke, his voice had dropped into a register that didn't belong to anything human.
"So I've been exposed."
"I'd been maintaining such a perfect cover, too. I was planning to wait until that girl who always comes in for the red bean bread was alone."
"...Oh well. Since you've already found me—"
In the reflected shock of every pair of eyes locked on him, the clerk's entire face split open — horizontally, from the eye sockets outward, across the bridge of the nose — and a mass of blood-slicked, writhing tentacles unfurled beneath the sickly amber glow of the streetlamps.
"—then you can all die here."
SLASH!
Ryuuen Kakeru felt a cold kiss of air graze his cheek. Several strands of his hair drifted silently to the ground.
Behind him, the vending machine had been cleaved clean through the middle. Cans of drinks clattered and rolled across the pavement, the noise sharp and grating in the night air.
The monster made a faint, almost disappointed sound.
"...Missed."
"How annoying."
___
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