A gunshot rang out.
The malevolent spirit that had been practically pressed against Horikita Suzune's face burst apart like a popped balloon — and dissolved in an instant into a cloud of black mist.
Horikita swallowed. She confirmed it wasn't a hallucination.
She was still alive.
...Barely.
A bead of cold sweat traced a slow line down her cheek. She hunched forward, both hands braced on her knees, dragging in ragged lungfuls of air.
"Hah... hah..."
Several seconds passed before she clawed her way back to something resembling rational thought.
She raised her head.
Not far away, a girl stood with a gun raised — face just as pale as her own.
"Th... thank you."
Horikita Suzune's voice came out rough and dry.
At the same moment, the corner of her eye caught something.
It wasn't just Ichinose.
Scattered across the corridor — Sakayanagi Arisu, Ryuuen Kakeru, and even the usually unflappable Katsuragi Kohei — all of them had their black weapons trained on the spot where the spirit had just vanished.
Evidently, every one of them had reached the same conclusion at the same instant.
Ichinose Honami had simply been half a beat faster than everyone else — driven by some instinct that had nothing to do with tactics.
"Surprisingly decisive of you, Ichinose-san," Sakayanagi Arisu remarked, lowering her gun barrel. There was a trace of genuine surprise in her tone. "You were terrified out of your mind — and yet you still pulled the trigger faster than anyone."
"Shall I say... as expected of Class B's little angel?"
Sakayanagi said it with something that sounded almost like admiration.
In a system where everything was ultimately driven by points, one glance at Ichinose's expression — still flooded with relief — made it plain that scoring hadn't even crossed her mind. She'd pulled the trigger purely to save someone.
...The desire for points, in the end, couldn't override the instinct to help someone in need, hm.
Ichinose-san. I'll admit — I underestimated you. Even if only a little.
Faced with Sakayanagi's half-teasing, half-genuine praise, Ichinose managed a strained smile.
"I really was scared... but I've always believed that if you help others from the heart, they'll be there for you too."
"And besides — in an exam that can actually kill us, if we don't stick together, none of us are making it out. Right?"
"Sticking together, hm?" Sakayanagi smiled.
She'd heard pretty speeches before. But someone who could actually live by them in a situation like this — that was rare.
She turned her gaze toward Chris, who had been standing right beside Horikita the entire time.
"Earlier — why didn't you act? Were you really not worried?"
Chris let out a weary exhale.
"Come on. I was less than half a meter away from her."
"With everyone this close together — if I'd swung that blade, the only thing I'd have accomplished is opening up a friendly-fire bleed debuff on half the party."
"A sound judgment," Katsuragi Kohei said, stepping in to smooth things over.
"It looks like Sakayanagi's earlier theory was correct, then."
"Which means our next step is actually quite simple. We designate a few people as bait — draw its attention — and let whoever's positioned in its blind spot take the shot."
"Bait...?" Kamuro Masumi shrank back slightly, unease written all over her face. "So from here on out, we split into smaller groups and work separately?"
"Obviously." Ryuuen Kakeru gave her the look he usually reserved for people who were wasting his time. "Don't forget the whole point of this exam — and the scores are tied to class rankings anyway."
But...
In a lot of the locked-room mysteries I've read, it's usually the moment the protagonists think they've already won and split up that they end up getting picked off one by one.
Shiina Hiyori hesitated.
Before she could say anything, Ichinose had already stepped in.
"What if we run into multiple spirits at once? Don't forget — the Black Sphere's notes mentioned hidden monsters too."
"Ryuuen-kun, I understand you want to fight for your class's ranking — but can we not rush this? I really don't think class rankings are worth more than everyone's lives right now."
The moment she said it, Kamuro and Shiranami — who had already been leaning that way — nodded like their heads might fall off.
Even Katsuragi and Sakayanagi, after quietly weighing the costs, tacitly endorsed the "stay together" approach.
After all, surviving was the prerequisite for everything else.
Seeing how the wind was blowing, Ryuuen Kakeru didn't bother picking a fight with the consensus.
He wasn't in a hurry.
Plenty of other people were in a hurry for him.
Such as...
Chris's gaze drifted past the group and landed on the dark-haired girl standing slightly apart, head bowed in thought.
She was biting her lip. Eyes cast down. Her nails were pressing hard enough into her palms to leave marks.
Was she afraid?
Of course she was.
That suffocating, near-death sensation from just moments ago was something she never wanted to experience again for as long as she lived.
But...
If it were my brother, he wouldn't back down from something like this.
Horikita Manabu had held his position at the top of this brutal school for three full years — sitting comfortably in the Student Council President's chair the entire time.
If she retreated now — if she didn't even have the resolve to push through this much —
Then she would lose, forever, any right to chase after him.
I won't back down.
I'm going to score. I'm going to prove my worth.
Something in Horikita's eyes hardened into quiet determination.
---
As the group reformed and prepared to push further in, Chris quietly activated the Imperial Arm.
Sure, it might have looked like cheating to some — but then again, this was a man who had GANTZ under remote control, with a hand of trap cards and rush cards sleeved into his metaphorical deck at all times.
Magic Cylinder. Water Barrier. Crossout Designator.
Why would he bother turning those on now? He'd never turned them off to begin with.
Not that it mattered. He wasn't planning to steal kills from these rookies on something this low-tier anyway.
This was purely a chance to watch them perform — and incidentally...
"Might as well take it for a spin," he thought.
One item a day. Chris believed the daily-refresh system deserved proper respect.
And as it happened, the Omniscient Eye came equipped with future-prediction sight.
When they eventually ran into the special "three-in-one Parasyte BOSS" he'd personally designed for this session, he figured he'd use it to test whether he could pull off something resembling a Bankai.
---
The advance after that went surprisingly smoothly.
Now that they'd cracked the "pretend you can't see it" rule, this group of elite students adapted with remarkable speed.
Using the bait-and-flank tactic, they cleared three more spirits — methodical, steady, clean headshots from the blind angle.
Ryuuen, Katsuragi, and Sakayanagi each claimed a kill.
At this rate, barring something unexpected, each person would walk away with roughly two spirits apiece by the time the hunt was done.
"This is going well..." Ichinose Honami wiped the sweat from her forehead, and the knot in her chest eased just slightly. "It looks like we might actually pull off a clean run where nobody gets hurt!"
That was what Ichinose thought.
Not everyone shared her optimism.
---
At the back of the group.
After a long moment of internal deliberation, Horikita Suzune quickened her pace and fell into step beside Chris.
She flicked a glance toward the front of the group, where Sakayanagi and Kamuro were walking alongside Ichinose, chatting and laughing, and dropped her voice.
"You're fairly close with those two from Class A, aren't you?"
"How about it... Want to work together? Watch each other's backs?"
Chris tilted his head and looked at her, mildly surprised.
The dark-haired girl still had her usual cool expression locked into place — but the hands gripping her weapon told a different story entirely.
And honestly? Fair enough.
When it came to sheer nerve, she was something else. Nothing like Yukino-whatever. He'd give her that much.
Chris pulled his gaze back.
"What makes you think I'd break off from the group to take risks."
"And even if I were going to — why would I partner with you specifically? Why not go with the veterans, like Ichinose or Sakayanagi?"
She clearly hadn't expected him to be so blunt about it.
But she steadied herself quickly, and laid it out with clean, precise logic.
"This exam, excluding the hidden monster, has exactly twenty spirits in total. Split evenly, that's about two kills per person."
"In other words — unless someone finds the hidden monster, the final rankings will almost certainly be decided by whoever secures the last few kills."
"Class A already has a built-in numbers advantage. Their main concern is holding off Classes B and C — Class D isn't a real threat to them. We don't have a fundamental conflict of interest."
Clean logic. Clear stakes.
Could've just led with that instead of dancing around it. You're asking for a favor — act like it.
Chris didn't answer right away. Instead, he glanced sideways at Sakayanagi Arisu.
With the Omniscient Eye active, he could see it clearly — her burning, barely-contained desperation to accumulate enough points to heal herself.
Not that it took psychic sight to figure that out, honestly. Any idiot could connect the dots.
"Hey," he said, casually, to Sakayanagi. "Classmate Horikita over here wants to peel off and run solo. I'm neutral on it. What's your take?"
Sakayanagi stopped walking.
"Let's wait a little longer," she said.
"Sixteen spirits still in play, and we're in a building with this much structural complexity. That's too many variables."
"When the time actually comes for rankings to matter — we won't need to manually form alliances. The factions will sort themselves out on their own."
She paused, and a small smile played on her lips.
"Wouldn't you say, Ryuuen-kun?"
Ryuuen, walking at the front, gave no indication he'd heard a word she said.
Not that it mattered — he hadn't been planning to compete on spirit kills anyway.
Between Class A's inherent advantage, the total spirit count, and the difficulty of taking them down, the point value per kill obviously wasn't going to be high enough to move the needle.
If he wanted to blow the rankings wide open, it was going to come down to the hidden monster.
He already knew that hunting a BOSS solo with just himself and Shiina Hiyori would be a stretch.
That was precisely why he'd had her pick up the Y-GUN that nobody else had touched.
Just like Sakayanagi — he had a theory about what that thing could do.
---
With disciplined teamwork, the group continued clearing the building — and before long, everyone had added one more kill to their count.
As the body count climbed, the raw fear that had gripped them at the start steadily loosened its hold.
When they located the next lone spirit, a wordless look passed between them — and a quiet understanding was reached.
"Hold up."
Ryuuen Kakeru stopped. His gaze dropped to the Y-GUN in Shiina Hiyori's hands — then to the one Kamuro Masumi was holding.
"Time to find out what that thing actually does."
He tracked the red dot on the screen as it drew closer, then plucked the oddly-shaped capture gun from Shiina Hiyori's hands and gave it a single, measured toss in his palm.
"When it shows up — nobody fires until I do."
"Watch my shot. Then act on what you see."
Nobody objected — not Katsuragi, not Sakayanagi. Someone had to be the guinea pig, and Ryuuen had volunteered himself.
And so.
When a malevolent spirit — its body sunken with strange spiral grooves twisting all the way down its form — came drifting unsteadily around the corner of the stairwell, it walked straight up to Horikita Suzune.
That warped face drew close. Close enough to press against her nose.
It tilted its head to one side, and began its relentless, droning loop:
"Can you see me... can you see me..."
Horikita Suzune's expression was the picture of suffering.
Why is it always me?!
Even with mental preparation, the putrid stench still sent her stomach heaving.
But while the spirit was still fixated on confirming eye contact —
Ryuuen Kakeru pulled the trigger without hesitation.
____
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