"Slacking off at work gets your pay docked, you know. I caught you this time~"
Outside the window, the pink-haired girl blinked at Takumi, then extended a finger in a finger-gun pose and made a shooting motion.
"Chika?"
Not expecting her to return to school at this time, Takumi quickly stood up.
The other two security guards inside the guard booth showed no abnormal reaction at all, as if they could not see Takumi or Chika. They sat honestly in their seats without moving. Seeing this, Takumi did not say anything more. He simply put away his phone and walked out of the guard booth.
"Is your body all right now?"
After stepping out of the booth, Takumi looked at Chika standing a short distance away. Her complexion still seemed slightly poor, and he could not help but ask.
"Walking is basically not a problem anymore. It's probably because of the physical enhancement from the A-rank evaluation. My recovery speed is much faster than before."
Chika nodded as she answered, then very naturally walked at Takumi's side, moving forward shoulder to shoulder with him.
The two walked for a short distance, reaching a small pavilion inside the school grounds. They went in and sat down inside. Classes were still in session at the moment, so the area around the pavilion was completely quiet, with only Takumi and Chika sitting there.
While walking over and sitting down, Takumi had tried to take Chika's hand, but the girl rejected him without hesitation. She said that daytime should be left as much as possible to Maki, and that in a place like the school, where they could easily be seen, it was better for the two of them not to be overly intimate, so as to avoid gossip. Seeing how firm her attitude was, Takumi could only give up.
"How's little Maki doing?"
As soon as they sat down in the pavilion, Chika looked at Takumi with clear curiosity and asked.
"She seems fine. I don't think there's any problem. But are you really all right? It's better not to force yourself."
As Takumi spoke, he carefully observed Chika's reactions. He knew that he had gone a bit too far yesterday. He had originally thought that she would rest for about a day, but instead she had only slept through the morning and returned to school in the afternoon.
He had heard that after a girl goes through an adult rite, her walking posture can undergo subtle changes. Would others notice it?
Thinking this, Takumi's gaze could not help but shift toward Chika's legs. He had not paid much attention to her walking posture earlier, but it did seem that compared to yesterday, there was indeed a very slight difference.
"I said I'm fine, so of course I'm really fine. Don't underestimate me. Um… anyway, no matter how you look at it, I still feel a bit sorry toward little Maki, so during this period, the daytime should be left to her. As for me, it's better if I don't show up for now, so I don't stimulate her."
The pink-haired girl frowned, thought for a moment, then shook her head.
At least for now, she still needed to give the other party some more time.
As for what would come afterward, Chika could not think too far ahead for the moment. However, she did at least have a plan for a two-day hot spring hotel trip next weekend. If things went smoothly by then, it should help ease the changes in the relationship among the three of them.
Come to think of it, shouldn't this kind of thing be something the guy takes the initiative on? Takumi really is useless.
Thinking this, Chika lifted her head and looked at Takumi with a slightly aggrieved expression—only to be pulled in by him as he wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her straight into his embrace.
"Don't worry. I know what to do. Don't think too much about it."
Lowering his head, he buried his face in the girl's soft, smooth pink hair.
Takumi took a deep breath of the fresh fragrance lingering in Chika's hair, then finally let her go as her face flushed a deep red.
"Dummy Takumi, that's cheating…"
The girl muttered softly, reaching out to pinch Takumi's arm.
Just then, the class-ending bell rang from the teaching building. Chika said goodbye to Takumi and headed in that direction. The way she moved carried an almost valiant, high-spirited air—perhaps because she was not going to class, but to play games at the tabletop gaming club she belonged to.
This time, Takumi carefully observed Chika's walking posture and confirmed that when she stepped forward, her legs were indeed slightly uncoordinated. From her thighs up to her hips, the stiffness was quite obvious.
She ended up like this because of me, after all. Transmigrating into a crossover anime world, being forced to participate in a death game, embracing beauties and opening a harem—this whole process that only web novel protagonists get, I've basically gone through it all now. All that's left is to completely resolve the Sacrifice Game and find a way to return to the real world with this extraordinary power.
But does such a method really exist?
Takumi had looked into all kinds of rumors circulating among players, including those about how to escape this horrific world.
Most of that information lacked any reliable sources. After all, the players themselves did not know what it would truly take to break free from this once-a-month journey of death. Among all the speculations and guesses, the one believed to have the highest possibility was to obtain A-rank clear evaluations in two Red Moon-level instances, thereby gaining the qualification to participate in even higher-difficulty instances beyond the Red Moon level.
Many players believed that within that legendary instance lay the real way to escape this hell.
However, in the two years since the Sacrifice Game came into existence, not a single player had ever met that condition. Even among the very top Red Moon-level players, no one had ever successfully obtained two A-rank clear evaluations.
Thinking this, Takumi returned to the guard booth, took out his phone, and logged back into the player forum.
Even now, there were still quite a few people on the forum discussing the mysterious players who had cleared and destroyed the Red Nut Grey Cave instance. Although Ed had released part of Takumi's personal information, the vast majority of players still believed that it was impossible for the instance to have been cleared by Takumi alone. They were convinced that he must have had a powerful team backing him up. Some players even speculated that it had been accomplished by a top-tier team preparing to challenge the Red Moon-level.
Some of those guesses were actually quite accurate, but Takumi had no interest for the moment in paying attention to the wild speculations of players from all over the place. He simply found several posts that had been specially highlighted and archived by the forum moderators, and from them located the Campus Uncanny section.
Rather than worrying about being dragged into this high-difficulty instance someday, it was better to first understand the relevant information. That way, even if the kind of disastrous situation he anticipated really did occur, he would at least not be completely ignorant of what was going on, forced to start investigating from scratch with no clues at all.
After opening the section, Takumi quickly saw five different posts that had been deliberately pinned to the top.
The titles of the first four posts were Hayadate Elementary School, Fujihana Middle School, Yoruyama Middle School, and Baidōsu Academy. These were the names of four different schools that players who had successfully survived the instance had summarized and identified within the Campus Uncanny instance. Hayadate Elementary School, as the name suggested, was an extremely eerie elementary school; Fujihana Middle School was an abandoned junior high school; Yoruyama Middle School was a middle school; and Baidōsu Academy was a university.
According to the players, these four schools were independent of one another yet also intertwined within the instance. Players could freely travel to any one of the schools. Within the instance, there existed two different types of rules—Public Rules and Area Rules—and depending on the environment a player was in, the rules that needed to be followed would change in various ways. The specific details were extremely complex, far beyond what could be explained clearly in just a few sentences.
Among these schools, Yoruyama Middle School was believed to contain three different core obsessions, making it the location with the greatest number of core obsessions among the discovered instance areas. Of those core obsessions, two core Obsession Items had already been taken by players. As a result, Yoruyama Middle School had fallen into a semi-sealed state, and there was now almost no way to enter that school area.
Fujihana Middle School, meanwhile, was the only school in the instance that appeared in an abandoned state. Its interior had already become a field of ruins, accompanied by phenomena of spatial distortion. It was said that even now, there were still living players lost inside, unable to escape.
Hayadate Elementary School was an extremely mysterious place, from which almost no effective intelligence had been released. For reasons unknown, nearly all players who survived and left that place were unwilling to share any information, and many even developed severe self-destructive tendencies. The only player team willing to share anything merely stated that "under no circumstances should anyone enter this place," and refused to discuss anything further.
Among the four discovered schools, Baidōsu Academy was an outlier. Judging from various characteristics, the other schools all appeared to be schools from Japan, yet Baidōsu Academy was a Western-style university campus. Its grounds were vast, with an extremely high density of buildings. This academy seemed to contain multiple layers of temporal and spatial distortion at the same time. According to the players who successfully cleared this area and took away a core Obsession Item, the academy should have gone through three major periods. Two of those periods functioned as a school and appeared outwardly normal. The remaining period, however, belonged to a time of war, during which the academy was used as a concentration camp and execution site.
According to information disclosed by the Red Moon-level player team that specialized in clearing this academy, they believed that from the academy's establishment to its disappearance—from the real world to its involvement in the Horror Story world—at least 1.6 million people had been transported there and ultimately executed and killed. Within the Campus Uncanny, only Baidōsu Academy was filled with an almost inexhaustible number of aberrations, making it a place of despair where players could scarcely survive even if they did not violate any rules.
It had been confirmed that Baidōsu Academy contained two cores. After that Red Moon-level player team took one of them, they never attempted to return to the instance. Moreover, after the loss of one core Obsession Item, not a single player who entered Baidōsu Academy ever left that area alive again. Before this, although the academy had been fraught with danger, there had still been barely viable ways to escape or survive temporarily. Now, however, this academy area had become an abyssal dead zone within the Campus Uncanny, with a mortality rate of 100%.
And then, beyond these four academies, there was the final academy.
Player teams that had explored this instance were firmly convinced that there existed—though no clues had ever been found, and neither its name nor its location was known—an academy area that existed only in legend.
Many players claimed that they had seen that school: in the darkness, under dim night skies, when they looked toward the distance, they saw a school located extremely far away, shrouded in mist.
These players asserted that they had seen lights shining from the school, and had even heard bells ringing and the sound of reading coming from within. However, all searches and investigations to date had yielded no progress. That school seemed to exist only within the players' imaginations; no one had ever truly reached it—or rather… no one had ever reached it and then left the instance alive, successfully recording any information related to it.
Takumi casually opened the post for Fujihana Middle School and began carefully reviewing its contents.
This post summarized twelve different game prompts that players who started inside Fujihana Middle School had heard at the beginning of the Campus Uncanny instance. Yes—unlike Dusk-level and Dark Night-level instances, the opening prompts of a Red Moon-level instance changed almost every time. Even now that this instance had been downgraded to Dark Night-level, players entering it would still hear entirely different prompts depending on their initial starting location.
In addition to that, Fujihana Middle School contained a total of four distinct areas, which could be broadly categorized as the Teaching Building, Residential Wing, Athletic Field, and Swimming Pool. Each of these four areas had completely independent rules—entirely separate sets of game rules.
"Alice's game? Why does that sound like some kind of model-assembly game?"
After seeing the uniform title format on the four different rule sheets, Takumi could not help but mutter his complaint aloud.
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