[Outstanding Student, Alice, is now requesting special accommodation…]
[Request approved. Special accommodation target: Bad Student Takahashi Takumi…]
[Beginning preparation for the special accommodation ritual…]
He seemed to faintly hear some sort of voice sounding inside his mind.
Through the haze of his consciousness, Takumi felt as though he had been pinned onto an icy iron bed, his body bound down with restraints. Then someone pushed the bed, wheeling him into an elevator, taking him down toward some place deep underground.
Bzzzz—
A shrill noise rang out.
The elevator itself gave a faint tremor, as though it were heading toward some special zone rather than the underground research base from before.
Beside him, he could vaguely hear someone humming softly.
It also seemed like someone was watching him, letting out low snickers, pacing back and forth around him, or waving a hand in front of his face.
Far away, he could also hear someone crying out miserably, struggling.
The smell of blood gradually spread through the air.
Through blurred vision, Takumi saw the elevator walls smeared with filthy blood, along with clear scratch marks gouged out by fingernails.
Where am I?
Where are they taking me?
Ding—
In the chaos of his thoughts, the elevator doors slowly opened.
Someone was pushing the iron bed, rolling him out of the elevator and into the darkness beyond.
[Are you really sure this is feasible?]
He seemed to hear a voice rise out of the darkness.
[It'll absolutely work. In the end, Aberrant power is nothing more than layers of madness and hatred piled on top of each other, isn't it? As long as we control the details and can ensure the experimental outcome remains stable, then we can definitely achieve our goal. Trust me. Nothing will go wrong.]
Another person in the darkness slowly spoke, answering the first.
[But how many people would have to die to get the result we want? And even if it succeeds, can we really create the thing we want? That hotel… can the thing inside that hotel really be trusted?]
The first voice still sounded hesitant, and faintly tinged with fear, as though he was afraid of something.
[There's no mistake. If we keep going according to this method, success is absolutely guaranteed. This isn't the time to hesitate. We have to act. This is our opportunity. As long as we succeed, no one will ever be able to look down on us again. No one will ever be able to stand over our heads again!]
The second voice grew more and more serious, even taking on a trace of fanaticism.
They seemed to be the silhouettes of two young men.
Their clothes were disheveled, their bodies covered in dust and grime, and the exhaustion on their faces, along with the relief of having survived a disaster, was especially obvious.
They seemed to have gone to some terrifying place and only managed to crawl back out alive after exhausting every ounce of strength they had.
There, they had obtained something.
Something extremely special.
Something that had driven them into a frenzy.
[…Fine. I'll trust you this once, Sato.]
[Then first, we show the military the thing that brought us out of there. We have to make them understand that this is not something ordinary people can use. Only then will we have a chance to go further!]
The two figures made up their minds, then strode off into the darkness, vanishing from sight.
In the place from which they had come, something seemed to exist.
A vague, illusory thing whose exact shape and outline could not be seen clearly… something like a building, a very tall building.
Takumi only cast a single glance at that phantom before suddenly feeling it become a little more solid, with an eerie sensation as though that thing were drawing closer to him. Instinctively, he pulled back his gaze and tore himself free from the hallucination.
He had been brought back to the platform where the bone staff was placed.
The instant Takumi regained clarity, he immediately realized that he was lying on that platform, with countless tubes connected to his body.
Alice stood right beside him.
It was that Alice who had possessed Miko and, through that, gained a physical body.
She was still expressionless.
She seemed to be operating something beside him. Her own body also seemed to be connected to tubes of various sizes, some of which were even linked directly to him.
[Teacher, do you want to know what special accommodation is? Teacher read the student ranking handbook, so you must have been very curious about what that 'special accommodation' really means, right?]
A girl's giggling voice sounded by his side.
Another Alice was right there next to him, the one without a physical body, merely a phantom.
[At first, it was really just a trick to fool people. After all, in the earliest stage, this school didn't actually have anything special about it yet, and the students were merely ordinary people. So back then, special accommodation was presented on the surface as a ritual where outstanding students would absorb the life force of bad students through a special ceremony, allowing those outstanding students to become even stronger.]
[But in truth, that ritual that looked so intimidating on the surface was nothing more than using a stun gun to kill the Bad Student strapped to the bed, then giving the Outstanding Student who believed they had absorbed "life force" a nerve stimulant, making them think they had grown stronger.]
The other Alice sitting by Takumi's feet continued, an undercurrent of excitement in her voice.
[But then, just like how this school gradually became a genuine Aberration school, that fake ritual—which originally had no real effect—also became a real ritual because the students believed in it so completely.]
[Just like Miko-chan right now. She really will absorb your life, your bodily vitality, your ability to think, and all of your memories. She'll inherit everything you are.]
[Everything you have will belong to someone else. You'll live forever inside another person's body. Doesn't that sound interesting? After all, you're Miko-chan's dear, dearly missed good friend, so you'd definitely be happy about this, right?]
The last Alice walked past Takumi's side, speaking with a smile as she did.
The three phantom Alices appeared, then quickly vanished without a trace.
The Alice standing beside him, who had been quietly operating something the whole time, pressed a button. In the next instant, a sound like marrow being sucked from bone suddenly rang out from Takumi's body.
Gurgle—gurgle gurgle—
Blood, flesh, internal organs… everything was rapidly withering and shriveling.
A fake scam that should never have possessed any real supernatural power had, here, become a genuine aberrant ritual with real effect.
His thoughts were collapsing bit by bit.
His body was steadily turning into a dry skeleton.
In an instant, violent pain flooded all of his senses, and in the very next moment it spread even more wildly, as though it would not stop until it had thoroughly destroyed his senses altogether.
And as that intense agony spread, Takumi also felt as though he were crawling and writhing through one narrow tube after another, felt himself being torn into long thin strips and sucked away bit by bit by something.
In his daze, Takumi felt as though he had left his own body and entered someone else's.
It was as if he could still sense the consciousness inside that body—that painful, despairing consciousness that no longer had the strength to struggle or resist.
She seemed to sense his presence as well.
But she could no longer do anything.
It's okay… it's okay… it'll be over soon…
Even though he could no longer speak, Takumi still did his best to whisper those words in his mind, hoping to convey that thought to her.
Creak—creak—
At this point, his body had already become completely twisted, little more than bones covered in human skin, and even so it was still continuing to shrink, as though it would not stop until he had been erased from this moment in time altogether.
Takumi sensed the presence of another consciousness.
No—could that really even be called a consciousness?
Such profound darkness, like the bottom of an abyss that would never see sunlight.
That thing had already completely occupied this body.
And everything that he was seemed about to be melted into that thing.
It's already time for it to end… no, not yet… it still hasn't truly ended yet…
He stretched out his hand and grabbed forward with all his strength.
By all rights, there should no longer have been anything like an "arm" left, and only a single consciousness should have remained, yet at this moment, as Takumi struggled and forcibly stirred up his consciousness, he distinctly felt that he had reached out and seized something in the darkness.
Ah…
He saw a new scene…
Those figures sitting on a long bench back then.
Old and young, men and women—there seemed to be no common trait among them.
Except that all of them had had their eyes gouged out, leaving nothing in their sockets but pitch-black hollows.
[Not enough. None of these will do. They're completely unsuitable.]
Someone spoke in an unhurried voice.
[What about this one? She was picked out from the camp. She was originally supposed to be sent up to the military, but she seems to be able to see things?]
Another person spoke while pulling over a small figure.
That was… Alice?
A girl standing before the corpses with their eyes missing, no more than one and a half meters tall, looking not even fourteen years old.
A girl with long golden hair, clutching a dirty doll tightly in one arm, her eyes filled with fear.
She looked very much like Alice, yet lacked that exquisitely inhuman charm Alice possessed. She looked like nothing more than a very pretty young girl.
[You can see them? You can see the things ordinary people can't?]
Someone asked in a low voice.
The girl trembled a little from fright, then nodded lightly.
[Good. Then it's you. Don't be afraid—this is a chance to become a 'god.' You ought to be thanking us.]
In the next moment, together with that person's voice, darkness swallowed the small girl whole, and Takumi began to feel that his own consciousness had finally reached the edge of collapse, finally about to be unable to hold together any longer, about to be devoured completely.
Alice's laughter rang out by his ear.
In the darkness, Takumi saw her open her arms toward him, wanting to embrace him.
[Teacher, stay here forever.]
That gentle voice wrapped around him.
And at that moment, the one-minute countdown on the watch finally reached its end.
Boom—
Vaguely, he heard the sound of something exploding.
The darkness vanished completely in an instant.
Amid piercing screams, Takumi saw the entire Teaching Building turn pale, turn insubstantial, as though the color had been drained from it, and then rapidly scatter and disappear.
And beneath the disappearing Teaching Building, something appeared.
It seemed to be a building.
A building that had been abandoned for who knew how long, filled with a bleak, desolate air.
That building was buried deep underground.
Until the Teaching Building disappeared, it could not see daylight again, could not be discovered, and there was no way to enter it.
At the very last instant before his consciousness completely dissipated, Takumi saw a figure slowly step into the building—a blurry silhouette with its back to him, its appearance impossible to make out.
He felt its presence.
Even if it was only for a fleeting moment, he still clearly felt its existence.
That thing… that person… was the true core of Fujihana Middle School, the only core Obsession Item in this Instance area.
But Takumi could no longer see anything more.
Because the Teaching Building that had originally disappeared had already reappeared in its original place.
That illusory thing which concealed the truth once again covered everything, blocking the path toward the truth.
Click—
The hand on the black watch had already moved from 5 to 6.
And the scene Takumi saw in that final moment also finally vanished without a trace, along with his thoughts sinking into silence.
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