Chapter 199: Are You Joking Right Now?

Cold, damp, and laced with a smell that scraped at the nerves.

Nanase Tsubasa scanned the dense, utterly unfamiliar forest around her.

She accepted the fact that she'd been dragged into the upperclassmen's exam zone almost at once.

"So I didn't land with anyone else…"

The girl's brow creased.

She glanced down at the Black Sphere Watch on her wrist. Bad luck. She'd already burned the S Points she'd saved up on a [Combat Suit] and a basic [Black Sphere war sword].

And everything she'd earned in the Godzilla instance after that had come as item points.

No Controller. No X-GUN radar.

In other words, she was opening this one completely blind.

Nanase Tsubasa bit lightly at her lower lip and reached for the Black Sphere Watch, meaning to see whether her item points could buy her anything to fight with —

"Rustle… rustle…"

A thin scraping of leaves, faint but closing fast, came from directly behind her.

Her head snapped around.

A reeking, blood-slick maw filled her vision.

A mutated python as thick as a water barrel came down at her skull, using the tree trunks for cover.

Too close. Too fast.

On instinct, she chose not to raise the Black Sphere war sword to block. She knew exactly what would happen: with no room to charge the Combat Suit, once a snake that size wrapped her up she wasn't getting loose. In that case, better to upgrade herself first.

Face blank, she fished out the capsule holding the Vampire Bloodline.

She crushed it in her fist and refined it on the spot.

"Chomp!"

The python's jaws closed, and Nanase Tsubasa vanished whole into its gullet.

…

Thirty seconds later.

Hurried footsteps crashed through the brush as three students in Advanced Nurturing High School uniforms followed the signal on their Y-GUN radar to the spot.

"The radar says the green dot is right — damn it! That animal ate her!"

One of the upperclassmen stared at the python coiled around the trunk, gritted his teeth and shouldered his gun, ready to put it down and check whether the swallowed classmate still had a breath left in her.

He never got to squeeze the trigger.

"SHRRRIP—!!!"

A blade burst out through the python's back.

Then it drove upward, ripping through the snake's armored scales and spine in one long tear that carried all the way to its head.

Stinking blood and shredded organs rained down.

Under the stunned stares of the three upperclassmen, Nanase Tsubasa stepped out of the split-open belly, Black Sphere war sword in hand, expression flat.

"You're… the first-year, Nanase Tsubasa?"

The third-year senpai leading the group came forward a step, shock flickering in her eyes as she took in this underclassman who looked like a god of slaughter.

Nanase Tsubasa turned toward the voice.

"Third-year… Ayase Natsu-senpai?"

They weren't close, but during the joint training sessions in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber she'd crossed paths with these upperclass testers often enough to put names to faces.

Ayase Natsu nodded and lowered the Y-GUN in her hands. "We were just wondering who could possibly still be alive in a situation like this. If it's you… then it's not much of a mystery."

Nanase Tsubasa gave a faint laugh and let the comment pass.

She flicked the blood off her blade and asked, "Senpai, this area… is it really just the three of you?"

Ayase Natsu's face darkened. She shook her head and sighed. "Not just this area. Strictly speaking, we're not in the original exam zone anymore. We've been pulled into an extra instance called the 'Revival Match.'"

"Because apart from the three of us… every other upperclassman taking the test is gone."

Nanase Tsubasa considered that in silence.

Beside Ayase Natsu, a senpai raised his wrist, checked the X-GUN radar screen, and cut in. "Ayase, there are more monsters by the minute!"

"But they aren't wandering the forest at random. They're converging on the places where the most people are grouped up… From the looks of it, that side's already in a brutal fight. There may be a lot of casualties already!"

Ayase Natsu drew a deep breath, her expression turning grim. "Then we go pull them out. Whatever else happens, we save whoever's still breathing and get every question we need answered!"

Several kilometers from that forest, inside The Cabin in the Woods.

Things were far worse than Ayase Natsu and her group imagined.

Just as Ryūji Kanzaki fitted on the Stone Mask and felt the change spreading through his body, and Yotsuya Miko raced the clock trading for gear on her Black Sphere Watch —

A clown's head, painted in garish greasepaint, its mouth stretched into a bloody grin, punched in through the window.

Its neck stretched out several meters. It pressed itself against the back of a boy's skull while he stood there on edge, keeping watch.

"Surprise~"

"AAAAAHHH—!"

The jump scare tore screams out of half the people in the room.

And in the instant those screams left their throats, several Facehuggers waiting in the dark launched themselves onto their faces.

The situation flipped in a blink — bodies hit the floor, thrashing.

"Bastard!"

Ryūji Kanzaki, his transformation barely finished, tossed the mask into Shiranami Chihiro's arms. "Shiranami, get everyone turned!"

Before the words were out he threw himself forward, grappling bare-handed with the clown head still hissing out its laughter.

On the other side of the room, Yotsuya Miko didn't flinch either.

With the Black Sphere war sword she'd just traded out of her Black Sphere Watch, she flicked aside a Facehugger mid-leap at another girl's face.

Acid blood spattered across the floorboards, hissing as it ate into the wood.

Miko kicked the carcass away, scooped up a dropped Y-GUN, and shoved it into the hands of a still-shaking Chie Hoshinomiya. "Hoshinomiya-sensei! You know how to use this, right?!"

"Aim with it, wait for the radar to lock and bind the target, then pull the trigger and teleport it out!"

Without giving Chie Hoshinomiya a single second to refuse, Yotsuya Miko spun to face the cabin's shuddering front door.

"BZZZZT — CRASH!"

A chainsaw ripped a ragged hole straight through the barred door.

Splinters flew.

A chainsaw maniac shoved his twisted, snarling face into the gap and howled with delight. "Here's Johnny!"

Faced with that, the old Yotsuya Miko would have shut her eyes and burst into tears.

But now…

"Here's Johnny my ass!"

Yotsuya Miko gave him nothing. The war sword in her hands shot out to full length, golden Ripple coursing along the edge.

"Squelch!"

Head and half a torso came apart in one clean stroke.

The maniac dropped, blood fanning across the boards.

The chainsaw hit the floor and shrieked as it spun free.

She didn't even get a breath.

Through the ruined door, the horde of zombies that had been waiting out there saw the opening and surged toward it, snarling.

"They are not getting in!"

Teeth clenched, Yotsuya Miko planted herself alone in the doorway.

A lot of people still hadn't finished the vampire transformation.

In a space this cramped, if the zombies broke through, it was over.

She didn't need to kill them all. She only needed to hold for a little while…

The moment everyone finished turning with Shiranami's help, the whole board would flip.

After all, it was night.

For near-immortal vampires, what better farm was there than a pitch-black world crawling with monsters?

Especially… for a group who had already clawed their way back from death and treasured this second life more than anything. The members of the Revival Match.

What none of them — not Yotsuya Miko, not Nanatsura Tsubasa — knew was this.

In the secret base directly beneath their feet.

When word came that the Neon Branch's "sacrificial ritual" had failed as well, and that they were now humanity's last straw, the base fell dead silent.

The fat supervisor who, minutes earlier, had been shouting about slaughtering every last one of those "shitty students," now wore a truly remarkable expression.

"Holy shit! Holy shit!"

He clawed at his thinning hair and roared into the console microphone. "Stop it! Call those damn monsters back, right now!!!"

He whipped around toward his slack-jawed staff and shouted, the words tripping over each other, "I hate admitting we screwed this up… but at this point all we can do is treat the dead horse like it's still alive!"

"Now! This second! Find people in that pack of nobody-knows-where students who fit the criteria and finish this sacrifice!"

Watching the fat man work himself up to the edge of wetting his pants, the bespectacled man he'd chewed out not long ago pushed his glasses up his nose.

He sighed and finally spoke, resigned. "Supervisor… actually, that's exactly what I was trying to tell you earlier."

He pointed at the girls on the big screen. "When I was reviewing the surveillance of their arrival, I intercepted their internal comms channel."

"I heard them saying things like they'd been dropped in here by a 'presiding god,' 'as sacrifices.'"

"So there's a very good chance that some of them came here precisely to fill the sacrificial roles we'd originally cast."

Jack flipped through a few camera feeds and analyzed it calmly. "Look. That boy brawling with the clown, quick reflexes — doesn't he look a lot like The Athlete?"

"That girl directing everyone against the Facehuggers — doesn't she look a lot like The Scholar?"

"And that female teacher too scared to hold a gun steady… doesn't she look exactly like a clueless 'Fool'?"

The supervisor's eyes went wider and wider until they looked ready to pop out of his skull.

He slammed a palm into the back of the bespectacled man's head, spraying spit as he yelled, "Jack, you useless idiot bastard!!"

"You knew all this — why the hell didn't you say something sooner?!"

"You nearly got the entire human race killed, you understand that?!!"

Jack spread his hands, the picture of innocence. "Buddy, you might've let me get a word in!"

Arguing was pointless now.

With the monsters out of control and no way to go up and verify anyone's identity, the crowd in the control room could only stare at the big screen like drowning men gripping the last piece of driftwood.

Pinning every last hope on this batch of "sacrifices fallen from the sky."

Back up on the surface, in the little wooden cabin.

Holding the doorway, Yotsuya Miko noticed something was off.

The zombies and assorted deformities that had been pouring in like a tide were visibly thinning out.

Quite a few of the monsters circled the cabin a couple of times, then inexplicably turned and melted back into the trees.

'What's going on? They're pulling back?'

Before Miko could puzzle out an answer, she spotted several figures driving hard toward the cabin, carving through everything in their path like a knife through vegetables.

When the one in front reached her, Miko found herself facing a woman drenched head to toe in reeking blood, her features almost impossible to make out.

Her sword came up on instinct.

Then she met the pair of clear, deep-blue eyes still bright in the darkness, and stopped.

Yotsuya Miko lowered her weapon in surprise. "Nanase-san?"

Nanase Tsubasa wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. Since that hand was also covered in blood, she only smeared her small face dirtier.

"Miko, how are things on your end?"

Confirming she hadn't mistaken the face, Yotsuya Miko let out a long breath — then her expression sank again. "Luckily I still had the [Stone Mask] saved. I got the Vampire Bloodline into most of our classmates and just barely kept them alive."

"But… a few minutes ago some bizarre bugs took advantage of the chaos and latched onto several people's faces. There's something inside them now…"

Worry filled Miko's face. "And now that they're vampires, I can't even use Ripple on them — I'd burn them to ash. I have no idea whether they can survive that kind of Xenomorph parasitism."

Nanase Tsubasa raised an eyebrow and ran the numbers in her head.

"We don't have anything that can perform surgery or advanced healing either… Let's clear the monsters out of the house completely first, then worry about it."

Yotsuya Miko pressed her lips together and nodded. "That's all we can do right now."

With that, she led Nanase Tsubasa's group at speed toward the part of the cabin where Ryūji Kanzaki was fighting.

Inside, at that moment.

Ryūji Kanzaki and a handful of classmates who'd completed the vampire transformation were circling the clown.

The strange part was this: no matter how they attacked, the thing might as well have been a phantom they couldn't catch.

It always twisted out of the way, treating the whole thing like a game, splitting its mouth wide on rows of fine needle teeth as it giggled and taunted them from every side.

Every so often it let out a grating laugh and raked them with a claw — nothing serious.

Not lethal. But it wore a person down like sandpaper.

Nanase Tsubasa took one look at the farce and strode straight in.

The Black Sphere war sword in her hand shot out to full length, tearing the air as it punched clean through the clown's chest.

"Squelch!"

The clown looked down at the blade in its sternum. Rather than dying, it laughed harder.

Chie Hoshinomiya saw it and hastily raised her weapon to aim.

But fear kept the Y-GUN's red targeting frame sliding all over the screen. The lock never completed.

Watching Hoshinomiya flail like that, Shiranami Chihiro finally lost patience.

She snatched the Y-GUN out of Chie Hoshinomiya's hands and leveled it at the clown with practiced ease.

"Beep—!"

Red frame locked.

Three laser cords lanced out and bound that noodle-soft body — and in that instant Shiranami Chihiro pulled the trigger without hesitation.

"Bzzt—!"

The teleport beam came down.

Right up to the moment it was shipped out entirely, the clown didn't understand.

It couldn't work out why, out of this pack of brats, only one or two weaklings had been afraid of it at all.

Was its performance really that bad?

Of course, if it had known that most of these people had already gone up against vertigo fields, Jogo, Muzan and the Pillar Men — dodging indiscriminate AOE while also watching their own teammates' backs — it might have made peace with it.

Next to real monsters who killed by the dozen, its little party tricks simply didn't rate.

To say nothing of Shiranami Chihiro.

Not that long ago, she'd been a ghost girl herself.

What exactly was one clown supposed to use to frighten a genuine, card-carrying ghost?

With the clown — a creature whose whole mechanic ran on absorbing fear — forcibly removed from the stage, the freed-up hands worked with Nanase Tsubasa to sweep out the leftover zombies and assorted small fry.

The crisis eased, for now.

Nobody got to sit down and catch their breath. They gathered immediately around the classmates the Facehuggers had parasitized.

"What do we do now?"

Shiranami Chihiro sounded uncertain. "Do we gamble on vampire regeneration? Cut their chests open, rip the things out of them by hand, and let them heal on their own?"

Ryūji Kanzaki rubbed his chin, face heavy. "There's no telling when something nastier crawls out of the dark next."

"Short of using the teleport gun to erase them painlessly, I'm afraid that's the only method left that might save them."

Hearing that, one of the parasitized boys ringed by the others turned out to be made of hard stuff.

He'd already died once, so death didn't hold the same terror for him.

The moment Kanzaki finished, he stiffened his fingers into a blade and drove them straight into his own chest, trying to tear out the whole nest at the spot Yotsuya Miko had located earlier with Ripple.

"Squelch!"

Flesh gave way.

But clearing the outside monsters had eaten up too much time, and the Xenomorph inside him was already near hatching.

His strike didn't pull it out intact. It crushed the creature's body outright.

Acid blood burst free and ran through the inside of his chest cavity.

The boy screamed in a voice that didn't sound human and thrashed across the floorboards.

That acid didn't just cripple vampire cell regeneration.

It had detonated inside him.

A vampire's stubborn vitality wouldn't let him die quickly. It only forced him to live the same hell over and over — organs corroded, regrown, corroded again.

Yotsuya Miko went white.

She rushed forward and poured blazing golden Ripple straight into his body.

Under that sunlike purification, the boy's vampire flesh unraveled fast.

The screaming finally stopped.

Yotsuya Miko had given him release, but the sight — closer to torture than mercy — made the other Facehugger victims standing nearby swallow hard, all at the same time.

It was too horrible.

In the end, one of the boys laughed bitterly and stepped forward on his own.

"And that's just the embryo stage… already that bad."

"Feeding on bodies that are vampires now, when the thing actually hatches, a full-grown Xenomorph will be a monster nobody here can handle."

He lifted his head and looked at Shiranami Chihiro, the Y-GUN in her hands. "Use the teleport gun. Send me out."

"My name is Yoshida Kenta. First-year, Katsuragi's class."

He drew a deep breath. "Everyone — if you make it out, live my share too."

Once he'd said it, the rest of the infected came forward one after another.

"My name is Ninomiya Kuranosuke. Second-year, Class C."

"My name is Sonoda Masashi. First-year, Class C."

Listening to the names given out one by one, like last words being entrusted, Shiranami Chihiro felt her eyes burn.

Almost numb, she raised the Y-GUN, locked onto each of them in turn, and sent them away with her own hands.

For a moment, everyone in the wrecked cabin stood in silence.

And then, while they were all still mourning those classmates —

"Bzzt — click."

A sound nobody expected came from a corner of the cabin.

It was followed by a man's voice, obsequious and a little frantic. "Ahem… uh, people inside, can you hear me?"

"I know you probably don't understand who we are right now, and that the situation must be extremely confusing…"

"But! For the sake of saving this world, for the survival of the entire human race!"

"Could 'The Whore,' 'The Athlete,' 'The Scholar,' 'The Fool,' and 'The Virgin' among you… please step forward voluntarily?"

"This really is to save all of humanity! If you don't offer yourselves and complete this sacred ritual… then in a few hours at most, an ancient Evil God will break out of the earth and destroy this world completely!"

"For humankind, for this beautiful planet, I'm begging you!"

"Five of you, sacrificed, and billions of people are saved!"

The survivors in the cabin listened to that absurd broadcast and looked at one another.

After a brief stunned pause.

Somewhere in the group, someone let out a cold laugh.

And then everyone was laughing — the kind of laughter that comes out the far side of rage.

Ryūji Kanzaki found the speaker first and crushed it in his fist.

Nanatsura Tsubasa spotted the micro camera hidden in the eye of a stuffed bear.

In a thoroughly unladylike gesture, she raised her middle finger. "At a moment like this, you must be joking."

"Because our favorite thing to do, to arrogant people like you who think they can dispose of other lives however they please…"

"Is say no."

____

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