Chapter 295: The Masked Maniac

"Ahhhh!!!" Leo screamed as his body plummeted under the force of gravity. "I will do it! I will do it!"

His body stopped just before his face was about to hit the ground, the rope tied around his belly stretching taut. The rope was hooked over a branch thick enough to bear Leo’s weight. Its other end was held in one hand by the Joker, who lay lazily in the shade of the tree.

On the trees neighbouring the one where the Joker lay, six girls and five boys hung. These teenagers included members of Leo’s team and the two teams that had come as reinforcements. The scene looked horrific, as if ghosts were hanging from the trees, with the bruises on the faces of these poor teenagers adding to the effect.

The boys were upside down, the ropes tied to their ankles, while the girls were tied by their bellies, most probably because their skirts would otherwise have flipped over.

This little consideration by the Joker was the only reason the victims still believed he was human...or maybe not.

He would have made Leo hit the ground if Leo hadn’t agreed to his demand just now. Hitting the ground from such a height would definitely have broken a few of Leo’s bones despite his chubbiness.

"Tch, you agreed so early," the Joker muttered, a hint of disappointment in his voice. "Kids these days are cowards."

The survivors hanging from the trees looked at him with darkened expressions and pale faces. He was definitely not human.

The Joker loosened his grip on the rope.

Thud!

Leo’s heavy body fell to the ground. The Joker rose, stretched his arms, and then moved towards Leo. His back was slightly bent, his hands slipped inside his pockets as he took comically big steps. Upon reaching Leo’s side, the Joker untied his hands and rolled him over with his foot.

"Oh dear god!" the Joker exclaimed, his hand flying to his chest the moment Leo’s face become visible.

Dirt and dry leaves clung to Leo’s face, damp with sweat, tears and snot, the reason for the Joker’s scream.

"Sniff...sniff...I-I’m Leo Roosevelt, the heir of House Roosevelt," Leo said in a broken voice, a hint of arrogance still beneath his cries. "M-my father...sob-sob...will hear of this."

"Ehh?" The Joker leaned closer to Leo’s face, that creepy artificial smile sending chills down Leo’s spine. "Do you know who I am?" The Joker asked.

Something about his tone told Leo that this psycho Joker might finish him off right away if he really knew his identity.

"I don’t know!" Leo blurted, fear laced in every syllable. Obviously, even if he knew, his answer would have remained the same.

"What the heck could your father do, then?" the Joker asked with a wild, annoying snicker.

Leo had no answer. He was too terrified to even feel offended at the moment.

The Joker drew fourteen green tokens from the multiple pockets of his black trousers. These were the forest tokens that the Joker’s victims—Ahem, survivors had collected by defeating the monsters of the forest.

He placed the tokens in Leo’s hand. The latter began channeling his mana into the tokens, still gasping, his belly shaking with each breath.

In just a few minutes, all the green tokens had been marked by Leo, their colour brightening into a glowing emerald.

"Here." Leo handed the tokens back to the Joker while wiping his snot on his sleeve. "I marked all of them as you asked. Now let us go."

The Joker silently took the tokens from his hand and put them back into his pockets. Apparently, these tokens could not be put inside a storage ring, for obvious reasons. Putting them in a pocket dimension would stop their navigation function, so the Academy had put a spell upon the tokens that restricted them from being placed inside storage-type Artifacts.

Including both his T-shirt and trousers, the Joker had a total of fifty pockets. Forty-one of them were spacious enough to perfectly hold one survivor’s identity token, which was palm-sized, and three forest tokens, which were pinky-finger-sized. The remaining nine pockets were larger.

A single one of them could fit as many as ten identity tokens.

The Academy hadn’t told the hunters the minimum number of tokens they needed to pass or the maximum number of tokens they needed to get a perfect score.

But judging by the number and size of these pockets, the Joker already had a vague idea for the perfect score: 41 identity tokens and 123 forest tokens. As for the remaining nine pockets, the Joker had his own plans to fill them.

He rose to his feet and turned around. Assuming he was about to move out, the survivors released a collective sigh of relief.

Leo quickly wiped his tears, preparing to untie his friends and fellow victims.

The Joker had taken only a couple of steps forward when he stopped, his eyes shifting to the metallic badge in his hand. He had already destroyed the other two badges, which belonged to the reinforcement teams.

The Joker looked back at Leo over his shoulder, causing the latter to flinch from that terrifying mask alone.

"By the way... what’s Operation Hunt?" the Joker asked, curiosity laced in his voice. He had clearly heard a familiar voice from the handset mention Operation Hunt.

His question made the entire bunch of survivors, hanging from the trees like vines, flinch.

"W-we don’t know!" Their collective, firm voice echoed. They sounded like prisoners of war who had been told to reveal the enemy’s secrets. They would rather die than betray their nation, which, in this context, was the first-year batch.

"Ehhh?" The Joker’s curious voice echoed, his back bending backward until it was perpendicular to his lower body.

"E-even if you kill us, we will never tell you about Operation Hunt!" Leo declared, clenching his fist in determination.

"We would rather die!" one of his girl teammates exclaimed from the tree.

"Rather die!" another of his girl teammates added.

Following them, the whole group shouted, "We will never tell you!"

For a few seconds, the Joker didn’t respond. Slowly his hand moved to his face, his back bending even further until his inverted face looked at Leo.

"Bwahahahahahahaha!" The Joker’s wild laugh tore through the forest, his hand repeatedly slapping his masked face.

When his laughter died down, his voice turned chillingly cold as he whispered, "Oh God, you lot are so screwed."

At that moment, the freshers realised that protecting oneself was more important than protecting the nation. There was a reason they were called survivors, after all.