"In my most beautiful days..."
"People around me were dying in droves..."
"In factories, on nameless islands, across the oceans..."
"And I lost the chance to adorn my youthful years..."
The recitation continued.
The candle flames flickered unnaturally under the sterile white lights, moving without wind.
The students seated at their desks read aloud from their textbooks.
Expressionless.
Mechanical.
Voices emerging from hollowed-out mouths, from bloody cavities where faces should be.
And among these recitations—other sounds.
Trembling voices.
Sobbing whimpers.
On the verge of breaking, yet forced to continue reading word by agonizing word.
They couldn't stop.
Because it stood behind them.
The girl who had paused her reading—just for one second—now lay headless across her desk. Her severed head dangled from its grip, still screaming as if alive, though her body was already dead.
"You must... study hard..."
"Bad children... who don't obey... must be punished..."
The muffled voice emerged from beneath the sheep's head mask.
Blood dripped steadily.
The faceless students continued reciting.
The students with crushed skulls sat quietly, blood and bubbles frothing from their tracheae as if they too were reading.
And the severed head in its hand still wept.
"Teacher... I'm sorry..."
"I was wrong... please... don't tell my parents..."
"They... work so hard... please... don't..."
As the head whimpered, blood began leaking from its eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.
The sheep-headed figure moved between the desks, step by deliberate step.
With each movement, the head it carried wept louder, bleeding more profusely.
Students with mangled limbs sat at their desks.
Students with snapped spines sat at their desks.
In this brightly lit yet deathly silent classroom, over half the seated "students" were no longer human—corpses reanimated under the lights, forced to read.
Click.
High heels tapped against the tiled floor.
The figure stopped before a trembling girl.
"Help me... someone help me...!"
The severed head suddenly thrashed, blood spraying across the girl's face.
The girl shook violently but didn't stop reading. Tears streamed from her eyes, yet her voice never faltered.
After a pause, the figure moved on to the next student.
Like a dutiful teacher inspecting each pupil.
Takakai sat at his desk.
The moment he saw the sheep-headed figure, sensed its overwhelming malice, and noticed the neighboring classroom's candles had stopped burning—he acted.
He dragged Miko back to their original classroom just as the previous disturbances vanished. The overturned desks had righted themselves.
He immediately took his seat, finding a textbook inside. The other girls, seeing this, hurriedly copied him—except one who sat in a dead student's chair.
The consequences were...
Takakai glanced sideways.
A grotesque fusion of flesh—two heads, tangled limbs, exposed organs pulsing unnaturally. The two faces still twitched with separate expressions, clearly not yet "harmonized."
But that wasn't the immediate concern.
His focus shifted to his candle.
It burned alarmingly fast—at least three times quicker than during the dark phase.
Rules observed so far:
Dark phase: Dead students' candles burn rapidly. When extinguished, they turn into specters.
Light phase: Dead students' candles freeze. Living students' candles accelerate. Their time is running out.
If a living student's candle dies, the hidden specter attacks instantly—invisible to all but Miko. Survival is nearly impossible.
Solution: Find more candles to merge with theirs.
Choices:
Steal from living students - Guarantees their deaths. Their corpses would transform rapidly, becoming new enemies.
Take from the specter-students - Their candles are identical. But the moment they're disturbed, the dormant specters activate.
The game's malice was undeniable. Barely ten minutes in, and it had already forced this cruel dilemma.
Daytime had lasted ~15 minutes. Nighttime before was ~20 minutes. The cycle likely alternates between light/dark phases every 20 minutes.
Before the next night, they must secure additional candles—whether from the living or the dead.
Takakai's gaze drifted to the hole in the wall.
The adjacent classroom held 25 half-burned candles.
Since he'd already activated those specters, he might as well take them all. They'd awaken during the next night anyway.
But how long would that buy them?
And if one random classroom had 25 specters...
How many more existed in this school?
Were all classrooms packed with these things? Would they all activate simultaneously at some point, flooding the halls?
A chilling thought struck him—what if the candles burned down on their own timetable, unleashing every specter at once regardless of human interference?
The scenario seemed implausibly cruel.
Yet his instincts whispered: It's all true.
How could they possibly find the five items under these conditions? Let alone escape without "becoming Alice's friends"?
Without his usual artifacts, this was a nightmare.
A faint anxiety crept in.
Don't panic.
It's not hopeless yet.
Hadn't he always survived like this? Struggling through worse?
This time, the struggle might just be... messier.
Click.
The high heels stopped beside him.
Takakai looked up at the sheep's head.
Up close, he realized it wasn't a mask.
It was a real severed sheep's head—rotten, crudely stitched to a human neck with wire and staples. Maggots writhed beneath its peeling skin. The bulging eyes, marked with black horizontal slits, rotated to stare at him.
The stench of decay overwhelmed his senses.
The bloody head in its grip slowly turned toward him.
Its jaw unhinged.
A torrent of blood erupted—
—drenching his desk—
—splattering across his face—