Chapter 182: Sunshine Sanatorium Hysteria (Patreon)

Shido Makoto's scalp prickled instantly.

It knew his name!

It knew he hadn't taken the medicine!

What exactly was this thing?

The Director? Or something else entirely?

Shido Makoto held his breath, pressing himself flat against the ventilation duct, not daring to move a muscle.

Every second felt like a century.

He could feel the black slime on the floor spreading to fill the entire room, its corrosive stench growing thicker by the moment.

Finally, just as his arms began to ache and tremble from the strain, the voice outside the door spoke again.

"It's all right... you'll eat it eventually..."

The voice faded away, and the suffocating pressure faded with it.

The black slime on the floor rapidly withdrew back under the door.

The crisis had passed.

Shido Makoto dropped down from the duct, his back soaked through with cold sweat.

He'd been marked.

The next morning, the iron door of the punishment room swung open.

Blinding sunlight poured in, and Shido Makoto, eyes adjusted to the dark, instinctively squinted.

A faceless nurse stood in the doorway, watching him with no expression at all.

"Confinement is over."

Shido Makoto rose, brushed the dust off himself, and straightened his rumpled patient gown.

He put the vacant, foolish grin back on his face and shuffled out after the nurse, giggling.

When he returned to the ward upstairs, his eyes were clearer than they had been the day before.

Everything in the sanatorium seemed to have returned to "normal."

Pink walls, soothing music, and the seemingly harmless patients drifting through the halls.

But Shido Makoto knew it was only a surface.

He spotted Suzuki Miho at a glance.

The woman was hovering around a nurse, her face flushed with excitement as she pointed at the little red flower on her gown, chattering on and on about it.

"Nurse, look — I did so well yesterday, I finished my whole bowl of soup!"

"I'll keep working hard. I can get more little red flowers, right?"

Shido Makoto's eyes went cold.

He could see that Suzuki Miho's mind had been subtly warped.

That bowl of soup, simmered from a player's flesh and blood, worked like a poison — it had left her craving the nurses' reward, that ridiculous little red flower, with an almost obscene hunger.

She'd stop at nothing to get more of them.

And he — the disobedient one — was clearly an obstacle standing in her way.

She'd try to get rid of him. No doubt about it.

Sure enough.

When Suzuki Miho saw Shido Makoto walk out of the punishment room unscathed, shock flickered across her face, quickly replaced by thick venom.

Her eyes darted, as if some vicious plan had just occurred to her.

She slipped quietly away from the group and hurried toward the doctor's office at the end of the hall.

Dr. Smile's office.

Shido Makoto didn't stop her.

He found a corner and sat down, watching quietly.

The woman was going to snitch.

Which was exactly what he wanted.

Not long after, a knocking sound suddenly came from the water pipes in the ward.

"Tap tap... tap... tap-tap-tap..."

Hm?

Shido Makoto pressed his ear to the wall.

Morse code — simple, but the message it carried mattered.

[Woman, reported, you, didn't take medicine.]

[Doctor, coming, with nurses.]

[Careful.]

Shido Makoto smirked coldly.

They'd probably read his lack of the medication off his behavior — a guess, nothing more.

As for Suzuki Miho's crude scheme to use the doctor as her weapon, he'd seen it coming from the start.

He'd already written the script for his counterattack in advance.

He quickly adjusted his breathing, controlling the rhythm of his heartbeat.

He needed to bring his body to the perfect edge of a breakdown.

Footsteps echoed down the hallway — hard shoes on the floor — along with Suzuki Miho's voice, dripping with malice.

They were here.

Shido Makoto, unhurried, didn't hide. Instead, he stood up and opened the door to his room himself.

A vacant, foolish grin plastered across his face, he greeted them with a smile.

Dr. Smile arrived with two nurses carrying oversized syringes, led by Suzuki Miho, right up to Shido Makoto's door.

Suzuki Miho's face was full of triumph. She couldn't wait to point a finger at the grinning, vacant-looking Shido Makoto.

"Doctor! It's him!"

"He never took his medicine yesterday! He must have hidden the pill somewhere!"

"I saw it with my own eyes! He's faking it! He's a liar!"

She spilled it all out in one breath, waiting for the doctor to purge this detestable creature on the spot, and reward her with an even bigger red flower.

Dr. Smile pushed up his glasses, his pure black eyes locking onto Shido Makoto.

"Oh? A naughty child who fakes illness needs the 'ultimate treatment.'"

He advanced on Shido Makoto, one step at a time.

Just as Suzuki Miho thought her plan was about to succeed, everything changed!

The foolish grin on Shido Makoto's face, still standing in the doorway, suddenly froze.

His eyes rolled back, showing only white, and his body began to convulse as if jolted by electricity!

"Aaah!!"

He lunged at Suzuki Miho like a madman.

"Demon! I see you! You're a demon!"

Shido Makoto's hands clawed wildly at the air, his nails carving bloody lines down his own face.

"You want to hurt me! There's a devil hiding inside you! I see it — it's laughing at us!"

Suzuki Miho, terrified out of her wits by the sudden outburst, screamed and stumbled backward.

She couldn't understand why this madman had suddenly turned on her.

Dr. Smile froze as well.

He stopped in his tracks, confusion crossing his face.

Because the symptoms Shido Makoto was now displaying — a sudden, unprovoked outburst, screaming, self-harm, attacking others, all paired with intense persecutory delusions — weren't the symptoms of severe delusional disorder at all.

This was... hysteria!

And [Hysteria] was precisely the diagnosis listed on Suzuki Miho's patient chart!

Dr. Smile's mind began racing.

A twisted piece of logic formed in his thoughts.

The sanatorium's rule was: patients have episodes.

And now, Patient A (Shido Makoto) had suddenly displayed the symptoms of Patient B (Suzuki Miho).

What did that mean?

Within the sanatorium's warped logic, there was only one explanation: Patient B's condition had spiraled out of control — it had even spread to infect other patients!

This was a dangerous signal. It meant her condition had deteriorated to a critical point — she herself had become a source of contamination.

Dr. Smile's pure black eyes slowly shifted from Shido Makoto to Suzuki Miho, whose face had gone deathly pale.

"Suzuki Miho, your hysteria has begun to affect the other patients."

"This means you either didn't take your medicine on time last night, or... the soup you drank failed to suppress your condition."

"Your condition has worsened."

Suzuki Miho's mind went blank. She shook her head frantically, babbling incoherent explanations.

"No... that's not it! Doctor! I ate it! I drank the whole bowl of soup! I still have my red flower!"

"It's him! He's faking it! He's putting on an act!"

But the rules never listened to explanations.

As far as the doctor was concerned, Shido Makoto's episode was the most direct evidence there was.

And Suzuki Miho's protests now only made her look more like a hysteria patient desperately trying to hide her condition.

"Enough."

Dr. Smile cut her off coldly.

He snapped his fingers at the nurses behind him.

"This patient has lost control. Take her to the forced treatment room for purification."

"No!"

The two towering nurses swarmed her, pinning her to the ground like she was nothing more than a chicken to be caught.

No matter how she struggled, how she wept and begged, it made no difference.

She was dragged away, roughly, and vanished into the room marked "Forced Treatment" at the far end of the hall.

One scream. Then silence.

Hiding in a doorway further down the hall, Chu He and Ashu, who had watched the whole thing unfold, felt cold sweat soak through their backs.

They watched Shido Makoto — his convulsions slowly stopping, blood still streaked across his face as he climbed back to his feet — with a deep, unsettling awe.

Brutal. Absolutely brutal.

Shido Makoto rose slowly, as if nothing at all had just happened.

He walked over to where Suzuki Miho had struggled, bent down, and picked something up off the floor.

It was a pocket watch, small enough to fit in his palm.

It had fallen out of her pocket while she was being dragged away.

[Ghost item: Silent Pocket Watch (uses remaining: 2/3)]

[Effect: When activated, creates an absolute silence field within a ten-meter radius for ten seconds.]

A decent haul.

Shido Makoto slipped the pocket watch into his pocket without so much as a flicker of expression.

Just then, the hands of the clock on the wall began spinning wildly backward!

Dr. Smile's face went white. He looked up at the clock, and for the first time, something close to panic crossed his features.

"Time's... up?"