Chapter 207: Private Qingteng High School Failing Student Purge (Patreon)

The door swung open.

Two stiff figures walked in, one behind the other.

The one in front was Frank.

Behind him came the other peripheral player who had been judged a failure during the day and dragged off along with him.

Mark wasn't with them.

When everyone made out their faces in the moonlight, they all froze.

Their faces were paper-white, and the most horrifying part was their mouths.

The corners of both men's mouths had been forcibly sewn shut with cotton thread. The black stitches cut deep into the flesh and hauled the corners upward, stretching their lips into an eerie fake smile.

Shido Makoto's gaze settled on Frank's collarbone.

A bloody hole still gaped there, exactly where the iron hook had pierced him in the daytime.

But the flesh around its edges had dried out and turned black. Not a single drop of blood seeped out.

Lin sucked in a cold breath and hissed in a low voice, "They've been corrupted! Don't interact with them in any way!"

Frank and the other player seemed not to see anyone else in the dorm. Each walked stiffly to his own old bed.

Frank sat down on the edge of the mattress and awkwardly pulled a textbook from inside his clothes.

Then he began to recite its contents.

"Good students… must study hard… obey discipline… only by obeying discipline can they… survive…"

"I want to study… I want to be a good student…"

His voice echoed through the dorm again and again, like a demonic chant drilling into their ears.

The other returned player stood facing the wall. He stuck out his fingernails and began scratching something into it, frantically.

Scrrrch… scrrrch…

The sound of nails dragging across plaster was even more grating than Frank's recitation.

Soon his nails curled back from the friction, exposing mangled, bloody fingertips.

He didn't care at all. He kept carving with those ruined fingertips.

Mitsuhashi's hot-tempered companion was clearly the first to crack under the mental torment.

His breathing grew heavier and heavier.

Finally, he couldn't take it anymore and swore.

"Fuck! It's so damn loud!"

That one complaint seemed to trip a switch.

Frank, mid-recitation, and the other player, mid-carving of formulas into the wall, stopped at the very same instant, their mechanical motions cut short.

Then, in perfect unison, the two of them turned their heads toward the player who had spoken.

"You… don't love studying…"

"You are… a bad student…"

"Bad students… must be… expelled…"

The words had barely left their mouths.

Frank's stiff body, seated at the edge of the bed, suddenly lunged forward!

His limbs braced against the floor at unnatural angles, and he scrambled toward the player on all fours like some mutated spider!

He was shockingly fast, nothing like the stiff puppet from a moment before!

"Ah!"

The player was scared out of his wits by the sudden attack and scrambled backward, tumbling and crawling.

Survival instinct made him draw the dagger he'd kept hidden at his waist. Without a second thought, he drove it hard into the chest of the charging Frank.

It was a ghost item, one that had never failed him in previous dungeons.

Squelch!

The dagger plunged into the area over Frank's heart without any resistance, sunk to the hilt, with only the handle left sticking out.

Yet Frank acted as if nothing had happened. The blade through his heart drew no reaction, he didn't pause for a second, and his stitched fake smile stretched even wider.

Despair filled the player's eyes.

The next second, Frank was already in his face.

Crack!

Frank opened his sewn mouth, and the black threads snapped with a sharp pop.

He bit down on the player's neck.

The player's body went rigid. His eyes bulged, and blood gushed from his throat.

The whole dorm instantly erupted into chaos!

"Kill him!"

Mitsuhashi watched his companion get taken out in seconds. His eyes nearly split with rage, and he instinctively reached for his ghost item to strike back.

Junho shrank straight into the corner of his bed.

Lin readied himself for battle.

"Don't move! Nobody make a sound!"

At that moment, a low shout from Shido Makoto stopped everyone.

They didn't understand, but after seeing Shido Makoto's strength, they instinctively chose to trust him.

The dorm fell silent except for the sound of Frank tearing at the corpse.

Sure enough, once he had bitten through the player's neck completely and confirmed the target was dead, Frank's frenzied movements ceased.

It seemed he had lost the target that had "disturbed their studying."

He turned and walked back to his own bed as if nothing had happened.

"Good students… must study hard…"

The recitation started up again.

A chill ran down the backs of every player there.

Shido Makoto said in a low voice, "Get it now? They've become lackeys of this dungeon. They aren't aggressive on their own, but the moment anyone does something that shows they don't love studying, or disturbs the studying, their mechanism triggers."

"Damn it! Even making noise counts as a disturbance? So now we can't make a sound, and we can't even resist? The moment they judge it a disturbance, we're dead!" Lin said.

"Then what do we do? Just sit here and listen to them chant all night? I'll go insane!" Junho said.

Mitsuhashi stared at his companion's corpse, eyes wide open in death, his face a livid green.

Just as everyone in the dorm thought they could survive the night as long as they stayed quiet—

Hmmmm—

The lights in the dorm abruptly went out.

The next second, blood-red emergency lights flared on.

Wooo-wooo-wooo!

An alarm shrieked through the entire dormitory building!

The loudspeaker on the wall began to broadcast at the same time.

"Warning. Warning."

"A serious violation of discipline has occurred in the Grade 11, Class J dormitory."

"Initiating the failing student expulsion procedure."

"Repeat: initiating the failing student expulsion procedure."

As the broadcast ended, the already decrepit dorm door began to shake violently, as if an army were hurling itself against it from the other side.

At the same time, countless dragging footsteps came from outside the door, hundreds upon hundreds of them, converging from every direction.

Inside the dorm, the two lackeys who had been studying leapt to their feet!

Frank threw down his textbook, and the player who had been scratching the wall stopped what he was doing.

"Expel…"

"Expel all… the unqualified trash!"

Frank no longer needed any sound to trigger him. He locked onto Junho, the closest, and pounced—

"Ah! Get away from me!"

Junho was so terrified he wet himself. He scrambled backward on his hands and feet, tripped over a bed leg, and crashed to the floor in a heap.

Bang!

The dorm door was smashed open from the outside by a huge force.

Seven or eight monsters stood in the doorway, all wearing the same eerie fake smiles.

Some were missing arms. Some had heads twisted around three hundred and sixty degrees. One had a mouth growing on its belly.

They swarmed in all at once!

"Damn it! We can't hold them off!"

Lin watched the monsters flood in like a tide, and his face grew ugly. With a roar, he abandoned any hope of following the rules.

Bellowing, he lifted a chair and smashed it down on the lead monster.

Junho was knocked flat. In terror, he held up one arm against the fangs lunging for him while his other hand groped blindly across the floor for anything he could defend himself with.

Mitsuhashi also scrambled under a bed, crawling and rolling.

Shido Makoto's eyes darkened.

The expulsion mechanism?

How had it been triggered?

Did they have to study in the dorm, like those two monsters?

Or maybe…

But thinking about that now was pointless.

…