Chapter 217: Private Aoto High School Confession (Patreon)

Shido Makoto stared at the mirror, his mind quickly sorting through the information.

He'd seen this kind of mechanism before. Plenty of movies and novels used similar setups.

The rule was simple: trade honest confessions for your life.

The more sincere and the darker the confession, the better it fed the thing in the mirror. Lie, or say something without enough weight, and you'd be judged insincere and sucked into the mirror as fodder.

The ghost hands on the floor had already begun to pull. Lin was sliding toward the mirror.

"Let go of me! Let go—!"

Lin screamed as he struggled.

He was the first one dragged. Probably because his mental state was the most fragile. The terror of blindness had pushed his psychological defenses to the brink of collapse, and for a mechanism that fed on what lay buried inside a person, he was the easiest prey.

Lin was hauled right up in front of the mirror. He couldn't see it, but the chill radiating off the glass made every hair on his body stand on end.

"Speak!"

A resentful voice drifted out of the mirror, echoing directly inside his head: "Your darkest secret… Speak…"

Lin's lips trembled.

"I…"

His resistance lasted less than three seconds. The ghost hands tightened.

"The last dungeon!" Lin cried out.

"There was a rookie in the last dungeon… He didn't know anything. I, I needed someone to block whatever was coming up behind me…"

His voice came in broken pieces.

"I kicked him. Knocked him down, and those things pounced on him…"

"I never even learned his name. He just died like that."

Tears mixed with blood ran down from his two empty sockets.

"I'm trash! I'd do anything to stay alive!"

A satisfied sound rose from the mirror, as if something in there were swallowing great, greedy gulps.

The ghost hands around Lin's ankles let go, and he collapsed on the floor.

"Next," the voice in the mirror said.

The ghost hands turned toward Yukino. She drew a deep breath and walked up to the mirror.

"Speak."

Yukino bit down hard on her lower lip. She didn't want to say it. Having the most shameful part of herself cut open for others to see made her whole body crawl.

She had lived her entire life inside a flawless shell: top grades, good looks, good family, impeccable manners, forever the "child other parents wished they had." But the thing underneath the shell…

The ghost hands tightened.

"My sister."

"Yukinoshita Haruno."

"She's better than me at everything. No matter how hard I tried, the first thing everyone said when they saw me was, 'Oh, you're Haruno's little sister.'"

"I worked for more than ten years, and in the end I was only her shadow."

Yukino's voice sank lower and lower.

"I used to think… if she weren't around… if there had never been a Yukinoshita Haruno to begin with… then maybe I could—"

She couldn't finish. Tears slid down her face without a sound.

She had never said these thoughts aloud to anyone. She hadn't even been willing to admit them to herself. She hated her sister, and that hatred was tangled up with admiration and dependence, with jealousy and inferiority. It was ugly.

The chewing sound came from the mirror again. It was full.

The ghost hands released Yukino's ankles. She stumbled back two steps, her legs gave way, and she nearly dropped to her knees.

Shido Makoto turned his gaze to the mirror. Clearly, he was next.

Every ghost hand surged toward him and seized his ankles, more eagerly this time. The green glow on the mirror's surface deepened, and the evil spirit inside let out a greedy moan.

It had caught the scent. A cold-blooded soul like his had to be hiding something far darker than the other two.

"Speak…"

The evil spirit's voice echoed in his head: "Say it… what lies deepest in you…"

Shido Makoto stood before the mirror, looking at his expressionless reflection.

"I have nothing to repent."

"And I don't think I've ever done anything wrong."

The green light in the mirror flared violently.

"Liar—die!"

Countless ghost hands pulled at once, dragging him toward the mirror! His body slid nearly half a meter. The green glow spread outward across the glass, forming a whirlpool-shaped gateway, as if to swallow him whole.

"Makoto!" Yukino's voice cracked.

Lin twisted around on the floor. He couldn't see, but he'd heard that terrible sound.

And yet—

After about three seconds, the pulling force suddenly jammed. The ghost hands were still clamped around Shido Makoto's ankles, but the rule's judgment had been triggered.

The Confession Mirror's underlying mechanism was simple. It read the guilt buried deep in a target's soul and fed on it. If the confession was true, the guilt was released and the evil spirit got its meal. If it was a lie, the guilt stayed suppressed, and the evil spirit would forcibly tear the soul open to eat.

But now there was a problem.

It had torn open Shido Makoto's soul and found nothing inside. It was truly spotless. Empty. When this man said he'd done nothing wrong, he meant it. His soul simply didn't produce an emotion like guilt.

Had he harmed anyone in a dungeon? Not actively, no. But turning a blind eye? That, yes. Yet that was a necessary survival tactic, and he saw nothing in it to feel guilty about.

Was he cold-blooded? Yes. But cold-blooded didn't mean remorseful. He knew exactly what kind of person he was, and he had fully accepted it.

Zero internal friction. A pure pragmatist.

The evil spirit in the mirror froze, dumbfounded. Its gaping maw was aimed at Shido Makoto's soul, stretched as wide as it would go, yet it couldn't draw in a single thing. It was like jamming a straw into an empty cup and sucking with all your might, only to get a mouthful of air.

"Uh—"

The evil spirit let out a strange noise, and its green light began to flicker unsteadily.

Shido Makoto looked down at the ghost hands on his ankles. Their grip was getting weaker. He raised his head to the mirror, where the evil spirit's form had begun to distort.

It fed on guilt. Shido Makoto's soul had none. But it had already opened its mouth and already triggered the rule's judgment. It couldn't stop, and it couldn't swallow anything.

What happens to a program stuck in an infinite loop?

It freezes.

Pop!

A creature that lived by feeding had choked itself to death in front of an empty soul.

Shido Makoto watched the ghastly face in the mirror roll its eyes back, and the corner of his mouth twitched. He took off his glasses, put them back on, and looked at the mirror again.

Sure enough. Through the lenses, the green glow was only a low-grade illusion. The mirror itself was no gateway to hell. Behind it was a hidden compartment, a safe set into the wall, with the mirror serving as a disguise draped over the front.

Shido Makoto clenched his fist and drove it into the dead center of the convulsing, eye-rolling face.

Bang!

The mirror shattered. Glass sprayed across the floor and the green light dissipated with it. The evil spirit didn't even have time to scream before it crumbled to dust along with the shards.

Every ghost hand on the floor withdrew.

With the mirror gone, the hidden compartment in the wall lay exposed. Shido Makoto brushed the broken glass aside and reached in. His fingers closed around a booklet about the size of a notebook.

He pulled it out. Four words were written on the first page.

"Confession Record."

The handwriting was still legible, and Shido Makoto flipped through it quickly. It was a psychology teacher's private journal, containing the counseling files of the thirteen failing students from years ago, written before they died.

The last few pages mattered most.

"They were pushed."

"The Principal planned it personally. For the sake of the university admission rate, thirteen 'worthless' students who dragged down the average were packaged as suicides from academic pressure."

"I saw it. I saw everything. But I didn't dare speak."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry—"

The final "sorry" was completely warped, its strokes dragged out in a long smear, as if the writer had been hauled away halfway through.

Shido Makoto closed the booklet.

"What did you find?" Yukino walked over. She had already regained her composure.

He handed her the booklet.

"The truth about what happened back then. The thirteen failing students were murdered on the Principal's orders."

Yukino skimmed a few pages, her face growing darker with each one.

"The core of this dungeon," she said in a low voice, "is a buried mass murder?"

"Right," Shido Makoto said.

"That's why the failing students became vengeful spirits. Their resentment is the fuel that keeps this dungeon running."

"What about the conditions to clear it?" Lin asked, leaning against the wall.

He was blind, but not deaf.

Shido Makoto turned to the second-to-last page. A slip of paper was tucked in there, the handwriting crooked, as if left by one of the students.

"The knives are still inside the plaster statue in the art room. Thirteen of them, one for each of us. If anyone finds them, please bring them to the Principal."

"He's afraid of these knives."

"Because our blood is on them."

Shido Makoto tucked the note away.

The clue to clear the dungeon had surfaced: thirteen carving knives, the ones the thirteen failing students had used to hurt themselves, stained with their blood. And the art room was on the top floor.

He glanced up at the wall clock.

23:30.

Time seemed to be passing abnormally. It had clearly been afternoon before, and after the evil spirit incident it had somehow turned into the middle of the night. Still, for him this counted as good news.

The moment he finished reading the clock, the broadcast overhead crackled to life.

"Zzt…"

"Midnight Cleanup Protocol initiated."

"Time remaining until total school erasure: thirty minutes."

"All non-staff personnel, regardless of location, will be purged at midnight."

"There are no exceptions."

Thirty minutes. Shido Makoto stared at the wall clock.

In half an hour, he had to fight his way from the counseling room in the main hall to the art room on the top floor, grab the carving knives, and then find the Principal. All in a school crawling with monsters.

"Let's go." Shido Makoto stood and took the fire axe back in hand.

"Is thirty minutes enough?" Yukino asked.

"If we don't move, we die," Shido Makoto said.

He walked to the door and set his left hand on the latch.

"Lin, follow my orders. When I say left, go left. When I say drop, drop. Don't ask why."

"…Got it." Lin nodded.

Yukino took Lin by the arm, and the two of them took up position behind Shido Makoto.

Shido Makoto pulled the latch open.

…