Chapter 220: Private Qingteng High School Begins (Patreon)

The fifth and sixth days were the longest forty-eight hours of Shido Makoto's life.

The Inner World's rules were still in force. Walking upright was forbidden in the corridors. Every half hour, a fresh set of monsters began patrolling the classrooms. The canteen was sealed off completely, and the cold storage door was mostly choked with flesh, leaving a gap less than twenty centimeters wide.

Shido Makoto led Yukino and Lin through the cracks of the school building like a rat.

"Get down." Yukino hauled Lin along by the collar, following close behind Shido Makoto.

Lin couldn't see the path and had to rely on her to guide him. The three of them crawled along the base of the walls, so slowly it was maddening.

On the day of the fifth, they hid in the ceiling crawlspace of the third floor bathroom for a full six hours. Two mutated monsters patrolled below, passing by once every three minutes.

Shido Makoto lay motionless on the crawlspace boards, watching the floor below through a crack.

Six hours. Even when his legs went numb, he couldn't move.

Yukino's breath pressed against his back, warm puffs falling on his neck again and again. She didn't move either, but he could feel her body trembling faintly.

From the cold. The crawlspace was freezing, and their clothes, long since soaked through with sweat and blood, clung to them, damp and clammy.

When the monsters' patrol timing finally slipped, Shido Makoto led the other two down from the ceiling and along the pipes to the cold storage in the main hall.

The dry rations in the cold storage were already gone. All that remained were a few moldy loaves of bread and some compressed biscuits that had been sitting there for who knew how long, their surfaces furred with green.

"Can we eat this?" Yukino picked up a piece and frowned at it.

"Yes." Shido Makoto scraped off the mold, broke off a chunk, and shoved it into his mouth. "Don't smell it. Just swallow."

Yukino did as he said.

Lin sat against the wall and groped for the food Shido Makoto handed him. His fingers paused when they brushed the patches of mold on the bread, but he asked nothing and simply put it in his mouth.

The three of them chewed their moldy food in a dark corner of the cold storage, and nobody said a word.

That was the fifth day.

The sixth was worse.

At three in the morning, as Shido Makoto was moving the other two from the cold storage to a storage room on the second floor, three mutants suddenly burst out from the end of the corridor.

They were the bodies of players who had been eliminated earlier, now fully mutated into monsters that crawled on all fours.

"Get down and don't move." Shido Makoto kept his voice low.

But it was too late. The three things had already caught the scent of living flesh.

He didn't hesitate. The fire axe split open the first monster's head.

When the second one lunged, he sidestepped and slammed the back of the axe into its spine.

The third had circled around behind Yukino.

"Duck!"

The instant she heard the command, Yukino dropped to a crouch. The fire axe skimmed over her head and struck the third monster squarely in the throat.

The whole thing took less than ten seconds.

A fresh gash had opened on Shido Makoto's left arm, raked by the first monster's claws. Blood ran down his arm, but he didn't even glance at it. He tore off a strip of sleeve, wrapped it around twice without care, and kept moving.

Yukino stared at his back. Her lips moved, but in the end she said nothing.

Similar encounters happened four times on the sixth day.

Shido Makoto's wounds kept piling up. Old injuries hadn't scabbed over before new ones were laid on top. His clothes had long since lost any trace of their original color.

But he never let a single monster touch Yukino or Lin.

Deep into the night of the sixth day, 23:30, the three of them collapsed on the rooftop.

Shido Makoto sat against the railing, using the last of the bandages on a gash in his arm that went down to the bone. His method was as crude as ever: spray slapped straight on, bandage yanked tight, and never mind whether it lined up.

Yukino sat a meter away from him, knees drawn up to her chest and chin resting on them. Her school uniform was in tatters, her hair clung in disarray to both cheeks, and a streak of dried blood marked her face. She had been watching him bandage himself the whole time.

Lin sat a little farther off, his back against the rooftop ventilation duct, his hollow eye sockets turned toward the night sky. He couldn't see anything, but the feel of the night wind on his face told him he was still alive.

"Half an hour left," Shido Makoto said.

Twenty-eight minutes until midnight on the seventh day.

"Mm," Yukino answered.

Silence. The wind passed between the three of them and carried off some of the stench of blood.

"Fang Si," Yukino said.

"Hm?"

"Do you remember what I said before?" Her gaze left his wound and drifted to the dark ruins of the campus in the distance. "At the Service Club, I told people I wanted to change the world."

His bandaging hand paused.

"I remember."

Yukino gave a small laugh. "Looking back, it's so arrogant. Change the world? I can barely keep myself alive. Six days in this wretched place, and I've eaten moldy bread and nearly been bitten to death four times. Every time, you were the one who pulled me back."

"Not just you." Shido Makoto bit the end of the bandage, tore it off, and tied a knot. "Lin too."

"I know." Yukino nodded. "But that's not what I wanted to say."

She turned and looked at him head-on.

"I used to think that if I were just excellent enough, I could change other people. Change the ones who bullied me, change the unreasonable rules. That's why I founded the Service Club. I wanted to help others grow stronger in my own way.

"Then I realized I couldn't even change the people closest to me." Her voice dropped. "My sister is still the same. Mother is still the same. At school, I'm still alone."

Shido Makoto said nothing.

"It was only after I came into this dungeon that I finally understood something." Yukino's eyes were a little red. "I don't want to change the world anymore. It's too ridiculous."

"Then what do you want now?"

"To get back alive," Yukino said. "Changing the things I can change about myself is enough. I don't want to die in a disgusting place like this."

Shido Makoto looked at her.

Yukinoshita Yukino. The girl called the Ice Beauty at Sobu High School, the young lady whose every word had thorns and who pushed everyone away.

Now she sat in the cold wind on the rooftop, uniform in rags, face smeared with blood, hair a mess, and she had just said the clearest-headed thing anyone had said in six days.

The corner of Shido Makoto's mouth twitched.

"Then we'll live," he said.

Yukino blinked, then smiled too.

"Mm."

Off to the side, Lin listened to their conversation without cutting in. He leaned his head against the ventilation duct, and the corner of his mouth tugged up as well.

Quiet settled for about ten seconds.

Then—

Clang—

A bell tolled from somewhere deep in the school.

Shido Makoto's expression tightened instantly.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

Midnight.

The seventh day had arrived.

The rooftop beneath their feet began to shake violently. Shido Makoto grabbed the railing with one hand to steady himself and seized Yukino's wrist with the other.

"Here it comes!"

He looked down. The school building was splitting apart.

All the flesh tissue shattered into countless fragments and flew into the air, then began to reassemble, defying the laws of physics. In less than thirty seconds, the entire school building was gone.

In its place lay an open-air sports field.

The ground of the field was made of pure flesh, its surface covered in pulsing blood vessels. Countless desks were lined up in neat rows across it, every one of them wriggling faintly, the patterns on the desktops following the paths of the veins.

The rooftop under the three of them was sinking too. The whole floor warped and pushed them toward the center of the field.

An invisible force struck.

Shido Makoto's hand was torn from the railing. He tried to grab Yukino, but the force pulled the three of them apart and dragged them off in different directions.

"Don't panic!" he shouted, but even his own body was out of his control.

A few seconds later, the three of them were pinned to three flesh desks at least thirty meters apart. Countless fine tendrils of flesh sprouted from the desktop and wound around Shido Makoto's wrists, ankles and waist. He strained against them, but they didn't budge.

He couldn't sit up or stand. All he could do was stay pinned in place at the desk.

Shido Makoto raised his head and looked at the sky. Dark clouds churned. The red cloud layer looked as though something were pushing it open from the inside.

Then the face appeared.

The Principal's face filled half the sky.

That smile reminded Shido Makoto of the Butcher in a slaughterhouse, sizing up a pig.

The seventh day.

The Bloody Final Exam.

Had officially begun.

…