The rumble of the fire axe splitting the iron door of the isolation room had barely faded when the hallway alarm became a piercing wail. Ayanokoji Kiyotaka—or rather, the new personality that had fully fused with Lin Yuan's memories—slowly straightened up.
The azure interface across his retinas rippled like water, and the whole world was suddenly parsed into countless streams of data: Karuizawa Kei's heart rate, 127, as her chest heaved; the callus on Ryuen Kakeru's right thumb, 0.3 millimeters thick from years of clenching his fist; even the paths of dust motes moving through the ventilation duct.
"What a revolting perspective." He pressed a hand to his throbbing temple. The flood of information from the Combat Module felt like it was about to split his skull.
But when he looked out the window, his pupils abruptly contracted. Dozens of drones were pouring out of a hidden compartment atop the clock tower, crimson lights flashing beneath their hulls.
"They're anesthetic darts!" Ryuen suddenly yanked Karuizawa in front of him as a human shield. Three steel needles grazed her hair and embedded themselves in the wall. The girl screamed and struggled, but Ryuen clamped a hand around the back of her neck. "Don't forget, Class C still has leverage over you."
Ayanokoji had no time to deal with their farce. His gaze locked onto the silver-white craft in the center of the drone swarm. Magnified forty times, the image showed that it wasn't carrying anesthetic—it was loaded with miniature incendiary bombs.
The Combat Module instantly calculated seven escape routes, then settled on the third: reach the electrical room through the men's restroom ventilation duct and cut the signal relaying the drones' commands.
"Follow me if you want to live." He kicked open the fire door. The shattered glass reflected the astonished faces behind him.
Ichinose Honami struggled to get up, but the electronic patch on her forehead sparked. "Don't mind me... The chip they implanted in my spine... Ah!"
Her scream was swallowed by an explosion. The entire school building began to tilt, the floor collapsing like melting butter.
Ayanokoji grabbed a fire hose and swung across the gap, the Combat Module automatically calibrating his arc. In the instant of weightlessness, he saw black shapes writhing in the abyss below—the "Failed Experiments" mentioned in the files, human-shaped creatures riddled with tubes, tearing into desks as they fell.
The electrical room reeked of something burnt. When Ayanokoji pulled off the fuse box cover, his fingertips brushed something sticky.
By the faint light of his watch, he saw dark red liquid snaking across the circuit board like veins of blood come alive.
"Cognitive Disruptor." Karuizawa's voice came from behind him. Somehow she'd gotten away from Ryuen. Bloodstained gauze showed through the torn cuff of her uniform. "I heard that too much exposure makes people hallucinate that ants are eating their insides."
Ayanokoji didn't turn around. His tweezers snipped the third main wire with precision. When the drone swarm's buzzing suddenly stopped, he spoke without warning. "Twenty minutes ago, you deliberately crushed the hallway sensor. Was it so the cleaning robot would trigger the trap early?"
Karuizawa's breathing caught for half a beat.
"You and Ryuen weren't working together on the spur of the moment." He turned around, the Combat Module magnifying the girl's trembling pupils into a high-definition slow-motion image. "The sports festival schedule wasn't in the Old School Building. What you were really looking for was the transmitter hidden inside the piano."
The air thickened into something gelatinous. Suddenly, Karuizawa pulled open her collar, revealing the black number E-129 burned beneath her collarbone.
The girl who always played the victim now smiled like a poisonous datura flower. "Guess what happens when the 'Primal Personality' awakens to 100%?"
She raised her phone. On the screen was surveillance footage from the Chairman's Office: the Fox-Masked Man aiming a gun at the unconscious Ichinose Honami.
Sparks suddenly burst from the fuse box. As if they'd smelled blood, the veins swarmed around Ayanokoji's wrists like snakes.
Karuizawa's voice grew distorted. "The rules of the game have changed, Mr. Variable. Now you have to choose not between victory and defeat, but..."
Her words were cut off by the sound of metal tearing. Ryuen Kakeru burst through the window, gripping the High-Frequency Particle Blade that should have been locked in the archive room's safe.
The blade flashed, severing the veins, but more tendrils multiplied from the cut ends.
"Enough talking." He spat out a mouthful of blood and tossed Ayanokoji half a charred photograph.
In the fragment of an image, a young Horikita Suzune stood before the observation window of the White Room. Behind her were rows of clones submerged in cultivation tanks.
When Ayanokoji finally broke into the Chairman's Office, the Fox-Masked Man was brewing black tea. An undissolved sugar cube sat at the bottom of an English bone china cup, a ludicrous contrast to the electronic debris strewn across the floor.
"You're three minutes and seventeen seconds later than expected." The voice from behind the mask was mechanical, processed through a voice modulator. "But you arrived just in time to witness the birth of a new world."
He tapped a key, and the entire wall of windows instantly turned transparent. The campus burned in the night, and a blood-red moon hung in the sky—or rather, it was a Ring Space Station a kilometer in diameter, its surface packed with honeycomb-like cultivation tanks.
The Combat Module suddenly blared a shrill alarm. Ayanokoji realized his body was disintegrating into particles, breaking apart into blue streams of data starting at his fingertips. "Cognitive collapse?" He dropped to one knee, the taste of rust rising in his throat.
"Quite the opposite." The Fox-Masked Man removed his mask, revealing a face that nearly overloaded Ayanokoji's code core. It was his own face, twenty years older, with a mechanical eye identical to Shiina Hiyori's in place of his left eye. "Welcome to the real world, Subject No. 479."
In the beam of light cast down by the space station, countless clones of Ayanokoji Kiyotaka opened their crimson eyes. But the true nightmare had only just begun: a blood-red prompt suddenly appeared across his retinas—
"Personality fusion rate: 100%. Format Lin Yuan's memory module?"
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