The bullet had an effect, knocking one of the students to the ground.
That person lay on the ground, curled up, clutching their leg as they writhed and twitched in agony.
Seeing the dark red blood flowing from the other's knee, Gao Hai couldn't help but frown. The fact that a firearm attack was effective was completely beyond his expectations.
Anomalies, even living people in the gradual process of transformation, were typically able to ignore gunfire. For example, there was that Kawano he met during his second run through the Red Nut Gray Hole. After his Obsession Item lost control and he was possessed by an anomaly, he was able to withstand bullet fire and several otherwise fatal attacks to engage in a prolonged fight. He didn't even die after taking several bullets to the head.
Could the students standing outside with their backs to him actually be ordinary people? Were they just being compelled by some force to stand there and face away from him?
If that was the case, then if he could knock them all to the ground, he might be able to find a way to escape through the window...
[Hee hee hee— Someone's about to become a bad child~]
Before Gao Hai could take any further action, he heard a sound right by his ear, like a girl's low chuckle.
Click!
The living room lights went out in the next instant.
Darkness enveloped the entire living room in a flash, covering everything.
Although it was not yet night outside, still just Twilight, not a shred of light shone into the living room. It had gone completely dark in an instant.
Gao Hai heard footsteps.
It was an incredibly clear sound, like human footsteps, walking directly in from outside the living room door.
The other's gaze was already locked onto him.
The intense malice and non-human aura were enough for Gao Hai to understand what was happening.
BOOM—
A violent explosion swept through the entire living room in the next moment.
Scorching flames scattered and flew about.
Even before the dynamite exploded, Gao Hai had already pulled Miko down to the floor, kicking over the sofa for cover in one smooth motion.
In the blaze, the wall separating the living room and the corridor collapsed with a roar, and the window glass shattered explosively. But after the glass was completely gone, what appeared outside was not the street, but a pitch-black corridor. It was so dark that the fire from the explosion could only illuminate it for a brief moment, failing to light up its end. He could only see the darkness stretching out, seemingly to infinity.
Ignoring the girl beside him coughing from the smoke, Gao Hai shot to his feet the moment the explosion ended, pulling her as he rolled to a burning corner of the living room.
A small, blood-drenched hand swiped past, nearly grazing Gao Hai's body and slicing open a bloody gash over ten centimeters long on his back. Then, just before reaching the area illuminated by the firelight, the small hand silently retreated and vanished.
Gao Hai knew where the other had been.
When he threw Lao Guo's dynamite, in the instant of the explosion, he had clearly seen it was a student in a dirty sailor uniform standing in the middle of the living room.
Well, a headless student. The neck was just a mess of shredded, rotten flesh. This was the thing that had rushed in the moment the living room lights went out, and it had come straight for Gao Hai himself. The explosion had only momentarily halted its advance. If Gao Hai hadn't reacted fast enough, he probably would have died from that last attack.
"So it's an upperclassman, huh."
Gao Hai spoke softly, looking toward the darkness in front of him.
The thing hadn't stopped because of the explosion, but because of the light.
It seemed that the anomaly could only regain its ability to move in a completely dark environment. Therefore, creating a sufficient light source could stop it.
It sounded like a type that was easy to guard against, but...
"Can you still turn it on?"
Gao Hai asked, looking at Miko beside him.
"...No, it won't light up at all."
Miko fiddled with the flashlight in her hand for a good while before finally shaking her head in regret.
After that sudden "lights out" phenomenon, the flashlight couldn't be turned on. Gao Hai had realized this problem the moment the flashlight in his hand went out, so he had unhesitatingly thrown the dynamite he carried, a gift from Lao Guo, to create a new light source with the resulting fire.
He picked up a wooden leg from the blasted coffee table.
He tore off a piece of the burning curtain and wrapped it around the table leg.
A simple torch was crudely fashioned.
Gao Hai then repeated the process, making another torch and handing it to Miko.
Then, holding the torch, he moved forward first and saw them—headless upperclassmen, both male and female, standing and filling the entire living room.
"While I've always welcomed guests to my home, isn't this a bit too impolite?"
Looking at these headless students, their necks severely deformed and rotted beyond recognition, the corners of Gao Hai's mouth twitched several times. He didn't know what to say.
Judging from the shape of the wounds, it seemed their heads had been severed through repeated blows with a blunt instrument.
The number of these students... one, two, three... twenty-six in total. In a place like Japan, that was about the size of a single class.
The style of their uniforms was identical. These students should be from the same school. Could they be from the same class?
"Now... what do we do?"
Miko Yotsuya, having been through too many shocks today, was now desperately using her willpower to keep from fainting. If Gao Hai glanced down, he could see the girl's legs shaking nonstop, to the point where she could barely stand steady.
"Don't be scared. The more you're afraid, the more dangerous it is. You have to stay calm when you encounter these things."
Gao Hai first spoke seriously to Miko, then carefully walked up to one of the students, holding his torch.
The student didn't move, standing rigidly on the spot like a mere corpse.
The wound on his back stung slightly, but under the power of the Blessing, the gash on Gao Hai's back had already stopped bleeding on its own, a layer of clotted blood forming over it. In two or three days, a wound that would take a normal person over ten days to recover from would be completely healed for Gao Hai.
But that wasn't the focus right now. Gao Hai stood before this headless student, and after a moment of silence, he placed his hand on the Watch he wore, intending to try and take out the scalpel to see if he could cut the student's body.
...It didn't come out.
The very instant Gao Hai had the thought of taking the scalpel Obsession Item from his black Watch, he was forced to terminate the idea.
Because if he did, what he would take out wouldn't be a scalpel, but an anomaly that emerged from the scalpel.
It would lose control the moment it was taken out. There was no other possibility.
Gao Hai was one hundred percent certain of this; the premonition from the black Watch would not be wrong. And in fact, Gao Hai already knew from other Players that [Twilight-level Obsession Items will instantly lose control in a Red Moon-level instance].
So, if the [Campus Horror Stories] instance, manifesting in the real world, still possessed the ability to instantly cause a Twilight-level Obsession Item to lose control, then this instance was, in fact, completely Red Moon-level, right? Then how the fuck did those bastards running the Sacrificial Game downgrade this thing to Dim Night-level? Seriously, what part of this instance deserves to be Dim Night-level? They're not giving him any chance to survive, are they?!
Thump!
Gao Hai kicked out violently, sending five or six students tumbling to the ground. These students rolled on the floor and collided with others, and soon, the two of them were looking at headless students rolling all over the place.
"This..."
Miko, who had been scared to death by these anomalies just a moment ago, felt her entire worldview take a massive hit after seeing Gao Hai's clean and decisive kick.
"The first rule of dealing with anomalies is to understand that these things all act according to a set of rules."
Pulling back his foot, Gao Hai looked at the students who had no intention of resisting and spoke to the stunned Miko beside him.
"Once you break the rules, they will attack you frantically. Sometimes you won't even know how you died."
"But as long as you haven't broken the corresponding rules, no matter what you do to them, they won't do anything to you."
"This is the absolute number one rule. Remember it. You'll be using it often in the future."
Hearing Gao Hai's earnest lesson, Miko nodded subconsciously. As she understood why Gao Hai dared to act so roughly with these strange entities, she secretly committed this rule to memory.
Wait a minute...
Then the girl belatedly realized.
I'll be using it often in the future... wait, what does that mean? This kind of thing... dealing with these terrifying things, does this mean I'll encounter them many, many more times in the future?!
"Time to go."
Grabbing Miko's hand, Gao Hai, torch in hand, passed through the headless students and arrived at the corridor he had avoided entering until now.
At this moment, the corridor was markedly different from the one in his memory.
The floor was covered in pools of black, filthy blood. The walls were smeared with bloody scrapes, along with marks that looked as if they were left by some sharp object being torn and cut across them.
Drip— Drip—
Blood dripped from the ceiling.
Gao Hai looked up and saw what looked like a young boy hanging upside down from the ceiling. Wires were wrapped layer by layer around the boy's body. His head was completely deformed; one eyeball had been squeezed out, and brain matter mixed with blood was flowing out from the gaps in the wires. It was hard to imagine what kind of force had controlled these wires to crush his skull and turn him into this.
Miko, holding her torch, glanced back and saw the twenty-some headless students following right behind her, all standing silently in the darkness, visible as soon as the torchlight hit them.
"Can we... get out of here?"
In her fear, the girl could only look at Gao Hai, the only person she could trust and rely on.
"The odds are against it. Best be prepared to die here and become their sworn brother."
Hearing Gao Hai's honest answer, the girl's expression instantly froze, and she was at a loss for words.
What she didn't know was that Gao Hai had already learned another piece of information through Maki: a rising, blood-red moon had been observed by more than one Player over his house.
In other words, the instance's invasion of the real world was about to end. Theoretically, Gao Hai had at most one hour to escape the house he had lived in for over a month. Otherwise, he and Miko would be directly teleported into the [Fujihana Middle School] instance—and not during its official opening period. They would have to survive inside for more than ten days until the instance started.
My one-month vacation as a Player has only been going for a little over ten days, hasn't it?
It hasn't even been half a month, not even fifteen days, and something like this happens. Is my luck really that bad?!
Though he desperately wanted to roar, Gao Hai maintained a calm expression on his face. He led Miko forward step by step down the corridor, slowly arriving at the stairwell.
Gao Hai saw the stairs leading up, where the light of the setting sun could be seen filtering down from above.
And, something he had never seen before today: another set of stairs, leading down, extending into the underground, deep into the darkness.
________________________________________
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