A blood-red city.
A sense of peace, as if returning home.
Cough. That sentence was a joke. In truth, if he had a choice, Takumi really did not want to come back to this hellish place at all. After all, every time he came here, it meant taking another step closer to true death.
But this time was the sole exception. Only this time did Takumi truly experience what it meant for living to be worse than dying—the feeling of being imprisoned in a pitch-dark cave, tormented to the brink by hunger and dehydration, his entire body being squeezed and twisted little by little. It was simply too horrifying, too despairing.
In fact, even after entering this blood-red city, Takumi lay on the ground for quite a while before struggling to slowly sit up, gradually regaining sensation bit by bit.
He had stayed in that hellish place for far, far too long—so long that Takumi felt his sanity was on the verge of breaking.
If the Shirakawa Apartments in the first game had merely made Takumi somewhat dislike the sound of knocking on doors, then now he had genuinely developed a bit of claustrophobia. Being locked in a cramped cave for a full thirty days of time… no, that was not right. During the period when the instance was active, time in the real world seemed not to flow. Which meant that he had actually been trapped for a full forty-five days…
Being confined in a dark cave for such a long time, while also enduring the maddening, intense pain and the terror of his body gradually collapsing and being torn apart—it really was too much to bear. Truly, it was unbearable.
"Haa… Fujiwara Chika, I owe you big this time…"
As soon as he thought of the sight of that girl smiling at him at the final moment, and the words she had spoken with such genuine feeling, Takumi's heartbeat became a little irregular.
He could not help but think back to all the moments when he had acted together with Fujiwara Chika in the first run, and to all the times this girl had stayed by his side.
Unlike Shijō Maki, who was very opinionated, full of ideas, and always carried herself with a proud air, Chika's personality was clearly much softer. When facing all the unknowns within the rule-based Horror Story instances, she was more inclined to assist him, helping Takumi with all kinds of tasks. But when she needed to act on her own, this girl was also able to come up with all sorts of ideas and make various attempts. For example, when they were trapped in the Residual Obsession Zone, she had secretly obtained a promotional poster, allowing Takumi to confirm the identity of that senator—a member of the Bush family, one of the four major families of the United States.
That identity really was high enough. No wonder that later on, even after Patrick Reed had already realized something was wrong and had begun to consider shutting down the park, he still could not bring himself to stop. With such a powerful figure looming over everything, let alone Patrick Reed—even if Superman Clark showed up, he might not be able to do anything, unless he switched to some kind of Injustice-style outfit or something like that.
Of course, within the Horror Story game, those identities were completely meaningless. Judging from the appearance of that Bush senator in the Residual Obsession Zone, he had clearly also been dragged into the cave, and had suffered the cruel fate of drowning alive in an underground pit. Well, for someone like that, Takumi felt it was entirely deserved. And if he could drag that guy into the watch and use him as fuel, Takumi would absolutely have no psychological burden at all.
Buzz—
At that moment, Takumi heard a sound.
He raised his head and saw several items slowly falling down from high above.
A necklace that did not look particularly eye-catching.
A medicine bottle containing sleeping pills.
And a silver ring.
A total of three Obsession Items landed like this right in front of Takumi.
The first two Obsession Items belonged to a guy called Kawano. Probably because of the fight in the water, the blood that flowed from Takumi was splashed everywhere, and as a result it got onto Kawano's Obsession Items.
Among them, the necklace's function was to impose psychological suggestion on people, allowing a person's thinking to unconsciously lean toward the user's expectations. However, the inducing effect of this Obsession Item was not strong. It could only work on matters that did not violate the other party's principles. For example, if a person liked both apples and oranges and felt hesitant between the two choices, then you could, through the power of this Obsession Item and through verbal communication, activate it to make the other party choose apples or oranges. But if the choice involved something the other party liked very much, such as oranges, or something they extremely disliked, such as durian, then no matter how you activated the power of the Obsession Item or how you communicated, at most you could only make the other party not choose apples—you would absolutely never be able to persuade them to choose durian.
The second Obsession Item was that bottle of sleeping pills. Its effect was fairly simple and brutal: restoring physical strength. Eating one pill could make wounds recover rapidly, and for roughly the next ten minutes, no matter what injuries were suffered, as long as one was not dead, they would heal at an extremely fast rate. However, this Obsession Item was already almost in an out-of-control state. Once the first pill was taken, basically the entire instance could no longer allow a second pill to be taken, because taking the second pill would almost certainly result in being possessed by the bizarre.
That Kawano probably also encountered something while crawling through the Blood Vessel. It was just that he was not directly locked onto by the core Obsession like Takumi was and given the "members-only high-end restaurant treatment." Instead, he likely ran into something else, was injured, and failed to pass through the Blood Vessel within ten minutes. Because of this, he had no choice but to take a second pill and gamble desperately, and then successfully "played gg" by being possessed by the bizarre, which ended up causing enormous trouble for Takumi and Chika.
Should he take that guy's Obsession Items? Thinking it over carefully, although the guy had attacked him, that was not originally his intention. As for conscience and the like… there was no such thing as conscience here. Takumi remembered very clearly that during that battle, Kawano's own residual consciousness had also wanted to attack him. That guy's self-destructive desire to drag others down with him was something Takumi found extremely unpleasant. Taking his Obsession Items, Takumi could say he had absolutely no psychological burden at all.
Then there was the ring.
Takumi looked at the last Obsession Item, one of the two core Obsession Items of the Red Nut Grey Cave, the wedding ring that belonged personally to Andres.
The function of this ring was very simple—just one word: Immortality.
As long as the power of this Obsession Item was activated, the user could obtain the power of immortality for the duration of its activation.
Whether one's head was chopped off or one's body was cut into pieces, as long as the power of the Obsession Item was still in effect, the player would exist as an undying being.
Such a simple, crude, and incomparably powerful function truly left Takumi at a loss for words. If he had possessed this Obsession Item back when he was in the Shirakawa Apartments, he could have acted freely even while being doused with boiling water and stitched with needles and thread. Even the execution of the core Obsession Item, he could have treated it as casually as drinking water or getting a massage. It could only be said that the higher the level of the instance, the more powerful the items it produced truly were. Takumi did not even dare imagine how powerful the core Obsession Items of a Red Moon-level instance could be.
Unfortunately, this Obsession Item was something Takumi had no way to take out of the instance. At most, he could only use this item during the subsequent cycles.
As for why, it was because he had already realized what this watch demanded of him—what he was forced to do.
Clang!
The first chime of the bell rang out.
Takumi came to understand the sixth function of this watch, or rather, its first form of punishment.
He had to achieve a perfect clear.
To break the obsessions and destroy the instance—this was the only way for Takumi to clear the game.
Any other method of clearing was not permitted. Once he did so and succeeded, the watch would take his life and then start everything over from the beginning.
This was the first time Takumi sensed that the watch itself possessed a certain inclination, a certain demand, a certain desire.
It wanted to devour the obsessions within these instances.
It wanted to destroy the instances, and then devour the obsessions that lingered inside them.
It granted Takumi the power to start over from the beginning, and so Takumi had to satisfy this desire of its.
Otherwise, he would have to die.
The moment he escaped at the end of the second cycle—if Takumi had not been pulled into a fork in the road by the core obsession, Andres, and if he had escaped the instance in his true body—then this black watch that had been helping him all along would have killed him on the spot, and then rewound time back to the opening of the second instance.
Avoiding the challenge was absolutely not permitted.
At this moment, Takumi understood that.
"…So getting this thing's help really isn't that easy, is it?"
Softly, Takumi let out a sigh, genuinely feeling a trace of trouble and fatigue.
Although the watch had not provided corresponding information about other things, he could already roughly guess that such a huge abnormal change in the second game was very likely related to this watch. And this also meant that in every game from here on, the difficulty would very likely be utterly outrageous.
If he went by the idea of destroying the instance to obtain an S-rank evaluation, and that after obtaining two evaluations the next game's difficulty would increase, then Takumi strongly suspected that his third and fourth games would be stuffed by this watch with two pseudo–Red Moon-level instances. And if he could survive those two games, then the fifth and sixth runs would definitely be real Red Moon-level instances. By then, what tier of Red Moon-level instance would this damned watch pick out for him? Just thinking about that question made Takumi shudder with dread.
"I really have to thank you for that."
Not knowing what else to say, the corner of Takumi's mouth twitched for a long time, and in the end he could only say this.
Clang!!
The second chime of the bell rang out immediately afterward.
Takumi turned his head and looked at those two wretched parents, who were still being tormented amid the raging flames, then shook his head and turned back.
The watch had already unlocked the seventh function.
This function was likewise simple and brutal: suicide.
The activation process required Takumi to focus his attention completely, make a request to the watch, and then there would be a wind-up waiting time of about one minute. After the time was met, if Takumi did not change his mind, his body would explode on the spot, breaking free of any binding force of obsessions, die immediately, and then begin a new cycle.
What needed special emphasis was that this manner of death would not bring any pain at all. During the process of dying, Takumi would feel nothing—he could welcome the new beginning as if he were falling asleep. It could be said that it was quite humane.
Using this function had no cost. Very obviously, this was a response from the watch to Takumi's intense wish when he was trapped in the rock wall, and such a wish just happened to be the kind of simple wish that did not require consuming rollback counts.
So first came a punishment warning, and then a new function.
That said, is this watch playing some kind of psychological manipulation on me? Hitting me with a big stick and then giving me a date afterward—why do I suddenly get that kind of feeling?
Clang!!!
While he was thinking, the third chime of the bell had already rung.
And within Takumi's perception, he saw that girl standing with her back to him, proudly straightening her chest and lifting her head, as well as the stubbornly outstretched small hand she was waiting for him to take.
"…"
After a brief silence, Takumi turned his head.
He saw the second girl.
Facing him was a pink-haired girl, blushing slightly with shyness yet showing a cute smile, reaching out her hand toward him.
The heartfelt words she had spoken while holding him before death, those words overflowing with sincere emotion, and the smiling face she had shown as she disappeared amid the flames—until now, Takumi still had no way to forget them.
He really had already taken this girl's heart…
It felt just like being a scumbag, but… scumbag or not, so what? Saying things like "this girl who likes you will disappear"—isn't that thinking a bit too beautifully? Who do you think you are, Kaori Miyazono? Stories about a departed, idealized past love don't work with me. I absolutely have to keep you!
He stepped forward.
In the next moment, Takumi tightly grasped the pink-haired girl's small hand.
Click!
Amid the crisp sound, the watch's hand moved from the mark at 5 to the mark at 6, just like that completing half of the watch's scale.
And in the next instant, as the entire world once again sank into darkness, the memories that should originally have dissipated instead awakened together with a certain girl.
Takumi had already opened his eyes.
Drip—
Amid the clear sound of dripping water, he slowly stood up from the ground.
It was still that chaotic stone cavern.
The very first place—the one he had already seen for the third time.
But this time would definitely be different from the last.
"It's time to set off."
Murmuring this softly, Takumi took a step and walked toward the direction where the light was.
There, he had already seen that girl who had put on her explorer's outfit and was waiting for his arrival.
The two of them exchanged a glance, and then the same smile rippled across both his face and hers.
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