He saw the entirety of that girl's life.
From the hazy moment she first opened her eyes as a baby, letting out her very first cry.
To her babbling infancy.
To the days she could run and skip along the road, crying loudly whenever she fell, demanding to be picked up.
Then gradually growing up, gradually maturing, gradually becoming a quiet and kind girl, living each ordinary day in a simple, uneventful way.
She loved sweets—especially pastries—yet worried about calories, and because of that, she often envied her childhood friend.
She liked cute little animals—cats, rabbits—and had little resistance to fluffy toys. She would even carefully choose charms for her phone.
She did not long for anything extraordinary or out of the ordinary. Simply holding onto the present and living each day well was already enough for her.
She did not have many desires, nor many demands. Being content with an ordinary life was part of who she was.
She did not want to see those phantoms.
She did not want to face those twisted aberrations or Alice.
She did not want to experience these terrifying things.
But after seeing Takumi protect her, after witnessing Kumagai Mai's sacrifice, she had already gathered her courage—already prepared herself to face everything.
Even now, she was still conscious.
Alice had never truly erased Miko's consciousness.
The cruel nature of this aberration meant it always preferred to preserve the victim's awareness—so they could feel everything being destroyed while being completely powerless.
Takumi felt Miko's emotions.
He felt her sense of self.
And at that moment, Miko also saw the true thoughts in Takumi's heart—understood what he was trying to do, understood his helplessness, and the resolve he had already made.
So… it's okay.
"Takumi-san, please do what you want to do."
"Right now, I can't help you anymore. I can't be your support anymore… I'll only end up hurting you."
"So please, go and do what you want to do. Don't feel helpless about it. I believe you've already done the best you possibly could."
"So just… do it. At least at the very end, I can still talk to you… I can still let you know how I feel. And that… is enough."
"…"
The girl's final trace of consciousness had already vanished.
Everything she was had fused with Takumi, becoming something entirely under his control.
He had personally killed the girl who had accompanied him through battle and exploration all this way, the girl who had always been trying her hardest to help him.
Takumi would offer no defense for that.
He simply continued to feel the sensation of that fusion, feeling the aura that had been stuffed into him along with Miko's dissolution—the aura of another thing.
[Alice]'s aura.
An intense chill enveloped Takumi's entire body.
The aberrations whose skulls had been split open had already drawn close.
In that instant, Takumi saw something new—something belonging to [Alice], something that existed within the monster's memories.
It was the ruins of an abandoned school, dilapidated and broken-down.
It was the true form of this place before it became an Instance, an abandoned site exactly identical to the darkened Fujihana Middle School Takumi had explored across three loops.
Four people were carrying something into the school.
Some were sobbing under their breath. Some were full of anger. Some looked almost despairing. And some were so excited their faces had flushed red.
On the empty Athletic Field, they set that thing down and lifted away the white cloth covering it.
It was Alice's corpse.
The corpse of the young, beautiful, already dead Alice, who possessed an almost devilish power of seduction.
Her cause of death was three bullets through the head: two bullet holes in her forehead, and another below one eye on the side of her face. The bullet holes themselves were not large, and from the front, the corpse did not look as if it had suffered severe damage. In reality, however, the back of the corpse's head had been blasted open into a much larger hole. A large chunk of the entire back of her skull had been shattered, and the brain structure inside had been reduced to something like paste—only, it was frozen paste, so it would not spill out anymore.
The white cloth used to cover the corpse bore the mark of the police station.
The corpse's face was filled with confusion, as if she had seen something incomprehensible before her death.
Was this the final trace left behind by [Alice] when she had still been alive?
After seeing the corpse, the four people who had carried it into the school once again revealed fanatical expressions. One of them even had the impulse to go up and kiss the corpse, to touch the corpse, only to be stopped by the other three.
They took out knives, saws, and all kinds of tools they had prepared long ago.
Takumi realized that these people had come here to dismember the corpse, to divide this body into four pieces. This was the original source of the four Alice Obsession Items. It was the fanatical act committed by four fans who were obsessively infatuated with Alice, to the point that they had even stolen her body after her death.
No… If it was merely a fanatical act, why had they deliberately brought the corpse back to Fujihana Middle School? Why had these fans died in different areas of Fujihana Middle School, and why had they just so happened to bring the Obsession Items they created into the research base?
Takumi, sensing something, looked to one side and saw Alice standing not far away in the darkness, smiling as she watched these four people.
In the end, that corpse was divided into four pieces. These people carefully sorted them out and then prepared to each take one away for further processing.
Behind every person who left, there followed an Alice figure—an Alice no one could see, one that seemingly only Takumi, as a historical observer, could discover.
He closed his eyes.
At this moment, Takumi had no time to analyze or think over the information these images had revealed. Instead, he focused his attention on the present, on the crisis before him that he had yet to survive.
Kita Ikuyo had once again pressed close. The students, too, were drawing near one after another, gathering toward Takumi under the control of that unnamed aberration from Yoruyama Middle School.
Crack!
Amid the sound of bone splitting, a three- or four-centimeter-deep gash had already been cleaved into Takumi's forehead.
He could not help but collapse to the ground. Blood dyed his vision red, and his consciousness grew hazy.
Those aberrations once again approached until they were right in front of him.
The sound of footsteps—tap, tap—kept echoing around Takumi.
And then…
All the footsteps vanished.
The aberration gnawing on the flesh on his back vanished as well, while the wound gradually repaired itself under the power of the Rescue Team Badge.
Takumi crawled up from the ground and swayed to his feet. All he saw was the empty hall, the flesh monster that had quieted down and curled into a ball, and the rescue team member standing in place not far away, caught by the bloody human hands surging out of the meat soup and therefore unable to smoothly reunite with him.
Within his consciousness, something was constantly battering against his sense of self.
It seemed as if something had been locked inside his body and was now struggling with all its might, trying to break free from him.
He could even hear the shrieking that thing was letting out.
"Stop howling. What the hell are you howling for? It's the middle of the night. Don't bother the neighbors."
As Takumi muttered under his breath, he walked toward the rescue team member.
That power was still trying to influence him. It wanted to manipulate his senses, destroy his sense of self, and stop what was happening right now.
Takumi's vision, hearing, smell, perception, and every other means of cognition all suffered an extremely severe distortion at this moment—so severe that he could barely tell whether he was dreaming or whether he had already gone insane without realizing it.
But he continued walking forward.
The Rescue Team Badge transmitted the summoned rescue team member's perspective to Takumi, allowing him to keep seeing the real scene.
And so, step by step, he walked right up to the rescue team member, reached out and grabbed the meat soup, stared at the distorted human face of Alice pieced together from chunks of flesh that surged out of the meat soup, and turned the watch around, aiming it at the meat soup.
This time, Alice could no longer stop any of Takumi's actions.
"Goodbye."
After those words fell, that bowl of meat soup was successfully contained by Takumi inside the black watch's inner space.
One second.
Nothing changed at all.
It seemed that losing this Obsession Item had not brought about any immediate change. The underground base still looked the same as before, and Fujihana Middle School continued to exist.
At 2 seconds, Takumi began to feel a faint tremor coming from underground.
It was like a very minor earthquake—so weak it didn't even compare to the vibration of a massage chair, utterly negligible.
At 3 seconds, everything shattered.
The underground base collapsed.
The entire complex of Fujihana Middle School—whether it was the Teaching Building, the Dormitory Building, the Swimming Pool, the Athletic Field, or even the school's front gate sign—shattered like glass in that instant, losing the very foundation of their existence as the Alice Obsession Items that sustained them disappeared.
Takumi fell into the darkness.
Falling together with the collapsing buildings.
The umbrella, the bone staff, and the meat soup had all been sealed. The existence of Fujihana Middle School could no longer be maintained.
Not only that, Takumi could clearly feel a certain pulling force. After he had taken three of the four Obsession Items, the fourth was being drawn by that force, forcibly crossing the barrier of space to return.
And so he quickly saw it.
It was a very small piece of jewelry.
It looked like… a necklace made from an eyeball and glass?
An eyeball necklace, writhing, struggling, trying to escape, restless and unwilling to be captured.
Without even a moment of hesitation, Takumi reached out, grabbed the necklace, and locked it into the watch's internal space, completely finishing the suppression of all four Obsession Items.
He could almost hear Alice's shriek inside his body growing even more shrill and piercing, could feel the complete collapse of this monster's composure.
And so he laughed.
Laughed with pure exhilaration, bursting into unrestrained laughter.
"Hahahahahahahaha—"
His laughter echoed into the darkness.
And what Takumi could not see—
Somewhere in the real world, inside a high-end restaurant, a figure set down their knife and fork and let out a surprised "Hm?"
The person waved a hand, as if trying to summon something into their grasp, yet received no response at all.
"The Obsession Items have returned to the Instance…"
"The Obsession Items of Fujihana Middle School have returned…"
"Obsession Items passively returning to the Instance… someone changed the situation inside the Instance, at a time like this?"
That figure suddenly stood up, their tone filled with disbelief, their emotions surging violently.
At the same time, in another place in the real world, Shijō Maki took a deep breath, turned back and nodded to Fujiwara Chika behind her, then stepped forward, reached out, and pressed the doorbell of a residence, her gaze landing on the sign beside it that read [Gotō Residence].
Within the span of an hour, they had done everything they could to find help, and in the end, following Kogawa Shu's recommendation, they had come here.
According to that market administrator, this was the only person capable of helping them—the only one who had a chance of saving Takumi from that terrifying Instance known as [Campus Uncanny].
'Takumi… please don't let anything happen to you.'
Behind them, standing not far away under the shade of a tree, Shinomiya Kaguya watched the two girls' barely concealed anxiety and could not help but reflect on how much they had changed.
However, while worrying about Takumi's safety, Kaguya had another concern as well.
Her personal maid—her most trusted and closest companion, Hayasaka Ai—had, for some unknown reason, completely disappeared. No matter how she searched, she could not find any trace of her.
Thinking about how her recent decisive takeover of the Shinomiya family had shaken Hayasaka, as well as the girl's very obvious attention toward Takumi, the more Kaguya thought about it, the more something felt wrong. Yet she could only force down the unease in her heart and maintain a composed exterior.
All of this was beyond Takumi's sight within the Instance.
He simply continued falling.
Falling into the darkness, until he was finally swallowed by it.
Then—
When Takumi opened his eyes again, he found himself lying on a hospital bed. His limbs were tightly bound by a restraint suit, and metal rings were fastened around his ankles, waist, and neck, fixing him in place so that he could not even turn over. Not only that, even his teeth were fitted with a bite guard, sealing his mouth completely so that he could not speak.
The room was bathed in a soft blue-violet light. The walls and floor were entirely padded, and even the bed frame was cushioned, as if to prevent him from harming himself—like he was being confined as a highly dangerous patient in a psychiatric hospital.
Where… is this?
Takumi had considered all kinds of possibilities for what he might face next, but he had never imagined he would be tied up and placed in a special ward of a mental hospital like this.
However, despite how secure these restraints were, his strength had already surpassed that of a normal human. So with a slight exertion, Takumi easily tore apart the cloth bindings restraining him, ripped off the metal rings with his bare hands, and sat up from the bed.
Is this… the "reality" beneath Fujihana Middle School?
There was nothing to be learned from this room alone. He needed to get out and check the situation outside as soon as possible. After all, now that he had sealed Alice, his life had already paid for itself—taking a bit of risk at this point was no issue at all.
Having made his decision, Takumi stood up.
At that moment, a man wearing a filthy police uniform phased out from the wall in front of him and walked straight toward him.
"Hm?"
This completely unanticipated scene made Takumi instinctively meet the man's gaze—
—and then he saw the handgun the man raised.
Bang—bang, bang—
The first bullet pierced his chest.
The second shot went through his head.
The third struck his heart.
At that moment, both the Rescue Team Badge and the power of blessings lost all effect. In the face of the core aberration's power, they could not be maintained—completely suppressed before the true core that formed the [Fujihana Middle School] Instance.
Takumi collapsed back onto the bed.
And that thing didn't even spare him a glance. It turned around and simply walked through the wall and left. From entering to exiting, the entire process took less than three seconds.
Blood slowly spread, soaking through the bed.
Lying there, Takumi's pupils gradually lost focus.
Meanwhile, the black watch on his wrist—the single hand on its face—began to tremble slightly. From the slot marked with the number [6], it moved forward, directly reaching [7], and let out a crisp sound that no one could hear.
Click—
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