[Zaelum: Chapters names started to spoil too much]
In that moment, Saya Takagi had no desire to keep "solving" anything.
She suspected that once she cleared the whole thing, she would no longer be useful, and they would silence her.
Still, she could not openly refuse. That man might simply put a bullet in her.
Fine. Then she would play along and stall for time.
If something like a terrorist attack had happened at school, the police would be alerted, and her father would immediately send people to rescue her.
So the plan was simple: survive, pretend to work, and drag it out.
Slacking off did not mean she had to stop thinking. She could still work out the answers in her head. She just would not enter them. Delay was the point.
After running the calculations in her mind, she arrived at what the result should be. And if she was right, then the next step would surely reveal something even more interesting.
She wanted to know. She really wanted to know.
Just one more step. It did not look like she would "pass the trial" immediately anyway.
With her curiosity itching, Saya started typing rapidly.
"Huh?" "Two-three-zero."
Saya froze.
The instant she entered the final segment, the screen—previously filled with what looked like code—suddenly devolved into garbled characters.
No, not garbled… it was rearranging itself.
Then the screen went black. No, it looked like it was booting.
But it was not a normal boot screen.
It was playing something—particles? Cells? A double helix… DNA?
It was straight-up an animation of human evolution.
In the end, the ape "evolved" into a human—and that human's appearance was…
"N-no, what is this?!"
Blushing hard, Saya stared at the only computer still lit in the room. The "evolved human" on the screen was her.
And there was one more problem: she was completely naked, rendered as a rotating 3D model.
Text flashed at the top: the template body had been confirmed as the logged-in user.
Her 3D figure slid into the corner, and a window popped up—sleek and futuristic, like something out of a sci-fi film.
It looked like a bunch of folders—
The next second, the screen abruptly died.
The dark monitor faintly reflected a terrifying face behind her shoulder, glaring at the screen with intense pressure—no, it felt like he was glaring at her.
"N-no, it's not like that. What did I even touch?!"
Saya tried to explain in a panic. She could smell something burning. Smoke was rising. The computer tower was clearly fried.
"What did you see? Did it say how to make the Panacea?"
"Ow—!"
That was Saya's answer, because it hurt so badly her eyes watered. Kain's hand had clamped onto her shoulder with crushing force, like he was about to snap bone.
"Sorry. What you saw—was it about the Panacea?"
Kain immediately let go and pressed again.
Her panic made him stride over to look. He saw the computer had shut off—but right before the display died, he had barely caught the characters for "elixir" on the screen, and that alone was enough to send his pulse racing.
Was the hard drive full of a recipe for the Panacea?
That would be outright cheating—something absurdly overpowered.
"I… I didn't see clearly. It looked like some kind of medicine recipe."
Saya was not lying out of spite, nor was she deliberately hiding anything. She genuinely had not seen enough.
But she did grasp the general idea: it was some sort of pharmaceutical formula.
"You have a computer at home, right? Something better?"
Kain sounded like he already knew the answer as he spoke, and while he was talking, he pocketed the hard drive.
"Huh?"
"We're going to your house."
"Huh?"
Saya went blank again. Was she supposed to walk into her own cage?
"Move."
He tugged her, and she nearly fell.
It was not that he yanked too suddenly. It was that she felt completely drained.
And she was soaked, sticky with sweat.
So in the next moment, he simply scooped her up around the waist and carried her.
It was horribly uncomfortable. His arm was hard as metal.
And then she saw it—an oversized metal palm.
A prosthetic?
Only now did Saya also realize that Saeko Busujima—her senior—was gone.
When they left the computer room and stepped outside, Saya finally saw that the school's chaos was beyond anything she had imagined. Screams were everywhere.
A few students came stumbling past in panic. One of them tripped clumsily—and another "student," something wrong and twitchy, pounced on top of them.
It opened its mouth and bit down on the person's face.
With a single savage wrench, it tore away half a mask of skin.
Saya's mind went completely white.
And when she finally snapped back—
"Wait—those are zombies!"
She screamed. Even she could see what was happening. Some of the students had gone mad, biting people like rabid animals.
And Kain was walking straight toward them.
The ones feeding on the already-dead student swayed to their feet and turned.
Dead-pale faces. Bloodless skin. Whites of eyes showing.
Then, as if the two of them were food, they howled and charged.
Right as they were about to tackle and bite, Saya's vision blurred.
Two heads flew up.
Two bodies collapsed.
What… happened?
Saya finally understood: Kain had decapitated both of them.
A knife had been attached to his handgun at some point, and with it he had cleanly taken their heads.
From that point on, Saya's entire body stayed limp—not because she had no strength, but because she was terrified.
The man carrying her killed every attacker in their path with a single blow.
How many heads hit the floor along the way, she did not even know.
But she also understood something else.
This was not rabies.
It had to be some kind of abnormal virus.
The school had suffered a bioterror attack. If you were bitten, you would be infected quickly, go berserk, and die.
And those infected might only be killable by destroying the brain.
On the stairwell, she saw a corpse tumble down, twisted beyond recognition—its neck rotated a full half-turn, its limbs contorted like braided rope—and it still staggered upright, trying to bite.
A normal person would have been dead long ago.
So what the hell was happening?
Did it have anything to do with whatever was on that hard drive—some "medicine"?
Was this bio-disaster caused by that "drug" in the first place?
Conspiracies lined up one after another in Saya's mind—until she saw a familiar figure in the distance.
Saeko was at the infirmary entrance, holding a real blade like she was enforcing a quarantine line.
Around the doorway, numerous bodies lay sprawled.
Had Saeko done that?
"Maybe your world can still be saved."
That was what Kain said to Saeko. She blinked in surprise, then her expression blossomed into joy.
But for Saya, those words were chilling.
Was he saying this outbreak could threaten the entire world?
That it was not just the school—that poison could be spreading everywhere?
When she was brought into the infirmary, she noticed someone else inside: Shizuka Marikawa, the teacher, hurriedly gathering medical supplies.
Saeko came in to help, because Ms. Marikawa was clumsy and kept fumbling things.
As for the man who had taken Saya, he remained at the doorway on guard.
After a brief daze, Saya went to a window where she could see the schoolyard—and beyond it, the city.
What she saw made her breath catch.
"N-no way…"
Her pupils trembled. Her voice trembled.
The schoolyard was hell.
Outside the school was chaos, too.
She saw fires and smoke.
She saw three helicopters falling out of the sky.
So this was not only inside the school.
It was the entire city?
No… maybe it was erupting everywhere across the world.
No. That was impossible.
It had to be.
(End of Chapter)
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