Chapter 11 - Kisaku: Plan

1

The boys all stood before the room next to the art room. On the door hung a “do not enter” sign. Students weren’t allowed in here. Even Hiroshi had never been inside. He knew only that the faculty used it as a smoking room and that it had roof access.

He inserted the key he’d cleaned off in the keyhole under the doorknob and turned it to the left. There was an audible click. He looked at Kazuya and Takuro before placing his hand on the knob. The next moment, they heard shouting from inside.

“Shun!”

Hiroshi threw open the door, but what he beheld inside left him dumbstruck. Shun was lying on the floor, his hands and feet bound. And Naoki, who was in the midst of transforming into a monster, was standing over him.

“Shun... listen... turn back... Shut up! Shut up! Turn back time... If you do... save... You’re so annoying! I don’t need you anymore! Hurry up and disappear!”

The monster’s body pulsed, nearly reverting back to Naoki’s form before suddenly growing huge again. It was completely unstable. It was as if two minds were fighting within one body. Perhaps that was exactly what was going on, Hiroshi realized.

“Go... roof... up... there...”

Those were Naoki’s last words.

“AHHHHH!”

An ear-splitting roar then flooded from his mouth as his body exploded inside. His head punched right through the ceiling, making the whole room shake. One of the light fixtures broke free with a snap, plunging down toward Shun below.

“Look out!”

Hiroshi moved reflexively, throwing himself over his classmate. He tensed, bracing himself for the pain... but it never came. He slowly looked up to see Takuro smiling. The light fixture was lying in pieces by the window. He must have used his inhuman speed and strength to kick it out of the way.

“Whoa! Wh-What is that thing?”

Kazuya, meanwhile, stumbled backwards as he looked up at the huge monster in horror. He tried his best to stand, but the strength had completely left his legs. It was all a perfectly normal reaction considering this was his first time meeting a monster.

“What in the world is going on? You guys know, don’t you?”

“Yes, but I’ll explain later. Let’s just focus on surviving for right now.”

“Okay, but how? Can we even beat that thing?”

Despite the circumstances, however, he was still lucid and rational. Perhaps Kazuya had more guts than anyone realized.

Takuro took a step forward, glaring at the monster. Hiroshi could tell he was readying himself for a fight. He was probably about to transform as well, but the monster suddenly turned on its heels and fled the room like it hadn’t even seen them. It was a mystery why it didn’t instantly attack, but the boys knew they didn’t have any time to stop and think about it. Hiroshi immediately got to work untying Shun.

The monster’s footsteps were quickly fading into the distance. It sounded like it had taken the stairs in the adjoining room that led up to the roof. By the time Hiroshi finally had Shun free, everything was quiet.

“Thanks, guys,” Shun said with a smile.

His wrists and ankles were painfully raw, but he appeared to be in perfect health otherwise. Hiroshi couldn’t help letting out a sigh of relief.

2

Unfortunately, they couldn’t enjoy their reunion for long.

“We’ve gotta hurry! Let’s move!”

Nearly as soon as he was on his feet, Shun dashed into the adjoining room. Staring hard at the computer monitor on the desk, he began clacking away at the keyboard with agile fingers.

“What are you doing?” Hiroshi asked as he peered over Shun’s shoulder.

On the screen was a familiar game, which was currently displaying a pixelated boy with blue hair at a computer.

“Naoki said something before he turned into the monster, remember? I couldn’t put it all together, but it sounded like he was saying something like, ‘Turn back time.’”

“Turn back time...?”

Hiroshi was suddenly struck with a strange sense of déjà vu. He could swear something like this had happened before...

“Reality and the game are synched again. That being the case...”

Shun opened up the computer’s settings menu. A simple analog-style clock appeared in the center of the screen, currently reading 8:09 AM. They only had 11 minutes before time was up.

“The clock on the screen is real-time, right? The two worlds are running in parallel, so if we change time in the game via the computer’s internal clock, that change should be mirrored in the real world,” Shun explained as he tapped away at the keyboard. “In other words, we should be able to use this to literally turn back time.”

“Is that so?” Kazuya asked, one eyebrow raised.

This probably all sounded beyond farfetched to him. Talk of turning back time in such a fashion was decidedly unrealistic, but the wary Hiroshi wasn’t even batting an eye. He was still combating the strange feeling that he’d already been through this—all of this craziness—once before. Takuro, calm and steeled, simply nodded. It only further confirmed Hiroshi’s strange feeling.

“If I turn it back two hours, to 6:10 AM... That’s when you guys were passed out in the courtyard, right? So once we clear the game and escape the building, we’ll all be able to restart from then. It’ll kick us back in order to reconcile the time difference.”

“Does that mean Mika and Takeshi... everyone who died will come back?”

Shun nodded emphatically in response to Takuro’s question.

“Really? They’ll all come back...? Thank... Thank God...”

Slumping against the wall, Takuro let out a sigh of relief. Hiroshi followed suit. But for some reason, Shun’s expression remained uneasy.

“Huh? That’s weird,” he mumbled, tapping away at the keyboard.

“What’s wrong?” Hiroshi asked, returning his gaze to the monitor.

The clock still read 8:11 AM. Nothing had changed.

“No matter how many times I try and change it, the clock won’t update.”

“What’s going on?”

As quickly as their hope had arrived, it vanished. A silent tension gripped all four boys.

“Oh. Maybe...” Shun opened a few windows and began searching for something with inhuman speed. “I knew it. This computer’s managed by a different one, so we don’t have the right permissions to change the time.”

Hearing that, the light bulb came on for Hiroshi.

“Ah, yes. A slave clock.”

“Slave clock? What the heck is that?” Takuro asked.

“There are dozens of clocks within the school, so how is it that they all manage to keep the same time? You’ve never seen anyone going around to synchronize them, have you?”

“Huh, guess not. I bet the big clock on the roof would be a huge pain to set.”

“Those are all slave clocks, which depend entirely on a signal from a master clock to tell them what time it is. That makes it possible to manage an entire system just by changing the one clock—the master clock.”

“So if we find this master clock, we can change the computer clock?”

“Theoretically.”

“Then where is it?”

“I couldn’t say. I don’t even know where to start looking, either,” Hiroshi answered honestly.

“Then we’re screwed!” Takuro exclaimed in exasperation, looking like he’d been slapped in the face. “We’ve only got ten minutes left. What do we do now?”

“I might have an idea...” said Kazuya, who had been quietly listening in confused silence thus far.

Everyone’s eyes fell on him.

“You’re looking for the master clock, right? It’s probably up there,” he said, pointing to the staircase the monster had taken.

“On the roof?”

“No. At the top of the stairs is a control room. It should be right behind the giant clock.”

“How do you know that?”

“For the longest time, I always used to wonder how it was that the clocks at school were never wrong. I asked Panzee one day, and he told me all about radio clocks and...”

“Let’s go.”

Hiroshi took Shun by the arm and quickly led him up the stairs. The door at the top leading outside was wide open. The monster was out on the roof just beyond it, but they couldn’t afford to be scared now.

To the right of it was another door. It was so small that the boys would have to bend down to get through it, but it was a completely unremarkable metal door otherwise, labeled unceremoniously with a sign: “Control Room.”

Please don’t be locked...

Hiroshi said a silent prayer as he placed his hand on the knob. If it was another locked door that was too sturdy for Takuro to kick in, then... They certainly didn’t have time to go looking for the key, but the boys were met with a small stroke of luck. The door opened without a fuss. Their prayers had been answered.

Exhaling their pent-up tension, the boys stepped inside. Shun went in first with Hiroshi and Kazuya taking up the rear. The room was tiny, just barely large enough for them all to fit in like packed sardines. The low ceiling didn’t help that impression, either.

But perhaps more remarkably, the room was dusty enough that it seemed no one had been here in quite some time. Specks of dust danced in the single ray of sunshine beaming in from the tiny window. Across the room from it was a white box attached to the wall. Surely that had to be it—the master clock. Hiroshi had imagined something digital, but the multiple clocks nestled inside the box were all analog.

“Can you figure it out?” Takuro asked from outside, poking only his head in through the door.

“Yeah,” replied Shun. “As long as we can figure out what these buttons do, changing the time should be a cinch. What do you think, Kazuya?”

“Let me give you a hand. I’m good at tinkering with stuff,” Kazuya offered.

He seemed confident he could handle the task, so Hiroshi decided it would be all right to let him and Shun handle this.

“Shun, Kazuya, I’m leaving things here to you. Takuro, let’s go to the roof,” Hiroshi instructed as he exited the control room.

He hadn’t been able to shake his worries about what the monster might be up to. For all he knew, it was getting ready to jump off the building and attack the unsuspecting students in the courtyard below. And that thought alone was enough to make him hasten his pace.

“Yeah, let’s get a move on,” Takuro agreed as he stepped out onto the roof. “I’m pretty sure Naoki said something about going to the roof, anyway.”

“Indeed.” Hiroshi followed after him. “The last key—our ticket to escaping—should be just up ahead.”

Hiroshi swiftly looked around. There was no immediate sign of the monster, but it had to be around here somewhere. There was no access to the roof other than the door they’d just come through. A cold northern wind mercilessly raked at their skin. Hiroshi kept up his guard and followed close behind Takuro.

“I suspect that we should split up and look for clues at this point. We’re direly pressed for time.”

By Hiroshi’s estimation, they only had maybe six minutes left.

“Don’t worry. If we run out of time, I’ll hop the fence and get us down that way,” Takuro declared, proudly pounding his chest.

With his superhuman body, not even a several-story fall would put a scratch on Takuro. The real problem would be the aftermath. A considerable crowd had gathered in the courtyard below, which included several armed police officers now. How would they all react to a monster suddenly appearing out of nowhere?

“Welcome to the last level,” a low voice said from above.

Hiroshi and Takuro both looked up to see the monster sitting atop the water tower.

“You only have five minutes left. Everything okay?”

It cocked its giant head to the side as it swung its legs. It didn’t sound at all like Naoki. The monster’s other consciousness must have taken completely over, or so Hiroshi figured. He bit his lower lip.

“This is the final battle, but there’s no saving and reloading like in a game. You’d better fight like your lives are on the line.”

There, the monster slowly stood up.

3

It was now 8:15 AM. The police had arrived half an hour ago, but it hadn’t changed much. The crowd had merely gotten a little larger.

In five minutes, the school bell would ring. The courtyard was overflowing with students. A gathering of teachers were visibly discussing something serious over by the corner of the building. Most likely they were debating whether to keep the students waiting or send them home.

Anna, avoiding her classmates, was observing the crowd from the shadow of the gym. If she ran into anyone else she knew, she’d inevitably be bombarded with questions about why she’d been absent—doubly so if word made its way around that she’d been one of the first to arrive that morning. The commotion would make it all too easy for her to miss the SOS signal from Shun and the others. She had no choice but to keep her distance, simply watching as things played out.

Her gaze nervously shifted to the bench in front of the gym. While she was worried for her friends, something else was currently commanding most of her attention. It was Mari. After she collapsed, Anna couldn’t help noticing how wide and black Mari’s pupils looked. They looked just like hers did. The question was why.

During her hospitalization after the accident last year, the doctors had given Anna a drug called Atropine, which temporarily enlarged her pupils so her eyes could be examined. Perhaps something similar had happened with Mari, but Anna hadn’t seen her use any sort of eye drops. All she’d had with her was cold medicine. Maybe it was a side effect of that... The unease ate at Anna’s gut. She couldn’t help thinking the worst.

Mari’s friend Satsuki was sitting next to her on the bench, watching over her. Other than coughing every now and again, Mari seemed perfectly fine. But something was wrong. Anna couldn’t say exactly why she felt that way, which was frustrating to say the least, but there was definitely something going on with Mari. There was something different about her.

Was it her scent? Anna’s heightened sense of smell was so strong now that she could detect things too subtle or faint for humans. And concentrating on it, Anna realized that was exactly it. Mari smelled different from everyone else. It was a strange smell, something inhuman... Yes, quite like the way the blue giants smelled.

“Mari! What’s the matter?!” she suddenly heard Satsuki shout.

Mari, who had been happily chatting away with her best friend just seconds ago, was now tense and spasming violently. She was in danger of hurling herself off the bench and hitting her head.

I can’t let this happen.

Anna jumped out from the shadow cast by the gym and made a beeline for the bench. A few other people who’d noticed were on their way over too.

“Mari! Mari, wake up!”

A terrified Satsuki was leaning over her friend, doing her best to keep her up on the bench.

“Get off!” a deep voice roared.

Suddenly Satsuki went flying through the air, landing flat on her back on the ground. Everyone who had been running over to help froze in place. They watched in confusion and shock as Mari slowly rose from the bench.

“Grrrrr...”

A creepy growl escaped her lips. It sounded like something that had crawled up from the very depths of hell. Her whole body was shaking. Thick veins bulged underneath the skin on the backs of her hands. They swelled and swelled, becoming huge lumps.

It started on her hands, but it didn’t stop there. Lumps were forming all over her body and expanding rapidly. Her glasses slipped off her nose and fell to the ground. Her face was so terribly swollen that she no longer looked like herself. Her uniform ripped here and there, exposing skin with more lumps. The lumps then began to merge, forming even bigger lumps.

“Rahhhhh!”

Mari was screaming in pain. No... Whatever this was, it was no longer Mari. You couldn’t even call it human. It was just a mass of the weird, pulsating blue lumps that were still continuing to grow.

“Oh, I see what’s going on here. This is some prank, isn’t it?” The gym teacher approached what used to be Mari. “You really got us covering up all the doors and windows, but this is taking it too far. Whose stupid idea was this? Well? Take off that silly costume right this instant and—”

The moment he reached out and tried to touch the blue mass that used to be Mari, sharp teeth emerged from within it. They sank into his arm with a disgusting squelching sound as they gnashed. It was all so sudden that the gym teacher didn’t even realize what was happening. He just stood there in a daze as a fountain of bright red liquid gushed from his elbow. Showered in a rain of his own blood, he sank to the ground. In a few short moments, the monster was finished chewing and bared its teeth once again. A bizarre, unearthly cry echoed across the courtyard.

“AAAHHHHH!”

Upon the realization that something terrible was afoot, the crowd fell into an instinctual panic. Over 300 students raced for the school gate, pushing and shoving each other out of the way. Anyone who fell was immediately trampled.

But try as they might to run, the blue, fleshy mass descended on the crowd. The air was electrified with all the agonized screams. It was pure carnage. The police officers stood and stared, unable to comprehend the situation. The stern-faced officer eventually collected himself enough to draw his gun, but there was no way he could get a clear shot amid all the chaos.

Anna too was forced to bear witness. Everyone was going to die, and she was just watching. Her fingers curled into tight fists.

No, I don’t want them to see my true form... But I’m the only one who can stand up to that monster. I can’t just stand here. I can’t just let them all die.

Every second she spent thinking about it was another student dead. She had no choice but to act.