Akira woke up. His eyelids remained closed for several seconds as he tried to make sense of the surrounding environment.
The texture of the bed beneath him wasn't the same as the one in his dorm, and the stale atmosphere of the room quickly reminded him of where he was.
He opened his eyes, the vaguely familiar room of the Start Anew Academy dorm coming into view.
Akira rubbed his eyes with slight irritation before slowly sitting up, his mind gradually sorting through everything that had happened yesterday.
The classroom, the pop quiz, the cafeteria, Ichinose and the others, and finally that voice.
Akira was certain now. The voice he had heard in the darkness had belonged to Ryuen Kakeru.
He had heard it much more clearly in his sleep, making it impossible to dismiss as a simple hallucination.
"You absolute morons! Would you go to the third-year building already!"
Akira stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. "So you're alive..."
At least, there was a possibility that he was.
Akira couldn't completely rule out the dungeon reproducing Ryuen's voice.
After all, this place had already demonstrated that it could manipulate their perception and reproduce the appearances of people they knew.
There was no reason to assume that voices were beyond its capabilities.
But that wasn't the only thing bothering him.
The third-year building.
The dungeon had explicitly told them that there were only first- and second-year students.
There were only two dormitory buildings, and there were no other grades.
If they encountered someone claiming to be a third-year student, they were supposed to immediately find an excuse to leave.
Yet Ryuen was telling them to go to the third-year building.
Akira frowned slightly.
It was contradictory, but he couldn't immediately conclude that the dungeon had lied.
In fact, after thinking about it carefully, he wasn't even sure that the rules had lied to them at all.
The rules had helped them survive the first day.
They had given the players a framework for understanding the dungeon and, more importantly, had prevented them from blindly walking into situations they didn't understand.
But Akira had learned something during his first Eerie Game.
Stability didn't mean safety.
A rule could tell you how to survive a situation without telling you how to escape it.
And that distinction mattered.
The dungeon had told them to survive for three days.
That didn't necessarily mean surviving for three days would actually clear the dungeon.
For all Akira knew, following every instruction exactly as written could be the safest possible option.
Perhaps the dungeon really was giving them the correct method. Perhaps the black fog was an escape route.
Perhaps the Third-Year Building was another route. There was even a possibility that both were connected.
He didn't have enough information to know.
And because he didn't know, Akira decided to take the riskier gamble.
He trusted his instincts more than he trusted the instructions of something that had kidnapped him and thrown him into a supernatural death game.
There was a chance that he was being paranoid. There was a chance that following the rules was actually the correct answer and that Ryuen's message was nothing more than another trap.
But if that was the case, he'd find out eventually.
"...I might be wrong."
Akira admitted it without hesitation as he reached for his school bag.
He wasn't certain that the Third-Year Building was the answer. He wasn't even certain that Ryuen was actually alive.
But he would rather investigate the possibility himself than spend three days obediently following instructions given to him by the very thing he was trying to escape.
"Listening to a kidnapper's instructions isn't exactly my idea of escaping."
Akira slung his bag over his shoulder and reached for the door.
Before his hand touched the handle, however—
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Akira stopped.
His eyes narrowed slightly as he looked toward the door.
After everything that had happened yesterday, there was no reason to blindly trust someone simply because they sounded familiar.
"Who's there?"
A voice immediately answered from the other side.
"You're lesbian."
Akira stared at the door.
"...I'm a guy."
"You're gay."
Akira stepped forward and opened the door without hesitation.
"Come in."
The door opened, revealing Sakura Airi standing outside. She stepped into the room and closed the door behind herself before looking at Akira with a faint smile.
"Morning, Akira-kun."
"Morning."
Airi looked at him for a moment before noticing his slightly serious expression. "....did you by chance.....hear anything while asleep?"
Akira nodded. "Ryuen."
Airi's expression changed slightly. "...You heard him too?"
"Yeah."
She hesitated before continuing. "I heard his voice while I was sleeping too, but what he said was different."
Akira raised an eyebrow. "What did he say?"
Airi thought for a moment before answering. "He said something about the third years. Something like, 'There aren't supposed to be any third-year students.'"
Akira's eyes narrowed slightly.
That wasn't what he'd heard.
He had heard Ryuen telling them to go to the Third-Year Building.
Airi had heard Ryuen saying that there weren't supposed to be any third-year students.
The contradiction was almost irritatingly perfect.
"There aren't supposed to be any third-year students," Akira repeated.
"Yeah."
"And I heard him telling us to go to the Third-Year Building."
Airi stared at him for several seconds. "...But if there aren't any third-year students, why would there be a Third-Year Building?"
"That's what we're going to find out."
Airi nodded slowly, but her expression remained thoughtful. "By the way, you still remember the code?"
"Obviously."
"You actually thought we'd still use it?"
Akira gave her a flat look. "Why wouldn't we?"
The code was something the two of them had created during the break between their first and second dungeons.
It wasn't complicated, nor was it intended to be some perfect method of authentication.
It was simply a small precaution they could use if either of them encountered the other inside another Eerie Game.
Neither of them had any illusion that it was foolproof.
If the dungeon could manipulate their cognition and potentially access their memories, then there was always a possibility that it could discover the code as well.
But that didn't make the precaution worthless.
If there was even a small chance that something pretending to be one of them didn't possess the same information, then using it reduced the risk.
And after yesterday, neither of them was willing to take unnecessary chances.
Airi smiled faintly. "I guess it's still useful."
"Until we stop entering places where things can copy people's faces."
Akira paused.
"...So probably forever."
Airi let out a small laugh before her expression became serious again. "We're going to find the others, right?"
"Yeah."
"And then?"
Akira opened the door and looked toward the hallway. "We investigate the contradiction."
"The Third-Year Building?"
"Yeah."
Airi hesitated. "But what if the dungeon is telling the truth?"
Akira glanced back at her.
"It probably is."
Airi blinked. "You think so?"
"The rule says there are no third-year students. It doesn't necessarily say there isn't a third-year building."
Airi's expression slowly changed as she understood what he meant.
Akira stepped into the hallway. "That's the part I'm interested in."
He didn't know what waited inside that building. He didn't know whether Ryuen's message was a warning, a clue, or something else entirely.
But if the dungeon had gone out of its way to establish that third-year students didn't exist, then there was probably a reason.
And Akira had never been particularly good at ignoring suspicious contradictions.
"For now though, we need to meet with our other teammates....."
He narrowed his eyes a bit, "...."I want to see what our helpers have decided to do."
End of Chapter 5
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Ah! Finally managed the motivation to bring this back to life
I'm trying to finish this so I can create dungeons that I can write naturally so if it feels rushed and off pace...my condolences