“The window!” a panicked examinee shouted, as the pale skinned monster from the well grasped into the classroom once more with its unnaturally long limbs, searching for its next victim.

The woman’s gurgled cries could still be heard. It was like a scene torn straight out of a horror movie.

In a mobbed rush and panicked voices, examinees flung themselves towards the windows that led to the inner courtyard. Cranking open the meter high windows, they flung themselves into the inner courtyard one by one, as examinees climbed over each other in a rush to not be the last one out of the lecture hall.

But for some odd reason, Zack stood frozen in thought.

Don’t go through the window into the inner courtyard, someone was telling him from the back of his head. It had to be whoever’s eyeball was floating in that pickle jar. The one whose chosen in-game name was Zero. Zero… what a silly name. Zack knew that that had to be just a username, and not his real identity.

“Move it!” Wallace shouted, elbowing his way past other examinees as he and his group of a dozen or so followers cleared through the leftmost window, all of them climbing out and dropping down onto the inner courtyard.

Ariel gave a glance back at Zack while she was exiting, mixed emotions written on her face. It was clear that she didn’t trust him now because of the violent implications of ownership of the gold mark. With a look of slight betrayal, she climbed out of the window and landed onto the inner courtyard along with all the other examinees. Two more markless girls convened around her, and they began moving as a group while talking in hushed voices with each other.

As the last examinees left the lecture hall auditorium and the demon’s searching hand grabbed wildly, grasping and clawing at the podium where Callow Bitterman had been just a while ago, Zack stayed firmly put despite all of his instincts telling him to flee. And that was because of what the voice was telling him.

Although the inner courtyard is safe, it is the wrong path. You will never reach the storage room from there. I should’ve known before I went out the window, the memories told him.

Listening to voices inside his head… he was beginning to question his sanity, but there was something at the core of his soul that told him to listen to the dead man’s advice. Zack glanced out the window. From the courtyard, relieved examinees were already running and making their way to the other end.

He stayed as silent as possible, not daring to move a muscle as the beast continued to reach into the lecture hall with its long nailed arm, grasping and dragging at whatever it could reach. If it came in, he’d be dead meat.

However, the demon did not enter the lecture hall. After grasping a bit longer, its long winding arm retracted back into the hallway outside, and it began to walk away.

Zack breathed out slowly, collecting his thoughts. There was another reason why he decided to follow the dead man’s advice besides just a blind hunch, and his suspicion appeared to be correct. Some kind of ward prevented the demon from entering the classroom.

He noticed a faint crunching sound when he first entered the lecture hall. At the time, he hadn’t paid any attention to it.

Zack descended the auditorium stairs, listening carefully to make sure that the female demon was truly gone. Hearing nothing outside, he bent down on all fours and took a closer look at the doorway. A faint line of white salt could be seen sprinkled on the sill of the door, accompanied by some black ashes in a small pile to the left of it.

“So you need to lay down a line of salt and burn something to repel Hamagku,” he thought out loud. “But what exactly did they burn here?”

[You have failed to access the memories of a dying man.]

He tried to recall those memories of a dead man, but nothing was coming to him. Now that he thought about it, he only experienced the memory flashbacks when physically confronted with a memory trigger, like the handle of the university’s door or the sight of examinees fleeing through the window.

Well, that was highly inconvenient. It meant that his memories only triggered when he placed himself in mortal danger or the unknown.

Right now, he focused on the two pieces of advice that the memories had given him. First, that there was a school library somewhere on campus that could give him a copy of the book of rituals. And second, the voice mentioned that he’d never be able to reach the storage room if he went through the window.

Zack looked at the door and the streak of blood from the woman who had been grabbed, and then back down at the items he had on his person. Maybe it was best to do an inventory check first and see what the hell he had to work with before charging out the door and into the female demon’s territory.

Two flares, some miscellaneous items, and the golden lunchbox. The only question mark here was the lunchbox. He was sure that it contained food, but was that really all there was to it?

Taking the golden lunchbox off his shoulder, he began to unzip it. While the exterior was made of some kind of tough fabric, the inside had a metallic aluminum-like case like a box thermos. Opening the thermos inside with a click, the contents of the golden lunchbox revealed themselves.

A plastic wrapped hotdog with a sad looking piece of bread and two bottles of water sat in their partitions in the bag. It was barely anything in terms of food, only enough for a schoolkid’s lunch. But looking closer, it appeared that the food was hardly the main attraction of the lunchbox. There were a few more slots, all strangely shaped. Sitting in them were not items, but rather handwritten slips of paper.

Zack removed one of the handwritten paper slips from a small rectangular compartment. The paper was folded into a rectangle and sat snugly in the slot. Unfolding the paper, he read the scant words that were scribbled onto them.

Matches, classroom 2-B. Do not linger.

That was it.

He moved onto the next slips of paper, three thin cylindrically rolled scrolls of parchment bound together with little pieces of string. He untied the string and read them one by one.

Chalk, classroom 2-H.

Chalk, classroom 2-F.

Chalk, lecture hall A-3.

Upon reading the final slip, Zack immediately stood up from the lunchbox spread out in front of him and walked to the blackboard behind the professor’s podium. A piece of chalk stub that had been used until it was barely even the length of his smallest fingernail sat at the very edge of the blackboard. He took it carefully, making sure not to waste any more of the precious chalk that remained, and placed it into the slot in the lunchbox, tying it down with a piece of string. A few pieces of white chalk flaked off wastefully while he did so.

His sister Shanna would be good at this, he thought to himself. She’d always taken care of things that required fingerwork finesse back when mom was still alive, and she was a good sewer. Compared to her, Zack’s finger movements were crude even with the extra care that he took.

He needed to survive this examination and make it back to the real world to take care of his last remaining family, and for himself of course. Zack had no intentions of dying here, and he’d collect anything and everything that he needed to survive this ordeal. There were still so many things he hadn’t experienced yet in this world, all because of his lack of money. In a sense, this examination thing felt like a giant reset. Here, he was the sum of his own efforts, and not burdened by insurmountable inherited debts.

Next to the three chalk slots were three much larger cylindrical slots. He already had a feeling of what these would be for even without unfurling the paper slips, just based on their size and shape, and the fact that all the previous items appeared to be ritualistic ingredients.

Candles, just like the three candles that the narrator of Chronicles of Gakuen High had mentioned.

Candle, Storage Room.

Candle, Storage Room.

Candle, Storage Room.

Ah. Now it made sense why the dead man’s voice insisted that he did not go through the window. The moment he dropped down onto the inner courtyard, he would no longer be able to access the storage room for crucial ritual ingredients.

There was one final mysterious slot that did not have a slip of paper in it. Judging by the placement of the slot, it was the most important piece of the puzzle. Zack stared at it for a while in thought, but it did not bear fruit and he was ultimately unable to figure out what that final slot was for. Without a hint paper, he was as good as in the dark. He had to count himself fortunate already, as the gold mark had already afforded him many more clues to get to the end of this mysterious and haunting campus than the silver or bronze marks.

“I guess it’s time,” he said, closing and zipping back up the golden lunchbox as he slung it onto his shoulder. He placed the two flares in his back pocket for ease of access. All he had to do was pull on the end of a flare and it would start to smoulder like a lit firework.

With his inventory sorted out, Zack slowly made his way to the doorway when he realized something–the salt could be reused! Taking a piece of discarded paper that was in the trash bin nearby, he scooped up the little salt and ashes that remained on the ground and poured it into a small pocket of his lunchbox.

When that was done, he cautiously peered out the door. There was nothing to the left of the hallway. But to the right, a gruesome streak of blood from the snatched woman trailed down the hall and around the corner.

[ ← Entrance ]

[ ← Resource Center ]

[ Academic Affairs → ]

[ Student Council Room → ]

[ Storage Room → ]