“Are you sure?” the florist woman whispered, her arm bringing the teenage boy closer to her.

“Yeah,” Zack replied in a low voice. “Look at that head injury. Blunt force trauma. That wasn’t done by the demon. You saw how the demon kills. She likes to pierce people with her nails.” In his head, he was mentally reviewing his notes about how the Hamagku functioned, and it was painfully obvious that this wasn’t done by her the more he thought about it.

“Should we turn back?” the florist woman answered, the fear palpable in her eyes. “If someone is killing other examinees up on the second floor, maybe we shouldn’t go up there. We could just camp on the first floor until the monster goes away.”

Patricia nodded approvingly. “Yeah, there’s no reason to go upstairs.”

Answering them was not his main concern at the moment. He needed tokens, and the man whose body was slumped against the staircase could have some. Hearing more screams come from down the hall to confirm that the coast was clear for at least a minute, Zack bent down and rummaged the pockets of the coat on the dead body, finding two tokens in his front pocket. As he did this, both the two new examinees and Patricia looked at each other with trepidation.

“I’ll need these more than he does now,” Zack said softly. He bowed his head slightly in respect to the body. “Rest in peace.”

With that done, he motioned for the other three to follow him up the stairs. When they appeared hesitant, he spoke. “You don’t have to follow me if you don’t want to.” Then, he turned his back and continued to ascend the stairs.

Exchanging hesitant looks with each other, the sound of a young man’s scream from the first floor sounded extremely close by. Patricia, enterprising as ever, peeked around the corner of the stairs back at the first floor and recoiled in alarm at what she saw.

She’s here. The pink haired woman still in her sleepwear mouthed two words at the terrified duo of examinees, and immediately took off up the staircase in her white slippers without looking back. The florist and the boy with glasses followed without a shred of their former hesitation, making quite a bit of noise as they moved.

Zack immediately made a shushing noise with his finger, but he noticed that there was already a strange dragging sound coming towards them from the lower hall. The beast had noticed them.

“Run!” he whispered urgently, as he climbed to the top of the stairs and emerged on the second floor. There was a continuation of the stairs to the third floor to the left of him, and he ran towards them only to get suddenly stopped by an invisible barrier.

[The third floor of the campus will be locked until midnight.]

“What?” he muttered in surprise. But there was no time to contemplate the strange time restriction, as the dragging sound drew near the lower staircase, followed by a low growl.

The four of them made a right, running down the hallway until they came across classroom 2-H. Zack recalled that this was one of the classrooms that had chalk in it. Placing a hand on the door, he yanked it to slide it open, only to realize that it had been locked from the inside.

Patricia had run forward to 2-G and tried the same. “This one’s locked too!”

“Go find somewhere else,” whispered a man’s voice from within. “And don’t draw that monster here!” It appeared that the other examinees had run upstairs and locked the doors from within, keeping them safe for the time being.

The growling noise was coming up the staircase now. Zack cursed under his breath, running to the next classroom and trying the door. Locked again.

The boy with thick rim glasses called out to them from further down the hall. “This door’s open!”

Following Patricia and the florist woman inside, they found themselves inside classroom 2-B. The moment that he entered, Zack felt a shiver down his arms, as he remembered the ominous note that accompanied the golden lunchbox that he was given.

Matches. Classroom 2-B. Do not linger.

Do not linger. From the moment that he read that, he felt the malevolent intent. What else could it possibly be besides a threat?

Ssssshhhhhhkkkkk

The sound that they dreaded the most had arrived, ever so audibly perceptible due to how quiet they were staying. The Hamagku had arrived on the second floor, and was crawling outside in the hallway, looking for its next victim. Inside each classroom were groups of examinees, and to make things worse, one group possibly contained a murderer. And to make matters even worse, there was this sickly nervous feeling that the classroom that they were currently staying in exuded.

The florist woman hugged the boy with thick rim glasses tightly, both of them terrified out of their minds. Patricia looked like a deer in headlights as well, not a single sign of her previous confidence. The three of them looked like they were about to fall apart mentally, and he couldn’t blame them. There was something eerie about the classroom they were currently in, 2-B.

Zack was not one to believe in the supernatural, but the goosebumps on his arms didn’t lie. Even he could tell that there was something terribly wrong here.

“Listen,” Zack whispered as quietly as he could, bringing in Patricia, the florist woman, and the boy with thick rim glasses in a huddle with him. “There’s some information I need to share with you.”

He carefully opened his lunchbox, and unfurled the rectangular slip of paper, showing them the warning message.

“What the hell is this…?” Patricia exclaimed quietly. “I know that you marked examinees all got some fancy stuff, but I thought it was more along the lines of weapons and tools. But this is just some kind of ominous clue.”

“Yeah,” Zack replied. “But with all the clues I have so far, I’m starting to get a picture of what we’re dealing with. We can kill that demon with some kind of ritual. It involves candles, matches, and chalk.”

The boy with glasses looked up in surprise, speaking for the first time. “That’s like a computer game I played once, called World of Corpses. My friends showed me it recently. It’s been trending lately.”

Zack’s eyes narrowed. “Really?”

“Yeah. You have to draw a three pointed magic circle with three lit candles, and then lure the demon onto there. Then, bang, it’s over.”

“What do you mean by over?”

“That’s how you beat the case. It doesn’t really tell you the ending, it just says that it’s over. Then you play the next case. I didn’t really get it, but it was really popular a few weeks ago and we all dared each other to play it.”

Zack did not like the sound of that. Over could have a lot of meanings, and the open ended ambiguity made him uncomfortable. In addition, this meant that there were more games that appeared to be precursors to these deadly examinations. Just who was behind spreading all of these games?

“Does it mean that this school is haunted?” the florist woman asked.

Zack nodded. “Yes, it is. The demon was a girl called Hamagku who died by being thrown into the well, and she’s afraid of water.”

“That’s terrible,” replied the florist woman. “Suddenly, I feel a bit sorry for her.”

“She targets innocent people now,” Patricia noted. “So I wouldn’t feel too sorry. Feel sorry for her victims instead. We might be part of them too soon.”

“Not if we can help it,” the fifteen year old boy said. “The name’s Abe, by the way. I’m a highschooler. And that’s my big sister Poppy. She’s twenty four.”

Zack and Patricia quickly introduced themselves as well. Their quietly whispered formalities soothed the anxiety that was creeping on everyone’s mind.

“Help me find the matches first,” Zack said. “And please hand me any tokens that you can find. I need to buy something from the vending machine that will make me stronger. Also, we already have three candles. We just need to find some more chalk and a book on rituals to know how to make the right magic circle.”

“Okay,” Abe responded without any hesitance, digging into his pocket and dropping several tokens into Zack’s hand. He nudged his sister to do the same. “Poppy, I think we should trust him. If we don’t, we might not be able to get out of this alive.”

“Oh, well, we just need to make our way to the gymnasium, don’t we? Is there really a need to do this whole ritual thing?” the florist woman replied, still a bit unsure.

Zack shook his head. “The gymnasium might not be the safe haven that you think it is. It’s where the Hamagku first killed one of the Gakuen high school students. Also, something has been bothering me for a while now. Look at the time up there.”

He pointed at the clock to the side of the blackboard. “It’s half past seven right now. That means that we have until midnight to reach the gymnasium with our five hour time limit. But when I tried to go to the third floor just now, it said that The third floor of the campus will be locked until midnight.”

His tone turned grave. “That means that this examination might not end at midnight. If what I’m thinking is right, this is just the first stage of the examination.”

Patricia shook her head. “I feel like you’re right, but that’s just terrible to think about. It’s not going to be over?”

“And it’s not just that,” Abe interjected, as he also seemed to be putting together some of the clues. “Isn’t it strange that they gave us so much time to reach the gymnasium, when we don’t really need it? I mean, even if we moved really slowly and hid for half the time, we’d only need two hours at most. This reminds me of World of Corpses, where you have to collect resources with your extra time to survive the next stage. Like for example, you could pass the first case easily without collecting anything, but you might be missing a flashlight to find a secret in the third case, or a roll of duct tape to unlock a new ending on the fourth case.”

Zack nodded. That was the same conclusion that he came to, but hearing that the kid had game knowledge really intrigued him.

“I see,” Poppy replied, nodding at her younger brother’s observations. “It’s like how the preliminary examination was in the starting town on that game that shut down… the extra time makes sense. But why are all of these examinations based off of games? Is this all some kind of cruel joke?”

“I don’t think so,” Zack said solemnly, shaking his head. “This feels more like practice, for bad things to come. And right now, we’re practicing how to survive being hunted.”