“I just don’t get it though,” Poppy responded, the freckled young woman engaged in thought. “This feels really cruel to put us through.”

Zack disagreed with that. Given the intensity of emotion that he felt from the dead man’s memories, he had a feeling that this training was essential to prepare them to face the horrors that were yet to come, not only in this examination, but also as the world irrevocably changed. “There might come a day where we will appreciate the practice that we got here. Anyway, let’s go find those matches first. Remember to be quiet.”

Poppy and Abe nodded and began to tiptoe across the classroom, looking around for anywhere that a box of matches could be hiding.

Patricia looked a bit less enthusiastic about helping to look around. “This better be worth it,” she said to Zack as she bent down to look under the shelves by the side of the classroom.

“What’s with that cabinet over there?” Abe asked, pointing towards a particularly tall and foreboding cabinet. The ominous cabinet stood out like a sore thumb–its size was far too large to appear like a commonplace item in a classroom like this one, and it appeared to have been unused for quite some time in stark contrast to the relative newness of the tables and desks in the classroom.

Even without any magic affinity, all four of them could sense a vengeful, malevolent aura coming from the cabinet. They had already felt it when entering the classroom for the first time, and the oppressive, bone-chilling sensation leaking out of it was only getting worse by the minute.

Much to their horror, a black shadow began to leak from the corners of it like a black pus overflowing out of a nightmare. But just as soon as that appeared, it soon disappeared like a figment of their imagination, leaving the examinees second guessing what they’d just seen.

“I’m not checking that.” Patricia was the first to reply, and hers was the general consensus. Even to the untrained eye, the cabinet could only be described as a death flag in horror movies, contributing to the fact that nobody wished to open it, and rightfully so.

“Maybe we should just leave it be,” Poppy replied.

Even Abe was hesitant, despite his experience with World of Corpses. “I agree with my sister. It might be best to just keep it closed.”

At that moment, the black pus-like substance erupted once again, oozing from the corners of the cabinet with such hair-raising dissonance that Patricia, Abe, and Poppy all recoiled in fear. They scrambled backwards on all fours, desperate to get away from whatever horrors the cabinet contained.

Only Zack had not retreated. Slowly, he rose to his feet and began to approach the cabinet despite every instinct in his body screaming for him to run away.

But he would not run. Pressing forward with every muscle fiber in his body working against him, he slowly inched towards the oppressively malevolent cabinet, dark pus now dripping like congealed blood down the sides of its walls.

A look of absolute determination sat on his face as he walked forward another few steps, as the other three had already scrambled until their backs were against the wall and they had nowhere left to retreat.

Zack’s fear had subsided substantially after receiving the memories of the dying man, replaced only by an all encompassing desire not to fall into the same regrets that the dying man once had. He felt, no, he knew, that if he did not risk his life to uncover as many secrets of this campus as he could, he would sorely regret it in the future, even if the process of uncovering those secrets could place him in mortal danger. The dying man’s messages to him were enigmatic and chaotic at best, but there was one unquestionable message, one common thread that strung everything together. It was this message.

If I take the easy route… if I don’t face and conquer my fears…. if I don’t get stronger at the expense of everything, those that I care about won’t survive in the future.

And so he pressed on to the cabinet.

Would the cabinet trigger any additional memories? He’d find out soon, as he placed his left hand on the cold steel handle and pushed downwards, the cabinet unlocking with a click. With his right hand, he held up his metal bar, preparing to strike down whatever it was that was inside there.

He slowly opened the cabinet, but after just an inch, it began to open itself.

[Chronicles of Gakuen High have been updated.]

The phone in his pocket buzzed, but there was no time to check. In addition, the sponsors who had been so chatty earlier on were silent.

A slimy appendage was the first to appear, covered by a cursed black fog that made it impossible to see the outline of whatever it was clearly. The black thing pushed the center panel out, and as the panel creaked open ever so slowly, a face was revealed. A male corpse’s head with glasses and dead red eyes sat on a shelf in the cabinet, except it was a head without a torso, its body replaced by an amoebous glob that extended forwards towards Zack as a long tongue shot towards him.

Patricia let out a horrified scream, which were soon followed by Abe and Poppy’s as well. Nothing in former lives could have prepared them for something so horrifyingly disturbing as this. They let out screams that could surely alert the Hamagku that lurked right outside, but nothing could stop basic human instincts from kicking in.

“Aaaaaaaahhh!!!!!!”

“No, please!”

Zack had never seen or heard of anything like this monster, and that put him at a disadvantage. He didn’t know its weaknesses.

But someone did. Some who had played World of Corpses, where a similar scenario to this one had played out.

“Target its tongue!” Abe shouted.

The severed amoebous head’s tongue began to coil around Zack like a snake, the slimy thing constricting around his waist. A normal person would be doomed at this point.

But Zack was also not a normal human being, the kind that spent their days at school or in an office, and their free time scrolling through their mobile phones or going out to eat. He had never had much free time, and all the backbreaking work that he did in the mines and on the streets had naturally molded his body into something formidable.

He didn’t have a single power to call his own at this point, but he was a far cry from defenseless. With a muscular body sculpted by thousands of hours of manual labor and a height that towered above the average human, he may have lost some muscle mass during his injury recovery period, but he never lost the core of his power as a laborer who had worked two heavy lifting jobs at the same time. When it came to raw physical power, he was unmatched.

Seizing the thing by the tongue, he pulled, his hands gripping so tightly onto the wet and disgusting tongue, then pulled as hard as he could. The raw grip strength he had was not as high as it used to be during his coal mining and garbage collecting days, but it was more than enough for this small corpse creature.

The severed head’s tongue tried to constrict even tighter around his waist, threatening to burst his intestines with the extreme pressure, but Zack clenched his teeth through the pain and never let go of his grip on the tongue.

Without paying any mind to the screams of the girls, he finally broke through, tear the severed head’s tongue clean in half in a disgusting squelch, then picked up the metal bar and smashed it against the head with resounding force, showing a level of brutality that even he himself was surprised that he had.

[You have vanquished the Headmaster.]

[You have accomplished a notable feat.]

[Your fame points have increased.]

When it was over, he looked up at the examinees with mildly stinging black pus all over his hands and arms like blood.

“It’s done,” he said quietly, wiping the pus onto his shirt.

The three of them were speechlessly looking at him.

“So this is a gold mark,” Abe said, breaking the silence. “I’m glad that you’re on our side. We’d be dead without you.”

“Thank you,” Poppy continued. “You saved my brother and I. We will forever be in your debt.”

Patricia rummaged through her pockets and stood up, then placed several tokens on a desk next to Zack. “Please take care of me boss,” she said, curtsying slightly in her pajamas, a strange change of pace from the tomboyish demeanor that she displayed not so long ago.

Zack nodded, taking the tokens and shoveling them into his pocket. “Payment accepted. I’ll try to keep you guys alive for as long as I can, but for me to do that, you need to promise to listen to my orders no matter how strange they are. Remember, I’m a gold mark. I was given some extra information that you guys might not know.”

“Of course we will, won’t we Abe?” Poppy assented.

“I agree with my sister,” Abe replied.

“Yes, boss,” Patricia answered respectfully.

“Good.”

They would provide him with help collecting resources and problem solving, and he would provide them with the safety of a bodyguard and valuable information about the examination.

Zack headed over to the cabinet, spotting the box of matches on top of it. He checked them, and was happy to see that it was a full pack. Next, he looked inside the cabinet. There was a bunch of science equipment, including several vials. Suddenly, they started glowing ever so slightly, like in a video game to indicate the importance of certain items.

[You have found several vials.]

“Alright, I get it…”

He got the pushy hint that it was probably good to take several of those with him. Surprisingly, they fit snugly in the chalk compartments of his lunchbox.

Right as he did that, a new notification popped up.

[By destroying the Headmaster, you have assumed a new authority.]

[Headmaster’s authority. You will be able to unlock all locked doors on campus.]

“What?” he exclaimed in surprise, attracting the looks of the others. He quickly shook his head. “Never mind me, I was just thinking to myself.”

Headmaster’s authority was quite powerful, wasn’t it? Now, even if other examinees locked the doors to their classrooms, he could still force them to unlock. And if there were any secret rooms like the storage room, he wouldn’t need a key anymore.

“What should we do next, boss?” Patricia asked.

“We’re going to get out of here and then head to the classrooms with chalk. Then, we’ll be paying a visit to the cafeteria. But before that, we have company.”

They had been loud during the fight, and now a sinister scratching sound similar to what happened in the lecture hall was coming from the other side of the door.

The others looked at each other with terror, but Zack was unfazed. “Don’t panic,” he told them. “But get ready to make a run for it.”

Untying the little stub of chalk from his neck, he placed it on the ground and began to draw the magic circle he’d seen earlier from memory, as Abe, Poppy, and Patricia looked on with intense interest.