Chapter 28 — The Lifeboat
The door sealed behind them with a sound like a vault closing.
Not a slam. Not a click. A *hydraulic hiss* — the rush of air equalizing pressure, followed by the mechanical *thunk* of heavy locks engaging in sequence. Hayato turned in time to see the doorway they'd just stepped through disappear entirely, the white wall reforming over it with the seamless precision of something that had never been interrupted in the first place.
No seams. No outline. No way back.
He turned forward.
The room was massive.
Not massive in the way the previous waiting rooms had been massive — those had been vast through emptiness, infinite white space stretching in all directions until perspective gave up trying to find edges. This room was massive through *scale*. Defined boundaries. A ceiling thirty meters overhead, supported by nothing visible. Walls that stretched perhaps sixty meters in each direction, forming a perfect square. The floor was white and seamless, the same featureless material as every other surface in this place, but here it felt different — denser, more solid, as though it had been engineered to bear weight that the other rooms hadn't needed to support.
And in the center of the room—
Eight chambers.
Hayato's analytical mind catalogued them immediately, mapping their arrangement with the automatic precision of someone whose survival had come to depend on understanding geometry before anything else.
The chambers were arranged in a perfect octagon — eight identical structures positioned at equal intervals around a central point, each one facing inward toward the middle like the petals of a mechanical flower. Each chamber was roughly three meters wide, four meters deep, and three meters tall — the dimensions of a small bedroom, or a prison cell. The walls were transparent. Not glass exactly — something harder, clearer, with no visible distortion or reflection. Polymer, maybe. Something engineered to be unbreakable.
The chambers were connected.
Between each adjacent pair of chambers, a cylindrical tube ran horizontally at shoulder height — perhaps twenty centimeters in diameter, made of the same transparent material as the chamber walls. The tubes formed a complete circuit, linking all eight chambers in a closed loop. Clockwise. Chamber 1 connected to Chamber 2. Chamber 2 to Chamber 3. All the way around to Chamber 8, which connected back to Chamber 1.
Hayato could see objects inside the tubes — small cylindrical containers, waiting. Pneumatic delivery system. Items could be sent from one chamber to the next through controlled air pressure.
Each chamber had a door — a single hinged panel in the front wall, currently standing open. Above each door, a number glowed in white light against the chamber's exterior: **1**, **2**, **3**, **4**, **5**, **6**, **7**, **8**.
And inside each chamber—
A chair. Bolted to the floor in the center of the small space. Metal frame, no padding, positioned directly over what looked like a circular pressure plate built into the floor itself — a scale, Hayato realized. A weight measurement device.
A tablet mounted to the right wall at eye level, its screen dark.
An oxygen tank mounted to the left wall — industrial gray, with a mask and hose coiled neatly beside it. Digital display on the tank's regulator showing **80:00** in red numerals.
And scattered across the floor of each chamber — objects.
Books. Tools. Metal weights like the kind used in gyms. Wooden blocks. Concrete cylinders. All manner of items with visible mass, distributed unevenly across the eight chambers. Chamber 1 appeared to contain perhaps twenty kilograms of material. Chamber 5 looked like it held closer to eighty. The distribution was deliberate — Hayato could see that immediately. Unequal by design.
Above each chamber, built into the ceiling thirty meters overhead, a circular hatch. Closed. Metal. Perhaps two meters in diameter — large enough for a person to fit through. Each hatch had a red light glowing at its center.
Locked.
"What the hell is this?" Daichi's voice came from behind Hayato, thin and strained.
No one answered.
The eight of them stood just inside the room's entrance — Hayato, Takeshi, Sachiko, Yumi, Daichi, Ryota, Megumi, Katsurou — staring at the octagonal arrangement of transparent chambers, trying to process what they were seeing.
Then the speakers activated.
---
The sound was immediate and invasive — not the crackle of old equipment warming up, but the clean, sharp activation of a system that had been waiting in standby mode for this exact moment. The voice that followed was the same one they'd heard before. Flat. Genderless. Mechanical. Each syllable articulated with the inhuman precision of synthesized speech, every consonant landing exactly where it was engineered to land.
Above the chambers, a massive display screen materialized against the far wall — not emerging , its surface brightening from black to white in a fraction of a second.
Text appeared.
Black letters on white background, rendered in that clinical sans-serif font that Hayato had come to associate with rules that would kill you if you misunderstood them.
The voice spoke the words as they appeared, synchronized perfectly:
---
**[ GAME: 2 ♥ ]**
**[ CATEGORY: HEARTS ]**
**[ DIFFICULTY: ★★ ]**
**[ PLAYERS: 8 ]**
---
A pause. Two seconds. Long enough for the information to be read and absorbed. Long enough for eight people to understand what category they'd been placed in.
*Hearts.*
*Betrayal. Trust. Psychological games. Difficulty two — low, but that doesn't mean safe. It means the mechanics are simple. The execution is what kills you.*
The screen scrolled.
---
**[ OVERVIEW ]**
**[ THIS GAME IS CALLED "THE LIFEBOAT." ]**
**[ THE OBJECTIVE IS FOR ALL PLAYERS TO ESCAPE BEFORE TIME EXPIRES. ]**
---
Another pause. Shorter this time. One second.
Then the rules began to appear, line by line, each one replacing the previous text as the voice spoke it aloud with that same emotionless precision:
---
**[ RULES ]**
**[ 1. EACH PLAYER MUST ENTER ONE CHAMBER. ONCE ENTERED, THE CHAMBER DOOR WILL LOCK. PLAYERS CANNOT LEAVE THEIR CHAMBERS EXCEPT THROUGH THE ESCAPE HATCH ABOVE. ]**
---
The text held for three seconds. Hayato's eyes scanned it, extracted the critical information,
*Locked in. No exit except up. Committed once you enter.*
---
**[ 2. AFTER ALL PLAYERS HAVE ENTERED THEIR CHAMBERS, THE ROOM WILL BEGIN TO FLOOD. WATER WILL ENTER ALL CHAMBERS SIMULTANEOUSLY AT AN EQUAL RATE. ]**
---
---
**[ 3. PLAYERS HAVE EIGHTY (80) MINUTES OF AIR IN THE OXYGEN TANKS PROVIDED. AFTER EIGHTY (80) MINUTES, ALL PLAYERS STILL INSIDE CHAMBERS WILL DROWN. ]**
---
Beside Hayato, Sachiko's breathing had changed — shallower, faster, controlled but strained. Yumi had gone very still. Ryota's face had lost all color.
---
**[ 4. EACH CHAMBER'S ESCAPE HATCH WILL OPEN WHEN THE WEIGHT ON THE CHAMBER'S PRESSURE PLATE EQUALS EXACTLY ONE HUNDRED (100) KILOGRAMS. ]**
---
*One hundred kilograms. Exact. Not approximate. Exactly 100kg.*
Hayato's mind was already calculating. His own weight was roughly seventy kilograms. He'd need thirty kilograms of items. But the distribution across chambers was uneven. Some had too much. Some had too little. Which meant—
---
**[ 5. PLAYER WEIGHTS RANGE FROM FIFTY-FIVE (55) KILOGRAMS TO NINETY-FIVE (95) KILOGRAMS. NO PLAYER WEIGHS EXACTLY ONE HUNDRED (100) KILOGRAMS. ]**
---
*Confirmed. Everyone needs items. No one can escape with body weight alone.*
---
**[ 6. ITEMS IN THE CHAMBERS HAVE VARYING WEIGHTS. TOTAL ITEM WEIGHT IN EACH CHAMBER RANGES FROM TWENTY (20) KILOGRAMS TO EIGHTY (80) KILOGRAMS. ]**
---
*Unequal distribution. By design. Forces trade. Forces cooperation.*
---
**[ 7. CHAMBERS ARE CONNECTED BY PNEUMATIC TRANSFER TUBES. PLAYERS MAY SEND ITEMS TO ADJACENT CHAMBERS THROUGH THESE TUBES. ITEMS CAN ONLY BE SENT CLOCKWISE AROUND THE CIRCUIT. ]**
---
*Clockwise only. One direction. Chamber 1 to Chamber 2 to Chamber 3. No going backward. Constrains the solution space.*
---
**[ 8. EACH PLAYER'S TABLET DISPLAYS: CURRENT WATER LEVEL IN ALL CHAMBERS. CURRENT WEIGHT ON ALL PRESSURE PLATES. TIME REMAINING. ]**
---
*Full information. Transparent system. Everyone can see everyone else's status. No hidden variables except intent.*
---
**[ 9. WHEN A PLAYER ESCAPES THROUGH THEIR HATCH, ALL ITEMS REMAINING IN THAT CHAMBER WILL AUTOMATICALLY DROP INTO THE NEXT CHAMBER CLOCKWISE. ]**
---
Hayato's breath caught.
*That's the mechanism. That's the trap.*
*Items cascade. When someone escapes, their leftover weight transfers to the next person. Which means the sequence matters. Escape in the wrong order and the weight distribution breaks. Someone ends up with too much or too little, and the math stops working.*
*This isn't just cooperation. This is precise coordination. Calculated sequence. Everyone has to escape in a specific order, and everyone has to trust that the people before them will stick to the plan.*
*One person deviates, and the chain collapses.*
---
**[ 10. WIN CONDITION: ALL EIGHT (8) PLAYERS ESCAPE WITHIN EIGHTY (80) MINUTES. ]**
**[ 11. LOSE CONDITION: TIME EXPIRES, OR ANY PLAYER DROWNS. ]**
---
The text held on screen for five full seconds.
Then it cleared.
A new message appeared:
---
**[ PLAYERS HAVE FIVE (5) MINUTES TO CHOOSE CHAMBERS. ]**
**[ CHOOSE CAREFULLY. YOUR POSITION DETERMINES YOUR SURVIVAL. ]**
**[ TIMER BEGINS NOW. ]**
---
A countdown materialized below the text:
**[ 5:00 ]**
**[ 4:59 ]**
**[ 4:58 ]**
The voice ceased. The screen went dark.
And in the massive white room, eight people stood in silence, staring at the transparent chambers arranged in their perfect octagon, understanding with sudden, terrible clarity exactly what kind of game this was.
---
"Okay," Takeshi said.
His voice cut through the silence like a blade through fabric — clean, sharp, controlled. He stepped forward, positioning himself where everyone could see him, his broad shoulders squared, his hands loose at his sides. The posture of a man who'd spent decades managing crisis situations and had learned that the first sixty seconds determined whether people panicked or focused.
"We have five minutes to choose chambers," he continued. "And approximately thirty seconds after that to figure out the solution before we're locked in and the water starts. So we don't waste time. We move fast. We think clearly. Understood?"
Nods. Some firmer than others. Ryota's was barely perceptible, more of a tremor than acknowledgment, but it was there.
"First," Takeshi said, "we need information. Weights. Everyone—what do you weigh?"
A pause. The question was invasive in a way that would have been awkward in any other context. Here, it was survival.
Sachiko spoke first. "Sixty-two kilograms."
"Seventy-three," Katsurou said, pushing his glasses up.
"Ninety," Megumi said flatly.
"Fifty-five," Yumi said, her voice small.
"Seventy-eight," Takeshi said.
"Sixty," Daichi said.
"Sixty-seven," Ryota said.
All eyes turned to Hayato.
"Seventy," he said.
Takeshi nodded, his eyes distant, already calculating. "Okay. Range is fifty-five to ninety. We need everyone at exactly one hundred. Which means we need to distribute items so that person plus items equals one hundred, and we need to do it in a sequence where the cascading items help the next person instead of breaking them."
"The tablets will show us the item weights in each chamber once we're inside," Katsurou said. His voice was calm, analytical — the tone of a man approaching this as a logic problem rather than a death sentence. "But we won't know the exact distribution until after we've chosen positions."
"Which means we're choosing blind," Sachiko said.
"Not entirely," Hayato said.
Everyone looked at him.
He stepped toward the chambers, his eyes scanning the interiors, cataloguing the visible items in each one.
"We can estimate," he said. "Chamber 1 has fewer items — maybe twenty, twenty-five kilograms total. Chamber 5 has the most — seventy, eighty kilograms. The others are distributed between those extremes. Which means—"
"Which means the lightest players need to go in the chambers with the most items," Megumi interrupted. "And the heaviest players need chambers with the fewest items."
"Exactly," Hayato said.
Takeshi was already moving, pointing at chambers, his mind working through the permutations faster than most people could process the rules.
"Yumi," he said. "Fifty-five kilograms. You need forty-five kilograms of items. You go in Chamber 5 — the one with the most items."
Yumi nodded, her face pale but focused.
"Daichi. Sixty kilograms. Forty needed. Chamber 4."
"Sachiko. Sixty-two kilograms. Thirty-eight needed. Chamber 3."
"Ryota. Sixty-seven. Thirty-three needed. Chamber 6."
"Hayato. Seventy. Thirty needed. Chamber 2."
"Katsurou. Seventy-three. Twenty-seven needed. Chamber 7."
"Megumi. Ninety. Ten needed. Chamber 1 — lightest item load."
"And me," Takeshi said. "Seventy-eight. Twenty-two needed. Chamber 8."
He looked around at the group. "Does anyone see a flaw in that distribution?"
Silence. Hayato ran the numbers in his head, cross-checking against the visible item loads. The logic held. Approximately. They wouldn't know for certain until they were inside and the tablets activated, but it was the best estimate they could make with the information available.
"We have three minutes left," Katsurou said, glancing at the countdown still visible on the main screen. "We should enter now. We'll need the time inside to calculate the sequence."
"Agreed," Takeshi said. "Everyone—your chambers. Move."
They moved.
---
Author's Note:
If you enjoyed this chapter, please consider supporting my Patreon!
Even a small contribution helps me release chapters faster and improve the quality of the novel.
👉 patreon.com/c/LostLegacy