After a brief, quiet moment of frustration, Shiina Hiyori refused to let it get the better of her.
As someone who had read widely and deeply, she knew there were certain worries that refused to leave you alone — the kind that persisted even when you fully understood the stakes.
In moments like these, the only thing to do was stay calm.
Still...
Beneath the table, her slender legs shifted and crossed. With a touch of flustered annoyance, she pressed up onto her tiptoes and let the soles of her feet rub together, her small, bare-socked feet fidgeting against each other in muted protest.
The tingling sensation was still there — that ghost of a tickle that refused to go away. She bit down lightly on her lower lip, trying to redirect her attention elsewhere.
The small, telltale movement did not escape the upperclassman seated across from her.
"Something wrong?"
Kiryuuin Fuka rested her cheek against one hand, the corners of her eyes soft with something that looked like genuine concern.
"A café at this level should have basic first aid supplies on hand. If you're injured, or if it's an allergic reaction..." She glanced sideways at Chris. "I'm sure our little junior here wouldn't mind running an errand for you."
Chris gave a small nod, his expression a neutral offer — need something?
Shiina Hiyori's face scrunched slightly, a faint internal war playing out behind her eyes.
Because honestly — all she'd done was take off her shoes to stuff them onto that creature, and now the soles of her feet were breaking out in this bizarre, inexplicable, ants-crawling-across-my-skin kind of tingling. Was that not completely insane?!
Do I... have some rare dormant condition I never knew about?
Is it possible that being dragged into this exam as an uninvited participant triggered extreme stress, which then manifested as a physical symptom I'd never noticed before?
Or — or does that creature carry some kind of latent pathogen? One never before documented in the history of medicine? The kind that gets named after the first documented case?
"Shiina Hiyori Syndrome" or something...
Her imagination galloped freely through several increasingly dramatic scenarios — and then, in the end, she kept all of it firmly inside her own head.
Because for a girl in her teens, the idea of sitting in front of a boy and openly discussing the strange sensations in her bare feet was... well. It was mortifying.
How was that any different from stripping off her clothes and dancing in the middle of the street?
She settled for a small shake of her head, a quiet clearing of her throat, and a deliberate pivot back to safer ground.
"I'm fine, senpai. Just thinking about something."
"Actually... the day before yesterday, we went through a Black Sphere exam of our own. When we came face to face with the creatures from that exam, we learned something directly from them —" She paused, organizing her thoughts. "Those monsters. Apparently, they're not native to our world."
Shiina Hiyori continued:
"I've been turning it over in my head ever since. The creatures deployed here. The Black Sphere, forcing us to participate. Us, cast as the players. In this whole process... what role is each of us actually playing?"
Kiryuuin Fuka heard this and turned her gaze toward the X-GUN resting quietly on the table.
"Who knows."
She tapped her fingers lightly against the tabletop, her voice taking on a distant, contemplative quality.
"Maybe we're just characters living inside a novel someone reads for fun."
"The Black Sphere, the monsters, the life-or-death trials... maybe it's all just a setup — something an unknown author cobbled together to entertain readers existing in a higher dimension. And honestly? There's a decent chance even he hasn't fully figured out what all of it is actually supposed to mean."
Shiina Hiyori fell silent.
Without thinking, she let the tip of her foot knock softly against the leg of the table. The fabric of her knee-high socks dimpled slightly at the toes — as if her feet were quietly expressing, on her behalf, all her frustration with a world that had stopped making sense.
Beside her, Chris glanced at Kiryuuin Fuka with a mildly surprised look.
Not that the words felt out of character for her. They didn't. Given who she was, it wasn't strange at all.
But it did give him something to think about.
Settings fabricated to entertain...
In a certain sense, she wasn't wrong.
The Black Sphere game — at its core, wasn't it just something he'd hacked and remixed for his own amusement, to kill some time?
And those creatures. When you got down to it, their greatest purpose seemed to be serving as stepping stones for the students' growth.
Chris rubbed his chin, his thoughts meandering.
He had a system that delivered a random item every day — and never took them back. Setting aside everything else, just the gadgets from Doraemon alone covered time travel, rebooting the world, rewriting the underlying logic of reality itself. None of that was beyond his reach.
So maybe... all of this really is a closed loop. A causal inversion — some future version of himself, bored and done with it all, reaching back through some gadget to engineer the very circumstances that created him.
Chris didn't think that probability was particularly small.
But it didn't stir anything in him. No guilt. No moral weight.
At his core, he was a selfish person. He had a conscience — just not a surplus of one. At most, he'd clean up the world after he was done playing with it.
Leave no trace, don't break the world beyond repair — that was already his maximum generosity.
On that thought, he split his attention.
Turning part of his focus toward Ayanokoji and the others, somewhere deeper in the mall.
With the bound Silence serving as a living memory anchor, Horikita Manabu's group had managed to sidestep the constant cognitive erasure that The Silence's passive ability would have otherwise inflicted on them.
On top of that, these particular Silences were arrogant to the point of being genuinely a bit dim — and the mall's open floor plan gave Horikita Manabu and Nagumo Miyabi plenty of room to kite, reposition, and land ambushes.
The upperclassmen's group was cutting through the remaining units like a knife through warm butter. At this rate, the last of the regular enemies was about to be mopped up entirely.
Faster than I expected.
Chris took that in, and decided it was about time to serve the main course.
Yamaki Sorao... I choose you.
The thought turned.
Without warning, the floor shuddered.
BOOM——!!
From somewhere deep within the mall came a thunderous crash — the kind that sent the café's glass panels shrieking in protest.
Kiryuuin Fuka's brow arched. The languid ease she'd been wearing all evening snapped shut in an instant.
Her hand shot out and closed around the X-GUN on the table.
Everyone crowded in.
On the radar screen, the last faint red blip — the one that had been barely flickering — was suddenly swallowed up by a new light source. Larger. Brighter. A searing blotch that hurt to look at.
"That's..."
Amikura Mako pressed a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. "They've hit the hidden final boss?!"
Shiina Hiyori gave a small nod.
She wasn't sure if it was her imagination, but she noticed — oddly — that with the crisis arriving, the tickling sensation in her soles had faded. She forced herself to stay level-headed and think it through.
"In general, a hidden boss that only appears at the end will have combat power that dwarfs anything that came before it."
"I wonder how the upperclassmen are holding up right now. Whether they can handle it."
Chris thought for a moment, then turned toward the window.
"Technically, the moment they take down that last target, the exam ends."
"What I'm actually curious about... is the other scenario."
"What if the student council president's group can't kill the hidden boss — but they've already completed the standard objectives and get teleported out. What happens then?" He paused. "What does that hidden boss do? And what happens to us — the ones left behind with no protection?"
Kamuro Masumi, who had been anxiously raking her fingers through her hair, heard this and nearly had a meltdown.
"Do you HAVE to say stuff like that right now?! You are genuinely evil, bro!"
"It's called rational contingency planning." Chris spread his hands.
Amikura Mako had gone a shade pale — but she was squarely in agreement with his concern.
"It sounds awful, but... it really is the thing we should be most worried about right now."
"If the upperclassmen get teleported out and the monster is still here — those of us with no weapons will be facing a genuine dead end."
Shiina Hiyori looked toward Kiryuuin Fuka. "Senpai — has anything like this happened in the exams you've been part of before?"
Kiryuuin Fuka rose to her feet and shook her head, cleanly and without hesitation.
"I've told you — when it comes to the Black Sphere's rules, I may know even less than you do. That's the honest truth."
"But..."
She slung the X-GUN at her side, gave her silver-white hair a casual toss over her shoulder, and smiled like someone who had never in her life entertained the concept of waiting around to die.
"Sitting here and doing nothing was never really my style."
"Let's go take a look. If they're in over their heads, we can help from the perimeter and finish the job."
No one objected.
Or rather — objecting wouldn't have done much good anyway.
Under the current circumstances, beyond the X-GUN in Kiryuuin Fuka's hands, the rest of them had absolutely no intelligence or means of locating Black Sphere creatures on their own.
Before they left —
Kiryuuin Fuka glanced down at Shiina Hiyori's bare feet. "You don't have to come, you know. Stay here and wait for us."
It was a kind thought.
But Shiina Hiyori understood the reality clearly: in an enclosed space like this, being left alone was the most dangerous thing of all.
Better to move toward the action than sit still and wait for something worse to find her.
At the very least, with Horikita Manabu and Nagumo Miyabi holding down the front lines, they wouldn't be meeting whatever was out there with zero chance to react.
That was what she thought. And it was what she said aloud.
Seeing that her mind was made up, Kiryuuin Fuka's lips curved into a quiet smile.
"Since you first-years already have your own experience handling these exams, I won't push it further. We'll all read the situation as we go."
"If you spot any Black Sphere equipment that's been dropped along the way, feel free to pick it up and try it. Gear specifically designed for these exams probably won't have strict usage conditions."
Shiina Hiyori murmured her agreement and moved to follow.
Chris stopped her.
Like he'd just remembered something, he turned back toward the café's open prep station and rummaged behind the counter — coming out with two thick, rough-weave burlap bags used to store coffee beans.
He held them out without ceremony.
"Not ideal, but they'll do. Better than nothing — at least they'll give you some grip, and they'll keep you from stepping on any broken glass."
Shiina Hiyori caught the bags.
She blinked. Stood there for just a moment.
Then the girl dipped her head in a small, graceful bow, and a gentle warmth bloomed across her pale, snow-white cheeks.
She accepted them with both hands.
"Ah..."
"Thank you so much, Chris-kun."
Chris waved her off.
See, she's even thanking me for it.
— End of Chapter —
(Author's Note: Feeling the itch to write something a bit spicier, but I'm not sure I can keep it tasteful enough to avoid getting flagged. Might just write a couple of side chapters for it down the line — we'll see.)
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