He watched coldly as the torrential rain came pounding down.
Through the curtain of rain, with his see-through vision, Chris could plainly make out all of Death's little arrangements.
Just shifting position, or making a slight adjustment, would have been enough to dodge them all with ease.
But he had no intention of actively exposing Death's schemes.
After all, it had already laid its cards on the table without even bothering to put on a show—so as its partner, the least he could do was respect the fruits of its labor, right?
The whole "meet every move as it comes" thing was exactly what you used at times like this to spice up the gaming experience.
What's more... honestly, even after the Uninhabited Island exam, this bunch of students still had far too many lives to their names.
Sure, these "extra lives" counted as a kind of insurance against a total wipe, but once people had a way out, it really did blunt everyone's sense of urgency by a huge margin.
On top of that, the preliminary trials could even grant the victors extra resurrection lives, so by now the life counts had started to feel a little... inflated.
So Chris figured he'd use this first advancement exam as a reasonable opportunity to make everyone "cough up" one life apiece first.
It was both to let them taste the urgency of dangling by a single thread, and to give them more drive to fight for rank in the preliminary trials that followed.
It could even let Kushida Kikyo—who'd been slacking off in the back this whole time—personally confirm that special identity of hers.
All of this... was the painstaking thoughtfulness of the presiding god's hand working behind the scenes!
Chris mused to himself in the back of his mind.
Just then, Yotsuya Miko, who had only just managed to recover, lifted her head and asked in puzzlement:
"The highway up there is full of big rigs that've crashed, and on top of that we've got vehicles right here that could blow at any second... It feels like it'd be way too easy for Death to make its move."
She wiped the rain from her face:
"And with the rain coming down this hard, if some tanker truck up there exploded and triggered a landslide... that doesn't even feel impossible, does it?"
At her words, Ayanokoji Kiyotaka, beside her, shook his head:
"No good. We can't move right now."
"The rain's too heavy—we can't hear or see the smaller movements at all."
"Recklessly leaving here would only make it easier for Death to use the terrain to engineer an accident for us."
Nanase Tsubasa nodded in agreement too:
"I've calculated the timing. Hold out a few more minutes and we'll be able to leave safely—no need to take this risk at the very last moment."
"And although this is the outskirts, and seems far removed from the dangers of the city, it only looks like there's less danger."
"Tall trees can conduct electricity, and dense underbrush can hide venomous snakes and traps... If anyone gets hurt right now, it'll be a real problem."
Yotsuya Miko thought it over and, though still uneasy at heart, could only give a resigned nod.
It was at this moment that the SUV, parked not too far and not too close to them, finally reached its critical point under the leaping firelight.
"BOOM—!!!"
A thunderous roar, and an enormous burst of flame rose up.
However, with the rain as cover, and Chris shielding them in front,
the spraying fragments didn't cause any real harm to the group.
But that debris, still carrying unextinguished sparks, sailed over them and landed where several cars up above—cars that hadn't exploded yet but had leaked gasoline all over the ground from rear-end collisions—were sitting.
In an instant, the sparks licked at the gasoline.
Soon, one after another, came the deafening sound of chain explosions!
Just as Chris casually batted aside a few massive sheets of metal raining down from the sky,
Kamuro Masumi, hiding behind him, couldn't shake the feeling that her heart was pounding abnormally hard.
"I just feel like... there's more to it than this. Is it only my imagination?"
Kamuro Masumi pinched at her nails, murmuring under her breath.
Tachibana Akane thought for a moment, then forced herself to speak calmly:
"Death's power is to engineer all sorts of accidents... Given the current environment, the most it could do is another landslide or a mudslide?"
"But we're almost done, and a natural disaster like a mudslide—which comes with warning signs—would be pretty hard to make happen so soon after the rain just started."
"After all, Death's power is to manufacture 'coincidences,' not to conjure 'disasters' out of thin air."
Nanase Tsubasa picked up the thread in deep agreement:
"If it's engineering an accident, there's usually some lead-up cue, so forcing one right now really would be fairly difficult. But..."
The girl's tone shifted: "But what if the accident Death engineers is one we simply can't detect at all?"
"Can't detect?"
Yotsuya Miko scrubbed hard at the soaking strands of hair plastered to her forehead, and following that line of thought, suddenly spoke up:
"If the danger isn't somewhere in our immediate surroundings where we can easily sense it... then where would it come from?"
"The horizon farther out... or, could it be, the sky?"
At her words, an image flashed through Ayanokoji's mind—the very beginning, at the airport, that passenger jet that had crashed just moments after taking off.
He looked up on instinct!
Through the dense veil of rain, he saw, up in the sky, an enormous shadow—faintly lit by the light refracting through the raindrops—rapidly swelling larger.....
Ayanokoji's pupils contracted sharply!
On reflex he tried to retreat backward.
Now that he could already make out its outline, at this falling speed, you could practically say it was about to come crashing down right on top of their heads—
But before he could even lift his leg, Chris had already moved.
Granted, with Chris's current build, pulling off the kind of effect you'd see in the movies—Quicksilver swooping in to save the day as if time itself had frozen—was a breeze.
But without factoring in those hidden conditions, stacking up enough performance to hit at least twenty times the speed of sound really was quite the strain.
On top of that, Chris had never intended to save everyone in the first place, so he just went with whatever was most convenient.
So the instant he spotted the crashing jet, he spun and grabbed—flinging Ayanokoji, along with Tachibana Akane and Yotsuya Miko, all in one go, hurling them forcefully out toward the periphery!
As for Nanase Tsubasa and Kamuro Masumi?
These were, after all, the direct members of his own class and people he knew well, so naturally their treatment was a bit different. One in each arm, he scooped them straight up by the waist.
With a single flash-step, he pulled them out of the blast radius.
"KA-BOOOM—!!!"
An earth-shaking roar resounded through the night.
The passenger jet, laden with tons of aviation fuel, crashed down right where they'd just been standing, turning into a sky-high sea of flame.
Even with the flames soaring to the heavens and the heat wave staggering, under Chris's all-out scramble to haul them clear, in truth no one ended up with any fatal injuries.
On the surface, it looked like a beautiful timeline where "everyone survived."
If, that is, nothing went wrong.....
Chris set down the still-shaken Nanase Tsubasa and Kamuro Masumi, then turned to look at Tachibana Akane and the others he'd thrown clear.
At that moment, the group had just tumbled across the muddy ground, splashing up great sprays of muddy water and letting out a few cries of pain.
"Cough, cough, cough...."
Tachibana Akane rubbed the ankle she'd twisted from landing at a bad angle, struggling to prop herself up.
Before she could even bare her teeth and draw a sharp breath,
Yotsuya Miko, not far from her, was massaging her tight, aching chest when she suddenly caught something at the corner of her eye and, voice trembling at once, spoke up:
"Senpai... don't move! There's a snake?!"
Tachibana Akane froze, her mind going blank.
Then it hit her—she really could feel it: something cold and slimy seemed to be slithering around her ankles, and beneath the cover of the rain, it came with a faint "hiss-hiss" sound.
Her whole body went rigid; she didn't even dare to breathe.
Chris, who had come over toward the sound, saw this and called out a reminder:
"Looks like a rattlesnake."
"Don't move around—I'll grab it for you."
Tachibana Akane's eyes went wide, her lips trembling as she nodded frantically.
Honestly, she really hadn't wanted to show such a weak, helpless face in front of Chris.
After all, even before Student Council President Horikita Manabu, she had never put such a sensitive, fragile side on display—yet here, in front of this little junior the president had specifically entrusted to "look after her," she'd let her timidity slip again and again.
And this was even after she'd already learned that Horikita Manabu was, in fact, not dead.
It gave Tachibana Akane an inexplicable sense of guilt...
It felt as though she'd betrayed the president and turned to depend on another man instead.
And because of this guilt working its mischief, the fear in her heart was magnified without reason, without limit.
Even back in Hell, when facing enemies utterly incapable of resistance, she hadn't been scared to tears.
Tachibana Akane pressed her lips together tightly.
The droplets sliding from the corners of her eyes—for a moment, it was genuinely impossible to tell whether they were rainwater, or tears that had finally broken loose under this tangle of pressures.
Seeing her like this, the corner of Chris's mouth curled up slightly beneath his mask.
He bent down, seized the rattlesnake by its vital spot in one grip, and lifted it up from between the girl's thighs.
And in these final few dozen seconds of the countdown,
the crashed passenger jet, under all of Death's "teasing," had successfully linked up with another chain-reaction pileup of cars on the highway above, pulling off a combo move!
"Bang! Bang! BOOM—!"
Fuel tanks detonated, and countless steel fragments large and small, mixed into the curtain of rain, spread out like a celestial maiden scattering flowers, raining down to blanket the people below!
Because of the delay from helping Tachibana Akane catch the snake, Chris had also smoothly goofed off... ah, no.
It was because of this little episode that his reaction was half a beat slow.
In that hair's-breadth moment, he only managed to save Tachibana Akane and Yotsuya Miko in front of him, while just barely shielding Nanase Tsubasa and Kamuro Masumi behind him.
As for Ayanokoji, who was a bit farther off, along with the White Room staff—
naturally... it was Game Over.
"Squelch!"
The sky-filling metal fragments mercilessly pierced straight through their bodies.
But it was fine.
Ayanokoji had plenty of lives to spare—he could afford to be knocked around.
Just as Chris's side was wrapping up the instance and handing out rewards. The world of Chainsaw Man.
Ryuuen Kakeru and the others had already left the department store.
Having found a room stocked with all sorts of equipment and with no one else around to borrow it, they had the summoned [Super High-School-Level Animator] Mitarai Ryouta working overtime to rush out an animated video "capable of making humanity no longer fear the darkness, and stirring hope in their hearts."
At first, when he was asked to make this thing, Mitarai Ryouta was utterly dumbfounded by what he heard.
But under Ichinose Honami's patient explanation, this boy—originally gloomy and withdrawn, who could only escape reality by making animation alone in his room—soon had the fire in his heart ignited.
However, because time was tight,
if they wanted Ryuuen Kakeru and the rest to have enough time to challenge the Darkness Devil, they had to finish production in a short span and spread it far and wide.
True, with the help of Ryuuen Kakeru—decked out in alien high-tech—they saved an enormous amount of time and hacked straight into the global network, doing away with the headache of distribution channels.
But this also meant Ryuuen Kakeru missed out on a lot of time he could've spent using the media to farm monsters from afar.
As a result, even adding together the points of Ichinose, Sakayanagi Arisu, and everyone else present, they simply couldn't scrape together enough item points to buy the Yama Sword.
What's more, even if Horikita Suzune wanted to help, she didn't have the authority to draw on other people's points to make up the order.
And just as the group, brows tightly knit, was pondering whether they should go find Makima,
"Knock, knock."
Sakayanagi Arisu arched a delicate brow: "Who is it?"
Ryuuen Kakeru immediately pulled up the surveillance feed in his mind.
Then, his taut nerves easing slightly, he gave a cold snort:
"It's that Chris guy."
"He's got Nanatsura Tsubasa and Yotsuya Miko with him, and he's holding some kind of controller... All the features check out, so it should be right."
Morishita Ai, too, turned at the words to look at the radar display of the enhanced gun in her hand:
"It's a green friendly dot."
Once it was confirmed, Horikita Suzune, who had come over too, heard this and immediately stood up, ready to go open the door for Chris.
Unfortunately, quick as her move was, the hesitation over confirming his identity cost her time, so she didn't beat the more decisive Ichinose Honami to it.
"Click."
Looking at the two girls who appeared at the door, one after the other,
Chris looked at Horikita Suzune with a touch of surprise:
"Horikita... aren't you here as a test administrator?"
"How come Tachibana Akane, Kamuro, and the others who left the instance with me all settled up and departed, but you didn't? Did something go wrong over here?"
Horikita Suzune sighed:
"The test administrators and intruders who didn't enter the extra instance with you have all been brought under the control of the Control Devil here."
"By the Black Sphere's ruling, even if we complete the test objective, we still have to deal with the Control Devil—or rather... we have to deduct one extra life as the 'price' to break free."
Chris understood:
"I just took a look through the controller—the Control Devil is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, able to go fifty-fifty with the Darkness Devil... It really is rather troublesome."
Ichinose Honami didn't press for details. She simply stepped aside and reported in passing:
"Senpai, we've already figured out how to deal with the Darkness Devil."
"Right now we're agonizing over whether we should ask Miss Makima for help in order to get to Hell."
She looked at Chris and asked expectantly: "Oh, right—Senpai, did you all get anything useful in that instance?"
Chris led the two girls inside, his gaze sweeping over Mitarai Ryouta, who sat at the computer rubbing his temples, and raised an eyebrow at just the right moment.
But he answered Ichinose first:
"Apart from the one instance card I got, we each came away with 6 S-points, plus 3,000 item points."
"All I can say is, it's better than nothing—a little beats none."
At this point, Sakayanagi Arisu, seated on the sofa, suddenly spoke up:
"In that case, how many item points do you have in total right now?"
"As I recall, Chris-kun, you haven't upgraded any equipment at all in the presiding god's space, have you?"
The girl's eyes flickered as she fixed them on him: "If even your points aren't enough, then I'm afraid we really will have no choice but to go begging that Makima."
Chris stroked his chin and asked, following the thread:
"Does the mystery shop this time have a solution for the Darkness Devil?"
He looked toward Mitarai Ryouta:
"Is it this guy here? Let me see the shop's product list—I'll check whether I can afford it."
Horikita Suzune shook her head:
"He's a support unit we redeemed from the shop. I'm the one who's the mystery merchant this time. Otherwise, I would actually have already been killed by the Darkness Devil back in Hell."
Chris gave a slight nod, watching as Horikita Suzune called up the shop's virtual interface in midair.
Upon seeing the product descriptions on it, Chris too wore a look of comprehension:
"I see... Devils are the embodiment of humanity's fear."
"So as long as you make humanity stop fearing the darkness, you'll correspondingly weaken its power—or even make it vanish outright... Not a bad idea."
"And as for this [Yama Sword]—is this the item that opens the way to Hell for us?"
Chris clicked his tongue: "Eighty thousand points... so expensive."
"If I hadn't farmed some points in the last exam, there's really no way I could afford it."
At this, Ryuuen Kakeru pursed his lips:
"You mean to say, you can afford it now?"
"Then that settles it!"
As he spoke, Ryuuen Kakeru raised a hand and pressed it onto the computer tower.
In no time he'd hacked into network channels across the entire world, putting the 'hope' video Mitarai Ryouta had just rushed out on loop across every screen.
Listening to the others' nearly riddle-like conversation, Nanase Tsubasa leaned in close in front of Horikita Suzune and took a careful look at the shop interface, only then grasping the battle plan.
She promptly spoke up with concern:
"But... it's not possible that everywhere is hooked up to the network, right? Some people might even be sleeping right now—not looking at their phones, not touching any electronics at all."
"Can a single video really completely erase everyone's fear? And we can't possibly wait until the day every single person has seen it."
To this, Morishita Ai, expressionless as ever, said the following:
"Enough is enough."
"It can't possibly work completely—of course we know that."
"But doing nothing equals zero."
"Weaken it by however much we can, and then... the rest, we can only face head-on."
Nanase Tsubasa pressed her lips together and fell silent, taking it as agreement.
Meanwhile, on the other side, Chris had successfully redeemed the [Blank Card Box] and the [Yama Sword] from Horikita's shop. He casually gave the Powa Sword a swing and said:
"For the trip later, it'll be me and Ryuuen going."
"Even weakened, the Darkness Devil is absolutely not something you can handle just by throwing on a Combat Suit."
At this, Sakayanagi Arisu, gently caressing the [Soul Gem] in her hand, rose to her feet with a brimming smile:
"Oh my? Don't underestimate us, Chris-kun."
"Ichinose and I are the genuine article now—real, honest-to-goodness magical girls~"
"Wanting to lend a hand wouldn't be any problem at all."
Ichinose nodded along:
"Senpai, I'm sure I can be of help to you now too!"
Horikita Suzune spoke up as well:
"As the mystery merchant for both of these exams, the kickbacks I've pocketed aren't exactly small. I'll buy a [Two-Star Ultimate Uniform] in a bit—but as a support, that should be no problem."
"Anyway, I've still got the merchant privilege as a revival safety net..."
Chris opened his mouth.
He glanced at Horikita Manabu, who stood in the corner, silently watching Horikita Suzune.
He actually really wanted to say:
It's not that I'm worried about whether you're afraid of dying.
The thing is... your big brother-in-law can't leave this place.
For Horikita, on this trip, there probably won't be a chance to meet him for the time being.
You really won't talk with your brother a bit more, give him a proper farewell?
However. Seeing the gratified look in Horikita Manabu's eyes, along with the firm, resolute expression on Horikita Suzune's face,
the words on the tip of his tongue, Chris swallowed back down, changing tack: "That works."
"But the last question is... will this Super High-School-Level Animator be sent back in the end?"
Chris looked at Mitarai Ryouta:
"Otherwise, if he gets brought under control... that would absolutely be a problem for this world."
Ryuuen Kakeru clicked his tongue:
"Tch... that really is a problem."
At this, Mitarai Ryouta meekly raised his hand to explain:
"Before I came here, a voice asked me whether it could borrow two hours of my time to save the world."
"Honestly, since I was pulling an all-nighter at the time, I thought it was just hallucinations from too much stress. I never imagined I'd actually be summoned here for real."
The boy scratched his head a little awkwardly:
"Um... since it's only borrowing two hours,"
"once the time's up, I should be let go, right?"
"This Black Sphere, this presiding god you all keep mentioning—aren't they an organization that saves the world?"
—End of Chapter—
Note ①—Mitarai Ryouta: His ability is to employ color-shifting techniques within his animation to achieve a hypnotic, brainwashing effect. The effect is absurdly powerful—without him, Danganronpa would be missing a huge chunk of its plot.
____
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