In a near-future society, humanity is split into rulers and the ruled. The ruled have no rights. Children without parents are raised in facilities and shipped out as disposable resources once they reach adulthood. Werner, a noble of the ruling class, hosts death games as entertainment using these people. The preliminaries are a simple war of attrition—hundreds run, and only survivors advance. The champion of the main event is promised "human rights."
Kaito and Ren, both facility-raised, survive
A Will for the Survivors - The City of Hourglasses — The Corpse Tells of a Swapping Habit
Before dawn, the Snadokei district was quiet for a while.
Kaito stood at the second floor of the abandoned factory, gazing out through an opening where the window frame had fallen away. The cold air stung his cheeks. The eastern sky was still dark, not a star visible. The only things illuminating the sector were the pale blue glow of emergency lights scattered here and there, and the small blinking of the surveillance drones—the "Flies."
Somewhere in the distance, someone coughed.
Kaito didn't move. He sat with his back against the wall, knees drawn up. The fabric of his work clothes was thin, and the cold of the concrete seemed to reach all the way to his bones.
(Yesterday, after parting ways with Ren, I haven't slept a wink.)
It wasn't that he hadn't slept. He couldn't sleep.
When he closed his eyes, that boy's smile floated up. Friendly, light—and yet, something sunken deep beneath it. Kaito knew that kind of smile. Because he could smile the same way.
A smile to hide your emotions.
At Sodateya No. 7, Kaito had learned it. More precisely, he'd been made to learn it. The staff hated children who showed their feelings. Children who cried were beaten, children who got angry were denied meals, and children who smiled—only the ones who smiled, for some reason, were treated just a little better.
So everyone learned to smile.
Regardless of what they really felt, they raised only the corners of their mouths. Their eyes stayed dead.
Kaito looked at his left wrist. The cuff of his work clothes was frayed. Beneath it, his skin bore layer upon layer of burn scars. From the machine work at the facility. Every time he touched hot metal, the pain reminded him—"I'm still alive."
(Alive, huh.)
He glanced down at his terminal. A wristband-type resource terminal, commonly called a tag. In the small window on its surface, a "0" was displayed. Rings in possession: zero.
But that was a lie.
Kaito reached into the chest pocket of his work clothes. Through the fabric, three small hard rings touched his fingertips.
Rings.
Unconfirmed rings. Ones he'd picked up but hadn't yet "taken possession of." They didn't show on the terminal. Invisible to the audience, to the oddsmen, to the other participants.
This was Kaito's trump card.
(Ren has the same thing.)
He wasn't certain. But watching that boy move, he could somehow tell. Ren was the same kind of human as him.
Kaito exhaled slowly.
His white breath dissolved into the dark air.
—That was when it happened.
In the distance, a scream went up.
A man's voice. No—it might have been a woman's. The scream cut off immediately, and in its place, the sound of metal striking concrete echoed along the walls.
Kaito moved only his eyes.
Outside the window, beyond the collapsed factory wall. In the darkness, two shadows were tangled together. One had fallen, and the other was striking the fallen shadow again and again with something in his hand.
A dull sound.
A wet sound.
Eventually, the striking shadow stopped moving too, and knelt over the fallen one. Searching for something. Taking the ring.
Kaito didn't watch any longer.
(It's begun.)
The real killing game of the main round.
The sky slowly brightened.
Morning in the Snadokei district was quiet. Too quiet.
Kaito left the abandoned factory, walking as if threading through the gaps in collapsed walls. Making no footsteps. From shadow to shadow. Tracking the movements of the surveillance drones with his eyes.
Faint sounds came from all over the sector.
Footsteps.
Breathing.
Occasional short shouts.
And the terminal vibrated. Kaito looked down at his wristband. Small text floated on the screen.
"Eliminated: 17"
As of yesterday, it should have still been in the teens. Overnight, it had grown further. The total number of participants was in the thirties. Which meant nearly half were already dead.
Kaito rolled the numbers around in his head.
(Out of thirty-some, seventeen eliminated. The remainder... under twenty.)
The killing game was progressing faster and more violently than Kaito had anticipated.
It wasn't skill.
Luck and positioning.
Only those decided life and death.
Kaito stopped at the corner of a collapsed building. In the alley ahead, a single corpse lay sprawled.
A young man. His work clothes were soaked black with blood, his face swollen beyond recognition. Nothing was clutched in his hands. The ring had already been taken.
Kaito crouched near the corpse.
(...Something's off.)
Something was off.
Kaito observed the corpse's position and the surrounding situation.
The man had fallen in the middle of the alley. Not against a wall, not in cover. If he'd been trying to flee, he should have been running closer to the walls. If he'd been trying to hide, he would have fallen in a different spot.
As if he'd been waiting here for something.
No.
As if he'd been lured here.
Kaito looked at the corpse's wrist. The tag was still active. The screen displayed "1." He'd been carrying one ring. That was what he'd been killed for.
(Why was this guy here?)
Kaito turned his eyes to the back of the alley.
Beyond the collapsed wall, he could see a small staircase. Something had fallen at the top of it.
Kaito stood and approached the stairs.
What had fallen was a scrap of paper. No—not paper. A thin plastic sheet. Something was printed on its surface.
"Ring Location"
That was what it said. A map, and an arrow. And a mark indicating this alley.
Kaito flipped the sheet over.
(This is...)
The color of the print was subtly different. Only the arrow portion had a different ink density. As if it had been pasted over afterward.
No, not pasted over.
It had been made that way from the start.
Kaito put the sheet back on the ground.
(The organizers are scattering false ring information.)
This was a lure.
To gather participants in specific locations and make them kill each other.
Kaito looked around. Similar sheets lay scattered everywhere. Some were pasted on walls. All of them indicated ring locations.
(But not all of them are necessarily fake.)
Some might contain real information. No—by mixing real with fake, the participants would be unable to resist checking, even while suspicious.
That was the organizers' aim.
Kaito looked at the corpse once more.
(This guy believed the information and came here.)
And someone lying in ambush killed him.
(Because he had one ring.)
No, that wasn't it. Not because he had a ring. Because he came looking for one. Coming to this place at all was the trap.
Kaito exhaled slowly.
(That was close.)
He himself had nearly fallen into the same trap.
Shortly before noon, Kaito had returned to the shadow of the abandoned pipes where he'd parted ways with Ren yesterday.
They hadn't made a promise. But somehow, he'd thought the boy would come.
His prediction was right.
"Oh, you came, you came."
The voice dropped from above.
When Kaito looked up, Ren was sitting atop a rusted pipe. As always, his brown curly hair swayed, and a smile was plastered on his freckled cheeks. His work sleeves were rolled to the elbow again today.
"Morning. Sleep well?"
Kaito didn't answer, just looked up at Ren.
"You didn't sleep."
"Neither did you, right?"
Ren lightly jumped down from the pipe. The landing sound was, again, almost nonexistent.
"We lost a lot overnight, huh."
"Yeah."
"Seventeen, they said. The notification came to my terminal."
"I saw it."
Ren leaned his back against the wall and looked at Kaito. His amber eyes, catching the morning light, narrowed like a cat's.
"At this pace, we might drop below half by today."
"Probably."
Kaito was observing Ren's expression.
He was smiling.
But just like yesterday, his eyes weren't smiling. No—something even deeper inside seemed colder than yesterday.
(This guy has seen corpses.)
And not just one or two.
The distance of someone accustomed to death. Kaito could tell. The way Ren stood, the way he moved his gaze, the shallowness of his breathing. Everything had adapted to the atmosphere of the killing game.
He wasn't an amateur.
Kaito was certain.
"So, did you find anything?"
Ren's voice was light.
Kaito paused for a moment before speaking.
"False ring information is being scattered everywhere."
Ren's smile stopped for an instant.
"...Huh."
"There was a corpse. In the middle of an alley, killed while holding one ring. Near it, a sheet showing a ring location had fallen."
"Hmm."
Ren crossed his arms.
"What was that sheet like?"
"A map and an arrow. It said 'Ring Location.' Only the arrow part had a different print color."
"Different color."
"Yeah. Like it was pasted over later—the ink density was different."
Ren was silent for a while.
His smile hadn't disappeared. But behind it, Kaito could tell he was calculating something.
"...That's probably not a paste-over."
Kaito looked at Ren.
"It's made that way from the start. Only the arrow part is printed in a different process. The color's different because the ink type is different."
"Why would they do that?"
"To make people distinguish fake from real."
Ren pushed off from the wall.
"The organizers want participants to search for rings. But if they're too easy to find, it's not interesting. So they mix fakes with real ones, make you wonder which is which. That way, participants can't help but check, even while suspicious. ...And then, at the place they go to check, they get killed by someone lying in wait."
Kaito listened in silence.
Ren's explanation was almost identical to Kaito's own guess.
But one thing bothered him.
"How do you know all that?"
Ren grinned.
"Something similar happened in the preliminaries."
"In the preliminaries."
"Yeah. In the preliminary venue too, the organizers scattered false hints. Not rings—locations of water and food. And everyone got lured in and started killing each other."
Ren's voice was as light as ever.
"Back then, I memorized the corpse positions and the paste-over patterns of the false hints. Corpses always fall just short of where the hint points. The ambush positions are mostly fixed."
"...So you read the traps from the corpse positions."
"Something like that."
Ren shrugged.
"If you see where the corpses fall, you can mostly tell where the traps are. Same this time. False hints are scattered around the corpses. Which means the organizers are still luring participants."
Kaito stared at Ren's face.
(How many corpses did this guy see in the preliminaries?)
The number might exceed Kaito's imagination.
"...How many people did you kill in the preliminaries?"
Kaito's voice was low and quiet.
Ren's smile vanished.
Just for an instant.
But Kaito saw it clearly.
"...Who knows. How many, I wonder."
His tone had changed.
The lightness was gone, replaced by a flat, bone-chilling resonance.
"I didn't count. Not one by one."
Kaito didn't ask anything more.
There was no need to.
Ren stood in a deeper place than Kaito had thought.
The two moved to the second floor of the abandoned factory.
Light pouring in from outside the windows made the dust-filled air glow white. The floor was scattered with broken machine parts and shattered glass fragments.
Kaito stood by the window, watching outside.
Ren crouched in the center of the room, drawing something on the floor. With his fingertip, a map in the dust.
"So, about what comes next."
Ren spoke without looking up.
"Do we keep moving as a pair? Or split up?"
Kaito didn't take his eyes off the window.
"Moving as a pair draws less attention."
"Right."
Ren added several marks to the map on the floor.
"I was circling the east side of the sector until just now—there are already groups forming over there. Two trios. Plus a few solos. The west side is still quiet. But the false hints are concentrated on the west side."
"And the east side?"
"On the east side, several real rings have been found. The organizers probably deliberately put the real ones east and scattered fakes west. They're planning to
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