In the year 20XX, deep within a remote forest, a white facility stood alone.
Ryo woke up on a bed. His memory was completely blank, except for his name.
Nine other men were in the room, all looking just as confused. They were all around nineteen and had also lost their memories.
A woman in a white coat appeared and announced, "You will now undergo a psychological test."
But the test was extremely strange. Questions like, "Who in this group is the odd one out?" and "If you had to sacrifice so
Ten Men Who Lost Their Memories - The Miracle of Everyone Surviving, and the Prelude to the Underground
An earsplitting electronic sound, like a siren, echoed through the entrance hall.
Red emergency lights flashed, and countless shadows danced across every wall. The smell of blood still lingered. Takeru's body had been moved to a corner on Kazuki's orders and covered with a sheet.
"Wha—what the hell... Is it another Judgment?!"
Ryou braced himself beside Shutarou. His blond hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, and his friendly brown eyes were now wide with terror. Just moments ago, the three of them had lit the signal fire for their counterattack.
The other participants in the cafeteria had all turned pale as well. Kazuki, arms still folded, quietly looked up at the speaker on the ceiling.
*"Good day to you, test subjects."*
A processed, eerie voice. The Game Master.
*"I hereby pronounce the Final Judgment. Time limit: two hours. Of the nine people here, kill everyone except the single person you trust the most. Only one may survive."*
The hall fell utterly silent, as if a hush had descended upon water.
(Only one...)
Shutarou stared blankly at the speaker. His vacant brown eyes slowly shifted to Ryou's profile.
(There's no way I can do that.)
Now they were being told to kill the comrades they had just sworn to fight alongside. What did the owner of this voice think the human heart was?
"Don't screw with us, you damn game!!"
Ryou shouted, as if reaching the limit of his patience. His voice shattered the silence, pulling the other participants back to reality.
"I can't take this anymore... This is insane..."
"Who the hell can we trust?! Everyone here was trying to kill each other just a minute ago!"
Amidst the swirling fear and angry shouts, only Kazuki remained calm. Leaning against the wall, he stared intently at the psychological test results in his hand, his narrow eyes peering out from beneath his bangs.
"...Interesting."
He muttered quietly.
"Rationally speaking, my probability of survival is close to zero. My only asset is my intellect; I can't beat anyone in combat. Under these rules, someone like me would be the first target."
"Hey, what's gotten into you, Kazuki? Don't you have some rational solution, like you always do?!"
Ryou pressed him, but Kazuki just shrugged.
"A rational solution is no longer about obeying the Judgment and killing someone. That's merely short-term life extension. The true solution is—to destroy this game itself."
He spread out the several sheets of paper in his hand—the psychological test results, behavioral records, data on all participants he had secretly been collecting—onto the table.
"Shutarou. You were right. I'm abandoning rational judgment here. I'm betting on you two."
Shutarou turned his hollow eyes toward Kazuki.
"On me?"
"Yes. I'm entrusting all the data I have to variables my formulas can't measure—your bond, your irrational friendship. —Look. This is the truth."
Kazuki pointed at a single sheet of paper. It was the detailed notes he had taken at the time of Satoshi's death.
"Satoshi, the first to die. The angle of the stab wound on his body simply didn't add up. Whether he was stabbed by someone else or did it himself—it was neither."
"What do you mean?"
Gou asked in a low growl.
"The angle of the stab isn't consistent with a wound from a natural struggle. It's evidence that the body was moved. Meaning, when we first found Satoshi, he was either still alive—or the body had already been staged."
Ryou's head snapped up as if struck by a realization.
"Then... the first person to find Satoshi's body was..."
"That's right. Hiroki, it was you."
Kazuki's cold gaze pierced a single man standing at the edge of the crowd.
Hiroki was a man of average height, wearing the same gray sweats as everyone else. Until now, he had played the part of a weakling, merely cowering in fear. But the moment Kazuki called him out, all expression vanished from his face.
"...When did you figure it out?"
Hiroki's voice had changed from its previous timidity to something flat and emotionless.
"I sensed something was off from the beginning. Just before the blackout, you definitely pointed to 'that hallway over there,' but it was a dead end. How did you escape from there unscathed? The answer is simple. After killing Satoshi, you immediately fled to a safe location."
"You bastard... you're the tenth intruder!!"
Gou gripped his iron pipe and stepped forward. But Shutarou gently raised a hand to stop him.
"Ryou."
Just by murmuring his name, his intention was conveyed.
Ryou stood directly in front of Hiroki. There was no longer any hesitation in his eyes.
"Hey, Hiroki. Enough, alright?"
It wasn't his usual loud voice. It was quiet, with a deep resonance.
"Someone put you up to this, right? You don't have to be the only bad guy for the sake of this crappy game. Tell us the truth."
At Ryou's words, Hiroki's temple twitched.
"...What do you know? What could someone like you possibly understand?!"
Hiroki's face, expressionless until now, twisted with sudden rage.
"I didn't have my memory erased like you guys! I was given special training by the woman in the lab coat! Told to participate in this game while keeping my memories!"
"My job was to accelerate the game! To stir up suspicion, trigger the first murder, and maintain the chaos! If I failed, I would be—!"
His words dissolved into sobs. Hiroki collapsed to his knees, placing both hands on the floor.
"If I failed, I'd be killed... by that woman too...! So I killed Satoshi. He suspected me during the blackout chaos. I had no choice but to kill him...!"
A heavy silence fell over the hall.
The true identity of the intruder, who had been the very symbol of their mutual suspicion, was, in the end, just a person like them—dominated by fear, simply wanting to live.
"...That's enough."
Shutarou crouched down in front of the kneeling Hiroki.
"It's not your fault. It's all this game's fault."
His vacant eyes stared directly at Hiroki's tears. There was no anger, no hatred in them. Only a deep, profound sadness.
"Why... why are you guys like this...?! I killed your comrade...!"
Hiroki clung to Shutarou, his voice trembling. Shutarou gently patted his shoulder.
"Even so, you're here. So let's do this together. Let's end this rotten game."
With those words, something inside Hiroki crumbled audibly. He collapsed face-down on the floor and began to wail loudly like a child.
The other participants lowered their weapons, staring at the scene in stunned silence. It was the first moment a tangible sense of unity was born among the nine who had been pointing blades at each other.
Gou dropped his iron pipe with a clatter.
"...Jeez. We should've done this from the start. Alright, leader. What's next?"
Gou's sharp eyes looked at Shutarou.
Shutarou stood up, picturing the facility's layout in his mind.
"The second floor. There's a monitoring room. We'll stop the Game Master's program."
"Alright! Been waiting for this!"
Ryou clenched his fist.
"I'll continue analyzing the data. We'll need all available information to access the system."
Kazuki was already gathering the documents on the table.
"I'll protect the others. Even if we're united, we still need weapons. You two go on ahead."
Gou picked up the iron pipe he had dropped and readied himself again.
Shutarou nodded quietly.
"Ryou. Follow me."
The two of them dashed out of the cafeteria.
—
The hallway was a sea of surveillance cameras. Countless red lights blinked, monitoring their every move.
"In the way."
Shutarou muttered quietly and kicked the wall.
THUD!!
Using the recoil, he leaped up to the ceiling and tore out the surveillance camera's wiring with his bare hands. Sparks scattered, and one by one, the red lights went out.
"Your leg strength is insane as always! But man, I don't get how you move like that!"
Ryou laughed as he hurled a wrench at a camera in another hallway. The high-pitched sound of shattering glass.
Without slowing down at all, Shutarou sprinted through the facility. With his incredible leg power, he ran along walls, kicked off ceilings, and destroyed the wiring of 42 surveillance cameras one after another. His movements were no longer human. The memory of running on an athletics track, for someone else, for his comrades, drove his body forward.
(I will never give up.)
He couldn't even remember who taught him that, but that conviction was everything to Shutarou now.
Meanwhile, in the underground power room, Gou was putting up a fierce fight.
BANG!!
He slammed a crowbar into the security system terminal. A pale blue discharge of electricity. Sparks illuminated his scarred face.
"Bring it on, you damn machines!"
From beyond the door, some of the participants who had turned violent, still unable to grasp the situation, were rushing forward with weapons. Gou was holding them off all by himself. He wasn't subduing them with brute force, but rather banging pipes with his crowbar, intimidating them with loud noise and sparks to keep them away from the power room.
"Stay back if you've got no business here! I'm guarding this place. If you've got complaints, I'll hear 'em all later!"
Behind him, the private generator roared.
—
Second floor, in front of the control room.
A steel door, 8 centimeters thick, blocked Ryou and Shutarou's path. A numeric keypad lock glowed pale blue.
"It's a PIN code! There's no way we can figure this out—"
Just as Ryou shouted, Kazuki's calm voice came through the radio.
"The code is '0804'. I cross-referenced the last four digits of the total subject numbers from the psychological tests with the lab coat woman's employee ID. Rationally speaking, the Game Master is lazy. Definitely the type to reuse passwords."
"Kazuki! You're the best! I knew your brain wouldn't let us down!"
Ryou shouted as he punched the keys.
Beep.
With a heavy mechanical sound, the steel door slowly opened.
The control room was dimly lit. Twelve monitors lined the wall, most of them displaying static after Shutarou had cut their wiring. In the center of the room was a massive main computer. And—standing in front of the terminal was the woman in the lab coat.
She stared at Ryou and the others with emotionless eyes.
"You're the cause of all this!!"
As Ryou tried to lunge at her in anger, Shutarou grabbed his arm and stopped him.
"Wait."
"Who are you?"
Shutarou asked quietly.
The woman in the lab coat twisted her lips slightly. The first human-like expression she had shown.
"I am an observer. —The chief researcher of this 'White Room Protocol'."
She began to speak matter-of-factly, as if presenting at an academic conference.
"This is an experimental facility of the Fermata Foundation. We research the 'limits of human empathy' under extreme conditions. How long can a person continue to trust their comrades? At what stage do they abandon altruistic feelings? The data from you, the seventh test subject group, has been truly fascinating."
"What do you think our lives are...!"
Ryou gritted his teeth.
"Lives? No, you are specimens. As a researcher, I thank you for producing such excellent results. —Especially you, Shutarou. Among all test subjects, you possess the strongest empathic ability."
"...Where is the Game Master?"
Shutarou's voice was as small and mumbling as ever. But the sharpness of the question made the woman in the lab coat falter for just a moment.
"The 'owner of the voice' does not exist. That was an AI program that learns your psychological data in real-time and generates the optimal 'Judgment'. This facility itself is a sentient experimental apparatus."
Ryou slowly approached the woman in the lab coat. His bright eyes wavered with anger and sadness.
"We're not... your damn 'specimens'. We get hungry and eat, we get sad when someone dies, we want to trust our friends, and it hurts. —Don't you understand that?"
The woman in the lab coat didn't answer. Bathed in the pale light of the monitors, her expressionless face looked like a d
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