Chapter 20: Chapter 20: The Pretending Game

 

 

 

She’s right next to him. The game isn’t over yet.

 

The young man sits at his desk in the classroom, his folded hands held as stiff as his straight back, which practically aches from the unusual rigidity. He doesn’t move an inch, staring straight forward towards the lector’s board at the front of the lecture hall.

 

Life is often quite challenging in ways that are simply not easily understood until a person is finally confronted with them, having thought they were prepared for this situation beforehand. However, often when this situation does then arrive, the variables are different than the ones that said person had initially considered in the back of their minds. The smells are different, the textures, the presence of it are all simply different and despite the fact that the rest of the plan lines up with what was considered prior, that little bit of difference is often far more than enough then is needed in order to fully disrupt and destroy the best laid plans.

 

His trembling lip holds firm, never opening. His shaking eyes never leave from their firm lock on the board, and all of this as her breath presses against the side of his face. The warm dew wicks against his open eye, which he doesn’t dare to blink. The smell of metal moves in through his nostrils as he listens to the soft tap, tap, tapping in his ear, coming closer and closer by the second.

 

He was prepared for her, in theory. But then when theory came to practice and he found himself in the room together with everyone else — and her — well, the theory went to shit.

 

Wetness wicks against his shoe, soaking through the thin leather and wicking into his sock. It’s blood, from the pool of it puddling around his feet. The desk to the left of him is tossed over, his classmate, Babel, lying headless, blood streaming out of her stump. The desk ahead of him is flipped over, having been used to violently bludgeon Cardigee to death.

 

They lost the game.

 

But he can’t look at them. If he does, he’ll lose the game too.

 

Erschein stares, his eyes burning as he focuses on the blackboard, only on the blackboard, despite the smell in his nose, despite the clicking and tapping in his ear and despite the wetness of a long, slimy tongue, pressing its tip against the side of his neck. His eyes are locked onto the words carved, not written, on the whiteboard by an unimaginable horror.

 

 

Water doesn’t form around his eyes anymore. That’s all done with already. It’s been hours now, and he is the only one left. He’s the only one who hasn’t lost the game. He’s the last man standing.

 

There’s just him and… her.

 

This isn’t his first game. This is his third. He’s… he’s pretty good at the games. But that’s because he’s a good thinker. He’s able to keep himself busy in his own head, enough so that the won’t get any dumb ideas, like losing the game by trying to take a peek at the woman, who is breathing in his ear.

 

— The opponent.

 

Her face is long and slender, like that of a gaunt woman, as if someone had shoved their fingers into her mouth and ripped her jaw down low, letting it heal that way. Her mouth is full of rows of blunt, flat teeth. Her hair is black like seaweed, rotting in a dead tide.

 

And she is very good at the games.

 

A finger creeps up towards his face, his mouth. It is long and round and nobby, its joints bulging out like orbs between the rail thin sections of bone that connect them. Slowly, it slides past his cheek and towards his lips. The skin of her hand feels cold and damp, like one’s hands would after having been underwater for a time, and he can feel her pressing against his face — the soft layer of meat between the skin of her finger and the end of her fingerbone compressing too easily as she applies pressure to his face, as if the meat below were old and softened by decay.

 

Slowly, she slides it towards his sealed lips as he intently stares at the board, not wavering as she grazes over his mouth, lightly flicking his lips around as she swirls her finger over the area. The smell of death comes up to his nose from her hand — not only from her, but from the gore, viscera, and bile of his classmates who lost the game that she wipes onto him, before slowly working her way into his closed mouth, running her finger along the inside of his cheek, over the outside of his teeth.

 

— But he doesn’t look away from the board.

 

A crystal chimes in the air, suspended above the door, as it absorbs a timed magical frequency that signals the end of exactly another hour, making eight total.

 

She slides her hand out of his mouth and gets up, staring at him as she returns to the front of the classroom. The monster, akin to a spider masquerading in an old corpse, given the way it moves, she moves, grabs a cloth and wipes over the chalkboard — to little effect.

 

The rag gets snagged on the scratched in rules she left on the surface and rips apart. A moment later, she drops it to the ground and picks up the chalk, entirely nonsensically as she turns around to look at him again, her arm moving straight back behind herself as her eyes never leave his.

 

 

She drops the chalk to the ground and simply walks out of the room.

 

Erschein breaks, immediately vomiting all over the floor, his body shaking as he finally gives in to it, now that he has the luxury of doing so.

 

Heaving, the young man looks around himself at his classmates, his horrified Dranta, who was strung to a noose made from his own intestines, or Miri who was impaled on the rector’s pointing stick all the way through and simply left there, propped against the wall, nobody leaves the classroom.

 

They lost the game.

 

Shaking, he gets up to his feet, the last one left from his class, as he looks at the tally on the board.

 

How many more?

 

How many more does he have to win?

 

He has to get out of here.

 

---

 

The windows are barred.

 

The doors are chained with massive, broad chains that could restrain a giant.

 

It doesn’t matter which dormitory of the academy he checks; it doesn’t matter if he goes to the dean’s office, the classrooms, the bathrooms, or even any of the hundreds of corridors in between.

 

The entire academy has been turned into a prison overnight.

 

It was a normal day like any other, barring the evacuations in the days prior, given the presence of the Demon-King. But not everyone was evacuated. Evacuation implies there is a place to go after fleeing, and for many of them, there is no place to go. The Triumervate academy is a boarding school mixed in with an orphanage at the same time. They all live here, sleep here, eat here, and grow up here from adolescence until adulthood. There’s nowhere for them to go and, so, rather then letting them run off into the wilds where they might have a chance of escaping, the dean of the school simply locked all of them, who had no other family or money, inside, saying that the academy was perfectly safe to weather the storm in.

 

Of course, he said this as his servants carried away his bags to his carriage, before he locked the doors and then rode up north to the capital.

 

It was fine at first, if not a little haunting. The students who remained banded together and made do. It’s not like they turned into violent animals overnight. They continued to make their beds, they organized cooking and cleaning duties that are rigorously followed, and they studied, though not as much as they should, in all honesty. They were surviving pretty well, all things considered.

 

Then, a few days ago, somebody pinned notes around the school — fliers — that advised them to prepare for the games to come.

 

Every class assumed it was a student group from another class than their own, trying to organize something to lift everyone’s spirits.

 

They were mistaken.

 

Erschein quietly closes the door to classroom three behind himself, standing out in the hall as the other doors open too, as the other games come to an end. He is the only one who made it out of five today. Three days ago, his class had forty people. Everyone he’s gotten to know for the last few years since they moved into the advanced classes — his friends, the cute girl he had a crush on — they're dead.

 

They lost the game.

 

He looks to the side, staring at classroom one, from which three people come out. This morning, nine went in. His gaze turns towards classroom two’s door, which quietly opens, revealing a single, small girl stepping outside and then vomiting. He recognizes her as the quiet girl from their class. The typical short-haired bookworm type. He waits for more to come out after her. Classroom two still had ten people this morning.

 

Nobody else comes out.

 

Finally, classroom four.

 

Six people went in this morning.

 

Nobody comes out.

 

The woman, the creature, the monster — she plays games with everyone. Every game has a different set of rules and conditions each day. The price for winning is being allowed to leave, only to come back to play tomorrow’s game. The price of losing is obvious.

 

“I CAN’T!” screams one of the three from classroom one, pushing the other two away. “GET OFF OF ME!” she yells, grabbing hold of her hair and then falling down, slumping against the wall. He recognizes her as one of the more extroverted girls in class one, not that he knows her. But she’s one of those people who you know of, just because you see them every day since you’re in the same space but not the same circle. Her classmates don’t bother trying to console her, which he understands.

 

He just stands there too, with nobody to console him. Traditionally, as the rector would say, it is not the place of a man to be the one who needs consoling; a man is the one who consoles, and so Erschein consoles himself.

 

– The validity of such a social theory is, at least by the old ways of this institution, unquestionable. The academy is extremely socially conservative.

 

“Sorry, I’ll help you,” says a voice from the side, interrupting his thoughts. He blinks, looking at the lone survivor from class two.

 

“What?” asks Erschein.

 

“You’re Erscheint from class three, right?” she asks. He nods, somewhat confused. She points over her shoulder, past her ear length, poorly cut hair. “I threw up,” she explains, as if that would give it all some context. He looks at her puddle of vomit and then back at her, replying not with words but with a questioning expression. “You’re on hallway mopping duty today,” she explains, plainly.

 

“Oh…” replies Erschein, staring at her for a moment as the girl from the other class descends into violent sobbing, together with her friends who also join in. “I, uh… I think…” he starts, wanting to tell her that there just isn’t really a priority right now, in all honesty. Before the games started, it made sense for them to keep up with their chores. It kept them and their minds busy. But now, well, it doesn’t really matter if there is vomit in the hallway or not, does it?

 

One of the others nearby screams something incoherently, running off down the corridor, likely looking for a way out.

 

He watches them go, wishing them luck, but knowing that they’ll be back tomorrow. He’s already looked everywhere too. He checked every window and door in every room he could, and none of them, not a single one, was available to be opened.

 

The young man turns back to look at the girl from classroom two, who is still standing there before him.

 

What the hell else does he have to do?

 

“Sure,” replies Erschein. “I’ll go grab the mop,” he says. She nods, going off to get some water in a pail. The two of them clean the hallway and mark the chore done off of the list, as the only one that has been completed today out of the entire collection.

 

He stares at the list of names for a moment, and then picks up the chalk again, striking through the names of everyone in his class.

 

“This one too,” remarks the girl, pointing at a name and then at another and then another, until they’ve marked off everyone from their classes except themselves, Erschein, and the quiet girl, Verschwind.

 

He follows her name, noticing that her chore for the day isn’t done yet either. She spent her free time helping him clean up. Erscehin taps against the box with the chalk, looking at her. She has to clean the fireplaces out today. “Come on, I’ll help you,” he says.

 

The junior classmen lowers her gaze. Each of the classes is sorted according to its time here, with the fourth class being the oldest and the first class being the youngest. All of them are adults at this point but still have a couple more years to finish their education. “That’s okay…” she says, shaking her head. “I can manage. You didn’t make the chimneys extra dirty,” explains Verschwind.

 

He sets the chalk down. “I don’t have anything else to do,” he admits. The last few nights he has spent talking with his classmates and trying to find ways out. But now he has no classmates left and there is no way out, so he’s stuck in a very deep sense. “Let me help you.”

 

Verschwind stares down quietly at the floor for a time, before quietly mumbling her approval and walking away.

 

Chimneys are the worst chore of them all, you always get filthy from it and somehow the work always seems to take longer than you think it would, even if you expect it to take forever.

 

He, of course, takes the opportunity to look up the chimney shaft for a way out.

 

But it is too tight to crawl out of after a few meters.

 

The day ends too fast, the two of them not really talking too much but still hanging out together as they work. She’s not really a talker and even when he finds something to talk about, she somehow manages to craft replies that are a few words long at best and never leave an opening to continue the conversations in. It’s difficult.

 

Then, after work, they simply sit there.

 

---

 

You can’t be late to class.

 

On the first day, there were people who were late. They weren’t there by the second day.

 

Erschein with a shaking hand, grabs hold of the door handle to classroom three, taking a deep breath as he tries to build up the nerve to open it. He doesn’t want to. Everything in his body tells him that he doesn’t want to, from the sweat that collects in his damp socks to the feeling of nausea welling in his gut to the ice in his veins.

 

But he has to.

 

Being late means that you lose the game.

 

He takes a deep breath and opens the door with a quick, sharp tug, before he has the ability to think about it any more than that.

 

It, she, is standing there, by the teacher’s desk. Her head slowly turns to look at him with a wide smile, as if to welcome him in for a new morning. His heart falls into his gut as he looks at her long face. She stretches her arm out, beckoning him inside and telling him to sit.

 

Terrified, as he ought to be, the young man steps into the classroom and closes the door behind himself, staring in confusion at the others, who are there too, in deeply tense silence except for the one girl from class one who can’t stop crying. Crying isn’t against the rules. The quiet girl, Verschwind. And two of the three from class one are there, sitting at their desks. It looks like they’re one down. The corpses of his class have been ‘cleaned’ into a pile in the back of the room, where their limp, mangled bodies are simply stacked over one another in a gruesome, rotting display.

 

The room smells as you would expect.

 

There is a shrill, sharp scratching in the chalkboard as the creature writes on it with her long, curved nails, cutting deeply into the stone, the noise of which causes him to deeply wince.

 

 

The creature smiles, staring at them as the crystal chimes, signaling the start of a new day in class and the new game. She stares at them, her recessed eyes pulling back into her skull, as if something were sucking them in, giving her the look of a pulsating insect as she stretches her mouth open and hangs her head downward. A bulge forms in her throat, her abdomen distending and her jaw unhinging as the left half of a naked, human torso simply drops out of her mouth, covered in a slimy concoction of stomach acid, saliva and blood.

 

The head is missing, but on the flappy half of the neck that remains, there are clear noose marks to be seen where the skin was freshly burnt from a rope.

 

This would be the missing member of class one, who had likely assumed she had found an exit of her own. But you can’t try to kill yourself.

 

It’s against the rules of the game.

 

The crying girl intensifies her howls; the boy next to her covers his mouth. The teacher smiles broadly, a long strand of saliva connecting the monster to the chunk of a corpse. Her long fingers tap, tap, tap against the desk, signifying the passage of time.

 

The boy from class one is muttering incoherently to himself, his finger stuck on the top of his head as he stares down at the desk.

 

Verscwhind leans over. “Siblings,” she explains, summarizing the story in one word as she points over her shoulder to the boy from class one who is having a breakdown, which is perfectly allowed today. But it’s costing them time.

 

Erschein blinks, looking down at his desk too. ‘Costing them time’? What the hell kind of thought is that? As if the boy were in the wrong here.

 

But what else are they supposed to do?

 

After days one and two, he was a bit stretched, and day three was rough in its own way. But this… With every passing day, the games are becoming sicker and more twisted.

 

— Tap. Tap. Tap, taps the knobbly finger against the desk, the woman watching them, her eyes having returned to ‘normal’.

 

“I don’t want to die,” admits Erschein, looking at Verschwinden, as if this statement were some great secret that nobody else was meant to hear. She looks towards him, staring at him for a time without replying, and then simply scoots her chair back, rising to her feet.

 

He watches her walk over the deep, large blood stains on the floor as she moves towards the teacher’s desk as the first. The teacher seems very pleased, smiling broadly as Verschwind approaches. Erschein looks over his shoulder at the other two, who are still in the middle of their thing.

 

The young man scoots his chair back, rising to his feet as the second one. Even this…. Even this, he’s willing to do. The drive for survival is stronger in some than in others, and in him it is particularly strong. There’s no real reason for it. It’s not like he has any family waiting on him on the outside, or any lofty dreams or particular goals. He’s just interested in living for the sake of living. He wants to live for no other reason than the fact that he wants to live.

 

And that’s perfectly fine.

 

He stands next to Verschwind, looking down at the mutilated torso, covered in scratches, claws, and tears. Flaps of meat hang from the flayed ribs, the organs already removed — or digested. A small human's torso, minus organs, for a young woman of this size weighs thirty to forty kilos? He’s not really sure at all. This is half of that and no organs.

 

This train of thought stops him for a moment as he catches up with it and lifts his gaze to look at the teacher, who is just silently standing there and watching them.

 

With four people, it should be doable. It’s disgusting. But they have just less than eight hours to do it.

 

But that’s assuming they all…

 

His own reality catches up with his thoughts and drive for survival as he stares at the piece of human meat again. This was a person yesterday. He saw her.

 

But before he can spiral too deeply into anything like that, Verschwind drops down and sinks her teeth straight into the flesh of the torso. He watches her go, half shocked and half lost in horror as old blood drips out of the meat and stains her face. A moment later, following her example, he begins to tear at the soft flesh of the stomach before he has any more time to think about it and stop himself.

 

He bites through the skin, which makes an odd, light popping noise in his mouth as his teeth break through. Fluid presses into his throat as the meat only slightly gives way, requiring him to bite down harder to rip through the flesh.

 

— The contents of his stomach press up against him immediately, as soon as he has something in his mouth. He covers it with his hand, wincing and forcing it back down, together with a sliver of unchewed meat.

 

“You need to chew,” explains a voice from his side. Gasping for air, he turns to look at Verschwinden, who turns to face him, old blood streaking down her face. “If you don’t, you won’t manage all five,” explains the girl, before biting back down.

 

He’s silently grateful to her right now, as he watches her tear into the human body like a monster.

 

It eases his conscience as he continues his work.

 

He doesn’t want to lose the game.

 

After an hour of this, which becomes easier as time goes on, as he simply decides to stop thinking about it in the middle of the process, one of the others from class one arrives, the girl, and looks down at the corpse of her classmate and friend, which has now been gnawed on by three creatures, who step aside and make room for her as she, crying, joins in.

 

Erschein looks at the teacher, who diligently watches them from the other side of the desk.

 

On the first day, people tried to attack her.

 

Those people lost the game.

 

The only way to survive is to play along, but for how long? There’s no end in sight, as far as he can tell.

 

Blood squirts past his face, splashing onto Verschwind with a red streak that runs as a cut would across her skin, as he bites into an old, clogged artery that bursts.

 

The dead girl’s brother cannot be convinced to join the game.

 

Not joining the game means that they would all lose the game.

 

They force him to join the game. Verschwind and Erschein hold him down as the other girl shoves pieces of his sister into his mouth, practically jamming them down his throat with her fingers.

 

By the time all is said and done and the crystal chimes, there are only bones left on the table.

 

The teacher looks pleased.

 

She turns around, standing to face the chalkboard, and lifts a clawed hand.

 

 

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The haunting woman then just walks to the door and leaves, leaving four animals behind her in a room full of carcasses.

 

They won today’s game.

 

---

 

Erschein stands before the list of chores, staring at it.

 

Today’s chore for him is to hang the laundry out to dry.

 

This is obviously impossible to do, given that one, there is no laundry being done, and two, they can’t go outside to dry it.

 

“The classroom hallway,” says a voice next to him. He turns to look at Verschwind, who has just been silently following him this whole time, ever since the afternoon. Neither of them have talked about what happened, not to one another or to the other two. He’s not sure what they’re doing or if they’re talking about it. He doesn’t exactly intend to talk about it either. It is what it is. They did what they had to do to survive.

 

He still feels nauseous from the sheer volume of raw meat sloshing around in his gut, ignoring its source.

 

“We can hang it up in the classroom laundry,” explains Verschwind, referring to the laundry.

 

He looks at her and then back at the board. She is free of chores today. There’s no reason for her to be helping him with his. Well, other than the reason he himself had already gone through.

 

It’s better than being alone.

 

“There isn’t any washed laundry to hang up,” replies Erschein.

 

She looks at him, staring for a time, before she then simply starts unbuttoning her shirt right in front of him. He watches her for a moment and then, realizing this, turns around. “We will have to wash ours,” she explains.

 

“Did you have to start doing that here?” he asks, clearing his throat. A shirt lands down at his feet, having been thrown there by her. He looks down at the bloodied rag, staring at it as a hand touches his back.

 

“We’re going to die,” says the voice from behind him, echoing around the room. The two of them stand there for a while like that as he thinks about that statement. They’re going to die? Really? No. No, he doesn’t think so. He doesn’t want to die. Erschein turns around, looking at her. “We’ll wash our clothes,” she explains. “Then we’ll have something to dry.”

 

Erschein undoes his shirt, covered in the gore of today’s game, and drops it to the ground, and the two of them just quietly stare at one another.

 

“We’re not going to die,” says Erschein, looking at her. “We made it this far.”

 

She shakes her head. “All games end eventually.”

 

“What if we beat her?” he asks, leaning in. “What if we beat every game until she runs out?!” His voice echoes around them, drifting past her unchanging, mostly blank expression that never really seems to change. “Why would she kill us if we win?”

 

“— asked the mice, as they spoke of the cat,” finishes Verschwind for him with a sentence that really illuminates their situation more in a clearer context.

 

He stops, his mouth slowly closing as her words sink in and silence his hopes. “…Then why are we even playing the games to begin with?” asks the young man, his question receiving no answer.

 

She bends down and picks up the shirts, walking away. “Why are we doing the laundry?” she asks in return as she quietly walks off. He watches her go, mulling over the question.

 

He doesn’t find an answer and shakes his head, walking after her in silence.

 

They wash their shirts in the basin, together with the meager amount of laundry the survivors of the last days had deposited, throwing them into the basin of spinning water, powered by the resonance of an enchanted mechanism. The washing pit is essentially a hole in the ground with a clean, cylindrical shape. In the middle of it is the mechanism, and the interior is filled with sloshing water that they occasionally pour soap into.

 

The two of them stand there as the laundry spins beneath them.

 

A pair of pants fly into the mix from above, and he turns to look at her, not even surprised. They’re going to die anyway. Might as well have clean pants. He shrugs, taking off his own and kicking them in too.

 

“I like doing the laundry,” she says, sort of out of the blue.

 

He watches the water spin around and around. Laundry is one of the better chores. You just have to throw in all of the laundry, make sure the mechanism is on, and then you’re done. It’s essentially the same as having a day off. Hanging laundry is, however, the worst chore to have as it requires a lot of bending, moving, carrying, and walking. It’s a full few hours of work just for one’s daily chores, making it a real nuisance, especially during winter when clothes still have to be hung up outside too.

 

“Yeah,” says Erschein.

 

The two of them stand there in silence for a time, just watching the water. It isn’t really awkward; it’s just an expected silence, rather. The two of them just stare at the hypnotizing spell of the water, swirling around in an endless circle, streaks of blood washing out of many pieces of fabric and vanishing in thin stripes, little by little.

 

They’re going to die.

 

It doesn’t matter if they win the game or lose it. They’re going to die.

 

He turns to look at her, and she turns to look at him, and both of them, without needing any words, use the opportunity and one another to cross one more thing off of their lists before the games finally come to an end.

 

When all is said and done, the night is half over. They get up again to finally hang up the now-washed clothes in the main corridor. Once that pointless task is done and they check off the chore on the chart, the two of them return to his dorm and continue with one another as before until they fall asleep together.

 

It feels nice to have someone fall asleep with you. The other stuff too, but mostly this. It’s quiet.

 

He wishes he had done this sooner.

 

---

 

Groggily, Erschein opens his eyes and then quietly rolls his head, looking at Verschwind as she lays there, her arm and leg draped over him.

 

Quietly, he slides out of the bed, doing his best not to wake her. She just mumbles in her sleep as her arm flops against the pillow and her leg against the mattress, and he slowly rises to his feet.

 

The young man wanders out of the room, silently closing the door behind him as he heads into the hallway.

 

He’s not really sure where he’s going, honestly. Instinctively, he bends off towards the bathroom, taking a moment to relieve himself.

 

— There is a distant sobbing, coming from one of the stalls in the back. He turns his head, listening. It’s the boy’s voice, the other survivor from class one.

 

Erschein stands there, listening for a moment as he dries himself off, and then walks back out of the bathroom.

 

Crying isn’t against the rules of the game, and he’s hardly in a position to try and console the boy whose sister he helped eat. She was dead already, of course. But the moral line here is obviously dubious at best. So he decides to just step over it entirely and to let the boy cry. They’re going to die, after all.

 

Why not cry.

 

He should cry his heart and soul out, if that’s what he wants to do.

 

Erschein looks around, deciding to put away the hung up laundry by himself. It should be dry by now. He walks through the school in his underwear, passing by the other surviving girl, who is sitting in the library, feverishly reading through obscure books on demonology and the like.

 

If that’s how she wants to spend one of her last nights, more power to her. They’re all going to die, so if she wants to read, she should read until her eyes turn dry.

 

She lifts her gaze, watching him shuffle by like the undead in all of his indifference.

 

Erschein grabs the hung up clothes and begins folding them before stacking them neatly on the cart that he pushes along the hallway past the classrooms.

 

He stops, looking at the doors to them and then, without knowing what he’s doing, wanders out of sheer idle curiosity to the other classrooms than his own. This is how he wants to spend one of his last nights.

 

The hinge creaks as he looks inside at the rooms, reading the last games that the prior denizens had gotten to play.

 

Three, he knows, as he was there. But for classes one, two, and four, he has no idea.

 

Class one, the class with currently two survivors, had to sustain a scream from three people for eight hours. He’s not going to make assumptions about how they did this, but it would explain a few things.

 

Class four, across the hall with zero survivors, had to, as their last challenge, complete a perfectly sized replica of a human using pieces of their own skin. Half-flayed and bled out bodies lie all around the room.

 

Class three was his challenge.

 

And class two, which has Verschwind as its sole survivor — He opens the door, looking inside.

 

 

Erschein looks at the room, at the two other students, sitting at their desks, bound, their heads having been violently bludgeoned in with something blunt as he processes what he has just read.

 

He takes a deep, slow breath, quietly closing the door again, before standing there in the hallway in silence for a time, something aching in his gut.

 

Quietly, after a moment more, he pushes the laundry cart back to its spot and takes fresh clothes for the two of them, before heading upstairs again and back into his room, where she is still laying. He sets the shirts down. Disturbed from her rest, Verschwind opens an eye and looks at him in a daze.

 

“Bathroom,” explains Erschein, laying back down in bed next to, then over, her as he thinks about what he read down below in her classroom.

 

The night ends soon enough, and a new, very fun game begins.

 

---

 

 

The four of them stand there in the room, from which everything has been cleared except four desks.

 

The teacher stands there with a bright smile on her face as she looks at them all.

 

They all look at one another, trying to figure this one out. There’s not really a way out this time though; it might really be it. Or?

 

Four people, each pointing once at someone else.

 

“If we all point at our neighbor,” says the girl from class one, we’ll have fulfilled the criteria,” she explains, her haggard face revealing the lack of sleep she got and, given the fact that she’s here with them, it doesn’t look like she found any answers about demons in her books last night. “If everyone is pointed at once, nobody is pointed at the most. It’ll be a draw,” she says.

 

In pure theory, this is true.

 

The game is very easy. This solution is so simple that anyone could think of it. Everyone gets pointed at once. In and out, the game is over in less than a minute in total.

 

But it’s not that simple, is it?

 

Erschein looks around at them, at the boy whose sister they ate to survive. He might hold a grudge for that. Plus, he’s emotionally unstable. He could do anything. The girl herself from class one seems like a reasonable, logical person. He’ll guess she’ll stick true to her own plan and point to Verschwind, who is next to her. Verschwind should then, in theory, point to the other boy, who is her other neighbor.

 

But that’s not so simple either, is it?

 

Given her special game, she has to betray him. He’s the only one with whom she has established trust, thereby qualifying him as a candidate to be betrayed. She can’t betray the other two because they expect nothing from her. He’s already quietly accepted that. He’s going to die anyway, so what does it matter if she betrays him or not? Still. There’s a game to be played. So, in theory, she is going to point at him out of order, making him the person with the most votes, assuming the other boy follows his ‘assigned’ role.

 

It’s impossible to say for sure, but this is the most likely thing.

 

So, for his own survival and for him to win the game, he should point at her.

 

The crystal chimes, signaling the start, and four arms slowly start to rise into the air.

 

The girl from class one points at Verschwind.

 

Verschwind points at him, breaking the defined order as expected.

 

The boy from class one also points at Verschwind, when he should have been pointing at him instead. But of course he is. Verschwind is the one who first started eating his sister, and he and the other girl are in the same class, even if she did force him to join in.

 

The teacher grins a large grin, her flat, wide teeth showing as she looks at them, her mouth held wide open as her eyes, together with everyone else’s, look at him.

 

His hand is held out, his thumb pointing back at himself.

 

There was never a rule about the person needing to be somebody else.

 

This brings him to two votes, his own and Verschwind’s. The other two have no votes.

 

“…Why?” asks Verschwind, looking at him, despite that maybe being his question to ask given the finger pointed at him.

 

He shrugs, looking at her. “What else am I going to do?” he asks. “The rules don’t say anything about choosing yourself. It’s a tie,” he says, looking at the teacher. “The rules say only the single most pointed at person counts.”

 

“Wait!” yells the girl from class one. “You can’t do that! It’s CHEAAH- The teacher grabs her head, slamming it back against the desk, and rips her mouth open with her other hand so forcefully that her jaw audibly cracks. She reaches down, grabbing hold of her lips, and tears them off in long strips with violent yanks, blood pouring down into the girl’s mouth. Turning around, the teacher holds her up, pressing her face against the chalkboard. Her body below kicking and flailing as she screams, trying to escape as the monster arches her half broken head back and writes on the chalkboard with the girl’s teeth still in her mouth.

 

Erschein looks at Verschwind, who had just freshly tried to deliver him to this exact fate. He reaches down, and she reaches over, grabbing a hold of his hand in hers as they watch in silent horror as the score is updated in grim fashion.

 

 

She turns around, dropping the girl to the ground. She isn’t dead; her face is simply shattered and her teeth have been filed down and broken. Desperately gurgling, she tries to crawl away, but the teacher plants a foot on her back and gestures to the door.

 

Today’s game is over.

 

Not needing to be told twice, Erschein yanks Verschwind out after him. The other boy tries to run away too, but Verschwind shoves him back and Erschein plants the sole of his boot against his chest, kicking him away and towards the monsters before tightly slamming the door shut.

 

Adrenaline courses through his veins in a way he can’t explain, having never come this close to death before. Horrific screams come from the other side of the door as the two last members of class one are brutalized. The two of them fall against the hallway wall and one another, lost to an animal senselessness of their own as they listen to the noises, fueled by the thought that they themselves were this close to being the ones making them tonight.

 

Games are exciting.

 

---

 

Tomorrow is the last game.

 

It has to be.

 

There are only the two of them left.

 

He lays in bed, staring up at the ceiling.

 

Then he sits upright, the blanket falling from his chest as he gets an idea. It’s a strange idea, one that doesn’t make much sense in any logical context. He looks down at the woman who almost murdered him today, his hand running over her back. But the best games aren’t logical.

 

— They’re fun.

 

Games have to be fun.

 

If they’re not fun, they’re bad games.

 

“I have an idea,” he says, looking down at the sleepy eye that looks up at him from the pillow.

 

---

 

The crystal chimes, signaling the start of a new day and the final game.

 

The door opens, and the teacher comes in and looks at Verschwind, who is sitting at her desk, and at him. He’s standing at the chalkboard, tapping against it with the chalk.

 

Erschein looks at the creature and then holds out his arm, gesturing for her to sit down as she had so often done to them.

 

He watches her observe him, and then, without much else, she walks over to the students' desks and sits down there.

 

As are the rules of the game.

 

See, the thing that he realized is that they’re just playing pretend. She’s pretending to be the teacher, this is her game; this is fun for her. But today, he got here early. Today, he has the chalk, and today, he is the teacher.

 

The rules are easy, once you manage to understand them.

 

Erschein writes on the board.

 

 

It’s simple, really. But fun — for him. Just as the other games were fun for her.

 

Erschein taps against the chalkboard, signaling for them to start.

 

“One… two… three… four… five,” counts Verschwind.

 

He looks at the creature, which opens its long, stretched out mouth. However, it does not know how to speak, and even if it did, the shape of its tongue and mouth would not allow it to enunciate the words properly.

 

Its smile turns into a frown as he taps against the chalkboard, counting out the time, and then, soon enough, the game comes to an end.

 

The two of them turn to look at her, the loser, who is well familiar with what comes next.

 

---

 

 

The Demon-King sits on his throne, the carriage rolling on toward the north, toward which they draw ever closer. The old poem in his hand burns into ash.

 

 

 

“My lord…” says Cartouche, as they watch his terror entity succumb to a grim, violent death at the hands of the two humans who tear it apart like crazed animals before tearing into one another atop the fresh carcass, as one would expect of frenzied beasts.

 

“Sometimes, Cartouche,” says the Demon-King, watching the two of them with a raised eyebrow. “In a game, we must sacrifice in order to gain,” explains the Demon-King, looking at the two of them as they fully forsake their humanity for the gift of depravity, bathing in and plunging the demon-blood into one another through method of tongue and body. He watches their bodies start to break, their bones start to crack, their limbs start to stretch, and their skin start to tinge.

 

---

 

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