Editing A Simple Survey:Volume2 Reaper02 (section)

===Part 1===

It seemed the blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman was named Rachel.

She attended a junior college in the city and had found out about the monitoring through a help wanted section in the newspaper.

But the high school girl named Matsumi did not have it in her to focus on each of their individual situations.

“…Hey, the wall has crumbled here,” said the man in the work uniform named Kazakami.

He was peering into one of the five rooms the time bombs had detonated in.

Either the shock had been too great or it had been set up that way from the beginning because one entire wall had crumbled leading to another space beyond.

Hiyama in her showy suit and Rachel with her skin too white to be Japanese leaned over to peer into the room.

(He settled that quite well.)

Matsumi was focusing on a single participant out of the other four.

He had given the name Higashikawa.

He appeared to be about college age. It may have been due to the extreme situation or he may have always been that way, but his expression did not seem to change much.

He had said every single one of them needed to survive in order to get back at the organizers.

It was an excellent goal.

And as a fellow participant, Matsumi had no real reason to reject it.

And on top of that…

(The bonds of a group are often strengthened by finding the odd man out and attacking him.)

As a high school girl, Matsumi knew that process quite well. That problem weighed down on anyone in the confined area known as school life.

(Normally, that odd man out has to be kicked out of the group first. Once he is not part of the group, the situation will not grow violent so easily.)

For example, say a nearby school is seen as a rival in an upcoming mock examination or club competition. A competition between the regulars of a school will unavoidably grow into a mess on the surface and behind the scenes. However, when the scope is expanded beyond the school, the competition can amazingly be carried out in a pure fashion.

Defusing that delicate situation had taken quite a lot of skill.

Although Matsumi was not sure if Higashikawa was aware of the situation he had created or not.

(Anyway…)

Matsumi switched over her train of thought.

She could not deny that she wanted to seize the initiative in the conversation, but forcing herself into an already settled situation would only cause unnecessary problems.

She double checked where she stood.

If she was going to give up on remaining neutral, she would need to focus on not being pushed outside the group.

She did not fully agree with Higashikawa’s view and she was not prepared to remain with the other four to the very brink of death. But her sense for how to remain within a delicate group told her she must not let them realize that.

They had already been united into a group opposing the organizers. If she said she would prefer to act on her own discretion, she could easily be seen as disrupting the harmony of the group. In the worst case, she could even be labeled an ally of the organizers.

She glanced over at Hiyama and Rachel, the other women.

On the surface, they seemed to agree, but had they truly not realized the risks? Or had they and they were simply making sure no one noticed just like Matsumi was?

She could not tell what they were truly thinking.

They had officially united as a single group, so the others might begin suspecting her if they thought she was trying to sound out the others.

“What are you doing?” asked Higashikawa, the one who had set up the situation.

While using her facial muscles to create a harmless-looking smile, Matsumi replied, “Wait. I’m coming.”

She then passed through the steel door that had been warped in the explosion and entered the room.

The room had been bare to begin with, but the blast had created cracks in the walls and the ceiling. Small fragments must have rained down because the floor gave an overall impression of being disorderly.

Then again…

One major factor behind that impression may have been the corpse that had been blown to pieces and scattered across the floor and walls.

Matsumi did her best not to look at that.

The main issue was the back wall.

Unlike the rest of the room, the entire wall had crumbled. Another area continued on beyond it. It was a long passageway. The linoleum floor was covered mostly in a cold darkness and was eerily lit by an emergency exit.

This was not the same as a school.

It seemed more sterile yet gave off a strong impression of death.

Yes.

“This looks like a hospital,” muttered Matsumi.

As no one gave a differing opinion, it seemed they all felt the same.

The five moved further in.

This passageway had a window. The darkness outside made it clear it was night. But it would prove difficult to leave through the window. They appeared to be over 10 stories up.

And…

“What the hell? Metal bars?” said the man with a slight beard and a work uniform.

Yes.

Several thick steel bars were welded to the inside of the window. They did not provide enough room to squeeze through and they looked too sturdy to remove. Plus, they could be booby-trapped with a bomb or high voltage current.

The metal bars over the window were partially there to keep anyone from leaving, but they also gave off a sense of humiliation like they were trapped in a cage at the zoo.

Hiyama pointed down the passageway.

“Hey, I see some more bars up ahead.”

“…What?”

“Is this a mental hospital?”

Hospitals equipped with metal bars would occasionally show up in movies or dramas. However, a high school girl like Matsumi had no idea if real mental hospitals were equipped with such inhumane bars.

However, it brought a certain image to mind.

She recalled a certain term that had recently been all over the tabloid headlines and the hanging advertisements on trains.

“…Is this that Hell Hospital?”

“Ugeh!? Not that…” groaned Kazakami with a visibly displeased look.

However, he had to be thinking something else as well:

That was an idea the organizers of these deadly attractions would find absolutely mouthwatering.

Higashikawa wiped sweat from his brow and said, “What was that again? Some kind of facility that took in children who refused to go to school and claimed to help them return to society? But they were actually thrown into a hospital filled with metal bars and put through torturous rehabilitation, right? They ignored the kids’ personal situations and assumed they had dropped out due to an immature mind.”

“An expert medical institution backed them, so the kids’ parents did not suspect a thing. I heard that by the time the authorities realized what was going on, the group had become so utterly twisted that they insisted the children were simply sleeping even though they had been mummified in their beds. I wonder how much of that was true.”

Matsumi only had the information from tabloids, but one theory said the children who made mistakes would be given a special punishment in which they were dragged to the operating room, had their skulls opened up, and received a lobotomy.

She had no idea how much of it was true, but it had been on a large enough scale to leave its mark on the history of Japanese crime.

And since it seemed like a cult linked to medicine, it was also said the health food and diet booms had helped instigate it.

However…

“We have no way of knowing if this is the real Hell Hospital,” said Higashikawa. “We saw a lot of different stages in those attraction videos. This could be a building the organizers created to resemble the Hell Hospital for their twisted purposes.”

“That’s right.” Kazakami looked back out through the barred window. “I can’t see the lights of a city outside. And is that the sea in the distance?”

They could only see in the one direction, so they could not be certain if they were on the coast or on an island. That difference would greatly change what they had to do after escaping the building.

At any rate, they had to keep moving, so they continued on.

However, they found more metal bars not even 20 meters down the passageway. A small door someone could pass through was installed, but it was of course locked.

Higashikawa stared at the small door.

“I guess it won’t be that easy.”

“But there was only one path here. Is there a key hidden somewhere in the passageway like in the rooms or were five different passageways meant to open up in the explosions?”

“Hey, look,” said Kazakami as he pointed at the bars.

Or more accurately, past the bars. The area was too dark to see it immediately, but a small sign had been set up in the middle of the passageway. It resembled the ones used to warn of a wet floor.

But a scrap of notebook paper had been taped to it.

Extremely round writing had been written with a thick permanent marker.

It said: Beware the traitor.

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

An unpleasant silence fell over all of them.

It was a simple sentence. It had no basis and they had no guarantee it was accurate.

But…

(This is bad.)

It did not matter if it was true or not. Seeing that here would cause them to begin to wonder if there was a traitor among them. To put it bluntly, that was information that must not be inputted within them. Once it made its way into their heads, it would remain as a prickling in the corner of their hearts no matter how much they denied it on the surface. It would sow the seeds of suspicion.

“They’re just trying to shake us. It’s obvious what the organizers want here,” spat out Higashikawa as he averted his gaze from the sign.

Rachel and Kazakami did the same.

“…”

Hiyama stared at the sign for a bit, but finally sighed and did the same as Higashikawa and the others.

Matsumi did not follow anyone in particular’s lead, but followed the overall flow of the situation and looked away as well.