Editing A Simple Survey:Volume2 Reaper01 (section)

===Part 1===
Higashikawa Mamoru hurriedly stood up. He ignored the corpse and the bomb and ran over to the room’s only exit.

It was an extremely thick steel door.

But it would not open no matter how much he pushed or pulled. He kicked it and rammed his shoulder into it, but it showed no sign of breaking. It seemed to be very sturdily built and it was tightly locked. He spotted a keyhole near the doorknob. The design gave off a different impression from the keyhole to a house.

“A key?” muttered Higashikawa as he looked around. “I need to find the key. Is that what this attraction is?”

No response came from the speaker.

Higashikawa looked around the room. The square space had no furniture or equipment. No matter how small the key was, he should have found it immediately as there was nowhere to hide it. Yet it was not there. He could not find it. Was there simply no key in the room? Or…

(If it’s hidden…)

Higashikawa looked over at the wall clock that had fallen to the floor. The clock had been turned into a time bomb with an unknown time limit. The key could be hidden within, but he did not want to carelessly dismantle it.

Higashikawa’s impression of bombs came from movies and dramas, but he was fairly certain that real bombs would explode if you messed with them just like in fiction.

But on the other hand…

(The bomb was installed on the outside of the clock. Was that because there was no space inside for it?)

And the parts on the outside such as the circuit board and the bomb itself were completely exposed. They were not hidden within a box. He could see nothing in which a key could be hidden. The cylindrical container with the liquid explosive inside was transparent, so he would have been able to see a key hidden within.

It was not in the clock.

Where else could the key be hidden?

Where could a small key be hidden in that almost entirely empty room?

“…You’re kidding me.”

After looking around the room again, Higashikawa’s expression stiffened.

There was something he had been trying to keep his mind off of.

It was sitting in the middle of the room.

The corpse of the woman in a kimono.

It was true a key could be hidden on that.

“…”

He hesitated to approach.

If this was the remains of a relative who had lived to a ripe old age and died of natural causes and it had been properly prepared for a funeral, he might have been able to tearfully see her off to her grave.

However, the object in the center of the room was clearly different.

The woman in the kimono had been killed in an abnormal way so she was missing her head and hands. And it seemed a few days had passed since her death, so this had transformed into something no normal person would think of as “human”. The corpse seemed to be radiating the invisible concept of “death”. He felt he would be enveloped by that “death” if he carelessly approached.

But he had to check.

A time bomb that could explode at any time had been put in the room. And he had been thrown inside with it.

He had no idea how powerful the bomb was, but he doubted it would be survivable from within the room if it was one of their penalties.

He guessed the blast would envelop the entire room at least.

He had to find the key to the door before that happened. He had to search every spot it could be in.

“Dammit…”

With every step he took, the urge to vomit grew. His feet grew unsteady beneath him. He felt as if he was walking on a ship. His gaze was fixed on the corpse’s neck wound.

The ten steps it took felt like hell.

But he eventually made it to the corpse.

He crouched down.

Approaching it and touching it were two different things. This was an even higher hurdle. But he had to do it. Higashikawa grabbed the cloth of the kimono and flipped over the corpse.

He found a silver key. Tears welled up in his eyes. But something was wrong. The key did not have the proper jagged teeth.

This was a blank key. Trying it in the door would only waste time and could even destroy the keyhole

He rolled the corpse back onto its back and stared at the kimono. Unlike western clothes, the kimono technically had no pockets. However, a key could still be hidden in the clothes.

This was a woman’s corpse with no head or hands.

He felt an intense rejection towards the idea of sticking his hand inside the kimono.

“Uuh…”

Even so, Higashikawa was urged on by the ticking of the time bomb.

He reached out a trembling hand.

He first reached inside the corpse’s right sleeve. He felt a sticky sensation and his urge to vomit doubled. Was this blood from the severed hand or had the woman’s skin started to liquefy like a green onion? Higashikawa did not know much about the decomposition process and he was afraid to think about it too much.

He then felt a hard key.

But when he pulled his hand back out from the kimono’s sleeve, he was holding another blank key. Something brown and wet covered his fingertips. A sharp odor reached his nose. He thought he was going to cry. But he also felt like his mind would completely break if he stopped working now. While thinking as little as possible, Higashikawa continued his work.

He reached his hand into various parts of the kimono, but found nothing but more blank keys.

He had gone so far and yet it had all been a waste.

He suddenly started to wonder if there was any need to continue the search for the real key.

Could he perhaps dig through the wall with the blank keys? He did not need to open up large enough a hole to pass through. He just had to dig around the bolts holding the door frame in place. Then he could pull the entire door down.

But…

He continued his search for the real key. Would the enemy allow him to ignore the proper method and force his way out? They were the same people who had prepared this corpse.

If he did not find the real key, he would be blown away by the bomb.

The extreme situation felt as if it would destroy his stomach, but then a thought struck Higashikawa.

He realized where the key could still be hidden.

He thought of a location.

“…”

With almost no expression left on his face, Higashikawa Mamoru looked toward that location.

He looked back toward the kimono-wearing woman’s corpse.

However, he did not think they key was hidden in her clothes.

He had to search deeper.

There was a much crueler hiding spot.

In other words…

The key could be inside the corpse.

It could have been embedded inside it somewhere.

“You’re kidding me…”

Higashikawa shook his head at the very idea he had come up with himself.

He wanted to deny it.

But with the organizers who had thought up and carried those attractions, it seemed likely.

“You’re kidding me!!”

Higashikawa shouted, forcibly encouraged himself, and then began poking down at the surface of the kimono-wearing woman’s corpse. He was pressing down almost hard enough for his finger to sink into the decomposing skin. If a key was located under the skin, he thought he would feel a hard lump.

But he could not tell.

He was not sure.

Just pressing down with a single finger was not enough to know if a key was there or not.

Which meant…

He had no choice but to actually cut the corpse open and check.

“……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………”

As Higashikawa imagined it in his head, he rolled over onto the floor.

And he cried out.

“Aaaahhhhhhhhhh!! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

He felt like his entire stomach was going to come out his mouth. He pointlessly swung his arms and legs around. Tears poured from his eyes and his vision blurred. He felt an unpleasant crawling feeling on his palms.

Was he going to do it?

Did he really have to do it?

Whether alive or dead, a human was a human. That bluish black corpse that he had felt so repelled by now brought the word “human” into Higashikawa’s mind. He would be slicing it open. He would be looking inside. Those actions felt like desecration.

But time continued on.

If he did not want to die in the explosion, he had to try out every possibility that came to his mind.

He wiped away his tears and looked around.

Something was glittering on the ground near the clock that had fallen to the floor. They were sharply pointed glass shards. The glass that had protected the face of the clock had shattered from the fall.

He could use one of those sharp fragments as a blade.

“Uuh…kh…”

Higashikawa slowly stood back up.

He did not want to die.

He did not want to be blown into as many pieces as logic and common sense had been.

He moved across the room to grab the largest of the glass shards and then faced the kimono-wearing corpse once more. He gulped audibly. He had to cut it open, take out the contents, and examine them all. That was his unavoidable path if he was to attempt every possibility for survival.

He crouched down.

He removed the kimono from the corpse’s chest.

What lay below was more horrible than he had thought. For an instant, his vision darkened and stomach acid rose in his throat, but he somehow managed to endure. He focused intently on the glass shard he held between the fingers of his right hand. He brought it down to the corpse’s unmoving chest.

He pressed down.

The transparent shard sank down about 5 millimeters and Higashikawa forcefully shook his head.

It was too late to bring a hand to his mouth.

“Geh!! Ugeehhh!! Gbggh!! Gbh!!”

He felt like his stomach had suddenly become directly attached to his mouth. Like water flowing back up through a pipe, vomit spewed out across the floor.

Most of his heart cried out that he had had enough.

But he would not survive if he took the easy path. He would meet a similar fate to this corpse. And being blown to pieces by a bomb had to be even more horrible than being decapitated by a guillotine.

Higashikawa grabbed the glass shard once more.

He placed it against the center of the kimono-wearing woman’s body and pressed his weight down on it. After making sure the tip had sunk in, he felt like intense static was running through his mind. He was overcome by dizziness as he pulled the glass shard down to the woman’s navel.

This was different than cutting a piece of paper with a utility knife.

He continually felt the shard catch as he worked his way down.

Because the woman had died several days before, she did not bleed much. Instead, something more black than red seeped out. The sour smell spread further. He realized anew that her insides were rotting.

Higashikawa’s heart had already numbed over.

He had imagined it as being like opening up a pair of double-doors, but it was not that neat. The end result was more like the slit to a disposable package of tissues. He could not see the insides from the outside. With his head wobbling, he moved both hands and stuck his fingertips into the vertical slit he had opened up.

He felt a horribly soft and squishy sensation.

He felt around primarily in the center of the upper body where her stomach would be, but only found a blank key.

She had not been made to swallow the real key.

That meant it had been surgically embedded somewhere else.

He would have to cut her open and search everywhere from her back to the ends of her arms and legs.

Higashikawa’s breathing grew erratic and he felt oxygen deprived even in that room filled with air.

He pressed the tip of the glass shard against the corpse’s right arm and cut it open.

He felt something hard near the elbow.

He stuck his fingertips into the wound and tried to pull it out, but he could not.

It was not a key. When Higashikawa realized the protrusion was white, he vomited for the second time.

Even so, he had no choice but to continue the work.

This was no time for showing respect to the dead.

He found bloody blank key after bloody blank key. It was possible a limit was set on the number of times he could look, but it was not worth thinking about now. As the woman’s corpse slowly lost its general form, Higashikawa Mamoru finally found something made of a gold metal in the woman’s right thigh.

The object covered in something sticky that was both red and black turned out to be a real key with teeth.

He tossed aside the glass shard.

Not even the standard idea of wiping off his dirty hands entered his mind.

“…”

He walked unsteadily toward the steel door. He could think of nothing crueler than this key not fitting the keyhole, but fortunately the organizers had not gone that far.

The key entered the keyhole.

It turned.

Whatever the doorknob had been catching on was gone. The door easily opened.

He practically fell out of the room.

Higashikawa Mamoru gave several shallow breaths to try to take in oxygen while lying on the floor soaked in sweat.