Editing A Simple Survey:Volume2 Reaper01 (section)

===Part 2===

Higashikawa Mamoru found himself in a narrow passageway.

Five identical steel doors were lined up along it.

He could not tell if they led to identical square rooms or if they led to the building’s exit.

“Dammit…”

Higashikawa brought his hands to the steel door he had left through and slammed it shut half in desperation. He did not know if that would be enough to stop the blast, so he walked backwards away from the door. He felt a chill as he thought about if he had decided to destroy the doorframe without using the real key. His back reached the wall and he slid down to a sitting position.

“Dammit!! I survived. I survived!! Was that the attraction, you bastards!?”

He put all his strength into shouting, but received no response.

But then…

One of the other five steel doors opened. A man with a slight beard and wearing a bloody work uniform came out.

Intense anger and wariness welled up within Higashikawa.

The man must have sensed something in Higashikawa’s eyes because he frantically shouted, “W-wait! Wait!! I’m a participant too!!”

Higashikawa finally realized something thanks to that shout.

He looked down at himself.

He was covered in just as much blood as the man in the work uniform. Dirtying his clothes had been unavoidable while searching for the key embedded in the corpse.

Still sitting on the floor, Higashikawa looked up at the man.

“…Did you do the monitoring too?”

“Yes. And now I had to find goddamn key in a corpse’s thigh. I’m Kazakami. How about you?”

“Higashikawa,” he replied quickly before finally taking a deep breath. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. You showed plenty of restraint in not running at me.”

The man named Kazakami tried to wipe sweat from his face but then realized his hands were still covered in blood. He grimaced.

“Attraction Land is a world famous amusement park, so I thought nothing shady would be going on here. …And yet this is what I find. How insane can this get?”

“Hey, about that…”

Just as Higashikawa began to speak, two more of the five steel doors opened. From one came a woman in a suit who looked like a coldhearted career woman and from the other came a high school aged girl in a school uniform.

Their clothes were bloody too.

It seemed everyone had had a corpse to deal with.

The career woman said she was Hiyama and the high school girl said she was Matsumi.

After they had all exchanged names, Higashikawa returned to the topic at hand.

“This was supposed to be a job with Attraction Land, but do we really know they’re involved in this at all? It’s a famous amusement park, so maybe someone was just using the name.”

[[Image:Survey_v02_245.jpg|thumb]]

“Yes, I doubt an international corporation would be involved in such risky games. Perhaps someone was using the large grounds without permission.” The blood on her hands must have bothered her because Hiyama scraped them up against the wall again and again. “For one thing, a company making that much money would have no need to be involved in anything so dangerous.”

“That’s right,” agreed the high school girl named Matsumi. “But where did the other participants go? If I recall, there were thirty or forty people watching those videos.”

There were only 5 doors.

If only one participant had been locked inside each one, it did not add up.

Were the others involved in their own attractions elsewhere?

Or…

Had those attractions already been completed?

The man in the work uniform, Kazakami, searched through his pockets.

“Hey, does anyone have a cell phone. I want to call the police.”

“Mine was taken,” said Matsumi.

Higashikawa and Hiyama shook their heads.

The organizers had likely confiscated them in preparation for the attractions.

“That isn’t good. They can get our personal information from the phones’ memory.”

“Wait a second!! So this group of psychos will know our addresses and our friends’ phone numbers!?”

“Just escaping will not be enough.” Hiyama let out a quick sigh. “And if those videos were all real, these organizers kill people for fun on a daily basis. They must have a system in place to escape the police even if they are reported. I have no idea what that might be though.”

“Then what are we supposed to do?” asked Kazakami.

Hiyama glared lightly at him and said, “But there is plenty of evidence of their crimes here. If we can gather enough information to prove what sorts of attractions are carried out here… Well, having them all arrested would be best, but even if we can’t manage that, we might be able to hold them in check so they cannot go after us anymore.”

“Wait. Are you saying we head deeper into this instead of running away?” frantically cut in Kazakami. “Will that really work!? That’s like heading deep into the forest yourself. It’s suicide!”

“Then what do you say we do? We can assume they have our personal information from our phones. Escaping here does us no good if they can simply target our homes.”

“I don’t know what we can do about that, but escaping here comes first. We can always just abandon our homes. We could run away to some tropical island.”

The high school girl named Matsumi shook her head.

“If we had the money for that, we wouldn’t have come for this job in the first place.”

“We can just go to some really cheap country! We can manage to live comfortably enough for a while.”

Despite Kazakami’s vigorous explanation, it simply did not sound realistic. And that was likely especially true for Matsumi who was still supported by her parents. A minor like her could not choose to abandon the country.

Not that Higashikawa Mamoru’s situation was much different.

“Hey,” said Hiyama as if she had suddenly realized something.

Higashikawa looked over to find her looking at one of the five steel doors.

“Does anyone know when the time bombs will explode?”

“No.” Matsumi shook her head. “None of the attraction’s rules were explained to me.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well…” Hiyama pointed a slender finger toward the door she had been looking at. “That door is the only door that hasn’t opened yet. I have no idea when the bomb explodes, but doesn’t the person in there need to get out as soon as possible?”

“…”

They all turned to look at the unopened door.

Kazakami spoke up as if to shake off a bad feeling.

“Well, we don’t actually know every single door has a participant inside. That door might lead out of the building.”

“But…”

What if someone was locked in there with a bomb?

What if they had not realized the key was in the corpse?

Or what if they knew where the key was but did not have the courage to take it out?

Higashikawa, Matsumi, Kazakami, and Hiyama.

Those four had made the decision to survive. But that did not mean everyone would make the same decision in the same situation.

“Hey…”

The next thing he knew, Higashikawa was calling out toward that door.

No one tried to stop him.

Higashikawa stood up and ran over to the steel door. He frantically pounded his fists on the door and shouted into the room.

“Hey!! Is there someone in there!? Did you give up when you kept finding blank keys? You know where the real key is, right? This is no time to hesitate!! Hurry up and get out of there!!”

He tried to turn the doorknob, but as expected, it was locked and would not budge. Trying to kick it down would be useless.

Meanwhile, a frail female voice came from the other side of the door.

Higashikawa could not tell if the voice was really that quiet or if it was only being muffled by the thick door.

“…I cannot.”

“You can’t what!?”

“I cannot do it. I cannot… That is…that is…”

“Dammit,” cursed Higashikawa through clenched teeth.

If the person inside did not cut up the corpse and get out the key, she could not leave the room. If she did not leave, she would eventually be blown to pieces by the time bomb.

The woman inside knew that yet could not choose to do it.

Higashikawa did not think she was simply refusing to look at reality or being indecisive. He saw something incredibly bright in her.

But it was all over if she did not do it.

That bright thing had been completely normal not long before and yet now it was too much to even look directly at. And it would soon be destroyed in an explosion.

Higashikawa pounded his fists on the steel door and shouted, “Come out!! Get out of there!! This is no time to be idealistic! We were forced to do this. We aren’t the ones at fault here!!”

“But…but…”

“The real key is in the corpse’s right thigh. You don’t have to open up a very large hole. You only have to make a small cut! Hurry up and do it!!”

“…I cannot do it. I cannot live like this. I do not want to survive badly enough to do something like this. Do not worry about me. At least work to survive yourself…”

Higashikawa felt an intense heat surge through his stomach.

This was not confusion or fear over the unreasonable situation he had been thrown into.

It was anger.

It was anger toward the organizers who enjoyed creating these cruel situations they called attractions. He felt fierce anger when he thought about them rejoicing as they trampled goodness and reason underfoot.

He had no idea who this woman on the other side of the door was.

Focusing on one’s own moderation and “dropping out” of one’s own free will may have been a different option a human could take. That decision may have been much more respectable than Higashikawa and the others’ decisions to slice open someone else to save themselves.

But he could not allow it.

Someone that decent could not be allowed to die in such an unreasonable and nonsensical way.

“…You can’t do that.”

“What do you mean?”

“No matter how noble your choice may be, the organizers will only rejoice when they see it! They will be clapping their hands together and laughing their asses off in some comfortable room!! I can’t let that happen. There is only one way to make those fucked-up organizers cry and your decision here will ruin it!!”

“What…way is that? These organizers have created such an elaborate setting to mess with us while ensuring they will never be harmed. I do not see how we can fight back. And even if we can, do not worry about me. You can head down that path yourself.”

“I need your help for the method I’m thinking of.”

The organizers had overwhelming power.

They were absolute existences who used human beings like game pieces.

If there truly was a method of frustrating those unknown people, it had to be to…

“Every single one of us must survive this. That is the only way to defeat the organizers!!”

A slight silence followed.

Higashikawa continued on.

“So don’t die here! Don’t end this!! That is not the path you chose. That is the ending prepared by the organizers and it is the ending they are eager to see!! So survive this! Survive by any means necessary!!”

“…”

“…Please.”

Higashikawa seemed to squeeze out that last word.

Setting aside whether the person had been alive or dead, he had cut open a human being. He did not want to put anyone else through that experience nor did he want anyone to be treated in the same fashion after their death.

They would live on and go home.

That seemed like a terribly obvious thing, but it seemed horribly unrealistic here.

But he spoke once more.

“Please!! We’re at our limit. We can’t accept people’s deaths again and again! If you die, something will break within us. So please…please! Don’t show us that again!!”

He received no response.

He could hear nothing at all through the door.

Had he not been able to reach her?

Thinking he had not, Higashikawa leaned up against the door.

But then…

He heard a hard clicking noise from the steel door.

It was the sound of a key turning.

“Uuh…kh…”

He heard someone groaning through as the door cracked open.

A foreign-looking woman with blonde hair and blue eyes exited. She appeared to be about college age. Her clothes were covered in dark red blood and she had tears and snot covering her face.

“Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

The blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman looked at Higashikawa and the other participants in the passageway before collapsing to the floor. She covered her face with hands covered in someone else’s blood and began sobbing.

She had made a decision and lost something bright within her.

But she had survived.

Higashikawa dragged her fully out into the passageway and shut the steel door.

Not even 10 minutes later, an explosive noise stabbed into their ears.

Despite how thick the steel doors were, all five of them bulged out quite a bit. If even one of them had not been closed or if any one of the participants had escaped without using the proper key, everyone in the passageway would have been smashed to pieces by the blast. The giant mass of violent noise was enough to tell them that.

For a while, the five of them stared at the warped doors.

For the moment, they had made no sacrifices.

It took a full three minutes before that hit home.

“…It’s over,” muttered Higashikawa blankly. “It’s over.”

“Yes,” agreed the career woman named Hiyama. “But what is over?”

“…”

They had definitely cleared one attraction. But they had no idea where they were and there did not seem to be an exit. Even if they managed to escape, they had no guarantee the organizers would not pursue them. In other words, their safety was in no way ensured.

The man in the work uniform named Kazakami cut in to say, “I kinda liked the sound of that.”

“?”

“That thing about the only way to defeat the organizers.”

“I agree,” said the high school girl named Matsumi. “I don’t know if even our best efforts will be enough, but having a goal like that is a good idea. Having everyone survive is our way of opposing the organizers.”

“…”

The blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman looked up at Higashikawa from the floor.

He did not know what to say.

Finally, he breathed a sigh of relief and simply said the words that came to mind.

“Then let’s go and find a way to survive.”

The five began moving.

The second attraction was sure to begin soon.

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