Amidst all that madness…
Ryota was running, a sharp look on his face.
As rocks rained down around them, suddenly…
a rock came crashing down directly in front of Ryota.
Before it even touched the ground, he shifted sideways at a sharp angle.
The rock barely passed by his face, close enough for the wind it generated to scatter his hair.
Another rock fell from above.
He swiftly raised his arm and tilted his body slightly while running.
The rock grazed his shoulder.
He had barely finished evading the first and second rocks when two enormous rocks suddenly crashed down directly in front of him, so massive that they nearly blocked out the horizon!
Ryota leaped to the side and evaded the first rock, but…
The second rock was directly above him!
Mizushi’s eyes widened as he thought:
“He’s still in the air! He has no chance of moving quickly enough!!”
“He has to…”
Shock silenced him.
Ryota had calculated with terrifying precision that at that exact moment…
Ryota struck the first rock with his foot, twisted in midair, and evaded the second by a mere few millimeters!
He landed on his hands, pushed himself off, leaped, landed on his feet, and continued running at almost the same speed as before, despite the rocks ahead of him.
…
Mizushi watched him, his expression frozen in shock, and thought:
“Is he the one throwing these rocks from above or something?!”
“He’s not merely trying to evade them…”
“He’s reading the entire trajectory of their fall!”
He clenched his teeth.
“Even in the midst of this madness, you’re still searching for patterns in the randomness?!”
…
Suddenly…
Two rocks fell one after another directly in front of Evander.
He clenched his teeth.
He jumped over the first.
Then he violently forced his body through an incredibly narrow gap between the second rock and the wall of the massive pillar.
A fragment of stone even tore part of his clothing.
He gasped heavily and gave a bitter smile.
“Damn… this isn’t a test… it’s mass extermination…”
…
As for Mizushi…
His situation was different.
He did not possess Ryota’s senses.
Nor did he have Evander’s body.
But…
He possessed something else.
Calmness…
While everyone else was screaming and looking around,
Mizushi’s eyes remained completely fixed ahead.
He did not look backward.
He only watched the ground, the shadows, and the direction of the dust.
A rock suddenly descended toward him from a blind angle!
And for a moment…
He instinctively lowered his body…
The rock passed directly over his head!
One of the survivors widened his eyes in shock.
“How… how did he evade that?!”
Mizushi continued running, and for a moment, he realized that even thinking had become an excessively expensive luxury.
He had to devote his full concentration to pushing his senses to their absolute limit, detecting any irregularity around him and responding to it instinctively.
His body was moving on nothing but the instinct to survive…
Hitoshi heard the sound of someone stumbling behind him…
Someone had fallen to the ground while running.
He tried to get back up.
But his injured leg could no longer bear the strain.
He reached out toward the others and shouted:
“Don’t leave me…”
A rock came crashing down over the lower half of his body.
A scream…
Short…
Torn apart…
Then…
Silence…
Hitoshi’s eyes trembled violently.
“No…”
He almost turned toward him…
But Ryota immediately shouted at him:
“Don’t look back!!”
And for the first time…
Hitoshi realized something…
Something terrifying…
He thought:
“Ryota was never trying to save everyone in the first place…”
“He was trying…”
“To prevent a collective collapse at any cost.”
“Even if that cost was sacrificing part of the group itself!”
“He understood from the very beginning that this trap did not kill with rocks…”
“It killed through human reactions!”
“Looking…”
“Hesitation…”
“Compassion…”
“Panic…”
“Instinct…”
“Everything that makes a human being human.”
“That itself is the killing tool of this trap…”
“And that is why…”
“Ryota’s orders were this harsh.”
“Because simply…”
“They had to keep running…”
“As though the person dying beside them…”
“Meant nothing to them…”
Hitoshi wiped the tears from beneath his eyes.
“But this is difficult…”
“Extremely difficult…”
“How can you ask me to accept the deaths of my brothers so easily?!”
“We’re not like you, Commander…”
“We’re people who are overcome by pain…”
“We’re weak…”
“We’re not warriors…”
………………..
And after seconds that felt like an entire eternity…
The few who remained finally made it out of the falling zone.
And as soon as they had put a safe distance between themselves and it, some of them stumbled to the ground.
One of them vomited.
Another collapsed, trembling.
Hitoshi covered his mouth with his hand, trying to keep himself from crying.
As for Ryota…
He remained standing.
Silent.
Staring toward the falling zone.
Behind him.
Apart from Evander and Mizushi, only five people from the group were still alive.
Five…
The others had disappeared completely.
…
Ryota closed his eyes for a moment and thought:
“Five survived, and five died…”
“I came out losing again…”
“My decision barely even had any meaning…”
He looked toward the pillar, which still stood tall, barely eroded at all by those falling rocks.
Then he looked toward the rubble and the bodies buried beneath it.
He thought:
“It was obvious…”
“The cracks were not a warning that it would fall…”
“They were a means of distraction.”
Silence…
“Then…”
“How many times… has my mind deceived me?”
He then looked toward the survivors and spoke with an eerily calm tone:
“Do not trust what you see.”
“Do not trust what you hope for.”
“Do not trust what you expect.”
Silence…
“Not even… what I tell you… completely…”