Chapter 313: Surplus Man (2)
"Oh. You're finally awake."
Vikir said as he stretched.
A giant flower bloomed atop the clock tower. It opened its gaping mouth like it was laughing and chewed on a human.
Crunch- crunch- crunch- crunch...
Bones and bits of flesh mixed with the gurgling blood.
As the blood soaked in, the surrounding vines, which had dried up like mummies, seemed to wrinkle ever so slightly.
All the students stepped back in horror at the ghastly sight.
The fairy chuckled and said.
[ Do es th is pla nt eat a per son onc e a day ? It's st ill sm all, so one per son a day wo uld be eno ugh, rig ht ? Do it eat th e liv ing and th e de ad ali ke ? ]
Danger level S. 'Daylily of Blood Tree'.
A powerful demon tree that, although it is an immature creature, must eat a person a day.
It was a dangerous creature that could not even be compared to the hellhounds they had encountered in the previous stage.
Realizing this instinctively, the students stared at the cannibalistic flower on the clock tower in disbelief.
"No way! You expect us to spend 69 days in a place where such a monster lurks?"
"Oh, no, it's only 68 days now!"
"Damn it, whatever!"
"Calm down! It's not important that one day is shortened, but why it was shortened!"
"Maybe we can reduce it further here!"
With the death of one person just now, there are fewer days to endure.
But even so, 68 days was not a short time.
With limited food and water, and with one person a day falling prey to the monster, it was a long time to wait.
Everyone is watching with fear and anxiety.
Meanwhile, Daylily stretched out its long tongue and pulled out the bits of meat stuck between its teeth, then went back to sleep.
[ Did you see it ? It's ok ay as lo ng as you don't att ack it ? ]
However, the fairy's words that followed caused the students' expressions to stiffen once again as they breathed a sigh of relief as soon as Daylily fell back to sleep.
[ We ll, I gu ess it wi ll wa ke up aga in, rig ht ? ]
The nightmare had only just begun.
Now, the students have to fight cold, hunger, and blood-sucking daylilies for 68 days here.
Some of the students gritted their teeth and tried to attack the stems of the daylilies, but there was no way they would be able to make a dent in the body of a Dangerous Class S monster in the first place.
Especially since they were a hundred times weaker than their strength outside the tower.
"That's wrong, I can't even gather enough mana."
"Ahhhhh! I don't want to be in the same room with that monster! I don't want to!"
"But the ruins are so cold. Even if you don't like it, if you don't stay close to that monster...."
"Ewww! I'd rather freeze to death in a concrete sewer!"
"Do you think that plant won't find you? Didn't you see the roots and vines growing out of it earlier?"
"Alas, what am I supposed to do, I'm hungry and thirsty and... how am I supposed to spend 68 days here...."
The students were frustrated. They were so confused and scared that they didn't know what to do.
Then. The fairy said good-naturedly.
[Do not be so discour aged, I will br ing you a spe cial gi ft ? ]
At the same time. strange things appeared before the eyes of all the surviving students.
... Pop, pop, pop!
With a loud firecracker sound, a box fell into each of the students' arms.
It was a black cube the size of a human head, with a red symbol '?' written near the lid.
[ I'm afr aid you wi ll be uncomfor table if the re's noth ing in it, so I've prep ared a spe cial gift for you – Wh at's inclu ded is ran dom ? ]
According to the fairy, it contains "items," tools that are called artifacts or Ooparts outside the tower.
What's inside is random, and if you're lucky, you'll pull out a powerful and useful item; if you're unlucky, you'll get a piece of junk.
"Great! I'm good at these gacha draws. I'll show you my luck!"
One student was the first to open the box.
The box was designed to be opened by lifting the lid, sticking your hand inside, and pulling out what was inside.
You couldn't turn it over or break it to get at the contents.
"Let's see. What's inside?"
The student stuck his hand inside the box.
At that moment.
...Wham!
An unpleasant crackling sound was heard.
"Huh?"
He pulled his arm out of the box and saw that his hand had been severed from around his wrist.
"Ahhhhhh!?"
As the student fell, holding his bleeding arm, the black box naturally disappeared.
[Do es 'bang' al so co me out occasi onally? Some th ing li ke Mim ic? Is it li ke th is ? ]
The fairy's words once again turned the faces of the students, who had seen the random box and had the slightest glimmer of hope in their eyes, into dead faces.
The students were now divided into two groups.
There are students who open the random box in front of them and students who do not.
Most of them didn't open the boxes because they'd seen people get their wrists blown off trying to open them earlier.
However, there were quite a few students who opened the box anyway.
"What if I don't open it? I can't just sit there and starve to death."
"We have to get something before we die of hunger."
"Damn it. I'm going to slit my wrists!"
"Weapons, come out! Please! Something to defend myself...."
The results of the randomized box were then revealed to the sound of loud fireworks.
The most popular item was the "strange candy".
Red, blue, and green candies, in that order.
After that, someone had a fan full of feathers like those worn by noble ladies, someone had a scary-edged iron sword, someone had a small harmonica, someone had a mace too heavy to lift, someone had salt and pepper, and someone had beef jerky. Some people provide drinking water, some people use farming tools....
There was no shortage of items dropped in the randomized boxes.
In addition to the group opening the random boxes, some of the more intelligent students began to analyze the situation.
"At the beginning, the number of days we had to survive here was 69, and then it was reduced to 68, right?"
"You don't think 24 hours have passed since then, do you?"
"I think the time we have to survive here is up to us."
"What does that have to do with the fact that there were 69 survivors when we first got here?"
"Surely the fewer people we have, the fewer days we have to survive?"
"A plan like that is certainly possible in the minds of the demons."
The number of survivors who first came here was 69. 69 days to live here.
But after a student was eaten alive by a daylily, the number of survivors dropped to 68.
At the same time, the number of days they had to survive here was reduced to 68.
Eventually, the students came up with a frightening deduction.
The number of days to live here is equal to the number of survivors.
... What if the number of survivors decreased, the number of days they would have to endure decreased as well?
"After a while, some of them will die of cold and hunger, and maybe before that, there will be more deaths due to violence over food and grudges."
"That's not so bad. It means we'll have fewer days to live."
"Still, I've been scouring the ruins and there's not a whole lot of food. It's just that most of it is spoiled or rotten."
"If anything comes up, let's eat this fat guy first. Kkkkkk–"
"What? What kind of joke is that, it's not funny!"
"...Do you think it's a joke?"
"...."
The amount of time a person can go without eating is between three and seven days at most.
If you have access to some water, you can go up to 20 days.
So 68 days without food in a cold, desolate ruin like this is a long way to go.
And if the daylilies wake up at this time tomorrow, that's a problem.
"It only takes one to get eaten and then it goes back to sleep, so why don't we all run for our lives and let the slowest ones get eaten first?"
"That seems like the fairest thing to do. It's called natural selection."
"Yeah, right. If you're slow, you die."
"Is that daylily so strong in the first place? Can't we all just fight it?"
The students are talking to each other.
The fairy added, as if she had forgotten something.
[Isn't th at rig ht? Daylilies get annoy ed wh en you mo ve a lot ? Th ey can eat six or eig ht pe ople in a sing le bi te ? It's bet ter not to mo ve a lot, isn't it ? ]
After speaking, the fairy pointed to the inside of the window of the building next door.
Where everyone's eyes turned, there was a pile of bones.
All large, thick bones.
They were the remains of hellhounds, shattered all over the place, along with the surrounding terrain.
The fairy chuckled and pulled up a hologram window.
It showed scenes of the hellhounds from the previous stage fighting against the Daylily of Blood Tree.
Nearly a hundred hellhounds, each baring their teeth and claws, lunged at the Daylily of Blood.
...And the results were devastating.
-Bam!
The 100 hellhounds didn't last 10 seconds against the Daylily of Blood.
In the three-second window between 10 and 8 seconds, 50 of them were hit by the whip-like stems, separating their upper and lower bodies.
In the span of 4 seconds, from 7 seconds to 4 seconds, 40 of them, slightly less than half, were hit by roots protruding from the floor, turning into blood clots and stuck to the floor.
From 3 seconds until the count reached 0, the five surviving Hellhounds were hit by the poisonous breath that spewed out from the central tassel of the flower on the clock tower, melting into a handful of blood.
From then on, the daylily ate the hellhound's corpse for a while, but soon got tired of it and moved to another location.
Annihilation.
"...."
A silence descends among the students.
Even the Hellhounds that had harassed them so much in the previous stage were like this.
If it's true that Daylily grows more ferocious the more it moves, this means that in a worst-case scenario, it could kill all 68 of them at once.
That's one person a day, one human sacrifice.
An eerie silence falls over the ruins. The 68 surviving students begin to fight for attention.
Cold, hunger, and the risk of being chosen to be sacrificed to the monster.
What's more.
"That cannibal flower. If we throw a corpse at it, it will eat and sleep, right?"
"Of course it will, it said earlier that it eats both the living and the dead."
"So it doesn't just eat one person a day until everyone dies."
"No. If everyone's going to die, then all we can say is to die."
"...Okay, that's it. Anyway, it also eat corpses, right? It will make things easier."
"I'm thinking the same thing, maybe even easier than the last stage?"
Some of the students cast dangerous glances at the others.
The atmosphere in the ruins was getting increasingly out of control.
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