Chapter 1 – Two Yandere 【1】

After school.

I was playing a game called The Labyrinth Is Full of Hope! in the club room.

Judging by the title alone, you’d think it’s an adventure game where you have lovey-dovey fun with cute girls, but it’s actually the ryona game that took first place at Ryona-Con.

Considering that Ryona-Con’s judging criteria are the quality of death scenes and the sheer maliciousness of content and scenario, you can probably grasp just how insane this game is.

According to the creator, the heroine has—shockingly—344 death scenes.

She gets killed in diverse ways across various situations.

The scenario is also brutally cruel.

Sakuragawa Hanako, an ordinary middle school girl you could find anywhere, was summoned to a certain labyrinth one day because she supposedly had a high aptitude factor.

Hanako aims for the lowest level to escape the labyrinth, but being an ordinary middle school girl, her stamina is low and she tires immediately when running.

Furthermore, she has no power or special abilities to defeat the labyrinth’s monsters.

To survive, she must flee from the monsters roaming the labyrinth, but with her low stamina, running away is out of the question.

In the end, her only option is to analyze the monsters’ movement patterns, hide somewhere, and wait for them to move elsewhere—but there’s a penalty where staying motionless in the same place for too long kills you, so it’s hopeless.

If I were in Hanako’s position, I’d choose suicide. Well, I couldn’t, though.

It’s not a matter of fear of death or anything like that.

Actually, the concept of death doesn’t exist in this labyrinth.

For instance, let’s say your body gets cut in half by a greatsword.

Common sense says you’d die normally.

However, in this labyrinth, you’d still be alive even then.

You can feel the pain, and you can’t move, though.

So what you can do is only self-harm. You can’t commit suicide… that’s the setting.

According to the demon god, there are two ways to escape this labyrinth.

The first is to wait until the labyrinth disappears. The labyrinth supposedly disappears along with the dimension’s destruction.

However, one year in the labyrinth equals one second in the real world, so escaping by this method requires waiting for eternity.

And even if you could escape, the dimension would already be destroyed anyway, so you couldn’t survive regardless.

The second is to contract with the demon god sealed in the lowest level.

No matter how you look at it, there’s no choice but the second option.

This is why Hanako is aiming for the labyrinth’s lowest level in this game.

However, to reach the lowest level, she must clear five boss stages.

By the way, the bosses’ appearances are extremely disgusting, and there are far too many instant-death patterns.

Furthermore, even if she safely reaches the lowest level and breaks the demon god’s seal, she can’t escape.

The demon god merely used Hanako to break its own seal.

This is honestly too cruel… If I were in Hanako’s position, I might’ve burst into tears.

The content is also extremely malicious.

Breaking, cutting, getting beaten to death—that’s just the basics, and there are countless situations that put the player between a rock and a hard place.

For example, in the second floor, a monster appears that bursts from the floor screaming.

Hearing the scream means instant death. To avoid dying, you need to equip earplugs obtainable on the first floor.

…But the material for those earplugs is tentacle fragments, you know…

Just imagining putting tentacles in your ears makes me sick.

Also, there’s the “Door That Won’t Open” that you finally reach after avoiding various traps—you must solve three problems the door presents within a time limit.

Wrong answers naturally mean instant death. If you take the trial without removing the earplugs you’ve been wearing, you can’t hear the problems, so you die when time runs out anyway.

Therefore, to solve the problems, the player removes the earplugs, but while listening to the third problem, a monster suddenly bursts from the floor and screams.

I have absolutely no idea what you’re supposed to do.

Furthermore, the death scene CGs are exquisitely detailed—you can clearly see everything from brain wrinkles to bone porosity.

Incidentally, if you look closely at Hanako’s bones, her bone porosity seems slightly higher than a healthy person’s, which might be because she constantly preferred drinking phosphoric acid-containing carbonated beverages while avoiding calcium.

If that’s the case, Hanako-chan, I think you should supplement your calcium to prevent osteoporosis from now on. Well, that’s impossible now that you’ve come to this labyrinth, though.

…I got sidetracked.

Anyway, what I’ve described above is only a fragment of this game’s maliciousness, but even that should be enough to convey just how dangerous a person this game’s creator is.

So why am I playing this game?

The reason is that the ryona game I created took second place at Ryona-Con.

I thought my work deserved first place, so unsatisfied with the judging results, I intended to play this game and then criticize it mercilessly.

However, after playing it, I was forced to accept reality.

If Ryona-Con were an erotic novel contest and this game were an erotic novel, the ryona game I made would be nothing more than a children’s fairy tale.

That’s how large the gap between first and second place was.

Ah, Hanako died again. No wait, she didn’t die, though.

This death scene involved her entire body being torn apart by various weapons, eaten by monsters, and continuing to suffer inside their stomachs.

That aside, even though her brain and nerves were torn to pieces, why can she still feel pain? I have absolutely no idea.

…Let’s just reset for now.

I reset the game and loaded again.

Then, after controlling the naked Hanako to easily dodge the earlier monster, I entered the final boss battle.

◆　◆　◆

…I’m extremely tired.

The boss battle that started afterward—who knew the boss would transform three times…

Of course I knew that, but fighting it directly really made the impact different.

And in the end, it even turned into something like a bullet-hell shooter.

However, since this game is definitely not a shooting game, her entire body including clothes becomes a target for attacks.

In other words, you can’t dodge bullets by keeping only your hitbox safe like in certain shooting games, and there are no evasion techniques or bombs to clear bullets in critical moments.

I’m really glad Hanako was completely naked.

If she’d been wearing clothes, the attack hitbox would’ve expanded and clearing would’ve been absolutely impossible.

In reality, the range expansion from clothes isn’t that significant, but the bullet curtain was so dense that even that slight difference determined whether you could clear it or not.

When the fourth floor’s boss dissolved only Hanako’s clothes, I thought “What a good guy,” but after seeing the tidbit that “the reason for dissolving the clothes was because wearing them when eating Hanako whole would worsen the taste,” I reconsidered.

But during this battle, I once again realized that guy really was a good one.

That boss probably never imagined its dissolving the clothes would lead to the demon god’s defeat.

Well, it’s slime in the first place, and it has no brain, so I don’t know if it can even think.

That aside, even though the attackable area decreased a bit, it’s still an ordinary middle school girl’s physical abilities.

Considering the insane difficulty of having to dodge the demon god’s bullet curtain while even counterattacking, this clear can only be considered a miracle.

If the pattern hadn’t been written on the web strategy site, I would’ve had no choice but to extract the game’s database files for analysis.

—Confirming aptitude factor. First factor, labyrinth clear, confirmed.

Huh? I thought I heard a strange voice just now…

However, there was only me in the room, and the only audible sounds were the rotation noise from the HDD and fans inside the computer, plus someone running in the hallway.

Was it just my imagination?

Now then, it’s finally the long-awaited ending. Let me thoroughly savor the sight of Hanako despairing and crying out.

Just as I was thinking that, the club room door suddenly opened and a girl entered.

Thinking about it now, at that moment, she—my underclassman, a first-year high school student named Kobayashi Eri—certainly said this:

“Sugar-senpai, please help me!”