Chapter Text
It ought to have been a relief, when Akane woke to find that she existed. She’d been surfing the edge of paradox for many years now, her instinctive understanding of the contours of the morphogenetic field as crucial for her survival as her instinctive knowledge of breathing. And now when her mind reached out to ascertain her metaphysical status she found nothing but mundane normality – she existed as surely as Aoi, or her too-long-awaited Junpei, or the sofa she was lying on. That should have been the end of all Akane’s problems.
Akane knew better.
Instantly filled with alarm, Akane lurched up and took in her – new – surroundings. The orange-brown sofa she’d awoken from was placed on a small circular rug in the centre of an expansive fan-shaped room with a high ceiling. Akane’s attention was drawn immediately to the ‘hinge’ of that fan, where an imposing steel door with a red ‘X’ daubed across the central mechanism marked the obvious exit to the facility she’d been brought. Such a shame that it was just as clearly unopenable.
Was this a death game that she had been kidnapped for, just like the Nonary Game she’d been about to put into motion? You wouldn’t have made that connection just from a glance. Building Q and the ship it had once mirrored had been designed, even after being rigged with puzzles and escape rooms and death traps, to retain the air of luxury of the original cruise liner. This place had none of that: everything from the dilapidated basketball hoop in one corner to the bar counter over on the opposite side, down to the very surfaces of the walls was rugged and practical, set up to allow for robust maintenance by whoever inhabited the place. And yet despite that difference in the overarching design ethos, something in the atmosphere had Akane convinced this place had the same purpose.
If this was a death game there would be some indication of how to proceed. Akane looked round for it. Could those screens beside the X-door be…? But one was blank and the other only displayed a list of unconnected words. ‘Hero’. ‘Fool’. ‘Future’. ‘Hex’. ‘Kill’. ‘Eye’. The screen with ‘Hex’ on it had a jagged crack through the centre. Nothing on there was helpful.
Akane was beginning to wonder if she’d have to go exploring the facility blindly away from her starting position. She and Aoi had figured such a beginning to their game would leave things unacceptably down to chance and had prepared carefully worded instructions to give to their players once they’d escaped the initial rooms. Surely the Nonary Game would have gone better than this confused beginning thanks to that precaution. But since the mastermind of this hadn’t done that…
At that moment a crackling sound drew her attention. On the other side of her sofa Akane found a low coffee table, on which was placed a bulky, old-fashioned television screen. The sound that had drawn Akane there had been the screen crackling to life, the light that produced its image now emanating out to cast an uncanny glow across the floor in front. Akane hurried round to look at that image head on.
What she saw shocked her. The face on the screen was wearing a gas mask – not just any gas mask, but the very one Aoi had used when kidnapping the players for her Nonary Game. If whoever had brought her here had gotten ahold of that mask, they knew far too much about what Akane had been about to do.
Akane’s alarm, and her diverted focus as she considered all the possibilities of what this meant, distracted her from the first thing the figure on the screen said. The man behind the gas mask seemed to waiting for Akane’s response. With no idea what she was supposed to be replying to Akane put on an act, sinking to her knees in front of the television and letting her voice soften. “Please! Let me go! I don’t know what you want from me so please, just–”
“You can lay off the crocodile tears, June.” The codename she’d intended to be called during the Nonary Game came through the speakers as a deep, malicious hiss. It should have been several days before she was called that for the first time. “You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know exactly what you’re about to do.”
Even as Akane let the helpless act recede and her back straightened, the strength went out of her legs for real. “Who… are you?” she said weakly. How did he know about the Nonary Game Akane had intended?
“I’m what’s left once you’ve taken everything else out of me,” the gas mask replied. “You might as well call me… Mugen.”
The gas mask – Mugen – faded from the screen, to be replaced by a low-resolution, three-dimensional, computer-generated map. Akane recognised the shape of the room she’d woken in surrounding the path to the exit. Several corridors fanned away from the other side leading to many smaller rooms, through with the image only showing featureless brick-like blocks Akane only had the shapes of each room to go on: that wasn’t enough to work out what they were supposed to be.
“This underground bunker…” Mugen continued, even as the map revolved on the screen. “Well, there’s no reason to expect you to recognise this place. All the blood that’s been spilled in this place, and to you it’s no different to any other location of a death game. I’m going to make you understand.” The gas mask was suddenly back on the screen, larger as though Mugen had rushed the camera. “Seek me in this place. If you get to me, maybe you’ll find a way out.”
The man on the screen then began to turn away, as though about to leave. Akane cried out, “Wait!” When the gas mask was back dead-centre in the screen, she said, “What about the people kidnapped for the Nonary Game?” They were all now asleep, waiting for the start of the game. With Akane and not there that could never happen, and they’d just be left in a Soporil-induced slumber until death. That was a fate Akane wouldn’t have wish even on Gentarou Hongou, let alone Clover and Light, Hazuki, Junpei…
If Mugen appreciated her owning up he showed no sign of it. “Seems to me like you have other things to worry about.”
With those bitter final words, the screen went black.