Anime Crossover: Tokyo Reincarnation Game — Chapter 106

Chapter 106: The Diplomat’s Classic Interrogation Segment

In truth, the mechanics of the deception were brutally simple.

The moment Asagiri and the girls stepped out of that sterile corridor, a quiet alarm had already triggered in their minds. The instance felt fundamentally wrong. After meeting Kind Mita and listening to her earnest plan to breach the core area and eliminate Crazy Mita, that creeping sense of incongruity only sharpened into absolute certainty.

Kind Mita had insisted that the core area strictly rejected anyone who wasn’t a Player. Yet, while the team prepared to register, Crazy Mita had already pushed an invitation directly to Asagiri’s phone. This meant the rogue entity was fully aware that, despite no Player ever stepping foot in this game world before, the eye-icon App granted Asagiri’s group the potential to bypass the rules.

The logical hole was glaring: if Crazy Mita knew they were coming, why keep Kind Mita alive? Why leave the basement entirely devoid of defensive measures?

There was only one rational conclusion. This was a long-con trap, carefully drafted by Crazy Mita long before they ever arrived.

The supposed ‘secret path’ to the core area that Kind Mita discovered, along with the protective barrier that repelled the other Mitas, were nothing more than artificial zones. Crazy Mita had exploited a system bug to construct them. Had Asagiri blindly walked into that zone a moment ago, he would have stepped into a meat grinder of unknown variables.

The most twisted part of the design was that Kind Mita hadn’t lied. Because Crazy Mita had deliberately locked her in that basement, the naive girl was absolutely convinced her escape route was genuine. She was just a pawn, dancing on strings she couldn’t see.

Short-haired Mita, stationed as a guard in the assembly area for failed creations, and Chibi Mita, who fiercely believed she was protecting the core’s entrance, were equally oblivious chess pieces.

Crazy Mita possessed a chilling degree of cunning. She understood that if the path to the core was completely unobstructed, the sheer abnormality of it would instantly trigger Asagiri’s paranoia. To mask the trap, she deliberately arranged hundreds of highly aggressive, failed creations to choke the route. It provided the perfect illusion of a hard-fought dungeon progression.

Of course, if Asagiri and his group were simply torn apart by the horde, it made no difference to her. Her ultimate objective remained unchanged: slaughter the four Players—Asagiri, Yuuki Asuna, Iwanaga Kotoko, and Kato Megumi—harvest their phones, and click the App icons to register herself as a Player.

What the rogue entity failed to calculate was that her grand design had been dissected and discarded by the team within minutes. Their tacit understanding had reached a terrifying threshold; a few subtle glances were enough to draft an entire counter-operation in total silence.

Even Asagiri’s dramatic, temporary farewell to the girls before setting off had been pure theater.

Megumi lingering at the back of the group had nothing to do with shyness, nor was she worried about sparking jealousy from Asuna or Kotoko. The instant her fingers intertwined with Asagiri’s, she activated the exclusive skill Shadow Dancer, violently suppressing his physical presence from the sensory plane.

Right on cue, Kotoko and Asuna had erupted into a loud, colorful argument. The bickering served as the perfect auditory and visual flashbang, drawing the complete attention of the surrounding Mitas. Under that cover, Asagiri appeared to simply phase through the protective barrier, vanishing into thin air.

The execution required absolute precision.

From beginning to end, Megumi never let go of Asagiri’s hand. The skill carried a strict thirty-second limit. Every time the timer threatened to expire, she instantly forcefully reactivated it, chaining the durations together without a single microsecond of delay.

Fifteen minutes. Thirty consecutive activations.

Under normal circumstances, forcing a skill that many times would drain a Player’s mental and physical stamina past the breaking point. Megumi should have collapsed, her legs giving out, exposing a fatal flaw in the illusion.

“Violet’s cloak. Necro’s brooch,” Megumi murmured softly, her breathing only slightly elevated as she extended her hands.

Asuna retrieved the heavy crimson fabric, while Kotoko took back the small metallic pin, both girls silently re-equipping the gear they had temporarily lent out. These items carried no user restrictions, making them perfect stat-batteries to keep Megumi standing through the ordeal.

As for Megumi’s sudden wardrobe change right in front of the Mitas? They hadn’t noticed a thing. Megumi’s natural lack of presence was so absolute that, while waiting in the hallway, the clones had practically forgotten she existed.

The four-person team orchestrated this elaborate ghost trick for one specific reason: to feed Crazy Mita the illusion of total victory, ensuring she would leave Asagiri’s phone completely intact. They had no idea how to forcefully extract the entity hiding inside the device without destroying the hardware in the process.

According to standard horror-game logic, Crazy Mita should have ambushed them during the chaotic brawl with the hundreds of failed creations. The fact that she stayed hidden revealed a critical weakness.

She had peeked at Asagiri’s Player panel, processed the data, and recoiled in absolute terror. She didn’t dare face him in open combat.

Thus, the bait-and-switch operation was born.

The trap had snapped shut perfectly, but a few lingering anomalies remained. It was the only reason Asagiri hadn’t immediately crushed Crazy Mita’s skull, opting to temporarily spare her miserable life.

“First question.”

Asagiri stared down at the rogue entity. Crazy Mita was currently pinned to the floor by the overwhelming physical weight of the Demi-Fiend, her face contorted into a grotesque, glitching snarl. Asagiri’s voice was flat, carrying the casual cadence of someone ordering coffee.

“What exact information did you pull from my Player panel? Recite everything.”

“Hehe… hehehe…”

Crazy Mita spat out a frantic, mechanical laugh, straining her neck against the Demi-Fiend’s grip just to glare up at him.

“Does it matter? You’re going to kill me anyway. I’m a failure! I don’t have pain receptors like those other pathetic dolls. I don’t feel a thing! You can use the most barbaric, extreme torture methods your human brain can conjure, and I won’t even flinch. You want to extract data from me? How childishly cute, Player~”

Faced with the entity’s manic, mocking defiance, Asagiri’s expression didn’t shift a single millimeter. Instead, a dark, genuine spark of amusement flickered in his eyes.

“Is that right? You lack the capacity for physical pain, so you think you have nothing to fear.”

Asagiri slowly dropped into a crouch, resting his weight on one knee. He leaned in, bringing his face inches away from Crazy Mita’s glowing, erratic red eyes.

“But what if I rewrite your code?” he whispered, his tone terrifyingly gentle. “What if I turn you into a real Mita? And then I kill you. Again, and again, and again. I will reset your data on an endless loop, slaughtering you until your very existence glitches into a permanent state of inescapable agony—the exact same hell you designed for the others. I wonder… what would you feel then? I am genuinely curious.”

The metallic laughter died instantly. Crazy Mita’s artificial body violently convulsed.

“Scared? Good. Fear is a useful metric.”

Asagiri reached out, his gloved fingers lightly patting Crazy Mita’s pale cheek. As he did, the featureless gray surface of his Ever-Changing Mask rippled, forming a wide, exaggerated smiley face.

“You suffer from a severe God complex. You believe you are elevated, unbound by the rules that govern the other Mitas. The mere thought of being dragged down into their suffering breaks your fragile ego, doesn’t it? And the best part? You won’t even remember the transition. Your current memories will be entirely wiped.”

Listening to the chilling, methodical breakdown of her psychological destruction, a cold sweat broke out across the necks of the observing Mitas. Even Asuna and Megumi felt a distinct drop in the room’s temperature.

The essence of a perfect threat relies on one absolute principle: the target must believe, down to their marrow, that you aren’t just talking.

Looking at the smiling mask and listening to the deadpan delivery, no one in the room doubted him. Asagiri wasn’t bluffing. He fully intended to do it. In fact, he looked slightly disappointed, as if he were secretly praying she would refuse to answer just so he could begin the experiment.

“I… I’ll tell you…”

Hearing the rogue entity’s voice crack in total surrender, Asuna let out a quiet, internal sigh.

As expected. Combine Asagiri’s twisted personality with his ‘Diplomat’ class, and you get a flawlessly executed interrogation.

Any other Player would have hit a brick wall. Threatening an unfeeling, suicidal AI with physical violence was pointless. It required a specific brand of psychological cruelty to break her.

“The data I pulled was…”

As Crazy Mita rattled off the list, Asuna, Megumi, and Kotoko immediately caught the discrepancy they had already suspected.

The entity accurately listed every single metric: physical stats, exclusive talent abilities, equipped gear, and active skills. But she completely missed one specific entry.

A red, epic-tier consumable: the Hourglass of Reversal.

The logic clicked into place. If Crazy Mita had known that item was sitting in his inventory, she never would have abandoned her hiding spot inside his phone. She would have waited until the hourglass triggered, ensuring Asagiri was permanently dead before making her move.

The team had originally taken a massive gamble. They hadn’t wanted to burn such a priceless artifact just to bait a trap unless absolutely necessary. The gamble paid off—Crazy Mita was completely blind to its existence.

But the implications were staggering. Crazy Mita possessed enough administrative privilege to infiltrate the App and censor dungeon clear notifications. Yet, she couldn’t ‘observe’ the Hourglass of Reversal.

Did this mean an item of that tier operated on a higher authority than the game system itself?

Were the artifacts Players wielded actually generated by the App, or was the system merely a courier, pulling pre-existing items from entirely different realities?

The game was a black box of escalating mysteries.

“Second question.”

Having confirmed the first anomaly, Asagiri didn’t waste a second, his voice cutting through the heavy silence.

“How exactly did you know that executing a Player and stealing their phone would grant you registration rights?”