Anime Crossover: Tokyo Reincarnation Game — Chapter 38

Chapter 38: The Strangeness in the Water

“A strange aura…”

Asagiri descended the concrete steps, his footsteps echoing in the dim stairwell. He casually waved a hand, gesturing for the trembling Suit Man and the Woman with Heavy Makeup to step aside. They scrambled out of his way, pressing their backs against the peeling wallpaper. Asagiri approached the heavy, reinforced fire door blocking their path to the next floor. He ran a hand over the cold metal, his eyes narrowing slightly before he glanced back over his shoulder.

“Necro. When you scouted this area earlier, did you not sense this strange aura bleeding through the door?”

Kotoko shook her head, her expression placid. “The fire door simply refused to budge. I lack the physical means to breach industrial-grade steel, and without knowing what lurked on the other side, acting rashly would have been foolish.”

“A strange aura suddenly manifesting behind an impassable door…” Asuna stepped up beside Asagiri, her eyes scanning the reinforced frame. “Could the source of this hotel’s anomaly possess high-level intelligence? If it anticipated our descent to this floor, it might have deliberately positioned Evil Spirits to ambush us.”

She paused, her brow furrowing as she immediately dismantled her own theory.

“No, that contradicts the established rules. The Red-Clothed Specter we encountered earlier was strictly bound to its own floor. The Evil Spirits in this instance should operate under the same territorial restrictions. If they could roam freely, the entity wouldn’t need to manipulate the temperature to herd us; it would just send the spirits to hunt the players directly. There has to be a hard restriction on the source’s reach. Yet… it can still lay traps. Based on what we know, the medium it uses to bypass those restrictions is…”

Asuna crouched, bringing her face close to the bottom edge of the fire door. She scrutinized the hairline gap between the heavy steel and the concrete floor.

“There’s no draft. The gap is completely sealed… I see.” She stood up, looking directly at Asagiri. “Leader, I suspect the entire corridor behind this door is completely submerged. The entity isn’t just spreading its curse through the plumbing; it’s actively weaponizing the contaminated water to lay traps, just like the bottled water those two drank. If we force this door open, the sheer pressure of the accumulated water will cause a flash flood. Even if the impact doesn’t kill us, we will be drenched in the curse.”

The Suit Man, eavesdropping from the steps above, swallowed hard. His face was pale. “Water flooding an entire hotel corridor? Is that even physically possible? The walls would cave in from the pressure…”

“It is a supernatural anomaly. Defying the laws of physics is practically its job description,” Kotoko replied smoothly. She stood gracefully on the steps, lifting her cane to tap the concrete with a sharp, rhythmic clack. A faint smile graced her lips. “However, once you decode the internal logic of an anomaly, no matter how bizarre the phenomenon appears, dismantling it becomes quite simple.”

Just as the words left her mouth, Kotoko’s posture stiffened. The relaxed confidence in her deep purple eyes shattered, replaced by razor-sharp vigilance.

“Leader! Violet! Get back!”

The warning came not a second too soon. Behind them, the Suit Man and the Woman with Heavy Makeup began to violently convulse. Their bodies rapidly inflated, skin stretching taut like overfilled water balloons. Veins bulged and blackened against their translucent, tearing flesh. They were going to detonate.

Asagiri didn’t even blink. He had already anticipated the trap.

The exact millisecond Kotoko shouted, he moved. He scooped Asuna up by the waist with his right arm, snatched Kotoko with his left, and launched himself up the stairs. His legs coiled and released with terrifying explosive power, clearing half a flight of stairs in a single bound.

Boom!

A deafening, wet explosion rocked the narrow stairwell. A shockwave of pulverized bone, boiling blood, and shredded viscera slammed into the concrete walls, painting the stairwell in a gruesome coat of crimson.

By the time the grotesque shower of gore rained down on the lower steps, Asagiri had already carried the two girls back up to the sixth-floor landing. He set them down gently, completely untouched by the carnage below.

“The Leader’s reaction time is truly exceptional,” Kotoko remarked, utterly unfazed by the fact she had just been carried away from a human bomb. She calmly smoothed out the wrinkles in her dress and adjusted her hat, her signature airy smile returning. “I see. It appears the entity can detonate any human or Evil Spirit infected by the water at will. It likely held off on triggering them until now either because the process drains its energy, or because it was waiting for us to lower our guard for a guaranteed lethal strike. Perhaps both.”

Asagiri stood casually at the edge of the landing, looking down at the smoking, blood-soaked crater that used to be two people. Despite having just sprinted up a flight of stairs carrying two girls, his breathing was perfectly even.

“Whatever the reason,” Asagiri said, a dry, dark amusement lacing his tone, “burning a one-time trick like this proves the entity is feeling the pressure. Heh. A cornered rat trying to bite back. A bug trying to stop a bullet train. All bark and no bite. Refusing to face the music until the gallows drop.” He cracked his neck, a feral glint in his eye. “I’ve diagnosed it with a terminal case of skill issue. It’s practically begging to get stepped on by a Demi-Fiend.”

Asuna suppressed a sigh at his unhinged string of metaphors, though she couldn’t deny his point. “Still… the difficulty of this instance is on a completely different level compared to the tutorial.”

She recalled their time in Mount Massive Asylum. That place had been a walk in the park—a straightforward survival test where clearing it required minimal effort. As long as a player could walk, or even crawl, they could survive. This hotel, however, was a psychological meat grinder.

With the entity’s ability to detonate infected players, any group gathering was a potential suicide trap. A single drop of hotel water turned a person into a walking biological weapon, ready to explode and shower other players with the curse. The true horror lay in human nature. Even if players figured out that the water was the transmission vector, their survival instinct would kick in. An infected player would absolutely hide their condition, terrified of being ostracized or preemptively murdered by the rest of the group.

The numerical disadvantage mentioned in Asagiri’s special prompt wasn’t about the ratio of Evil Spirits to humans. It was the terrifying ratio of clean players versus infected players acting as sleeper agents.

Unfortunately for the entity, its grand, psychological master plan had completely derailed.

Not only had Asagiri and Asuna deduced the water’s secret within the opening hours of the game, but they also had Kotoko—a walking radar who could see the anomaly’s aura and instantly identify infected targets.

How was the entity supposed to play its game now?

What was designed to be a grueling, paranoia-inducing battle of attrition, testing the players’ psychological endurance and turning them against each other, had been violently hijacked. These three had turned a survival horror scenario into a one-sided game of hide-and-seek.

And the worst part?

The players weren’t the ones hiding. The anomaly was.

Once Asagiri found it… it was going to have a very, very bad time.