And Then There Were None

Chapter 1

Black. The darkness consumes me as I stare blankly back into nothingness. My sense of time, sense of touch, and sense of feeling all escape me. My lips are motionless while I remain in a paralyzed state. I reach out for any hope of help, but I receive none. Life itself does not exist. Do I even exist? All the classes I took over the breaks or in my free time I took to studying and expanding my knowledge on the human existence and easier ways to make it through the world which did exist. Now everything I've learned, everything I had, is gone. Nothing matters anymore but the present. Nothing matters but this moment in time.The human species is but an ant in a world of behemoths. I swim through a sea of black trying to search for the light when I suddenly discover something else. Pain. Excruciating pain throughout my body yanks me out of the stillness. It happens quickly, but enough to make me screech.

As my mind grips conscientiousness, I realize a blindfold is obscuring my vision, and a rope binds my hands together so tightly, my wrists start to bleed from the friction. I feel blood seep out of my body as it drip down my wrists and out of my stomach.

Someone must've stabbed me a lot, but not too much as to make me die from blood loss. The kidnapper seems like a sadist to sit there and listen as my screams fill the room, echoing the sounds of displeasure and emphasizing the fact of how slowly my life is being whisked away from me, like a daisy that is one day lively and blooming, yet the next stepped on and squashed. Dead. My feet are tied together, but with this sort of imprisonment, I already know I have no chance of escaping. The one thing that strikes me at an odd is how easily my lips move about. My mouth should be duct taped, or better yet, gagged so that no one can hear my measly cries of SOS. But it's not.

How did I get here in the first place? Let's work backwards from the start.......My name is Satoshi Mochida. I'm seventeen years old, and I'm a male student from Kisaragi Academy Senior High. One of my best friends, Ayumi Shinozaki, was graduating from Kisaragi and going to attend college, so we had a little party inside the school. We spent time in an empty classroom telling ghost stories and eating snacks, but we didn't want that to be the end of our memories and journey together.

Sure, we could always call or visit each other from time to time, but we all would soon go our separate ways. To be with each other always, we performed the Sachiko Ever After ritual, which granted us a charm that would guarantee the fact that we would stay friends for all of eternity. We ripped the paper doll together, each one of us getting granted a piece. Then we recited the words, each of us nine times, "Good Luck, Shinozaki!", to wish her good luck on her trip to college. The only warning we were told before the ritual is if any of us counted one less or one more phrase then the original instruction required us to, something terrible would happen to all of us.

Soon after, we were told to keep the ripped piece somewhere we know it will be safe like somewhere close to us, such as a wallet or pocket. But before we even got the chance to place it, the floor below us caved in and we crashed through a roof of another building like flimsy cards falling into a the hand of an entirely different game. This game requires us students to go insane before we win, die before we win, kill others to live, or live long enough to watch the ones we've loved and spent our most cherished memories with die in front of us. The ghost story we read was about a teacher who lost her footing on the stairs of a school by the name of "Heavenly Host Elementary" and tragically died. The principal treated the school as if it was his own child, but the misfortune continued. On a certain day after the incident, it was decided that the school would be closed down. The principal's heart broke down so much, that on the closing day of the school, he climbed up to the school's rooftop and committed suicide.

As I'm reflecting on the past memories and trying to conceal the obvious pain of the wound I'm handling, the blindfold gets yanked off my face. My eyes dilate as they adjust to the change in atmosphere. I find that I'm laying on the floor like a desperate fish out of water, squinting so that I can find the person who would do this to me. To us. To everyone who ended up here. The room stinks of urine and guts while I discover that the room is painted a warm maroon color, unlike the atmosphere. Finally looking fear in the eye, I decide to lift my gaze up to the person who is standing right above me. I feel vulnerable being tied up like this and having to look up at assailant.