You fill my lungs and take away the air [Global Examination]

Chapter 13: A course into the dark night

Standing by his door, mere inches away from the safety and privacy of his room, 154 felt like he was going to die.

Time in the System was wonky at best and messy at its worst, with each examination taking varying amounts of time to complete, and that's not even mentioning exams where the examinees got themselves killed off early, examinees being punished at the Twin Towers, or exams that only had set times for trigger events and not an actual ending time...

Because of this, the System also liked to find ways to standardize things, so it did generally sent invigilators to exams in order to make the amount of relative time that passed "consistent" between the invigilators, so 154 generally had quite a good grasp of how much time had passed in the real world, and how much time had "passed" in the System's reality.

But when it came to the confinement room...

His sense of time had been completely thrown out the window, and between all the flashes of examinees whom he had taken examinations with, examinees who he and 922 had to punish, examinees that he's only seen because the System had announced their deaths in real time... 154 had no idea how much time had actually passed before 922 found him, and set him free.

And the worst part was, just like the System was cut off from access to the confinement room... 154 was also cut off from the rest of this simulated reality.

Everything suddenly felt like... nothing.

It was too quiet, the deafening silence within the room just screaming death at 154.

One petal, two petals... one flower, two flowers.

At least, there was no one in the confinement room except the bulging eyeballs, the unearthly gaze of the dead and the dying, to witness 154 and his blossoming feelings as he hurled up more flowers into the empty room full of the lingering remains of eternal rest.

Feelings that 154 would not be able to feel if he wasn't alive, living a life that was perpetuated by the very examinees that had been slaughtered by the System.

His throat was so sore, torn up from the petals and stems that spilled from his lips, and 154 was fortunate that amongst the darkness and chaos of his confinement room, 922 had failed to notice the coppery stains that were masked against his dark coloured outfit, the faint traces of bloody evidence left on his lips, the flowers and petals that had once been clogging 154's throat now scattered across the floor, hidden amongst the bodies that were still bleeding out and the mess of mangled corpses.

His coat also helped greatly; not did it keep out the cold, but 154 had also somehow managed to discreetly stow the flower petals that he had choked out, right in front of 922, in one of the pockets on the inside of his coat, with his partner none the wiser.

Or maybe 922 had just been distracted when 154 tried to grab the confinement room keys from him, and simply didn't notice him purposefully, discreetly hiding the flower petals away.

After all, 922 wasn't the only one he had to hide his Hanahaki from. 

Speaking of which... the System also seemed particularly lax today, only asking 154 for a personal account of what had happened with the confinement room while they were returning the confinement room keys to their rightful place in the monitoring room, before taking it upon itself to fix the issue by wiping the confinement room and giving it a hard reset.

Hopefully, by restoring it to its original settings, it would be sufficient to eliminate the bug that resulted in the confinement room automatically starting up upon the door being closed, instead of only when an examinee had to be punished... while also wiping away any remaining evidence of his emotions.