Death Paradox 💥BAKUDEKU💥

Chapter 18

THE HERMIT

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Chapter 18

Lunch, if you could call that sorry fucking excuse for a meal lunch, showed up not long after the money finished raining down and the last chipper note of that clown-show jingle faded out. The masks passed the bentos out one by one to the remaining players. What passed for food in this hellhole was a cold block of rice, a half-drowned pickled radish, and something that might've once been meat but now looked like it had ambitions to become concrete.

Didn't matter. Everyone ate. Hunger didn't care about taste, only survival, and the room was full of people who'd do worse than choke down shit to see another morning.

Nobody talked much. The air felt like stale sweat and old blood, every mouthful chewed in silence. Katsuki picked at his rice, eyes drifting across the dorm, picking up on the changes; the numbers were obvious now. Bunks were stripped bare, empty mattresses left where players used to be. The masks moved through the aisles, methodical as fucking undertakers, dragging off the sheets and frame, each clatter another reminder of who hadn't made it. No one said a word about it.

Hell, What even was there to say? After the first game, everyone had been pretty fucking aware of what was going to happen as the games progressed.

When the clean-up was done, the room was left to stew. No instructions, no schedule, just an afternoon stretched thin and useless. The guards retreated behind the large hangar door, the masks gone like ghosts, and for the rest of the day, it was just the one hundred and one players.

Katsuki watched the way people huddled in new groups despite their teams from the last game, the way they eyed every stranger like a loaded gun. The atmosphere had curdled. Half the room was gone. The other half knew, with sick certainty, that there were more empty bunks coming. He didn't need to count to know the odds were getting worse.

He let his mind wander, not really tasting the food, just chewing and watching, half-counting every new bruise and unfamiliar face. That's when Izuku's voice cut through the noise, soft but insistent, snapping him out of it.

"Kacchan? Did you hear what 240— I mean, Uraraka just said?"

Katsuki blinked, dragging himself back to the present. "No. Wasn't exactly dying to hear what the extras were yapping about." The less he got to know these alternates, the better.

Iida straightened at that, already puffing up with the force of a moral compass on overdrive. "456, that's incredibly rude! We're all in this together now—"

Kirishima just grinned, shoveling another bite of rice into his mouth. "Nah, that's just how he is. You get used to it. Kind of."

Katsuki scowled but didn't argue. If anything, it was almost normal... almost like a lunch table back at UA, if you squinted past the body count and hideous suits. The others had settled into something like an uneasy truce, all things considered, and had finally gotten around to introducing themselves over that sorry excuse for lunch. Not that Katsuki cared, he was busy watching every face worth remembering back during the first and second game, and filed the rest under problems for later.

The tension still hummed between all of them, but it was a nervous sort now, jittery and uncertain. It was All Might, of all people, who broke the awkward circuit. The old man plopped down across from them with a gentle, rattling smile and boomed, "Well? What do you all think the next game will be?"

Katsuki shrugged, not bothering to look up from picking at his rice. "At the rate they're thinning us out, we won't even make it through all seven games. Probably only need three or four before there's nobody left to run."