BOOM!!!
The sound of thunder rolled continuously near the school. The lightning in the sky grew increasingly frequent.
SPLASH!!!
The heavy rain poured down.
A man and a woman took large strides, sprinting into the school grounds.
"Phew~"
"Denji-kun, thank goodness we made it in time, otherwise we would've gotten soaked."
"I thought we agreed to stroll naked in the rain?" Denji muttered under his breath, clearly disappointed that they had made it inside dry.
"Denji-kun, aren't you afraid of catching a cold?"
"I'm at the peak of my vitality right now! It's basically impossible for me to catch a cold."
"Oh? I can certainly see that Denji-kun is very... full of energy." Reze smiled, her hands clasped behind her back. "Alright, let's just find an empty classroom to study in."
Reze led Denji into the nearest classroom. She turned on the lights. The neatly arranged desks and chairs brought a wave of joy to her heart.
School had always been the place Reze yearned for the most. Here, there was a good environment for learning. There were many classmates to work hard together with. Going to and from school happily every day. Aside from studying, there was no need to worry about anything else.
But Reze's reality was far crueler.
Since she was a child, she had been controlled and treated solely as a weapon. No family. No friends. She didn't even have a real name. In the Soviet Union, she was only referred to as a "guinea pig," subjected to endless, horrific human experiments.
The only reason she had met Denji was because she was carrying out orders from her superiors. As long as she retrieved Denji's heart and brought it back to her country, her superiors promised to grant her freedom.
But after spending so much time together, Reze found herself feeling genuinely happy when she was with Denji and Arata.
"Reze, what are you thinking about?" Denji nudged the dazed Reze.
"Nothing. Denji-kun, let's do it."
"So fast?!" Denji spun around, his face blushing bright red. But his true thoughts were quickly exposed as he immediately ripped off his jacket.
"Denji-kun, what are you doing?" Reze stood at the teacher's podium, looking completely bewildered.
"Aren't we... doing it?"
"Huh?" Reze was stunned for a second before bursting into laughter.
"What are you laughing at?!"
"Denji-kun, you're way too funny." Reze clutched her stomach, laughing hard. "I... I meant doing practice problems!"
"Uh..." Denji was instantly so embarrassed he didn't know what to do with his hands. "I-I'm gonna go to the bathroom real quick!"
With that, he bolted out of the classroom.
However, he had no idea where the bathroom actually was. Once he was out in the hallway, he completely lost his sense of direction.
Tap... tap...
At that moment, the sound of footsteps echoed from the end of the dark corridor.
Denji whipped his head around, but didn't see anything unusual. Behind him was just an empty, pitch-black hallway, accompanied only by the sound of thunder.
Without overthinking it, he continued searching for the bathroom. After wandering around a bit more, he finally spotted the restroom not far away.
The bathroom was completely dark. Denji reached for the light switch, only to find that it was broken. Left with no choice, he walked in blindly.
Splish.
The floor was soaking wet. Denji stepped through the puddles to open a stall door. He really needed to take a dump.
"Why is it locked?"
Denji pushed two doors, but found them both locked.
"Locking the stalls in the middle of the night? Are they afraid someone's going to steal the poop?"
He pushed a few more doors in a row, all locked. Only the very last stall at the end of the room was open.
Denji pushed the door open, immediately dropped his pants, and squatted down.
Because there was a large gap at the bottom of the bathroom partitions, Denji, having nothing better to do, leaned down to take a peek.
He saw a pair of feet in the stall next to him.
"Taking a dump this late too!"
Denji was slightly surprised to find someone else squatting in the dark bathroom with him in the middle of the night. But remembering that the security guard hadn't been in the booth at the front gate when they came in, he guessed it was probably the guard in the next stall.
He didn't think much of it.
Once he finished his business and felt relieved, Denji knocked on the wooden partition and asked, "Excuse me, do you have any toilet paper?"
His voice echoed in the dead-silent bathroom. But there was absolutely no movement from the other side.
"Hey, spare some paper?"
"You're here to take a dump too, you should understand the feeling of forgetting to bring toilet paper!" Denji called out again.
Still, no one answered.
"Did he leave?"
Denji lowered his head to look again and saw that the pair of legs was still in the exact same spot.
So, he stuck his hand under the gap and grabbed the person's leg.
When he pulled, the entire leg came completely loose and ended up right in his hand.
"What the... what the hell is this?!!!"
Denji frantically dropped the leg.
When he looked up, a severed head was hanging from the top of the partition, staring dead at him with lifeless eyes.
"AHHHH!!!!"
Denji let out a bloodcurdling scream. He violently yanked up his pants, kicked the stall door open, and scrambled outward.
But his foot slipped, and he face-planted hard onto the floor. Splash!
At that moment, a bolt of lightning flashed. Denji finally saw clearly that the puddles on the ground weren't water—it was thick, pooling blood.
He scrambled and crawled, sprinting madly out of the bathroom. He simultaneously screamed Reze's name at the top of his lungs.
But outside, the wind howled and thunder roared. His voice was completely drowned out by the storm.
On his way back, Denji momentarily forgot which classroom they were in. He spun around a few times but couldn't find it.
It wasn't until he noticed bloodstains outside one of the classroom doors that he immediately charged inside.
A man was standing by the window.
"Who's there?!"
VROOOM!!!
Denji swiftly yanked his rip cord, transforming instantly. He swung his dual chainsaws directly at the dark silhouette by the window.
CLANG!!!
The shadow's speed was incredible, blocking the chainsaws instantly with a weapon of its own.
"Are you trying to kill your Master?"
Lightning flashed outside the window. Arata's face was illuminated for a split second.
"Master!!!"
"Why are you here?!"
BOOM!!!!
Another massive clap of thunder roared.
"I came here to check on you."
"Wait a minute. How did you know I was at the school?!" Denji's eyes suddenly turned cold.
"Are you doubting me now?"
"You aren't my Master at all! Where did you take Reze?!" Denji roared.
"You've gotten smarter, kid. Actually starting to doubt your Master's identity. Check your right pocket."
"I can't exactly check right now." Denji was currently in his Chainsaw Man form; he was afraid of being sneak-attacked if he retracted his chainsaws to check his pocket.
DING!!!
A familiar ringing sound.
Denji instantly froze perfectly in place.
Arata reached his hand into Denji's pocket and pulled something out. He then cancelled the Third-Level Dream Realm.
When Denji snapped back, he saw Arata holding a small, shattered mirror in front of his face.
"Does this look familiar?"
"The mirror!"
"Exactly. When the Ghost Devil was in the house earlier today, I gave you this mirror. I told you that as long as you ran into danger and smashed this mirror, I would rush over immediately. This mirror shattered, which is how I knew you were at the school."
"Then I must have crushed it when I fell coming out of the bathroom!"
"How about it? Do you believe I'm your real Master now?"
"I believe you..." Denji said he believed, but internally, he still wasn't 100% convinced.
"Who was it that wanted to be Makima's breast pad?"
"Master!" Denji immediately cancelled his devil transformation and shouted.
"Master, there's a dismembered corpse in the bathroom! And Reze is missing too!"
"Then a serial killer must have snuck into the school. The person who got killed should be the night-shift security guard."
"What about Reze?! There's blood outside the classroom!"
"Don't worry, that's not Reze's blood. It's some guy's blood. He was just incredibly unlucky to run into Reze in the classroom. He probably thought he found a helpless lamb, but instead, he ran into a literal bomb."
"Master, did you take care of the serial killer?"
"The killer was already dead when I got here. So as not to traumatize the kids and disrupt their classes tomorrow, I had my rats eat the corpse. Otherwise, a dead body in the classroom would definitely get the school shut down for a while."
"Then where did Reze go?!"
"Listen closely. That sound echoing outside right now isn't thunder."
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