The investigator looked down at the two papers he was handed by Faye, from the forensic team.

“What’s this,” He asked,

“Julius… this is the crime scene investigation report just then; The headless case. Also, you should check on this report too.”

“Hm?” Julius looked up from his cup of coffee, “what about it?”

“Thought you’d be interested in it,” Faye responded, “there seems to be another incident. Three corpses, piled at one of the local streets of 9th ward last night. It’s been confirmed that there were four other people at the scene, though their involvement is still uncertain.”

“So, what’s the relation then?” Julian looked at the photos of the report, “Oh that’s nasty.”

“The culprit is likely to be the same, unknown methods and all beheaded. The other three…”

… are either witnesses or accomplice, not that it mattered for the moment being.

With an abnormal case like this, it would be faster to find the evidence through witnesses and also would serve a big role to the investigation. The risk may as well be big when it comes to finding anything useful, and he might lose his occupation.

But even so, such a challenge was inviting him. That’s the thrill of it, after all.

“heh…” He sighed, “so we have to get either of those bunch then. Sure, pass me their report on the case, I’ll take this investigation too.”

“Understood,” Faye then left the office.

Then, Julius sighed again.

He pulled out his phone from the pocket, which showed a message. He had checked the number it was from, but it was just from the number of the phone which the corpse had carried.

Too bad there weren’t any names attached to mobile service account it uses. But this type of information was already all too familiar to him.

[WELCOME TO FREEDOM]

“… what a joke,”

Julius whispered to himself, then he just smiled.

He chuckled to himself, once again, muttering,

“What a joke.”

***

18 hours before,

[WELCOME TO FREEDOM]

“Yeah… About that,” I showed Hoshina the screen of the phone, “I’d like an explanation on this…”

“I see, you just started the game recently haven’t you?”

“well, more like I just started… it’s been nothing but reading and skipping the tutorials… I’m the type that really learns while I’m at an actual game.”

“Skipping-” She looked surprised at first, then disappointed, “You know… that’s gonna cost your life.”

“Well,” I gulped, nothing about earlier today made much sense, and even more so my phone’s notifications of that time… it was too obvious, “I guess that’s a given by now. So yeah, throw me an explanation.”

But yeah, it was a pretty general explanation and bored the hell out of me so I might as well summarize it here.

So, apparently, they call the players of this game ‘sinners’… though specifically, it refers to players who are active/involved with the PVP function at one point. Since this game’s functions of mini-quests and missions on the phone is really just a façade to cover the PVP function, this game already stands somewhat dangerous.

So say it simply, the game should be safe until you have been in a PVP state, whether you challenge or are challenged.

That said, sinners… that’s a pretty harsh way to categorize us. Apparently, the game functions are made possible due to some sort of ‘sting’/injection’ that Hoshino vaguely mentioned when she started the game. I haven’t really experienced anything of the sort prior, so I guess there’s an error or that I’m special… not possible though.

“By the way,” Hoshino suddenly asked so I forget to continue to explain to the audience, “How’d you get that scar? We saw it when I did the first aid on you.”

“Uh…” I looked down a bit at my bandaged body, there wasn’t much about the wound near the right… right, the stitches on my right arm, “Yeah, I think that happened long ago. Don’t worry too much about it.”

“Oh I see,”

Anyways, back to explaining this. Please don't sleep on me though.

This game’s got some interesting perks of its own that I’d pay for if not for the ‘death to all sinners and have them kill each other’ random PVP function. This baby though, it’s got a pretty sweet free data service just dedicated to this app, so lag isn’t really an excuse. There’s also a radar for detecting other nearby players so you can check info whether you want to or not, but the most you’d receive you just be up to the date of birth, gender and ranking.

So far there’s also rankings in terms of PVP, but there seem to be a bit more than 10 with most people in unranked and not engaged in PVP as of yet… so that’s a good thing in itself I guess. Hoshino’s currently rank 13, having only had two encounters, no victories but gained survival points. The point system is pretty much categorized into Attack Points (AP) and Survival Points (SP), obviously, AP would worth more than SP but that being said, that’s how both Hoshino got our points from today.

There’s this A.I. system named [keeper] too, it really acts similar to a game manager to prevent broken rules and such and on top of that, could also be used for other purposes too, like leveling various statuses up and purchased in the game store.

Speaking of the game store, I think that purple thing that Hoshino used was from there, too. Anyways, it really works like any RPG game store with items like potions, buffs, barriers, bombs and gotcha machines.

That being said, there are three titles only available; [young], [sinner] and [king]. These are only available through evolution, so players would by default starting from [young], which is my current title. According to her, there seemed to be a rank lower than [young] though almost impossible to achieve. So far Hoshino has only mentioned that Ms. Hanae is the only person of the [Sinner] stage we know as of so far.

[USER: REAPER (Natsuki Sakuzaki)

RANK: 15 ( 200+ unranked)

TITLE: [Young]

ABILITIES: none

ITEMS: none

POINTS EARNED: 0 (AP) & 1 (SP)

KEEPER: Active

FRIEND: 0 of 0 active]

And to top it off, this is just the beta… the beta of what ‘they’ probably have in plan.

If there’s any real threat now, it’d be the people playing for real; those who currently rank high. I scrolled up to the names up on the top.

[USER: QUEEN (???)

RANK: 2

TITLE: [Sinner]

POINTS EARNED: 4 (AP) & 0 (SP)]

With only attack points and no survival points… that player’s definitely a straight-up murderer. Maybe that player was the one we had encountered, maybe not… but even so, they’re all the same types. If I’m lucky enough, that would be ‘her’ real name.

Anyways, Hoshino started speaking.

“Ms. Hanae, she mentioned there’s a worse function later in the game,” She said, “I’m not sure what it is, though.”

Figures, probably related to her experience, rank, and title.

[USER: HANAKO (Hanae Haruko)

RANK: 10

TITLE: [Sinner]

POINTS EARNED: 1 (AP) & 7 (SP)]

“I see… I guess it was foolish of me to even try to meet up with you,” I sighed, “tonight’s my fault anyways so I’m sorry!”

“Eh… you don’t have to since we’re fine and all,” She flustered a bit, “wait, you tried to meet up with me?”

“Yeah, saw you near the station so I wanted to greet you… not the best choice isn’t it?”

“Pft, I guess you’re right,” she paused for a moment, “by the way, what’s with the username?”

[Reaper], that was the username I ended up choosing. I mean, in a game like this, this name already sounds pretty suspicious but eh, I thought it sounds cool so I went with it.

And so that’s how I responded.

“I thought it sounds cool.”

“What are you, 12?” She asked sarcastically.

“On a scale of one to ten, yeah.”

Then we both chuckled a bit.

***

It was the next day, and Hoshino and I had already had our farewells. There’s no way I was to sleep at a girl’s place that late into the night. Though, living alone probably has its own perks. Well, she probably had it easy living alone.

That being said, it was until breakfast when I met up with everyone. Well, just My sister and uncle really. For some reason, Uncle Tenya had a pretty weird grin to his face.

“Hey Nozomi, what happened to uncle? He’s got a pretty weird smile…”

“Eh, it’s probably from that woman I mentioned before… I think he’s seriously got a chance at it.”

“Ah,” I responded in understanding, “so that’s why he’s eating ramen like that too.”

“I could hear you,” Tenya responded, “pretty clearly on top of that.”

Nozomi and I looked at him briefly and decided that we didn’t really care about his response.

“Apparently it this random woman that he met at the café he works at.”

“Eh… Good on him I guess.”

“Ok, ok guys it’s time for you to shut up,” Uncle Tenya cuts in, and reaches for the television remote. Once he got it, he switched on the television to distract us. Though, it just brought us to the morning news.

‘Last night there has been an incident resulting in three casualties. The police are currently undergoing this investigation-‘

So much for the morning news. It killed our appetite to eat.

“That place…” Uncle Tenya spoke first, “isn’t that pretty close to your bus stop, Sakuzaki?”

“Yeah, it is…” I softly replied.

This incident, without a doubt, was what Hoshino-san and I encountered the night before. Thinking of it still disgusts me, and I don’t think I could do much about it. It was already pretty impressive for the police to even count all those severed limbs and body parts for the ‘mountain of corpse’.

“It’s pretty unfortunate,” Nozomi quietly commented.

“Anyways, just make sure to be safe when you’re on your way to school,” Uncle Tenya immediately turned off the television, seeing as that clearly killed our appetite.

And then Nozomi and I soon packed up to leave for school.

Tenya checked the time; 8:15 am.

“Guess it’s time to go as well.”

Tenya Natsuki, a single bloke in his late twenties and a useless uncle of mine, works at a café store not far from my school. But even so, he usually prefers to walk his way there instead of the bus. And so that’s what he did.

He checked on the counter of the café, just minutes before the opening time. Usually, there’s not much to do during the morning hours, but he looked forward to that moment.

Because there was a certain customer that caught his eye, and it was an opportunity he had not want to let go.

So he prepared the coffee beans into the machine, and let the machine do its job to prepare that certain order.

“One double espresso, please,”

The store opened before he noticed, and Tenya immediately hands the prepared order to the customer.

“Here you go, Hanae-san,” Tenya gives his usual corporate smile to the customer, but sometimes he felt it be genuine.

***

“The hell’s with you?” Daisuke exclaimed when we met on the way to the bus, “That incident on the news, that’s pretty much where you were last night… Wait don’t tell me you-“

“I didn’t do it,” I responded, “What…Do you not trust me?”

“To be honest, yeah,”

That hurt me in more ways than it should.

“hah…” I sighed, “Sorry to disappoint you then, but yeah she was there too.”

“You jumped into a crime scene for a girl?” Daisuke exclaimed just as we both reached to the bus stop.

“You what?” Haru suddenly intervened into our conversation from behind.

“OH WHAT?!” “eh?!”

“What is it now,” Haru pouted, “you guys hiding something from me again?”

“Heh…” I really could not explain my situation last night, after all.

“He jumped into a crime scene for a girl, you know, the one on the morning news.”

DAISUKE YOU ASSHOL-

I mean, excuse the language but Daisuke dogged me out. I guess he doesn’t trust me at all. Gee that bastard seriously wants to ruin my chance with her.

Hearing that obviously surprised Haru, to which she replied, “I’ve only been away for like 2-3 days and you get yourself involved with this? Can’t you just be more mature or something, Natsuki?”

Yeah um, that’s the type of thing you say to Daisuke, not me.

Of course, I didn’t say that.

“…That being said,” She continued, showing me photos on her phone “I was checking some stuff and saw this thing in a photo. There’s this really creepy guy in the background.”

She zooms in on a photo of the three of us, and in the background was a pretty mysterious figure, “I thought it was a stalker of some sorts, so I tried to take some photos of you guys while I was ‘away’.”

“Hey,” Daisuke interrupted, “Aren’t you the stalker in that case?”

Then Haru suddenly exclaimed in the bus.

“HELP ME THIS PERSON IS GROP-”

I covered her mouth, but to that result, she already attracted the attention of everyone on the bus… well, besides the driver. I quickly released it, panicking.

“Ah sorry, I think there’s a misunderstanding,” Haru then calms the whole bus down and continues back at us, “Sorry about earlier but um, I don’t think I’m the stalker in this case.”

It was clearly a threat she said. If we disagree, she’ll claim us to be groping her or something. Even someone like Daisuke was taken back in that instant. We were both reminded that Haru was obviously us all.

This is seriously not fair though, how can a character like her, who only appeared in prologue and barely appeared in the last chapter, undergo so much character development?! It’s like as if the character ‘Haru’ in the prologue is completely different from this one.

“I want you to look at this,” Haru then shows a series of photos of me, in different situations of my everyday life.

I mean, having your crush having so many photos already gives me mixed feelings about this. Isn’t she pretty much the ‘stalker’ who takes the photos?

But then I noticed a common pattern amongst all of them. There was someone wearing a similar hooded outfit for most of them.

If Haru’s the one taking the photos… does that mean I have an actual stalker?

#probablyacliffhanger