Do you know what it feels like to die from your blood drying out?
It’s an expression describing extreme torment, used when someone suffers physically and mentally for a long, grueling stretch.
We’re feeling exactly that right now.
A sensation like our blood’s drying up.
“……”
“……”
Three days.
We’ve been trapped in this ghost story, trembling in fear of death, waiting for our companions who’d never come—without proper sleep or food. We’re experiencing firsthand what a human being is like in that state.
Did you know that if a person doesn’t sleep properly for a solid three days, they start to lose the ability to think rationally?
‘Perfect for going insane.’
Especially if the person you’re with was a minor who just got involved in a ghost story for the first time.
“Hiek! W-Where are we going…?”
“…It’s been 56 minutes. Let’s move.”
The high school student I was supposed to rescue staggered to his feet, limping.
He’s probably more mentally drained than I was. He’s starting to waver more from dizziness than from the ankle injury and was muttering nonsense into thin air instead of crying.
He didn’t even have the energy left to weep or get angry anymore.
‘He’s hardly eaten, too.’
Obviously, safe food was extremely scarce in this damned supermarket, and nearly everything that’s available was something a high schooler wouldn’t normally touch.
…Like rats or cockroaches.
Things that clearly wouldn’t be considered store merchandise by anyone’s standard.
‘He’d rather starve for three days than eat that lineup.’
Occasionally, we found items that shoppers already paid for but lost—things that appeared in the food court randomly. If those happened to be food, we’d eat them.
In the last three days, that’s happened exactly once.
When had a banana ever been so precious in your life?
‘Which means the only thing we’ve eaten in three days was that single banana…’
It’s insane.
Luckily or unluckily, we hadn’t come across any other missing persons on the second floor, so we had no competition for resources.
It made sense, though. Most missing people…
‘…are on higher floors.’
“……”
Anyway.
We’re at our limit.
‘The high schooler I’m looking after is out of stamina and willpower.’
Even trying to fill up on water from the food court’s dispenser had its limits.
If this were to go on for two more days, he’d probably be forced to eat those rats or bugs.
‘Of course, it’s even more likely that something else will ‘go wrong’ before that.’
Currently, we got up to go to the bathroom every hour. If one of us would doze off or collapse and we miss our window, then…
That’s it.
‘…We’d run into an employee.’
Whether it’s an employee coming by to take orders, or one pretending to clean the restroom…
Escorted outside. Reported missing.
Nothing but a single line in an exploration record stating our disappearance.
The mix of revulsion and dread creeping down my spine was overwhelming.
“……”
Frankly, managing to survive for three days in a ghost story with an injured minor was already feat in itself.
And to be clear, I’m not an idiot. I didn’t intentionally create this situation.
‘I never thought I’d go three days without finding Agent Bronze…!’
Right. My senior agent has vanished.
This is insane.
“……”
On the first day, I thought maybe we were just missing each other.
‘Did we spend those thirty-plus minutes hiding under the display while he came up to the second floor and left?’
If I didn’t have an injured high schooler to look after, I might’ve been more aggressive in planning an escape.
So, after much deliberation, I decided to stay on the second floor.
‘If he wants to rest, he’s most likely to come back here.’
Honestly, I didn’t have much choice anyway. Hauling an injured teenager up and down floors was practically suicide.
So we picked the relatively safe second floor to wait it out, and I still think it was a sound decision.
But that guy never showed up.
So from the second day on, I began searching other floors.
I couldn’t do long searches, because leaving the injured high schooler alone for hours seemed like a death sentence.
But I pushed myself to the limit, even making a crazy trip down to the basement floor, and still nothing changed.
Agent Bronze was nowhere to be found.
At least not within the area I could feasibly search in an hour.
That’s how three days had gone by.
And then…
‘All this time, the supermarket never resumed normal operations…’
This is one of the reasons they urge you to escape before closing—the culprit that makes this supermarket a hell and lowers the survival rate for civilians.
The shortest interval observed for the supermarket to resume operations is one day, and the longest is twenty days.
It’s impossible to know when it would reopen for business.
That’s right.
No one knew when Looky Mart’s ‘next day’ would begin.
Sometimes it opened normally after just one day, but other times hundreds of hours might pass from a human perspective, yet not even a day has gone by in the supermarket’s timeline.
‘That’s why people speculate the timeline in Looky Mart gradually drifts further and further from reality, until eventually… it’s stuck way in the past.’
Whether that’s accurate or not doesn’t matter right now. What mattered was the reality that we’re facing.
We’ve been trapped here for three whole days.
…And I’m starting to fear what might be going through the high schooler’s head.
“W-We actually came here looking for a kid who lives in our apartment complex.”
Right then, I heard him mumbling dazedly.
“…You came looking for him?”
“Yeah, yeah. He sent me a DM saying he was heading to Lucky Mart, and then he vanished. So we thought it was some kind of ghost story, and decided to investigate…”
Good grief.
“But that was stupid. He’s probably dead by now… H-How awful if he ended up in that blender?”
“…Don’t go leaping to the worst conclusion.”
I patted the high schooler on the shoulder.
“For now, you’ll be able to leave today.”
“…Huh?”
I had a reason to believe that.
I recalled the record that presumably belonged to Agent Bronze.
An unexpected situation arose, and the agent lost contact for three days.
Result : Rescue failed. Agent returned alone.
If I reconstruct that.
‘After three days, the Bureau reestablished contact with the agent.’
He then escaped on his own.
Even if the rescue attempt failed, he definitely tried to save the civilian.
‘He must have planned to hold out until the supermarket resumed operation.’
So statistically speaking, there was a high chance the store would open again today.
“W-Wait, are you saying…”
“Yeah. Let’s see.”
Hope and expectation surged as I calmly checked my wristwatch.
[ 09 : 59 ]
My heart pounded.
Any moment now, when the time changed…
[ 10 : 00 ]
On the dot.
Silence.
“…?”
I waited a bit longer.
But nothing happened.
No jingle. No announcements. No lights clicking on.
……The doors did not open.
“……”
Once again, the supermarket didn’t reopen for business today.