“You do this, then that… and this is how you solve the problem.”

  The demonic teacher moves his hand to write on the bckboard, but unlike what one might expect, the bckboard remains the same. It has everything written on it since the css started. When he ‘finishes’ writing, he turns around and scans the students. They stay completely silent, doing their best to keep the teacher’s attention away from themselves.

  “Hmm… Who’ll volunteer for the next question?”

  At those words, the student’s faces warp in fear. They know what comes next, and the st thing they want is to volunteer.

  “No volunteers?” The teacher smiles, gently. “Alright, I’ll choose myself then. Hmm… you. Stand up.”

  The demonic teacher points at one of the students, who, clearly reluctant, stands up and waits for the teacher to state the question. He looks around in despair, questioning with his gaze why he had to be the unlucky one to get chosen. It could have been anyone else, why did it have to be him?

  “Khm, khm!” The demon makes a fake cough to clear his throat. “Alright. This one will be easy. If you have four apples and divide them between you and your friend, how many oranges do you end up with?”

  “Pfffft…!?”

  As interesting as the spectacle is, the question is so surprising that I choke. If I had been drinking something and this was reality, I’m sure I’d have soaked whoever was in front of me, leaving a puddle on the ground. I quickly recover and continue watching silently, though not before Laura gres at me. She, too, wants to see what happens next. My actions could have interrupted the py, but luckily, they didn’t.

  “Ha, um, ah…” the student hesitates, “...weren’t we talking about apples? Why are you asking for oranges…?”

  “Buzzz!” The teacher makes an ‘error’ sound with his mouth, “Wrong answer,” and presses a button on the teacher’s desk.

  Above the student, the ceiling opens and a rge boulder falls on top of him. It all happens so quickly, that he doesn’t have time to react before he and his desk get squashed into meat paste. The nearby students don’t seem to mind getting blood on their clothes, they’re more worried about being the next victim.

  “He didn’t even try it…” The teacher shakes his head, impassive. “Alright, you, give me an answer.”

  When he points at another student, that student stands up like the first one, shaking in fear. He thinks for a while, trying to find a good answer, or at least one that won’t immediately get him killed like the first one. He hesitates, anxiously watching the teacher grow bored, his finger already hovering over the button that will kill him.

  “Sixteen!” He suddenly says.

  “Hmm?” The teacher tilts his head, not expecting that answer. He smiles and meets the student’s gaze. “...How did you get to that answer?” He looks like he’s having fun.

  “Uh, ah… I, I…”

  “Don’t lie. Remember it’s what I hate the most.”

  “Uh, I-I… I just made that number up. I thought you’d like that I tried to give a proper answer without hesitation…” As the student talks, his voice fades away, as if he wanted to disappear by getting away.

  “Ahahaha!” The demon bursts out ughing. “This is it! That’s the spirit! If you don’t know the answer, just do your best to get it! If you’re dumb, at least have the guts to try!” He gleefully spins, his arms wide open, before suddenly stopping and smming the desk’s button. “Good idea, but still wrong.”

  *Ching!* A rge flying bde embeds itself on the wall after decapitating the student.

  I see… there are multiple traps, huh? I agree with the teacher’s decision, it’d be boring to watch all of them die in the same way.

  “Since you can’t solve this question, let’s move on to an easier one. You split one human into four parts. With how many humans do you end up with? You, give me an answer!”

  Taking into account this question and the first one, it’s clear what ‘subject’ they’re studying, right? Although I must admit that the way to learn it is questionable… and definitely not ordinary.

  The chosen student, having learned from her predecessors, quickly answers. “You have zero humans because the human will die when you split it into four parts.”

  But unlike the st time, the professor doesn’t seem to like the answer, because he quickly ‘punishes’ the student for giving a wrong one. She ends up impaled on a metal rod that goes from the ground to the ceiling like a brochette.

  “Hah. You end with four dead human parts. Is it really that difficult? Why are my students so dumb…?” He shakes his head as if he were dissatisfied, but he’s wearing a nasty grin as he says it. “Let’s stop this farce for now. You haven’t learned today’s Demonmatics lesson. I’ll expin it all from the start.”

  Standing up from his desk, the teacher walks to the exact same position he was when we first looked inside the cssroom, and starts ‘writing’ on the bckboard. The students, relieved, can finally rex. For as long as the teacher expins, there’s no risk to their lives.

  Haha, I’ve never seen students so happy when they have to listen to theory. Usually, it’s the other way around.

  But before the students can let go of the tension, the demonic teacher suddenly turns around and adds, “Oh, and don’t forget to get the dead to the Resurrection Center once the css ends. We can’t have them skipping lessons.”

  The students anxiously nod, and the css resumes. They don’t want to join the ‘resurrect’ group, so they lower their heads and pay attention.

  How can I describe this…? Brutal. Yeah, that’s the word I was looking for. But for some reason, I can’t stop grinning. This is so perversely perturbing but at the same time so entertaining…

  Laura and I exchange a gnce. It looks like the spectacle has ended. We’ve been to a few csses already, and all were as crazy as this one.

  In cooking css (also called ‘Fiendish Delicacies’), the students had to learn to cook using their own body parts. We didn’t see the extraction process, though; it’d have been way too gore for most pyers. When the show started, all the students already had their missing body parts on top of the table, their wounds covered with bandages, and were ready to start cooking. In physical education (or ‘Meatbag Education’), they had to complete a deadly obstacle course filled with dangers. To me, it seemed more like a ‘torture course’, though. None of the students made it out alive to the end, and more than half decided it wasn’t worth the effort and actively made a ‘mistake’ on the first obstacle to get a swift death.

  By the way, all the students in this school are adults. I’m sure it’s because it’s less perturbing this way, but also because most children are still pretty innocent, and only adults are real sinners.

  “You do this, then that… and this is how you solve the problem. Hmm… Who’ll volunteer for the next question?”

  Distracted by my thoughts, enough time passes that the spectacle inside the css starts from the beginning, from when the teacher starts asking questions. This is what happens in games like this, the likes the NPC have are limited and the only thing they can do is repeat them over and over, until your ears, as the pyer, start bleeding.

  Laura urges me to move forward and start investigating properly, but I signal her to stop.

  “Wait, I want to check something. Can you move away?” I ask her to some distance. “Yeah, it’s okay over there.”

  She sends me a curious gnce, but instead of giving her an expnation, I return to the scene inside the ‘Demonmatics’ cssroom.

  As you might expect, the dead students are still dead, and the traps that sprung the ‘first session’ still show signs of being activated. But what else did you expect from a game? The same scene as before repeats for a second time, only that this time the victims are other students. Still, their lines are the same, and even the teacher’s and students' motions are identical too.

  The only things that change are the students that die, and the traps that kill them.

  I wait for the moment when the teacher points at one of the students. Then, I jump to the side as quickly as I can. I prick my ears, and surely enough, I don’t hear anything coming from inside. I then drag myself over the ground, and as soon as the cssroom pops up in my vision, the action resumes as if I had pressed the ‘py’ button.

  “How interesting…” I mutter to myself.

  “...”

  Laura watches me with a weird face but doesn’t say anything. So I stand up with a fake cough and feign ignorance.

  “Cough, cough. I was just testing the AI and how this dungeon works.”

  “I thought so,” she naturally answers but continues to look at me with the same expression as before. “I too find it pretty interesting.”

  The demons and humans in this dungeon are programmed in such a way that they behave simirly to real-life humans. For as long as their lines don’t end, that is. Still, it’s such a big difference from what I’m used to…

  Even in my dungeon, I’ve used voice lines for some of my monsters, like the human-headed critters in the sealed area; or changed their behaviors to somewhat unusual ones, like the dancing flowers. But nothing that can compare to this dungeon.

  I’ll have to do a few more experiments while I’m here. I’m sure I can learn a thing or two.

  But first… I must check something.

  “What you find interesting is the dungeon design and the monster’s AI, right? As a science computer student, right? It has nothing to do with the fact that this is a demon dungeon where they py and torture sinners in a macabre way, forcing them to act as students, right…?”

  She looks away. “I… why can’t I enjoy both!? Isn’t it weirder to fixate so much on the AI and ignore the rest? There’s so much effort behind the scenario that it’d be a waste to ignore it!”

  “Alright, alright…” Before this turns awkward, I decide to change the topic. “Let’s do some investigating, shall we?”

  All the personnel in this school are demons, while all the students are humans.

  Why am I saying this right now? Because the first pce we go to investigate is the ‘morgue’, the cssroom temporarily converted into a refrigerator to keep the corpses fresh. And since all the victims are students, they’re all human.

  “Hmm… Ugh…” I groan. “I’m not going to touch it. You do it.”

  “What? Y-you want me to touch… t-touch that!? You do it. You’re the boy!”

  “What does gender have to do with this? You can do it too!” Our arguing seems to reach no end. The reason? Well… let me expin from the start.

  As soon as we entered the morgue, we saw the dead students lying in a row. After removing the cloth covering them, we immediately realized that the little imp (the school’s director) was telling the truth: they all are mummified as if drained of all fluids.

  He was right about their ecstatic faces too. I’ve only seen those kinds of expressions on certain adult videos… I’m sure you know what I mean.

  The problem is that this isn’t all about their bodies. Near their nether regions, they have a whitish and sticky substance that resembles you-know-what. Given the situation they’re in, we can guess what it might be; and even if this is inside a game and there’s no way it’s the real thing, it isn’t any less disgusting.

  If the victims were demons, we could have accepted that it was a substance produced by them naturally. I mean, if they can have horns, wings, blue skin, and pustules that constantly emit pus, why wouldn’t they be able to produce a white substance like this one? But all victims are male humans. And male humans only produce something like that in one way.

  Still, to produce so much as to die, and dried up like a mummy at that? Is this the work of a succubus…?

  How dreadful indeed. To die like this… I might have found a preferred way of dying. D-don’t misunderstand! It’s just an idea, an idea! I’m not that crazy!

  …but perhaps…

  “You touch it.”

  Laura shakes her head. “No, you do it. There’s no way I’m touching it.”

  There won’t be an end to this. I’ll have to man up and be the adult. “Alright, alright… Let’s do this,” I propose, “We’ll act as adults and reach an agreement. How about this: nobody touches it and we hope it isn’t relevant for the quest’s resolution.”

  “...fine by me.”

  Alright, problem solved.

  “What I like from quests in DMA is that they can be very different from the usual experience. From time to time, I love finding a dungeon with a quest, to break the monotony.”

  - Words from a random DMA pyer.