Horror Survival: I Speed-Ran the Kill Route

The rest of the class stood frozen with grim expressions. The scene before us was a living hell.

The classmates who'd been standing here yesterday, smiling and reassuring us, now lay scattered on the ground with torn limbs and blood everywhere. Some had even been ripped into pieces.

Isolde Adler, the prettiest girl in class, had her face slashed and her body mutilated until she looked nothing more than a human stump.

Someone finally couldn't handle the sight anymore and stumbled aside to throw up, while another broke into panicked, helpless sobs.

My hands trembled slightly, and my face was deathly pale. I was one of the calmer ones, but there was no denying that I was just a high school student.

It all started yesterday, during our class trip. The bus plunged over a cliff, and we woke up to find ourselves here.

A system appeared before us. It told us we were dead and that clearing this game, The Tyrant's Atonement, was our only way back.

It was a game where we could choose our roles.

There were 36 of us, and as long as one person managed to achieve a 100% atonement score, the system would consider it a success for all of us.

The game was streamed live across various platforms. Each of us was given a special phone by the system so we could communicate, watch the livestream, and read the scrolling comments. But we couldn't send any messages ourselves.

There was also a merit vault where we could exchange merit points for items we wanted. Each of us started with 12 merit points.

Once the system finished explaining the game, several classmates volunteered to select their roles and enter the scenario block, including Isolde and the class president, Asher Brooks.

Isolde spent one merit point to purchase a fragment of the tyrant King Ragnar's memories.

The screen flashed and showed a woman in an Aethelian dress saving a young beggar, the future King Ragnar, from a deadly beating.

The viewers filled in the backstory in the scrolling comments section.

"She's King Ragnar's savior and his first love. If not for her, he would have died from the beating back then."

"When he took the throne, the first thing he did was send his secret guards to search for her, but they never did."

"Rumor had it that he never took a queen because he'd been waiting for her."

Isolde was pleased. Just as she was about to enter the game, I stopped her. For some reason, dread was twisting in my chest.

The system said we were the seventh batch to arrive, which meant the previous six batches had failed.

Judging from the number of our current participants, at least 100 players must have joined the game. How had not even a single one of them succeeded?

I shook my head at Isolde, trying to warn her to wait and see. But she patted my hand and reassuringly said, "Someone has to go first. Even if I fail, we all survive as long as someone in our class makes it.

"Don't worry. I'll definitely bring back good news."