My only Life (The Ones Within x Fem!Reader)

Traveling

71:38:34
That's what the Timer said.

"Check it out." Karin got everyone's attention. "There are numbers written on the back." She held one piece close to her, examining it.

"Six digits...! Same as the password!" Akatsuki sounded happy, I felt a little overwhelmed by the sights of so many different codes.

"So, he gave us this task to find that one little piece that's different than everyone else..." Well, now I'm relating to a piece from a puzzle! Ain't that something?

"U-um...I never done a jigsaw puzzle before...how long does it normally take to complete them?" Inaba asked us, not certain about this whole situation just yet.

"It depends on the person but...for me it takes about half a day to finish a 1000 piece puzzle." Akatsuki said.

"So 30,000 pieces would take roughly 15 days. If we do a simple calculation, dividing the work among 8 people, it'd take about 2 days or less." Oshigiri still sweat dropped about the amount of work that would come.

"Th-...then we'll make it somehow, right...!?"

"I don't think so Inaba-San, since Akatsuki-Kun was probably talking about a puzzle with colors. These here are white ones, they are on a different level since we do not get a hint to where they might fit in." My explanation sounded reasonable and also held truth, even then, I felt depressed about this as well. Seemed like I made their relief vanish too, they looked sad.

"It'll be fine~" we all looked over to her, "Puzzles are my specialty. 30,000 pieces or so is nothing. But we'll need all hands on deck to clear the stage. So, no more idle chit-chat. Hop to it~"

"R-...right. Anyway let's do this." Everybody went to another pile and started to sort them around.

Though I still had my doubts, Yuzu wasn't looking at us the whole time and her cheeriness sounded forced. The words from Paca still left a bitter taste but I just had to trust Yuzu here, she was with us since day one. Not feeling confident again, I just left her be for now and joined the others.

Her scratching sounds could be heard, well for me at least, everyone else was still focused on the task. 'I have to stop getting distracted and focus on this as well!'

"We've got four corner pieces, and those aside, 629 border pieces." I stated, looking over at our work.

"The numbers match up correctly, right?" Akatsuki asked Himiko, she nodded and put a tick on our checklist that we've received from Roromori.

A few hours earlier

"Alright. Everyone start sorting according to these steps." She handed us a piece of paper which I accepted of course.

"...hey. Are we seriously putting this thing together? Wouldn't it be faster to try putting the password going through each of the 30,000 pieces?" Anya asked her.

"I've thought about that, too. But in that situation, only one person can work on it at a time. It's inefficient. Supposing we work in shifts and input the numbers without any breaks, if we spend 5 seconds for every 1 piece it would take roughly 41 hours. It'd be one thing if we were exact, inexhaustible robots, but we're susceptible to losing our concentration and making mistakes. What if worst case scenario, someone made a mistake while inputing the correct piece? What if there's a limit to the number of times we're allowed to input something? We should only turn to a strategy involving so much risk as a final resort."