The sudden terrorist incursion had caught GHQ headquarters genuinely off guard.
Major Rowan moved with a full squad at his back, sweeping floor by floor from the tenth down — not one room skipped, not even the bathrooms. Every exit was sealed. Ambush teams had been dispatched to the drainage vents and ventilation shafts. The two intruders were rats in a box.
— Thank goodness for Mr. Diavolo's warning.
Rowan allowed himself a moment of quiet relief. His clearance level didn't extend to whatever this so-called "gene" business was about, but he'd had enough authority to overhaul the base's entire defensive configuration on short notice — and that was entirely thanks to General Yang's trust in him.
"Sir, look — blood!"
The door to an archive room swung open. On the floor: a clear bloodstain, still fresh, not fully dried. Whoever had been here had only just left.
"Analyze it immediately."
Rowan's brow furrowed as he gave the order.
Soldiers in white armor crouched down with scanners, projecting a thin beam of light onto the stain to begin analysis.
Japan had become ground zero for the Apocalypse Virus ten years ago. After GHQ took control of the country, it began distributing regular vaccines to suppress the spread of the crystallization disease — at the cost, naturally, of significantly steeper taxes than the decade before. As a result, a blood sample could now be cross-referenced against the population registry almost instantly. Crime rates had plummeted accordingly.
"Major... this individual has no record. Completely unregistered."
"Tch. Someone from the Roppongi exclusion zone?"
Rowan clicked his tongue in irritation. Crime rates may have dropped, but the people inside the exclusion zones were completely beyond the law — drug rings and terrorists growing out of environments like that was hardly surprising.
"Major Rowan."
His earpiece crackled — the voice of a comm officer from the command center, one of the few personnel who'd managed to get organized under circumstances this chaotic.
"We've located the intruders... only now there are three of them. Someone joined up with them at some point."
"What?"
"I've already dispatched pursuit teams, but one of them — a masked figure — moves in a way we can't account for. Infantry can't stop them. I suspect the terrorists smuggled in some kind of individual combat weapon through OAU—"
Rowan's eyes went wide.
He'd encountered the original two himself — one tall, one short, and one of them looked practically like a child. If they hadn't grabbed a grenade off a fallen soldier in a panic and blown out a wall to block his path, they'd have been in cuffs already. And now there was a third one? Some kind of terrifying "combat weapon"?
"They're heading for the East-2 gate. Looks like they're planning to use the main bridge!"
"Running scared?" Rowan couldn't help exclaiming. "That's a death trap."
These terrorists really had been backed into a corner — making a desperate last stand. Survival instinct must have overridden rational thought. Two or three of them, it didn't matter. If they were foolish enough to walk that route, there was only one outcome waiting for them.
"Your orders, Major Rowan? Shoot to kill, or—"
"The General wants prisoners if possible. We need intel on the terrorist organization 'Funeral Parlor' directly from the source, and that combat weapon could be a key lead as well."
Rowan wasn't known for cool-headed tactical thinking. He executed orders. That was his strength.
"Deploy the GOCE Endlave units to the bridge. Hold position and cut off their escape."
"Yes, sir!"
...
...
Inori Yuzuriha led Gai and Kyo through the facility on routes she'd memorized. The enemy had apparently caught on to their direction and was converging from multiple angles — though the narrow corridors neutered their numerical advantage, and then there was Inori herself, the terrifying "combat weapon" in their midst.
A set of double iron doors blocked their path. Every other route was sealed. To reach the main exit, they had to pass through the wide-open hangar beyond.
Inori drew her sidearm and shot out the keypad lock, then threw herself shoulder-first into the doors and shoved them open. The moment they swung wide, searchlight beams snapped onto them from multiple angles. Figures in armor converged. Inori reflexively shielded her eyes — but King Crimson, already slipping out of her body, had already counted the dozen-plus soldiers ahead, rifles raised, waiting.
"You're not getting away!"
"Drop your weapons! Surrender now!"
— Interesting. Confident, are we? Or something else? Either way, GHQ isn't shooting to kill — if they were, we'd already be shredded.
"Wait! Don't shoot — I surrender!"
Gai stared in open disbelief as the girl who had just shown extraordinary skill with near-perfect precision screamed for mercy, tossed her weapon out voluntarily, and raised both hands.
"You too — weapons on the floor! All three of you! Hands on the backs of your heads and squat down!"
The lead soldier barked the commands with barely contained triumph. This might be the biggest catch of his career.
"Hey — what do you think you're doing?"
"It hasn't come back yet," Inori murmured without turning, her voice barely above a whisper. "Buying time."
"It? Buying... time?" Gai stared at her blankly. He had no idea what she was talking about.
"Mm. My Void."
Inori smiled — then turned to face them, pulling the face mask down as she did.
A girl with a smile that bloomed like a flower and a wildness in her eyes that could set the air on fire. A face so achingly close to the her Gai had spent so long chasing — down to the exact curve of that smile.
Then she raised her right hand, stripped off her glove, and held it up. On the back of her snow-white hand, a dark tree-shaped crest pulsed with faint light. He couldn't see it himself, but the gathered luminescence seemed to flow back into her body — and that crest was the mark of the Power of Kings. The very thing he and Kyo had risked everything to retrieve.
Gai's throat worked silently. He couldn't produce a single word.
"Hey! Eyes forward!"
The soldiers had noticed something was wrong.
"Get down, Gai Tsutsugami!"
Inori left him with that and spun around. A flash of red — visible only to her — and she was moving at a speed no human body should allow, cutting sideways across the hangar. But the distance from the entrance to the soldiers was dozens of meters. Even the slowest reflex would be fast enough to respond.
At a single command, more than a dozen automatic weapons opened up simultaneously.
Gai didn't hesitate — he threw himself over Kyo and hit the floor.
The entrance to the hangar sat two steps lower than the interior. Flat on the ground, the bullets sailed mostly over them.
— King Crimson!
Inori activated Time Erasure — but her target wasn't the soldiers. It was the decommissioned Endlave rusting in the corner, forgotten for god knows how long. A broken Endlave was no better than scrap metal, and scrap metal was exactly what she needed right now.
Every soldier froze in place. The girl who had been moving a moment ago seemed to teleport — vanishing clean out of their floodlights. Raw, nameless fear swept through the room. And then, from directly above them, they heard it.
"Endlave da!!!"
Her voice.
A massive shadow swallowed the light. The decommissioned antique — heavy, ancient, irreparably broken — fell from above. No one had time to run. It landed squarely on top of them with a thunderous crash that shook the floor underfoot. Blood pooled from beneath the crushed wreckage. Severed limbs. The scene was grotesque.
Inori clapped her hands together and loosened up her joints, then hopped down from the wrecked Endlave.
— Not bad. Would've been even better if it was a steamroller.