BLACK BULLET 4

CHAPTER 03

THE THRESHOLD OF VICTORY

1

“It’s begun, Satomi.”

At Kisara’s reverential whisper, Rentaro frowned. But before he could say another word, she spoke again.

“Look at the Monolith.”

Rentaro raised his gaze from the ground to look. A ripple of shock went from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. First, a corner of the rectangle collapsed. But that immediately led to the next collapse. Finally, the enormous body of the cracked Monolith couldn’t stand up against the Varanium corrosion fluid any longer and let out a scream, and then nothing could stop the chain reaction of structural failure.

From where Rentaro was, he couldn’t hear the sound of the actual collapse, but that made the shriek of the Monolith a moment before even clearer. Abruptly, the whole bleached pane became fatally splintered, and the Monolith looked like it was shrugging its shoulders as it disintegrated. Chills went down his spine with it.

The Monolith fell like time-lapse photography, starting from its base with fragments flaking off the top. In no time, it would crash into the ground. As he watched, there came a roar, and then they were hit with a shock wave rumbling the ground, forcing Rentaro to raise his arms and grit his teeth. The vibration shook Rentaro from his feet to his guts, and the shock wave blew away the surrounding debris, rotting signs, and sheet metal that had fallen.

When Rentaro lifted his face, he saw the sky was covered by a cloud of dust and fine particles. “No way…”

It was starting. The Third Kanto Battle was starting—and not when they were planning for it to start.

“Satomi!” Kisara yelled.

“I know!” Rentaro fixed his eyes on the broken Monolith once more and ran toward the battlefield. No matter what, he couldn’t leave Enju, so he ran down the stairs from the roof and through the police station. Inside the station was chaos, with everyone pointing and screaming at Monolith 32 in the window.

“Enju!” He found her sitting in the waiting room, looking down dejectedly.

“Rentaro…” Enju looked at him and slowly tried to put a cheerful expression on her face. It was painful to watch.

“Enju, let’s go.”

Enju looked like she didn’t understand. “Go where?”

“What do you mean, ‘where’? To the base at the front lines! The Monolith collapsed!”

The girl turned her head, seemingly noticing the frantic screams and fleeing bodies around her for the first time. “It…collapsed?”

Rentaro shuddered. “You… Don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed?”

Even though it was so loud…

Enju shook her head. “I noticed. It’s just…I was just a little spaced out, is all.”

Rentaro didn’t reply; he simply closed his eyes. Enju had just heard the news of the death of her classmates this morning. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t want to put her on the battlefield. However, the current situation was not so kind.

“Rentaro, I’ll jump with you on my back,” said Enju.

“No, that’s okay… Let’s run,” said Rentaro.

“Why?”

“Just do it.” Rentaro took Enju’s hand and they hurried outside. He tried to flag down a nearby taxi but soon realized it was futile. The cars were fleeing, scattering whether or not there were passengers riding in them, and now all he could see were people running around screaming.

When they hit a thoroughfare, the conditions were even worse. The six-lane street was in a state of confusion, with cars at a standstill and horns honking in a loud chorus; all the while people were abandoning their cars to get just a little farther away from Monolith 32.

Rentaro and Enju bumped into shoulder after shoulder as they ran through the crowd, running in the opposite direction as everyone else. No matter how much time passed, they could not find a ride. There was no train station nearby, and even if they had been able to make it to a station, there was no guarantee that trains would be running on their usual schedule in this state of emergency.

In the meantime, they passed through to the neighboring District 40. There were fewer people there, and it was mostly filled with abandoned buildings. As they ran, he swept his gaze left and right: Even though Rentaro’s body was moving at full speed, his brain was calmly analyzing their current situation.

There was still quite some distance between them and the civil officers’ base at the front lines. So, it was obvious that he would not be able to continue running at the speed he was now, overexerting himself. Wasn’t there anything he could do?

There were scooters, motorcycles, and cars around them, but the former two were covered in rust and pretty much totaled; the latter were missing tires and had their hoods open, their parts looted.

But shortly after, he glimpsed a bicycle hidden in the crack of a building. After a quick inspection, he found it in usable shape despite showing its age; it had air in its tires and had had maintenance done. A resident of the Outer Districts had fixed it and had been using it, no doubt. It was a granny bike with thin tires and a child seat strapped to the back.

However, a joint-type bike lock connected the body of the bike to the pole next to it. Rentaro looked left and right and apologized silently to the owner, vowing to return it later. Drawing the gun from his hip, he took three steps back and aimed. He carefully pulled the trigger and fired, and the bullet blew the lock away.

Sitting astride the saddle, he put Enju behind him and pedaled hard. The bike seemed to stretch as it accelerated, shooting through the streets of the Outer Districts. A sudden warning siren rang in his ears, and he lifted his face in surprise, looking around him. The siren roared high and low, coming at them from all directions.

“A biohazard warning?” he said. In the ten years after the war, no matter how dangerous a Pandemic crisis Tokyo faced, this warning had never been sounded, but now, it was echoing around them, ringing like crazy.

Then, another strange thing occurred: After a loud screech pierced his ears, a large black mass came toward them from the northern sky. Suddenly, the street was covered by a dark shadow, and Rentaro and Enju, who were going full speed on the bike, were completely surrounded by it, their world turning dark. It was so dark that it could have been mistaken for night.

He soon realized what the black mass was. Birds. A group of birds of various species and sizes screeched noisily as they flew away in the opposite direction of the fallen Monolith. So even the birds had started their escape—they seemed to know instinctively that Tokyo Area had no future.

Enju made a fist with her hand, which was wrapped around Rentaro’s waist from behind, and he could feel sweat on his palm. Rentaro pedaled even harder and shifted into high gear. Before he knew it, the handlebars, too, were slick with sweat. He naturally lifted his pelvis as he sat and rounded his back to reduce air resistance, rising into a racer’s stance.

He raced around the utility poles that were bent back and forth and the useless traffic lights, weaving his way through the cars lying around like an obstacle course, leaning this way and that to avoid them. Avoiding the traffic signals enabled him to save more time than he expected.

After the Monolith collapsed, they would definitely see Aldebaran’s troops start moving. Unfortunately, the self-defense troops who were stationed downwind had been showered with the dense mineral dust from the collapse and were probably in a state of panic. The problem was whether or not they would be able to regroup and attack before the Gastrea arrived.

Getting onto a highway, Rentaro stood up and pedaled to climb the small hill. There was a cliff to his right with a guardrail next to it. Climbing the hill required a lot of stamina, and he was soon panting, his calves straining, but he finally made it to the top, where a cool breeze whipped around his body.

Looking over, he saw that the tracks of the overhead train line running parallel to them were blocked with piles of clay roof tiles and blocks that had been blown over. He was right to not head toward the train station after all. It would be impossible for them to run.

Abruptly, he thought he felt a tire hop and gave a small yell. His inattention brought calamity, and he ran over a rock on the curb. The bike fluctuated wildly.

“Rentaro! In front of you!” Enju shouted.

Before him, the guardrail in front of the approaching cliff had been scraped away. The cliff below was steep, and the forest beyond seemed very small and far away. If they fell, it would be instant death.

He yanked the handlebars to the left and released the power of his artificial leg. The artificial skin and his uniform on his right leg were torn off as he fired cartridges out of the limb. From the thruster, there was an instant of bursting sparks as their inertia adjusted. Resistance in the pedals disappeared as he lifted his feet, and they accelerated so much that it seemed like they were going to be thrown off. But they turned at the last minute, and followed the curve of the guardrail.

Rentaro was in shock from the close call. They definitely couldn’t afford to be injured in a place like this. Still, he didn’t slow down as he continued.

Finally, the base at the front lines came into view. Even from far away, he could see clearly how the civil officers were flustered. They were trying to make the formations they had learned in a hurry, but they were confused, and their lack of experience was already being exposed.

By the time Rentaro had left the bike in front of their tent and rushed to the front of the squad tent, the rest of his team members were already talking things over in a circle.

When Kisara saw Rentaro, her eyes widened. “Satomi, how did you get here? Even Tina and I just got here a minute ago—”

Rentaro’s whole body was covered in sweat, and he tried to calm his ragged breathing. He placed both hands on his knees and somehow managed to raise his head, then wiped his mouth with a sleeve. “I’ll tell you later. We’re going, too!”

It took some time for the civil officers to recover from the confusion caused by the unexpected destruction of the Monolith. The destruction of the enormous rectangular structure standing 1.618 kilometers high and 1 kilometer wide produced an enormous amount of dust and ash that was blown upward into a heavy cloud. In little time, it covered the sky of Tokyo Area and hid the sun.

The prediction from the Japanese government office had included the shock wave from the collapse, the ashes, and the irregular weather, but there was a big difference between hearing about it and actually seeing it in person, and the strangeness of it forced Rentaro into feeling like the world was ending. Even so, he and the other civil officers managed to complete their battle formation in about three hours, but that did not seem to be the case for the self-defense force on the front lines. Because of the wind, the ashes from the Monolith were blown directly at the self-defense force’s camp. But even with that, they were able to rally because of their regular training and their reputation as defenders of the country.

At around 7 p.m., even though it was summer, the sky had turned an indigo blue, and it was finally time for the invasion of Aldebaran’s troops. From where Rentaro and the others were, the back of the SDF formation was too far away to see Aldebaran’s troops beyond them, but the clouds of dust their enemies kicked up as they marched forward in lines blurred the horizon, and the low, beastly roar of their voices gave Rentaro goose bumps. They had probably gone around the fallen Monolith before finally making it inside the city.

It was the omen of an unavoidable Great Extinction. He’d watched the scene on a video-streaming site many times—when Gastrea invaded a broken line of Monoliths, the possibility that the people living in that city would all be killed was 100 percent, and up until now, there had been no example of any city avoiding the Great Extinction once a wall went down.

The next instant, someone opened fire.

The self-defense force’s long-range weapons—self-propelled guns, tank guns, and automatic cannons—all fired at once, drawing a dazzling arc as they rushed into the enemy Gastrea. The next instant, there was an explosion. The first lines of Gastrea were blown away spouting flames, and the next line of them plunged in deeper than the first.

A crimson battlefield appeared, and the sky burned. The shock wave came later and reached even Rentaro, and the hot wind of the battlefield hit his whole body. Rentaro lifted his arm to shield his face and narrowed his eyes beneath his hand. Looking at the scorching-red sky, Rentaro felt a throbbing pain at the base of his artificial right arm.

It was the same. He had seen the same sky ten years ago. It was the hell that the young Rentaro had seen at the end of the Gastrea War: Gastrea had invaded the area where he had been living, and he had been pushed onto a train and sent to live with the Tendo family. On the way to Tokyo, he’d seen different battlefields from the window of that train—burning cities, burning farms, burning people. At the boundary between the jet-black sky and the red flames, the endless indigo blue gradation had warped and burned its image onto Rentaro’s retina.

The passengers had shoved in close together and were all shaking and crying inside the train car, finally resorting to prayer—quietly, to themselves, of course. The fact that the train had arrived in Tokyo without being overturned or derailed by Gastrea was a miracle in and of itself.

Rentaro squeezed his chest and tried to check the unpleasant sweat pouring out of him with all his might, trying desperately to put a lid on the terrible memories.

Five hours passed in the way, until the time read midnight. The battlefield was locked in night, and it became a night battle in earnest. The sky was closed off with the ashes of the Monolith, so there was no moon, and there were no streetlamps in the Outer Districts, so it was surprisingly dark.

From the midst of all that, Rentaro could intermittently hear the deafening roar of tank guns and shock-wave blasts that shook the atmosphere. There were the flames of 25-mm machine guns firing rhythmically like a typewriter. In the spaces between, he could hear the groans of Gastrea, followed by their angry cries and screams.

And, just as he had predicted, the self-defense force never asked for support from the civil officers no matter how much time had passed.

Rentaro was growing impatient. What were they thinking? Did they really think that they could win this war holding on to worthless things like distinguished service, territoriality, and pride? Shouldn’t they attack the Gastrea as one right now? Who was even winning? What was the current state of the war?

When Rentaro turned his head to look at the civil officer troops’ battle formation, he saw that even though they had built campfires, many also watched the proceedings anxiously.

From atop a small hill, Rentaro and his group could see the situation of all the squads clearly. His group was a kilometer in front of where the frontline base tent had been built, and they were spread out to the side as they waited. The troop, made up of a little over a thousand civil officers, was grouped into adjuvants, and they were placed under the charge of a company commander in sets of ten. The one in charge of the company commanders was Troop Commander Nagamasa Gado.

Diagonally in front of Rentaro to the right, he could see the superior officer directly above him in rank, the company commander. Apparently, all the company commanders had been selected from Gado’s adjuvant, and this one was a young man equipped with a lead-colored, Japanese armor-type exoskeleton. His name was Hidehiko Gado, and he was the biological son of the general commander, Nagamasa. He had a pale face with hollow cheeks, with a long, thin face and glasses. He looked like an academic who was always shut up in research labs that didn’t get any sun, or perhaps a librarian.

Next to him was an Initiator named Kokone. At training the day before yesterday, Hidehiko had rubbed her shoulders, lifted her chin, and stared at her profile entranced. It looked like he had feelings for his Initiator beyond that of a partner or family member.

Looking at Hidehiko, Rentaro couldn’t help but feel uneasy. Even in just these last few days that the civil officer troops had spent training together, Hidehiko’s clumsiness was apparent. It wasn’t just that he passed down orders slowly—he seemed to lack the ability to make decisions, and Rentaro didn’t feel any confidence or dignity from the man’s orders.

Even now, as he held his partner Initiator’s shoulders, he looked like he was desperately mumbling a prayer. He was probably praying that the SDF would win and that he would not have to take his turn.

Behind adjuvant leader Rentaro was the president of the Tendo Civil Security Agency, Kisara Tendo, and her partner, Tina Sprout, who was holding an antitank rifle almost as tall as she was. And then there was the president of the Katagiri Civil Security Agency, Tamaki Katagiri, and his little sister, Yuzuki Katagiri. Also waiting were Rentaro’s senior disciple in the Tendo Martial Arts, Shoma Nagisawa, and his partner, Midori Fuse. They were all filled with nervousness, and they were holding their weapons at the ready so they could rush out and fight at any time.

And right next to Rentaro was—

“Rentaro, do you think the self-defense force will win?” Rentaro stole a sideways glance at Enju Aihara’s profile, her nervous face staring far out over the horizon.

Even as Rentaro felt impatient, he closed his eyes firmly and tried to change his thinking. Right now, he could not prioritize Enju. He had to prioritize what they were doing.

How much time had passed?

The gunfire slowly grew sparse, and the voices of the Gastrea faded. And then abruptly, both of those sounds disappeared.

On the flat plain in front of him spread darkness that seemed to absorb the stillness of night. Agitation spread noisily, like ripples, among the civil officers. Rentaro overheard people saying:

“Hey, what happened?”

“Who won?”

“Someone go look.”

Rentaro felt a sudden tap on his shoulder and turned around to see Shoma looking at him with a grave expression on his face. “What do you think, Satomi?”

“I don’t know… But thinking about it rationally, the self-defense force probably won.” Rentaro stopped talking and looked up, into the darkness. “Right now, I can’t hear the voices of the Gastrea or the sound of the cannons. It’s probably because they drove the Gastrea away.”

He had said that mainly to make himself feel better. Then, he looked at Hidehiko Gado. “Hey, you. Why don’t you try sending a flare up to headquarters to sound things out?”

The oval-faced company commander shook his head like there was no way he could. “None of the other squads are doing that, are they? We can’t act arbitrarily on our own!”

Rentaro was about to protest that they should do it because no one else was doing it but then shook his head. This man’s thinking was so different from his own that it didn’t matter what Rentaro said.

Suddenly, Tina, who had been peering into the darkness quietly this whole time, murmured quietly, “Big Brother, someone’s coming.”

“You can see them?” Rentaro asked. Then, he remembered that Tina was an Initiator with the Owl Factor in her body. Her eyes had the ability to amplify even the tiniest bit of light and project it onto her field of vision.

“Yes, there are people walking this way. And it’s not just one or two of them.”

Before long, as if backing up Tina’s words, shadows of people appeared blurrily about a hundred meters in front of them, near where the limit of the light of the bonfires reached, and he could see shadows walking toward them.

There were about fifty people walking in a line, side by side. They were all SDF officers wearing digital camouflage that met the technical specifications for the year 2031. Among the civil officers an obvious sense of relief spread, and Rentaro could see some civil officers break rank to rush forward and tend to them.

But Rentaro felt uneasy.

Thinking about it rationally, they probably came to report that they successfully drove away the Gastrea. But then, why did they send so many people? It would have been enough to radio the information over, so they couldn’t all be messengers. Even if he allowed that they would send messengers, then one, or at most, two, would have been enough. And they weren’t even riding motorcycles.

Slowly, they grew bigger in his field of vision. They seemed to be injured and were walking unsteadily. Seeing them, the Initiator from the team right next to Rentaro couldn’t help but rush out toward them. She was a girl about eight years old. As an Initiator, she was probably just barely old enough to bear fighting. She had soft curly hair, and she looked kind. As she rushed toward the injured fighters, she peeked up at the faces from below, showing consideration for the soldiers. Then, abruptly, she stopped moving.

At that moment, Rentaro also noticed something out of place. The soldiers were walking calmly, even as they held in their intestines that were spilling out of their stomachs. And they had gotten close enough that their expressions could be seen—their faces were ashen and their lips blue. The blood spilling out of their cut stomachs soaked bright red into their camouflage uniforms. From their half-open lips came cryptic groans.

There was no question that they had lost more than a fatal amount of blood. It was an unpleasant sight that they were all too familiar with, and they all got chills.

Rentaro called out to the girl. “Get away! Don’t go near them!”

The girl turned back, looking like she was about to cry.

Suddenly, everything above her neck disappeared. The next instant, blood spurted forcefully into the air like a geyser. The girl’s legs became tangled, and her body fell forward.

There was a stifling stink of blood. Right next to Rentaro, there was a thud as something about the size of a basketball fell to the ground.

He froze with his eyes wide open. He could not for the life of him find the courage to turn his head a little to look there.

As if waiting for that moment, all the soldiers’ bodies burst open from the inside. What appeared from each was eight legs that included a set of two large pincers. Bodies, flattened, slid parallel to the ground, but their backs arched and at the tips of their gigantic tails shone things that looked like sharpened blades.

Arachnids—mottled scorpion Gastrea—appeared, attacking with red eyes glittering. One made a giant leap into the adjuvant next to them. Even though it was still a larva, it was so sudden that they were too late and were cut, screaming with a shower of blood.

Looking around, Rentaro could hear screams and shouts from different directions, and their ranks became a melee. Just then, from the centerline where the general commander was, a howitzer shot something into the air with a long white trail of smoke. It stretched far and then opened up a parachute high in the sky. It scattered oxidizing materials, combustible materials, flame-coloring materials, and brightening materials that were fastened to the lower part of it into the sky, giving birth to a small sun.

It was a flare.

One after another, parachutes opened, and in no time, a number of lights were in the air, greatly expanding how far they could see. Rentaro shielded his eyes with his hand and narrowed his eyes.

Then, he took a step backward in shock.

The strong light exposed a small mountain of countless silhouettes. They were probably two or three kilometers ahead. They were all various types of Gastrea, big and small. As if they had been waiting for that moment, red dots suddenly appeared in the darkness. When Rentaro realized that they were all the red eyes of Gastrea, he gave an involuntary groan. In order to approach the civil officer camp unnoticed, they had closed their eyes and tread softly.

What was really frightening was their number. The Seitenshi’s prediction was that there were about two thousand Gastrea gathered outside the walls, but this was at least twice that. The self-defense force that was supposed to act as the advance guard was nowhere to be seen. And yet, the vanished SDF troops and the additional Gastrea seemed to balance each other out in his mental arithmetic.

“There’s no way…” His stomach dropped, and he felt like hurling. How did the Gastrea Legion manage to defeat the entire self-defense force? The SDF should have had the knowledge to completely shut out the Gastrea the way they had in the Second Kanto Battle.

The Gastrea realized they had been exposed by the flares, and so, no longer needing to hide, they looked toward the sky en masse and gave a loud howl. The air rumbled, sending Rentaro’s skin prickling. Finally, a conspicuously large Gastrea at the front rushed toward them, and the rest followed, one after another, making a number of rhombus-shaped battle formations. The front line drove toward the civil officers in a straight line, tips of their swords aimed forward.

The invaders let out a rumbling war cry, one that sent a crack through the ground and clouds of dirt alike, to the point where it was hard to tell if it was the ground shaking or the entire earth. Sweat poured from Rentaro’s frame, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

What was with these Gastrea that could follow orders? They didn’t look like a troop of Gastrea, they looked like a school of fish that had gathered together, resembling one giant organism. Even humans who had trained for years would have had a hard time moving together like this.

Just then, a piercing pain stabbed into Rentaro’s head. He felt like he had noticed something important, but the thought had dispersed before becoming clear.

Enju came close to him with an uneasy expression on her face and squeezed Rentaro’s palm tightly.

The Gastrea were less than two kilometers away.

The civil officer troops were also experiencing a precipitous drop in morale. Even battle-hardened veterans were struck with fear.

“E-everyone, prepare for battle!” Hidehiko instructed his subordinate adjuvants, but his voice shook, and the hand he raised into the air was weak.

“Everyone, prepare for battle!” Rentaro repeated the order. Realizing that his own voice also sounded slightly nervous, he made an effort to stop his teeth’s chattering. He drew his XD gun from his hip and pulled the slide so it would be ready to fire at a moment’s notice.

The Gastrea were one kilometer away.

As the Gastrea slowly closed in on them, every single one of the civil officer troops seemed racked with nerves.

Five hundred meters away.

Reinforcing the front lines were the crustacean- and beetle-type Gastrea. Their forewings and bodies hardened with keratin and chitin were made into even harder armor by the Gastrea factor, and they glittered as they reflected the flares they were being hit with one after another.

An adjuvant line that was equipped with rifles took a step forward and fired them at the commander’s signal. There was the dry sound of bullets firing while muzzle flashes dazzled their eyes. The NATO-standard, high-speed Varanium rifle cartridges rushed into the first line of Gastrea. They were bullets optimized for destroying the insides of Gastrea, and would change into a mushroom shape to expand the wounds. The Gastrea’s flesh would be ripped apart in the display of attack power. That was what was supposed to happen.

Rentaro let out an involuntary shout.

The Gastrea did not fall. Surprisingly, the beetle Gastrea in the front row did not stop even after receiving wounds that would have incapacitated normal Gastrea long ago. The rifle squad faltered, but they soon fired again continuously. Over the sound of blood splattering and flesh ripping apart was the strange sound of the Gastrea roaring with all their might.

They finally brought down a few Gastrea after blowing their heads off, but those were soon trampled and detoured around, and a hopeless number of Gastrea gushed forth. The number that had been taken down was a lot smaller. It was as if they could not feel pain.

Rentaro didn’t really understand what had happened, but instinctively, he understood one of the ways they had broken through the SDF.

Three hundred meters away.

“Big Brother, over there!” Tina shouted.

Rentaro put his face next to Tina’s. She was pointing at something in the air. At first, it was too dark to see anything, but then a flare exploded close by. A squad of flying Gastrea appeared in the area where the veil of darkness had been lifted. There were a little less than fifty of them.

The problem was the round objects they were carrying between their front and back legs: other Gastrea. In other words, paratroopers. When that realization struck, chills shot down Rentaro’s spine.

The flying Gastrea seemed uncomfortable at having light shined on them and tilted their bodies to move away from it, taking a large detour around the air above the civil officer troops and going behind even the area where they had set up tents, landing in the forest behind the backs of the civil officer troops. They released the Gastrea they were holding and then returned to the front lines.

Rentaro looked at Tina. “Did you see that, Tina?”

Tina paused. “Yes,” she said. Seeming to understand the seriousness of the situation, Tina gave a quiet nod. That was probably a detached force sent to attack the civil officer troops in a pincer attack.

Rentaro looked around, but it did not look like anyone else had noticed. Rentaro made up his mind and ran, going for the front line where Hidehiko Gado was commanding the rifle squad. When he got there, he put his hand on the man’s shoulder and whirled him around. “There’s a detached force behind us. We’re going to be caught in a pincer attack. Let us go fight it.”

“Don’t you understand that this is no time for that?!” shouted Hidehiko.

“If they get through from behind, then it really will be over. We’ll be completely wiped out!”

Hidehiko waved his arm in front of him with bloodshot eyes. “Right now, we have to deal with the Gastrea in front of us. Get back in line, Satomi!”

Rentaro wanted to object more, but he controlled himself. Turning around, he went back to his adjuvant, where everyone on his team was waiting for him with uneasy expressions.

“Satomi, what is it?” Kisara asked on behalf of the group, meeting his eyes. He hesitated for a second but then explained the developments as briefly as possible.

“That’s serious!” said Tamaki, taken aback.

Shoma watched Rentaro silently as he listened. “Satomi, what do you want to do?”

“I want to go fight the enemy on our own.”

Enju looked uneasy. “Rentaro, but that means…”

Rentaro nodded silently. That would mean disobeying orders from his superior officer, Hidehiko Gado. During the civil officer training they had undergone these past few days, Rentaro and the others had been given detailed instructions about the severe punishment that awaited them if they disobeyed orders.

Yuzuki contemplated for a while, and then looked to Rentaro. “You decide, Rentaro Satomi. I’ll do as you say, Leader.”

The adjuvant members all looked upon him as well, waiting expectantly for his decision.

“I…” he started.

Just then, a thunderous shout reached their ears. “Cease fire!”

When Rentaro turned to look, he saw that the rifle squad was moving back under Hidehiko’s instructions, passing the baton to the civil officers who had close-combat weapons. Rentaro’s adjuvant had more close-combat fighters, so they were supposedly part of that group. Rentaro and the others moved forward, as if being pushed by the rifle squad and their paranoid gazes.

The Gastrea were a hundred meters away.

The rumbling of treaded ground combined with war cries to bring about the thunderous roar of the Gastrea. There was no sign of the enemy decreasing. What was going on?

Rentaro’s sense of crisis increased. No matter how he thought about it, he was far from being able to take an optimistic view of the situation. Looking left and right, he saw that the other adjuvants shared his anxiety.

A young man to his right with hair sticking up like a rockhopper penguin was coincidentally the leader of the adjuvant next to them at camp, as well. Even though Rentaro was often hated by other civil officers for being an upstart, when the young man found out Rentaro was ranked 300, he put his hand on Rentaro’s shoulder and said with an affable smile, “I’m proud to be fighting next to you.”

Rentaro ground his clenched teeth together. If he left right now, there was a possibility that the space left by his absence would cause the death of Hidehiko Gado or the neighboring leader. They were getting close to the time limit. A little longer and Rentaro would be saved by the easy ending that they had run out of time. In that sense, the choice of not choosing anything was undeniably an option.

However, if the surprise Gastrea attack squad reached them without being noticed and they were completely overtaken from behind, they would lose more than ten or a hundred people. The last breakwater would burst, and Gastrea would flow into Tokyo Area.

Rentaro took deep breath after deep breath and looked forward. This was no time to hesitate. It was time to move. “Let’s go.” He turned as he said this, and everyone nodded gravely.

Watching each Promoter put arms around his or her Initiator, Rentaro also stood next to Enju and put an arm around her waist; she put her strong arm around his. His eyes met Enju’s; her black ones turned a deep crimson. The next instant, he was hit with pressure pushing down on his body. It had been a while since he had last felt the acceleration that seemed like it would blow him away. Enju had awakened her Rabbit Factor.

They flew over the sky above the columns of civil officers in large parabolas, heading for the back. Rentaro’s uniform flapped in the gale, and it was hard to open his eyes in the wall of air pressing in on him. When Rentaro’s feet touched the ground again, he gasped as he pulled air into his lungs.

Looking back at what they had left behind, he saw that most of the people were staring at them with their mouths open, not understanding what had just happened. However, one person—Hidehiko—grasped his fist tightly, shaking with anger.

Rentaro felt a second of guilt, but he soon shifted his concentration on what was in front of him. Checking to make sure his whole team had followed, he went through the frontline base where they had camped for the last few days and into the forest that had been at their backs until now.

Rentaro squinted through the wall of air that came at him and instructed Enju and the others to gather in the forest. It was dark there, and full of sticky, humid summer air. Once together, he made sure everyone knew the rough position of where the Gastrea had been last spotted, and then set off. The group moved by holding on to the Initiators, borrowing their ability to move at high speeds. With the Owl and Cat in the lead with their night vision, the adjuvant members jumped through the tops of the trees like ninjas.

Leaves grazed Rentaro’s cheeks, and his gaze went left and right dizzyingly. Enju landed on a thin branch, and crouched to start another massive leap. This time, his chin was pulled down, and his vision rose and fell, practically giving him vertigo.

Kisara, who had just newly formed a pair with Tina, looked like she was having a hard time with the girl’s freely changing directions, but Rentaro couldn’t say anything because he was having a hard enough time trying not to be thrown off by Enju’s superfast acceleration.

Inside the still forest, four pairs forming a total of eight people were advancing, rustling the leaves as they jumped.

Rentaro’s heart had been beating hard for a while as he stared in front of him at the impending confrontation. Some time had already passed since the airdropped Gastrea had landed; they’d most likely started moving already. If they were planning a surprise attack on the back of the front lines, then they would soon come across each other.

Just then, there was a loud explosion behind them, followed by the sound of weapons firing. The main civil officer troops beyond the forest were finally fighting the Gastrea front lines head-on.

From between the treetops, Rentaro caught glimpses of explosions’ red flames painting the battlefield crimson.

“Leader, I’ve found them!” Midori shouted toward him. Looking in the direction she was pointing, Rentaro, who couldn’t see as well as she could in the dark, couldn’t immediately tell what she was talking about.

He signaled Enju by tapping on her shoulder three times, and she used her rabbit jumping power to leap even higher. Rentaro gritted his teeth against the invisible hand that seemed to push down on him as they accelerated, until the pressure finally disappeared. With the sound of the wind in his ears, he opened his eyes narrowly and saw that they were already fifty meters in the air. Straining to look in the area where Midori had pointed earlier, he saw a pitch-black group, darker than the darkness, squirming in a clearing.

And a straight line from that was the main civil officer force led by Nagamasa Gado. There was no sign that the main force had noticed the impending danger of the Gastrea sneaking in from behind them.

“We’re going down, Rentaro!” After Enju spoke, they lost inertia and traced the trajectory of a free fall. The forest rushed toward them at a terrifying speed and the fundamental fear of falling engraved in his DNA ran through his whole body. However, Enju safely thrust her legs at a thick branch, and with exquisite timing, bent her legs perfectly to break their fall and jump toward the next branch. Before they had time to relax, Rentaro gave the hand signal to attack to those behind him.

Everyone leapt off their branches.

This time, he could see the enemy even more clearly. Their chests were made up of eight parts, and a pair of antennae extended from their heads like whiskers; each antenna had a pair of small compound eyes. The hard exoskeletons, like those of crustaceans, glittered like obsidian. And there were a lot of them.

The Gastrea were shaped exactly like pill bugs, but in order to infect humans with their bodily fluids, their mouthparts were stretched wide and had giant fangs peeking out. They came up to about Rentaro’s chest, but because they did not have crazy shapes, Rentaro concluded that they were all Stage One simple factors.

The Gastrea crowded together in a diamond formation, but because they were so vigilantly waiting for a chance to launch a surprise attack on the main force, they had, luckily, still not noticed Rentaro and the others.

After a while, one dropped suddenly from the sky and screeched to the others upon spotting Rentaro’s crew, but by then it was too late.

Rentaro and Enju jumped into the middle of the Gastrea gaggle side by side. Just before they landed, Enju cut Rentaro loose, and Rentaro rolled forward to break his fall as he landed. Enju released her terrifying natural leg powers and darted around, obliterating the enemy’s admittedly crowded battle formation. Her hurricane roundhouse kick surpassed even the claws of a tiger, ripping through the armor of the crustaceans easily. With their exoskeletons peeled off, their bodily fluids spurted into the sky, and they were covered by the high-pitched screams of the Gastrea.

The Varanium weights on the bottoms of Enju’s shoes drew out a strong and unparalleled kick that was like a flash of death for Gastrea.

They could not lose.

“Haaaaaaa!” Rentaro released his artificial limbs. The artificial skin covering his right arm peeled off, exposing his black Super-Varanium artificial arm. Gritting his teeth at the fuzzy pain burning into his brain, Rentaro made a fist and raised it, activating its power.

Empty golden shell casings were kicked out from his arm. At the same time, his arm was pushed forward with intense acceleration. He felt the thrust of Homura Kasen sink into the flesh of a Gastrea that weighed less than seventy kilograms. The next instant, it was thrown into the horizon like a bowling ball, impacting the surrounding Gastrea and scattering them like pins.

The Gastrea had been planning a surprise attack, but they had ended up on the receiving end of one, and it threw them into confusion.

The other members of Rentaro’s adjuvant landed like shooting stars, crushing enemies left and right. Midori’s nails sprinkled death before they could even be seen, and when the Gastrea tried to retreat, they were caught in invisible spider silk and exposed to the appalling slaughter of Tamaki’s Varanium chain saw.

Soon, about thirty Gastrea had screamed and were starting to flee, succumbing to fear.

A violent urge filled Rentaro. He couldn’t let them get away. Behind them spread the undefended Tokyo Area. If even one Gastrea created a Pandemic, it would be more than enough.

“Leave it to me.” Just then, there was a hint of the smell of citrus shampoo right next to him. Kisara, with her long hair fluttering, danced out in front of Rentaro. Using her right foot as an axis, she rotated her body once, slipping her sword out of its sheath with centrifugal force. “Tendo Martial Arts Sword Drawing First Style, Number 8—” There was a ringing sound as the sword came out of the sheath. “Muei Musou.”

The thirty Gastrea that had turned around and were starting to flee were suddenly cut in two, and there were screams and splashes of blood. In addition, the trunks of the pine trees and sugar maples in the area were also cleaved in half, and all the trees within range of the attack were felled.

Rentaro stood still in amazement, forgetting for a moment that they were in the middle of battle. A whirlwind slash. It was the only way to describe that attack.

But just then, Rentaro was surprised as the skin of the Gastrea that had been cut down started to foam, and then started to stand, convulsing. Gastrea that had escaped damage to their hearts and brains were showing signs of regenerating.

“Kisara, get back!”

Realizing what Rentaro was trying to do, Kisara retreated.

Rentaro made eye contact with all the Promoters. Standing in a line horizontally, they drew their guns from their belts. The impact of the kickback reached Rentaro’s elbows and his eyes were dazzled by the muzzle fire that bloomed in the dark of the night. They pulled the trigger continuously without even checking to see where their shots landed.

Rentaro, Kisara, Shoma, and Tamaki fired with unwavering control, rushing into the bodies of the Gastrea that were trying to regenerate, and the Varanium’s regeneration-inhibiting properties started to work. The Gastrea trying to revive themselves were pierced with a storm of bullets, and this time, they stopped moving.

There was a strong smell of gun smoke from the muzzle of Rentaro’s XD that had emptied itself of ammunition. Rentaro changed magazines and waited for a while, but after realizing there was no sign of regeneration, he sighed.

They had defeated them all.

And because he thought that, when one of the bodies at Kisara’s feet suddenly jumped up and sprang at her, he wasn’t able to deal with it in time. “Kisara!” he shouted.

At his voice, a look of astonishment appeared on her face.

Just as the Gastrea’s fangs were about to pierce through Kisara’s skin, a fist came from the side, twisting into its torso. The Gastrea that had been hit by the fist expanded suddenly and then burst, like a balloon that had been pricked with a needle.

A sullen mist of blood hung in the air, and Rentaro and Kisara stopped in their tracks, eyes wide. In the end, Shoma was the one who had saved her.

However, Kisara was so astonished that she even forgot to thank him. Abruptly, Rentaro’s and Kisara’s eyes met. Even without words, he could tell that she was asking, “What was that move just now?”—because Rentaro felt exactly the same way.

If she were just asking the name, he could have told her that it was Rokuro Kabuto, which drew a circle around the opponent as it was released, but that wasn’t a move that made the opponent explode.

Shoma had improved on the move.

Seeing Rentaro’s and Kisara’s eyes on him, Shoma turned his body around awkwardly. It was as if he suddenly regretted using the move.

“Leader Satomi, we have finished here.” Turning around, Rentaro was just in time to see Midori slipping her claws out of the last pill bug’s body. She had skewered the brain easily through its armor by going through spaces between segments, and the light of life had already been extinguished in the Gastrea’s eyes.

In the middle of a terrible battlefield filled with corpses, the four Initiators looked at him with their eyes shining red.

They killed them all in such a short time… Rentaro shivered. They were strong. This was the true value of the adjuvant system.

Rentaro returned to himself with a start when he realized they were all watching him, waiting for orders. “All right, now let’s hurry up and go back and help the main force.”

Rentaro and the others tried their best to move quietly as they hurried back. As he held onto Enju’s shoulder, with her kicking trees and rustling leaves as she moved, for some reason, the uneasiness he felt showed no sign of going away.

It was true that they had nipped the surprise attack in the bud, but everything they had encountered so far was Stage Ones.

Where were the Stage Twos and higher?

Finally, they could hear the rapport of weapons and hardened voices beyond the trees, and see red through the leaves. Suddenly, the forest cleared, and his vision widened all at once. The rough voices that had been muffled by the trees became noticeably louder.

Because they had been in the dark until now, Rentaro involuntarily narrowed his eyes as light flowed into his retinas all at once. “Damn it, they’re already here…?”

They had only been away from the formation for a short time, but the battlefield had changed considerably. The battle formation that had been organized before had collapsed, and they had been pushed by the Gastrea all the way back to the tents. Flames were blazing here and there all over their own camp. A melee of enemy and ally mixed together; shouts and cries, guns and swords—the battlefield played the music of pandemonium.

An enormous, cylindrical Gastrea that looked like a snake but had a mouth like a sucker smashed the tents around it as it writhed; it was a leech Gastrea. Fighting more than equally with a pair that had swords in both hands was a Gastrea that looked like a strange combination of spider and scorpion—a pseudoscorpion Gastrea. There was a group of civil officers with spears who had gathered to form a line around a boar almost ten meters in length.

Pushed back by the fierce attacks, the civil officers fought hard within the camp, but no matter how Rentaro looked at it, there was too big of a difference in their numbers, and the civil officers were at a disadvantage. In this situation, it didn’t matter which squad they were in anymore.

In the back of his mind, Hidehiko Gado’s face looking at him with betrayal crossed his mind for a moment, and he shook his head. He had to at least try to find them. Rentaro signaled his team members to follow him and then ran like the wind through the battlefield. Fortunately, all the combatants were focused on their own bouts, so they were able to weave through the gaps as they ran.

Climbing the small hill in front of them, Rentaro suddenly found a shining, dark gray exoskeleton and sighed with relief. There was no mistaking it. It was Hidehiko Gado.

In a spot a little ways away from the battlefield, not even giving any orders, he was wandering around idly.

“Hey, you. This place is done for. Give the order for the troops’ immediate retreat.” Rentaro started to stretch out his arm, but he noticed something strange and stopped his hand in midair.

“Well, if it isn’t Leader Satomi.” Hidehiko turned his pale face around to face Rentaro. Rentaro had always imagined that the man shut himself in a research lab all day, but at that moment he was more than pale; he was pallid. Even though he had been so nervous before the attack that even the roots of his teeth were shaking, right now, the man was strangely calm.

However, rather than putting Rentaro at ease, it seemed eerie. The problem was the object Hidehiko held in his right hand.

“Have you seen the Spear of Light?” Hidehiko asked.

“The Spear of Light?” Rentaro repeated.

Hidehiko chuckled. “If those guys have such a thing, then humans have no chance of winning in the first place. It’s over.” Saying that, he showed Rentaro the object he held in his hand.

Next to Rentaro, Enju took a sharp breath.

It was a human arm. It was a distorted cross section, as if it had been ripped off, and there was nothing past the elbow. From its size, it looked to be that of a young girl. It was probably his Initiator’s.

“Kokone and I were a real family. We said we would be together even until the end and held hands the whole time. That’s when we were attacked by the Spear of Light… Before I knew it, the spear went astray and came right next to me. Kokone disappeared, leaving only her arm.” One glance at Hidehiko laughing loudly, and Rentaro could tell that he was not in a normal state of mind. “But I’m glad that you’re okay, Leader Satomi.”

Seeing Hidehiko take a step as his armor creaked, Rentaro involuntarily took a step back. In the end, that action decided their fate.

Suddenly, the ground started to crack beneath Hidehiko’s feet, and there was a sudden bump, and it split in half with a roar.

“Look out!” Rentaro pulled so hard he thought his arm would be dislocated, and before he knew it, he had fallen on his back on the ground.

Where Hidehiko had been standing, about ten meters of the ground had completely fallen away, and there was a giant hole. Gado had disappeared.

Suddenly returning to his senses, Rentaro quickly took a flashlight from his hip and ran up to the hole. He covered his mouth to keep out the choking earth and its smoky cloud of dust. The second he shined the light on the bottom, however, he met the eyes of creatures. They’d dug their way out of the earth.

Except—to be more precise, their eyes had degenerated so much and were so small that they could no longer see. They had fur that looked like wet velvet. Their five gigantic claws that had become enlarged were for pushing through the dirt, but the feelers and bright red flower that broke through their fur gave off the stink of a Rafflesia plant. If they didn’t have the feelers radiating out from the tips of their noses covering their faces, Rentaro probably never would have noticed that they were star-nosed mole Gastrea.

He had not expected this attack from directly below them at all, and it gave him the chills. They were probably Stage Twos. From what he could see, there were about five of them. They’d caused the cave-in and were coming to attack them.

When the moles realized they’d been seen, they quickly rushed into a side tunnel.

“Tinaaaaa!” Rentaro called out.

“Yes, sir!” Tina leapt and jumped down to the bottom of the hole and thrust the antitank rifle that was almost as big as she was into the side tunnel and pulled the trigger. There was a dull bang, and a great muzzle flash spouted out of the tip of the rifle from the V-shaped muzzle break. The discharge gas that flowed backward blew up a cloud of dust that covered the surrounding area. In an instant, there were screams of Gastrea coming from deep in the tunnel. Without pausing to take a breath, Tina changed her aim and pulled the trigger again and again, mercilessly, until finally all the Gastrea were silent.

“Big Brother, I have defeated them,” she stated.

Nodding once at Tina, who had jumped out of the hole and returned to his side, Rentaro looked over the battlefield.

It had become a melee with no logic or reason. Once it had come to this, the commander’s instructions had no way of reaching them. On the other hand, he did not have the power or authority to do anything about their current battle.

Rentaro closed his eyes and then slowly opened them. “We will split up and help those civil officers who are fighting tough battles.” Everyone gave a nod. Rentaro closed his eyes and took three steadying breaths, then announced, “Let’s go.”

Promising to reunite, they bumped fists and split up by pair.

Rentaro ran along the battlefield, looking for civil officers who needed to be rescued. Enju was able to make enemies retreat and rescue their allies at what seemed like lightning speed. They rescued an Initiator who had been cornered by Gastrea and was desperately scooting backward to escape, then saved a pair that had lost their comrades, and carried out the wounded without a break.

Some of the people they saved were dumbfounded and stupefied, some repeated their thanks more than necessary, and some looked Rentaro in the eye and squeezed his hand, saying nothing as they returned to the battlefield.

However, as was natural on a battlefield where life and death competed with each other, they didn’t meet with just beautiful situations. Unfortunately, they were unable to make it in time to save an Initiator who they watched get ground up between numerous rows of sharpened teeth. In particular, their eyes were filled with the sight of confused Initiators who lost their Promoters, their commanders, and emotional pillars of support.

In one place, there was a girl sitting unmoving next to the corpse of her Promoter. When Rentaro pulled her arm to try to get her to a safe place, he was met with resistance.

“Stop,” said the girl. “If I leave this man’s side, I’ll be hit a lot.”

The words were an account of the kind of treatment she had received from her Promoter when he was still alive. No matter how many times Rentaro told her that her Promoter had died, the girl wouldn’t believe it, and Rentaro left to rescue someone else. When he passed by that area again, a large number of Gastrea had swarmed over, devouring something greedily with their backs turned to him, looking like they were fighting over something in front of them. They seemed to notice Rentaro, but they showed no sign of coming to attack him. They must have really liked whatever they were eating there.

In another place, there was a Promoter who was turning into a Gastrea. He was aiming his gun so that he could at least die as a human, but an Initiator with her dyed hair in buns stood in his way, imploring him with tears in her eyes. “Shun, it’s not too late. So don’t kill yourself!”

The next instant, the transformation was complete, and the girl’s head was plucked off by the Gastrea behind her. Her body fell, spinning like a top.

The smoke made Rentaro’s eyes sting. His breathing became shallow. His face was probably black with soot and mud. The effective temperature was around a blistering 50 degrees Celsius. Rentaro ripped off his necktie at the battlefield’s heat.

He had gotten separated from Enju without realizing it. When he looked around to see where he should go next, he saw a flame of fire approaching an abandoned cottage right next to him. The flames of the burning civil officer tents called to each other and merged. When they did, they transformed into an intense swirl of flame that reached over 2,100 degrees Celsius. The roar made by the surge of crimson was like the bellowing laugh of the devil.

If he remembered correctly, this building held gasoline—

The instant he saw the tongues of flame stretch to reach the drums, the blood in his entire body froze. The next moment, there was a burst of flame, and his body was hammered with the wind from the blast as it was thrown into the air. Rentaro was thrown almost twenty meters back, and his body was pushed into the ground. He rolled a few times with the momentum until he finally stopped.

There was damage to his inner ears. As his world turned, he spit out the gritty sand and put his hand on the ground, pushing up his hurting body. From his scorched uniform came the stink of burning synthetic fibers. His clothes were ripped all over the place, and there were dark red spots of coagulated blood. He breathed in too much thin air and dizziness hit him like a tank. Ringing reverberated deep in his ears. Feeling strange, he put his hands over his ears and realized that he could no longer hear. Damage to his eardrums…

Rentaro stood, dazed, looking across the battlefield that had lost its sound.

Black smoke rose from the civil officer’s base at the front lines, which was red with flames. Ashes danced in the air. The remaining officers were shouting desperately with their mouths wide open, trying to turn the tide in their favor, but their situation just kept getting worse. There was an Initiator with her arm around a Promoter without a head. She was looking desperately for a medic. A reptilian Gastrea threw an Initiator’s body high into the sky, then, when it caught her in its mouth, it and another Gastrea ripped the body clean in half.

There was an Initiator who must have gotten separated from her Promoter. She had white skin and wore a white dress, and in the middle of the scorching battlefield, she covered her face with both hands, crying. At her feet, there were pieces of bodies mixed together that came all the way up to her ankles. The organs of the dead went flying, and opened-up craniums had brains showing as they rolled around covered in mud.

It was hell.

That was the only way to describe the scene unfolding before him.

“What are you doing, Rentaro?” Suddenly, he felt strong pressure on his head. Enju’s voice and the sounds of the battlefield returned to his ears. “It’s coming this way! Get down.”

“What do you mean by it?” Before he could even finish those words, it suddenly happened.

Far off in the distance, beyond the curtain of fire, he thought he saw a brief flash, and something that looked like a beam of light mowed down an area right above where Rentaro was, moving at the speed of light. The next instant, everything that was in that silver path had been cut, and with a strange sound, ten or so civil officers were split in two, their bodies dancing in the air.

Chills went down his spine. Standing up reflexively and looking behind him, Rentaro could see those silver paths cutting through, with frantic screams one after another.

Spears of Light—Those three words appeared inside his head.

“No way…” Rentaro took a step back in shock.

The anti-Gastrea tactics they had developed in these past ten years had been made on the assumption that Gastrea did not use projectile weapons. That assumption was crumbling from its base. This was probably the thing that had shot down the Tomahawk missiles fired by the aegis cruiser the other day and brought down the helicopter and fighter aircraft.

His instinct told him that they could not win. They were all going to be killed. Rentaro himself, Enju, Kisara, Tina, and all their other adjuvant members would be killed for no good reason.

At that moment, a long roar echoed across the battlefield. This roar reached from one end of the forty districts to the other. The roar that sounded like distant thunder was not a war cry or a shriek, but a scream of agony.

All the Gastrea froze at once and turned their heads toward the roar. After a brief moment, the sound disappeared from the battlefield.

Rentaro also followed their gazes, looking in the same direction. He saw an enormous silhouette that looked like a small mountain twisting its body in agony. It was obviously tens of times bigger than the other Gastrea.

Rentaro knew instinctively that that was Aldebaran.

On the heels of that thought, the Gastrea moved as one. Caterpillar Gastrea crawled along the ground, and insect and bird Gastrea all hung in the air around the enormous one, using their own bodies as a wall to retreat.

Because of the Gastrea flying like a defensive mosquito swarm around Aldebaran, even if Rentaro strained his eyes, he could not see what the Gastrea in the middle looked like. However, the hoarse scream he heard for a moment and the excessively large silhouette were more than enough to send shivers up and down his body.

Finally, all the Gastrea had left the battlefield, and all that was left were the living and the dead.

“Have we been…saved?” The small Promoter next to him muttered this quietly, but it echoed in Rentaro’s ears for a long time.

2

The next day, a black rain poured down on Tokyo Area. The torrential rains drenched Rentaro’s whole body and dripped from the bottom of his chin. He thought about the temperature being 15 degrees Celsius in July and found it hard to believe how cold it was.

However, that was only to be expected. When Rentaro raised his face, he saw a dark, lead-colored sky.

The day before, the enormous Varanium structure, the Monolith, had collapsed. The seriousness of the effects had become clear after a night passed. On the news Rentaro watched in the morning, he learned that when the Monolith collapsed, a large amount of ash from the Monolith had drifted up into the stratosphere and formed a thick cloud. It blocked the sun and looked like it would remain in the sky above Tokyo Area for three days.

The sound of the Monolith’s collapse had been heard even at the edge of Tokyo, and the vibrations from the collapse were felt all across Japan, reaching even Hakata and Hokkaido Areas. The shock wave from the collapse went halfway around the world and was even seen at the weather observatory at Pike’s Peak in Colorado, USA. On a global scale, there was a 0.3 hectopascal rise in atmospheric pressure measured. Based on recent weather observation models, the ashes and sand from the bleached Monolith were carried north by the westerlies and were expected to fall as far north as Hokkaido.

Even the black rain that drenched Rentaro’s body right now was apparently from the ash and sand from the Monolith’s collapse that had been dissolved by the rain and were now falling back down. From the announcement made by the government, there was nothing harmful in it, but he could not tell if that was the truth or not. At the very least, he did not try to whet his thirst with it.

Even more serious was that for the next three days, the sun would not peek out onto the surface of the earth. There was already a gloomy, defeated mood spreading through the civil officer troops who had survived the hell from last night. If at least the weather changed for the better, their moods could be changed so too, thanks to the secretion of serotonin in their brains, but…

The bottoms of their boots were filled with mud, and it felt very uncomfortable.

Rentaro lifted his head and looked around him. The surrounding area was a wide, vast plain, and Promoters were spread out. There was a mountain nearby of raised ground with one side covered with debris, telling the story of how intense the battle had been between the Gastrea and the self-defense force.

Rentaro was walking where the infantry division of the SDF had made camp.

He was sandwiched between body bags for some reason. This morning, only the Promoters were gathered under the pretext of searching for survivors and rescuing those in the base camp.

Everyone had noticed that it was just a pretext to conceal the real reason they were here.

The SDF facilities they were visiting were destroyed, and its officials were mainly lying around in a state where they did not need rescuing. The fact that the Aldebaran army had flooded the civil officer rear guard meant that the fate of the self-defense force that had been the front guard had already been decided, but it was still a shock to see it with his own eyes. They had been completely wiped out by Aldebaran first, after all.

They could not come to an agreement with the Gastrea or take prisoners of war, so once they started fighting, it inevitably became a war of extermination. Thanks to that, there wasn’t really anyone in need of rescue. It was reasonable to assume that most of those who were not here had become Gastrea themselves.

Apparently, the goal given to Rentaro and the other Promoters was to retrieve the corpses before they rotted and spread serious infectious diseases, as well as to send them back to their bereaved families. Rentaro thanked them silently as he tried to gather as many of the parts of the corpses as he could and put them into the body bags one by one. Nevertheless, part of his brain was still stuck on asking why this had happened.

There had been two battles in Kanto already. In the First Kanto Battle, the self-defense force suffered a defeat. In the Second Kanto Battle, the self-defense force had won. During the Second Kanto Battle, the SDF had come up with a strategy to force the Gastrea out and keep them out, so they were confident that they would be able to win the third battle as well. It was hard to believe that they had been defeated so easily this time.

Just what was the difference between the last battle and this one? If they could not determine the cause of the self-defense force’s defeat, there was no way they’d find the clues needed to help them defeat the Gastrea. Moved by instinct that was close to conviction, Rentaro walked around the remains of the battlefield in search of his clue.

Before long, he came across one strange thing after another. A tank was split completely in two. From the sharp cut on it, he thought that it was probably from the Spear of Light. There were also those that had fallen into holes and couldn’t move. Taking a quick look around, he saw that there were self-propelled guns and missile silos that were also in the same situation.

This was probably the work of the Model Mole—the mole Gastrea that Rentaro had also encountered. They dug tunnels until they were right under the weapons of the main force and then scraped away at the dirt to make a hole, inducing the ceiling of the tunnel to cave in. No matter how good the tank treads were on bad roads, they did not appear to be able to get out of deep pitfalls.

Rentaro’s feelings had surpassed fear and had turned into admiration for their superb strategy. With their sniping, the moles had even brought down the general, Hidehiko Gado, in front of Rentaro’s very eyes.

No matter how Rentaro looked at it, they were being led way too well. They were like a single colony of insects. How in the world were they sharing information?

Just then, he felt a prickle in his mind. That’s right, I had thought about this possibility before. If he remembered correctly, that time, he thought they looked like a school of fish that gathered together to look like one giant fish. Suddenly, in the back of his mind, this image overlapped with the image of Aldebaran retreating with its subordinates circling around it like a swarm of mosquitos.

A lightbulb flashed in his head and Rentaro involuntarily raised his voice. Could that be what it was? If that was the case, then Aldebaran’s real ability was—

“Man, this is terrible.” There was a splash, and Rentaro turned his head to see Tamaki Katagiri standing with a grim look on his face. His dark blond hair had gotten darker after being in the black rain, and his face, under his sunglasses, was somber.

Rentaro made a sound of agreement and turned to Tamaki. “Speaking of which, I haven’t thanked you for your help yet.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“With Kisara.”

Tamaki seemed to understand and looked around them, saying, “Sure.”

Rentaro followed Tamaki’s gaze and saw all the Promoters moving slowly, putting the corpses in the body bags. As a Promoter, Kisara should have also been called for this work, but after talking to the higher-ups about it, he convinced Kisara not to go, saying it wasn’t something a girl should be doing.

Kisara put up a fight, but Tamaki helped Rentaro try to convince her, and they somehow settled the matter without incident.

Kisara had said, “What, both of you?” sulkily, but after seeing this scene with human body parts scattered all over the place, he confirmed that his judgment was correct.

Tamaki shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not like I did it for you. I did it for her.”

Just then, there was a noise from far away that split the air, and they lifted their faces.

Rentaro had heard this noise before. It was a helicopter rotor. Looking in the direction Tamaki was pointing, he saw a helicopter the size of a bean growing larger and larger. Rentaro saw the logo of the news company on the side of the helicopter and got a bad feeling.

Looking around, he saw that other civil officers had also stopped working and had turned their faces to the sky.

The helicopter passed over Rentaro’s head with a roar that made him want to cover his ears. He couldn’t hear very well with the sound of the rain and the rotor, but a sliding door opened and a reporter shouted something. He could predict what the reporter was saying.

In the first place, humans liked news where they could laugh about others’ mistakes more than they liked news about others doing heroic things. What did the organization that was optimized for getting ratings have to say to the civil officers who couldn’t even be said to have won an easy victory if they were being nice…?

Rentaro gritted his teeth. Damn it, are they here to publicly scorn us? Suddenly, Rentaro was surprised by an explosion at his ear and a roar that moved upward at the same time. Covering his ears and looking next to him, he saw Tamaki looking up with white smoke rising from the muzzle of his Magnum revolver.

Rentaro then heard the hoarse scream of the reporter in the helicopter. Apparently, the bullet had hit inside the helicopter, and the helicopter made a sharp turn and turned tail.

“Shit! In movies, handguns could make military helicopters blow up, but it doesn’t work like that in real life, I guess?” Tamaki muttered.

“You were trying to blow it up?” Rentaro was dumbfounded for a moment, but when his shock subsided, a smile rose to his face.

The civil officers working around them laughed pleasantly and cheered, and that slowly grew louder. Rentaro realized that the stagnant mood that had been on the battlefield had been driven off for a moment, and looked with wonder at Promoter Tamaki Katagiri.

3

In the end, the Promoters rescued sixty-eight survivors in half a day. Thinking about the fact that the self-defense force’s infantry was a large force that had more than seven thousand people in it, this was only a hundredth of them, which was a depressingly low number. The injured were immediately brought to the medical squad. Those who were crying and had lost their will to fight from fear of Gastrea were deemed unable to withstand more battle, and were given similar treatment.

They were currently hearing what had happened from the survivors, but Rentaro wouldn’t hear anything from his lowly place on the totem pole, so he could only imagine what they were saying.

After a while, the black rain stopped, and when it grew dark, they used that as a chance to end the search. They kept trying until the very end, so even though they didn’t have any proof, they were able to feel pretty confident that they had picked up all the survivors.

They returned, completely exhausted, to a town close to the plain. The towns in the Outer Districts had been abandoned for ten years and were growing wild, overrun with trees and grass, with plants budding from their roofs. The plants had grown bigger due to the Gastrea virus, and some were swallowing up whole houses with their massive roots.

Tokyo Area, District 40, the Outer District where Rentaro and the others were fighting, had plateaus and steep slopes extending far into the area, so few people lived there. As such, there was little chance of coming across Manhole Children or people living illegally in the ruins, so the civil officer troops, who had lost their base to the Gastrea attack, requisitioned these buildings.

Fundamentally, the buildings in the Outer Districts were exposed to remarkable aging the moment people stopped living in them and heating them, as they went through differences in temperature and expanded and contracted over and over. The government did not recommend living in the Outer District buildings that could collapse at any moment, but everyone was tired of exposing their skin to the black rain that had been falling since morning, so there were no objections.

There were many different buildings of various sizes in the town, but only about a tenth had the minimum facilities to protect them from the rain and keep them warm. Peeking through a convenience store window whose glass had been shattered to pieces, Rentaro was very surprised to see a goat that had gone wild sprawled between the product shelves. The park he stopped by on the way back had an abandoned tricycle and a flattened soccer ball being blown drearily by in the wind. The letters on a rotting signboard with red rust making it thicker could only be half-read from the stains and peeling.

Even on the day it started being evacuated as a Gastrea danger zone, the residents must have thought they could return in two or three days. The whole town still looked as if time had stopped on that day ten years ago, with traces of the residents’ lives over everything.

Rentaro was heading toward a certain junior high school deep within the town. Faint light leaked from the gym that was connected to it. If he remembered correctly, this was where Kisara and the others were working. Thinking that, he diffidently opened the emergency exit door with a loud creak. When he did so, the noise that had been absorbed by the walls rushed at him. There was the sound of people groaning and sobbing mixed with other unintelligible screams, with the sound of slippers running on top of all of that.

Inside the building, it was like a field hospital. Injured civil officers and self-defense force troops lay on beds and futons, and when there weren’t enough, on rush and straw mats. Between them, volunteer doctors and nurses in white coats hurried back and forth. It was so loud that one had to yell in order to be heard by the person next to him or her, and the smell of medicine wafting through the building was so strong it made Rentaro’s head hurt.

Because they had no electricity, there were lanterns and candles all over the place, with electric lights tied on top of generators used in place of the normal lights, so the whole place was dimly lit, and there was a strange mood in the air that was hard to explain.

“Oh, Rentaro, Rentaro, Rentaro!” An especially loud voice called out, and he saw Enju waving an arm above her head as she ran toward him. With a thud, Enju’s head rushed into him and a soft weight rested on his chest. Hugging Enju to him, he noticed a pink nurse’s cap on top of her head.

When Rentaro pointed at it, Enju lifted her face as usual and laughed gleefully. “Isn’t it cute? They gave it to me since I was helping. They said workers had to wear this.”

“I-I see…,” said Rentaro.

Enju tilted her head slightly. “What’s wrong, Rentaro?”

“Nothing—”

“Oh, Satomi, you’re back early.” Turning around, he saw Kisara holding a washbasin with hot water in it. She also had a nurse’s cap on her head, like Enju. “Our shift is almost over, so please wait a bit.”

Rentaro looked around at the bustling atmosphere before looking back at Kisara. “Even Enju’s here. She’s not being a bother?”

Kisara smiled and shook her head. “Not at all. Enju’s a big help, holding the injured people’s hands tight and just being with them. Everyone seems to appreciate her. On the other hand, I can only do random chores, so I’m sure I’m more in the way of the doctors and nurses.”

Enju stuck out her chest proudly and sniffed. “You see? I am being of help.”

Rentaro watched Enju silently. It was possible that Enju was recovering from the painful incident of her classmates being killed in a bombing. He had the urge to ask her directly, but considering the possibility that he was stirring up a hornet’s nest, he could not speak carelessly. Rentaro hid his inner turmoil and patted Enju on the head, as if going through his usual movements, saying, “Yes, yes, good job,” pretending to act normally. Enju did not seem to notice.

“By the way, Satomi, have you met up with Dr. Sumire already?” Kisara asked.

“What? Doc? Doc’s here, too?”

Just then, Rentaro felt a weight on his shoulders as someone draped their arms over him from behind. Cold skin like a corpse. Said person put lips close to his ears. “Good evening, Satomi. It’s a nice night.”

“Gah!” Jumping away quickly and turning around, he saw a smiling face shining brightly with enjoyment through a curtain of hair that was left to grow as it pleased.

Dragging a long white lab coat, the coroner, Sumire Muroto, lifted her hand in casual greeting. “Yo,” she said. “I had some free time, so I left my basement room. The outside is nice sometimes, too.”

Rentaro’s mouth gaped in amazement, and he was unable to respond for a while. “Doc… Why are you here?”

“There was a request, so I came here today to supervise the doctors. Didn’t I tell you before? I’m a genius, so I have knowledge of everything. I’m just a coroner because it matches up with my hobby. In times of emergency like this, I get called in as a doctor, too.”

“So even Dr. Death saves people’s lives once in a while?”

“What, do you want to be euthanized, Rentaro?”

“I-I was just kidding. Don’t get mad, Doc.” Just then, a question crossed his mind. “Doc, didn’t you win a lottery ticket for the shelter? Why are you here?”

“I didn’t win it. I was given it. A government official came to my lab and said they couldn’t let Japan’s greatest mind die and gave me a ticket. I politely ripped it in half and threw it away then and there, though.”

“Huh?”

The corners of Sumire’s mouth lifted as she grinned. “What? Is that strange?”

“No… But if you’re going to rip it in half, then at least give it to someone.”

“Who would I give it to? Even if you had a single cup of water in the desert, it won’t do you much good, will it? At most, people will just start killing each other over the water. It’s more compassionate to resolutely throw the water onto the bare ground in this case.”

Rentaro paused. “Then, what fundamental solution would you propose for the lack of water?”

“Find a giant oasis that can quench everyone’s thirst, or get out of the desert. But looking at Tokyo Area’s current evacuation situation, I don’t see how we can find an oasis big enough to quench everyone’s thirst. I came here because I wanted to support the idiots who are carrying out the idiotic plan to get out of the desert.”

“Just so you know, once the Gastrea rush into this place, you won’t be able to run away.”

“I understand completely.”

“Doc, I thought you were a more logical person.”

Sumire grinned again. “Humans think about things logically and then move because of their emotions. I am the same. Keep moving, Rentaro. If you stop, death will catch up to you.”

“You’re right… Thanks, Doc.” Rentaro suddenly remembered something and asked her about Enju behind him in a low voice. “Doc, did you hear about Enju?”

Sumire’s eyes narrowed, and her expression grew stern for an instant. “Yeah, I did. Her classmates were killed because of all that uproar, right? It was very unfortunate.”

“Doc, how does Enju look to your professional eyes?”

“Don’t worry, she’s probably already fine.”

“What?” Rentaro’s mouth dropped open, stunned speechless.

“Enju has more mental strength than we think she has.”

“R-really?”

“You’re a really suspicious guy, aren’t you? Well, it might be that with the immediate danger of the Gastrea, she’s just not thinking about the bombing incident. Just in case, don’t say anything to her that might make her remember the incident.”

His strength suddenly left him in relief. It was all just his needless worrying. At the same time, he became embarrassed by all the nervous actions he took around Enju.

Sumire nodded in satisfaction and looked back at Enju and Kisara, clapping her hands. “Now, you two don’t need to help anymore, so go home and rest.”

“What will you do, Dr. Sumire?” Kisara asked wonderingly.

Sumire stuffed both hands into the pockets of her lab coat and smiled. “I will spend the night here. I’m going to do my own job. It’s better than you’d expect. It’s the perfect dimness with a nice atmosphere thanks to all the candles reminding us to slow down and reflect. On top of that, the groans of the patients around me make me feel like I’m in the middle of a zombie movie. Thanks to that, I feel like I’ll have some wonderful nightmares.”

After waiting outside the gym for a while, Enju and Kisara came outside. Rentaro accompanied the girls, walking streets wet with rain. Following the shining GPS dot sent from Shoma’s cell phone, they headed toward the place supposedly secured for them to spend the night. When he finally raised his face, Rentaro found a ruin standing in the middle of a thick forest. It was called Century Heights Hotel.

“Is this the place, Rentaro?” Enju asked him.

“Yeah… At least, it’s supposed to be,” he replied.

“I don’t like it. It’s kind of creepy,” said Kisara.

Rentaro couldn’t help but agree with Kisara’s opinion. He lifted the flashlight and shined it on the unfinished woodwork of the building; the place looked like a haunted house.

There was ivy growing over the edifices, and the place looked like it had sports facilities, including a pool and tennis court. It looked like it was trying to be an all-in-one leisure facility, but that resulted in an air that smacked of identity confusion. Picking up a pamphlet that had fallen on the ground, he was surprised to find that one could even hold weddings here, once upon a time.

“This plateau breeze will make your life more sophisticated.” The aesthetic sense of that catchphrase seemed to go beyond a strained laugh and gave him the shivers instead.

Rentaro and the others carefully picked their way through the entrance, where the ceiling had already collapsed.

“Oh, Big Brother. Welcome.” Wearing an apron over her clothes, Tina had a candlestick in one hand and a feather duster in the other and was running toward him noisily. “I cleaned this hotel so that we can live in it.”

Rentaro saw that the dust on the ground had been swept, and the broken glass in the windows had been removed, so it felt quite clean. “Well…even if you say we’re going to live in it, we’re just borrowing it for a few days.”

“Even so, if we have to stay here anyway, doesn’t it make you happier if it’s clean?” Tina’s eyes were sparkling. She looked like a child who had made a secret hideout.

When she led them to a Western-style dining room, they were met with an unexpected warmth. There was a long table with benches and a redbrick fireplace with brightly burning flames. Shoma, Midori, Tamaki, and Yuzuki had been preparing a meal and were just about to finish. There was a wood-chopping ax on the side, meaning someone had split apart the extra chairs and turned them into firewood.

Thinking about it sensibly, it did not seem to make sense that they would need to use the fireplace in the middle of summer, but after the ashes from the Monolith covered the sky, the temperature dropped suddenly, and to Rentaro, the warmth from the fireplace felt just right.

When preparations for the meal were completed, they didn’t need to be ordered to sit and eat. The stew piled on plates and bowls smelled sweet, and when Rentaro brought it to his mouth hesitantly, his eyes widened in surprise. “This is good…” It was a little salty, but they probably thought that on a battlefield, it was better to have strong-tasting foods. It was hard to believe that these were made from canned rations and ready-made food packages.

“Hah, how about it? What do you think of me now?” It was Tamaki, who sounded proud as he rubbed his nose.

“You made this?” Rentaro asked.

Yuzuki answered, challenging but triumphant. “My big brother’s the chef at home. A perv like you couldn’t even come close to his skill.”

Rentaro crossed his arms. This was exactly what was meant by “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” He felt the call of rivalry stir at the idea of another cook.

Once the meal was devoured, they were filled with a languid satisfaction. It wasn’t that there was a lot of food. In fact, since their storehouse had burned down in yesterday’s fighting, the amount of food they’d been given wasn’t enough to match the needs of all the civil officers who were left. If operations in Tokyo Area hadn’t been frozen, they’d have promptly received relief supplies, but right now, those prospects were dim. Even so, the sense of relief they felt that all eight of them had survived the battlefield and were able to share another meal together overrode the physical shortage of food and gave them comfort.

Midori and Tina brought coffee out unstably after the meal, and after that, they all chatted pleasantly. At first glance, it looked peaceful, but Rentaro noticed some awkwardness mixed into their conversation. If he had to say, it felt like they were choosing words in such a way that the critical points of their conversation were not meshing.

But at that moment, Enju’s innocent voice interrupted without sensing the mood. “Rentaro, why did Aldebaran run away?”

“There are rumors flying among the ranks of civil officers,” Rentaro started. “But no one knows the real reason why…”

“Oh, is that so?” Enju made a serious face and crossed her arms. However, she seemed to think of a different question and murmured, “Will the Gastrea attack us again?”

Everyone stopped suddenly and looked down. The light of the candles in the three-pronged brass candlestick flickered ominously. It was the question no one had dared to ask until now.

Everyone had already lost too much. For Rentaro, he had studied how tragic war was time and time again in class. However, what he experienced after actually being thrown into the middle of a battlefield was a hell that destroyed the clichéd view of war he had a hundred times over. That battlefield, filled with screams that made his hair stand on end and dyed red with blood and guts, had opened up the lid to his sealed-off trauma and overlapped with images of the Gastrea War he had seen as a child.

Honestly, Rentaro had avoided taking the initiative to start this conversation. However, if they continued to keep their mouths shut and avert their eyes from reality, it would result in a grave miscalculation of their chance at survival.

When Rentaro looked up, he focused on Enju. “Well, we still have three days. I can’t really say anything for sure.”

In the original scenario of the Monolith’s collapse, the Monolith was predicted to collapse seven days after Aldebaran injected it with Varanium corrosion fluid, and three days later, the replacement Monolith would be completed. However, because the Monolith had collapsed a day early, and they had already started fighting, even after a night had already passed they were still three days away from the arrival of the replacement Monolith. And it would be expecting too much to think that Aldebaran would not come back in the next three days.

“Satomi, wait…” Kisara raised her hand timidly. “About the Spear of Light…”

At those words, everyone’s faces clouded over with disgust. Everyone had had a hard time dealing with it on the battlefield. If Enju hadn’t saved Rentaro in the nick of time, he might not have been able to remain in this world.

“What was that, anyway, Kisara? Was it some sort of laser weapon or something?” That was the conclusion Rentaro had reached after thinking about it for a night.

It was the work of a moment, but the instant anything touched the silver thread that looked like a wire saw, every object in its path seemed to be chopped up in a second.

Kinetic bombardment—if it was like a bullet, tank gun, or particle beam, then it seemed like it would cause even worse damage than just blow things away around it. In the first place, if there were Gastrea that could shoot lasers, they would be an unbelievable threat.

However, Kisara shook her head quietly. “After spending the day helping the medical squad, I saw those who had their limbs cut off by the Spear of Light. All of them had various symptoms like deafness, loss of peripheral vision, and trembling.” Kisara stopped talking for a moment and stared at Rentaro. “Satomi, don’t you realize? These are all symptoms of a disease we learned about in Japanese history—Minamata disease.”

Rentaro put his chin on his hand. If he remembered correctly, Minamata disease was a pollution-induced illness caused by the intake of methyl mercury concentrated in the bodies of seafood. Once he got that far, he stood from his chair without thinking. “Wait a minute, then Kisara, that means…”

Kisara shifted in her chair and looked straight at Rentaro. “Dr. Sumire, who examined the corpses, said the Spear of Light that severed everything was probably compressed mercury.”

“Mercury…” The other members of the adjuvant were also unsettled and couldn’t hide it, murmuring unanimously.

Rentaro continued forward with his calm calculations. If that was the case, then somewhere, there was a Gastrea that could compress mercury inside its body and fire it.

“Big Brother, there is something I would like to report regarding that,” said Tina.

“Tina, don’t tell me you…”

Tina nodded once and released a Bit from her sleeve into the air. It silently floated in the air and circled around their heads. “After we split up, I saw the Spear of Light as I fought. At the time, I immediately shot out Shenfield to capture the Gastrea that fired it, but unfortunately, it was five kilometers away and so my rifle couldn’t reach it.”

“Five kilometers away?!” It fired at their camp from that far away? “What kind of Gastrea was it?” he asked, hoping against hope that she had seen.

However, Tina shook her head hard. “I’m sorry, Big Brother. Because Shenfield puts a large strain on my brain, it doesn’t have the ability to send images. All I know are things like the distance, wind speed, and coordinates. However—” Tina beckoned the patrolling Shenfield to return and held it in both hands, staring hard at it. “It is quite large. It’s about ten meters high; its length and width is also about ten meters. It’s probably a Stage Four.”

That was the thing that wreaked havoc on the civil officer base. They had no hope of winning unless they eliminated it. But how were they supposed to do that…?

Just then, a loud voice called “Excuse me!” from outside the door. When Rentaro stood to look out the window, he saw a man he didn’t know standing outside. “Is there a Leader Satomi here? I have a summons from Commander Gado. Please report immediately to the temporary headquarters.”

4

Rentaro left the dilapidated hotel looking sidelong at Enju and the others, who were watching uneasily. He followed Gado’s messenger to the temporary headquarters; he had heard that it was in the main school building of a different junior high, and this was his first time visiting it.

The campfires he saw from afar grew steadily bigger, and the half-dilapidated school appeared slowly out of the darkness. After a quick, silent bow to the two guards standing in front of the campfires there to burn away the summer insects, they entered the school building.

From the direction the messenger was leading him, Rentaro surmised that Gado and the others were using the staff room as their temporary headquarters. From the light spilling out beyond the room, it looked as though they’d given top priority to acquiring electricity. Once Rentaro was delivered, Gado’s messenger bowed shortly and left.

Rentaro knocked on the door and waited until he was given verbal permission to enter. At the voice, he slid open the door.

Having grown used to the darkness, the brightness inside dazzled his eyes. The extra steel tables in the staff room were pushed to the corner, and Gado and the twelve or so members of his adjuvant sat around a U-shaped table. In the center was a single, high-backed chair. Everyone around the table was wearing exoskeletons that looked like traditional Japanese armor, and the heat they emitted made the room feel cramped. It was as if they were about to start an inquiry.

Rentaro licked his upper lip and told himself to be careful. From the tense atmosphere and hostile gazes, Rentaro guessed that they weren’t about to talk about something fun.

“Sit down,” urged the bald Gado, with his goatee and red armor, from the seat at the head of the table. Cautiously, Rentaro did as he was told.

But Rentaro’s eyes widened the moment he faced front and focused on Gado. Trying desperately to stifle his uneasiness inside, Rentaro nervously raised his arm and pointed at Gado. “You’re…”

“Yeah, it happened when I fought Him.” There was nothing below Gado’s left thigh. It looked like it had been cut off, stitched up, and covered with a bandage. The bandage was covered with a dark stain of blood.

“By him, you mean…Aldebaran?” That instant, it was as if he had said an abominable name, and Gado’s team covered their faces in agitation.

The rumor was true then, after all. In yesterday’s battle, there was a scream of agony that echoed right before the civil officers were completely wiped out, and then the Gastrea suddenly retreated. Rentaro and the other regulars hadn’t been told the details, but it was a badly kept secret that Gado and his partner had fought Aldebaran, and that their fight had ended in a draw.

What was baffling about the situation was that Gado had gone into hiding with no explanation after that, but seeing the sorry state he was in now, Rentaro understood why. It was beyond the level of a badge of honor. If Gado showed himself to the civil officer troops the way he looked now, they couldn’t avoid a drop in morale.

Gado seemed to notice Rentaro’s silence and showed his white teeth with a sinister challenge, slapping his left knee. “You know, this leg wasn’t stolen from me. I gave it to that damn Gastrea.”

“Nagamasa, sir, please do not push yourself.” The quiet Initiator wearing a sky blue exoskeleton, Asaka Mibu, bravely waited upon him, trying to replace his leg.

But Gado waved her away, annoyed, and looked at Rentaro. “What was Hidehiko like in the end?”

“He fought gallantly, sir,” Rentaro answered.

Gado sighed deeply. “I was the one who forced him to give up being an artist and become a civil officer… If I had known this would happen, I would have let him do as he liked.”

Rentaro looked at the faces of everyone gathered there. “Did you fight against Aldebaran with everyone here?”

“No, Asaka and I were the only ones who made it past the enemy’s close battle formation. The enemy did a good job leading us by the nose with its splendid movements. Ironically, even though we can understand words, the enemy was a much better commander.”

“What if there was a rational explanation for why the enemy could command troops?”

“What do you mean?”

“Gado. Aldebaran’s base is probably a bee Gastrea.”

This time, all of Gado’s adjuvant stirred with astonishment, and Gado looked dubious. “What are you talking about…?”

“Gado, do you know why the self-defense force that had an easy victory during the Second Kanto Battle was beaten so quickly this time in the Third Kanto Battle? Also, when you wounded Aldebaran, the surrounding Gastrea immediately formed a wall around it to protect it and retreated. Isn’t that strange if you think about it?”

Gado rubbed his bald head and tilted it. “Get to the point. Are you saying you found the answer?”

“Pheromones.”

“Pheromones…? Are you talking about those things that come out of your body to attract the opposite sex?”

“Those are sex pheromones. What made them all gather immediately to protect Aldebaran were probably swarm pheromones. It is said that swarm pheromones are what command a school of fish in the water to make them seem like one giant fish. There are also alarm pheromones, pheromones to tell friend from foe, pheromones to change moods, trail pheromones, and other different kinds. Over one thousand, six hundred have been identified.

“Aldebaran manipulated mole Gastrea to efficiently stop weapons like tanks and automatic cannons from underground, and had dragonfly Gastrea drop others for a surprise attack to break through the rear. From the timing to everything else, it’s too perfect. Aldebaran is probably able to use known and unknown pheromones to command the Gastrea.

“Pheromones have no taste or smell, so normal humans definitely cannot sense them, and if Aldebaran can use pheromones so dexterously, then it has to be a bee or some other kind of similar Gastrea. Gado, you saw Aldebaran, right? Did you see degenerated wings or a stinger somewhere on its body?”

Gado, lost in thought, didn’t answer as he put a hand on his chin.

It looked like Rentaro had hit the nail on the head. “Do you understand what this means? It means if we take down the head, Aldebaran, the whole swarm will fall apart. Gastrea working alone won’t have a leader anymore and can be easily routed. If we continue to get rid of them, they will suffer an upset before long. There’s no need to chase after them. Eventually, the replacement Monolith will arrive. We’ll win.”

However, even after listening to Rentaro’s plan for victory, Gado remained silent with his arms crossed. Eventually, he put his elbow on top of the desk and put his chin on his hand, looking at Rentaro listlessly. “Your opinion was very helpful. Then, I will share with you a piece of information that you don’t know. About none other than Aldebaran—”

“Commander!” A member of the adjuvant stood up with a screech of his chair. It was a middle-aged man whose face looked oddly similar to Gado’s. He had been part of Gado’s son Hidehiko’s adjuvant. It was possible that all the members of Gado’s adjuvant were his own blood relatives. “I must oppose this! If that is leaked, there will be a fatal drop in morale. You have no obligation to tell a mere soldier!”

Gado shook his head. “It’s not a problem. Leader Satomi’s IP rank is 300. He has the highest rank out of everyone in the troop besides me. He has the right to know. If there’s trouble from it, I will be held responsible.” Saying that, Gado looked back at Rentaro and said gravely, “Leader Satomi, Aldebaran is an immortal Gastrea. There’s no way to kill it.”

“Huh?” Rentaro responded stupidly. He thought he must have heard wrong. However, that faint hope was crushed to smithereens the next moment.

“I will say it again, Leader Satomi. Aldebaran is an immortal Gastrea. Last night, I got in close to him, ready to cross swords and cut off his head. With this,” Gado said as he had Asaka go get the weapon leaning against the wall.

The weapon Asaka reverently brought back was a giant weapon about as big as she was. Two black blades came from the hilt. It was a special sword called a twin sword.

“My sword split open the Gastrea’s head, no mistake, and pierced its chest with its next stroke. I definitely felt like I had done damage to its brain and heart, but that thing didn’t fall, and the next instant, its wounds started to heal, albeit slowly. I was extremely confused and left myself open. Thanks to that, my leg was eaten, and now look at me.”

“No way. That’s impossible…,” Rentaro said. Gastrea only had two vital spots—the brain and the heart. These two areas were supposed to be virtually impossible to regenerate, and other than stabbing these areas and defeating them, using Varanium weapons that inhibit regeneration to inflict damage was the main tactic used when fighting against Gastrea.

Gado’s sword, with its twin obsidian edges, was without a doubt made of Varanium. Damage to the brain and heart, plus the fact that these attacks were made by the regeneration-inhibiting Varanium, should have made triply sure to give Aldebaran a prompt death. To be able to heal wounds like that was extremely unusual.

Gado shrugged his shoulders. “Gastrea cells repair and regenerate telomeres, so they never die of old age. In other words, rather than being immortal, it would be more accurate to say Aldebaran will not age or die.”

Will not age or die…

The back of Rentaro’s mind was numb, and he did not know what to say. The darkness of despair pushed in and enveloped Rentaro from all sides. He had thought that Aldebaran’s ability was just the Varanium corrosion liquid and using pheromones to completely control a troop of Gastrea, but he had been jumping to conclusions thinking he knew the truth behind the ghost.

There had been one more ability.

Something that was the capability of the Stage Five Taurus’s right hand, the Stage Four Gastrea Aldebaran.

“Why—” Rentaro said, gasping. “Why, Gado? Aldebaran has been sighted numerous times in the past. Why hadn’t anyone realized that it had this ability until now?!”

“I’m sure there are various reasons for it, but one is that we were probably all too caught up with how strong the Taurus troops were,” said Gado. “Until a year ago, when the girl of unknown citizenship and name called the world’s strongest Initiator came and unexpectedly killed Taurus, many cities were completely annihilated when trying to stop their advance. Most countries did not survive to bring home intel.”

Gado took the teacup Asaka held out to him, gulped the contents in one go, and leaned forward with a rustle of his armor, looking at Rentaro with belligerent eyes. “Besides, this isn’t the only trump card the Aldebaran troops have. Leader Satomi, you’ve heard of the Spear of Light that many civil officers are talking about, haven’t you?”

“That Gastrea that can shoot high-pressure mercury from five kilometers away?”

Gado widened his eyes in surprise. “High-pressure mercury? It’s shooting mercury?”

Rentaro nodded quietly. “I have a lot of excellent people in my adjuvant. It’s probably an archerfish Gastrea.” Normally, archerfish were tropical fish that used their pointy, funnel-shaped mouths to shoot compressed water and bring down insects near the surface of the water. They only measured about twenty centimeters or so in length, but they could shoot up to 1.5 meters. “According to one of our Initiators, the enemy is a giant Gastrea about ten meters across in all directions, so I can’t even begin to imagine how much pressure that compressed mercury is being shot out at.”

“I see…,” said Gado. “Well, anyway, we were calling the Gastrea that appeared suddenly yesterday Gastrea X, but after consulting with the Japanese National Security Council this morning, it was acknowledged to be as much of a threat as Aldebaran and was given the code name Pleiades, after the group of stars in the middle of the Taurus constellation.”

“Pleiades…”

Gado fished around in his breast pocket and pulled out two objects engraved with intricate designs. Rentaro could tell immediately that they were chess pieces, a king and a queen. “It’s true that, like you said, if we defeat Aldebaran, we’ll probably win this game. However, even if we try to defeat the king, the queen will definitely stand in our way. So in this game, we must defeat the queen in order to be victorious.”

In chess, everyone knew without saying that the king was the most important piece in predicting the outcome of a game. And that the queen, who could move in all directions and had an unlimited range, was the supreme ruler of the battlefield. It was a perfectly fitting phrase.

“But this isn’t chess, it’s shogi, right?”

“Hmm?”

“The opponent’s camp can use all the pieces that were defeated by the Gastrea virus. We’re the ones that are being made to play by the rules of chess.”

Gado seemed to be holding back laughter as he shrugged his shoulders queerly. “That might well be the case.”

“How many people were killed?”

“It would be impossible to explain that in one sentence.” Gado took a sip of tea from the cup Asaka proffered, crossed his arms, and looked down. “When the battle started, the enemy numbered about two thousand. However, the seven thousand decisive self-defense soldiers were defeated, and though the Gastrea forces lost five hundred, in exchange, it looks like two thousand of the defeated self-defense force troops were infected with the Gastrea virus and turned into Gastrea, adding to Aldebaran’s numbers. Then, the expanded Gastrea troop of three thousand five hundred bodies came up against our five hundred pairs of civil officers, or a thousand people. The enemy lost nine hundred, but half of our pairs were killed as well—and sadly, it looks like a hundred of them were added to the enemy’s numbers.”

“In other words, the current match up of fighting bodies is…”

“Two thousand seven hundred Gastrea to our five hundred.”

Rentaro was sure that wasn’t all. They had suffered more serious damage than the numbers made it appear. There were, of course, the injured, but also those ten-year-old girls who were dispirited from the trauma of being suddenly thrown onto such a cruel battlefield. There were also many pairs whose combat power was less than half because one of the partners had been killed. Even if those who lost their partners formed impromptu unofficial pairs, they could not be expected to be in sync. It would be better to say that their actual numbers were about a third of what they had left, or a hundred and sixty-six people.

“Those numbers are hopeless,” said Rentaro.

“I have nothing to say in response to that…,” replied Gado. “On top of that, today we must give an even more painful ruling.”

“What?” Slowly, the pressure from the gazes around Rentaro became even stronger, and he felt intense pressure from them.

The corner of Gado’s eyes narrowed sharply. “Leader Satomi, do you know why you were called here today?”

“What are you…talking about…?”

“You were not called here today so we could ask you to analyze Aldebaran and Pleiades. The fact of the matter is, we want to ask you about the independent action your adjuvant took when you left Hidehiko’s formation during the operation.”

When Rentaro understood what Gado was trying to say, he got chills down his spine. “Please, wait. We noticed the Gastrea that had gone to the back of the formation to prepare for a surprise attack and went to intercept them—”

“We have confirmed the corpses of the Gastrea to the rear of the main battle formation. However, appearances are appearances, and disobeying orders is disobeying orders. We must think of these two as separate.” Unlike earlier, Gado’s voice now had coldness mixed into it.

Rentaro realized that the winds were blowing in a strange direction and wiped the sweat on his palms hard on his pants.

“In order to maintain appearances in the army, even if just one person from the civil officer troops disobeys orders, I’m sure you can imagine what would happen. From the perspective of the other civil officers who did not know the circumstances behind your actions, what you did looks like deserting under enemy fire. In addition, you and your Initiator are a high-ranking pair with an IP rank of 300. Your actions caused a fatal disturbance in the other civil officers who were desperately enduring their shaking knees to stand in line. I must have you pay for that.”

“B-but—”

Even as Rentaro tried to argue vehemently, Gado cut him off completely. “It was rash, Leader Satomi. I hereby disband your adjuvant and sentence you to capital punishment. I will not hear any excuses. You disobeyed the orders of your superior officer and deserted under enemy fire. Those are serious crimes even among serious crimes. If I do not punish you, it will set the bad precedent that even if one disobeys orders, they will not be punished. Military troops with warped rules can no longer be called military troops. They are just a disorderly crowd. Especially now that the mood of defeat has grown stronger, discipline must be tightened.”

At Gado’s words, a heavy weight fell on Rentaro with a thud.

Capital punishment. In other words, death.

“S-stop messing around!” The instant Rentaro stood from his chair to try to get closer to Gado, a strong fist sank into his stomach, and he almost passed out from the blow.

“Oof.” Rentaro couldn’t bear it, and his knees bent. As he gritted his teeth against the pain, he looked next to him and saw the Initiator, Asaka, looking down at him with a bored look on her face.

The little—!

“If you move, you will send your life flying,” she said.

Rentaro was forced to his knees, and pressing into his throat was the cold blade of a Japanese sword. Behind his back, he could hear multiple guns cocking, and as he glared at Gado with his teeth gritted, he received a pitying look. “Leader Satomi,” Gado said, “I personally expected a lot out of you. It’s unfortunate.”

Damn it. Rentaro cursed his own carelessness as his clenched fists shook above his knees. When he had been summoned by Gado, why had he not sensed any danger? If he had been able to predict that this would happen, he could have thought of a way to deal with it. Instead, he just nonchalantly…

Rentaro lamented his own foolish actions and the fact that he could not find anything wrong with Gado’s logic. Gado’s reasons were completely valid. If the rules of the corps were to be the most important, then he had to punish whoever broke the rules, no matter who it was. If their positions were reversed, then Rentaro likely would have imposed the same grave punishment on Gado.

Resignation slowly took its toll. Rentaro’s stomach felt as heavy as lead, and he started to feel dizzy.

“My…” He saw Enju’s smile in his head. He felt stunned, and his vision grew dark as he sweat profusely. Then, finally, words of defeat passed Rentaro’s lips. “My adjuvant… Please do not punish them… They were just following my orders. Please.”

Gado snorted. “To think that the hero who defeated the Zodiac Gastrea Scorpion and saved the country is now on death row. Fate is ironic to the bitter end, isn’t it?”

“Commander. There is no need to have pity on him. Let us execute this man here and now!” demanded one of Gado’s subordinates.

Gado rejected his subordinate’s suggestion with a wave of his hand and looked straight at Rentaro with a sigh. Then, he said, “Leader Satomi, are you ready to die once more?”

“Huh?” said Rentaro, startled.

“Commander!” said Gado’s subordinate.

“Now, wait a minute,” said Gado. “Leader Satomi, as you know, the battle we are fighting right now is a defensive battle to hold out until the construction of the replacement Monolith. However, there are also people who think we should not just be defending. If we were able to eliminate the symbol of the civil officers’ current fears, the Gastrea Pleiades, then I believe we can find a way out of this blockade. However, we do not have enough troops that I can deploy elite troops to do the job.” Gado stopped talking for a moment and gave a bold smile. “So I have a request to ask of you.”

Gado stood with one hand on his cane, schooled his gaze, and spoke from his belly. “What I ask is for you to infiltrate enemy territory by yourself and exterminate the unknown long-distance sniper Gastrea Pleiades.”

Rentaro felt like he had been hit hard on the side of the head. He couldn’t react for a good while.

“What I really want to say is to go and defeat Aldebaran, but it would be rash to go up against an immortal Gastrea without a plan.

“Asaka.” Gado gave her an order, and she calmly operated the PDA device next to her. When she did, a giant 3-D image that seemed to bury the whole room appeared. In front of them spread the expanse of flat plains connected to the ruins that Rentaro and the others had requisitioned, and through the forest behind that was the memorial monument, the Flame of Return.

It looked to be a scale model of District 40, where Rentaro and the others were. There was something similar in Miori Shiba’s student council room, but the accuracy and color of this was nowhere near as good as the one owned by the daughter of a multimillionaire.

From where Rentaro was, he could see the small mountain of powder in the back that was what remained of the Monolith.

“Currently, the civil officer and Gastrea troops are positioned equidistant from the Monolith with the Monolith between them,” said Gado.

As if their hearts were beating as one, as Gado spoke, Asaka turned the model and drew a line. The line disappeared into an oval-shaped forest quite far away and outside the city wall. The forest was expansive, and there was a river that seemed to pierce its center. With a tree canopy that high, even a Stage Four Gastrea could hide in it.

Gado continued. “Because of the Gastrea virus, this forest has seen abnormal growth and diverse ecosystems. Somewhere in this forest, the twenty-seven hundred-plus Gastrea we were discussing are resting.”

“Do you know what part of the forest Aldebaran and Pleiades are in?” Rentaro hedged.

“Unfortunately, no. Not even the highest resolution artificial satellite could tell us this. We do also have sixth-generation unmanned reconnaissance crafts, but the JNSC cabinet ministers are extremely unmotivated to send them.”

“Pleiades, huh…?”

“That’s right. A being that the JNSC higher-ups are afraid to shoot down even with cruise missiles and support fighter aircraft. They had guaranteed us mastery of the air, but they have not brought that promise to fruition yet. Thanks to that, the flying Gastrea dealt us a lot of damage, and it was all we could do to defend ourselves. They really gave us a beating.”

The joke that even one powerful Gastrea could change the tide of a war was happening in real life. And the still unseen Pleiades that shot compressed mercury… According to Tina, it measured about ten meters on all sides. Since it was on land, its archerfish genes must have mixed with those of a land-dwelling animal, so Rentaro wondered what form it would take.

“Leader Satomi… No, Former Leader. Destroy it. You have no right to refuse. You only have a small chance of succeeding, but since you were supposed to die anyway, it will be no great loss if you go. Dead heroes are very easy to use, after all.”

Fury pierced Rentaro’s spinal cord, and he brushed off the men at his sides who were holding him down, pushed away the other subordinates trying to stop him, and pressed on determinedly toward Gado. Slamming the palms of his hands on Gado’s steel desk, Rentaro got so close to the man that he practically head-butted his nose. “You’ve finally shown your true nature, huh? You old weasel…!”

Gado smiled without changing the cool expression on his face. “But Satomi, these are also my honest, true feelings. Among the civil officers, there are those who mistakenly believe that we don’t need to fight Aldebaran anymore and can sit pretty for another three days. Unfortunately, once Aldebaran completely heals the injury I gave it, it will definitely attack again. This is the only chance we have to attack. Satomi, if you accept this mission, I promise that I will not charge your adjuvant for this crime. But if you refuse, I will punish you all together. It looks like you have an Initiator who adores you as if you were her father and a lovely childhood friend in your adjuvant. I’m sure you could not bring yourself to let them undergo such severe punishment.”

“Just try laying even a finger on Enju or Kisara… I’ll kill you!”

“Then, it’s decided. We will prepare the equipment for you. Go say your good-byes to your friends today.”

Rentaro closed his eyes and exhaled, then slowly opened them again. “There’s one last thing I want to ask. You all saw Aldebaran with your own eyes, right? What did it look like?”

The moment he asked, a startled expression crossed over everyone in the room. Gado had a frighteningly stern expression on his face and looked like he was about to shoot fire from his angrily narrowed eyes. “Satomi, unfortunately, I cannot answer your question. No, I do not want to answer your question. Last night, because of our encounter with the repulsive monster, none of us slept one wink. We will probably not be able to sleep well tonight, either. Do your best. I pray from the bottom of my heart that you will be able to complete your mission without running into Aldebaran.”

5

“Oh, Rentaro!” Enju welcomed him back cheerfully as she bounced out of the abandoned hotel, her pigtails swinging.

Enju’s voice started off a chorus of flurried others.

“What, Satomi?”

“He’s back?”

—And other such calls. All of Rentaro’s friends gathered around the door, noisily welcoming him back. Thinking they were overreacting, he checked the clock and was a little surprised. Apparently, he had been talking with Gado and the others for over three hours.

Kisara looked at him uneasily. “Did you get a talking-to for what we did yesterday after all?”

Rentaro said, “Let’s talk inside,” and they returned to the dining room en masse. He waited until everyone had sat down and calmed; he didn’t know where to start, but thinking that everything was important, he falteringly gave a full account of what happened with Gado. It was a shock, as expected, and the part about Aldebaran’s immortality and its attack after it healed its wound resulted in an air of silent despair among his team.

And then, Rentaro deliberately hid the fact that he had been ordered on a mission to subjugate Pleiades. “Sorry, everyone. It looks like our adjuvant will be disbanded after all. It doesn’t look like we can avoid it.”

“N-no… Wait a minute!” It was Yuzuki. Her gaze wavered, and she was obviously shaken. “I was finally able to make friends with Tina and everyone… R-Rentaro Satomi! Do something about it!”

“No, what bothers me is how light the punishment is.” It was Shoma, who had been silent until now, murmuring with a hand on his chin. “The commander said from the very beginning that disobeying orders would be punished severely. Don’t you think just getting our adjuvant disbanded is letting us off too easy, Satomi?”

As expected of Shoma, Rentaro thought admiringly, without letting it show on his face.

“Shoma, I’m sure that is because the commander also took into consideration the results of our battle and made the punishment lighter,” Midori interjected with a smile.

Shoma did not look convinced but accepted her opinion. Midori’s kindhearted reasoning was completely off the mark, but Rentaro was at least grateful that it kept Shoma from asking him more questions.

“Then, what’ll happen to us?” Tina asked, her face clouding over.

Rentaro chose his words carefully to keep from upsetting her. “Maybe we’ll be sent to support those adjuvants that have lost members? I don’t really know, either.”

“I-I see…,” said Tina.

As if she had sensed the mood growing melancholy, Enju suddenly stuck her fist in the air above her head and snorted as she stood. “But even if we get separated, it’s not as if we’ll never meet again!”

“That’s…true, too.” Kisara nodded a beat later.

Beneath his sunglasses, Tamaki rubbed his eyes and sniffed. “It’s just as that bunny girl over there says. It’s a little sad to be sayin’ good-bye tonight, but that’s why I’ll turn this into a grand good-bye party!”

Everyone else looked at each other, grinning.

The time after that passed like a dream. They lavishly used up the rest of the food they had been rationed for the three days and recooked it desperately, filling their half-empty bellies to bursting. Inside the room, large candles burned brightly and turned everyone’s faces red. It put the room in a festive, birthday party-esque mood, and the dimly burning flames reflected in the eyes of Enju, Tina, and the other girls, shining lovely.

Among them, the irises of Kisara’s slightly smaller, cat-shaped eyes took in the light and reflected it in a bewitchingly beautiful way. Before he knew it, Rentaro was driven by the impulse to stare at it, but he didn’t want to seem impolite, so he quickly turned his head to the side just when it seemed like their eyes were about to meet.

Most of the time was taken by the girls complaining about wanting to take hot showers. On the other hand, the boys’ conversation was extremely pragmatic as they tried to calculate how much of the emergency stores were left after the fire at headquarters. Rentaro joked that at this rate, they would run out of provisions and have to hunt lizards and snails to eat, and Kisara, who had been raised a proper lady, said with her eyes half-closed, “You’re the worst.”

Tamaki brought some wine stolen from the wine cellar in the basement, and he had a cup with Shoma, who was also old enough to drink. Rentaro didn’t think that the boisterous Tamaki and reticent Shoma would get along, but he seemed to be wrong. Shoma was nodding quietly as he listened to Tamaki’s nonstop talking.

The gloomy, defeated mood had been blown away, and it made them forget for a while that they were in the middle of a war. Rentaro also started to feel better and had fun without worrying about the time. The party broke up in the wee hours of the night, and everyone went to their respective hotel rooms.

The hotel was small, with just three floors, and the windows were mostly still intact. Rentaro even tried going onto the roof, but it was submerged, possibly from a clogged pipe.

The third-floor room Rentaro and Enju were assigned had two beds with a side table sandwiched between them. Part of the ceiling was broken, and insulation material was sticking out. The floor was covered with a thick coating of dust, but Rentaro saw that the dust on the bed had been brushed off. Tina probably cleaned here, he thought. The smell of mold that had been the room’s inhabitant for the last ten years seemed to be a little like incense.

Rentaro lay on the bed and talked with Enju until the lights went out. She went on about various topics unchecked, adding exaggerated gestures as she spoke, and Rentaro nodded in response.

For some reason, Rentaro felt that he had to treasure this time.

Finally, Enju got tired of talking and fell asleep, and the sound of her breath echoed into the darkness. Rentaro’s heart gradually grew colder.

And so, Rentaro Satomi realized that the last hours he had spent with his friends signaled the end.

Staring at the darkness in the ceiling, he waited a while longer, just in case, and then got up slowly. For some reason, the air that hit his body seemed much colder than earlier, but still he put on his shoes and his jacket.

Just as he quietly walked to the door and put his hand on the doorknob, a voice called his name, and he startled.

Looking back, he calmed his pounding heart. Enju seemed to be talking in her sleep. Rentaro didn’t know what kind of dream she was having, but there was a part of her voice that seemed sad. Enju’s expression was hidden by the covers, so he couldn’t see it.

“Sorry, Enju.” Looking downcast as he said this, Rentaro left the room. He went down to the dining room without encountering anyone else, and there, Gado’s messenger was waiting by the fireplace. When Rentaro saw that the messenger had come into their temporary residence without taking off his shoes, he felt disgusted but was careful not to let it show on his face.

The messenger casually threw Rentaro a backpack. Taking it silently, Rentaro upended it on the table, and the contents fell out. The first thing he saw was a heavy, rectangular mass. Feeling it over its wrapper, he saw that it was soft and pliable like clay. It was a C-4 plastic explosive.

In a former age, when nitroglycerine was first discovered, scientists of the time were troubled by how even the slightest shock could make it explode, but current explosives were so stable that they would only burn down when thrown into a bonfire and did not explode accidentally. Instead, they were detonated through the fuse and combusted with a large blast. They combusted at over eight thousand meters per second and could cause an astounding number of casualties. This was probably custom-made to work against Gastrea, with powdered Varanium and the like mixed in.

Besides that, there were portable rations, a canteen, a compass, a beta light, and various other survival goods.

Rentaro took off his jacket and hung his pouch and back holster from his belt and made a small adjustment so he could attach the silencer onto the XD gun at his hip. After pulling back the slide so it could fire, he stored it in the carbon-fiber holster made by Blackhawk! He checked the fit of the holster by practicing a few quick draws. He also hung the combat knife from his belt with the scabbard still on, then refitted his jacket over it all and grabbed a strap of the backpack.

Leaving behind Gado’s lackey’s indifferent look, Rentaro departed the hotel. He looked at the sky, pitch-black and starless, and heaved a sigh. The air outside had gotten even colder, too. In fact, it was cold enough that he would have believed it if someone had told him that it was late fall. He had not expected the Varanium ash to make the surface temperature of the earth lower this much. They were lucky, at least, that it was summer right now.

Rentaro looked straight at the fallen Monolith and started quietly toward it. The regular crunching sound of his footsteps on the ground sent Rentaro into the depths of his thoughts. In the end, he’d left without finding the right time to tell Enju and the others what was going on. Of course, he had thought about the option of telling at least Enju the truth and having her go with him. But after thinking it over, Rentaro had decided that it was his responsibility alone to take care of this and had chosen to go alone.

He had his reasons, of course—

“Satomi…”

Rentaro hid his backpack quickly and turned timidly toward the voice. He hadn’t been hearing things.

Shoulders hunched, standing stock-still and crestfallen with a shocked look on her face, was Kisara Tendo.

“Kisara, how…?” he asked.

“When I woke up to use the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of you leaving your room, and when I followed you, I saw your exchange with the messenger, and…” Kisara lifted her face and continued. “Where are you going?”

Rentaro quieted his heart and tried to put on an air of nonchalance. “I was going to the bathroom, too. What, Kisara, do you want to come with me?”

“S-stupid! Of course not!”

“Then don’t follow me. I’m just taking a walk after taking a leak.”

“Toward the Monolith?”

A freezing summer wind blew between Rentaro and Kisara. It sent Rentaro’s hair and Kisara’s skirt fluttering.

Kisara shook her head hard. “I can’t believe you. Haven’t you noticed, Satomi? I’m sure you’ve been given a crazy mission, but going alone is like going to your death.”

That was something he slowly understood after hearing the details of the mission. Ostensibly, this was a secret mission Gado entrusted to Rentaro, but in actuality, it was different. Rentaro’s name at least was known in the world as that of the hero who defeated the Zodiac Scorpion, so if Gado had punished Rentaro in any way, Gado probably would have faced internal criticism. For Gado, who wanted to unify the civil officers because they were at a disadvantage, that could possibly work against him. In other words, Gado was in the difficult position of losing unity whether or not he punished Rentaro.

That was probably why Gado came up with the plan to give Rentaro amnesty in exchange for defeating Pleiades. Of course, it was a mission that he was unlikely to return alive from. Rentaro would be finished off by the Gastrea in the forest, so Gado wouldn’t have to dirty his own hands, and Gado would be able to keep up appearances in front of the other civil officers.

In other words, Rentaro’s mission was none other than a prettily decorated trip to the gallows. That was also the reason why he had not brought Enju. There was no way he could bring Enju along on a journey that would lead to her death.

“Why just you, Satomi? Don’t we all share the blame for following you?” said Kisara.

It became hard for Rentaro to look at her face, so he turned his back to her. “Someone had to take responsibility. That’s why I’ll go.”

“Let’s run away.”

“Where?”

He heard a sharp breath behind him as she faltered. “Well…”

“There is nowhere left to run in Tokyo Area. If we don’t hold them back here, we’ll die no matter where we run. I must avoid that, at least. Thank you, Kisara. But I’m going to go.”

Rentaro strode forward without looking back.

“You really are stupid!” Her voice followed close behind him and seemed to pull at his hair. Desperately trying to control the feelings this stirred in him, he attempted to leave as quickly as possible.

Because of the black rain that had been streaking down since the morning, his boots scraping along the undergrowth were soon soaked and felt uncomfortable. His nostrils were filled with the strong smell of earth after the rain.

After walking a while, the fallen Monolith 32 grew large in his field of view. Its pieces had crumbled and formed a mountain of white debris, and only the pillarlike structures of the frame that had not been bleached remained standing in the mountain. The current spine-chilling remains seemed like some sort of grave marker.

What Rentaro found unexpected was that even after it became like this, the Monolith still seemed to evoke some sort of reverence in his chest. It was a massively enormous structure that surpassed UV rays, acid, attacks, and human intellect. He didn’t know what to say now that it had collapsed, but thinking it appropriate to thank it for its hard work, Rentaro mourned it in his heart.

Rentaro made a large detour around the grave marker of the Monolith and finally stepped into Unexplored Territory. Although, since Monolith 32 had collapsed, the boundary between what was within the Monoliths and what was Unexplored Territory had become ambiguous.

Animals from the ocean could not live on land. Animals from land could not live in the ocean. At the water’s edge, there was the undeniable boundary between life and death.

This was the same thing.

Humans could not live outside the Monoliths. Gastrea could not live inside the Monoliths because they would be exposed to the strong Varanium magnetic field. At least, that was how it was supposed to work. That rule was currently being overtly infringed upon.

This was a battle with the lives of the Aldebaran troops and all the survivors of Tokyo Area on the line. There was no way he could afford to lose.

Rentaro tried imagining what Aldebaran looked like, but no matter how hard he tried, it looked hazy and blurry. Even in the first picture he got from the Seitenshi, only the mouthparts had been lit up by the searchlight and could be seen clearly. He had not been able to see the other parts.

It would not age or die, it had the ability to corrode Varanium, and it could command other Gastrea using various pheromones. Even though he kept finding out about its fearsome abilities one after another, he did not have the least bit idea what it looked like.

And Gado’s adjuvant wouldn’t even be able to sleep well tonight because they had encountered Aldebaran.

The darkness of the night sent Rentaro’s imagination in the wrong direction, and he gave a start at the silhouette of a parabolic antenna in his peripheral vision. Rentaro shook his head. Get ahold of yourself, Rentaro Satomi.

Meanwhile, he had passed the expanse of flat plains and could see the ruins of the area destroyed by the Gastrea War. Just about when he passed the wreckage of a railroad crossing that was forever open, Rentaro started to think that maybe this area had once been a factory town. The abandoned pulp factory had pulp plastered everywhere and was becoming a grayish white, and the roof thatched with galvanized zinc sheet metal had turned red with rust. The beams seemed to be giving up on supporting the roof, and looked like they were inviting a collapse. Electric cables were tangled on the ground and looked like they would wrap around his legs. Of course, there was no electricity running through them, so there was no danger of getting electrocuted, but he was still careful. The adjacent roof that protruded as much as it could seemed to be entwined in a complicated way, and they looked like a single organism that had combined.

Rentaro tried his best to not make any sound with his footsteps, stepping slowly on the ground heel first. He stopped and strained his ears at even this slightest rustle of a mouse. He used his beta light to read his map and compass, checking his direction as he walked. Narrowing his eyes and looking far ahead, he could faintly see something that looked like a forest. Apparently, past these ruins was the forest where Gado had said the Gastrea were hiding. However, if he didn’t go straight through and pass this long stretch of ruins, he would never reach the forest.

Rentaro thought over Gado’s explanation inside his head. Ten kilometers one way. Twenty kilometers round trip. Assuming Rentaro walked at a speed of four kilometers per hour, he could make it back in less than five hours, but of course, it would not be that easy. Even now, he was using all his senses as he slowly marched forward with Gastrea in his surroundings, and even after he got out of this place, he would have to successfully find Pleiades and defeat it to return alive. No matter how well things went, it would take at least three times as long.

In addition, he did not know what Pleiades looked like. All he knew currently was that it was ten meters long and that it probably had funnel-shaped mouthparts that it used to shoot compressed mercury. He didn’t have much to go on.

Rentaro hesitated, but he decided to go into the factory and move forward by weaving from door to door. He decided that it was necessary in order to lower even slightly the possibility that he would get caught by one of the flying Gastrea since he had no way of knowing where they were observing from.

He had been prepared for it, but he started to see strange things here and there inside the building. There was a giant rusting gear of unknown use, and below that was a bloodstain from some unknown animal’s entrails that looked like they had been splattered and painted on the wall, and the handrails in the hall had handprints of blood clinging to them.

Looking carefully, Rentaro saw that there were white objects dropped here and there on the floor. He picked up one of the bigger pieces and shone his MagLite on it. It was a piece of femur that had marks from where it had been chewed on and stripped of its flesh by some kind of animal.

This is bad, he thought as he forced his fear down. There was some sort of Gastrea that counted this whole ruin as part of its territory. He was probably smack-dab in the middle of that monster’s property right now. He had to get out of here as soon as possible, but if he ran into the Gastrea before getting out of the forest, it would be bad.

He told himself that his first priority was to figure out what kind of Gastrea it was. He hadn’t noticed until he turned on the MagLite, but he could see faint footprints of mud at his feet. They were pretty big, and each one was about as big as Rentaro’s palm. From the looks of things, it walked on four legs. Also, stuck to the handrail that came up to about Rentaro’s waist in the hallway was a piece of an animal’s whitish fur. If it was already that tall on four legs, then it was probably pretty big. Leaning in and bringing his nose close to the fur, he could smell traces of animal. The leavings weren’t that old.

Rentaro passed through a number of buildings until he entered what looked like a cement factory. He stopped at the strong scent of animal—it hit him like a wall. Passing a hallway with piping all over the place, he carefully put an ear to the rusted iron door beyond a broken conveyer belt.

Confirming that there was no sign of anything alive beyond, he opened the door slowly and quietly. When he got it partway open, the stink from the crack was so strong that he had to cover his nose. This was it. He was sure of it.

The stink of animal, rotting meat, mold, rust, and other things he couldn’t name mixed together into something so strong it made his eyes water. He fought desperately against the desire to immediately turn around and run out of the factory. Chanting to himself to calm down over and over in his head and taking a deep breath, he opened the door with all his strength and shone his MagLite inside. The ring of light he slid from right to left exposed a vast number of dried-up human bones in the dark and made them disappear again. Before Rentaro knew it, he had covered his mouth and was desperately feeling around in his pocket for a handkerchief.

He had no room to doubt that this was where the Gastrea had feasted.

As if begrudging the opening of a secret room, the place seemed to respond with a sullen silence.

Rentaro made up his mind and stepped inside. His gaze was drawn to the flecks of dust dancing in the air as his light revealed them. Countless chains dangled from the ceiling, and a large, complicated machine was attached to the pipes.

Timidly taking a step inside, his shoes squished something damp, and he was surprised by the creak of deteriorating floorboards. Even though he knew it was impossible, he couldn’t shake the wild idea that the next second, the skeletons would start laughing boisterously and stand up to attack him.

While leaning over to pass the pipes, he inspected a corpse that had not been completely bleached yet. It had received serious damage and most of it had sharp bite marks, large and small. It looked like this wasn’t just one or two Gastrea.

Is it possible that the Gastrea is even raising young here?

Rentaro started to have an idea of what kind of Gastrea had claimed this area. If Rentaro’s predictions were correct, then he needed to get out of here as soon as possible. He felt the urge to bury the corpses abandoned between the cold boards, but he didn’t have time for that. He had no choice but to ask them to wait a little longer until they were able to reclaim their country’s land from the Gastrea.

When Rentaro left the cement factory, he froze, panting.

The forest where Pleiades was lay right in front of him. However, his impatience spurred him to move more than before.

Rentaro continued on the jet-black pathway. The beam of the MagLite that he’d left on shook, and the silent road changed into something suffocating. When he got out of the town of dilapidated factories, it was all wild, and there was nothing left to take cover in until he got to the forest. He just had to get across.

Just then, there was a quiet sound he normally would have ignored, and steady footsteps coming from somewhere. Rentaro pricked his ears, making sure to not look back. It wasn’t just one. There were at least five. And they were increasing.

Naturally, his pulse quickened and he sped up his walk. Pulling his gun out of its holster, he attached the one-touch mountable silencer. It would be another hundred meters before he reached the forest in front of him. Even if he got away, he didn’t think his pursuers would stop chasing him, but he had hope that some might give up.

Rentaro wanted to start running immediately, but he desperately controlled himself, knowing that it wasn’t time to provoke his pursuers yet. Apparently, they seemed to stop trying to hide their existence, and he could hear beastly howls from behind him.

He was getting damp with sweat as he grasped the grip of his gun. For just one second, Rentaro glanced behind him. They were enveloped in darkness, so he couldn’t see details, but he confirmed silhouettes with four legs and rounder eyes than usual for a carnivore. The pairs of eyes amplified the trace amount of light and glittered dangerously, with vertically slit pupils shining red. From the position and height of the eyes, he predicted that each Gastrea was about the size of a lion.

They were all bigger than normal. Rentaro chanted prayers to Buddha.

They were wolves.

Actually, the Gastrea that gave civil officers the most trouble were not the grotesque-looking ones or the poisonous ones. When what would have eaten humans in nature—in other words, their ultimate predators, the animals at the top of the food chain—became Gastrea and formed packs, they became the greatest threats to the corps. And here in Japan, the wolf undeniably occupied part of the food chain’s top rung. The horror of wolves becoming Gastrea was unbelievable.

They were called “wolves in sheep’s clothing” after the men who pretended to be gentlemen and escorted women home, only to make passes at them, and just so, these Gastrea wolves followed after their human prey persistently.

Nine times out of ten, normal wolves would not attack humans. However, that wasn’t true after they became Gastrea.

After seeing the settlement at the cement factory, how could he have optimistically believed that wolves would not attack humans? These guys definitely killed humans and ate them.

“Arooooooooooooo!”

Suddenly, a wolf’s howl shook the night and Rentaro’s body was struck by metaphorical lightning. Crap! he thought and started running. The thin, almost sad howl was communication with the other members of the pack. In this case, it was without a doubt a command to attack.

Rentaro heard countless footsteps and ragged breathing behind him. He gritted his teeth and fired off shots, half turning, the kickback hitting him in the shoulder. Because of the silencer, the whole gun was longer, and it was harder to turn and aim; he ended up firing randomly as he ran. He kept running, without checking to see if he hit anything.

Rentaro ran through the animal trail he had turned into his own path and ran into the giant forest, pushing his way through the rough forest dense with prehistoric Jōmon cedars. Grasping at the rotted leaves and scattered puddles, he jumped over the intricate roots protruding from the ground.

Making sure to shine light on the ground with the hand holding the MagLite, he told himself, Be careful. If his feet got caught and he fell, then he would be surrounded and tortured to death.

The sound of footsteps ran alongside Rentaro in a fan shape. He couldn’t see them, but he could feel the pressure of their terrifying, high-powered pursuit.

Suddenly, he heard panting from directly in front of him. When he pointed his light toward it, his vision was filled with a large, open mouth full of fangs lunging toward him. Reflexively, he bent his upper body back, and the massive jaws clamped the air where his neck had been. As the large body passed by, he froze.

When did it get in front of me?

Just then, his feet tangled in fright and he tripped on a root. Shit, he thought, as his torso pitched downward and the tree root approached him frighteningly fast, giving him no time to take a defensive stance. The world shook, and he suffered a blow to his brain. He didn’t even have time to groan in pain as one wolf Gastrea bit his artificial leg and shook it ferociously. He hurriedly cut off the pain sensors, but his nerves had already sent the shock straight into his brain.

Rentaro sighted his XD gun even though he was still lying down, knowing it would be almost impossible to hit. He pulled the trigger three times. The 40-caliber Varanium bullets pulverized its fangs and jaw, and one shot hit an eye. Seeing the wolf retreat with a shrill canine yelp, he thought, I did it.

However, there was a sudden heavy attack to his chest. His sternum grated loudly as a body that weighed at least two hundred kilograms leaned on top of him. A wolf’s massive front paws sank into Rentaro’s chest almost amusingly, and Rentaro let a groan out from between gritted teeth. A wolf other than the one that had mounted his chest opened its mouth wide and blew its beastly breath and drool toward his face.

The fear of being eaten pierced Rentaro’s spine, and in desperation, he flung his right arm up and stuck it into the wolf’s mouth. “Haaaaaaaaaaahhh!” He ignited his explosive-style arm. In a moment, the wolf’s face distended at terrifying speed and the next instant, it exploded. A huge amount of spinal fluid and blood splattered on Rentaro’s face.

Avoiding the giant body as it fell with violence, he jumped up and checked around him. He was surrounded.

Then, how about this?! He stuck his right fist into the ground and activated his arm again. He used a striker to set off the bottoms of the cartridges inside and fired. There was a metallic clang, and the ejector kicked out empty golden shell casings that repelled the night as they rotated. A small explosion started from Rentaro’s feet, and sand and gravel was kicked up with intense speed as it covered his vision.

The wolves were flustered and moved back somewhat. Seeing the break in the enclosure around him, Rentaro fled with all his might. He ran all-out, without pacing, and soon all the strength left his body and he hurt all over. His vision grew hazy. He was covered in mud, panting heavily, pulse racing, and he felt so sick that the contents of his stomach threatened to come back up.

Inside his head, the part that was still thinking calmly rang an alarm bell. He couldn’t continue like this. Wolves followed their prey by smell. If he didn’t remove his own scent, then they wouldn’t stop chasing him. What should he do?

He put his arm on a grove of prehistoric cedars and turned around, and suddenly his vision widened. Rentaro went dizzy with despair. The path ended abruptly and turned into a steep cliff.

Shining his light on it, he saw that it was a long way down, maybe twenty meters to where the river at the base of the cliff flowed. It was flooded from the black rain that had been falling since morning and surged with thunderous roars. If he jumped in, there was no guarantee he would survive.

He was surprised by a growl immediately behind him and turned around. His hand slipped with the momentum, and he dropped his flashlight. He hurriedly tried to pick it up but accidentally kicked the back of the light instead. It spun quickly, like a top, and with the light still on, as it strobed the landscape from light to dark, it brought out shadows of countless wolves from the darkness, only to have them disappear again.

Rentaro took a step backward, dumbfounded. What in the world…?

There weren’t just ten or twenty wolves. From the glowing red eyes he saw between the cracks just now, no matter how he counted, he estimated that there were almost fifty of them.

He took another step backward in despair and tripped, almost losing his balance. The fragile part of the cliff crumbled away, and he could hear the sound of the pieces rolling down the steep slope.

Rentaro swallowed hard. Predatory beasts approaching from the front, a cliff at his back. He closed his eyes, exhaled, and slowly opened his eyes again. Using his right leg as an axis, he spun his body halfway around and turned his back to the wolves, looking at his feet.

Without the MagLite, he couldn’t see the bottom at all and could just barely hear the violent flow of the muddy river. He wasn’t in his right mind. He berated himself for almost losing his breath at the sight of the wide-open mouth of hell below him.

Behind him came the growls of the wolves and the sound of their footsteps sidling up beside him. The soles of his shoes seemed to have grown roots, for he had to forcefully peel his feet away as he forced himself to jump. He felt an uncanny floating sensation when the wind hit his face; he was getting sucked into the darkness at amazing speed. He flapped his arms to maneuver himself to fall feetfirst, but it didn’t work.

Abruptly, his whole body was hit with something hard, and he almost lost consciousness. But he was forced aware again by the frigid water that streamed over him. The flooded river started to carry Rentaro’s body away with the force of a roller coaster. Even if he opened his eyes, he couldn’t see even a meter in front of him in the muddy river. He was stunned witless for a second, until he started struggling desperately to find a handhold. However, he’d lost his sense of equilibrium and couldn’t tell if he was heading up or down, and his screams turned into muddy bubbles.

Suddenly, he caught a glimpse of a pitch-black mass, and it was approaching him. By the time he realized that it was a large, sharp boulder standing in the bottom of the river, it was too late. With the impact much stronger than he imagined it would be, his backbone creaked and most of the air in his lungs turned to bubbles and was forced out of him.

He crashed over and over into driftwood and boulders, and still unable to tell up from down, he spun like diseased leaves being scattered by the wind, turning over and over on the river bottom. Rocks the size of fists pelted his body all over like slugs from a shotgun. He was about to lose consciousness again. If he let go of the reins of consciousness right now, he knew instinctively that he wouldn’t wake up again. He waved his arms around desperately.

Suddenly, Rentaro’s right hand grabbed onto something. When he realized that the rough protrusion was a handhold on a rock, he made a split-second decision to stretch out his left hand as well and go against the rapids. Blood was streaming from the top of his shoulders. He gritted his teeth and clung on with his whole body, yelling as he heaved himself upward.

Before he knew it, Rentaro was lying faceup on a rugged bank, his chest heaving up and down. As he vomited the water that he had swallowed, he fought against chills that made his stomach feel like it was going through the wringer. Finally, Rentaro lifted his pallid face and looked around.

Before the Great War, it had probably been a mooring place for boats. There was a small concrete pier with an abandoned mooring rope, and next to it he could see a dark brown shack. Gazing at the black rapids that looked like ink had been poured into them, he told himself that he was not completely out of danger yet.

Rentaro wrung out the dirty water from his uniform and stood up unsteadily, holding his aching body as he changed out his equipment. He hadn’t noticed that the backpack he was carrying had been washed away, and the silencer had also come off, but at least his gun was still stored in its holster. It was a painful realization that his food rations, water, and the explosive he had gotten to defeat the Pleiades had all been washed away.

Relying on the dim glow of the beta light, he went into the shack and found a match and portable fuel. There was alcohol and food, too, but it had been abandoned for more than ten years, so he decided that it would be better not to touch it. His uniform was heavy with the water it had absorbed, and his consciousness was about to give out, but in order to run away from those fearsome predators, he just had to move.

However, he reached his limit faster than he thought he would. Unexpectedly, his vision wavered and his knees weakened. Rentaro fell to his knees. A wheezing sound escaped from his throat and his body trembled like he had the ague.

When he looked up again, he saw an enormous tree trunk that pointed straight into the sky. This was probably thanks to the Gastrea virus. Giant sequoias that were easily more than five hundred tons were growing here and there, and just the outer circumference of their trunks was probably about ten meters.

When Rentaro found a good clearing, he gathered firewood and laid out the solid fuel. The matches were damp and his hands shook, so he lost some matches before he finally lit a warm fire on the tenth try and managed to carefully move the subsequent fire. As the red flames grew bigger, he let out a sigh of relief from the bottom of his heart.

After much effort, he peeled off the clothes twisted around his body, gave them a good wringing out, and put them back on. His body was covered with scratches and bruises, but seeing that he was able to move, he figured he did not have any broken bones. He was still worried about tetanus and other bacterial infections, but when he remembered that the portable dose of antibiotics was also in his backpack, his face twisted wryly.

After his body had warmed up somewhat, the tense knots of nervousness also started to come loose. As if waiting for just that second, there was suddenly a sharp pain in his side.

“Ow… Gah!”

A large shadow the size of a lion had bitten Rentaro’s side, and fresh blood was spraying out. More than the pain, he felt dumbfounded.

Rentaro retreated to lean against one of the sequoias, holding his side. “Those guys…sure are persistent,” he managed to squeeze out between pants.

At Rentaro’s words, the pack of wolves appeared smoothly out of the shadows of the trees. They showed no sign of being afraid of the bonfire.

Why are they still here? he thought over and over in his head. Hadn’t he taken a gamble and jumped into the river to wash away his scent to avoid letting them use their highly developed sense of smell? He thought that much and then shook his head. It wasn’t worth thinking about. They had followed Rentaro down from the cliff and through rapids; they weren’t going to stop now.

Just then, the hedge of wolves suddenly split, and a gigantic Gastrea walked out from the depths of the darkness. It had round pupils and a pointed snout like a canine, and its silhouette was slightly short and stout rather than sharp. Its white fur gathered more red as it reached its back, and on all fours, it was already over two meters tall, making all the other wolves look like pups.

It was a Japanese wolf, said to have been extinct since 1905. Its canines were overgrown and looked like a saber-toothed cat, its tail was split into three, and one of its eyes was cloudy. Its fur was shedding all over the place. It looked as evil as the watchdog of hell.

It was probably a Stage Three, and no doubt the leader of the pack.

Rentaro’s legs became unable to support his body, and he slid down to the ground with his back still on the tree trunk, leaving a diagonal trail of blood along the way. Checking the wound in his side, he saw that the hand and shirt he had been using to press down on the wound was bright red. It was a serious wound that needed immediate treatment.

Rentaro gritted his teeth and looked up at the sky. Was today the last day of his life? If so, what had been the point of his sixteen years of life? Was the hominid called Rentaro Satomi put on this earth for sixteen years just to be eaten by Gastrea in the depths of this dark forest today? Irreplaceable memories flashed in his mind, and before he knew it, tears welled up and flowed down his cheeks.

The leader of the pack walked in front of him with sneering eyes, filling Rentaro’s vision with its open mouth.

But right before Rentaro was devoured, the wolves suddenly perked their ears. They changed the direction of their stances, tilting their bodies forward. As they growled, they focused on the darkness beyond the bonfire before Rentaro.

He looked in the direction of their gazes hazily, but Rentaro couldn’t make anything out. However, the wolves could see something. Just as he thought it, the pack of almost fifty wolves howled and rushed into the darkness. Immediately after, there was the sound of combat and yaps of pain.

Rentaro didn’t know how much time had passed, but suddenly, all the sound stopped, and the place was filled with silence. He heard the bonfire popping and the sound of an owl hooting from somewhere. What just happened…?

Rentaro leaned the top half of his body forward and looked hard at the depths of the darkness in front of him. Suddenly, something was thrown at superhigh speed into the trunk of the sequoia next to him, and the sound of pounded flesh echoed.

Rentaro gazed in wonder. That something that had been thrown into the tree was one of the wolves that had attacked him. Its neck was twisted with an abnormal strength, its tongue was sticking out, and a straight line was carved into its stomach. With the crash, a flower of blood bloomed on its face, and it became clear that it was dead.

Seeing the slash on its stomach, something stirred in Rentaro’s memory. Where had he seen this nightmarish swordsmanship before…?

He raised his voice in surprise. This was the same thing as what he had seen with Enju three days ago at the civil officer frontline headquarters. They had found civil officers dead on the street while they were recruiting members for their adjuvant. It had looked like a quarrel between civil officers, but it had ended in him not knowing who had actually done the killing. The two civil officers lying piled on top of each other had been carved with the same swordsmanship. Why was this here?

“Is there anyone who saw what happened?”

“C-could you be Rentaro Satomi?”

At the scene of the crime, this was the first thing the witness had said.

“What if I am?”

“Uh… Y-you… Never mind, it was my mistake. Forget about it.”

“Huh? What do you want?”

“I said, forget about it!”

When Rentaro had spoken, sounding irritated, the witness had turned and left the scene before Rentaro had a chance to call him back. Thinking back on it now, that was a strange dialogue. Why did the witness go out of his way to check Rentaro’s name and then insist that he had made a mistake afterward?

Could it have been something like this? What if a civil officer pair that was definitely not supposed to be there was there? A pair that had been defeated by Rentaro and Enju and were treated as if they were dead and removed from the civil officers’ list? That’s why the witness doubted his own senses. Because there was no way dead people could walk around…

There was one. Just one pair that could maneuver such a sharp slash and that was supposed to have died in their clash with Rentaro and Enju during the summoning of the Zodiac Scorpion. Why hadn’t he noticed until now?

Three more wolves were blown out and crucified on the tree trunk in succession from out of the darkness. There was a cross cut into their stomachs, a death cross—the universal symbol of God’s authority over those who were going to die.

Rentaro’s arm flung up, and he aimed his gun into the darkness. After a while, the leader Gastrea of the pack came stumbling out. Both of its saber-toothed cat fangs had been broken, and it was covered in cuts. There was a deep wound on its neck, and fresh blood dripped steadily from the wound and dyed its white fur red. The Gastrea looked with pleading eyes as its head shook left and right, and then fell to the ground with a plop. The body seemed to be at a loss for a while after losing its head, but it finally fell sideways to the ground, shaking the earth as it fell, and then stopped moving altogether.

* * *

“Papa, I think he’s the guy that was with Enju.”

“Oh my.”

There was the sound of a bell, and first, a white-gloved hand grasping the tree trunk firmly appeared from out of the pitch-black darkness. Next, a face with a white mask and silk hat was revealed, reflecting the orange light of the bonfire. In his crimson red tailcoat were the double guns, Spanking Sodomy and Psychedelic Gospel. Next to him, with short swords in both hands wearing a frilly black dress, was a young girl.

Goodness.

“Fancy meeting you here—my dear friend.”

“Kagetane…Hiruko……!”

The strongest magician whom Rentaro had ever fought in a life-or-death contest appeared.

6

To think that he would one day sit around a fire with this man…

Rentaro held his gun at the ready as he used his teeth and left hand to wrap a bandage around his stomach, never letting his guard down.

The bleeding at his side had stopped at least, but if he tried to do too much, it was possible that the wound would open up again, so his movements would be limited for a while.

Rentaro’s gun was trained at the people sitting on the other side of the fire facing him.

Kagetane gave a forced shrug. “I wonder if you might put that gun down soon.”

“No,” said Rentaro.

The man threw a dry branch into the fire. “Have you already forgotten who provided you with the bandages and antibiotics?”

“What about you? Have you already forgotten what you two did?” Kagetane and Kohina Hiruko. They were the terrorists who had summoned the Zodiac Scorpion, driving Tokyo Area to the brink of destruction. Rentaro had used the railgun called the Stairway to Heaven to end the matter before anything happened, but one wrong step and it could have turned into Tokyo Area’s Great Extinction.

“If I get serious, your little toy gun’s not going to work, you know.”

Rentaro was at a loss for words. He had experienced firsthand the despair-inducing defensive ability of the repulsion force field Kagetane used; the thing could repel antitank rifles. Yet after all this time, Rentaro still didn’t know what the man was after.

In their encounter earlier, while Kohina had asked enthusiastically, “Papa, can I kill him?” Kagetane had made her be quiet and threw over bandages and antibiotics himself.

Their relationship had once been one where they were after each other’s lives. There were a lot of reasons for Kagetane to hate him, and no reason for Kagetane to help him.

Rentaro’s nervousness didn’t go away as he gently put the gun down. “Why are you here in the Unexplored Territory? Are you helping old Kikunojo with more of his conspiracies and doing some secret maneuvering?”

“Oh dear, can you please not ask any leading questions? No comment,” said Kagetane.

“You were the ones who killed that civil officer pair on the street in the frontline base three days ago, weren’t you?”

“Let’s see.” Kagetane put a hand on his chin and looked at the girl. “Do you remember, Kohina?”

The Initiator beside him, Kohina Hiruko, hugged both arms around her knees and covered her face, staring at Rentaro with upturned eyes. “You must be an idiot. How can I remember every little ant that I trample?”

Rentaro was speechless. He realized again the difference between his values and those of these killers. Explaining morals to these two was likely to be more futile an endeavor than preaching to aliens.

Kohina looked next to Rentaro for a second and then at him with upturned eyes. “Where’s Enju? Is she dead?”

“She’s alive. She’s doing something else.”

“I see.” She spoke curtly, but her mouth smiled happily. “Enju…I want to see her, I want to kill her. I want to see her, I want to kill her. I want to see her, I want to kill her.”

Just then, Rentaro noticed that there were now four short sword scabbards on Kohina’s back.

“Satomi, what about you? Why are you in a place like this?” Kagetane asked.

Rentaro couldn’t decide whether or not to tell the truth. Would it be safer for him to bluff and say that his friends were close by? “I’m here to defeat Pleiades.”

“Pleiades?”

“The unidentified Gastrea that can shoot mercury at long distances. Apparently, it’s in this forest.”

“Yeah, apparently it is.”

That response was suspicious as hell. “Don’t tell me you guys were also in the line of battle yesterday fighting against Aldebaran?”

Kagetane laughed so hard he held down his mask, as if it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. “Of course not. I climbed the tallest tree in the area to get a better view. Why should we have to fight? What good would it do us?”

“If we don’t fight, everyone will die.”

“So fight, and then what lies ahead of that?”

“Peace.”

“I have never desired that.” Kagetane looked at Rentaro with pity in his eyes. “I can bear an eternal hell. I can bear this body being half-carved open and dissected. But you know, if peace and joy were to continue forever, I would scream and plead for someone to kill me.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Are you saying I wasn’t until today?”

Rentaro and Kagetane glared at each other wordlessly as the bonfire sent up flames and started burning stronger. Rentaro shifted his gaze first. He couldn’t suppress his anger at everything the man did, but even if he threw himself on Kagetane now, he would most likely be swiftly murdered.

Kagetane sprinkled what looked like seasoning into the camp pot that was set over the bonfire and stirred the contents with a spoon. Finally, salted-plum rice gruel was served on a plastic tray. It wasn’t a dish that sounded very appetizing, but Kagetane had probably made rice gruel on purpose out of consideration for the injured Rentaro, offering him something easier to eat.

Since his backpack had been washed away by the river, Rentaro had exactly zero food rations on him. And there was no chance that he would be able to get any in the future.

There’s no way he poisoned this, right? Rentaro thought as he waited for the two of them to eat theirs, before timidly slurping a spoonful himself. It was salty, and there was some kind of soup stock in it as well, so it tasted less like gruel and more like chazuke, but it didn’t seem like the taste was being covered up by salt like many store-bought versions; rather, it left a curious aftertaste. Rentaro was surprised to find that it was an understatement to call it delicious.

Kagetane himself flipped up his mask and slurped the gruel with neither relish nor disgust, but the flames of the bonfire threw up intricate shadows. Unfortunately, from where Rentaro was sitting, the other man’s face was a shadow and Rentaro couldn’t see what it looked like.

Rentaro finished eating in no time and helped clean up since he had nothing better to do, continuing to stare at the man’s creepy face cover.

“Why do you wear a mask?” he asked finally.

Kagetane seemed to also be done eating and had put the mask back on. “Satomi, do you not wear a mask?”

There was a short pause before Rentaro replied, “What are you talking about?”

“I can see the mask you wear, you know. The guardian mask you wear when interacting with your Initiator, the Tendo Civil Security Agency Employee mask you wear when you work as an employee of that female boss of yours, and the facing the enemy mask you’re wearing now with me. Aren’t they all different ‘Rentaro Satomis’?”

Was this man talking about psychological personas?

“Satomi, did you see my real face just now?”

“No.”

“You were right not to try. I’m sure you’ll regret seeing my real face.”

“You saying you’re disfigured or something?”

Kagetane shook his head scornfully as he tapped on his mask. “What’s under this mask—is your face, Rentaro Satomi.”

“Stop messing around, you bastard.”

“You and I are the remnants of the New Humanity Creation Project. Twins, so to speak. I’m sure you’ve also noticed, right? We’re human, yet we have power greater than that of other humans. Have you ever wanted to kill someone you couldn’t stand? Have you ever wanted to violate a woman by force? That artificial arm could make all of that happen easily.

“I’m sure you’ve had the thought before, when you were exposed to outrageous violence, ‘I have enough power inside me to make you all into mincemeat.’ I was able to make that a reality. That’s why you hate me. Because you’re jealous.”

“Shut up!”

“But you know, Satomi, just like the honor student hates the delinquent, the delinquent hates the honor student, too. Do you know why? It’s because each person can do what the other cannot. Just like you envy me in the bottom of your heart for being able to kill as I please, I also envy and hate you. Even though you are as inhuman as I am, you live comfortably in the world of light. I detest you so much I can’t stand it.”

Kagetane’s white mask suddenly came toward Rentaro and whispered into his ear. “Come with me, friend. We’re both survivors of the New Humanity Creation Project. We’re special beings. I’ll teach you the pleasures of killing as much as you like. Kidnap a woman, and after you rape her, pluck her arms and legs off and kill her. I’ll teach you how to use money, too. You can buy everything but poverty. You can buy love, and respect.”

“I’m not going to change how I use my power.”

A fat piece of firewood broke apart in the flames and fell, sending a shower of sparks into the sky and making Rentaro’s and Kagetane’s profiles dazzle for a second.

Kagetane wore his silk hat low over his eyes and hid his gaze. “Let me make a prediction, Satomi. You will definitely come over to my side. Without a doubt.”

“Give it up. There’s no way that’d happen.”

Next to them, Kohina didn’t seem the least bit concerned about their conversation and silently got another helping of the rice gruel, polishing off most of it by herself.

They ran out of things to say to each other, and when the firewood burned out, they used that as a sign to retire for the night.

Rentaro’s body had already reached its limit with exhaustion, and his whole body felt heavy and slow. Even now, his eyelids felt like they were about to close. But there was no way he would fall asleep before the other two. Rentaro pretended to sleep and didn’t let his guard down until he saw that Kagetane and Kohina had truly fallen asleep.

The bonfire smelled like burnt embers.

His body clock told him that about an hour had passed, and when he heard Kohina’s regular breathing that meant she was asleep, his eyes popped open, he grabbed his XD gun, and snuck over to where Kagetane and Kohina were sleeping, crouching. They seemed carefree, sleeping on their sides while holding each other and sharing a blanket.

Rentaro silently aimed his gun at Kagetane’s head.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Kagetane asked without moving a muscle.

“You were awake?” said Rentaro.

“What a fine way to treat us.”

“You don’t seem worried, Kagetane. Is your barrier one that you can pull up faster than I can pull a point-blank trigger?”

Kagetane didn’t say anything.

Rentaro glared at Kagetane with hatred. “Did you think that if you were nice to me, that I would cry with joy and be your friend? Did you think to bury the hatchet by putting me in your debt? Too bad. You’re dangerous. As long as you’re alive, you’ll definitely cause another disaster. I have a duty to kill you to maintain public order as a civil security officer.”

“Will you kill my daughter, as well?”

Rentaro took a fleeting glance at the soundly sleeping Kohina. “Is she really your daughter?”

“Of course. Satomi, do you know about the jar of poison? A large number of insects and snakes are put in a large jar and made to eat each other until the last one left is said to be the strongest, the one with the most cursing power. Long ago, when I was still young, I kidnapped five women and artificially inseminated them. At the same time, I also gave the embryos a large dose of the Gastrea virus.”

Rentaro was at a loss for words. In other words, Kagetane had created artificial Cursed Children.

“Then, I locked my five daughters into separate underground rooms for six years, training them to kill and brainwashing them. And then one day, I had them meet for the first time and try to kill each other. The one who survived was Kohina.”

“Why did you do such a thing…?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.” “That must be a joke.”—To be able to reject Kagetane’s madness with empty words like that, to preserve his own peace of mind, was something that could have been done only by the Rentaro that existed before he had known what kind of person Kagetane Hiruko really was. Now, Rentaro imagined that Kagetane probably really did conduct that devil’s experiment.

Kagetane continued. “I wanted to know everything about this world. I wanted to rule over everything and discover the truth. I wanted to know what those girls who were the future of the humans species really were.”

“You demon. What do you think a human life is?”

“I didn’t know. That’s why I tried conducting the experiment.”

“Children are innocent beings! They can be raised to be angels or devils. It’s your fault, Kagetane! It’s your fault that this girl turned into a devil.”

“Aye, I wanted to try making a devil. But I failed. What was born was an angel that just got in the way.” Kagetane softly stroked the sleeping Kohina’s hair and quietly lifted her chin. “Look at this. This adorable sleeping face. My unsightly, repulsive, sweet little monstress. These girls are strong as a biological species, but they also have an unfixable weakness.”

Just then, Kohina stirred and made a small sound in her sleep, and then whispered something that seemed completely out of place. “I love you, Papa.”

The muzzle of the XD shook with a start, and Rentaro was astonished. Why? Why? He wanted to shake Kohina’s shoulder to wake her up and then scream at her, “You’re being tricked! Your dad is brainwashing you!”

Kagetane looked sideways at Rentaro’s reaction and sneered inside the depths of his mask. “Satomi, what is the happiness of a human? I made this child live for six years confined like a frog at the bottom of a well. But she just kept looking up at the blue sky from the bottom of that well.”

“Stop screwing around! How many people do you think have died because of you two? Just how many people have you killed up till now?!” His gun hand shook with anger.

“Please stop, comrade. Even if you could kill either me or Kohina, you’d surely die before you managed to kill the other.”

Do it, Rentaro Satomi. If you don’t kill this man today, he will continue to spread death like an epidemic. You won’t get a better chance than this to stop him. Kagetane is bluffing. Don’t be tricked. Abandon your reason. To hell with thinking calmly. Fulfill your duty.

But no matter how much he thought it, his trigger finger was frozen and would not move.

Rentaro squeezed his eyes shut. “Damn it!” He put his gun away and went to a fallen tree in desperation, sitting down angrily. “I’m grateful for your help with my wound. But I can’t trust you two.”

Saying only that, Rentaro watched Kagetane and Kohina as they sprawled on the other side of the fire, his trigger guard still on his gun.

The flames of the bonfire seemed to sneer at him as they moved. It was the perfect chance. And you just wasted it.

7

It smelled like dirt. And grass.

Rentaro could sense just the slightest bit of light on the other side of his eyelids. His shoulder felt cold, so he tried to pull up his blanket, but he couldn’t feel the familiar smoothness on his shoulder, and his hand waved in the air a few times until his consciousness suddenly awakened.

He stood up with a start and looked around. He had fallen asleep without realizing. Before him sat the smoky remains of a bonfire with just the faintest warmth still remaining. Realizing that his clothes were tinged with moisture, he looked around and understood why: There was a thin layer of morning mist, and the sky was cloudy. There was still no sign of the sky returning to normal from its covering of Varanium ash.

There was no trace of Kagetane and Kohina in the spot where they had been sleeping. Rentaro was silent at that—it looked like they left without doing anything to his person, even though they had had plenty of chances.

He checked the time. It was 8 a.m. He had fallen asleep around 3 or 4 a.m., so he was not fully recharged, but considering the situation, it wasn’t too bad.

Allowing his feet to go where they wanted, he pushed through the place that had been too dark to see last night. There was almost no undergrowth; instead, it was a mysterious scene with enormous, giant sequoialike trees continuing all around him. As if territorial in their own way, after a while, the stand of trees turned into different kinds of vegetation. The prehistoric Jōmon cedar, sitting in the middle of a nest of roots sticking out of the ground, was where Rentaro had tripped while being chased by the large pack of wolves the day before and thus gotten into trouble. Lichens, too, grew thick between the countless bumps of the fat tree’s bark, and there were smashed cars stuck to the trunks, lifted up as if purposefully surrounded.

Rentaro gazed at the sight for a while. If he had woken up next to this scene without reference, he would have succumbed to loneliness and despair, believing himself to have been thrown into the distant future where material civilization had collapsed, and he was cut off from returning to his own time.

It still was not completely clear what effect the Gastrea virus had on plants, but even so, it was hard to separate it from how big they had grown in the ten years since the war. Of course, the plants had gotten better at surviving their environment. There were even absurd instances where there were forests like the Amazon inside Japan, such as during the Kagetane Hiruko terrorist incident.

The area where Rentaro found himself was part of the Unexplored Territory near the Monolith, so this was still not as bad as other places.

There were two days until the replacement Monolith arrived.

“So you were in a place like this, huh?”

Rentaro was surprised by the sudden voice and turned around. “Why are you here?”

The owner of the voice was who Rentaro thought it was. There was a girl looking at him sullenly with undisguised wariness, holding four short swords; and a mysterious man with a mask and silk hat. “There was one thing I forgot to tell you yesterday,” said Kagetane, holding down his mask. “We encountered that Gastrea you call Pleiades yesterday, once.”

“Where?!”

As Rentaro braced himself to take a step toward Kagetane, the man suddenly raised an arm. “Just follow the river upstream. There’s a big Gastrea campground there. I didn’t see where the compressed mercury was being fired from, but that’s probably Pleiades.”

Campground. Even Gastrea have campgrounds, huh? That was something Rentaro had been wondering about since he entered the forest the day before. He’d been sure that the instant he entered the forest, there would be Gastrea concealed all over the place and had readied himself for that, but in the end, the only Gastrea he had encountered were the wolf ones.

In other words, the two thousand Gastrea of Gado’s estimates were gathered in one place resting—like a human company of troops.

“Why are you telling me this?” Rentaro demanded. In the past, the man in front of him had tried to summon the Zodiac Scorpion in order to break down the Monoliths. And his motivation for committing the crime was to restart the Gastrea War to give the New Humanity Creation Project a reason for existing—in other words, he had fervently wished to be needed.

From Kagetane’s point of view, the current Tokyo Area where the Monolith had collapsed by chance should have been his ideal. Even though Kagetane had saved Rentaro last night, the biggest reason he couldn’t trust Kagetane was because of the worst-case scenario: that Kagetane was on the side of the Gastrea.

Kagetane narrowed his eyes behind the mask and laughed. “Now, I wonder why? I don’t really think about things like that much.”

How serious is he? Rentaro wondered.

“If I had to say, it’s because I like you. But unfortunately, if you continue like this, you will definitely die.”

Rentaro couldn’t help but be at a loss for words.

Kagetane continued. “You’ve been strange since yesterday. You said you were working separately from your Initiator, but you don’t seem worried about her at all. You seem to be prepared for the special mission of defeating Pleiades, but there is no sign of your adjuvant around at all. If this was an official mission, then it would be a little hard to think that they would send a lone Promoter out to assassinate a Gastrea. In other words, it is reasonable to assume that you left your squad because of your own justice or were banished for some reason.”

He couldn’t make a single strangled sound because it was exactly as Kagetane had said. Rentaro wanted to retort with something sarcastic, but he reconsidered, thinking that he couldn’t buy the location of Pleiades for all the money in the world. Honestly, thanking Kagetane would be offensive, so he snorted and walked past them, starting to walk toward the river for now.

But with the sound of his boots stepping on dirt, Rentaro noticed that there were other shoes mixed in. “Hey, what are you doing?” Stopping and looking back partway, he saw that Kagetane and Kohina also stopped short, as he suspected, about ten paces behind him.

Kagetane shrugged and spread out his arms. “I wonder what? You just happen to be in the path upon which we are also heading.”

“Do what you want.” Rentaro snorted in desperation and hurried forward quickly, but he soon heard footsteps behind him again. Rentaro succumbed to the mysterious feeling of annoyance mixed with bewilderment.

After the wolves in sheep’s clothing came Kagetane in sheep’s clothing…

It was such an unfunny joke that he felt his cheek spasm. “You bastards walk in front.”

“No thank you. I do not want to suddenly be attacked from behind.”

Rentaro scratched his head. Damn it, what the hell is this?

After following the river for a while, Rentaro left its banks and climbed up a small mountain to check the time. As morning turned to afternoon, the temperature rose, and with the warming air, their body scents would be lifted higher; it was safer to gain altitude to keep the Gastrea from sensing them before climbing down again at night.

Rentaro looked sideways at Kagetane and Kohina next to him, not letting down his guard. He couldn’t calm down with them there, but Kagetane said he didn’t want to walk in front either, so that was the compromise. His bizarre companions traveled with him, as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

Next to him, Kohina was loudly—intentionally so—breaking the bar of chocolate Kagetane had given her while continuing to check Rentaro’s movements. She seemed to be saying, Papa said I can’t kill you, so I won’t kill you…just yet.

Because chocolate bars were a lightweight, high-calorie food that didn’t take up much space, they were fitting for survival supplies, and Rentaro had heard that the self-defense force and other military organizations gave it to their soldiers as portable provisions. He had thought this since watching the food preparation process yesterday, but Kagetane seemed to be even more of an expert at survival than Rentaro had ever imagined. It was nice to have someone like that in his party—of course, that was if he was an ally and not an enemy.

“Satomi, look at that.” After they had climbed up a steep protruding rock face for a while, Kagetane handed Rentaro a pair of digital binoculars.

Rentaro checked the state of his wound where the wolf had bitten him and kneeled down, looking through the binoculars in the direction Kagetane indicated. He got chills like someone had put a block of ice down his back and ducked reflexively, looking at Kagetane.

“Did you see it?” Kagetane asked.

“Below that?” said Rentaro.

“If it’s in the same place as it was yesterday, then probably, yes.”

Rentaro looked hesitatingly through the binoculars again. In the optically enlarged world, there was a large flock of bird-shaped Gastrea flying in a circle over a fixed spot, and underneath were trees densely woven together, their thick canopy spread out such that it blocked even sunlight.

Suddenly, a dull noise echoed and a titanic tree shook hard; the birds it housed hurriedly took flight en masse. The leaves at the tops of trees rustled, and he could tell that a large being was moving through the forest. Rentaro’s heart thrummed with nerves. It was there. There was some kind of land-dwelling Gastrea in that area.

“Good timing. It’s going to rain soon,” said Kagetane.

Surprised, Rentaro lifted his face and saw the man looking up with a hand stretched out over his head. Following Kagetane’s gaze, Rentaro also looked up. The weather had been cloudy since the morning, and it didn’t look like there had been much change to it.

As if understanding Rentaro’s misgivings, Kagetane continued. “The sound is echoing pretty far. That’s because the temperature is rising, and there’s more moisture in the air.”

Just then, there was a rumble of thunder from the clouds, as if backing up Kagetane’s words.

He’s like a prophet, Rentaro thought in awe.

In any case, the rain was welcome. Their smell would be washed away by the rain so canine Gastrea wouldn’t be able to track them, and the noise from the rain would also make it harder to hear their movements.

However—

“It’s that black rain again…?” Rentaro had learned the main points of World War II in history class, and he couldn’t help but connect the black rain to the atomic bomb and felt a physical aversion to it.

There were no adverse effects to humans being rained on by the ashes from Special Varanium; in fact, if the bleached Monolith had even a little magnetic field left to give off, the rain could possibly even restrain the Gastrea’s movements a little. However, yesterday, when the black rain first poured down, the citizens who wanted to protect the home front became panicked, and the radio and news incessantly repeated “Don’t worry” to calm the panic.

Suddenly, Rentaro thought about how Enju and the others were doing. Half a day had passed since he had fled into the night. Everyone in the adjuvant had probably already figured out that Rentaro was gone.

He wondered how Kisara had broken the truth to Enju. Did she tell Enju straight-out that he had left on a mission from which he had no hope of returning alive? Or did she try to give Enju hope by telling her that he would be back eventually?

It was probably the latter. If Enju had known that Rentaro was in danger, she was likely to follow him and rush into the forest to cause a small disaster. There was no way Kisara would not realize that.

Suddenly, he had the urge to hold Enju tight and just breathe in the smell of her hair.

In any case, he had to defeat Pleiades first. If he safely completed his mission, then Gado probably wouldn’t lump any more blame on him. He would defeat Pleiades and boldly return to Enju’s side.

Rentaro glared straight at the Gastrea campground.

8

The sky soon began to cry. Like the day before, there was a large amount of rain. In a bad mood, the sky rumbled, but there was still no lightning yet.

As Rentaro climbed upstream, he wiped the raindrops from his face and looked at the palm of his hand. The raindrops coiled about like diluted ink.

After a while, a three-tiered waterfall spread out in front of their eyes. It was as wide as the river itself, and the top tier had a drop of about three meters, the middle tier about two meters, and the bottom tier about three meters again. Normally, it might have been a beautiful scenic spot, but currently, the river was a dark reddish-brown, muddied from the dirt, sand, and rain, and the fact that it was about to overflow.

Yesterday, Rentaro had jumped into such a fearsome muddy current.

“We should probably jump to the other side now, while we can,” said Kagetane.

“Yeah.” Rentaro immediately nodded at the suggestion. The Gastrea campground they looked down on from the top of the slope was probably on the other side of the river.

“Kohina.”

“Yes, Papa.” Kohina released her power, and her eyes turned a bright red. Kagetane offered her a shoulder, and they got to the other side in one jump.

Rentaro watched them jump and then went to the bottom of the waterfall. There, he found a thin path at the back of the basin and walked across. He didn’t feel like being at the mercy of Kohina.

The waterfall roared as it splashed down with impressive force, and there were no sure places to put his feet. In addition, there was slippery moss covering the path, so he had to be extremely cautious as he crossed.

Just then, he noticed a small hollow in the back of the basin. He tried sticking his hand in but felt the cool, slimy rock face and pulled his hand back quickly. It wasn’t like in a movie, where the back of the hollow continued on; it simply ended presently. It wasn’t that interesting, so he hurried forward, but then there was a slick sound as his feet slipped on the rock and kicked forward.

Wagh—

His whole body pitched forward. He was only able to stop himself and stand up again by sticking his hand on a sudden protrusion on the wall.

He caught his breath after the shock. This time, Rentaro walked deliberately and carefully across to the other side. The moment he took his last step, he heaved an involuntary sigh of relief.

Seeing that Rentaro had safely crossed, Kohina clicked her tongue.

They continued north, checking the compass to confirm. On the way, they finally stopped following the river and entered the thick, luxuriant forest. Compared to the forest with the giant trees where Rentaro and the others had spent a night, the tops of these trees weren’t that impressive, but there was no comparing how much denser the plants grew here.

Rentaro took the lead, followed by Kagetane and then Kohina. Rentaro crouched as he marched, quietly taking out the Varanium survival knife from his hip. In a close-combat fight, it would be faster than sighting his gun and pulling the trigger.

In the Unexplored Territory, it was a hard-and-fast rule to move without making any noise. Rentaro’s XD gun had lost its silencer when he had been washed away in the river, so since they were nearing the crowd of enemy Gastrea, he definitely couldn’t make use of it.

There were many ferns at their feet; Rentaro spotted gingko and Adiantum. Bearing with the black rain in his eyes, Rentaro used his survival knife to move the intricate tripe-shaped leaves, and his field of view widened unexpectedly. There, he saw a strange scene and signaled behind him to stop.

What is this?

“Everything’s been bitten off, huh? What is this?”

Surprised, he looked next to him and saw Kohina slip past Rentaro like she was not the least bit nervous. Rentaro checked around him to make sure there were no Gastrea around before he followed behind her.

There were many trees almost two meters high growing wild, but strangely, the leaf blades of this tree had almost all been bitten off by some kind of living being. Finding a whole leaf, Rentaro saw that it was flat, like broadleaf trees. Since the leaves looked like they had been bitten off by some sort of herbivore, it was strange that all the other trees around it were unharmed.

Where have I seen this leaf before…? The second understanding shot through his brain, Rentaro let out an “Ah!”

“Do you know what this is, Satomi?”

Rentaro nodded silently. Even someone with such extensive survival knowledge like Kagetane couldn’t be expected to distinguish between South American plants.

“This is a coca leaf…”

“Coca? As in…”

“The plant that the raw material for the alkaloid from which cocaine can be extracted.”

Kagetane put a hand to his chin. “I don’t understand. Why have these been bitten off? Of course, it was a Gastrea that bit the leaves off, right? What in the world was it after?”

“The Gastrea must also be using it as a stimulant.” Alkaloid plants and their derivatives could stimulate the central nervous system and temporarily block fears. Rentaro thought back to his first fight against the Gastrea the day before yesterday. Even when they fired on them with guns, the Gastrea in the front row yelled but did not fall or stop advancing. They had probably chewed these leaves beforehand for their stimulant and painkilling properties.

Rentaro had conjectured all this on his own, but he still found it hard to believe. Even if they developed intellect, chewing coca leaves before going into battle was too far beyond what ordinary insects and animals could do. Before long, it was possible that Gastrea that could speak human languages and/or something similar could appear. Of course, human and animal vocal cords were very different, so it was uncertain whether they would be able to converse like humans, but still…

When Rentaro looked carefully, he saw that all the plants had been beaten down in a uniform direction, and there were a number of footprints. There was no doubt that Gastrea often came through this area.

Just then, they heard a groan that was obviously inhuman, and each looked in that direction. Suddenly, they saw two vertical shadows in the curtain of rain.

Rentaro gulped. They were snakes with four legs, standing upright. They did not have the long, narrow faces of lizards, but rather had flat, apelike ones. The legend of the Chinese gods with human faces and snake bodies, Nüwa and Fuxi, passed through his head.

The moment seemed to last forever as both sides acknowledged their sudden encounter with the enemy, and the Gastrea took a deep breath to call others of their kind.

This is bad.

Before Rentaro could rush out, Kohina had thrown two of her short swords at high speed. Her aim was true, and one sword skewered the brain of the Gastrea on the right, killing it before it got a chance to call out.

The Gastrea on the left twisted its body quickly to avoid the other sword, but it couldn’t get out of the way completely, and the short sword pierced its chest. Ignoring the Gastrea’s cry of anguish, Kohina pulled out another two short swords from their sheaths and ran in faster than the eye could follow. With a light sound, Kohina jumped up and landed on the short sword before jumping again. Leaping up to where their noses almost touched, she inserted her blades to destroy the brain, quickly killing the Gastrea.

The two monsters fell to the ground at almost the same time, shaking the world as they did so.

Rentaro looked at the scene, dumbfounded.

“You’re weak. That’s why you will die.” With a cold glance, Kohina poked the corpses with her foot, looking bored.

As Rentaro watched, chills shot down his spine. He bit his lip—he definitely did not want to reunite Enju with Kohina. Kohina and Enju were completely evenly matched. But added to that was Kohina’s cruelty. Seeing that this girl was not shy about it at all, it was possible that she was not even aware that killing was wrong.

Rentaro suddenly remembered how Kagetane had called her an evil angel. Rentaro had definitely been saved by some crazy people—devils he met in a hell called the Unexplored Territory. So that made this…the second level of hell.

“Now, Satomi. We are nearing the enemy’s inner circle.”

Rentaro nodded without saying anything. They had been hearing a growl that sounded nothing like the rain from beyond the forest for a while now.

And then that omen became reality.

Rentaro and the others, who were going through the forest halfway up the mountain, had prepared themselves already, so no one screamed in an unsightly way even after seeing it.

“So this…is the enemy’s base…,” whispered Rentaro.

Beyond their vision was an open area with various types of Gastrea, big and small, as far as the eye could see. There was a large organism that looked like a platypus, complete with a wide bill and a shell on its back. There was also a mouse with the faces of two different organisms stuck together in a strange place and covered with a chitinous exoskeleton. Could the roadrunner that had gotten so big it looked like a dinosaur fly with those wings it had? It was like a parade of demons in front of his eyes, but in modern-day Japan.

A putrid breath blew over to where they were and made Rentaro’s lungs feel like they were going to rot.

Because Stage One Gastrea were just a larger version of animals that already existed on earth, they were able to make formations with others of the same type, but the Stage Twos and above did not fit in; they were around the edges and were all different shapes and sizes. They just ended up resting all over the place, it seemed. The camp was made up of all different sizes, from small Gastrea to some so large they could be mistaken for small mountains, and they continued as far as the eye could see.

Rentaro could see a giant fly Gastrea staggering around with one wing ripped off, probably injured from fighting the civil officers and self-defense force. When he looked more carefully, he saw that some Gastrea had lost legs or had eyes that had carbonized white. Based purely on numbers, the Gastrea had an overwhelming advantage, but the Gastrea were in no condition to fight.

Aldebaran should have also been there somewhere, but there were so many Gastrea that Rentaro could not find it.

“Isn’t that the Gastrea you all call Pleiades?” said Kagetane.

Following Kagetane’s gaze, Rentaro saw it: sixty, seventy meters distant.

“That’s…” Of course, it was Rentaro’s first time seeing Pleiades, but he instinctively felt that that must be it. He roughly estimated it to be about ten meters tall and wide. It matched the report from Tina’s Shenfield.

It stood out a head and shoulders above the Gastrea around it, and its mouth stuck out like a funnel just as he had imagined it would. It still kept some fish characteristics, but its eyes were set apart like those of a herbivore’s, and its mouth was more like that of a stork or pteranodon than an archerfish.

The first thing to draw the eye was its swollen belly. It was inflated like a balloon, and it was so blown up that even now it seemed like it would float up into the sky. The pectoral and dorsal fins seemed to have atrophied and could not be seen, but in their place were things that looked very much like human hands and feet with five fingers and toes.

Rentaro didn’t understand what was going on. Compared to its swollen belly, its arms and legs were much too short. With those, not only would it not be able to bring the prey it shot down with the compressed mercury to its mouth, but it also couldn’t even move the way it wanted to. That beast was a failure even by the warped standards of evolution of the Gastrea virus. If left alone, it would be eliminated through natural selection in no time. How in the world did it survive to see this day?

His doubts were cleared up unexpectedly quickly. A Gastrea that looked like a demon monkey climbed adeptly up Pleiades’ balloon stomach. As Rentaro watched rapt with interest, the monkey Gastrea shrugged its shoulders and made its whole body tremble as it regurgitated fish from its throat to give to Pleiades.

Gastrea helping each other. Rentaro felt like he was witnessing an important part of Gastrea ecology.

An unhappy-looking Kohina poked him with her elbow. She seemed to be saying, “If you’re going to go, hurry up.”

Rentaro looked at Kohina and then Kagetane and gave a big nod, then detoured around the forest to get closer to Pleiades. It went without saying that this was Aldebaran’s base. If they were discovered by the enemy and surrounded…

Rentaro calmed his shaking breaths. This was a critical moment. He needed to calm down and do his job. He felt like he was about to slip in the muddy path, and the rain that started just then chilled the extremities of his arms and legs, so he was already numb. He hadn’t had enough sleep, either, and most of all, being in constant fear for his life was wearing on Rentaro’s nerves.

He had also become part of the food chain. He had never been as aware of that fact as he was today.

Just then, Rentaro took a wrong step—his boot stepped on and broke a twig that had fallen to the ground. Even in the midst of the sounds of the rainfall, the dry snap reverberated.

One of the reptilian types sleeping nearby lifted its head slowly with a growl and shook its head left and right.

Holding his breath, Rentaro stopped moving and closed his eyes. All he could do was pray.

Finally, the Gastrea’s neck seemed to wind back into place. Rentaro heaved a massive sigh.

Detouring around the forest, Rentaro cautiously drew near to Pleiades, and his neck slowly tilted more and more. The creature’s enormous body practically filled his vision, and a low, heavy growl came from what could have been its chest or its stomach, which was expanding as it breathed, blowing away rain with its breath. In the rain, white steam was coming off its hot body.

This really is a huge Gastrea, he thought again.

“What were you originally planning to do once you got to this point?” Kagetane asked in a low voice, frowning.

“I was planning to set a plastic explosive and blow it up from a safe distance. But I lost the explosive along with the backpack when I was washed away by the river.”

“Then there’s only one way to kill it.”

Rentaro looked at his exposed, black-chrome right arm with mixed feelings. The original purpose of the New Humanity Creation Project was to create human weapons that could destroy the Gastrea.

The tactical ideology of Section 16 that Kagetane had been affiliated with was to create the ultimate defense that could stop the attack of a Stage Four Gastrea, and Section 22, where Rentaro had undergone unexpected medical treatment, had the ideology of creating an ultimate attack that could rip through the shells of Stage Four Gastrea.

In other words, both of them were designed to deal with all Gastrea besides the nonstandard Stage Fives.

According to Kisara, the former Seitenshi had called Rentaro and Kagetane the ultimate spear and shield, which was a fitting name for them. If that was the case, then it was possible for him to eliminate Pleiades by using his arm the way it was meant to be used.

Suddenly, a snicker came from next to him and he turned to it. Kagetane was holding his mask and giving off an air of brutality. “That’s great. I’ve always wanted to go up against something like that. I’ll kill it.”

Rentaro was shocked. “Hey, wait. I’ll go.”

“I don’t take orders from you.” Saying that, Kagetane left for the thicket they had seen earlier.

Rentaro was dumbfounded for a moment but then soon followed him, pushing Kagetane aside with his shoulder. “You can’t do anything with your attack power. Stay back.”

His shoulder was shoved back. “Injured people should stay back. That’s my prey.”

“Y-you bastard…”

Just then, a nearby Gastrea finally noticed them. Rentaro and Kagetane clicked their tongues at the same time and moved forward in the rain side by side. Rentaro was in a good mood, and Kagetane held down his silk hat. It was the walk of people who had given up trying to hide and had resolved themselves.

Rentaro’s heart beat loudly. They had to do this in one hit.

Rentaro’s explosive-style artificial limbs and Kagetane’s repulsion field were both techniques that were far from being silent, and it was not hard to imagine the fearsome counterattack that would follow upon letting off such an attack in the Gastrea base. Therefore, their plan could only be to take one attack and withdraw quickly.

Pleiades noticed them. It looked at them with reddish eyes that looked like they had a film of oil over them, but it did not look like it was going to take any action. Rentaro had seen it before. Those eyes were eyes that had given up on everything. Rentaro looked beyond his own position and couldn’t help but sympathize with the monster. It had evolved only its ability to slaughter until it was unable to move freely, and was only being kept alive because it was being fed by other Gastrea.

“Well then, shall we?”

“Yeah.”

It was a strange feeling. In the past, during the many times he had fought against this mysterious man, he could not bear the reality that they were both alive and breathing at the same time. When Rentaro’s spirit of justice mixed with hatred and clashed with Kagetane’s logical evil, Rentaro and Kagetane could only deny the other’s existence with their whole souls. That was the only way they could see to resolve their situation.

But then why—how could he feel that he could rely on a man like that right now? What was this uplifting feeling he felt in his chest?

The Gastrea around them screeched warnings to their comrades in response to the humans that had suddenly appeared in their base, but it was too late. There was a high sound, almost like the air itself was being cut, as Rentaro and Kagetane pulled back their arms.

“Tendo Martial Arts First Style, Number 3—”

“Endless—”

Phosphorescence gathered around Kagetane’s hands and formed into a sharp spear. At the same time, three empty golden cartridges flew out of Rentaro’s right arm and bounced on the ground with metallic clangs.

Rentaro’s and Kagetane’s eyes met.

“—Rokuro Kabuto, Burst!”

“—Screeeam!”

The right fist with great mastery of technique in it and the shining demon spear of darkness drove into the abdomen of the Gastrea Pleiades at the same time. The sound of the impact reverberated out right afterward and blew the leaves off the tops of the trees, making the forest shake. The center of the explosion caved in, lifting up the bedrock and blowing it backward.

As Rentaro’s rotating arm thrust powerfully, he felt his arm swing through. Pleiades’ skin, which had been reinforced to keep it from getting crushed by gravity, was split open and scattered in all directions. The creature was extinguished from the earth without even having a chance to scream.

Under the Gastrea’s shocked gazes, Rentaro tended to his fist that had heated up and took the Infinite Stance and focused; meanwhile, Kagetane put his silk hat back into place.

Rentaro realized that he had completed the mission to defeat the Gastrea Pleiades. He groaned involuntarily. There was an intense pain in his side, and he fell to his knees and coughed, unable to bear it.

His wound had opened up.

“Papa, hurry!” said Kohina.

Kagetane did an about-face and started running. Immediately, there were angry bellows in succession behind them, and the air shook. Almost three thousand Gastrea contacted their comrades to report an enemy attack.

One side of Rentaro’s face twisted with the dull pain, and he ordered his body to move, but his movements were slow, and he naturally protected his side as he ran. His vision turned hazy and his legs became tangled. He almost fell. He had used up the last of his strength with that last attack.

“You’re too slow!” He was suddenly pulled so hard he felt like he would dislocate his shoulder, and his body felt like it would be torn apart with the sudden acceleration. Opening his eyes while he gritted his teeth against the assaulting wind pressure, he realized that Kohina had taken him by the shoulder and was flying through the air.

“Why are you…?”

Kohina pretended not to hear, and jumped off of boulders and tree trunks, making Rentaro’s vision shake.

He felt like he was being shaken in all directions by her violent running, and he started to feel nauseous. Still, he held on tight so that he wouldn’t fall off. He definitely did not want to scream, so he gritted his teeth. Behind him, he could hear angry bellows here and there that seemed to bunch together into a single roar. Danger signals resounded in the back of his mind.

Their restless enemies had finally started to follow them in earnest. Of course, there was the threat of the fast-moving Gastrea, but if flying Gastrea also started following them…

Ignoring Rentaro’s misgivings, Kohina jumped from tree trunk to tree trunk as fast as a tornado. He grazed his cheek slightly on a giant tree, and the rough leaves cut his face.

Light suddenly appeared on the opposite side. Kohina darted over with a vast leap and they continued on that road in the opposite direction, running through the forest where they could see the cloudy sky, light rain, and the swamp they were following.

“Over there! There’s a small hollow in the back of that waterfall!” Rentaro pointed at the three-tiered waterfall downstream of the river.

Kohina didn’t spare a single glance in his direction, but Rentaro could tell that they were on the same page by the way Kohina made her steps lighter. She silenced her footfalls and ran in the direction of the waterfall.

With just two jumps, she brought them to the waterfall and let go of Rentaro without warning.

He couldn’t deal with the unexpected floating feeling and awkwardly flapped his arms in midair. Immediately after, he spun over and over with sharp pain hitting all over his body. He felt like he had just jumped out of a speeding train—and decelerated like it, too.

Before he knew it, he was lying facedown. The rocks along the mountain stream hit him, and he thought he would lose consciousness in another moment. His joints hurt. Just breathing made his lungs hurt.

Damn it, is she trying to kill me?

“Hurry!” When he looked, he saw that Kohina was beckoning him, unconcerned about the details. Behind them echoed the sound of the earth rumbling as their pursuers followed them, and he desperately used his hands to push himself up and walk through the catwalk of the basin of the waterfall, practically hurling himself into the hollow in the back to hide himself.

Not five seconds passed before a soaked Kagetane also rushed in, looking like a drowned rat. “Will they really pass by us if we stay here?” he asked.

“There’s nowhere else!” Rentaro snapped.

“You two are both too loud!” Rentaro was taken aback by Kohina’s roar and shut his mouth. After that, they didn’t talk anymore and just holed themselves up in the crowded hollow, trying to quiet their breathing and hide.

The short and shallow rise and fall of Rentaro’s shoulders quieted down, but it meant that he could more clearly hear the vibrations of Gastrea pounding on the ground, and his world shook. In front of them was a curtain of water, and because of the rain, the Gastrea were not supposed to be able to pursue them by smell.

Rentaro closed his eyes and made a hard fist.

After a while, the loud cries passed over them, and the large group of Gastrea went by. This didn’t feel like real life.

Finally, their cries faded away with the Doppler effect.

Rentaro was about to give a sigh of relief when the ground shook loudly, and just as he was about to fall into the waterfall basin, Kagetane grabbed both his arms.

There was another loud vibration. Rentaro’s body floated in the air, and his feet danced. He broke into a cold sweat. This time, it was an outrageously large Gastrea walking toward them.

“Last night, because of our encounter with the repulsive monster, none of us slept one wink.”

Gado’s words echoed through Rentaro’s head. Could this possibly be what he had been talking about? The general over all the enemy, the Gastrea Aldebaran?

The low rumble of its breath made the air vibrate, and the stink of animal attacked Rentaro’s nose.

It was here. He couldn’t see it, but he could tell by its overwhelming presence.

A giant Gastrea was plopped right above the hollow where Rentaro and the others were hiding. What in the world did it look like?

What’s wrong? What’s it doing? Hurry up and leave. Why isn’t it moving?

Rentaro started to panic. Don’t tell me it’s noticed where we are?

Just then, the waterfall in front of them split open, and the earth quaked as something large poked into the waterfall basin.

At first, Rentaro thought that a stone pillar had fallen from the sky. But no, it was a leg. One of the Gastrea’s gigantic legs had stepped into the waterfall basin by chance.

That did not mean that they had been noticed yet.

Rentaro pushed his back deep into the hollow as far as he could.

Finally, the giant leg was pulled out of the waterfall basin, and the Gastrea’s steps gradually faded away.

Rentaro slid down the back of the hollow.

In the next two hours, Gastrea came near them intermittently, but none of them came as close as Aldebaran. Rentaro didn’t know where it had gone. Right now, all he could hear was the sound of the muddy water flowing past them.

However, since they’d been spotted, the Gastrea were on guard; if they were seen again, it was less likely that they would be able to escape again. The three of them were in agreement about not moving until nightfall.

After they waited another two hours, the dim, lead-colored sky had quickly turned into an indigo blue, and now, it was completely dark. It was hard to tell from the back of the waterfall basin, but it looked like the rain had also stopped.

For Rentaro, having to hide himself in the hollow with a constant sheet of spray flying in was a cruel trial. Blood loss had made him pale, and he was shivering uncontrollably from the cold. Earlier, he’d injected himself with morphine, but it seemed to be wearing off, and now he was being attacked by stabbing pains.

He’d sewn up his side with the needle and thread in his first-aid kit, which lay at the bottom of his survival knife under the back flap. Multiple times, he’d almost lost consciousness from the ordeal, but he was determined to survive despite it all. In the end, he covered the affected area with a pad of biological glue called fibrin and wrapped a bandage over it.

When his mind was fuzzy from the morphine, various memories ran through it unchecked. He remembered how, at the Tendo Civil Security Agency lit orange by the setting sun one day, Kisara started complaining about how they didn’t have any clients, and Tina mollified Kisara as she served tea. Enju stuck her head into the fridge without permission and started rifling through the stockpile of food, and Rentaro, who had been put in charge of accounting, glared at the unforgiving finance software as he desperately grappled with the numbers.

Even though the memory wasn’t that old, it seemed to be fading into sepia, slightly blurred with tears. For some reason, the casual everyday scenes had become irreplaceable. They were like an edited movie of happy endings with all the kissing scenes strung together and pressed in on his heart.

“Rentaro.” A voice suddenly called his name. The outline of the person was blurry, but a clearer image slowly focused on his retina. A square face with rectangular glasses, with hair that was over half-white, and rounded cheeks with deep laugh lines that gave the impression of being overwhelmingly kind.

“Dad.”

Takaharu Satomi. The father who had passed away ten years ago when Rentaro was six years old.

“Mom and I will be there soon, too.” Saying that, Takaharu had pushed Rentaro onto a full train and told him the name where he was to evacuate—Tendo.

Don’t go.

However, Rentaro knew what happened next: He knew that his father would not evacuate to Tokyo Area. The next time he saw his parents, they were in coffins.

“Rentaro.” His father kept calling his name.

Tears ran down Rentaro’s face. Why didn’t his parents come for him? His father said that they would be there soon…

Liar. I believed you. I loved you.

“…tomi…Satomi…”

“Dad.”

The blurry square face he had been looking at turned into a cold white mask before he realized it. The path between dream and reality was severed, and he reflexively jumped up.

“Did your father wear a mask or something?”

“Sh-shut up.” Rentaro turned away to hide his hot cheeks, but when he did, the pain in his side returned immediately. He shook his head as he pressed down on his eyes, rolling with pain. “Where are we?”

“We’re still in the waterfall basin. However, there’s something strange going on outside. Go out and look for a second.”

Rentaro’s head still felt like it had been stuffed full of mud. But he crouched and, when he got outside of the water, saw large, round footprints pressed into the ground, with tracks of something crawling in their center. It looked like Aldebaran didn’t walk upright, and had at least six legs.

The wind was blowing too hard and cold.

At first, he was on guard for Gastrea outside, but when he looked around, he soon noticed the strange feeling Kagetane had.

It was too quiet.

“There aren’t any Gastrea around here anymore, huh…?” said Rentaro.

“That’s right. I had Kohina scout out their camp earlier, but it was empty,” he replied.

Rentaro felt like cold water had been poured on him. “They weren’t there? Not a single one?”

“That’s right. It looks like the Aldebaran troops have started to move.”

Move. Where? No, it’s obvious: the civil officers’ base.

That meant Aldebaran had recovered from its injury.

—Enju!

Rentaro sprang to his feet and started running. A voice behind him called for him to stop, but he paid it no mind. Since he’d already been seen by the enemy once, he should have moved far more cautiously, but impatience won out.

There was no sight or sign of the enemy anywhere in the forest, which actually worked for the better, since he could run at full speed. He jumped from cliff to cliff, ran over mountains and through valleys. He didn’t know how much he had run. He stumbled out of the forest, out of breath, and the space in front of him widened. He squinted at the light of flames and flares.

Bizarre silhouettes were clumped together and attacking fiercely, scattering the puny humans below them. In fact, there were so many fewer people by comparison that it wouldn’t have been strange for Gado’s troops to have fallen apart already. The desperate bitter fight continued, but it was as plain as day that they would not last long.

Enju and the others were in the midst of that. If anything had happened—

He had no time. He took out his cell phone with shaking hands, switched it to satellite mode, and pulled up a number.

It rang ten times, and then the person on the other line answered in bewilderment. “Satomi, this is not the time for—”

“Lady Seitenshi, please listen! I have defeated Pleiades. You can use missiles and fighter aircraft now,” said Rentaro.

The Seitenshi gasped but regained herself quickly. “Please, continue.”

Rentaro reported the coordinates of the enemy troops’ position verbally and then requested fire support quickly after that. “I’m counting on you, then.”

“Oh, wait, Sato—”

Rentaro hung up and waited impatiently, praying.

Before long, an object came in at such high speeds that it was impossible to track with the naked eye. It rammed into the back of the Gastrea troops and exploded. A large number of the enemy force was caught up in the blast.

It was an antiship missile. Starting with that first one, missiles inundated the enemy with second and third consecutive waves. Heat pulses from the explosion pressed toward Rentaro, and he protected his face from the splinters and dust that blew his way.

When he lifted his eyes, red flames were blooming in the night sky and hot wind gusted against his cheek. The crimson tongues from hell billowed upward with a thunderous roar, and there was black smoke from the burned-up sky.

Two support fighter aircraft arrived at the battlefield late. Spitting out jet fire, the single-engine turbofan planes approached the battlefield at the speed of sound, crossing over them and letting loose five-hundred-pound guided bombs used for ground attacks. Heavy tips pointing downward, they sucked up the Gastrea on the ground, and more fire and heat from the explosions scattered around them.

The Gastrea troops who had been rushing in headlong slowed to a stop for the first time and gave off sounds of bewilderment and fear. Just then, there was another shower of regular bombs, demolishing the front lines.

The enemy was restless, and there were even those among them who had succumbed to their fear and were running backward toward their own troops. That was fine. If it turned into a stampede, it would be better for the humans.

Just then, Rentaro saw a mysterious sight and held his breath. In a corner of the enemy ranks, in a spot that was relatively well controlled, a giant Gastrea suddenly faded in. When Rentaro saw the silhouette of its rounded back with thin tentacles sprouting from it in random places, he was shocked. It was almost fifty meters in length.

No way… Is this Aldebaran?

With a wave of one of this giant silhouette’s arms, it swung downward at the Gastrea trying to run away. The monsters that had been pierced by the arms didn’t even know what hit them; they struggled and finally started to spasm in death throes. Aldebaran brought the bodies of its subordinates to its mouth, opened its giant mouth wide, and threw them in without hesitation.

Rentaro heard the dying cries of the Gastrea as they were ground to pieces, even though he shouldn’t have been able to hear them. He resisted the urge to vomit.

Aldebaran was eating the other Gastrea that were on its side.

“Gahhhhhhhhhh!” Angered, Aldebaran howled into the sky. The remaining Gastrea that were just about to stampede froze in midstep. Finally, they slowly returned to their positions and once more faced the civil officer troops.

Even their enemies were afraid of their commander, and were willing to struggle to the death on its orders.

Aldebaran was also focused on aiming for the self-defense force’s fighter aircraft. They were under attack.

The flying-type Gastrea that had come to intercept the attack formed a large cloud to strike. The two fighter aircraft released air-to-air missiles. The spears of science from the four missiles ran into the wall made by the flying Gastrea and blossomed into flames. The sight of the countless Gastrea dropping from the sky as they screamed long screams made Rentaro’s hairs stand on end, but he couldn’t take his eyes off it for a moment.

However, the enemy was not to be taken lightly. The flying Gastrea had strength in numbers, and a few of them went through the middle of the flames to throw themselves at the jets with a high-pitched neigh, prepared to die.

One of the aircraft couldn’t escape completely and was grazed on the edge of one wing, losing its balance and going into a tailspin as it fell. In the end, it couldn’t recover its position and crashed into the ground.

The remaining aircraft charged the Gastrea. With a cross counter that did not take defense into consideration, it delivered a single courageous strike to Aldebaran. The fighter aircraft let loose a guided missile at the same time that Aldebaran stretched out a conspicuously long tentacle. The alloyed metal body was pierced by Aldebaran’s tentacle, which went straight through the cockpit as it exploded. The pilot probably didn’t even realize what had hit him as he left the world. And the five-hundred-pound guided missile that the aircraft had left used GPS guidance to make slight adjustments to its position as it fell and was sucked into Aldebaran’s torso.

The next instant, there was a huge explosion, and Aldebaran’s scream rang out.

When the flames from the explosion cleared and Rentaro could see again, he saw that the silhouette of Aldebaran was still, not moving an inch. It had completely lost its head and was bare to its abdomen.

“All right!”

But just then, Gado’s dispirited comment rang inside Rentaro’s head:

“Leader Satomi, Aldebaran is an immortal Gastrea. There is no way to kill it.”

Aldebaran’s body twitched and wings unfolded out of its torso, fluttering at high speed. It was moving without a head.

Rentaro looked on in wonderment. Its brains had been blown out. If Aldebaran was an organism that used nucleic acids as a base to replicate DNA to form proteins, then its regenerative abilities should have been greatly reduced, what with its heart and pulse stopped and its pupillary light reflex gone. It should have just been waiting for its inevitable death.

“No way…”

Was there really no way to defeat this thing?

His shock aside, a familiar scene repeated itself before him. The entirety of the Gastrea halted abruptly and retreated while protecting Aldebaran. The flap of its wings earlier had probably been to spread pheromones.

A mass of Gastrea troops left the Monolith and came toward Rentaro. He quickly dove into a dilapidated house nearby, removed a floorboard, and let the creatures pass him by. After waiting for the right time, he rushed out and ran back toward the civil officer base.

“Kisara!” Seeing her among a group of civil officers covered in wounds, he waved his hand as he ran toward her.

He could see Enju next to her, too; the girl noticed him at the same time. “Rentaro!”

“Enju!”

They hugged with such force that they almost knocked each other over. Rentaro embraced Enju tightly and buried his face in her neck.

The girl’s arm went around his waist. “You idiot.”

“Sorry, Enju. Really…I’m sorry.” Regrets flowed up from the bottom of his heart. He should have explained the situation to Enju, at least. He really thought so now, after he had seen how painful it was to spend time apart.

“Why did you leave without informing me? I was worried.” As she said that, she half-sobbed and punched his sides.

“Argh, that hurts, stop it. I’m injured there! Don’t touch it.”

“Satomi……?”

Pushing Enju away from him, Rentaro looked toward the voice and gulped. Kisara’s black hair and white skin were covered with soot and blood, and she had a cut above her eyes that forced her left eye closed from blood. When he looked more carefully, he saw that Enju’s clothes also had traces of cuts and tears all over them.

Even so, Kisara let her tears gather at the edge of her vision as she put a hand firmly on her hip and looked at him sharply. “Jeez, you’re late!”

“Sorry.”

Kisara looked like she was about to say more, but no more words came out. Clasping her hands in front of her chest like she was praying, she looked down, shoulders shaking.

Rentaro was racked with guilt and scratched his head, not knowing how to deal with it.

Just then, a voice called out, “Hey, isn’t that Rentaro Satomi?” Rentaro raised his head as the surviving civil officers looked at him as if he had returned from Hades, surrounding him from far away.

He heard voices raise a commotion:

“I heard he’d been banished…”

“Then, the missiles that flew over were…”

“Did he defeat Pleiades and come back?”

“No way…”

From their reaction, he understood at once what the others had been told about his mission to subjugate Pleiades. He desperately controlled his expression to make sure his inner thoughts did not make it to his face. From their hollow eyes, he could tell that everyone was more exhausted than their visible wounds allowed. Thankfully, he still saw Tina, Tamaki, Yuzuki, and Shoma, but what was the deal with having their five-hundred-person-strong troops reduced to about sixty people before the second wave came?

He wanted this to be a joke. He wanted to hear the sound of footsteps bringing the remaining civil officers saying, “Don’t tell me you thought we died?” and laughing it off. He would feel annoyed for a moment, but then he would be grinning happily with them.

“Where’s…everyone else?” His voice sounded stiff, dry, and flat as he spoke.

Kisara wiped her eyes with her sleeve and looked at Rentaro solemnly. “Satomi…Leader Satomi.” Kisara saluted and looked at Rentaro sharply. “Commander Gado has died in battle.”

He felt like he had just been hit hard in the head. Died? Gado did? The war veteran with an IP rank of 275 died?

“According to the Adjuvant System in the civil officer manual, article 40, if the commander dies, then the authority to command the troops will pass to the civil officer with the next highest rank.”

“Then who’s in right now?” Rentaro asked.

All the Promoters and Initiators around them looked their way.

No way… Rentaro shook his head slowly as he backed away. It’s impossible, Kisara. There’s no way I can do it.

“From here on out, we will fight with you in command. Please lead us, Satomi.”