BLACK BULLET 5
CHAPTER 01

RENTARO SATOMI, FUGITIVE

1

The monster loomed large in his optically magnified vision. The single Gastrea, clambering an almost sheer vertical wall, looked like a crustacean-type at first glance—one with octopus-style tentacles growing out of it.

Its form, replete with a seemingly endless supply of sucker-laden feet, was clearly a walking mollusk. Its base core, however, was covered in a thick, almost helmetlike shell. Its head was directly attached to its chest area, making it impossible to tell exactly where its eyes or brain were, and as you went down the gentle plane of its back, you eventually came upon a long, sharp, spiked tail.

Just then, the Gastrea used its tentacles and arms to take another step forward, straight up the building, its entire body tensing itself at the effort. The sun, now halfway up the sky, kept it brightly lit as large droplets of sweat spilled from its eyebrows and down its cheeks. Its piercing, insectlike cry was extremely annoying to all who could hear it, and its skin was tanned so deeply that it seemed ready to catch fire under the sun’s rays at any moment.

Even in this tense environment, though, Rentaro Satomi found a very different stress placed upon him. The Gastrea was climbing straight up Tokyo Tower’s proud, bright-red iron frame.

“Big Brother, the wind’s blowing at ten to thirteen kilometers per hour from six o’clock.”

Rentaro pulled his face up from the scope on his sniper rifle to stare quizzically at the blonde girl next to him, lying prone on her stomach. This was Tina Sprout, and just like Rentaro, she had a sniper rifle loaded and ready, ignoring said “Big Brother” as she kept a watchful eye down her scope. The Bits that formed part of her aiming system flitted at regular intervals between her and the target Gastrea. Those were the infantry of sorts for her Shenfield, a thought-driven interface that, like so many buoys strewn across the sea, transmitted wind speeds and other pertinent sniper information directly into her brain.

She and Rentaro had set up shop atop a building not far from the Tower. Although he had a wet towel wrapped around his head, the punishing sunlight crashing down from above made him feel like he was taking a nap on a frying pan. Wiping the never-ending torrent of sweat from his brow, he tried to fight off the heat, strong enough to make his vision twist and warp.

But despite the clear afternoon weather, Tokyo Tower and the area around it was bereft of its usual activity. There were no resting children, nor any elderly dozing off into an afternoon nap. That was only to be expected, given how police had cordoned off the entire area, and every street around the Tower was crawling with patrol cars. A virtual army of officers sat resolutely at their positions, shotguns pointed upward.

Yet they didn’t seem poised to take action. Ever since Gastrea-related crimes sent the police’s line-of-duty death rates through the roof, responsibility for Gastrea incidents fell somewhere in between the police and self-defense force, right into the hands of the civil security agencies.

For a change, Rentaro and Tina were the first civsec group on the scene, earning the right to take out the Gastrea latched on to Tokyo Tower from their sniper nest’s vantage point. He peered back into his scope. One hundred meters between him and the target. No sweat for any regular sniper, and the low wind speed worked to their advantage as well. He could get away with ignoring the wind effect on his shot if that kept up.

But despite all his efforts, Rentaro’s vision kept blurring and falling apart through his scope, robbing him of any decent trigger chance. The sense of impotent irritation that resulted did nothing to calm his thoughts.

“Big Brother!”

The voice came tumbling in from behind him, pushing him to act. Throwing caution to the wind, he squeezed the trigger.

He felt a sharp kick at his shoulder. The Varanium bullet flew up and to the right, missing the Gastrea and pinging against the metal of Tokyo Tower.

There was no time to gnash his teeth in regret. The Gastrea, now on high alert, opened up its head/torso and deployed wings it had kept under wraps before.

—Oh, great. It’s gonna fly off on us.

Quickly, Rentaro pulled the handle to load the next shot. Rapidly, he fired again and just barely missed, the bullet aimlessly flying through the Gastrea’s former location.

Just as the monster was about to penetrate the police perimeter and make Rentaro question why he woke up this morning, there was a loud crack as a bullet cut through the Stage Two beast’s core. It fell into a tailspin in midair, crashing helplessly to the ground.

Cheers erupted from the police officers nearby. It wasn’t dead yet, but thanks to the Varanium bullet blocking its regenerative abilities, it was no longer in any shape to fight.

Rentaro looked to his side, noticing a wisp of smoke from Tina’s Dragunov sniper rifle. She kept her eyes closed for a beat or two, perhaps so she could take in the remaining vibration from her gun, but a moment later, she looked up from her infrared-detector scope and wiped away the sweat with her arm.

“It’s all right, Big Brother,” she said. “That’s how it is for everyone at first.”

Rentaro hung his head in defeated shame. The nicer Tina acted around him, the more it seemed impossible to be around her a second longer. But he’d sound like a spoiled brat if he ever let that get out.

As both a gunman and a Tendo Martial Arts practitioner, Rentaro was just as much a close-range specialist as his Initiator partner, Enju Aihara. He felt it was his duty to provide some mid- to long-range cover when Enju’s skills weren’t a good match for the fight. As far as mid-range went…well, his pistol skills were good enough. But what about beyond that?

That was what drove him to ask Tina for a little instruction. Which was fine and all, but—and it really did hurt him, deep down—he wasn’t progressing nearly as quickly as he had hoped.

Rentaro shook his head. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I have the worst time trying to focus on just one single thing like that.”

And look at what just happened, besides. One more mistake, and that Gastrea would have gotten away. Who knows what kind of disaster that could’ve caused?

“Big Brother,” Tina replied, “why did you want to master sniping in the first place?”

The force of her pure, emerald-green eyes overwhelmed him. “Because I thought I needed to,” he said, averting his gaze. “I mean—I don’t know. I just feel like I gotta make myself stronger.”

“That’s exactly it.” Tina lifted a finger into the air. “You want to get stronger, Big Brother, but you can’t clearly articulate why. And that’s what’s showing up in your marksmanship. It’s making you hesitate.”

“So you’re saying it’s all in my head?”

Tina nodded. “You’ve noticed it, too, haven’t you? What being a sniper is all about?”

Rentaro groaned. That hit a little too close to home.

She was right, of course. As he had learned the hard way through training, shooting a pistol required a completely different skill set than firing a sniper rifle. There were the distances involved, of course, but more than that, a sniper had to reap his target’s life before he even realized he was being targeted. To Rentaro, it felt a little too much like premeditated murder to wrap his head around.

If they were debating a gun battle between two hostile, engaged foes, he could at least explain that as a case of justifiable self-defense. But snipers didn’t work that way. Rentaro still didn’t know how to approach the connection between his pull of the trigger and the death that ultimately resulted.

This was somewhat doable with a Gastrea, at least. But Rentaro couldn’t keep himself from thinking about it: Could I will myself through the sniper process if this was a human opponent?

“Can…can you deal with that?”

The platinum-blonde girl nodded brightly, eyes still on him.

“Sniping is the entire reason I exist. If I couldn’t master this skill and manipulate this Shenfield the way I can, Professor Rand would’ve branded me a failure and I’d be disposed of like yesterday’s garbage.”

“Disposed of?”

“Yeah… Well, I heard all kinds of rumors, but I still don’t know exactly what happened to the children who couldn’t adapt to their machine bodies. If anything saved me, I think it’s the way I shut off my imagination. That kept me from thinking too much about the future. That’s how I mastered all the skills granted to me in pretty quick time. You can’t kill another person unless your own soul dies, too.”

“But that’s not the way a person lives, Tina.”

Tina fell into a shamed silence.

“Are you saying I need to kill off my own emotions if I want the strength to pull the trigger?”

“No, Big Brother. I’m saying you need to find a reason for yourself. One that’ll make it seem worth taking another person’s life. And that’s something I really can’t help you find. Or, really, unless you do find it, all the practice in the world isn’t gonna make you any better, Big Brother, so you should probably give it up sooner than later.”

When it came to this subject, at least, Tina wasn’t one to mince words. For a few moments, she and Rentaro were silent, merely staring into each other’s eyes. The lukewarm wind blew across the roof, gently tossing their hair around. Rentaro was the first one to speak again.

“You’re a real slave-driving teacher, Tina.”

Tina smiled through the sweat covering her face. “You’ve been teaching me this whole time, Big Brother. I’m just glad I have something to teach you back.” Then she hefted up the Dragunov rifle and pointed downward. “The Gastrea’s still alive. Let’s finish it off before it hurts any citizens.”

“Yeahhh!” a joyful voice bellowed out from below. “You did it, you bastards!!”

Startled, Rentaro and Tina tracked the voice to its source. At Tokyo Tower’s base, they noticed a familiar civsec pair, both bedecked in some pretty authentic hardcore-punk fashion. It was Tamaki and Yuzuki Katagiri, two old comrades they had fought alongside during the Third Kanto Battle; they had already set upon the Gastrea Tina had shot down. It was clear their foe didn’t have long to live.

Which meant—

Rentaro and Tina looked at each other and shouted in unison:

“They’re stealing our bounty!!”

2

It was mid-August, and even with the Gastrea War decimating population figures worldwide, global climate change was still a serious problem.

The latest way it manifested itself was in the tundra—the eternally frozen land up north. Now that the permafrost wasn’t so permanent any longer, the animal and plant carcasses caught under the ice were starting to decompose, unleashing an astonishing amount of methane into the atmosphere and further accelerating the warming trend. The media were on it like hyenas, of course.

The human race was releasing only a tiny fraction of the carbon dioxide that it used to, but they were still inheriting the cost for all the excesses of generations past. For all anyone knew, it was well beyond the point that anything could be done about it.

Even when operating at full blast, the air-conditioning unit back at the office could do little against the 39 degree Celsius temperature outside. The droning of the cicadas began to sound like a plea for help in the occupants’ ears.

At least it was quiet inside the office. Solemn, even, in a way. Tina, Enju, and Rentaro were at their seats, meekly examining one another as the sweat poured down.

In a corner of the Tendo Civil Security Agency, lit diagonally by soft light from the setting sun, lounge chairs were positioned around a glass table. It was meant for conducting conversations with paying customers, although in practice it wasn’t used for this purpose too often.

Kisara Tendo, wearing an apron tied over her school uniform, appeared through the noren curtain separating the lounge from the kitchen area, setting four plates on the glass table. The one placed in front of Rentaro emanated a sweet scent that found its way into his nostrils as the steam washed against his face. It was enough to make his stomach growl.

Settling down with her own plate, Kisara closed her eyes and put her hands together.

“All right, everyone. Ready to get started?”

Rentaro and Enju did the same, but just as they were about to tuck in, someone shouted “Wait a minute!” in a panic.

Tina looked around in abject bewilderment, then pointed at her plate.

“Um…what is this?”

Rentaro followed Tina’s eyes down to the object placed on her lily-white plate. It was shaped like a somewhat elongated diamond, laid upon the plate in all its purple, tuberous glory.

“What is it? …Well, it’s a potato, right? A sweet potato, to be exact. A perennial root vegetable from the family Convolvulaceae.”

“Th-that’s not really what I meant… I mean, is this all? This is all we have for dinner tonight?”

Kisara placed an index finger on her chin, having apparent trouble understanding Tina’s complaint. “Hmmm,” she muttered, before slapping a fist against her hand. “I got it! Just a minute, okay?”

Tina breathed a sigh of relief as Kisara ventured back into the kitchen. “Wow, President Tendo, you sure can be a prankster sometimes!”

Before long, Kisara cheerfully came back out, plinking a cup down in front of Tina.

“Here you go. A glass of tap water. All the seconds you want, too.”

Tina’s face stiffened for a moment.

“Uhhmm, President…? Is our agency really this short on money?”

“It’s desperate.”

“Wh-what’s on the menu tomorrow?”

“Bean and bean-sprout soup. Also, plain udon noodles. I’ve got some bread crusts that the bakery gave me for free, too.”

“What about the day after that?”

“Sautéed bean sprouts and bread crusts.”

“And the next day?”

“Bread crusts.”

Tina began to see a pattern emerge.

“Umm, and f-four days from now?”

Kisara, impressed that she even dared to ask, gave herself a confident thump on the chest and smiled warmly.

“Well, on the fourth day, I figure we’d change it up a little and go with fried bread crusts!”

“That’s the same thing!” Tina shouted. “Just because they eat fried food all the time in the US doesn’t mean I have to!”

This triggered a sudden mood swing on Kisara’s part. She stood up and slapped her hands against the table.

“What do you want from me?! We’ve completed exactly zero cases this month, too! I was preparing beefsteaks for all of us tonight, but Satomi’s such an idiot that we’re out the entire bounty! And we even had you on site this time, Tina…!”

Rentaro scratched the back of his head. He was certainly not expecting the Katagiri Civil Security Agency to scavenge his (okay, their) kill like that. The end result was all too clear, however: Today, the civsec experts at the Tendo agency were going hungry.

“But why,” asked Enju as she poked at her sweet potato with a finger, “are we always so penniless like this?”

“Yeah.” Tina nodded, seeing the logic in this. “Where’s our pay from the Third Kanto Battle, Kisara?”

The Tendo Civil Security Agency, after all, had at least three major jobs under its belt. The Kagetane Hiruko terror incident; foiling the attempt on the Seitenshi’s life; and more or less snapping victory from the jaws of defeat during the Third Kanto Battle. Each should have generated a nontrivial payment on its own.

Kisara looked oddly startled for a moment. Then she turned her eyes upward, cheeks reddening. “Listen, Satomi,” she mumbled. “I kept this under wraps until now, but about two months before the Hiruko case, our finances pretty much hit the limit and I couldn’t pay the lease on the office any longer. So I, uh… I kind of borrowed some money.”

“From where?” Rentaro asked, already dreading the potential answer. Kisara replied by bashfully pointing up at the ceiling. Their upstairs neighbors—Kofu Finance, the friendly neighborhood yakuza-funded loan shark.

“You might be too stupid to realize this,” Kisara dolefully continued, “but when you take out a loan, there’s something called ‘compounding interest.’ For example, let’s say I borrowed a million yen, right? After ten days, they’d apply ten percent interest on it, so now I have to pay back 1.1 million instead. Then, ten days after that, they add on ten percent of that 1.1 million figure…so then it becomes 1.21 million.”

That was all it took for Tina to put her hands to her face and start crying. Rentaro, for his part, closed his eyes tightly and silently apologized to her. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Tina. It’s not your fault our president is so clueless.

“What’d you use for collateral when you borrowed the money?”

“Y’organs.”

“Buh?”

Kisara said it a little too quickly for Rentaro to pick up.

“I said…your organs, Satomi. Like, Abe up there said your lungs and corneas and stuff would go for a lot of money, so…”

“Wuh?”

Kisara, cheeks still flushed, put her hands on her hips. “Look, you’re my employee, Satomi,” she sulked. “I’m the president, and that means you’re mine. Plus, you get to work for one of the cutest presidents out there. A cornea or spleen or two is more than a fair price for that!”

Rentaro stared at Kisara. There were no words.

—Did I just have this girl I like order me to hand over my internal organs?

Enju looked equally disgusted, but in another moment her eyes were back down upon her plate.

“So these potatoes…”

Kisara ran a hand up through her black hair. “Uh-huh,” she intoned. “Kind of the Last Supper, if you know what I mean. Starting today, it’s nothing but bean sprouts and bread crusts, day in, day out. By which I mean six days, because starting day seven, we’re gonna have nothing but water to live on. I hope you enjoy all the luxury I’m giving you tonight.”

The group listlessly stared at the sweet potatoes on each respective plate. A sudden quiet descended upon the office.

Enju silently raised a hand. “I have a suggestion on how we can split these,” she said. “We should divide Kisara’s potato into thirds and give one piece each to me, Tina, and Rentaro.”

“Wh-why is that?”

“We three couldn’t survive three days without food or water, but with all the nutrients you have stored in your breasts, Kisara, I’m sure you’d be all right for at least a year or so.”

“Oh, a year without food or water, huh?” Now it was Kisara’s turn to raise her voice. “I’m not a monster! Besides, Enju, you’re always picking on me about my chest, but it’s not like this is all wine and roses for me! They make my shoulders all sore, there are never any nice-looking bras my size, I keep getting prickly heat all over them…”

Sadly, the pain Kisara’s gifts gave her was not shared with the others.

“Daaaaaahhhh!” Stricken by a sudden case of breast hysteria, Enju lunged over the table toward Kisara. “If you don’t want them, let me take them from you! Give me back the boobs you sucked away from me!”

“Ow ow ow ow! Stop pulling at them, Enju! You’re gonna rip them off!”

Tina shot Rentaro a nervous look. Rentaro shook his head at her and sighed. “The hunger’s just getting us all worked up.” Then he turned toward Kisara, an offhand premonition crossing his mind.

“Hey, um, we are kind of the ‘saviors of Tokyo Area’ and everything, aren’t we? Shouldn’t that earn us at least a little more regular work?”

Kisara, finally a safe distance away from Enju’s ferocious attack, turned back toward him. “It is,” she said, her breath ragged. “Someplace on the east coast of the United States wanted us to eliminate a great white shark Gastrea that’s been appearing around the beach. Apparently it’s been chewing up all the local shark fishermen with gusto, and the local oceanographers and police chiefs don’t know what to do about it. How’s that sound to you?”

“It sounds like something we better leave to an underwater specialist. What else?”

Kisara ripped a page from the memo pad next to the office’s landline phone. “Here, I’ll read it to you,” she said. “‘They’re late with my food delivery again; do something about it.’ ‘I challenge Rentaro Satomi to a duel. Let’s find out which of us is the real man!’ ‘Hey, President Tendo [heavy breathing], what color panties you wearing right now [groan]?’ ‘Get this cockroach out of my closet!’ ‘I want you to kill that good-for-nothing housewife next door for me.’ …That kind of thing.”

A wave of hopelessness crashed over Rentaro. What do people think civsec officers do all day, anyway?

“Okay, well, do we have any other way to make money?”

“You could always work at the gay bar on the first floor, Satomi. They said they’d start you at 8,000 yen an hour.”

“Why don’t you work at the cabaret on the second floor, Kisara? They said they’d give you 10,000!”

“……”

Between the yakuza on the fourth floor, the den mother running the cabaret on the second, and the strapping lads behind the bar on the first, there was something about the Happy Building that kept its tenants either slaphappy or trigger-happy all the year through. Rentaro, given the choice, preferred not to deal with them.

“Still,” Enju murmured, her face harboring serious contemplation. “We might not be wrapping up any jobs, but I heard the number of Gastrea sightings is creeping up.”

Rentaro nodded at the observation. “Yeah. A little too much, if you ask me.”

Whenever a Gastrea was sighted or caught on a security camera, an alert mail was automatically sent to all civsec officers within a ten-kilometer radius. From there, it was an all-out first-come, first-served Gastrea competition. Agencies may have occasionally worked with one another, but generally, whoever struck the killing blow first would get the entire bounty from the government.

That was how civsec agencies kept the books balanced—never receiving formal requests, just hoping the right Gastrea crept along at the right place and time—but the sheer number of incidents lately was getting crazy. The alerts would force Rentaro out of bed in the middle of the night, its shrill, piercing beep even going off during class before summer break began, making his teachers want to stab him.

None of these invaders had triggered a Pandemic yet, thanks to a citizenry well used to evacuation and a herd of civsecs always rushing to the scene in time, but the sheer numbers would put anyone on edge. And to someplace like Tendo Civil Security Agency, getting tossed this way and that by all these alerts and always missing out on the kill by the barest of margins, it was starting to become downright frustrating.

“Is there another Monolith problem, maybe?”

“No way.”

Rentaro was quick to reject Kisara’s question, but his voice trailing off showed that he wasn’t too convinced himself. The previous Third Kanto Battle took place because of a defect in a Monolith, something thought to be impervious to damage. It was a completely avoidable, manmade disaster.

The only sure thing when it came to security was that there was no such thing as a sure thing. It hadn’t even been a month since Tokyo Area paid a dear price for failing to realize that.

The eyes of the agency’s employees wandered over to the window. On the other side, draped in a dark red, the line of Monoliths stood tall, their tops hidden by a line of clouds.

“This really doesn’t taste good…”

Turning back, Rentaro found Tina chewing on the potato, her face puckered. Enju, driven by curiosity, took a bite herself, only to bunch up her face and stick her tongue out.

“Nnh! This isn’t cooked all the way through.”

“Um, really?” said a confused Kisara.

Enju sighed. “Kisara, you should really have Rentaro teach you how to cook sometime. For real.”

The sheltered little rich girl shrugged despondently in response. After a moment, she dejectedly turned her eyes upward.

“Could you?”

“Uh, sure.”

With another deep sigh, Kisara dragged her feet over to the reproduction of some Klimt masterpiece across from her ebony-colored desk. Slipping her hand behind it, she took out a thin envelope.

“All right,” she said, burying a 10,000-yen note in his hand. “Here. My private stash, if you want to call it that. Go buy something with this. You can have Enju and Tina do the shopping.”

The two girls’ faces sparkled with joy.

“We’ll try to keep it as cheap as possible!” Enju said with a wave as she took Tina out of the office.

The sound of them clanging down the stairs faded away, silence reigning once again. It was half past seven in the evening. The wretched-sounding drone and clicking of the evening cicadas filled up the emptiness, and across from the now deep purple sky, the last weak rays of sunshine were dimly lighting the room. Once the sunlight disappeared for good, a nearly full moon drifted into the heavens, the LED lights bordering the signs beyond the window began to systematically flicker into existence, and the Magata neighborhood found new life as a town of the night.

The moldy smell seeped into the room from somewhere.

“We’re alone.”

“We are.” Rentaro stole a glance at the side of Kisara’s face. “And?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you send the girls out shopping because you wanted to talk to me?”

“Well, sort of.”

With practiced hands, Kisara untied the apron behind her back and shook her hair a bit. There was the sound of rustling clothes as the apron fell to her feet. She picked it up and, with the echo of her slip-on loafers, walked over and sat on her ebony work desk, a tad forlorn as she looked at Rentaro.

“Listen, Satomi… I’ve been offered an arranged marriage.”

She looked at the surprised Rentaro, then back down at her feet as she began swinging her long, thin legs back and forth.

“It came to me through Shigaki. I told him I didn’t want anything like that yet, but he’s done a lot for me, so I couldn’t just turn him down…”

Through Shigaki, huh…? Having that name brought up left even Rentaro in a weak position. Senichi Shigaki, once a butler at the Tendo residence, was probably approaching fifty-six years old this year. He had known Rentaro and Kisara since back when they lived in the Tendo manor. Even after he retired, he had helped them through all sorts of issues in their lives.

Most important, though, was that (on paper) he was the manager of the Tendo Civil Security Agency, not to mention Rentaro and Kisara’s more-or-less legal guardian. They owed him a lot. She couldn’t dismiss his offer out of hand.

“But why now?”

Kisara had long been disinherited from the Tendo family will. If she was still considered a Tendo woman, it wouldn’t be unusual for her to be forced into a succession of arranged (or even forced) marriage proposals starting at sixteen—a sort of modern human sacrifice still prevalent in Japanese high society. But now that she was de facto not a Tendo, she could no longer effectively function as a tool for a strategic marriage.

What were Shigaki’s aims, making a request like that? Kisara seemed to understand Rentaro’s doubts, but merely shook her head in response. “I don’t know. But you’d know the guy pretty well, Satomi.”

“I would?”

Kisara took a piece of paper out from the desk and gave it to Rentaro. The moment he saw it, he felt a jolt of surprise.

“Atsuro Hitsuma…? …Why?”

The headshot, printed upon the fancy cotton paper used for the résumé-like introductory papers, stared blankly in response. He was somewhat oval-faced, wearing silver-framed eyeglasses and projecting an air of intellectual ease.

“We must have both been eleven, right? The last time we saw Hitsuma.”

Sliding his eyes down, Rentaro saw that he was a police superintendent, working at Tokyo’s metropolitan police department after passing the civil-servant exam. His whole family was in law enforcement, his father the commissioner of the entire force. A brilliant record, all written down in elegant block-style lettering.

He seemed like the embodiment of the perfect man—tall, handsome, highly educated, well paid. But before any of that…he used to be Kisara’s fiancé, too.

“I thought the whole thing was broken off after you left the family, Kisara.”

“I know. So did I. What could Shigaki be thinking at this point…?”

Rentaro could feel something spread out from his chest—something he couldn’t describe, but wanted none of. He didn’t want to hear anything else from her—for some reason, he was seized by an impulse to get up and walk out of the room immediately. But instead he silently handed the résumé back to Kisara, acting like it was nothing.

“So when’re you gonna meet him?”

“…Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

Which meant the proposal must’ve come a long time ago.

“So you’ve already agreed to meet, or…?”

Kisara twirled her hair around her finger as she averted her eyes. “I wasn’t trying to hide it or anything. It was just kind of hard for me to say it…so I wound up dragging it out all the way to today.”

Rentaro realized he had been unconsciously clenching his fists so hard that he could feel his nails against his skin. Kisara lifted her head.

“I want you to be there for me, Satomi. As my attendant.”

“…What do you mean?”

“Hitsuma is going to have his mother and father as attendants, and Shigaki was going to act as both my manager and attendant, but I still need someone else. I don’t really have anyone to ask besides you, so… Please. I know this is unusual, but would you mind accompanying me to the meeting?”

“……Fine by me.”

“Really? Good.”

The beauty in black breathed a sigh of relief, but still anxiously darted her eyes back toward Rentaro.

“What do you think, Satomi?”

“What…?”

“Are you, like, against it?”

Of course he was. Just imagining Kisara being held in the arms of another man made him feel sick to his stomach.

But Rentaro knew well enough by now. This was Kisara Tendo. A proper girl, from a proper family. The class system may have disappeared from modern Japanese society long ago, but among super-rich families like the Tendos, things hadn’t changed much.

If she was a Tendo girl, it was only common sense that she would marry the scion of another suitably wealthy family. The idea of her running off with some stray dog instead was preposterous. Ever since it was founded, the Tendo family had never allowed a single exception to this ironclad rule.

Practically speaking, Kisara should never have even exchanged words with the mere adopted child she shared a home with—nor had any other personal connection, for the rest of either of their lives.

That was something the Tendo private tutor imprinted deep into Rentaro’s mind from the moment he was taken in, almost to the point of brainwashing. “Listen,” she would say. “Tendos aren’t like regular people. Don’t you dare catch yourself acting like you’re one of them.”

“…I think it’d be a good match. If it works out okay and you wind up being happy with it, I bet Enju and Tina would love that.”

“You, too, Satomi?”

Light reflected from a passing car’s high beams streaked across the room for an instant, bathing Rentaro’s and Kisara’s heads in white light. He looked up, straight at Kisara.

“Of course.”

For some reason, the reply made Kisara lower her head, her face like a wounded animal. After a moment, she forced a smile, trying her best to bottle it up.

“Yeah…I guess so. It’s not like we were ever exactly a pair or anything, besides. I’m acting pretty stupid, aren’t I?”

She gave herself a light bop on the head and stuck out her tongue, determined to laugh it all away.

That was the last straw.

“Hey, I’m gonna go look for Enju and Tina. I’m kinda worried about them.”

Rentaro turned around as he finished, going through the office door before he could hear whatever Kisara said in response.

As he quickly descended the staircase, trying his hardest to leave the Happy Building as fast as humanly possible, he felt a small jolt in his right shoulder. His mind was so occupied with Kisara that it took him a beat before he realized who he had bumped into.

“Hey! Hey, is that you, Rentaro?”

He looked up in surprise to find the face of a man, one who had only just begun to climb the building’s stairs. Traces of happiness streaked across that face. He was young, maybe about Rentaro’s age. His face was long, his brow broad, and his hair a shade between brown and orange. His pointed gaze gave him the look of a street thug, but something about his smile made him seem oddly charming when he flashed it.

Rentaro combed his memory—he looked familiar to him. The man before him began to overlap with the face of a boy from his memory. He let out a yelp.

“Wait, are you Suibara? Kihachi Suibara, year four, class five, seat ten?”

That was apparently the right answer. The man gave him a broad grin and stuffed his hands into his jeans. “Yuh-huh…Rentaro Satomi, year four, class five, seat nine…” Before he could finish saying it, Suibara’s arms were around Rentaro. “Damn, it’s been years!” he exclaimed. “Hope you’ve been doing good, you bastard!”

“Y-yeah, you, too.”

Rentaro’s vision lurched to and fro as this unexpected old friend jostled him in his arms. But instead of enjoying this almost too-perfect chance encounter, another sensation made the hairs on his neck stand on end.

He looked up at the roof of the building in front of him. “But, Suibara, what are you doing here? You haven’t started cruising cabarets or gay bars at age sixteen or anything, right…?” He noticed the Rolex on Suibara’s wrist as he spoke. “And I guess you aren’t poor enough that you’re borrowing money from the yakuza, either.”

“Of course not, you dumbass,” an astonished Suibara replied, eyes half-closed.

“So—”

Suibara thrust a thumb toward his face.

“You guessed it! I’m here to visit the Tendo Civil Security Agency. I’m a client, Rentaro.”

—A client? This childhood friend that he hadn’t spoken to in years was a client? Between this and Hitsuma’s name coming up a moment ago, a lot of old friends were popping up in the oddest of places.

Suibara shrugged at the notably bewildered Rentaro. “Well, we ain’t just gonna stand by the stairs here, are we? Show me where your company is!”

“Um…”

Rentaro hesitated. He had just half-forcibly ended a conversation with Kisara and all but sprinted out of the office. Something told him trudging back up wasn’t a good idea right now.

He shook his head. No. I gotta get this client back to our place. Why am I acting so guilty about this?

Leading the way for Suibara, Rentaro stood before the Tendo office door. It was already dark out, but there was no sign of a light inside. Pushing the door open, he saw Kisara sitting in her office chair, staring forlornly out the window. Once she noticed them, she shot back to her feet and bounded up to them.

“Oh, good, Satomi,” she gasped. “I was thinking about some stuff just now, and—!” She stopped abruptly, presumably noticing Suibara behind him.

Rentaro could barely stand the awkwardness of it all, but kept it off his face. “I got a client,” he whispered.

Kisara, looking happy about something else up to now, froze. She hung her head back down, as if heartbroken.

“Oh…”

What the hell? Rentaro thought. A few hours ago, you were practically pleading for a client to come in through the door.

Suibara hurriedly intervened. “Um, I’m sorry, did I come at a bad time or something?”

Kisara shook her head before Rentaro could open his mouth. “No, not at all. Good evening. My name’s Kisara Tendo, and I’m the president.” With a shallow smile, she extended a hand. Suibara, a surprised look on his face, gingerly accepted.

“Uh, hello. I’m Kihachi Suibara.”

“Come on in. It’s kind of dirty, I know, but…” Kisara pushed a button on the remote she had stationed on the desk. Dazzling light poured from the ceiling, making Rentaro instinctively squint.

Pictures drawn by Enju and Tina were strewn around the room, and the would-be dinner of sweet potatoes and nothing else was still laid out on the table. Kisara’s show of humility was clearly anything but a show as the full state of the office came into view.

“I’m sorry. I’ll clean this up in a sec…”

“Oh! No, actually, about that…” Suibara paused a moment before continuing. “I’d prefer to talk to Rentaro alone about this job, actually. Sorry if that’s weird…”

Rentaro and Kisara exchanged glances, and he silently signaled her to leave. The request seemed baffling to him, but he could hardly turn this guy down now. He gave an affirmative nod to Suibara, who nodded back in agreement.

“All right. I’ll go look after Enju and Tina, then.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Once he was sure Kisara was out of sight downstairs, Rentaro cleared the dishes and sat across the table from Suibara. The young man propped his arms on top of the backrest, clearly at ease.

“That’s Kisara Tendo, huh? Man, you were head over heels for her back when we were all kids, weren’t you? She’s gotten dang pretty since then. That’s the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my life, even.”

Rentaro silently agreed. Between his encounters with people like Miori Shiba and the Seitenshi herself, he had run into a lot of women with sirenlike beauty. They had lived long enough together that it would occasionally slip his mind, but to Rentaro, the sight of Kisara side by side with Miori or standing alongside the Seitenshi was always such an embarrassment of riches for him that it’d often take his breath away. And now this beauty was going to discuss a marriage proposal with Atsuro Hitsuma tomorrow. Rentaro shook his head to clear his mind of the distractions plaguing it.

“So, what did you need?”

Suibara studied the office around him like a curious archaeologist. “Oh! So, hey, do you remember how it was when we first met?”

“Hmm? Yeah, I do…”

If he closed his eyes, he could instantly transport his mind back to the fourth year of elementary school. It was four years after Rentaro lost his right arm, his right leg, and his eye. Because he was still growing, he had to have his artificial limbs replaced frequently. The continual pain he experienced each day made him want to die at times.

The way he could hide his metal skin under an artificial human epidermis was a fairly recent invention in the grand scheme of things. In his younger years, during school and for every other hour of the day and night, Rentaro had to live with a pair of dull, black prosthetic limbs for all the world to see.

“Nobody wanted to come near me. They were all freaked out by this weird black arm and leg I had. But you weren’t. I think the rest of the class shunned you, too, right? Because there was one of the Cursed Children in your family.”

“Yeah. My little sister.”

The story of Suibara and his sister ultimately fell down a tragic path. Once the child’s presence was known to the general public, a lot of people naturally began to have a problem with that.

Their mother was the first family member to let it all break her down—the stones her neighbors lobbed through the windows, the filthy diatribes spray-painted on the fence. “If only she wasn’t here,” she’d whisper to herself over and over like a woman possessed—and, unfortunately, Suibara’s father kept a pistol inside a locker at their home for self-defense. Everything was in place for a tragedy.

“We were together in our loneliness,” Rentaro said in profound tones. “That’s why we started hanging out and playing with each other.”

“Yeah!” Suibara excitedly added. “You knew a ton about stuff like fish and bugs, and we’d go running around the hills and stuff. That was so much fun! It’s like just being with you helped me learn all kinds of things, y’know? Like how to catch crayfish with a string, or how to mount an insect specimen.”

His words were all it took to jog his memory. Soon they were sprung to life by the dozen, as if bursting out of a giant toy box. Back when he had no friends and couldn’t even leave the house freely, Rentaro would hole up in the Tendo family library and spend the entire day poring over full-color insect field guides and plant references. After a while, there was no one who could even hope to challenge his knowledge.

“Yeah, and I learned how to trash talk from you, didn’t I?”

Suibara beamed. “Yeah, I remember how you were all ‘to-mah-to’ when we first met.”

Rentaro turned away, cheeks red with embarrassment.

“Ah, shut up. Kisara was really sad once you started rubbing off on me, y’know. She was like, ‘Satomi’s talking like this criminal now!’”

“Oh, don’t give me that crap! Who’s the guy who started imitating me in the first place?”

“Ah, eat shit and die.”

“You first!”

Once their eyes met again, Rentaro and Suibara grinned at each other.

“Rentaro,” Suibara said, leaning forward on his sofa deep in thought and lowering his eyes down to his clasped hands. “It probably wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t show this to you first.”

The item he took out from a side pocket made Rentaro gasp. It was a black chunk of metal that made a clink when he put it on the glass table. He spotted a trigger attached to the dull matte-black frame. It was a sixth-generation Glock pistol, one where even the slide was made of a glass-fiber reinforced polymer to reduce the gun’s weight.

Why? was the first question that came to mind. The general public still wasn’t allowed to carry concealed weapons outside their homes. According to the laws of Japan in 2031, there were three types of people allowed to walk around armed in public: the police, members of the self-defense force, and—

Suibara placed something else from his pocket on the gun: a synthetic leather rail-pass holder. Seeing the civsec license inside, complete with ID photo, gave Rentaro the biggest shock of the evening.

“Suibara, you’re a civsec?”

Suibara, grinning, tapped a few buttons on the cell phone in his pocket and showed it to him. The screen showed a photo of a girl, her hair done up in a bob cut, her averted eyes indicating she didn’t enjoy having her picture taken very much.

“Whoa, did you…?”

Failing to notice Rentaro’s astonishment, Suibara soldiered proudly on. “That’s my Initiator. Her name’s Hotaru Kouro, and, man, is she a cutie, am I right? I mean, my grandma used to say, ‘You’re so sweet, I could just eat you up,’ but now I think I get what she was talking—”

“Stop.”

Rentaro, his mind still a jumble, just barely managed to get the syllable out. Suibara’s sister was one of the Cursed Children. It had wrecked the entire family. The idea of him teaming up with another one of them and working the civsec beat was hard for Rentaro to swallow. What’s more, this job meant that he was all but completely dependent on his Initiator if he wanted to stay alive. It had to be a bitter pill.

“Is she…taking the place of your dead sister for you?”

The quiet question made Suibara peevishly turn his face away. “Nothing like that, no. What’s the big deal?” Then, after a moment’s pause, he placed an elbow on the table and rested his chin above it. “You wanna hear about this job for you, or what?”

Rentaro thought about that. A civsec hiring another civsec—subcontracting work, in other words—generally meant the client had a job that was too much work for him to handle alone. That often meant whoever he hired would get the short end of the stick paywise. But despite knowing that bit of conventional wisdom, something still told Rentaro there wasn’t anything conventional at all about Suibara’s job.

“Lay it on me.”

“Now we’re talking,” Suibara replied. But what he had for Rentaro next was a complete reversal of his light, friendly tone.

“So, Rentaro, like… You were the last guinea pig for the Ground Self-Defense Force’s enhanced-soldier project, right?”

This shock was enough to send Rentaro back to his feet.

Why did he know that? Maybe Suibara could surmise that Rentaro’s artificial limbs were black because they were made out of Varanium, but there was no possible way he could’ve connected that with the so-called New Humanity Creation Project.

“Bingo, huh?” Suibara murmured as he glanced sidelong at the stunned, wide-eyed Rentaro. But there was something close to regret on his face, like he’d just realized he was right when he had wanted to be wrong.

“So look, Rentaro, I picked up on some serious shit earlier. Have you ever heard of the New World Creation Project or the Black Swan Project? Either of those names, at least?”

“New World… Black Swan Project? …No.”

The “New World” Creation Project? What’s that? It sounded too close to the “New Humanity” Creation Project.

An ominous premonition started to build in Rentaro’s spine.

“Okay,” Suibara muttered in reply. Then he fell silent for a few moments, staring at the glass ashtray on the table. Rentaro waited patiently for him to go on.

“Well…I don’t know how much you’re aware of this, Rentaro, but among us civsec folk, you’re the subject of a lotta rumors. You were raised by the Tendo family, and I’ve heard that you got personal connections with Lady Seitenshi.” He paused, face turned upward. “So that’s what I’m here for. I want you to get me connected with the Tendo Group or Lady Seitenshi. I don’t care what it takes; I gotta get a person-to-person audience with either her or her aide, Kikunojo Tendo. We’re talking serious crisis mode for all of Tokyo Area, you know what I mean?”

“Is that connected to the projects you just mentioned?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s no other middleman you can go through besides me?”

“No. If I try that, there’s no telling where they’ll hear about it.”

“Are you trying to blow the whistle about something? ’Cause if you have any evidence you can give me, I can make sure it gets to her.”

“…I’m sorry. My evidence got stolen.”

“Stolen?”

Suibara nodded grimly.

“My place has been broken into a few times lately. A few things were stolen, including the evidence. The only option I got left is to appeal directly to the Tendo Group or Lady Seitenshi as a living witness. I mean, you’re about the only guy left I can trust.”

This was no longer a friendly chat between old friends. Rentaro rubbed his fingers against his chin.

He had no particular vendetta against Suibara, of course. He’d like to help make that request happen, as much as he was able. The problem was how. Not only was he no longer technically related to Kikunojo; they hadn’t spoken a word to each other since their somewhat…strained conversation after the Kagetane Hiruko case. He doubted Kikunojo wanted to see him much, and the feeling was absolutely mutual.

But the Seitenshi? He literally had her digits. That connection, at least, seemed plausible enough.

“Let me float up one condition. I want you to tell me beforehand what you’d say to Lady Seitenshi.”

“Aw, c’mon, you don’t trust me?”

“We’re talking about the head of state, Suibara. I gotta be careful.”

“…Yeah, I guess so, huh?”

Suibara seemed open to concessions. But then he looked around the office, his body language betraying his uneasiness.

“…Hey, this room ain’t bugged or anything, is it?”

“Huh?”

“You know, bugged. Like, do you trust the guys who live above and below you?”

“Man, who knows?”

Rentaro’s eyes followed his conversation partner’s around the room. The floor and ceiling were surprisingly thin in this building. Sound had a way of traveling around. The walls were plain mortar, too, and it wasn’t exactly a wide margin between this building and the adjacent one.

In a rickety old dump like this, soundproofing would never be a priority. If someone had any sort of decent-grade listening device or parabolic microphone, Suibara’s right to client confidentiality would be worth about as much as a sheet of toilet paper.

“Okay,” Suibara said. “Not here, then. Tomorrow night… You know where they’re building the new Magata City Hall, right? Let’s meet there. But lemme make sure we’re straight on one thing: Once I tell you, you’re in, got it?”

The earnest truthfulness Rentaro saw in Suibara’s eyes made him shudder.

After proposing an exorbitant sum of money for Rentaro’s services, Suibara stood up from the sofa and prepared to leave. Rentaro stood up to see him off, and they chatted about assorted silly little things on the way downstairs.

It was completely dark outside, with women plying their trade and groups of drunken businessmen mingling on the congested city streets. The wind that beat against Rentaro’s skin bore the lukewarm heat of an August night.

Right in front of them, Enju, Tina, and Kisara had returned, their arms laden with well-stuffed shopping bags. They were excitedly laughing and poking at one another as they meandered along, apparently enjoying their night out to the fullest as the streetlights lit them from behind.

Suibara squinted, as if looking at a bright light, then slapped Rentaro heartily on the back. “Rentaro, I’m pretty sure they think you’re involved with me by now. Sorry I got you involved in this, but watch out, okay?”

“They?”

Suibara thrust both hands into his pockets and set off without another glance.

Watching him go, Rentaro realized that he still couldn’t figure out how to parse this within himself—this old friend he just reunited with after so many years. He could practically see lines of depression emanate from Suibara’s back. If this secret of his had to do with that, he would be fine with trying to get it out of him so that they could shoulder the burden equally.

Suibara tried to forget about his sister as soon as he could, way back when. Seeing him involved so deeply with the Cursed Children now was nothing less than astounding. Rentaro didn’t know what changed his mind about it all, but the Initiator taking the place of his sister… How did she feel about it?

Either way, there were several terms Suibara bandied around that Rentaro could never let go unexamined. There was time until tomorrow night. He had some avenues he could research.

“Mm? Did our client leave?”

Looking down, Enju was right next to him, grinning from ear to ear as she held up the spoils of her big night out.

“Look! We picked up all kinds of meats and vegetables on the pre-closing sales. Tonight we’re gonna have a yakiniku party with Kisara’s secret stash!”

Turning his eye toward Kisara, Rentaro realized she was sizing him up at the same time. They turned their eyes elsewhere with near-perfect timing.

Straining to keep the awkwardness from showing up on his face, Rentaro flashed Enju a smile. “Sorry, Enju, but I’m not hungry. You three can eat by yourselves.”

“Ehh?”

Enju’s expression froze. Gradually, it began to grow anxious.

“Why…is that?”

“Oh, no reason. It’s no big deal if a guy wants to eat by himself now and then, is it?”

With that, Rentaro turned around and walked off, making sure he didn’t accidentally catch a glimpse of Kisara’s facial expression as he did.

3

The hollow bamboo tube, its head heavy with water accumulated inside, had its tail end struck against a nearby boulder. It was a shishi-odoshi, a traditional Japanese contrivance meant for scaring birds away from gardens, and the sharp clack it made could be heard from the balcony above.

A beautiful sound, Kisara thought. Compared to that, the clamor from the equally traditional room she was sitting in, lined with tatami mats, was hard for her to stomach.

“…And so, while our child was quite the handful back during his more rebellious years, he ultimately decided to follow the same path his father did a generation ago. In fact, at the police academy he’s head of the class—in the schoolroom, and out in the training grounds.”

“Hey! You don’t have to embarrass me like that.”

“…Ha-ha-ha! Ah, how wonderful. Almost too good of a match for my Kisara here.”

The middle-aged man at the head of the table, mouth wide open in a hearty laugh, was face-to-face with Tadashi Hitsuma, police commissioner, the scar across his face giving him a decidedly gangster look. By his side was his wife, sporting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. She raised a hand to her mouth as she tittered in agreement:

“Oh, no, not at all,” she said. “Your young Tendo is as beautiful as a porcelain doll! Why, our Atsuro told me it was love at first sight!”

There wasn’t a girl on earth who really liked being called “beautiful” by a stranger, but considering how much of a farce this was, Kisara doubted even less that she could take the compliment at face value.

Kisara herself was currently ensconced inside Utoro, an impossibly fancy Japanese restaurant. Including her, there were six people seated around the table, participating in this omiai—an arranged-marriage meeting. Only about half of these six were active in the conversation, however. Rentaro, next to Kisara in his typical school uniform, sat there silently, his face inscrutable.

When she first brought up the engagement offer with Rentaro, Kisara honestly thought he’d explode in anger. That was why seeing him give such a blithe okay disappointed her—and enraged her. She was hoping Rentaro would stand up right now and do something to ruin the proceedings for her.

But why? She darted her eyes around the room as she pondered this, eventually settling on a mirror hung next to a wall scroll, the frame demonstrating the elegantly sculpted work of an artisan. She craned her neck to get a view of herself, only to find a Kisara done up in lipstick, blush, an elaborate hairpin, and a kimono, of all things. She was passing acquaintances with the daughter of Shiba Heavy Weapons’ president, a lover of traditional Japanese clothing, and while she was reluctant to go near one at first, she had to admit—it suited her well, sitting here.

She adjusted her head in the mirror, wondering how she’d look at a forty-five-degree semi-profile. But as she did, she sensed someone’s eye on her and turned around.

It was the bespectacled man sitting face-to-face with her, smiling warmly. It made her cheeks redden. She hurriedly returned to her original posture.

There was one other person in the audience left to describe. He was slender, even more so than in his picture; he hardly ever spoke at all; and he was more than a little handsome: Atsuro Hitsuma. He was seated in a formal kneeling position, the family crest clearly visible on his own traditional clothing. He had grown in the past five years, and it gave him a touch of masculinity that wasn’t there before.

“Right,” said his mother. “How about us old fuddy-duddies leave the room and let these two lovebirds talk to each other?” She stood up before anyone could respond.

“Oh, what, I gotta leave, too?”

“Of course you do, you fool,” Senichi Shigaki said, pulling Rentaro up. “Come over here.” The Hitsuma parents followed them, pulling the sliding screen open and leaving the room.

The only thing that remained was silence. Kisara emitted a light sigh as Hitsuma politely lowered his head.

“I apologize,” he said. “My parents are getting carried away.”

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Mr. Hitsuma?”

“Yes. Five years, I suppose?”

Kisara had trouble figuring out how to interact with the man in front of her. She found it honestly bewildering.

“Um… So you got promoted to police superintendent?”

“Ha-ha! Yeah, the last time we met, I had just joined the force, hadn’t I? I hardly knew right from left back then. Now, five years on… Well, really, I mean, look at you. You’re a completely different person from five years ago. I still thought you were cute in a kidlike way back then, but now there’s no doubt about it. You’re beautiful.”

“Oh, stop flattering me, Mr. Hitsuma!” She meant it, too. Kisara looked down, cheeks blushing. “But…why now, though? Out of the blue…?”

“What do you mean?” he replied, smiling graciously at Kisara. It made her feel a bit guilty as she went on.

“I mean that I feel bad for you, Mr. Hitsuma. I disowned the Tendo family by my own free will. That’s why you received the cancellation notice that you did. So…and I’m sure you know this already, but…I don’t think marrying me will help you make any inroads with the Tendo family. I’m fully separate from them now. They treat me pretty much like they’ve disinherited me. I still go by the name Tendo, but I don’t feel that I’m a Tendo at all. Not one bit.”

If Kisara had it her way, she’d have all the Tendo blood flowing within her drained from her body and replaced with someone else’s. She opted against sharing that little tidbit out loud.

“Well, it’s not that I made this request to Mr. Shigaki because I wanted to build a connection with the Tendo family.”

“So why did you, then? Your dad’s police commissioner; you’re already a superintendent yourself… I’m sure you’d have no problem attracting attention.”

“Is being taken with you at first sight a good enough reason?”

Kisara blushed and turned her face away at this unexpected attack.

“Oh, stop joking.”

“I didn’t mean it as a joke.”

“That makes it even worse… You’re embarrassing me.”

She was willing to hear out Hitsuma’s sweet nothings, but a darker voice was making itself known in her heart. There was a time when even Kisara believed in Cinderella. That dream she had, of some Prince Charming falling in love with her and saving her from disaster, disappeared from her life the day her parents were killed by being eaten alive. If there really was a prince or a wizard or whatever out there, she’d want him to resurrect her parents right this minute, not marry her.

Kisara urged herself to press on as she adjusted her posture. Then she decided to change strategies. She was getting sick of this whole arranged-marriage system—trying to make yourself out to be perfect while watching your partner like a hawk for any imperfections. It was time to buck the system.

“The whole reason I’m alive is so I can take revenge on the Tendos.”

“I know.”

“What?” Kisara heard the shishi-odoshi clack against the rock behind her.

“Of course. I’m fully aware of your circumstances, Ms. Tendo.”

“And you went through with this proposal anyway?”

“Yes. In fact, I think I might just be able to help you on that particular matter.”

“…Um, how so?”

Hitsuma briskly stood up from the table, a smile crossing his intellectual demeanor as he pointed outside.

“Would you like to go for a walk while we discuss it?”

Kisara nodded. It was the only thing she could do.

The pair left the room, walking around the perimeter of a gravel-floored garden. A small pond lay in the middle of it, with an arched, bright red footbridge decorated with ornate, knob-topped guardrails crossing it. Kisara sprinkled some dry food from the bridge, marveling at the dazzling colors of the Japanese koi fish that gathered to lap it up.

“So…?” Kisara began, not trying to sound too keen lest he was simply taking her for a ride.

“I…will omit the details for now, Ms. Tendo, but we in the Hitsuma family do not have exactly a cozy relationship with the Tendos either.”

Kisara’s eyebrows twitched. “That’s playing with fire, you know,” she said, eyes still focused on the koi she was feeding. “The Tendo clan is filled with financial giants. They train their kin from infancy to become full-fledged members of the political elite. Trying to resist them is like trying to resist the government itself. They would raze your family to the ground, just like all the other people who faded into darkness after opposing them.”

“I imagine they would, yes, if we took a full-frontal approach. But even the most heavily guarded of fortresses can be conquered, if you just know which untended back door to strike at first. Someone like you, attempting to eradicate Kikunojo Tendo and his allies from the face of the earth, should know that all too well.”

A koi leaped out of the water with a splash.

“…How much do you know?”

“Just what I’ve picked up through the grapevine.”

Kisara turned around and looked at Hitsuma. “Well, I’m glad you’re offering to help me, but this is my battle to wage. I’m not interested in having other people use me.”

“But you may feel free to use me all you like. I will not use you at all.”

This made Kisara’s brows furrow. “You’re starting to creep me out. What do you want from me? Just come out with it.”

Hitsuma put a hand to his chin, as if pondering over something. “All right,” he said. “Let me rephrase that, then. There is something I want from you.” Then he suddenly wrapped his arm around Kisara’s waist, holding her hand with his own. The presence of such a comely man at close range made Kisara’s heart skip a beat.

“You’ve been making me go crazy, and it’s thanks to your beauty. If I ever do anything to make you dislike me, then by all means, take up your sword. But if not…”

Hitsuma brought his face closer to hers. Kisara turned her red cheeks away.

“You’ve been reading too much Shakespeare.”

“I mean it.”

It was a surprise to her, this man’s passion all but forcing her into his embrace. Satomi would never do anything like this for me, she thought.

Searching around in his pocket, Hitsuma took something out and placed it in Kisara’s hand. Startled by the feel of cold metal, she looked down to find a disc-shaped object shining a golden hue in the reflected sunlight.

“What’s this?”

“A pocket watch. Open it up.”

Following his suggestion, Kisara lifted the watch’s golden lid. Her mouth opened a little in surprise. The hour and minute hands were also done up in gold, and the fancy-looking clock face was lined with jewels, dazzling her with a flood of color.

“This is so nice. Is it for me?”

“I’d be glad if you took it. It won’t go to waste that way.”

She was about to say thanks, but swallowed the word after realizing something. “But,” she said, “our old engagement was canceled.”

“That doesn’t matter. I love you.”

“…If I had someone like you whispering about love into my ear, maybe I’d start looking for a pair of glass slippers before long.”

“Would you like to try?”

Kisara watched as Hitsuma’s lips advanced upon her. Then she closed her eyes.

Neither the beautiful white sand that extended out toward the right-hand side of the Japanese garden nor the sublime ephemerals of the rock garden’s dry landscape were enough to brighten Rentaro’s heart by now. He was walking down the wooden platform that lined the garden, in search of a bathroom as the anxiety began to well in his mind.

What is Kisara’s problem, anyway? Getting all dolled up and putting on that nice kimono for his sake. She doesn’t have to act all preoccupied about how she looks. Around me, it’s been the exact same black school outfit, 365 days a year.

The gloominess in Rentaro’s heart had, if anything, only been magnified by the five years that had passed since he last saw Hitsuma. He was, after all, the first real love interest in Kisara Tendo’s life—and the worst part was that she probably didn’t even realize it. He thought his shallow memories of that time would drift away over the years, but now that he saw Kisara dressed in her finest and discussing marriage like this, he wasn’t so sure that would ever happen.

“Listen…Tendos aren’t like regular people. Don’t you dare catch yourself acting like you’re one of them.”

What do I want Kisara to do here? Do I…?

Just as he rounded a corner of the walkway, staring at the garden for lack of anything better to focus on, Rentaro stopped. Kisara and Hitsuma were talking on the arched bridge. He couldn’t hear what they were saying from his vantage point, but if Rentaro’s eyes weren’t deceiving him, they looked like they were enjoying themselves.

“…!”

Then Hitsuma brought her close, his lips approaching her face. The two silhouettes overlapped.

Rentaro’s body tensed up, as if struck by lightning. Sweat ran from every pore in his body. Then he turned around on the spot and swiftly walked out of the restaurant.

As Hitsuma’s face dominated the entirety of her vision, Kisara closed her eyes. But, the moment before their lips met, Kisara brought her palm between them like a partitioning board, pushing him away with the other hand.

“…For now,” she said, “let go of me.” She was freed without complaint.

Kisara adjusted the neck of her kimono in order to focus attention away from her flushed cheeks.

“So is that how it is? You don’t mind if I use anything of yours that I find useful, and in exchange for that, you want me?”

“You can feel free to see it that way, yes.”

Kisara mulled this over silently as she pretended to adjust her wardrobe. No matter what she decided to do, her life was worth about as much as a pebble on the side of the road. All she had to do was make sure she kept it intact until the remaining four Tendos were slain. And being lucky enough to be born with this beauty, being able to use it as a bargaining chip for her aims—who could ask for anything more?

It’s a matter of using, and being used. As simple a relationship as that. I might even find myself liking Hitsuma before long.

A prickly sensation ran across Kisara’s chest.

…Wait a minute. Is this what love and romance is?

4

“So you saw Kisara get all kissy-kissy and that pissed you off so much that you ran away from her?”

Sumire Muroto, head of the Magata University forensics research lab, stared at Rentaro with a look of pure glee on her face.

“It’s, it’s not like that, or anything…”

“The way you look, you’re not exactly convincing me otherwise.”

Rentaro remembered that he was currently head down on the desk. He sheepishly sat back up and looked distractedly at the bare light bulb illuminating the basement room.

He liked visiting the forensics lab at times like these. It was his way of appealing for divine aid—or, in Sumire’s case, demented aid. Someone older and more experienced was a treasure to have right now. Rentaro failed to sleep a wink the previous night. The whole thing with Suibara played a role in that, but to be wholly honest with himself, he was agonizing over Kisara’s arranged marriage. He decided to give Sumire the whole story because he was certain she’d have just the right piece of advice to cut through this crisis. Right now, he was being disappointed.

“Well, forget it. Just give it up. The fact that a prime piece of land like Kisara hasn’t been snapped up yet is a miracle in itself. She just found the right buyer, is all.”

Rentaro grimaced. “Jeez, Doctor… I thought you were rooting for the two of us.”

“What, are you kidding me? I’m just trying to stir the pot a little, ’cause if I didn’t, nothing would change until you both had one foot in the grave. In fact, if things start working out between you two, I’d start sabotaging it for fun.”

“Awful. Just absolutely awful.”

“Though actually, I was really hoping you’d finally let your hormones get the best of you and just push her down. Think about the headlines you’d make once the police caught you!”

“Why would the police get involved?”

“You think you’ll ever bag Kisara any other way?”

Rentaro snorted in disgust as Sumire pulled up a chair facing him, waving a hand in front of his eyes.

“Just knock it off, okay? Knock it off. I know you’re thinking about some hanky-panky with Kisara and maybe marriage in the future, but why do you think marriage is such a good thing anyway? Lemme give you a little lecture on how men and women work. Men, you know…they have to put up with women nagging them to no end until it drives them insane. They give up on their dreams, and they have to resist the urge to stare at every big-titted bimbo they see on the way home from work. And women, too—they have to deal with men’s crazed fetishes; they have to cook and dress in a way that pleases them; they give up their entire bodies to them! It’s just a constant string of sacrifices for them both. Men, at the core, really hate women, and women, at the core, really hate men.”

“So why do people get married, then?”

“‘We all need the eggs,’ as Woody Allen put it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Eesh. Look, Rentaro, could you at least try to make an effort to think a little? People in ancient times thought that brains were used for nothing but creating the snot out of your nose, but you’re not using your brain for too much apart from that, are you? Your whole existence is a tragedy. I’m a nihilist, remember? Just take the nihilism out of my advice if you don’t like it.”

“What’d even be left?”

“Men, at the core, love women, and women, at their core, love men. Don’t tell me you don’t even get that.”

Rentaro froze, as if bewitched. It was impossible to tell where the jokes ended and real talk began with Sumire. She stood up and turned her back to him, no doubt off to whip up another batch of coffee. Rentaro stared at the back of her oversize lab coat and resolved to bring up another topic close to his heart.

“Doctor, have you ever heard of something called the Black Swan Project?”

“No, I haven’t,” Sumire said as she filled a kettle with water and pushed the ON button within her induction cooker. “However,” she added, “if they named it ‘Black Swan,’ it might have something to do with the black swan theory.”

“The black swan theory?”

Sumire measured out a suitable amount of instant coffee from the can. “Swans, you know,” she began, “are supposed to be all white in color, but then they found a population of black swans in Australia. It turned the world of ornithology upside down back in the day. The entire world ran on this assumption that swans were supposed to be white, so nobody was ever able to predict that black swans would ever be a thing, too.

“So the ‘black swan theory’ is where you build long-term predictions while bound by your current state of comprehension, but thereby fail to account for unpredictable events even after they happen. It can cause all sorts of damage if you’re not careful. There’s no such thing as absolutes in this world—life’s full of uncertainties. Making predictions as if these uncertainties are ironclad facts always costs you in the long run.

“You could kind of see this theory as a warning to the human species, and how their minds work. If you’ve had ten years straight of bountiful harvests, you’d never imagine that a flood would ravage your farmland tomorrow, right? Or maybe crises that theoretically shouldn’t occur for millennia keep taking place every few decades, or an unexpectedly huge earthquake causes a meltdown at a nuclear power plant, or—”

“—Or a pack of virus-infected parasites appears and tries to destroy the human race?”

Sumire grinned. “That’s exactly it. Glad to see you’re quick on the pickup, at least.”

Rentaro turned his eyes toward his hands. The “Black Swan Project”—something about the name disturbed him. He was already starting to regret what he’d said before. Perhaps the situation Suibara fell into was a lot more dangerous than he thought. Perhaps he should’ve forced the whole story out of him at the office.

He checked the clock. There was still a fair amount of time until their meet up.

“There’s something else, too, Doctor. The ‘New World Creation Project’—does that ring any bells?”

Sumire swung around, surprised. Judging by the reaction, Rentaro knew he hit the nail on the head. The eerie resemblance between “New World Creation Project” and “New Humanity Creation Project” was something that stuck out in his mind from the moment Suibara uttered the term.

The kettle began to emit a shrill whistle, the lid clattering around on the top.

“Where did you hear that name?”

“A client relayed it to me.”

“How much do you know about it?”

“Pretty much nothing. That’s why I’m asking you, Doctor.”

Suibara had been acting far too jumpy. He had been paranoid about bugging devices and wanted to talk at a separate location. It seemed fair to think that these “New World” and “Black Swan” projects were something dicey enough to put the fear of God in him.

Sumire considered this for a few moments, a thoughtful hand on her chin.

“I think I told you why the New Humanity Creation Project was disbanded.”

“Yeah…um, because it cost too much money and stuff.”

“Right. The natural-born Children we use cost nothing, but even building one of you took vast sums of money.”

Sumire picked up two heat-resistant beakers and filled both to the brim with coffee, staring up and down Rentaro’s body as she did.

“You’re a ten-billion-yen kid, Rentaro.”

Yeah, that’d sure torpedo the project, all right. If it took that much to produce just one soldier, setting up some kind of mass-production system would’ve been all but impossible.

“But if it weren’t for the Children showing up,” Sumire continued, “the New Humanity Creation Project was prepared to move on to the next phase. In other words, the New World Creation Project. You can basically think of the New World project as the final, complete version of the New Humanity one.”

“Complete version…?”

“Right. People like you and Tina and Kagetane Hiruko are walking high-tech marvels—superfibers, replacement organs, metal skin, you name it. The New World Creation Project would’ve taken that one more step. The aim was to replace at least half the human body with machines. The idea was to eventually work up to replacing the entire body, except for the brain.”

“Wait a minute,” Rentaro interjected. “You said that the success rate for New Humanity surgeries was pretty low as it was. If you guys tried to replace even more of the body at once…”

Sumire sat back down, looking a bit remorseful as she squinted at the light bulb. “Well,” she replied, “there was a nonzero chance of it working. And if there’s a nonzero chance, a scientist is always gonna take a crack at it.”

“…But you’re a doctor first, aren’t you? Not a scientist.”

“I am, yes. But the poison you and I call ‘curiosity’ works its magic at astonishing speed with people like us. It kills a lot more than just the cat, you know.”

Sumire slid one of the beakers Rentaro’s way. He picked it up with both hands and stared at the murky black liquid inside, a faint warmth spreading across his palms.

“But what’re you talking about, though? The New World Creation Project never took place, then? I heard that name right from the mouth of my client…”

“Yeah, I’m awfully curious about that myself. I was the woman in charge of the New Humanity project, but I never heard anything about the New World one starting up. But…hmm. Maybe it’s got to do with those murders?”

“Which ones?”

Sumire sat in silent thought for a moment before continuing. “Well,” she said, “a man was killed at the New National Theater a bit ago. Kenji Houbara, age thirty-five. An opera aficionado. He was stabbed during a performance. At the same exact time, someone went into the home of Saya Takamura, age twenty-eight, and murdered her with what’s believed to be a shotgun. And at the same time as that, Giichi Ebihara, age fifty-three, was shot to death by a sniper while on a high-speed train.”

“Three murders on the same day…?”

“Yeah. But that’s not the point. The point is that all three victims had something in common.” Sumire took a sip of coffee, her tone suddenly growing dark and heavy. “Kenji Houbara and Saya Takamura were both surviving soldiers enhanced by the New Humanity Creation Project.”

“What?!”

Sumire crossed her legs and tilted her glass again as she glanced at her dumbfounded guest.

“They were both my patients. Let me tell you, I was shocked. I knew them both really well. I was hoping you wouldn’t have to know about that—two ex–New Humanity soldiers, hunted down like that… But this was premeditated murder. Both of them saw action in the Gastrea War, unlike you, and they both retired to civilian life after the war because they were sick of fighting.”

Rentaro had heard from Sumire earlier that a lot of enhanced soldiers, finding themselves with no place to go, wound up becoming civsec officers like him. Apparently there were exceptions, though. Sumire put her hand back on her chin and stared off into the distance.

“If they wanted peaceful lives for themselves, I welcomed that with open arms. But it looks like there was a snake tempting them. This guy.”

Sumire picked up a sheaf of papers from her cluttered desk and tossed it over. An autopsy report, apparently. The first page had Giichi Ebihara’s name and profile printed on it.

“Who’s he?”

“Someone high up in Public Security.”

“Public Security” referred to the Public Security Force, the department that protected the national government from things like radical extremism and international terrorism. Most of their investigative techniques were classified, but word on the street indicated it was akin to a secret police or spy organization.

“Why Public Security?”

“It looks like this Ebihara guy made secret contacts with these two war retirees. He had them do some kind of secret-agent stuff, apparently. I say ‘apparently’ because now that he’s dead, I can’t establish what kind of relationship they had. He’s the only one who would’ve known that. I only learned about this because Ebihara’s secretary saw him conduct a secret meeting with Houbara in their building. He said that he heard the term ‘New World Creation Project’ in their conversation, not that he knew what that meant at the time.”

“And now all three of them are dead. Which means…?”

“They all knew something they shouldn’t have. What, I couldn’t say.”

Silence descended upon the basement. The humid air lapped against Rentaro’s neck as Sumire extended a pale, veiny hand toward another file on her desk.

“By the way, Satomi, have the police visited Tina yet?”

“No…why?”

“Well, I got all curious about these murders, so I had Miori give me some information. There were no witnesses to Kenji Houbara’s stabbing at the theater and they couldn’t find any fingerprints on the knife, but apparently there was a faintly sweet scent left on the weapon. Saya Takamura was murdered with anti-personnel rounds fired by a twelve-gauge shotgun. No witnesses there, either. As for the train murder, the bullet that killed Ebihara was a powerful type of sniper bullet known as Lapua Magnum. I don’t know all that much about guns, but the train would’ve been running at high speed at the time—200 kilometers an hour or so. Despite that, the sniper made a clean kill through the train window and right through his head. Can you believe that?”

Now Rentaro knew why Tina’s name came up.

“Wait a minute, Doctor! Tina’s not a murderer!”

“Well, I’d like to believe that, too. But if you whittle down the suspects to the kind of people with superhuman skills like that, Tina’s bound to show up on the list sooner or later.”

No way. There’s no way Tina could do anything like that.

“Lady Seitenshi pulled a lot of strings to keep Tina’s punishment down to just probation, but remember, she tried and failed to assassinate our leader. If she racks up any more charges, it’s gonna be the firing squad for her.”

“…But—all right—even if we assume there’s some kind of superhuman hit man group out there, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re from the New World Creation Project. If they were, though…like, could I even beat them, being an older type?”

Among Kagetane, Tina, and Aldebaran, Rentaro had a lot of high-profile kills under his belt by now. But he never thought his powers ever gave him an inherent advantage. If anything, he was amazed he always managed to eke out a victory at the very end each time.

Sumire sighed dejectedly, apparently knowing what Rentaro was getting at. “I don’t know if you have the wrong idea or something, but there’s still a lot of potential for improvement in your artificial limbs.”

Rentaro paused for a moment, having trouble parsing this statement. “R-really?” he said, all but pressing Sumire for an answer. She confidently lifted her hands in the air.

“Really really. You’re in the top class of the soldiers I created, and when I say that, I’m talking about your potential, too. You’re doing a great job using your limbs and your eye, but I can’t say you’re performing up to the specs I envisioned at first. That eye, for example.”

Rentaro instinctively brought a finger to his artificial left eye.

“There’s a limiter circuit in your eye that ensures its processing speed doesn’t go above a certain level.”

“Wh-why’s that?”

“Because you’d see too much. It probably feels like time’s slowing down for you as your eye calculates the enemy’s range and future position, but it can still go a lot further than that. We transplanted a version of your eye without a limiter into several patients, but none of them ever came back.”

“Came back…?”

“The moment their eye was unlocked, their brain scans started going haywire, then flatlined to zero. I have no idea what they saw, and I couldn’t really use it if I didn’t know what was going on, so we were forced to stick a limiter on it. It’s a pity. I mean, every day of our lives, we use things that we can’t fully observe—operate a car engine, write data to hard drives, that sort of thing. But when bio-ethics get involved, the bosses get all picky about every little thing.”

“Well, yeah. If you ignore stuff like that, that’s criminal neglect, isn’t it?”

“Neglect, huh…? I see. So I’m a criminal to you, then?”

“You’re pretty much as gray area as you can be without going full black.”

Sumire offered an offended snort. “It’s all in the way you put it, isn’t it? Though I’ll admit, the limiter was probably the right answer. Lowering the processing speed does a great job reducing the burden on the user’s brain. But there’s one term I want you to remember: terminal horizon.”

“Terminal horizon?”

“Right. Your eye’s processing speeds up in tandem with your emotions, such as anger or sadness. When you have it activated, I’m sure it feels like time slows down for you, but it’s not like time itself is slowing. Your brain is just operating at faster speed as it works with the powerful computer in your eye, so time feels slower by comparison. But eventually you hit a wall, and that wall’s one two-thousandths of a second—in other words, a second of real time slows down to what feels like two thousand to you. That’s the terminal horizon. All the patients who crossed that never came back. Their brains were completely fried.”

Rentaro was shocked. Even in the fight against Kagetane Hiruko—when he was sure his eye ran quicker than it ever did before—he’d peg the slowdown to around fifty virtual seconds for every real one. Maybe it maxed out at a hundred on limited occasions, but even that was iffy.

Two thousand, though? That far ahead?

But Rentaro also understood that, if anything, this was good news for him. If he didn’t want to see himself lagging behind the rest of the Tendo Civil Security Agency’s employee roll, trying to come as close to this terminal horizon as possible would never be a bad thing for him. Even if he still couldn’t handle a sniper rifle as deftly as he wanted, it would be a killer advantage.

“But let’s get back on topic,” Sumire said as she recrossed her legs. “I know you have to maintain confidentiality with your client, and I don’t need to know his name, either. But you better make sure this guy’s safety is a priority for you, as much as you can. If your client has the same info the other three victims had, he could be in serious trouble.”

That settled it. Rentaro stood up, figuring he’d better go to Suibara’s meet-up site immediately.

“One more thing.” Sumire shot a sharp look at Rentaro. “We still haven’t come to terms with something else. What are you gonna do with Kisara?”

Rentaro froze to the ground.

“I’m not gonna do anything.”

“Nothing? So you’ll just sit there and gnash your teeth while she goes off with another guy?”

Rentaro left his stool, looking down at Sumire. “Doctor…I talked to you before about the thing between Kazumitsu and Kisara, didn’t I?”

“Yeah…”

During the Third Kanto Battle, Kisara Tendo killed Kazumitsu Tendo, her adoptive brother. In the cruelest of manners, no less.

“I…I mean, I like Kisara. I’d be willing to do just about anything for her. But after that experience, I think I realized something. She’s let her hatred for the Tendo family dominate her.”

For a period, after her parents were eaten by a Gastrea before her eyes, Kisara lost both her speech and any reason to keep living. One day, though, she just got out of bed, begged Sukekiyo Tendo to teach her, and began learning swordsmanship at an astonishing pace.

The one thing driving her heart and having her try to keep living was the desire to plunge the people who ruined her life into the deepest pit in hell.

“Things were pretty fun for the first year or so the Tendo Civil Security Agency was running, so I thought she was forgetting about it. But I was wrong.”

“Don’t you understand? Justice isn’t good enough. Justice can’t oppose evil. But absolute evil—evil that goes beyond evil—can. I have that power.”

Rentaro gritted his teeth, head hung low.

“Nothing I said reached her…”

As he spoke, his thoughts gradually coalesced together. Now he was starting to see what kind of attitude he needed to approach Hitsuma and Kisara’s arranged marriage with.

“Ever since the Tendos took me in ten years ago, I’ve owed so much to Kisara. I could never pay her back in a million years. I’d do anything to make her happy. I’ve made up my mind, Doctor. I want Kisara to realize something. That life’s worth living for more than just revenge. And if I can make that happen…”

Then Rentaro realized something. The decision he had just made in his heart meant a final good-bye to all the emotions he had accumulated for Kisara over the past ten years.

Sumire looked dubious. “You’re gonna stand down because you’re putting Kisara’s happiness first? Do you know what that means, Rentaro? If you really just want Kisara to be happy, you’re gonna have to keep killing off your own feelings. There’s no way to half-ass that. Do you swear you’ll do that?”

Rentaro closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids, he could see the beautiful Kisara, a graceful hand near her lips.

“I swear, Doctor.”

“Even if this proposal goes well and Kisara gets married, has children, gets happy—even then, she still might not forget about her revenge. You can always rebuild a broken body, but a broken heart’s beyond all help. You can’t do a thing with it. And if it’s too late for Kisara, that’s gonna be up to you to manage. Can you do that?”

Rentaro stood up and turned his back to Sumire.

“I’m leaving, Doctor. I’m meeting with my client in a bit.”

He half-walked, half-fled from Sumire, but his feet were heavy as they pounded on the stairs.

I can do anything for Kisara’s sake. Anything…

Realizing that his breathing was growing rapid and out of rhythm, Rentaro instinctively put his hands to his hips. He wanted to grab his pistol’s grip with both hands, clasping his fingers around it in a macabre prayer as he tried to calm himself.

But his hands caught air instead. The familiar weight hanging from his side was gone. In a panic, he felt around with both hands. Nothing. Rentaro’s XD gun was gone.

He couldn’t believe it was possible, but there was no sign of the gun in any of his pockets. Did I drop it somewhere? It’s been hectic all day since the morning, so I wasn’t really paying attention, but…

Suddenly, his conversation with Suibara shot back to his mind.

“…I’m sorry. My evidence got stolen.”

“Stolen?”

“My place has been broken into a few times lately. A few things were stolen, including the evidence. The only option I got left is to appeal directly to the Tendo Group or Lady Seitenshi as a living witness. I mean, you’re about the only guy left I can trust.”

And he’d said this, too, hadn’t he?:

“Rentaro, I’m pretty sure they think you’re involved with me by now. Sorry I got you involved in this, but watch out, okay?”

He shook his head. This is ridiculous. There was no way Suibara’s enemies could just reach out to him like that in less than twenty-four hours. And even if these supposed “enemies” were behind this, why would they bother stealing Rentaro’s gun?

It was almost time to meet up. Rentaro shook off the premonitions making themselves known in his mind and hurriedly walked to the designated building.

5

The new Magata City Hall building was still under construction, its bare concrete walls lit dimly by the pale moonlight, which itself fell through a mass of scaffolding and temporary platforms to create an evocative piece of shadow art.

In this landscape stood Suibara, scuffing at the floor with his hands in his pockets. He was a good hour early for the planned meeting because he was fresh from a little quarrel with his Initiator back home.

He began to wonder if meeting in a more crowded public place would’ve been a better idea, but quickly shook it off. There was no way they could have a relaxed conversation someplace where there was no telling who might be listening in.

Just a little bit longer, Suibara forced himself to think. If I get this out to the public through Rentaro, it’ll all be over. Then I can finally sleep in peace again. Everything’s going exactly as I want it. Just a little bit—

Suibara turned around, hearing heavy footsteps behind him that echoed across the darkness. His shoes were the first things to appear, the moonlight streaming in diagonally through a crevice, illuminating the man from the bottom up.

Checking his cell phone, Suibara realized he still had forty minutes to go. He grinned to himself. Man, he’s here already? What’s with all the hurry? The idea of Rentaro being as impatient as he was gladdened him as he walked up.

“Yo, Renta—”

The roar and light of the muzzle flash was perfectly synchronized with the impact he felt on his side. The force made his cell phone fly out of his hand and into parts unknown.

“Uh?”

He didn’t know what had happened at first. An empty shell casing clinked on the floor, and right after that, his side felt burning hot, as if someone took a branding iron to it.

Hesitantly looking downward, he saw the blood that seeped through his shirt in the abdominal area.

“Ah…nnh…!”

The moment he realized he was shot, Suibara experienced an intense pain across his entire body.

No. This isn’t Rentaro.

The figure fired two more shots as it walked forward, striking Suibara in the thigh and stomach. He crumpled to the floor.

He couldn’t breathe. And as a second wave of pain crested over him, he felt something rise up from his stomach and vomited a large volume of blood.

Now chills ran across his body. Not wanting to die without knowing what happened, he bent his body like an inchworm, stretching it out, trying to get even another millimeter away from his assailant.

But the awkward attempt at escape ended in an instant. Something thumped against the back of his head. He could tell by instinct that it was the barrel of a gun.

An array of happy memories began to flicker across Suibara’s brain. Tears fell in a waterfall. His breathing pitched; he reached out into the air to grab at the greatest memory of all—the memory of a certain girl.

“Hotaru…!”

There was a gunshot, and the building was bathed in light for an instant. The sound of the empty cartridge clinking against the floor, and the seemingly incessant echo of the explosion, stayed in the attacker’s ears for a long time to come.

A warm wind blew through, shaking the nearby rows of trees.

The moment he arrived at the Magata City Hall construction site, Rentaro stopped, sensing something was wrong as he looked up at the building. There was a crisp, clear August moon above the unadorned walls. He still had around twenty minutes until the meet-up time, and as he ascended the stairs, he wondered if he had shown up too early.

He shook his head and continued climbing to the fourth floor, remembering Sumire’s parting words. They’d agreed to meet here, but it was still dark, vast, and empty. He turned on his smartphone’s flashlight and called out to the void.

“Hey, Sui—”

He didn’t make it to the bara part before the smell of blood wafted into his nostrils. He swallowed nervously, motionless for a moment until his brain could catch up, then brought his smartphone above his head to light up the darkness.

It took only a few moments for him to notice the man in a pool of blood, collapsed behind a column.

“Suibara!”

Rentaro flew like an arrow to the site, desperation already consuming him. Suibara was lying facedown, having been shot four times: in the side, the thigh, his right breast, and the back of the head, which must have been the killing blow. He was dead—this man who, just yesterday, was breathing, smiling, talking assorted random nonsense with him.

Then Rentaro spotted something that put him in even more disquieting spirits.

“What the hell…?”

On Suibara’s exposed back was a gun, presumably the murder weapon. Hesitantly, Rentaro reached out to it. A voice in his heart was urging him to stop: This is a crime scene now. You’re about to tamper with a crime scene.

The warm night air brushed past his skin, and a cold bead of sweat ran down his cheek. Driving the appeals to reason out of his mind, he picked up the gun.

The slide was four inches, the left side engraved with a notice that it was a .40-caliber weapon. It all looked too familiar to him.

In fact, it was clearly a Springfield XD pistol. The slide was the same length as the one he used. It was the same-caliber model. And there was no doubt at all this gun was just used to commit a murder. A closer look at the nicks and scratches on the frame and slide, the results of years of heavy use, confirmed it for good—this was the gun that saw Rentaro through his battles against Kagetane Hiruko, Tina Sprout, and Aldebaran.

The gun he thought he lost was right here all along. At the scene of Suibara’s murder. Why?

Then, right at that moment, two beams of light flooded the room. Rentaro covered his face against the brightness.

“Police! Don’t move!”

Squinting, Rentaro could open his eyes just enough to spot the police uniforms. A cold shiver ran up his spine.

“No! Wait a minute!”

“Drop the gun now!”

With a loud boom, a warning shot gouged its way through the floor beneath him. It made Rentaro realize he had a steely death grip on the gun that just killed Suibara. He let go of it at once.

One of the light beams approached, and before Rentaro knew it, he was tackled, his arm screaming in pain as it was twisted behind his back. The concrete floor advanced upon him, and he groaned as the impact hit him face-first.

There was the sound of metal against metal, and then he felt something uncomfortable around his wrists. Gritting his teeth, he turned himself around, only to find his hands connected together by a pair of dully shining handcuffs.

“Secured!”

Rentaro shut his eyes tight.

This was a trap!

6

Rentaro slammed his fist on the steel desk as hard as he could.

“God damn it, I’m telling you I didn’t do it!”

“Quit lying to us! Who else would there be?”

“Someone framed me!”

“The victim was killed with your gun. The rifle in our database was a perfect match with yours. We got all the evidence we need. Trying to deny it all’s just gonna give you a longer sentence.”

This was getting nowhere. Rentaro crossed his legs and plopped himself back down on his stool. The cramped interrogation room he was brought into dripped with tension. The dull, dark-gray walls were complemented by a set of tiny stools. It was the size of a shoebox, but it was certainly tidy—there was no other furniture or decoration.

After two hours of pointless prodding and coercing, Rentaro was starting to get sick of it all. Enju must have noticed he wasn’t coming home by now. Hopefully, she wasn’t worrying herself sick.

Why did this have to happen to me? I need to get home ASAP. The frustration of being accused of a crime he didn’t commit brought him to the point where he wanted to beat some sense into the officers.

The door opened, and the detective interrogating him stretched up to see who it was. A thick, wrinkled face peered through the doorway. To Rentaro, it was like a helping hand pulling him up from hell.

“Inspector Tadashima!”

It was Shigetoku Tadashima, an inspector in the violent-crimes department. They had conferred with each other during any number of Gastrea attacks. Finally, a kindred soul! Rentaro was sure he’d testify that he’d never commit a crime like this.

But, at the next moment, he realized exactly how over-optimistic he was.

“So, you’re Rentaro Satomi?”

“What?”

His eyes looked like they were chiseled into his square-jawed face. A glare from him was enough to make even nonoffenders involuntarily shiver. That’s when Rentaro realized it. Tadashima wasn’t here to talk with Rentaro Satomi, his acquaintance in the civsec industry. He was here to question Rentaro Satomi, murder suspect. Expecting a warm welcome from him now would be as useless as crying and pleading for clemency on the guillotine stand.

Tadashima traded places with the younger detective in the room, sitting face-to-face with Rentaro. The detective questioning him before now stood behind him, pacing back and forth along the wall—a classic intimidation tactic.

Then Tadashima leaned over the steel desk. It creaked under him.

“How about we start by you telling me what you were doing the night of the murder? From the start.”

“I’ve already told you guys a thousand times.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

Rentaro stopped himself from lashing out at his arrogance. This was another conventional police tactic—have the suspect give his story time and time again, searching for any contradictions that appear along the way. He kept himself cool as a cucumber as he gave Tadashima the basic outline.

“So I understand the pistol belongs to you?”

“I told you, someone stole it from me. I reached for it, and it was gone.”

“If it was gone when you reached for it, why are you so sure it was stolen? You didn’t think that you dropped it somewhere?”

He broke into a greasy sweat. This wasn’t good.

“That… I said it was stolen because it wound up getting used to commit a crime. I didn’t think it was stolen at the time.”

“Misplacing a gun is a pretty serious issue. Why didn’t you immediately inform the police about it?”

“Well, like I said, I didn’t think it was stolen. I figured it’d turn up if I searched the office or my home.”

“When did you notice it was missing?”

“Um…a little bit before I was gonna meet Suibara.”

“Hmm. Just before meeting the victim, huh? Kind of a convenient time to remember that.”

The doubt and suspicion was clear in Tadashima’s eyes. Ah, shit. If Rentaro had a time machine, he would’ve used it right now to warn his past self to report it to the police first.

“Listen, Inspector Tadashima, when Suibara called upon the Tendo Civil Security Agency, he was already fearing for his life. Why would I be the one killing him?”

“Who would know about that?”

“What do you mean?”

Tadashima opened his notebook, licked his thumb, and flipped through a few pages.

“Before I came here, I asked a few basic questions to the people in the Tendo Agency.”

Rentaro thought his heart was going to stop. So Kisara, Tina, and Enju all knew he’d been arrested.

“Your boss testified that the victim, Kihachi Suibara, visited you to discuss a job. Thing is, though, she didn’t hear what the job was about.”

“He only wanted to discuss it with me. It was a trust issue.”

“All right, so who would know about that?”

“We were the only two people in the office. Suibara told me to get everyone else out of there—”

“—So nobody besides you knows what the job was about?”

“…What are you getting at?”

Tadashima’s eyes settled on his notebook. He began flipping through pages again.

“Well, I have some testimony here from your Initiator. She said you were clearly acting strange when she got back from her shopping. She offered to eat dinner together with you, but you declined and disappeared somewhere, apparently.”

“That…!” Rentaro raised his voice at first, but fell silent for a moment, unable to figure out what to say.

“What is it? Go ahead.”

“That’s a different thing…”

“You’re using your right to remain silent about it?”

“No! My boss got an offer for an arranged marriage, so…you know, it was hurting me, sharing the same space as her.”

Tadashima’s face indicated this wasn’t the reply he expected.

“So you’re in love with your boss?”

Rentaro blushed and stared at the floor. He could hear snickering from behind.

“Stop trying to dodge the question.”

“What do you mean by that?” Rentaro turned around and glared at the detective behind him. “Keep your eyes on me,” a low voice rumbled from in front. He followed the order, as Tadashima placed his elbows on the desk and clasped his fingers together.

“All right, so this is what we’re saying here. Basically, we don’t think Kihachi Suibara had any job for you at all.”

“What?”

“The victim was demanding money from you. Blackmail. I don’t know what he had on you, but you knew each other since childhood, so I’m sure he could dig up something. You saved Tokyo Area’s hide in the Third Kanto Battle and the Kagetane Hiruko terror attacks, so Suibara figured he’d try extorting whatever money he could from you. He threatened you, and that freaked you out so much that you didn’t feel like eating dinner together with your coworkers. Am I right?

“Then, once you decided to kill him, you lured Suibara to the site of your choice, you pulled the trigger, the police got a report of gunshots, and there you were. Kind of a silly thing to commit murder for, isn’t it?”

“That’s bullshit, man!”

Where did all that come from? There wasn’t a shred of truth to it… But there was, too. He was the only person to hear the nature of Suibara’s request. And he really did leave afterward, because he couldn’t bear to face Kisara. He never dreamed the events of that evening would lead to this kind of misunderstanding. The sweat continued to run down his cheeks.

“…Look, Inspector. I fought in the Third Kanto Battle. I fended off Kagetane Hiruko. Do you really think I’d kill someone over something like that?”

Rentaro was ready to turn to prayer at this point. If he lost Tadashima, the only person he could turn to now, his fate was all but sealed.

But the inspector just gave him an indifferent head shake. “I don’t know that. That’s why I’m here questioning you right now. Evil people do evil things. They get arrested for it. I’ve seen dozens of so-called ‘nice guys’ in here after something possessed them to go bad.”

Rentaro weakly shook his head.

“I didn’t do it.”

“So you’re denying the charge?”

“Of course I am! I’m not gonna own up to something I didn’t do. Get me a lawyer. You gotta have a lawyer on duty, right?”

Tadashima gave Rentaro a tiny sigh, staring straight through his suspect with cold eyes.

“Rentaro Satomi, I’m officially placing you in police custody. I’m gonna request an extension from the judge tomorrow, too, so I hope you’re ready to spend a little while in jail.”

7

“Well, I guess luck’s not been on your side lately, huh, Rentaro?”

Sumire Muroto sat on one side of the reinforced-glass barrier, picking at her hair distractedly as she griped at the prisoner on the other side.

“I swear, every time I get involved with you, I wind up being forced out of the basement over and over again. I hate it. I had to expose myself to the sun at full blast on the way here. I thought I was gonna turn into a pile of ashes, ha-ha-ha.”

Even by Sumire standards, the laugh sounded terribly contrived.

“They wearing you out in there?”

Rentaro gave her a shrug. “I’m doing pretty good, actually. Three hots and a cot, and all that. Plus, I can nap all I want.”

Sumire looked surprised for a moment, then curled her lips upward. “That’s the spirit, my boy,” she said. “If you could keep your spirits up long enough to escape, that’d save me a lot of trouble.”

A cough emanated from behind Rentaro as the prison guard chose that moment to make his presence known. Sumire replied with a calm shrug.

The two of them were in the visitation room. A week had passed since Rentaro was placed under custody.

“Y’know, I figured if you ever got yourself arrested, it’d be once you finally succumbed to your raging hormones and started licking little girls’ rear ends in the park. But murder, though, huh? For better or for worse, you’ve really surpassed my expectations.”

“I didn’t kill anybody.”

“They must’ve let you talk to an attorney by now. How’s that going?”

“It’s going nowhere. I’m a shoo-in to get prosecuted, and he said I don’t stand much chance of winning.”

“Must’ve been a shock, huh?”

“Not really,” Rentaro lied. Somewhere in his heart, he still believed in himself. He didn’t kill anyone, so someone would understand soon enough. Justice would be served. But it turned out that he didn’t need much time for that hope to transform itself into hopelessness. There were the intense interrogation sessions, the extension of his custody period, the cuffs and belly chain they made him move around in like a hardened criminal, the being forced by detectives and assistant prosecutors to recite what he did on that evening dozens of times. His miserable pleas of “I didn’t do it” were cut off by apathetic inquisitors telling him to “just answer the questions you’re asked,” shouting down the voice of innocence.

The idea that some assassin group rubbed Suibara out was greeted with open derision. On more than one occasion, the desperation made him want to confess to everything and put the matter to rest finally.

“I bet we could improve your chances if I represented you in court, but I guess I’d need to go through all this stupid paperwork and licensing and so on first.”

“Uh, you’re a doctor.”

“Nothing in the law books saying a doctor can’t be a lawyer, is there?”

“Well, no, but…”

“Besides, I’ve read all the statutes already. All of them. Pretty heady reading. It took me thirty whole minutes to memorize them all.”

“What did you think of it?”

“It’s a remarkable guide to all the greedy desires of mankind. There’s a lot of them. And by the way,” Sumire said as she looked at Rentaro’s chest, “I heard that Enju’s been paying you regular visits.”

She was staring at a poorly made patchwork rabbit sewn into the loose hoodie he was wearing. He touched it, noting the quilted fabric. A gift from Enju.

The school uniform he had on during his arrest was confiscated from him—he could’ve hung himself with the belt, or swallowed the buttons on it to die of suffocation or blockage or something. He really should’ve had his cybernetic limbs taken from him, too, but the artificial skin covering them meant he didn’t have to worry about that unless he blabbed about it.

Enju had been his only other visitor. Neither Tina nor Kisara showed their face once.

“How’s Tina doing, Doctor?”

Sumire shook her head. “She hasn’t gotten back from the police yet.”

Tina was detained not long after Rentaro’s arrest. Just as Sumire feared, Tina was the only person they could find capable of shooting a target traveling on a 200-kilometer-per-hour train. According to Enju, she wasn’t charged with anything, but the police hauled her in as a material witness and she hadn’t been sighted at the office since. Her inability to provide an alibi for the day of the murder was another black mark on her credibility.

“If this keeps up, they’ll probably make you out to be the mastermind behind Giichi Ebihara’s murder, with Tina serving as your hit man.”

“That’s insane!”

As Rentaro spat out the words, Sumire, distracted, leaned over and calmly placed her elbows on the table in front of her, putting her chin on her crossed arms.

“It is. It’s really insane. But whenever something absurd and nonsensical happens, they always try to rationalize it as much as possible. You were at the scene of the crime, and you were standing there with the murder weapon in your hand. Meanwhile, a sniper killed their target under next-to-impossible conditions, and they can only find one person realistically capable of doing that. Only the scales of justice know what the verdict will be, and all that, but it’s pretty easy for me to imagine the jurors’ faces listening to that story.”

“……”

“But enough good news, huh? Lemme give you the bad news. Once you’re found guilty in a court of law, the regulations say that your civsec license’s gonna be revoked. I guess they don’t want convicted felons carrying those licenses around. Who knew, huh? But the worst part of that is, once you’re stripped of your right to perform civsec duties, Enju’s gonna be turned over to the IISO—the International Initiator Supervision Organization.”

“They’re…?”

“You’re allowed to live with a ten-year-old girl you’re not related to because your civsec license gives you that right. If you lose that, Enju’s gonna be put in a pretty rough situation.”

“She can just retire from the Initiator business, then.”

She should have the right, Rentaro reasoned. Initiators in Tokyo Area were fielded from a pool of volunteers and scouts. But Sumire shook her head. “I don’t think that’s gonna work. If Enju quits that gig, her supply of anti-corrosion drugs from the IISO will dry right up. In her current state, that’s gonna be fatal.”

“Shiiiiit.” Rentaro slammed his fist against the table. “We’re all screwed, aren’t we?”

The prison guard rolled his eyes at them as Sumire stood up.

“Well, just think about it, all right, Rentaro? It’s do-or-die time.”

Then she left the room.

What should I do? Rentaro internally asked himself. But no clear answer came to mind. As long as he was locked in here, it wouldn’t be easy for him to do much of anything. His last hope was that they’d decline to prosecute due to lack of evidence.

Calming his frayed nerves, Rentaro put his hands against each other, as if in prayer. I won’t get prosecuted. I mean, I didn’t kill anyone. Even after the guard motioned him to stand up, he stayed right in place, silent.

Two days later, Rentaro Satomi was officially indicted by the assistant prosecutor and went from being a suspect to the accused.

8

Days of dejection followed the filing of the prosecution papers.

When he was first told about it, Rentaro grew so angry at all its unfairness that the guard escorting him had to hold him down. What followed after that was a profound emptiness.

He hadn’t been able to see Tina since his arrest and detainment, but based on what he heard, the situation wasn’t too favorable for her either. Normally, the ten-year-old Tina Sprout would be offered at least some protections in the juvenile courts, but the prosecutor was apparently bound and determined to throw her to the gallows, using the excuse that she was not strictly a human being in order to try her as an adult and get her on the stand in court.

The despair in Rentaro’s mind weighed on him intensely. Wasn’t the law supposed to be the final line of defense the weak could turn to? Had human civilization decayed to the point where witch hunts like these were allowed to happen? Or was it that the hearts of the people themselves had decayed?

Enju, at least, came to visit him almost every day. She’d lean close to him, almost pressing her face against the partition, and give him all sorts of trite pleasantries—“It’s gonna be all right,” “You haven’t done anything bad at all, Rentaro,” “Once you get out, I’ll let you cop a feel free of charge,” that sort of thing.

Rentaro, for his part, gave what he thought were suitable replies—“Thanks,” “Of course not,” “I’ll pass on that.” Still, he was deeply in gratitude for her. Without her encouragement, the punishing despair he was facing would cause irreversible damage to his psyche. If it weren’t for the shatterproof glass in the way, he’d embrace her in a shower of kisses. Then, realizing he was getting this worked up over a ten-year-old girl, he felt an odd sense of embarrassment.

Today, once again, Rentaro was seated on his visitation-room chair. The person sitting across from him, however, was neither Sumire nor Enju.

For a while, Rentaro stayed silent, not knowing how he should break the ice. To the girl in the black school uniform, it must have been the same way. The clock on the wall robotically ticked off three minutes of their valuable visitation time before the girl opened her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had wanted to show up earlier than this…”

“It’s all right, Kisara. I don’t mind.”

Enju had given him enough advance warning that he had managed to keep himself calm at the sight of her.

He had no way of knowing this at the jail, but Rentaro’s arrest and Tina’s volunteering herself to police questioning had drawn the attention of the mainstream media—a frenzy that fell squarely on Kisara’s shoulders to handle. He respected how wild and audacious she could be, but he also knew that this was still just a sixteen-year-old girl.

Worse, Tina’s and Rentaro’s absence meant that the Tendo Civil Security Agency now boasted a roster of exactly zero pairs. Enju mentioned that they’d had to turn down the paltry number of jobs they’d been offered in the meantime due to that—and, to help prop her up mentally, Kisara had met up with Hitsuma several times, her potential marriage partner now serving as her closest confidant.

“So what’re you gonna do about the marriage, Kisara?” Rentaro gently asked.

Kisara put a bright face forward. “Well, Hitsuma’s a really good person. He’s with the police, so we’ve been able to talk about your case a lot, Satomi…” Then she stopped for a moment, head hung low. “But, Satomi, you want to ask me a lot more than that, don’t you?”

“Like?”

“Like, why I haven’t come to see you until now?”

“Not really,” Rentaro bluntly replied. “You were busy, weren’t you?” But the accusation startled him internally. He did want to know. It was driving him nuts. No matter how busy she was, she didn’t have a single moment to stop by? Did Hitsuma have something to do with that? …It sounded so pathetic to him, asking about trivial nonsense like that. What remained of Rentaro’s pride kept him from doing it.

“You know, Satomi, I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff. I thought that I probably shouldn’t see you until I was ready to give a concrete answer…but I think I have that now.”

Kisara raised her head up, adjusting her posture as she looked at Rentaro.

“Satomi, I’m willing to do anything for you. I’ll hire the best attorneys I can find. You don’t have to worry about the money. I’m going to make sure Tina wins her case, too, and then all four of us can go back to running the Tendo Civil Security Agency. I know it took a little too long, but that’s my answer.”

Rentaro looked at Kisara, speechless, emotions welling up in his chest.

Where would Kisara, who once tried to make her employees live off nothing but sweet potatoes, get that kind of money? She must have been talking about taking all her assets—her stocks, her savings, the deposit paid toward her tuition at Miwa Girls Academy—but, no, that still wouldn’t be enough. And if he wound up losing his case, that would be the final straw for their agency. She’d be so in the red, she would never be allowed to run a business again. And yet, that was the decision she made.

Rentaro felt ashamed of himself. He was obsessing so much over Hitsuma and Kisara’s relationship that he completely lost sight of what was important. The ugly jealousy that ruled over him melted away into nothing. Love replaced it. He wanted to smash through the partition and bring Kisara close to his heart right this minute.

But a voice in the back of his head stopped him.

“Do you know what that means, Rentaro? If you really just want Kisara to be happy, you’re gonna have to keep killing off your own feelings. There’s no way to half-ass that. Do you swear you’ll do that?”

The forensics department head asked him that in Magata University Hospital’s basement. How did he reply, again?

It was clear enough from what Kisara had told him that he was important to her.

Rentaro closed his eyes and slowly opened them again.

I won’t hope for anything more.

“Kisara, I’m glad you feel that way, but I don’t need that.”

“Wh-why not?”

Rentaro stared at his knees, gauging the shocked Kisara from the corner of his eye. “How about you calm down a bit?” he asked dryly. “I’ve sat here and let you talk, and what I see is that you’ve been running around with all your might, trying to be a hero. And that’s your right and all, but I don’t want your help.”

“What’s with that…?”

Kisara, eyes wide open, was at a loss for words.

“What’s with it is that I don’t need it. Besides, you’re about to go through with your marriage anyway, aren’t you?” He loosened his voice, taking on an admonishing tone. “Well, now’s a good time to start transitioning, isn’t it? Now that I’m like this, I can’t watch over you anymore, Kisara. You can have Hitsuma protect you from now on.”

Happiness would never materialize for Kisara Tendo as long as Rentaro Satomi was by her side. That was his steadfast conclusion. To Kisara, Rentaro’s existence was just a painful reminder of her parents, the ones she lost in the most traumatic fashion imaginable. All he was doing was holding her back, in bondage, and if that’s how it was: Their only choice was to separate. That was the only and final way for Kisara to forget about revenge and find happiness.

If it was possible, Rentaro wanted to be the source of happiness in her life. He wanted to teach her everything that could make a woman happy. He thought perhaps he was the one who could send her to dizzying heights of ecstasy. But he wasn’t, and it grievously troubled him.

Kisara stared at the aloof Rentaro, ruefully pointing her chin at him.

“What is your problem today? I mean, Hitsuma’s a nice guy, okay? He treats me like I’m important, unlike some people in my life. He’s got money, unlike some people in my life. He’s tall, unlike some people in my life. And he wants to marry me, too, okay? Maybe you don’t know this, Satomi, but I actually have a social life with the opposite sex. Hmph!”

“Oh? Well, that’s great.”

“What do you mean, that’s great?” For some reason, Kisara demonstrated an extreme dislike for Rentaro’s blunt reaction. “Look, Satomi, are you looking for them to find you guilty, or what? You didn’t kill him, did you? You’re acting weird!”

Kisara blushed and turned her head away, rubbing her thighs together nervously.

“You know that my chronic diabetes prevents me from fighting for extended lengths of time. That…that’s why I want you to keep protecting me, Satomi. Because in the end, I’m just another weak little girl.”

Rentaro wordlessly shook his head. “Please, Kisara. I don’t want you to come here anymore.”

“Why not? Why are you saying that? Do you hate me or something?”

Rentaro stared straight into Kisara’s eyes.

Thanks, Kisara. I’ve been so grateful to you, ever since the Tendo family took me in ten years ago. The Gastrea that killed your parents took an arm and a leg from me, too, but the fact I managed to keep you safe is something I’m kind of proud of.

I really like you, Kisara.

“Please don’t come back. I don’t want to see your face again. That’s all there is to it.”

With a clatter, Kisara stood up off her chair, covering her mouth with both hands. Tears were welling out of each eye, running down her cheeks.

“What is…? What are you?”

No matter how much she wiped at them, the tears incessantly came down. She must not have been expecting this display herself, saying “What?” and acting terribly confused. Then she quickly turned around and tried to rush out of the visitation room.

This is how it should be, Rentaro said to himself. Hitsuma will make her happy. He watched Kisara as she reached for the doorknob, as if that was the punishment he was facing this whole time.

Just as her figure was about to disappear behind the door, Rentaro had a flashback to Tina, Enju, Kisara, and himself around the dining table, laughing with one another. Something he would never have back again. The tears rushed into his eyes.

Don’t go, Kisara.

“Help—”

Rentaro closed his eyes and put both hands over his mouth, struggling with everything he had to keep the rest of the words from coming out. He didn’t have to worry. The door closed shut with a heavy bang, and then only a cold silence remained.

Tears dripped down from the end of his downward-facing nose, spreading across the thighs of his pants. He sobbed, his voice cracking, at the pain of losing something he could never replace.

The image of the Tendo Civil Security Agency breaking apart in midair quietly spread across his mind.

9

“Why…?”

For the nth time today, Rentaro’s mouth opened a crack and whispered the word as he took in the view of the Seitenshi’s palace, in District 1 of Tokyo Area.

Why am I here?

Looking back, he should have suspected something from the moment he woke up, when he was ordered to put on his school uniform instead of the hoodie Enju gave him. That same prison guard effectively banned belts and buttons from his life when he was first sent to jail.

Even when he noticed that the minivan he shared with a driver and two escorts was taking a different route from the usual one to the public prosecutor’s office, he didn’t pay it any special mind apart from finding it a bit odd.

The view out the window was dull, dark, and bereft of any color.

Since his first and last meeting with Kisara, Rentaro had grown indifferent to nearly all external stimuli, spending more and more of his time lost in thought. Diligently, he tried to collect all the fun, happy memories he had and examine them all one more time. The problem was, recollecting his time in the Tendo Civil Security Agency seemed all too short to him.

“Keep your head forward. Lady Seitenshi is seeing you.”

His unfocused thoughts jumbled with one another as his consciousness returned to reality. They didn’t come fully together until he finally understood what he heard.

“Lady Seitenshi?”

Upon following his escort’s directions, a key was thrust into his handcuffs, freeing his hands. He was relieved from the chain wrapped around his waist like a dog’s leash, and then he was led forward, guards in front of and behind him.

The palace guards, standing like statues of Adonis in front of the entrance, saluted the procession as they passed. They must have received advance word.

After a few minutes’ wait in the reception room, lined with dozens of trophies and an unnervingly realistic hawk sculpture, the group was led to a large hall meant for special events. The high ceiling arched above them; the well-polished floor formed a mosaic beneath their feet. Rows of marble columns lined the space. Every piece of décor was done up to enormous proportions, making Rentaro feel like he had stumbled into the home of a giant.

Everything inside the palace was refined and splendorous. Nothing like the gray walls of the interrogation room, or the jail cell he was in. That, at least, brightened Rentaro’s spirits a little.

“Here,” a guard said, “take this.” It was, oddly enough, the same civsec officer’s license that was confiscated from him at the time of his arrest.

“Why this? What’s happening here?”

The guard did not respond. Instead, he just nudged his back, making him stand in front of a large door. With a low rumble, it opened from the other side, letting a warm beam of light enter the room. Proceeding in, then up a steep, winding stairway, they found the Seitenshi at the top, just as she left her throne and was on her way down. The two guards around Rentaro straightened their backs as tightly as they could.

The Seitenshi made a sweeping motion with her hands. The guards sandwiching Rentaro on both sides gave each other worried looks.

“Lady Seitenshi, it’s too dangerous for you to be alone!”

“I don’t care. Stand aside, please.”

They disappeared behind the door with extreme reluctance. Only Rentaro and the Seitenshi remained in the gigantic space.

“It’s been far too long, hasn’t it?” The Seitenshi smiled a sad smile.

“Well, yeah. You’re the head of state, and I’m a failure of a civsec officer. You wouldn’t be meeting up with me unless you had some kind of business.”

“Yes. In which case, I suppose this is a good thing. A civil security officer out of a job means the world must truly be at peace.”

“Yeah, sure.” Rentaro rubbed a shoulder as the Seitenshi gave him a graceful laugh. The tension palpably melted between them.

“So what do you want?” he asked.

The Seitenshi put both hands together in front of her dress skirt. “Mr. Satomi, are you aware of which way public opinion is going on your case?”

“Can’t say I am. They don’t allow any media in jail.”

“People were beginning to soften their stance against civil security agencies, after they made such a heroic effort guarding Tokyo Area through the entirety of the Third Kanto Battle. Your on-the-scene arrest for murder, sadly, put an end to that.”

“…You think I killed him, too?”

The Seitenshi shook her head. “I don’t know that, and I am in no position to determine that.”

“But you rule this whole area.”

“I am the head of the political apparatus, yes, but that does not extend into the realm of judiciary power. I do, however, have the power to appoint people to certain positions. I’ve done that for you before, and I’ve also helped you get your rank promoted no less than three times. Along those lines, the attention I’ve demonstrated for you has also made me the target of criticism.”

Rentaro, realizing the conversation was drifting into hostile waters, broke into a cold sweat. Why was I invited to the palace today, anyway? It still made no sense to him.

“Today, Satomi, I’m afraid I need to tell you some bad news.” The Seitenshi paused deliberately, raising her face to eye level. “As of today, your civil security agency Promoter license has been revoked.”

“Wha…?!”

Revoked? If that happens…

“Do you remember, Satomi?” the Seitenshi continued, indifferent to Rentaro’s obvious consternation as she continued. “When you protected me from that sniper, I remember telling you this: ‘I will have to ask you to work continuously from now on. For me, and for our country.’ It is a shame I have to renege on my word in so short a time.”

“Wait a minute! If you confiscate my license, the IISO’s gonna take Enju away. You can’t take Enju from me, too!”

The Seitenshi turned her face away from Rentaro, a dejected look on her face as she kept her eyes away from view.

“It has already been decided.”

Rentaro’s fists began to shake. He took the license from its plastic cover and, with shaky hands, placed it in the Seitenshi’s hand. Then he turned his back to his ruler, just as she opened her mouth to speak, and briskly left the chamber.

The fifty-million-yen paintings that lined the corridors, as well as the brass vases with arabesque patterns sculpted upon them, were nothing that could move the Seitenshi’s heart any longer.

As she trudged down the hallways from the meeting chamber to her personal room, she came across a man in a white formal hakama gown, his white hair and beard a seeming mismatch for the firm, muscular body he possessed. It was Kikunojo Tendo, the Seitenshi’s aide and a major powerbroker in the world of politics.

“I admire your hard work, my lady.”

“Kikunojo…do you think that was the best thing?”

“But of course. Our story is this: Before he was arrested, he requested to be removed from the roster of civsec officers and returned his license to the authorities. That way, the civsec industry can retain its good name, and damage to your administration for appointing him will be kept to a minimum.”

“But…we are drowning out the voices of those pleading his innocence!”

“It is my priority, my lady, to do whatever it takes to protect you.”

“But that is not my way.”

“Lady Seitenshi, you… I am afraid you have to choose. If the lifeboats are already full of people, you must have the resolve to let those who couldn’t find space on them die. That is a must in order to keep the boat itself viable.”

“If I jump off the boat, I could rescue one more person.”

“Are you saying you would let a starving person cannibalize you, then? That is very self-sacrificial, my lady, but it has no role in politics, and it is the political system that you are charged with directing.”

“But what do you think of Satomi, Kikunojo? He was once your adopted son, and when you were chosen as a Living National Treasure of Japan, I understand you designated Satomi to be your apprentice, though not a blood member of the Tendo family. Your opinion of him couldn’t have been entirely negative; at least, not at the time. But how can you be so coldhearted to him now?”

“…Ever since he abandoned our family with Kisara, he has been neither my kin nor anything else to me. If this is the end for him, I can only call it his just deserts.”

“How could you…?” The Seitenshi stared at the floor and bit her lip. Unable to withstand it any longer, she flew into Kikunojo’s breast and clung to him. “I can’t help but notice,” she whispered softly. “Wherever Satomi goes, there I am, watching from behind. Whenever I speak with him, I feel my heart beating faster. I…I yearn for him.”

Kikunojo’s chest twitched with rage.

“What…?!”

“It pains me. My public persona demands that I must be harsh, but as a living, breathing person, I wish I could use all my political influence to help him out of his plight. My heart, and my body, are being pulled in two different directions. I feel like I’m going to be ripped apart.”

“……”

“It pains me. Kikunojo, what am I supposed to do…? What…?”

Kikunojo placed a hand on the Seitenshi’s back and silently stroked it up and down.

10

Touji Watagasa put his hands on the Elgrand minivan’s steering wheel, placed his foot on the accelerator, and turned his eyes toward the windshield, even though his mind was still focused on the eerie silence unfolding behind him.

It was night. The unpaved private road lit by his headlights made for a bumpy, uncomfortable ride, the car lurching to and fro whenever it ran over an odd tree root sticking out. The tall trees jutting out from both sides depressed him, and—unusually for him—he began to regret trying to take a shortcut.

Touji’s main work for today involved picking up the prisoner Rentaro Satomi from lockup and driving him to the Seitenshi’s palace. Now he was making the return trip, taking him back to jail. He was on standby inside the van while they spoke, and thus had no idea what had transpired in the palace, but judging by how much gloomier the atmosphere was in the car leaving than going, it must’ve been something bad.

He looked behind him in the rearview mirror. Rentaro Satomi, slumped down between his two guard escorts, looked like he just had the life sucked out of him. He already looked pretty rough when he picked him up, but now he was even worse—a gruesome sight to see, even. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

Touji would readily admit that he had a visceral disgust for the Cursed Children, these Gastrea Virus carriers strutting around like there was nothing wrong with them. But he also understood well enough that he was still alive right now thanks to their efforts in the Third Kanto Battle. It was complicated—and it didn’t help that he lost the lottery for a shelter spot during that fight, forced to stay with his family and curse his bad luck.

The joy he felt when Aldebaran fell was difficult to put into words. Seeing this Promoter in such a miserable state right now made Touji wish he could do something to help. But what, though, exactly?

The question made his mind hit a wall. Even if he did something as reckless as help him escape, the sense of satisfaction that would give him wouldn’t be worth the lengthy prison term he’d receive afterward. He had a family to support.

Touji chided himself. No, he didn’t have what it took to be a hero. All he could keep safe was a small sphere of people around him. And that was good enough for him. Sometimes it was better to listen to the timid little voice of his conscience.

This was the kind of hero who could stand up and devote all his courage to the preservation of Tokyo Area. Now, though, he was yesterday’s news. The rules of the world could change with just a snap of the fingers, it seemed.

Thinking about all this caused Touji to lose his concentration. It made him notice just a moment too late that something was jumping in front of the minivan.

He didn’t see what it was at first, but once the headlights thrust their way through the darkness, a girl with chestnut hair cut in a bob danced between the beams.

There she stood, in the middle of the road, arms open wide—it was already too late by the time Touji realized this. An instant later, no doubt, the bumper would be smashing into the small figure’s body. A chill ran down his spine, and before he could think about it, his foot had slammed the brake to the floor as he pulled the wheel to one side.

There was a screamlike screech as the wheel locked itself. The car veered into the woods. They had just barely dodged the girl, but the tires fell into a rut on the side of the road, and the van was lifted into the air like someone had tipped it up.

Just when Touji realized he’d made a poor decision, the bloodcurdling feeling of weightlessness struck his body as his vision slanted to the side. Only a few seconds ago, he’d been picturing himself pulling into the jail’s parking lot, just like he had done a million times before. There was no way he could have predicted the intense pain that would invite itself into his life a moment later.

The results were similarly disastrous for Rentaro in the backseat. He felt his rear end rise up, then he yelped in pain as his vision lurched and his body was battered around the interior. The noise of the crash drowned out all his shouting.

The next thing he knew, Rentaro was lying facedown, his face buried in something soft. The droning sound of the car’s stuck horn just barely kept him conscious. He heard something dripping, and a disquieting scent sickened him. He felt something pricking under his eyelids. Something must have struck his throat, because even groaning was painful for him. It was hard to breathe in whatever confined space he was in.

His consciousness still hazy, he opened his heavy eyes, only to find one of his escorts right in front of him, blood dripping from his head. He was approaching his golden years, loose wrinkles on his cheeks.

Then Rentaro realized the van had flipped over, and he was staring at the ceiling. Why was that? It was too dark to figure out how the car had fared, but all of the guards in the car were completely silent. The thought that they were possibly dead made him anxious.

I gotta get outside, first of all.

But— Oh, wait, I’m still cuffed. Groaning in frustration, he started kicking at the side door. It took about three good kicks before the door blew open. He crawled his way out, experiencing the crisp, warm night air of summer.

Just as he’d thought, the minivan had flipped on its roof, an impressive layer of burned tire rubber on the road behind them. He had no idea what led to this.

Then he noticed a black liquid seeping out of the car. It jogged his memory. The smell that caught his attention in the vehicle was gasoline. The engine was still sparking. The whole thing could blow soon.

Even with his hands cuffed, Rentaro managed to pull the two guards in the rear out to safety. It was just when he was trying to pull out the unconscious driver that a spark finally lit up the fuel. A wave of heat and flame pushed upon him, making him shut his eyes. He just barely got him out in time.

Rentaro sized up his body. Miraculously, apart from a few scratches and bruises, he was not seriously hurt. He turned back toward the minivan, now engulfed in flames.

Really, though, why—?

“Are you Rentaro Satomi?”

A startled Rentaro turned toward the voice, only to find a girl dancing on the other side of the undulating curtain of flame. She was short, child-size, and while he couldn’t discern her face, the legs jutting out from her hot pants indicated she was definitely female. Did she just stand by idly while he was trying to rescue the guards?

“Why did you help them?” she asked.

“Who’re you?”

“That doesn’t matter to you.”

“Did you make this van flip over?” he demanded.

“You’re the one who killed Kihachi, right?”

“Kihachi? You mean Suibara? No. It wasn’t me.”

The moment he denied it, he felt a wave of rage emanate from the figure. She took a step forward, trampling the earth with her foot.

“So why were you arrested for it?”

“I…”

For a moment, Rentaro flashed back to an image of himself at the crime scene, XD gun in his hand.

The girl picked up on his lack of an immediate response. She pointed her arms forward toward Rentaro. There was a small-size revolver in her hands.

“Don’t think bad of me for this. I’m never going to be at peace with myself if I don’t.”

Her trigger finger moved without hesitation, setting off the percussion hammer and slowly spinning the magazine around with a metallic sound. Rentaro’s body froze at the expected blast to come.

But, for whatever reason, the shot didn’t arrive. The contradiction taking place before the girl—this guy who killed Suibara rescuing three guards from a burning vehicle—perplexed her. And just before she could pull the trigger that little bit more, the sound of a wailing police siren plunged between the two of them. There was no doubting it.

The girl groaned to herself and quickly executed a flip that propelled her into the woods. The leap sent her form flying all the way up to the top of the tree canopy. Her jumping skill was clearly something beyond any ordinary human’s ability.

Oh, great, she’s an Initiator, Rentaro thought to himself as he watched her bound away. The voice didn’t sound familiar to him, and he couldn’t make out her face. But if this was an Initiator on a first-name basis with “Kihachi,” who was also out for revenge, that narrowed it down pretty quickly.

Rentaro scoped out his surroundings. There were three unconscious guards and one burning minivan. It wouldn’t be easy to explain this, but his only choice, he supposed, was to be honest.

Suddenly, he noticed a small key that fell out from one of the guards’ pockets.

It was for a pair of handcuffs.

His heart thudded loudly in his ears. As if on cue, the police siren began to grow louder as it approached.

Right now, right at this minute, he could get away. But if he fled now, in the worst case, he might wind up copping the blame for this accident. As of right now, he was merely indicted for murder, not condemned. It’d take time to plead his case in court. If he wasn’t going to scream his innocence to the high hills to the end, why did he go through all this up to now?

But, he asked himself, is that really the case? A trial was all about sizing up the available evidence and using it to decide between guilty or not guilty. Had they discovered any sort of evidence so far that’d clear his name? Judging by the highly loaded questioning he had been subjected to so far, it seemed beyond a reasonable doubt that the “presumed innocent” clause would be worth about as much as the paper it was printed on.

Many times now, Rentaro had been forced to put on that belly chain and shuffle between jail and courtroom. They’d be much quicker with Tina. She’d be found guilty before she walked in the room, and—with her role in the attempt on the Seitenshi’s life brought into consideration—she would be immediately condemned to death.

Thanks to the astonishing regenerative powers of an Initiator, the government was aware that the usual method of hanging would only serve to make execution a needlessly painful process. An injected cocktail of barbiturates and muscle relaxants wouldn’t work, either—the Gastrea Virus would immediately take action to neutralize the poison.

So, by process of elimination, Tina would be sentenced to death by firing squad. Her legs would shake as she was dragged to the execution stand, a sack placed over her head as she was tied to a pole. There was no way the fragile psyche of a ten-year-old could withstand the sheer terror of this situation, so she would sob, crying about how she didn’t want to die. But no one would be willing to listen.

Varanium bullets would be the ammunition of choice, naturally. The firing squad would line up in a row, waiting for their captain to give the signal to fire at once. As per tradition, one of the squad’s rifles was equipped with blanks, but none of the team knew which one. This gave the squad members plausible deniability for their actions, believing in the possibility that they hadn’t killed her as they went home and enjoyed a hearty meal with their families. But Tina would still be dead.

With her employee list now empty, Kisara would have little choice but to shut down the Tendo Civil Security Agency. She would marry Hitsuma, live her life, and—despite the handicaps her diabetes presented—successfully give birth to a child.

Over time, her memories would fade. Of Tina, whom she treated as her own sister; of Enju, whose boundless energy put her at her wit’s end on so many occasions; even of Rentaro—she would forget about them all, and never take another look back.

With the loss of her partner, Enju would be picked up by the IISO, which would then assign her another Promoter to work with. Her new partner would be far from ideal. He would refuse to give Enju so much as a decent meal, and he would regularly abuse her. The girls’ healing abilities were the result of a metabolism that worked several times as quickly as regular people’s, so being left to starve meant her wounds would stop healing correctly.

Without her corrosion-suppression drugs being administered, Enju’s internal corruption rate would surpass 50 percent, making her experience pain like her guts were being turned inside out, and eventually she’d transform into a Gastrea. The total cost of an Initiator with the overwhelming strength of Enju going Gastrea would be nightmarish, both monetarily and in terms of human lives.

And how ironic would it be, that the group charged with hunting her down would be other civsec officers—the only group that Enju took pride in ever belonging to…

Rentaro, his breathing shallow, returned to reality. Was the sick prediction of the future he just envisioned really nothing more than paranoia in action? What made him think the future would turn out any other way, once he was found guilty? He looked down upon his palms. His wrists, black and blue from the handcuffs, stung at him. He shook his fists.

I didn’t kill Suibara. Why do I have to put up with all this absurd insanity? Whoever framed me is probably cackling to himself right now, thinking everything’s gone to plan. He never got taken to court.

Rentaro’s vision grew hazy as the insides of his eyes became warm. It was frustrating, so frustrating that he couldn’t stand it. He wanted to get it back. Everything from his normal life. Everything that was taken from him. The same Tendo Civil Security Agency he once knew, with Tina and Kisara and Enju.

More than anything, he wanted to hunt down the real murderer and burn him with the brimstone of rage. His pride and his reputation, so cruelly ripped from him and trampled upon, demanded nothing less.

The siren grew stronger, bashing against his earlobes. It clearly wouldn’t be long before police officers would be swarming down the road. The time that remained forced Rentaro to make a decision.

After a moment, Rentaro’s body stopped shaking. He turned his face up and gave a cold stare to the dazzling neon city beyond the woods.

Several minutes later, once police arrived on the scene, they found a flipped and burning Elgrand, three unconscious but breathing guards, and an empty and abandoned pair of handcuffs.

Rentaro Satomi was nowhere to be found.

11

“What…?!”

The Seitenshi couldn’t help but say it out loud.

“Satomi…escaped…?”

“Yes, my lady,” the saluting palace official replied. “We believe he staged a deliberate attack on his transport back from the palace in order to escape. The three guards on the van haven’t regained consciousness, so we don’t know the details yet, but…”

She could hardly believe her ears as she palpably felt the blood drain from her face. How could this be? Did taking his license in order to keep him safe wind up driving him to desperation?

What was I supposed to do, then?

The Seitenshi, as the political leader of Tokyo Area, loved all her subjects equally. She was not allowed to see anyone as more special than anyone else.

She noticed a heavy hand on her shoulder.

“Lady Seitenshi, please get ahold of yourself.”

It was Kikunojo.

“With all due respect, my lady, he fled his fate because he is spiritually weak. It is your task to do what must be done.”

The Seitenshi closed her eyes, refocusing her attention on her situation. Her pulse slowed. “Are the police in pursuit of him?” she said, somehow managing to remain calm.

The palace official stood bolt upright. “Yes, my lady,” he bellowed. “We believe they will arrest him before long.”

“Then—”

“—Would you mind leaving that business to me?”

“And you are…?”

The Seitenshi looked up at the interrupting voice. The tapping of thick boots rapped across the chamber as a man walked in from the darkness on the other side of the corridor.

He was perhaps just a little under sixty, his medium-length crew cut partially interrupted by a diagonal scar that ran across his scalp. His eyes were deeply sunken into his head, the excessive white between the iris and the eyelids giving the impression of someone prone to anger.

It was a familiar face.

“Ah, Commissioner Hitsuma,” said Kikunojo, standing to the side of his leader.

Commissioner Tadashi Hitsuma walked up to the Seitenshi, giving her a respectful salute.

“I apologize; I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation. Forgive my lack of communication, Lady Seitenshi.”

“It is good to see you, Commissioner. But what brings you here?”

“I called for him,” Kikunojo responded, giving a glance at the Seitenshi before continuing. “Since your former bodyguard conspired against you, I have been your sole protector, a situation that cannot go unaddressed for much longer. I asked the authorities if they would be willing to assign a security-police unit to you.”

“And judging by what I hear, the escape was entirely a failure on the part of the police,” Hitsuma continued. “But do not worry, Lady Seitenshi. We will capture this cowardly fugitive as soon as humanly possible…and I know the ideal person for the job.”

“The ideal person?”

“Yes. My grandson. He may still be green, yes, but he is a well-put-together lad. I am sure he will hook this would-be escapee in very short order.”

The car door slammed shut as some of the lukewarm night air found its way inside, the smell of raw earth reaching his nostrils.

The scene around the burning minivan was crawling with media, swarming out from God knows where and lighting up the night with their flashbulbs. Even without them, the flashing lights from the police cars and ambulances nearby would have provided more than enough ambient light, further punctuated by the reflective police tape around the scene.

Pushing his way through the reporters, Shigetoku Tadashima ducked under the tape. “Chief,” a familiar voice called out. Turning toward it, he saw Yoshikawa, a younger detective with a look of regret on his face. “Oh, I mean, Inspector…”

“Where’s the scene?” Tadashima asked, ignoring him.

“This way,” Yoshikawa replied, taking him to the burned-out husk of the minivan.

He sized up the upside-down minivan, its ceiling crushed by the impact, and peered at the brake marks left on the road.

“What do we know?”

“This minivan was transporting the suspect back to jail when a girl ran in front of the car. The driver swerved and flipped the vehicle. The two guards in the rear are in the hospital with broken bones. The driver got out of it better, though. He’s awake and alert, and we’re questioning him now.”

“A girl? Did that civsec’s Initiator come to help him?”

“Doesn’t look like it, actually. Rentaro Satomi was being transported from Lady Seitenshi’s palace, where apparently he voluntarily resigned his post. He surrendered his license on the spot. At about the same time, a person from the IISO visited Tendo Civil Security Agency and met with his former Initiator, Aihara…um…”

“—Enju.”

“Right, yeah, Enju Aihara. He apparently seized her, and that reportedly wasn’t so voluntary. Either way, though, she’s got an alibi.”

“Okay. So who was it?”

Tadashima sighed. He remembered how drained and pathetic Rentaro looked when he told him that Enju was captured by the enemy during the whole Seitenshi sniper crisis. The type of Promoter who really cared for his Initiator, in other words. If he gave up his license, then was told he’ll never see his Initiator again, that might just drive him to do something rash.

Fanning himself, Tadashima sat on a nearby fallen tree trunk and looked up at the starry sky. “Pfft,” he said. “I didn’t think we were really gonna indict him.”

“You’re still saying that, Inspector? You think he’s innocent or something?”

“Nah, I mean… He’s the hero of the Third Kanto Battle, you know. I just figured someone up high would’ve stepped in to cover all this up by now.”

“You know Lady Seitenshi hates doing that, though. She likes keeping things clean like that. Bet she’s been crying her eyes out the whole time, though.”

The conversation trailed off. Tadashima tapped a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, taking a smoke out and lighting it.

“You think he’s really the guy, though?” Yoshikawa muttered to the side.

Tadashima took a deep drag and exhaled the smoke into the air. “Who knows?” He stood up from the tree trunk, watching the officers scurry to and fro around the scene. Just as he took in a lungful of air to bellow his orders, he heard someone say, “Are you the man in charge here?”

There, among the flashing lights, the police tape, and the seemingly endless flashbulbs, was a slender young man walking right up to him. His posture was straight, his silver-framed glasses matching with his business suit. He was unfamiliar to Tadashima.

“Atsuro Hitsuma, sir,” he said as he saluted. “Superintendent at the department. Are you in charge of the scene?”

Realizing he was outranked, Tadashima hurriedly dropped his cigarette, put it out with his heel, and saluted.

“Y-yes, sir. Inspector Shigetoku Tadashima with the Magata department.”

There was something almost cartoonlike about the scene—the wide, barrel-chested Tadashima and Hitsuma, barely a wisp of a man, saluting each other. Tadashima couldn’t help but feel a little cowed.

“Oh, great, a career-track grunt,” Yoshikawa groaned forlornly from behind. Tadashima elbowed him to shut him up.

“I apologize, Inspector, but I’m taking over the investigation.”

“Sir, this crime took place in our jurisdiction. Besides, why would a police superintendent go hands-on with a sorry scene like this? I really think we’re in a better position to handle it.”

He tried his best to remain polite around his superior, but the irritation behind his words remained clear. But the pale, wispy man remained composed, using his middle finger to adjust his glasses.

“Inspector Tadashima, I’m afraid I can’t allow that. This is a much bigger situation than what you’re picturing. We’ve decided to form a special investigation team for this case. They’ll be based in the metropolitan police HQ instead of the Magata department, and it’s being led by the commissioner. Starting now, the Magata department will be taking their orders from us, and us alone.”

“It’s going up to commissioner level?” asked Tadashima, clearly taken aback.

Hitsuma shrugged. “Well, this was caused by ground-level police error. We want to get it squared away as soon as possible.”

“God damn…”

What the hell is going on here? Tadashima wanted to scream. It had to be one hell of a major case if they were forming a team to handle it. It wasn’t something they’d deploy just to catch a single fugitive.

“Inspector, how long has it been since the suspect fled the scene?”

“I’m told it was about an hour ago.”

“All right. He shouldn’t be far, then.” The light glinted off Hitsuma’s frames. “Could you tell me what you know about Rentaro Satomi? I read his profile on the way here—height 174 centimeters; weight 61 kilos; first-level black belt in a combat style called Tendo Martial Arts. That’s not what I want to ask about. I understand that you knew him personally, Inspector. What kind of person was this Rentaro Satomi, would you say?”

“Well, he might act all happy-go-lucky and clueless, but he’s a natural at his job. And if I may speak freely, Superintendent, I really don’t think you have a chance at catching him.”

Hitsuma stared blankly at Tadashima, then gave him a forced smile. “Oh?” he said. “You seem to be quite a fan of his, Inspector.”

Tadashima’s spine shivered as Hitsuma clapped his hands to attract the attention of the nearby investigators.

“All right, everyone, I want us to establish a perimeter at a 25-kilometer radius around the area before we let the fugitive get away from us. The escapee’s name is Rentaro Satomi; average size, average build. He’s a student and former Promoter at a civilian security agency. I’ll get photos out to everyone. Repeat: Rentaro Satomi, fugitive at large.”

He clapped one more time, signaling them to start their work. The investigators, presumably his own underlings, sprang into action and dispersed.

Tadashima dolefully stared at Hitsuma’s back. “So, Superintendent, what are you gonna do next?” he asked.

“Rentaro Satomi doesn’t have that much of a social life. It’ll be pretty easy to figure out who he’ll try to contact first. In fact, I know the person myself, so I’ll handle that on a personal basis. Don’t worry, Inspector. I have a feeling you’ll be proven wrong. We’re going to solve this case by the end of the night.”

12

A heavy silence flooded the Tendo Civil Security Agency, the sole tenant on the third floor of the Happy Building. Kisara Tendo, in her usual black school uniform, sat at her wide ebony desk without saying a word.

The clock ticking away the seconds sounded abnormally hollow to her ears. In her mind, she pictured the second hand beating against a fully inflated balloon, ready to burst at any minute. Instinctively, it felt like once the hand inevitably popped the balloon, it would all be over for her.

It hadn’t been long since someone claiming to be an IISO agent appeared at her door, taking the reluctant Enju and all but dragging her out of the office. He said Rentaro had voluntarily surrendered his civsec license to the Seitenshi, which officially made Enju IISO property.

That was just too ridiculous to be true. Kisara had a front-row seat to Rentaro’s behavior around Enju, and if anything, she thought he was a little too attached to her. Even if they knew they were doomed to be pulled apart, there’s no way he’d so readily toss out his civsec license like that.

Something else must have happened at the palace.

But another voice in her mind wondered about that.

“Please don’t come back. I don’t want to see your face again. That’s all there is to it.”

Why did he have to be so curt with her? Kisara still couldn’t figure that out, but if that was the moment when Rentaro changed his whole outlook on life, then maybe he really would abandon hope for Enju and obediently hand over the license.

She felt her heart throb. It made her sick to her stomach. Enju was gone, Tina was gone, and Rentaro was gone. Why bother running this firm, then…?

Just then, her cell phone rang. She used the third movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 as her ringtone. Reluctantly, she picked it up.

“Kisara, it’s me; you gotta help me.”

“Satomi?” She jumped out of her seat. Looking at the screen, she saw the call came from a public phone.

“Wait, what…what happened to you?!”

She could hear the hesitancy in his voice from the other side of the call.

“—I don’t have time to explain. Things have changed. I need you to help me.”

“Things have changed? What…?”

“Listen. First floor café lounge, Magata Plaza Hotel, eight thirty. Can you do that? I’ll tell you everything there.”

Kisara glanced at the wall clock. That was only half an hour from now.

Rentaro grunted. She could hear police sirens faintly over the connection.

“’Kay, see you there, Kisara.”

“Whoa, wait a—”

The sound of him hanging up seemed to linger in the air for a few seconds. She had no idea what she just experienced. Rentaro couldn’t have been released, on bail or otherwise. His custody period was extended because the prosecutor convinced the court that he might try tampering with evidence. That he contacted her from the outside meant he was out on his own initiative. Kisara couldn’t think of too many legal ways he could’ve done that.

“Oh, no…”

“Sorry, but I can’t let you go anywhere.”

Turning around at the unexpected voice, Kisara was shocked to find a handsome, bespectacled man leaning against the wall by the entrance.

“Mr. Hitsuma! Why are you here?”

“That was a call from Satomi, wasn’t it?”

“N-no.”

The harried denial made Hitsuma mournfully shake his head. “I don’t know if you heard yet, but he flipped over the transport vehicle he was in and escaped with a girl we believe is his accomplice.”

“His accomplice? …Who?”

“I don’t know. We’re investigating.”

Hitsuma spread his arms as he approached Kisara, the smell of his pomade flying into her nostrils. “Ms. Tendo,” he said, “as someone in the business of Gastrea extermination, I’m sure you know how important the initial hours of the investigation are in solving a crime. Unfortunately, he’s already gone past a certain point. If you know where he is, would you mind telling me? I still have authority over this, so I can be gentle with him.”

“But you…”

Hitsuma’s arms were extending out, attempting to embrace her shaking body. Kisara took a step back and pushed Hitsuma’s chest away. He looked at her quizzically, like a hurt puppy.

“Do you like him?”

“No…I don’t. He’s an idiot, he’s useless as an employee, he’s chronically poor, he treats Miori like she’s some kind of goddess, he pays zero attention to me, he never calls unless I call him first…”

Kisara ran out of things to say. She turned away from Hitsuma, head hung low, then felt a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“If he was innocent and wanted to earn justice for himself, he could’ve proved his innocence in a court of law. He might be innocent, for all I know. Maybe it was a false arrest. Maybe the police messed up the investigation.

“But even if they did, I can’t really approve of him crashing a police vehicle and sending three innocent men to the hospital. Ms. Tendo, if you really want what’s best for Satomi right now, you know what you should do, right? Tokyo Area’s not that big of a place. He can’t run from us forever. Sooner or later, we’ll find him. But you’re the only one who can keep him from adding any more charges to his record.”

“Please don’t come back. I don’t want to see your face again. That’s all there is to it.” Kisara shook her head from shoulder to shoulder. “I just don’t know. I don’t know what Satomi’s thinking, I don’t… I don’t know anything. I did before, but now, I just don’t.”

Before she knew it, Kisara felt a hand raising her chin, dragging her face toward Hitsuma’s friendly grin.

“Well, you can just leave the rest to me. I promise I won’t treat him badly. Where is he?”

Kisara hesitated. Hitsuma decided to keep pushing.

“You don’t want to see it all end with an officer shooting him down, do you?”

“N-no,” a startled Kisara said.

“Okay. So you know what you should do, right, Ms. Tendo? Just think about what’s the best thing you can do for Satomi right now. Take your time.”

After excusing himself from the Tendo Civil Security Agency office, Hitsuma went down the stairs and stood in front of the building. The blissfully unconcerned face from before was a thing of the past. He was close to losing his temper, ready to kick the first thing that came into sight—an empty can, a small dog, anything.

Hitsuma took out his cell phone and tapped a number in his call history. He didn’t have to wait long.

“Hey, how’s the reception on the bug you put in Kisara Tendo’s cell phone?”

“Loud and clear. But I’m sure Rentaro Satomi’s moved on from his previous call location. She promised she’d meet him at the café on the first floor of the Magata Plaza Hotel. We’ll have some people there.”

“Pfft.”

“Something wrong, sir?”

“Kisara Tendo… She didn’t disclose anything to me.”

“Are you doubting our technology, sir?” The man on the other end of the line didn’t understand what he meant. “Whether she cooperated with you or not, we’ve got all the intel we need—”

“—No. Not that. I was testing her. I wanted to see whether she’d testify against Rentaro Satomi or not. But she kept mum. Right up to the end.”

“It’s nothing that’s compromising our mission, sir.”

“No…it’s not.” Hitsuma shook his head, trying to put his mind back on track. “Do we know where the memory card is yet? What about Hotaru Kouro’s whereabouts?”

“Nothing on either front yet.”

“This is getting messier than I thought it’d be.”

He had a mountain of issues to deal with. The only way to deal with them was to tackle them head-on, one by one. Let’s start with Rentaro Satomi.

“I’ll tell the police about this later. We got thirty minutes.”

“What are the higher-ups telling you?”

“Feh. My father told me that Lady Seitenshi ordered him not to be killed. Maybe the rumors about her having some kind of special feelings for the guy were true after all.”

“Well, that sure makes me jealous. What are you planning to do, then? I’m assuming you don’t want him unhurt.”

Hitsuma snickered to himself. “Don’t be stupid, Nest. We have no idea how much Suibara told him. I don’t care anymore. Rub him out. We’re using Dark Stalker for this job.”

13

The Magata Plaza Hotel was even more gaudy and ostentatious than what he was picturing. The lounge café, an open-air setup underneath the lobby’s vaulted ceiling, was separated from the rest of the world by a series of connected glass pieces, all in assorted geometric shapes.

A combination of recessed lights and a chandelier filled the space with warm orange light, the atmosphere tied together with the calm melodies of classical music.

A waiter made his way between the tables, each covered with a prim white tablecloth. Occasionally one would see men in expensive-looking business attire or pastel-colored Oxford shirts, entertaining their lady friends with impassioned discussions about what the Varanium industry would be like in ten years or whatnot.

Although it was theoretically open to the public, the café’s customers all seemed to be overnight guests. Perhaps this was a bad time after all, Rentaro thought, as he began to regret the uncharacteristic location he selected. The sight of a nervous-looking young man in a dirt-stained school uniform fidgeting by himself at one of these tables was bound to stand out a fair bit.

His mind was a frazzled mess, and not merely because of the cups of coffee he drank just to give his hands something to do. Looking at the clock on the wall, there were less than ten minutes until the appointed hour. He doubted the police could have targeted this hotel before the end of the evening, but looking back, opting for such a public place was hasty thinking on his part.

Rentaro was isolated, helpless. The police could figure out where someone like that would attempt to spend the night. He could rough it outdoors for a night or two, but sooner or later, he’d want a roof over his head again. Once he did, the first place they’d scope out would be hotels like these.

When the time hit twenty-five minutes after eight, Rentaro decided to ditch the café. He was too worried that something might’ve happened to Kisara.

“Are you eating alone?”

Rentaro’s face darted up at the voice. A smiling young man was peering down at him. He was about the same size as Rentaro and couldn’t have been much older. The navy-blue stand-up collar on his uniform looked familiar to him. It was from Nukagari High School in District 9, not far from where he lived. The smile seemed friendly enough. For someone like Rentaro, whose facial setup made it seem like he was faking every smile no matter how hard he tried, the warmth behind this one almost made him envious.

The mystery kid shook a deck of cards in front of his face.

“Care for some blackjack, maybe?”

“Uh, no, I…”

Before Rentaro could piece together a coherent response, the boy sat down across from him and dealt him two cards from the deck, turning one of them faceup—the king of clubs. Well, Rentaro thought, guess I missed my timing. Better just play a game with him, then shoo him away. He very reluctantly turned the other card. It was an ace of diamonds—and since an ace counts as eleven as long as the total doesn’t exceed twenty-one, this meant his total was twenty-one, a natural blackjack. The boy’s own cards totaled sixteen, so Rentaro won with absolutely no effort on his part.

The boy grinned and opened his palms wide. “Congratulations!” he said. “You’re just like what the rumors say, Rentaro Satomi. Guess you really do have the luck of the heavens on your side, huh?”

Rentaro’s shoulders twitched.

“Why do you know my name?”

The boy put the used cards into a separate pile and began setting up a second game. “If you’re looking for Kisara Tendo, she’s not coming,” he said indifferently.

Rentaro instinctively began to lift himself from his seat. “And you are…?”

The boy ignored the question, eyes on the game as he pointed at the deck—his signal for another hand. This irked Rentaro, but he still sat back down, figuring he wasn’t going to start swinging at him here in public. Picking up the corners of his facedown cards, he saw he had an eighteen—nothing worth taking a further risk on. Then his opponent revealed his cards. Another eighteen. A push.

The boy placed his elbows on the table and crossed his arms together, fixing his gaze on Rentaro.

“We went through all the trouble of taking care of Suibara and the Public Security guys and pinning the blame on you, but you’re just so stubborn, aren’t you? You keep running on us, so our entire blueprint’s about to fall apart. That’s pretty grave news for us. We’ve already decided on our script—Suibara tried to blackmail you, you killed him out of desperation. It’s a little too late for rewrites.”

“So are you—?”

“—The New World Creation Project. Nice to meet some of the old alumni. I was built to surpass you.”

It was like someone hit the side of his head with a hammer.

“That’s crazy…”

If Rentaro was pursuing a case that already cost the lives of Suibara and a Public Security officer, he was prepared to deal with not just the police, but other, more nefarious organizations. He didn’t know who was involved with it—he had only a hazy idea of its structure, really—but he was convinced it was far more dangerous than anything the police could do to him.

What he wasn’t expecting was for this assassin group to track him down less than two hours after his escape. He would’ve laughed it off at the time, but here it was, all laid out in front of him. The sight of this perfectly composed kid sharing a table with him was an utter shock. He fell silent for a moment. The boy picked up the slack.

“My code name is Dark Stalker, but my real one is Yuga Mitsugi. You can call me whichever one you like more. Glad to get to know you. I’ve been assigned to your execution.”

“That’s bullshit! The New World Creation Project never got off the ground!”

“So what does that make me, then?” Yuga said, the spite becoming clear in his voice. “Some kind of ghost? Satomi, we need you as a sacrifice. Tina Sprout’s going to be executed. Kisara Tendo’s going to be trained to destroy the Tendo family. Enju Aihara’s actually got her next Promoter assigned to her already. He’s a bad seed. A buddy killer. Worse than you’d ever imagine. And once you’re found guilty, the whole picture’s complete.”

So everything from the very start…

“I’ve been told to ask you this, so I will,” Yuga blithely continued as Rentaro gritted his teeth in anger. “Where is the memory card Suibara gave you?”

Rentaro stopped himself from asking What’s that? just in time. He had no memory of Suibara giving him anything like that. But his instincts told him that if his foes had the wrong idea, he needed to find a way to exploit it.

“If I give it to you, what’ll you do?”

“That’ll be your best way to assure this meeting ends as amicably as possible. It’ll give you the right to shut up and get back in your cage. You’ll get to keep your life.”

“That’s a load of crap, and you know it.”

Yuga laughed derisively at his conversation partner. “So that’s the end of negotiations?”

“We never started negotiating in the first place.”

“Well, I suppose that means I’ll have to kill you and strip it from you instead. Which is really stupid of you, you know that? I gave you a chance at survival and everything.”

Invisible sparks flew between them. They could have exploded at any time. Rentaro quelled his emotions and analyzed his enemy’s war power. Yuga, calmly seated in front of him, was average in size and height. His physique wasn’t much different from his own. His capabilities, though, were a complete unknown. If he was really part of the enhanced-soldier project, at least part of him had to be cybernetic.

If Sumire was correct, in fact, these were the guys who killed Kenji Houbara and Saya Takamura—the New Humanity Creation Project specimens who were completed ahead of Rentaro. People with real experience in the Gastrea War.

Losing this battle would mean New Humanity would be forced to completely submit to New World. For the sake of the dead, at least, he couldn’t afford to lose.

He made a tight fist beneath the table.

“Well, should we get started? Where did you—?”

Seizing the first move, he swung his leg and kicked the table upward.

The guests around them nervously shouted. Yuga’s surprised expression was soon masked by the table’s circular shape as it knocked itself over. Standing up, Rentaro planted his left foot on the ground, lowered his hips, and kicked the middle of the table with his right leg. From Yuga’s perspective, not only did the table block his field of vision—the obstacle was advancing upon him. There was no way he could dodge it.

—That conviction was why the sight of Yuga easily leaping high over the table and advancing upon his vision was something Rentaro failed to instantly react to.

Realizing he was about to unleash a flying kick, Rentaro promptly wrapped the tablecloth on the floor around his toes and kicked it up, sending it flying. The white cloth billowed in the air, catching Yuga’s body. The moment he used every bit of his agility to crouch down, Yuga’s kick scraped just past his ear.

Rentaro had only a moment to shake the sweat off before he adjusted his stance toward the cloth-covered, mummylike Yuga.

Tendo Martial Arts Second Style, Number 16—

“How about…this!”

—Inzen Kokutenfu.

The roundhouse kick, delivered with all his might, slapped home against the side of the struggling Yuga’s head. He was sent into the air, crashing into an adjacent table. Plates of dinner meals flipped into the air, and the shrill sound of shattering porcelain rang through the lounge. The guests’ shouts were escalating into a panic.

He felt he had something good going. But, in the next moment, it was Rentaro yelping in surprise.

Yuga wasn’t down. He had carved a pair of large gouges in the carpet as the kick drew him back, but he wasn’t knocked down—he had blocked it. No forward vision at all, and he blocked it. Unless he was tapping directly into Rentaro’s mind, that shouldn’t have been possible.

His adversary finally tore the tablecloth off his body. The moment Rentaro saw his face beneath, his eyes opened wide enough to nearly tear his eyelids off.

A pair of geometric shapes were laid over his irises, both rapidly spinning.

“That…that’s crazy…”

Both his eyes are cybernetic? That’s like saying he’s—

“Oof. Guess you noticed, huh? Didn’t I tell you I was built to surpass you?” Yuga, the very picture of calm composure, pointed a finger at his right eye. “This is the 21-Form Enhanced, an improved version of the 21-Form Varanium Artificial Eye. Compared to what you got, all of this model’s specs received major upgrades.”

“The 21-Form Enhanced…?”

Who did that?

The 21-Form Varanium Artificial Eye, developed by Sumire, was just one reason why she was hailed as one of the Four Sages. Your typical member of the scientific community, as he understood it, wouldn’t be able to decipher even its basic workings.

As he stood there in a state of near-total desperation, he heard someone say, “Um, excuse me, sir…” from behind Yuga’s back. He was a muscular hotel employee clad in a black suit, clearly a bouncer or something of the sort, and now he was placing a hand on Yuga’s shoulder in a belated attempt to restore order.

“I can’t have you brawling in here, guys; you’re interfering with other—”

With a sharp blam, the man spouted a fountain of blood as he arced through the air, flipped over and unconscious the moment he hit the floor. The backward punch Yuga unleashed without even turning around smashed cleanly against his chin.

“Aaaaaaaaaahhhh!”

There was a series of ear-piercing screams as the hotel guests, their panic unleashed by the sheer bizarreness of the situation, began to swarm toward the revolving door at the hotel’s entrance like an avalanche. Amid the echoing screams and shouts, only Rentaro and Yuga remained quiet, a distance away from each other as opponent sized up opponent.

Yuga reached down to his waist and took something out. It was no coincidence, perhaps, that it was almost exactly where Rentaro liked to keep his gun.

In Yuga’s hand now was a Browning automatic revolver, high-powered. Yuga raised it up, cocked it, and pointed the barrel forward, his squinting eyes focused on his prey. Rentaro could feel the murderous rage already. The shrill drone of the alarm drifted away as his mind immersed itself in the situation. He swallowed hard, his heart beating like a drum.

Ignoring for the moment the question of why he even had cybernetic eyes, Rentaro decided to consider his position. His own artificial eye was built for gunners’ work—to help him predict the path of a bullet, from the barrel to the target. But if his foe had the same capability, how effective would that remain? There were fewer than ten meters between them, but to him, it may as well have been a yawning chasm.

Quietly, Rentaro closed his eyes.

Don’t get scared.

Along with his keen, natural eye, his artificial one began its high-speed calculations. He could feel a burning pain behind his eyelid as it began to heat up. As Rentaro’s vision began to go into a bizarre sort of slow motion with the overclocking of his eye, Yuga’s finger tapped against the trigger and slowly began to squeeze. For a single-action weapon, it had a uniquely long and sticky stroke, a trademark of high-powered revolvers. With his focus turned up to maximum, Rentaro could even hear the trigger spring creak as it was being compressed.

Soon, the bar attached to the trigger did its work on the sear, the hammer swinging its way forward, the firing pin inside the breechblock striking the bottom of the cartridge.

Then, with an explosive flash, the bullet spiraled its way out of the barrel with 339 foot-pounds of muzzle energy, plowing its way straight toward him.

Rentaro calculated his escape route and started moving.

The sight of hotel bystanders screaming and crawling out the hotel door in a panic was quickly noticed by Inspector Tadashima, whose crew of officers was secretly staking out the building from the outside.

“Superintendent!”

Hitsuma, accepting the radio call from his director’s van, replied an “All right” and nodded to the man beside him. “Inspector, the commissioner just gave the order to deploy a Special Assault Team.”

“An SAT?! Do we really need to go that far?”

Hitsuma brought in a blue-uniformed special-forces captain. They saluted each other.

“Captain, I need you to bring your guys in. Take the fugitive dead or alive; just get the situation under control ASAP.”

“B-but, Superintendent Hitsuma, Lady Seitenshi said to not hurt the fugitive as much as possible…”

“I think we’ve got some wires crossed, Captain. I want you to shoot the fugitive down. You have my backup on that.”

Just then, a single gunshot rumbled its way across the hotel, as Rentaro Satomi and an unknown teenage boy began to wage battle in the middle of the lounge.

“What in the…?” Tadashima groaned.

The battle proceeded in bizarre fashion. The mystery kid would fire off a succession of shots, and Rentaro would step to the side or back to dodge them all. Not only that, but whenever there was an opening, he’d edge that much closer to his opponent. By the fifth shot, he was at point-blank range, the point where fists would decide the path of the fight.

Rentaro unleashed three punches from his arms. All of them would have ended the match right there, if they landed in the right place. The kid deflected them, retaliating with a high kick of his own. Rentaro bent his chin back to dodge it as he unleashed a horizontal chop designed to smash against his opponent’s throat.

It was a dizzying array of attacks, dodges, and further counters, like an elaborate martial-arts demonstration. The number of strikes offered by each fighter in the space of a single second made any side observer’s head swim. They appeared to be looking at each other, but in a way, they were both looking somewhere much farther off. When he realized they were simultaneously dodging attacks while piecing together a strategy for their next ten strikes, Tadashima’s entire body shuddered.

This wasn’t the sort of battle any human being could tag into.

What in the hell is going on?

Tadashima slipped a hand inside of his suit and tightened his grip on the revolver in his holster. He was going in after the first SAT assault.

Not that Tadashima could have known, but there was no way a battle whose participants could conduct the entire thought process—observation, comprehension, action—behind each move in a hundredth of a second could ever be stopped by a team of regular people, whose comparatively paltry muscle-reflex time never had a chance of reaching below 0.20 seconds.

The core processors behind each of their cybernetic eyes calculated furiously, straining near their maximum output to find a hole to exploit.

But, gradually, the battle began to demonstrate a certain one-sidedness.

“Gah!”

Taking a kick that made it feel like he was about to be reunited with the contents of his stomach, Rentaro found himself falling over a nearby upturned table. A flurry of glass shards rained upon him.

“We’re working with different specs here, okay? Different specs.”

Ahead of him, he could hazily see Yuga, calm and content as he opened his arms to him. Rentaro gritted his teeth as he stood up, readying himself for battle on unsteady legs. Yuga, observing his actions in detail, snorted.

“I know, Satomi. You’ve applied force to your right hamstring, your right femoral bicep muscle, and the ulnar extensor and ulnar flexor muscles on your left wrist. You’re planning to feint with a left and strike me with a mid-level kick, aren’t you? That’s gonna be a poor move, though. Once we exchange blows for the thirty-seventh time, I’m going to smash your skull bone to pieces. Checkmate.”

Startled, Rentaro tossed his accumulated tactical analysis into his mental garbage can and began to conceive a new strategy.

“Oh, are you changing gears now? That’s gonna be even worse. If you lunge at me to try to pin me down, I’ll break your jaw in ten moves or less. Checkmate.”

“No…”

The short circuit taking place in his brain made it impossible for Rentaro to even formulate a plan. He found himself edging back in fear.

Yuga lowered his stance, a self-assured smile on his face. The moment he did, a team of blue-suited assault troops streamed through the entrance and windows behind Yuga, charging for both of them.

The SAT? Why?

This was going too fast. The alarm bell only just started ringing a second ago.

The situation was beyond Rentaro’s comprehension, but he could tell they weren’t exactly here to rescue him. He had to get out of there. Now.

At that moment, a move flashed across his brain like lightning. A move that could completely turn the tables.

So how about this?

Tearing through the skin on his right leg, he revealed his artificial limb, the black chrome shining brilliantly in the light. The striker hit the cartridge hidden inside his leg, the ejector kicking it away.

“Raaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!”

Leaving his body to the power of inertia, Rentaro kicked. His foot was aimed at the floor beneath the carpet. His Super-Varanium toes tore through the fabric, pulverizing both the marble beneath it and the bare concrete beneath that as it blew all the debris forward.

The results were akin to a directional anti-personnel mine, one with a lethal, unavoidable payload of shrapnel.

The rock and marble, now crushed into several hundreds, several thousands of shards, unerringly advanced upon the SAT troops and Yuga. Even one of them striking anyone’s head would cause a sure concussion—and if not, a few dozen of those striking Yuga’s armorless frame could very likely result in multiple bone fractures.

But, amazingly, Yuga covered up his face and plunged right into the storm of shrapnel. An innumerable amount of fragments pounded against his entire body. Blood flew. His clothes were ripped to pieces. But he still made it through the shockwave.

By the time he realized Yuga was at his chest, the heel of his palm right against his breast, it was all too late. The blood drained from Rentaro’s face as he witnessed the twisted look of joy on his opponent’s.

“I admire your performance, Satomi. Good-bye.”

He twisted his palm. A paralyzing pain took Rentaro, as if the torsion was applied directly to his internal organs. Picturing the cold hand of death clasping itself around his heart, he quickly spun his body, kicked at the floor, and flew back, avoiding lethal injury. Something heavy smashed into his back, knocking the air out of his lungs.

The next thing he knew, Rentaro had flown into an elevator car, panting for breath. Yuga was positioned for a follow-up strike. Reflexively, Rentaro jabbed his finger against the DOOR CLOSE button and the one for the top floor. The door closed so slowly, he wanted to scream—and Yuga was advancing on him the whole time.

Just as Rentaro thought his adversary disappeared behind the heavy doors, Yuga let out a shuddering kick to prevent his escape. With the sickening sound of twisting, crushing metal, the door began to dent inward.

The entire elevator car shook, bits of wall tile falling off and plinking against the floor. It took Rentaro some time to realize this disaster was engineered entirely by a single kick.

Still, after a moment or two of thought, the cable hoist installed at the top of the shaft apparently decided to haul the elevator up. The elevator rose with a slow, listless, but nevertheless constant force.

Rentaro gritted his teeth at the grinding pain as he rolled up the long-sleeve shirt he was wearing. The mark Yuga’s palm had left on his chest was a sickeningly deep shade of blue. What kind of strike could damage the human body so profoundly? All he knew was that Yuga meant that last move to be his finisher. If it had hit him full bore, he’d be dead right now.

That was the New World Creation Project.

“Damn it…!” He sighed deeply as he stared at the ceiling, languid.

Despite losing his prey, Yuga—eyes staring at the elevator’s floor indicator to see where Rentaro would escape—felt perfectly refreshed in his heart. The edges of his lips curled upward.

“The game begins, Satomi. Just try to escape this hotel alive.”

“Halt!”

Suddenly, a rather impolite voice flew at him from behind.

“Put the gun down and put your hands on your head!”

He narrowed his eyes, annoyed at the interlopers ruining the mood. As he expected, a large force had their eyes and guns pointed at him.

They were clad in blue, which nicely framed their black bulletproof vests and the visored helmets on their heads. The front line wielded handguns and riot shields, the troops behind them armed with submachine guns. It was the SAT.

Yuga very reluctantly put his left hand above his head, the right one pointing at a pocket in his light jacket. Receiving a nod of permission, he slowly, deliberately took out a card holder and threw it on the ground.

An SAT team member gingerly picked it up, fixing his gaze upon it. It contained a civil security license.

Yuga was not a Promoter, nor did he have an Initiator partner. It was a fake, given by his “employer” to make it easier for him to walk around armed in public, but the special-forces team would never have a chance to confirm that.

“Oh, what, you’re a civsec? What’re you doing here?”

“I heard about him escaping on the news. I spotted him on the street, and as a fellow civsec, I felt it was my duty to do something about this. Guess he got away, though.”

The SAT member tossed the case back at Yuga and waved him away. “All right, you can go. We’ll take over the scene.”

Yuga shrugged and walked toward the entrance. Just as he did, two detectives came through the revolving door. One was clearly Hitsuma—tall and handsome, even from afar—but who was that worn-out old guy next to him?

Hitsuma clapped his hands to get the SAT troops’ attention. “All right, hurry up and cut off the elevator’s main and backup power. Once we trap Rentaro Satomi in there, you guys take the stairs up. I have another team coming down from the roof; we’ll close in on him from both sides. Do not let the fugitive get away.”

With a single order, the hall filled with noise as the SAT crew divided into two groups, one running for the emergency stairwell. As he passed by Hitsuma, Yuga took advantage of the loud footsteps to whisper into his ear.

“I’m ambushing Satomi from another point.”

“Don’t make this harder for me, Dark Stalker. Not even I can cover for you forever.”

“I know, Mr. Hitsuma.”

The whole interaction took place without so much as their eyes meeting. Once Yuga emerged out the revolving door, he found a small herd of police cars, their lights bouncing off every surface in the area around the hotel. A hot, sticky wind blew against his face, but it still felt weirdly refreshing to him as he looked up at the Magata Plaza Hotel, looming large in the night sky.

They had already allowed him to escape once. If Rentaro made it out of the hotel, the police’s reputation would be at stake. There was no doubt they’d pull out every stop to hunt him down.

From this point forward, Yuga’s adversary would be the SAT.

Rentaro slapped his cheeks to mentally refresh himself. He couldn’t sit in this car forever.

Before long, the elevators would shut off. They’d operate a circuit breaker or two, he figured, to make sure only his elevator would stop in place. This meant the car would turn into a giant metal tomb. He’d just have to sit there and wait for his arrest.

But how am I gonna get out of this hotel…?

Looking at the floor indicator, he found the hotel spanned a total of thirty-two floors. He pushed the 20 button, nearest to where he was now, and in a few moments, the door opened with a chipper beep.

Then the light in the elevator shut off, darkening his vision. Just as the door was about to close, it stopped cold for good. Rentaro had no time to be startled—he knew immediately what had happened. A bead of cold sweat ran down his back.

The lights were still on in the corridor he stepped into—recessed lights, illuminating the beige wallpaper. Towels, nightgowns, and other detritus lined the floors. Perhaps unnerved by the sudden alarms, most of the guests on this floor left their doors wide open, fleeing the scene with whatever they could grab. In other words, most of them were long gone. He couldn’t sense anyone nearby.

Keeping his guard up, Rentaro crept up to a twentieth-floor window and carefully looked down. The police had already arrived, and the flashing lights of their cars silently revealed the multilayered perimeter they built around the hotel, ringed by yellow police tape. Beyond that, a crowd of reporters and onlookers teemed. There wasn’t enough room for so much as an ant to slip through.

Suddenly hearing a rotor from afar, he squinted at the sky, spotting a helicopter restlessly spinning its searchlight around. Rentaro edged away from the window as the ray of light swept past it.

There was no way he could stay on this floor for long. The police already knew the elevator was stopped on floor twenty. But going down was out of the question…which meant his only option was to go up. Rentaro knew all too well that things were only getting worse for him.

Pushing open a metal door beneath a green emergency-exit sign with a little running man on it, he felt a chill wind against his face. In stark contrast to the magnificent interior décor, the rustic emergency stairway was lined with exposed pipes as it spiraled up and down.

Hearing subdued footsteps from below, Rentaro looked over the guardrail to find SAT troopers in riot gear, their faces covered by visors, about seven floors below him. He met eyes with one of them. In a panic, he pulled his face away from the guardrail, in tandem with the trooper pointing his gun upward and pulling the trigger.

With a blast muffled by a silencer, a hail of bullets clanged against the rail, making Rentaro snap his head back. Sweating, he crouched down low as he sped off. One way or the other, his only path was upward.

But, after a few floors, he heard a clatter of equally subdued footsteps from above. His spine froze in terror. They must have climbed out from the helicopter.

Realizing he was the victim of a pincer attack and feeling the desperation settle in, Rentaro looked at the metal plate in the stairwell. Floor 26. Opening the metal door, he rolled into the hallway, fairly wide and lined with beige wallpaper, recessed lighting, and familiar-looking doors on both sides. The same as the twentieth floor. Several doors were open, left unattended by panicking evacuees, some leaving their shoes and even their wallets on the floor as they stumbled away.

He had to stand his ground here.

Rentaro thought about barricading himself in an empty room, but the voice of reason stopped him. He was dealing with professionals at resolving standoffs and disarming terrorist groups. What chance would he have?

He ducked into the nearest room, went up to the bathroom mirror, and took an elbow to it. With a dry cracking sound, it shattered. He chose a suitable piece, left the room, dove left at a T intersection, plastered himself against the wall, and pointed the mirror fragment at the hallway he had just left, pulling his wrist back as he adjusted the angle.

As he guessed, he heard the faint creak of the emergency-exit door, stirring up the otherwise-stagnant air of the empty hotel.

Here they come. Six of them, with riot shields, in the mirror-image world. Surprisingly, even though they were in heavy headgear, protectors, and combat boots, he could no longer hear them move. Their intense wariness indicated that they were sure of his position.

Quietly, Rentaro wiped a sweaty palm on his pants.

The troopers’ headgear protected their eyes from things like flash grenades. Their submachine guns were a half-and-half mix of Heckler & Koch and Shiba Heavy Weapons, both deadly accurate. Luckily, they hadn’t noticed him yet.

Since he was still in the clothes he wore to the Seitenshi’s palace, Rentaro had neither his wallet nor any sort of gun. He’d have to tackle them empty-handed. An all-or-nothing bull rush at them might allow him time to finish off one or two, but no more than that before someone shot him. But if he stayed still, they’d spot his position, roll a Flash Bang down the hall, and that’d be it. Those things were serious business—between the sound, the light, and the pressure wave from the explosion, they were the perfect weapon for indoor combat zones.

The shockwave, in particular, was powerful enough to break cell phones, wristwatches, and other precision devices. Having one blow up at point-blank range could even cause bone fractures and ruptured eardrums—nothing you could avoid just by closing your eyes and sticking your fingers in your ears.

Rentaro’s pulse quickened, the hairs on his nape sticking out.

What do I do? What do I do? Even as he thought about that, the SAT were following what they learned in training, tackling each doorway in pairs to eliminate blind spots before entering and clearing out the hotel rooms. It was shocking how silent they were.

Something bounced off Rentaro’s foot as he began to walk. Looking down, he realized it was a Magata Plaza Hotel–branded box of matches. A guest must have dropped it in the frenzied confusion earlier.

A flash of intuition struck Rentaro’s mind, and looking straight up, he found exactly what he was looking for. Resolved to his plan, he nodded to himself and performed a move he never thought he’d do in his life.

Suddenly, one of the hallway doors opened, revealing a confused-looking woman wandering out. He thought she might’ve been a straggler who missed the evaluation, but one look, and he knew it. Those empty eyes told Rentaro she was struggling under some sort of illness.

A surprised SAT trooper pulled his gun on her.

“Whoa, wai—”

Before Rentaro could stop him, an empty-sounding blast ripped across the hall as an unfortunate shot bounded its way toward the woman. She fell to her knees, then to the floor. Rentaro sped out to get near her, only to be pushed back by a steel wave of bullets, pulverizing the wall behind him and creating a cloud of dust that got in his eyes.

They got my position, too.

He had no time to think. He dove into a nearby room, took a chair out of it, then stood on it as he struck a match against the flint. A warm flame kindled itself in his hands. He thrust it toward the edge of the ceiling.

It was aimed squarely at the fire alarm system. The heat-detection sensor picked up on the flame from the match, immediately ordering the adjacent sprinkler to activate.

An intense rain sprang up across the floor.

Listening to the SAT team fall into confusion and making sure their fire had stopped, Rentaro looked down the corridor. The scene was exactly what he envisioned. The SAT troopers, their sight robbed by the sprays of water, were a disorganized mess, trying their best to remove their helmets.

This was his chance.

Leaping out from the wall, Rentaro activated his gunpowder-activated artificial leg, firing off a single burst. Thrusters spat out exhaust from the back of his foot.

“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!”

His body zoomed at superspeed down the hall, so quickly that he felt like his body would fall apart. Then he smashed right into the SAT men in front of him. Even through their visors, he could tell he had the element of surprise on his side. Keeping the thrust going, he used his pivot leg to give himself rotational force, unleashing a roundhouse kick. It slammed into one of the polycarbonate shields, smashing it along with a trooper’s visor as he was sent flying through the air backward.

The point man—lagging behind because of the potential for friendly fire—along with two troopers desperately trying to rip their helmets off, were struck in the face by a pair of fists launched from Rentaro’s body. Without skipping a beat, he searched for his next target. The heel of his palm applied to another trooper’s chin rattled both the SAT member’s visor and his brain. He finished another with a chop to the throat before his opponent even knew what happened.

One could only guess what the final survivor was thinking, watching his comrades get picked off in less than a second. After an instant of thought, he threw off his submachine gun and tried to take out his backup revolver. It goes without saying that this move was ill-advised. Handguns had little power when one was within closed-fist range of a target. After that point, it all came down to how gifted a martial artist one was.

Rentaro lunged at his chest, grappling at him as he placed a hand above his holster to keep him from drawing. His other hand was placed palm-down on the plating in his bulletproof vest.

“Tendo Martial Arts First Style, Number 12—”

A bolt of terror flashed across the man’s eyes. But it was all too late.

“—Senkuu Renen!”

With a heavy thump, the very air shook across the floor. The trooper’s body bounced off the floor, eyes lolling upward. The force applied to him at such tight quarters was enough to finish him, no matter how thick the plating on his vest was; that was an ironclad rule in close-quarters combat. This was the unchanging credo that gave Tendo Martial Arts such all-powerful strength.

Amid the torrential rain from the sprinkler, Rentaro quietly took the Infinite Stance, calming his heart just as the five SAT troopers he had faced fell to the floor all at once, flopping over the one Rentaro had defeated first with his roundhouse.

The fight was over. The rain falling around him was warm to the touch, weighing down his school uniform. Sensing the water droplets falling from his hair, his chin, his nose, Rentaro adjusted his breathing for a moment as he remained in his stance. Then, returning to reality, he crouched down next to the woman one of them shot.

“Hey. Hey, hang in there.”

She was shot once in the abdominal area with a 9-mm bullet. It was still lodged in her body.

The woman groggily opened her eyes. “I…I couldn’t sleep… I…I took some…pills…”

Rentaro heard that being forced awake after taking a strong relaxant resulted in intense feelings of anger and the inability to walk steadily. Whatever her illness was, her medicine knocked her out so cold that she couldn’t even respond to that alarm in time. He fetched a towel from a nearby room and pressed it against the open wound to stop the blood. It went bright red in the blink of an eye. The sprinkler water was chilling her body as well. This was nothing first aid could solve for her. And he had no time left to lose.

Giving himself a nod, Rentaro walked over to an SAT trooper—the one who fired the fateful shot at her. Kicking the submachine gun away, he grabbed his knife and gun, holster and all. Making sure he was wholly unarmed, Rentaro crouched down and slapped his cheek.

With a groan, he opened his eyes, trying to hazily focus on Rentaro in front of him. A professional to the core, he didn’t make a noise once he realized the situation, and instead glared at Rentaro.

“You’ve got nowhere to run. Stop filling up your rap sheet.”

Rentaro aimed his gun at him. “Shut up,” he threatened. “That ammo you fired hit an innocent woman. She needs surgery to remove the bullet right now. Can you carry her down to the lobby? Just nod if it’s yes.”

The man looked overwhelmed for a moment, but quickly returned to his usual grave countenance. Still pointing the gun at him, Rentaro made the man pick the woman up and saw him off to the stairwell. Before they left, he grabbed the woman’s hand.

“Stay calm, okay, lady? They’re gonna save you.”

The woman gave him an unfocused look. “You…,” she said, unsteadily. “You’re…a killer… Why’d you…help…?”

“……”

Then the woman extended a hand to him.

“I…ah… Thank—”

“Don’t talk. Just think about staying alive.” Rentaro gave the man a nudge. He looked back a couple times, clearly wanting to say something, before descending the stairwell. Carrying a person down from the twenty-sixth floor was hard work, but a trained SAT trooper could probably deal with it.

Rentaro watched him go down, thinking to himself.

The HQ might be panicking about the lack of contact from their SAT group, but once they realized how it doesn’t affect their position all that much, they’d just send in another team. There was no guarantee he’d win next time. And there might be other stragglers like that woman. If he broke down a door or two, grabbed some quivering hotel guest, and took him hostage, that might prevent the cops from making the first move.

“…Don’t be stupid.”

Rentaro immediately shook his head. He made it this far because he wanted to prove his innocence and find the real killer. Committing more crimes for non-self-defense reasons would be putting the cart before the horse.

He took a glance at the floor above him. He knew this great escape had every chance of ending soon, but there was nothing else he could do. He just had to struggle for as long as he could.

Not bothering to stop at the top floor, he continued climbing the stairs, through an AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign and right up to the door leading to the roof. He shook the knob. It didn’t budge. Locked. Activating his artificial arm, he swung a fist right into the middle of it, sending it off its hinges and into the outdoor air.

Stepping onto the roof, he noticed the clouds zipping by at high speed in the night air. The sky was so much closer now; the wind lapping between the high-rise buildings made the sopping-wet Rentaro feel unpleasantly cold.

Running to the edge of the building, Rentaro observed the police lights flash on and off below him. The sound of the helicopter rotors was, thankfully, far away.

Spotting a building in front of him taller than the Plaza Hotel, Rentaro found himself seized by an odd sense of déjà vu. Then he remembered something. His battle against Tina Sprout, the Seitenshi sniper, amid the derelict buildings of the Outer Districts. In order to get under her position, he had used his leg thrusters to launch a series of rapid bursts to leap from building to building. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

Could that work here, too?

Rentaro took another glance down. The authorities had surrounded the hotel building, but nowhere else. The adjacent building was free. Eyeballing it, he estimated the distance between here and there to be around twenty meters. A wide river flowed between the two buildings. He had made it across a much larger distance, he figured, in the Tina battle. Just do it the same way as before, and it would be a shoo-in.

Can I do this? Can I?

Rentaro brought a palm up to his face. It was shaking slightly. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t scared, but knowing this wasn’t the first time he had faced a deadly leap like this pushed him over the brink.

Walking back from the guardrail, he went all the way to the other side, giving himself ample space to build up a head of steam. He pictured the successful traverse in his mind. One little error in his timing, and he’d be falling straight down to his death. The hotel, if his memory served him, was 147 meters tall—not exactly the duplex down the street. Mess this up, and not only would they have to peel him off the sidewalk; he’d have plenty of time to picture the whole scene on the way down, too.

He stretched out his fingers, forming them into fists and opening them up again to calm the nerves. The sweat came right back to his palms. He inhaled, then exhaled.

Staring at the space in front of him, he started running. Slowly at first, not more than a jog. Then gradually building up speed, then at full blast, making sure not to get his feet tangled.

The guardrail was in sight. He stepped over it, then flung himself into the air. After a moment spent gliding, he felt an odd type of weightlessness as the wind carried him into its current. Simultaneously, he set off a cartridge in his leg. With a bang, he felt acceleration hit him like a wall as it propelled him forward.

Barely managing to squint ahead, he saw thin air spread in front of him. The angle, and the timing of the thruster blast, were perfect. Now he just needed to maintain a steady rhythm of cartridge blasts to keep him—

Suddenly, he felt a shock rip through the side of his stomach.

“—Uh?”

He’d been so sure of his success just moments ago, he couldn’t immediately identify the plume of blood fanning out from his side at first.

From that point forward, the world went into a bizarre sort of slow motion. Rentaro’s body flailed in the air, head pointed straight down. Then he saw it.

There was a gunshot wound on his side. A sniper hit him, in midair, at blazing speed.

The rangefinder almost reflexively activated in his eye, spotting a figure 200 meters off in the distance, on top of a roof with a gigantic light-up billboard on it.

“N…no…”

Feeling gravity do its work on his body, Rentaro was swallowed up in the perpetual darkness.

The smell of hot smoke wisped out from his gun, searing his nostrils.

“Checkmate.”

Yuga, assuming a kneeling posture on the roof, lifted his head up from the night scope mounted on top of his DSR sniper rifle. He turned the handle as he pulled it forward. An empty cartridge flew to the ground.

Standing up, Yuga watched Rentaro fall for a few moments as he took out his cell phone.

“Dark Stalker to Nest. Mission complete. Target silenced. Awaiting further orders.”

“You’re sure you got him?”

“He fell in the river, so I can’t be sure, but falling in water from the height he did is just like impacting concrete. He must’ve broken every bone in his body. My condolences to his family.”

14

“No…!”

The Seitenshi rose from her throne in horror, both hands covering her lips.

The police commissioner in the crew cut, hands clasped behind his back, sadly shook his head.

“They were apparently forced to neutralize him after he put up heavy resistance. There was nothing we could do.”

The shock was similar at the Tendo Civil Security Agency.

“You, you’re kidding me…”

Kisara, rearing away, was blocked by her desk from going farther. Hitsuma quickly acted to hold her before her legs gave out.

“I’m deeply sorry, Ms. Tendo. I told my men multiple times to take Satomi alive if they could, but apparently there were some crossed wires in our command chain.”

Kisara shook violently as she embraced Hitsuma.

“What am I gonna do…? I… What am I gonna do? Enju, Tina, Satomi… They’re all gone.”

There was something moving about the sight—such a firm, resolute woman, looking so pitifully small now. Hitsuma turned her head away from the desk, then lightly blew into her ear. It practically made her leap out of his arms.

“Now you’re all alone,” he sweetly whispered. “I want to be here. To help you forget about your loneliness… Will you marry me, Kisara?”

They both had their respective chins on each other’s shoulders so he couldn’t gauge her face, but through the shaking, he could feel one firm, palpable nod on his body.

Now this girl is mine.

Resisting the urge to shout out in joy, he turned his face downward.

Her hair was as jet-black as a raven, her skin almost a sickly white, her neck thin. Her collarbone was flushed with pink, no doubt from her emotional agitation. Her breasts, like fruit, pushed up by her black school uniform, were ripe and ready for the picking, practically dripping with sweetness radiating off her body. It was like a work of art.

Just as he was reaching toward one of them, hoping for perhaps a small taste, the cell phone in his breast pocket rang. He nodded at Kisara, almost groaning in frustration in the process, and answered it.

“This is Nest. Dark Stalker says he needs to talk to you about Rentaro Satomi. It’s urgent.”

It was now one o’clock in the morning.

Police officers swarmed to the riverside where Rentaro fell, Yuga Mitsugi among the crowd. He stared at the river with his hands in his pockets, motionless.

Is this it? he wondered to himself.

Rentaro Satomi… He considered the life of his adversary: the savior of Tokyo Area. Part of the civsec pair whose names were on the lips of people worldwide. The slayer of Kagetane Hiruko, Rank 134. Slayer of the Zodiac Scorpion. Slayer of Tina Sprout, Rank 98. Slayer of Aldebaran, the immortal Gastrea.

If this was any normal civsec, he would’ve been 100 percent dead in these circumstances. But was he?

A bespectacled young man sidled up to him.

“What is it?”

“Mr. Hitsuma,” he said as he stared at the black water, “can you get divers on the scene right away?”

Hitsuma eyed him doubtfully, wondering what inspired this.

“There’s no point doing that until sunrise.”

“It’ll give me some peace of mind, at least. It’ll be too late by then anyway.”

Hitsuma’s eyebrows arched downward. “You think Rentaro Satomi is alive? You said you defeated him.”

“I’m saying that we need to prepare for anything. Common sense doesn’t apply to him.”

“That’s high praise, coming from you.”

“You haven’t fought him, Mr. Hitsuma. You wouldn’t understand. My specs were defined so I’d be able to suppress Rentaro Satomi. When we did the calculations before the mission, there was supposed to be a 0.02 percent chance of Satomi even landing a blow on me. But even though I deflected it, Satomi landed the first strike. A kick. When we unleashed our eyes, he managed to graze me three times because I couldn’t calculate his moves fast enough. In the end, I was hit by a rain of shrapnel I had no chance of dodging. Satomi was starting to get accustomed to my moves.”

“……”

“Wouldn’t that make you sleep better, too, Mr. Hitsuma, if we found an arm or his head or something?”

“Look, are you threatening me?”

Yuga shrugged and raised his hands in surrender.

“No, no, no. I’m just making a suggestion. Just get those divers in here, all right? As long as we don’t find a body, I think it’ll be smarter for all of us if we treat him as alive.”