In the end, Rentaro had won the gamble. He opened and closed his hands and rotated his arms. His body felt fine. There were no symptoms of him turning into a Gastrea. Kagetane went crazy shooting his fully automatic Beretta. Rentaro’s arm went up to protect his head and heart as he shielded Enju. Again, he felt the intense attacks pierce his flesh as blood flew out of his whole body. Almost all the bullets hit their target, but immediately afterward, the bullets were excreted from his body.
Even as Rentaro felt dizzy with the pain, he chuckled inside. As long as he had this—
However, that self-conceit only lasted for a few seconds. Because Rentaro had raised his hands to guard his face, he noticed Kagetane’s approach too late. The rear guard was coming in for close combat? Why?
Completely deliberately, Kagetane slowly put the palm of his hand on Rentaro’s side. “It’s over. I will show you my secret weapon.” Rentaro could hear Kagetane’s voice deep within his skull. “Endless Scream.”
In the blink of an eye, an intense shock ran through Rentaro’s body from his toes to the top of his head, and his body floated for an instant.
“Huh…?” said Rentaro. The repulsion field had become an enormous spear and pierced through Rentaro’s abdomen.
Kagetane pulled out the spear with great momentum, and Rentaro tottered and stumbled for a few steps. The right side of his abdomen was gone. A circle was cut out of Rentaro’s body as if drawn by a giant compass. A cross section of his ribs was visible, and his internal organs peeked out. Rentaro slowly put his hand to his stomach, scared of what he would find. Blood welled up as if it had just remembered it needed to, and his organs and bowels spilled out.
“N-no…way…” Rentaro coughed up blood and fell to his knees. Turning his head and seeing Enju with both hands covering her mouth, he reached out a hand, imploring Kagetane Hiruko, who was looking down at him with cold eyes.
Kagetane crossed himself. “You’ve lost,” he said.
Thinking that the ground was drawing near, Rentaro fell forward. The stain of blood encroached on the deck. The shadow of Rentaro’s death was reflected in the puddle of blood. His arms and legs twitched on their own.
No matter how long he waited, the wound in his body would not regenerate. Even with the effects of the AGV test drug, it apparently could not deal with such a large wound. Unable to bear the pain, Rentaro’s cells were quickly giving up on their host. Darkness came at Rentaro from all sides and an extraordinary loneliness descended on him.
Enju was desperately shaking his body. Tears poured out of her eyes as she screamed at Rentaro for some reason. He couldn’t hear what she was saying.
Then, Kohina kicked Enju’s chin away as Enju raised her head. Enju flew into the lounge table and fell loudly, getting tangled with an umbrella. Kagetane aimed at Enju’s head with his gun and mumbled something under his breath.
Was he planning on killing Enju? Enju, who had already lost the will to fight?
Enju stretched out her arms at Rentaro, without any consideration for her own safety. The pain seemed to gouge out Rentaro’s heart.
“…………!”
He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t hear Enju’s voice. He could feel the cold hand of death reaching into his wound.
“………………!”
His consciousness disintegrated, and he sank into a deep darkness. His eyelids felt heavy and trembled.
Suddenly, Enju’s voice mixed with sobbing flooded in through his eardrum and echoed in his head. “Don’t die, Rentaro! We haven’t been able to do anything yet. Don’t leave me alone!”
Thump, his heart leapt, and his eyes opened suddenly. His right hand grabbed the four remaining AGV test-drug syringes in a flash and, holding them between his fingers, he pulled off their caps with his mouth and thrust them all into his abdomen.
With a familiar sound, Rentaro’s chest swelled, and his bones rang with a strange sound. His body cramped and boiled, and he felt chills like something was crawling around through him. The hole in his body made a popping sound, and then—
Enju was surprised at the regeneration that started. Blood spilled, flesh bulged, bowels hung out, nerves connected, his body temperature dropped, bones were rebuilt, and cells regenerated as they died out.
Rentaro’s body was dying at a terrifying speed and then coming back to life with amazing momentum, a melting pot of contradictions. Feeling an intense pain as if his internal organs were being rearranged, Rentaro writhed and randomly hit his head against the deck.
Then, Rentaro gave a great scream at the sky and stood up. He staggered a few steps as he almost slipped on the blood pooled below him. His vision was severely distorted, and his depth perception bent the world as if he were completely drunk. But he could still see the death god he was supposed to defeat.
His body was hot. It felt like it was on fire. He felt extreme nausea that came with a pounding headache and the urge to vomit. Rentaro himself wondered why he was able to stand. However, his arms and legs could still move, and he was alive.
Kagetane’s mouth gaped as he stood, frozen. “Satomi… What in the world are you…?”
Rentaro shot an evil look at his enemy and readied himself. He took the Tendo Martial Arts Water and Sky Stance. The clear ocean and sky became a single, boundless blue. It was a stance that attacked without worrying about defense.
When Rentaro let out a hot breath, it lingered white in the air and then was carried away by the wind. He closed his eyes and then slowly opened them. Then, he kicked the ground. The sound of an explosion rang from his feet, and an empty casing was ejected. He turned his leg’s mobility thruster back and let the jet propulsion come out of the back of his leg. His body felt like it was being torn apart, but he bore the pain and sprung out in a second in front of the enemy.
Kohina unfroze and jumped out without a moment’s delay. “Off with your head!” she shouted.
“Outta the way!” said Rentaro as he used his right arm to deal with the blade she swung downward with all her might. Three empty casings popped out at the same time as the explosion, and the strong smell of gunpowder filled their nostrils. Kohina’s eyes opened so wide that the corners of her eyelids seemed about to split apart.
Tendo Martial Arts First Style, Number 8: Homura Kasen, Burst.
Coming at Rentaro from the front again was the fist and the short sword. Intense shock waves pierced his whole body. With his Super-Varanium fist, he broke the remaining short sword into pieces and blew Kohina away like a scrap of paper. She bounced on the deck and broke through the wall to the pilothouse, crashing into the meters and gauges inside. Kohina lay stunned against the wall with a concussion.
Without stopping, he fired his leg and accelerated again with an impact that almost blew him away. He charged directly through a barrage of bullets.
Kagetane lowered himself with a flutter of his tailcoat. “Endless…”
“Tendo Martial Arts First Style, Number 15…,” Rentaro began.
Kagetane turned and threw away his gun and reached behind him to ready the spear. At almost the same time, an empty casing flew from Rentaro’s arm, and he let loose an uppercut with wonderful speed that looked as if it were scooping something from the bottom up.
“…Screeeeeammm!” Kagetane finished.
“…Unebikoryu!” Rentaro shouted at the same time.
A phosphorescent spear hit Rentaro’s fist and a thunderous roar scattered through the night sky. The clash of a strong fist with unparalleled hardness and a bluish-white spear that could repel bullets from antitank rifles lit up their surroundings like midday.
Rentaro gritted his teeth, his leg sinking with the deck. The ship planks on the deck were flying off from the shock. He tasted bitter adrenaline in this mouth.
As the superior spear slowly pushed his arm back, he broke out in a cold sweat all over his body. Rentaro screamed, stuck together with Kagetane, and fired off a succession of cartridges. The first shot pushed the spear, and the second shot made it clear t
hat his arm was shoved into the spear.
The third shot—Rentaro felt his arm suddenly thrown forward. With an explosive sound that deafened his ears, a supersonic uppercut blew the spear and Kagetane’s body ten meters into the air. Kagetane looked like he did not know what had just happened.
Rentaro bounded up, changed the thruster angle to the back and fired. Jumping up as high as Kagetane, he half turned his body at the top and, facing downward, he fired off the rest of the cartridges in his leg. “Tendo Martial Arts Second Style, Number 11—”
For a brief moment, everything seemed to be in slow motion.
A shower of empty golden casings shot out as he turned, seeming to pour down in a shower from above, filling his vision in slow motion. In the downpour of empty casings, his eyes met Kagetane’s.
Kagetane spoke in a quiet, hoarse voice, as if he had already given up. “I see… So I lost…to you…huh…?”
As the wind whistled by Rentaro’s ears, time returned to normal. It was all or nothing. “—Inzen Kokutei Unlimited Burst…! Fall…!”
It was an overhead kick of judgment that turned the sky and earth upside down. With his Super-Varanium toes, he ripped through Kagetane’s field and crushed his lungs, breaking a few of his ribs and blowing him away. Kagetane’s body bounced with amazing speed over the top of the ocean like a skipping stone, going through two of the small boats moored in the bay, blown almost a hundred meters away, where he landed with a pillar of water like a tsunami that rose and sank.
Rentaro couldn’t completely negate the force of his own kick and spun in midair as he dropped, landing hard on the ground on his back with a groan. Immediately jumping up, he surveyed the ocean without letting down his guard.
Ten seconds passed, then twenty. The air shimmered with the heat let off from the successive firing of large-caliber shells from his artificial limbs. The enemy remained submerged.
Slowly letting out a breath, he turned toward to Enju to show her a smile. “All right, we won, Enju! Yahoo!”
Enju gaped, flabbergasted.
Rentaro scratched his head. Well, it was surprising.
“No… Papa, Papa…!” Turning his head toward the voice, Rentaro saw Kohina on her knees with an expression of despair on her face.
Enju appeared conflicted as she looked up at Rentaro. Rentaro shook his head softly. “She’s not an enemy anymore.”
At that moment, there was a vibration in his chest pocket, and a tinny electronic sound echoed in the air.
“It seems you’re alive, Satomi.” He knew who it was just from the voice. Hot tears pricked his eyes when he heard the graceful voice filled with kindness and confidence.
“It’s done,” said Rentaro. “I won, just like I promised, Kisara.”
“I saw. Unfortunately, I have one piece of bad news for you.”
“Bad news…?”
Kisara spoke with an unusually gloomy voice. “Listen calmly. A Stage Five Gastrea has appeared.”
“What?” Rentaro could only respond questioningly. The words wouldn’t sink in and just floated superficially at the surface of his mind.
So it was over for Tokyo Area. Everyone would be killed. No one would survive.
2
Kisara added one thing after another using present progressive tense as the events were happening. According to what she said, at almost the same time the JNSC council room celebrated the defeat of the Kagetane pair, they received the report of the appearance of the Stage Five, and everyone’s faces paled.
The instant the nonstandard-size Gastrea’s head appeared in Tokyo Bay, missiles, poison gas, and torpedoes were fired, but the missiles and torpedoes barely scratched it, and those scratches healed in a second. The poison gas was a VX nerve gas, the worst known to man, but after taking in the gas, the Gastrea virus analyzed its components in a second and developed a resistance to it. The dependable Varanium armor-piercing ammunition was repelled by the Gastrea’s hard skin. Kisara ended by telling him that the people in the meeting room had fallen into a panic.
Rentaro looked from the port to the faraway horizon of Tokyo Bay. It was true that he could see light and hear soft sounds of explosions in the night. The battle had already begun.
From what she said, he gathered that Kisara had somehow been invited into the JNSC situation room. While they were talking, Rentaro could hear frantic screams and angry shouts arguing back and forth incessantly in the background behind her. It was probably only a matter of time before people started trying to run away.
“Is it all over for us? Is there no hope left of saving Tokyo Area?” Rentaro shut his eyes tightly and prayed as he waited for her answer.
Finally, she spoke, her voice with its usual dignity. “It’s too soon to give up. When I asked the Seitenshi if the plan I just came up with was physically possible, she said, ‘I daresay we can do it.’”
“We can survive…? H-how?”
“We can see you and Enju from here. You can see the answer if you look southeast.”
He turned his head in the direction she had given. Then he understood her plan and was taken aback. No way… It’s impossible, Kisara. There’s no way it’d work.
Two parallel rails 1.5 kilometers long stretched out and pierced the sky at an angle of elevation of about seventy degrees. From where he stood, thin clouds were in the way and he could not see through to the tip. A relic of the last stages of the Great Gastrea War, the massive weapon was completed but had not even been tested once before it was unavoidably abandoned and left to watch over the loss of the war. It was called the Stairway to Heaven.
It was also known as a Linear Electromagnetic Projectile Device. It was a railgun module that could accelerate and fire metal projectiles eight hundred millimeters or less in diameter at near light speed.
“You two are the closest to the target location. There’s no time to lose. You’re going to do it, Satomi.”
The electric lights of the facility turned on all at once as Rentaro and Enju approached. Using the power supply network from the mainland, it was the first time in ten years that they had been turned on. Because the thick power cables were securely shielded and buried underground, they did not suffer any damage from the Gastrea running wild aboveground and could still operate now, ten years later.
The facility sat atop a small mountain, and a deep forest spread around it. The pure white outer walls with spikes on top rose sternly to refuse entry, but unfortunately, it did not take into account the jumping powers of a girl with a Rabbit Factor. Enju quickly carried them over the wall, and they went inside.
From the air, Rentaro could see the whole facility for an instant. The giant base of the Stairway to Heaven that was propped up by supports was connected to a round object about a hundred meters in diameter, which was probably used to store power of some kind.
However, compared to the impressive railgun module, the adjoining research facility looked smaller even than the grounds of Rentaro’s school, Magata High. The mystery was soon solved when he looked at a map of the facility that had been sent to his phone. The facility stretched belowground like an ant nest, and the building that showed its face aboveground looked like it was just the tip of the iceberg.
“Satomi, hurry,” Kisara said from Rentaro’s cell phone.
Rentaro dashed inside the facility with Enju. Inside was a tangled, complicated maze, as though its designer had been afraid of guerrilla occupation. The room they were looking for was on the second floor of the basement. Following the map and Kisara’s guidance, Rentaro reached the middle computer room, panting.
The dome inside was spacious, with computers and other equipment set up around the room. On the front was a giant angled electroluminescent panel spread out, and surprisingly, even after being abandoned for ten years, there wasn’t a speck of dust accumulated on it.
Rentaro hurried to the control panel in the center of the room, stretched out the external connection terminal, and connected his cell phone. When it suddenly asked for a twenty-
digit password, he was flustered, but Kisara’s clear voice over the phone did not show a moment’s hesitation.
He could hear other people’s voices behind Kisara. Apparently, in the midst of this confusion, Kisara had been made responsible for this plan. Which meant that the Seitenshi and everyone else present were probably staying back and relaying information to Kisara. The password went through easily and the green bars extended, completing the link. Transmissions between the facility and headquarters began.
“…the electricity supply from the unmanned transformer station underground looks good, and there are no irregularities with the power supply network, either. The vacuum flask for the liquid helium also looks good. This will work. We will carry out the launch sequence on our end.”
As they were getting a handle on the condition of the facility, Rentaro fidgeted nervously. Kisara’s voice was far away. On top of that, there were fewer transmission signal indicator bars showing up than he had expected. At first, he thought it was because of the large amount of data, but it seemed to be a problem with the signal. But why? A satellite phone was never out of area, so he didn’t know why the data would transfer so slowly. He had a bad feeling about this. If his connection to Kisara was cut off right now, it would be all over.
While all this was going on, an alert lamp lit up in the facility and a synthetic female voice echoed through the halls. “We will now commence the activation of the Linear Electromagnetic Projectile Device. Workers in the interlock portion of the superconductor flywheel power storage system should evacuate immediately. Sequence, moving to Phase One. We will now commence energy storage.”
There was a circular indicator displayed on the right side of the panel showing the percentage of energy stored. Even though Rentaro wasn’t touching anything, the touch-panel screen was tapped and flicked at dizzying speeds. Headquarters was controlling it remotely. A joystick stored in the housing of the control panel suddenly popped out, and movements of an invisible hand firmly pulled and pushed it. The rhythmical movements were like a car’s gear changes.
Black Bullet, Vol. 1: Those Who Would Be Gods Page 20