Verlaine threw a punch while Chuuya threw one of his own just as quickly. As their fists collided, a flash of black light exploded, filling the room. “The facility’s automatic disposal system is in progress. Sixty-eight percent of the facilities are now dysfunctional. We have to find Master Chuuya before the rest of the operations are shut down.” I set the room’s communications device to a preferred connection and tried to hack into the facility’s main system. There was only one thing left we could do after losing sight of Master Chuuya. I had to hack into the security system through the computer in the panic room and pinpoint where a battle was taking place. The panic room had an established connection to the facility’s security system in order for the evacuated VIP to give orders from inside. However, being a secret military connection, the line was highly secure. Furthermore, the facility’s functions were gradually shutting down, so the rooms’ ports were rapidly disconnecting from the central hub. It was like wanting to cross a wooden suspension bridge, but the planks were gradually falling off. “You should probably check the fuel supply system first,” suggested Dazai while spinning in a swivel chair with his hands behind his head. “All the documents in here, plus the facility itself, are gonna be burned so that there’s no evidence left. Only after the workers get out, though. That’s why the fuel supply system needs to stay put until the end, so you should still be able to hack into it.” “Very well.” The fuel supply system was comparatively easier to hack than the others (the life-support, security, and main memory systems). After that, I was able to send commands to other facilities through the processor I was operating, thus expanding the scope of my control. “I wonder if we can do it,” I said as I struggled with the system. “Do what?” “Defeat Verlaine. Even if we do find Master Chuuya, we still have to defeat Verlaine. Will we really be able to defeat him?” “Beats me,” replied Dazai almost indifferently. “Of course, I’ll try to come up with a way to take him down, but it doesn’t really matter if we lose. We’ll just die. There’s only one thing I can say for sure about Verlaine.” Dazai lowered his arms and looked at me, his eyes even colder and more robotic than a machine’s. “There isn’t a single human in this world who can defeat Verlaine in hand-to-hand combat alone.” A storm shook the small room. Two fists clashed, producing miniature suns that disappeared almost instantly. The collision of two forces of gravity tightly compressed the space before it returned to normal. The shock wave alone ravaged the room, knocking over tables and sending electronic devices smashing into the wall. “Is that all you’ve got, Chuuya?!” shouted Verlaine. The plaster cracked like a piece of candy and crumbled onto the floor, simply from being in close proximity to Verlaine’s punch. Chuuya continued to dodge the flurry of meteorite-like strikes. A single one would be enough to kill him. Right as he threw a low kick, Verlaine increased the gravity of his guard, but Chuuya suddenly switched to a middle kick. Verlaine groaned when Chuuya’s leg struck his torso. However, Chuuya was the one who turned pale. Verlaine had grabbed Chuuya’s face. Before Chuuya could even counter, Verlaine swiftly lifted him up and slammed him into the wall, leaving a radial crack upon impact. Chuuya screamed in agony, but still reached out for Verlaine’s wrist to pull off his hand, though all he grabbed was air. Verlaine’s arm was no longer there; by the time Chuuya realized this, Verlaine had buried a front kick deep in his torso. Chuuya slammed into the wall as if he had been hit by a semitruck, demolishing it and coughing up blood. The attack left him badly wounded since he was unable to leap back and weaken the impact. He shot through the demolished wall and into another room, then crashed through two more walls as well. Chuuya was covered in dust and rubble; he couldn’t even see Verlaine anymore. Verlaine lowered his leg, then checked his injuries. Blood was pouring out of the wound in his chest, soiling his suit. It was deep. “Why don’t you get it, Chuuya?” Verlaine scowled at the blood staining his hand. “There’s no reason for us to fight.” His eyes then locked onto an iron slab on the floor. It was the gray top of a broken desk. Verlaine placed his toes under it, tossed it into the air, and kicked it. The slab pierced the wall right in front of N as he tried to escape. “Eek!” “Did you really think I’d let you get away?” After grabbing N by the neck, Verlaine effortlessly lifted him up and pressed him against the wall. “You have zero chance of getting out of here alive.” His eyes shone with a light that hadn’t been there before: Rage. “I can see something sinister inside you. A darkness far deeper than any evil.” N tensely smirked and replied hoarsely, “Is that really something…an assassin should be saying?” “Sometimes creating is far more sinister than killing.” Verlaine’s grip tightened around N’s neck. The gravity being emitted from his hand warped the space around it. “W-wait…! Just listen to what I have to say!” “No,” replied Verlaine as his fingers tightened. However, right before the supergravity could snap N’s neck clean off his shoulders, he screamed: “If I die, your secrets die with me!” Verlaine stopped squeezing. Time passed: one second, then two. Nobody said a word. Nobody moved. Nobody even blinked. “…What?” muttered Verlaine in a deep, slightly cracked voice after five silent seconds went by. “I’m not lying. You’ll lose everything, even what you want to know most of all: The Secret of the Gentle Forest.” Next came the sound of a brief intake of air. It was Verlaine. “You…!” A fist roared. It was Verlaine’s free hand hitting the wall and causing the room to shake. He had punched right by N’s face, leaving cobweb-shaped cracks as rubble fell to the ground. “You’d better be careful if you’re trying to outsmart me.” Verlaine’s voice was so low that it sounded as if it were coming from the pits of hell. “If I even get the feeling that you’re lying, I will peel every bone off your body while you’re still alive.” I finished hacking into eighteen out of twenty ports and took control of the facility’s second and third computing cores. I then used their computing powers to attack the fourth and fifth cores. Everything was going smoothly. I would likely be able to obtain the necessary security systems to search for Master Chuuya at this rate. However, the real issue would come afterward. “Not a single human in this world can defeat Verlaine in hand-to-hand combat…” I ruminated over what Dazai said. “Does that mean there is no way to defeat him?” I asked. When I looked over at Dazai, he replied, “Exactly.” His gaze appeared all-knowing. “I was buying time to figure that out.” He then took a notebook out of his breast pocket. It was the leather-bound notebook from earlier—Rimbaud’s memoirs. “Not only can he manipulate gravity with his skill, but he has experience as a spy as well. It’s insanely unfair how powerful he is. He essentially doesn’t have any weaknesses. But…there is something he fears.” “‘Something he fears’?” “Himself.” Dazai smiled cryptically. “Just like how Arahabaki is for Chuuya, Verlaine contains a singularity that’s beyond his control. And if it does lose control, it’ll destroy everything in sight, including him. It’d be the nightmare of Suribachi City all over again.” The nightmare of Suribachi City. I searched my database. Dazai was most likely referring to the explosion that happened nine years ago when Master Chuuya lost control of Arahabaki. The blast created a mile-diameter crater and left no trace of the city that was once there. That was the true power of a singularity. It was the manifestation of something that should not exist in this world. And slumbering inside Verlaine was a beast capable of such a catastrophe… “‘The Secret of the Gentle Forest.’” Verlaine’s voice contained a hoarse, dry anger. “How do you know about that?” “Artificial skill user, Paul Verlaine,” N began gently, trying to avoid the question. “The darkness sleeping inside you—that’s the other Arahabaki. Unlike the Arahabaki created in the lab, the demon within you was created by a single skill user. And you killed them. With your own two hands. That’s why you lost the chance of ever knowing about the beast that sleeps inside you. You fear its manifestation.” “And?” replied Verlaine, clearly irritated. “Are you saying you know what this thing inside me is?” “That’s a good question. If anything, I’m the only one who’d know the answer.” While speaking, N slowly moved his arm behind Verlaine’s arm in his blind spot. He moved as carefully as a snail while bringing his fingers closer to his pocket. “We were able to create Arahabaki because the military secret service managed to obtain data on you from one of their connections in German intelligence. I got chills when I read the files. The man who created you was a demon. No decent human being could come up with a thing like that.” N’s fingers grabbed onto a remote in his pocket. It was the same remote that he handed Chuuya in front of the black cylindrical tank. “About the only evil I can do is this.” He pressed a button, and the ceiling collapsed. Rubble rained down onto Verlaine—along with something else. Bluish-black liquid. Verlaine promptly raised his hands into the air and used gravity to protect himself, but something slipped between the rubble and liquid. That something kicked Verlaine backward. He was instantly sent slamming into the wall. Both agony and surprise simultaneously colored his expression; not a single person was capable of penetrating his gravity-manipulating guard like this. “Did you really think those chains and a little electricity was the ace I was keeping up my sleeve?” N smiled. The one who kicked Verlaine landed by his side. At N’s side was a set of bleached-white bones. Hanging from its body were bundles of infusion tubes and cords used to measure vitals. All it wore was a plastic lab garment. It was the skeleton of the boy who died in Chuuya’s arms before the flesh melted off his bones. The original Chuuya. Verlaine’s face darkened with rage the instant he realized who it was. “You…!” “We aren’t copying what they did in Europe. This is our own unique technology. It destroys what I order it to. Have a look.” The skeleton leaped forward, the wind whistling in its wake. It sped up using gravity instead of muscle power to collide into Verlaine. Verlaine grabbed its shoulders and stopped it, but he wasn’t able to completely halt the momentum. His heels dug into the floorboards. Verlaine’s and the skeleton’s gravity counteracted each other, which produced a small vortex of gravity in the center of the room. The skeleton opened its jaw and tried to bite Verlaine with a click of its fleshless mandible. “Are you in pain?” Verlaine’s eyes narrowed. His voice faintly trembled with emotion. “I’m sorry…but you should no longer be in this world.” Verlaine increased his skill’s output. The skeleton fell to its knees with an audible creak and was pinned to the floor. “I’ll take you back to the surface with me later and find you a place to sleep where you can see the stars. But for now, I need you to stay still and wait.” He reversed gravity, causing the skeleton to float in the air. The nearby rubble floated as well. Verlaine let go. The condensed gravitational field then began surging in search of an exit. Verlaine purposely limited the direction it could go, which sent the skeleton accelerating that way like a cannonball. Even after hitting the wall, it didn’t stop. It shot through the wall and continued tumbling until it was covered in rubble and steel beams. Then it crashed through the walls and ceiling before piercing the wall in the very back, where it finally stopped. Verlaine stood stock-still, gazing in the direction he sent the skeleton flying. His eyes clouded with countless emotions. He clenched his teeth and punched the closest table with brute strength alone. The already beat-up and warped table bent even more until it was folded almost straight down the middle. Verlaine looked around the room, but N was nowhere to be found. He had already escaped using the emergency elevator. After walking over to the back of the room, Verlaine forced the door to the elevator open, but the cab was already gone. N was taking it up to the surface. Verlaine emotionlessly grabbed the cable dangling in front of him and pulled. The snapping of metal immediately followed as the shaft’s beams broke, and soon he heard the safety mechanism breaking. Verlaine caught the falling elevator cab with one hand, pried it open, and dragged N out. “I’m going to kill you.” There were no flames of rage in his eyes—only hatred black as boiled sludge. “However, I’m not going to kill you with the respect I give others as an assassin. I’m going to do something different—something I’ve never done before. You will die by my hand in agony, regret, and despair. But first, I’ll give you plenty of time to suffer for what you’ve done.” There was an intense pain in his side. His nerves were throbbing. He tried to sit up, but he felt an unpleasant stickiness at his flank. Chuuya felt around for the source of the pain with his fingers. There was a metal pole piercing the muscle in his side. A piece of the wall must have stabbed him when it was destroyed. Only the tip of the pole was sticking out of him, but the other end was hidden under the rubble, which made it impossible to tell how long the pole was. After Verlaine kicked him straight through several rooms, Chuuya eventually hit a wall and was buried under the debris. He hadn’t been able to manipulate gravity and protect himself from the successive impacts. Now he was bleeding all over his body, and the wound in his side was especially deep. It was rare for him to get injured, so he wasn’t used to judging how deep a wound was from the pain or the severity of his injuries. Even if he got a little hurt during a mission, the Port Mafia’s extraordinary medical personnel had him healed within a few days. Extraordinary doctors like Doc. The name of Chuuya’s friend calmed him. Doc was gone now. And not just him; all of Chuuya’s friends were… Chuuya tried to sit up, ignoring his wound and the pain. Fresh blood spewed out of his side. “I gotta…keep moving…” He firmly planted his feet on the ground, then tried to pull the iron bar out while swinging himself into a sitting position. But the very next moment, he was slammed back down to the ground. He wasn’t expecting this. The metal bar deeply pierced his body once more, causing even more blood to spill out. “Gah…!” Chuuya looked up. White bones. Tubes and cords. A resin lab garment. Pale bones that were only managing to stay together due to the gravity manipulating them. The skeleton was straddling Chuuya and trying to push him down. “Damn it…!” Chuuya grunted as he tried to withstand the pressure by using his own gravity manipulation skill. Their bodies creaked painfully under the overwhelming pressure. “Stop doing this!” shouted Chuuya. “This doesn’t make any sense! You’re me!” But the skeleton could not comprehend his voice. It was simply following orders to destroy the nearest skill user. Its murderous urges were clear and shapeless—and irrational. Bones screeched. It wasn’t clear whose bones they were. The gravity the skeleton was manipulating was gradually exceeding what the human body could handle. Cold sweat dripped down Chuuya’s forehead. The skeleton didn’t care if it destroyed itself, but Chuuya didn’t share the sentiment. However, if they kept up this gravity-based pushing match, they would both be crushed simultaneously since their bodies were equally durable. Chuuya had to do something. But he was fighting himself. He was in pain. Intense pain. Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The hell is that? A skeleton? You’ve gotta be kidding me. Shirase rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t seeing things. The world before him was warping. The irregularities in the gravitational field were causing the surrounding gravel to float. In other words, there was a gravity-manipulating skill being used, which meant Chuuya was here, too. Shirase almost dropped the garment bags out of fear, but he promptly tightened his grip around them in a fluster. And yet—these garment bags didn’t actually contain any garments. Inside were valuables Shirase had stolen. He’d been looting whatever goods he could find while searching for an exit. After all, both security and the researchers had already left, and he could make a small fortune selling gems used in the laser transmitters or even the supercomputers. They’re just gonna burn this place to the ground in order to destroy the evidence, Shirase thought, so why not give this stuff a new life as war funds, help rebuild the Sheep? Better than wasting them. Man, I’m a genius. And with that in mind, Shirase started to loot before eventually realizing he was utterly lost, leading him to this room. He frantically looked around. There didn’t seem to be anyone else here besides Chuuya and the skeleton, and they appeared to be battling. Shirase caught a glance of Chuuya’s pained expression. “Chuuya!” He reflexively began to sprint forward before hastily stopping himself. What am I doing? I’m gonna die if I go over there! Even I’m not stupid enough to throw myself in the middle of a battle between two monsters. I’ve always been smart about avoiding trouble, and that’s why I’m still alive. Chuuya’s the one who did the fighting. Chuuya dealt with the pain. He was the one who showed our enemies just how much we should be feared. We took care of everything else, though. And it only made sense. He’s powerful, and he was simply fulfilling the duty he had as someone with that kind of power. But he’s somehow weaker than usual right now. He’s covered in wounds. I’ve never seen him like that. He looks just like a regular guy my age. Wait, no—he doesn’t just look like one. He is my age. He’s a boy just like me. It had finally hit Shirase. “…” But still… Even then, why’s that my problem? “Who cares! I’m getting outta here! Alone if I have to! You guys can fight about war and weapons and the truth about skills yourselves! All I wanna do is have a good time, and I need to be alive to do that!” Shirase tightly held the bags, turned his back to Chuuya, and began to walk away with a long stride, carving each footstep into the floor. The skeleton’s weight increased. A heavy, dull sound echoed along with their creaking bones. The floor’s foundation was caving in. Any ordinary human’s body would have easily been flattened by this point. “Stop doing this…,” Chuuya faintly muttered as his lungs were being crushed. “You’re me, damn it…” A glimmer of hesitation appeared in his eyes. The skeleton’s jaw rattled as it quietly looked down at Chuuya with pitch-black eye sockets. There was no light within. No emotions. Nothing. An absolute void. And from those eye sockets—from that nothingness, Chuuya could sense what it was trying to say. Perhaps it was only his imagination, but he couldn’t stop the words from flowing into his head. They were meaningless words, but it felt like they were coming from the skeleton: This should have been you. “You’re me,” repeated Chuuya while he stared at the skeleton that had left its humanity far behind. His words were unconscious. Even Chuuya didn’t know what he was saying. “So…who am I?” The gravity increased as the skeleton’s face—the face of death itself—approached Chuuya until they were nose to nose. All of a sudden, there was a scream. “Ahhhhhh!” Someone had charged at the skeleton and knocked it aside. The skeleton and the shadowy figure who had lunged at it rolled on the floor in a pile. Chuuya opened his eyes wide. He recognized the shadowy figure. “Shirase…?!” Shirase’s voice cracked as he screamed something unintelligible before getting back to his feet. The skeleton, which had used every bit of gravity it could to push Chuuya down, was powerless against the sidelong impact that broke off its right arm at the elbow. But that hardly slowed it down at all. It opened its jaw to tear into Shirase’s flesh. Shirase lifted his garment bags, and the skeleton chewed right through them. The cracking of gems and electronics was painfully audible, but the gems were far harder than any bone; the skeleton’s jaw snapped in half. “Shirase, you dumbass! Get outta here! Run!” “Ahhhhhh!” While Shirase wildly flailed his arms with his eyes shut, his fingers happened to get caught on one of the tubes in the skeleton’s back, pulling it out and causing a bluish-black fluid to spill onto the floor. The skeleton suddenly slumped forward and seemingly stopped moving for a few seconds. The moment Chuuya noticed this, he yelled, “Shirase! Pull out the cables! All of them!” Shirase once again flailed about wildly for a few moments in confusion until he realized what Chuuya was saying. Rolling in the bluish-black chemicals, he grabbed the tubes and cords—the skeleton’s “tail”—and gave them a swift, powerful tug. The bundle of tubes that continued all the way to the neighboring room popped out of the skeleton’s back. It screamed. But a body of only bones does not have any vocal organs. It had no throat, nothing to produce a scream. The sound it made was the remnants of gravity and its fading skill shaking its bones, resonating like a musical instrument. It was the echo of an appalling scream, the last gasp of a crying boy. The skeleton eventually lost the signal to its command directive and exhausted its energy reserves. It toppled over at the waist before landing on the ground headfirst. Without gravity holding its body together, its bones fell apart. The cracks the skeleton sustained from the onslaught spread throughout each bone until it was nothing but small white fragments that slowly turned to dust and vanished. And then it was no more. It was as if no one had been there from the very start. After staring in blank amazement for a few moments, Chuuya slowly managed to get back to his feet. “Shirase.” He turned his gaze toward Shirase while clutching his side. “What?” Chuuya stared at Shirase as if he wanted to say something. After eyeing Shirase, covered in dirt and dust and bluish-black chemicals, he eventually said: “You’re filthy.” “Kiss my ass!” Chuuya held out a hand. Shirase grabbed it and stood up. “Let’s go. We should meet up with Adam first.” “All right.” Shirase and Chuuya began to walk side by side. When Shirase glanced over at Chuuya, he saw just how bloody and dirty he was. Chuuya was wounded from head to toe; there were too many bruises to count, and he was still bleeding from his flank. “Hey, Chuuya.” Chuuya turned around. Shirase looked like he wanted to say something—like he wanted to apologize. Chuuya waited in silence until Shirase eventually told him: “You’re filthy.” Chuuya lowered his gaze and smiled. “Kiss my ass.” The first thing that came to mind when I ran into the room was Did a dinosaur go on a rampage in here? That was how wrecked the room was. It was irretrievably destroyed. The chairs and desks had been warped beyond recognition, the floor had fractured and buckled, and there was a hole in the wall roughly large enough to fit two adult humans. None of the furniture was in its original location. It was to the point that I was unable to immediately recognize what kind of room this had originally been. Nevertheless, the wretched state of things did not hold my attention any further. There was something else I had to deal with first: Verlaine, the king of assassins. He stood at the back of the room and looked this way with his hand wrapped around N’s neck. His grip was as casual as if he were holding a sleeping dog’s leash. “Help… Help me…!” N called out, voice trembling. I promptly took out my gun. “Let go of him.” “Him?” Verlaine wore a curious expression as if he was not expecting such a proposal. “You’re not human, so surely you can think about this logically. How would you benefit from protecting scum like this? Are you really going to fight and die for this man?” “My sole reason for existing is to protect humans from crime,” I replied with my gun still aimed at him. “I was not programmed with a function to determine if someone is scum, nor would I even want such a function.” “I’m jealous.” Verlaine chuckled cynically and looked down at his hand. “But don’t worry. I’m not going to kill him…without making sure he suffers.” I suddenly heard a voice coming from behind. “You’re not going to get any information out of him, Verlaine. Not even if you take him back with you and torture him.” Verlaine looked in the direction of the voice, mildly surprised. “Dazai…” “Hey. What a coincidence running into each other here, huh?” Dazai came strolling over as if he were taking a neighborhood constitutional before stopping by my side. “Seeing as you’re here…I can only assume that means you double-crossed me,” said Verlaine. “Hey, you make me sound like the bad guy when you put it like that. I was never on your side to begin with. I’m on their side.” “‘Their side’? I find it hard to believe someone like you even takes sides.” “Heh… You really are a joy to talk to.” Dazai smirked ambiguously. Dazai and Verlaine—the two superhumans stared at one another in silence, wearing smiles no ordinary person could understand. During their exchange, I ran my combat evaluation module. I had a gun, but no matter how I ran the numbers, our chance of winning never exceeded 0.1 percent. Firing my weapon now would be a poor strategy. My only choice was to wait and see how the situation developed. However, the situation changed far more quickly than I imagined. “Hey, Verlaine,” Dazai suddenly said as if he had realized something. “You should probably keep your head down.” He lowered his head until it was chest level. Verlaine stared dubiously, but the very next moment, two blocks of rubble flew through the air like cannonballs. One whizzed right past where Dazai’s head had been a second ago and then broke apart; the other one collided with Verlaine. Verlaine reflexively blocked with his arms, which shattered the slab of concrete into many pieces. “The hell do you think you’re doin’, Dazai?!” came an enraged voice. “How dare you show your stupid-ass face to me without my permission!” “Hey, Chuuya. How was the torture?” Only the corners of Dazai’s eyes lifted in a smirk. “I was planning on saving you before you got tortured, but that would’ve been way too boring, so I decided to take my time instead.” “You what?!” Verlaine stood in mute amazement for a few moments before nodding as if he had figured out what was going on. “Now I get it. I finally see how you two did it.” Master Chuuya and Dazai stood side by side. There was something surprisingly perfect about it. Two young men with completely different personalities… “I heard that you two managed to kill Rimbaud on your own.” “And you’re planning on avenging him, Verlaine?” asked Dazai. “Not at all.” Verlaine shook his head, then stared off into the distance. “He was already dead long before you two killed him. To me, at least. He died nine years ago the moment I attacked him from behind.” Dazai observed his expression, then took a step forward. “Do you know why I’m here, Verlaine?” His gaze was clever, calculating. “Because I’m done buying time. You’re going to die. You shouldn’t have crossed the Port Mafia.” But Verlaine simply shrugged at the chilling death threat. “We’ll see about that. I’ve been similarly threatened countless times, but they’re always wrong.” Verlaine tightened his grip around the trembling researcher’s neck, then started to retreat. I promptly followed him, my gun still pointed at his head. “Your skill is powerful, but I already have a good idea of what you can and can’t do,” Dazai quietly added. “All I need to do is use an even greater power to kill you.” Verlaine burst into laughter. Blissful laughter. “You have a good idea of what my powers can do?” Right as he raised his arms toward the ceiling, his carefree smile vanished. Every one of my gauges simultaneously went berserk. “Oh no” was what I tried to say, but the sound was absorbed into nothingness. The light in the room vanished, and a shock wave followed shortly thereafter. A shock wave, then a black light. It was anyone’s guess as to how many seconds went by. The powerful electromagnetic wave temporarily shut down my external sensor, so I made sure to check my surroundings the moment I could see again. Master Chuuya and Dazai were still safe. They hadn’t moved from their previous position, but they were staring blankly at the ceiling, their mouths agape. I quickly followed their gazes…and realized the ceiling was gone. “Hey, dipshit. You said ya had a good idea of what he could and couldn’t do, right?” “Yep.” I realized there was a cold breeze blowing past us. It was coming from outside—specifically, from the sky. “Didja know he could do that, too?” A colossal hole was where the ceiling used to be. Dozens of floors of the underground facility had been penetrated, creating a tunnel straight back to the surface. The hollowed floors continued into the distance in a concentric pattern, and at the very end was a small cutout of the evening sky. Neither N nor Verlaine was anywhere in sight. Nobody said a word. All we could do was look skyward as if in prayer, sensing that something not of this world was about to emerge.
Chapter 110
26 min read