She continued taking advantage of their confusion and pressed on. “I’m code name Fool—and it’s time to kill with…”
“You little shit!”
The man with the shaved head roared and fired off a front kick.
Erna had assumed that her elbow jab had knocked him out cold, but clearly, he’d managed to soften the blow at the last minute.
“Gah!”
Unable to get a shot off in time, Erna had no choice but to block the kick with her arms. However, her body was too light to defend against a blow from a trained adult man. She went hurtling backward and smashed her head against the brick wall behind her.
How unlucky…
As it turned out, her odds in a fight against three full-grown men were slim.
The one thing she could use to beat them was her special talent, but it wasn’t just some switch she could flip at will. All it let her do was detect where tragedies and accidents were likely to take place, nothing more. And right now, there was nothing to speak of in the area.
I don’t sense any misfortune… Everything’s totally safe here.
Her nose twitched as she tried to sniff some bad luck out, but she couldn’t sense anything. It made her wonder if her senses were getting duller. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t noticed the Nilfa ambush, either.
There was nothing she could do to win.
“TAKE THIS, TRAITOR!”
The bald man raised his fist to strike Erna.
She got ready to dodge, knowing that it was going to be a close call.
That was when a knife pierced the man’s hand clean through.
The Genesis Army trio let out cries of disbelief.
The knife had come flying from out of nowhere and impaled his hand straight through the bone.
“What’s gutter trash doing with a weapon like that…?” the man stammered.
Erna didn’t understand what was going on until she looked behind him and saw what had happened.
The knife had come from the young homeless man who’d been trying to defend Erna. He was holding a weapon resembling a gun, and based on its shape, that must have been what had fired the knife.
He was breathing heavily in fear as he stared the Genesis Army members down.
Considering how shabby he looked, it was weird that he had a weapon so advanced…
“It was a present from yours truly, yo.”
A new voice came, this time from above.
When Erna looked up in shock, she saw Annette standing on a nearby rooftop.
Unlike her, Annette had barely grown at all over the past two years. Her messily tied-up hair, on the other hand, had become even more billowing. It sat under her large gray hat and made her unnervingly eccentric-looking.
“I made sure to hand them out in advance. Erna was doing some dangerous work, you see.”
The Genesis Army men stared at her in bafflement as she swung her way down on a wire.
Annette had seen all this coming.
Now Erna realized why she hadn’t sensed any misfortune. If anything, the only thing welling up in her chest was pity for the doomed Genesis Army members.
“Who even are you…?” The bald man clutched his impaled hand and scowled in discomfort at the sudden newcomer. “Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into by defying—?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be rough. But realizing that gave me a cool idea, yo.”
Annette loudly clapped her hands together.
“If you’re gonna do bad things, then two can play at that game!”
That clap was the signal.
On Annette’s prompting, people began emerging from all over the alleyway—the homeless ones Erna always gave bread to. There were men and women, young and old alike. There were three of them at first, then five, then seven, then nine, their numbers swelling with each passing moment. The one thing they all had in common were the gun-shaped weapons they were holding, courtesy of Annette.
The Genesis Army men screamed. Perhaps understanding had just dawned on them.
They were already fully surrounded. There was no way for them to escape.
Annette flashed a grin at the homeless throng. “Now, everyone pull your triggers in unison. If you don’t, they’re gonna kill you all.”
Some of the people in the group were frightened, but her threat did its job and stamped out their hesitation.
“This is Last Code: Knickknacks—a sobered world of ruin, yo.”
It was the same technology that had powered the electromagnet back on the Marnioce naval base. Despite being as small as watch batteries, they were incredibly powerful. Annette installed them into all of her inventions. With a flip of her remote, she could turn the magnetic field on and off—and in doing so, this allowed her to facilitate other people’s homicides.
This time around, she’d included them in guns that fired knives. It was a weapon that gave normal civilians the power to kill.
The knives flying from the homeless people’s guns sank deep into the bald man’s body, drawn to him by the magnetic force the first knife that hit him gave off. There was nowhere for the surrounded Genesis Army members to run. As soon as a single knife found its mark, the power of the magnets meant that the next ones could no longer miss. The men’s blood sprayed across the alley as they got skewered from head to toe.
All the while, Annette didn’t lift so much as a finger. She simply observed in silence as the homeless people vented their pent-up anger by filling the Genesis Army members with knives.
“You can be pretty vicious, you know,” Erna said.
“Hmm?” Annette replied. “What, are you mad or something?”
“No, no, it’s fine. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t been so careless. It’s my fault…”
They’d made it through unscathed, but immediately after the danger passed, Erna regretted the whole thing.
The three Genesis Army members were dead.
That was murder. Erna might not have killed them directly, but her heart still ached. Those men had killed scores of innocents, but still.
However, the more pressing issue was the fact that the Genesis Army had their eyes on her.
“We won’t be able to go home or back to school anymore.”
She was going to end up on the wanted list for sure.
The homeless people present at the scene had been involved in the murders themselves, so they weren’t going to blab, but even so, her life was about to get a whole lot less peaceful.
“We’ll need to relocate and lie low for a while.”
Annette grinned and wiped some of the dead men’s blood off herself. “Yo, we could always go back to Din for a bit.”
It was a reasonable suggestion.
With nowhere to live, they were essentially homeless themselves now. The smart thing to do would be to quickly retrieve their luggage from their lodgings and flee the country before the Genesis Army began hunting them in earnest.
Erna bit down hard on her lip and shook her head. “We can’t. We haven’t finished the work Teach assigned to us yet.”
Scurrying home and abandoning their mission wasn’t an option.
In her mind, she was thinking about the vow they’d made that night during their vacation.
“We can’t rely on Teach or the others. We all agreed. Once we split up, it was up to all of us to do our best.”
The two years since Lamplight’s founding had inspired major changes in Erna. That was true of the year she’d spent training and completing missions alongside the others, and it was true of the lonely year she’d spent working on foreign soil with only Annette by her side.