▼ 10:05 am
Area 3, Inner Ring
MISS Ena and Ukita are waiting for us when we get back to the inner ring.
“D-Did something happen?” Miss Ena stutters with worry. “I heard something explode earlier.”
“It wasn’t quite an explosion. I caused a backdraft…,” I inform them, explaining what happened in the outer ring.
Ukita frowns at my story. “Hmm. The fires are spreading farther and faster than I expected. Shouldn’t we speed up the search?”
“Yeah, let’s move to Area 4— Wait a sec.” I pause and look around. “Hey, guys, where’s Yuuri?”
Everyone gasps and looks around.
“What do you mean ‘where’? She’s not here?! Where did she go?! She was here until just a minute ago!” Miss Ena panics.
“Crud! Let’s look for her! She’ll be in danger alone!”
Everyone agrees and we break into groups to look for Yuuri.
As I run through the corridor, I mull over where she might go. Yuuri shouldn’t have a security card, which means she can’t have left this area. So if she’s going to be anywhere, it has to be within Area 3’s inner ring.
The emergency stairwell comes into view as I’m working out her possible destination. Maybe she went to check if there’s a way to the surface from there? I charge inside, hoping to find her, and spot Yuuri trembling in the dark depths of the stairwell.
“I found her! She’s in the emergency stairwell!” I shout, summoning the others right over.
“You can’t run off like this, Yuuri!” Tachibana harshly scolds her. “Why did you leave Ms. Tsubakiyama?”
“Um, I…heard an explosion and got scared…,” she weakly answers.
“Going off on your own is even more dangerous than an explosion! You must never leave us without permission!”
“I-I’m sorry…” Yuuri hangs her head, tears welling in her green eyes. Being yelled at by an adult has thoroughly crushed her spirit.
“Don’t be too tough on her, Tachibana,” I say to smooth over the tense mood. “Yuuri was frightened by the backdraft I caused. You should be blaming me instead of her.”
“You’re being too soft, Captain! If something like this happens again, we might find a body next time!”
“I agree, but Yuuri’s learned her lesson. Haven’t you?”
“…I have.”
I offer the crestfallen girl a reassuring smile as we head to Area 4.
Along the way, I glance at my watch. “We’re in deep here. It’s already 10:07 am. We have less than ten minutes before we need our next injection,” I mutter, more to myself than anyone else, but it gets a reluctant response out of Yuuri.
“U-Um…if it comes down to it, I don’t mind passing on the shot—”
“How could you say that, Yuuri? We don’t have to think about those things until we’re out of time for sure. Let’s have faith that we’ll find more AD in Area 4.”
“O-Okay…,” she timidly agrees.
As I’m encouraging her, my suspicions start to rouse. Yuuri is in no way uncooperative with our search. She’s terribly afraid but she still puts others before herself. So why would such a kind person try to escape on her own?
I think back to the face she made when we first met. Fear undeniably twisted her features when she saw me.
Is she scared of me the most? If so, why? I don’t have the time to figure it out as the gate dividing the areas comes into view.
I open the gate with the Procyon in my opposite hand. It’s reading 1,782 mSv—a safe level with AD. There aren’t any signs of a fire either.
But something entirely different has us frowning at the open door.
…What in the world is this smell?
The passageway beyond the gate has a strange odor like rusted iron. I’m getting a bad feeling about this.
“That’s the smell of blood…!” Moribe cries out, shocking the rest of us.
✦ ✦ ✦
▼ 10:09 am
Between Area 3 and Area 4, Inner Ring
Connecting Passageway
“BLOOD?! Could Tenkawa and the girls have gotten injured?!” Miss Ena is the first to react aloud.
My heart lurches at the thought. This connecting passageway goes around a bend in the middle, making it impossible to see to the end. But the smell of blood is definitely coming from farther inside.
“…Don’t jump to conclusions, Miss Ena. There’s no guarantee it’s one of your students.”
“I want to believe otherwise too! But—” She bolts down the passageway before she finishes speaking.
“Tachibana, Moribe, after her!” I shout.
“Roger! Yuuri, please wait here with Mr. Ukita!”
Tachibana, Moribe, and I run off, leaving Yuuri and Ukita at the gate. Miss Ena is already to the bend. A second after she disappears around the corner—“KYAAAAAAA!” —she lets out an ear-piercing scream.
Her shriek stops us in our tracks. She staggers back into view.
“What’s wrong, Miss Ena? Did you see something?!”
“A-Around the corner! C-Corpses…!”
The air around us instantly freezes. For a second, I imagine those children’s bloodied bodies.
“Corpses? Please don’t tell me you found your students!” I ask in a hoarse voice.
She shakes her head. “N-No, not them… But they aren’t normal corpses!”
“H-How so?”
“…You’ll know when you see for yourself.” Trembling, she points beyond the bend.
Gripped by terror of the unknown, I squeeze out, “Let’s go…”
Tachibana and Moribe silently nod. I reluctantly peer around the corner and sharply inhale.
A gruesome scene straight out of a horror movie jumps out at me. The first thing that floods my vision is deep red. The passageway is dyed with the color of blood. Lying in a pool of blood are two corpses ripped full of holes. Farther past them is yet another dead body, wearing the same hazmat suit as the ones Tachibana and Moribe showed me.
The second she sees the third body, Tachibana cries out in a quivering voice, “I-It can’t be! That’s… That body is…!”
“You know them?”
“Y-Yes…it’s D-Dojima.”
I’m floored by that reveal. That’s the name of one of our teammates!
“Does that mean our teammate died?!”
Tachibana nods and weakly mutters, “Wh-Why did he…have to die this way…?!”
No one has an answer for her. I stare at that dead body in a daze.
I always thought the corpses I’d see in this facility, if any, would be those who had been burned to death. But that clearly wasn’t the case here. It doesn’t take a professional to know that’s not what happened. These were the bodies of people who had their lives taken by another—they’ve clearly been murdered.