Mindless terror overpowered him to the extent that he couldn’t even run in a straight line. He ran in a forward pitching motion, almost tripping and rolling countless times, before finally coming to a stop in front of the largest set of security gates.
Arato had reached the end of the journey he had started with Lacia. He had arrived, but his body had been pushed to its absolute limit. The strain he was feeling drove home painfully the reality of human life; even with all the automation, our actual bodies haven’t changed much, Arato thought.
“Ryo!” he yelled, “Are you okay? Are you alive?” There was a giant hole in the final gate, as well, and worry for his friend drove out all other thoughts.
“Arato!” His friend’s voice called out to him.
Arato felt as though his heart would burst out of his chest from how it was hammering. Dazed, he stumbled forward, tears threatening to drip from his face as he stepped through the hole and into the Operators’ Room.
His friend was still alive.
The room was stark, empty and wide. The sole furnishing was something like a control station, placed squarely in the center of the room. A little ways in from the smashed barrier, Arato saw a human figure decorated with flowers. He lifted the artificial nerve gun to shoot it at her back, but his left arm was too tired to hold his aim steady.
Arato could just see Ryo on the other side of Snowdrop. The last time Arato had seen his friend, Ryo had been pointing a gun at him at Kichijoji, but that all seemed so trivial at that moment.
“Ryo! Use this!” Arato called. He pushed his tired feet to their limit, taking a short approach run before swinging his entire body around to add momentum as he hurled the artificial nerve gun with everything he had. Weakened as he was, he could only manage to throw it ten meters; the nerve gun went sailing through the air before clattering to the floor and sliding.
Their eyes met; Ryo was laughing through his tears, and Arato felt like something that had frozen between them was melting. Ryo, who had been hiding behind the control table in the center of the room, now leaped out to snatch up the weapon.
Securing the nerve gun in both of his hands, Ryo took aim and fired the weapon at Snowdrop/Methode’s amalgam. The shot that had been impossible for Arato, with just his left hand, had been a simple task for Ryo, whose arms were uninjured. The two of them together could do what either one of them couldn’t have accomplished alone.
After taking the dart in her shoulder, Snowdrop shuddered for a moment. However, an instant later, the Snowdrop/Methode amalgam kept moving, as if nothing had happened. The monster seemed to be made up of Methode’s body, with Snowdrop riding on her left shoulder; the two had been bound together with green vines. It was horrendous. Unable to completely maintain its balance, the amalgam continuously shambled awkwardly toward its goal. Methode’s face was covered with vines and flowers, blinding her, and Snowdrop had neither arms nor legs. Methode’s purple body was full of holes, and her left side alone was incapable of supporting the whole weight of the body, so the monster dragged a leg behind it as it moved.
It came to Arato then that he had left the artificial nerve gun on its ‘security release’ mode. “You can switch it to weapon mode on the terminal attached to the gun!” Arato shouted.
Ryo grasped the use of the device from Arato’s short explanation and immediately activated the second mode on the terminal before firing again. The amalgam staggered, as if the leg hit by the dart had gone numb.
Arato couldn’t do anything against a unit that was the peak of the Lacia-class, so he had to rely on Ryo’s movements. Ryo grabbed a computer unit that filled his arms and dragged it out from the wall, dragging its many connected cables away with it; Arato assumed Ryo’s actions had something to do with counteracting Snowdrop-Methode’s device. The amalgam must have realized that Ryo was doing something important as well, as it turned to lurch toward him.
Tied to Methode’s head by countless vines, Snowdrop glared at Arato the whole time. “How about I burn you to a crisp, too?” she asked menacingly. Then, one of the hands that had broken Lacia slowly lifted, and Arato dove for the floor.
Under Snowdrop’s control, Methode’s arm sent flames shooting at him. There were pitifully few places one could hide in the Operators’ Room; only two, in fact. There had been a space behind the computer unit which Ryo had pulled out of the wall, or another behind the control panels.
Arato leaped and rolled behind one of the cubic computers just as Snowdrop’s flames roasted it, and a warning alarm began to ring out loudly from the ceiling.
〈An attack on one of Higgins’ expansion terminals has been detected. There has been damage to the data that was being processed,〉 a warning voice said.
Since his life was on the line, Arato was able to grasp at least part of Ryo’s plan to keep them alive. By pushing Snowdrop into breaking one of Higgins’ expansion computers, he had shown her the danger of attacking them recklessly in that room.
Arato remembered that Snowdrop was capable of taking hostages in the Mitaka Incident. He figured her thought process directed her to focus on her priorities, if murdering everyone around her wasn’t an option.
“If you throw that fire around, you’ll damage Higgins’ hardware! Wasn’t this what you came here for?” Ryo warned, from behind the control panels in the middle of the room. As he spoke, he signaled to Arato with his hands. Arato scuttled over to join his friend behind the control panels, but things weren’t quite settled between him and his friend.
“Why the hell did you come here after losing Lacia?” Ryo demanded. His face, which Arato hadn’t seen for a while, looked honestly surprised.
“What about you?” Arato asked. “Were you really waiting here for me?”
At least Arato had Lacia by his side. Ryo hadn’t even had that. But regardless, Ryo had chosen to wait for him there. They both fumbled for what to say but, strangely, they both wore broad grins. Even Ryo’s stiff expression had softened.
Snowdrop, probably wanting to avoid burning the flowers that bound her to Methode, deliberately manipulated Methode’s hand to draw out the artificial nerve dart in her leg. Then, still lurching, she continued moving forward.
“Yeah, I waited here for you,” Ryo said. “I was hoping you’d bring a slightly stronger weapon with you, though.” The normally cautious Ryo was obviously taking insane risks himself to fight against what he saw as the end of humanity.
“Don’t say that, man. At least you have a weapon now,” Arato replied.
“You shouldn’t have been so quick to toss this one to me, then,” Ryo said.
It seemed to Arato that Ryo still hadn’t completely gotten over what had happened at Kichijoji. But, even though they were fighting for different goals at that moment, they had at least returned to the appearance of friendship. The closeness between them moved their hearts, if not their minds.
“You can use it better than I can, so don’t worry about it,” Arato said, feeling a simple joy from interacting with his friend like old times again. He was glad he had come.
“Where is Higgins?” Snowdrop asked. “Bring him out for me.”