Black Bullet - Volume 5 - Chapter 2.05

5

Rentaro pushed the door’s intercom button. The moment the door opened, he took a hand to the edge, pushed himself inside, and readied his weapon.

“Get out. Now. Keep it slow.”

The bathrobe-clad old man, nonplussed to be facing the barrel of a gun this time of night, sheepishly went out the door, not quite managing to find the right timing to scream or at least act surprised.

“Could I ask who you are?”

Rentaro ignored the question that finally did come out, prodding the elderly man forward until he was in the elevator. Inside were ten other people from the twelfth floor, all corralled there by him in the same manner.

“Is it money? Do you want money?” “What was that noise just now? Was that gunfire? What’s going on?”

“—I don’t have time to explain. I’m sending you guys down to the lobby, so just get out of the building and call for help.”

A few moments ago, there was gunfire and the sounds of combat from the floor above. The enemy was up there. If he could get these people down, at least they wouldn’t run into the guy. That was Rentaro’s line of thinking as he pushed the L button and took a few steps back from the door.

Before he could see them off, though, misgivings began to creep into his mind. The enemy cut off the phone lines to prevent him from contacting external help. They’d need switchboard access for that, and that switchboard had to be either on the first floor or the basement. Definitely not on the thirteenth or higher. Which meant there had to be multiple hostiles—one snapping the cords, one engaging Hotaru above him.

The moment before the door closed, Rentaro stuck his arm in to stop it.

“Wait. I’m getting on, too.”

The residents of the twelfth floor dolefully glared at him. God damn it, I’m trying to protect you guys.

The doors began to close again. This time, Rentaro stopped them because of a voice shouting “Wait! Help!” from across the corridor. A girl in a straw hat, maybe thirteen or fourteen, was making a dash for the elevator, teddy bear at the ready.

“There’s some kind of tire monster upstairs! There’s dead people up there!”

“Tire monster?” Rentaro exclaimed. Then he had a thought. He put his hand up to around chest level. “Hey, did you see a girl about this tall up there?”

The girl shook her head, tugging at her stuffed animal a little.

“Oh…”

The gunshots and other noise were gone. Whichever way the battle went for Hotaru, it was over. Hopefully she made it.

Looking at the button panel, Rentaro noticed the building had fifteen floors and two basement levels. The occupants of the car, perhaps moved by the girl’s disturbing testimony, remained meekly silent. The door finally closed. The L button was lit.

There was a slight sense of weightlessness as the car shuddered into action. The number on the top of the panel began to count downward, far too slowly for everyone’s tastes. Nobody said a word. The smell of stagnant sweat permeated the car. Rentaro had a bad taste in his mouth. The silence was painful, and not just because of the lack of personal space.

Rentaro wiped his palms against his slacks, his brain preoccupied with the thought of the elevator jarring to a halt and the overhead light going out. Luckily, it didn’t happen. The elevator let out a cheery ding as it reached the lobby.

Suddenly, a ferocious sense of dread struck Rentaro, for reasons he failed to articulate.

—Then someone or something smashed into the car with a loud roar, strong enough to put a dent in the door. Gigantic serrated blades made their way through the slit in the middle. Then they began to spin, generating a cascade of sparks. Pressing the DOOR CLOSE button did nothing. It was being pried open.

“Aaaaaaahhh!”

Doom and panic prevailed inside the car. Rentaro jostled his way to the front. No time to think. Sizing up the whirling blades wresting the doors open, he rolled up his right sleeve, revealing his cybernetic arm as he held his body low.

Waiting for the moment when the door was open enough, he activated his arm. There was a loud percussion, followed by a single empty cartridge spinning in the air.

“—Kohaku Tensei!”

He unleashed his arm, driven by a sudden massive propulsion that sent him into the lobby. The punch, easily a match for the mysterious spinning object, cut through the blades. He could feel the blow hitting home.

The tables were quickly turned. Rentaro’s blow, powerful enough to send a microbus into the air, smashed right through the spinning saw, sending it bounding off the floor and into the opposite wall.

“What is that…?!”

Now the enemy was fully in sight. “Tire monster” was the only way to describe it. Its engine revved loudly. An unmanned drone? Or…?

The person who called Dr. Surumi’s home came back to his memory. “The enemy’s about to head your way. Code name Hummingbird. A soldier from the New World Creation Project.”

If this was what this Hummingbird was capable of, Rentaro knew someone who had notably similar capabilities. Tina Sprout. She had a brain-machine interface that let her use brain signals to operate autonomous machines—technology that Ain Rand, genius scientist and former colleague of Sumire Muroto’s, pioneered and produced. Meanwhile, Yuga Mitsugi—aka Dark Stalker—boasted the same abilities as Rentaro’s 21-Form Varanium Artificial Eye, an advanced piece of tech that Sumire expended countless hours of research and effort to complete.

What kind of group would it take to not only copy this tech, but actually upgrade it? Who was behind the New World Creation Project…?

Rentaro had little time to think about it. The tire monster resumed its position. He removed the Beretta from his holster and fired two shots. Shockingly, the enemy zigzagged left and right to dodge them. Rentaro deliberately ignored the gunsights his eye put up for him and fired again, aiming at a fire extinguisher near the hole the tire just gouged into the wall.

The sturdily built Varanium bullet broke through the glass and dented the aluminum exterior. Rentaro kept firing. On the fourth shot, the extinguisher finally gave up the ghost against the supersonic 9-mm Varanium bullets and went flying. He was ready for this.

“Haaahhh!”

The next moment, he closed in on the tire, gun aimed at the engine inside its hub.

“Tendo Martial Arts First Style, Number 12—”

He triggered a cartridge in his arm. The smell of gunpowder burned his nostrils. The monster shuddered in fear, but it was too late.

“—Senkuu Renen!”

The entire floor shook as his hand plowed through the tire’s engine and sank into the floor itself with a loud bang. The force of the point-blank strike rendered his enemy motionless, the faintly blinking signal light on it fading as it fell to the ground.

Once he was sure it was done for, Rentaro loosened up his body and took a breath. Leaving a BMI-driven machine unattended would be suicide. It was better for him to crush it while he had the chance. It was a lesson Rentaro had to learn the hard way in his fight against Tina.

Rentaro took a look around the first-floor lobby as the smoky mist from the extinguisher began to dissipate. The sight made him furrow his brows. The BMI devices had done in some of the residents who’d noticed early on that something was up and had tried to escape. The bodies were now in multiple pieces and splattered across the walls and floor. Was everyone in the New World Creation Project this heartless…?

Then, remembering his duty, he turned back through the mist, toward the elevator as he waved his arms.

“It’s all clear now!”

The people slowly, warily filed out of the elevator car. One of them, the old man in the bathrobe, asked a question.

“Wh-what is this? What’s going on…?”

Rentaro shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “All I can say is that the lobby’s safe. All of you get out right now and call the police.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll get as many people out of here as I can until the police come.”

It wasn’t a very well-made plan, but without so much as an emergency alarm at his disposal, the best one he could think of involved positioning himself and the residents up and down the elevator until police arrived. Considering he was a wanted man, he wasn’t entirely sure he had an escape route if the authorities decided to send an army of cops his way, but he wasn’t willing to simply leave this hideous murder scene behind him and run. Besides, the whole reason for this massacre was because Rentaro was here, paying a visit to Dr. Surumi.

Rentaro watched the twelfth-floor denizens leave out the front door, then turned around. He noticed someone still on the elevator. The girl with the teddy bear. Rentaro irritatedly waved at her.

“Hey! You get out of here! You want to get killed?”

The girl meekly smiled back. “Let me help, too,” she said. “Two people would be more efficient than one, right?”

It was a fairly incredible request to Rentaro’s ears. Unless you were trained to do so, or at least had a fairly strong sense of duty, you wouldn’t be wanting to help other people in a situation where your own life was in danger. If a lion was chasing you, your main focus wouldn’t be on the friend running away with you.

But this girl…?

Rentaro was honestly more suspicious than thankful.

The girl gave him a flick of her eyebrows and smiled. “Come on, let’s go. Even as we speak, those tire monsters are still running around, aren’t they? It’ll be twice as efficient with the two of us.”

She had a point. Rentaro closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them.

“All right. You can help if you want. I’ll get off at the eleventh floor,” he said as he entered the car and pushed DOOR CLOSE, “so you take the tenth.”

Then he smelled something sweet. Perfume. He didn’t notice it when they were packed in like sardines earlier, but she must have been wearing it.

This triggered something in his brain. Something he heard from Sumire at her underground lab when he discussed the murders of Kenji Houbara, Saya Takamura, and Giichi Ebihara.

“I got all curious about these murders, so I had Miori give me some information. There were no witnesses to Kenji Houbara’s stabbing at the theater and they couldn’t find any fingerprints on the knife, but apparently there was a faintly sweet scent left on the weapon.”

—A faintly sweet scent?

Rentaro shuddered.

If the tire monsters were BMI devices like Tina’s Shenfield system, there had to be someone nearby the scene controlling them. If Hummingbird was inside the building right now, then where?

The elevator door closed with a clattering sound. Rentaro’s pulse quickened, his chest pained. He felt nauseated. His hand, checking the position of the holster around his hips, was drenched in sweat. He looked at the girl opposite him in the car, but the large straw hat made it difficult to gauge her expression. She held the teddy bear in her left hand, and now, with her right hand, she was fumbling around its stomach area.

Taking a closer look, there was an odd indentation in the bear’s stomach. Clearly there was something besides stuffing in it.

Rentaro’s brain went on red alert. The elevator door was fully closed. The girl moved. Rentaro moved with her. At lightning speed, his gun was drawn and aimed.

But the next thing he knew, his vision was dominated by the barrel of another gun, one aimed squarely at his head.

The girl had a ferociously self-confident smile on her face. “Oh-hoh? How come you noticed that, huh? I think this might be the first time I didn’t get the first attack on someone. It’s kind of novel!”

“Are you Hummingbird?”

“Uh-huh! I’m the second assassin.”

Rentaro gritted his teeth bitterly. I am such an idiot. How could I fail to notice the assassin when she’s right in front of me?

“Listen, um, I kinda lied to you earlier.” Hummingbird waited a moment before showing off a mischievous smile. “Hotaru Kouro’s actually been cold dead for a while now.”

Fury erupted from Rentaro’s fingertips to the top of his head. He squeezed the trigger, just as he tilted his head to the side to get out of her sights. His enemy mirrored him, doing the exact same thing. Two deafening gunshots erupted. The heat from the muzzle flash opposite him made him squint his eyes as he felt a sonic boom from the bullet whizzing by his ear at somewhere above Mach 1.

One of the shots ricocheted, zinging between the walls of the elevator car—but by some diabolical coincidence, neither party was injured.

Now it was time to disable the enemy’s weapon. Rentaro slapped the girl’s thin arm away, smashing the elbow on his cybernetic right arm against the palm of her hand. She yelped in pain as the gun fell. A moment later, it transformed into a maniacal laugh.

What is with this girl?

Hummingbird lowered her body, then unleashed a kick aimed at Rentaro’s crotch. It was a clean hit. Rentaro fell back just in time to take a blow to a joint right above the arm holding his gun. The pain made him feel like his arm was being twisted off. It made him quickly shut off his pain receptors, but it was just enough to make him drop his own gun.

The girl rammed into him, plastering him against the wall of the cramped elevator and knocking the wind out of him. His back slammed against the button panel, hard enough to make the elevator shudder to life. A cold sweat ran down his side. He was flexing his muscles to the limit, but the sheer unrelenting force his enemy used against him was something no young girl should possess. Desperate, he finally managed to land three knee strikes on her hips, waiting for her to let up just a little bit before sidestepping around and behind her.

Then his brain triggered a danger signal. He reared his head back out of instinct, just in time for Hummingbird’s nails to miss the eyes they were targeting. There was no time to even be shocked. He shouted in pain at the blow she then landed on his left calf. The upper-body eye gouge segued perfectly into a low kick.

Taking a dagger out from the teddy bear lying on the floor, Hummingbird held it close to her stomach and rushed forward. There was too little space to escape.

With an electronic beep, the door opened behind him. The elevator was on the fifth floor. Rentaro realized he had an escape path after all. There was no time to evaluate how practical his plan was. Grabbing his foe by both shoulders, he diverted the kinetic energy of her bull rush behind his back, holding his own body down as he sent her flying in a classic judo-style overhead throw.

Unable to stop herself, the girl flew into the air, a surprised look on her face. She must not have realized what had happened to her at first. Before she could, her tiny body smashed into the opposite wall of the elevator lobby at full speed. It offered Rentaro a perfect chance at a follow-up strike, but his leg was still in pain from the low kick, preventing him from taking nimble action.

Hummingbird leaped back to her feet, hiked up her skirt, drew her auxiliary pistol from a holster strapped to her thigh, and fired. Rentaro hid behind the elevator frame, turning his head against the ensuing blast and rain of sparks. He jabbed at the DOOR CLOSE button. The elevator obeyed after a moment. He pushed the LOBBY button. The elevator began to descend.

He leaned his body against the now-pockmarked elevator wall, just barely managing not to crumple to the ground. Every part of him was screaming. His bandaged wound was about to reopen. For the time being, at least, he was distant from his foe, but the threat was no less present. His mind raced. What should I do? What should I do?

Then the elevator rattled like it was the victim of a sudden earthquake, the ceiling light flickering on and off. Rentaro held on to the wall to keep from slipping. Something must’ve fallen on it from above. But what?

The answer was obvious—Hummingbird had fallen on him from the fifth floor. Rentaro threw his body to the ground, grabbing his Beretta and the gun his enemy dropped, then unloaded both straight upward.

His foe was firing by instinct from above as well. The flying bullets smashed the button panel and shattered the ceiling lights, sending a rain of glass down at him. He tried as hard as he could to fight back. The concerto of crisscrossing gunfire continued on, empty cartridges providing bombastic percussion to the proceedings. A pang of pain as a bullet grazed his cheek. Then, the intense heat of bullet against bone as a ricocheting shot struck him in the knee.

Both of his guns ran out of ammo simultaneously. So did his enemy’s. For a moment, there was deafening silence, and the smell of gunpowder assaulting Rentaro’s nostrils.

What happened?

After a moment, he heard something heavy thudding against the ceiling above him. Somewhere in the midst of the battle, the elevator had stopped moving. The shot that struck the instrument panel must’ve knocked it offline. The ceiling lights were gone, except for a single flickering bulb. The space was dim.

Holding a hand against the wall, Rentaro gingerly got himself up and peeled off a dangling, heavily perforated ceiling panel. A prone Hummingbird tumbled into the elevator, groaning once her body hit the floor. Two 9-mm shots in the stomach and one in the chest were staining her dress crimson, her upper body heaving as she gasped for breath. The battle was over for her.

The girl looked up at the ceiling in disbelief. “You…you’re kidding me,” she whispered. “I was built to…to surpass the New Humanity Creation Project…and I lost…?”

Rentaro looked down silently at her for a few moments.

“…There’s a lot I want to ask you. I’ll treat your wounds if you don’t resist me.”

Hummingbird scowled in self-derision, coughing violently in response to the pain in her chest. A fountain of blood shot out, and faint lines of red oozed from her lips.

“Don’t be…stupid,” she said weakly, her trembling hands tapping against her heart. “They’re…monitoring my heartbeat, and if, if they, found out you, helped me… I’ll, I’ll be rubbed out either way. You…you’ll never have any more peace. Even if—if I die…it’ll be someone else, next. My friends, will kill…you. It’s all the same.”

She sighed as she stared upward, resigned to her fate.

“I guess…I guess Dark Stalker was…right after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dark Stalker…was the only one, who, who recognized…what kind of threat you were. He said you…you were a genius. He wanted to, to fight you again, and…and he fought our, our leader over it.”

“……”

Internally, Rentaro was shocked that someone as breathlessly confident of himself as Yuga was willing to heap that much praise upon him. Maybe Yuga Mitsugi was the greatest threat to his life after all.

Then he noticed Hummingbird’s skirt was up, revealing her lily-white thighs. He gazed at them in wonderment. There was a five-pointed star tattooed on one of them, a pair of intricately designed feathers drawn on two of the points. The exact same. Just what he saw carved on the Gastrea in the photo.

“Hey!” he hurriedly shouted. “What’s that? What’s that star on you mean?!”

Hummingbird simply smiled wryly. “Look…look at what’s, what’s inside my teddy bear.”

Rentaro, despite his suspicion, obeyed. The polar bear, a scarf around his neck, still had an oddly bloated stomach. There must have been another weapon inside. He stuck a hand in, trying to get it out, but it was too big to easily take out of the slit. The bear was soft and fuzzy on the outside, but inside, there was something cold and solid to the touch.

What is this? Growing increasingly impatient, he finally just ripped the bear’s upper body apart. Cotton stuffing flew out from it, revealing what was inside. Rentaro gulped nervously. The bear’s stomach was lined with cords and lumps of what looked like clay. A cheap digital timer was attached to the middle. It had just gone past thirty seconds. The moment he realized it was a time bomb, his blood froze as a dark chill crashed upon his body.

Hummingbird let out a bitter laugh. “If…if my heartbeat, goes down enough, it’s, it’s set to automatically, go off. The elevator’s down, your leg’s hurt… I don’t think you’re escaping. So…can we, can we call it a draw?”

“Shit!”

Rentaro jumped for the door, trying to pry it open. It wouldn’t budge. Then he tried jumping for the ceiling, holding his wounded leg in the air. A sharp pain erupted from it, incapacitating him. Twenty seconds to go.

Then, with another loud noise, his vision was jarred up and down as his feet struggled for purchase. It didn’t take him as long to realize that something just fell on the elevator again.

Through a hole in the battered ceiling, he could see what it was.

Rentaro and Hummingbird both opened their eyes wide, the confused dismay particularly clear upon Hummingbird’s face. She let out a scream.

“You, you’re supposed to be dead—”

The reply came in the form of gunfire. With a dry crack from the gun, Hummingbird’s head exploded in a spray of blood, falling limply against the wall behind her.

A cold voice fell in from above.

“Good-bye, my splendid princess.”

“Hotaru!”

The shadow he could barely make out above turned into a silhouette of Hotaru Kouro, her frozen eyes coming into view.

“You… Hummingbird said you were dead…”

Then he shook his head. There were more pressing issues at hand. He looked at the timer. Seven seconds left.

“Hotaru! The bomb!”

“Gimme your hand!”

He lifted up his arm. It was yanked up, hard enough to almost dislocate his shoulder, as he was pulled into the elevator shaft. His vision suddenly went dark, the sound of the cable groaning at the weight pounding his eardrums.

“Grab on to the wire!”

Rentaro obediently did so. Four seconds left.

With a series of nimble shots, Hotaru fired at the braking devices latched on to the guide rail, destroying them all.

—Three seconds.

Then she took out her knife, using her Initiator strength to snap in an instant the three cords besides the one Rentaro held.

 Two seconds.

Grabbing the one remaining wire with her left hand to secure a lifeline, she lifted her legs high and bashed her heels against the top of the car.

 One second.

The elevator car, struggling at this new force applied to it, snapped its remaining wire, tumbling down the shaft like a shooting star. The wire the two of them held shot up in response, zooming up like a bungee cord.

Rentaro and Hotaru tried madly to hold on to the torn wire. Below him, he could see the car generating sparks as it plunged down the guide rail. The counterweight scraped against the side of the shaft as it, too, whizzed downward.

Then—the bomb finally went off.

A hot shockwave, too hot for Rentaro to keep his eyes open, slammed up at him. Like a tugboat in a typhoon, they were tossed and roiled as they clung to the wire. Flames shot up the shaft as the elevator began to consume itself, stopping only when they were right at Rentaro’s and Hotaru’s feet. Slowly, they retreated downward, almost like a living creature licking its wounds in chagrin.

The two of them breathed a synchronized sigh of relief. Hotaru’s eyes, now unexpectedly close to his, were wide open with surprise. They looked endearing to him. But the attention made Hotaru avert them in embarrassment. “Let’s go up,” she said as she pulled the rope, dragging Rentaro along.

They emerged at the fifteenth-floor elevator lobby. The setting sun bathed the area in a bright red, almost too bright to set eyes upon. It was near the end of the day. In the light, Rentaro noticed Hotaru’s tank top was torn, shredded, and covered in a rich crimson.

“Did she stab you?”

“It’s already closed up.”

“Closed up…?”

She had clearly been stabbed right in the heart. Was it too shallow to kill her, though? No way. Rentaro shook his head. Hummingbird had said it herself—“you’re supposed to be dead.” He doubted a gifted assassin like her would fall for a victim playing possum on her.

“Hotaru, what type of Gastrea factor do you have?”

Hotaru stared silently at Rentaro for a moment. Then she shook her head lightly, perhaps realizing there was no way to hide it any longer.

“It’s a dugesia, a type of flatworm.”

“Dugesia…?”

Rentaro had heard of this. He hadn’t read all those nature books in the Tendo family library for nothing. It was a type of planarian flatworm, a small creature with astonishing regenerative skills and the ability to weather just about any kind of famine. They could famously form two distinct and healthy flatworms even if cut in half, making them useful for experiments in natural regeneration.

“So that means you can…”

“Basically, I have enhanced regenerative skills. Most Initiators can close up their wounds and heal even if their injuries would kill any normal person. In my case, my ability’s strong enough that I can push back against Varanium inhibiting that.”

Rentaro sighed in amazement. The natural world always had a way of aweing him like that. Twice in the past, Rentaro had personally witnessed people healing themselves at astonishing speed. The first time, it was Rentaro himself—the AGV test drug from Sumire helped him overcome mortal injury and fend off Kagetane Hiruko. But that drug had the Russian roulette–like side effect of turning 20 percent of its patients into Gastrea. Rentaro using all five of the syringes given to him and still not making the transformation was something of a miracle. It wasn’t exactly safe for everyday use.

The second time he saw regeneration like that was with Aldebaran, the enemy he fought in the Third Kanto Battle. Those ominous memories were still fresh in his mind. The high-powered EP bomb developed by Shiba Heavy Weapons eventually blew it to smithereens, but that battle couldn’t have been a closer call than it was.

“That’s so…powerful. Why’d you hide it from me?”

Hotaru shook her head in frustration. “It’s not the cure-all you probably think it is,” she replied. “The human body’s a lot more complex than a flatworm’s, so I can only regenerate so much at a time. If someone lit my dead body on fire with gasoline or decapitated me, I’m not gonna be able to make up for that. It’s not like I can put up a resistance while I’m dead, so I need to make sure my enemy doesn’t know about that ability. It’s hard to work into a battle strategy. I kept it a secret from you because if someone tortured that info out of you, that’d mean trouble for me.”

I see, thought Rentaro. That makes enough sense. When two Initiators fought against each other, even a single blow could be lethal, no matter what the ability. If her foe knew about her innate skills, that could easily be used against her. As a result, Initiators generally stayed tight-lipped about that sort of thing. Loose lips sank ships in this business.

“Wow… Well, I guess I see now. I thought you really hated me for a while.”

“There was that, too.”

“……”

“What?”

Rentaro scratched his head, forcing himself not to pursue this line of conversation. He removed the outer jacket of his uniform and tossed it at Hotaru. “Here,” he said, “put that on. Your clothes are all bloody. You can’t go walking around like that.”

Hotaru gave Rentaro’s jacket a light sniff, then winced. “It smells terrible. Why does men’s sweat have to be so stinky all the time…?”

“Okay, give it back.”

“Well, I’ll put it on if I haaave to.”

Rentaro rolled his eyes and turned around. She was so annoying to deal with.

“Oh, uh, thanks.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Let’s go, Rentaro.”

Her cheeks were red, perhaps because of the evening sunlight she was drenched in, as she marched off. “Wait a sec,” Rentaro said, stopping her as he pointed at his left leg. “Lend me a shoulder.”

Hotaru watched him silently for a moment, walked back, and just as silently offered her shoulder. He sheepishly accepted. She was unflinchingly cold to him, but for whatever reason, her skin felt hot to the touch.

Wisely opting to leave the elevator for someone else to worry about, the pair of them limped down the stairs and out the main entrance. The front was lined with people. It was only a matter of time before the police showed up. Wary that someone would notice him, Rentaro hid his face, pretending to be unconscious as Hotaru dragged him along. She keenly picked up a taxi and directed the driver to the apartment she was hiding out in.

The middle-aged driver gave the two extremely disheveled passengers a dubious look, but his sense of professionalism willed him to gently bring the car into motion regardless.

They could hear sirens far away, and before long, a small squadron of police cars came in from ahead, lights flashing. As they passed, Rentaro and Hotaru instinctively ducked from the windows. The Doppler effect made the sirens sound almost comical as they faded away behind them. Cautiously, they sat back up and looked toward the rear. The police were now pouring into the apartment building they had just left. Just in the nick of time.

Rentaro loosened up, the mental strain exiting his body—but then the driver’s eyes met his through the rearview mirror. He looked startled for a moment but quickly averted his gaze, as if he had just witnessed a couple making out at the bar. The odd response made the hairs stand on Rentaro’s nape.

That stare indicated the driver had just connected a vague memory with his current reality. And his eyes darted away right afterward. From the backseat, Rentaro sensed danger. What did the driver just remember—? What else could it be? His face matched the fugitive’s from the news. Otherwise, why would he awkwardly take his eyes away like that?

And of course Hotaru had to give him the exact address of her apartment before hopping in. The idea that the driver would drop them off then not exercise his civic duty to contact the police seemed far too optimistic to him. In fact, he might even drive his taxi right to the police station instead of taking them over. If he did, they were finished.

The taxi stopped quietly at a red light. Hotaru sat there, picking up on Rentaro’s nerves and waiting to see what happened next. She knew the driver was on to them. The tension was at the boiling point. Just a light prod could make it explode.

The light turned green. The driver stepped on the gas. Rentaro could feel the inertia drive his body into the seat a little.

“Um, sir…?”

Rentaro shuddered. His body tensed up, as if a judge just sentenced him to death.

“Would you mind,” the driver continued, “if I talked to myself for a little bit? I know this isn’t exactly a glamorous job I have, but y’know, I was seriously thinking about joining the self-defense force a month ago. At my age, you know? Like, you remember how they expanded the age limit to accommodate for just about anybody during the Third Kanto Battle? I figured, y’know, maybe I needed to take up arms and fight to defend this city, too, so…”

Then the driver fell silent. “Uh, and then what?” Rentaro dared to ask.

The steering wheel squeaked a little underneath the cabbie’s grip. “Ah, it didn’t work out in the end,” he said mournfully. “I was too scared. I lost my wife and kid in the war ten years ago, so I figured I had nothing left to lose, but…you know, I wound up marrying another widow, someone just like me. We live in a pretty humble place, but we’re happy, y’know? …So I just couldn’t go through with it. Not if it meant losing something again. If I’m doomed to die, I wanted it to be together with her.”

“…Nothing wrong about that. That’s a natural reaction.”

The taxi entered a tunnel. A steady stream of orange lights whizzed by, weakly illuminating their faces at regular intervals.

“Do you have any family, civsec?” the driver asked. He had no doubts about Rentaro’s job position, at any rate.

After a moment figuring out what to say, Rentaro decided to just shake his head, not bothering with pleasantries. “They’re all dead.”

“You weren’t scared of that Aldebaran guy at all?”

“Well, sure I was.”

Hotaru looked at Rentaro, mouth slightly open.

“That wasn’t something anyone should have to experience. And compared to the work it took, I’ve gotten far too little appreciation for it.”

“So why do you do it?”

Rentaro thought for a little, then shook his head again. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I was the only one there who could, really, so…”

“Oh…”

The driver clammed up again. Rentaro grew anxious, squirming in his seat as he wondered if he had offended the cabbie somehow. But the words that finally greeted him weren’t what he expected.

“I guess the kinds of people we call heroes are pretty much like that, huh?”

The driver smiled at him through the mirror.

“Don’t worry. I’ve been terribly forgetful as of late, y’know. By the time I drop you off, I’m probably going to forget I even had anybody in this car.”

“Oh… Uh, well, thanks. I really owe you one.”

Rentaro didn’t know what he could say after that. So he kept quiet. His conversational partner joined him. The atmosphere was far gentler now. He closed his eyes.

He was no hero, no savior of humanity. That much he was sure of. But if what he did helped others smile just a little more, enjoy that little bit more of happiness—didn’t that mean there was some greater meaning behind the path he took, at the end of it all?

Nothing at all had improved with his situation. Enju was still a ward of the IISO. Tina was still locked up in jail somewhere. And Kisara was still wrapped cruelly around Hitsuma’s finger. The thought of Hitsuma taking advantage of her trust in him filled his mind with rage, but it wasn’t like he could storm the police headquarters with guns a-blazing. That would just add to his already-long rap sheet. His only hope was to follow Suibara’s trail down whatever he was investigating and catch the people who put him in this mess.

He managed to dispatch Hummingbird. The girl who almost certainly killed Kenji Houbara. Judging by the sniping skill he showed off at the Plaza Hotel, Dark Stalker must have been Giichi Ebihara’s killer.

Which meant, by the process of elimination, that someone whose name he didn’t even know must have assassinated Saya Takamura.

So, two killers left. And the one Rentaro really had to watch out for was Dark Stalker. One thing the battle with Hummingbird made clear was that he didn’t have to dread them so much after all. They were strong, but beatable. And sooner or later, he’d make that clear as black and white to them.

The fury in his stomach warmed his entire body as Rentaro contemplated his enemies, wherever they lurked, across the Tokyo Area landscape.