Black Bullet - Volume 6 - Chapter 4.01

BLACK BULLET 6

CHAPTER 04

THE STARLESS NIGHT

1

He was in a dream.

There stood the Happy Building, soaked in the colors of twilight. Up the stairs he went, going through the door with the TENDO CIVIL SECURITY AGENCY plate on it. Enju’s clothes were strewn all over the sofa, the sink on the other side of the curtain filled with dirty dishes.

The visitor sofa was always Tina’s favorite. Her nocturnal schedule meant she slept there a lot, balled up like a cat. He peered over at the sofa, but there was no trace of her—just a somewhat worn-down pillow, suggesting it held her weight not long ago. There was a just barely started workbook of math drills on the nearby desk, along with a small pile of eraser shavings.

There was the sound of running water. Lifting the curtain to the cooking area, he found the sink was full of water from the neglected tap. It was already dampening Rentaro’s socks.

It seemed so lived in, but nobody was there. Like the Mary Celeste of maritime lore. But Rentaro, for some reason, knew that.

They were gone. Kisara was gone. Enju and Tina were dead. Killed. Those days would never return. This office was an empty shell, as though someone had shot footage of the Tendo Civil Security Agency in happier days, spliced the beginning and end together, and put it on permanent loop. It was just a video image supported by his memories, and now someone had edited the entire cast of characters out.

It was indescribably sad. Besieged by regret, Rentaro fell to his knees on the spot, grasping his head and wailing his laments. A groan like a frog run over by a car emanated from his throat. It’s all my fault. Because I couldn’t save any of them.

Suddenly, he heard someone calling his name. A girl. She was pleading for him. He shook his head and searched for the voice. Where did it come from? Where was he hearing it from? It was neither Kisara’s, nor Tina’s, nor Enju’s voice.

Right. That voice was—

The string of his dream was cut off, his consciousness gradually rising from the mud. His back was resting against something tough and unyielding, his body heavy. Sweat covered his clothing, and he was intensely thirsty.

But the voice was still calling him. With great effort, Rentaro blinked a few times and opened his eyes.

“What…? Shut up, man…”

The blurry world began to form images in his mind. Jolting his body into action, he realized it was Hotaru calling him. Her lips were pulled sharply back, her eyes red. A shock coursed across him.

“If you’re alive, at least answer me!”

“Where am I…?”

Hotaru wiped her eyes with a sleeve. “The sculpture studio. Our hideout.”

He finally recognized the familiar sight of the ceiling above him. Turning his head, Rentaro felt a jag of pain. Oh, right. I took a bunch of bullets to the back.

Nursing his neck, he looked down at his own body. His coat and shirt were off, and he was bandaged from below his armpits down to his stomach. It made him look like an enforcer from some yakuza flick.

He was, at least, alive.

Hotaru was back to her usual self to some extent, it seemed. She snorted at him, chin thrust haughtily into the air.

“I extracted the bullets. I think I got all of them, but no guarantees,” she said.

It was then that multiple blobs of metal, a pair of tweezers, and a pile of bloody cotton strips next to him entered Rentaro’s line of view.

“I’m impressed you could do that,” he muttered.

“I had to do it on myself once.”

That attracted his attention. He turned to her. “You’ve been shot that many times?”

“Yeah. Something wrong with that?”

“Nothing wrong, but…” He thought a bit about how far to pursue this, but before he could decide, he noticed the puffy bags around Hotaru’s eyes.

“Have you been sleeping at all?”

Hotaru covered her eyes with her hands, apparently ashamed of the rings on her face. Then she suddenly turned defiant, puffing out her chest.

“No, all right? I couldn’t, thanks to a certain idiot I got my ass teamed with. You better make up for this.”

Rentaro snickered. It was just such an innocent display.

“Look… Um, why do you ask?” Hotaru shifted again. Now her voice was small, almost nonexistent. “You got hurt so bad, trying to cover me…Why do you have to do all these stupid things? I told you, I wanted to keep this strictly business. I use you; you use me. If you die, I don’t take a look back. If the opposite happens, leave me on the sidewalk.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Rentaro lightly replied, trying to keep the subject from getting too heavy. Hotaru drooped her head and peevishly turned her back to him.

“You are so stupid.”

A weird silence commenced. Neither were talking—and yet, the silence wasn’t altogether uncomfortable, either. Rentaro didn’t mind it, at least. But they couldn’t afford to keep this going forever. They still had a mountain of issues to think about.

He gestured outside with a hand.

“It’s pretty hot in here. Wanna go out for a bit?”

The moon was out.

A river flowed not far from the abandoned sculpture studio, swollen with the rain that fell from morning to late afternoon. The sound of the dark water bustling by them brought a refreshing coolness to their ears.

Rentaro and Hotaru were walking side by side along the embankment. Despite the late hour, they were still passed by the occasional old man walking his dog, or the would-be weekend warrior panting from a jog.

They had been walking downstream for a little while by the time Hotaru flashed Rentaro an exasperated look.

“Look, aren’t you in pain at all? ’Cause you’re sure impressing me. I guess your New Humanity Creation Project surgery lets you control your pain, huh?”

“Yeah, more or less,” Rentaro lied. Pain seemed to ooze out of every pore in his body. To be honest, Hotaru would probably have to serve as his caretaker for a while to come. That wasn’t something he could bargain with her about yet.

He could still remember the dream he had, albeit vaguely. He was on his knees, wailing in an empty Tendo Civil Security Agency bereft of Kisara, Tina, or Enju. That couldn’t be just a dream. It was a very real problem, one that would be reality if he couldn’t rescue any of them. And his brain was presenting that very likely scenario to him in dream form.

Which meant, by then, that they couldn’t afford to waste another moment.

“Here, Rentaro.”

Hotaru took something out of a breast pocket. Rentaro thought it was a fallen leaf or something at first, until he realized that it was in fact a rather oddly shaped key. The handle was made to look like a leaf from a maple tree, right down to special chemicals used to simulate the corrosion of the fall colors. It was an intricate piece of art.

“What’s this?”

“Something Swordtail had.”

Rentaro’s eyebrows arched high. He gave it another close look.

“His phone was destroyed in the fight with Dark Stalker. This was about the only clue I could find on him.”

Rentaro brought a hand to his chin in thought. “What’s it for, you think…?”

“I have no idea.” Hotaru sighed dejectedly, shaking her head. They debated the issue fruitlessly for a few moments before putting the topic to the side for the time being.

Next, Hotaru took a piece of paper out of her pocket.

“And this, too.”

Rentaro took it, opened it up, and was shocked once more. It was Miori’s analysis results from the Gastrea tissue sample. He stared at it, virtually boring a hole in it with his eyes. It was lined with rows and rows of unfamiliar-sounding chemical compound names. Just trying to read it gave him a headache.

“How’re you supposed to read this?”

“I don’t know any of the details, either. But Miori said this is what we should pay attention to.”

She pointed at a corner of the sheet. Rentaro felt yet another jolt.

0.1 milligrams of trifdraphizin detected in Gastrea tissue.

A heavy shadow crossed over Rentaro and Hotaru. It was a train, roaring by at high speed across an overpass. It left nothing but silence behind.

“Trifdraphizin…?”

Hotaru’s eyes fixed upon him. “You know that?”

Rentaro nodded, watching the stare of her blue-gray eyes from above her slender neck. “Hotaru, how much do you know about the Gastrea War?”

She shrugged, like it was the last question she expected. “Well, I’m part of the Innocent Generation, so the war’s all just a secondhand story to me.”

Rentaro closed his eyes and gingerly filed through his memories of the war.

It was a time of heady research, conducted at a breakneck pace in order to deal with all the Gastrea getting infected by the virus. Every sense of morals, or ethics, people had was hurled out the window. It was a wink and a nod on a global geopolitical level. People did pretty much anything you could think of—cluster bombing, chemical warfare, minefield laying, genetic engineering, human experimentation, you name it. The New World Creation Project was another spawn from that dark era.

“Does trifdraphizin have to do with that?”

Rentaro nodded. “Trifdraphizin was first reported on as this miracle drug that could suppress the propagation of the Gastrea Virus. There was this huge fanfare in the news when the announcement came out. It wound up never making it on the market. The effect was only temporary, and once an animal built up enough tolerance to it, it wouldn’t work anymore. Still, there was one industry that still had a lot of expectations for it.”

“Another one?”

“If you used it on people or Gastrea, they found that one side effect was that it induced a state of virtual hypnosis in them. There was a time for a while when black-market dealers would smuggle it out of the warehouse and sell it on the street as a date-rape drug.”

The glories of academic research had a way of winding up like that. Finding uses far beyond anything their creators ever imagined. A bunch of mold eventually led to the discovery of penicillin, the first antibiotic. It saved millions of lives. Meanwhile, despite being created with noble aims, trifdraphizin found its real home in the underworld, dirtying the name of everyone involved with it.

The AGV test drug was like that, the “Anti-Gastrea Virus” compound Rentaro used to save himself after his encounter with Kagetane Hiruko caused half his stomach to get blown apart. It started as a failure, Sumire’s doomed attempt to halt the spread of the Gastrea Virus, but later was used for other purposes.

“But why was that detected in the Gastrea tissue?”

“I don’t know… Ever since it was banned from public distribution following that whole controversy, it’s gotten a lot harder to receive approval to purchase any. I totally forgot about it, too. It hasn’t shown up in the news in a while.”

“Right, but you said it could hypnotize people, Rentaro? Does that apply to Gastrea, too?”

“Yep. It works on both. Of course, the Gastrea Virus eliminates and neutralizes just about anything that enters its host’s bloodstream, so if you wanted long-term control over one, you’d need to have a hell of a lot of the stuff.”

“Like, up to the point where it shows up in tissue analysis?”

Rentaro paused.

“Hang on. You really think so? What would the Five Wings Syndicate do with a bunch of hypnotized Gastrea? Or is that the Black Swan Project, or what?”

Hotaru silently shook her head. The main problem with this theory was the question of how Five Wings could get the huge supply of trifdraphizin this conspiracy would require. They would need connections for even a small amount. Underground connections. There was no way they could hide that kind of operation.

“Underground, huh?” he muttered to himself.

“You know someone, don’t you?”

There was a sharp light in Hotaru’s eyes.