Vengeance Is Mine

by Shiden Kanzaki

  Tamaki’s gun shook in his hand. “Wh-what the hell… It was a bullet from a .454 Casull, you know!”

  Kagetane chuckled. “Too bad!”

  This is bad. At this rate… As Rentaro rushed out in a rage, he suddenly felt tremendous killing intent coming from somewhere.

  “Please get out of the way,” said a low voice, and the civil officers stopped in their tracks. There was a commotion as the crowd parted, and a single Initiator walked toward them. She held two fully automatic Glock guns in her hands, and her platinum blond hair was half-ruffled. “Release Yuzuki this minute. I’m getting angry…”

  “Tina!” said Rentaro.

  Apparently comprehending her unusual presence, Kohina took her foot off of Yuzuki. “Oh? You look strong. What’s your rank?”

  Tina said her rank quietly in a voice only Kohina could hear.

  The instant she heard it, Kohina’s eyes grew wide, and she muttered, “Interesting.” She turned to Kagetane. “Papa, I’m going to kill her! I’ll definitely kill her! Even if you tell me no, I’ll definitely kill her!” Kohina abandoned the sword that had been wrapped in thread and pulled out a new one from her waist, crossing her swords and lowering her hips.

  At the same time, two Shenfields spilled out of Tina’s sleeves and danced in the air.

  “You’re not a close-combat Initiator, are you?” said Kohina.

  “What if I’m not?” Tina replied.

  “You can’t win. Not someone like you.”

  Tina looked momentarily confused but then soon shook her head. “What a joke.”

  “Then why don’t we give it a try?”

  The murderous intent and fighting spirit clashed, turning the air explosive.

  Shoot, Rentaro thought. Even if he ran out himself, there was no way he could stop them. However, he didn’t expect a second intruder to appear just then. He heard the ringing of a sword departing its sheath and saw skirts fluttering gently.

  “That’s enough.” Kisara suddenly appeared between Kagetane and Kohina and flipped her long hair. She had an eye patch protecting the left eye she’d damaged in the recent fight. “If you insist on continuing this, I will intervene in the fight.”

  Kagetane drew his gun from its holster and pointed it at Kisara’s brow. “Oh dear, lovely Miss President. Do you remember me?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s been a while, Kagetane Hiruko.”

  Kagetane held his mask as he chuckled. “But your joke makes me laugh. You will intervene in the fight? What of it? I am the one who will destroy the world. No one can stop me.”

  Just as Kagetane put his finger on the trigger of his Beretta, Kohina suddenly realized something, and the color drained from her face as she screamed. “Papa, no! She’s the most dangerous out of everyone here!”

  Kagetane looked at Kohina in disbelief and then returned his gaze to Kisara.

  Kagetane held his weapon at the ready, and Kisara had her hand similarly on her scabbard. Invisible sparks flung between the two.

  Rentaro didn’t know how Kagetane judged Kisara’s strength, but surprisingly, Kagetane was the one to back off first. Kohina even looked regretfully at Enju and Tina and sheathed her short swords.

  Rentaro didn’t understand what had happened. Even though Kohina had been even more eager to challenge Tina after learning her rank, she panicked the instant Kisara said she was going to intervene…

  Wait a minute. Does that mean—

  “My friend.” His train of thought broken, Rentaro looked up to see Kagetane smiling softly as he held his mask. “I wanted to test the strength of your adjuvant. Sorry.” He chuckled.

  Rentaro didn’t say anything as he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. After encountering Kagetane in the forest and somehow or other working together to defeat Pleiades, Rentaro thought that maybe even someone like Kagetane could change his ways for the better. However, in the end, even as Tokyo Area was on the brink of destruction from the approaching Aldebaran, this pair was more concerned with pissing contests.

  After glaring at Kagetane silently, Rentaro exchanged glances with Tamaki and nodded once. Tamaki lent a shoulder to his little sister, Yuzuki, and hurriedly took her to the relief squad. In the end, neither Enju nor Rentaro, nor the white-coated Shoma, had found an opportunity to join the fight.

  Hmm? Rentaro felt like something was off and looked around him, realizing that there was an Initiator he hadn’t seen this whole time. Casually looking around him, he walked to where Shoma was.

  “Shoma, bro, where’s Midori?”

  A startled nervousness spread on the faces of the members of the adjuvant, and Rentaro felt uncomfortable at that baffling answer. “Enju, did…did something happen?”

  Enju looked down, not meeting Rentaro’s eyes.

  “Satomi, there’s something I need to tell you.” Solemnly, Shoma opened his mouth slowly and spoke.

  And then Rentaro understood why Enju had been silent.

  “No way…”

  Kisara shook her head gloomily. “Anyway, you should go see her. You’ll still make it. She was waiting for you to come.”

  3

  Rentaro went through the dense forest and came once again to Central Heights Hotel, careful as he went through the entryway with the collapsed ceiling and up the metal spiral staircase to the second floor. Relying on memory, he stood in front of room 201, stopping his hand just as he was about to knock.

  Rentaro realized that he still did not have his feelings in order. What kind of face was he supposed to show in front of her? There was nothing more worthless than an adjuvant leader who wasn’t there when it really mattered. He couldn’t complain if she blamed him.

  “Is someone there?” He heard a feeble voice call out from the other side of the door.

  Rentaro prepared himself and exhaled from his nose. He twisted the knob and entered quietly, but the screech of a rusted hinge mixed with the stagnant air inside the room.

  In the orange light of a silently burning lantern, he saw Midori Fuse lying in the bed on the right. Next to her was a water pitcher and cup. When she saw Rentaro, she hurriedly took the pointed hat from the side table and put it on to hide her cat ears.

  The light was only shining on half of her face, but she was sweating profusely, and her cheeks were flushed. At first glance, it seemed like she had just caught a cold, but Initiators were protected from a variety of illnesses in exchange for the corrosion rate that bound their bodies, so of course that was not the case.

  Rentaro brought over the stool in front of the vanity and sat down next to Midori. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m all right, Leader.” She tried to sit up and bow politely, but Rentaro hurriedly kept her down. The shoulder he held rose and fell with small movements, and she was panting, her pulse beating hotly. To Midori right now, even that small feat was difficult.

  “More importantly, are you really…?” Rentaro asked as he helped her lay down again.

  She smiled faintly, as if answering a question about the weather. “Yes, I’m sorry. I fell behind. The Gastrea got me, and now I cannot move my body as I would like.”

  He couldn’t help but feel compassion for the conditions of how she fell in battle. Alone and unaided, surrounded on all sides with the enemy closing in…it would have been possible for her to survive if she and Shoma had been able to keep their usual formation and focus on defense, but…

  Midori had seen an Initiator in trouble during battle. Apparently, they had only bumped into each other in the camp and exchanged silent bows, but because they were both shy, they had never actually exchanged words. But when Midori found out that girl had gotten separated from her Promoter and had lost both her legs and was just abandoned in the middle of the battlefield, she didn’t think about anything else but rushing in to rescue her.

  What was frightening was how elaborate the Gastrea’s tactics had been. At the very least, the Gastrea’s mind had been developed enough to calculate profit and loss beyond immediate kill of the prey it h
ad brought down. They had waited for another to rescue their haul, and thereby get both at once.

  Just as Midori rushed in to comfort the girl whose name she did not even know, the sandlike ground caved in under them and hollowed out into a funnel as they watched. At the end of the upside-down cone, a repulsive Gastrea with a snapping lower jaw appeared. It was probably an ant lion larva Gastrea, but its form had changed so much that she couldn’t be sure.

  A minute passed. In that time, her arms and legs were being pulled down by the sand as she slipped down, and her movements were being stopped by neurotoxins as she was injected with the Gastrea virus.

  Organisms that had turned into Gastrea grew something called a virus pocket somewhere in their bodies packed with the virus, and they injected it into their opponents in one way or another to turn them into Gastrea, too. There were, on average, over two hundred million Gastrea viruses in each milliliter of the virus pocket. A normal person would have been turned into a Gastrea in no time, but it was unknown what would have happened to Midori if Shoma had rescued her even a second later.

  All that could be found of the Initiator Midori had tried to save on the battlefield were traces that looked like scraps of food, and there was no way to know exactly where she was. In addition, according to Sumire’s close inspection, Midori had a Gastrea virus corrosion rate so hopeless that she hesitated to even say it.

  And Midori herself did not know this. “Leader, I’ll get better soon and be able to fight again, right?”

  Rentaro looked down, unable to look straight at her face.

  “Kill that girl.” Involuntarily, the masked man’s baritone voice ran through his head. Those were the words of Kagetane, who had been eavesdropping when they were talking about the circumstances of Midori’s situation earlier.

  “It’s over for her. Even if you kept her alive, she would just slow you down. No, she would definitely get in the way. You should send her off swiftly before she turns into a Gastrea. That is your first duty as the new commander.”

  When Kagetane murmured that, Kisara flared up fiercely. “You can’t. I’m against it. If we keep Midori stable…at best, she could still live for another month.”

  Kagetane shook his head in disgust. “This is ridiculous. Are you really going to face Aldebaran with the nonsensical illusion of friendship?”

  Kisara turned once and glared sharply at Rentaro. “Satomi, you better not listen to what a guy like this says. If you kill Midori, I’ll scorn you forever.”

  “Satomi, kill her. In the past, we fought because I wanted to throw the world into confusion, while you wanted to maintain world order. You won. This is the world you desired. You must deal with the consequences.”

  The two of them glared Rentaro down, making him feel extremely conflicted as he left.

  I will… I will…

  “What’s the matter, Leader?” Midori’s voice brought him back to himself, and he shook his head listlessly.

  “It’s…nothing…” Rentaro put his hand behind his back and checked the position of his XD gun.

  Midori had no way of knowing Rentaro’s thoughts as she poured water from the pitcher into the cup and slid her finger around the wet brim. “Leader, I have a favor to ask of you.”

  “A favor?”

  “Yes. I’m having trouble feeling my extremities… Will you play along for a while?” Saying that, without waiting for an answer, she stuck her arm out horizontally, still lying down. And then, she slowly closed her eyes. “Leader, please take hold of any finger you’d like.”

  Rentaro look suspiciously at the outstretched hand but gently took hold of her middle finger.

  “Just now, did you touch…my thumb?”

  Rentaro was taken aback. There were no uniform symptoms for Initiators whose corrosion levels were close to the borderline. There were those who turned into Gastrea while in a deep coma, but on the other hand, there were those who turned mad in the midst of agonizing pain, losing all emotion as they turned into Gastrea. There was also the unfortunate case of the girl Rentaro had helped die in the past, Kayo Senju, who looked on clearheaded as she watched herself helplessly turn into a Gastrea.

  Rentaro closed his eyes and murmured, “God.” Midori’s encroachment was starting at her extremities in the most tragic way. And she would likely remain clearheaded like Kayo as her brain stopped being able to control her muscles and her motor neurons died out. Her whole body would become numb, but her cerebral function would remain clear and she could watch herself as she succumbed to the illness.

  Now that it had gotten to this point, there was no way to save her. After this, the Gastrea virus could advance easily without using any more strength, and at the end of nursing her in vain, she would turn into a Gastrea. The Gastrea virus was called an invincible virus that did not respond to any interventions by modern medicine, so there was no way to escape inevitable death.

  Rentaro quietly changed his grip to her thumb without her noticing. “You got it right.”

  Midori opened her eyes slightly and tilted her head with a wry smile. “Really?”

  “Huh?”

  “Really? You didn’t cheat just now, did you?”

  He felt a second of intense panic. He desperately controlled his gaze so that he would not look shifty-eyed as he squeezed out, “I didn’t cheat.”

  Midori lowered her eyes, which had a tinge of pain in them. After that, she deliberately took off her hat, revealing the cat ears that grew on her head because of the Gastrea factor. “Because of these ears, no one ever needed me. Not even my mother, who gave birth to me.”

  “Gastrea Shock, huh…?”

  “Yes.”

  He had guessed already, so he was not especially surprised to hear this. It was said that the development of a child’s personality was greatly dependent on environment. A child who was greatly oppressed while growing up would rebel. A child who was ignored would act up in order to get attention. Midori’s timid and meek personality was probably because she was raised in a way that thoroughly denied her existence.

  “But then, Shoma came to need me. And then, so did you…” Midori stopped talking for a while and looked up at Rentaro, a dignified look in her eye. “I can still fight. Please let me fight.”

  Rentaro silently shook his head. “It would make me and Shoma the happiest if you rested and got better quickly right now.”

  For some reason, the saddest smile he had ever seen appeared on Midori’s face. “I heard that you were promoted to commander. Congratulations, Leader.”

  Rentaro looked down and dropped his gaze to his knees. “……I can’t do it.” It was something he couldn’t even confess to Enju, but for some mysterious reason, it came out honestly in front of Midori. “I can’t handle it. No one will listen to me.”

  “Because you’re still young?”

  Rentaro nodded, and Midori smiled faintly but broadly.

  “Then you really must be the commander, Leader. You should be happy.”

  “Happy?”

  “Yes. If your age is the only thing that is being emphasized, then it could be said that you have fulfilled all the other requirements.”

  “You’re giving me too much credit. I’m not who you think I am.” That’s right. I even want to run away right now. I want to push the job of commander onto someone else. Once he put it into words, the insincere voices curled up in his mind came gushing out one after another, and there was no end to them.

  The fist he made on his knees shook slightly.

  A warm hand came and gently covered his own. He looked at the girl in surprise, and found her looking at him straight-on.

  She was a strange girl… He had never had a proper conversation with her, but unexpectedly, it seemed possible that she was not an Initiator who depended on Shoma one-sidedly.

  “Hey, what was the scent divination you were talking about when we first met?” said Rentaro.

  “Huh?”

  “Remember? When you introduced yourself, you said, ‘my spec
ial ability is scent divination.’ What is that?”

  Midori seemed to understand and put her hands in front of her chest, stroking them. “Oh, it’s because I’m a cat. So I have a pretty good nose.” Midori closed her eyes and showed him her nose twitching. “After smelling a lot of different people, I can tell each person’s unique smell. When I used that as a kind of fortune-telling, it got an unexpectedly good response from the people around me.”

  “Really? Then, what kind of smell do I have?”

  For some reason, Midori looked up at him timidly. “You won’t get mad?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “You smell like destruction.”

  His heart leapt. “I smell…like destruction? Does destruction even have a smell?”

  Midori also shook her head, bewildered. “I don’t know. This is just something instinctive, so it’s not like I’m thinking about it when I say it.”

  Silence descended. Midori gulped down the water in the glass. The ice slid down inside the glass with a clatter. “Another thing, about Miss Tendo…”

  “Kisara?”

  Midori seemed to resolve herself as she looked at him. “Please be careful, Leader. She smells strongly of destruction. She seems to be easily drawn to darkness.”

  Rentaro was at a loss for words. “What does that mean…?”

  “But if you’re the commander, then I’m not worried. I’m sure you will do well. I am relieved.” Their conversation seemed slightly off, but Midori forced herself up, put her hat back on, and stuck her feet into her shoes.

  “H-hey.”

  “I’m just going out for a while. To the restroom. Don’t tell me you’re going to follow me?”

  Rentaro groaned.

  Midori smiled shyly, put her hand on the door, and turned her back to him. But then her hand stopped abruptly, and she suddenly turned back with an urgent expression on her face. “Leader! Um, I…!”

  However, she didn’t finish the rest of her sentence, no matter how long he waited. She forced her emotions back, looking like she was in pain, and then her usual calm self returned.