The Gastrea was gone. But who was this man…?
Eventually, the masked man turned around and gave a faint smile. From behind the mask, he turned his sharp gaze to Rentaro. “You’re rather late, civsec, my boy.”
“What…? Are you…in the same business?” said Rentaro.
“It’s true that I was also after the Gastrea that was the source of the infection. However, I am not in the same business as you. Why, you ask?” The man spread his arms in front of him as if performing on stage. “Because I am the one who killed the two police officers.”
The instant Rentaro realized the man was an enemy, his body reacted. He closed the gap between them in an instant and hit the man with the heel of his hand, not waiting for an answer. The angle and timing of the attack were both good.
“Oh, you’re rather skilled,” said the man.
Just as Rentaro thought the masked man looked like he was having fun taking the attack, there was an impact on his chest. The punch made Rentaro’s chest cave, throwing him across the room. He crashed onto the glass coffee table in the living room on his back, winded.
What in the world is this guy? Rentaro thought. His face twisted in extreme pain, he opened one eye and saw the masked man winding up his fist for another close-range punch. As he hurriedly rolled off it, the glass table splintered with a shrill crash. Rentaro was able to jump out of the way and stand up, but a roundhouse kick came right at the side of his head, as if his evasive position had been anticipated. Both he and the arm he put up to block the attack were sent flying into the wall with the terrible force of the kick.
The masked man sniffed contemptuously.
Rentaro was dizzy with despair at the vast difference in their abilities even as he took a firm stance.
Then, an out-of-place ringtone echoed through the room, and the masked man picked up the phone. “Kohina? Um, yeah. I see, okay. I’ll go meet up with you.”
“Look over here, you monster! This is for my friends!” shouted a voice.
When Rentaro turned to look, standing in the door were a number of police squad members holding carbine rifles.
The masked man quickly drew a gun from the holster on his hip without even looking in their direction. Blood suddenly erupted from their blue tactical vests and splattered on the wall. The masked man kept firing, and three people who used to be human were shot down in the blink of an eye. The officers waiting outside became agitated.
Rentaro closed the gap with all his strength and stepped firmly on the floor. “Tendo Martial Arts Second Style, Number 16: Inzen Kokutenfu!” The round kicks that he fired off in return were avoided by neck movements from the masked man, but Rentaro stepped quickly into his second attack and unleashed his Inzen Genmeika. Rentaro fired off high kicks that didn’t miss their mark this time, and hit the masked man’s maschera directly.
Rentaro started to yell “Yes!” but the man put a hand on his neck—which had been twisted back with the force of the kicks—and forced it back into position with a strange sound. The most surprising part was that the man did not once let go of his cell phone. “Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just a little busy. I’ll be there soon.” Flipping his cell phone closed, he didn’t move, looking intently at Rentaro.
Rentaro felt chills freeze his blood.
The man let out some short laughs as he held his mask to his face. “Oh my, that was wonderful. Even though I was not paying attention, I didn’t think you’d actually get a hit in. I would love to kill you right here, but there’s something else I must do right now.”
He stopped talking for a moment, and his piercing eyes looked at Rentaro from the depths of the mask. “By the way, what’s your name?”
“Rentaro…Satomi.”
“Satomi…Satomi, huh?” the man mumbled to himself, sidestepping the pieces of glass from the broken window and going out to the balcony, putting his leg on the handrail.
“Let’s meet again sometime, Satomi… Or should I come find you?”
“You… What are you?”
“I am the one who will destroy the world. No one can stop me.” The man jumped down from the balcony in a single bound.
For a while, Rentaro’s stiffened body couldn’t move, as if it had been sewn down. He opened his sweaty palms and closed them hard. Could such a powerful being exist in this world?
He heard a groan and looked back with a start. The men who were shot by the mysterious masked figure were seriously injured and were being carried out on stretchers, their friends calling desperately to them.
Rentaro’s fist shook. Then, he felt a hand on his shoulder give him a strong shake.
“Get a hold of yourself, civsec! We’ve been prepared for this since starting this job. What you need to do right now is—”
Rentaro clucked his tongue and shook Tadashima’s hand off. “I know! I have to stop the Pandemic first!” Looking at the clock on the wall, he gathered his thoughts and gave himself a pep talk. He had lost a lot of time, but his work wasn’t over yet. Shutting out thoughts of the strange man from his consciousness for the moment, Rentaro, gun in hand, cautiously checked the bathroom and inner Japanese-style living room, opening all the closets. Finally, he opened the only thing left to check—a large wooden closet.
Inside, there was nothing but clothes.
“Hey, what’s going on? Where’s the Gastrea?” said Tadashima.
Rentaro was a little confused hearing Tadashima’s voice behind him, but he put his gun away and went back to the living room.
The problem was a puddle of blood that had spread on the floor where the masked man had been standing. It was not the man’s blood. He had not been injured. And even though Rentaro didn’t want to think about it, this was enough to be fatal.
Rentaro looked at the picture frame on the low table. It was a picture of a family, with the daughter tucked in between the loving embrace of the husband and wife. “The guy living here was living by himself, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, it was a man living by himself,” Tadashima answered.
Rentaro checked the ceiling. “What the…?”
Tadashima made a face, following Rentaro’s gaze. There was an object stuck to the ceiling with green gel. Rentaro jumped and touched the thing stuck to the ceiling. He rubbed it with his fingers, and it felt extremely sticky.
“There’s no mistake that the victim was attacked here,” said Rentaro. “But the victim probably escaped from the window of the living room looking for help. And then, I don’t really wanna say it, but moving around after losing this much blood, he’s probably…”
Tadashima nervously groped around in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. “Let me get this straight. Not only is the source of the infection still walking around somewhere, but the infected person is, too?”
Rentaro nodded. “Inspector Tadashima, please evacuate the neighborhood immediately and request a blockade to seal off the area. They couldn’t have gone far. We should look outside, too. If we wait until it becomes a Pandemic, demotion’s gonna be the least of your worries.”
It was like drifting between being awake and being half-awake. There was a reassuring floating bridge connecting the two, but just as the man realized what it was, it would disappear.
Before he knew it, he had stopped his wandering around in the sunset. He looked to his right and to his left. Why was he walking around this place? Even though it was at some remove from his home, the view in the distance looked familiar, so this had to be be somewhere in the Tokyo area. He couldn’t say exactly where he was, but he had a faint memory of the scene around him. He thought maybe he was so drunk that his senses had gotten confused, but his thoughts were clear and he had not lost his sense of balance, except for the slight languidness left in his body.
He shook his head slightly. What was his name? It was Sumiaki Okajima, of course. After having the name for forty-five years, he wasn’t going to forget it that easily. It was fine up to that point. But then why was he in this place? No matter how hard he thought, he
could not come up with a single explanation.
It didn’t seem like he was sleepwalking. This was a residential area, but he didn’t have any friends who lived in the area. He couldn’t possibly have trekked all the way out here, then. Or perhaps he had just set out on an aimless walk, and the inertia of his feet had carried him here. Inertia, he repeated inside his head and couldn’t help but smile bitterly.
Ever since the company he worked for had gone under, it was as if he’d just kept living through inertia. Tired of having his savings get lower and lower, he’d tried to compensate for their loss through gambling and poker, but that was the beginning of the end. By the time his delirium died down and he was able to objectively see how stupid he had been, he had already paid an immense fee to learn his lesson.
After the Gastrea War, Sumiaki had looked with scorn on those people who had lost their purpose in life and were slowly killing themselves, but he had now turned into exactly what he had scorned in the past.
He could not bring himself to blame his wife and daughter, who had washed their hands of him early on. When he lost money, he would get drunk and violent. No one could call him an excellent father by any standard. His ability to barely maintain a clear head was, pathetically, because he had run out of money to buy alcohol. His house had been foreclosed upon, and now that he spent all day in his cramped apartment spacing out, he’d grown uneasy at not being a productive member of society, and was occasionally so overwhelmed with emptiness that he wanted to scream.
Sumiaki bought a sports drink from a vending machine by a utility pole and put it to his mouth. Maybe it was because the flavor was too light, but it didn’t taste like anything to him. He downed the five hundred milliliters in the blink of an eye, but it just seemed to make him even thirstier. “Seriously, why am I here—”
At that moment, Sumiaki was taken aback, hearing someone yelling in a loud voice.
“Rentaro, you insensitive imbecile!”
In front of him, he saw a girl with a long shadow walking toward him. She seemed about ten years old, wearing a short skirt and a fancy coat lined with a checkered fabric. She had thick-soled lace-up shoes, and her hair was tied with largish hair ties into pigtails that swayed slightly left and right.
As he passed her, he heard her furious voice saying, “You bastard, you’ve got some nerve abandoning me, your fiancée, like that!”
It seemed like someone had left her behind, but she passed Sumiaki without noticing his presence. Thinking she lived in the area, he called her from behind. “Miss, can you give me some directions?”
He himself was surprised at how suspicious he sounded, so it made sense that the girl was surprised. She lifted her face, suddenly jumping and backing away.
“W-wait, please. I don’t mean you any harm. My name is Sumiaki Okajima, and I think I live around here, but I don’t know how to get home.”
The girl looked at him without moving a muscle. As he was thinking about what else he could say to clear up any misunderstanding, the girl seemed to realize something and looked at him in bewilderment. “Sir… You don’t know what has happened to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s nothing I can do for you. Of course, there’s nothing anyone else in the world could do for you, either. But… Well, is there anything you have left to say in the end? To your family or friends? You have someone, right, sir?”
“What in the world are you saying?”
“I’m not saying this because I want to. But Rentaro says it’s my duty to tell the person, so that’s why I’m telling you, sir.”
Their conversation wasn’t meshing properly. Sir? This girl that barely came up to Sumiaki’s chest was looking at him with what seemed like pity in her upturned eyes.
“You have not realized, after all? Then you should take a look at yourself. But do it slowly, so as not to fall into a panic. Then you will understand my words.”
Overpowered by the mysterious resignation the girl emitted, Sumiaki looked at himself. “What the… What is this?” His abdomen was dyed red. No, it wasn’t just his abdomen. He had a large wound that looked like he was ripped open up to his collarbone or throat, and there was still fresh blood flowing from it. His blood was dripping and forming a puddle on the paved road where he was standing.
Gingerly touching his abdomen with his hand, he felt a slippery, unpleasant sensation. Why didn’t he notice until now? Why didn’t it hurt, anyway? What had happened to him? Just then, his vision took a turn for the worse, and it looked like the sky and the earth switched places. The next thing he knew, Sumiaki had collapsed on the ground. “I…remember. That’s right, I became penniless, and then…”
In the countless job interviews Sumiaki had gone to, his character would occasionally be attacked, and he would be tormented by frustration that made him grind his teeth. Eventually, he was hired as a solar cell module cleaner. It was hard work, but he was guaranteed a certain wage, so once his life settled down, he might even be able to bring his wife and daughter back to live with him. It was still just a dream, and his goal for the time being was just to put his life back together, but once he realized there were still things that he could do, his body was filled with excitement.
He wanted to at least hear their voices. Thinking that, he had gone out to the balcony of his apartment to call his wife’s parents’ house. In the few rings it took for the other side to answer, Sumiaki looked up suddenly, which might have been the most unfortunate thing he did in his life.
There was a giant, human-size organism stuck to the wall on the fourth floor. It seemed to choose the moment Sumiaki noticed it to move, and its two eyes flashed red like fresh blood as it climbed down.
“I ran away after almost being killed by that Gastrea, and got all the way here.”
“You have infectious Gastrea in your bodily fluids,” the girl said in an emotionless voice.
Sumiaki looked at the marks left by two fangs on his collar. “Oh,” a resigned sound leaked out of his throat.
He remembered what he saw many times on TV during the war. A lab rat was injected with the Gastrea virus, and minutes later became a terrifyingly strange-looking creature that scared audiences out of their wits when it gave a cry.
After the girl pointed it out, his calf started to itch, and his body grew hot, tormented by a pressure that was bursting out from the inside. His DNA was probably being rewritten at high speed that very second. The next thing he knew, his eyes welled with tears. “Then you’re a civil officer’s…?”
“Yes, I am an Initiator. My name is Enju Aihara. I’m ten, and old enough to be a real lady.”
He tried to smile, but his face twisted with a spasm. His body was already starting to move on its own. “I have a favor to ask… Will you apologize to my wife and daughter for me? Tell them I’m sorry for everything I did.”
“I will.”
That was the last of the world Sumiaki saw. Just like that, he passed the critical point where he could stay in human form. Just as it seemed like his arms and legs were shriveling faster than common sense would allow, long, thin, pitch-black legs sprang out from his body as if piercing through it. Hair sprouted from the legs, and four pairs of glowing red eyes appeared on the head. His abdomen swelled up like a ball, and from the corners of his mouth, two glistening fangs grew in. The yellow-and-black spotted pattern would fill a human with a visceral disgust. This was a giant spider.
The petite girl didn’t scream or run away. She just quietly readied herself. Then, she was interrupted by a voice from a completely different direction. “Gastrea—Model Spider, Stage One, confirmed. Entering battle with it now!”
“Rentaro!” said the girl.
“Enju, you okay?”
Enju ran to him. Rentaro also ran toward her with his arms spread wide. Even if it was just for a short time, the two had been apart, and under the slowly setting sun, in a flood of emotions, they reunited with an embrace—an embrace Enju would under no circumstances allow, as she le
t loose a kick straight at Rentaro’s crotch.
“Owwwwww…” Holding his crotch, Rentaro went to his knees and put his forehead to the ground. Writhing with an intense pain unknown to any woman, Rentaro clenched his teeth and lifted his face. The girl, Enju Aihara, 145 centimeters tall, was looking down arrogantly at him with her hands on her hips.
“You have some nerve shamelessly showing your face in front of me again after throwing me off the bicycle.”
“A-are you mad?”
“Of course I am.”
“I-I had no choice. If I didn’t get this job, Kisara would have kicked my butt, you know!”
“I would do the same if you abandoned me.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“You should just offer your buttocks quietly. Then the only remaining problem would be who is going to kick it. You can choose who will kick it.”
“Dummy, who wants to choose between two options like that?”
The two were interrupted once again by the roar of a gunshot. Arriving late to the scene was Tadashima, holding a smoking revolver in his hand. “Hey, you two! Are you ignoring the enemy to do a comedy sketch? Do your job, civsec!”
The newly born Gastrea’s skin spurted blood when the bullet hit it, but in the next instant, it began healing with terrifying speed, and finally spit out the .38-caliber bullets that Tadashima had fired from the healed wound. The Gastrea turned its head toward Tadashima and let out a shrill cry. Not good.
Rentaro decided it was faster to rush over and knock Tadashima to the ground than it was to yell at him to duck.
“Oof! What’re you doin—”
The giant spider lowered itself and jumped, scraping the area the two had just been with incredible force. Tadashima’s face paled.
“Inspector, this is a single-factor Jumping Spider Gastrea.”
“J-jumping spider?”
“The original is a spider that can jump tens of times its body length to get food. You can tell from the characteristic coloring on its body. Also”—Rentaro took Tadashima’s revolver—“regular bullets are not that effective against Gastrea. If you shoot at them, you’ll just make them excited, so you’re not supposed to use them.”
Black Bullet, Vol. 1: Those Who Would Be Gods Page 2
