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Click
Shizuru's vines coiled around the lock mechanism, felt out the pins, and turned them one by one with delicacy.
The side door opened without resistance.
The two exchanged a glance and went in.
The upper floor was... disappointing. White hallways with lights, empty offices, meeting rooms with whiteboards. It didn't even have a decent security system.
Anyone who walked in here would think it was exactly what it claimed to be: a materials research institute with nothing interesting to offer.
But they both knew that was nothing more than the disguise. The real thing remained buried underneath.
Following the blueprint's directions, they found the access to the underground levels at the end of the east wing: a reinforced door concealed behind a bookshelf that Shizuru shoved aside with a push of vines.
Behind it, stairs descended into darkness.
And once they crossed through, everything changed.
The air became more humid, thick with a metallic, chemical smell that stung their noses.
The lighting went from fluorescents to an intermittent greenish glow that washed over the walls.
An arched passage stretched out before them, wide and tall enough for a truck to pass through without touching the edges.
The walls on both sides were covered in a dense tangle of pipes and cables of varying thicknesses, intertwined like veins and arteries of some organism. Between them, devices that neither of them recognized blinked with intermittent lights.
As if it were alive.
"This is..." Involuntarily, Shizuru lowered her voice.
From the moment she set foot inside, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, as if someone or something was watching her.
Rinko didn't respond, but her hand closed around the hilt of her katana and both of them quickened their pace in silence, advancing through the narrow passage with rapid steps.
The corridor stretched on for what felt like eternal minutes, and the humming grew louder, as if they were getting closer to the heart.
Then the hallway ended and opened abruptly into a massive space.
Both stopped dead in their tracks.
The room had the dimensions and height of a school gymnasium, maybe more. The ceiling vanished into the shadows, and the greenish light illuminating everything came from the capsules themselves... Hundreds of them.
Lined up in rows across the entire floor, each one roughly the size of an old phone booth. Vertical, sealed, made of a translucent material that let you see the green liquid filling them.
The liquid bubbled inside each one with a constant gurgling, rising in slow currents and descending in spirals, as if they were breathing.
And inside the liquid, something was moving...
Each capsule was connected to a network of cables and pipes that spread across the floor like capillaries, converging and diverging in patterns that resembled a circulatory system.
And those conduits, in turn, fed countless unknown devices distributed between the rows: machines whose functions neither Rinko nor Shizuru could even begin to guess.
The gurgling filled the place.
A chill ran down Shizuru's spine.
"This doesn't look legal..." She murmured, scanning the capsules with a gaze that was trying to process the scale of what she was seeing.
Meanwhile, Rinko already had the recording device turned on, making sure to capture everything.
"Do we keep going?"
"Mmm..." Shizuru frowned. This was big. But on its own it wasn't enough. "We still can't confirm Washizu's direct connection to the demons. We need something that implicates him personally, and the key is in his office. Let's keep moving."
She started walking, stepping over the pipes on the floor. But barely three steps in, something above caught her attention.
Stopping, she looked up.
"This is..."
Rinko followed her gaze toward the ceiling.
Suspended from above, attached to metallic structures that hung like inverted clusters, there were more capsules. But these were enormous. Three, four times the size of the ones on the floor.
And what was floating inside the liquid wasn't shapeless forms.
They were giant spiders, but with mechanical parts.
"It looks a bit like American technology..."
Shizuru's pupils contracted. She connected the dots: experimental military programs, biomechanical fusion, combat hybrids... She had read reports about similar projects, but seeing them in person was a whole different story.
"Wait..."
Whether it was the sound of their voices or the vibration of their footsteps, the liquid inside one of the ceiling capsules began to boil.
The bubbles went from slow to violent in less than a second, the glass fogged up, cracked, and a web of fissures spread across the surface.
BAM!
It burst open.
The spider shot out with its steel mandibles wide open and its legs extended toward them.
But Rinko was faster.
Slash!
The silver gleam of Ishikiri Kanemitsu cut through the air like a horizontal bolt of lightning.
The blade pierced through the spider's body from side to side before its momentum carried it another meter beyond, and the two halves separated cleanly in midair, spitting corrosive green fluid in every direction.
"Watch out!"
Extending her right hand, Shizuru made thick vines burst from the ground like geysers, intertwining at full speed in front of both of them and forming a barrier that intercepted the acid rain.
Tsssss!
White smoke rose instantly where the fluid made contact. The plant surface began melting, Shizuru clenched her teeth and reinforced the barrier with another layer while the acid ate through the first.
But they didn't have time to breathe.
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
One capsule after another burst open on the ceiling like a chain of explosions. Glass rained from above mixed with green liquid and mechanical bodies that fell like a biblical plague.
Dozens of spiders landed softly and rose up, deploying their limbs into combat position.
Their heads, disproportionately small compared to their bodies, turned toward the two intruders.
"Looks like these little guys are the guardians of this place." Shizuru's jaw was tight and her eyes were calculating at full speed. "...My Wood Style isn't much use here."
"Leave it to me."
Swish
Rinko's figure shot toward the swarm.
Silver lines traced through the darkness at a speed the human eye couldn't follow, crisscrossing and overlapping like a spiderweb. Each line, a cut. Each cut, a limb falling to the ground.
SLASH! CLANG! SLASH SLASH!
The first spider lost four legs in a single move. The second was bisected vertically before its mandibles could close. The third tried to catch her with a stream of acid, but Rinko was no longer there: she had spun around and appeared behind it, where a descending cut separated its head from its thorax.
Green fluids flew everywhere.
Mechanical remains crashed down with a clatter while she moved through the swarm like a ghost without stopping.
"That's overkill..."
Shizuru watched from her barrier, mouth hanging open. She knew her kōhai was strong. But hearing about it and watching someone dismember spiders live were radically different experiences.
In barely three minutes, the floor was a junkyard graveyard. Mechanical limbs, sparking circuits, and puddles of green fluid spread in every direction.
"Let's go!" Rinko flicked the blade clean with a sharp snap.
No explanation needed.
The racket they'd just caused had woken the dead, and the guards from the surface wouldn't take long to arrive.
Both broke into a run back through the passage, retracing their steps at full speed. Their boots echoed against the metal floor while the hallways they had previously navigated with caution were now crossed at a sprint.
As they exited the building into the open night, Shizuru looked back one last time.
At the entrance of the institute, half submerged in darkness, the remaining spiders had congregated. Their red eyes glowed from the shadows, staring at them fixedly.
But they weren't coming out.
"They can't leave?" Rinko slowed her run for an instant, looking back cautiously.
Shizuru was panting with her hands on her knees, catching her breath. "Probably. They must be ordered to operate only inside the facili..."
But before she could finish speaking, Rinko's pupils contracted sharply and instinctively, she raised her katana.
CLAAAANNG!!
The impact reverberated from her wrists all the way to her shoulders.
Sparks burst in a brilliant fan that lit up the night for one blinding second, and in that flash, Rinko saw the attacker.
A male figure, dressed from boots to high collar entirely in black, blending into a featureless metal mask that covered his entire face.
And in his hands, claws.
Five steel blades per hand extending from his knuckles like a predator's talons, and at that moment they were pressing against the blade of Ishikiri Kanemitsu with a force that made Rinko's arms tremble.
But they had no time to think.
Breaking the lock, the masked man attacked again.
The claws whistled in consecutive arcs aimed straight at her throat. Rinko blocked the first, dodged the second by leaning back, and deflected the third with the flat of the blade, but each blow pushed her one step backward.
'He's fast.' Too fast...
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Three brutal exchanges in less than two seconds. The impacts echoed across the clearing with a violence that scared off the nearby birds.
But on the third strike, she found an opening.
The masked man overextended his left arm. Half a centimeter that a swordswoman of her caliber turned into a death sentence. Ishikiri Kanemitsu spun in an ascending arc and the blade connected cleanly against his chest.
SCRRRIING!
Nothing but sparks.
The cut that would have split anyone in two bounced off something hard beneath the suit, tearing out a shower of bright embers but failing to penetrate.
'This son of a bitch is armored!' Rinko clicked her tongue.
"Don't ignore me!"
Shizuru's sudden shout came with action to match.
Thorned vines burst from the ground and coiled around the man's legs, driving the thorns through the fabric and anchoring him to the ground.
The plants tightened, squeezing, immobilizing him for an instant.
An instant that was all Rinko needed.
"HAAAAA!!"
Her figure vanished from the ground and materialized above his head, three meters in the air, with the katana raised over her head in a descending cut that channeled all her weight, all her speed, and all her killing intent into a single point.
The blade fell.
And at the last instant, lightning erupted.
An electrical discharge burst from the masked man's body like an explosion of white light. The voltage incinerated the vines, charring them in less than a blink, and the shockwave deflected Rinko's cut just enough that the blade plunged into the ground where he had been a fraction of a second before.
CRAAACK!
The earth split apart. But the masked man was no longer there.
During the electrical flash, he had spun on himself and changed direction in a maneuver that shouldn't have been possible at that speed.
And now he was in front of Shizuru.
"SHIZURU-NEE!!"
Rinko ripped the katana from the ground and launched herself toward them, but the distance was too great.
The claw cut.
SLASH!
Blood splattered.
Shizuru staggered backward with her eyes wide open from surprise and pain.
Her right arm had an open gash running from shoulder to elbow, deep, bleeding, and the five parallel lines from the claws had torn through both fabric and flesh.
But the masked man didn't finish her off.
He seemed to have accomplished what he was after, because without the slightest hesitation, he turned around and launched himself toward the forest.
His figure melted into the shadows of the trees, as if the darkness had swallowed him whole.
Rinko was ready to chase him, but a sound behind her stopped her dead.
"Mmh~... ngh~..."
She turned around.
Shizuru was on her knees on the ground. The wound on her arm was bleeding, but that wasn't the strange part. Her face was flushed, red as a burning ember, and her eyes, which a minute ago had been those of a combat veteran, were now clouded with a wet, glassy haze that Rinko recognized.
"Mmhh~... ah~... no..."
Something that was making her squirm and press her thighs together and bite her lips in desperation.
"Poisoned?"
Rinko knelt beside her and examined the cut.
"Mhh~... Rin... ko-chan... don't... touch me there~..."
Shizuru swatted Rinko's hand away with a weak slap. Her skin was burning hot to the touch and the flush had spread down her neck to her chest.
In the distance, among the trees, the sound of footsteps and shouts was approaching rapidly, flashlight beams cutting through the darkness of the forest in multiple directions.
The guards had arrived.
Rinko didn't hesitate.
She wrapped an arm around Shizuru's waist, lifted her off the ground, and formed a seal with her free hand.
"Hang on, Shizuru-nee."
The next instant, they vanished.
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Shizuru is down and things are heating up... literally. What's Rinko's next move? Tell me what you think in the comments!
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