"Take this, Shu."
Segai smiled and placed a strangely shaped pen into the boy's hand.
In his desperation, Shu had made that offer — and after a brief exchange, Segai had agreed to his terms. Inori's personal file would be purged from GHQ's intelligence database. No further investigation into her. In return, Shu was to cooperate with GHQ's operations against Funeral Parlor.
"When the moment comes — press it in the order blue, blue, red — and we'll take care of Gai."
...
The guilt of betraying his comrades sat on Shu like a stone. He couldn't find a single word for Segai. He just accepted the pen in silence.
"Don't look so miserable." Segai gave him an almost cheerful pat on the shoulder. "Funeral Parlor has been tearing apart the order we spent years building. What you're doing is a public service. And you've protected a girl who matters to you — two birds, one stone. Cheer up."
The violet-haired young officer smiled at him. Segai wasn't cruel, exactly — he simply looked it. A face like that, paired with that mechanical eye, meant every expression he made landed wrong regardless of intent.
Shu said nothing. He waited until Segai and his men left, then dropped to his knees and fished the small communicator out from under the bed. He'd left it behind in his original cell on purpose — in case they searched him again if he was caught.
He did his best to keep his voice steady. He failed, mostly. The dilemma waiting for him on the other side of this — and the feeling that he'd let Inori down on the task she'd given him — pressed up into his throat.
"I'm sorry... sir. I ruined it."
Inori was walking the path to Funeral Parlor's base, working her way through a watermelon-flavored lollipop.
She'd been planning to drop in on Gai — work through the logistics of rescuing Shu and Kenji Kido, and coordinate the assault on the leukocyte ground-control facility. Ideally, she wanted to move tomorrow. Delays were dangerous.
The path cut through the lockdown zone, abandoned and unrepaired, the road surface rough enough to make itself felt through her school shoes. Every few steps, a loose pebble made the soles of her feet sting.
I should find a steamroller and fix this one day.
She was halfway through that thought when King Crimson signaled — Shu's special task had concluded, and he was attempting contact.
"I'm sorry... sir. I ruined it." His voice came through thin and miserable.
"It's all my fault..."
"It's fine. You already did your best."
Inori allowed herself a private smile and let King Crimson carry the words. It was on its way back to her now. She should at least give the boy some reassurance — the last thing she needed was him doing something reckless out of guilt.
She would have loved to praise him properly. But if she let him know what the whole exercise was actually for, he'd put the pieces together. So she settled for something vague and moved on.
Failed? Hardly. This was a total victory.
Two things. Those were the two things Inori had needed to confirm.
First: what kind of person Shuichiro Keido actually was. She'd already marked him as her primary target — someone she was going to have to eliminate — and any intelligence on his current location would have been ideal. She'd known that was a long shot.
Second: the information they had on her.
That she hadn't anticipated. Keido had known she was in Funeral Parlor all along. His words — vessel, attuning — almost certainly referred to Mana. Before Inori had woken up in the isolation tank, Keido had tried more than once to trigger her awakening, and every attempt had failed. His conclusion must have been that the vessel — Inori's body — was incomplete. He was letting her stay in Funeral Parlor because the exposure to other people, the accumulation of feeling and experience, was exactly the conditioning she needed — so that she could one day truly merge with Mana.
That was probably also why, in the original story, Inori could walk openly in front of GHQ practically wearing a costume with a goldfish motif, and no one moved on her.
Which meant: Keido only had intelligence on Inori the vessel. He didn't know King Crimson existed. He had no idea that the mysterious investigative consultant named Diavolo — who had handed GHQ its evidence against Shu — was the same girl. If he'd known, he never would have told Segai to look the other way.
All that effort crafting a disguise, and it turns out I barely needed it.
She thought about the soldiers she'd quietly eliminated at the Christmas Tree facility — the ones who'd seen her face — and exhaled through her nose.
And that means Yahiro Samukawa doesn't need to die. Not yet.
A slight easing of tension in her chest. He was her classmate. Shu's arrest had already rattled the school badly enough — having another student turn up dead on top of that would detonate what remained of the peace.
"We're going to get you out soon, Shu. Hang on a little longer."
"Okay... sir. Um, I—"
"Hmm?"
She could already read the shape of what he wasn't saying.
(③)
In Shu's mind, the voice on the communicator belonged to a Funeral Parlor member — someone with no connection to Inori. There was no way to tell this person that he'd sold out their leader to protect her. But staying silent wasn't sitting right with him either. So he just hovered there, stuck.
In the original story, Shu had only grown dissatisfied with Gai after several battles together. Here, he'd met the man once. The only real impression Gai had made on him was warmth — a leader who'd welcomed a total stranger with open arms. Betraying that, even for Inori, was a weight he couldn't set down.
"Never mind."
"Don't overthink it. What you did today — you handled it."
"...Thanks."
Even Shu himself couldn't quite articulate what he'd contributed. But the praise landed anyway, and his voice came back a little lighter.
"That's everything for now."
Inori signaled King Crimson to end the call and return.
Funeral Parlor's base came into view.
She stepped inside and immediately noticed something was off. The mood was different from the usual routine.
The younger soldiers had been riding high since their last victory — understandably so. The surge of outside support, supplies rolling in from contacts all over the country and abroad, the constant buzz of next time we'll really show them. The edge of discipline that a genuine threat sharpens in people had quietly gone soft. Even during training drills, she'd been catching fragments of conversations about how they'd crush GHQ next time — a sure sign of how far they'd drifted from the mindset that kept them alive.
But today the atmosphere had shifted completely. Everyone looked tense. They were doing weapons checks, moving Endlave components, going through the kind of readiness preparations that preceded an actual operation.
"Argo. What's going on?"
Inori spotted Argo Tsukishima and the others hauling Endlave components and called out to him.
"Oh, Inori." The boy had an older air about him than his age suggested. He answered easily. "Gai told us to get ready. Said we might have an operation coming soon."
"Is he in?"
"He is, but..." Argo's expression shifted into something slightly uncertain. "His mood's not great."
"That's fine."
She waved it off and headed for the second-floor office.
Obviously. Nobody who'd just had those kinds of words thrown in their face through a phone call could be expected to feel good about anything. Gai had almost certainly channeled the anger into something useful — probably tore into every underprepared soldier in the building until the place looked exactly like this. All that tension, all that sudden readiness: it was him working the fury out through his people.
The solution was simple. She'd go to him. The moment she offered her help, he'd steady himself. That much she could count on.