When Inori Yuzuriha followed Gai's signal to the room, she pushed the door open and walked straight in. A heavy smell of blood met her — though she barely registered it anymore.
The scene was, however, a touch awkward. Gai had torn a strip from his jacket and bandaged his arm himself to slow the bleeding. Shu, meanwhile, had folded himself into the corner with his arms around his knees and his head buried low, like a child who knew he'd done something wrong. The moment Inori entered, he shot to his feet.
"Inori! You — how did you end up here?"
His expression was a complicated tangle of relief and worry.
What happened next dropped him somewhere cold. Inori didn't spare him so much as a glance. She walked directly to Gai and moved to help him up — but Gai shook his head and pushed himself upright without her.
Inori hadn't thought much of it; tending to the injured first simply made sense. But for Shu — the original male lead, whose feelings ran closer to the surface than most people realized — it landed like a verdict. He was a traitor now, he'd decided. What waited for him was Inori's cold indifference, maybe contempt. He had already accepted that.
"Gai, come on — up."
The wound was on his arm, and Gai Tsutsugami was the kind of man who had grown up fighting as a mercenary in third-world countries. Something like this barely registered.
"I'm fine."
Gai's attention was elsewhere. One misstep from here and the whole operation collapsed. He scanned the situation carefully — and found, at least, one thing to be grateful for: Inori didn't appear to know what Diavolo had been planning. He exhaled. With this Void-queen standing beside him, every threat shrank a little.
He had entertained a darker possibility earlier — that Inori had come here deliberately, under Diavolo's direction, to lure him in. That she might move to eliminate both him and Shu here, then report back to the rest of Funeral Parlor that GHQ had killed them. If that were true, the consequences would be unthinkable.
"Tsugumi — have you narrowed down Kenji's location?"
"Gai — are you okay? What just happened?"
"Explain later. I'm safe for now." He glanced at Inori, who had stepped back to the doorway, gun raised, watching the corridor. Then he continued: "His location — quickly."
"The enemy movement patterns aren't making sense… My best estimate is somewhere around the second basement level, but — wait. No!"
In the rear position, Tsugumi had finally pulled the feed from the infiltration robot's camera. It showed a figure bundled up like a parcel being rushed through the corridor in a wheelchair, a ring of soldiers surrounding him — heading straight toward them. An emergency transfer was already underway.
"He's moving toward you! Seven soldiers. Stay sharp!"
"Inori, we're moving."
Gai ended the call, picked up his gun one-handed, and walked out. Inori followed without deliberation — they needed Kenji Kido free, and his Void's gravity manipulation was too useful to leave behind.
"Wait!"
Apparently they had both forgotten there was a third person in the room.
"I… can I come with you?"
Shu knew exactly how he looked right now — pathetic, and fully deserving of it. He was the one who'd betrayed them. The fact that Gai hadn't killed him on the spot out of sheer anger was already more than he had any right to expect. And now he was asking to evacuate with them?
"Stay here."
Gai's voice came out quiet, the wound in his arm a low and constant ache. Though the deeper pain was probably somewhere else. Because of Diavolo, he had to close the door on Shu — here, now, in the middle of all this. But that was fine. The past had always been something he left behind. This flimsy plastic friendship wasn't worth keeping, especially from someone who no longer remembered who he was.
"GHQ will send you home, Shu. Don't come near us again."
"…"
Shu went silent, head bowed. This wasn't the outcome he'd wanted. But he'd braced for exactly this. It was enough — as long as Inori was safe—
"Put that on."
Inori turned toward him without warning, gesturing with her eyes toward the floor — toward one of the soldiers Gai had shot.
"Huh?"
"Put it on and follow behind us. Not too close, not too far. Just like I told you before." Inori blinked. Her expression was perfectly even.
"Inori!"
Gai stared at her, thrown. She was taking back a traitor? Was this — had she chosen Shu, just like Mana had once chosen him?
"Shu is my classmate. If he ends up as an enemy, my school experience is going to get very unpleasant." Inori delivered the logic cleanly, without a trace of irony. "And I think he had his reasons."
"…"
Gai had no desire to see Shu Ouma again tonight. But the situation was moving, and this was not the moment to argue with her. He could deal with it later. He gave a short, reluctant exhale.
"Shu — don't hold us back."
"Y-yes! Got it!"
Shu's relief was almost overwhelming. While he pulled the uniform off the fallen soldier, he kept stealing glances at Inori's back — and something shifted in him, more than the simple pull between a boy and a girl. There was gratitude too. She must have understood why he'd done it. She had to. He found himself thinking, with a kind of helpless sincerity, that there was no one else in the world like Inori — nothing else that came close. Like an angel.
"There — Inori!"
Inori and Gai moved through the facility's circular corridor. Gai's shout came sharp. Inori looked where he pointed: one floor below, a cluster of soldiers was moving with deliberate secrecy, surrounding a figure strapped to a wheelchair and wrapped up like a bundle. Narrow frame, that particular shade of orange wrapping — who else could it be but Kenji Kido?
"I'll go ahead. Take the stairs and come around."
She left the words behind her and was already up on the railing — and then the wall directly ahead of them erupted inward. A blue Endlave punched through the concrete in a shower of dust and debris, the shrapnel nearly catching Inori across the face.
"Found you! You — the one with the mask!"
A voice, half-unhinged, boomed from inside the mech. Daryl Yan. The volatile blond GHQ pilot who Inori had once kicked — then stolen the kaleidoscope Void from, and whose beloved unit, the Steiner, had subsequently been requisitioned and handed to Funeral Parlor's top pilot, Ayase Shinomiya.
It was not difficult to imagine the depth of his hatred.
"I'm going to grind you into the floor!!"
Daryl bellowed and drove the Endlave straight at them like a battering ram. Inori didn't step back. She moved forward — directly into the machine's path — and in the last fraction of a second before the foot-unit would have sent her flying, she jumped.
She cleared it cleanly. Her body rose through the air with a kind of effortless lightness, and she drew back her fist.
The punch landed on the Endlave's chest. It looked like nothing — a small girl's arm against a machine — until a violent burst of crimson light erupted from her knuckles, and a massive scarlet arm slammed into the mech's chest like a wrecking ball.
"Ora!"
Behind her, Gai and Shu both forgot to breathe.
She followed through, hammering a second punch squarely into the mech's head. The Endlave had been barreling forward with the full force of its weight behind it — and it went down flat on its back. Like a sprinting child running headlong into a wall of solid muscle.
"Did the power increase?"
Inori examined her own hand, opening and closing her fist slowly.
She wasn't talking to herself — she was asking King Crimson. The Stand wouldn't give her a precise answer, but through the feedback of those punches, she already knew: the force behind her Stand had grown noticeably stronger than before.
"Th-that was…"
Shu couldn't get words out properly. He was half-convinced he was dreaming.
An Endlave. A mech that weighed as much as an armored vehicle. And Inori had just put it on the ground with her bare hands.
"Don't panic — that's Inori's Void. I'll explain when we're back." Gai said.
"…R-right! Yes!"