"Open fire! Shoot them down!"
Segai's brow tightened. The Endlaves below were already out of action, but he still had plenty of soldiers on hand. Bullets wouldn't be slowed by zero gravity — if anything, they'd accelerate. And the four of them drifting slowly upward were sitting targets.
"This is bad — Inori, think of something! Fast!"
Gai's nerves were pulled wire-tight, cold sweat running. They had no way to dodge bullets in open air like this. He looked to Inori — she was the last card they had. She would have something. She always had something.
"Don't shout."
Inori Yuzuriha cut him off flatly.
Kenji Kido's Void didn't generate a weightless zone. It manipulated gravity itself.
Gravity was a remarkable thing — it was the one force that could reach across spacetime without limit. The Golden Spin that shattered the Love Train had worked on exactly this principle. The trouble was that Inori couldn't hold onto this Void indefinitely; kept too long outside its owner's body, it would be recalled automatically. And destroying the original would end it too.
In some fundamental sense, Voids and Stands were the same kind of thing — both born from spiritual energy, both bound by the limits of their host.
Inori fired the bubble again. This time she thought only one thing: flip gravity entirely.
The effect was immediate. All of them — Inori, Gai, Shu, Kenji — lurched as though the sky had become a floor, and they shot upward toward the dome ceiling at sudden, sickening speed. Like a high-altitude fall in reverse.
The volley of gunfire missed cleanly. But now they were about to hit the ceiling at that same speed.
Inori tilted her head up. She braced against the inversion.
"King Crimson!"
"Ora! Ora! Ora!"
King Crimson tore free of her body and hammered the reinforced ceiling in a relentless barrage — each crimson blow punching through until a massive breach cracked open above them. The four of them shot through cleanly into open air.
Inori adjusted the field one last time, reversing the direction laterally, and the bubble carrying them began to drop forward — toward the ground, toward the exact stretch of street where Funeral Parlor's forces and GHQ were already clashing.
"—gh—haaack—"
They came down without serious injury. Shu bolted straight for the nearest tree and lost everything he'd eaten.
Just the sea of bodies in the elevator had almost been enough. Then came Inori's back-to-back gravity inversions — an experience that made any amusement-park ride feel like a gentle rocking chair.
"Who's this?"
Argo hadn't seen Shu before. He had the vague sense of a familiar face, nothing more.
"Isn't he the one who came with Inori that time?"
"He's joining Funeral Parlor." Inori announced it unilaterally.
"Wait — seriously?"
The others exchanged glances. The kid looked completely ordinary — unremarkable in every way. What was he actually going to contribute?
Funeral Parlor had younger members, sure, but every one of them had been forged in the blockades, put through proper training and assessment before they were cleared for combat. This was something different.
Only Gai and Inori knew about the betrayal. If Argo found out, his response would be anything but measured.
"…" Gai glanced at Shu, then at Inori's expression. He exhaled. "Fine. For now."
He genuinely couldn't work out why Inori placed this much value on Shu Ouma. Was it fate? Two people — Mana and Inori — whose lives were wound so tightly around each other, and both of them had landed on Shu?
"The operation was a success."
"Order Ayase and the others to fall back."
Inori couldn't go home tonight.
This was only the first step. The real objective — the one the whole rescue had been in service of — was the destruction of the Leucocyte ground control station. For that, they needed Kenji Kido's gravity Void. How long before the next phase could start depended on Gai's preparations and how quickly Kenji's body could recover.
Gai introduced Shu to the rest of Funeral Parlor, much as Inori herself had been introduced once. The reception was noticeably cooler — nobody had a good feeling about someone who looked this obviously out of place. Gai assigned Ayase Shinomiya responsibility for Shu's training, with the expectation that he'd be combat-ready as soon as possible.
"No need! You don't have to trouble a girl sitting in a wheelchair…"
"Don't step on that one, Shu."
Inori was exhausted and wanted quiet. But before she left, she gave the boy that much.
"Huh?"
He watched her go, a little puzzled — but it only fueled something in him. However badly today had gone, however humiliating the tree incident had been, he was still here. Still staying. And staying meant more chances to be near Inori.
"You really are a kind person, Shu."
Ayase smiled warmly and extended her hand.
"I didn't do anything — just call me Shu, please — huh? Whoa!"
He reached for it, slightly self-conscious —
— and she locked his wrist, spun the wheelchair in a clean 180, and threw him flat onto the ground without a moment's hesitation.
Inori looked back once. The laughter from the others. Shu's yelp as he hit the floor. Something in the scene made her go still for a moment she hadn't anticipated.
Inori felt tired today — without any particular reason she could name.
It wasn't the Stand usage. She had done far more reckless things before, charged through gunfire using Time Erasure as a matter of routine — and never felt anything like this afterward. Her body was fine. It was something behind her eyes that felt worn thin, the intermittent lapses in focus coming and going like something she couldn't pin down.
Like she'd swallowed someone else's King Crimson.
She just wanted somewhere quiet.
"♪ Every time you reach for me I hear my own heartbeat~♪"
Inori sat on the floor in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, arms around her knees, watching the night settle over the city beyond the glass. The melody she was humming was "You, the Sky, a Miracle" — an Egoist song she carried only in memory, not yet turned into an actual song in this world.
Everyone had their own way of quieting themselves. The way Enrico Pucci once counted prime numbers. Inori sang.
"♪ For the first time since I was born, I found that longing itself can be a kind of strength~♪"
"Inori… Miss Inori…"
Inori stopped. She turned.
Shu was sitting beside her. She hadn't noticed him arrive.
"Is that a song you haven't released yet?"
"It's beautiful. It has the same feeling as your first single… Did you know — Souta and a lot of the others, we actually prefer listening to your gentle songs like this."
Inori looked at him. The deep-red of her eyes was still — nothing moving behind them, like two rubies left in the dark. Moonlight through the window frame lay in strips of pale white across her face.
Her lips parted.
"If you like it, big sister will keep singing for you. How does that sound?"
"Huh?"
A familiar cadence. A familiar way of speaking. And without warning, the words reached down into something buried deep in Shu's memory and dragged it up — an endless sea of fire, and a rope reaching toward him through the flames, and the face of a pink-haired girl he could never quite make out.
— No.
That's not me.
I'm not—
Inori felt a spike of pure horror and tried to cry out — but she couldn't. She had lost control of this body.