"Inori, move fast."
"But be careful—that thing is extremely sensitive. Once it stops rotating, return Kenji's Void to him. He'll connect to the device and input the shutdown signal."
...
"I'm being careful."
Inori raised the Zero-G Void high and took slow, deliberate aim at the glass housing around the active core. Inside, a Möbius strip rotated in place—a simulated Earth at its center, and along the loop, several orbiting spheres representing the satellites. Inori's brow furrowed, and a flash of crimson light moved across her.
King Crimson materialized behind her, spreading its arms wide and wrapping around her from behind, its hands closing over hers on the weapon to assist with the aim. Its A-rank precision engaged—there was no possibility of error.
But then she saw it.
...As a precaution, Inori had activated Epitaph—and in the vision it showed her, the core was going to shatter in tens of seconds.
Epitaph showed absolute, inevitable facts. Other than using Time Erasure, there was no way to change what it revealed. But Time Erasure couldn't be applied to anything external—only to herself. Inori's pupils contracted in shock, her lips parting slightly in silent realization. Which meant—
"What's wrong? Nervous, Inori?"
Gai noticed her hesitation and frowned.
And then, before she could act, a deafening noise erupted at the breach. The hole the grenade had blown through the wall was smashed apart even further as a mech came crashing in uninvited—Daryl Yan.
"Mask girl!!"
The moment Daryl spotted Inori, he lit up with the frenzied energy of someone who had been waiting for this.
The kid had taken enough losses at her hands to twist sheer anger into something closer to obsession.
He didn't waste words. He leveled the heavy-caliber gun mounted on his mech's arm and opened fire at everything in the room. Gai hit the ground immediately. Inori's eyes snapped into focus—she activated Time Erasure in an instant, and the bullets passed through her body, riddling the core behind her full of holes.
"Inori—!"
Gai cried out in alarm, having watched helplessly as the girl failed to dodge and the rounds punched through her.
Inori bit down on her lip, then turned to face Daryl with cold, steady eyes.
What was going on? He was supposed to be locked in combat with Ayase Shinomiya out on the perimeter. Unless… the mech outside had been a drone all along, remotely operated from inside the base—and the moment his targets had breached the facility, he had switched to his real unit. And it had to be Segai's doing. That man had known they were going to strike the White Blood Cells. The way this was set up, he intended to use the mech's advantage in an enclosed space to kill them outright—or did he? Inori had one-shotted Daryl before, and Segai had seen every bit of it. He wasn't stupid enough to think a single ordinary mech could handle her. Which meant his real goal was something else—destroy the core, then pin the blame on Funeral Parlor. If that played out, the Leukocyte satellites would rain down on Tokyo without any guidance, and the casualties would be catastrophic. Funeral Parlor would lose all public support in one stroke. Their corporate backers would pull out. It would nail a sign around their necks reading terrorists who murder civilians.
"Inori—rest for now!"
Gai assumed she had taken a bullet and was wounded. He called out to her and launched himself at the mech.
He fired a grapple line at a steel beam overhead and let it sling him into the air. Daryl was a skilled hand-to-hand pilot inside a mech, but apparently his marksmanship was another story—he sprayed fire for several seconds and still couldn't hit Gai in the air.
The golden-haired man landed on top of the mech's head, drew his sidearm, and emptied every round he had directly into the cockpit—merciless, without a moment's pause, as though avenging Inori. The fire came so fast and so full it had the fury of something personal. Daryl went quiet. The mech's arms dropped. Slowly, heavily, it sank to its knees.
...The image was almost surreal. An ordinary person taking down a mech with nothing but a handgun. Inori let out a wry smile. She'd chalk that one up to Gai's personal talent and leave it there.
"The core was—… damn."
Gai caught his breath and walked over—only to find the glass housing already in pieces, blue arcs of electricity crackling and spitting from the ruptured core.
At the same time, every signal across Tokyo lurched violently under the interference of the malfunctioning White Blood Cells. Neon signs guttered out across the city. Internet and television feeds died.
"Gai—this is bad!"
Tsugumi's voice came through on emergency comms.
"The core breach sent corrupted data to the White Blood Cell control system! It's losing orbital integrity—it's coming down!"
"At this rate, Leukocyte 1 is going to fall directly on Tokyo—intact!"
"That was the plan all along…? They were willing to spend that many lives for this?" Even as the situation unraveled around him, Gai kept his voice low and controlled. "Can we get a fix on the projected impact point? Deploy missiles to intercept?"
"Impossible! It's dropping too fast—and the projected center is District 12! Our weapons can't operate at that range!"
A satellite falling from orbit wasn't a meteor strike, but the destruction it would cause was incalculable. Gai's fist clenched tight. Was there truly nothing they could do? Nothing at all?
"Gai. Can I borrow this Void for a moment?"
Just as the situation hit a dead end, Inori broke the silence. She held up the Zero-G Void—expression perfectly calm—and looked at Gai.
"Inori, are you all right? Your body—"
"The bullets didn't hit me." Inori said it quickly, without room for follow-up. "I'm going to stop that White Blood Cell. I need you to have everyone cover me."
"Wait—!"
Gai felt like his brain wasn't keeping up.
She had just said… stop it? A satellite currently falling from the upper atmosphere toward the city below? Did she actually understand what she was proposing?
"You're planning to use your Void to stop it?"
"A very important friend of mine lives in District 12."
Inori didn't answer the question directly. She said it simply, with a quiet steadiness that left no room for negotiation.
"And Gai—when have I ever done something I wasn't sure I could pull off?"
"Trust me."
"..."
Gai stared at her, struck still. Inori slowly reached up and drew back the hood of her coat. Her rose-pink hair lit up the darkness around them, swaying like a living flame, her gaze sharp and absolute with conviction.
"Tsugumi, can you lock on to the White Blood Cell's descent trajectory?"
"No problem!"
"Good." Gai drew a slow, steadying breath, then switched to the Funeral Parlor-wide channel and called out, clear and full. "All units, listen up! Mission parameters have changed—full firepower—cover Inori!"
...
...
Inori stood alone on an open rooftop platform, waiting for her moment. Below her, the battle burned—she could hear the distant, rolling thunder of explosions. She tilted her head up toward the high night sky, and King Crimson appeared behind her, its vivid green eyes slowly adjusting their focus. She found it—that massive, blazing silhouette tearing against the atmosphere, trailing fire and black smoke in a long tail as it plummeted toward the city.
— Little Inori, what exactly are you planning to do?
Even with her full confidence in Inori, Mana couldn't quite silence the worry rising in her chest.
"Stop the satellite. Obviously."
— But how…? Are you really going to—
"Not yet. Right now it's still eight thousand meters up—I'd pass out from hypoxia if I went now."
Inori had already run the numbers. Around two to three thousand meters would be the ideal launch window, and she had passed that information to Gai. Once Tsugumi confirmed the specific altitude, she would move.
"I'm going to… punch it down."
— Punch it?
Mana went very still. She'd guessed what Inori had in mind—and then the earpiece crackled with Gai's tense voice.
"Inori—target has entered four thousand meters!"
"Copy."
Inori closed her eyes, gripped the Zero-G Void with both hands, and fired it straight down at her own feet.
The bubble expanded at breathtaking speed. Inori reversed the gravitational field and pushed the intensity to its upper limit—the result was immediate: her own body, caught in the inverted gravity, was launched upward into the sky at tremendous speed, falling toward the heavens.
"King Crimson!"
Inori called out. The Stand materialized instantly, throwing itself around her to block the crushing wind pressure and keep her stable. With that anchor, she surged upward against the gale.
The falling Leukocyte satellite was suddenly close—terrifyingly close. Its leading edge had been burned red by atmospheric friction, its stabilizer fins ripped away, dragging a long black smoke trail behind it as it screamed toward the city below.
She reached the target altitude. Inori shifted the gravity vector to horizontal, accelerating toward the projected impact point. Then—at roughly one thousand meters above the city—she arrived.
She raised the Zero-G Void, charged it, and fired directly into the plummeting satellite. A massive bubble engulfed the entire structure, forcibly inverting the gravitational field around it. The satellite shuddered and began to slow—decelerating like a car hitting its brakes.
(③)
At the exact moment the gravity flipped and the satellite began to reverse direction, Inori fired another round behind herself. This time the vector pointed forward—and inside that bubble, both she and the satellite would accelerate toward the sea ahead at normal falling speed.
Inori let out one slow breath, then pulled a deep one into her lungs and held it.
King Crimson raised its fist. Everything was in position.
"ORA!"
A full-force punch drove into the satellite with a resonant, metallic clang.
"ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!"
The sound was rapid and ringing—like hailstones hammering a steel plate, sharp and clean.
King Crimson roared. Both arms flew in a relentless barrage of high-speed punches, each one cracking the air around it, the strike rhythm constant and furious—and with the aligned gravity amplifying every hit, it drove the satellite hard toward the ocean, one blow at a time.
"ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!"
"ORAAAA!"
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