"How are you feeling, Jun?"
Yahiro Samukawa held his brother's hand, watching the half-crystallized face with careful, quiet attention.
Even now—disfigured, barely recognizable—Jun Samukawa managed to turn toward his brother and press out a small smile.
"Brother—thank you. It doesn't hurt anymore."
"I'm glad. Yahiro."
The friend standing beside him—Shu Ouma—felt the tightness in his own chest ease slightly at the sight of that smile, even though it wasn't his face that had smiled.
Inori had kept her word: Jun had been transferred to Funeral Parlor's base for care. Vaccine access was tightly controlled, but the Kuhouin Group had connections that could move such things, and there was no reason not to use them. There was no cure for the Apocalypse Virus—not exactly—but current vaccines and palliatives could at least slow the spread and dull the pain.
There was, Inori recalled, something else. In the original story, Gai had been receiving monthly injections of her blood from childhood to manage his exposure to the virus—a consequence of the Adam experiments. This world's version of Gai managed with compounds sourced elsewhere, less effective but functional enough that he hadn't broken down. The effect wasn't the same, but the result was livable.
For a moment, Inori had considered drawing some of her own blood to treat Jun directly. She dismissed the thought. There wasn't time—what was coming next would demand everything she had. And besides, once this was over—once Shu used his Void to draw out the crystallized virus from every infected person in the world—Jun Samukawa would recover on his own. That was the plan.
Inori was seated in the hallway just outside, one leg crossed over the other, scrolling absently through her phone. Fan comments on her latest post. People saying things she'd stopped actually reading.
Then something landed in her hair.
She reached up on instinct, brought it down. More settled onto her palm—pale dust, ash-fine particles drifting from above. She looked up. Outside the window, a silver-white pillar of light had risen above the White Bone Christmas Tree.
——Has it started?
"Yuzuriha-san! This is bad——!"
Shu burst out of the room at a run, voice high and unsteady.
"Jun—something's wrong with Jun, he's—he's——!"
Inori took one look at the state of him—barely able to string words together—and already had a rough idea of what had happened. She rose without a word and walked past him into the room.
Jun Samukawa lay rigid on the bed, face contorted. The crystallization along his jaw was moving—not slowly, the way it had been for weeks, but visibly, crawling at a pace you could watch, blooming upward across his cheek and onto his mouth. In seconds it had sealed his lips entirely. He couldn't make a sound.
"What's happening? Why is this——" Yahiro was beyond words. He clutched his brother's hand with both of his, useless, unable to do anything that would matter. "Jun! Jun——!"
"What is this? What's going on?" He turned to Inori, eyes wild.
"The Apocalypse has begun."
Inori said it plainly, her gaze locked on the window. The silver column of light cut through cloud cover. Around it, dark-violet shards had begun to orbit in a loose, diffuse ring—and from below, more fragments were rising to meet them, peeling away from the ground. From people. From anyone too close to run.
The Apocalypse Virus Meteorite, activated by Shuichiro Keido, was triggering the Second Lost Christmas.
"You can't mean——"
"Shibungi."
The situation was urgent by any measure, but Inori had prepared for this. She reached for her comm unit and connected to Funeral Parlor's operations channel, calm.
"Inori—is it what you warned us about? Has the moment finally come?"
Even Shibungi, for all his composure, was audibly rattled. The others would be worse.
Inori had told them only the essential shape of it: that the moment would arrive, that Shuichiro Keido was the final target, that a decisive battle was coming. Nothing more specific than that.
"They've moved, as expected. Stay steady—have everyone inject the prepared vaccines now, then move along the planned routes. Our objective is the elimination of Shuichiro Keido. One operation, total. I'll join you shortly—move fast. Once you reach your positions, don't attack immediately. Wait until GHQ falls into chaos internally, then follow my instructions. Anyone who engages without orders will be shot."
She issued the commands in a single continuous line, even-toned.
"Understood."
Shibungi drew a breath, steadied himself, and cut the channel.
"Yuzuriha-san—Jun, can't you do something for Jun?"
The desperation in Shu's voice was genuine. Whatever else he was, he was still soft-hearted—he couldn't stand to watch an innocent person suffer, and this was his best friend's brother.
"The vaccine has been administered. His body already carried the virus—on top of that, the resonance from that signal is amplifying it. All he can do now is endure on his own. The odds aren't good."
The crystalline fragments drifting through the air outside weren't falling dust. Each one was someone—a person who had been caught too close to the activation zone, someone whose body was already partway through the change. Ordinary people would begin showing symptoms. For someone like Jun, who had been living with the infection—this was unsurvivable by almost any standard.
"Are you serious——!"
Yahiro's head snapped up. If she had been a man, or if he'd been less aware of who she was, he would have grabbed her by the collar.
"You said you were prepared. You knew they would trigger the Apocalypse. Why didn't you stop it before it started?"
"I'm not finished."
Inori held his gaze—those furious, helpless eyes—and answered without blinking.
"There is one way to save him."
③
In the small room, with two boys watching, Inori turned—and walked directly to Shu Ouma, raised her hand, and pressed it flat against his chest without a word of preamble. The silver light of a Void filled the room in an instant, flowing and warm. Shu wasn't slow—he understood immediately what she was doing—and he clenched his jaw and bore it, the sharp intrusive pain of extraction, until the light coalesced into something solid and took shape.
"A...glove?"
Yahiro stared.
A black glove, tracing faint green lines across its surface. Simple-looking, almost plain. But this was currently the only object in existence capable of completely clearing crystallization.
"Put it on, Shu."
Inori looked at it a moment, then passed it back to him.
"Why? How do I use this——"
Shu turned it over in his hands, mouth half-open, not sure what to say. But his hands moved on their own—obedient, as they tended to be when she gave an instruction.
"Use it on Jun. Focus on drawing the virus out of him. That's all."
She stepped aside to clear the way.
Her expression, for once, was genuinely complicated.
She couldn't use Shu's Void herself—not for this. What was coming next required everything she had; she was about to walk into a fight, and she couldn't afford to absorb a virus for someone else beforehand. And besides: she didn't think her heart was capable of accepting another person in the way the power required. Used by her, it probably wouldn't work.
"Got it. I'll do whatever it takes."
Shu didn't understand what his Void was. He didn't know what it could do. But if Inori said this would work, Shu Ouma had learned, somewhere across the last several weeks, that the answer was simply yes. He stepped to Jun's bedside, pulled on the glove, took the crystallized hand in his, and closed his eyes.
Inori turned her gaze to the wall. She didn't want to watch.
She had half-expected Mana to take this moment to say something—to scold her for making Shu absorb someone else's virus, to protest on his behalf. But Mana said nothing. She stood inside the silence alongside Inori, watching.
"It's working!"
Yahiro's voice broke open—shocked, and bright with something that sounded like relief returning from a long distance.
On the bed, Jun—who moments ago had been drowning in unvoiced agony—went still. Then the crystallization began to pull back. In seconds it retreated, drawing away from his mouth, his cheeks, his jaw, leaving unbroken skin beneath. Shu had cleared it entirely in the space of a breath.
"Thank god—Shu——"
Yahiro turned to his friend, full of something he couldn't put into words yet. But the words didn't come. Because what he saw stopped him cold.
Shu was still in the same position, hand extended—looking, on the surface, only slightly tired from a first use of his Void. But along the side of his neck, behind his ear—purple crystal formations had appeared. The ones that had just left Jun's body.
"Well. That explains it."
Shu touched them with his free hand. Cold. Rigid. He just smiled, unbothered.
"So this is why Yuzuriha-san kept refusing to use my Void."