"Inori—it's Inori!"
Hare heard the voice from the roof and cried out in pure, startled joy.
It was the same confident, cold command presence Inori had worn the night she gave orders to the assembled members of Funeral Parlor in that big house—but to Hare's ears it was more beautiful than any song Inori had ever sung. She had never felt it so strongly before. In this moment, Inori Yuzuriha was the coolest person Hare had ever seen. A hundred times cooler than any hero in any picture book she'd ever read.
But the brief flash of happiness gave way to confusion, and then to a gnawing guilt. She knew what she'd done was foolish. She'd let Souta talk her into coming, told herself she was helping, and ended up as the one who needed saving.
Yahiro Samukawa let out a long breath and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He'd genuinely thought that was the end. As expected of her. She never failed to come through. They weren't out of danger yet—enemy units still surrounded them on every side—but could Inori really get them out safely?
Segai didn't panic. Inori's words hadn't rattled him. He simply clapped his hands together, twice, and from the rear formations more Endlaves rolled forward—but these ones held position instead of advancing, then raised their weapons simultaneously and trained every barrel on the van and the girl standing on its roof.
"You think that's enough to stop me?"
Inori looked over the line of robots and laughed, light and genuine. She wasn't performing for Segai's benefit. She actually found it funny—especially these Endlaves. Of all the mecha she'd seen across every franchise she could name, these had to be the most embarrassing. In other anime, grunt mecha could casually destroy tanks. In this world, a perfectly ordinary person like Gai Tsutsugami could take one down with a grappling hook. Mecha reputation: thoroughly ruined.
"Fire."
Segai watched the laughing girl and issued the command without any particular emotion.
The salvo erupted. Dense, full-auto fire tore through the space in front of him. And then the GHQ soldiers fell completely silent, because nothing made sense. The girl didn't move. Didn't raise the enormous sword. Didn't do anything except keep smiling at them while they emptied their weapons into her.
The bullets punched through her and through the van and buried themselves in the low wall behind, drilling a neat row of holes in the concrete. Not one of them had drawn blood.
Segai watched every frame of it. He didn't miss a thing. The bullets had unambiguously hit—and in that fraction of a second, something had happened. Something that neutralized them completely.
"That… is the Void that makes time leap?"
As part of their arrangement, Shuichiro Keido had shared everything he knew about Voids with Segai—including Inori's: a power over time.
"Can't you tell? I'm standing on this van, so the van is part of me."
Just as she could make a ship vanish across the surface of the sea, just as she could race unchecked through a city full of high-rises—standing on this vehicle made it an extension of herself. Everything inside it moved with her into the time-erased world.
Against bullets in flight, a single instant of Time Erasure was enough.
Inori let the smile fade. What replaced it was something quieter, more certain.
"Come to think of it, Segai—you seem very confident in your army."
A beat.
"Underestimating my allies is going to cost you."
Segai's comm crackled with an emergency burst.
"Major! Bad news!"
Segai's composure tightened, just slightly.
"Funeral Parlor broke through to your position! We couldn't hold them—there were weapons we had no intelligence on. A woman with metal legs flying through the air, someone else launching our vehicles and Endlaves skyward with some kind of strange device—but the line is still ours. Only two people broke through!"
"What did you say?"
Segai's face went rigid. He had laid a dragnet through the entire rear formation. How could Funeral Parlor's handful of broken machines possibly have the strength to do this? The soldier was describing Void weapons. But when had Inori deployed them? Had she anticipated this? The Void intelligence Segai possessed was limited: the sword, and the metallic figure capable of Time Erasure. Add the gravity cannon used during the Kenji Kido rescue, and that was all he had. He had not expected the other Funeral Parlor members' Voids to be this formidable.
"Inori, I've got Ayase—we're on our way!"
Shu's voice crackled through the earpiece, bright with the rush of it. Inori looked up and caught the distant black smoke and the percussion of faraway explosions—they were already close. She smiled, brief and relieved.
Ayase Shinomiya gripped Argo Tsukishima's Void—a bubble weapon—and fired. One round struck an Endlave and sealed the area in a field that blocked every signal and energy source. No physical damage, but the mech went completely inert.
And she wasn't just using Void weapons. Her leg armor was on—her own Void, fitted over her legs. In this state she was no longer a girl who lived in a wheelchair. Without a single Endlave, she crossed the sky and the earth alike at full speed.
"Watch yourself, Ayase. Don't get too far ahead of me."
Shu had the gravity cannon in one hand and Yahiro's scissor weapon in the other, carefully regulating his acceleration through the gravity cannon to match Ayase's pace while the scissors reaped through enemy units in his path.
"You're one person, Shu—stop acting like a one-man army. Remember, I'm still your instructor."
Ayase laughed and teased him over her shoulder, then hit her next burst of speed.
Segai hadn't had many people with him to start with, and he'd committed all of them to surrounding Inori. Now Shu and Ayase hit him from behind without warning, the two of them crossing through the formation in intersecting arcs at stunning speed, diving and rising in trajectories no one could track, tearing the rear guard to pieces.
Even in the most critical moment, Inori hadn't lost her composure. She had directed Shu to link up with Funeral Parlor's main body, collect the Void weapons she had pre-extracted, leave the large-profile Endlaves behind, and use the Funeral Parlor troops as cover—driving the two of them here to catch Segai between two forces, inside and out.
"This… is the radiance of the Void…"
Segai knew he had nowhere left to go. He felt no panic. No fear. He simply turned, slowly, and looked: through the spreading fire ahead, through the rolling waves of silver light, a boy and a girl danced and wheeled through the air like something out of a dream.
On his pale face, a sick smile slowly spread.
Ten years ago. The first time he had seen the light of a Void. A man in a red coat and a small blue-haired girl, fighting side by side in front of him—an improbable pair—and he had stood and watched and lost his left eye without once turning away. That was the light he had spent his whole life chasing. The destination he had never stopped searching for.
"So it was you, Ouma."
He came back to himself. A familiar and unfamiliar chestnut-haired boy was standing in front of him.
Familiar: the face. Unfamiliar: everything else. The bearing, the presence—nothing like the terrified boy who had swayed on his feet under interrogation in the detention facility.
"Can you actually do it? Kill someone?"
Segai made no move to resist. He just smiled and asked.
"I've already decided."
"For the people who matter to me—I'll stain my hands as many times as it takes."
Shu didn't hesitate. The scissor blades went in. They left no wound—but Segai began to glow, filament-bright, like a light being switched on for the last time.
"Another person's heart… entering my body…"
"The radiance of the Void—!!!"