Inori Yuzuriha's eyes fixed on the brief message glowing on her phone screen. The smile faded from her face by degrees. Every scrap of mental preparation she had made for the coming battle, every beautiful vision of what came after—all of it dissolved in that single moment.
"King Crimson. Head to the sixth bridge on the east side."
Her voice dropped to something close to absolute zero. Shu Ouma, seated in the front, felt the chill radiating off the girl behind him like a physical thing.
"Why are we changing course? What happened?"
Shu knew Inori's full battle plan. Days ago she had deployed him, Argo Tsukishima, and several other key operatives alongside Tsugumi to scout the conditions around the bone-white Christmas tree up close, searching for any crack in the enemy's defenses. They found none. The enemy's security was airtight. Inori had rejected one idea after another—blow the energy depot, blow up the hangars—and had even devised a strategy of first drawing the enemy out before detonating high-density explosive charges underwater to trigger a tsunami. No opportunity to execute any of it had ever materialized.
The Oshima engagement had put GHQ on maximum alert. Gathering intelligence alone was near-impossible, let alone laying traps. So Inori's current plan was clean and direct: Funeral Parlor's main force would draw fire at East Gate Six while she and Shu slipped in by sea from the opposite side, made straight for Shuichiro Keido, and put him and the grave keeper in the ground together. Simple. Satisfying.
But now she was abandoning that plan entirely. Something had gone wrong—Shu was certain of it. Inori wasn't the type to change course on a whim.
"Don't ask questions, Shu. From here on we hit them from the front. I may not be able to look after you when it starts, so you'll need to take care of yourself."
Her voice trembled as she spoke. The fist clenched in her lap said everything her tone refused to.
Is this what they call convergence? First Souta, now Hare. None of it makes any logical sense, yet here it is. Sweet, oblivious Hare, talked into being someone else's pawn again. Because of something this absurd—
Inori's crimson eyes wouldn't stop trembling.
She wasn't afraid of powerful enemies. She wasn't afraid of threats to herself. But Hare was different. The people she cared about were different. She knew it was her weakness—and she also knew it was the single greatest difference between her and that worthless boss Diavolo. Inori would throw herself into the fire for the people she loved. Diavolo had murdered a kind foster father and his own daughter just to protect a secret identity.
She closed her eyes. The scenes she had watched in a past life rose again, unbidden: Hare called out by Souta—who only wanted to run—to fix a car, caught in stray fire, the fuel tank detonating. Then Hare, barely alive, using her last chance to heal Shu instead of herself, her Void shattering into a thousand crystalline fragments as she dissolved.
"Shu. Hold on tight. We're taking a shortcut."
Inori said it plainly, as a statement of fact.
"A shortcut? There's no shortcut here—"
Shu barely got the words out before the world outside the window changed in an instant.
King Crimson felt the rage burning in its master. A finger found a small button on the console and pressed it down; the accelerator went to the floor. The pistons thundered. The illegally modified engine shifted into a mode that traded its own lifespan for brute, savage acceleration.
Then King Crimson turned and drove straight at the pedestrian walkway, aimed at the face of a bank.
"UWAAAAH!"
Shu screamed and instinctively covered his head—but when he braced for the impact of stone and concrete, it never came. He opened his eyes to find they had somehow passed through the wall, the car still charging ahead, not slowing in the slightest.
Discard the winding roads. Take the shortest straight line. Use Time Erasure to pass through every obstacle in the path. The fastest shortcut imaginable.
To anyone watching from the street it made no sense at all—just a car that had gone berserk, trailing a streak of black across their vision and then vanishing.
The faster the car moved, the shorter the intervals between Time Erasures, and the heavier the toll on Inori herself. She didn't care. There was no ceiling right now. There was only forward. A route that should have taken more than ten minutes she covered in under two.
She activated Epitaph as a precaution, peering through the fringe of hair across her forehead at the scene a few dozen seconds ahead: Hare, Yahiro Samukawa, Kanon Kusama, and the others, stopped by a GHQ military armored vehicle. An ambush line, pre-positioned. In a few dozen seconds, they would be mowed down by machine-gun fire.
They hadn't been caught off guard at all. GHQ had laid a trap to wipe out the Funeral Parlor main force she'd sent to the front.
Souta rolled down the window, trying to negotiate. The man standing above them was Segai. He said nothing. He just smiled and raised one arm, signaling his Endlave unit to take aim.
This is a fixed point. But Epitaph showed no deaths. There's still time. I can still make it.
"That man makes a drowned rat look appealing by comparison."
You have made me furious, Souta Tamadate.
I will not let this happen again. Even if I have to slaughter every living thing on this battlefield, I am saving Hare.
"King Crimson!!!"
The ghost car tore through another building and kept moving.
Meanwhile, Souta's van had nearly reached its destination when GHQ's encircling units materialized out of the dark, treating the whole group as hostile combatants. Evacuation orders had been in effect—anyone here was the enemy. Before they could react, several towering Endlaves had surrounded the vehicle on all sides.
"We're students from Tennouzu First High School! We're not enemies!"
Souta swallowed his fear and tried to reason with the soldiers. Not a single one responded.
"Orders, Major?"
Makoto Waltz Segai blinked.
"Kill them."
One short sentence. Large-caliber machine-gun barrels from every direction converged on the van. Yahiro Samukawa went cold with sweat. Not good. He hadn't thought their luck could possibly run this bad.
"What are you doing?! We're just students! Please—please don't!"
Souta saw how bad it had become. Eyes wide, voice cracking, he begged without shame. The GHQ soldiers—drawn from countries all over the world—were professionals. On a battlefield there were only two categories: ally and enemy. Schoolboy or not.
"Souta, are they going to—"
Hare bit her lip and held herself together, barely. Beside her, Kanon Kusama had already broken into tears, unable to think at all, clinging to Hare with her eyes shut, waiting for the end.
Then something hit the roof of the van.
A single impact, sudden and enormous, caving in a clean deep dent. A pink-haired girl had dropped from nowhere—landing in a half-crouch, silver longsword in hand—and in the same motion she snapped her head up, blood-red eyes blazing with killing intent. The blade swept forward through empty air.
A ring of silver light flew from the sword. One blink. Every Endlave in the perimeter was cut clean in half.
Segai's expression didn't change, but his fingers gripped his cane a little tighter, eyes alive with something eager and fascinated. The girl with the Void power. There she was.
"Don't touch my Hare."
She stood on the roof of the van and looked down at him, cold as stone.
"Do you want to lose the other eye?"