Syringe Headquarters.
A young girl with a green ponytail, kept checking through her backpack.
For some reason, she could not let go of that brief one-second rollback, the way the image had "jumped."
She did not believe it was ordinary visual delay, nor an abnormal frame-rate stutter.
Yet no matter how she checked, she found nothing. Not a single thread, not a single trace.
But that was exactly what made the scene terrifyingly clean. Unwilling to accept it, she kept digging as if she could force something to surface.
Then suddenly, an alarm window popped up.
It was the surveillance system she had written herself. It had captured an anomalous silhouette.
It definitely was not the Dead. She had already coded filters so that reactions characteristic of the Dead would not trigger special alerts. Otherwise, with corpses everywhere on the streets and their constant noise and motion anomalies, the system would be screaming nonstop.
So the alert that had just appeared could only mean one thing.
Someone was approaching the base.
Who?
In this city, how many living people were even left?
Someone from a local group?
Or… Black Label?
The latter was far more likely.
She clicked the alert, and a new window expanded.
Aerial surveillance. Something in the sky?
"Hm?"
Narrowing her eyes, she saw a single point of light hurtling toward them from the distant darkness.
At that speed and trajectory… was it a meteor?
No. With the world in chaos, it could just as well be a missile, and that would be very bad.
She immediately activated more monitoring devices and ran a rapid analysis on the target. The result made her blood run cold.
It could turn.
It was being controlled.
It actually changed direction mid-flight.
That instantly connected to her earlier suspicion of intrusion. Maybe it really had been a hack. Maybe their coordinates had been exposed and a missile had been fired straight at them.
Without hesitation, she triggered the emergency alarm.
A shrill siren tore through the entire base.
But the alarm likely would not do much, because at this rate, it would hit directly above them in two seconds.
Two seconds.
There was nothing anyone could do in two seconds.
Then—
"What… what is that?!"
The base leader jerked up, about to dive onto the bed behind her and roll into a hidden compartment mechanism in the wall.
But she stopped dead.
On the monitor, the approaching point of light suddenly braked and hung motionless in midair.
What?
She rushed back to the computer and switched to a high-resolution feed to see what on earth could stop in the sky after flying that fast.
The image sharpened little by little.
It was not a missile.
It was—
"W-what is that…?"
A dazed, tangled sound spilled from Reika's lips.
A figure in powered armor. Flying. So sci-fi it made her skin crawl.
In the next instant, her reflexes snapped into place, because the intruder raised a weapon that looked deeply wrong and aimed it at the ground.
If that fired—
As the electrical arcs around the muzzle intensified, the screen abruptly went white, the lens overwhelmed by blinding light.
Almost simultaneously—
Boom!
Heaven and earth shook, like an instant magnitude-eight quake. Everything swayed violently. Bad screams erupted everywhere.
There was fear in the voices, but more than that, pure panic.
The shaking came fast, and it ended fast.
Reika, knocked to the floor, scrambled back up and stared at the computer, which was now vomiting out alerts.
It listed which systems had been damaged and what failures were cascading through the base.
She ignored all of it.
Her eyes were locked on the surveillance feed.
The ground above had been blasted open, revealing a massive hole that looked bottomless.
The rim of the crater glowed red, seeming to flow. In truth, the ground itself had been melted by extreme heat.
She forced herself to look closer.
Then she hammered the keyboard again, bringing up internal camera feeds.
And she saw it.
A shaft punched through most of the base's layers.
On one of the levels it had pierced, the torn rim of the opening still glowed. Beside it lay a corpse reduced to only half a body, the rest simply gone—clearly vaporized by the strike.
That man had been one of the organization's stronger fighters.
And against an attack like this, "pitiful" did not even begin to describe it.
Her gaze snapped back to the surface feed.
Reika's lips trembled as terror rapidly filled her face.
The intruder—carrying weaponry so far beyond this era that it might as well have belonged to another century—did not hesitate.
Whether he dropped down through the breach or entered directly, it made no difference. The moment he reached the first level and saw living targets, he became the embodiment of death and began harvesting lives immediately.
Multiple death rays.
They carved through bodies as if human flesh were softer than tofu, and it was never just once. Several beams lanced through, slicing people into chunks of meat.
Those who were not closest to the reaper tried to evade at once.
It did not matter.
The death rays cut through obstacles with almost no resistance, then chopped the bodies behind them into pieces.
In less than ten seconds, everyone on the first level—people in other rooms included—had been harvested.
Even when someone hid behind walls made of thick metal plating, the intruder fired a special shot, the wall ruptured instantly, and the laser followed. Anyone inside had no chance of survival.
Now he was moving into the second level.
There was no meaningful resistance, just like the first.
And honestly, what could anyone use to resist this?
Against a monster this unfair, there was no "counterattack." Before anyone could even move, the death ray had already cut them apart.
As for who the intruder was, Reika already had a good idea.
When their Osprey had been shot down, the deputy leader had confirmed the enemy's arrival.
Even now, with a strip of cloth or a visor-like mask covering his eyes, it was still clearly the same person.
This was retaliation.
After Mr. Astro's strike… how long had it even been?
And he was already here, delivering payback?
Too fast.
"We really did provoke someone we should never have touched."
Reika let out a bitter, almost helpless laugh and collapsed back into her chair.
She had no intention of running.
There was no option to run.
Because the enemy's machine seemed to have a special scanning system that could accurately pinpoint everyone's coordinates.
So all she could do was wait for death to arrive.
She reached down and picked up a can of cola she had pulled from the fridge earlier.
Halfway through the can, she saw the wall of her room begin to melt.
Before she could even see that death angel clearly, a death ray swept across her.
Her consciousness was swallowed by darkness.
(End of Chapter)
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