It was a gaping hole that looked like it had been torn open, with a faint red glow still lingering along the edges.
This was where a high-energy beam had swept past and left everything heat-scorched red; even the concrete had been vitrified into something glassy. And centered around the opened breach, the surrounding buildings had suffered the blast wave's impact—countless windows shattered at once, spraying fragments across the area.
Most of the debris had already fallen, but there were still occasional pieces dropping here and there. With the moonlight being fairly bright tonight, the falling shards caught and reflected it as they drifted down—strangely beautiful.
A disturbance on this scale had practically drawn in the whole city's dead.
They might not have sight, but their hearing was abnormally sharp. Almost instantly, as if by unspoken agreement, they converged from every direction. Faintly, you could already hear countless dead shuffling in from all sides, gathering toward this place.
Before long, this area would probably become a tightly packed sea of bodies.
But in a night this quiet, other chaotic sounds were equally clear.
They were coming from below the opened breach. Gunfire, the sound of explosives, and human screams?
It sounded like twenty thousand bullets detonating at once, roaring through streets filled with the dead, shaking the entire roadway until it trembled.
It was the first time she'd felt panic this strong, because what was happening in front of her was genuinely beyond exaggeration.
"Miss Sakura, can you tank his bombardment?"
"Are you an idiot? Do you think my shield is Captain What's-His-Name's vibranium shield from the movies?"
"Right. Then I think we should leave immediately."
This unknown newcomer, this kind of weaponized mobility… it turned out we'd been using leftover rejects all along.
She glanced at the drone bomb in her hand. After Oriha's modifications—she was a genius technician in her own right—she'd been confident it was world-advanced.
But compared to the gear on that man, it was like pitting a modern jet fighter against a World War II prop plane. It was outright bullying.
So if they didn't hide now, once he finished dealing with them and turned his attention toward the three of them, they were done.
"Then—"
Sayo was about to tell Oriha to leave first, but before she could finish, the enemy was already right in front of them.
On an open patch of ground roughly one kilometer from the blast center, the earth suddenly bulged upward. A passage cracked open, and a modified military Humvee came roaring out like a beast set loose.
Through night vision, she saw the driver wearing a ghost-like mask—it was the Syringe crew.
At the same time, someone else in the vehicle popped up through the roof and immediately began operating the roof-mounted machine gun, aiming straight at the passage entrance behind them.
In the next second, as if he'd seen something, he squeezed the trigger. The gunfire poured into the passage mouth in a savage stream.
Sayo snapped her gaze over and saw a figure emerge from the passage, trying to rush through the entrance before it could close.
Faced with incoming 7.62mm fire, he didn't dodge at all—he charged straight into it.
And then, before a single round could strike his body, sparks erupted in midair as the bullets ricocheted off in all directions.
"This is…!"
As a policewoman, Konomi Suzue was so stunned she couldn't even form words.
Because what grabbed Konomi's attention wasn't some high-spec force-field shield unfolding from his armor.
"Miss Sakura, do you think the policewoman can do something like this?"
"With this rate of fire and this caliber, you can do it in a dream. But you can't block a sweep like that. You'd get turned into a honeycomb."
Sayo and Oriha both fell silent.
Right in front of them, he was using a slender blade—purely and directly—to hack apart an oncoming machine-gun spray.
Every single bullet.
Every single warhead.
All split.
So, on the Humvee, one of them immediately pulled out an RPG.
In the next second, the RPG exploded.
Correction: it wasn't a self-inflicted detonation. A beam of light pierced straight through the rocket the instant the man pulled the trigger.
That explosion sent the Humvee out of control. It slammed into a wall and finally stopped.
Two survivors staggered out, stumbling as they tried to run.
They didn't make it five meters.
As several beams swept over them, both legs were severed clean off and left behind on the spot. The two bodies continued forward from sheer momentum, then crashed hard to the ground.
That should have been the end of it.
But before their bodies even hit the ground, several more flashes of light passed—then the bodies dropped like shattered pottery, splitting into multiple chunks of flesh with perfectly neat cross-sections.
"Ugh!"
Oriha's body locked up instantly. Cold sweat broke out all over her, as if a finger from the Reaper had traced up her spine—numbing terror shooting straight into her skull.
At the same time, she immediately released the drone in her hand and raised both hands fast, making a throwing posture—terrified that if she was even a beat too slow, she'd be chopped into seven or eight pieces as well.
A red dot had landed on her body—an obvious weapon lock from the man's gear.
Not just her. Sayo and the policewoman had them too.
"Don't! We're not with the ones you're fighting!"
Oriha shouted the explanation at the top of her lungs.
He flew over—stopping when he was about two meters away—his true form shimmering into view on the surface of a gauzy distortion, overlaid with a flickering image feed:
[014401411 Fly-Point 002460420]
His gaze snapped to the mask hanging at Sayo's waist.
"This mask isn't the same as Syringe's. The design is different. We really aren't with them."
Oriha was drenched in sweat as she explained, because she was genuinely about to be killed thanks to that idiot girl. This mask should've been swapped out a long time ago.
...
"You're Black Label?"
That made Oriha go quiet.
He seemed to know Black Label, but she couldn't tell what his attitude toward Black Label actually was.
Enemy?
Or ally?
"If you want cooperation, you'll need some time."
Leaving only that sentence behind, he turned, rose into the air, and then streaked away like a meteor—until he vanished into the black horizon.
"Haa…"
Oriha let out a long breath, her legs going weak as she collapsed onto the ground.
"Haa…"
Sayo also exhaled deeply, and only then did she finally unseal the opening at the tear in her clothing.
At this distance, she finally understood just how terrifying that man was.
The terror wasn't the intimidation of his weapons.
It was him.
He carried a deathly aura so heavy it didn't feel like "he's killed a few dozen people."
It felt like no matter how many you killed, you still couldn't build something like that.
It was like death from hell itself had wrapped around him—like he'd lived alongside a devil on the road ahead, and never once left its company.
So what did that line mean?
Cooperation… with Black Label?
She couldn't understand it.
Someone with gear like that—meaning a power behind him beyond imagination—still needed cooperation?
When they got back to base, she'd ask Dr. Mochizuki.
For now, at least they'd confirmed what was happening with the base that had been breached.
(End of Chapter)
[Get +30 Extra Chapters On — P@tr3on "Zaelum"]
[Every 300 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter Drop]
[Thanks for Reading!]