The crackling pa-la sound was the cables discharging intermittently, briefly lighting the dim underground corridor.
It also illuminated a heap of butchered flesh and a floor stained dark red with blood.
Lifting her foot, Oriha could feel her shoe tack to the ground. It was the stickiness of dried blood.
Now she, Sayo, and the idiot policewoman had gone underground. This really was Syringe's hideout.
From the massacre on display, it was easy to picture what happened: a slaughter so one-sided there hadn't even been the chance to resist.
This base probably had no survivors.
"What is it, Hitsugi?"
Sayo suddenly tensed. Was there someone alive down here?
Following the direction of Sayo's focus, Oriha flew her drone closer. The camera centered on the spot, and she checked the live feed on her laptop screen—
"W-What is that?"
Oriha blurted, stunned.
"That's a ghost, right?"
The policewoman's shocked reaction fit what Oriha was seeing.
It was a dismembered body, but it looked like something out of an old ghost story. Not a "spirit" kind of ghost, but the yōkai kind—an oni, with horns.
"Is this one of Syringe's bio-soldiers made through the D99 experiments?"
Oriha noticed gouge marks nearby, shaped like claw rakes—almost like a goat's hoof-claw had torn through something.
And what it had torn through was steel plating.
Judging by the depth and spread of those scratches, if that thing hit a human body, it would tear someone open like paper.
But even a monster like that had been cleanly carved up by a laser.
They continued down the corridor and found more incubation tanks—ten in total.
All of them had been killed.
Seeing the terminal still running, Oriha immediately moved to jack in and see if she could pull any data.
"Hmm?"
Sayo spotted something: a disc.
It looked deliberately placed—left there on purpose.
Had the person who came through here left it for them?
"Oriha, check this first."
"Huh? A disc? Okay."
She inserted it, located the file, and clicked.
A video.
When it opened, they realized it wasn't just one camera. It was a compiled cut—footage from multiple security feeds across the entire base, stitched together.
So Oriha and Sayo got to watch, in full, exactly what kind of hopeless force Syringe had faced.
"Looks like he didn't clean everything up. Someone got away… no, not 'got away.' More like they were lucky enough not to be in this base. And this disc was left specifically for the one who escaped—Togo Reika."
Togo Reika was "Syringe's princess," the organization's figurehead and current leader.
Oriha's gaze shifted to Sayo.
Because this Togo Reika probably had something to do with her.
Sayo's father, Togo Itaru, had already been confirmed as the one who founded Syringe in the first place.
Of course, that didn't mean Sayo as part of Syringe. She'd just been used as an experimental subject by a father who'd long since gone off the rails—until Black Label found her, and Yuko rescued her.
And now this Togo Reika was claiming to be Togo Itaru's daughter as well.
Sayo had no memory of any sister, older or younger.
Which meant it was likely a daughter her father never mentioned—raised somewhere else.
Back to the point: the man who made even Syringe despair had left that disc for one reason only—to twist the knife, and to deliver a message.
Put bluntly, it was:
Insects shouldn't try to fight the sky.
Arrogant. Cold. Cruel.
But also true.
It would make Togo Reika grind her teeth harder, rage harder, refuse to accept it—
And still be completely powerless.
That, too, was despair.
…
Black Label Base.
The chief of staff, Fiona Lan Winchester, got another update from Mikoto via satellite phone. Syringe had been enhancing humans with D99-derived drugs—creating bodies that looked like oni.
Even though that thing had been effortlessly disposed of by Mr. Kain, Fiona already had Mikoto and Yuko's assessment of his strength. And once she compared that to the fact he'd still taken injuries while killing Syringe's people, she understood exactly what it implied:
That Syringe operative had been extremely dangerous.
If Black Label ever had to kill someone like that, they'd probably pay a brutal price to do it.
But that wasn't even the main issue.
Syringe had provoked him, and Mikoto reported that he'd produced weapons far beyond anything that should exist in this era—then went straight to retaliate against Syringe with them.
And now, less than thirty minutes later, Fiona received a report from Sayo and Oriha that left her stunned all over again.
The timing was too clean.
From Oriha's report, Fiona also learned the specifics of Syringe's experiment program—how far it had progressed, and what its end state would have looked like.
If Syringe had succeeded, then in a collapsed world like this… they really might have been able to dominate everything.
But all of it—every dream Syringe had—had been strangled in the cradle by the appearance of this man whose origins were still completely unknown: Mr. Kain.
According to what Oriha had described, once the subjects stabilized, they would have gained terrifying, superhuman power.
And yet under Mr. Kain's absolute force, the whole thing felt almost laughable.
It only confirmed what Fiona had already begun to suspect:
His power was beyond the range of anything Black Label could even properly interpret.
And someone like that… wanted to cooperate with Black Label?
It was hard not to feel uneasy.
…
Tokonosu City.
At the largest general hospital—
"We did it!"
Someone's voice burst out, trembling with excitement. Faces that had been caught between anticipation and fear finally tipped fully into relief.
Because the newly produced Earth Elixir had completed testing successfully.
A volunteer took it, then was scratched by the dead.
No infection.
But right as the mood peaked, a nervous voice cut through it:
"Even if it works… can we get out?"
The room fell heavy again.
About an hour earlier, the massive commotion—especially the explosion—had drawn the dead from across a huge portion of Tokonosu City. Now the hospital was sealed in.
Looking out, all anyone could see was a dense, endless corpse tide—blocking every route.
On the rooftop, Kiba Mikoto was scanning for a way through.
Her plan was to bring down a nearby high-rise—to smash open a path.
To break a building, she needed explosives, but she also had a special weapon in hand.
It was something he'd tossed to her right before leaving.
A rough, cyberpunk-looking handgun.
But its rounds were anything but normal.
And the recoil was vicious. Earlier, she'd fired a few shots to deal with emergencies, and each one hit like a sledgehammer—so hard it nearly snapped Hitomi's arm with that 2.75-caliber kick.
Then—
She saw a fast-approaching point of light in the sky.
Mikoto froze for a beat, then the tension in her body eased.
He was finally back.
And the next moment, she saw just how terrifying his armor and weapons really were.
He hovered above the corpse tide jammed in front of the hospital gates. The weapon systems on his body flared, bright lines cutting through the night.
Multiple beams crossed and interwove into something like a net—and as it swept over the horde, a scene that made Mikoto's skin crawl unfolded.
Hundreds—thousands—of the dead collapsed as if their bodies were made of blocks, spilling into piles of chunked flesh.
It dwarfed the "warning demonstration" he'd staged back when he first arrived at the Takagi estate.
That earlier hell had been ugly.
This was the real thing.
A true meat-block inferno.
At the same time, something strange began happening to the three teams on the rooftop as well.
(End of Chapter)
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