Shido Koichi was given a perfect destination.
Most of the Dead in that area were little kids, which meant their jaws weren't very strong. They wouldn't be able to tear off big chunks.
And since he'd taken Earth Elixir, he couldn't turn into one of them, couldn't become their "companion." So the Dead would just keep chewing on him.
As for the crazed high school boy who'd convinced himself he was a savior, he got the cleaner ending. They let him leave this world the quick way, his head taken off in one decisive stroke.
In the blink of an eye, time reached the point where Kain had exactly twenty-four hours left before he'd be sent back.
Which meant he'd already been in this world for a little over three days.
Most of day three had been spent dealing with the Dead in this city.
Of course, wiping them all out in a single day was impossible. The real work was identifying the other survivor zones, running rescues, and cutting open safe corridors.
As for mass-producing Earth Elixir, the more it looked, the more the best place was right here, at Black Label's base. The facilities were complete.
So, to keep this place stable too, he—
"I never thought I, an old man…"
Bang!
The gunshot cut the old man off. His body, and the chair he was sitting on, were practically vaporized.
The underground emperor of Fushimi City. The absolute authority in a family that controlled nearly half the city.
Kain couldn't be bothered to listen to his last words, so he sent him on his way.
And as for the rest of the family, he cleaned them out with almost no guilt at all. They were the kind of people you could execute ten times over and still feel like it wasn't enough.
Especially that "young master," a nauseating, obese sack of flesh, who'd earned his death by sheltering that monster "Hundred Days."
On top of that, this family also had ties to Syringe. Cooperation in places, hostility in others.
To put it simply, the Fushimi Family, Black Label, and Syringe were like a three-kingdom standoff.
When Black Label looked stronger, the family would secretly aid Syringe to suppress Black Label, so their own dark businesses wouldn't get targeted.
But when Black Label looked too weak, the family didn't want to face Syringe head-on, and they definitely didn't want Syringe growing so strong that the family would have to bleed itself dry to contain them. So they'd flip the other way and quietly leak Syringe's intel instead.
Ideally, from the family's perspective, Black Label and Syringe would annihilate each other cleanly. Even if that didn't happen, as long as both sides were badly crippled, the family could sweep in, wipe out what was left, and harvest the spoils from both organizations in one bite.
"That's the difference between a cheater and a whale, I guess," Oriha Nashida muttered.
The Fushimi Family was the city's biggest tumor, already terminal. Black Label knew it, but they'd never had the scalpel to cut it out.
Now it had been eradicated in under an hour.
No, more accurately: under ten minutes. The moment they entered the enemy's headquarters, they carved straight through it without effort.
So the Fushimi Family, after bleeding this city dry for years and piling up obscene wealth, could be called the ultimate whale, the number one spender in town, the strongest whale there was.
Too bad they ran into a rule-breaking cheater.
Kain was using power that didn't belong in this era. He crushed them without even trying.
And the "cheat" on his body—that sci-fi combat rig—had Oriha, who loved weapons and tech, practically drooling.
Laser strikes. Beam cannons. Those special rounds that didn't need casings.
Oriha wanted to take it apart, study it, and honestly just play with it.
The more she looked, the more she liked it, until she couldn't help stepping closer, reaching out to touch it with her hand.
"…"
Kain gave her a flat look, half speechless, as the busty "loli" actually drooled at the corner of her mouth.
"It's handled. Now take me to your base."
Kain's main reason for going to Black Label's base was simple: he wanted the real sample of the D99 virus.
If it really was as described—if it could make limb transplants easy, with no rejection—then to a surgeon it was basically divine.
And if he could bring it back to the Warhammer side, and if it could be applied there too, then using it in Adeptus Astartes augmentation procedures would be a massive breakthrough.
More Astartes for the Imperium meant more leverage against every monster and nightmare clawing at humanity.
Of course, it wasn't because he felt any deep empathy for the Imperium or for mankind, like he was fired up to make the world better out of pure righteousness.
It was simpler than that.
A safer world meant his own day-to-day life—comfort, entertainment, everything—would scale upward with it.
As long as he couldn't completely detach from this universe, then if he had the power to improve the environment, he was going to invest it. Slowly, steadily, until his life improved along with it.
But if he wanted the Imperium to use D99, he'd need someone influential to believe him.
Ask the Lord Regent?
He'd been dragged in by that "Emperor light-orb" to do contract work, but people like Guilliman didn't know who he was at all.
That Emperor light-orb hadn't revealed anything about him. Maybe it was worried he'd draw the attention of the four gods.
Still, it wasn't like he had no options.
Kain had always suspected the identity of one particular grease-monk he'd been trading with.
"Grease-monk" was what he called those people who'd replaced most of themselves with machinery.
They worshiped the Cult Mechanicus, headquartered on Mars, ruling it outright.
They provided the vast majority of the Imperium's technology and manufactured every kind of weapon, armor, vehicle, and even Titan war engines.
In other words, the Imperium's science and industry were basically in their hands, and so was the production of nearly all machines and war materiel.
The grease-monk Kain suspected was, in the Cult Mechanicus, something like… a heretic.
And the only reason a heretic like that could still exist was because he was too capable. The conservative grease-monks hated him so much they ground their teeth, but they couldn't afford to get rid of him.
Because he was trying to modularize everything. Standardize production. Make it truly assembly-line.
In the Cult Mechanicus, that kind of thinking was heresy.
They preferred handcrafting and layers of priestly ritual, with efficiency so pathetic it was almost comedic.
Meaning that if this grease-monk successfully pushed modular production across the board, a huge portion of the Cult Mechanicus would become obsolete.
As an aside, from one angle the Cult Mechanicus was basically Kain's peer group, because one of their core missions was scouring the Imperium for STCs.
Science became archaeology.
The Cult Mechanicus were the official, sanctioned "archaeology team," while he was more like a tomb raider.
And they also enforced a harsh crackdown on independent civilian research. Anyone outside the Cult Mechanicus doing unauthorized experimentation got crushed.
It was one of the major reasons the Imperium's technological development had stagnated this badly.
Right, and since it was a cult, of course they had something they worshiped.
That thing was the Emperor, a blazing sun deep in the Warp.
Which was why Kain kept calling him the Emperor light-orb.
At first, he'd thought it was a "main-god light-orb," like he'd been dumped into some kind of god-run survival game.
Turns out it was the Emperor light-orb.
It was the Warp.
(End of Chapter)
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