"Chop! Chop! And chop again!"
Geno swung the cross-shaped longsword, now a size smaller than usual, both hands locked around the hilt as he spun his whole body around like an oversized top - a meat grinder loose in the middle of the Ethereal pile.
Ethereals burst apart by the dozen, scattering into streams of data in midair without the slightest chance to resist.
Even so, more of them kept pouring in from every direction, endless, like respawn points in a video game.
"Whew~ This never ends. Who balanced these numbers? I'm leaving a one-star review!"
Geno blew out a stale breath. The Bangboo body did drag his kill rate down, sure, but not far enough to explain a fight that refused to finish. Thousand Faces had to be tampering with something again.
Still, grinding away like this got him nowhere. He had to find Yanagi Tsukishiro and the others.
One man never makes an army, and more hands make lighter work. Better to link up with the main force first.
He was weighing whether to just pick a direction and cut his way out when a shriek of split air caught his attention.
He looked closer. It was an arrow trailing blue light, crackling and popping with current.
"What's this?"
The arrow streaked across the sky like a meteor and dropped dead-center into the Ethereal horde, touching off a violent explosion. When the smoke cleared, a corridor lay open in front of Geno.
"So that's where they are."
Geno knew exactly what he was looking at. That was a signal flare from Anti-Air Section Six. Follow that direction and he couldn't go wrong.
"Right, here I go!"
Hoisting the greatsword onto his shoulder, Little Bangboo Geno went pattering down the road that had been blasted open.
Plenty of Ethereals tried to block the way. He cleared out every last one of them.
Before long, those stubby little legs carried him to the foot of the building where Section Six had holed up.
The moment he arrived, the glass door in front of him clicked open, a hand shot out and hauled him inside, and the door slammed shut again.
He hit the floor with a thump and bounced twice. Geno rubbed the sore spot, then finally looked up at whoever had grabbed him.
"Huh, that's a model I've never seen before. What's a little Boo like you doing out here all alone? Did you get lost?"
Asaba Harumasa strolled over with a wicked grin, enjoying himself thoroughly at Geno's expense. Yanagi Tsukishiro, standing off to the side, looked anything but surprised. She pushed Harumasa aside and spoke.
"Geno, that is you, isn't it? How did you end up as a Bangboo?"
The way he had been carving through the Ethereals a moment ago gave his identity away plainly enough. The puzzling part was why he was wearing a Bangboo's shape.
"That? Long story, let's leave it for later. What matters right now is buying time for Belle and Little Geno."
As he spoke, Geno glanced back at the entrance he had come through. Now that the Ethereals outside believed there were no targets left in the open, they had swarmed in around the door again.
Then he tilted his head up at Yanagi Tsukishiro. She was the sharpest mind in the room, and Geno was waiting on her call.
"This building won't hold for long. The system's security defenses will be breached soon, and once they are, this place turns into the dead end where we get surrounded and finished off."
Yanagi Tsukishiro turned it over. The way things were going, the building would give out shortly, and after that they would be facing a tide of Ethereals vast enough to bleed them dry.
That was no kind of good news.
"Look, what is that?"
Yanagi Tsukishiro was still working through their next move when Soukaku's startled cry pulled every head around.
Outside the door, the Ethereals had stopped clawing at the building all at once, as if some order had reached them, and were peeling back to clear a path.
At the far end of that path, several enormous Ethereals came into view.
"It's Avarus! And the Bloodthirsty Madman!"
Avarus and the Bloodthirsty Madman - both of them special-class Ethereals subjected to Filth Corruption in the Lemnian Hollow. Nobody expected data on that kind of Ethereal to be sitting inside this system.
"Look out! They're charging!"
The two hulks came barreling down the lane the Ethereals had opened for them and slammed into the building like a pair of colossal bulls.
The glass door that stood for the system's security architecture finally gave out and burst across the floor in shards.
And just as Yanagi Tsukishiro had predicted, the Ethereals flooded in like a swarm of monstrous hornets.
"Move! Get upstairs first!"
Yanagi Tsukishiro made the call on the spot. The interior was cramped, which hampered them, but it hampered those two hulks just as badly. Falling back upstairs and holding a fixed position was their best option.
And none of it escaped Thousand Faces' surveillance.
In a space no one could place, the Bangboo that Thousand Faces wore as a body stared at the screen in front of it, malice all over its face. What the screen showed was Geno and the others retreating up the stairs.
"Run, go on, run. Where is there left to run to? Soon this world will belong to me completely! I'll be the god of the new world!"
Thousand Faces laughed out loud, wild with it. Behind him stood three ghostly figures, utterly still. Look closely and they were Hoshimi Miyabi and her two companions.
"Almost there. It ends soon, and then nobody will be able to stop me. Everything that's yours will be mine as well!"
What Thousand Faces was after had never been anything as small as one virtual world and a little payback against Anti-Air Section Six. In the end, he meant to return to reality.
But before that, it needed a body of its own.
"You people scrubbed out every stand-in I had. Fine. Then the lot of you can become my stand-ins!"
Thousand Faces muttered it to himself. He had no body to call his own, nothing to do but drift like a ghost through the data world of the networks.
The stand-ins he spoke of were Bangboos or intelligent machines whose consciousness he had usurped. Piloting bodies like those was the only way he could walk in the real world at all.
This time, though, he would use the Virtual Dive System to take a body of real flesh and blood.
"And the best body is obviously the strongest one! The power of the Void Hunter - how could anyone not be fascinated?"
He was already picturing the perfect life waiting for him once he had taken her body for his own.
"Of course, waste is a terrible thing. The other bodies are quite nice too."
Thousand Faces could seize permissions for more than one body at a time. Imagine it - every last member of Anti-Air Section Six moving at the command of Thousand Faces alone. What a delightful picture that would be.
There was one person left out of it, though. That was Yanagi Tsukishiro...
____
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