Black Bullet, Vol. 1: Those Who Would Be Gods (17 page)

“She has high hopes for you, doesn’t she?” said Sumire. “Thank her by achieving great things.”

He instantly caught what she threw into his chest. There were five small syringes connected together like bells. Inside each was a red liquid, and a cap was on each needle.

“That’s my going away present,” she said. “It’s something I made while researching Gastrea. You know what I’m talking about when I say it’s the AGV test drug?”

Rentaro gazed at them in wonderment and kept looking at the drug inside.

“Don’t use it unless you have to,” she continued. “If you go away, there will be fewer visitors to this basement room, and that’ll be problematic.”

He didn’t know what he could say to thank her, so he just stood still for a moment.

“I have one important piece of advice,” said Sumire. “Do you want to hear it?”

“Y-yeah.” Rentaro straightened.

Sumire put her hands on his shoulders. “You know…if you die, you should die neatly.”

“Huh?”

“I would prefer you to freeze to death if possible. No, no, that’s asking too much. In this case, starving to death would be fine, too. I’ll pour turpentine down your anus and cover you with natron salts and put you out to dry in the sun.”

“A-are you planning on turning me into a mummy and using me to decorate your lab?!”

“You understand things quickly. That’s right. Don’t worry, as a burial accessory, I’ll put a pair of Kisara’s underwear on your head and put you up in the university where everyone can see!” She laughed evilly.

“I’ve just decided! When I die, I’m going to die with a bunch of hand grenades in my arms. I’m gonna rest in pieces!” Asking himself what kind of threat that was supposed to be, he became a little depressed that he couldn’t even die carelessly.

“Rentaro, can I just say one more thing?” Sumire sat down and crossed her legs. Rentaro sat like he wasn’t going to be tricked by her again.

But he was wrong.

“Ten years ago, from the day Gastrea first started exterminating mankind, my world changed completely. Heaps of bodies, streams of blood, mangled corpses… No matter how many words you used, it would not be nearly enough to describe that hell. However, even if that was the case, what I did to you cannot be forgiven.” Sumire shook as she clutched the locket on her chest. Rentaro knew that there was a picture of her lover inside. “My conduct was abnormal at the time. I don’t know what I can say to apologize.”

Rentaro hesitated a few times and then finally spoke. “Doc… I have never once resented you, ever since that day.”

Sumire didn’t say anything for a while.

Rentaro snuck a glance at the locket before returning his gaze to Sumire. Rentaro silently put his XD into its holster and turned to leave. As he was leaving, Rentaro looked at her shelves with her Western film collection and suddenly gave a thumbs-up. “I-I’ll be back,” he said falteringly.

Sumire looked at him blankly for a moment like she didn’t know what he meant. Rentaro was suddenly embarrassed, but he couldn’t just pretend it didn’t happen at this point, so he tried yelling it one more time in desperation. “I said…I-I’ll be back!”

The next instant, Sumire was holding her stomach with laughter. “Oh man, you think you have the face of a Hollywood star? Even if I forgave your terrible acting, you need to at least be able to say that without getting embarrassed. And you need to become a man worthy of that line. Don’t die.”

He was suddenly pulled back to reality by a tug on his sleeve. The sound of the helicopter’s rotors returned to his ears.

“What’s wrong?” Enju asked. “What are you thinking about, Rentaro?”

“Nothing…,” he said.

Enju, bundled up in an extra layer of green flight jacket, was staring up at him. Her mouth had been clamped shut for a while as she fidgeted nervously.

“Now that I think about it, is it your first time going to the Unexplored Territory?” asked Rentaro.

Enju nodded. Rentaro understood. Things that one had to do outside the Monolith were definitely not something you thought about if you lived inside. He braced himself, thinking that he would have to provide her with the best support he could. “Is there anything you want to ask about before we start the operation?”

“What is this helicopter called?” Enju asked.

Rentaro looked around inside the aircraft. “It looks like parts of it have been upgraded, but it’s probably the Japanese version of a Black Hawk.”

“I know that name! It’s one of those weaklings from that retro movie I borrowed from Sumire where two of them crashed. Rentaro, is this going make a nosedive and fall headfirst, too?”

The pilot looked over at them with an unpleasant look on his face. “Hey, idiot! What are you saying?”

Rentaro apologized with a look, and was about to complain to Enju, but when he turned to her, she had such a dark look on her face that he couldn’t finish what he was about to say. She was probably trying to get rid of her nervousness in her own way. No matter how much her strength surpassed the human norm, she was still a ten-year-old child. Looking at Enju, sometimes he forgot that. Rentaro decided he would stay with her to the bitter end, and nodded slightly with resolve.

“Do you have any other…questions you want to ask?” said Rentaro.

“Then…what part of this helicopter is upgraded?” asked Enju.

“The helicopter again? You really like helicopters, don’t you? The rotor has probably been changed to a newer model that makes as little noise as possible.” The sound of the rotors interrupted every break in their conversation.

“It’s still really loud, Rentaro.”

“We’re pretty high up, so from the ground, it should be a lot quieter. Inside a helicopter, you’d normally have to talk a lot louder to hear each other.”

Enju looked like she still wasn’t satisfied with the answer and swung her legs. “Why do we need to be quiet?”

“So we don’t wake the Gastrea. There are some that wake up in the morning and sleep at night like us humans, but there are also nocturnal ones that are active at night. If we make too much noise, we won’t just catch the attention of the nocturnal Gastrea, but we’ll also wake up the ones that are sleeping right now, and it’ll be troublesome. I’ll teach you how later, but when we get to the ground, you need to make sure you move without making any loud noises. If not, terrible things will happen.”

Enju murmured, “I see,” and looked up at him. “What was the Stage Five you were talking about in the hospital room? I thought Gastrea only went up to Stage Four.”

“Oh, that?” Letting his eyes look out the window, he could see the ghost town of a city below. Suddenly, he saw a small shadow in the window of a residential house. That was probably some kind of animal, or a former human. Inwardly, he thought,
She’s finally asked the question, huh?

Rentaro answered her. “Where should I start…? Normally, Gastrea start with Stage One, and then move on to Stage Two and Stage Three, growing bigger as they mature, with their skin growing harder, right? In that process, they take genes from various animals, so each one takes on a unique appearance as it matures. Because of that, there is no one way to deal with Gastrea.”

“Yeah, I already know all that,” said Enju.

“Yeah, I’m sure you do. You could say that the Stage Five is something outside of that general knowledge we have of Gastrea. Normal Gastrea go up to Stage Four—in other words, the complete form, where they are not supposed to grow anymore… But Stage Fives certainly exist. We confirmed their existence ten years ago, when Gastrea appeared repeatedly around the world at the same time. No one knows how they came to be, or where they came from, but anyway, they’re so gigantic that they make Stage Fours look like children. Besides that, in order
to not be crushed by their own weight, their muscles, skin, bones, and even their organs have been reinforced and are hardened. Doc once said that the Gastrea virus is like a designer that designs creatures, but this is the idea to its extreme.”

“But since we have the Monoliths, no matter what Gastrea comes, none can come into Tokyo Area, right? It doesn’t matter how big they are, does it?”

“That’s a good point. That’s where the problem is. The long and short of it is that the magnetic field given off by Varanium doesn’t affect Stage Fives.”

Enju’s eyes widened. She was clever enough to have noticed right away. Mankind made Monoliths out of lumps of Varanium and holed up like badgers in winter, preserving this delicate peace for the past ten years. But there was the possibility that that peace could be shattered.

“That’s not all. The most frightening thing is if even one part of a Monolith gets destroyed by a Stage Five. If that happens, Stage One through Stage Four Gastrea will come flooding in through that broken line like an avalanche. If that happens…”

Enju held her breath as Rentaro trailed off, lost in his words. “Wh-what’ll happen?”

“We call cases like that Great Extinctions. In the past, it happened in the Middle East and Africa, but in a word, it’s hell.”

Enju’s face paled. In his head, Rentaro critically asked himself what he was trying to do, scaring her like that. After thinking about it for a while, Rentaro shook his head firmly. He couldn’t treat Enju like a child anymore. She had a right to know the full extent of the dangerous situation occurring right now.

“You understand, right, Enju? This is the critical moment that will decide whether or not Tokyo Area faces Great Extinction. Even I still have a hard time believing that there’s a way to summon a Stage Five to Tokyo Area, but with the government spearheading such a large-scale operation, it is probably possible. And its origin is that duralumin case that was stolen from us. That’s why we have to defeat Kagetane and his partner and stop it.”

“Are there a lot of Stage Fives?” Enju asked.

“There were eleven that were seen,” said Rentaro. “Miraculously, two were defeated. Generally, cells with the Gastrea virus automatically repair and regenerate their telomeres, so theoretically they won’t die of old age. The ultimate goal of the civil security agencies is to destroy the remaining nine Stage Fives. No—you could say that’s the wish of all mankind.”

Just then, the pilot’s voice said, “We’re here,” over Rentaro.

Rentaro stretched his hand out to Enju. “Now, let’s go, Enju. Let’s save Tokyo Area.”

Looking at the helicopter starting its way back after it dropped them off, Rentaro began feeling discouraged. The next time he would ride in a helicopter would either be when they successfully completed the operation, or when his corpse was carried out in a bag.

From here on out, they would need to clear the path themselves.

Rentaro and Enju had been dropped off in the middle of an extensive forest. The tall, dense evergreens grew thick, and the fact that it was nighttime contributed to the low visibility. Because of the torrential rains the other day, the whole forest was wet, and their nostrils were filled with the thick smell of humidity and the night.

In any case, they couldn’t keep standing there forever. Rentaro took the lead, and Enju followed him. Rentaro took the bush knife from his hip and cut away the branches that looked like they would get in Enju’s way as she followed after him. With Enju’s strong regenerative ability, a scratch caused by a branch on her arm would be healed in a second, but she still felt pain, so he never felt like it was acceptable for her to get hurt.

A canopy of tall trees about thirty meters high covered the moon, and the forest was extremely dark. Unexpectedly, the map he had received ahead of time was completely useless. The map was ten years old, so he had naturally expected there to be differences, but it wasn’t just a matter of vegetation—even detailed topography had changed.

Rentaro quickly surrendered and was forced to use the light he had brought. He had not wanted to use the light because it would reveal their position to the enemy Gastrea and to Kagetane, whose location they didn’t know, but he had no choice.

He twisted the bottom of the switch cover. The 180-lumen circle of light cut through the darkness and illuminated various things. Rentaro looked at the scene and was dumbfounded.

Even though it was chilly, ferns and shrubs that only grew in tropical rain forests stretched as far as the light shone. Among them, there was even a plant he had never seen before that twisted its trunk around the surrounding trees. It was like a strangler fig, but he had never seen one with a mottled black and red pattern.

The strangest part was the sound. At night in rain forests near the equator, it would be noisy with the chorus of bugs, birds, and frogs, but this fake forest was dead silent and seemed as if it had already died out.

“R-Rentaro…” Enju was spooked, too, and drew closer to Rentaro.

“This is my first time out this far away from Tokyo Area,” said Rentaro. “Isn’t this terrible?”

The distribution of plants and animals in an area taken over by Gastrea was always crazy, but this was the worst Rentaro had ever seen. Of course, there should have been living things that hadn’t been made into Gastrea, but perhaps they were in hiding. In any case, they were nowhere to be seen. “Enju, we’re gonna get out of here and head to a nearby town.”

“Weren’t we told to look in this area?” she asked.

Rentaro put his hand on his chin and thought a little. Currently, in the First District of Tokyo Area was the headquarters of this operation being spearheaded by the Seitenshi. Somehow, these government officials had decided that they would use a human wave attack to draw Kagetane out, and as Enju had said, Rentaro had been given instructions to search this area before they left.
But
, he thought as he shook his head. “No, let’s go to the town after all. No human in their right mind would want to stay in a place like this for long. I’m sure Kagetane and his partner are somewhere else.”

Enju didn’t object.

After a while, they found themselves on a forest path. Under their feet, the soft ground changed to paved asphalt. From both sides of the road, the forest looked like it was trying to cover the road. The asphalt was cracked and broken.

Enju started to jump on the road with a strange look on her face. “What lousy work. The Japan Highway Public Corporation is a tax thief.”