Chapter 82: Chapter 5.2
The last remaining survival instinct
Our tentacles struck at each other, their tips aiming for our opponent's heart, throat, head. I heard spraying fluids and smelled the blood. The fact that my
tentacle was the same type as Seed's kept me from falling too far behind. Seed was the original, though, the progenitor of all pseudohumans, and he had every special organ and ability that Chameleon and the other clones had.
I'd spent twenty years constantly honing my bat ears, but faced with an overwhelming monster like that, I was just a former human. How many minutes
—how many seconds—had I managed to stay on my feet? "It's useless. You won't last much longer."
Seed's emotionless voice sounded far away.
That wasn't because he actually was, though. My consciousness was fading. I was on my knees, and I tried to get back on my feet by pushing myself up with my right arm. Then I remembered I'd lost that arm already.
"...Ha-ha! Harsh..."
Seed's tentacle had lopped my right arm off at the shoulder. Even as I felt thick, lukewarm blood dripping from the stump, I managed to get up.
"...But I took your right ear."
My tentacle had cut off one of Seed's ears, and I tossed it aside. I knew it would grow back pretty fast, of course. Even so, the ability that matched mine was the one that would give me the most trouble, so I'd had to take it.
"Why would you go this far in order to fight?" Seed asked impassively.
I couldn't see, there was a hole in my gut, and I'd lost an arm...but I was still on my feet again. He sounded truly, utterly mystified, from the bottom of his heart.
...Nah, it wasn't like he had a heart in the first place. He was just a seed that had flown here from outer space. There wasn't much point in trying to have a conversation with him.
"This thirst for revenge is my 'survival instinct.' It's what's keeping me alive right now," I replied.
I thought about what those words meant—revenge, retaliation, vengeance.
Was there any meaning in those things, really?
...I'd thought there was.
That was why I'd brought them up with the sapphire girl. I'd told her to shoot the enemy who'd killed her parents with a bullet of vengeance. To exorcise her parents' regrets.
But she hadn't. Instead of a pistol, she'd chosen a microphone. I mean, I wasn't saying she was wrong now, of all times. I didn't even have the right to.
The problem was what did that mean for me? What should I do? Right. That's all this was about.
"What did you find amusing?" Seed asked, out of nowhere. Oh. Was I smiling?
The excruciating pain was making my mind hazy, so I hadn't noticed. "Oh, you know. I was just remembering a line I'd heard somewhere." Revenge produces nothing. Nobody wants revenge.
Hate only begets more hate.
I'd wanted to knock down any hypocrite who tried to feed me a line like that. The dead don't want revenge?
Who do you think you are, huh? Why are you speaking for the dead? If the dead don't talk, then don't you talk, either.
I'd carry out my long-cherished ambition without taking orders from anybody. "I see. Shall we continue until you meet your end?" Seed murmured, sounding
faintly disappointed. He'd probably seen the tentacle regrow from my right ear.
I hadn't managed to give him the answer he was looking for. Still, talking had never been what I wanted. I wanted mortal combat. It wouldn't be long before that was over, too.
"Yeah, but don't be in such a hurry. You're meeting your end right along with me, Seed."
The cell phone inside my breast pocket vibrated, telling me the preparations were complete. I took out the detonator I'd been hiding and hit the switch. Instantly, the thing that was buried right under Seed's feet blew up, enveloping the enemy in flames before I could blink.
You guessed it: I hadn't run into this abandoned factory because I was losing.
I'd done my homework and laid a trap here to corner Seed.
"—A bomb, hmm? Yes, if I had been human, that wouldn't have been a bad move."
However, Seed's low voice spoke from the raging flames. And then— "...! Ha..."
A burning tentacle shot out of the fire, piercing my chest. It seared my windpipe, and breathing got a whole lot harder. I didn't even know how many holes I had in me.
"...I guess I really am no match for you." The voice was so hoarse it didn't seem like mine. Even so, I set my left hand on the tentacle Seed had impaled me with and dug my fingers into it. "On my own, I can't kill you. I can't burn you with these flames."
The primordial seed wasn't just a plant, and fire that wasn't at least two thousand degrees Celsius couldn't burn him.
That was why we had come up with a certain plan.
It was our first and last team play: We'd use this trap to defeat an enormous evil.
The tentacle from my right ear lashed out to bind Seed, blazing flames and all. "Bat, do you intend to die here as well?"
"I almost lost this life four years ago anyway."
But if this ended up granting the wish I'd harbored for so long...would it mean that white-haired ace detective had fulfilled my request, too? If so, that's a hell of an ironic twist, I thought, laughing to myself.
"Sorry, Seed. What's going to kill you isn't me or the flames from that bomb." The next moment, the time bomb I'd rigged up to the factory's ceiling exploded, blowing the metal roof off. And peeking in through that mutilated roof
and the billowing black smoke was... "What's going to burn you is—the sun."
Mic and pistol
"What is this...?"
When I reached the abandoned factory Saikawa had told me about, what I saw left me speechless. Except for a few pillars, the building had been demolished, reduced to a pile of rubble.
"He blew it up... The whole factory..." Natsunagi barely managed to get the words out. She was standing next to me, shielding her eyes from the thick smoke.
At SPES's research facility, we'd come up with the theory that Seed's weakness was the sun, and before we'd reached this factory, we'd put together a plan. We'd lure Seed to a specific place, and while Bat was keeping him pinned down, Natsunagi and I would blow the roof off with a bomb, drenching him with sunlight.
However, to make sure the plan succeeded, and in order to verify our theory, Bat had acted alone and blown up the entire factory. By now, the fight seemed to be over. The victor was—
"Bat...?"
In the midst of the smoke and the flickering flames, a man in a torn-up suit was standing with his back to us. When I looked closer, I realized that his right arm was gone.
"...!"
I took an impulsive step toward him, but— "That's not Bat anymore."
A girl's voice stopped me. Right in front of me, blond hair streamed in the wind, and a slim golden sword cut down the tentacle that had reached out for me.
"Charlie...?"
Charlotte Arisaka Anderson, agent extraordinaire, held her blade at the ready and glared at her target. "He's been taken over by the primordial seed. We blew it. I knew Yui wasn't the only one Seed could use as a vessel, and yet..."
"...! Seed's using Bat as a temporary vessel?" Why? Simple: To protect himself from the sun.
Just the other day, Seed had plotted to spring Bat from prison and keep him nearby. This might have been what he was after. To Seed, Bat had been emergency rations.
"Bat..."
My former rival turned around, his head cocked at an unnatural angle, and fixed unfocused purple eyes on me. Our plan, and Bat's gamble, hadn't quite managed to finish off the enemy.
"...! Kimizuka, Nagisa, get back!" Even before Charlie screamed at us, the tentacle that had sprouted from Bat's—no, Seed's—back had split into three and attacked all of us.
"I don't recall saying I would never hold a pistol again." Just then, a shot rang out.
There was a short howl, and Seed spat out red blood.
Slowly, he turned around. Yui Saikawa stood there. Instead of a mic, she was holding a pistol with both hands.
"I'll avenge him."
She gave a sad little smile.
I was sure the emotion wasn't simple enough for the word revenge to cover. As she'd sworn on that night, she wouldn't let grudges or hatred hold her down anymore. Even so, Saikawa had fired a bullet full of determination for her companions who walked beside her, in order to link our story to the future.
"—Unless I make time to recover, this is going to be difficult."
As Seed murmured, he was looking at the new bullet hole in his stomach. Before Bat had become his vessel, had he been able to inflict even a few
moments' worth of sun damage on him? Using his tentacles as springs, Seed shot up into the sky. Then he disappeared, his figure melting into the surrounding air. Just like Chameleon.
Once he was gone, the four of us slowly gathered on a corner of the former battlefield.
"Is everyone all right?" Charlie asked.
We hadn't seen one another for a few days, but we were all so ragged we might have been fighting for years.
"Yeah, we're alive."
—But.
"Just surviving wasn't the goal, though." What we really wanted was to defeat Seed.
Yes, the enemy had attacked suddenly, but we'd meant to catch him off guard and defeat him here. We hadn't been thorough enough. We'd fallen a step short, and our worst enemy was on the loose again. My head began to hang in disappointment.
"—Still, we are alive."
I looked up. Was it Natsunagi's "word-soul" ability?
No, I was sure that wasn't it. This was the character she, and only she, possessed.
"As long as we're alive, we can keep trying. We'll fight as often as it takes. We can get back up, over and over and over." Natsunagi was wearing a rather impish smile.
It was a total cliché. If I'd said something like that, I bet people would have told me it was corny, but coming from her, it couldn't have sounded better. That bothered me, but there it was. Hearing her voice, her words—it turned our focus to the future in a way I didn't really understand. It had nothing to do with her red eyes or word-soul ability. It was Natsunagi's passion and her powerful, powerful will.
"So the sun is definitely Seed's weakness?" Charlie asked. She wanted to know what had been behind this maneuver.
"Yeah, Natsunagi and I based that theory on data we found at SPES's test facility...and Bat put his life on the line to prove it."
With SIESTA's help, we'd checked into the movements of Seed and his clones. We'd discovered that any obvious moves they made always happened at night, or during bad weather.
When I thought back carefully, in London a year ago, Cerberus had attacked
people for their hearts under the cover of darkness. He'd tried to kill me late at night as well. Later on, I remembered there'd been a sudden downpour on the day Seed had visited our apartment disguised as Ms. Fuubi. And then a month ago, on that cruise ship, Chameleon hadn't shown himself to us until after sundown, even though he'd kidnapped Natsunagi earlier.
All these things suggested that Seed and his clones were avoiding the sun. They probably couldn't live in sunlight. No matter where you went on Earth, the sun was the one thing you couldn't escape.
That was why Seed had created SPES, and why he'd had Bat and Hel do the bulk of the work: Their original bodies were human, and the sun didn't bother them. Then he'd worked on developing human vessels so that he'd be able to conquer the sun himself one day.
However, this had been no more than a theory.
...Until just now, when Bat had risked his life to demonstrate it. "What a pretty blue sky." Saikawa looked up, pensively.
The rain from earlier that morning had cleared completely.
This was a man-made sun break, though. We'd created it to help our maneuver succeed. Seed was a cautious enemy; he wouldn't show himself to us easily. He'd attacked in an attempt to secure Saikawa today, even though it was morning, because thick rain clouds had blocked the sun. However—
"Yeah, because a thousand missiles erased the clouds."
It was a technique adapted from cloud seeding, one that had already entered practical use in Russia and several other countries. Military planes were used to scatter liquid nitrogen, dispersing the clouds, while missiles packed with silver iodide destroyed active rain clouds. The redheaded police officer had arranged all that; I'd have to thank her later.
"Honestly, Kimizuka. You never care about the mood." Gazing at me coldly, Saikawa heaved a big sigh.
Man, that's not fair.
However, I hadn't seen that expression in ages, and it did make me smile. "We've got another reason to fight now," I said, looking at the cigarette butt that lay on the concrete.
"Bat protected me to the end." Saikawa was gazing at the distant sky again. "I lost sight of the enemy, but my left eye knows which way he went."
We didn't need to ask her what she meant. The next thing I knew, Natsunagi and Charlie were both looking in the same direction, at the summer sky.
Yeah, I know.
This story began four years ago for me—and now I would end it. "Today, the four of us will defeat Seed."
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