Chapter 67
There is little information available to the Reformists and the Japanese government about the Second Generation Beastkin. The truth has been buried by the research lab’s director, Reina, and the other Second Generation Beastkin. Only those directly involved in the research at the time know the reality.
The Reformists, with their half-baked intelligence network, treat any leaking truth as unnecessary and dispose of it. Misjudging the enemy’s strength was the biggest cause of defeat in this battle.
(The enemy is alone, no response to emergency communications. Judging from the components visible in the severed neck, this corpse is real. To engage and defeat these two within an hour and reach me, she must be specialized for speed.)
Greg forcibly pulls his confused mind back to reality. To survive a battle against Strains, one must be able to respond to any abnormal situation. With his two previous combat experiences against Strains, he could start thinking without denying the impossible.
(No possibility of a sniper type either, as there’s no point in bringing a severed head. In that case, this alley works to our advantage. In an enclosed space, there’s a high chance of death from ricocheting bullets…)
While recalling the strategy used against the now-deceased Lucas, he formulates a plan. No matter how fast, it’s not rational to reach sonic speeds where shock waves damage one’s body. That means bullets can still capture her, and by reducing options and increasing the number of shots, she’ll lead herself to destruction.
Instead of drawing his sword from behind, Greg signals the cyborgs. In the narrow alley, amidst scattered garbage and silently fleeing rats, Shiroinu Reina smiles beautifully.
「Is the strategy meeting over?」
「Of course, quite sufficiently!」
The cyborgs quickly disperse vertically. Kicking off the walls, they reach over 10 meters high in an instant, targeting Reina on the ground. Simultaneously, three cyborgs with armor plates for accidental fire emerge from behind her, surrounding her like a dome. Greg, stepping back from the enclosure, activates the silencer as a signal.
There are various types of silencers, but this one emits specific sound waves to cancel out certain sounds. The target, of course, is gunfire. Thus, no sound is heard outside as a storm of death manifests in the alley.
Anti-machine beast bullets with power surpassing 2040 tank cannons rain down in rapid fire. The destructive cries that tear through targets, too loud for even the silencer to fully suppress, convince many of victory. Only Greg, unable to fully dispel his doubts, could barely glimpse reality through the gaps.
Just before pulling the trigger, Reina’s body vanishes. The sound of gauntlets crushing bones, which the silencer couldn’t completely erase, catches Greg’s attention. He sees the cyborgs’ heads being ripped off.
The walls cave in forcefully on both sides. Deducing from the result, she likely kicked off the walls and landed on the ground with great momentum. Again, several heads belatedly dance in the air. Finally, the ground shatters as Reina closes the distance of several dozen meters in an instant, her fist smashing through the anti-Strain armor plate head-on, completely shattering the encirclement.
It all took less than 3 seconds. Severed heads finishing their descent, cyborgs collapsing with pierced torsos. Once dead, they face a login restriction.
「Hmm, not bad. First time I’ve seen a formation shoot at this speed.」
「Not bad, you monster.」
「You guys are quite battle-hardened too, see.」
Reina waves her hand playfully at Greg, the last one standing. A metal blade has penetrated deep into her gauntlet. The final resistance left by Greg’s subordinate.
「Judging from your fixation on ripping off heads, I assume you implanted blades in the necks. Interesting cyborgs who can do weird things.」
「Yeah, cyborgs who can extend blades from their entire bodies. Their strength in human combat was decent, but they were really good guys.」
It’s a lie. The true value of the subordinate’s implanted blade is the poison oozing from it. The source of their strength is the modification that allows them to house 12 types of artificial poison glands in their bodies. Therefore, this girl, invaded by various poisons, should die. He needs to buy time.
As if mocking Greg’s thoughts, Reina pulls out the embedded blade. The wound regenerates instantly.
「Well, once condensed into the beastkin format, my combat abilities are quite inferior to Strains. From what I’ve heard, a newborn baby can barely fight evenly with them.」
「What are you talking about?」
「But in exchange, there are aspects that far surpass Strains. For example, energy efficiency, mobility. And, for example, regenerative ability.」
Over 100 times the lethal dose of multiple poisons enter her body. Even beastkin should develop health problems within seconds and soon die. Greg has witnessed such scenes many times.
Nevertheless, the woman before him showed no effects at all. No matter how many seconds pass, her calm expression remains unchanged.
Greg draws his monomolecular expansion blade, prepared for death. It looks like an ordinary straight sword, but the incision and leaking cold air indicate it’s no ordinary weapon. Still, it feels too unreliable against the monster before him.
(I’m probably going to die.)
Both Lucas and Durand possessed specialized weapons. Yet they were killed. It foreshadows his own future, while leaving a glimmer of hope.
[This is Aiden. Fighter jets taking off. We will now break into the National Diet Building.]
As long as their team exists, the assassination plan itself can be carried out. So what he needs to do here is stall the monster before him. If he can literally sever her legs, that would be ideal.
For some unknown reason, this woman is also acting to prevent the assassination of the two politicians by Lucas’s unit. Even if Orange is impossible, Greg readies his blade with a resolve to die, hoping to achieve that much.
「Come.」
Unknown to Greg, in the previous battle inside HAO, he could fight one-sidedly without entering her range, thanks to foresight and the mechanism in his legs.
So how about this time?
The monomolecular expansion blade, boasting a 20m reach, unfolds. The metal part resembling a scabbard splits open, revealing a wire-like true blade, akin to a snake sword. The strongest weapon theoretically capable of cutting any object. Its true value is displayed against even greater foes.
Greg exhales, feints twice with his shoulders, then swings the blade. The single strike, heedless of prying eyes, bisects the surrounding buildings and easily slices through Reina’s legs. But the overly simple conclusion doesn’t allow him to feel relief.
His body is violently pulled. At the other end, the woman is closely observing the side of the monomolecular expansion blade she grasped. Her figure then swells.
「So this is how it works. Humans are amazing. They have the power to defeat UYK. I guarantee it.」
「Wh-what is that?」
「How rude. Isn’t it obvious? A monomolecular expansion blade and a tail-connected leg. Look, this one belongs to your comrade, right?」
Flesh swells up. The blue flesh, indicating Strain origin, rapidly changes shape and synthesizes into a form familiar to Greg. Tentacle-like protrusions form into Lucas’s legs, and a familiar straight sword extends from the right hand. Leaking cold air from gaps, Reina smiles as she readies it.
Strains mimic tools. Just as UK-08 does, just as a nucleus does. The exact same phenomenon is unfolding before Greg’s eyes. Grasping and observing a 2060 crystallization of wisdom, she makes it her own. What stands before him now is not only a Second Generation Beastkin but also a crystallization of the Reformists’ cyborg technology.
This is the strongest force the Orange faction boasts. Because of her existence, they can continue taking high-risk plans. The Second Generation Beastkin.
Greg moves. But even faster, a slash far swifter than Greg bisects him. The speed of the arm causes the monomolecular expansion blade to fracture, running across the earth. Gazing at the surrounding objects being sliced apart, Reina looks at the bisected Greg. Of course, he can neither speak nor regenerate. To defeat the last enemy, Reina sets her sights on a suitable building.
◇
「Greg, Lucas, Durand, respond!」
「No good, seems they’ve been annihilated!」
Piloting fighter jets seized from the Self-Defense Forces, they charge towards the National Diet Building. Their target is the gathered politicians. However, the loss of communication with their other comrades continues to give Aiden a bad premonition. The three fighter jets carrying them have passed most of the distance, exceeding the speed of sound. The world at an altitude of 10 km looks down upon the ground equally.
No intercepting missiles are heading their way. Certainly, there’s a game of passing the buck of responsibility, and internal collaborators are hindering the switch from being pressed by any means. Aiden was convinced that the missiles would either not be launched at all or end up being too late, judging from the confusion in the communications from the ground Self-Defense Forces.
「We’ll break in shortly. Lowering altitude.」
「Not doing a steep dive?」
「No, it increases our fatality rate and makes us more susceptible to interception. We’ll use civilians in the city as shields.」
The fighter jet gets swallowed by the airflow, shaking and rattling. The angle of the body tilts as it descends below the clouds. Snorting at the countless warning communications as cowardly, they begin low-altitude flight low enough to make windows of buildings quiver from the shock wave. It’s like an exhibition of dumbfounded faces from the populace clearly seeing the buildings and looking up at them in astonishment.
That’s precisely why noticing it was the greatest misfortune. One of Aiden’s cyborgs, specialized in visual and hypermass atom detection, noticed it.
A white figure leaping towards them from far below.
「Warning! Detecting high hypermass atom concentration approaching at 160 m/s! Likely a counter beastkin!」
The woman approaches the fighter jet at an abnormal speed, as if sliding across the top of buildings. Seeing her figure diving in to block their path, Aiden scoffs at the idea of a suicide attack and increases the throttle. They have the upper hand in both speed and power. There’s no reason to lose.
12 seconds remaining until breaking into the National Diet Building. The woman’s body bounces up. They were certain she would crash, but the opponent would definitely be the one to splatter into minced meat. It’s obvious that when a machine weighing tens of tons is flying at sonic speed, anything that hits it will shatter. The cyborgs let out a dirty laugh at the sloppy defense system where missiles and rocket launchers have yet to fly, and only one person is running towards them.
However, in the next moment, a blade extends from under Aiden’s feet. That one person was the problem. They should never have dealt with that one individual. No, that’s not it. Reina had completely seen through the sonic-speed aircraft and charged in. She leapt, clung to the underside of the aircraft, and swung the monomolecular expansion blade she had just acquired. The fighter jet emits a fatal sound and explodes, and Aiden is sliced into pieces with no room for evasion, dying instantly.
The remaining two aircraft are finally shot down by tank cannons from the Self-Defense Forces, who have lost their patience. Despite being from 2040, their sufficient firepower and aiming technology easily bring down the flying machines. The escaping cyborgs are then taken down one after another by snipers from the ground. It’s the unit led by the First Generation Beastkin, Shiroinu Anna. Within a mere few hours, the entire fighting force of the Reformists withdraws from 2040.
This concludes the outcome of the 『Inverse Dive Citation Information Project』 on the 2040 side. It was nothing more than the hidden card, Shiroinu Reina, trampling over 20 years of preparation and determination. However, the final concern—the issue of Hereafter’s technology being recovered by the Reformists in 2040—remains unresolved.
「I’m counting on you, everyone.」
Reina lands without leaving a dent in the ground by activating pseudo-NMM, and departs from the scene to accomplish another objective.
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