Vengeance Is Mine (20 page)

“L…looks like it,” Tamaki said, clearly confused by Enju’s sudden change in attitude.

As Rentaro watched, Enju grinned and beckoned him with a hand. In the Satomi household, this was a signal to bring your face closer because the beckoner had something to tell you. Wondering what it was, Rentaro bent his knees so his eyes were on the same level as hers.

Suddenly, something soft was pushed against his lips, and Rentaro’s eyes opened wide. His vision was filled with the sight of Enju’s closed eyes. Her cheeks were flushed.

Rentaro moved away from her in a hurry, and Enju opened her eyes shyly.

Rentaro exclaimed, “Hey, idiot! What are you doing, all of a sudden?! In the first place, why do you always have to suddenly—”

Enju looked triumphantly in Kisara’s direction and smiled. “Rentaro and I both love each other, like I thought. Rentaro said he wanted to continue living because of me. He said breast size didn’t matter!”

“Wait a minute, Satomi!” Kisara shouted. “What are you doing? You moron! Pervert!”

Enju, carried away, jeered at Kisara, who had jumped up suddenly. “Kisara’s vexed!”

“I’m not vexed! Hmph!”

Hmph?

“Enju, you already have the advantage of living with him. You should be more discerning about your relationship with Big Brother!” Tina admonished.

Enju just put her hands on her hips and retorted happily, “I don’t wanna be more discerning.”

“Satomi, dear, let’s kiss-kiss, too.” Now even Miori was interfering, and the situation was getting out of control.

Asaka looked at him with contempt in her eyes. “Having relations with four women at the same time…? What a brute.”

He thought that things were getting too complicated, but he also noticed that the place had grown brighter with Enju returned to her normal self. Rentaro gazed up at the night sky behind him.
With this, all of our preparations are ready, Aldebaran.

All that was left was to wait for the searchlight batteries to arrive…

The vehicle shook as it popped up stones, and the objects in the luggage compartment covered with a waterproof sheet sounded like they were lolling about.

“Damn it, why do we have to do something like this?”

Staring at his partner cursing in the passenger seat with his legs stretched out in front of him, Daigo Jogasaki gripped the steering wheel hard.

“Well? Daigo, why do we hafta do something like this? Huh?”

Daigo thought his partner was pretty drunk. He’d been grumbling about the same thing over and over like this for a while now. Well, it was understandable. Daigo responded: “I don’t want to do it, either. I mean, transporting batteries is…”

“Not that! What I’m trying to say is, why are we heading toward the civil officer troop that Rentaro Satomi of all people is leading?”

Rentaro Satomi
—when Daigo heard that name, his heart could not remain calm, either.

“We’re elites! Respect us! Damn it!” Daigo’s partner, Tatsumi Ashina, held a cup of
shochu
in his hand as he yelled and kicked the dashboard with his feet. The latch broke and maps slid out of the opening and fell to their feet.

“Damn it,” he swore again, moping. He ground his teeth in regret, and started to sob. The self-defense force camouflage uniform he wasn’t used to wearing did not suit him at all.

Again, Daigo could not help but look back at his own decline. Just as Tatsumi had said, they had been elites. He had been incredulous when they received the invitation from the talented Takuto Yasuwaki, who was a year his senior at the National Defense Academy and had graduated at the top of his class. He and Tatsumi had talked it over for a whole day, a serious conversation about what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. And in the end, it had been a great decision to follow him.

Somehow, Yasuwaki was selected at a young age to become the commander of the Seitenshi’s personal guard, and thanks to his influence, Daigo and Tatsumi had been able to work at the palace as his subordinates. The guys at the Seitenshi’s palace were all terrible cowards who were easy to domineer over. Their duties were easy and their pay was good.

When they had free time, they would change into plainclothes and go to the Outer Districts where they would shoot at Cursed Children. In order to keep them from running away, they restrained them with many layers of strong wire and then took turns picking them off from afar. It was really fun to shoot at a living doll that could scream, and it wasn’t like the girls paid taxes or were in the family registers; the men almost felt proud—like they were playing a role in beautifying the area.

When he went shooting with Yasuwaki, the man had often talked about his dreams. The Seitenshi still did not have a successor, and her advisors had often told her that she should get married. Yasuwaki wanted to become the idealistic princesses’ knight in shining armor, receive a post in the national government, and pull the strings of Tokyo Area from behind the scenes.

Yasuwaki had said, “Of course, I’ll also bring you guys with me.”

Daigo had believed in him. He had believed in his own shining future and had not suspected anything. However, a trap had opened its jaws in an unexpected place.

The Seitenshi Sniper Incident—apparently that was what the public called it. The skinny civil officer with the black uniform whom the Seitenshi had hired independently had changed everything.

Daigo’s hands gripped the steering wheel, creaking in anger. “I wonder what Commander Yasuwaki is doing right now…”

Tatsumi was brooding next to him, but even though he was drunk, his ears were sharp enough to catch Daigo’s words. “Don’t call that idiot
Commander
! Rumor has it that he’s in some mental hospital right now. He must’ve been real scared of that kid—I heard his hair turned all white.”

“Get out of my sight, and never come near Tina again. If you refuse, I will shoot you to death here and now for refusing to obey orders from a superior officer.”

Just remembering that voice sent chills down his spine. Of course, Yasuwaki’s subordinates, Daigo and Tatsumi, were with him at the site of his downfall, but they were so overawed that they couldn’t move a muscle.

It wasn’t that Daigo didn’t sympathize with Yasuwaki, but because of what Yasuwaki had dragged them into, Daigo and Tatsumi also had to take some of the blame for the incident. The careers that they had built up turned into nothing, and they were made to join the boring transport squad. They would probably be doing this job for the rest of their lives. Forever, in this job with no opportunity for advancement. But right now, it seemed like it would be faster to be killed by Aldebaran.

“Stop.”

Daigo hit the brake reflexively and pitched forward. “Wh-what’s the matter?”

Tatsumi ignored Daigo’s question and got out of the car. They had reached the bank of a small lake. Thinking something was suspicious, Daigo followed him and went around to the back of the transport vehicle. There, Tatsumi opened the door to the back without permission and took out a battery that filled his arms.

“Hey, what are you doing—” said Daigo.

“
This
is what I’m doing—!” So saying, Tatsumi threw the battery into the lake. It rolled down the slope slowly before it finally dropped under the water with a loud plop.

Daigo almost screamed as he grabbed Tatsumi’s shoulder. “What are you doing, you idiot?! We’ll be severely reprimanded if anyone finds out.”

Tatsumi’s bleary eyes reflected an intellectual light that did not seem dead drunk. “No one will find out, Daigo. Think about it carefully.”

“What?”

Tatsumi dug in his pocket and pulled out two plane tickets. “These are for the last flight to Osaka Area. They rose up to a ridiculous price, so I had to use your money, too, and now we’re penniless, but with this, we can survive. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Either way, this is the end for Tokyo Area.”

Ignoring orders and deserting. It was true that they would be severely punished if they were caught—but of course, that was only if Tokyo Area continued to exist.

Tatsumi’s hands grabbed Daigo’s shoulders tightly. His eyes shone, and his mouth was twisted into an evil smile. “Not only have we used up all our money, but we’re also clearly criminals. Now that we’ve done all this, it’s terribly unfortunate, but
we’ll just have to have Tokyo Area fall, or we’ll be in trouble
. Right?”

We’ll just have to have Tokyo Area fall, or we’ll be in trouble…
That was true. But even so, it pricked the small conscience that Daigo had left. Was there really a need to do all this? It was one thing to have nothing to do with the civil officer troop as they fought the Gastrea, but to purposefully do something that would be advantageous to the Gastrea…

Just then, he noticed that Tatsumi’s two jet-black eyes were peering at him, and he got chills up his spine. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna let me do all this and then pretend that you’re a good boy by yourself when it’s over,” Tatsumi said.

“O-of course not. That’s not funny. It’s not enough to kill Rentaro Satomi normally,” said Daigo.

“Then, you know what you have to do, right? Those guys destroyed us. Now, it’s their turn to atone for their sins.”

Daigo could not refuse.

After that, they threw all the batteries into the lake, and Tatsumi upturned a can of gasoline that he “accidentally brought” and emptied it of its contents. When he threw in a lighter, tongues of flame reached out from the lake.

Tatsumi started to dance with the flames and shout with joy. “Whoooooo! Take that! Now it’s over for them!”

Watching his partner laughing maniacally out of the corner of his eye, Daigo wiped the sweat that had beaded on the palm of his hand on his pants. It was as if Tatsumi had been possessed by Commander Yasuwaki, but Daigo desperately forced himself to avoid speaking the thought aloud.

Rentaro vented his frustration by kicking an eighteen-liter drum barrel. The cylinder clunked and blew away, falling from the top of the building, getting swept sideways by the wind and disappearing from his sight. He rubbed his head vigorously and banged a fist over and over on the wall of the pump house. “Why?! Why aren’t the batteries here yet?!”

“Rentaro,” Enju said with an uneasy voice.

Rentaro put both hands on the wall and tried to calm his ragged breath. Eddies of wind gusted around the building like a flute shrilling in his ears and violently fluttered their clothes.

Rentaro checked the time and ground his teeth in despair. It was 10:50 p.m. There were only ten minutes left before Aldebaran was predicted to arrive.

Wandering to the edge of the building’s roof, he gazed out into the distant darkness. Because there was no electricity in the Outer Districts, there were no streetlamps. The thick cloud of ash from the Monolith’s collapse that covered the sky blocked the moon, so they could not count on light from that, either.

Because his eyes were used to the darkness, it wasn’t like he couldn’t even see an inch in front of him, but it was not incorrect to say that he
could see pretty much nothing. The only people who could move freely in this darkness were those few Initiators who had night vision, like Tina.

And he could hear from the darkness the countless feet crushing bedrock as the voices of the Gastrea surged forward. Even though he couldn’t see them, they were there.

His nails dug into his fist. According to his and Miori’s plan, they would use the searchlights set on the roofs of the seven buildings surrounding the Flame of Return to quickly find Aldebaran’s location and then attack all at once. However, given the current situation, the searchlights were obviously useless. In which case, their plan would fall apart at its first step, with them unable to determine Aldebaran’s position.

The civil officer troops were already in position, hiding within the bottom floor of the building. It was too late to order a retreat. It made Rentaro regret not replenishing their supply of flares.

Should they charge in desperately like this and try to lessen the enemy numbers even a little bit? But it was a fight they had no chance of winning. Once it became a Pandemic inside Tokyo Area, they would not be able to remove the lesion.

Rentaro closed his eyes tightly. Even if he knew that they would definitely lose, he still had to carry out his duty as the leader of the civil officer troops.

There was no other way.

Rentaro took the radio in his hand and took a deep breath. “All troops, char—”

Just then, Enju pulled his sleeve. “Rentaro, look at that.”

“What now, at a time like this?” Rentaro asked rhetorically, irritated, but Enju couldn’t answer him. She just pointed dumbfounded at a single spot in the sky.

Suddenly, Rentaro felt a soft, unusual light behind him, so he turned around to follow Enju’s gaze. His eyes, which had gotten used to the darkness, were suddenly hit with a scalding beam of light. Rentaro shielded them with his hands and squinted.

He was astounded. The sky over all of Tokyo Area was filled with a dazzling light. He soon realized that the source of the light was a large number of soccer ball–size hot-air balloons. At the bottom of the ball-shaped balloons was oiled paper soaked in fuel and burning brightly, the hot air making the balloons rise gently as they floated left and right.