Green had quietly moved toward the door of the living room, intending to slip out and find Maeda Miwa in Room 205, so she could strike the clock instead.
He had even deliberately delayed a little. After learning that the hanging clock could rewind time, Green had reasoned that Takumi might already have experienced a rewind before—and he suspected that those who died before the reset might not retain their memories afterward. This much could already be inferred from the differences between the Black guy and Maeda Miwa before and after the previous rewind.
So, if he waited until Takumi, Kaguya, and Maki were all killed by the anomaly before having Maeda Miwa strike the clock, wouldn't he be able to cover up his act of defiance? After all, that woman who just screamed nonsense all the time—obviously brain-fried from overdosing on hallucinogens—wouldn't draw any attention anyway.
Green felt quite pleased with himself for coming up with such an idea.
And then Yamamoto Hiroshi burst in from outside and blocked his way.
Although Hiroshi was nearly fifty and not particularly strong, his broad frame was more than enough. Green himself, standing over 1.9 meters tall, was a large man, yet he found himself wedged in the narrow hallway, unable to get through, and instead was shoved backward by Hiroshi.
Had he been more forceful—just knocked Hiroshi down and forced his way out—Green's plan might still have worked. But then he heard the loud crash from the living room and realized that the charred corpse had begun to move. At the same time, true to his lifelong petty-thief instincts, once his scheming was discovered, he instinctively panicked and froze. As a result, he was pushed back into the living room, left dumbly watching Hiroshi rush into the kitchen. Moments later, Kaguya stepped out, her expression ice-cold.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I was too scared! I was just too scared!"
Realizing that his plan had completely fallen apart, Green dropped to his knees and began apologizing frantically.
Kaguya reached out and grabbed him by the collar.
Though she looked delicate, her body possessed the unreasonable strength of a two-dimensional being. She suddenly heaved him up, sending the 1.9-meter-tall man flying through the air and slamming hard onto the floor.
As Green screamed in pain, she twisted his right arm, pressing his head down against the ground, then drew the knife from his waist and drove it down, slashing a bloody gash across his cheek.
"Ah… ahh—!"
Terrified out of his wits, Green thought that slash would kill him. Trembling all over, he tried to scream, but just as he opened his mouth, Kaguya punched him squarely in the head. He couldn't even get a sound out and instead spat out a broken tooth.
"Um… what exactly is going on here…?"
Hiroshi watched Kaguya's outburst in confusion, completely unable to understand what was happening.
Takumi, supporting Maki, stepped out of the kitchen at that moment. Seeing the scene, he only shook his head. He helped Maki over to the sofa to sit down, then finally looked at the fingers he had been clenching tightly since earlier.
When he had tried to shove away whatever had grabbed him, Takumi had torn off a small object from it.
He hadn't had time to look at it before—but now he could finally see what it was.
Opening his hand, he saw a small, discolored cloth badge—brownish-yellow now, though he guessed it had once been bright red.
The lettering was embroidered, and despite long exposure to water, the words were still legible.
They read:
[XX Major Flood Relief Team]
...
For the time being, the exploration of the first floor could only be temporarily suspended.
The reason was simple—just lifting the boards was enough for everyone present to clearly see the pale faces standing below in the kitchen, all of them staring upward.
Those things stood there silently, and even after several hours had passed, they still had not disappeared.
The follow-up investigation of the first floor clearly had to be suspended for the time being. The group had no choice but to halt their actions and deal with the discord within the team.
After all, the reason they had fallen into such a dangerous situation just now—and the hidden risks that remained—had quite a lot to do with one disobedient individual.
"Please… please, I beg you… I was just too scared at the time, I was wrong, I really was just too scared… please don't…"
Trembling all over, Green pleaded in a pitiful voice, but Kaguya only stared at him with a blank expression. Beside her, Yamamoto Hiroshi, his face complicated, handed the removed door lock from Room 209 to Maki, then turned away and left the room, unwilling to watch further.
In this horror apartment, Green naturally understood what it meant to lose a door lock.
He also knew very well what his earlier actions represented—a betrayal, in the eyes of Kaguya and the others.
As a nearly thirty-year-old drifter who had spent his life scraping by at the bottom, Green possessed a bit of petty cunning, a bit of streetwise cleverness. But just like his unchanging place at the lowest rungs of society, that little cleverness of his would never amount to anything real. He knew he was a good-for-nothing, so he always tried to cling to stronger people—but he never had the resolve to truly fight for his own survival. Thus, when faced with real danger, he couldn't recognize what the right thing to do was. The result was exactly as before: at the critical moment, he refused to turn the clock and even tried to flee, and now came the reckoning for it.
It was just like back in his youth, when he had barely managed to worm his way into a gang and rise to the position of a low-level enforcer—only to steal part of the protection money he was supposed to hand over. He had known perfectly well that once he turned it in, a cut would eventually come back to him as a bonus, but when he saw the cash, he simply couldn't resist. He ended up beaten half to death and thrown out of the gang. If not for an old acquaintance who secretly intervened out of pity, he might have been beaten to death back then.
After that, Green had never again managed to get a decent position. He had thought that lesson was enough—but reality proved otherwise. At yet another crucial moment, and this time with his life on the line, he still couldn't make the right choice and instead made an even deadlier mistake.
Now, the wire he had used for lockpicking had been confiscated, and that impressive-looking knife of his was now in Kaguya's possession.
The strength the man had once taken pride in was effortlessly crushed beneath the overwhelming might of Kaguya, the unreasonable "Muscle Queen" of the two-dimensional world.
At this moment, he knelt on the ground in utter disgrace, devoid of even the slightest courage to resist.
"I thought you had at least a bit of wit—enough to understand what you needed to do to stay alive. But it seems your cleverness really is nothing more than that—petty cunning. When it truly matters, you can't tell what's important, and you act on your own, thinking yourself smart. Truly disappointing."
Playing with the knife in her hand, Kaguya looked down at Green with eyes so cold they could pierce to the bone.
"I'm sorry, I…"
Too frightened to lift his head, Green began to stammer, trying to defend himself.
"Did I say you could speak?"
Her next words made his heart nearly burst from terror. He could only lie flat on the ground, trembling uncontrollably.
'What an overwhelming aura… this so-called Ice Princess Kaguya.'
Sitting to the side, Takumi couldn't help but sigh inwardly.
Had he not seen it with his own eyes, Takumi would never have believed that a seventeen-year-old girl could possess such an aura.
Still, considering that she was a one-in-ten-thousand genius—and that she came from the utterly twisted Shinomiya conglomerate—it was understandable that Kaguya would have been raised into such a personality, even if it still looked deeply distorted.
"Takumi-san, I'm curious—are you familiar with Japanese yakuza culture? Do you know how a subordinate who fails to complete a superior's order is supposed to atone?"
Kaguya turned her head then, looking at Takumi.
'Why is she asking me? Because Maki's too gentle for this kind of thing?'
Takumi, who had thought he could just stand by and watch, froze for a moment, then after thinking it over, gave his answer.
"Put him in a barrel, fill it with cement, and sink it into Tokyo Bay?"
That reply alone nearly scared Green out of his wits. Thinking he was about to be killed, he almost collapsed completely on the spot.
"Just kidding. I think it's cutting off a finger—your pinky, right?"
But Takumi's next words only made Green relax for a brief moment before terror crept back into his eyes.
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