She tilted her head back and looked up at the building before her.
The clouds had just parted, letting the sun through.
It wasn't a particularly tall structure. The glass curtain wall caught the early-summer sunlight and scattered it in dancing ripples across the facade.
This was the Tokyo Metropolitan Investigation Bureau's Second Affiliated Hospital.
And, as Su Yuzu confirmed with a glance at the message on her phone — the place where "Raven" was being held for treatment.
In the wake of the string of Aberrant attack events that had struck the Tokyo metropolitan area, a worldwide manhunt and crackdown on the Eye of Insight cult had begun.
It was grueling work. But it had to be done.
The cult's core doctrine had grown into a direct threat to the existence and safety of human settlements.
They worshipped Truth.
They were consumed by a hunger to uncover the so-called absolute reality lurking beneath the ground beneath their feet.
If that pursuit of Truth had once been merely an obsession — the Eye of Insight had long since crossed the line into something far darker.
The Truth they believed in was hidden beyond the Abyss.
They were convinced that what the Abyss brought was not disaster — only that the human body was simply too limited, too frail, to perceive the true nature of the world beneath their feet.
They craved Aberration.
If catastrophe was coming, then they would become part of it.
And beneath what they called the "fate" glimpsed by the Eye of Insight, they had been quietly fanning the flames of something far worse.
The four Aberrants from that attack event.
[Wind · Fire · Mountain · Forest].
Among them — Feng Ke had turned out, against all expectations, to be a man-made Aberrant cultivated using Soga Ishikawa Kiyomi's Factors as the base substrate.
Her body had been subjected to extensive modification.
Her combat strength had been capped at the peak of the Second Sequence, but in exchange, Feng Ke had been fitted with a far broader range of utility functions.
Such as — well. War correspondent, for one.
She had been injured that day, and had forcibly read a sequence of memory images, after which she was transferred to the Soga clan's hospital — where Soga Ishikawa Kiyomi's mother, Asumi, personally performed surgery and oversaw her care.
Su Yuzu had not brought her back from the Edge of Aberration.
Aunt Asumi had said that Feng Ke's body had been through an enormous amount of experimentation and modification.
The physiology of an Aberrant was completely unlike that of a human.
Su Yuzu had no way of knowing what might go wrong with the girl's body if she brought her back from the Edge of Aberration.
For now, Feng Ke was being kept under restraint at the Soga clan's hospital — shackled and watched.
Zero was in the same situation.
As for Mountain from [Wind · Fire · Mountain · Forest] — Su Yuzu had sent her back to the Abyss with a single sword strike.
The one currently held in the hospital ahead — was Fire from [Wind · Fire · Mountain · Forest].
"Raven."
She passed through the double-layered glass isolation doors.
The air inside was thick with the sharp, sterile smell of hospital disinfectant.
Crossing the wide open space of the lobby, Su Yuzu showed the nurse at the visitor registration counter the information on her phone.
The slender-figured nurse led Su Yuzu into an elevator and brought her up to a ward near the very top floor of the hospital.
The elevators in this hospital were unusual — semi-transparent cylinders of glass.
Through the glass walls, she could see the bright sunlight outside, and, in the adjacent shaft, another elevator descending.
The Investigation Bureau's Miss Superintendent had told her that ever since the woman regained consciousness, she had refused to say a single word.
Under ordinary circumstances, they would have shipped her straight to the Fourth Action Division for interrogation.
But — not this time.
This woman had been personally rescued by Lady Yuzu.
Since the whole matter of returning from the Edge of Aberration was already far too absurd and far too dangerous to explain, Director Saionji Sagara and Ms. Unohana Chiyo had put forward the following account: the woman had simply been under the control of the Eye of Insight. The true power source had been the Raven.
After all, the woman had already returned from the Edge of Aberration.
Aside from Yuzu herself, no one knew the truth — whether the woman was a summoning-type Aberrant, or whether she had simply been under the control of a Catastrophe Beast.
And then — the Investigation Bureau had actually believed it.
No — more precisely, the Investigation Bureau had no choice but to believe it.
Setting aside the sheer weight of the Soga surname, the head of the Fourth Action Division was already well on her way to becoming that particular Miss Soga's most devoted little admirer.
Even if Miss Superintendent privately felt that something about all of this was ten thousand kinds of wrong — what was she supposed to do? Her boss had signed off on it.
All she could do was hope that "Raven" would cooperate.
Miss Superintendent had noticed that whenever Su Yuzu's name was mentioned, the woman's otherwise blank, vacant expression would suddenly shift — cracking open into something unmistakably terrified.
And so, under the crushing pressure from the Fourth Action Division next door, she had reached out and asked Yuzu for help.
In the ward — not small by any measure — the woman lay in bed wearing a hospital gown, white sheets drawn up to her chest.
Along her bare neck and chest, a web of red and blue tubes connected her to the various machines around the room, monitoring every vital sign.
Beyond that — Su Yuzu could clearly see the restraints locked around the woman's wrists, ankles, and neck.
She looked as though every last trace of her power had been stripped away.
And yet — the Investigation Bureau was still holding her under the same containment protocols used for Third Sequence Espers.
The woman had been staring blankly out the window at the blue sky. The moment she caught sight of Su Yuzu, her entire body tried to curl inward on itself.
Beep — beep — beep — beep — beep —
The machines in the room began to alarm. Whatever vital sign was being monitored, the readout spiked into violent, erratic waves.
She wanted to run.
"Raven" knew she would never, for the rest of her life, be able to forget the memory of that girl chewing through her Catastrophe Crystals — one by one, piece by piece, until there was nothing left.
It wasn't just the physical crystals that had been consumed.
Her soul, too — it had felt as though the girl had swallowed that down as well.
That sensation in the instant when it felt as though even her soul might be devoured — it hadn't been painful.
Quite the opposite. It had been pleasurable.
Only — it had been a pleasure that rose to heights so impossibly vast, like a furious gale sweeping the open sea, that in a single moment it had ground every last fragment of her will and reason into dust.
Honestly — it was terrifying.
The threshold of her body's senses had been raised to a height she would likely never reach again in her entire life.
Beneath her chest — there was only emptiness now.
But what frightened "Raven" even more was the true nature of what Su Yuzu had done when she brought her back from the Edge of Aberration.
The girl was not the hope she had once imagined her to be.
Quite the contrary —
For her, Su Yuzu was, without question, something like a living nightmare.
It was those Eye of Insight fanatics who should be calling her their hope.
"Raven" had experienced it herself.
The true nature of how the girl had brought her back.
In essence — a terrifying existence on par with the Abyss itself had torn her away from the Edge of Aberration by force.
Had tasted every part of her, thoroughly, with a slow and deliberate crunch.
Eaten away the candy shell — and then spat her back out, soaked through and through.
The New Sovereign —
Yes.
Only not humanity's New Sovereign. The New Sovereign of the Edge of Aberration itself.
"Long time no see~~~" Su Yuzu settled herself down at Raven's bedside.
She looked at the woman before her, whose lips had gone a ghastly white.
"L... long time no see..." The voice came out in a trembling, tear-choked rasp — and the woman, who had been silent all this time, finally spoke.
In Su Yuzu's presence, she was as meek and docile as a child who'd had her secrets laid bare.
At the same time —
Down on the ground floor of the hospital, a sharp-looking woman in a leather jacket and leather trousers stepped up to the visitor registration counter.
She was, quite frankly, indecently eye-catching.
The zipper on her leather jacket was only half-done up, leaving an impressive expanse of her chest on full display — as though the zipper might burst open and everything spill free at any given moment.
"Registration~~~" She gave the counter a light tap with her knuckles.
Even the nurse — herself a woman — couldn't help but steal more than one glance. "Name."
"Somehana——"
"Tsukimisato... Somehana."
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