The conditions for deciding the winner between the two sides were as follows.
The infiltrator's win condition was to find the classified document.
The classified document was hidden somewhere secret within the battleground. They would provide several locations, and those places contained clues.
By attacking those locations and obtaining all three clues, he would be able to determine where the classified document was hidden. Once he seized it, that would count as his victory.
Naturally, every place where a clue had been hidden was also rigged with all kinds of traps set by the defenders.
If the infiltrator was injured during the process, no matter how minor the wound, he had to be sent to the hospital.
Of course, if he got hurt and they did not notice it, then it would not count as a loss.
Aside from that, if the defending side successfully managed to attach "toxin" to his body, that also counted as his defeat.
The so-called toxin was actually just a kind of glowing paint. They would use every possible method to get it onto him.
As long as even a tiny bit got on him, he lost.
There were limits on how they could use glowing paint against him, though. Otherwise, if they simply stuffed a large bomb full of the stuff and blasted it over a huge area, that would go beyond unfair.
In practice, the glowing paint was loaded into paint rounds. Once they hit, they also produced a fluorescent effect.
The number of rounds was unlimited. As long as they could land them on him, any method was allowed.
Actually, loading that stuff into a large bomb would not have worked all that well anyway. Most of it probably would have been burned away by the heat from the explosive before it could even splatter onto him.
Boom!
Two explosions rang out.
"They're seriously useless, those idiot sisters."
Watching the footage through the monitors, Oriha Nashida could not help muttering that under her breath.
The twin sisters, who had once been idols like her and even her rivals, had been the first to get eliminated. That was not surprising at all.
But to be fair, they had genuinely tried their best, already doing better than a lot of ordinary people.
The apocalypse had only started a short while ago. Not long before that, they had still been idols. Then afterward, they joined the training, and the fact that they had managed to hold out at all already put them above many others.
They had performed very well.
So Oriha pressed a button.
In an instant, a massive amount of water poured into the basement where the infiltrator had entered.
At the same time, an electric cable was fed into the flooded space.
Faced with that situation, just as expected, he leaped up toward the ceiling and fixed himself there.
And that was the moment the hidden firearms appeared and opened fire without hesitation -
"What the - !"
Oriha was so stunned she could barely get the words out. The guns had not even fully popped out yet before they were already destroyed, shattered by concealed projectiles he had thrown.
What kind of insane reaction speed was that?!
Boom!
The ceiling was blown open, and he climbed right up through it.
Heh heh heh -
Checkmate. Because Mikoto Kiba was waiting right above him, so -
"No way, Mikoto, how did you lose instantly?!"
What had even happened?
Only after replaying the footage captured by the high-speed cameras over and over in slow motion did Oriha truly begin to understand how terrifying this man was.
At this point, Yuriko Takagi's revised setup could honestly be described as a certain-death scenario for anyone involved. A killing field so vicious that even the world's top special forces units would probably have taken casualties in it. To her, that was not an exaggeration at all.
Because the infiltrator could not be dealt with using methods meant for humans.
Treating him like the T-1000 from The Terminator was the correct approach.
In the blink of an eye -
Boom!
A world-shaking explosion erupted, like an aerial bomb had just been dropped. Oriha could only stare, sweating coldly.
"Your mom is seriously brutal."
She said that to the bespectacled girl beside her.
"..."
Saya Takagi had no response.
The massive explosion in front of her had caught her completely off guard. It had not been part of the battle plan her mother had shared with her at all.
Which meant her mother had added it herself.
At this point, all three clue points had already been breached, and he was now heading straight for the final objective - the endpoint guarded by her mother.
And seeing the whole thing escalate into what was basically a real war made Saya tense beyond words.
"Huh? What happened? Where'd that explosion come from?"
A figure jolted awake in surprise, then immediately felt the pounding in her head and wanted nothing more than to lie back down again.
"This is really getting ridiculous."
Sayo Hitsugi forced herself upright again and clicked her tongue as she watched another round of explosions ahead, caused by more than a dozen miniature missiles.
Still, she understood why Mrs. Takagi was acting like she was waging an actual war.
Because only after fighting that man yourself did you realize what kind of monster he really was.
In a way, this showdown was also a kind of warning drill for them. If a monster like that ever appeared in the future, they would not be caught completely unprepared.
Hm?
She spotted the Ho 229 aircraft. Large numbers of lasers were slicing across the ground.
And a figure was weaving through the beams, closing in on the machine in its humanoid form, racing straight toward its pilot, Yuriko Takagi.
The final item was on her.
So he had to reach her and seize it.
And he had to do it without suffering even the slightest injury in the process.
So what was the result?
The result was -
"Mmgh - !"
Yuriko let out a muffled groan of pain, forcing back the scream that almost escaped.
He had hit her with a taser gun, and it was set to maximum output. He really had not gone easy on her at all.
Paralyzed by the shock and unable to move, she could only watch as the item hidden against her chest was taken from her.
And so, in less than twenty minutes, the match came to an end.
A moment later -
"Well? Do you still want to go over it again?"
The victor asked the defeated side whether they still wanted to review the footage.
Did they want to go through it frame by frame?
The recording contained all the scenes from his battle, especially the final assault on Yuriko. They were trying to find even a single moment where he had been injured or struck by a paint round.
"All right, we lost."
The bomb girl slumped in frustration and finally gave up on reviewing it again.
At that point, he had thirteen hours left before departure.
...
Time seemed to pass very quickly.
Only two hours remained before Kain was due to leave.
Then, all of a sudden, he received a message that pulled him out of that sea of warmth and tenderness.
At a glance, he could see that the women making up that soft paradise all had varying amounts of a substance on them that resembled Earth Elixir.
After leaving there, he had originally planned to head out in the smaller Ho 229 aircraft.
Instead, it became the two of them riding together in a Ho 229.
His companion was Yuriko Takagi, who had not taken part in the party.
Now it was just like before, when he had been the instructor and she had been the novice driver, the two of them using the Ho 229 together on the way to Black Label.
They were going there because some more purified D99 had been prepared for him, and he could take it away with him.
And while he was there, he could also leave behind more blood for them to continue their research, especially now that they already knew he would disappear again for a while.
So returning to the earlier question: why was Yuriko going with him?
It felt as though she had finally made up her mind about something.
Did she want to be alone with him so he could state the demand he had earned from defeating her?
Did she think he was going to ask for the same kind of thing that had happened at the party, and that was why she was accompanying him alone, because she did not want the others to know?
More specifically, it was not that she did not want Saya to know.
It was that she did not want Saya to see it.
Come to think of it, after the party, he no longer really had many remaining demands he could make of them.
That gathering had originally just been a spontaneous party among him, Saeko Busujima, Yuko Sagiri, Rika Minami, Shizuka Marikawa, and a few others.
Afterward, some people had joined in of their own accord.
Saya Takagi had been one of them.
(End of Chapter)
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