[445] The Day of the Full Moon (9)
Avant-garde.
By human standards, the Vajra Armor's design was daring to the point of innovation—and beautiful.
Organic plates clung to the body's curves while metallic bands ran across them asymmetrically, and a crimson cape, fierce as a flame, flowed from head to toe.
Gauntlets of bone linked like insect segments and wrapped to the fingertips; the nails were sharpened to points like awls.
Aside from the artificial brain, a pupil unmistakably Akamai's had been embedded, and it glared at the Garas.
This is it! With this, I can catch it!
Armand's extra functions were immediately installed into Shirone's mind via the Ultima system.
He had already raised the ceiling of his psychic transcendence fighting Satan, but these options were in another league.
"Grrrr!"
Unable to escape the antithesis, the Garas secreted a savage pheromone.
The sour stench spread, and the Garas waiting nearby—at the king's command—charged Shirone.
"Danger!"
Plu raised a fire-mist—the natural predator of those creatures—to form a flame barrier, but the Garas' obedience was mindless, like that of a machine.
They targeted only Shirone, heedless of their flesh burning, pouring coordinated attacks from all sides.
Rampage!
Shirone drove his fist down and cast magic; a curtain of light struck the space like an explosion.
Augmented by Galtomic's Law—the S-class chimera—the power of Rampage became comparable to iron plating in durability.
The Garas struck by the forty-hits-per-second barrage had even their bones crushed; they were flailed to pieces.
Seeing that, Plu broke off and fell back to stand behind Shirone.
The Garas had surely consumed every living thing in the command center below.
With reproduction climbing exponentially, however many the lab had killed, more would keep pouring in.
"I can't hold them with the Phoenix Pavilion. This isn't something I can solve from my end."
Her role in the project was, ultimately, supporter.
She could assist teammates with versatile mission skills, but she was outmatched against an uncountable swarm of Garas.
Shirone had joined the project as a terminator to destroy key targets and facilities, but the situation had far surpassed that brief.
A biological weapon that gathered every conceivable trait.
Among the thousands of Garas split into species, these had evolved so powerfully that no natural predator existed for them.
"Kwaaaaaa!"
A giant lizard breathed flame and melted Armand, but Kenser's infinite cell proliferation restored the armor with regenerative force.
Seeing that brute force wouldn't work, another pack of Garas—feline monstrosities—rained down razor teeth and claws.
In response, the Ringer's metallic tissue formed with the strongest known durability, turning Shirone into a perfect fortress.
Kang! Kang! Kang!
Hardness to rival any other.
Every Garas weapon shattered, and pained screams echoed through the lab.
The silver metal body reanimated into organic life; the cape's tip thinned and twisted into red tentacles.
At the tentacles' ends hung Kuzen's feeding teeth, which consumed organic matter to produce volatile energy.
The teeth meshed like an ankle trap and bit into the Garas mercilessly, pouring explosive power into Shirone's body.
Landing and diving into the swarm, Shirone unleashed linked shotgun movements.
A flash—its size, power, mass, and speed all enhanced—swept by; a mere graze shredded Garas flesh.
"Kyaaaaa!"
From among the Garas watching their minions die, the king leapt out and cast a spell.
Air compressed, and a wind sharper than any blade surged.
Tt-t-t-ting!
Silver lines scored across Shirone's armor where the wind slashed.
But it was Ringer metal—unbroken even by Etella's yin-yang wave—so the wind couldn't bite into it.
"I will swallow you whole!"
The Garas pinned Shirone's shoulder and stretched its jaw to tear his face away. At that moment, the artificial brain's antithesis activated.
"Kraaaak!"
The Garas froze, tongue hanging limp. Shirone gathered his focus and prepared his counter.
Galtomic's power amplified the Law, and with a pop a one-meter-diameter photon cannon compressed into being.
"Damn...!"
The flash of energy born of mass and velocity burned the Garas' bodies to ash.
"Kiek! Kiek!"
With their king dead, the Garas' ranks fell into chaos.
Breeding urge drove Garas to risk death, but facing a predator that transcended life, most fled; only a few dared to fight to the end.
"This is bad! They can't get out!"
If the Garas escaped the underground lab, the local ecosystem would collapse.
No—if there were no extraneous species nearby to block their spread, the damage would be beyond imagining.
There was no choice.
Shirone activated Armand's final option.
A black-and-white halo spun above his head and began calculating his desire.
Valhalla Action.
A vague sense of how long it would take desire to reach result washed over him.
When approval came, Shirone wasted no time and deployed the magic circle.
Ataraxia sprang into being without the build-up, and automatically a photon cannon formed and fired forward.
Kwaaaaaaaaaa!
With no time to prepare, Plu squeezed her eyes shut and turned away.
A brightness so intense it nearly paralyzed the eye muscles exploded forward with a thunderous roar.
The flash lasted a full three seconds.
For the span of time it took to count slowly by mouth, an extreme mass wave swept away everything in its path.
Plu, who had been frozen with her hands over her ears, slowly opened her eyes and turned her head.
A breathtaking sight lay before her.
Like a lump of clay cleanly sliced by a knife, the sealed lab had been cleaved in the shape of that flash.
The scale was so grand and natural that it left one gaping; it felt impossible to attribute to human hands.
Light leaked through the torn ceiling, and nowhere were Garas corpses to be seen.
"Ghh—!"
Shirone's nostrils flared as he stared ahead.
The time Shirone would be incapacitated to fill the cause behind the result was about twenty-three seconds.
A figure he could achieve thanks to Armand's unity with him, which had raised the limits of his psychic transcendence.
Plu muttered in disbelief.
"To even absorb an angel's ability..."
Even if cause and effect are an equivalent exchange, reversing causality is a massive event for beings bound by the flow of time.
Especially if one can deploy the archangel's amplification array instantly—being incapacitated in exchange hardly counts as a flaw.
Once the photon cannon passes through Ataraxia, few lifeforms would survive.
Shirone waited the twenty-three seconds in relative ease, and the moment the restraint lifted he exhaled deeply.
Armand, reverted from Vajra Armor into a sword, gave off a strange glow.
Using fine control, Shirone made the sword hover before his eyes and examined it.
It had the color of blood flowing through metal—slightly grotesque, yet addictively compelling.
Ultima Version (Functions equipped: 6)
1. Ikasa's Valhalla Action: Equivalent exchange of cause and effect. Automatic computation of exchange probability.
2. Ringer's Skin: Generation of an ultra-hard metallic substance. Automatic reaction.
3. Galtomic's Mana Amplification: Explosive reinforcement of the Law.
4. Kuzen's Feeding Metabolism: Consumes organic matter to generate volatile energy.
5. Kenser's Absolute Restoration: Maximizes cellular regeneration speed.
6. Akamai's Antithesis: Reverses the Law to suppress the target's actions.
As Shirone sorted Armand's functions in his mind, he suddenly noticed something he'd overlooked.
Eight lifeforms had been combined, but only six options had been added.
Excluding the main type Armand, the missing trait was Reysis's.
How could that be? Ilhwa's potion should have been perfect. Was the trait not absorbed because of the four-sided Marai-gi?
Plu placed a hand on Shirone's shoulder as he brooded.
"You okay? After a fight like that, you really are fine?"
Her voice trembled with excitement after watching his devastating combat up close.
With Armand's abilities added, Shirone's combat power was strong enough to be effective even against Heaven.
More encouragingly, he was the terminator meant to land an unprecedented blow on Heaven.
The greatest fear was someone killing him before he could enact divine punishment.
If he could protect himself, the mission's success chance would rise dramatically.
"I'm fine. The organ healed. But... the Garas are really all wiped out, right?"
Plu looked over the path the flash had taken.
"We were the only beings in the lab capable of breeding, so they were all converging here."
"But there can be exceptions."
"No, I don't think so. Would a person starved for ten days resist the smell of meat? The Garas' urge is far stronger than that."
Faces appeared through the split ceiling.
They were survivors dug out of the wreckage.
Shirone breathed a sigh of relief.
If anyone could testify to Reysis's crimes, today's incident might become the spark for uniting the rebels.
"Are you all safe? What happened to your commander?"
"He's dead. All of them."
Hearing the drone's translation, the troops nodded with bitter expressions.
It was fortunate the mad commander who used even his subordinates as experiments was dead, but the command center's damage was irrecoverable.
When Shirone surfaced, the survivors—haggard and broken—circled him.
Their commander was dead and even the officers annihilated.
Now the one they could lean on was the light of Sector 73: Shirone.
"Nephilim, what should we do now?"
"Please become our commander. Only you can do it."
He didn't want it, truthfully.
It was an odd irony that those who had denied Anke Ra and gathered in Purgatory would try to deify another person.
That might be the easier path. But—
It was dangerous.
When judgment is handed over to someone else, humans are capable of crimes worse than humanity itself.
"All right. We'll carry out a rebel unification operation. For now, go back and get treated."
It wasn't the way he liked, but the desperate looks in the troops' eyes made the decision acceptable.
The most important thing was Gauld's project; clinging only to his own ideas would be perilous idealism.
It's over.
Thus the work at the Second Headquarters came to an end.
The two had completed their assigned mission successfully, but silence lingered between them.
Heavy things remained in their hearts.
Life, creatures, humans.
In this Purgatory, where humans were merely one species among many, what did their existence truly mean?
Reysis...
How could he explain that the woman who preached the meaninglessness of the body was actually most obsessed with it?
Is reason the product of an evolution beyond animal nature, or just another desire crafted to hide desire?
Weary of endless questions, Shirone sighed and looked up at the sky.
A single fly that had escaped from underground rose and flew away.
(End of Volume 18)