"I need your help, un-na. Two of us tampering with it at once will go faster, un-na."
Little Geno's eyes stayed locked on Belle beside him — or, to be precise, on the Fairy standing behind Belle. It had already punched through the firewall, but what came next was a face-to-face contest with whoever was on the other side, and for that, the more hands the better.
Belle nodded and took hold of the keyboard again, and Fairy came through the network to fight shoulder to shoulder with Little Geno.
"Also, I need the rest of you to log back into the system, un-na, to help pull their attention off us, un-na," Little Geno said, turning to Geno and the others. If they wanted to stay unnoticed, every move they made had to be slow and careful.
And if that was the case, anything that dragged on the enemy's movements could only help.
"No problem. Leave it to me."
Yanagi Tsukishiro stepped forward on her own. She had already been inside once, and while the other side had kicked her out by force, that also meant her logging back in would land like a thunderclap tearing open the sky — impossible for them to ignore.
"I'll pitch in too. One more body, one more pair of hands."
Geno was itching for it. No hidden motive, either — he just wanted to try out full-immersion virtual reality technology. If somebody could turn this thing into a game, then…
Ahem. Getting off track. The point was, helping out cost him absolutely nothing and got him everything.
"This… fine."
Yanagi Tsukishiro had been ready to refuse. Dragging an ordinary civilian into an operation cut against every principle they were supposed to uphold as officials.
Then a thought struck her: Geno was an Ethereal… did he even have a brain in there?
And with no brain, presumably there was no brain death to worry about either…
That settled her conscience nicely, and she led Geno over to lie down inside the device pods.
Then, in the last instant before she dropped into the virtual world, she thought she caught a very strange line.
Something like… Lincoln Dead Bighead?
Everything went black, and when her eyes opened again she was looking at that familiar scene.
"I'm back. First thing is finding where the Section Chief and the others are."
Yanagi Tsukishiro took stock of her situation the moment she arrived, then got ready to move out and search for Hoshimi Miyabi and the rest.
Geno, however, standing right beside her…
"Woohoo! It's exactly like the real world! The power of science is a beautiful thing!"
Staring at a virtual cityscape indistinguishable from reality, Geno's eyes lit up and he grinned like a two-hundred-pound kid.
"Geno, there's no time to play around. We still have to find the Section Chief and the others."
Yanagi Tsukishiro's head was starting to ache. How was it that a man who had seemed so dependable a minute ago was now less use than Soukaku?
"Don't worry, Miss Yanagi. I think I've already found Miss Miyabi and the others."
The bouncing, jittery Geno had gone still, his gaze fixed on one direction, a wide grin splitting his face.
Yanagi Tsukishiro, who had been about to comment on what he was calling her, went blank for a beat instead. Then she crossed to his side and looked where he was pointing.
The two of them were standing on an elevated overpass. Directly across from them stood a high-rise.
What Geno was pointing at was the ground beneath that building — a plaza.
And in the dead center of that plaza stood Hoshimi Miyabi and her two teammates, hemmed in by Ethereals pouring at them from every direction.
"Section Chief! We have to get down there fast — wait. What are you doing!"
Seeing her colleagues surrounded, Yanagi Tsukishiro was already hunting for a way down when she caught what Geno beside her had decided to do.
He had planted both hands on the guardrail and swung himself over it, then spread his arms wide and simply fell, shouting on the way down.
"Woohoo! Leap of Faith!!"
Air rushed past his cheeks, and Geno felt exactly like the protagonist of a game — unstoppable, untouchable. A drop of a dozen meters or so was hardly enough to kill him, after all. He had confidence in what his body could take.
"Justice from Above!!! Uraaa!!"
Twisting midair into a very cool pose, Geno failed to register two things: this was not the real world, and since nobody had uploaded his baseline data beforehand, the system had defaulted him to the physical stats of a standard investigator.
And so…
Splat.
[Geno] Cause of death: accident.
Back in the real world, freshly splattered and forcibly ejected from the game, Geno's skull felt warm all over, like it had just come out of a microwave.
The investigators around him stared at him with their mouths hanging open, and Twiggy, Little Geno and the Wise and Belle siblings all wore the same speechless look, until even Geno's thick-skinned face went red.
"So, uh. If I said that was an accident, would you believe me?"
"Ugh. Little Geno, adjust his parameters for him, would you? Just enough that he stops splattering himself."
"Un-na."
Little Geno did not waste a single word on him. It went straight into the system data it had just seized and uploaded a fresh set of stats for Geno.
Hoshimi Miyabi and the others had all been measured in advance, their data uploaded ahead of time.
The copies Thousand Faces had created drew on part of that same data as reference.
"Relax. There's no way anything goes wrong this time!"
Geno thumped his chest in guarantee, moved to a different pod and connected in again.
Inside the virtual world, after watching Geno die a spectacular death right in front of them, Hoshimi Miyabi and the others realized someone outside had sent in reinforcements. They looked up, and sure enough, there was Yanagi Tsukishiro.
"Ah! It's Sis Yanagi!"
Soukaku swung her enormous weapon, waving it at Yanagi Tsukishiro like an oversized greeting.
Relief loosened Yanagi Tsukishiro's chest at the sight of them unharmed. She vaulted down along a side path, kicking off the gap between the bridge and the building's wall to carry herself down.
A click, a flash of blade light — and with all the momentum of the fall behind her, Yanagi Tsukishiro shredded a whole cluster of Ethereals in one stroke.
Hoshimi Miyabi saw it, and Tailless left its sheath at once, another flash and gone. Lightning and frost crossed, and the two elements sent a shockwave rolling outward that flung dozens of Ethereals clear of them.
Asaba Harumasa was not idle either, playing close-range archer with Soukaku covering him. Four of them, an army in seconds, cutting a bloody path in a single direction.
"Move! Get into the building first!"
From up on the bridge, Yanagi Tsukishiro had noticed that not one Ethereal came anywhere near the high-rise. It had to be a safe zone the system set by default.
So the instant she landed, she made clearing the Ethereals on the building's side her priority.
The four of them worked as one and were inside the building before long — with no idea that a far nastier opponent was waiting for them further in.
____
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