Hare Menjou was a light sleeper at the best of times. She lay staring out at the ocean night beyond the window — a vast, open maw of darkness, nothing to see but black and the sparse scatter of streetlamps around the house. The place was beautiful and quiet, but it lacked something. A kind of warmth. The lived-in sense of people.
This trip was nothing like the school retreats she'd been on before. At an inn, you could always catch the muffled sound of other guests talking somewhere below, the current of life carrying on around you. Here there was nothing.
Unable to sleep, she thought about going to find Inori Yuzuriha for a late-night chat — but Inori's door was shut fast, as if she'd already turned in. That struck Hare as odd. Inori had spent the entire afternoon napping on the beach. She should have plenty of energy by now. Hare was the one who was supposed to be tired — and yet sleep refused to come.
Then the alarm broke through, sudden and sharp, and she was on her feet.
She looked out the window. The sea was alive with lights — scattered and shifting, like stars brought down to the water. Ships. GHQ warships.
Something had happened — again. Without stopping to think, Hare went straight to the room next door and hammered on Kanon Kusama's door until she dragged her out of sleep. The two of them shuffled downstairs in their pajamas, not even pausing to change.
Hare was still thinking about waking Inori and the two boys — this counted as an emergency, after all. They should probably move somewhere safer. If fighting broke out while they weren't paying attention, a stray shell landing nearby wasn't something to laugh off.
But she hadn't expected what she found at the bottom of the stairs.
Standing there, in the hallway, was Shu Ouma — who had last been seen on campus over a month ago.
"Shu…?"
Hare's mind went blank.
He looked terrible. Filthy, haggard, with dried tear-tracks plainly visible on his face. He was just standing there in the corridor light, and behind him were a number of people she didn't recognize.
They were milling around the wide hallway, the door to one of the rooms standing open — Souta's room, she thought — and Yahiro Samukawa was somewhere in the crowd, but there was no sign of Inori Yuzuriha.
"...Long time no see."
After all this time, Shu raised a hand in greeting — awkward and hollow.
"Ouma-kun? And these people are…?"
Kanon Kusama was frightened. The house had filled up with strangers in an instant, and Shu's sudden appearance — a person already classified as a criminal — was not a good sign.
"Hello."
A girl's voice came from behind them.
Both girls turned at once. There, seated in a wheelchair, was a young woman with a disability. Her face carried a clear, gentle smile, even though her eyes were still red and swollen. Behind her, pushing the wheelchair, was a short girl wearing cat-ear headphones. A peculiar combination.
"Please don't be afraid. We're from Funeral Parlor. I know you might not believe us, but we don't mean you any harm. We just need a place to lie low for a little while."
"A-abduction?!"
Kanon pressed both hands over her mouth and pressed herself against Hare's side.
Even if the girl across from her seemed perfectly pleasant and was speaking politely enough — wasn't this exactly what it sounded like? They were being held here against their will, their villa commandeered as a hideout because there was a military fleet outside?
"Shu! Was it you who brought them here?!"
"It wasn't him. It was me."
A firm, resonant voice rang out from the open doorway of Souta's room; the crowd of strangers parted automatically, making way — and from the darkness, a familiar figure slowly stepped into the light.
Her face was composed. Blank. Not a flicker of expression.
"Inori…?"
Hare's heart dropped.
The woman standing there — at the center of all those Funeral Parlor members, looking exactly like a commander — could have been someone else entirely who just happened to share Inori Yuzuriha's face, and Hare wouldn't have questioned it. The calm she wore, that cold composure — it was nothing like the energetic, playful Inori she knew. They seemed like two entirely different people.
"Shibungi, have the decoys been deployed?"
Inori only glanced at the two girls for a moment before turning sideways to address the white-haired man with glasses.
"Without a single error. Don't worry."
"Good. The next step is to wait." Inori raised her voice past Hare's shoulder toward the small girl behind Ayase's wheelchair. "Tsugumi — I'll need you to forge new identities for all of us. Once that ship goes down, we all walk back to Tokyo as ordinary passengers."
"Leave it to me!" The cat-ear girl slapped her flat chest with a confident palm. For her, an infiltration like this was as easy as eating breakfast.
This operation's clean execution owed everything to her.
Tsugumi's Void was a singularly unusual ability — a portable handheld scanner with built-in 3D-printing capability. It could copy a person's appearance down to the last detail and produce a perfect physical duplicate: a puppet indistinguishable from the original even to the person themselves. The copies could be operated at a distance, could open their mouths and speak, and beyond the limitation intrinsic to any Void — taking damage would shatter them rather than bleed — they were in every other respect identical to a living human being.
Inori had fabricated a puppet for each of them, then sent the full set aboard the motorboat they'd arrived on. The puppets would make straight for the GHQ fleet — a brazen, suicidal charge, a show of breaking through — with all of Funeral Parlor's weapons and ammunition loaded onboard. In a short while, a battle would ignite out there on the water, and Funeral Parlor would have the misfortune of being wiped out to the last. GHQ would assume a clean sweep and withdraw satisfied.
Let the puppet decoys absorb the fire and draw away the fleet. Stay hidden here. Once the dust settled, slip back to Tokyo dressed as ordinary tourists. That was Inori's plan.
"You've all worked hard. Get some rest in the living room for now."
With everything arranged and Souta Tamadate's Void safely returned, she'd finally scraped together enough time to sleep — she'd been running around half the night, fighting on top of it, then wrangling the escape logistics. Even Inori was feeling it now — a little drowsy.
She glanced at the clock. Three-thirty in the morning. Less than three hours until dawn.
Too much had changed tonight. Losing Gai Tsutsugami was a blow too heavy to simply absorb. Even with the first operation under Inori's command going off without a flaw, turning that page wouldn't come easily. But time had a way of softening things.
When morning came again, they would all have to keep going.
At least it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Inori was also a very capable leader — and that, at least, was something to hold onto.
No one disturbed anyone else. Oogumo settled onto the floor with his back against the wall and dropped off where he sat. Shibungi and Argo took the sofa, their jackets pulled over them as makeshift blankets. Shu stretched out on the floor and made do with a bedroll. Tsugumi and Ayase went up to the second-floor sitting room. Yahiro Samukawa, thinking of his friend, hauled two folding beds and spare bedding down from the storage closet.
Yahiro had actually intended to share a bed with Shu — out of concern for his friend — but Shu had declined.
Because he'd noticed Inori Yuzuriha watching him with that particular "friendly" look of hers. Yahiro was perceptive and sharp; if he started asking questions and something slipped — even a hint of suspicion about how Gai had actually died — Inori Yuzuriha would not let that stand.
Inori returned to her room. Her thoughts were tangled — Shuichiro Keido's next move, what he planned to do with the Stone of Beginning now that he'd lost Mana as a vessel. All of it needed to be anticipated and prepared for.
"Inori… aren't you going to explain this to me?"
Hare Menjou was standing at her door.
Inori turned to look at her. She'd deliberately left the door ajar. She'd been expecting this.