*
After proving the effectiveness of the personality training ticket firsthand, Dante had the Sinners tear through the tickets one by one.
But we didn't use them all. The reason was the sort of reason you'd commonly see in a gacha game.
All right, let me explain slowly.
When you use a personality training ticket, the level displayed on the terminal goes up.
It's easiest to understand this level as a numerical measure of a sort of threshold—one that represents our physical abilities rising and our techniques sharpening.
Anyway, just like in a gacha game, the experience bar needed to level up increases in direct proportion as the level rises.
And our personality training tickets are limited.
In the end, that means dumping everything into a single personality just isn't efficient right now.
Following that logic, Dante thought up a way to use the tickets as efficiently as possible.
The plan was to quickly level up the current tickets to the point that looked most efficient, then save the rest for the personalities that would come later.
If a new room for obtaining these tickets appeared in the future, that would be a different story, but that wasn't the case now.
So, for those reasons, we were once again left with nothing to do.
That meant the days of mindlessly killing time inside the bus had returned.
"Sara! Did you see my new personality earlier? What did you think? Wasn't it great? Don't you feel like praising me to the heavens?"
"Wow~ Ms. Rodion, you're amazing~"
"If you're going to compliment me, at least do it sincerely!"
Thwack!
Ow!
Even if Dante can heal me with one turn of the clock, wasn't that a little too hard?
But if I tried to talk back to Ms. Rodion, all I could picture was a future where I got folded in half.
Damn it...
...That aside.
Wouldn't there be anything to do for the next two weeks?
What kind of gacha game releases its growth materials two weeks after launch...
*
A few more days passed, and we were finally able to obtain our new enhancement method.
Thread.
Something contained in a bulb-like vessel... something that looked as though it were weaving together the thread of possibility I was looking at. Maybe it was the same thing.
According to Faust, that thread could draw out more of the original power contained within our personalities.
Hmm... to be precise, it was closer to aligning the personality here with the one over there, synchronizing them.
By her explanation, even if you applied a freshly drawn personality right away, you couldn't use all of its memories or techniques.
She called it inefficient.
Synchronization seemed to be the process of raising that efficiency.
Dante also tried to apply it to each Sinner's main personalities, but...
"It's insufficient."
The thread was absurdly scarce.
At best, enough to finish synchronization for three or four people before it vanished.
I'd heard that the red personalities used fewer threads, so if things went well, maybe you could push it to eight...
But it still felt wrong to leave the golden personalities sitting there unused.
I'd also heard that if a duplicate personality appeared during extraction, the shards it converted into could be exchanged for thread at a one-to-one rate, but even that didn't seem right.
...
To make matters worse, there was currently nowhere to farm this growth material.
Is this really a gacha game?
"Hmm... then let's do it this way."
Dante's solution was as follows.
First, the Sinners who had obtained golden personalities wouldn't need to exchange anything at the vending machine, so their shards would be converted into thread.
With that, we'd finish synchronization as much as possible with the golden personalities first.
The Sinners with red personalities would be put on hold until they obtained a golden personality, and if a mission came up before then, they'd synchronize before reaching the destination.
That was the result Dante calculated based on Faust's advice that golden personalities were the strongest personalities currently available for extraction.
And for some reason, though I still don't know why, I was chosen as the first person to undergo synchronization.
*
In a Catholic-style library, a man quietly reads a book.
The title of the book is Cain.
...A book that mocked God, and did not fit the atmosphere of the church at all.
"You're looking at something like that again?"
"Ah, Librarian noona."
Damn it, I thought I wouldn't get caught this time.
He put on a deliberately calm expression, as if reading books like this was nothing new to him.
"You keep reading stuff like that, so you're always wandering around alone. Don't you ever think about reading something else?"
"Haha..."
"Haa... how did someone like this end up at DH, of all places..."
Just then, his phone rang in his pocket.
"Ah, I've got a call. Is it a mission? I'll head out now."
"Go on, then. Your skills are good, so I can't really complain, but honestly..."
"Yes, ma'am. Thank you!"
Leaving the book behind, he headed straight for the request's destination.
He seemed to have considerable skill even in the Fourth Section of the Southern DH Association.
If he didn't, he wouldn't have been able to take missions mostly alone and still rise all the way to the Fourth Section of the DH Association.
Of course, that was proof that he didn't quite fit in with the DH Association, but it didn't seem like he had any intention of fixing that.
Or maybe the very idea of believing in God was simply boring to him.
"Get him!"
Thud, thud, thud!
"Do you really think I'd let myself get hit by such pathetic attacks?"
"Damn, you—!"
He casually dealt with the enemies rushing at him.
So much so that even the comrades who joined the mission late afterward stared at him with blank expressions.
"Tch. With combat skills like that, you can't be much of a scholar."
He said this while looking at the remaining enemy stragglers.
"I hope you can at least show me some satisfying technique."
*
...What was that just now? Memories from a new personality?
When using a personality, there had been times when memories came through like fragments of recollection, but this was the first time it had felt so vivid, as though I were watching someone's psyche unfold right in front of me.
Was this synchronization? It was a pretty strange feeling.
No, wait. Dante said this was when synchronization rose to stage 3, so was it only like this at that point?
"..."
Dante was staring at me blankly, as if they had seen the same scene I had.
It's a little uncomfortable if you keep staring like that...
It seemed Dante didn't know this would happen when synchronization reached stage 3 either.
Then again, I was the first one, so I guess that made sense.
I had a few thoughts, but I decided to return to the bus and sit quietly.
First, there was nothing to do even if I stood around. Second, having memories suddenly pour in like that was more exhausting than I'd expected.
I felt strangely drained...
Maybe I should go to my room early and rest today.
I wouldn't be able to do that during work hours, but there wasn't much time left anyway, so I'd just have to endure it.
*
"..."
I stepped into a room so eerily silent it made my skin crawl, then quietly closed the door.
Even now, I still can't get used to the door changing depending on who opens it.
And I'd been using this door for more than ten days already.
Click, click.
I walked slowly to the mirror reflecting my face.
The first thing I saw was a rather handsome face, and hair with a slightly deep blue tint.
And then those blue eyes—so deep they were almost unsettling, like staring into the abyss.
Carefully, I touched the pupil with my right hand.
Scrape, scrape.
But my eye didn't hurt, and all I heard was the sound of my hand wiping across glass.
...What exactly is this eye?
The sensation seems linked, but there's no pain, and something like possibility can be seen...
Even when I tried to dig through my memories to find out, all that came back were memories buried under something white, and nothing else would surface.
It's definitely connected to the past from two years ago...
Hmm...
For a moment I wondered if Faust might know something, but maybe I wouldn't even be able to get an answer from her.
And if I wanted to contact anyone I knew, I didn't even have a phone...
I've been searching hard lately to see if there's anything left in my memories, but there hasn't been much progress.
Where on earth did this eye come from...
Seeing that I could use its power even when wearing personalities from other worlds, I did wonder if something in another world was involved...
But there's no record of this ability in the memories of those other personalities either.
I really can't figure out why this is happening to me.
If I had to make the most reasonable guess, maybe the eye isn't affected by putting on a personality?
...I still don't know.
"Haa..."
With that frustrating feeling of almost understanding something but never getting anywhere, I gave up and lay down on the bed.
If I rested a little, maybe something would come to mind.
Just what kind of life did I live that I ended up like this, a salaried slacker in the first place...
After nearly thirty years in the City, I thought I'd seen everything worth seeing, but I guess that was arrogance.
...Tch. What's the point of worrying about it? I should just sleep.
That night, I couldn't sleep for nearly an hour and only managed to drift off after tossing and turning.