Sumire watched Rentaro with a faint crease of confusion, tone flat. She saw no reason for any of them to stay.
Satoru could handle a Stage 4 Gastrea without breaking stride. The operators added nothing except bodies to protect.
"We're Civil Security. Protecting people is our job. We can't hand the whole thing to Satoru and stand back."
Rentaro glanced around at the others.
Heads nodded. Whatever gap in strength existed, the uniform meant something. Standing between humanity and the Gastrea was the work they'd signed up for, and none of them intended to step aside.
"Besides, nobody expected it to be this easy."
Half the people here had come prepared to die. Instead the mission had turned into a walk.
Somewhere out in the trees, Tiger Funeral kept killing, the sound rolling back in bursts, and a thought took root in him that he couldn't shake. If anyone could end the disaster the Gastrea Virus had made of the world, it might be this man.
Years of being pressed under those things. Friends torn apart. Cursed Children left with nowhere to go.
He knew how absurd it sounded. The virus was too strange, too widespread. Wiping it out was beyond any single person, Satoru included.
The thought came anyway.
That power sat so far past what Rentaro understood that it dragged hope up with it, and hope made him picture a future with no Gastrea in it.
"Satoru." He let the subject drop and pulled someone forward from behind him, gentle about it, smiling. "This is my senior brother, Shouma Nagisawa."
Warmth colored the introduction, and the look he gave Shouma with it.
"Hello."
Satoru had already noticed the man. He offered the greeting with an easy grin and no trace of self-importance, sizing him up with mild interest.
"Good to meet you."
Shouma waved back quickly, all courtesy. Nobody who'd watched what happened in those woods would be anything else.
Admiration ran under it. A summon from this young man had shredded a hundred Gastrea for entertainment. Someone worth knowing, by any measure.
"This is Midori Fuse. She's my senior brother's Initiator. Her Corrosion Rate is a little high. Could you lower it?"
Rentaro stepped aside to reveal the small girl behind Shouma.
The wide-brimmed hat hid most of her face, leaving only her mouth. Slight, shy, fingers clamped around the hem of Shouma's coat, something skittish in the set of her shoulders.
Shouma's face did something complicated.
Lower it? The words wouldn't sit right in his head.
He'd been in this line of work for years and had never once heard the phrase. Countless Cursed Children, countless Initiators, and the Corrosion Rate was the chain every one of them was born wearing. A verdict, not a variable.
Suppressants slowed the climb. They didn't reverse it. Stop the doses and the number raced upward until the girl stopped being a girl at all.
But Rentaro's face carried no joke in it, and Rentaro had never been the joking sort about anything that mattered. If he said it, there might be something behind it.
Is there really a method I've never heard of? Put that way, it wasn't unthinkable. The man flew. The man called down monsters out of open air. Set beside that, adjusting a number seemed almost modest.
Satoru's strength had already broken past what counted as reasonable. Doing the impossible was apparently within his range.
"Is that true?"
Shouma's voice cracked. His head snapped up, eyes locked on Satoru, wide open and pleading.
Midori was his family, the person he'd built his life around. He worked himself raw for suppressant money and knew perfectly well it only bought time.
If that number could come down, then a future existed for both of them.
"If it's possible, please help her. Whatever you want in return, I'll do it."
He bent into a bow, nearly folded double, voice thick with sincerity.
Nothing else registered. If it lowered her Corrosion Rate, he'd pay any price, his own life included.
"Shouma, I wouldn't joke about this."
Rentaro caught his shoulders and pulled him upright, smiling.
"He already did it for Enju."
His eyes went to the girl beside him, something soft in them.
"That's right, my rate is super low now. Nothing to worry about at all."
Enju stepped up, chest out, patting herself with one small hand, grinning like she was showing off a medal.
The confidence in her voice finished whatever doubt remained.
Shouma stared at her, and hope replaced suspicion wholesale. His gaze snapped back to Satoru, heart lodged somewhere near his throat, waiting.
Satoru's mouth tugged sideways at the raw appeal in the man's face.
The easy smile stayed, warmer now, the usual detachment gone from his eyes.
"She matters to you?"
Quiet question, plainly spoken, care hidden somewhere under it.
"She's the most precious person I have. My family."
No hesitation at all. Shouma looked at the girl the way people look at their own heartbeat.
"I'd give up anything for her."
Not loud, but nothing about it wavered. Everyone standing there felt the weight of it.
Satoru laughed and clapped a hand on his shoulder, broad and warm, and something in Shouma's chest loosened.
"Relax. I'd have done it whether you asked or not."
Casual delivery, absolute certainty behind it, as though the Corrosion Rate barely qualified as a problem.
He threw Rentaro a wink. "Once Elder Matsuzaki and the others are settled into the new place, I was going to start on this anyway."
Offhand, like discussing the weather. Every person within earshot froze.
"Step one is bringing down the Corrosion Rate for every Cursed Child taken in across Tokyo."
Flat tone, immense confidence, the impossible reduced to a scheduling matter.
"Civil Security partners are included, so nobody needs to worry about that."
The words detonated. Faces went slack all around him.
Lower every Cursed Child's Corrosion Rate? Tokyo held tens of thousands of them. Pour the entire city's resources into the problem and it still wouldn't be enough.
Shouma, who moments ago had only been praying for one girl, felt his mouth fall open wide enough to fit an egg. Nothing came out of it. His mind had gone blank.
"Satoru, there are so many of them now. You're saying you'd take in all of them?"
His voice shook when it returned. Feeding, housing, and caring for tens of thousands wasn't a small undertaking. It meant money, land, staff, and pressure from every direction outside.
"Mm."
Satoru nodded, entirely unbothered.
"I've already discussed it with Seitenshi. We won't start at that scale, obviously." The smile didn't slip. "As the numbers grow, we expand the site."
"It won't happen overnight, of course."
He talked through it comfortably, treating a thing Shouma considered fantasy as an ordinary logistics question, no hesitation anywhere in it, like a man waiting on nothing but the right moment.
"Satoru... this is going to be very hard."
Shouma started twice before the words came out, worry underneath them.
It wasn't doubt about the man's strength. The scale of the thing was beyond what anyone could carry.
Coming from anyone else, he'd have written it off as a bad joke. Sheltering tens of thousands of Cursed Children and curing them besides belonged in a storybook.
Coming from Satoru, after everything the last hour had shown him, it carried weight.
Which was precisely why the difficulties frightened him on the man's behalf.
"So what?"
The grin turned bright and reckless, something burning behind those eyes, as though obstacles existed to be walked through.
"None of that is a problem for me."
Certainty carried it, the kind that made people believe against their own judgment.
Then every communicator on every belt began to vibrate at once.
Small units, the pulse faint but unmistakable, running through all of them together.
No sound. No message.
They'd agreed on the signal before takeoff. Nothing elaborate, only the buzz, and it carried the only information that mattered.
Every head turned forward in the same instant.
The target was close. Less than five hundred meters to the Stage 4 Gastrea.
The mood snapped taut. Hands tightened around weapons, eyes sharpened, shoulders drew in.
Satoru or no Satoru, none of them relaxed. They knew what a Stage 4 could do, and that knowledge left no room for carelessness.