29 / 04 / 2019 - Daito, Osaka Prefecture, Japan.
12:10 PM, Wednesday. Class A. One day later.
The moment he saw Kirihara-sensei finally exit the classroom, the rigid, deadpan mask Akane had maintained all morning melted under a wave of sheer exhaustion.
Behind his thin-rimmed spectacles, faint, dark bruises of fatigue contrasted the pale skin beneath his eyes.
His usually bright crimson-ashen gaze was noticeably blurred and dim, stripped entirely of its sharp agility.
With his eyelids half-lidded in sleepiness, Akane completely tuned out the rising chatter of the lunch break.
He reached into the bag slung over the side of his desk, pulling out his mobile phone to check for any incoming updates on the progress of the cases and monitoring.
"Haahhhhh…"
Gripping the device in his right hand, first things first — before this, he used his left to push his glasses up onto his forehead, rubbing the bridge of his nose in a desperate bid for clarity.
Despite having established a concrete lead to follow, he couldn't shake the deep-seated anxiety and weariness plaguing his core.
Behind his closed eyelids, his temples throbbed with a persistent, dizzy ache.
These past few days had been utterly unforgiving. Instead of settling, his mind remained aggressively haunted by the mystery of those vanishing entities.
What was the underlying spatial mechanism behind it? How were they bypassing physical tracking? Who was orchestrating the deployment? And why did factions like Heaven's Gate seem completely oblivious to the phenomenon or its place?
Opening his blurry eyes, he refitted his glasses just as a burst of distant laughter echoed through the classroom.
Shaking his head faintly to clear the fog, he looked down and unlocked his phone.
'If only I could afford a pair of Corvo Flare One... I wouldn't have to deal with the hassle of a handheld screen.'
He typed out on the keypad absentmindedly.
Compared to the sleek, floating holographic smartphones that had taken over the consumer market three years prior, his current device was a relic.
Though he had actually owned a premium holographic model in the past, a gift from his mother, in the end that piece of hardware had long since turned to ash amid the catastrophic ruins of Chiba.
Currently, within the family, his twin Ayato was probably the only one who owned that kind of holographic phone.
Not that Akane particularly begrudged him for it, but relying on this obsolete model severely bottlenecked how quickly he could display and synthesize raw data.
If he had the choice, he would gladly trade up for a holographic phone or, ideally, the Corvo Flare One.
While waiting for a network response from his expensive, rogue AGI, he leaned back against his chair's backrest, letting his gaze wander toward the left window where a sharp, slanted blade of midday sunlight cut across his desk.
The Corvo Flare One was a premier neural-interface device manufactured by Bio&Med Tech, one of the globally dominant Eight Pillar Corporations.
It utilized the exact same neurological architecture found in military Virtual Visors and high-end full-immersion Game Cabins.
By tapping into localized neural currents, the glasses could read the user's brainwave patterns with near-perfect accuracy.
It achieved absolute hands-free input; through pure, focused intent, a user could browse databases, transmit messages, or digest technical data entirely within their own thoughts.
'Though the initial commercial intent was entirely different...'
Akane idly recalled the technology's history. Virtual Visors and immersion cabins had originally been engineered strictly for advanced medical rehabilitation and prosthetic calibration.
It was only after Bright Living Enterprises realized the astronomical commercial potential of full-immersion "Neural Deep Dive" technology that the global gaming and research markets blew wide open.
To him, in the present time, it was a magnificent, wonderful era to be alive.
The concept of full digital immersion that constructed realities used simultaneously for entertainment and deep scientific simulation never failed to fascinate him.
Practically speaking, from now and then, his hunger for technological knowledge was always insatiable.
'It's wonderful…'
A sudden, aggressive vibration against his palm abruptly shattered his trance.
Akane looked down, pulling up Elecia's text response.
[Elecia]: "Still zero progress, Admin. The target entities refuse to take the bait. Even after deploying the micro-drones, my algorithms haven't found a single security gap to exploit. Please exercise patience, Admin... and trust in my capabilities!"
'Heh… Trust.'
Akane's expression darkened into an icy, bitter scowl.
If he hadn't trusted her reckless operational efficiency, he would have easily had enough capital to purchase those exact Bio&Med glasses by now.
Instead, her elaborate mercenary deployment had left him entirely penniless, holding leftover money that was not enough to guarantee a week of snacks for Irina.
A deep, venomous urge to find a way to psychologically torture a virtual personality flared within his chest.
"What's with the sour face, Shirakami? It doesn't suit you at all. Then again, an expression like that usually tells a pretty wild story."
Before Akane could formulate a digital threat to send to his AGI, a loud, familiar voice echoed directly beside his ear, accompanied by a heavy hand clapping down onto his shoulder.
Letting out a soft sigh, Akane didn't flinch. He simply used his index finger to push up his slipping glasses and turned his head.
In the desk directly in front of him, Masayuki pivoted around in his seat to join the interaction, a mixture of subtle worry and absolute, unadulterated glee dancing in his eyes.
This bastard is definitely enjoying my misery, Akane thought dryly.
"It's nothing, Tsuchimikado," Akane replied smoothly, his tone perfectly measured to silence any further probing.
"I've just been pushing myself a bit too hard lately. It's only natural for your mood to fluctuate when you're dealing with chronic fatigue."
He desperately needed to maintain his personal boundaries here. It was already a bad idea that he had been showing up to school looking like a walking corpse for the past few weeks.
"Aha! Hear that, Tomodachi?! This is exactly why mandatory club activities are inherently evil and should be banished to the absolute fringes of the school curriculum!"
Motoharu interjected loudly, stepping out from behind Tsuchimikado. Under the bright glare of the afternoon sun, Motoharu's spectacles flashed with an aggressive, blinding white reflection.
With his arms tightly crossed over his chest, Motoharu calmly rested his index finger against the bridge of his own glasses.
Stepping up to Akane's desk and dramatically pointing a finger straight at Akane's deadpan face.
"Look at this face, everyone! Tired! Weary! Severely sleep-deprived! Every single day, Shirakami-Akane-kun leaves his household by 6:00 AM and doesn't cross his threshold until 6:00 PM! What kind of dystopian heresy is this?!"
Motoharu gasped dramatically, clutching his chest as his voice echoed across the room.
"We are not horses! We are human beings! Behold the inhumane, soul-crushing toll the system has taken on our dear Shirakami-kun!"
"Oh, the tragedy! The once brilliant, peerless mind of our class has fallen into a murky, inescapable swamp of exhaustion!"
Then slamming the desk, Motoharu leaned toward Akane's face, close enough that Akane himself had to back away a little.
"Speak to us, Shirakami-kun! Expose the crimes of the administration to the masses!"
Motoharu stood breathless, his eyes wide with a terrifying blend of theatrical madness and profound, compassionate hysteria.
A heavy, suffocating silence dropped over Class A.
Akane froze, his mind entering a temporary state of sheer panic.
He slowly looked around the room. Every single eye in the classroom was currently locked onto his desk.
Even Hayasawa-san, who was usually entirely silent and reserved, was currently looking at him from across the aisle, a profoundly sad, pitying smile on her face.
'What the hell has happened to my public image?' Akane's mind roared in absolute agony.
'Is my reputation even salvageable at this point? They think I'm a victim of systematic abuse!'
"I... I'm completely fine, Motoharu," Akane forced out, squeezing a visibly trembling smile onto his face. He reached up, firmly patting Motoharu's shoulder while leaning in to hiss a deadly whisper: "Tone it down right now, you bastard!..."
"Wha—What?!" Motoharu recoiled in theatrical horror, his voice booming across the silent room.
"The boy is entirely institutionalized! Shirakami-kun has developed Stockholm syndrome! He's actively defending his own torture! No! Someone save him!"
'Shit! Even if the club is not technically mandatory now, don't force me to play with your antics, you bastard!'
Akane's right temple throbbed with a violent, terrifying twitch as his pure, unadulterated anger finally flared to life.
He knew that this Motoharu must have had a terrible childhood, that he always harbored a grudge against big corporations. A tree grows crooked — he is the unsalvageable one.
Then again, what was this sudden pity for him? He wasn't some kind of important person anyway. Was he? Akane's thoughts began to halt, following this branch of thought as he gritted his teeth.
Camaraderie, or something else? What made them value him? Thinking of the past few weeks, he had been as amicable as he always was, responding as always, answering some questions — not anything particularly mentionable.
Ignoring the chatter and the class that had begun to come alive once again, Akane resumed his thought.
The best he could remember was that his score on the test was massively good despite not studying beforehand; his answers had earned a good score from the senseis, which proved that at the very least, his critical thinking was there.
'Well, it is unrelated…'
Pressing his lips thin under this distress, he decided to shut down that branch of thought and return to the present. In truth, just a few seconds had passed as he thought, recalled, and then grew distressed.
"Are you sure you are fine, Shirakami-kun? Taking a leave of absence from the club is all right, you know?"
Hayasawa-san interjected from behind. Though Akane had only caught a glimpse of her face before, she was probably still smiling faintly now. She was, after all, also in the same club as Akane.
"Ughhh, it really is fine, Hayasawa-san… really, there is no need to worry too much…"
Replying again — though this time more genuinely, pressing on it — he didn't even turn his head, looking straight to the front and meeting Masayuki's laughing face.
"It really is fine…"
Pressing it once again, he looked up at Motoharu, who was now laughing, and Tsuchimikado, who was shaking his head to the side; all in all, everything was the same as usual.
———
08:00 PM, Later, Akane's Room.
"Huhhhh…"
Akane leaned heavily against the wall beside his mattress, his eyes half-lidded.
He was exactly one step away from wandering into dreamland, his laptop balanced precariously on his lap.
For a chronic late-nighter normally consumed by a chaotic, grinding schedule, he had actually closed his windows and tidied his room ahead of time for once, fully preparing for sleep.
Yet, his pupils actively flickered against the display's glare.
He was reviewing the live camera feeds he had left active on Sunday, prompted by an urgent notification from Elecia indicating she had detected an anomaly on screen.
"After cross-referencing loop replays from your hidden cameras and public surveillance, I have identified an external variable," Elecia's synthesized brief from a few minutes ago still echoed in his mind.
"I am classifying them as Party C. This faction actively visits the perimeter at calculated intervals, and they seem acutely aware that the nature of the entity investigators is distinct."
"Through calculated coincidence, they consistently operate one step ahead or one step behind the deployment vector, meticulously scrubbing any traces left by the released creatures. Conclusion: Party C functions strictly as a bio-hazard cleanup crew."
That revelation was the sole reason Akane was still awake.
Having finally filled his stomach with a hot meal and alternated between scalding and freezing water in the bath to shock his nervous system, his mind felt remarkably fresh, even if his body desperately craved the deep sleep of a lazy dragon.
'To be fair, is there any other hardworking dragon out there that would clock in at 6 and out at 6 too?'
The lingering exhaustion from his public death sentence at school earlier still plagued his thoughts.
He stared boredly at the interface, watching the frame-by-frame replay compile on the left side of his split-screen layout.
Lately, he had been ruthlessly squeezing every spare second of his day to analyze the artifacts Fraiigilar had left behind.
Because the sheer volume of data was astronomical, he had chosen to start with the foundational mechanics of "Thought-to-Energy" conversion.
Simultaneously, he was dissecting the baseline behavioral traits of the anomalous creatures cataloged within the "First Seas Compendium" he had purchased from the Dark Network.
The heavy resource acquisition had effectively left him entirely penniless on both sides of his ledger, whether in yen, dollars, or points.
But all in all, it was worth it.
Akane let out a wide yawn, covering his mouth with the back of his hand as a tear of exhaustion squeezed out of the corner of his eye.
The fatigue was heavy, but beneath it, he could feel it clearly now: the distinct, oppressive sensation known as [Saturation].
The more knowledge he gleaned, the more his mind felt like a water tank being filled to the absolute brim in real-time.
It triggered an underlying phantom sensation of internal loss and missing cognitive fragments, like a persistent, scratching irritation at the back of his brain.
"Admin! There's progress on the matter of the vanishing entity!"
Elecia's sudden alert instantly snapped his focus back to the monitor. The display shifted seamlessly to a live feed.
Akane's eyebrows furrowed. The timing felt entirely too coordinated to be an accident.
The designated "Cleaner" faction identified by Elecia had conducted a perimeter sweep earlier that afternoon, and now, the anomalous entity was returning to the exact same sector under the cover of evening.
'Isn't this too risky?'
But as the hidden camera planted directly opposite the mouth of the Hirokacho alleyway sharpened its focus, Akane went entirely silent.
Perhaps the orchestrators targeted this specific window precisely because the standard patrol schedules were low.
Right at this moment, the creature was different this time.
Slinking beneath the dim hum of the streetlights, the entity moved with a sickening, predatory gait.
Akane held his breath, leaning closer.
This iteration was far more outrageous than the specimen from Sunday. Captured in pristine, high-definition resolution, it wore the exact same tattered, pale patient garments.
But its head was completely blanketed in coarse, dark-grayish fur.
As Akane input a manual command to zoom in, the camera captured rows of elongated, razor-sharp fangs.
Thick saliva drooled uncontrollably from its jaws, and its eyes burned with a pure, unadulterated crimson madness. There wasn't a single sliver of cognitive rationality left behind those pupils.
Lowering the lens angle, Akane noted that its hands and feet were tightly wrapped in thick medical bandages, though dark blood consistently seeped through the layers.
The underlying anatomy was barely recognizable as human, as the fingers terminated in curved, metallic claws that gleamed like tempered steel.
Akane clutched the edge of his laptop, the pale glow of the screen illuminating his intense, expressionless face.
Both he and Elecia remained locked in absolute silence as the beast swayed rhythmically, stepping directly into the dark mouth of the dead-end alleyway.
The moment of truth.
As the entity plunged into the shadows, supplemental camera angles from his secondary tracking devices flared to life on screen to capture the rear maintenance gap.
Akane's heartbeat spiked to its absolute peak. Right beneath his gaze, a faint, high-pitched ringing sound caught on the audio feed, drifting clearly into his ears.
Before his brain could even process the frequency, his entire monitor layout went pitch black.
The surveillance cameras, the public streetlights, the localized data gathering devices — everything terminated in a split-second. The dead zone was expanding rapidly.
A power grid failure? No. This signature... it's an EMP.
The absolute final frame captured before the blackout was the creature vanishing into thin air, completely bypassing the solid brick dead-end of the alleyway.
A holographic projection trick was mathematically impossible; they had thoroughly stress-tested the spatial coordinates for light refraction beforehand.
"Elecia!"
Akane shook the laptop up and down in frustration. It couldn't end like this. The orchestrators had anticipated this digital warfare.
Gritting his teeth, a wave of anger and frustration washed over him.
He should have known better; it was never going to be simple to fool a high-level military arms conglomerate with basic consumer-grade surveillance.
To the operators pulling the strings behind the curtain, his tracking grid was nothing more than child's play.
'Damn it... the entire capital investment went to waste!'
But just as his anger was about to boil over against the black screen, the video layout abruptly shifted.
A highly unstable, heavily artifacted camera feed bloomed onto the screen, rendering a chaotic, vibrating perspective of an unidentifiable surface.
Akane blinked, his rage instantly morphing into sheer confusion.
"Don't worry, Admin!" Elecia's voice suddenly boomed with absolute, triumphant confidence.
"I mapped a ninety-four percent probability coefficient for a localized electromagnetic pulse beforehand! The real show is about to begin!"
Akane's breath hitched in his throat. The unstable feed instantly split into four distinct, beautifully rendered quadrant perspectives. In the upper corners of each matrix, crisp system labels blinked into existence:
#SPIRON 01 - RIGHT WAIST // ONLINE - ENCRYPTED QT GATE COM.
#SPIRON 02 - LEFT WAIST // ONLINE - ENCRYPTED QT GATE COM.
#SPIRON 03 - RIGHT SHOULDER // ONLINE - ENCRYPTED QT GATE COM.
#SPIRON 04 - LEFT SHOULDER // ONLINE - ENCRYPTED QT GATE COM.
Letting out a slow, ragged breath, the intense tension in Akane's shoulders vanished. He leaned back against the wall, a faint smirk playing on his lips.
"You really couldn't have given me a heads-up, Elecia...?" he muttered, his voice raspy. "But... good work it is."
"My directive is to never disappoint the Admin," she responded.
Her tone was perfectly measured, but Akane, whose senses were heightened by the lingering adrenaline of [Saturation], caught a subtle, proud undulation in her vocal processing.
Brushing the observation aside as his residual drowsiness evaporated, he refocused entirely on the quadrant feeds. The environment had transformed.
The spiders were riding the creature down a steep, downward flight of subterranean concrete stairs.
The corridor walls were painted in a sterile, institutional combination of stark white and pale mint green.
As the entity descended, a fine, pressurized mist consistently hissed from automated vents along the masonry.
'Chemical disinfection,' Akane analyzed rationally. 'And likely an atmospheric jamming agent acting as a secondary layer of data insurance.'
As the creature progressed deeper, automated luminescent panels flickered to life ahead of its stride, illuminating the path to the underground.
Akane forcefully regulated his breathing, suppressing his emotional impulses to view the unfolding blueprints with absolute, cold rationality.
Minutes ticked away in complete silence as the gray-furred beast descended the orderly stairwell.
Finally, the oppressive corridor opened up as the entity crossed a massive, reinforced security threshold.
Akane's eyes narrowed. The creature stepped onto a massive, industrial steel platform.
The cavernous surrounding space was profoundly dark, but through Elecia's real-time night-vision enhancement, the structural details sharpened into terrifying clarity.
'This specific connection angle... the structural steel beams embedded directly into the bedrock... and the descending slope. It's an elevator terminal.'
His brow furrowed deeply. His dark premonitions were being verified in real-time; this layout was connected to something massive.
This heavy cargo elevator existed for heavy-tier logistics.
The entity stepped onto the wide platform just as a massive cargo transport rig automatically locked into place beside it.
The elevator initiated a rapid descent.
By calculating the rhythmic frequency of the passing structural guide lights, the massive support pillars built into the stone walls, and the raw gravitational telemetry, Akane mentally formulated a depth equation.
"Ninety-eight meters down? Or perhaps..."
"It is precisely one hundred and ten meters below sea level, Admin," Elecia cut in, correcting his calculation.
"This scale is unprecedented. The sheer depth and the existence of a heavy cable-car transport infrastructure... this layout could not have been engineered overnight."
"If this is an active research laboratory, they are likely repurposing a pre-existing Cold War-era bunker or a classified municipal underground facility."
Akane didn't argue the correction, his eyes glued to the screen as the elevator ground to a halt.
The creature exited the platform, shuffling down a wide, heavily reinforced underground highway paved with industrial concrete.
Strangely, there wasn't a single armed guard or automated turret visible along the route, a detail that briefly confused him.
The base felt entirely hollow.
The gray-furred entity eventually reached a massive, armored blast door that recognized its biological signature, opening automatically to reveal the layout behind it.
The view split into a massive subterranean junction divided into three distinct sectors.
As the Spiron cameras scanned the industrial plaques bolted to the steel walls, Akane's heart leaped into his throat:
[SECTOR 01: HIBERNATION CHAMBER]
[SECTOR 02: STORAGE & POWER CORE]
[SECTOR 03: CENTRAL LABORATORY]
The creature veered left, entering the Hibernation Chamber corridor.
It walked beneath a harsh grid of fluorescent overhead lights, entirely alone in a base that felt utterly devoid of human life.
Thinking for a moment as the creature walked for a few minutes, it really did seem to be modeled after a bunker.
And the one on record last known to conduct biological chambers was only one: Bishop Marten.
So—
'Is that old bastard still breathing...?'
Since Akane had never physically witnessed Marten's death with his own eyes, the terrifying possibility couldn't be ruled out.
Suddenly, the entity reached the end of the corridor, and a massive pair of automatic pressure doors slid open to both sides.
Akane's pupils dilated instantly, the breath catching completely in his throat.
Before him sat a grand, cavernous amphitheater.
Thousands upon thousands of cryogenic hibernation pods were arranged in a neat pattern that stretched out into the dark.
Every single unit glowed with an eerie, translucent bluish-white luminescence.
From the creature's elevated perspective on the upper observation deck, it began a steady, mindless descent down the iron scaffolding stairs.
As the micro-spiders on its shoulders rotated their lenses to scan the surrounding area, Akane noted rows upon rows of completely empty, shattered, or pre-opened pods directly adjacent to its designated station.
The army had already been awakened.
"Elecia," Akane whispered, his voice low and flat in the quiet bedroom.
"Record every single serial number on those pods."
"Detach Spiron Units 01 through 04 from the host immediately. You are granted full, unrestricted authorization for a free-roam infiltration."