novelraw Chapter 86 86: Cleared
Chapter 86 86: Cleared
Mio
Mio cast Vitalize on herself. The green light filled her body up but it wouldn't take away the ice in her chest.
The warmth sank through the skin and into the raw tissue beneath—muscle fibers finishing their weave, blood vessels sealing, the fragile stitching that had held her together for the last twenty minutes finally setting permanent. It hurt more than the wound had.
She stood and her knees held. Then she felt a subtle movement in her jacket pocket—Jii-jii had made itself cozy at some point, snoring quietly despite everything.
Kaito was still against the wall with Kise in his lap. He'd closed her eyes. The gauze on her wrist had come fully loose and her crooked fingers rested on her own thigh, curled inward.
Mio sat back down next to him.
"You look like actual shit," Kaito said.
"You look worse."
Chi-chi's phone sat between them on the concrete, the timer reading 00:06:41 and counting. Neither of them moved.
Mio looked at Path C's stone wall—still sealed, still with three hostiles on the other side and Mori running a fever with two other Agents. Bannai had all of Kise's charges because Kise couldn't carry them with a ruined hand.
00:05:58.
00:05:57.
The wall exploded outward. Stone blew out in chunks that scattered across the staging platform, dust swirling through the gap in a gray cloud that rolled across the floor and covered Mio's legs.
Mori walked through the hole.
She was patting dust off her field jacket with one hand, the other holding her phone. Her mask was gone and her auburn hair had come loose from its ponytail, her cap nowhere to be found.
"Oh, hey cuties. Why the sad faces?"
"Did you clear yours?" Kaito said.
"Nope."
Mio sat straighter. "Why not? Where are Bannai and—"
"They tried to rape me." Mori brushed a chunk of concrete dust off her shoulder. "So I killed them."
The staging platform went quiet. Emergency lights hummed. Chi-chi's timer ticked. Deep in the corridor behind Mori, a pipe groaned and settled.
Mori leaned against the edge of the hole she'd made, breathing harder than she wanted to show—the fever still in her, visible in the sheen on her forehead and the way she held her weight against the stone instead of standing free.
Kaito looked at her, then at Kise, then back. His eyes went blank for a moment, then brown again.
"Both of them?"
"Both of them."
Mio's throat was tight. Bannai. Soft eyes. Carried Kise's gear because she couldn't. Left his blanket by the entrance. Watched Chigusa during the briefing.
Soft eyes.
"Enokida was a spy," Mio said.
Mori looked at her and didn't even try to hide her smile.
"On Path A. His sonar was feeding us bad data—my Engine said eight hostiles, his ability said three. He lied about the corridors, the positions, the clearance checks."
Mio's voice was steady. Her hands weren't. That, or it was the familiar rage building up in her veins.
"Chi-chi died because we split based on numbers he made up," Mio continued.
Mori's expression didn't change.
"I know," she said. "Mr. Segawa said it would happen."
Mio heard the words and processed them, and the processing took longer than it should have because the sentence didn't make sense and then it still did not.
"Why didn't you tell me? Us?"
Mori pulled an earbud from her pocket and put it in, then the other one. She didn't press play, not yet.
"You aren't cleared, Mio-san."
Mio stood straight up and that seemed to shift Mori's demeanor in the slightest.
"Careful, little deer."
Mio was wrong. She'd thought that for the slightest chance, she actually could get along with the grade-A monster.
"Fuck you, bitch."
"Not good enough." Mori giggled. "Anyway. They're gonna blow up the incursion. We failed."
Kaito stood up next and picked Kise up the way he'd carried her in—tucked against his chest, head on his shoulder, blood dried brown on his forearm. The sword on his hip shifted with the weight.
Mio picked up Chi-chi's phone. The timer read 00:03:12. She put it in her pocket because that's all she could do.
Mori put her music on—Mio could hear the tiny bleed of whatever she was listening to from two meters away—and pushed off the wall toward the staging platform's exit, the main corridor back to the surface, the one they'd come down through hours ago. She didn't look back at the hole she'd made or the three uncleared hostiles still alive behind it.
They walked on. Kaito carrying a dead woman, Mio carrying a dead woman's phone, Mori with two airpods in and her eyes half-closed.
Bannai's blanket was still folded by the entrance where he'd left it. They walked past it.
The surface hit them in stages—the air first, cold and wet, then the floodlights, then the sound. Scanner drones in holding patterns. Voices on radios. A perimeter of Bureau vehicles blocking the street in both directions.
And beyond the perimeter, a sound Mio had never heard before: chains on tar. Three military tanks that dwarfed everything they passed, behemoths she'd only seen on the news, all barrels pointed at the station. Containment artillery.
The nested incursion hadn't been cleared—Path C's three hostiles were still alive inside the collapsed architecture—and the Bureau's response to an uncleared B-grade nested was not a second team.
The first shell hit the station entrance forty seconds after they cleared the perimeter. The ground shook. Mio felt it in her teeth.
They were bombing Kokubunji.
She watched the second shell hit—the station entrance collapsing inward, concrete folding, dust rising in a column that caught the floodlights and turned white. Then they kept firing—shell after shell after shell, until the station wasn't a station anymore and the street shook like it wouldn't stop. It did not stop.
"This happened to America?" Mio said.
"Something like that."
Chi-chi's phone buzzed in her pocket. The timer had hit zero and the alarm played—a short chime, some kind of anime opening. She couldn't remember the last time she watched or read anything.
Mio turned it off.
A Bureau officer approached with a clipboard and started asking questions. Mori pulled one earbud out, gave her name and squad number, put the earbud back in. Kaito gave his while still holding Kise. The officer looked at the body, looked at the clipboard, made a note.
Mio gave her name.
The system notification had been sitting in the corner of her vision for the last eleven minutes. She'd ignored it through the walk, through the perimeter, through the shelling. She opened it now.
[Status]
Level: 43
HP: 2543/4,389
Reservoir: 234,411/537,500
VIT: 209
STR: 90
AGI: 60
INT: 45
SPR: 49
[Unallocated Points: 45]
She closed it.
Eight levels from one B-grade nested that killed two of her squad and sent the Bureau's artillery into a residential district. Three hostiles still alive under the rubble because the woman who was supposed to clear Path C had been busy surviving worse than monsters.
Mio looked at the officer with the clipboard, at the perimeter vehicles, at the column of dust still rising from what used to be Kokubunji Station. Chigusa died because of bad intel. Togashi died because of bad intel. Kise died because Path B was harder than it should have been, because the squad assignments were built on a spy's numbers.
And Mori knew. And Segawa knew. And even then Mio wasn't cleared.
She felt it then. Not the hunger, not survival, not the cold arithmetic of bloom and HP and Reservoir management that had kept her alive for forty-three levels. Something older—from the cathedral, from when she bled and fought on the ground drinking potions from her dead party.
She was Level 43 now.
"Jii-jii, come."
[Equip]