Chapter 77: Flowers in Bloom

Mio

The girl’s fingers were still wrapped around Mio’s obsidian hand. She hadn’t let go since the last platform. Hadn’t spoken either.

Chi-chi checked her phone. “Eighteen minutes left on the timer. We save the mommy, kill the monster, then come back in one piece preferably.”

“Eno-san, can you take point?” She tossed the green chemical stick to the damp floor. The glow was almost spent. “Your light’s more useful up front.”

The tall man nodded and picked up his pace. His eyes glowed yellow, illuminating four meters of tunnel ahead.

“Say, Mio-chan. You have a sister, don’t you? What’s she like? Is she a brat? Does she beat you?”

Nana. Brat, sure. Beat her? Only when Mio swung first.

“Any sister is a brat,” Mio said. “Mine just happens to like cheddar puffs.”

Chi-chi’s teeth caught the dim light when she grinned.

“How about you?”

“I did.” Chi-chi paused. “She died nine years ago.”

“Oh.” Mio kept walking. “Was she a brat?”

“The most annoying.”

Chi-chi touched one of the blue streaks in her hair. Twisted it between two fingers.

“Kaoru dyed hers this color first. I thought it looked stupid.” She let the strand fall. “Then she died and I kept buying the same brand.”

“Kaoru?”

“Mm.”

“My name is Amori!” The girl squeezed Mio’s obsidian fingers. Chest out, chin up, like she’d been waiting for someone to ask.

Nobody had asked.

Mio squeezed back. “Hey, Amori.”

The girl’s grip loosened. Satisfied.

“Chi-chi.”

“Mm?”

“It suits you.”

Chi-chi laughed. Mio hadn’t expected it from her own mouth either.

They kept walking. The tracks split into an empty platform. Just a vaulted ceiling dripping onto rusted rail.

Mio shifted the girl to her left side and caught her forearm. Morgue-drawer cold.

Mio looked down. The girl stared ahead. Brown eyes, dry, holding her hand like she’d been doing it her whole life.

The hunger had been quiet since they entered Path A. Mio couldn’t remember the last time it went this long without a word.

The ground shook. Dust dropped from the ceiling in sheets and Enokida’s glow caught movement at the far end of the platform.

A shape pulling itself from the wall. Shell plated and ridged, each segment thick as Mio’s torso. Legs unfolded from gaps that shouldn’t have fit them.

[Ironshell Crab — B-grade]

[HP: 20,000]

Bigger than the last one. The first crab had taken Chi-chi six seconds and a sleeve. This one filled the corridor shoulder to shoulder.

Mio stepped forward. Chi-chi’s arm blocked her chest.

“I need total focus for thread manipulation. One distraction and the weave collapses.” She cracked her knuckles through the glove. “Watch the girl.”

The threads launched from her right sleeve. The crab’s forward legs locked together before it could plant them. Chi-chi was already circling, a second thread anchoring the shell to the rail track while a third cut into the joint between carapace and leg.

The crab swung. Chi-chi dropped under the claw and drove three threads into the gap her first cut opened. Purple light flared inside the shell.

Fifteen seconds. Legs folding. Shell cracking from the inside out.

Chi-chi pulled her threads back. They restitched into the sleeve, dimmer than before. Her breathing had picked up. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

The right sleeve was done. What the first crab took from the forearm, this one finished to the shoulder. She tugged it once, tested the give, and left it.

Thirty-two thousand bloom washed through Mio warm and clean.

“Eno-san.” Chi-chi rolled her shoulder. “Timer check.”

Enokida held up his hand. Started counting down from five.

Five fingers extended upward from a closed fist.

Four.

Three.

Chi-chi’s eyes stayed on his hand.

Her left hand drifted to her remaining sleeve.

“How long have you been pretending to be Eno-san?”

The countdown stopped. Yellow glow flickered in his eyes.

“You drunk?”

“Japanese don’t count down like that.”

“Chi-chi?” Mio’s throat caught at a half-gulp.

“Chinese spy.” Chi-chi didn’t look at Mio. “We don’t count like that.”

The face wearing Enokida’s features held the smile for another beat. Then it dropped and the voice came out flat, the vowels sitting in the wrong part of the mouth.

“Knew you’d be trouble.” He tilted his head. “Doesn’t matter now. This operation has been infil—”

The thread took his head off at the jaw.

Chi-chi’s left sleeve hung limp, spent on one cut. The body folded at the knees and what came out wasn’t blood. Dark, stringy, hitting the concrete in chunks.

The smell hit before the legs stopped twitching.

Amori yelped and buried her face in Mio’s hip, hands clamped over her ears.

The hunger woke up.

It had been quiet the whole descent and Mio had been grateful for the silence. Now it pressed against the back of her teeth. Twenty-one thousand, sitting where the body fell. She wasn’t sure if it was her or the hunger that wanted to pull it in. She bit her tongue and let the blood pool instead.

Mio stared at the body. She’d watched the elf walk into fire. She’d killed two raiders with her hands in a world that wasn’t hers. But those were over there, behind the bone-white door, where the rules were different and the sky had three moons.

This was Kokubunji. Forty minutes from the apartment where Nana was doing whatever she did.

Jii stood on Mio’s shoulder. Both daggers drawn, pointing at the thing on the ground. She’d been right. Twice she’d warned Mio, and twice Mio had tucked her back in the pocket.

“We need to leave.” Both sleeves gone. Chi-chi’s voice had dropped the warmth. “The entire operation’s been compromised. Mio, you said eight hostiles?”

“Eight.”

“Shit.” She looked at the sealed passage behind them. Looked at the tunnel ahead. “Sonar’s been feeding us garbage since entry. Three hostiles. Three. And we bought it because I trusted him.”

Chi-chi pulled at her jacket collar. The fabric was dark. Spent.

“That means five hostiles unaccounted for. Spread across three paths. And every squad is operating on bad intel.”

She was already moving. Back toward the sealed passage, hands on the wall, looking for a seam.

Amori let go of Mio’s arm.

She walked toward the dark end of the platform. Bare feet on wet concrete. Steady steps, same pace as before, like the man who brought her this far hadn’t just lost his jaw.

Chi-chi stopped searching the wall.

A woman stepped out from where the tunnel curved with her arms open. Pale skin over a frame too wide and too long. Human from the collarbones up.

Below the waist, the body fused into shell. Barnacles and hard growths covered every surface, layered so thick the original shape was gone. Legs folded beneath it, filling the tunnel wall to wall.

[Ancient Hermit Queen — B-grade Elite]

[HP: 63,000]

The woman’s arms closed around Amori. She pressed her lips to the top of the girl’s head.

“You found my daughter.”

Mio’s obsidian arm twitched. Final Vigil sat at 25,000 Reservoir. She could fry the monster five times over with the arm cannon.

She should step forward.

Chi-chi was already moving.

The jacket came off first. Then the blouse. Two layers hit the wet concrete.

She stood in the compression shirt. Arms bare, blue streaks stuck to her forehead with sweat.

“I lied to you.”

“What?”

“The threads aren’t in the fabric, Mio.”

She peeled the compression shirt at the collar. The threads came with it, then kept going. Silk pulling from her skin in ribbons, coiling midair, more of it than any garment could hold.

“Watch me.”

Mio didn’t move.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep