CH 237

After returning back to his room, Akira decided to turn in early. He wanted to be at his peak performance tomorrow.

Hikaru also did the same and laid down. Although she was not as tired as yesterday, she woke earlier than usual today to go to see the sunrise with Akira, so she was already pretty sleepy.

[…Just one more day. Because of what happened yesterday, I heard that they got more reinforcements. Since we’re heading to the west this time, the monsters should be not as dangerous as yesterday. And if I’m lucky, Akira won’t even get dispatched…. Just one more day… Let’s give it my best…]

As Akira and Hikaru slept, the convoy finished its preparation and left for Kugamayama city.

The next day, Akira once again went to the rooftop early in the morning to watch the sunrise. Just like last time, Hikaru was with him, clinging close to him. Akira did suggest using the forcefield armour of the bike to shield them from the wind, that was when Hikaru asked him how he would get the bike to the rooftop. Akira casually said by climbing on the outer walls of the transport vehicle. Naturally, Hikaru rejected him immediately. Because of that, just like yesterday, Hikaru was clinging to Akira like they were lovers.

Hikaru had more or less gotten used to the situation on the rooftop so she was not as scared as before. But that was not the case to the fact that she was clinging close to a boy around her age. She still feels embarrassed because of that. She reminded herself that it would be over soon while watching the sun rising from the horizon.

In the midst of that, trouble approached. Just like Akira, they came up to the rooftop. It was a young boy accompanied by a man, they were the two who were watching Hikaru and Akira back in the hangar, Shirou and Hammerz.

Shirou was donning casual clothes, while Hammers was in a sleek business suit. Judging from their outfits, they must be there for sightseeing. But even so, they were walking casually amid this turbulent wind. Either those casual clothes were actually augmented suits, or they were people with enhanced bodies.

Hikaru noticed Shirou, who lightly smiled and waved at her. He then approached her.

“Hello there, are you out here to enjoy the sunrise as well?”

“…Pretty much, yes. Do you need anything from us?”

Hikaru, who wanted to keep Akira away from any potential conflict, ended up giving a rather brusque and unfriendly reply. But Shirou was not bothered by it.

“Not at all, I’m also here to enjoy the sunrise. I just thought of saying hello after finding someone that seems to share the same interest as me. As expected, it’s only right to see it directly with my own eyes. The flow of information is just different, you know? The flow of information. You think so too, right?”

Shirou said so and glanced at Akira. Akira paused for a bit before replying.

“I’m sorry, but I was told not to talk with anyone in the middle of my job.”

Shirou was happy that Akira did not just ignore him. While at the same time, he was also a bit surprised. But Hammerz suddenly interjected.

“We’re bothering them, Shirou. This should be enough, right? Let’s return, it’s not wise to keep bothering them.”

Shirou exasperatedly replied.

“Good grief, you people just don’t understand. Listen to him, this guy here said that something like sunrise can be enjoyed just the same through the room’s monitor, you know? Can you believe that?”

Shirou looked at Hikaru, hoping that she would agree. But in reality, she actually agreed with Hammerz. Meanwhile, it was Akira who took the initiative and sided with Shirou.

“You can say that again. It’s pointless watching it from a monitor.”

“Right? I know you would agree with me!”

Shirou smiled triumphantly, he then looked mockingly at Hammerz. To which, Hammerz twitched and snapped.

“Seriously, give it a rest already! We’re returning right now! In the first place,  you should not have interrupted a couple who are enjoying the sunrise! Or do you take that not being able to read the mood as a virtue?”

“Whoops, you are on a date?”

Shirou sent a half-cold gaze toward Hikaru. She thought that if that misunderstanding would send him away, decided not to deny it. It even made her self-conscious and blush. Meanwhile, Akira was completely apathetic.

Shirou shrugged.

“I see, I see. I’m sorry for bothering your date in the middle of your job. I’ll leave right now. I just have to leave, right? Okay, okay.”

Shirou smiled at Hikaru and Akira, lightly waved, and then left. Hammerz sighed and followed behind him.

Akira looked at the leaving Shirou and tilted his head.

“What was that?”

“No idea, probably just tourists who got excited to the point that they would even go up to the rooftop to see the sunrise?”

“Tourist, huh? He mentioned something about the flow of information, so I don’t think they’re mere tourists that would go out to the wasteland just for sightseeing.”

Akira muttered to himself and did not bother to think any further. As for Hikaru, she finally realized that she might be blushing at the moment and tried her best to keep calm as she said.

“…Ah, uhmm, should we return back too?”

“Hmmm, I guess. Let’s return inside too.”

The sun was already high in the sky, so Akira and Hikaru also decided to get back inside the transport vehicle as well.

Shirou, who returned back before Akira and Hikaru, was walking through the hallway to a luxurious special room. It was his private room during the journey. During that time, Hammerz was still spouting complaints, which Shirou completely ignored. As a matter of fact, he had something else on his mind.

[That faint reaction when we were in the hangar was not a mistake. I thought one of them is the same as me and tried to approach them, but I can’t really tell which one it is when they’re sticking that close to each other. Just who is it? As I thought, it can’t be the both of them. Is it the guy? Or the girl? That girl might have gone to the rooftop and that guy accompanied her as her escort. Or it’s the other way around. The guy wanted to go to the rooftop and the girl was only following him… No, that’s unlikely. The guy seems to be someone skilled while the girl is just an amateur. Of course, there is a chance that it’s just a disguise as well, but it is highly unlikely. Judging from their reaction, it is most likely the girl…]

Even after he went to his room and was no longer with Hammerz, he continued to ponder on this subject.

[Hmm… Well, I’m not even sure just by judging from their reaction… What if they are just dummies made to fool me? But if that’s the case, why she is wearing Kugamayama city staff’s uniform? And why were they on the rooftop…? I heard that Yanagisawa is a pretty sharp guy. He even managed to get a deal with a caretaker AI from Kuzusuhara ruin. It won’t be strange for him to use some kind of old-world technology to mimic that signal in dummies. He might have made her wear a city official’s uniform, sent her along with the inter-city transport, and made them go to the rooftop before me… But for what? Is it to understand my behaviour or is it for conveying some kind of hidden message? Something like it’s futile even if I try to run away?]

He unconsciously made a stern expression while in the middle of his breakfast. He was so deep in his thought to the point that he stopped scooping food into his mouth. But he eventually shook his head.

[…No. I must be overthinking this. All of this might just be a simple coincidence. Even if she’s just a dummy, I’m sure that she didn’t go to those places intentionally to meet me. They are only distractions so that I’ll be safe if someone tries to ambush us… It’s a good thing to think of the worst-case scenario and prepare myself. But it is a bad idea to overdo it. It’ll be all for nought if that causes me to miss an important opportunity instead.]

Shirou started eating again. Although it was a luxurious meal, he did not show any reaction at all. He had gotten too used to it already. He understood that he was treated special and was given such a luxurious room. Not to mention that he had some level of freedom as well. He fully knew that he was living a good life.

But he had something he wanted to accomplish even if it meant that he would have to sacrifice everything he had.

“…Just wait, I’ll definitely do something about this. So just please wait for me.”

Shirou mumbled so with a serious expression. And in order to bring his plan to fruition, he knew that he could not miss such a perfect opportunity where he was allowed to be outside Sakashita Heavy Industry’s facility.

Akira and Hikaru were also boarding Gigantes 3 on their way back to Kugamayam city. Although, the route it took differed greatly from before.

Due to its massive size, Gigantes 3 was also called a moving fortress or a land battleship. It could easily bulldoze its way through mountains of rubble. But even so, other than flying through the sky, there was only a limited area that it could traverse through. Adding the conditions that it was used as inter-city transport, there was a

limited number of routes that it could take. And when considering safety as well, 4 routes were mapped out for Gigantes 3.

The supposed safest routes, route A and B, were infested with colony-size giant bugs, it was not possible to go through those routes anymore. With that, it left the convoy with only 2 routes available, and the general public knew about this as well.

If something happened that caused that number of routes to fall down to 1, the transportation activity would come to a full halt considering the safety of the transport convoys. Or at least, that possibility would go up greatly. This was common sense among the people who were involved in inter-city transportation.

As his shift was coming close, Akira went to the storage facility together with Hikaru. After finishing their preparation, Akira hopped on his bike and awaited the time.

“Hikaru, it’s about time.”

“Ah, yes, right…”

Hikaru looked troubled as she contacted the storage guard to open the door. Normally, that door was to be used for the powered suits to shoot down monsters from inside the transport vehicle.

“Akira, you’ll be fine, right?”

Judging from what they could see from the open door, the transport vehicle was travelling at high speed. Only death awaited anyone who fell off it. If Akira’s bike was a hoverbike with completely no tires, Hikaru would not have been worried about him. But the bike that Akira was using had 2 tires fixed under it. From the perspective of those who did not know its full capabilities, what Akira was planning to do there was nothing short of a suicide jump.

Of course, Akira thought that it was fine, but even so, when someone was worriedly asking him, he could not help but to get worried as well.

“Alpha, it’s going to be fine, right?”

“Of course. Don’t worry.”

Alpha was smiling as usual, that was enough to put Akira at ease.

“It’ll be fine, I’m going out now.”

“Good luck, I’ll be watching closely.”

As Hikaru said so, Akira turned on the bike and rode it through the storage facility, he then just jumped out through the door with his current momentum. He leaned the bike over in mid-air as if he was making a sharp turn. At the same time, he activated the bike’s forcefield armour to create an invisible floating platform. The moment the bike’s wheels touched the platform, the energy conversion turned the force from the wheels into a flash of light. This caused the bike to leave a trail made of light as it raced over the platform.

Akira executed a drift with his bike, and it spun toward the transport side of the vehicle. He then used more strength to turn the accelerator handle. After flying through the air for a while, the bike eventually landed on one of the walls of the transport vehicle and started climbing straight up. The momentum threw the bike up into the air after it reached the top. Akira then tilted his bike forward and landed on the rooftop with its front wheel, after driving it forward for a bit, he finally landed

the rear wheel as well. With this, he had safely landed on the rooftop.

Hikaru saw what Akira just did there through the camera on Akira’s headgear. After seeing such crazy manoeuvres through from start till end, she was glad she had rejected Akira’s idea of taking the bike to the rooftop this morning when they wanted to watch the sunrise.

Akira’s shift eventually ended without much accident. He only encountered two monsters during that time. One of them tried to charge and stick itself on the transport vehicle but failed and then fell beneath it and got crushed under the transport vehicle’s massive weight. Meanwhile, the other one did manage to stick on one of the walls of the transport vehicle, but Akira easily shot it down and it went through the same thing as the first monster.

Thanks to the bike’s powerful balancer, it was able to stay stable without any support. So Akira could just spend his time leisurely sitting on top of it.

There were people who saw Akira from afar. It was Tatsukawa’s team that was posted further ahead. Tatsukawa boarded his own powered suit and watched Akira in action in that short battle which could not even be called a battle.

“I heard that he’s pretty strong based on what the men said, but he doesn’t seem that strong to me though.”

Melshia, who was sitting on the powered suit’s shoulder, casually replied.

“He doesn’t seem that strong to you?”

“Not exactly, well, I do think he’s pretty strong, you know? Even though he’s posted around the back of the convoy, he’s basically assigned to a post that’s normally handled by a whole team. To top it off, he even had the leeway to help those in the other post as well. Although he’s not as strong as me, there’s no doubt that he’s a strong Hunter. But, what can I say… He doesn’t seem to have the strength that would make Kibayashi act like he did yesterday. Don’t you think so?”

After he heard that Melshia was rejected by Hikaru yesterday, Tatsukawa went and called Kibayashi to explain what just happened. He wanted to request Kibayashi to force Hikaru and allow Melshia to meet Akira. 

***

Now he once again remembered the conversation they had yesterday.

“Well, we’re not strangers. So, I don’t mind putting in some extra pressure if you want, but it won’t be for free, you know? And it won’t be cheap as well.”

“Oh, how expensive exactly?”

“Let’s see. How about one year’s worth of your usual daily spending?”

“…Whoah, why would it even be that big of a favour?”

“I have my reasons, you see. Let me at least tell you this. I’m actually selling you this favour for cheap, you know? I’m considering us as acquaintances after all. If it’s just some random person, I would have only laughed at you and left it as it is. Well, if you think that it isn’t worth it, I wholeheartedly agree with you. As long as you don’t have a strong reason to do it, I don’t recommend you take up this offer. But if you still insist on it, I don’t mind doing it. Though to be honest, I can’t imagine what kind of reason you might have to want to meet him that badly.”

***

Tatsukawa already had a rough guess of what was going on from his call with Kibayashi.

Kibayashi was not lying. Both Hikaru and Akira were under contract with the inter-city transport, thus it was not easy to try to meddle with them. But from Kibayashi’s point of view, if he put on pressure on Hikaru, she might use that as an excuse to transfer the responsibility to him. It was easy to imagine how troublesome that would be. So, in order to prevent that, he ended up giving a rather exaggerated answer.

Melshia had also heard about Tatsukawa’s conversation with Kibayashi.

“Ahhh, actually, that also piqued my interest, so I did some digging on my own. That boy, he might be an agent from Kugamayama.”

“Eh? Is that so?”

“I’ll send you the result from my investigation, you can decide for yourself after that.”

Tatsukawa checked the document that he received. He then sighed exasperatedly, the document listed Akira’s track record.

The track record was nothing sort of believable. He had started as a Rank 1 Hunter with no ID from the slum city, then climbed up to Rank 10 in a short time and went hard on his Hunter job since then. He was involved in most of the incidents in Kuzusuhara ruin and once accepted a request from City Management to boost his Hunter Rank. That request did give his rank a quick boost and the person who was handling his request was Kibayashi himself.

Moreover, he was also deeply involved in the gang dynamic inside slum city. He was involved in eradicating a certain large gang that was causing trouble for the city. While the gang that he was sponsoring had connections with one of the city officials. The relic shop that the gang was running has been pretty popular lately with some of the relics harvested from the Kuzusuhara ruin official’s managed area found there.

Considering the relationship between Hunters and City Management, it was easy for people to guess that he was an agent from Kugamayama city.

“…Welp, this isn’t even funny, it’s so suspicious to the point that it’s not even strange. Not to mention that his operator, Hikaru, she’s also a staff from Kugamayama city, right? I guess there’s no doubt anymore, right?”

“If I may add one thing, it seems that Hikaru was also the one who got him this escort job.”

“So, basically, those two are in some kind of special mission, huh? Well, if that’s the case, there’s no wonder why Kibayashi acted like that yesterday.”

Tatsukawa lightly sighed. Seeing that, Melshia more or less understood what Tatsukawa was thinking.

“It seems that had satisfied your curiosity.”

“Yeah, I’m originally also from Kugamayama city after all. I was pretty happy to hear that someone from the same city as me reached this level of success. But… It turns out that he’s an agent… so, it’s actually pretty disappointing…”

“Is that so? Want to stop trying to get him to join our team?”

“I’ll leave that to you. It’s your speciality. You’re best at calculating the risk and reward in taking someone in. We already know that he is an agent from the city, right? So, I have no interest in asking him to join at all.”

“Alright, I’ll think about it then.”

“Yeah, I trust your decision on this one.”

Tatsukawa switched the display inside his powered suit that was showing the image from a camera that was watching Akira to another image to help him waste time. Basically, it contained some sexual content. Melshia who noticed that quickly complained.

“What? You’re going to watch that when I’m right here?”

“It’s fine, right? It’s not like we have anything else to do anyway, or is it that you want to get in too?”

“We’re in the middle of a job, you know?”

“My instinct is saying that we won’t be busy.”

“Is that so? Well, I guess it’s fine then.”

The cockpit of the powered suit opened up and after Melshia entered the cockpit, it then closed up. Although Tatsukawa’s men were around, they knew that it was the usual thing and completely ignored it.

After his shift ended, Akira called Hikaru to reopen the door to the storage facility. He then rode his bike down the side of the transport vehicle and returned inside. Hikaru, who was already waiting there, sighed and said to him.

“You know… I don’t think that’s not how you ride a bike.”

“I do think so too, but it’s nice that I can do that.”

“Well, that’s true. Either way, good work out there.”

They left the bike back in the hangar and returned back to Akira’s room. In the midst of walking, Hikaru was curious about something and asked Akira a question.

“By the way, that’s pretty amazing you can do that although you only bought it yesterday. You did not even ride it beforehand. Weren’t you worried? It’ll be dangerous if you fall, you know? Or is it that you’ve done it multiple times before so you’re already used to doing that kind of thing?”

“Both, I guess? If you think that is dangerous… Well, going out into the wasteland is already dangerous enough, so the danger I face doesn’t really change by much. That might be why it doesn’t really bother me.”

“You have a point, but still…”

“And also, I once scaled a building with a cheaper bike before, so I thought that it should be fine if I’m using something this expensive.”

“I-I see. By the way, what happened to that other bike? Did you buy a more expensive one because you thought it was time to get a better bike?”

“It took a bunch of missiles and exploded to pieces.”

“I-I see… So, basically, you needed a new bike, huh?”

Hikaru did question how did he survive that, but she decided not to ask anything unnecessary.

Akira returned back to his room, took a break, went out again when his shift came. He then returned to his room again when his shift ended. Even after a couple of cycles, nothing worth noting happened. Both Hikaru and Akira were content with the situation. They thought that the ambush from the giant bugs on their way to Zegelt city was nothing more than bad luck, so something like that would not happen again.

This also meant that they had lowered their guards. Because of that, when Akira noticed that the sky got a little cloudy, he just thought that it was natural clouds and did not think anything more than that.

Even if he had noticed what was going on at that time, he did not have the power or the luck to change anything.

A thick grey cloud was hanging over the transport convoy that was blazing through the wasteland. There were occasions where the clouds in the eastern district were mixed with colourless mist, which caused disruptions in detecting enemies. The weather forecast had predicted a rather cloudy day with a small chance of rain.

The powerful sensor of the transport vehicle would be able to easily pinpoint an incoming swarm from far away. But that was limited only to the monsters below the clouds.

Above the thick clouds, at a height that the transport vehicle would easily detect if it was a clear day, a few white powered suits were flying. All of them were damaged although the extent of the damage was not the same. One of them had already lost all its limbs and was only able to move around thanks to the flying device being still intact.

Suddenly a white light lance pierced one of them, it formed a pillar that was thick enough to devour 10 per cent of its huge frame. It just went straight through the powered suit as if the defensive mechanisms of the suit were non-existent. That single shot easily took out the powered suit that could withstand a battle against a colony-sized giant bug swarm. The white powered suit crumbled into pieces and was

consumed by the cloud.

Meanwhile, another powered suit took a hit from a dish-shaped weapon. The diameter of that weapon was about half the size of the powered suit. It rotated so rapidly that it easily sliced through the powered suit. Sparks flew around accompanying the screeching sound of metal cutting through another. It eventually made a clean cut through the powered suit and flew away. The cut powered suit was separated into two as it fell down.

Another powered suit was stuck with multiple black disks. The other power suits saw that and quickly focused their fire to destroy the black disks while also sacrificing those powered suits caught by those black disks. Thus, another powered suit fell from the sky.

With the time and the distance that was bought by sacrificing their teammate, the rest of the white powered suits quickly dove down into the cloud. Of course, their opponents did not let them get away, the source of the light lance and the user of the huge disk weapon as well as the user of the multiple black disks quickly pursued them into the cloud.