A lone sedan drove down an empty road with three passengers inside. The silence made the atmosphere feel like a hearse, and only the roar of the engine accompanied this short journey.
Meanwhile, Minato was picking at his mouth, as if trying to remove a bone stuck between his teeth.
“You really have nothing better to do, do you?” Makoto wondered, looking at him as if he were a street lunatic.
“Nah. Wait a minute,” Minato muttered, and a few seconds later he pulled a broken tooth out of his mouth, which he had knocked out a few minutes earlier, and now examined it like a jeweler appraising a diamond.
“Kid, have you thought about installing a punching bag at home? It would be safer for society, considering your tendencies.” Suoh asked, taking a drag on his cigarette without even thinking about whether it was legal.
“Maybe you should go back to the tranquilizer course and sit there for a couple more years?” Makoto asked, handing a small piece of paper with a list of recommended medications to the front seat.
"I see you both think you're Andy Kaufman? Do you have extra teeth lying around?" Minato snorted, crunching his aching jaw and waving away an annoying insect that was buzzing nearby with a strange sound.
Looking at Minato, who was slightly more cheerful, Makoto felt a little better. Of course, he was annoying, smartass, and condescending towards her, but seeing him in a state of walking dead was painful.
It was as if everything that made him human had been sucked out of him, leaving only a dull shell. Now he was slightly better than the dead version of himself, but his apathetic state had already become the norm for her to some extent.
“Speaking of dead people, I was thinking. Why did you arrange a meeting with our shaggy zombie in the warehouse and start fighting to the death, huh?” Makoto asked Suoh.
“Hm? Ah, at that time I didn't have enough information, so I had every reason to believe that he was helping Shinso with her research. Just remember that most serum dealers are punks who haven't even finished school yet.”
As if to teach her a lesson for asking a stupid question, Suoh blew a large cloud of smoke in Makoto's face and continued with an unperturbed expression.
Pushing Makoto's face away, who had already pulled a thread resembling a razor-sharp string from her wrist to slit Suo's throat, Minato realized that there was one thing he couldn't understand.
“If that's the case, then why did Aranagi go there if it was an obvious trap? The only thing missing was a huge neon sign that said TRAP,” Minato asked in turn.
Slamming on the brakes and causing Makoto to hit her head on the front seat, Suoh continued, ignoring Makoto's curses, which rained down on him like a cornucopia.
“Because I threatened to kill the three of you if she didn't come. She's too soft-hearted, especially when it comes to children. That clearly hasn't changed.”
His words brought the cherished silence back to the car. The image of a kind-hearted scientist who went to her certain death for the sake of three kids she didn't even know and a heartless, pragmatic woman who was willing to walk over people to achieve her goal didn't fit together.
It was as if they were talking about two different people. Both Minato and Makoto understood that one did not interfere with the other. That even in the pitch darkness of the human soul, in the depths of despair, there is a spark that will not be extinguished so easily.
“You say the three of us, but where is Tsuna? Did you tie him up and put him in the trunk?” Minato asked, noticing a slight paradox.
“No. I just told him first, and he personally asked to go first and, if necessary, stall for time until we arrived or make sure I wasn't lying,” Suoh replied calmly, much to the surprise of the other passengers.
“He's strong...” Makoto muttered quietly.
Even though she doubted Tsuna's ability to stall for time, she was impressed by the guy's willingness to continue believing in someone, especially after the actions of the saboteur, who acted solely out of resentment towards those around him.
At the same time, she considered her own belief in the best in people to be false, and it had been trampled on twice in one day. First by Yorinobu, and then by Aranagi, who had brazenly lied to the three of them.
But what infuriated her most was that Minato's paranoia and alienation led to a better outcome. Not believing in people from the outset, he would not be crushed by sudden betrayal or disappointed in himself. In some twisted sense, thanks to his cynicism, Minato was stronger.
Now he was clearly not himself. Just a few hours ago, he, his younger brother, and his friends had nearly been crushed to death, buried under tons of concrete, because of the actions of a psychopath whom he could have helped if he hadn't been so obsessed with getting into SHA that he had largely stopped noticing the people around him who might need help, just like he himself did on the day he met Minato.
It was arrogance. He had become arrogant, but if it weren't for Minato, if it weren't for a chance coincidence, he could have become just like Yorinobu.
Turning Aranagi's business card, which she had given him during their conversation in the cafe, in his hands, Tsuna stood in front of the door that separated him from the truth. His heart was beating so hard that each beat echoed in his ears.
Hundreds of thoughts swarmed in his head, eating away at his psyche like a swarm of locusts. He didn't know if he was doing the right thing, but sometimes desperate measures were necessary. Putting the business card in the same pocket as the serum ampoule, he quickly typed a message to Minato and knocked on the door.
The knock was quiet, hesitant, without any confidence. To his surprise, Aranagi opened the door with a slightly bruised nose, from which blood was flowing, and cracked glasses. He could have sworn that a few moments earlier he had heard someone cry out softly and fall on the other side of the door.
“Uh, I guess I'm not welcome right now, huh?” Tsuna asked awkwardly.
“Oh, no, no, no. It's fine, I just wasn't expecting visitors, so I tripped on my way to the door and hit the floor. You can come in.”
After receiving permission and entering, Tsuna felt a strange sense of déjà vu. It was somewhat reminiscent of the moment he met this clumsy scientist. The scientist behind the turmoil that innocent people were suffering because of. This realization made his blood run cold, and he felt as if he had been thrown into a deep pit full of slugs.
The layout of her office was not quite what he expected. From dozens of TV shows, he expected everything to be crystal clean, the walls to be white, and the documents to be neatly sorted into file cabinets.
In reality, her office was more like a dump. It was a small, modest room where the dull walls were covered with a couple of plywood boards with photographs, news clippings, and her own notes. Everything was connected with red thread, like in detective TV shows. Several dozen sheets of paper lay on the floor, stapled together in pairs.
“It's such a mess, it's like I've walked into the house of a hikikomori. All that's missing is a couple of adult magazines and empty cans, and it would be a full house.” Tsuna thought to himself, not wanting to voice his criticism of Aranagi's interior, which already looked as if it would burn with shame.
“Is this all related to the investigation?” Tsuna asked, staring intently at the board with evidence.
“Yeah, I can't use hospitalization as an excuse to do nothing,” Aranagi said proudly, taking a new pair of glasses out of the closet that were identical to the old ones. At that moment, Tsuna saw that there were a couple dozen more identical pairs of glasses there, but he kept quiet.
Even immediately after being discharged from the hospital, after severe poisoning that caused even Minato to vomit blood, after multiple deep wounds, she didn't want to stop. Tsuna couldn't understand whether it was dedication to her work or fanaticism, which he wouldn't mind having himself.
“However, the wounds where the poison was still itch and tingle unpleasantly.” she replied awkwardly, pausing slightly, remembering how a certain guy sucked the poison out of her wounds, sometimes in places that were not easily accessible.
Fluttering around the office like a moth around a bright flame, Aranagi noticed the troubled expression on Tsuna's face. An expression that was painfully familiar to her. Regret.
“Are you thinking about today? Amamiya told me what happened. Do you want to talk about it?” Aranagi asked quietly, finally stopping for a moment.
Surprised by her perceptiveness, Tsuna couldn't help but smile contemptuously. Was he really that easy to read?
“Is it that obvious? I thought I was hiding it pretty well.”
"You may be good at hiding it, but if someone who has experienced or is experiencing the same emotions sees you, they will easily see through you. Your gaze, the focus of your eyes, your body language, your gestures, your posture, your facial expressions. The little things give you away." Aranagi said calmly in an understanding voice.
Tsuna was speechless. Did he really leave so many clues? Was it really that obvious what he was feeling? Now he was a little jealous of Minato, because his eternally neutral expression allowed him to keep a wall between himself and those around him.
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“You know, it's amazing in it's own way. A man almost killed you and those you care about, and yet you feel sympathy for him. It's a pity you couldn't see his pain.” She paused for a moment, realizing how hypocritical her next words would sound. “Don't hate yourself, don't let it destroy you from within. We must be greater than the things what we suffer from.”
The words were warmer than the spring sun, and their tenderness was comparable to a mother's embrace. For a second, denial appeared in Tsuna's mind. Her chest tightened, but not from fear.
Maybe Suoh was just a liar? Aranagi's words were not false; she believed in them and put her soul into them. Such a kind person could not be guilty. However, he could not allow a moment of weakness to cloud his judgment; it only prevented him from seeing the whole forest behind the one tree.
“Good words, I will remember them,” Tsuna said gratefully before staring at Aranagi's face. “Only it's hard to take them seriously from a person who clumsily fell and forgot about his bleeding nose.”
“Huh?”
Only now did Aranagi notice that she was still bleeding, and it wasn't going to stop. Her lab coat was already splattered with blood.
“Oh, shit! I gave such a great speech! All for nothing!” Clutching her head, she took a deep breath and walked to the door. “I'll be right back, don't touch anything,” she said before rushing out of the office at full speed.
Left alone with his thoughts, Tsuna wondered what interesting things might be here and what evidence he might find.
His train of thought was interrupted by the noise of an old computer's cooling fan, which hummed like an airplane turbine. The screen was still lit, which made Tsuna approach it. He felt like an insect flying toward the light. There was an open document filled with incomprehensible symbols. It looked as if someone had typed randomly on the keyboard and this was the result.
But upon closer inspection, he realized that what seemed like the ravings of a madman was actually a common cipher. The document was written in Latin letters, but the letters looked out of place.
“It looks like a quick cipher. Maybe she was doing this before I came?”
He quickly realized that it was an Atbash cipher. The essence of it was simple: the alphabet was reversed, so that instead of the letter A there was the letter Z, instead of B there was Y, and so on. Minato was more accustomed to calling it the out of the ass alphabet.
“Through trial and error, I managed to find the right proportions of chemicals C-157, U-12, and G-50. When combined correctly, they produce the desired effect and allow people to be endowed with the so-called superhuman gene.”
The more he read, the more he wanted to close the document and smash the computer, to see none of it, but it was as if an invisible force was pulling him back.
"Synchronization of brain waves can lead to gene destruction and death, which is why the decision was made to resort to the theory of the unconscious. After the drug is injected into the body, the subject becomes part of a cluster system, or part of the swarm mind. An alternative would be to create genetic clones, but that would take far too many resources. Besides, I am concerned about the ethical side of the issue.“
He wanted to gouge his eyes out, just to end this farce, to see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing.
”The drug uses the collective unconscious as a communication buffer, reducing all minds to a single archetype to avoid gene destruction from direct synchronization. However, a major problem will be the amplification of some individuals' emotions through the network. Most will become embittered, so emotionally unstable personalities may begin to wreak havoc under the influence of heightened emotional sensitivity."
The events of today came to mind. Were Yorinobu's actions motivated not only by his own hatred, but also intensified by the endless contempt of the others who took the serum?
"Once enough samples have been collected, the network can be used to borrow Specials from other clusters, where I will act as the central server for storing and processing their powers. This will cause a brief vegetative state in each patient, but it cannot be avoided. No matter how hard I try, this side effect cannot be avoided. I'm sorry."
Tsuna stood in complete shock, even forgetting to breathe. His head was splitting, and it wasn't just because of reading encrypted data in a foreign language. He was shaking. From anger, from fear, from horror that all this was happening right under his nose.
Even a bucket of ice poured down his neck wouldn't bring him to his senses.
But he couldn't afford to stand still. He had to do something, anything, to wait for the others to arrive. At that moment, the door slammed shut, and he heard a voice near his ear that sounded like the grinding of rebar against ceramic.
“Well, well, weren’t you taught that peeping is bad?”
Aranagi's hot breath contrasted with her cold voice, a distant echo of the kind and gentle voice he had heard a few minutes ago, and only paralyzed Tsuna more. And so, his pain began.
Minato's cracked phone vibrated in his pocket. With a slightly annoyed snort, he glanced at the screen, which displayed a message from Tsuna that he had managed to write before entering the beast's lair.
“Hey, king of freaks. Step on it.” Minato said casually.
“Huh? We're already going over the speed limit, how much faster can we go?” Suoh asked lazily, turning off the highway onto a remote street.
“Then go even faster. I have a bad feeling about this.”
“What's the matter? What does it say?” Makoto asked, peering over Minato's shoulder, but unable to make anything out due to the cracked screen.
“This idiot wrote that he apologizes because he's going to do something stupid, and if necessary, he'll fight her.”
Suddenly, a muffled explosion rang out a couple of kilometers away, reaching even them.
“Tsk, that's all we needed.” Despite his earlier objections, Suoh pressed the gas pedal with all his might, pushing it to the floor. The sedan began to accelerate even more, literally pushing everyone into their seats.
"Before picking you idiots up, I checked the secret service communication channels. They were planning a raid on her office, with the aim of either arresting her or killing her on the spot if she resisted. Now that shaggy-haired guy is either caught between two fires or will suffer the same fate as the arrest squad." Suoh continued, lighting another cigarette, not out of habit, but out of tension.
“Hey, if they're conducting an operation like that, does that mean the civilians have been evacuated?” asked Makoto, realizing the precariousness of the situation for outsiders.
“Yeah. It's easier for us, we don't have to worry about them.”
“Need I remind you that you brought two civilians with you on the mission?” Minato asked, looking at Suoh as if he were an idiot.
Turning the corner, Suoh's luxury sedan drove onto a small two-lane street lined with tall buildings on both sides. On the far left side of the street, Aranagi's office was located on one of the floors. But that wasn't what concerned them now. More important was the spectacle in the middle of the intersection, where there were two overturned armored personnel carriers, whose hulls resembled standard six-wheeled APCs, and on top of which stood a tank-like turret with a large barrel.
Or rather, it should have been, because the turrets of both vehicles had been torn off, and the burning hulls were mangled as if King Kong had been practicing his punches on them. In the middle of one of them was a hole through and through.
Next to them, like dead kittens, lay the members of a special unit designed to detain and eliminate particularly dangerous Special users, who often worked side by side with the best of the Specialists in the most difficult operations. But now they looked more like rag dolls scattered by a child.
As they approached the scene, one of the operatives fell onto the hood of the car, smashing the windshield with his body. This caused Suoh to slam on the brakes, and Minato, without even waiting for the car to come to a complete stop, jumped out of the car with Makoto and began examining the fighter's injuries.
He was not fatally wounded, but all his equipment was torn apart and useless in battle. The armor plates made of composite steel were torn apart like a stuffed toy given to an Alabai dog to tear apart. His entire body was covered with burns, cuts, and dark bruises, making it terrifying to imagine what was going on inside.
“He may have a concussion. Do you have any ice left?” Makoto asked, dragging the heavy body onto the asphalt.
Applying what little was left in the ice pack to the operative's head, Minato just stared at the fiery hell ahead, where many bodies of fighters sent to their deaths by Aranagi lay. However, none of them were dead. Each was seriously injured, but none were dead.
“This is a bloody massacre,” Minato whispered, his teeth grinding together as if they were about to crack.
He turned to look at the condition of the car, but Suoh was nowhere to be seen. It felt as if he had evaporated.
“That jerk has gone invisible again!” Minato grumbled, but his attention was quickly drawn to another person. A person whose red hair glowed in the light of the flames. Aranagi Shinso, who had jumped off the roof of one of the armored cars, which she had turned into scrap metal. Next to her lay another body, not as badly beaten as the operatives, but with numerous cuts and a battered face that clearly showed signs of a struggle.
“Tsuna...” The name slipped from his lips. Quietly, timidly, hesitantly. Only when he truly realized who was lying there did his voice break into a cry. “Tsuna!”
“He's alive. There's no need to shout like that. His life is not in danger. Besides, he's to blame for his own injuries,” replied the scientist coldly, her lab coat soaked in blood, her face showing only indifference. “If he hadn't tried to play the hero, I wouldn't have laid a finger on him.”
This person was different, as if a completely new, cruel personality had been implanted in her head. Makoto felt the greatest bitterness, as she had refused to believe any of this until the very end. But now, to deny what she had seen would be either blind or insane.
“So this is your true face?” Makoto asked, her voice trembling with rage that she could barely contain.
Aranagi's face showed only a slight, cynical smirk in response to her question. It was a simple movement of her lips and facial muscles, but it spoke more than a thousand words.
"I won't deny it. However, I hope you will be smarter than him.“ she said, pointing to Tsuna, who was sprawled out. “You two are the last people whose blood I want to spill. I know more about you than you think. More than you yourselves know. And about the tragedies that will befall you if you get in my way."
Aranagi's mysterious words confused them. On one hand, Minato understood perfectly well that she knew about him, but on the other hand, he didn't understand what Makoto had to do with it. Yet he didn't care much, nor did Makoto, who looked at him as if she would hit him if he dared to agree with Aranagi.
“Maybe you're right. Maybe you're not. It doesn't matter. I want to live for today, and I'll leave tomorrow's problems for tomorrow's me.” With that, Minato stood with his feet shoulder-width apart, ready for battle. He didn't want to use his ability, even now, the guilt was too strong to overcome.
“I agree. I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'd rather regret what I did than what I didn't do. That's all, that's more than enough for me.” Makoto replied, her gaze free of doubt, and if force was needed to bring Aranagi to his senses, her hand would not tremble.
They weren't fighting for the common good; their goals were painfully selfish, but that was enough to stand firm and fight to the last breath.
Their words only made things more difficult for Aranagi. She may have said she would do anything, but that decision was made after killing all feelings inside herself. There was only one thing she couldn't kill: her love for people.
Because of her strong love, she couldn't bring herself to kill those who had come for her soul, and because of it, she was forcing herself to fight to the death with these children who believed they were doing the right thing. The pain in her chest was so great that she bit her lip so hard that dark blood flowed from it.
“So be it. If you don't back down, I'll have to use force. I've given up too much to back down now.” she said with a slight melancholy in her voice, realizing how cruel this world is.
Chaotically selected red strands instantly turned white, and her eyes filled with blood, as if the capillaries in her eyes had burst. Her bloody gaze fixed on the two of them, wanting to see if they were strong enough to reinforce her determination.
Barely opening his bloodshot eyes, Tsuna could barely see the faces of those two people. But even their silhouettes were enough to understand who they were. Minato and Makoto stood opposite the flames, ready to clash with Aranagi. For some reason, he had no doubt that they would succeed, and it was this certainty that was extremely bitter.
They would succeed, he was sure of it, but he couldn't say the same about himself, lying there like a chewed-up piece of meat. They seemed so close, and yet so far away, like the bright, warm sun setting on the horizon.
“Damn... how I hate this... I hate this weakness...”
He could only curse himself for his inability to do anything. He despised his own weakness and worthlessness, and life had plunged him face-first into it. He hadn't strayed an inch from the insignificant Tsuna he had been before meeting Minato. And this truth burned like a mark of shame, burning until his mind sank into darkness.
