Confusion was evident on both their faces, but it was at least clear there had been a grave misunderstanding. They’d overlooked something—something critical. As realization dawned on Elena, she immediately grew suspicious. “You two were on the same team, right? So what happened here?” she demanded.

  “Sh-She... She...” With his remaining right hand, Ezio pointed at Monica.

  Then the truth came out.

  ◆

  The hunter who’d made his way all the way to the base had been practically on death’s door when they’d carried him to the sickbay. When he finally regained consciousness, the city official in charge immediately went to question him about what had happened.

  “First off, let me say what a relief it is to see that you survived,” said the official. “However, while we weren’t going to slap you awake or anything, we were waiting for you to come to. You see, it’s extremely important that you tell us what happened right away, as we currently have very little information to go on.”

  “Yeah... I understand,” the man said. “Oh, before that, though, just tell me one thing. What happened to that Monica woman in the end? You already know what she did—don’t you?” The man’s consciousness had been hazy back then, but he recalled confirming that much just before he’d passed out.

  “Oh, yes, we already know all about that.”

  “I see. Thank goodness!” The man breathed a deep sigh of relief. “So what’d you do with her?”

  “Well, right now she’s joined one of our rescue teams headed for Factory A. We made her guide the team back to the hunters she abandoned.”

  A silence fell between them.

  “What?” the man finally croaked—a sound that conveyed to the official precisely and succinctly how the survivor felt about this news.

  Puzzled, the official explained, “It was meant to double as her punishment for escaping on her own, you see. To show her that her efforts to save only herself had been in vain. Wait, what’s wrong?”

  The man’s expression had twisted in sheer terror, and his entire body started to tremble. “What’s wrong?! Everything! You’ve got it all wrong!” he screamed. “That woman didn’t abandon my teammates—she massacred them!”

  Startled, the official couldn’t help raising his voice as well. “What?! What did you say?!”

  ◆

  “That woman!” Ezio announced to Akira and the others. “She betrayed us! She didn’t abandon us—she worked together with the monsters to try and kill us all!”

  Everyone on the rescue team immediately turned to Monica. She looked surprised for a moment, then shook her head vigorously. “Wh...What? No, that’s not true! I would never do something like that!” she pleaded. “I know you’re upset at me for leaving on my own, but lying like that is beyond the pale! I don’t deserve to be called a murderer!”

  To all appearances, she seemed to be nothing more than an innocent woman who’d been suddenly and unjustly accused of a heinous crime. But Elena’s eyes narrowed.

  As team leader, Elena had to sort this out, but she wasn’t sure exactly how. It certainly doesn’t look like she’s lying—otherwise, she’d have to be quite the actress. And this hunter has a motive to frame Monica for murder—he’s probably holding a serious grudge against her for abandoning him and his teammates to their deaths.

  Elena went over the facts in her head. The city had told them that Monica had abandoned the other hunters to escape on her own. They’d drawn that conclusion after analyzing the data Monica herself had provided from her scanner. Scanner data would be unbiased and objective—at least, more objective than the hunter’s claim here.

  The data did come from Monica herself, but it would normally be incredibly difficult to tamper with information like that. She couldn’t just delete the original data—she’d need to rewrite it entirely. I certainly couldn’t manage it... But she is a surveyor. What if she’s used to manipulating data like this? Then again, could she really do it well enough to fool the city? If so, then why would she fake the data to show her abandoning her teammates in the first place?

  Of course, Elena considered, Monica might have had some reason of her own for deliberately manipulating the footage to show that specific scene, but piling speculation on top of speculation would get them nowhere. Right now, Elena needed to focus on the facts. The hunter said that Monica worked with the monsters to murder the rest of the team. But back when we rescued Monica, those same monsters had attacked her, right? Hmm...

  Ezio’s claim simply didn’t add up with what they already knew, so she suspected he was probably lying. After all, who’d ever heard of a hunter working in tandem with hostile machines? She turned to Ezio, her face tinged with suspicion. “Can you prove what you’re saying is true?”

  Ezio panicked. “P-Proof? Well, I don’t really have any proof... But it’s true! I’m not lying!”

  “Well, can you show us the data on your scanner, then?” Elena asked. “Of course, I know that per your contract that data is property of the city, and that it might contain confidential or private information regarding your team. So I won’t force you to hand it over, but it would certainly help clear things up.”

  Ezio detected the hidden meaning in Elena’s words: Without some sort of proof to base your claim on, we can’t trust you. He looked grim for a moment, then he sighed. “I’m sorry. I can’t give you the data. But I’m really telling the truth. You’re free to doubt me if you want, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  At these words, Elena found it hard to continue pressing him. The situation now seemed murkier than ever, and she was growing even more anxious.

  But then someone else broke into their conversation—Akira. “Why can’t you hand it over?” he asked. His tone was not accusing, nor did it have even a hint of tension—he sounded genuinely curious. At least, it wasn’t the tone one would normally adopt toward someone who just accused one of his teammates of murder with absolutely no proof.

  For a moment, Ezio looked taken aback by how calm Akira was. Then he gave the boy a look as if to say, You don’t even know that much? “I’m a hunter just as much as you are,” he answered. “Sure, maybe you’ll believe me if I give you the data—and if I don’t, maybe you’ll see me as the enemy and leave me to die.” His voice hardened. “But I’m not some cowardly third-rate hunter who’d leak my teammates’ info just to keep myself alive.”

  “Whoa, cool!” Akira marveled, clearly genuinely impressed.

  Even more surprised, Ezio smiled a bit in embarrassment. “Well, it’s not like I don’t have other reasons. For one, there’s no guarantee you’d believe me even if I did give you what you want. After all, the footage might be so chaotic or unclear that you couldn’t tell what was going on. Given this possibility, it wouldn’t be worth the risk.”

  Akira nodded in understanding.

  To Ezio, the boy seemed like an innocent, curious greenhorn, and the hunter couldn’t help but smile wryly. Standing nearby, Togami looked astonished—stunned that Akira couldn’t figure out something so basic, Togami briefly forgot his complicated mix of envy and resentment toward the other boy.

  But suddenly Akira’s innocent demeanor vanished. “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” he said, now looking deadly serious. “Did Monica really attack you and your teammates? Answer yes or no.”

  The hunter looked taken aback at the abrupt change in Akira’s attitude, but he answered just as seriously. “Yes.”

  What do you think, Alpha? said Akira silently.

  He’s telling the truth—probably. Since he’s a cyborg, I can’t say for certain.

  I see. Akira turned to Monica. His gaze was already dark with distrust. “Now I’ll ask you. Did you attack him and his team? Yes or no?”

  “W-Wait! You actually believe what he’s saying?! If he can’t hand over proof, that obviously means he doesn’t have any proof in the first place—”

  “Yes or no?” Akira cut her off, his expression unchanged.

  Monica went silent, and then, with a somber expression, answered, “I did not attack them.”

  Alpha?

  She’s lying.

  Akira’s eyes flamed with hostility. In his mind he marked Monica as an enemy, and his body tensed up as though ready for a fight. “Liar.”

  Monica took a step back. “W-Wait a second!” she said, shaking her head frantically. “What makes you think I’m lying?! It’s the truth!”

  Akira ignored her pleas and dropped one final question. “Are you our enemy? Yes or no?”

  If she didn’t answer, that was sufficient confirmation for him, but he didn’t feel the need to explain that to her. Perhaps if he’d come here without the rest of his team, he wouldn’t have even felt the need to ask this in the first place. After all, it would be highly unlikely—preposterous, even—for her to attack her supposed comrades and not regard Akira as an enemy as well. Under any other circumstance, he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill her right then. But he was on a team with Elena and Sara right now, and that stayed his trigger finger. For this reason alone, Monica remained alive.

  The surveyor turned a desperate, pleading look toward Elena and the others.

  Had a third party seen her expression and not known the situation beforehand, they might have immediately felt sorry for her and run to her aid. But now Elena and Sara also wore extremely guarded looks. Just like how back in underground Kuzusuhara Akira had detected the Yarata scorpions before anyone else, so now both women got the feeling that Akira had somehow been able to sense, with absolute conviction, that Monica was lying to them. They trusted his sixth sense more than they did the surveyor.

  So they, too, looked upon Monica as an enemy.

  Monica saw their faces, realized they weren’t going to defend her, and turned her pleading gaze to Reina’s group instead. But now Reina and Shiori were also regarding her with deep suspicion. The whole incident when Reina had been taken hostage, when both she and Shiori had nearly died, had come about precisely because Akira had told them someone else was suspicious—and they hadn’t listened. The lingering memory of that experience prevented them from siding with someone Akira claimed was an enemy—they’d remain neutral at the very least.

  In any case, their wary gazes told Monica they weren’t going to help her either.

  She scanned the area frantically, searching for anyone else who might go to bat for her. But Shikarabe didn’t have any intention of defending Monica either—and since his team was deferring to Elena’s for this mission, it wasn’t up to him to make that call anyway.

  For his part, Togami honestly wanted to stop Akira—to him, it looked like Akira had no grounds for treating Monica as an enemy apart from pure intuition. Togami himself certainly wasn’t haughty enough to turn on another hunter just because of his own hunches, so Akira’s actions here struck him as rooted in pure arrogance. But Shikarabe was Togami’s superior, and if Shikarabe stayed silent, then his hands were tied. So he kept his mouth shut as well, in wordless disapproval of Akira’s judgment.

  Monica’s eyes continued to search among them, desperately seeking someone who would defend her. But as she became certain no one would, she finally gave up, and the fear vanished from her face as though it had never been there in the first place.

  She sighed in apparent dissatisfaction. “Shit. I put in so much work, and yet it turned out to be all for naught. That’s why I explicitly ordered them to not leave anyone alive, dammit.”

  The jig was up—Monica had been their enemy all along.

  Chapter 118: The Traitor’s Employer

  Now that Monica had dropped her mask, Akira and the others regarded her with unreserved hostility. But Monica paid their glares no mind.

  “If only it had cleaned them all up like I’d asked. Then I could have lured you all deeper in like I’d planned. But that stupid hunk of junk couldn’t even manage that much! Though I guess I shouldn’t have expected a factory administrative system to think that far ahead in the first place.”

  That raised a lot of questions in Elena’s mind that she definitely could not ignore, but there were more pressing matters at hand. “Answer me, Monica! Why did you attack that team of hunters?!”

  “Because it’s my job! Not to borrow that guy’s line earlier, but I’m just as much of a hunter as you are. I’ve gotta make money somehow.”

  “Your job, huh?” Elena guessed that perhaps Monica had been hired by a rival city that was to impede Kugamayama’s efforts to investigate the ruins. At the very least, it was a safe bet that Monica was likely working at someone else’s behest.

  “Bullshit!” Togami bellowed. “You’re not a real hunter—you’re just a thief!” Unlike Elena, he’d leaped to the conclusion that Monica was just another of the many lawless bandits roaming the wasteland, and that she’d attacked the hunters in order to steal and sell off their possessions. That she would call such petty crimes “hunter work” angered him.

  But Monica didn’t even flinch at his sudden outburst. “I’m not a bandit. It’s honest security work. My job’s to eliminate trespassers. You’re a Druncam hunter—you ought to at least have experience working security, right? I’m doing the same thing—we just answer to different bosses.”

  Togami frowned, unsure how to make sense of this.

  But Elena realized the truth. “You were hired,” she marveled, “by the ruin itself?”

  Monica smirked. “That’s right. More specifically, by the system managing one of the factories here.”

  Still trying to catch up, Togami interrupted before he could stop himself. “W-Wait! Then why did those machines attack you back when I rescued you?!”

  Monica looked surprised for a moment, then her lips curled up in a sneer. “They didn’t attack me, idiot. I was the one who placed them there.”

  “Wha—?!”

  “Did it really not occur to you for even a moment?! Even though, when you entered the room, those sentries were aiming at you and not me? I had been in the room before you arrived, so didn’t you find that strange?”

  Togami replayed the scene in his head. Now that she mentioned it, the fact that she’d been lying on the ground completely unharmed did indeed seem strange.

  “I thought for sure you were going to interrogate me about that,” she added, “and I had a bunch of excuses already lined up. But if you’re that dense, I guess I didn’t need them after all!”

  It had been so obvious, Togami knew. He should have been the first to realize. Then regret turned to anger, and he glared at her sharply. The fact that he’d risked his life to save a murderer who’d nearly killed them all only added to his fury.

  But Monica’s smirk didn’t falter, even as she turned to Carol. “Be honest, Carol. You realized from the start, didn’t you? That’s why after I was ‘rescued,’ you took the rearguard position—so you could keep an eye on me from behind, no?”

  Carol grinned back. “Well, it’s not like I was absolutely certain or anything, but it sucks that my guess turned out to be right.”

  “Mind telling me what tipped you off?” said her former partner. “What could’ve possibly made you realize that all the way back then?”

  “A bunch of things,” answered Carol, “but the biggest was the fact that back on the day Akira and I first met, you didn’t end up dead.”

  “Oh? How mean,” Monica said with a mock pout. “Seriously, though, what gave it away? Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I was pretty confident my acting was flawless.”

  “Just what I said. With all those monsters running around, you shouldn’t have made it out alive. The fact that you did was suspicious in itself.” That day, Carol and Monica had encountered a swarm of hostile machines and gotten separated. After they’d met back up, Monica had said she’d escaped using a secret route. But even if that had been true, she wouldn’t have been able to fight through the swarm to reach it—at least, not with the strength Carol judged her to have. And if she had been perfectly capable of reaching the exit, and had been concealing her true strength all this time, then she never would’ve gotten separated from Carol in the first place—she would’ve been able to annihilate those monsters easily. At the very least, the situation would not have unfolded in the way it had.

  One possible explanation for Monica’s survival, Carol had reflected at the time, was that she’d been on the monsters’ side all along.

  “Well, it was just a shot in the dark,” Carol said, still grinning. “I wasn’t actually expecting anything as outlandish as you working for the ruin itself. So I was only keeping a close eye on you just in case.”

  “Ah, so that’s why, huh? Next time I’ll be more caref—”

  But Monica didn’t get to finish, because Shiori and Kanae had already gotten within striking distance.

  In the East, powerful long-range weapons dominated. So a hunter opting to use close-range melee arms would automatically be at a disadvantage. But by the same token, this meant such hunters had to be extremely skilled to even stand a chance of survival in the first place.

  As maids tasked with guarding their mistress, Shiori and Kanae had trained diligently in close-quarters combat and had become masters of their craft. Shiori had done so out of loyalty to her mistress, while for Kanae, it had just been a hobby. By now, they’d perfected their art of closing the distance to the enemy and ending a battle before their opponent could even fire.

  The sheath of Shiori’s blade was designed to open from the side. That way, instead of having to unsheathe the blade by pulling it up and out, she could simply draw it in the same direction as her slash, without any extra movements. The blade itself was fortified with a layer of force-field armor, sharp enough to easily cut through steel, and it could even counter enemy force fields.

  And if she loaded a compatible energy pack, it could become sharper and even more powerful. Then, while the sheath kept the blade protected, the blade would continue to charge until Shiori was ready to strike. Once she did, the energized attack was both stronger and faster than normal.

 

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