Yuri looked at Hugo, who seemed to have suddenly jammed, in confusion. After a moment's thought, he asked, "Are you stuck in debugging?"
"Humph." Hugo replied disdainfully, "How could I make such a low-level mistake?"
"Ah... I thought all programmers had experienced that time where bugs kept popping up, and they started over again, line by line, but found nothing. They had to run the program again, but after a few hours, the VM froze and shut down, ruining everything."
Hugo: "...Weren't you a medical student before?"
"Yes," Yuri said, "now he's a kidnapper."
"Then why do you know so much about programmers' jobs?"
"I had a friend who worked in this business before, but we later broke up."
"Rich-poor gap or class conflict? Isn't it all about overtime?"
"He said I was even more insensitive than the corpses I dissected. Who knows what happened?" Yuri, feeling a bit chilly without his coat, shifted into the sunlight, then stood still against a straight utility pole. He sighed again, and what seemed like a yawn. "I said, doesn't he deal with machines every day, too? But he said this was different, that humans should behave like humans. And then we never contacted each other again."
"This is too much..." Annie said subconsciously.
Hugo and Yuri both turned to look at her.
Annie: “…”
She said righteously, "Although you are a kidnapper who should go to jail, at least your friends shouldn't say that!"
"Uh, thank you." Yuri nodded politely, "But I won't let you go."
"What exactly are you planning to do?" Annie asked. "If you want to take action against the Vatican, it's impossible for just the two of you to do it. It's better to do it now..."
"Young man, don't be so confident." Hugo interrupted her with a mature tone. "In eight minutes, Gresham will arrive at this square. Their commander—is her name Jedda? That woman hasn't even noticed you're missing yet."
"How did you know that?"
Hugo pointed to his eyes and said: "I am everywhere and I see everything."
The surveillance cameras above the capital are working non-stop.
Anne flinched almost instinctively.
In an era like this, can a person's identity and whereabouts really be kept completely confidential?
The android's eyes flashed crimson. "Yuri, take your knife."
“…”
"Wait a minute!" Annie grabbed Yuri's coat tightly. "Why do you have to do this?! I don't think you have any serious hatred at all!"
"I've been immersed in hatred for too long." Hugo stood up, jumped down from the flower bed, and walked over to Anne. "Have you ever experienced the feeling of watching your companions being thrown into the incinerator while every part of your body decays?"
"You know how it feels to wait forever for someone to come back, only to find nothing?"
It suddenly lost interest: "Forget it, you are still young."
"I'm almost an adult," Annie whispered.
"It's very fast for me, but it's almost one-tenth of a lifetime for you," the android said. "I know how short human life is. You just share the same blood as those people back then, but you're not them."
The people it knew are no longer to be found in this world.
"Then why do you want revenge?"
“——”
Why?
Yuri thought.
There are not so many whys.
"Think positively." He comforted the little girl who looked on the verge of despair, "You won't die, they are just asleep."
“That’s not the case!”
"They're just asleep," Yuri repeated. "What's the difference?"
Anne carefully observed his expression and found that he was serious. "How can there be no difference?" She said in disbelief, "Death means eternal separation?!"
"This could happen while you're still alive."
"But……"
Annie finally realized that something was wrong with the two people in front of her.
You can't deny the 'human' part of them.
But they are in denial.
**
"Be gentle," Bertie grumbled. "This is just a test. Do you understand? I'm not asking you to use a grappling technique... What's the difference between you using this and a brown bear grappling a tree?!"
"I know, I know." Gresham said perfunctorily, "Next time I will definitely do it."
“…”
"You'd better turn yourself in to the police station in advance," Bod said. "The Vatican can't protect you."
"We're so unlucky," Gresham said, glancing up at the camera in the bushes. "I hope Yeda actually bought me insurance."
"……What do you mean?"
"I have a bad feeling, dear partner. The last time I had this feeling, the bullet was only three millimeters away from my heart artery."
He ignored Bertie's frightened pale face and continued, "Let's sort it out. Who do you think was the most noteworthy person around Erica at the zoo?"
Bod thought for a moment. "The man in the black cloak?"
"Huh?" Gresham said. "It's rare that great minds think alike. I think it's him, too. That guy is a completely obscure monster. Why doesn't he go into the entertainment industry and act in horror movies?"
"You're kidding, right?"
"Right," Gresham confirmed. "He can't really be a monster... it better not be."
The color had left Bod's lips.
"I'm sorry." The tall Alpha man apologized insincerely, "I forgot you were afraid of horror movies. Think about it, you stayed with him for such a long time and didn't lose your life, which means that at least he doesn't rely on sucking human essence to survive..." He stopped before Bertie rolled his eyes.
"But we probably won't meet him this time."
"Is this your intuition again?" Bod asked after a long pause.
I cursed my overly rich imagination in my heart.
"That's my guess. If a game's big boss appears at the beginning and can be defeated, it means the game will not exceed three hours. If the biggest villain in a novel meets the protagonist, it also means the book is almost finished. In any case, I don't think it will be him, maybe it will be one of the other two."
"A gray-haired man wearing a gray-blue windbreaker and a hat?"
Gresham: "I hope it's him. He looks like a normal person. I'm not good at dealing with underage kids with Chuunibyou. Even if they commit crimes, they can't imagine the consequences. That's the scariest thing."
However, the result was beyond all their expectations.
Gresham's earpiece rang with a series of exclamations: "Ulysses Valen, how could it be him?"
"Well," said Bod, straining his throat, "you're wrong. The plumber is the one behind this."
"...It seems like criminals these days all like the dark side. But don't they think that tastes a bit unpleasant? The sacrifice is too great, isn't it?"
"Hello." Yuri stood at the entrance of the garden openly. The area had long been cleared by the Vatican, and there was not a single stranger passing by. "I don't like being a sewer repairman, but this is the only job I can find right now."
"So you're out here to take revenge on society because you can't find a job and are living on the streets?"
Gresham casually talked nonsense while observing his surroundings calmly.
Bertie, who was a little behind, quietly took two steps back and signaled to the reinforcements who were observing from a distance.
Of course, Yeda would not be so heartless as to send only these two people. They were just vanguards.
"Well, if you must say so, it's not a big deal." Igor Sullivan... He's frighteningly frank about this, but I should always face the fact that I've accomplished nothing. Yuri thought of this and immediately labeled the Evil God Squad a newspaper company, but the god had never thought of it that way before he attacked him.
However, Hugo, who looked the most glamorous, never stopped imagining revenge.
This is what the saying means: don't judge a person by his appearance.
"I advise you not to bring too many people."
He turned around, grabbed Annie's arm and led her to the front. "She'll tell you that my proposal comes from the heart. Too many people will be useless. They will only become running and jumping obstacles."
"Annie?!" Gresham's eyes widened. "When did you run away?"
The little red-haired girl dodged and didn't want to look him in the eye: "...I'm here to find Erica."
"Annie!"
Gresham had never spoken with such a serious expression, "Friends are not always trustworthy!"
"I think he has a point," Yuri said, "but you can trust Erica because she knows nothing."
"That girl led us here," Gresham said sternly. "I don't know if she's in cahoots with you or if you're just using her. But regardless, taking a minor who came over to check on their friend out of concern as a hostage—don't you think that's pretty despicable?!"
"I didn't plan to kidnap her. This was a surprise to me, too." Yuri looked at the coat Anne was still wearing, but he didn't take it back. "Go back. Don't run around this time."
Anne was stunned for a moment.
Yuri actually dropped the hand that was holding her arm and stuffed his free hands into his pockets.
Gresham's voice changed with nervousness: "What did you do to her?!"
"Nothing." It was Annie who answered him. After a pause, she added, "Not when I was awake, but I was unconscious for a while before, so I'm not sure."
"..." Bertie shouted from the back, "Let her come over!"
"Annie." Gresham half-knelt down and opened his arms. "Come here."
Their cautious attitude infected Anne, but nothing happened until she reached Gresham.
"...Do I have a bomb on me?" she couldn't help but ask Yuri, "Will you detonate it when I return to the group?"
"Don't overthink it," Yuri said grimly. "I'm a doctor, not a munitions engineer."
Annie: "So it's a biological weapon?"
“…”
Gresham wanted to cover Anne's mouth.
He finally understood the pain that Yeda felt every time he watched him perform crosstalk live on the battlefield.
"Our initial tests came back negative," Bertie said quickly. "But how is this possible?"
"Possibly." Yuri's right hand pulled out a sharp knife from his pocket. "I'm not very good with a pistol, but I'm pretty good with a knife."
When the time came, everyone's minds remained strangely calm.
Time leaves no room for any human or non-human to panic.
Gresham's communications device was hijacked.
Instead, Hugo's voice rose above the music that kept echoing in Yuri's mind.
The music is a repetitive, monotonous sound.
The android's voice was a mechanical command without any emotion.
"Follow my command," it said.
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