Chapter 193: The Gap in Life Levels

Watching that ridiculous display, none of the onlookers ringing the field thought any less of Miyabi Nagumo for the undignified scramble.

Quite the opposite.

The Mystery Shop stocked no shortage of items, but the ones expensive enough to be worth committing to memory were rare indeed.

And the [Spider-Man Bloodline] Nagumo carried was absolutely one of them.

Even with that bloodline stacked on top of the [Combat Suit] and the [Gorilla Suit], he'd still dodged the Gravity Gun on pure reflex rather than trying to tank it.

Which told you everything about how much raw power that strangely shaped gun packed.

"Look at that blast radius…"

Honami Ichinose stared into the crater and swallowed hard. "If you pointed that at ordinary monsters, it'd be an absolute slaughter weapon!"

Impressive as it was, though, the Item Illustrated Guide listed no extra properties for the Gravity Gun beyond sheer destructive force. To confirm how pure physical destruction held up against creatures with immortality, the test still had to be run.

Fūka Kiryūin tossed her long hair back and stepped forward, planting herself squarely inside a patch of simulated darkness.

She crooked a finger at Chris.

"Come on, little kouhai."

"Use that Gravity Gun of yours and see if you can kill me for good."

Chris caught her reasoning at once. He nodded, a flicker of approval in his eyes.

"That's a solid line of thinking." "A vampire's regeneration is powerful, sure, but we already confirmed that if something with Catwoman-level physical strength crushes the head outright, death follows immediately."

"Now, though, you've got the healing boost from the [Beast King Transformation] Imperial Arms, Senpai, and you've swallowed a fragment of the Darkness Devil's flesh on top of that."

"If those three stack into some alternate form of 'immortality' inside a purely dark environment, that really is a nice combination."

With that, Chris squeezed the trigger.

A brief lag.

"BOOOOM—!!!"

The air itself was ground apart with an ear-splitting roar.

Fūka Kiryūin didn't get out so much as a grunt. Her entire body was compressed in a single instant into a puddle of bloody pulp. "Fūka jam," if you wanted to be cute about it.

Blood painted the bottom of the crater red.

"Hssss…" A short distance off, Amikura Mako clapped both hands over her eyes, simulation or not.

And, exactly as they'd predicted beforehand—

A fragment of the Darkness Devil might only be a fragment, but the rule embedded in its nature hadn't changed at all.

In simple darkness, whoever consumed it became an almost conceptually immortal existence.

Unless you could destroy her body and burn the buff away with brilliant light in the same breath — or unless your own power had already climbed to the level where rules meant nothing to you, where you could boot the Darkness Devil to death like a stray dog by the roadside.

And obviously, while Chris had deliberately dialed the Gravity Gun's output a little higher, its underlying logic hadn't changed.

Pure physical damage. Hit it hard enough and the bricks fly.

Against an enemy with conceptual-tier regeneration, raw physical damage had a very hard time finishing the job.

And so…

Under everyone's stares, the gruesome smear of "Fūka jam" at the bottom of the pit began to squirm and knit itself back together.

In the span of a few short seconds, Fūka Kiryūin was standing again, without a scratch on her.

But when she turned and took in the chest-deep cliff of torn earth around her, she couldn't quite hide her blank stare.

"…That much physical destruction, and it still didn't kill me?"

She looked down at her own hands and murmured, "Back when Catwoman put down those classmates who'd turned into vampires, the force she used probably wasn't even a tenth of this."

Chris walked to the lip of the crater, crouched, and held a hand out toward her. "The Darkness Devil is a root-tier monster born from human fear. It's far stronger than Jogo."

"When we faced Jogo in the midterm Uninhabited Island exam, even with gear as strong as [Demon Possession] and the [Gorilla Suit] backing us, pure physical output couldn't kill it for good either. It's not hard to understand."

"But…" Chris's tone shifted. "If you ran into a weapon like the [Soul-Release Blade], something that cuts the soul directly, then even though its shop value isn't especially high… it'd probably bypass your physical regeneration entirely."

Fūka Kiryūin drew a long breath.

She tilted her head up at the hand Chris was offering and hesitated for a moment.

With her current physical stats, she could have cleared the crater in a single standing jump.

But the more she thought about it, the less reason she found to turn down his help.

So the girl reached out without any fuss, took his palm, and used the pull to hop lightly back onto level ground.

Meanwhile.

At the far end of the field, Ryuuen — still at the controls of the mech — had already launched a new round of stress testing with Miyabi Nagumo, Kiriyama Ikuha and the others.

Seeing it, Arisu Sakayanagi and Honami Ichinose joined in without the slightest hesitation.

Since the whole point was to find out exactly where the machine's limits lay, nobody held back. Everything they had, all at once.

The results were fairly encouraging.

After a thorough bombardment, the strengths and weaknesses of the pilot-type robot were more or less mapped out.

The big thing's palm cannon hit with terrifying force, firepower on par with Ichinose's magic output. The oversized sword mounted on it threw a blade wave that could split a small hill in two without effort.

Its defense earned marks too. After eating Arisu Sakayanagi's [Romantic Cannon], Ichinose's [Ruby Ray] and Kiriyama Ikuha's flamethrower head-on, the frame still showed no crippling damage or shutdown.

On the flip side, the thing was genuinely clumsy.

Trying to use it against an agile enemy was firing a cannon at mosquitoes — exhausting and thankless.

Worse, the cockpit sat in the head, which dragged its protection down by more than one grade.

In the final phase of the live drill, Arisu Sakayanagi coordinated with Ichinose for a single pinpoint combined strike.

One round was all it took to punch clean through the mech's head armor.

If Ryuuen weren't currently walking around in an alien cyborg body, and if Sianweistan's time deceleration hadn't let him slip aside by a hair's width, he'd be sitting back in the real world right now, waiting to respawn.

In short, an item with obvious strengths and obvious flaws.

Then again, it only cost a hundred points. If it patched up its mobility and that glaring head weakness, the price tag would've been north of two hundred.

Chris glanced at Ryuen, then turned to Suzune Horikita, who'd been watching in silence beside him.

"Horikita, you're not going to give it a try?"

"Huh?"

Suzune Horikita blinked, visibly caught off guard.

She looked down at herself. "How exactly would I try?"

"Does anything about me look like it could do real damage to that thing…?"

Chris fought back a laugh.

"Doesn't your [Niga Mask] summon the Phantom Legion?"

"I've been watching. Those black-clad ninja can come out of anywhere there's a shadow, and there's no way the inside of that mech doesn't have shadows."

Understanding broke across Suzune Horikita's face.

"You can use them like that?!"

"Now that I think about it… yesterday, when Godzilla went on its rampage, the Phantom soldiers dragged me into the shadows on their own. That's the only reason I got out of it."

Horikita cast her mind back to the sensation. "They really can travel through darkness, and there seems to be a Kingdom of Shadows inside there, separate from reality… I actually considered loading the surviving civilians straight into it."

"But…" The girl's brow creased slightly. "I could feel it clearly. Moving through that place makes your mood turn unbearably heavy. I was afraid of losing my mind, so I dropped the idea."

"Putting it that way, it really is an excellent item. Almost impossible to guard against."

Fūka Kiryūin rubbed her chin and gave her honest assessment. "Our time inside the exam grounds is limited anyway. As long as we keep it in moderation, we can take the mask off the moment we're back at school and cut the connection…"

Suzune Horikita nodded, but raised a lurking risk anyway.

"The Phantom Mask doesn't seem to be a normal item you can just buy freely, though."

"There are only nine of them in total, and they absolutely must never be gathered in one place. Several have already surfaced at the school. It's hard to say whether gathering enough identical masks would trigger this so-called Ultimate Darkness of theirs."

Chris raised an eyebrow slightly at that.

Suzune Horikita had put her finger right on the crux of it.

The reason nine Phantom Masks in one place spelled disaster was that the black miasma sealed inside each mask would gather and resonate until the masks cracked apart, releasing the sealed Demon General and unleashing "Ultimate Darkness" upon the world.

But if it were merely a batch of identical masks piled together…

That might actually be fine?

After all, the masks weren't indestructible. You could even split one down the middle and wear the two halves separately as independent half-face masks.

The core of the crisis lay in the sheer volume of black miasma breaking the seal.

Which made it purely a matter of quantity tipping over into a change in quality.

Chris thought it through, then answered in a reassuring tone.

"It's a real concern, but avoiding it isn't that difficult."

"Practically speaking, the Phantom soldiers are mostly good for rescuing Intruders or acting as our eyes. As far as pure survivability goes, it's hard to argue they beat the private Mirror World the [Blank Card Box] opens up."

"We just need to watch how many we exchange for. No sense refusing to eat because you're scared of choking."

Suzune Horikita pressed her lips together and let the subject drop.

By then, the second wave of mech testing on Ryuuen's end had wrapped up as well.

This time Ryuuen didn't pilot it himself. Instead, Miyabi Nagumo and Kiriyama Ikuha took turns trying their hand at the controls.

Like Ryuuen, Kiriyama Ikuha could use the cybernetic prosthetic tech in his body to bypass the firewall and link in directly.

But without a [Gorilla Suit] to serve as the direct connection, his movements and response speed while piloting were noticeably a step behind Nagumo's.

Though in Chris's eyes, this robot was better suited to being a stationary heavy-artillery emplacement anyway.

Meanwhile.

In the real world.

A little earlier, when Amikura Mako had gone rushing off to find Ryuuen, Ayanokoji Kiyotaka had happened to be standing not far from the two of them.

With his hearing, he'd caught every word of their conversation and knew exactly what they were after.

He simply had no interest in hurrying over to join the party.

He waited quietly until past four before he moved.

Passing through the crowd of visibly relieved upperclassmen, he cast one long look toward the Student Council Office.

Then he turned and walked away.

It wasn't that Ayanokōji begrudged lending out the items he held.

It was that, down to his bones, he didn't believe a handful of low-grade defensive items borrowed from other people could produce any qualitative change in this game.

In his view of the world, relying on protection handed to you by others was always an unstable thing.

If you couldn't grow strong on your own, then every borrowed power was ultimately the moon on the water, the flower in the mirror. The moment the shelter was gone, none of it would last.

And among the so-called advance testers and the official examinees, facing monsters that kept escalating, how many would actually survive to the end… that was still an unknown.

So Ayanokōji had no intention of burning energy on this kind of meaningless social alliance.

Having confirmed that the upper years' exam hadn't started early, all he needed to do was wait for Ryuuen's notice about the special training and return on schedule.

As for himself, he could use the gap to attend to what was genuinely his own business.

Naturally, what counted as "his own business" in Ayanokōji's mind had nothing to do with working for those politicians at the White House.

It could only mean one thing: making himself stronger.

Using the class-point spending privileges he'd secured from Kazuma Sakagami, the homeroom teacher of Ryuen's class, Ayanokoji Kiyotaka entered the Hyperbolic Time Chamber alone.

He began meditating on and training the two systems of Ripple and "Ki."

After injecting the [T-Virus] and the [Super-Soldier Serum] back to back, Ayanokoji Kiyotaka closed his eyes and felt the Ki inside him — once sluggish and congested — moving now with the rhythm of his breathing.

He raised his right hand slowly.

The Ki roaming through his body was forced down and compressed into the center of his palm.

Expression flat, Ayanokōji shoved his hand out backhanded.

"BOOM!"

The ki blast slammed into a simulated stone wall in the distance, blowing a deep crater into it and sending shards of rock flying.

Looking at the residual heat lingering in his palm, Ayanokōji showed no trace of delight. He lowered his head and addressed his own right hand instead.

"Zero."

"Give me an objective assessment. That Ki I just released… how far behind Chris am I?"

An eyeball split open on the back of his hand. Parasyte Zero was quiet for a moment, then spoke slowly.

"Ayanokōji, I don't enjoy discouraging you like this…"

"But strictly in terms of the tier of your existence, the gap between you and Chris is… considerable."

"Roughly speaking… he is a great river in full flood, and you are a single pipe that has just begun feeding into a creek."

Ayanokoji Kiyotaka's eyelid twitched faintly.

"That wide a gap?"

Parasyte Zero explained patiently.

"Before, my own tier was too low, and he never displayed anything openly, so I couldn't sense it."

"But over the nearly two months of real-world time you've spent training, I've been evolving my perception right alongside you. Measured against every other person here, there's no question — you are a rare genius among humans."

"And precisely because you're a genius, because the Ki in your body far outstrips ordinary people's, I can sense it that much more clearly… the bottomless vastness inside him."

Ayanokōji fell silent.

"The tier of existence… not a lead in technique when it comes to using Ki?"

"Then, Zero." Ayanokōji asked abruptly, "At my current rate, I estimate two months at most before I can learn to fly through the air under my own power."

"Where do you think Chris stands right now?"

The Parasyte took longer to think this time.

In the end, it gave an answer that bordered on despair.

"I don't know what state he started from when he first touched this kind of power."

"But from what I've observed lately… at his tier, he could probably pick up Bukujutsu — flight — the instant he bothered to try, and might even reverse-engineer the technique from scratch."

"That wide a gap… seriously…" Ayanokoji Kiyotaka murmured under his breath.

Sensing its host's mood, Parasyte Zero offered what comfort it could, a little helplessly.

"There's no need to dwell on it. You could only barely sense and learn Ki after using an alien serum to force your genetic lock open."

"So you should understand better than anyone how vast a chasm this difference in the tier of existence really is."

"For him to open that much distance on you right at the starting line isn't difficult at all."

Ayanokoji Kiyotaka gave a small nod and drew his right hand back.

Surprisingly, none of it stirred up any discouragement or envy in him.

After all, long before he'd ever encountered the Black Sphere, he'd already seen that there was something different about Chris.

It was only today that the comparison finally handed him a concrete reason for that sense of wrongness.

"So Chris's past, and whatever his real trump cards are…"

"…are almost certainly not something I'm qualified to chase down yet."

"Fine."

"You eat a meal one bite at a time. You walk a road one step at a time."

Ayanokoji Kiyotaka shut his eyes again, steadied his breathing, and sank back into the tedium of meditation training.

"One day, I'll figure all of it out."

— End of Chapter —

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