The Counselee's Worries
If he had blocked or dodged that first strike, things might have been different. But it was far too late now to pivot into a defensive fight.
With the suit's outer armor already breached, what he needed was an attack that would put that mutant down fast.
The Level 1 mutant striking from underwater was impossibly quick — so fast it barely registered to the eye — while the suit only sank deeper by the second.
The plasma sword and the shotgun were both useless once submerged. The only thing left to trust was the Optical Phase Disintegration Beam he had chosen over the Ionic Plasma Shield.
He would be fine. The real question was whether Sera, sealed inside, could hold out.
— KWAANG!!
The mutant came surging through a spray of water, and the frame rocked hard once again. Water flooding the cockpit rose all the way to their heads, cutting off any chance of feeding air through the oxygen tube.
Fortunately, system messages still displayed without issue.
When he asked how long she could hold her breath, Sera held up two fingers.
Not two minutes… twenty.
Far beyond any ordinary human lung capacity. But if the fighting got rougher, that window would shrink.
A searing heat boiled up through both palms, and light bloomed through the vast underground aqueduct choked with rainwater. Between the black asphalt fragments swirling in the current, he caught sight of the mutant charging straight at them — tentacles evolved into fins, a maw gaping wide like an anglerfish's. It was massive enough to fill the entire round sewer pipe.
Its grotesque form was bad enough on its own. Worse, the closer it drew, the more he could feel the water's current shifting under its control.
Is that a superpower too?
"Mmnh— mmph."
Above, water kept pouring in without end. Predicting the creature's movements as it freely bent the violent current, and landing a beam on it, was no easy task. Simply thrusting an arm forward made the aiming reticle shake as if he were holding an umbrella in a typhoon.
Left with no choice, he decided to grab the thing himself and dropped every weapon in his hands.
The undulating motion in the dark vanished for an instant — then the creature dropped from the pipe directly overhead. As they both plunged toward a deeper stretch of floor, he seized its body with one hand and fired the Phase Disintegration Beam.
— PWOOOOOM!!
Ten percent of his power drained in a single surge. The roar, the vibration, and a brilliance fierce enough to make the visual sensors flicker all hit at once. Filthy water, superheated by thermal expansion, exploded outward, warping the entire sewer pipe and boiling furiously. The vast column of light punched clean through to the surface levels, incinerating everything in its path, and reached all the way to the broken sky of Ebon Square.
A small pocket of air formed just long enough for Sera to draw a breath. He pointed toward the floor beneath them.
I missed it. The surface was too slick — I couldn't get a proper grip.
Even after the light had torn up through the ground, it amounted to little more than one extra manhole. The water rushed back in almost at once.
If they were going to escape, now was the moment. But if they were going to finish the creature, now was the moment for that too.
Do we keep fighting? If we run now, there's a real chance we shake it completely.
Even the fiercest predator feared fire and heat — that much was common sense. The creature had tucked tail and fled for the moment, but there was no telling when it might strike again.
He left the decision to Sera.
Unlike him, who had only reasons to survive, she had reasons to fight.
"We finish it here. There's a chance it'll attack again… and more than that, this is already the port side of the ship."
If soldiers ran into that mutant, the casualties would be enormous. So they had to deal with it now.
A reason so thoroughly, unmistakably her.
She closed her eyes.
Calmly, she circulated the air she had drawn deep into her lungs. She focused every sense on the grit of soil striking her face, the metallic tang of blood seeping from her wounds, the lingering warmth still held in her hands.
One minute. Two… and before she knew it, five.
Every vessel in her body screamed for oxygen, yet her expression remained serene.
Sera thought back to the day her superpower first awakened.
A peaceful afternoon, footsteps busy all around. She had walked without stopping past the military barracks, straight to the energy silo where the research wings clustered, and thrown open the door.
"Please change it, Dr. Eustain. An ability like this is barely useful."
"Sera Robini… a cadet, is it? Do you think a superpower is some cheap cut of meat you pick up at the butcher's? Change it? Change it how, exactly?"
The disappointment of realizing you'd been swindled into buying a slab of raw meat riddled with fat. In truth, her ability really was useless for almost anything.
"Enhanced physical recovery doesn't help directly in combat. I'll obviously fail the Crown Guard entrance exam, and now my comrades pinch my cheeks even more often."
"I've no idea what that last part is about. If you're unhappy with the ability, raise your level. Raise the level. It won't be easy, mind you."
"Are you telling me to self-harm? Will that raise my level?"
"You're so young, and yet you look like you'd actually do it. Terrifying."
The first real frustration she had ever felt, at only fifteen years old.
At the time, the doctor — a temporary researcher assigned to counsel the soldiers — had offered what he called advice, though it was a strange sort of counsel.
"They may tease you now, but it might turn out useful in unexpected ways."
"Useful where, exactly?"
"The wedding night, perhaps? Men would go absolutely wild for it. Ah — unless you've already been living a rather free lifestyle, in which case it would be more of a demerit…"
"I will report you for violating military sexual conduct regulations. The Empire applies the same standard even to harassment between members of the same sex."
Her protest was waved off with a breezy, "I'm not military personnel, so that doesn't apply to me."
But not everything he said had been worthless.
"Hmm… for instance, there may come a moment when survival itself is under threat."
"When would something like that ever happen?"
"We've barely made it halfway through the voyage. It could still happen, couldn't it? And a sturdy body is a tremendous advantage — not merely in terms of physical recovery."
The doctor wiped away his meaningful smile, handed her a sedative and a cup of water, and spoke with unexpected gravity.
"The comrades who fight beside you will trust you all the more."
"…"
"Even the bravest soldiers can't endure watching the people around them die. So you'll keep being loved, just as you always have. What matters is how much you trust them in return."
In the end, the doctor's advice — which had only told her what she wanted to hear — proved exactly right.
"Don't worry about the Crown Guard. Teslot might be another story, but their commander isn't the foolish type."
A few days later, her acceptance notice arrived by personal post. And now, at last, her superpower was proving more useful than it ever had.
Somewhere past the fifteen-minute mark in the dark water, Sera opened her eyes.
An abnormal current registered against her senses. Snapping free of her thoughts, she expelled the last of her air in a stream of bubbles and opened her eyes fully.
The mutant, drawn by the scent of blood, came charging at full speed. The light and vibration that had terrified it moments before were gone. The sediment had settled, and all that remained before it was a single human, pale skin bare.
Its maw, stretched to the limit like a membrane of flesh, bristled with countless spines. Those spines punched into her forearm again and again, and Sera was driven all the way to the far end of the sewer pipe, bent like a carpenter's square —
— CHIIIIISSS!
Blinding white light erupted from beneath her feet. Asphalt fragments and water blasted outward in every direction.
When no pilot was aboard, the only thing impossible for JIN was direct locomotion. Generating oxygen, producing liquid nutrition, detecting life signs — all of that he could still do. Which meant firing a thermal beam from his hand should also be possible, so long as someone set the direction.
— PWOOOOOM!!
A second explosion tore through the mutant's abdomen, the beam of light spearing skyward. Unlike before, chunks of flesh went flying in every direction, and Sera herself was hurled up onto the surface.
"Cough — khk! Haa, kuh… JIN! I'm coming right away — wait for me!"
The water level had already dropped to her ankles. She gasped for air and immediately searched for JIN. Rainwater was still sluicing down into the sewers. The current wasn't fast, but if the suit had been carried off by the recoil of that last attack, they would be in serious trouble.
She couldn't see properly into the pitch-black passage, and there was no air on the surface either. On top of that, Sera — who had been holding her breath for twenty minutes, or longer still — was already at her limit.
Clinging to her fading consciousness, she flailed an arm toward empty air — and something in the water seized her and yanked hard.
"Mmph!!"
Was there another mutant?
She thrashed with the last of her strength — then felt a familiar pressure against her hips. The gravel underneath hurt a little, but there was no mistaking it: the powered suit's cockpit.
— Thud. Thud!
JIN, who had pulled her in with a mechanical arm, began to move. Debris that had been covering the frame spilled away as he planted a foot toward the surface.
The moment they broke the waterline, the air she had so desperately wanted flooded through the oxygen tube into her nose and mouth.
They had done it again — something that would have been impossible if either of them had stopped trusting the other to the very end. Emotion surged up hard in her chest.
"Cough — pahh, haaa…!"
She wanted nothing more than to collapse and rest, but urgent work remained. Sera pulled out the duct tape and clumsily sealed the hole torn through the suit's chest. Pain bloomed belatedly through her stomach, but JIN's wounds came first. Her own arms, her own abdomen — those would heal on their own. She could just wrap them thick with silver tape and be done with it.
"I'm sorry, JIN. This is because I was careless. If I'd kept my head clearer, you wouldn't have been hurt this badly…"
The apology, offered through brimming tears, received no answer.
By now, Sera found his silence more unsettling than anything else.
"JIN, is something wrong? Don't tell me the power—!"
She worried his power had been fully drained like last time, but oxygen was still flowing — if anything, more of it, to compensate for what leaked through the hole she hadn't fully sealed.
"Are you asleep? Was that really the time for a rest cycle?"
But that wasn't it either. His movement was normal, and more importantly, the mechanical arms never reacted at all when JIN was sleeping.
"Why? Why won't you answer me…? Don't tell me—?"
Sera's eyes snapped upward to the life-sign detector glowing at the top of her field of view.
If it wasn't a power failure, and it wasn't sleep mode — then there was only one reason JIN had ever gone silent.
Multiple life signs, consistent with a human stride, were approaching from ahead.