“Did something happen, Avalon?”
Micha must have assumed there were no problems remaining. She had imbibed too much alcohol and was quite red in the face as she tilted her head.
“Humans have this pesky habit of causing discord. And the Mutsuki boy is human. He is no exception.” The young man smiled bitterly. “It seems the Fujita Mutsuki boy is my final obstacle.”
Adolescent Adam 9: Chapter 3 – What Miss A Left Behind
“Ange-san!”
Machina had detected someone making a phone call.
No one was going to answer that call, but they managed to trace who had made the call quickly enough.
It came from the Fujita home – Mutsuki’s family home.
Once they arrived, Mutsuki’s younger sister, Fujita Chiaki, rushed out. She had been hesitantly watching things outside the house and tears filled her eyes when she saw someone she knew.
“Are you okay?”
Ange just about asked “you’re still alive?” instead but caught herself.
“Um, something isn’t right. The TV is weird and I don’t hear anyone at all talking outside.”
The girl was panicking, but she had not fully grasped the situation yet. She may have been starting to realize that people had vanished from the city. Ange patted her on the back to help calm her.
Once she checked inside, she found the Fujita family was confused, but all five of them were there: father, mother, older sister, younger sister, and littlest sister.
They had apparently eaten dinner together and started watching TV as a family when the TV suddenly started acting oddly. A few shows did not start when they were scheduled to begin. The channels showing recorded shows continued as normal, but the live news programs all showed empty studios. The older sister had checked some websites that were updated in real time, but they had suddenly stopped updating as well.
They had initially assumed there was some kind of trouble, but things only grew more and more disconcerting and no one answered when they calling the TV stations. The internet was functioning on the software side of things, but no one was accessing any of the sites.
It had felt a lot like their family had been cut off from the world, so they were scared and trying to find a way to escape.
Explaining the situation to the Fujita family would only scare them, so Lucia snapped his fingers to put the five of them in a deep sleep. The trio carried them to their respective rooms and placed them in their beds. They could assume this whole situation was only a dream.
And after placing a stuffed animal in the arms of Mutsumi, the third sister…
“What does this mean?” asked Ange.
“There is something in common between all of the people unaffected by this situation,” said Machina.
“Kind of makes me happy,” said Lucia.
The three of them walked outside.
With the Fujita family asleep, Machina could not detect anyone else in the world connecting to the communications network. They spotted an airplane that had landed safely, so apparently the pilots were avoiding an accident and then falling under its effects.
But there were exceptions who were not affected by it: Fujita Mutsuki’s family, Ange, Machina, and Lucia.
In other words…
“It looks like the people who Mutsuki-kun loved are unaffected.”
“…”
“Th-that feels too optimistic to me, but I can’t deny the possibility.”
Ange and Machina blushed and tried to dodge the issue, but that did best describe the current situation.
It was unlikely Mutsuki had done this consciously. Leaving his family alone in an otherwise empty world would be dooming them to a living hell, so something subconscious inside him must have created these exceptions like some kind of bug in the system.
But what did it mean for this bug to have occurred?
“…”
“What do we do?”
They exchanged a glance.
They knew what they had to do. First, they had to save transformed Fujita Mutsuki, break free of this situation, and return humanity to normal.
Thanks to that bug, they were the only ones who could do that…no, they were the only ones who would want to do it.
But wanting to do it did not tell them exactly what they had to do.
How could they save Mutsuki now that he had fused with Lilith? Would they have fight against Micha, Schwarze, and Ren who had sided with that fusion? And even if it all worked flawlessly, was there any way to restore the humans who had melted away?
“Let’s head to FeTUS HQ.”
The first to speak up was Machina.
“Is there something there?”
“I do not know, but Miss A told us to return to the sanctuary. There may be something there.”
“That’s a pretty flimsy hope,” sighed Lucia.
They had too little in the way of guidance, so Ange was unsure if it was even worth going with Machina.
Drip.
“…?”
But then she felt some wetness on her cheek.
It was water…seawater.
Thinking it was rain, she looked up.
“Huh?”
She saw an enormous structure floating in the night sky, as if placing a lid over the city.
It was so big that Ange and Lucia could not tell what it was. Machina was more familiar with artificial objects, so she finally realized it was a ship. But she could only tell it was the bottom of a super-massive cruise ship.
However, all three of them could tell where that ship was headed.
It was moving toward the mountain that overlooked the city.
Which meant it was headed toward Megutono Academy that stood at the peak.
“Hop on!”
With a powerful sound of scraping metal, three cars parked at nearby houses changed form.
The engines alone were extracted and they took grasshopper-like shapes. The driver’s seats moved up to the heads with four tires surrounding each one.
Machina hopped onto the seat for one and Ange and Lucia followed suit after a moment of hesitation.
Then the total of 12 tires began rotating at high speed.
The grasshopper engines surrounded by the tires were ejected like coil shooters. They launched straight toward the mountain. Gravity pulled them down partway through, but the grasshopper portion detonated the gasoline in the instant of landing to instantly reaccelerate them.
They arrived at Megutono Academy on the peak faster than the big but slow-moving ship.
The three of them landed below the familiar clocktower.
At the same time, they saw two people jump down on top of the clock tower.
“Miss E, Jiyuuni Ange, and Satowa. We are here to meet you.”
“Fujita loves you too and wants you by his side. So come with us.”
It was Ren and Schwarze. That confirmed who was on that ship.
“Get in.”
There was no time to chat. Machina made a split-second decision and opened the tower door.
As soon as the three of them rushed in, the floor within was split in two. The inside of the tower was designed to act as an elevator to the lower level, so slicing the floor naturally created a pit straight down.
While the three fell, they could see Schwarze and Ren pursuing them.
“I was hit by a barrage of defenses last time I was here!”
“And I will use those to delay them. …If I can.”
FeTUS HQ’s alarms blared at the presence of three intruders. Shutters covered up the pit and an electric current rushed in to attack.
Machina reached out a hand and the Witch’s command had the shutters pause just long enough for the three of them to pass through and then shut tight. The anti-angel electric current was reprogrammed to wait until those three had passed and then be emitted upwards.
“It’s no use, Miss E!”
The closed shutters were carved through in mere seconds and the two new intruders passed through. The waves of electric current were shredded with claws and a sword.
FeTUS Witches Misses B and C did not waste the time to unlock the path ahead, so they destroyed the defenses instead.
Even while forcibly breaking their way through, they moved faster than the three who were simply falling.