Marian came to a stop the moment she reached the shared location, freezing like a doll with its string cut.
It was an empty wasteland.
A dangerous place, where enemies could spot them at any moment.
“What? There’s nothing here.”
Anis gave Marian’s shoulder a small shake.
“It’s here.”
“Huh?”
“It’s here, it’s here, it’s here.”
“What?”
Anis took her hand off Marian’s shoulder and stepped back.
Marian turned around.
Her eyes were glowing red.
“Cor... corruption...”
Anis slowly raised her weapon.
But she couldn’t fire.
Only he could handle putting down a Nikke who had been corrupted.
And that hand was trembling slightly.
The calm expression he had worn just moments ago was now shadowed by a faint darkness.
“You knew?”
Bill nodded.
“Then why!!!”
Anis was about to shout when Rapi stopped her.
She stared at Rapi with wide eyes.
“No way? You knew too? Was that what the notebook was for earlier? Then why?”
Those eyes belonged to someone who had been betrayed.
Rapi felt a pang of pain, but this was the result of her own choice.
She had already prepared herself for this, and was just about to accept that feeling when—
Boom!!!
A violent gust and a deafening sound shattered the mood.
At the same time, both of them looked toward the source of the noise...
and saw the Commander flying past them and crashing away.
“Ah... that hurts...”
He had been struck by one of Black Smith’s tentacles and sent slicing through the air at terrifying speed.
He smashed through two already-collapsing buildings, and finally came to rest on top of a pile of crumbling rock.
It hurt.
How long had it been since he’d felt pain like this?
He glanced at the spot he’d been hit.
A single red line, hot and swollen.
Proof that this wasn’t a dream.
“No!!!”
In the distance, he could see Black Smith piercing Marian with a tentacle and stuffing her into a coffin.
And he could see Rapi running toward him while holding Anis by the hand.
“I need to get up...”
Marian couldn’t be saved anyway.
Then, just like before, he had to follow the exact same process as in the past.
He had to bring that Rapture down, and pierce Marian’s head.
That was the end of it, and the beginning of it.
“Are you all right!”
Rapi grabbed Bill’s hand and tried to pull him up.
She used the strength she’d calculated for an ordinary human body, but it wasn’t enough.
He didn’t budge.
“Huh?”
“I’ll do it. Huh?”
Anis was the same.
She had only used a little strength, worried that too much might crush his body.
“It’s fine. You can use more strength.”
He braced a hand against the ground and stood.
When he jumped down, small stones rattled and rolled away.
And then there was the vibration in the ground.
“What... is that?”
It wasn’t comparable to Black Smith’s landing from a moment ago, but for a human to make that kind of tremor was far too much.
He picked up a rock that looked to weigh about five kilograms.
Then he turned it over with his fingers until he found the best grip and threw it.
It wasn’t a simple toss.
With human strength, the best he could have done was shove it like a shot put.
And yet it flew in an instant, striking the Rapture’s core and shattering it to pieces.
Anis found herself asking what she had just seen.
The Commander had done something that only a Nikke should have been able to do—no, something even beyond that.
Was he human?
Or something pretending to be human?
She couldn’t easily reach a conclusion.
“I’m going ahead, so handle the rest yourselves.”
A thunderous crash rang out in front of them.
The massive Rapture rolled away like a ball, and the Commander in front of it shook his hand as if it hurt.
It was an incomprehensible sight.
It felt like she could stare at it forever.
But the small breeze brushing Anis’s cheek brought her senses back.
“Ha... so that’s what this was...”
Anis raised her drooping arm.
She still didn’t fully understand what was happening, but there was only one thing to do.
Kill the Rapture.
And survive.
“Eat this!!!”
The grenade launcher fired, sending a round racing toward Black Smith.
It noticed the grenade and tried to swing a tentacle, but—
“Not so fast!”
Bill snatched it out of the way.
Bang!!!
The grenade struck the red core, flickering like a pupil.
The Rapture’s center wavered and recoiled.
But closing in wasn’t easy.
Every one of those long, extended tentacles caused corruption, and even a brush against them brought instant paralysis.
It was a troublesome opponent for a Nikke.
Right.
For a Nikke.
There was a sound like something collapsing inward.
One of Black Smith’s legs lifted off the ground.
The huge body—no one knew exactly how many meters tall it was—was sent flying.
Even in that situation, Rapi kept analyzing.
A gun that could be blocked, and a force that could throw off the body’s very balance.
To the Rapture, the greater threat was obviously the Commander.
Black Smith easily deflected their attacks, but it couldn’t respond as well to his interference or close-quarters pressure.
From that, Rapi found the key to the fight.
—Is it weak against close-range combat?
Evolution.
It wasn’t just about becoming stronger, but about adapting to the environment.
If the situation was the opposite of what it expected...
If its opponent wasn’t a Nikke who fought with firearms, but him, who came in close to fight...
Then it might actually grow weaker.
It was something she’d never realized before, because she had always fought with a gun in hand.
“Anis, aim for the legs!”
“Got it!”
Anis fired another grenade.
Black Smith cut it down with a tentacle and avoided a direct hit, but in exchange Bill tore off one of its legs.
Just as expected.
It had almost no resistance to close-range attacks.
And if close-range and long-range attacks were mixed together, that thing became even more unstable.
It wasn’t an enemy two Nikkes could defeat alone.
Even with one irregular factor, the tide seemed to have turned.
But they also knew it wouldn’t end with that alone.
Black Smith rose again, its core shining even brighter.
So losing a single leg didn’t matter, then?
From where its hand should have been, a machine gun spun up with a harsh roar, announcing the attack.
“Damn it!”
Rapi fired at the machine gun’s joint.
But even that connection was thick and sturdy.
Unless she kept hitting the exact same spot over and over, it didn’t look like it would break.
And yet it was torn away with ease.
Black Smith kept focusing on them, which gave the Commander an easy opening to close in.
No matter how many tentacles it had, it didn’t matter.
He took one or two head-on with his body.
Even when one pierced his hand, he yanked it free and kicked it away with his leg.
Gagagagak.
Black Smith was collapsing bit by bit.
It had lost half of one side of its six short but sturdy legs, and could no longer move properly.
The machine gun and rifle were still there, but that was all.
The enemy couldn’t even turn to face the one closing in.
“Energy concentration confirmed!!!”
An energy sphere formed on Black Smith’s back.
Rapi tensed as a torrent of power far beyond anything a gun could produce gathered there, and she kept firing at the core without pause.
A house with no walls.
Every shot struck the core without loss.
And yet it remained maddeningly hard.
Bullets kept sparking and ricocheting off to the side.
“Where did the Commander go!”
“Black Smith is ignoring us!”
It didn’t seem possible to rely on his support either.
Maybe the Rapture had only realized it at the brink of death, but it was pouring all of its remaining weapons into suppressing the Commander.
Mine-type missiles rained down like hail.
The rifle sliced through the air, and the tentacles lashed about wildly.
Not a single one of them was aimed at them.
The light behind its back grew larger and larger, until it was already enough to swallow a person whole.
If that thing detonated, they would probably all die.
Should they run?
Impossible.
NIMPH prioritized his orders, and retreat was not allowed.
Then they would fight to the end.
They could see cracks spreading through the core.
If they had just a little more time, they could definitely destroy the power unit.
But then—
Tick. Tick.
A powerless sound rang out from Rapi’s gun.
At the same time—
“Rapi, I’m out of ammo!!!”
Anis’s shout rang out.
The surroundings went quiet.
As if it had already foreseen victory, Black Smith stopped its attack.
Bright light stabbed at their eyes.
The light flashed like a balloon bursting between two hands.
It was going to explode.
It was going to explode.
It was going to explode.
But at that moment, Bill ran.
He planted his foot on the ground, and for an instant, even on the air.
It was the momentum of a shell.
With a single leap, he covered more than ten meters.
And then he drove his fist into the cracked core.
Crack.
Just as the light was bleaching everything white, the sound of something breaking spread softly through the area.
The light faded.
The sound of machinery grinding to a halt rang out.
The sphere that had been blindingly illuminating the surroundings shrank smaller and smaller, then burst in a localized explosion in midair and vanished completely.
Rapi slowly opened her eyes.
At the center of the collapsing giant body...
his hand was completely through the core.
“That was tough...”
Bill let out a sigh as he fell backward.
Honestly, he had thought it was fifty-fifty.
He had expected it to go berserk at the end, but he hadn’t expected it to pour everything it had directly at him.
He couldn’t afford to rush in carelessly.
But it had been the final moment.
For that brief instant before the light exploded, there had been a pause in the attack.
Was it focusing on the sphere’s detonation?
Was it laughing because victory seemed certain?
That wasn’t a matter of success or failure.
Either way, it was a problem directly tied to the future—something that should never have been there.
—A Rapture making a judgment...
Tyrant-class Raptures shouldn’t have any self-awareness.
Their perception should remain unchanged unless altered by a higher existence.
And yet Black Smith had changed its targeting priority and fought accordingly.
“Ha... I don’t know, and I don’t care right now...”
That was something for his future self to figure out.
Now that the tedious fight was over, all he had to do was rest.
[...Com... Commander... can you hear me?]
Black Smith had fallen, and right after Rapi approached the sprawled-out Bill.
A familiar voice mixed with mechanical static reached them.
“Shifty?”
[Ah, you’re safe. The communication cut out in the middle, so I was worried something had happened...]
“We’re all safe. The Commander too...”
He was in a rather pitiful state.
Even the uniform that had already been half-burned and torn when she first saw him now looked too miserable to stare at for long.
[A lot must have happened... If I’m not mistaken, that downed Rapture is Black Smith, right?]
“Yeah.”
Bill propped himself up and answered.
Shifty covered her eyes a little at the sight, but he didn’t mind.
[I’m glad you’re safe. But how did you take down Black Smith? It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s nearly impossible with just two Nikkes...]
Shifty’s reaction was only natural.
A Tyrant-class Rapture was just below a Heretic, the peak of ordinary Raptures.
To think they’d taken one down with only two Nikkes—if she had been there herself, she wouldn’t have believed it either.
But he had already expected that.
He was nothing more than a powerless existence.
And yet, in this place, wasn’t there a Nikke more reliable than anyone else?
Bill took a deep breath, then said as if it were obvious:
“Rapi took it down.”
This will be the excuse for everything. Rapi did it.