Chapter 78

My vision flickered.

It must have been because part of my overheated brain had melted.

I had used a module that wasn’t even mine in the first place, with an unfinished body. Or maybe I still had too many shortcomings.

How much time had passed?

It must have been about five seconds, at least by my sense of it.

When I lifted my head, the scenery hadn’t changed much. I had swung the [Techblade] with all my strength, prepared for my body to be completely wrecked, but the effect seemed minimal.

‘That can’t be right.’

Bewilderment.

Aaron was still standing before me.

The nearby buildings and junk hadn’t changed either, and Benedict’s soldiers were still flying in the sky, watching from above.

“You’re foolish.”

Aaron muttered.

I frowned unconsciously.

I had failed.

In my impatience, I hadn’t been able to fully draw out the power of the module—that’s what I thought.

But that only lasted a moment.

I sensed something off.

‘It’s quiet.’

Unnaturally quiet.

As if the sound had been cut out entirely, the noise that had filled the battlefield just moments ago had completely vanished.

And then, one by one, anomalies occurred.

Screeeeeeeech–!

A utility pole to Aaron’s back left began to make a strange noise. Sparks burst from its shaft, and then it slowly toppled over.

The debris to his right was the same.

It was a chunk of concrete from when a building collapsed during the last Titan attack. It made a grinding sound like a millstone, and then the upper part slid to the ground.

The anomalies continued.

Soldiers who had been using the power of Lv.4 Powered Armor to move through the air suddenly all burst into small explosions and plummeted to the ground.

The frame of an abandoned car was suddenly sliced in half and collapsed. A crane, in the middle of restoration work, shattered. Glass windows in a building far from the battlefield inexplicably shattered with a crash.

Sssrrrk. Sssrrrk.

Like ripples spreading out.

Like a stone dropped into the middle of a still lake, things began to be sliced and destroyed, radiating outward from where I stood.

The once-silent space began to grow noisy.

Everything around me began making strange noises as if screaming—grinding sounds, breaking sounds, snapping sounds.

As if an orchestra were tuning their instruments before the performance, the objects began to wail.

And at last—

Aaron muttered.

“Do you still not understand, even seeing it?”

At his murmur—

As if that were the signal—

Everything split in half.

And came crashing down.

KRRRRAAAAAAAAAASH–!

Everything in my direct line of sight split, shattered, broke, collapsed, spilled, fell, was crushed, destroyed, exploded, and divided.

And Aaron was no exception.

“Khuhk.”

The first change that came over him was that he coughed up blood. A line of crimson ran down from his lips.

Thud.

One of his arms fell to the ground.

The way it was tossed limply onto the ground was so natural that I almost mistook it for something else.

As if that ‘arm’ had only been attached by force, and it had simply fallen off as it should have.

‘……That’s impossible.’

I silently watched Aaron.

Before long, the shirt he wore began to turn crimson. The liquid spread faster and faster until, in a matter of seconds, it was gushing out.

Even so, Aaron’s expression didn’t change in the slightest.

Those raptor-like eyes swept over me coldly, like a predator eyeing its prey. And in a voice slightly lower than usual, he asked,

“……Can you still keep going?”

A strange smile spread across his lips.

Crazy bastard.

That was my first thought, but I soon realized his goal wasn’t simply to revel in the thrill of battle.

Of course, that was probably the biggest part.

Right now, he was ‘Aaron Stingray’ and ‘me,’ and I was ‘me’ and also ‘Aaron Stingray.’

“I’ll do as much as I can.”

My body, melted and hardened again, was in terrible condition, but it was going to vanish soon anyway. Shouldn’t I at least follow the plan of the one who made me?

Thinking that, it seemed neither ‘I’ nor that guy was in his right mind.

Perhaps because long ago—

I had once resigned myself.

I had once given up on myself.

Death didn’t scare me at all.

Of course, the memories inside me now were only copies, but that’s exactly why I could understand.

‘I’ had already been broken long before becoming ‘Aaron Stingray,’ and the me created from the memories of that broken man was just as defective as a human being.

“Is this also for the plan ahead?”

“It’d be a waste to let it go in vain, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah. There’s still work to do.”

“……”

I quietly gripped my sword.

The [Techblade] had already returned to its usual form. With my body in bad condition from the overload, there would be limits to the output I could produce.

Its cutting power would be somewhat reduced.

Aaron was the same.

With one arm gone, it would be hard for him to perfectly control the [Cloud Spider]’s threads.

In the end, both of us had weakened.

It was, in its own way, a fair condition for us both.

“……”

I drew in a short breath.

And charged forward, swinging my sword.

* * *

The final was a battle between monsters.

That was the impression of those who witnessed the scene. As if everything before had only been a preview, the duel between the two Aarons raged violently.

They unleashed terrifying power, unbelievable for people so gravely injured. The impact of their battle kept changing the terrain around them.

[Da—damn it! Get out of there!]

[You’ll die if you get caught in it!]

In the end, the surrounding soldiers had to retreat far to escape the fallout from that disaster-like fight.

Of course, at first they too had tried to carry out their mission somehow. But their issued ammunition had all run out, and even the weapons produced through their internal modules were useless in the face of that fight.

A few brave soldiers activated close-combat modules and tried to intervene in the fight between the two monsters, but the results were predictably disastrous.

They realized that every time, Aaron Stingray would devour them and spit out their modules, and so they gave up.

Neither Iri nor Silence dared to recklessly step into their fight either.

At first, they had tried to help the younger Aaron somehow, but they were already tattered from the earlier battles. They hadn’t even clashed with the older Aaron for long before their equipment was destroyed and they suffered serious injuries in multiple places.

Like the Stingray soldiers, they supported each other, trying to escape the disaster the two monsters were causing.

“Senior. I think the joint part just broke. My shoulder’s fine, but it won’t move.”

“[Same here. But if you can walk, don’t take it off. If you happen to get hit by one of those blind attacks, without that armor you’ll be 100% dead.]”

Soon, they could only watch the two Aarons’ fight from a considerable distance away.

Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!

The fierce noise of battle rang out without pause. Watching for a while, Silence suddenly let out a hollow laugh.

“[Ha… hahaha…!]”

“W-why are you laughing all of a sudden?”

“[Because it’s stupid.]”

“What?”

“[I just feel so stupid. You wouldn’t know what I’ve been thinking until now.]”

With that, Silence swallowed the bitterness swirling on his tongue and closed his mouth. When Iri asked what he meant, he had no intention of answering.

How could he say it?

That he had planned to betray them.

Aaron Stingray, the replica, Iri, Miyu—everyone.

He had planned to kill everyone connected to Aaron Stingray once the battle ended, and then kill himself as well.

It was only natural.

He had lived for revenge alone.

The woman he loved—yet never once told he loved—had met such a horrific death.

Worse, her death had been turned into a chip, becoming someone’s entertainment, still being copied, spread, and desecrated to this day.

He could not accept it, and thought he had to find the culprit no matter what.

In search of evidence, he had meddled with a junk chip, and in the end his brain had nearly melted; now he couldn’t even speak properly without this damned mask.

If the culprit behind all that suddenly appeared and said, “Actually, I was the culprit. Sorry. But it’s not really my fault. Can you forgive me?”—could he forgive them?

That’s why he had planned to kill them.

Pretending to cooperate for a time, waiting for an opening to kill them all.

But he had failed.

The first reason for that failure was his own weakness. He had been confident in his skills, but they weren’t enough to even graze the monster that was Aaron Stingray.

The second reason was—

‘How could I, after seeing that?’

Aaron Stingray was sincerely trying to kill himself.

To erase himself from the world for all the countless sins he had committed, he had prepared this entire situation.

He had made the guns of the Stingray soldiers he led turn toward him, made the students he sponsored betray him, and even made his own replica point its blade at him.

‘He truly repents for his sins.’

He knew because he’d experienced something similar.

Hadn’t he himself been controlled by a suspicious junk chip made by a cult, and tried to kill Iri?

And what happened afterward?

He had felt a little sorry, but more than that, he had excused himself, saying, “It couldn’t be helped.”

He had thought, “It’s not my fault, so shouldn’t the blame be placed elsewhere?”

‘But that man is different.’

He had the ability—

Enough wealth, power, and force to erase the judgment against himself and walk away.

Yet he did not choose that path.

To reveal his sins and climb the execution platform, he was still desperately fighting even now.

‘So I have no choice but to acknowledge it.’

That he could not kill that man.

How cruel would it be to rob a man who hated his own sins that much of his chance for atonement?

The battle gradually reached its end.

Aaron’s face grew pale as his arm and internal organs were injured. It was due to massive blood loss. Of course, my own condition wasn’t good either, with my body partially melted in several places.

The long exchange of blows—

Thud.

At some point, Aaron could no longer endure it and dropped to one knee, and that decided the match. I approached him with my sword aimed.

Then I placed my blade to his neck and asked,

“……This should be enough, right?”

“Yes.”

Aaron answered.

“You’ve finally realized, I see.”

“……Yeah.”

I nodded.

“With this, you can move on to the next stage. Silence will forgive you, you’ll have grounds to bring down Benedict, and at the same time, you can firmly recruit Maria as an ally.”

“Not me.”

The original replied to my words.

“It won’t be me or you. It’ll be someone else.”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

From now on, the one to use Aaron Stingray’s body would be another self, born by replicating my mind—the copy of the original.

To put it in computer terms—

There was an original self-file A.

A was infected by a virus.

The computer’s owner, preparing for the day A became unusable, backed up file A(1) to another computer.

Once everything was over, the virus-infected A file would be deleted, and file A(2), created by copying from A(1), would take over the computer.

The first A, A(1), and A(2) were all A, but in detail, they were all different files.

“This will be fine, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you don’t know, then I don’t know either.”

“We’ll just have to leave it to the next one.”

“I guess so.”

But it didn’t matter to us.

The next one to take the stage would still be ‘me,’ just like the ‘me’ here now.

If I told Ciel, she’d probably argue immediately, but I had my own belief.

I reached out to the head of the fallen original. From my wrist, a cable extended, connecting to his Socket HUB, and I began the transfer.

With this, the virus called Aaron Stingray would disappear, and only my pure self would control this body.

……Well, to be honest, I wasn’t so sure either.

Original, replica, whatever.

The important fact was—

The most dangerous enemy had fallen. Who the new me would be, only the me of that time would know.

[Notice]

Part 1, Act 4 has ended.

*Reward granted.

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