Gears of Blood Rust

The roar of the fire axe splitting the confinement room's iron door had yet to dissipate, and the alarm in the corridor had already turned into a shrill wail. Ayanokoji Kiyotaka—or rather, the new personality that had completely integrated the memories of Lin Yuan—slowly straightened his body.

The azure interface on his retina rippled like water, and the entire world was suddenly parsed into countless data streams: the heart rate of Karuizawa Kei's heaving chest was 127, the callus on Ryuen Kakeru's right thumb from years of clenching his fist was 0.3 millimeters thick, and he could even see the Brownian motion trajectories of dust in the ventilation ducts.

"What a nauseating perspective." He pressed against his throbbing temples; the flood of information brought by the Combat Module was nearly cracking his skull.

But when he looked out the window, his pupils suddenly constricted—dozens of drones were pouring out of a hidden compartment at the top of the clock tower, their bellies flashing with scarlet light.

"It's anesthetic!" Ryuen suddenly grabbed Karuizawa to use as a human shield, and three steel needles grazed her hair, embedding themselves into the wall. The girl screamed, trying to break free, but was gripped by the back of her neck by Ryuen: "Don't forget, your leverage is still in the hands of Class C."

Ayanokoji had no time to pay attention to this farce. His visual focus locked onto the silver-white machine in the center of the drone swarm; the forty-fold magnified image showed that it was not loaded with anesthetic, but with micro-incendiary bombs.

The Combat Module instantly deduced seven escape routes, finally settling on the third: reach the power distribution room via the men's restroom ventilation duct and cut off the drones' relay signal.

"Follow if you want to live." He kicked open the fire door, the shattered glass reflecting the stunned faces of the people behind him.

Ichinose Honami struggled to get up, but an electronic patch on her forehead burst into a cluster of sparks: "Don't mind me... the chip they implanted in my spine... ah!"

Her scream was swallowed by the sound of an explosion. The entire teaching building began to tilt, the floor collapsing like melting butter.

Ayanokoji grabbed a fire hose and swung across the fault line, the Combat Module automatically calibrating the angle of the swing. In the moment of weightlessness, he saw the writhing black shadows in the abyss below—those were the "Failed Experiments" mentioned in the files, humanoid creatures covered in tubes, tearing at falling desks and chairs.

The power distribution room was filled with a burnt smell, and when Ayanokoji tore open the cover of the electrical box, a sticky sensation touched his fingertips.

By the faint light of his watch, he saw those dark red liquids winding and crawling on the circuit board, like blood-lines with a life of their own.

"Cognitive Disruptor." Karuizawa's voice came from behind. She had broken free from Ryuen at some point, and blood-stained gauze was exposed through the torn cuff of her uniform. "I heard that excessive contact makes people hallucinate that their internal organs are being eaten by ants."

Ayanokoji did not turn back, his tweezers precisely snipping the third main line. When the buzzing of the drone swarm suddenly stalled, he spoke out of the blue: "Twenty minutes ago, you deliberately stepped on the corridor sensor to trigger the cleaning robot's mechanism early, right?"

Karuizawa's breathing hitched for half a beat.

"You and Ryuen were never just cooperating temporarily." He turned around, the Combat Module magnifying the tremor in the girl's pupils into high-definition slow motion. "The sports festival schedule was never in the old school building—what you were really looking for at the time was the signal transmitter buried in the piano."

The air congealed into a gelatinous state. Suddenly, Karuizawa tore open her collar, revealing a black serial number, E-129, branded beneath her collarbone.

This girl, who always played the victim, smiled like a poisonous datura flower: "Guess what happens when the Primal Personality awakens to 100%?"

She held up her phone, the screen displaying surveillance footage from the Chairman's office—the Fox-Masked Man was aiming his gun at the unconscious Ichinose Honami.

Sparks suddenly erupted from the power distribution box, and those blood-red threads, as if sensing the scent of blood, swarmed like snakes to coil around the wrists of Ayanokoji Kiyotaka.

Karuizawa's voice grew distorted: "The rules of the game have changed, Mr. Variable. Now, what you have to choose isn't victory or defeat, but..."

Her line was cut short by the sound of tearing metal. Ryuen Kakeru crashed through the window, wielding the High-Frequency Particle Blade that should have been locked in the archives' safe.

The blade flashed, severing the blood threads, yet more tentacles proliferated from the broken ends.

"Too much talk." He spat out a mouthful of blood and tossed a charred photograph to Ayanokoji.

On the fragment, a young Horikita Suzune stood before the observation window of the White Room, with rows of clones soaking in incubation tanks behind her.

When Ayanokoji finally breached the Chairman's office, the Fox-Masked Man was brewing black tea. The undissolved sugar cube at the bottom of the English bone china cup formed an absurd contrast with the electronic wreckage scattered across the floor.

"Three minutes and seventeen seconds later than expected," a mechanical voice, processed through a modulator, came from behind the mask. "But just in time to witness the birth of a new world."

He tapped the keyboard, and the entire floor-to-ceiling window instantly turned transparent. The campus was burning in the night, and a blood-red moon hung in the sky—no, it was a Ring Space Station a kilometer in diameter, its surface densely packed with honeycomb-like incubation tanks.

The Combat Module suddenly emitted a sharp alarm. Ayanokoji realized his body was undergoing particleization, beginning to shatter into a stream of blue data from his fingertips. Cognitive collapse? He knelt on one knee, the taste of rust surging in his throat.

"Quite the opposite." The Fox-Masked Man removed his mask, and the face revealed caused Ayanokoji's core code to nearly overload—it was himself, twenty years older, with a mechanical prosthetic eye identical to the one worn by Shiina Hiyori. "Welcome to the real world, Subject No. 479."

In the beam of light cast by the space station, countless clones of Ayanokoji Kiyotaka opened their crimson pupils. And the true nightmare had only just begun: a bright red prompt suddenly popped up on his retinal interface—

Personality fusion at 100%, format Lin Yuan memory module?