A few minutes earlier.
Inside Tokyo Tower's elevator.
When Jiang Xia fell from above and crashed headfirst into her, Curacao's vision was filled with nothing but his rapidly enlarging face—countless horrifying CGs from games flashed through her mind in an instant, overlapping one another. The terrifying images broke through the boundary between dimensions and became reality, slamming straight into her.
Countless moves flashed through her mind, and she even instinctively wanted to press a game controller. But neither her physical defenses nor the defenses in her mind took effect—Uzo, that bastard, had definitely not merely "lost his footing." All her maneuvers proved useless. In the end, he crashed squarely into her, and she tumbled back down onto the bottom of the elevator car with a thud.
Amid the gasps of the onlookers, the brief overlap between the elevator car and the floor vanished. The elevator dropped, then, pulled by the emergency brake, stopped in a sealed section with no opening.
Sat down on the ground, Curacao stared blankly at the soft light overhead for a moment. Suddenly, she desperately wanted to travel back to the day before and slap the version of herself who had decided to seek out Kisaki Eri.
—Too naive. Far too naive.
She had actually thought that following an ordinary underling who rarely got involved in cases would let her escape disaster. And the result of thinking that way was... in all of Tokyo, with so many safe places to choose from, she had carefully selected this very elevator and delivered herself straight into a deadly trap!
Why had things turned out like this?
Curacao looked utterly lost, with a trace of dejection mixed into her confusion. *Come to think of it, it had always been like this. I'd almost never guessed Uzo's killers or murder