"Trigger"

"—Less than twenty minutes remained until the bombers' predicted detonation time! The child and police officer trapped with the bomb still had not been rescued!"

The reporter standing before the camera spoke with vivid emotion, her expression anxious and urgent, as though her own family and friends were trapped inside the tower.

Sweating profusely, Motohashi Yoji raised his head and glared viciously at the red tower behind the woman on the screen.

He tossed the earpiece, which kept emitting piercing static, aside. With more pressing matters before him, he could not afford any further distraction from the noise.

Those twenty minutes were an automatic countdown he had set long ago. Blowing up the bomb at noon today had been part of the plan from the moment he installed it.

Yet now, that same time limit had become a death sentence for him.

After several hours of effort, he had finally dismantled most of the circuits that could trigger the bomb. He was about to reach the bomb itself.

As long as the bomb had a structure identical or similar to his design, dismantling it would only be a matter of time.

But now, sitting in the small patch of cleared floor he had painstakingly opened up, Motohashi Yoji practically felt as if he were the one sitting high above, surrounded by tangled cables.

Had they, like him, set some final password on the bomb?

Or perhaps they had used something even more underhanded—taken the design he had refined over many years, but altered a few small details so he would mistakenly cut a circuit that should not be cut...

Sitting before the bomb, Motohashi Yoji finally experienced the torment he had inflicted on his victims. And because he was the creator of this design, the chief culprit behind this kind