[You did not immediately answer Yuki Tsukumo's weighty questions.]
[In that suffocating moment, you merely reached silently into your pocket and took out a slightly crumpled pack of cigarettes.]
[With the crisp click of the lighter's metal wheel, a bluish-yellow flame danced in the autumn breeze and lit the tobacco.]
[You took a deep drag, letting the harsh, bitter smoke rush down your windpipe, forcibly suppressing the emotions churning inside your chest.]
[Blue-white smoke slowly dispersed between you, and your half-obscured eyes gradually regained the cold rationality of a precision machine.]
[You began rapidly and objectively dissecting and analyzing the horrifying situation before you.]
[Judging solely through a professional technical analysis of those few crude, secretly taken battlefield photographs, if you measured the monster the local militants fearfully called "Steel Brain" against the extremely high standards you had set for a "fully independent cursed corpse," its construction was clearly crude in the extreme, enough to warrant the words "primitive" and "ugly."]
[Its patched-together metal casing and utterly unaesthetic wiring resembled a malformed creation an outsider who had not even grasped the fundamentals of Jujutsu had cobbled together in a scrapyard through sheer imagination.]
[Yet this scrap metal, so primitive that it offended your eyes, not only operated smoothly but had already been openly deployed in the real meat grinder of war for combat use-or rather, for brutal field data testing.]
[In a sense, this minimalism, which discarded all safety and humanitarian concerns to pursue killing efficiency alone, was enough to prove its terrifying battlefield potential.]
[Your fingers tightened slightly around the cigarette.]
[You should have thought of this possibility long ago. It was nothing less than the inevitable outcome of human nature!]
[Those foreign military leaders, financial magnates, and crazed research institutions had so clearly displayed their greed and interest