Editing BlazBlue:Spiral Shift - Hyokujin no Eiyu (section)

===Part 2===

Upon returning to the camp, Grimwood gathered Karenjina and the three soldiers.

The location was on the outskirts of the encampment.

The first aid for the injured was finally completed, but the real medical care has yet to come. There might have been injured people or stragglers from other units still rolling in. In the midst of the confusion of information leaks, each of them had to do what they could now. Under such circumstances, no one cared if a few soldiers gathered in a corner and talked in private.

Briefly, he explained to Karenjina and the others the story of their trip out to the wilderness just a short while ago.

When she was told they were leaving right now, Karenjina hung her eyes and grabbed Jin by the chest.

"Are you insane!? Grimwood has just been treated for his injuries and just look at all this chaos here! Are we supposed to just walk out of here!?"

Karenjina looked back at the base and spread her arms, asking Jin to look at the situation.

From a distance, the state of the base could be objectively viewed. 

They looked like they were able absent, not wishing to be here and just confused. No one even looked back when Karenjina shouted. Everyone had their hands full with themselves and their surroundings. Jin reaffirmed the correctness of his decision and pulled away from Karenjina’s hand.

“Because of this distortion in order, we have to.”

"What?"

Karenjina’s indignation was against the act of abandoning her friends even if they were fighting within the same framework of the Librarium.

She took the initiative in the tent to give first aid to the injured, as she had some experience in this area. There must have been many badly injured people that she could not help but to feel sorry for.

"But now is not the time to let cheap sympathy and camaraderie drag us down." Jin spoke with calm, emotionless eyes as he looked at Karenjina and the soldiers.

“It's about a two-hour walk from here to the place Grimwood is trying to find. It would be too conspicuous as an extra-operational activity if we headed there after things had settled down. Now it's the perfect opportunity to go off on our own without attracting suspicion."

Karenjina's lips tightened. Her fist that she clenched as she lashed out was unraveled 

Jin continued.

“Furthermore, this area has just finished a large-scale battle. There are no extra civilians wandering around, liners have been temporarily suspended and civilian facilities, if any, have been closed. In addition, the amount of seithr consumed is far greater than normal.”

This was after a large number of weapons and Ars Magus had been used. Seithr drifts in from everywhere, but it does not recover instantly. If it is consumed locally in a short period of time, the amount of seithr in the air will temporarily drop to a certain level, making the use of Ars weaken if even impossible. That was now.

"I see... Less noise you mean, huh..."

Karenjina voiced her admiration bitterly.

Karenjina’s Seagull Drive probes her surroundings all at once. The more targets she investigates, the more confusing and ineffective the information will be, just as it was when she was underground with the dead.

But now, she should be able to find what they were looking for in a much clearer and a more orderly state than usual.

It's now or never. In fact, now was the best time.

Jin's words gave Karenjina and the others an immediate sense of resolve.

“All right. Let's go."

Karenjina said, and the other soldiers nodded.

Packing the bare minimum, Jin and the others quickly slipped out of the small encampment and ran through the uneven wilderness, skirting the shadows of the rocks.

Honoka was left behind on purpose. They didn’t even explain to him that they were slipping out.

It all started when Grimwood told them that he could not be trusted. Karenjina and the others have been working with Grimwood for a long time now and they were fighting with the same goal of ending the civil war.

But Honoka was different. He was a guard assigned by the Librarium to serve as Jin's caretaker and monitor. If anyone was going to leak information about Grimwood and the others selfish actions to the NOL, it would be Honoka first and foremost. Honoka was in a position where the Librarium should take precedence over mercenaries, Jin and squad members. He didn't trust him and he didn’t think it was in their best interest for him to be drawn into this.

Jin agreed with that decision.

Jin, more than Grimwood, had a hard time trusting Honoka.

On the way, he ran and hurried to reach his destination in the shortest possible distance while letting Karenjina use her "Seagull" to grasp the terrain.

It was about an hour and a half after leaving the encampment when Grimwood stopped and said that it was around that area.

The landscape had changed from a wilderness to a mountainous area. Although one might say, the land has probably turned barren. The trees were thin and weak, and vegetation was scarce. The ground seemed to be rocky, with complex silhouettes forming here and there from the rocks jutting out from the earths surface.

Upon finding a place as open and flat as possible, Karenjina put her hands on the ground.

"The range is quite large. It's a bit overwhelming, but..."

Standing a little further away, Grimwood looks apologetic.

Karenjina looked up and shook her head so loudly that her gathered hair swung from side to side.

“This is my job. Let me do it. I'll use all my strength."

“Take it easy. The less seithr you have, the less noise you'll make, but the heavier your burden will be. Worst-case scenario..."

“I know."

Crisply, Karenjina interrupted Grimwood's words.

In order to activate the drive, seithr is consumed as energy. However, if the output is greater than the amount of seithr that can be consumed, it is the soul of the practitioner that will be used up as an energy source.

Worst case scenario, you die.

“Jin."

With her hands still on the ground, Karenjina now was looking up at Jin. Instead of replying, Jin's eyebrows moved slightly.

Deep, profound eyes that had the color of the night sky stared straight into Jin's green eyes with the purity of a wild beast.

“I don’t like you.”

"...I know."

“But..."

A grin. The fleshy lips carved a challenging smile and disappeared.

“I trust you.”

Jin was bewildered and at a loss for words when he was told.

Trust. That again. He was getting fed up. Anger swelled inside. Grimwood, Karenjina and the others were quick to look at him that way.

Ignoring Jin's furrowed brow, Karenjina took a deep breath, focused and lowered her eyelids.

“...Let’s begin”

She strongly put it into words. The next moment a dull gold light emerged from her hand, and the light spread out in an intricate pattern.

The scale was different from what she had viewed in the basement of the research facility of Sector Seven. The light spread out and traced the surface of the earth at 360 degrees.

“...Ku”

A muffled groan escaped from Karenjina's throat. Her brown forehead was sweating profusely. The small amount of seithr was quickly consumed. Even so, Karenjina expanded her range.

Not yet. She still couldn't find it. Karenjina shouted as she continued to expand her range.

“Jin, do it!"

Without pausing, Jin stood behind Karenjina and pressed his palm against her back. His senses sharpened as he followed Karenjina's concentration.

When he closed his eyes, he could see the dull gold light emitted by Karenjina spreading out all around him. Jin searched, in the light that spread so finely and traced the terrain

Black... A black line.

They were easy to see. Rather, there were too many of them. Countless black lines running in Karenjina’s lights.

They were all stretched straight toward a point.

(What the heck is this...?)

He had never seen a line like this before. Most of the time, lines were more or less irregular, wavy and curved. However, the lines that he saw now were all straight, undisturbed and without hesitation, as if they were drawn by a machine, converging on a single point.

Jin followed Karenjina's consciousness further to the end of the black lines.

The distance was about ten kilometers from here.

(Where is... What is this line? Where are you gathering...)

He wanted to know where the line led to. As he desperately traced the line, he suddenly felt a shock as if he had been pushed from the inside and Jin collapsed on the spot.

"Uhh!"

It was such an unexpected shock that he fell to the hard ground without even taking any precautions. He let out a distracted and pathetic voice. A terrible headache followed. It was as if his brain was being pushed open from the inside. At the same time, a wave of nausea rushed through his internal organs, and Jin quickly clamped his mouth shut.

At the feet of the fallen Jin, Karenjina had collapsed. Unlike Jin, she was already unconscious and was convulsing violently.

“Karenjina!”

Grimwood rushed over and held her, but there was no response. The spasms only became somewhat more mild.

One of the soldiers took her pulse. From the look of relief on his face, it seemed that her pulse was fine. The blood from her nose slid down her cheek and stained it.

"...Are you okay?"

Swallowing down the nausea and holding his head against the terrible headache, Jin sat up.

Karenjina must have been under a load many times greater than the one he had been under. Even so, she did not stop the Drive until the limit. If her survival instinct hadn't refused to continue, she might have used it until she really died.

"She's just unconscious, but breathing fine."

One of the soldiers spoke up and Grimwood finally felt relieved as he laid the small body he was carrying on the ground. His brown fingertips, not even slightly relaxed, rubbed the soil and drew short lines.

“Did you find it?”

Grimwood asked Jin in a low voice.

Jin stared into the distance to the west. He remembered clearly where the lines had gathered.

"Yeah."

“Really?”

Without answering Grimwood, who leaned forward to ask, Jin stood up unsteadily.

His gaze remained fixed on the west, where the line had run.

“That’s.... What the-?”

When he remembered it with his limp brain, a tar-like fear crept up from his feet to his head. His body naturally cowered and trembled.

He has never felt this way about these lines before. Was this fear? Or was it something else?

His head was numb and he couldn’t think straight.

It was not coherent, but that invasive discomfort at the end of the line that seemed to absorb all evil was stuck to the back of his skull and won't come off.

Jin shook his head, trying his best to push that tremendously disgusting image to the edge of his consciousness so that it would not interfere with his minimal thinking.

“Th-There's something about ten kilometers west of here. It was very different, disgusting to be exact. Never was there nothing else that looked like this, so it was probably there."

"Ten kilometers... So far, huh."

With a sigh of surprise, Grimwood looked down at Karenjina.

The range of Karenjina's "Seagull" is usually limited to a radius of about one kilometer. If it reached ten kilometers away, that means she has searched a hundred times the usual area at once. With a sly grimace, Grimwood moved Karenjina into the shade of a nearby rocky outcrop. Here, the jutting rocks and the short trees that nestled against them would conceal her from a distance.

That would mean the choice to leave her here.

“Are you sure?"

"It's not like there were any enemy soldiers hiding in the vicinity, judging from using the Seagull earlier. But even so, leaving a woman alone in the middle of nowhere like this was a moralists unnecessary sense of ethics poking at something as trivial as the conscience."

Grimwood replied to Jin's question as he backed away from Karenjina.

"I wasn't planning on taking her with me originally. If it weren't for Seagull, I wouldn't have told her about this either."

With that, he turned away.

“I see." was all Jin said as he stepped out in front of Grimwood. Now that Karenjina had fainted, Jin was the only one who could see their destination.

(Ten kilometers west...)

That's where the black line ended. Was it the weapon that Grimwood was talking about to stop seithr, or was it something more sinister than that?

Still having that uncomfortable feeling inside his head, Jin ran down the slope where the earth was exposed.

The night had been quiet, but now there the wind blew strong. 

It wasn't a dark night anymore. The moon must have risen very high.

The clouds that had covered the sky thickly were being swept away by the strengthening wind. The navy of the deep night resembled the color of the eyes of a female soldier, cowering in the shade of a rock.

The wind rustled the thin branches of the short, overgrown trees.

Karenjina, still unconscious, had not opened her eyes. Her limp, weak body laid on the dry ground, her cheeks motionless, her hair curling in a peculiar way.

Beside her, there was a foot.

It was a corner of the wilderness where a war was going on nearby. And yet, a pair of brown leather shoes with not a speck of dirt on them was right next to the fallen and sleeping Karenjina.

“Oh dear, you were left behind.”

The owner of the foot spoke to her with theatrical sympathy.

Karenjina couldn’t hear him.

The owner of the leather shoes bent his tall, slender body into an exaggerated peek at the face of the woman who was not speaking.

The clouds were peeled away and the moon appeared, illuminating the earth with its cold moon white color.

“Oh, I feel sorry for you."

Brown leather shoes, a black suit, and a black hat. The green-haired man grinned in a sadistic manner.