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

===Part 5===

The pathway leading to the back of the building seemed to curve as they walked along the wall. A soldier walking right behind Grimwood, who was hurrying ahead without turning on the lights to avoid being spotted by the enemy, called out to him in concern.

"Lieutenant Kisaragi is all right, isn’t he?"

They couldn’t imagine what was going on behind the closed doors.

But just before the door closed, Jin noticed something and braced himself, which made the soldiers feel uneasy inside.

Grimwood replied calmly, without breaking stride.

"He'll be fine. He's the man chosen by the Nox Nyctores. In fact, it would be more dangerous for me not to be with Jin."

“I know, right?”

No matter what happens, Jin will get through it. Everyone, including Grimwood, had absolute faith in his abilities.

Rather than that, one person behind him said in a muffled voice.

“Hah.”

That was all Grimwood said.

He was worried about Jin, but he was more worried about the smell that was getting worse as he went deeper. The dense stench of death was almost nauseating. What could be in the back? He didn’t want to see another pile of corpses like the last time, Grimwood thought to himself.

Eventually, the passage was cut off and a gaping hole opened up at the end of it.

It was bright on the other side. A flaming orange light leaked out and illuminated the end of the passage.

They heard some kind of mechanical noise.

Cautiously and distractedly, Grimwood peered inside.

Then his eyes widened at what he saw.

“What is this...?"

He wandered into the room as if he were being sucked in.

It was a large room. The ceiling was domed and in the middle of it was a large......

“Gahh!”

“Wha-!?”

Suddenly there was a sound like the simultaneous crushing of air and a puddle of blood and Grimwood turned around.

The soldier next to him took a few steps back and let out a cramped scream.

A white arm protruded from the abdomen of the subordinate soldier who was right next to the entrance. Looking down at it, the subordinate soldier spat out a large amount of blood from his mouth.

“Cap...tain...”

“Owl!”

His subordinate looked up at him with eyes that didn't understand what was happening. Grimwood, in a scream, called out to his subordinates.

Grimwood stretched out his arms, not knowing what that is for.

However, before his hand could touch the body of his subordinate, it was thrown away without a second thought by a thin white arm protruding from his abdomen.

Owl’s body fell to the floor, drawing a band of blood.

Grimwood, who followed him with his eyes in dismay, was approached from the place where his men had been standing until a moment ago.

"You bitch... What are you doing here?"

It was a woman's voice that spoke with a smile of cold ridiculing mockery. 

Grimwood turned around at the sound of the voice. It was an unbelievable sight, but it was real. Unmistakably she was-.

"You bastarrrrrd!"

With a grisly bark, Grimwood unfolded his battle axe and swung it wide.

The hem of a soft, white robe swept across his vision.



At the scream he heard, Jin was running in the dark.

The door that had separated him from Grimwood and the others opened straightforwardly with a flash of Yukianesa.

The passage ahead was dark and seemed to curve gently. Even without lights, it was not too difficult to follow the wall.

He was going along, paying attention to his surroundings, when he heard it.

He kicked the ground and ran down the long, narrow passageway as fast as he could. The dark walls echoed Jin's ragged breathing eerily.

Over there, behind here. The scream he heard belonged to the soldier who was with Grimwood, Owl. After a beat, he also heard Grimwood's angry voice, like the roar of a beast.

Something happend, else the calm Captain wouldn't have screamed like that. His heart was beating like a fast-ringing bell, alerting him continuously. He had a bad feeling about this. The blood in his body was rushing noisily. Seeing a flame-colored light at the end of the passageway, Jin abandoned his caution and jumped in.

It was an unexpectedly large room and Jin reflexively stopped in his tracks.

It was a circular room just like the previous one, with a domed ceiling as well. This structure also reminded Jin of that corpse-strewn underground facility of some time ago, but this one was much larger than that one. It was big and horrifying.

The room was filled with the stench of death, but no corpses were piled up this time.

Instead... Jin found them in a corner of the room.

Three corpses rolled around in a messy manner as if they were broken dolls.

One had a large hole in his abdomen. The other two had been torn to shreds all over their bodies. They were Grimwood's men who had been with him earlier.

“What happened...?"

It wasn't long before Jin rushed to the scene after hearing the scream. And yet.

He felt bad. It was a very unpleasant feeling. While enduring the discomfort that tugged at the back of his head, Jin looked around the room again, feeling slightly dizzy.

There was something bizarre about it.

A coffin.

A coffin-like box with some kind of writing on the surface hung in the middle of the room. Numerous pipes from the ceiling, walls and floor connected to it. It looked like a device of some kind. At the same time, he remembered the letters carved on the ceiling of the room before and the symbol of a coffin.

Below the floating coffin, there was a large hole in a circle. If the chain that hung the coffin were to break, it would easily fall into the hole. The hole was wide enough to do so, but narrow enough to cover the entire floor.

From within it. An orange light was flooding the room. It was similar to the color of a flame, it illuminated the room so brightly that he could see the whole room.

On closer inspection, the hole seemed to be boiling with a flame-colored sludge swirling inside.

It was like a "cauldron" filled with lava.

But he didn't feel any heat. In fact, the air was chilly. It was sticky and cold, like a corpse.

The sound of something hard hitting the ground came from the wall. He quickly braced himself and turned around, but as he looked back, a part of the wall slid out from under him.

It stretched out in a straight line until it reached the side of that lava-filled hole in the middle of the room, and then stopped. After that, a cheap driving sound started.
　
Jin ran up to it.

When he looked closely, he saw that the wall that extended to the side of the hole was like a conveyor belt. On the other side of the wall, he heard the sound of some heavy objects being dropped. The conveyor belt started to carry them away.

Jin froze in place in astonishment as the packages arrived in the room illuminated by the flaming light.

Unconsciously, his eyes widened and his mouth opened thinly, losing strength.

They were human beings that were brought to him. They were also ...... corpses. Some were wearing the clothes of soldiers of the Librarium, and others wearing the uniform of the Ikaruga Federation. He couldn’t tell which one they belonged to, but they were wounded bodies with bandages wrapped around them.

One after another, the corpses flowed in and were thrown straight into that hole.

It was as if they were stoking coal.

Suddenly, Jin's vision caught sight of a familiar figure. It was the corpse of a young man still wearing the uniform of the Librarium. His chest was stained black with blood that must have been his own. The face of a student soldier with a twitching expression and downcast eyelids that were the same as that of that student soldier who Jin took care of at the encampment and said he was a junior at the academy.

He flowed forward on the belt and eventually he too was thrown into the cauldron of heatless flame.

Immediately after that, the pipe above Jin's head made a muddy gurgling sound and swished. It was as if something was being fed into it. The end of that pipe was that coffin.

The idea itself was horrifying, but the device looked as if the corpses had been boiled in a cauldron and sucked up, then poured into the coffin.

A chill crept up the inside of Jin's spine.

He felt a different and more horrible fear than the one he felt when he confronted the black head earlier.

The smell of death lingered in the air unpleasantly.

And this crawling fear was much like the unpleasantness of the smell of death.

"Hmm? You're... Jin Kisaragi?"

Suddenly, he heard a voice. This time it wasn't an auditory hallucination. It was a human voice.

With minimal movement, Jin turned toward the voice.

He was so distracted by the large coffin and equipment that he didn't notice that there was a small figure on the other side of the cauldron. He couldn't see the details of the figure clearly because the light of the cauldron flame shining from below was too close. But he recognized her immediately by her voice and her clothes, which were too conspicuous for someone who belonged to the Librarium.

"You are... of the 'Zeroth Squadron'."

Meifang Lapislazuli. She was the commander of the Zeroth Squadron, whom he passed by at the Librarium branch in Yabiko.

The challenging clothes that deliberately expose her body lines. The fact that she exposes her true face without a mask. The unpleasant and conceited gaze, and the cruel smile. It's the same as that time.

Jin's heart thudded and trembled. The Yukianesa in his hand pulsated.

— Kill.

It whispered to him again. That she was a dangerous "enemy" and an "evil" that should be killed. A murderous intent lightened up in Jin.

(You're noisy... Shut up!)

For a moment, his mind went blank and he grabbed Yukianesa tightly as if to scold it, clenching his teeth to cement his stance. He resisted the urge to run and slash at Meifang.

But maybe that was a bad idea after all.

"Wha......"

When he regained his blurred consciousness, Jin was surrounded by white robed figures. Everyone of these figures wears a white mask over their face and a hood that covers eyes. The Zeroth Squadron. The "Garbage Disposal" squad. It is responsible for disposing of traitors who betray the Librarium in their own ranks.

Jin glanced around at all the white-robed people surrounding him, then glared sharply at Meifang.

"Why are you here? What have you done to them?"

He asked in a low, hostile tone. By them, of course, he meant Grimwood's men who were lying at the entrance of the room.

No one had passed them in that narrow passage before Jin came to this room. If a suspicious person had gotten to them, Meifang and the men of the Zeroth Squadron would not have let them escape.

The ones who killed them are the ones from the Zeroth Squadron here. No, it was definitely Meifang. Her white arms and the white robe she wore were covered with the red of blood.

"'What do you think you're doing?' That's my line. You 'renegades'."

Licking her blood-red fingertips, Meifang looked at Jin with emotionless, glass-ball eyes.

Jin clenched his teeth tightly.

It's true that they ignored orders and left the camp on their own. Acting on your own is a serious breach of discipline. Especially in an emergency situation like the current one, it is a serious crime.

But is it even possible to be called a traitor? Is it so bad to call for an end to the war as soon as possible so that no more unnecessary casualties will occur? It's absurd, Jin's stomach churned as he wondered if this was what an orderly world should look like.

But what Meifang continued to say was not exactly what Jin had assumed.

“This is a sacred place created for the "Imperator" of the Librarium... You were not only satisfied with trespassing, but you are also trying to sell it over to Sector Seven of all things. This is outrageous."

“Sector Seven?”

Why has that name come up? When Jin raised his eyebrows and asked incomprehensibly, Meifang licked off her fingertips and put her blood-soaked hand on his white cheek.

"Why didn't you know? Fufufu, was the man who could be the next head of the Kisaragi family used for such a puny mercenary?"

As she said this, she shook her loosely bundled hair and looked down at her feet. Underneath her high heeled boots, there was some kind of raised lump lying around. Grabbing it carelessly, Meifang lifted it with one thin arm.

"Uuu..."

The lump hanging lazily from the floor groaned. Jin was blinded by the sight. The one where Meifang grabbed a person by the neck and held him in midair.

"Grimwood!"

With an almost shouting voice, Jin called out the name.

His well-trained body, strong shoulders, sturdy arms and legs had no strength, and he was left hanging slackly. His whole body was wet with blood. His axe was also lying on the floor, smashed and broken. There was a muffled sound and blood bubbled in Grimwood's mouth as he was forced to look up. His ash gray mustache was stained with a sticky red liquid.

"You...!"

Jin braced himself with indignation.

Grimwood was quite strong. The soldiers in the 9th squad were also considerably powerful. It was hard to believe that she could so easily turn them into nothing.

But what he was seeing was undeniably true. It was an unforgivable fact.

Looking at the angry Jin with a tilted head, Meifang smiled smugly.

“What are you so upset about...? This is the man who leaked the information about our sides formation to the Ikaruga Federation during the last invasion. He is an informer and is also tied to that scum, Kokonoe.”

“......What?"

That's absurd. Grimwood was a traitor? On one hand, Jin also remembered that he had a number of doubts about his actions. Even Jin had looked at Grimwood with suspicion a few times, as he had been so well-informed. Was it that transparent? 

Meifang made a deliberate sound of pity.

“Such innocence. You've been used.”

The next head of the Kisaragi family, a user of the Nox Nyctores. Jin was self aware of how he can be used in many ways.

But he was not easily convinced that Grimwood was using him.

It was not based on circumstantial evidence or logic, but on a silly emotional argument that he was not that kind of person. He simply had faith in Grimwood. That's why he couldn’t believe what Meifang said.

"Jin..."

A muffled voice came from the other side of the cauldron, causing Jin to look up breathlessly.

Grimwood, who seemed to be unconscious, desperately reflected Jin in his eyes while hanging in the air.

"Run... This one's bad... She’s a 'monster'...”

Grimwood complained in desperation, spitting blood from his strangled throat.

The next moment, however, his expression became that of frenzy, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.

"Gu, gaaaaah!"

The hand of Meifang grasping his neck was filled with a lethal force. Grimwood's neck creaked under the strain.

Narrowing her eyes as if enjoying the sound, Meifang sneered at the large, suspended man from below.

“'Monster'? Oh, who is the real 'monster'?

He was speaking very slowly, as if he was trying to make sure, as if he was trying to tell Jin something, but then his eyes were wide open and he was screaming like a broken man with rage in his eyes.

“You are garbage! You are trash who betrayed the Imperator, so watch how you talk!"

"Ohhhh..."

Her finger tips dug into his throat, breaking the skin and causing blood to flow.

“Stop it! No more!”

As Grimwood struggled to wriggle out with a completely weak body, Jin let out a cry of grief that surprised even him.

[[File:SS1-4.png|thumb]]

At the sound of his voice, Meifang glanced back at him, then huffed and relaxed the force that had almost snapped his neck.

Grimwood's body slackened and lost tension again. Jin wondered if he had fainted, but that didn't seem to be the case. He repeatedly opened and closed his mouth like a fish seeking oxygen and glared at Meifang with his light green eyes. Animalistic hostility can only describe his current image.

"Fufufu... Listen, trash. The Imperator is a generous person and they will give trash like you a chance to atone for your sins.

Meifang asked, looking back into Grimwood's eyes as he stared at her.

"Answer me. "Who” sent you here?"

“I don't know what you mean by..."

"Do I have to explain everything to trash like you so you can understand? I'm asking who's giving you orders? You're in the Librarium, right? It's someone with the equivalent authority of... Ah, yes. For example..."

She was about to say someone's name, but Grimwood interrupted her as if to shake her off.

"I don't know what you are misunderstanding... 'monster'. I'm here of my own volition, under no one else's direction..."

Grimwood's words were muffled in mid-sentence. Maifang's hand grabbed his neck and crushed it.

Looking up at the large man, Meifang made a smile with her mouth as she glared at him.

“I didn't give you permission to say anything. Well, if you really don't want to tell me, I'll thoroughly ask that woman eventually. Fufufu..."

It was obvious who "that woman" was referring to. Grimwood's face instantly changed color as he struggled, but he could not free his body.

"Hey, wait you bitc- Kuh!"

“I will not allow you to speak. You have disrespected the Imperator’s mercy. From now on, you are forbidden to speak at all."

With a tone of voice that judged any disobedience, Meifang licked her lips with her red tongue and traced them. A sign of decleration.

"Now, the charges. 'Disrespect' and 'rebellion' against the Novus Orbis Librarium and the Imperator!”

Meifang's high-pitched declaration reverberated through the basement.

Meifang tells her white brethren as he hangs up the sinner, Grimwood, even higher. 

“With the blade of retribution and scales of judgment, I come to deliver... righteous justice! I am the condemner... I am the wing of judgment. This trial is over!”

At Meifang's sonorous declaration, the white-robed people surrounding Jin declared one by one.

“Death penalty!”

“Death penalty!”

“Death penalty!”

“Death penalty!”

The voices of dozens of people, seemingly endlessly repeating the words "Death penalty" one by one echoed loudly on the high ceiling.

Jin felt like he was going crazy with all the death threats blathering on around him. What the hell is this?

“Stop it... Let him go!”

Dazed and confused, Jin's voice was weakly overshadowed by the white robes that surrounded him. Eventually, the last one said, "Death penalty!”, and then…

Grimwood's body was thrust forward and Karenjina walked up to the cauldron.

"The Apostle's judgment is fair. Therefore, in the name of the Imperator, you, Grimwood Huster, are condemned."

There was already no response from Grimwood's body. The legs of his body slumped down and stopped over a hole that had the color of boiled lava.

With a grin, Meifang put a touch of torment on her lips.

“You are... sentenced to death!”

“Stoooooooooop!”

The sound of Meifang's voice echoing with ecstasy caused Jin to run. He had expected to be seized immediately, but the people of the Zeroth Squadron did not move.

Running straight ahead, he put his hand on the hilt of Yukianesa.

Meifang was watching him with amusement. The womans slender arms strangled Grimwood's neck with unbelievable force as she watched Jin run impatiently.

— For one moment, he thought he saw Grimwood jump.

But the next thing he knew.

Pop.

A wet light sound was mixed in with a heavy wet sound, and it made Jin want to cover his ears. The red liquid flowed and Grimwood's body and neck separated. The neck and body, separated by the bloodstained hand, fell apart.

It fell down, into the hole.

And was swallowed into the boiling cauldron.

A thick pipe moved above Jin's head, sending something into the coffin. The spilling sound felt like the pulse of life,

That... was Grimwood, wasn’t he?

At that moment, Jin felt something as cold as a snowstorm pass through his body.

— Kill.

The ice sword whispered.

An urge swirled inside Jin.

(Kill......kill.....kill....kill...kill..kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill.)

His legs ran faster than he've ever run before, and his eyes widened even more as he stared at the white flesh before him. He was going to slice through that skin, through that flesh, and he was going to spill everything that's in there. The color, the sound, the heat, everything, everyone, cut, mince, reject.

"I'll kill you, I'll kill you, you bastard!"

The taste of blood rose in his throat as he howled on his own.

He stepped forward and with the same momentum, Jin pulled out Yukianesa. The silver blader, colder than ice, sliced through the air and tore at Meifang's skin, ripping flesh from body.

At the thought, a moment of unbearable pleasure made Jin smile.

But immediately after, Meifang was not there. Jin gasped as he swung out his blade, which ended up striking the air.

"I'll dismiss your current rudeness as temporary insanity. Fufufu, be grateful."

"Wha…!"

The voice whispering leisurely and seductively suddenly came from right beside him.

That's absurd. What kind of reaction and speed is that? Who the hell is this Meifang Lapislazuli? Jin turned around, feeling an instinctive danger like prey being gazed upon.

"Don't get so heated... BOY!"

She smiled gently with lips that had red blood printed on them as if it was lipstick and Meifang's palm bottom plunged into Jin's side.

"Argh......ku!"

He didn't even have time to brace himself. In an instant, his breathing stopped and his consciousness became clouded as the shock shot up to his brain. His knees lost their strength, and despite his will, he collapsed and fell to the floor.

Maifang grabbed Jin's hair and held him back as he tried to fall, then looked into his eyes and put her face close to his ear.

"Oh, and didn't I told you to watch your language around your superiors. Or is that also...  'none of your business'?"

After she told him that, Meifang let go of his hand. When he was released, Jin did not have the strength to resist. He slumped to the floor, hitting his forehead hard. The floor was cold, and above his head, he could hear the sound of pipes rattling in the distance.

In his cloudy vision, he could see a cracked and broken ax.

Grimwood's axe.

After that, Jin's consciousness was cut off.