Editing The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume5 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 2===

The Miniature Garden was quite large.

Each room tended to be the size of a school gym and they were arranged like a necklace of morning dew on a spider web. The main corridors connecting rooms were large enough for semi-trailer trucks to pass each other and even the secondary corridors were large enough for a normal car to drive around. Kyousuke and the others could use program-controlled electric carts if they wanted, but a lot of them chose to travel on foot.

There was a simple reason for this.

They could jog to build up their strength.

“Hey, Rabbit Boy. If you’re headed south, then join me.”

“…”

Kyousuke did not bother matching his pace to the boy who arrived next to him.

They both maintained their high-speed pace, but Kyousuke did not reject the boy either and continued running as planned.

This was the Hatter, the leader of another group. That group had the most people in it. He was even older than the Queen of Hearts and, from Kyousuke’s perspective, he looked almost like he belonged with the adults. He had messy blond hair, dark skin, and a strong body.

Instead of a surgical gown with pants like Kyousuke, he casually wore a white jacket without a necktie. And true to his assigned name, he had a small straw hat on his head. But that hat had a silverwork decoration wrapped around it, so it looked a lot like a crown.

He gave off a similar scent to that man from Illegal. Or perhaps it was the scent of a Central or South American criminal organization.

It was obvious from the way the fabric was used, but his outfit probably had not been made by Kyoumi. Everyone else had been daunted by the humongous closet, but he had looked through the tens of thousands of options and found the optimal combination on his own.

In other words, he had ''spontaneously'' left the rails set by the adults.

And Shiroyama Kyoumi had called him a berserker.

Even in Lewis Carroll’s already absurd and nonsensical story, the Hatter on his card was known for being insane and broken.

“If you’re headed south, are you taking a class with someone? Like with Kuresawa?”

“With Shigara-san.”

“Madam Professor, huh? I doubt you’ll get much out of that anytime soon…”

“But she seems to be the most normal. Both in the theories she presents and in her personality.”

The Hatter laughed scornfully.

They were conversing while running at an above average pace, but neither of them seemed at all out of breath.

“That’s a good one.”

He was the madman.

He had been given the role deemed nonsensical even in a children’s story full of absurdities.

“But, Kyousuke, you’re probably the only ''specimen who finds any solace'' in the fact that someone’s the ‘most normal’.”

“…”

“Does Biondetta look normal to you? Or for someone else near you, what about Kyoumi? Don’t make me laugh. They’re warped in their own ways. Not that I’m one to talk when I’m the craziest of us all. For one thing, it isn’t normal to be taken to this Miniature Garden. We were invited here to the far end of the world, so there had to be some reason we were selected. That’s how it works. So,” continued the Hatter. “I’m curious about you. If we were going to rank the 15 of us, Humpty Dumpty and the Jabberwock might end up higher than you. But I’m still curious. My nose for combat ignores my crazy brain and I can’t stop myself from talking. Shiroyama Kyousuke, the strangest and least normal one here is you, the one who looks the most normal. After all…”

He arrived at a certain conclusion.

“You were still the most normal when we had our first experience with the Summoning Ceremony and made our contract with the Three.”

They stopped moving.

Their high-speed pace came to a sudden end because the Hatter held a long spear-like stick out horizontally to block Kyousuke’s path.

It was a Blood-Sign.

That crystallization of human knowledge could freely summon otherworldly beings and even used the gods in heaven as a stepping stone to reach even greater heights.

Their shapes and materials varied, but the Hatter’s started as a single silver coin. At some point, more and more coins stacked on top of the one in his hand until it had transformed into a long and heavy metal rod.

“You’d normally be afraid when something like this is suddenly handed to you. And when you learn that gods exist so nearby and that our damned human hands ''can control'' the laws of heaven.”

This boy did not judge people based on their size or age.

That madman judged all threats equally if he deemed them to be insane.

“You’d normally tremble in fear when you learn you’ll be cut off from normal society and will be forgotten by normal people once you leave their field of vision. It isn’t that I really want to head outside or that I want go around working to help people in society. But even if it’s only a hypothetical, it’s hard to accept that someone else took away the option to live a normal life.”

Had there been any meaning in him drawing the Hatter card?

Was he someone who measured the size of people’s heads and gave form to something to contain them?

“It would make sense to tear at your hair and writhe on the floor. It was only the very first step and we were already at that level. And yet you’ve somehow managed to maintain yourself. That’s because you weren’t normal in the first place. What I’m saying is…you’re weird. It’s weird that you can stay normal while you accept this decidedly abnormal environment. ''In fact, did you even bind a contract there?''”

The hatter quietly stared at him.

His eyes may have contained madness, but they were steady.

Strangely, his eyes seemed more focused on reality than anyone else’s.

“Who exactly are you?”

“…”

“Why are you here? You’re the most normal and the most deeply involved, so it doesn’t feel like you were ‘brought’ here.”

That was when a quiet metallic sound reached them.

Instead of from ahead, behind, left, or right, it came from directly above. It came from the tall, tall Great Ceiling. Something was tangled around the steel beams from which the countless halogen lights hung. It was a dark shadow. It was an octopus-like dark blue night combat uniform with a gas mask. In addition to the two legs, mechanical tentacles extended from the waist and wrapped around the steel beams.

The figure stood upside down and motionlessly readied a carbine with a grenade launcher equipped on the bottom.

The adults had said they would not interfere with the 15’s life.

But that had been retracted thanks to the threat approaching Kyousuke’s throat.

Faced with that inhuman accuracy, the Hatter sighed and put away the silver coin Blood-Sign. The coins fell away, but not a single one was heard hitting the floor. They all vanished into empty air.

“The guards, huh?”

They relied on guns, but since they could perceive Kyousuke and the others, they likely had Awards. Since they were not focused on summoning, they may have stopped below 100 to maintain a compromise with the real world.

“They have to know the superiority of guns isn’t gonna cut it.”

But the Hatter had not fallen back because he feared the bullets.

He had more to say as he left.

“I think there was meaning in the cards we chose at the beginning. You could call it fate.”

“…And what did you see in the Hatter?”

“First, that I’m unexplainably insane. And second, that I’m obsessed with crowns.”

The madman laughed and poked at his temple.

“And I’m not talking about this straw hat thing. Taking on bulletproof armor and bullets won’t get you anywhere. The expenses will just keep piling up and you won’t have anything to show for it. If you head into the mountains with a nice polished hunting rifle, you don’t just want shoot some crows and rats, right?”

“…”

“I want to fight someone with a larger crown on their name. Now that would be worth stuffing and mounting on the wall. Shiroyama Kyousuke, you’re probably the master of this mountain. And the crown on your head isn’t anything as cheap as ‘strongest’ or ‘invincible’ is it?”

The Hatter turned down another road.

Sensing the threat had passed, the gas mask figure up above moved his or her tentacles to leave.

Left all alone, Kyousuke stared in the direction the madman had gone.

The way that boy spoke, no one would believe anything he said. And he seemed to enjoy that, so he showed no sign of changing.

But how much of the truth had he seen in Kyousuke?

Had he seen through to the foundation of the Fifteen Siblings Project? Or had he seen through the next thin layer and to what lay even deeper?