Editing The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume6 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 2===

Kyousuke, Sekurtiti, Renge, and Higan ran up the isolated apartment’s emergency staircase. Bridesmaid would soon notice that Biondetta and the tomb keepers had gone to the ground floor. Before they figured out what Kyousuke’s group was up to, he had to summon a Material, scatter rubble in every direction, and take out the Bridesmaid members approaching to surround the group underwater. They had to go that far to clear a way out.

Or so Kyousuke thought.

But then something unexpected happened.

“!?”

He had taken the lead, but he stopped and quickly held a hand out sideways while a step away from their target floor. Before Renge could say something about being stopped by an arm moving like a railway crossing gate, the floor above them was filled with a downpour of rubble and explosive noise.

“Kyaaaah!!”

“Back, back!”

Kyousuke more or less shoved the girls back to the next landing down.

“Curse those tomb raiders!!”

Gold-adorned Sekurtiti and Higan were crushed below Renge who groaned and asked a question while lying face down.

“Wh-what? Did they start using that machinegun again?”

“This was something else…”

Kyousuke alone remained on the stairs and he poked his head out into the floor which had been given much better ventilation. Something was maintaining a circular course around the apartment and he initially mistook it for a fairy.

But it was not.

He saw long, curly, and reddish-blonde hair. He saw a pale and small body. And that slender girl was covered in a mountain of sinister weapons. A swimsuit-like console suit covered her body, a giant dragonfly wing unit was attached to her back, and an additional coffin-like device larger than her leg was attached to each leg. The two coffins seemed to contain some large payload and countless heavy weapons stuck out like the frame of a folding fan: a machinegun, a rocket container, a needle gun, a flame thrower, a railgun, a close-range welding blade, a wire shooter, an acoustic weapon cone, etc. The silhouette was reminiscent of a Western multi-tool that stored screwdrivers and knives in the grip of a pair of pliers.

“Azalea…”

His eyes met the triumphant eyes of a giggling girl.

She pointed at him with a handgun gesture.

“Azalea Magentarain!!”

The fan-like spread of weapons all bent to focus their aim on him. Kyousuke felt a chill down his spine, but then something strange happened. He heard a footstep from right next to him.

“Then allow me to punish this rude tomb raider just like before.”

It was Sekurtiti, the silver-haired and brown-skinned Tomb Priestess.

She stood tall and directed her pale blue eyes and her hands forward.

“Hahhhhhh!!”

This was the ruler’s “wall” that had guided the autocannon gunner to a malfunction before.

This was a crystallization of the skills mankind had spent all of history developing to stand above others.

But Azalea’s smile remained unchanged. Her handgun gesture moved. The index finger moved slightly upwards as if recreating the recoil of firing.

“You idiot!!”

Kyousuke grabbed at Sekurtiti’s skinny waist and tackled her to the floor.

Their momentum sent them rolling along the dangerous floor, but there was nothing he could do about that.

Excess electricity wrapped around the barrel as the railgun gave a roar.

With an air-splitting blast, the reinforced concrete was blown away almost amusingly easily. That also destroyed the emergency staircase up to the next floor. Kyousuke was worried about Renge and Higan on the next landing down, but he did not have time to go down and collect them. With that power, Azalea could blast through the floor and blow away the landing, so he would have no cover. And it would be best not to inform Azalea that the shrine maiden twins were there.

“…Oh?”

“Just keep your head down!!”

Sekurtiti calmly tilted her head like a young wife in front of the ATM after forgetting her PIN, so Kyousuke grabbed her arm and kept low while running across the floor. The thin inner walls would not work as shields, but remaining where Azalea could see them would be suicide. Even if it was only a thin wall, it would be best to vanish into a blind spot.

He heard what sounded more like an amplified version of a buzzing killer bee than a dragonfly.

He peered around the edge of the crumbling wall and looked into the sky which was no longer covered by glass.

Azalea could have flown into the apartment if she wanted, but she remained outside. She followed a circular course around the building and kept a set distance while making slight shifts to the left and right. That was likely the best course of action when attacking a high-rise building with an attack helicopter. She was avoiding the Summoning Ceremony and attempting to turn Kyousuke and the others to mincemeat before they could take advantage of a Material or the protective circle.

This routine was different from when her pride had caused her noble blood to boil.

A bitter look came over Kyousuke as he realized that defeat may have taught her how to change the way she used her power.

“That’s based on the Meganeura, a Quad Motors personal flight unit, but I thought that was only a mobility support device for infantry and was derived from a hang glider. She’s added way too much crap on there, dammit.”

“Whatever the case, the entire apartment will collapse if she keeps this up. The tomb keepers waiting down below will be crushed, so we need to do something and soon.”

“I know that.”

With their opponent in the air, it would indeed be hard to start a Summoning Ceremony battle, but hard was not impossible. The Artificial Sacred Ground was a 20 meter cube that appeared from the point of the Incense Grenade detonation. So even if Azalea was in the air, he could trap her in a summoner’s cage if he threw the Incense Grenade when she had another building’s wall behind her.

It was all about timing.

Step one was making sure Azalea did not notice what he was up to. If she found out he was trying to start a Summoning Ceremony battle, she would grow cautious of the buildings behind her.

Also, there was a waiting period of several seconds between pulling the Incense Grenade’s pin and its detonation. The ones Kyousuke carried now took 5 seconds. That might not seem very long, but it was plenty of time for any one of the weapons spread out from Azalea’s demonic legs. For example, the machinegun could fire 2000 shots every minute and each shot was twice the size of an anti-materiel rifle bullet. Without a protective circle around him, half his body would be blown away if one so much as grazed his shoulder. 5-10 such weapons were pursuing him, so he could not be optimistic about those 5 seconds. He had to assume that single Meganeura had more firepower than an entire unit of attack helicopters.

Thoughtlessly challenging it would not lead to a miracle occurring.

Kyousuke used his Repliglass Blood-Sign to swiftly pull in a fire extinguisher sitting a short distance away. But that was not enough on its own. He focused on the nerves in his ears and heard a dangerous sound coming from multiple locations. It was not Azalea. I came from within the floor which had almost entirely lost its walls and pillars like some ruins bombed down to the foundation.

(That’s from the remnants of the kitchen and bathroom. There’s gas leaking from both areas.)

He grabbed two bent cellphone batteries and metal clips from the rubble on the floor. And fire was readily available.

He slowly exhaled and made a suggestion.

“You need to set things up so we won’t die in the 5 seconds after I throw the Incense Grenade. Create a smokescreen with the fire extinguisher and then throw some fire into the kitchen and bathroom to trigger an explosion. If Azalea is distracted by the light and noise long enough, then we win. If she’s unfazed, then this will be considerably more difficult. Prepare yourself.”

“Y-yes. Anything is fine if we can strike back at the tomb raiders.”

She never had a choice in the first place.

Even so, Kyousuke waited until after Sekurtiti nodded to reach into his pants pocket and pull out the Incense Grenade their lives depended on. It looked like a hair spray can with a round pin and lever on the top. Anyone unfamiliar with his industry would probably think it was a flash grenade.

He waited for the right moment.

After learning of defeat, Azalea would not let her guard down. She was not a ferocious beast that knew no enemies; she was an injured beast. She refused to get too close and focused on killing him with every bit of firepower available to her.

Kyousuke pressed up against one of the few remaining inner walls and grabbed the Incense Grenade and its lever in one hand.

He passed his other hand’s index finger through the round pin and toyed with it by alternately bending his finger like a hook and straightening it.

Sweat dripped down his nose.

Next to him, Sekurtiti wiped the sweat away like he was a doctor performing surgery. He focused every nerve in his body to pick up the amplified killer bee noise coming from the outside.

(Come on…)

The way he focused on his opponent may have been like a cameraman trying to get a shot of a total solar eclipse. He gulped as he watched the sunlight reflected off the opposite building and waited for another shadow to cover it up.

(Come on!!)

The light bent.

The surface of white light on the flat glass wall gained the dark silhouette of a curly-haired girl’s slender and alluring body combined with heavy weaponry.

Kyousuke and Sekurtiti seemed to burst from the wall as they began moving.

The diversion was gold-adorned Sekurtiti’s job. She threw the fire extinguisher from behind cover and threw a battery wrapped in cloth and set on fire into the remains of the kitchen and bathroom. Azalea fired a spray of machinegun fire each time, but not all of the traps had to work properly. All that mattered was that the heavily-armed Meganeura was focused elsewhere.

At the same time, Kyousuke pulled the pin of the Incense Grenade he held, leaned out from behind the thin wall, and threw the metal can out into the sky with all his might.

Once it was shot, the fire extinguisher’s white smokescreen filled the floor. The ignited batteries failed to trigger any explosions, but the machinegun bullets that followed them did ignite the leaking city gas.

The Incense Grenade passed right by Azalea without being shot down and collided with the other building wall behind her. It bounced, rotated, and then detonated.

“Here we go, Sekurtiti! Get ready!!”

The summoner and vessel would be automatically taken the point of the detonation, but they could not let their guard down. If there was a piece of rebar sticking out in their path, they would be skewered. There was also a risk of Azalea’s gunfire hitting them. Physical attacks would only be negated once they landed on the wall, hit a White Thorn, and summoned a Material.

Their risk was the same as those summoners who he and Biondetta had taken out with their Blood-Signs earlier. He could not help but sense his own genes in Azalea now.

But that proved to be the least of his worries.

The child had exceeded her parent’s expectations.

Nothing happened. Even though the Incense Grenade did detonate.

Even Kyousuke was caught off guard by this. He had thrown the Incense Grenade and it had detonated while he was viewing her with the naked eye and while she was within range of the Artificial Sacred Ground, but the Artificial Sacred Ground he needed did not appear. Nor did he feel the tugging that ignored gravity.

(It failed!? But why would it-…?)

Before he could verbalize his question, that skilled summoner worked out the answer. There was only one explanation for this unreasonable result.

Repliglass was a bestselling weapon all around the world that used silicon stem cells to take on the structure of plants and animals.

And a summoner could only fight a Summoning Ceremony battle with another human. He could destroy a tank or fighter that happened to be inside the same Artificial Sacred Ground and a dragon’s breath or a stone thrown by a giant could leave the Artificial Sacred Ground and destroy the city, but he could not open an Artificial Sacred Ground by targeting a completely unmanned weapon.

Which meant…

“I thought that thing exposed too much skin for a logical and efficient weapon. I mean, it uses a swimsuit-like console suit without a helmet to cover the face or head. But I was wrong.”

The weapon calmly moving horizontally through the sky with its dragonfly wings once more targeting him.

No, the heavily-armed Meganeura was not the dragonfly shape itself.

“Is that tomb raider what I think it is…?”

There was another reason why Sekurtiti’s techniques as a leader had showed no effect.

Simply put…

“Is the whole thing Repliglass, ''including Azalea inside it''!? Did she realize an Incense Grenade wouldn’t work against an entirely unmanned girl-shaped weapon!? Dammit!!”

Immediately afterwards, the inhuman Repliglass modelled after a ''human'' opened fire.