Editing The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume4 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 6===

The rest did not take long.

Pandemonium had “cannibalized” their own people, so they had used up a lot of their own summoners. And even when they sent all of their precious Divine-classes after him, they could not defeat Kyousuke. There was simple reason for this: when up against someone he knew he could beat, he let the battle stretch on as long as he could.

And during the few battles he fought, he hit plenty of Petals into the Spots and built up his Material as much as possible.

That ultimately gave him the Unexplored-class Lady of Purple Lightning which he used to mow down all of the Divine-classes who ignorantly challenged him as a group. The girl sat in a run-down wheelchair with her sickly pale skin exposed by some highly revealing purple clothing. Each time she pointed her index finger, a beam-like attack would reap every enemy at once.

“Whoa!? That’s the Lady of Purple Lightning. Did we fall for his bait!?”

“It’s no good. All the losers wandering around are in the way! Move them to the side!!”

“Ah, wait. Don’t look this way! Why meeee!?”

After some fighting, they seemed to decide this was not worth it and the summoners from the three major powers began to retreat. Even if Kyousuke’s Material had reached the Unexplored-class, it would still vanish once his Chain state ran out of time.

But Kyousuke did not bother pursuing. With the number of enemy summoners and vessels so greatly reduced, they could not “cannibalize” each other like before. As time passed, their situation would only grow worse.

And he had somewhere he needed to go.

He let the summoners flee and made his way to the Pandemonium’s central processing core. The Chain state ran out on the way and Himekawa Mika returned to her human form, but that did not matter. Now that they knew their “cannibalism” would not work, it would be some time before the Pandemonium summoners thought up another plan. And if there were any sporadic attacks on the way, he could defeat them like normal.

The passageway was filled with a strangely unnerving rumbling with the regularity of a pulse.

(A Repliglass heart reactor? An artery must be running by nearby. That means there must be something here that consumes a ton of energy.)

They met almost no resistance.

Their footsteps sounded loudly on a steel catwalk. The scene below the wire mesh at their feet made it easy to forget this was a limited space inside a fortress. They were more than 10 meters up and the area below was covered in strange transparent spheres. Each one was about the size of a balance ball, some kind of glowing orange core flashed at the center, and several thick black cables attached to the outside. Altogether, it looked like a clump of giant roe or a type of parallel processor.

“Let’s hurry, Kyousuke-kun.”

“Right…”

He focused ahead again and ran toward the final space.

Shiroyama Kyousuke stood in front of an especially thick door as if to a bank vault.

“This is the processing core according to the diagram. The vessels are waiting beyond here!”

“…”

Kyousuke traced his hand along the final door.

He could have broken through it with the firepower of an Unexplored-class, but his Chain had not lasted. He had to use something else.

“It uses a vacuum locking mechanism. Those use the surrounding air pressure to close the door.”

Fortunately, they had acquired detailed plans, so they had information on the door’s mechanism and design. And no matter how sturdy the door, it could not be made into a solid piece of metal without a single screw or welding point. It had to be made of multiple pieces, so it could be dismantled.

“But if we send air into the vacuum layer, the difference in pressure will return to zero. Then the door will open. We can do this. It’s simple. We need to remove a panel and apply heat at a spot that the sensors won’t notice… No matter how fancy the system, a rubber seal is the best way to make it airtight. If the heat reaches that and melts it, the air will flow through the gap and into the vacuum layer!”

His Repliglass Blood-Sign came in handy at times like this.

It could move like a living creature, so if he supported it a little, it could spin like a drill and catch paper or cloth on fire from friction. If he used the beak-like part on the silicon pellet insertion slot, it could even remove screws.

With a loud metallic noise, the door slowly opened outwards and Kyousuke stepped back so as not to be crushed. The sealed processing core ever so gradually came into view.

This was the turning point.

He had to take the 353 vessels with him to escape Pandemonium and he had to think about what to do after that. It would all be meaningless if the vessels were recaptured after he rescued them. It was possible this would require taking on the entire Deltaston family.

But that line of thinking proved naïve.

As the door opened wide, he found no one at all inside the vast space within.

(50 x 50 x…)

It was a giant die-like space with fifty meter sides. Each of the six surfaces was crammed full of geometric patterns with lines as fine as hair. Red, green, and yellow lights pulsed intermittently through them.

(…49.998?)

But that was all.

There were traces of something. Chairs sat in concentric circles like at an international conference. They had belts attached like at the dentist. If all of those were filled, it was possible that more than a hundred people could have fit inside. But they were empty. It was only a drearily empty space.

Where had his assumptions gone wrong?

Had the diagram been wrong or an intentional decoy?

Had everyone been moved elsewhere because Kyousuke and Himekawa’s plan had been discovered?

Or…

“I have one question.”

Kyousuke slowly turned around.

The ponytail woman in a dark, dark navy blue tight skirt suit had not said anything for a while.

He spoke to Himekawa Mika as the decorations indicating her various sins jangled from her neck.

“''What is your true goal? Were there really 353 vessels here!?''”