Editing The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume8 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 5===

As soon as they opened the door, they ran into a security guard in a navy blue uniform who ran around a corner in the corridor.

He may have thought no one would see as long as there was no window nearby because he held a handgun customized for full-auto.

(Tch! So are we finally seeing the Illegal soldiers who are using the ship’s uniforms!?)

But Kyousuke did not face him head on.

He adjusted the angle of the waterproof steel door just before the merciless rapid-fire attack began. A clay model worth millions of yen shattered atop its rectangular pedestal, but Kyousuke was not focused on the horizontal downpour of bullets. A door built to withstand powerful water pressure was enough to block those.

What mattered was the ridiculously loud gunshots.

That was the natural result of firing in a closed space. The guard was knocked out by the wall of noise he himself had created.

“Let’s go, Olivia.”

“How did you do that? Ricocheting?”

He had not done anything so dangerous. Summoners needed decent spatial senses to handle the White Thorns and Petals with their Blood-Sign. If he adjusted the locations and angles of objects with a focus on how and where the soundwaves would be reflected, he could focus the noise on a single point like gathering sunlight with a concave mirror. That transformed it into a powerful nonlethal weapon.

Whenever they ran across an enemy, he would open a nearby door, knock down the ceiling panels with his Blood-Sign, and otherwise interfere with the reflecting soundwaves.

Each time, the brawny guards would collapse to the floor with amusing ease. He would approach the enemy while their limbs trembled like a dying insect and he would kick their handgun far away before hurrying on.

When the pursuing enemy was using projectile weapons, they could not use the elevator shaft again. They would have nowhere to escape if the enemy fired down at them while they were climbing up the ladder in that narrow shaft. That meant they had to leave straight through a security gate. They really did have break through.

And the enemy seemed to have figured out his trick.

When he saw a guard wearing something like headphones over his ears and attaching a silencer thicker than the gun barrel itself, Kyousuke grabbed Olivia under his arm.

“Hyah!”

“Quiet.”

He ducked around a random corner to avoid the muffled gunfire, opened a nearby switchboard, and messed with a fuse. A high-voltage current leaked out, he heard a loud sparking sound around the corner, and the storm of gunfire ceased. This was a production studio using the massive power produced by a nuclear engine. The excess power alone was plenty destructive.

Even after seeing the fate of the guard who had taken the lead, the enemy would only hesitate for a few seconds.

This was not a permanent solution.

Still holding Olivia, Kyousuke kicked open a nearby door. The sign had called it a “multi-purpose conference room”, but it was really an entertainment room. A movie theater screen surrounded you with over-the-top audio and video while you pedaled an exercise bike to produce plenty of adrenaline and dopamine.

Kyousuke combated the gunfire by turning off the lights to give them the cover of darkness. Olivia did not sound all that nervous in his arm as she made a suggestion.

“Why not summon a Material and wipe them all out?”

“It is true those are Illegal, but they’re ''still'' just normal soldiers. They aren’t even Repliglass soldiers protected by thick armor. Doing that would kill them.”

Kyousuke answered her while using a different exit to run back out into the corridor.

In addition to that, this was a windowless space located below the water level. The biggest threat would be if the enemy lowered some thick emergency shutters to cut off all escape and then flooded the area with seawater. The assistance of a Material and the protective circle only lasted 10 minutes, so they had no real defense against that tactic. He wanted to escape above the water level before the enemy came up with that idea like they had figured out how to use headphones and silencers to deal with his soundwave counterattack, so he wanted to avoid anything that would keep them in one place.

When restricting himself to nonlethal methods, the enemy always held the initiative. While making sporadic counterattacks to reduce the number of guards, Kyousuke and Olivia were driven from place to place.

(I see. So this is where we’re headed.)

Kyousuke noticed something and actually let the enemy lure him in a certain direction.

He tackled open a thick soundproof door and found a large space with 30m sides. It was hard to tell with the red lighting, but the floor and wallpaper were pure white.

“''The filming studio''…”

They had reached the very back of the ship, so they were directly below that party hall.

The enemy was already waiting for them.

One was a sexy woman with short hair, a black leather jacket that left her navel exposed, and a tight skirt. Her outfit screamed “prison guard” so much it seemed somehow fake. The other was a little girl with wavy hair dyed purple. She wore a comical white and black striped prisoner outfit and had a ball and chain attached to her ankle. A criminal scent hung over them both, but that may have been because they were an Illegal duo.

The female prison guard puffed on a ridiculously-thick cigar and spun a tonfa in her hand. It extended into a Blood-Sign more than 150cm long.

Kyousuke knew of a high Award-earner that matched this description.

Illegal Award 887, Eisen Rosen.

Despite their flashy appearance, they must have been faithful to their job. After all, they had agreed to work as guards under Illegal Award 999’s direct command even though he would attack enemy and ally alike.

Only two simple words left the mouth holding the cigar.

“Game on.”

She held a unique Incense Grenade made by sticking a rolled-up yellow journalism newspaper in the top of a small liquor bottle. She then used the tip of the thick cigar to light a blue flame in the wet paper.

And she threw it.

Before it could hit the floor and break, Kyousuke flicked a glass pellet from his finger and fired it like a bullet with a horizontal swing of his Blood-Sign. That was a piece of food for Phosphorous. The Artificial Sacred Ground would be established as soon as the bottle broke, so that seemed like a wasted action. The sound of shattering glass followed.

But it was not wasted.

Kyousuke’s pellet shot right past the airborne Molotov cocktail, ignored both the summoner and vessel, and broke through the wall there. No, it broke through the reinforced glass of the window embedded in the wall.

Once it hit the lever on the control panel there, a change occurred.

There were several loud crashing sounds overhead. The ceiling above separated this lower level area from the party hall above, but that split in two and transformed the two rooms into one giant space running vertically through the ship. Then a rumbling rose from below. The floor was really a fine wire mesh and there was a 30m propeller below that.

This was why Kyousuke had felt a creaking below his feet when he first stepped into the party hall.

An instantaneous blast of wind blew up from the floor.

Kyousuke and the others were freed from the bonds of gravity and flew straight up.

They flew more than 10 meters in no time.

The facility was built like a wind tunnel for testing the air resistance of cars or airplanes, except it was built vertically. It was actually a giant indoor skydiving facility that allowed them to film actors in midair scenes before adding in the high-quality VFX. To make the best use of the limited space on the ship, the single space could be divided up into multiple small studios or one large studio.

Of course, all of this also applied to the Molotov cocktail as it tried to fall to the floor.

As long as the small liquor bottle did not hit the ground and break, the Artificial Sacred Ground would not be established.

“Kh!!”

“You seem like the silent type, but shouldn’t you be more surprised than that?”

Luckily, the party above had already ended and the tables and dishes had been removed.

With indoor skydiving that used a powerful blast of wind from below, controlling air resistance was everything. You could ascend by spreading out your body to catch the wind and you could descend by folding up your body to reduce the resistance. By changing how you positioned your right and left arms and legs, you could intentionally put yourself in a tornado-like spin.

The lack of footholds was irrelevant.

While rapidly rotating, Kyousuke swung his Blood-Sign toward the side of the female prison guard’s head.

The summoner was still not used to this situation and had that weak point defenselessly exposed, but then a metal ball larger than a human head got in the way. Only after it deflected his attack did he realize what had happened. The girl in a striped prisoner’s uniform was flipped upside down and spinning like she was using capoeira. That had sent her ball and chain into Kyousuke’s Blood-Sign. Even after her defensive maneuver was complete, the girl with purple-dyed hair did not stop spinning. She was trying to break the palm-sized liquor bottle as it flew through the air.

“Oh, no you don’t!!”

Olivia then dropped down like a shooting star. Sinceria had said the girl was taking a program for figure skaters, so she may have had excellent balance and known how to spin quickly. And her small hands held a blunt weapon as effective as the metal ball. She was using the thick chain to swing down the bag-sized padlock she normally wore over her shoulder.

“Kh.”

The prisoner uniform girl avoided a direct hit by deflecting it with the metal ball, but she could not fully negate the shock to her body.

While Kyousuke caught Olivia in midair, the other vessel had no such safety. The momentum of the deflection remained with her and she slammed back-first into a nearby wall.

It was a stereotypical failure with indoor skydiving and it could even mean a broken bone.

“Fan!?”

The female prison guard shouted what seemed to be a name, but the striped prisoner girl did not respond. She must have passed out because she stared straight up with dead eyes with her limbs sprawled out around her.

And there was only one fate for a summoner who had lost their vessel.

Kyousuke grabbed the small liquor bottle with a yellow journalism paper stuck inside.

“You can have this back.”

“Kh!?”

The enemy did not have time to prepare herself.

A corner of the palm-sized bottle was swung down toward the female prison guard’s head and she was knocked out with the sound of shattering glass.

With a bluish-white flame that lacked any heat at all, the Artificial Sacred Ground belatedly appeared, so Kyousuke and Olivia ignored the intense wind and were sucked to the closest wall. Each level of the studio apparently had a monitoring room. Kyousuke carried the summoner in one arm and let Olivia carry the vessel as he fired a Repliglass pellet toward the reinforced glass that was now below their feet. That hit the lever and stopped the wind.

“This will only last 90 seconds. Let’s retrieve those two and then escape from the studio.”

He broke through the reinforced glass with his Blood-Sign and jumped into the monitoring room. Then the Chain state ended and the Artificial Sacred Ground vanished. If they had remained in the studio, they would have fallen several dozen meters.

They were in the top level monitoring room, so they had luckily escaped the lowest level.

“Now we need to get to the submarine hidden below this ship, right?”

“Right. Once we collect the things we left in the leisure room, let’s head back to the submersible.”

Kyousuke confirmed Olivia’s understanding of the situation.

“That’s when the fun really begins.”