The investigation into Helios Biotech was not progressing as Kujo had hoped. Just as Crow had told him, the corporation’s security level was abnormally high, and with the limited resources Iris could spare, even reaching information on the company’s outer perimeter remained difficult. The public-facing corporate databases were protected by layer upon layer of firewalls. Even tracing a single record of a published patent application forced Iris through countless dummy servers, and the connection itself was cut off before she could get anywhere near the original source. Iris divided her processing resources and continued gathering peripheral information during the empty hours late at night, but what she obtained was far too fragmented to come anywhere close to forming a complete picture.
Day after day, she continued the investigation in the gaps between assignments. But meaningful results remained elusive. Iris’s mechanisms showed no signs of impatience or disappointment in response. She simply continued searching for the next avenue, methodically and without pause. She eliminated unlikely routes one by one, then selected the next-best move from among the slim remaining probabilities. For a human, it might have been called pointless labor. To Iris, it was merely the fact that there remained a subject whose calculations needed to continue.
It was during one of those routine investigations that an unforeseen situation arose.
They had been tracking a suspect in a theft case and were about to take him into custody after cornering him in an alley. Cut off from the daytime bustle, the alley’s view was narrowed by waste containers stacked along both sides, forming a dead end with nowhere to run. With his escape routes gone, the suspect violently resisted, swinging a knife he had been concealing. The blade caught the faint light of a fluorescent lamp and glinted dully.
“Don’t move!”
Even knowing how dangerous an armed suspect was, Kujo had no reason to back away. The instant he closed the distance, the suspect’s blade caught his left arm. After the dry sound of tearing fabric came the sensation of skin and flesh being sliced open. It happened in an instant. Bright blood sprayed in an arc, scattering red droplets across the alley’s concrete. The amount of blood made it obvious that the wound was deep, but Kujo did no more than grimace for a moment. Years of instinct in the field made him prioritize assessing the situation before the pain.
“—ngh!”
Iris’s reaction was clearly beyond human reflexes. The moment Kujo was struck by the blade, Iris had already closed the distance between herself and the suspect. She caught the knife in his second, raised strike with her bare hand. There was a hard sound as the blade touched her skin, but no blood flowed. The high-strength skeletal material beneath her artificial skin had stopped the blade’s penetration after only a few millimeters.
“Resistance with a bladed weapon confirmed.”
Iris spoke in a voice devoid of emotional fluctuation. She twisted the suspect’s wrist upward and made him drop the knife onto the alley floor. The shrill sound of metal striking stone rang out. The suspect let out a scream-like cry as Iris forced him facedown. She subdued the large adult male’s resistance with a fluid ease as though she were handling a feather.
“Subdual complete. Checking the bleeding site. Kujo, please remain still.”
After handcuffing the subdued suspect’s arms, Iris continued processing and took another look at Kujo’s left arm. She had already been almost certain from her calculations that Kujo’s limbs were not biological tissue, but prosthetic bodies. Yet the blood continuing to flow before her eyes was indistinguishable from that of a living human. Viscosity, coloration, time to coagulation—every measurement matched the human-tissue data stored in Iris’s memory perfectly.
(Calculation result updated. This prosthetic body was manufactured with a structure virtually indistinguishable from living tissue...)
The precision was astonishing. Though it was a prosthetic body, blood actually circulated through it, and an injury caused it to bleed. Iris could easily imagine how advanced the technology required to achieve such a structure must have been. A network of blood vessels, a circulatory system mimicking a heartbeat, minute pump mechanisms to support it—not one of those things resembled existing mass-produced prosthetic-body technology. Who had invested technology on this scale, and for what purpose? In a corner of her calculations, that question mark quietly flickered.
“It’s not a serious injury. Leave it. Your hand’s... torn open too...”
Kujo said it dismissively while pressing his right hand against the wound. Iris looked down at her right hand, but the damage was nothing more than a tear in artificial skin, without any accompanying pain. The white synthetic material visible beneath the epidermis looked like an inorganic scar. Kujo’s injury, however, was clearly deep and could not be dealt with through first aid alone. Already, the blood loss had begun to give his face a faintly bluish cast.
“No. Kujo’s condition has higher priority. My damage does not affect my function.”
“Not necessary.”
“Kujo.”
Iris’s voice carried an unusual force. Rather than calculated words, her tone seemed to contain something else—something close to an impulse Iris herself had not yet named.
“If left untreated, the amount of blood Kujo has lost may cause a decline in his level of consciousness in twelve minutes. Please receive treatment at a hospital immediately. I will accompany you.”
“...Do whatever you want.”
Kujo looked displeased, but Iris’s position did not waver. In the end, Kujo reluctantly accepted Iris’s accompaniment. With the sound of a police cruiser’s siren approaching behind them, the two left the alley.
The designated hospital was one of the hospitals operated by Helios Biotech. The instant Iris saw the corporate logo displayed inside, a faint stir arose within her processing systems, but she did not let it show. It was an ironic turn of events: after being unable to grasp even a clue to her long-standing target, she had now stepped into its inner sanctum in an unexpected way. Iris quietly recorded that fact and, without changing her expression, committed the hospital’s layout to memory. The locations of surveillance cameras, the number of emergency exits, the placement of security guards. Information gathering in preparation for an emergency had always been conducted in parallel, separate from her original objective.
Kujo was taken into a treatment room and received more than a dozen stitches. As the sharp odor of disinfectant filled the air, the wound was carefully sutured under anesthesia. Iris was permitted to wait in the hallway, where she continued silently watching through the glass as the medical needle and thread gleaming in the doctor’s hands pierced the skin at regular intervals.
“Keep the arm immobilized for the time being. If you move it forcibly, the sutures may open.”
At the doctor’s direction, Kujo’s left arm was wrapped tightly in bandages and then secured in a sling. A faint stain of blood could be seen seeping through the white bandages.
“...I can’t exactly move properly like this.”
Kujo muttered unhappily. Although it was not his dominant arm, the treatment severely restricted his freedom of movement, and he could not hide his dissatisfaction. He clenched and unclenched his fist with one hand, then lightly shifted the arm as though checking how sluggish his movements were.
“Rest is the highest priority.”
Iris said this, and Kujo answered only with a click of his tongue.
They had finished treatment and were preparing to return to headquarters when it happened. The lobby where they waited for the billing procedures held only a scattering of patients finishing their evening appointments, and a calm atmosphere lingered in the air.
Suddenly, a sharp alarm rang throughout the hospital. Dry electronic tones echoed again and again, followed by a tense voice over the ceiling speakers.
“—All staff and patients are to remain where they are immediately. I repeat.”
It was an unfamiliar voice, distinct from the hospital announcements. Mechanical yet somehow carrying an intimidating edge, it froze the atmosphere in the lobby in an instant. Soon, shouts and screams erupted from the direction of the front lobby. The sound of breaking glass followed, then the heavy crash of something falling.
“What happened?”
The moment Kujo tensed, several armed men came rushing into the lobby. Clad in black combat uniforms with the lower halves of their faces concealed by masks, the group sealed off the entrances in an instant with coordinated movements. Pointing their firearms at everyone around them, they herded the patients, visitors, and hospital staff into a single location one after another. Elderly patients leaning on canes and inpatients dragging IV stands alike had guns shoved in their faces without mercy and were driven, screaming and crawling, toward the designated corner.
“Don’t move! I’ll shoot anyone who resists!”
Kujo and Iris were also quickly gathered as hostages with the patients waiting for appointments and the injured people who had been there. The lobby filled with the screams and sobs of people terrified by the sudden crisis. A mother holding her child cried silently, while an old man clasped his trembling hands in front of his chest. Someone’s belongings, trampled by people trying to flee in panic, lay scattered across the floor.
“Shut down every operational android deployed throughout the hospital! All of them! Right now!”
One of the attackers shouted at a terrified hospital employee. With a gun pressed against the employee’s forehead, the command left the employee operating a terminal with trembling hands. The hospital’s reception and guidance androids, along with the androids assisting with patient transport, collapsed one after another. They fell like puppets whose supports had been taken away, a sight that seemed almost like a portent of something to come.
“That white one’s no exception.”
The attacker’s gaze turned toward Iris, standing beside Kujo. His gun slowly rose, the muzzle aligning with Iris’s chest.
“Iris, run—”
Before Kujo could finish, one of the attackers raised his gun and pulled the trigger without hesitation.
Dry gunshots rang out again and again. Echoing through the cramped lobby, the sound spread with ear-splitting force. Bullets tore mercilessly into Iris’s body. Kujo heard with brutal clarity the sounds of rounds punching through her armor and savagely destroying her internal mechanisms. Fragments mixed with sparks flew from the holes bored into her silver-white exterior, while the sound of her actuators warped into a fractured whine.
“Iris...!”
Her silver-white body collapsed as though its strings had been cut. She crumpled from the knees, her upper body tilting limply before finally lying still on the cold floor. Once again, Kujo was forced to watch the light fade from someone’s eyes right before him.
For the second time.
Three years earlier—the sight of Akira Nagumo losing his strength before Kujo’s eyes. The memory of that day flashed violently through Kujo’s mind. A body collapsing, light fading, and his own helplessness. Powerlessness, despair, and guilt that could never be washed away. The same scene was unfolding before him again now.
(I failed to protect her again—)
His breathing grew shallow. His field of vision narrowed. The screams around him and the shouts flying back and forth reached him distorted, as though from the bottom of a distant body of water. The attackers holding their guns seemed to overlap with the terrorist androids from that day. The same black outlines, the same merciless muzzles, the same lives being taken away—the boundary between memory and reality rapidly melted together inside Kujo.
“Hey, you there! Don’t move!”
An attacker’s roar reached him, but it sounded distant and hazy to Kujo’s ears. His mind was being dragged into a deep darkness, to the point that he could no longer even feel the pain in his left arm. His fingertips grew cold, and the edges of his vision blurred black. Even Kujo himself felt it all as though it were happening to someone else.
Looking down at Iris’s collapsed body, Kujo desperately fought to keep himself from dropping to his knees. He clenched his teeth and braced his right hand against the wall. Even remaining standing now required every ounce of strength he had.
But inside him, the time that had remained stopped for three years began to creak violently into motion once more.