Principal Fujimura came to UTokyo early in the morning to water and trim the plants. He didn't expect that just a few minutes after he arrived, there would be literally eight police cars showing up on the road before the front entrance of the school. A man dressed in dark blue comes up to him looking all serious with a police notebook in one hand and a search warrant in the other, telling him that the investigation of the disappearance of Professor Suzukawa is ongoing, but also, Suzukawa is suspected of doing illegal experimentation and research.
It's necessary to search the places which Suzukawa often goes to in order to find the truth and prove that UTokyo has nothing to do with all of this.
"Hope you don't mind too much." A man dressed in black puts his left hand on his chest and bows at the standard ninety-degrees to the principal. "We might be coming here often for the next few days. I'm Kuroda, a private detective asked to help with the investigation."
Although the exact situation isn't all that clear to him, the principal has no choice but to put his beloved gardening hobby to the side for now and let the officers get to work.
"I see you've gotten into character pretty quickly, Fu..."
"Shh," he whispers as he brings his pointer finger to the lips, "Miai-san don't forget, my name's Kuroda."
Upon hearing this, Miai smiles. "Of course, I know what I'm doing."
As far as Miai can remember, this person...Ou Futoumiya always seems to be surrounded by mysteries which others cannot see through. Maybe it's because he has never stopped acting for the past thirty years, he always knows how to put on a perfect show for others.
No matter under what circumstances, no matter the conditions, and no matter who he has to face….for him, it's all the same. The only thing that matters is the mission.
Sometimes Miai's just really curious, this man who had the sense of "self" taken away from him from birth but also was granted with everything else, does he have anything that he cannot let go of? Is there anything, that serves as the real purpose as to why he lives as a person, as an individual?
Even if there is, that's probably something that Miai won't ever get to know about for this lifetime, even if they've already known each other for nearly a decade.
Even his like for black is probably just because for its convenience to camouflage into the night, which also serves useful for keeping himself alive during the process of any mission.
Miai has no idea what in the world Futoumiya could be thinking when he decided to bring thirty-eight people along with them. Not to mention, who knows if it's a coincidence or not, there's at least three officers who have connections with Tahou. Something that he can pretty know for sure, is the fact that Tahou rarely gets so involved in matters of the outside world, at least not to the point that they're willing to gather so many members of Tahou who serve as policemen and possibly risk leaking their identities. Which means that this case shouldn't be as easy as it may seem on the surface, at least he can't imagine how serious an illegal experiment and research done by just Suzukawa can get.
Who could it be that wills to spend all that money to have them deal with this, and even have a member of T20 get involved with this work himself? He surely has no clue.
Twenty-three out of thirty-eight people are responsible for searching Suzukawa's office and the classrooms where he teaches, while the other fifteen are responsible for every other classroom, every hallway, essentially every corner of UTokyo. This kind of setup focuses the investigation mainly where Suzukawa is the most likely to leave clues and also accounts for secondary scopes.
Sadly, a whole day of investigation amounts to pretty much the same at Suzukawa's home, just a bunch of books and info relating to biology, especially genomics, and some sci-fi movies as well. There isn't any evidence of actual experiment, at least not any relating to the situation that the client described.
Of course they saw it coming, so they're not too surprised about the results.
Yet after looking over their working efficiency, people do feel a little down in mood. That is, all but one person who not only doesn't feel a little depressed but even sort of delighted, which happens to be Futoumiya. Miai couldn't tell, whether or not this sort of delight happens to be a delight that comes from facing a good challenge. But judging from the mission, being stuck in this situation isn't a good thing for it may affect what Tahou has to gain.
Come to think of it, it seems as if this man has never had any type of fear that a normal person would, which might have something to do which the way which he was taught to think and trained when he was little.
What normal people would feel happy over, he feels nothing, and what normal people find frustrating, instead happens to be his entertainment?
That's an empty body walking in the world of the living dead. He moves his hands which have the strings that direct them, and naturally takes control of them so that they work for him until everyone cannot fight anymore, until blood decorates the whole place.
He will turn to see what he has done and smile as he directs those corpses forward, until the next war begins.
He knows very well what he's doing, and he's surely aware of the fact that it's infinite and that he has no way of escaping.
Did he choose his life, or did this life choose him? Not that it actually matters all that much—
"Right, all we have to do is find that guy, Suzukawa." As if having a conversation with the person in front of him, he leans on the mirror, and stares at those eyes. "It doesn't matter who chose who."
Once again, he steps into the clinic, he steps into the underground tunnel illuminated by torches, he steps onto that floor tile, he steps onto that second underground floor illuminated by white lighting, and arrives at the lab to sit in the same old seat of The Dream Exploring Machine.
Before falling asleep, he takes a look at the surveillance room. Although it's just for a short moment, but indeed he does see that creepy strange smile on Futoumiya's face—
Kaito Kuroba happens to be sitting on that chair again, only this time he sees that the seat across from him belonging to Suzukawa happens to be empty. Time flies by quickly, and with every movement of the second hand does the sound travel into his ears. When the time of waiting gets long, boredom starts to dominate, so Kuroba starts observing the design of the chair. First the material, the material seems to be some special type of wood. It feels familiar, but he can't quite get what it is. Then there's the handle—this is when Professor Suzukawa come back with a pile of papers.
Originally, Kuroba was sitting up straight with his arms on the handles and chatting with the professor pretty excitedly. Yet just within a few minutes after the professor came back, Kuroba already entered dreamland—
Coming right after Kuroba happens to be Kudo. Unlike Kuroba, he has to force himself to sit up straight and face the professor of the college that he graduated from with the most professional attitude, as if he's not all that tired.
Yet except for the first few minutes, Kudo doesn't hear any of the other things all that clearly at all. That boring monotone voice of the professor's slowly drives him into sleep.
Just like yesterday's dream. They both show up to their interviews and then get dragged into the lab by the professor. There's no excess memory that they can recall—
A slightly darkened white light shines on the autopsy table. A white sheet covers the person who not only doesn't move but also can't even breath anymore. A hand uncovers the sheet to see that below it is already a pale white corpse with a nasty blurred face which cannot be distinguished.
That hand approaches that overly rough face and slowly goes by the face features which cannot be identified to feel the temperature of death—
He suddenly wakes up from his dream. The lighting is still pretty dark like before. The machinery and the people, nothing here has changed.
"Tsukiya-san," he says as he breathes heavily, "I don't remember seeing that corpse ever," and then he takes a few more deep breaths, "what's with that scene?"
She smoothes her hair back and then holds her chin. "Well, there was about fifteen minutes of the screen being completely dark," she says as she takes a peek at the electricity meter and verifies that this time they did crank up the intensity of electricity. She then smiles in a way which people cannot tell what's the reason behind it. "It may be a precognitive dream, who knows."
Upon hearing this, he doesn't know how he should respond. When he finally gets ahold of things, he immediately runs out with Futoumiya following behind him—
Laying on the cold floor of the autopsy room is a newbie forensic pathologist, Hasegawa-san. That white light shines down on her, making her look even paler, and as beautiful as sleeping beauty.
As for the person on the autopsy table, it's a man whose face has been beaten to the point that no features can be distinguished. Just two hours before, Inspector Kudo left for an unknown reason. During this time period, Zoukai Takahashi appeared to have committed suicide by banging his head on the wall. Hasegawa originally took Takahashi's body onto the autopsy table so that she could dissect, inspect, and record on a first hand basis to prevent anyone from complicating things. Who knew, there would be someone who would break into the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, knock out an assistant forensic pathologist, kill Hasegawa who was mainly responsible for inspecting Takahashi's body, steal Hasegawa's body, and then just abandon him on the streets after ruining his face.
Within just two short hours, two lives have vanished under their eyes just like that, gone in an instant like the wind. As for the suspect that they caught, he bit open the poison capsule in his mouth the moment they caught him.
Futoumiya opens up an email to read that the precognitive dream did become reality. Then he closes his laptop and drives to UTokyo.
At this time, the investigation team that Miai leads still happens to be investigating in shifts, although they still haven't made any new discoveries.
Futoumiya silently stands in the middle of Suzukawa's office. Over and over again, he calmly observes the place with no hurry. Three minutes later, he stops and just stands there thinking. Two minutes later, a smile appears on his face. Then he requests to get a metal detector.
Although Miai doesn't really get what this person happens to be thinking about, he still orders people to do as Futoumiya says—
"Fujimura-san," Kuroda says as he observes the expression on the principal's face with great interest, "you seem to be awfully surprised."
Everyone here including Miai and Kuroda, a total of forty people responsible for investigation, all look towards Principal Fujimura. In those people, there's thirty-nine pairs of eyes awaiting some sort of confession. Yet, he just stops acting surprised with an exaggerated expression, but instead says very modestly: "I know nothing of this."
"Well then, Miai-san, it's fine," he says with a friendly smile, "this should have nothing to do with him." As he says so, he takes another look at Fujimura. "But, if it does by any chance, we shall go through all the necessary procedures in order to ensure justice." With that being said, he starts to investigate the newly found lab.
Just like how it was in the client's dream, this place has a bunch of stuff like materials and info, along with some smaller machines and blueprints of new inventions; the atmosphere seems rather unlively.
The main invention is of course this human-fusing machine standing in the middle of the lab, and also a tool of evil and sin which tortured Kudo and Kuroba like no tomorrow within a short twenty-four hours. Although Suzukawa didn't record down the way that can return them two back to normal, but using what they've found along with the technology that Tahou has, they should be able to solve this problem of the client. Yet, the devilish creator of this catastrophe, that professor, is still on the loose. Without finding that professor, they cannot truly bring back justice to the client.
As he thinks of this, Futoumiya steps forward to see the laptop computer in the front of the human-fusing machine that's surrounded by a bunch of officers, and then carefully uses his gloved hands to press down on the on button.
Seeing that nothing happens, he checks to see that the outlet, the plug, that there's no problem with these sorts of things. Then he inspects the machine some more, only to reach the conclusion that the data and controls have all been broken.
He smiles some more. Like he suspected, it's not that simple.