Akira enjoys some fresh air and exercise
She snuck out through an emergency exit—avoiding the RC scan gates on her way towards the perimeter. As she walked, she took a couple practice swings with her new weapon to get a feel for it.
The fresh breeze and daylight perked her up quickly. It was astounding how pleasant the air was after just over a day without traffic.
When she passed a couple of the groups on patrol, she exchanged a bit of chitchat—checking in to see if there was any friction between the investigators and the ghouls as they did the rounds. Everyone seemed to be getting along alright in the face of their common enemy.
She had a suspicion that the ghouls were taking advantage of the…abundant…food sources. None of them appeared on-edge with hunger the way they were underground. At least they were discreet enough about it. Normally that would be a headache for her but under the circumstances, it was saving her from a different, larger headache.
The monsters were drawn to the growing activity. Mindless with hunger and violence as they were, they attacked alone or in disorganized groups. There had been a couple of skirmishes and minor casualties, but all-in-all their defenses held.
She eventually ran into Fura pacing around as he watched his team—and a couple of ghouls tagging along at a slight distance—work on pushing cars out of the way to clear a street.
"This is a terrible habit. Don't ever start. Even if you quit, you'll always be addicted to nicotine. And I keep crawling back every time things get stressful," he said with a puff on his cigarette. "I saw you were back. Brave of you to show your face around here again."
"Are you kidding? I cleared my schedule for this." She sidled up next to him, to stare out at the wreckage and the path that was slowly appearing through it.
"I had to bum a pack from Ui, this time. Couldn't exactly run down to the 7-Eleven. He said we should watch our backs around you, you being a backstabber and all, but there is a slight chance we should cut you some slack."
She sighed at that assessment. "What's your reading here? Honestly."
"We're in survival mode. We're establishing a good perimeter and things are holding steady for now, but these attacks keep chipping away at us. I lost two subordinates to injuries today. They'll be out of commission for a while. A couple of other groups out here had fatalities. As soon as we face an attack with any organization behind it, it won't be pretty."
The radio clipped to his belt crackled. A frantic voice was on the other end. "Incoming—from the south—attacked, needed to retreat—"
Akira held a hand over her eyes to scan the area. "They were attacked from the south, or they'll be headed this way from the south?"
One of Fura's men suddenly started looking animated and pointing his weapon at whatever he'd spotted. "There they are!"
Running up to him, she was looking at what he'd seen—racing towards them, as far as they could see down the ransacked avenue, were the scouts that had radioed ahead. They seemed to be running for their lives.
At their back, gaining on them, was a pack of the monsters.
The hard edge of adrenaline prodded her into full alertness. "This is why you need a good rifle," she muttered. "I could hit half of them before they got in range of our best quinques."
Fura looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "Is that why you've never carried a ukaku-based quinque?"
"If I'm going to carry a long-range weapon, it better be long range," she defended herself. It took energy to carry the weight of a weapon. It ought to be the best weapon for the job.
The point was to stop the fight before it could come to you, after all. Too many investigators were satisfied with ranged quinques that still put them in close quarters with what they were attacking, which seemed less like good strategy and more like showboating. Or at least that was her less-than-popular opinion.
Looking again at the situation, it was easy to do the math. Those investigators wouldn't reach them in time. They'd probably fought with quinques upon their ambush, but they were on the run and none of them appeared in the position to stop sprinting and turn around long enough to get a strike in. They'd be overtaken, long before Fura's team could provide any help.
Except—there was a ghoul with them. She released her whip-like kagune behind her as she ran to blindly lash at the pursuing monsters. One stumbled at the blow, and a two more tripped over the body. It took them a moment to scramble back to their feet.
Akira switched the grip on her polearm from carrying to holding at the ready. "Now they've got a real chance."
Fura shook his head. "They still won't get close enough for us to cover them." He still signaled for his team to ready their weapons.
"Let's go to them."
"We can't abandon the line. Keeping the Main Office secure is more important." He was right. It would be wrong for him to shirk responsibility for his own glory.
I'm not bound by those constraints, though. Tightening her grip on her weapon, she took a couple of steps forwards. "I'll do it myself, then. Be ready." Picking up speed, she settled into an easy dogtrot.
She wasn't out to play the hero, she just didn't want to see anyone lose their lives when they only needed a little extra help.
As soon as she got in shouting distance of the rapidly approaching runners, she called out, "Serpentine!"
It took them a moment for anyone to comprehend her words, but they started running in zigzags and throwing their pursuers into disarray.
Zeroing in on the frontrunning monster, she picked up speed and hefted her quinque higher. She rushed past the nearest fleeing investigator and held her weapon at the ready. The monster racing towards her didn't falter. It screeched through its mouthful of razor-sharp teeth and tried to slash its claws at her.
Akira chose her weapon for a reason, though. The monster couldn't get close enough to strike at her, but it stepped into easy reach of her blade. The flat of her blade parried aside its arm, creating an opening. With one decisive stab, she pierced its chest before it closed in on her and twisted the blade. It exploded into a cloud of dust.
That's new.
She was sure that breathing in the particulate was not good, so she tried not to inhale until she could back away. Even so, she sneezed as she spotted another one rushing by her right, headed for a runaway human who had tripped. She clotheslined it in the throat with the blunt end of her quinque and spun around to separate its head from its body with the sharp end.
This time she was quicker to back away when it dissolved into dust.
While she was occupied, the tide turned and the other fleeing investigators managed to take down the rest of the monsters. She breathed a sigh of relief—that gambit had created enough space to fight instead of run.
Spinning her quinque into a rest position under her arm, she decided—I like this one.
A cough to her side caught her attention. One of the guys she'd just rescued was kneeling on the ground struggling to breathe.
With her free arm, Akira grabbed at his collar and hauled him after her. "Come on, we need to get back to safety."
"I know—can't breathe—"
Fura's squad ushered them back behind the perimeter. She continued to help the ailing man to the main building, towards the auditorium that had been repurposed into a patient center. He wasn't visibly wounded, but he was sapped of strength with each step they took.
She passed him off to a triage nurse at the door of the room. "What's the final damage report for today?" She looked over the room full of groaning patients.
The attendant sounded strained. "There were three really bad attacks in the last couple of hours. We lost most of two squads, and these investigators…They got injured by—those things. The ones who are still speaking said that they breathed something in that did this to them."
She caught sight of a few cancerous protrusions—on faces, chests, arms and legs—that seemed to grow as she watched. "And what did it do to them?"
"I…I think it looks like ROS. Like their RC cell levels suddenly skyrocketed, but they're human, they don't have a kakuho, so the excess cells manifest like…that. I won't lie, I'm starting to get freaked out."
Akira thought. She reached into her pocket and withdrew her last bit of RC suppressant. Handing it off to the medic, she said, "Try this. It's weapons-grade, so you may be able to dilute it down between a few people."
The medic looked at the vial for a moment, squinting at the concentration—hastily scribbled on in sharpie by Kimi ages ago. "Yeah, this might work. Hey! I need some saline and a few needles!"
Nearby, one of the more advanced cases started tossing and turning, wheezing in pain. It sent a shot of ice water through her veins to realize that his eyes looked…not very human anymore.
Akira sneezed again as she walked away.
She tested the door to the exam room. It was unlocked, good. Akira had been involved enough with the Quinx project that she'd seen Dr. Shiba use his fancy equipment to get test results back on the Quinx in less than a day.
Throwing open the door in the back of the room, she looked over the small lab where Shiba did some onsite processing of samples. There, against the wall, was a behemoth of a machine—the size of her whole kitchen counter.
"I supposed it'll need to warm up," she announced to the empty room. A couple of minutes of fumbling around the apparatus, and she located the power switch. The backlighting of all the screens and instrument panels came on, and the sound of the machine booting up to life filled the space.
The medical doctors, including Shiba, were all busy. They probably would be for a while. She didn't necessarily need one, though—just someone with a little more technical know-how than she possessed.
Luckily, a familiar face was sitting outside of the medical area, using a small toolkit to make what repairs he could on the pile of quinques in front of him.
She waited for Chigyo to notice her standing across from him, then cleared her throat when she got impatient. He jumped about a foot in the air. "Chigyo—can I ask you for a favor?"
"Dammit, you're back!" He collected himself. "I guess?"
There was a strange effect to this crisis, that all the bridges she thought were burnt were quickly being repaired out of mutual necessity. "I need your help. Do you know how to run that big machine in Shiba's office that gives you blood test results?"
"Yeah, I think you just load serum samples in a 96-well plate and toss it in the machine…it'll run all the assays automatically and send you the file. Why?"
"I think I need to run a blood panel. On me."
The day wound down. As she slowly walked back up to her office, she idly rubbed at the spot on her arm where she'd just had a very unprofessional blood draw. Neither she nor Chigyo were good at finding a vein. She'd have a huge bruise there the next day. Or maybe not.
Now that there was an organized response, they were pulling back towards the Main Office. The consensus coming from the scientific team was that the Dragon would lie dormant for forty-eight to seventy-two hours after its initial period of activity, and the monsters crawling through the streets were the remnants of that first effusion. Their numbers had steadily decreased through the day, and no one had witnessed any new ones being formed.
A ghoul-heavy patrol was put in rotation on the street, with a web of lookouts positioned farther out and backup support from a couple of investigator teams on call in the main building. Their job was simply to shore up defenses for the night so that everyone else get some much-needed sleep.
They would wait for daylight to launch new missions. Now that they had cleared civilians out of most of the affected areas, they had room to work.
She hadn't crossed paths with the Quinx squad yet, but she'd overheard someone mention that the whole group had holed up in a break room a couple of floors away.
The thought of having any serious conversations just then made her want to shrivel up and die. It was deeply tempting to let cowardice win.
But…it was on the way back to her office. Almost against her will her feet took her in that direction.
She couldn't help stopping and peeking around the doorframe.
The room was dark. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the low light, but eventually she saw the outlines of sleeping bodies on the floor and curled up against the wall.
Mutsuki was curled up on the couch next to Saiko and Hsiao—with Saiko using Hsiao as a pillow. Shinsanpei and Higemaru were sprawled out on the carpet, Urie was sitting at the little table and resting his head on his folded arms.
Just knowing that they had each other and they were making it through was enough for now.
She continued to her former office, where Ayato was half awake outside the door.
"What are you doing here?"
He mumbled, "Wasn't invited to their stupid sleepover, but Yomo said I should stay close." He pointed down the hall.
Yomo was there at the crossroads of two corridors, with a view of the elevators, the emergency exit stairs, and her office door. He was leaning on a decorative ledge, looking a bit more alert than Ayato.
He tilted his chin up at her once, in acknowledgment. She nodded back.
"Thank you, Ayato," she whispered.
He grunted and slouched a little more into the wall.
Cracking the door, she peeked in and saw that not only Ichika, but Hinami, Yoriko, and a few of the orphaned ghoul children had also made their way to her office to crash for the night. Her office was large enough to hold all of them without getting too cramped, but there was a significant risk of stepping on someone.
She searched for where Touka might be in the room, until she heard a whispered, "Hey," behind her.
Akira gasped a lot louder than she wanted. Clearly, she was still on high alert. It was just Touka, holding an armful of pillows. Their patterned fabric matched the decorative couches from the more public areas of the building.
The ghoul quietly tiptoed around her into the room to deposit her stolen pillows, and tiptoed back out.
Taking note of Ayato nodding off at their feet, Touka motioned for Akira to follow her down the hall a little way. She explained in a sotto voice, "No one knew where we were allowed to crash…and we didn't feel safe sleeping anywhere else. It's really freaky, being in this building."
"It's fine. It's not like there are any hotels open near here."
"I think I've found enough pillows and blankets for everyone," Touka whispered. "You, too."
"That was nice of you," Akira yawned out.
"You disappeared after you left to meet Kimi, then I heard your name on the walkie-talkies a couple of hours later—what happened?"
The image of that Oggai boy being flayed open flew through her mind. She shook her head to try and dispel it. "A lot. I'll tell you about it later. What about you? Anything I need to know?"
"Yeah. I took over for you with the map stuff. A couple of CCG people got snippy with me when they noticed. I told them I should be in charge because I've owned and operated my own business, while they only ever followed orders. That shut them up."
Akira fought through another yawn to retort, "There was a little more arguing than you're letting on, wasn't there?"
"Just a little bit. But I needed something to do. I don't want to sit around." Turning to look out the hallway window, maybe even able to see the ghouls circling the building in the darkness, she continued. "I think we have an idea for tomorrow. It got quiet towards the end of the day, so I was holding Ichika and double-checking everything with Hide to make sure the map was accurate, and we were talking…Anyways, Ichika grabbed at my necklace and started playing with the ring. It made me think, Kaneki should have been wearing one just like it."
She fished the chain out of her shirt to display the jewelry in question. "We want to find a satellite phone. Tsukiyama thinks he knows where to get ahold of a bunch of metal detectors. We're going to try and arrange a helicopter delivery tomorrow. There's a helicopter pad on this building, right?"
"Uh…yeah." Akira's mind felt gummed up. It was becoming more and more of a struggle to get the words out, and to keep her eyes open.
"Then I think wherever he ended up in the Dragon, maybe we'll have a way to find him?"
She pressed her palm against the spot between her eyes to try and massage away some of the tension she felt there. "That's a plan with potential. Talk to Kimi and…um…Marude tomorrow to fine-tune it."
"…Akira?"
She was startled by a hand on her shoulder. "What?"
"You closed your eyes and nearly fell over. Let's get some rest." Touka steered her back to the office.
Barely conscious at this point, the ghoul helped her find a spot without stepping on anyone. Akira was given an ill-gotten pillow and some cheap souvenir blanket—surely raided from someone else's office.
She curled up and was out as soon as her head hit the pillow.
I don't know how common it is, but I have a secret stash of hoodies and a blanket at work because the heating system doesn't always work well enough on extra cold days. I'd bet there's more than a few perpetually cold people like me in an office building as big as the Main Office appears to be!
Next week: Akira has to hurry up and wait
