High atop a mountain blanketed in forest, a massive yellow hive stood like a tower.
Fist-sized bees buzzed in and out of it.
From observation alone, it was clear their intelligence wasn't high—their behavioral logic differed little from ordinary bees.
As long as Arato Sora and Asagami Fujino drew near, the bees would immediately launch an attack.
Under Arato's insistence, Fujino had put on a full suit of stone armor.
The surface was uneven and pitted, riddled with shallow dents of irregular size and distribution.
For the time being, Arato decided to call the way he used his ability "mining blocks."
This armor was something he'd carved and assembled by adjusting the size of the "blocks" he produced. It wasn't pretty—but functionally, it should do the job.
The bait plan began.
The treacherous humans, using tools, taught the stupid giant bees a lesson.
If their enemy had been something like a giant bear—an organism with tremendous brute strength—stone armor would have been nearly useless.
But giant bees were different. Their method of attack was stingers.
Encasing her entire body in stone armor perfectly defended against the incoming needles of bee stings.
If the bees hadn't been able to fly, Fujino—wearing that stone shell—could practically have picked up a weapon and dueled them head-on.
Dead bees released pheromones, warning the queen in the mountain hive that danger had arrived.
For that enormous hive deep in the forest, the only response was simple: dispatch more bees, again and again, to exterminate the intruders.
More and more giant bees surged out.
The first pursuit group had been three. Then six, ten, twenty.
Exactly as planned.
Clack-clack-clack—clack-clack-clack—
Countless stingers hammered against the stone armor.
Fujino ran. They chased.
And, inevitably, they were guided straight into the trap prepared in advance.
Single-track animals had no "strategy" to speak of when facing human hostility—
Especially not creatures like these giant bees, true eusocial organisms akin to ants.
The attacking bees showed no fear. They possessed little intelligence; they were simply biological machines acting on the queen's orders.
They pursued Fujino with suicidal persistence, flying into the funnel-shaped cave.
Then, at the narrow end—where only a single bee could pass through at a time—they emerged one after another from a small opening.
And waiting there was a relentless stream of stone spears, each thrust precise and brutal, driving into their abdomens.
Pshhk—pshhk—pshhk—
Fujino, unable to step away fast enough, was splattered again and again with the insects' blood.
Wrapped in stone armor, she felt an extreme exhilaration blooming through her whole body.
It was the primal urge to kill—rooted deep in instinct.
Someone who lacked pain could not truly understand the hearts of those who possessed it. Empathy did not come naturally to her.
Just as she didn't care whether she died, she also didn't care whether others died.
She lacked understanding and resonance for death and suffering—and without those, she had no reason to feel pity or hesitation.
And with both of those emotions absent…
The most fundamental murderous impulse buried in the human heart—along with the joy delivered by each kill—rose with startling clarity.
The sensation of the stone spear piercing flesh was mesmerizing.
Behind the stone mask, the corners of the girl's mouth kept lifting higher.
Pleasure swelled inside her.
How did a person confirm their own existence?
Life and death were the heaviest questions etched into everyone's subconscious.
When you strip away another life—when you sever all of their possibilities—your existence becomes vivid, almost dazzling. The change you impose on the world feels immense.
Even your "self" is made sharply visible through slaughter.
Fujino, who had always been controlled by others, could now freely take life from other beings.
Cruel exhilaration surged, satisfaction climbed, delight thickened until it became almost heavy.
The bees' death-throes sounded like a beautiful piece of music.
Green blood sprayed across the ground, carrying a hard-to-describe, rancid stench.
When Fujino killed the last struggling bee, she suddenly realized that Arato Sora had already left the blood-soaked scene.
She turned her head.
There he was, crouched beside a stream. Next to him lay the spear they'd used—still smeared with viscous residue from the slaughter.
Arato had chosen to step back only after things were largely settled, leaving the rest to Fujino.
In both his past and present lives combined, he'd never even killed a chicken. For him, real, close-quarters killing like this was… more intense than he'd expected.
After the adrenaline wore off, with that nauseating insect-stench in his nose and the sticky filth clinging to him—
He sank into a kind of post-rush crash, forcing himself to calm down.
Beside the stream not far from the pile of corpses, he splashed water over his face, then stared into the distant woods, sorting out his thoughts.
And the woman in the stone helmet slowly walked over to him.
"Miss Asagami, aren't you going to take the armor off? Even if you're strong, wearing that has to be uncomfortable."
Arato turned and spoke to Fujino.
After fighting side by side, he felt he should at least show some concern.
"…No need."
Her voice came out muffled from behind the armor.
The boy's figure reflected in her view.
The excitement from killing—still lingering inside her—was like being doused with cold water, gradually forced back down into stillness.
The pain-free girl lacked true empathy, but she still possessed basic social common sense.
In that moment, she realized how abnormal she must have looked just now.
The pleasure remained, stubbornly, inside her heart.
And she understood something clearly:
That trait—far more than an inability to feel pain—was something society would never accept.
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