After clearing out a few Inquisitors left in the corridor, the Lobotomy Corporation branch we reached looked quite different from the place we had gone to on our first mission.
All kinds of torture devices and discarded prosthetic bodies...
Apparently the Inquisitors had used it as a base for quite some time, because the sort of things they'd use were scattered everywhere.
And over there...
"Please, just stop now... it hurts... too much...!"
"Hah. This one speaks of pain."
"It is surely false suffering. Pay it no mind."
Yes, the horrible thing that seemed likely to happen was, in fact, happening.
"No... it really hurts... It hurts, I'm telling you..."
"Was it not painful when you attached impurities to your body? Did your heart not scream when you ceased being human?"
"Enough. It is already too late for this one to repent."
"Look. It does not even shed tears, does it? A false confession."
Listening to their absurd bullshit, we slowly advanced.
As much as I wanted to smash their heads in right then and there, if I acted on my own judgment, I'd only end up causing trouble.
My inability to step in until Mr. Dante gave the order felt a little sad.
"No! I can cry... I can! So please...!"
"There is no need to refrain from confirming it, is there?"
"...Mm. Of course, tears without falsehood would signify humanity."
Had they retained even a shred of humanity?
Why were they showing mercy they had never shown before?
"Thank you... Thank you so much..."
"Now, I shall inspect your eyes."
"If even the tear ducts are said to have been attached to the body as filthy impurities, we cannot trust it unless we see for ourselves."
"If I pluck out your eyes and find flesh filling the sockets, I shall let you go."
...Of course. There was no way those bastards would show mercy to anyone who didn't fit their ideology.
"Wha... No, no!!!"
The moment I heard the scream, my grip tightened.
The urge to break ranks and rush in settled heavily in one corner of my chest.
But I still couldn't move... Ms. Rodion?
"...Hup!"
Thwack!
"Ghk... Kgh..."
A clean hit.
It was a surprise attack from a blind spot they hadn't noticed, and one Inquisitor lost his life in an instant.
For a moment, the Inquisitors and we all stared blankly at the scene.
It was a rather startling sight.
Mr. Heathcliff and Ms. Don Quixote, for their part, looked exhilarated.
...And yet, why hadn't Ms. Don Quixote, who despised villains so much, moved first?
"...Heretics are like insects."
"They do not stand alone, and endlessly obstruct the grand undertaking. How very fitting."
The Inquisitor who had regained his composure first opened his filthy mouth.
...Ah, I can't stand it.
"The bugs coming out these days are all white and can talk like people. How creepy."
"What...?"
While I had been watching in silence, I suddenly charged at him.
Apparently if I kept listening to the sounds coming out of that filthy mouth, my emotions would get ahead of my reason.
As if the current situation were any different.
Whoosh!
Clang!
...He blocked it?
Bang!
Just as I was wondering how to break through his guard, Mr. Heathcliff beside me smashed his head in with a club.
Crunch!
With a chilling sound, flesh burst out from inside the helmet, but for some reason I didn't feel disgusted.
Rather, it was satisfying, if anything.
Should I start ripping out those dogshit bastards' vocal cords before they even open their mouths?
Realistically impossible, but it was a rather tempting thought.
Anyway, with two of them already dead from the ambush... this battle should be pretty easy.
**
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As we were just about finishing off the fight with the Inquisitors, which was becoming familiar by now, a voice I knew came from somewhere nearby.
"What... You've already... gotten pretty... good at fighting..."
It was faint, but unmistakable.
When I turned toward the source of the sound, there was...
"Mr. Sword...?"
Mr. Sword, leaning weakly against the wall with wounds all over his body.
The injuries were covered in marks that looked less like human wounds and more like something had torn and chewed at him.
...Were those from the sinners?
"Are you all right? Can you stand?"
Ms. Ishmael asked with concern, but Mr. Sword looked like it was hard enough for him to speak, let alone get up.
"What happened to... Epi..."
...
"He's... alive, right? You met... him outside...?"
He was... alive.
I had personally cut off his breath and come down here because I couldn't bear to leave him like that.
But I couldn't bring myself to tell the truth to the pitiful-looking Mr. Sword, and my head naturally lowered.
I wasn't the only one feeling miserable; most of the prisoners were hesitating to speak first.
Even if they were as clueless as they were, they weren't devoid of emotion.
How could we tell the desperate-looking Mr. Sword that, unable to bear watching Mr. Epi being cruelly tortured, we had killed him ourselves before coming down?
"...Yes, he's alive."
Amid everyone's hesitation, Mr. Hong Lu offered Mr. Sword a white lie.
Everyone except Mr. Sword knew it was a lie, but no prisoner corrected it.
No, perhaps it would be more accurate to say no one could.
"Enough chatter."
"Those strange things seem to be crawling this way again."
At Ms. Otis's urging, I barely escaped my guilt and quietly listened to the surroundings, where I could hear the swarming approach of the sinners.
The sound of them coming felt like... though it surely couldn't be...
Like a huge wave of guilt over Mr. Sword crashing down on us.
To make matters worse, alongside that crawling sound, I could also hear the heavy footsteps of someone in armor.
...If this goes wrong, I might die too.
Even as my body stiffened with fear of death, my mind felt a little calmer.
Because while fighting, I wouldn't have to think about the guilt toward Mr. Sword.
There wouldn't be any time for stray thoughts in a place where one mistake could blow your head apart.
Srrrk. Srrrk.
Soon, with that eerie sound, the sinners appeared, and I raised my spear with a strangely lighter heart.
At the same time, it felt as if a memory that had never existed had suddenly formed.
"Seven Association, moving out."
The moment I uttered the sentence that had already become a routine, the crawling sinners lunged at us.
**
After that... it was chaos from beginning to end.
Honestly, I don't even remember how I survived.
I somehow blocked the sinners' irregular attacks aimed at us, and kept swinging at the heads of the N Corp Inquisitors who came at us following the sinners' movements.
Once the wave started rolling in, it kept swelling without end, driving us to the brink of annihilation.
By now, the only ones still alive are me and... Mr. Sword, who had originally been lying against the wall and hadn't been attacked.
There might have been other surviving prisoners, but aside from me, there was no one still standing.
The rest had mostly suffered severe injuries and weren't moving at all, so calling them dead would probably be more accurate.
Some of them still seemed to be breathing, but they still couldn't move their bodies.
No, was my condition worse than theirs?
With wounds bitten into me all over and nails driven into my body, I looked less alive than dead.
Unlike the prisoners who at least seemed able to move their mouths, not a single part of my body wanted to move properly.
The only difference was that I was still standing despite it all.
...Though looking at me, it wouldn't be strange to treat me as a corpse that happened to remain upright.
Since Mr. Dante is alive, there's no major problem yet, but that doesn't mean I can rewind the clock right now.
The number of N Corp Inquisitors that had been swarming us had dropped sharply, but if even by some one-in-a-million chance they spotted the defenseless Mr. Dante, it would be over.
It would be right to keep watching the surroundings a little longer and only turn back the clock once I judged it safe.
Searching for a truly safe place in the enemy's own base was nonsense.
Still, this place, where we had definitely cleared out the surrounding Inquisitors, was the safest spot available right now.
Yes, that's what I thought.
Krrrk... krrrk...
Just when I was certain this was the safest place here, a sound from the direction we had come from forcibly dragged up my body's survival instincts.
That distinctive sound of a nail scraping along the floor was already familiar, having been heard twice before from the worst enemy we had encountered.
...It won't resurrect a third time, right?
Unless it was hit with a real ampoule or something, there was no way it could keep recovering at that speed.
With that faint hope, I wanted to believe the sound had just been an auditory hallucination heard at the brink of death...
"...Manager. I'd like to suggest that confirmation kills be added to our standard combat plan from now on."
From Ms. Otis, lying on the ground, came words that completely shattered my hopes.
Seriously, seriously, had it come after us again?
I couldn't believe it. No, it shouldn't have been possible.
Even if it was denial of reality, I couldn't believe he had come back again.
Because if he showed up in our current state, our annihilation was half guaranteed.
I couldn't believe it, no—I didn't want to believe it. Accepting that fact would be the same as completely denying our chances of survival.
Krrrk... krrrk...
And soon, he appeared from the corridor we had come through.
"Heretics... must be... eradicated."
...Yeah. Now I can't even deny it anymore.
That voice was unmistakably the same man we knew.
Guido. That bastard had, at long last, come to find us for the third time.
And of all times, it had to be at the worst possible moment.