Chapter 37 - Rescue Mission (3)

He didn't answer. Instead, his cold eyes flicked around our surroundings. I gave another awkward smile.

Part of the tower had collapsed. Fallen chunks of masonry blocked the doors, and the civilian and I had been caught in a rain of rubble. One wrong move and we would have ended our lives flattened like dried fish.

Running beneath the awning had been my best move. It had withstood the falling debris. Kudo seemed to have cleared away some of the rubble surrounding it. Squinting in the flood of light, I nudged the man beside me.

This man had nerves of steel. No one could have blamed him for falling to pieces in a situation like this.

"Go out there and behave yourself," I told him as he made his shaky but determined way toward my senior. "Don't cause any trouble."

"What trouble would I cause? And why did you take so long to get here? You people can lift cars like books! Surely you can clear this stuff away in no time!"

He staggered along without letting up on the grumbling. What a man. I chuckled at the sight of him complaining even after that brush with death. Jonathan Kudo didn't so much as glance at him.

"What's this?"

After staring down at me for a while, Kudo broke his silence. I blinked and met his eyes.

"Sorry?"

"Let me see your back."

Ah. Was he talking about the burns on my back?

The commander-in-chief had told them about my slow healing, but my seniors never really grasped it until they saw it for themselves.

Jonathan Kudo didn't seem worried about me, though. He seemed purely curious rather than concerned, the way John Mühlen had been curious about me. He was just as difficult a person as I'd heard.

My fellow recruits were kind. Their training officers worried about my inadequate healing, too. Ami went without saying, and I could tell that Riccardo looked after me despite his grumbling.

... Choi Yun was a sociopath, so let's leave him out of this.

Anyway, the point was that this senior would be a little different from the others. He would rescue people because it was his job, and rescue me because I was his junior. But whether my name was Hildebert Taleb or Heshy Lyle wouldn't matter to him.

I'd better make sure I wasn't a nuisance.

The ankle that had been hit by rubble was much better. With most of the throbbing gone, I dragged my leg beneath me and stood, smiling.

"I'm just a little slow to heal. Thank you for getting me out, sir."

"Can you move?"

"Of course."

Kudo turned away, apparently satisfied that I wouldn't get in the way. Without looking back, he walked out along the path he had cleared through the ruins. I followed toward the flood of light, walking normally now.

RRRUMBLE

"Aaaah! What was that?"

"Oof."

The civilian's panicked shout struck my ears along with a deep rumble. I staggered and hastily caught my balance.

Wow. This place would come down any minute.

"No! My building!"

The man wailed as he looked up at the ominously shuddering building.

"My masterpiece! I poured my heart and soul into it!"

So that was why he had kept refusing to leave. He owned the building.

With a rueful smile, I surveyed the situation. The building shook for a long time, giving off one deep rumble after another, before finally going still.

The suffocating calm before the storm.

I sighed and looked around. Judging by appearances alone, things didn't look as bad as I'd expected.

Part of the tower had collapsed. The entrances were buried under rubble, but the very center of the lobby, where the creature had been, was intact. The tower had an open central atrium with a fountain at its base. That left that area alone relatively unscathed.

"It's barely been open..."

The owner buried his face in his hands in despair.

"This was supposed to rival A-Tech..."

SPLASH

I felt water lap around my ankles. It covered the floor. Was it from the burst pipe? Or had Shu broken the aquarium tank?

Come to think of it, where was Shu?

A cold feeling settled in my gut as I turned to my senior.

"Sir, what about Shu?"

"She probably got out," Kudo replied flatly, examining the floor. "My communicator's broken, so I can't contact her."

"What?"

The despairing owner raised his head. He stared at my senior's clean-cut face, with its mix of Eastern and Western features, then spoke.

"Your communicator's broken? Then how are we supposed to contact anyone outside?"

"Don't you have a phone?"

I took mine from my pocket and waved it.

"Is it broken?"

The owner stared at me for a long moment. Then, very slowly, he reached into his pocket and found his phone. He seemed to have briefly forgotten it existed.

Fair enough.

Silence settled over the ruined lobby as the owner stopped huffing and puffing and buried his face in his phone. I let out a long breath, taking in the flood of sensations.

The sound of water somewhere. Concrete dust pattering down from the mountains of rubble. The acrid smell of the shattered masonry.

Were we supposed to get out on our own? Or wait for help from outside?

My senior didn't seem inclined to tell me. I had no idea what he was looking at so intently. He was walking around the lobby, swishing his sword through the rising water.

Just as I was about to go over and speak to him, the owner shouted,

"I told you, I'm inside!"

Quite a booming voice he had.

"Inside the tower! Get someone here, now. Get me out of here! Didn't you see the building shaking?"

A fish fell onto him with a wet slap as he argued into the phone. The owner jerked, I snorted, and Kudo didn't look over.

The owner hurled the poor, already-dead sea bass to the floor.

SPLASH!

"Goddammit!"

"Sir, should we just wait here?"

"They'll tell us the safest escape route soon enough."

Kudo answered matter-of-factly, never taking his eyes off the flooded floor.

"There's someone famous trapped in here. And it's a building right in the heart of Area 1's downtown, so it's a hazard, too."

"Someone famous?"

Was he talking about himself?

I blinked in puzzlement, and a puzzled silence followed. The owner, who had been yelling into his tightly clutched phone, snapped his mouth shut. He stared at me in disbelief.

"What? Why did that sound like a question? Don't you know who I am?"

"No."

I answered readily.

How was I supposed to know who he was? He sounded like that lunatic texting me from a blocked number.

But the owner's jaw dropped, and even Kudo lifted his head to look at me. Apparently I'd done something wrong again.

This man was famous?

"You really don't know who I am?"

"I'm sorry. I'm a little out of touch with the world."

"But still. You don't know me?"

"I'm afraid not. The tower's owner?"

"Hey! I'm the chairman of Cureus!"

Was that a big company?

I glanced sideways and met Kudo's eyes. Still stirring the flooded floor with his sword, he was staring at me as if trying to determine whether I genuinely didn't know.

He was like a cat quietly studying a bug on the wallpaper.

It must be a well-known company. But did that really matter so much right now?

As if in answer to my unspoken question, my phone rang. The moment I snatched it up, an unfamiliar voice echoed through the tower.

["We recommend taking the stairs beside the south entrance and escaping through the underground parking garage."]

I looked up at my senior. His expression unchanged, he slowly approached and took the phone from my hand. The dried blood all over him seemed to be his own. Despite having been caught in the explosion and healed from it, he was in the best shape of the three of us.

"What's the tower's condition?"

["It doesn't appear to be in immediate danger of collapse, but you need to get out as quickly as possible regardless. Keep in mind that the ceiling could come down."]

"What about support from outside?"

["That's difficult. A careless intervention could accelerate the building's collapse."]

"I can't find the creature's corpse."

Jonathan Kudo dropped that bombshell without a flicker of emotion. The owner's face went white. I blinked slowly.

So that was why he had been stirring the flooded floor with his sword all this time. He had been looking for the creature's corpse.

So it left a corpse, then. It looked like a ball of fire; I'd thought the water would simply put it out.

The person on the other end went briefly silent.

["You're saying you can't confirm whether the creature is dead? Then you'll need to get out even faster. Are there any civilians besides the chairman of Cureus?"]

"None that I can see."

"Wait."

I hurriedly broke into the conversation. The owner, who had been looking around with his lip caught firmly between his teeth, and my senior, who had been answering so calmly, both turned their eyes on me. I met Kudo's utterly disinterested gaze.

"A woman tried to come in earlier. She said she couldn't find her children."

["Her children?"]

"What?"

My senior was visibly startled. I nodded at him as his eyes widened.

"Shu stopped her, so she didn't get inside."

"Even if they were inside, they'd be dead by now!" the owner shouted hysterically. "We don't know if the creature's alive or dead, and the building could collapse at any moment! Why look for kids who might not even be here and might already be dead?"

"Any idea where they might be?"

"I can hear faint noises upstairs."

"What?"

The owner shot me a look that said, There he goes spouting crazy nonsense again. But however contemptuously he glared at me, however much he looked at me as if I were the world's biggest idiot, it didn't bother me. Yun's looks of You're less intelligent than a chimpanzee had toughened me up.

I shared my theory with my senior, who was glaring at the owner.

"I think I've been hearing rustling upstairs for a while now. Shu moved everyone in the tower to the second floor earlier, too, so I'd like to check around there."

"All right," Kudo answered at once. "You can go check and get back safely, I trust."

The half-collapsed second floor. With Kudo's permission, I made the precarious climb up the buried escalator and found a little brother and sister there.

* * *

"What?"

The owner looked bewildered.

"Why are there kids here?"

"I found something suitable to use as a makeshift splint."

The seven-year-old boy's foot was badly mangled. He seemed to have been hit by falling debris. I gave my report with the four-year-old girl in my left arm and the seven-year-old boy in my right.

"The four-year-old girl is unharmed."

Kudo strode straight over and examined the boy's splint closely. He didn't look up until the cheeky boy asked, "What are you staring at for so long?"

"We'd better get out quickly."

Having raised his head, he stared at me.

"That's remarkable. Are they teaching you first aid for civilians already?"