8

There was an air of something splintered faintly hanging over the area. The air of an aftermath of violently discharged bullets; of silence, yet of a faintly lingering reverberation; of a constant ringing that echoed in one’s ears.

“………”

A look of disbelief painted Squeeze’s face as he looked down on Kageyama’s…on Captain Walker’s corpse. The two of them were supposed to have massacred everyone.

There were no external wounds. Only his neck was bent at a strange angle. His spinal cord and medulla had been twisted apart in an instant and he’d died on the spot. Had he gotten in a fight with the escaping crowd…?

“This is impossible…”

But what other explanation could there have been? There was almost nobody left in the event hall, and the few who remaining were looking around anxiously, unable to calm down. The people from the TV station who’d been relaying live hadn’t run away on account of their position, so the cameras were still rolling, but they were so stunned that they didn’t have any target to focus on.

“Nn, nngh…”

Furukita Sonoko, who’d been pushed away by Tosuke and knocked out cold, came to her senses after a few minutes. But her head was hazy, and after taking in her surroundings, she tilted her head in puzzlement.

“…What?”

She couldn’t at all remember what she was doing here. All she could do was look around in confusion, without knowing what the pool of green liquid spreading out beside her was. She recalled nothing.

And there was no one else nearby.

No one collapsed on the ground, no corpses, nothing. There were faint traces of scuff marks in the puddle of liquid, but any hint of tracks like footprints had already been erased, to the point that even knowing where they led was unfathomable.

* * * * *

…So in the end, though there was initially a great uproar about it being some kind of extra-terrestrial invasion or a mutant conspiracy, it was publicly announced that some equipment on the stage had malfunctioned, causing an explosion which had spilled out a whole lot of blueberry sauce that had been stacked there. There was nothing abnormal about it. The wild claims of people who’d been eating the ice cream’s blood starting to turn green immediately began to turn into baseless rumors and eventually dwindled into nothing. The image of the ice cream company in question had worsened to such a degree that it was temporarily dissolved, and its constituents were absorbed by others in the profession.

* * * * *

No one tried looking especially deeply into what became of Kigawa Tosuke. His existence had vanished into thin air.