Rebuild world volume 7, p.10
Rebuild World: Volume 7, page 10
Yeah, best to play it safe, he agreed. Then let’s go all out—or so I’d like to say, but can I request something first?
Sure. What is it?
Well, I want it to look more like I’m strong and less that the monsters are too weak, if that makes sense. And I’d also like to make this a training session, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.
Understood!
Akira was almost certain he was requesting something rather bothersome, so when Alpha responded with an immediate nod, he felt a little taken aback. You agreed awfully quickly.
Of course I did, she replied smugly. A request like that is simplicity itself for me.
This recalled to Akira’s mind just how capable she was. Right, how could I forget? She can do pretty much anything, he thought to himself. Then he grinned at her and said, Glad to hear it! Are you ready to rumble?
Of course! Let’s do this!
Akira had already started manipulating his sense of time. Once everything around him had slowed so much that he could send ten seconds’ worth of communication in a telepathic instant, he aimed both guns at the enemy and pulled the triggers. Countless C-bullets erupted from their barrels.
The energy packs attached to the guns had far higher capacities than Akira had ever used, and were reserved for hunters of rank 50 and higher. Thanks to the extra power they provided, each C-bullet was also charged far more than his previous ones—they even negated the natural dampening effect from the trace amounts of colorless fog in the air. These bullets sailed in a straight line, piercing the air and striking their targets without losing any of their force in flight. The monsters’ armor and armaments, which shrugged off even standard armor-piercing bullets, were blown to pieces—their cannons, machine guns, missile pods, laser cannons, and other long-range weapons were obliterated in no time, thanks to Alpha expertly analyzing and targeting the horde in order of highest priority.
But merely destroying their ranged weapons wasn’t enough to disarm them. Pincer claws appeared in place of the destroyed machine guns, and with unbelievable speed for their size, the creatures closed in. Others scuttled toward Akira rapidly on masses of legs, tank treads, or wheels. Some even flew toward him. A body slam from any of these could fling a truck over on its side, or perhaps topple a building.
However, destroying their ranged weapons had significantly reduced their power, and Akira could now easily shoot them down before they got too close. Steering his vehicle along the perimeter of the ruin, he continued to take out every ranged weapon he could. At the same time, he focused the threat magnet in the direction of the ruin so the monsters coming from it would target him first. That meant he now had to deal with the beasts who were trying to slam into him and every new creature that appeared.
Akira continued to fire, arms akimbo, darting here and there across the vehicle’s roof. He could have avoided an enemy machine gun on his own, and his armored vehicle could tank such an attack without harm. But shells and missiles could topple it over and knock Akira into the trajectory of an incoming projectile, so he had to be thorough about eliminating the enemy’s ranged weapons. He thus chose to ignore any monsters that weren’t targeting his vehicle, which meant that rockets aimed at him kept whizzing past. None hit their target, but the wind pressure they created as they passed was enough to tear a human body apart, not to mention blow them into the sky. But his powered suit kept his feet firmly on the roof, preventing him from getting knocked off, and the suit’s force-field armor protected him from the fierce shock waves. At the cost of spending a little energy, he remained completely unharmed.
He continued to dodge, jump over, and shoot down projectile after deadly projectile, reading the trajectory of every enemy shot fired at him. He never let up on his triggers once. Even if a gun was advertised to fire ten thousand times per minute, such wouldn’t be practical in combat. Having a mountain of bullets on hand was pointless if they were fired so quickly as to run out immediately—the gun would be no better than a blunt weapon afterward. But Akira had solved that problem with the inexplicably high-capacity magazines he was now using. He would have already gone through an entire vehicle’s worth of standard magazines, and yet he hadn’t had to stop to reload once—even though each bullet boasted power incomparable to standard ones.
With such raw power at his disposal, Akira was mowing down beast after murderous beast without any help from his teammates. A showing worthy of a high-ranking hunter was indeed vividly on display for all to see.
Still, this was an area that only high-ranking hunters were ever assigned to. Even for him, annihilating the whole horde solo would have been impossible. Some of the newly arrived beasts were also trying to corner his vehicle, and they were not the kind he could render powerless merely by targeting their ranged weapons. He had no choice but to eliminate them, delaying his response to the monsters attacking from a distance. At this rate, one of them would slam into his vehicle sooner or later, leaving him to be trampled by the enemy horde or struck by enemy projectiles.
But that didn’t come to pass. Even as Akira glanced at the oncoming horde, an intense barrage pelted the creatures from the side. Supporting fire from another vehicle pierced the monsters’ thick armor and tore through their insides. The force of the impacts ruptured their organs, killing them instantly. Some especially resilient beasts with force-field armor survived the first wave, but they were blown to smithereens by the next one because the first round had essentially vaporized their defenses.
Akira looked in the direction the gunfire had come from. There was Sara. Noticing his gaze, she gave him a smile and a thumbs-up. Akira grinned back at her, then returned to his fight.
While Akira fought from the top of Vehicle A, the other vehicles stayed at a distance, in position to aim at the monsters from the side while they followed him. Elena and Sara fired from the roof of their ride, Vehicle C. Both of their guns were longer than the women were tall, and as one might expect from such massive weapons, their bullets contained devastating power. The two hunters grinned as they unloaded salvo after salvo onto the monsters.
“Damn, talk about power!” Sara exclaimed. “With these, we’re definitely not gonna hold Akira back, huh?!”
“You said it!” Elena agreed. “He was kind enough to invite us, so we’ve got to give him a performance he’ll be satisfied with!”
Because Elena was no stranger to negotiations, she’d already realized she and Sara had been chosen not for their ability but because they were good friends with Akira—in other words, Hikaru was using Elena and Sara as a pretext to gain Akira’s trust. But Akira had been thrilled to have them along all the same, so Elena wanted to do her best for him. With that in mind, she’d negotiated with Hikaru behind the scenes to procure these extremely powerful weapons for them during this commission.
And now, thanks to her efforts, their gunfire was piercing right through the monsters of the Mirukakewa region. Seeing how effective their weapons were fired them both up.
“Hey Sara, let’s kick it up a notch, shall we? As Akira’s mentors, we’ve got to do a lot better than this if we wanna save face!”
“You said it! And that goes double for me, since I’m supposed to be the powerhouse of this duo! We’ve gotta make Akira say he’s glad we came along!”
And sharing a grin, they unleashed their most powerful salvo yet, as though trying to make their presence known to Akira. The annihilated monster corpses that littered the wasteland in their wake testified to their efforts.
Shikarabe and his colleagues, Yamanobe and Parga, were riding in Vehicle D. The three of them were only at hunter rank 40, but the equipment Druncam had lent them for this mission dramatically boosted their combat strength.
“Not bad!” Shikarabe marveled. “No wonder this stuff costs an arm and a leg.”
Parga grinned. “Are you really that surprised? These are the premium goods for hunters who’ve reached rank 50 and above. Guess we can’t really chide the rookies for augmenting their skill with expensive gear anymore, can we?”
Shikarabe grinned wryly. “What do you mean? I never had a problem with them borrowing gear in the first place. It just irked me a little that those brats always got far better outfits than we did.”
“A little? Could’ve fooled me, given how you were always bad-mouthing them. That said, it is good that we’re finally starting to get the treatment we deserve.”
As the three of them chatted idly, they also fought, enjoying the benefits of exceptionally powerful equipment at last. The effects of the decline of Druncam’s desk jockey faction were being felt everywhere, in every department of the syndicate. One such effect was that the syndicate was finally renting out top-tier outfits to its more experienced members. From now on, their stock would also cater to veterans, not just rookies.
Naturally, these goods were incredibly pricey and hence difficult to purchase with Druncam’s current budget. Even Mizuha had only managed to secure the all-in-one support system for her rookies after multiple negotiations with Kiryou, and with the stipulation that Katsuya’s group would gather test data for the company. A mere restructuring of the syndicate wouldn’t have been enough to account for buying such expensive gear—but the twenty billion aurum they’d earned from the nationalist extermination initiative had made the difference. Of course, since the syndicate had lost Katsuya in the process, it had still taken a big hit, but this didn’t change the fact that it had acquired an enormous sum of money—the combined reward for (supposedly) taking out the boss of the nationalists and compensation from Udajima for the loss of their most elite unit.
With this money, Druncam had also bought the four armored vehicles for this mission—providing these and the hunters’ gear was part of their ceasefire with Akira. In other words, it could have been said that the syndicate was keeping its head above water by spending Udajima’s money for Akira’s benefit. The compensation also doubled as a kind of severance pay, because Druncam had since cut Udajima off and switched over to Inabe’s side at Hikaru’s suggestion—an outcome of her negotiations.
Under Druncam’s new structure, the veterans were enjoying better treatment than they had in quite some time. But Katsuya’s death had brought many of them, like Shikarabe and his colleagues, back to their senses. Feeling partly responsible since they had not stopped the rookies from acting recklessly and thereby prevented the tragedy, they no longer felt like treating the young hunters as coldly as before. Therefore, Shikarabe and the other veterans had decided that from now on they would treat both the experienced and the inexperienced alike, prioritizing the organization’s members over its financial gain.
Parga turned his gaze at the individual responsible for this change in Druncam. “Seriously, though, when we first hired that kid for the bounty hunts, he was only rank 20, remember? And now he’s already rank 50! At this rate, I bet he’ll be on the Front Line before long!”
“Yeah, I don’t doubt it,” Yamanobe said with a small smile. “Back then, I pegged him as one of those hunters whose bloodlust would destroy him in the end, but he’s just gone on to kill anyone who could possibly pose a threat to him. Word on the street is he even pissed off an executive and got an undisclosed bounty put on his head. Said executive sent Katsuya and his team after him, which is why Akira killed them.”
“So I hear,” Parga replied. “And he plugged several of the city’s Investigation Bureau people as well, right? Though the city swept that under the rug pretty quick. Wonder if the powers that be figured letting him go was preferable to the losses they’d suffer from trying to apprehend him? What a scary dude!” He turned to Shikarabe again. “Back when you hired him, you’d already realized he was like that, hadn’t you? You told us you were bringing him along because he was a member of the hundred million club, but maybe the real reason was that your intuition told you he was a force to be reckoned with.”
“Who can say?” said Shikarabe noncommittally. More accurately, he’d hired Akira in order to test his intuition, but he dodged the question. “All right, you two, enough shooting the shit. We’ve gotta work. If we don’t do our part, this ceasefire with Akira might fall by the wayside.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Roger that!”
With that, the three of them sent a ferocious hail of bullets down upon the monster horde, determined to provide results that would keep Druncam in Akira’s good graces.
Meanwhile, Erio and his crew were putting up a desperate fight atop Vehicle B. A section of the armored roof had been raised to form a temporary wall behind which they could take cover. Some of the children were even firing from the open side doors of the vehicle.
The all-in-one support system guided the entire team with precision, having them concentrate all their fire on one difficult opponent before moving on to the next and urging them to take cover whenever it got too dangerous. Thanks to the system, all of them were able to fight safely and efficiently.
In addition, Kiryou had issued Erio and the others upgraded weapons and armor. Naturally, they didn’t individually have the power to take down the monsters of Mirukakewa on their own, like Elena’s or Shikarabe’s groups did, but they fought well enough when coordinated as a team.
The boys weren’t the only ones to benefit from this arrangement—Kiryou did as well. As things stood for the company now, a lone hunter had single-handedly eliminated an elite unit that had been aided by Kiryou’s support system, even after that system had been bolstered through the financial backing of a city executive. Overall, this did not reflect well on the efficacy of the system, and the company needed to restore the product’s reputation somehow. Luckily for them, the same hunter had also taken out a colossus that had driven off a Kokurou mech unit—and he had been wearing a Kiryou powered suit at the time. The company had seized their opportunity and found another unit to use the system while accompanying Akira on his job—namely, Erio’s team. Kiryou was hoping that their success on this commission would revive the system’s reputation.
Kiryou had been able to work all this out through their negotiations with Hikaru—or rather, Hikaru had more or less orchestrated the entire arrangement. In exchange for Akira choosing a Kiryou powered suit over any other company’s offerings, and for Hikaru promising to ensure Akira didn’t give the system a poor review, Kiryou had agreed to provide five billion aurum’s worth of gear for use on this mission at essentially no charge.
Erio and the others didn’t know anything about the details of this agreement, but Sheryl had told them that Kiryou would reward them handsomely for their success and that the company was expecting a lot out of them. Only a short time before, they’d been merely slum children, so to hear a corporation had high expectations for them—not to mention the promise of a big payout—had lit a fire underneath them, and they’d jumped at the chance to participate.
But out in the wasteland, that enthusiasm had considerably waned—and the moment they’d seen the enormous monsters charging toward their vehicle, any remaining trace of it had disappeared completely. Right now, they were just a terrified mess.
“Yikes! Another one’s coming this way, you guys!” one boy shouted, spotting a giant monster on the horizon, bounding in their direction.
“Then shoot it down!” Erio scolded him. “Don’t just stand there—keep firing! Shut your eyes if you have to, but don’t let up on that trigger! The support system will correct your aim for you!”
Erio and the others were assaulting the monsters, but the battle was far from one-sided. The enemies were also focusing their machine guns and artillery shells at the children. Akira destroyed as much of the horde’s ranged weaponry as he could, but of course he couldn’t take care of everything on his own. Some creatures slipped through the cracks, and their gunfire struck Erio’s vehicle while their artillery shells touched down right next to it, causing Vehicle B to shake and rattle.
Each time the automobile jolted, the children cried out. “Whoa! I-Is it just me, or was that one way too close?!”
“It didn’t hit us, so all’s well!” Erio called back.
“A-And what if one of them does hit?!”
“This vehicle can withstand a barrage of cannon fire or two!” Erio shouted, irritated by his comrade’s pathetic complaints. “Stop whining and fire! If we don’t hurry and kill these things fast enough, they’ll shoot us to death!”
The guidance from the support system could help them if they froze up due to panic, uncertainty, or terror. Even if they ducked down with their hands over their heads or shut their eyes, the system would aim their guns for them, never allowing them to stop fighting. Even boys in a stupor continued to attack, their bodies moving on their own. Their gunfire tore the limbs off of a large multilegged armored crustacean, then blew huge holes in the creature’s shell. Fluid poured from the holes, staining the ground of the wasteland.
“W-We did it! We took ’em out! Victory!”
“Keep it up! No time to celebrate now—here comes the next wave! Don’t let them get close!”
Killing such a monster was far beyond their raw skill. And the creature was only one out of many, so it was far too early to relax. But their triumph over an extremely dangerous enemy did dilute their panic and fear somewhat, and a sense of calm and confidence gradually took over as the battle raged on. Before long, no one inside the vehicle was screaming anymore. Erio and his team had mastered their fear.
“You know, we might actually survive this,” one boy said. None of them would have declared that this battle was “easy” by any means, but no one had died or been mortally wounded yet, and so far, none of the larger monsters had managed to approach their vehicle. Despite the danger, they were handling the situation effectively.
“See? What’d I tell ya?” Erio said, grinning at his comrades. “We’re gonna be fine. Akira wouldn’t have brought us along if he’d thought we were gonna be dead weight. He wouldn’t want us to just be in his way.”
