Shun Yin watched numbly as the medics ferried Tens.h.i.+"s corpse away in a black body bag, his eyes hollow. Behind him, Gabriel and Rebecca related the events to Henry.
"Lady Angelica came and she…she killed Tens.h.i.+. Without saying anything. She had this weird, powerful sword that we had never seen before…casting awesome fire spells and destroying all our equipment except the computers."
"Then after cutting Tens.h.i.+ apart, she went and downloaded all the data from our computers. Transferred it into some private cloud server. Then she destroyed our computers, our computing processing units, everything."
"Our data is all gone. I just checked the school"s cloud server. They"ve been wiped clean."
"All our work…gone just like that. Worse…Tens.h.i.+…she…she…!"
Rebecca began weeping and sobbing uncontrollably. Gabriel put an arm around her, trying to comfort her. From the looks of it, this wasn"t the first time he had tried to console her whenever she broke down.
The two of them had been too afraid to move after Angelica left silently, still hearing the noise of battle outside. They continued to cower inside the remains of the ruined lab, unable to move out because of their lack of combat ability.
"What did Lady Angelica want our research for?" Gabriel demanded, his voice quivering. Henry glanced at Shun Yin, and then shook his head.
"I honestly have no idea."
"She…she wanted to summon spirits of her own. I"m not sure how exactly, but she found a way to seal them into weapons. She claimed that the technology had not been completed yet, that she planned to perfect it. I"m guessing that"s why she stole your data."
Gabriel and Rebecca stared at Shun Yin in amazement. "Lady Angelica actually told you all that?"
Shun Yin hesitated at Gabriel"s question, and then nodded. "Yes. She wanted me to join her."
"Obviously you refused." Glen placed a rea.s.suring hand on his shoulder. His expression darkened. "I don"t care who she is…heiress or not, the future clan leader or not, she"s not going to get away with this."
"The clan leader and elders are in an uproar, from what I can tell." Henry looked grim. He glanced at Shun Yin. "They refuse to believe that Angelica is a traitor and that she had joined the a.s.sa.s.sins Guild. They are actually accusing you of lying."
"Huh? Then how are they going to explain all this?!" Glen demanded, gesturing at the destruction all around them.
"I don"t know. For now, they are asking us to confirm if Angelica wasn"t actually kidnapped by the a.s.sa.s.sins. They said there was no way Angelica would follow them of their own volition, and they want to personally interrogate the eyewitnesses…including you. Glen." Henry sighed and lifted his gla.s.ses to rub the bridge of his nose. Yes, even in the far future he chose to wear gla.s.ses, not because he was shortsighted but because of the various functions installed within the lenses to help with a.n.a.lysis and calculations. "However, I"ve just transmitted the recordings of the security cameras in this building, including the video of her murdering Seinagi Tens.h.i.+ in cold blood and stealing all the data from the computer terminals in this lab.""They surely can"t deny her guilt after that!" If he didn"t know him better, Shun Yin could have sworn he heard some relish in Glen"s voice.
"Honestly…at this point I think they would hide from the truth and choose to delude themselves if it means preserving their pride. They probably will continue deceiving themselves and denying reality until Angelica shows up herself to personally kill them."
Glen snorted. "If that happens, then they deserve it."
"Now, now." Henry raised both his hands in a placating manner. "Don"t wish ill of your relatives. As…delicate as they are, they are still your uncles and granduncles."
"Hmph."
Glen scowled as he turned away. Shun Yin raised an eyebrow at that. It was clear that the blond mage had some grudge against the higher-ups of the Porter clan, though he could not imagine what reason that could be.
Perhaps it was discrimination against his father and his family for being "outsiders" and the ostracizing he received from the main families that shaped his att.i.tude toward them.
However, Shun Yin was still concerned about what they planned to do.
"I don"t suppose they"ll knock me out with a tranquilizer dart, lock me up in a cell, drug and torture me in an interrogation session to force the truth out of me? And then after abusing me, ask me to be his right-hand man?"
"…huh?"
Both Glen and Henry stared at him in bafflement. For a moment, everyone was too stunned to say anything.
"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" Glen finally broke the silence.
"On my authority as princ.i.p.al of this school, I will not allow any of my students to undergo such violent interrogation sessions," Henry declared firmly. "You have my word on that. I don"t care if it"s an order from the clan head himself, I will not hand my students over."
"Thank you, sir." Shun Yin breathed heavily. However, Henry shook his head.
"Don"t thank me yet. I"m only just an outsider in the Porter clan, with no authority. There are limits to what I can do. I will do my best to stop them from touching you, but if the Porter clan decides to send their elite mages to capture you by force, then even I won"t be able to do anything about it."
"I still appreciate the sentiment, sir."
Henry smiled sadly. "I"m really sorry that you"re dragged into all of this. You deserve better."
"Those old man should stop being obsessed over bloodline and lineages!" Glen growled angrily under his breath. This time Henry didn"t reprimand him.
"Wait, what"s going on? You"re saying Lady Angelica betrayed us?"
Being in a daze all this while, it took quite a lot of time before the trio"s conversation sank in, and Rebecca stared at them dumbly. Gabriel still didn"t quite follow what was going on, but he probably already understood that Angelica had turned her back on her schoolmates the moment she callously murdered Tens.h.i.+.
"It"s a long story." Shun Yin sighed. Rebecca glared at him determinedly, and then gestured toward the body bag that the medics were carrying away.
"We have a right to know."
"You are right." This time it was Henry. He regarded the two surviving researchers seriously. "Angelica has joined hands with the a.s.sa.s.sins Guild. We believe there is someone hiring the a.s.sa.s.sins Guild to eliminate the Porter clan, but we don"t know who exactly. I don"t know why, but it seems that Angelica wishes to destroy the Porter clan as well. To achieve that end, she appears to want to finish the development of spirit technology…through these spirit weapons."
"It is possible that your data on summoning spirits might be vital to perfecting and stabilizing the current technology used to craft spirit weapons," Shun Yin added wearily. "At least that"s the impression Angelica gave me."
"…I see." Rebecca nodded resolutely. "Then we have to stop her, don"t we?"
"But how?" Gabriel blurted out.
"That"s for us to take care of," Henry a.s.sured them. "If possible, I would like the both of you to try and rebuild the project. I"m so sorry to ask this of you, and of course I"ll give you some time off to recover from the shock and trauma…but your strengths are clear. You both are incredibly intelligent and talented. Don"t recklessly throw your lives away in combat."
"Uh, that"s not what I meant." Rebecca looked embarra.s.sed. "I mean…we can"t let her use our technology for whatever it is that she is plotting. We have to develop a countermeasure for whatever we were researching on."
"How far have you progressed on your research?" Shun Yin asked, astonished. "Didn"t you say you still haven"t found a way to summon a spirit to this world and manifest it concretely yet?"
"And we still haven"t. But we were very close. This close." Rebecca s.p.a.ced her thumb and forefinger less than a centimeter apart.
"If what you said is true, it won"t take Lady Angelica much time and effort to finish up the work we have done so far on the project." Gabriel looked grim. "Especially if she already found a way to seal spirits into weapons – that"s something beyond even our capabilities."
"That"s not necessarily true. Tens.h.i.+ did manage to succeed in that. But the fluctuation was deemed too unstable and dangerous, so she sc.r.a.pped that part of the project. The spirit in the weapon would contaminate and possess the wielder, altering him or her psychologically and spiritually." Rebecca shook her head thoughtfully.
"What did you say? Tens.h.i.+ did what?"
Something stirred inside Shun Yin"s mind, a faint memory of what Angelica said during their duel earlier.
"Hmm? I said Tens.h.i.+ found a way to manifest a spirit inside a weapon, but it was too dangerous, so she shut that aspect of the project down. She originally didn"t want to tell you this because she knew you would take the risk anyway and put your own soul and body in danger."
"The both of us agreed with that," Gabriel put in hastily, as if he was afraid that Shun Yin would fly into a rage.
However, Shun Yin was far from furious. He was thinking very hard, trying to piece together what Angelica said with the current conversation.
"When did that happen? When did Tens.h.i.+ discover a way to manifest spirits inside weapons?"
"Eh? About…a month ago? Maybe three weeks?"
"Did Angelica perhaps visit you then…?"
"Hmm? Now that you mention it…" Gabriel thought for a bit. "A day or two after Tens.h.i.+ shuttered the project, Lady Angelica dropped by and asked us if she could look at our data."
It was during the time when Shun Yin was spending more time training at Miyamoto dojo than coming to the lab, so he missed her. Or perhaps Angelica came precisely because she was confident she wouldn"t run into him there.
"Tens.h.i.+ had a big argument with her back then. She refused to show Lady Angelica the data, and was asking her why she knew about the spirit weapon. But of course Lady Angelica used her authority as the heiress of the Porter clan…"
"They were arguing about the deleted data, right?" Gabriel cut in before Rebecca could finish her sentence. "Something about restoring the deleted data. Tens.h.i.+ refused to, but Lady Angelica overrode her and hacked our computer terminal to forcibly restore the deleted data and make a copy of it."
"In the end, Tens.h.i.+ just gave in, because we reasoned that Lady Angelica can"t do much with the data since she wasn"t a researcher. We didn"t think that she would have her own personal group of researchers working under her…"
"n.o.body did," Shun Yin affirmed, realizing how little he knew about the girl he was formerly in love with.
"I also thought they were arguing over you." Rebecca couldn"t help but smile mischievously, but the gravity of the situation wiped away all traces of humor in a second. "Tens.h.i.+ saying that she doesn"t want to put you in danger, but Lady Angelica insisting that she was doing this for your sake."
"Yeah. I don"t get it." Gabriel scratched his head in frustration before he shrugged in resignation. "Women."
Whatever the case, Shun Yin was sure of one thing. His memory vividly played back a single sentence in his mind over and over again.
"It cost us a lot of resources and lives, but we eventually implemented a working system for sealing the spirits into the weapons and making them safe enough to use."
Angelica said those very words to him. And he responded by demanding to know how many lives she sacrificed to achieve that.
"Angelica used Tens.h.i.+"s research…she used Tens.h.i.+"s deleted data and continued with the experiments, heedless of people"s lives or safety…and finally developed a spirit weapon."
"What?" Gabriel and Rebecca stared at him, but Henry nodded thoughtfully.
"That makes sense. And after she reached the limits of her research, she came to check if we had made any progress of our own. So she came to steal the data from you guys, to merge it with her own research data and experiments."
"But there"s still something strange." Glen raised his hand. "Why would Angelica kill Tens.h.i.+? I mean, she left the rest of the research students alive. She spared these two. And Tens.h.i.+ has no ties to the Porter family, right?"
"None that I know of," Henry confirmed.
"Then…why?"
Gabriel and Rebecca glanced at each other, and then shook their heads.
"We don"t know either."
"She never said anything. She just came in and killed Tens.h.i.+ without a single word."
Even as the others debated and pondered over it, Shun Yin found to his horror that he probably knew the reason. He could still recall the conversation from yesterday as vividly as if it had just happened a few seconds ago.
"…Seinagi Tens.h.i.+, was she? The two of you seem awfully close."
"I"m not talking about the research division or the team. I"m talking about Seinagi Tens.h.i.+ in particular."
Shun Yin did not pay much attention to Angelica"s tone at that time, but now, as he played the conversation back in his head, he realized that she sounded jealous.
It was entirely possible that Angelica had killed Tens.h.i.+ out of jealousy and because she viewed her as a potential threat…a love rival.
However, there was no way he could tell the rest that.
Swallowing his horror, he closed his eyes and lowered his head, discreetly pulling himself away from the conversation.