bookbashuk Page 19
Page 19
After confirming that the two people behind her were in place, the believer stepped forward and pushed open the ancient door.
It was a warm room, with a bright fire burning in a fireplace in one corner, bathing the whole room in a warm yellow glow. A dark carpet was laid out in the center, and comfortable sofas were gathered together. Looking around, bookshelves that reached the ceiling were placed against the walls.
A room filled to the brim with books, warm and cozy, looks perfect for staying at home.
Yukino followed Nobunaga into the room and soon spotted two familiar figures on the sofa.
One was a black-haired girl whose singing voice, somewhere between howling ghosts and intoxicating heavenly sounds, once reached a level that was unattainable.
The other is Little Red Riding Hood, who is everywhere but quite rare, yet well-behaved, cute, and thoughtful.
Besides them, there was also an unfamiliar figure.
He stared intently at the snow.
On the sofa in the center sat a black-haired girl quietly reading a book. She had a gorgeous appearance in an oriental style, like a delicate doll, yet she wore a jet-black gothic dress. The two created a stunning harmony, without the slightest incongruity. Judging from her appearance, she should be younger than Yukinoshita herself, and her figure was also very regrettable—the culprit was probably the decorative lock with a jet-black luster hanging on her chest.
Sensing someone's arrival, the gothic girl closed the book in her hand, raised her head, and looked directly at the figure in white through the crowd with her pure black eyes, and called out softly.
"Welcome to the Heaven in the Pot. Are you ready to hear this story, the Bound Bird of Hermes?"
"No matter how elegant your words are, they can't hide the fact that you're indirectly calling me a birdman." The believer Hearn strode forward and gave the gothic girl a sharp rap on the forehead, the force just right. "Speak like a human being, Dantalian."
"Ouch, that hurts!" The girl called Dantalian covered her forehead and glared back at him with teary eyes.
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Chapter 34 The Bird of Hermes is my name
"Let me make a final explanation."
In the warm room, everyone sat down on the sofa, and Nobunaga Hearn gestured to the snow beneath her.
Yukino nodded subconsciously, indicating that she was all ears.
"Yes."
"Do you want to know the reason?"
"I think that's nonsense." The black cat's curiosity had been piqued, so how could it possibly give up?
"Oh dear, you're starting to show your true colors after we get a little more familiar?" the believer feigned surprise.
"Ahem." Yukinoshita cleared her throat, signaling him to continue.
"If I told you that the [Hive] that the industry has been fighting over repeatedly is just the tip of the iceberg, like a pimple exposed on the surface of the electronic world, and that the real source is in a much deeper place, what would you think?"
“I would think of it this way—Mr. Hern, who is superior to everyone in the industry from any perspective, must have a way to get to that so-called ‘deeper’ place, and if I were to leak any information I heard today, I could be pretty sure I wouldn’t have a good ending, right?” Yukinoshita countered.
Miss Touma whispered to Miss Kuroyuki, "That girl is pretty smart."
Miss Kuroyuki curled her lip in an unfriendly manner.
“Perfect. I enjoy dealing with intelligent girls; it saves a lot of time,” Nobunaga praised. “Miss Yukinoshita, you can think of our business as a classic game. Please try to keep a relaxed and cheerful attitude and do your best. I personally hope that you will gain something from this trip—I mean, that it will help you in your current situation.”
"I accept your good words."
After the believer finished speaking, the gothic girl said in a clear voice, "Then, as is customary, let's discuss our expectations for this trip."
Touma Kazusa showed the letter in her hand, "I'll go first. From the letter I received, I seem to be a senior who is famous for her piano playing. She has a certain influence both inside and outside the school. Her specific year is unknown, but from the content of the letter, we can infer that we must come from the same academy and are about to go to an unknown Western-style building."
Ms. Kuroyuki flicked the pale yellow letter paper and continued, "My opinion is similar to Ms. Touma's, but I seem to be a bit younger than you all, so I'll play the role of a junior for now."
Yukino Yukinoshita took out the letter with a look of disgust and sighed, "Don't look at me like that. I'm just a pathetic woman who was unfortunate enough to be in the same class as a pervert and was secretly coveted by him for ten years."
Noblewoman Hern didn't even bother to look at the letter. "Don't be discouraged. You're the main character, Miss Yukino Yukinoshita, the beloved one. Look at me. According to the description in the letter, I was just a silly, popular guy from my generation in middle school. I was probably a blond guy too."
Charlotte, who had been silent all along, spoke softly after the believer spoke, "As for me, I'd say I'm similar to a transfer student from another country. I transferred to your class in the spring and will spend the last year and a half of my student life with everyone."
"The story of my ten-year-long love triangle with my beautiful pianist senior, my sweet and gentle junior, my classmate who is aloof and unattainable, and my mysterious foreign transfer student, while also taking a jab at the blond guy from my old class. This classmate named Tsukiyama Seiichi is such a jerk with terrible manners. Mr. Hearn, who is usually very good-tempered, has already decided to kill him - he will blast Tsukiyama to smithereens."
The believer, Hearn, rolled her eyes.
“I agree with Mr. Scone’s suggestion. Since it is a Japanese-style mansion, it is likely a product of the Taisho era, imported from China. We need not show any mercy to these feudal remnants. Once we arrive, we should storm in head-on and not let any of them go, whether they are alive or dead.”
Miss Kuroyuki calmly raised her hand to add.
“Although I know you two have been playing online games together for years, please stop your habitual 'scorched earth' behavior.” Touma slammed his hand on the table. “Miss Charlotte hasn’t finished speaking yet.”
Upon hearing this, the believer turned and gave Little Red Riding Hood a look.
“In fact, I think there’s something suspicious here, Mr. Hearn,” Little Red Riding Hood added after being prompted. “It was mentioned in my letter—the parties involved all seem to have graduated from a four-year college.”
"Where are junior high schools called 'academies' and are they four-year programs?" Yukinoshita asked upon hearing this.
“I don’t know. There are many people who meet one of the criteria, but those who meet both—I think our thinking might be flawed. There’s an assumption.” Nobunaga pondered for a moment. “If we take the Far East as a model, there are very few targets that meet both criteria. And the term ‘junior high’ might just be a translation made specifically to fit the Far East culture. Based on past experience, I think we need to be prepared for cross-regional activities, and there’s even a possibility of getting separated at the beginning. I believe in the abilities of our experienced companions, but if Ms. Yukinoshita draws this worst possible lot, frankly, your situation might be very bad. I’m not referring to your life safety, since you are the ‘beloved one’—I’m referring to your personal safety.”
"Yukino Yukinoshita instinctively hugged herself tighter, while staring intently into Nobunaga's eyes. "Mr. Hern, you'll arrive as soon as possible, right?"
"As long as it doesn't turn into a ridiculous scenario where I'm thrown into the Arctic or Antarctic permafrost while you guys are having fun along the equator, I'm willing to try anything else," said Hearn, spreading her hands.
""
The gothic girl, Dantalian, who resembled a doll, cleared her throat. "Ladies and gentlemen, it's almost time. Please adjust to a comfortable position and begin listening to this story. Mr. Hearn, please."
After confirming that everyone was settled, the believer Hearn left the sofa and walked to the gothic girl.
Yukino Yukinoshita watched his profile with slight nervousness, thinking about all the unknowns that might happen next, and a complex emotion of fear and excitement rose in her heart—then she saw the gothic girl with the luxurious appearance of a doll slowly unbutton the collar of her dress, revealing her flat chest and snow-white skin.
Yukino Yukinoshita subconsciously held her breath.
The gothic girl had a dark, old black lock embedded in her chest, bound by a black leather collar and silver chains, buried in the very center of her flat chest.
“Then, let’s switch sides. I grant you the right to open the door, Believer Hearn.”
The gothic girl revealed the black lock on her chest, which shimmered with a dim, gleaming light, and softly chanted, her voice like that of an ancient artifact that had endured countless years, ancient and timeless.
"Let me ask you, are you a human being?"
"no."
The believer, Hern, replied softly in the same tone, a silver key engraved with blasphemous words appearing in his hand. He calmly recited the incantation on the silver key and then inserted it into the keyhole on the girl's chest.
"My name is the bird of Hermes, which bites its own wings to control my heart."
"Four esteemed ladies, would you like any other desserts besides coffee?"
With her beautiful pink hair tied up high, the girl in the white shirt and blue stripes wore a lovely smile befitting her professional nature as she asked the four girls sitting together.
Yukinoshita snapped out of her daze and realized that Touma was talking to her familiarly. "Just coffee is fine, thank you, flight attendant."
"If you need anything else, please press the call button." The uniformed woman's smile remained unchanged as she reminded them again before pushing her pure white cart away from the table.
The car is decorated with a blue emblem resembling twelve diamond-shaped ice crystals.
"!" Yukinoshita felt a slight jolt beneath her, which was otherwise smooth. Through the round window beside her, she saw a sea of clouds.
Charlotte quickly covered Yukinoshita's mouth, "Shh, don't make a sound. We're currently at an altitude of 10,000 meters, inside a flying vehicle."
"And they're VIPs." Touma took a sip of his perfectly sweetened coffee and glanced around. "It's a private jet."
"To hell with those imported Western-style mansions from the Taisho era," Kuroyukihime said softly, holding her coffee cup. "Hey, [the woman of this time], I have good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?"
She was undoubtedly referring to herself. Despite her resentment, Yukinoshita calmly nodded. "Let's hear the good news first."
"The good news is that we can still communicate normally with the people here, and they speak English." Kuroyukihime raised an eyebrow and gestured for Yukinoshita to look around.
Looking around under the snow, the cabin interior, dominated by white, was decorated in a luxurious yet austere style, which was carried out to the extreme.
"And the bad news?" Yukinoshita asked in return.
"I thought you had already noticed." Kuroyukihime glared at her fiercely for no apparent reason.
"???" Yukino Yukinoshita was completely bewildered by the stare.
"The scones are gone."
Clang, clang, clang
The pitch-black iron dragon sped forward on the tracks.
A young man dressed in white sat in a comfortable chair, gazing out the window at the fiery red maple leaves in the deep mountains, with the faint sound of birdsong.
This was a soft-seat carriage, brightly lit, but completely empty.
He thought for a moment, got up and went to the connecting area between the carriages. After looking around and making sure no one was there, he jumped onto the roof of the carriage.
A mountain breeze brushed past my ears, carrying a refreshing scent unique to late autumn, which lifted my spirits.
Then it was hit squarely by a silver plasma cannon shot from a distance.
"Damn! You're in big trouble!"
With a seductive crimson blade drawn, deflecting the sudden plasma attack, the believer Hearn pointed at the enormous spider-shaped heavy artillery machine that was moving on all fours on the roof of the train more than ten carriages away and cursed.
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Ps2: I'd like to recommend a book written by a fellow member of our group called "As a Blue Fist Fighter, All I Want Is an Ordinary Youth." By the way, I've even forgotten about the Floor Worker League.
Chapter 35 So, there is only one answer.
Since childhood, Hearn, the devout woman, has had a dream: to gather a group of silly best friends in a warm and comfortable room and go on a peaceful adventure, preferably a traditional mystery-solving adventure, unraveling the mystery layer by layer, with each step linked to the next, until the fog is cleared, the truth is revealed, the good people are rewarded, and the bad people are punished, in a script full of love and peace.
Ever since he first awoke in the bird-of-paradise garden called "Twilight Tomb" due to an abnormal login on his personal terminal, and then escaped after encountering two strange hair-shedding creatures, the dark side of the electronic sea has been opened to him.
To be honest, when he was young and full of life, his first reaction after being caught up in [Hive] was not fear of the unknown, but "Wow, not bad!" This novel and mysterious experience made him see the possibility of realizing his childhood dream beyond his normal level. So, after he calmly wiped out all the two-legged or above-standing creatures in his first [Hive], he began to actively collect all possible random [Hive] invitations with great anticipation.
The Hive, the realm of cyberspace, is something I'd never actively try to touch, not even in this lifetime. Its scope is limited, and it's monitored 24/7 by official and unofficial organizations worldwide. Not only are there watchdogs, but even if I managed to break through, the chain reaction would inevitably impact real-world life. A bunch of petty, weaklings can't even muster a raid to solo the first boss, yet they insist on blocking the entrance and doing nothing. A single [Dragon Palace] instance can cause a twenty-year cooldown.
Because of her past experience playing antique video games with the neighbor's kid, Shinju has never been a big fan of those high-risk [Hive] places exposed to sunlight in the world.
Yukino Yukinoshita was accidentally involved that time. Otherwise, unless the clues inevitably pointed to a certain world [Hive] while collecting [Invitations], he usually didn't bother to put in the effort in that area.
waste time.
The Heaven in the Pot, also known as Dantalian, was his only discovery in a random Hive he entered through an invitation in the past. She was a petite and lovely gothic girl who lived in a warm study deep underground in the bar of The Real Folk Blues and was not a human with flesh and blood in the real world.
She is a door to the [Hive] hidden deep within and even at the bottom of the electronic sea, and the believer Hearn happens to have a matching silver key.
To be honest, before opening her eyes, the believer had high expectations for this so-called trip to the White House. She was so excited that her hands trembled when she found the two words in a pile of ancient fragments.
Is it finally here? A childhood dream, a classic mystery exploration, happy times with silly best friends, and a journey to a mysterious mansion where a bloody history is hidden beneath a glamorous exterior!
"Even the Immortal Yamato has appeared! What kind of traditional locked-room mystery is this?!"
The believer, Hern, swiftly swept across the roof of the speeding train, covering the distance of more than ten carriages in an instant. He leaped from the edge of the roof of the last carriage, gripped his knife in a backhand, and with a powerful descent, plunged the crimson blade straight into the giant spider-like bionic mech that had just fired a shot at him.
Then he flicked the knife.
Seeing that her blade could not penetrate the opponent's armor, the believer Hearn decisively jumped back off the back of the metal lump and landed on her feet.
This is a purely freight carriage, consisting only of a chassis without an outer shell. The space is not spacious, with piles of gray containers stacked on both sides, and outside the train is a seemingly endless forest of red maple trees.
The believer squinted as she examined the large creature. She had been too far away to notice that it had a head-like structure.
This bionic mech, painted in a highly futuristic black and red hue, has a spider-like four-legged chassis, while its upper body resembles a humanoid bionic structure. Its limbs can freely switch between cannon barrels and blades. In its artillery mode, the four cannons can fire independently or combine into a single giant cannon, firing extremely powerful and long-range blazing plasma. In its blade mode...
The giant spider mech had such a graceful waist. Its limbs suddenly transformed into chain blades, and its upper body began to rotate at high speed around the central axis of the chassis. In an instant, it transformed into a black and red windmill harvester that spun and scooped towards where the believer stood. Along the way, the high-speed rotating blades scraped across the metal underside of the vehicle, sparks flying and iron filings flying everywhere.
If you have too much hair, you will be weak to fire, and if you are big, you will be weak to the crotch.
Herrne's extensive combat experience allowed her to immediately pinpoint the weakness of this giant windmill combine harvester. An ancient chakra bloomed beneath her feet, casting a faint golden hue over her silhouette. The next moment, Herrne's figure accelerated abruptly, leaving a white afterimage, and before the rapidly spinning blades could reach her, she slid like a fish beneath the dark red mech's chassis.
Draw the knife!
Cut again!
This iron lump seems to have a shell structure made of a special alloy. Whether it was the back of the head just now or the center of the chassis now, the feeling of the blade cutting into it is like hitting an iron wall with chopsticks. The dark red paint adds a layer of skin with a biased nature to this mecha. When such narrow attacks make contact with the opponent's shell, they are deflected and deflected.
The sound of a blade scraping against paint is quite jarring to the human auditory nerve, much like the experience of scratching the blackboard with fingernails during breaks in school.
The woman's attack naturally attracted the attention of the giant spider. Its intelligence, through logical judgment, ended the "windmill" process. The four legs on the chassis suddenly stopped moving and stood upright. In an instant, a dense laser network lit up between the four legs, completely blocking the intruder's retreat. The nearly five-meter-tall massive body crashed down like a hydraulic jack as the sliding mechanism on the four legs unlocked. And that solid iron lump weighed far more than a thousand pounds.
The entire train chassis burst into sparks several meters high at the moment of impact, and the clang of metal colliding echoed far and wide through the valley, followed by a series of groans of metal deformation.
The mainframe AI of [Immortal Yamato] emitted a "beep beep beep beep" sound. If someone were present and personally joined the battle, they might be able to understand the profound meaning behind it through passion and atmosphere—"You're stupid, aren't you? I have a shield wall."
The sound of metal deformation continued to intensify, and the massive bionic mecha began to shake uncontrollably, as if its shock absorption system had completely failed.
This stalemate did not last long. When the trembling reached its peak, the oversized red spider suddenly took to the air. A blue figure bathed in flames leaped up in an uppercut stance. As the force of the punch increased, the blue flames instantly vaporized the [Immortal Yamato] with overwhelming force.
"You're stupid, aren't you? I can do the Rising Dragon."
The believer, Hearn, landed back on the surface of the train's cargo hold, carrying her knife. Looking around and seeing that the invincible actress was no longer there, she stood still, silent, lost in thought.
A moment later, he suddenly looked up, held the scarlet blade codenamed "Clothesline 07" horizontally in front of him, and delivered a knee strike, breaking the scarlet blade in two.
"Street vendor goods are unreliable, and as someone who came from nowhere, I'm definitely not suited for handling knives."