Blown wide open by nothing more than a few words from Hoshimi Miyabi, Thousand Faces was thoroughly incensed now — even the Bangboo figure on the screen had puffed itself up in a sulk.
"Hmph! Don't expect to get one more scrap of information out of me!"
With that, Thousand Faces cut the feed, and the whole monitor sank into blackness.
"That's fine. I already have what I wanted," Miyabi said, entirely unbothered by the refusal to talk.
So long as she knew that both Thousand Faces and Perlman were connected to The Exaltists, all that remained was to turn the spearhead toward The Exaltists themselves.
Back with Geno and Twiggy: the East Tower was clear, and the pair were on their way to the West Tower when they reached the tenth floor and ran into something of a problem.
"So... what do we do about this?"
Standing in front of them was an enormous shutter gate, and behind it lay the passage from the East Tower to the West Tower.
The trouble was that the gate ran on a motor, and every power facility in the Balai Building was currently dead.
Geno scratched the back of his head for a moment, then hit on a simple solution.
"How about I just cut it open?"
He drew his longsword as he said it and made to step forward and split the gate apart.
Twiggy stopped him a heartbeat before the blade moved.
"Calm down! That gate is built into the structure. Cut through it and the passage behind it could come down on us, and then we still won't get across."
The idea of Geno simply bulldozing his way through brought Twiggy out in a cold sweat.
If someone with that little sense of restraint put a bit too much strength into the swing, a ruined passage would be the small problem. Paying Mayflower for the damage would be the big one.
"Huh. Good point."
Geno lowered the blade he'd already raised. But that still left the question of how the two of them were supposed to get through.
"If I remember right, this building has a small backup power station. We can go take a look there."
The twin towers were equipped with thorough emergency measures. Twiggy pulled up the map, checked it, then set off toward the power station.
On the way, the two of them drifted back to the horror stories about the Balai Building they'd been discussing earlier.
"Say, do people really turn into ghosts after they die?"
Geno asked it with his hands laced behind his head. The ghosts he meant were the wandering-spirit kind, not the Oni race that Soukaku belonged to.
"Obviously there are no ghosts. People in the old era didn't understand the world well enough, so they were always mistaking strange things for spirits, but science has proven that ghosts absolutely do not exist in this world."
Twiggy put her faith in science, and none of it in the supernatural.
Geno, however, had his doubts. His very existence seemed to be proof that souls were real. And what was a ghost, if not a soul that had lost its body?
"Never mind that. We're almost at the power station. There are two main breakers, so we'll have to split up from here."
Twiggy pointed him in one direction and took the other for herself.
"Okay. Try not to get too scared without me around~"
"...Worry about yourself."
Geno was acting up again, and Twiggy was long past being surprised by it.
She set off alone toward the second breaker.
Walking on without Twiggy beside him, Geno found the corridor felt oddly empty.
With the air in the Balai Building growing colder by the minute, Twiggy kept circling back to the ghost story she and Geno had been trading.
For some reason, something about it made her skin crawl.
"It's in my head, right? The cold's just playing tricks on me. There's no way ghosts exist in the real world."
She patted her cheeks to put some fight back into herself, determined to finish quickly and get back to Geno.
Two laps through the building later, she finally reached the breaker.
She threw the switch, and the tension went out of her shoulders. Then she turned to go find Geno — and barely two steps on, a chill crawled up her back.
"Who's there!?"
A soldier's instincts had her saber out and a combat stance set before she could think.
But when she turned, there was nothing. The corridor was empty, and only her own voice came echoing back.
"My imagination? No — unless we missed an Ethereal somewhere?"
Her first thought was that the environment was messing with her, but she dismissed it fast. A leftover Ethereal seemed far more likely.
So she kept her guard up and crept back toward the spot where she'd felt it.
"It should be right here. But... this is just a wall?"
The wall in front of her was as solid as ever. She reached out and ran her palm slowly across it, and still found nothing out of place.
"Strange."
With no answer forthcoming, Twiggy stopped puzzling over it. Regrouping with Geno as fast as possible was the more practical plan.
She took a single step. Then a pale hand settled on her shoulder.
The cold of it seeped through her clothes, and the blood drained out of her face. She turned her head, stiff as a machine, and saw it there on her shoulder — a hand that was faintly translucent and unmistakably real.
"AAAAHHH A GHOOOOST!! e=e=e=(#><)!!"
Pure instinct made her smack the hand away, and then she bolted, screaming the whole way.
The shriek cut through the building and reached Geno's ears in seconds. He had just thrown his own breaker, and the moment he heard Twiggy scream he abandoned everything else and tore off toward her.
He was halfway there when he saw Twiggy come scrambling toward him in a blind panic.
"Twiggy, are you o— oof!!"
He'd meant to ask if she was all right. What he got instead was Twiggy at full speed, barreling straight into him without slowing an inch.
Given the difference in their heights, her face slammed into his chest, and her arms flailed on instinct, leaving two bright red handprints across his cheeks.
Geno had no attention to spare for a pair of slaps. He wrapped his arms around her, held her still until the thrashing stopped, and softened his voice.
"All right, it's fine, everything's fine. I'm here. Don't be scared."
The warmth of his arms and the voice that had kept her company day and night settled her breathing, and reason came trickling back.
"Thanks. I— I'm better now."
She lingered a moment longer than she meant to, then pushed out of his arms and straightened her uniform. That performance had been far too embarrassing to dwell on.
"So what actually happened?"
Geno asked it once she'd calmed down.
But before Twiggy could answer, the answer showed up right in his face.
____
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