Chapter 37 Thirty seven
Chapter 37 Thirty seven
Himari packed her things in the middle of the night because dealing with goodbyes sounded exhausting.
She didn't need a mountain of supplies anyway.
She took a portable frequency recorder she’d swiped from Arisugawa’s desk when the doctor wasn't looking.
She grabbed a messy hand-drawn map showing the jagged terrain left behind by the receded Sea of Spores.
The last item was a set of heavy cryo-maintenance tools she’d dragged all the way from the throne room floor.
Her logic was simple enough to keep her moving.
The Vex network was changing every single hour.
If any piece of Kaito was still wired into that system, he was changing right along with it.
Staying in the ruins of the Palace didn't offer any real answers.
Chasing the machine migration into the dark at least gave her a destination to walk toward.
"You really think you can just walk out of here?" Arisugawa asked, stepping into the small room with a tablet clutched to her chest.
Himari didn't stop stuffing her pack. "I don't think. I just know I can't sit on a pile of old bones anymore."
Arisugawa sighed and tapped the screen, thrusting the bright display directly into Himari’s face. "Look at these thermal projections, Himari. Look at the decay rates for the outer landscape."
The screen showed a lot of red lines and numbers that looked like bad news.
"The soil out there is practically dead, and the weather patterns are totally unpredictable since the core shifted," the doctor said, her voice shaking slightly. "You won't last a week without proper support."
Himari listened to the data without letting it change her mind for a single second. "The data doesn't feel Kaito’s pulse, Doc. I do."
Arisugawa stared at her for a long moment, realizing she was talking to a brick wall. "He wouldn't want you to die in a ditch somewhere out there."
"He wouldn't want me waiting around to rot either," Himari said, pulling the straps of her bag tight.
From the dark corner of the courtyard outside, Shinnosuke watched the whole exchange in total silence.
He’d been wandering the settlement for weeks like a man walking through unfamiliar rooms in a house he used to own.
He didn't say a word to Himari as she walked past him toward the exit.
Instead, he went back to his makeshift bunk and quietly started gathering his own belongings into a battered canvas pack.
He didn't offer a single word of explanation for why he was packing his gear.
Himari didn't ask for one when he lined up beside her at the eastern gate.
They left the Palace grounds long before the first hint of dawn could touch the gray sky.
The lower districts were a total mess after weeks of unrelenting rain.
The water had carved shallow, muddy streams right through the cracked asphalt of the old transit routes.
They kept their heads down, following the deep, heavy tracks left by the last known migration path of the Vex clusters.
Everything led straight toward the vast, empty eastern flatlands.
"You don't have to follow me, you know," Himari said, her boots squelching in the thick mud.
Shinnosuke didn't look at her, his eyes fixed on the horizon. "The perimeter here is clear. The logical path is forward."
"You sound like a broken machine," she muttered, checking the frequency recorder in her hand.
"Perhaps," he replied flatly. "But the data indicates that walking alone decreases your survival rate by half."
Himari scoffed, but she didn't push him away.
She was actually glad for the company, even if the company felt like a ghost wearing a soldier's face.
The first two days of the journey were nothing but gray mud and endless, empty space.
The sky looked like a wet blanket hung over a world that had forgotten how to grow anything green.
Every time Himari checked the frequency recorder, the screen just showed a flat line of ambient static.
It buzzed with a low, irritating hiss that made her ears ring after a few hours.
"Is that thing even working?" Shinnosuke asked on the third morning, his voice cutting through the damp air.
Himari tapped the glass casing with her thumb. "It's working. The grid out here is just totally dark."
"If the grid is dark, the migration might have dissipated," he noted, his tone completely level.
"They didn't dissipate," she said, her grip tightening on the strap of her bag. "They went somewhere specific. I can still feel the pull."
They kept walking, their legs aching from climbing the jagged ridges left behind by the old spore tides.
The air grew colder the further they got from the city walls.
Himari kept thinking about the apartment, about how Kaito used to complain about the draft under the door.
She wondered if whatever was left of him could still feel the cold.
By the afternoon of the third day, the ground started to slope upward into a steep, rocky ridge.
The mud gave way to sharp shale that slipped under their boots with every step.
"Almost at the top," Himari gasped, her lungs burning from the thin air.
Shinnosuke reached out and grabbed her elbow, pulling her up the last few feet of the incline.
The moment they reached the crest of the ridge, the frequency recorder in her pocket let out a sharp, deafening shriek.
It wasn't the usual static.
It was a single, high-voltage pulse that made her drop the device into the dirt.
"What the hell was that?" Himari yelled, clenching her hands as the vibration traveled straight up her arms.
Shinnosuke didn't answer.
He was staring down at the expansive, open plain stretching out beneath the ridge.
Himari followed his gaze, and her breath caught completely in her throat.
The entire valley floor was filled with thousands upon thousands of dormant Vex units.
They were standing eerily still under the gray sky, their metallic bodies glistening with rain.
They weren't moving a single inch.
They weren't growling or scanning the horizon.
But they weren't just standing in a random crowd either.
From up on the ridge, the horrifying truth became perfectly clear to both of them.
The thousands of machines were arranged in a massive, sprawling pattern across the dirt.
The layout was precise, geometric, and completely unnatural.
It was the exact same structural pattern that had been imprinted into the crystallized Apex-Wire beneath the Palace ruins.