“Haa…! Finally, some fuckin’ relaxation time!” sighed Ikusaki, heavily dropping his body on a chair.

“Just because they’re not around, it doesn’t mean you can mindlessly relax, Ikusaki,” warned Miue, taking a seat next to Mizusaki. He took a quick peek to the tablet placed at the centre of the table, the screen featuring several red dots spread around that location. “How are they behaving, Murayama?”

“Better than I was expecting,” confessed Murayama, taking a leisure sip to his coffee while half-heartedly reading one of the booklets being distributed throughout the shopping centre. “The fact no emergency button has been pressed in the restaurant area should be enough proof of that.”

“Don’t even mention that kind of shit…” groaned Miue, releasing an exasperated sigh afterwards. “Since we announced to them the testing period, I’ve been having nightmares about them going berserk for no reason whatsoever while outside of the base…”

“Maybe you should start trusting them a tiny bit more,” pointed out Mizusaki, popping his earphones out of his ears. “I mean, they have absolutely no interest in stuff that isn’t related to their missions. Why would they wreck a completely unrelated shopping centre?”

“Mizusaki has a point there,” acknowledged En, giving a couple of nods with his head. “They’ve been well behaved from the start, save some occasional lapses due to lack of knowledge of the world around them. They caused damages during the Russian attack but they did as they were told and there was no casualty on our side. Yes, they did a bit more damage during the testing period but it was all within their territory. For Mass Murder Machines, they’re really harmless to us humans.”

“I don’t get why,” said Ikusaki after a loud snort. “They’re all so prideful about being super soldiers and shit, but then they do nothing of what is expected from killing machines. This is not me complaining, though. I prefer having to survive their craziness over another insane killing spree.”

“Mitsu’s the same, isn’t she?” pointed out Sakinaka, placing her plastic cup of soda down on the table. “She’s a Mass Murder Machine like the rest of them but never once has she harmed any of us in any way or shape. If anything, she’s always been an elite worker to Tokyo’s military base. Whether she was doing it as a working soldier or as an infiltrated super soldier.”

“We’ve been living under the same roof as them for a while now but, in the end, we still know nothing about them,” sighed Eki, lowering his gaze back to the tablet’s screen. “No, maybe not ‘know’, but ‘understand’.”

“They’re also to blame for that,” said Miue, a small frown lightly creasing his brows. “Living with us hasn’t changed their opinion of us ‘poor, little humans’. They simply learned to tolerate our presence there because doing so is advantageous to them. Deep down, they still hate us.”

“Probably more instinctively than consciously,” added Sakinaka as she observed the red dots slowly moving around in the tablet’s screen. “All technology does what it was designed to do. If it does something else other than that, it was by coincidence or due to a mistake by the manufacturers. The Union’s scientists designed them so they would kill any human that appeared in front of them. That’s their purpose, nothing else. The fact they haven’t killed us all yet is because the scientists accidentally created them with far too much freedom of choice. They wanted them to be able to operate without needing instructions from their targets.”

“Really bad move there, scientists,” sneakered Mizusaki, a knowing smirk on his lips. “You dubbed them as your ultimate human-shaped weapon but, in the end, they are so imperfect they don’t even carry out their original mission~”

“Like I said earlier, we should be thankful for that,” said Ikusaki, straightening his sitting position a little bit when a sudden thought popped in his head. “But, like, if they can go against their original mission, doesn’t that mean the other super soldiers can do the same?”

“Probably not, Ikusaki, and for a very simple reason,” started Sakinaka as she placed her index finger next to the tablet. “These guys here are the only M serials ever created, according to the data Mitsu gave us. The other super soldiers out there have different characteristics from theirs. They were taught different things and raised with different methods. They will never be the same as them. Of course, sometimes defective products appear without any warning. If one of those defective super soldiers somehow managed to not be caught by the scientists and wasn’t eliminated by Rei, they’d be your best bet of having a like-minded super soldier.”

“What’s the probability of that happening?” inquired Murayama, raising his eyes from the booklet to glance at Sakinaka.

“So small you might as well call it extremely unlikely,” said Sakinaka, dismissively shrugging her shoulders. “The world is a big place. It would be one hell of a coincidence if such a rare surviving defective super soldier would end up precisely in Japan.”

-.-

“You can evade death once but the Grim Reaper will always come to get you at some point,” chuckled Tou, removing his hands from underneath the automatic faucet and shaking his hands around in the air to remove as much water from them as possible. He turned his body to the toilet’s entrance at the same time he finished wiping his hands on the sides of his pants. “Isn’t that right, Union’s lil’ Shinigami?”

“Why?” asked Rei, standing by the toilet’s entrance next to Iru.

“Why what?” asked back Tou, lightly arching an eyebrow in incomprehension.

“Why is there a super soldier in Tokyo’s military base?” asked Rei, his grey eyes flickering crimson red for a fraction of a second. “No super soldier was supposed to be stationed at that base. Why are you alive? All broken super soldiers are to be disposed of by The Union.”

“If you ask so many questions all at once, I won’t know how to answer…” hesitantly said Tou, rubbing the back of his neck with an awkward smile still present on his face. He sighed. “Well, not that I wasn’t expecting you to eventually come to interrogate me. For starters, let me introduce myself a second time. My name is Tou Kurose and it has been such for the last 8 years or so. Before The Union left me to die by the roadside, the scientists called me ‘F1’.”