meownovel online translation media presented

The battle was over, but remnants of the gravitational waves were still rumbling through the woodlands. Verlaine was lying at ground zero among the trees collapsed in a radial pattern. The lingering gravity created a small whirlpool that drew in sound, wind, and leaves. Verlaine, however, still hadn’t regained consciousness.
Adam sat him up with one arm and stared at his sleeping expression. “His pulse is stable. Breathing is faint,” observed Adam. “He is sound
asleep. The lingering gravity is not powerful enough to be a danger to the human body, either.”
He then leaned forward to focus more on Verlaine’s sleeping expression. This calamitous man known as the king of assassins looked extremely gentle at rest. He wasn’t the least bit threatening.
“Say, would you like to draw something on his face while he’s asleep?” asked Adam.
“Don’t,” said Chuuya, still sitting on the ground.
“This finger actually functions as a pen as well,” added Adam as he pulled the cap off the tip of his middle finger.
“I said don’t,” Chuuya repeated, though his lips were curling into a faint smirk.
“He looks just like any ordinary human sleeping so peacefully like this,” Adam noted while placing the cap back on his fingertip.
“Asleep or not, he is just an ordinary human,” Chuuya replied indifferently. “His skill is powerful, but that’s it. He gets mad, he worries… That doesn’t seem to be enough for him, though.”
Adam quietly stared hard at Chuuya after hearing those words, but before long he smiled. “You are exactly right. It appears you have reached the conclusion you needed to arrive at.” “Huh? The hell does that mean?”
But right as Chuuya shot a piercing glare at Adam, he suddenly heard static coming from his radio.
“Look at you two best buddies. I heard what happened.”
It was Dazai’s voice.
“You defeated Verlaine, huh? I’m impressed. When I came up with the plan, I was like, ‘Eh, Chuuya might get flattened before he even reaches the surface, but whatever. It’s just Chuuya, after all.’”
“Listen here, you little sh—”
Before Chuuya could even rip into him, the voice on the radio continued:
“But that’s not why I called you. Have you seen N?”
“Huh? N?” Chuuya furrowed his brow. “Verlaine kidnapped him, right?” “Of course, we sent a rescue group to go get him, since we could use a brain like his. I’m especially interested in having him take a look inside
you.”
Chuuya didn’t say anything for a few moments, but he eventually grabbed the radio and replied, “Oh. So that’s what you were really after, huh?”
“You just realized that?” Dazai chuckled mirthfully. “I know we had to protect Mori, and blah, blah, blah, but I’m nowhere near loyal enough to fight someone like Verlaine without a reward. That’s why I’ve come up with a plan to learn the command sequence N knows so we can modify you into our loyal company maid who—”
“Yeah, yeah. Keep talkin’ outta your ass. Anyway, get to the point.
Why’d you ask me if I’d seen N?”
“Because we lost contact with the rescue squad that saved him on their way here. We can’t get in contact with N, either.”
“What?”
“Something must have happened.”
Dazai’s voice eerily faded into the night.
A black Mafia vehicle had crashed into a telephone pole.
N rolled out of the back seat of the unmoving car. His entire body was bruised and beaten, and blood filled his mouth. He was on all fours at the roadside, his breathing ragged and strained.
The front end of the car was totaled from the head-on collision with the telephone pole on the shoulder of the road, and the entire vehicle was still smoking. This quiet area was near the battleground with Verlaine; there was no traffic coming or going. Only the dark trees were watching.
“I can’t…die… Not here… Not yet…,” gasped N before vomiting blood onto the ground. He slowly managed to stand, then began walking forward to escape to safety. “Not until…I give this message…”
He pulled an old flare gun out of his pocket. It was a dull red. Although it looked very similar to a normal pistol, its thick muzzle could fire twelve- gauge flares.
Next, N began to take off his watch—an extremely ordinary silver watch. His sweaty, bloodied fingers removed the glass covering and retrieved a single gear.
That gear was the watch’s only unique feature. The metal had a mysterious glow to it; there was gold, platinum, and a rainbow-colored alloy that most people had never seen before. When the moonlight shone upon the gear, an extremely small character string emerged onto the surface for the briefest moment.
N dragged his leg along the ground as he walked to a hill with a view of the battle site. There he saw a crater surrounded by collapsed trees.
“I knew this would happen… You let the Brutalization take over, didn’t you, Verlaine?” N panted. The corner of his lips faintly curled upward. “Then even these fragile hands of mine will finally be able to reach you.”
With calm, emotionless eyes, N took the mysterious metal out of his watch and placed it inside a flare. He had the gaze of a man who’d made up his mind and was simply following procedure. He loaded the flare into the flare gun, then aimed it at the sky.
Smoke was still rising from the car behind N. Fuel was leaking from under it. There were two people inside the vehicle, but they showed no signs of moving. Both were with the Mafia.
They were dead.
The man in the driver’s seat had his face on the wheel as if he were asleep, but from the nape of his neck to his waist, both his clothing and flesh had melted, exposing his spine. Putrid white smoke was still rising from his gaping wound.
The man in the passenger seat was more or less the same. His body was melted from his right shoulder to his arm; he died the moment his spine broke when they hit the telephone pole. The chemicals poured onto him from behind had chewed his seat belt into pieces.
An empty vial was lying on the floor in the back of the car. It was clear how the occupants had died: The man sitting in the back had suddenly doused them with a chemical solution. They were taken completely by surprise. The solution melted through their bodies before they could even react, and they subsequently crashed into a telephone pole on the curb.
These two Mafia members had rescued the man in the back seat—N— from the tower crane where he’d been abandoned. They had been in the middle of taking him to Dazai.
Chuuya was carrying the sleeping assassin and half-broken android on his back. Although their combined weight and size were double that of Chuuya’s, he showed no signs of struggling, since he had manipulated their gravity to make them lighter.
“Wow. What am I going to do?” Adam said with his eyes closed. “I completed my mission to a T. All of Parliament—no, every nation in the world is going to be thanking me when I get home.”
“Uh-huh. I feel like the guy carrying you on his back right now deserves some of that praise, too, though,” replied Chuuya. He looked peeved.
“I am going to be promoted without a doubt now. It appears I’ll be able to fulfill my dream of opening an android-only detective agency even more quickly than I imagined.”
“Yeah, yeah. Good for you.”
“In the future, perfect android detectives will protect the imperfect humans, and eventually, human detectives will be deemed obsolete and phased out… No, if anything, humans will be liberated from any activity other than leisure, and with no way to take care of themselves, we androids will be in charge of them… Heh-heh-heh.”
“Quit laughing like that. You’re freaking me out.”
Just as Chuuya fixed Adam with a stern glare, a flare shot into the sky due east.
“What’s that?”
It was a glittering golden flare. The tail of smoke sharply clipped the night sky like a shooting star moving in reverse. The light illuminated the outline of the trees, carving into the earth like a scar and throwing a long, long shadow from Chuuya’s feet.
“…Did the attack unit misfire or something?” Chuuya wondered, squinting as he looked up at the newly formed sun in the night sky.
Dazai watched without even blinking. His eyes swiftly darted about in search of the flare’s source.
The angle. The current time. The current situation. The type of flare.
The most likely suspect who fired it. The reason. The goal.
His eyes flashed as if he had all the answers before even a second had gone by. And then…
“This isn’t good…” The words fell from his lips in a crackling wheeze. “Everyone needs to evacuate… No… There’s no time.”
His eyes trembled with despair.
Countless peculiar fragments of rainbow-glittering metal began pouring down from the flare. Chuuya looked at the sky and saw multicolored particles finer than snow shimmering like stars. Their beautiful twinkle was reminiscent of a silent symphony.
That was when it immediately hit Chuuya: They were playing music. It was acoustic pressure, to be exact. A simple, pure musical signal that preceded a melody.
A sudden change occurred. Verlaine abruptly screamed from Chuuya’s back.
It was an unintelligible scream. Every hair on Chuuya’s body stood on end. Verlaine couldn’t possibly have woken up. Chuuya had let his guard down completely; what if he was under attack? This was the worst position he could be in. He’d have no way to evade a subsequent attack.
Chuuya swiftly leaned forward and tried to throw Verlaine off, but that was when he realized Verlaine wasn’t merely screaming. He was suffering.
His eyes became bloodshot as veins emerged on his face like a net. He clawed at his chest and fell to the ground, writhing in pain. His entire body tensed to the point that Chuuya could almost hear the muscles tear. Verlaine violently bent backward.
“Adam! What’s going on?!”
“These are not the effects of the poison I created!” Adam yelled stiffly.
That was when Chuuya noticed Verlaine’s lingering gravity was absorbing the metallic particles. That was most likely affecting him even more than if the particles simply touched his bare skin.
Someone was attacking. Verlaine was suffering because of these metallic particles.
But who could have shot that flare? “…Got me.”
Verlaine sounded like he was trying to groan something through the unbearable pain. Chuuya looked toward him.
“He…got…me.”
There was heartbreaking regret in his strained voice.
“That researcher…lied… He knew…The Secret of the Gentle Forest…”
That was when the change occurred. The space around Verlaine began to waver.
“The change in the gravitational field is swallowing the ambient light. Observing frequency fluctuations due to the Doppler effect!” Adam’s voice resembled a high-pitched alarm. “Something is coming!”
The earth around Verlaine began to sink like an invisible giant had punched the ground, gradually creating a crater. The trees trembled as if in fear.
“Please get out of here, Master Chuuya. As quickly as you can. This gravitational wavelength pattern is exactly the same as the one recorded on that day nine years ago.”
“What?” Chuuya’s expression instantly changed. “Verlaine, answer me!
What’s happening?!”
Verlaine was drowning in the gravitational wave vibrations he was producing.
Space warped until Verlaine was barely visible. The extraordinarily powerful skill-phase expansion reached a circumference of a few hundred feet. The energy potential inside the phase created successive blue flashes of lightning-like bolts.
Verlaine’s voice grew faint and weak as if it came from another dimension.
“The world…is going to end.”
He reached out with a trembling hand as if he were an old man drawing his last breath.
“Chuuya—live.”
His hand then touched Chuuya’s chest, manipulating his gravity and flinging him backward.
“Wha—?!”
Chuuya spun through the air and looked at Verlaine. He was smiling wistfully.
The rapidly expanding and diffusing matter soon caught up with Chuuya, swallowing his consciousness whole.
The heavens split. Black lightning struck the earth. The air expanded.
The mafiosi from the attack unit were preparing to evacuate when they heard it: the songs of angels. Dazai stood on a train car and heard the laughter of demons.
It was just like the calamity that occurred nine years ago. The ground boiled. Buildings evaporated. The heavens were scorched as the earth cried.
The god of destruction was emerging from the other side of this world.
But the creature burning through the forest was not Arahabaki. It was something even bigger, darker, and more sinister. The behemoth eclipsed the moon as each of its faint movements created a vacuum, splitting the land open.
Dazai looked up at the creature.
“This is a singularity? Did this power really come from a skill?” He sounded downright ecstatic. “It looks like the end of the world.”
Even his lips unconsciously curled with euphoria.
Within the first ten seconds, every tree within a mile radius had been destroyed. Ten seconds later, every bit of land in the same radius was demolished and burst into the air. Another ten seconds passed, and the hollowed earth began to boil, turning into lava that started burning the forest into nothing.
N cackled as he watched the show from atop a hill.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha! Oh, Verlaine! This is The Secret of the Gentle Forest! This is what Rimbaud removed from the files to protect you! It’s how we turn you back into your true form!”
The silhouette of a gargantuan black beast—the monster Verlaine had become—stood tall before N’s eyes.
“Even the god Arahabaki is a mere knock-off of you. You are the first living singularity to ever exist. You are the mythic beast that came from this world’s very origins. Your creator named you after the mirror image of the malevolent god, the original demon: Demonic Beast Guivre.”
The giant beast raised its head.
Its body was fire itself, as was its tail. Its highly dense jet-black physique was cold enough to freeze the night.
The monster had eight red eyes and rusty silver teeth. The high energy within was so powerful that it was difficult to make out its wavering silhouette.
The beast stood taller than a high-rise building; its jaw and general appearance were reptilian, and yet it looked nothing like any living being on this planet. This was a monster that existed only in legends, a ruler of chaos and evil itself—a malicious dragon of lore.
It was far too sinister to call a god. The soil beneath its claws boiled as the mafiosi who couldn’t escape in time screamed their deaths.
This was living, breathing chaos. A creature that only existed on a cosmic scale far beyond human comprehension, its howl of annihilation filled the air.