“Great Flame…”
“!!!”
Just as Turing was about to hurl the blazing spiral javelin in her hand at aside, countless ice bees burst through the walls on both sides of the room and converged on aside.
Turing froze for a moment.
A bone-rattling, icy wind arrived with the ice bees.
They were like a thunderstorm erupting out of nowhere, crackling across the ground and through the air. In an instant, they turned the water vapor in the room into ice crystals, filling most of the space.
Looking at the swarming ice bees, Turing didn’t dare imagine what kind of explosion the clash of hot and cold would cause if she hurled the javelin in her hand all at once.
“Turing! aside’s gone!”
“We need to get out of here!”
At Merka’s warning, Turing looked toward where aside had been. Sure enough, aside’s figure had vanished beneath the countless ice bees, nowhere to be seen.
【What?】
Turing’s pupils contracted sharply. No matter what method she tried, she couldn’t find aside.
It had vanished from this area without warning.
【Why? Why?】
【It happened last time, too. And now again…】
【Why does it disappear the moment the ice bees swarm in?】
【How does it do that?】
Reluctantly putting away the spiral javelin in her hand, which roared with fury like a blazing corona, Turing grabbed Merka and turned to run.
But the ice bees behind them weren’t so easy to shake off.
Organized and swarming in formation, they surged toward Turing and Merka like a rising tide.
“You two!”
“Over here, over here!”
“Come this way!”
Amid the crackling rush of the ice tide, a small, shrill voice reached their ears.
Turing looked toward the voice and saw a petite figure with red hair and green eyes standing in front of a huge machine in the corner of the room. She rubbed the bump on her head while frantically waving her two little arms to get their attention.
Turing hesitated and glanced at Merka. He nodded firmly.
“Mm. She’s trustworthy for now. Let’s check it out.”
At that, Turing spread the dozen-plus huge, powerful tentacles behind her and shot toward Oedipus.
Turing charged ahead like a giant spider with all its limbs spread wide.
She plunged her tentacles into the floor, the walls, even the ceiling. In all sorts of impossible poses, she darted through the room, dodging every bullet-like, suicidal dive from the ice bees.
Before long, Turing reached Oedipus.
“What is this… an MRI machine?”
After Turing set him down, Merka looked at Oedipus and the machine behind her and asked, puzzled.
It wasn’t that Merka wanted to show off his limited knowledge of foreign things at a time like this. He’d just noticed that the machine behind Oedipus looked an awful lot like the ring-shaped machine you could climb inside, described in foreign medical journals.
“Get inside! Hurry, hurry!”
Oedipus anxiously shoved Turing and Merka, trying to push them into the machine.
But Merka needed an explanation before he’d get into such a suspicious-looking machine.
“Oh, come on! You have to trust me!”
“I don’t know all the specifics, but the senior researchers in the lab told me that, to keep them from being affected by illusions, these ice bees don’t rely on sight or smell when searching for angels.”
“They rely on brain waves.”
“They can use aside to read the faint traces of consciousness in the air.”
“They can tell who’s an angel as soon as they read you.”
“This machine injects a dream-inducing agent. It can help you enter a deep hallucination quickly. The hallucinations will amplify the good things in your hearts. You could even spend a whole day in one, while only a dozen seconds pass in reality.”
“So as long as you hide inside the machine and sink into a deep hallucination, only your subconscious will remain in your bodies in the real world. The ice bees won’t be able to find you.”
“I’ll lead the ice bees away. You’ll wake up automatically when the time’s up, so don’t worry.”
“Think of it as taking a little break in the middle of a tense battle, okay?”
