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The final phase of the G evaluation was a live-fire simulation: "The Fracture." A hostage crisis in a virtual Shibuya. The test proctors flooded the zone with 10,000 synthetic emotional signatures—fear, rage, despair. A normal agent would be catatonic in seconds.

Bang.

Hiroko calculated the odds: 11%. "That's suicide. Your neural link will fry."

Hiroko's calculations spiraled. The sociopath was wired to a dead man's switch connected to the gas line. If his heart stopped, the building blew. If he was subdued, he'd trigger it. A logical stalemate.

Hiroko's dart hit his shoulder. Not his heart. The switch clattered to the floor, inert.

"Logic fails," Hiroko admitted, a cold dread seeping into her voice for the first time. "We withdraw."

"It's the only fact that matters," Oishi grinned, tapping her own G-mark. "That's why we're both 'G.' You see the pattern. I see the soul inside it."

Where Hiroko was logic, Oishi was chaos. Where Hiroko was the scalpel, Oishi was the earthquake. They were two halves of the same loaded gun. Oishi, with her wild auburn hair and a smile that always seemed to know a joke you didn't, was a "G-Class Anomaly"—a raw, untamed empath who could feel the emotional shrapnel of an entire city block.

Ayaka stood before the three-dimensional diagnostic mirror in her quarters, the number "G-1" glowing softly on the back of her left hand like a brand of divinity. Her reflection stared back—sharp, obsidian eyes, a severe black bob, and a posture that belonged to a blade. She was the Institute's masterpiece, a psychometric prodigy capable of analyzing any human flaw in a single handshake.

"No," Oishi said, standing up. Her eyes were bleeding from the psychic strain. "You do the math. I'll give him a heart."

And then she walked into the room.

Hiroko knelt beside her, her perfect, data-driven face fractured for the first time. "That was a 11% probability. You are illogical."

The dead man's switch trembled in his hand. His thumb lifted.