He put on his reading glasses and pored over every number on the record.
Where the figures had once been ugly enough to hurt, they'd gone gentle. Rates that had sat in the thirties and forties were all under twenty now.
His body began to shake. His eyes went red, and cloudy tears slid down the creases of his face and fell onto the page, blurring the ink into soft grey smudges.
For weeks he had watched the children weaken as their numbers climbed. He had watched them endure the sickness while he stood by, able to do nothing. That helplessness had come close to crushing him. He was only an old man, ordinary, without a single special ability, without even the stamina of the young.
Yet for these homeless Cursed Children he'd walked away from everything he had.
Every scrap of himself had gone into this place, into looking after them.
He'd kept his worry about the corrosion rates locked behind his teeth, telling no one, afraid the children would be frightened, afraid the mood would turn heavy.
And now the one thing nobody had ever managed to reverse had been driven down, all of it, by the man in the dark glasses. The children wouldn't have to suffer the corrosion. They had a chance at living.
Matsuzaki couldn't hold it back. He pulled off his glasses, scrubbed at his face with his sleeve, eyes rimmed scarlet, tears still coming, and stood to bow deeply. His voice cracked around the gratitude.
"Gojo, thank you. Thank you so much. If it weren't for you, these children... these children would have..."
"Elder Matsuzaki, next to what you've given these kids all this time, what I did doesn't count for much."
Satoru caught his arm and steadied him, sincere, without a shred of showmanship. He didn't consider it an achievement. For someone with his ability it had been simple. Easy, even.
Matsuzaki was different. An ordinary man who'd spent his whole life shielding children the world had thrown out. That kind of endurance was the part worth admiring.
"I've already spoken with Seitenshi. She's arranging somewhere spacious and safe, and we'll move everyone there. I'll be going too, to keep them protected."
He paused, then went on.
"After that I'll keep taking in other Cursed Children, a few at a time, and gather them all in one place where they'll be looked after properly. No more drifting from ruin to ruin. No more getting kicked around. When that day comes, I'd like you to be the director and go on caring for them. With you there, they'll feel safer."
The future in those words hit the old man hard. The tears came faster, but a brilliant smile spread over his face along with them, the smile of a man setting down a weight he'd carried too long and finally seeing a way through.
He couldn't speak. Not because of any title, but because the Cursed Children, a whole discarded population, were finally going to get real help.
Those poor children would have a warm home. A safe one. They'd get to live the way normal children lived, without contempt, without pain.
"Please... please let me keep looking after them..."
He gripped Satoru's hand tight, voice thick, eyes steady.
"I'll give everything I have to every last one of them. I won't fail your expectations, and I won't fail their trust."
There was probably no better description for the old man in that moment than weeping for joy.
The boulder on his chest had rolled away at last. The children had a future. Everything he'd poured out had come back to him.
With all the corrosion rates handled and a reminder passed along to Matsuzaki about clearing away the leftover fragments so nothing was left to find, Satoru gathered up Betty and Sumire Muroto and headed out of the sewers.
Fresh air met them above ground. He stretched, an easy grin spreading over his face.
"That's another thing off the list. All that's left is waiting to hear back from Seitenshi."
The memory of those bright, uncomplicated smiles warmed something in him, and the grin widened. He did as he pleased, always had, but he couldn't stomach watching innocent kids suffer. Being able to fix it made him happy in a plain, uncomplicated way.
Sumire, walking beside him, carried none of that lightness. She fixed him with a sulky stare that had something feverish behind it.
She grabbed his arm. "I am begging you. Get Seitenshi to hurry up. I can't wait to have a fully equipped lab so I can study you!"
"Your Reverse Cursed Technique, your Cursed Energy, the way you suppress the Gastrea Virus without breaking a sweat. All of it deserves study!"
"I don't mind being studied."
Satoru raised an eyebrow and threw an arm out to block her path, wariness all over his face.
"But let's get one thing straight up front. I'll cooperate with normal research. Anything abnormal or off the rails, forget it. Don't try to sneak one past me."
He knew her too well. Once the research fever took her she stopped caring about anything else, and without rules laid down beforehand she'd get up to something.
"What counts as abnormal research?" Sumire blinked, playing innocent, though the slyness leaked through. "Everything I do is legitimate science, thank you."
"The kind that tramples ethics," Satoru said, dead serious. "Or anything that makes me uncomfortable, or crosses my lines. Non-negotiable."
"Huh? You regenerate anyway. Pushing things a little shouldn't be a problem, should it?"
She wasn't giving up, still coaxing, the fever in her eyes undimmed, already sketching protocols behind them.
"Who told you regeneration means open season?"
He flicked her forehead, exasperated. "Regenerating hurts. And I'm not becoming your lab specimen to poke around with as you please. So, warning delivered. Anything over the line, don't even think about it."
"Fine, fine."
She rubbed her stinging forehead and gave in, aggrieved.
"I'll clear every experiment with you first. Happy? But you can't refuse everything either, or how am I supposed to develop a way to suppress the Gastrea Virus? How do I help more Cursed Children?"
"Refusing you doesn't get me anything."
He rolled his eyes, tone softening.
"If I said it, I meant it. I want results out of you too. More kids get saved that way. Stay inside the lines and I'll cooperate with anything reasonable."
While the two of them bickered, the system panel in his head shifted at last.
After all this time, the side story covering what he'd lived through in his own world had finished playing.
It was only a side story, with no deliberate push for conflict or payoff, but everything in it landed: a whole new Cursed Energy system, a cast with sharp personalities, and the string of white-knuckle fights he'd gone through to protect Riko Amanai.
And the ending, where he stepped up and cut down the rotten Higher-ups who treated lives as disposable. All of it sat exactly in the comment section's wheelhouse.
Judging by the comments streaming across the panel, the audience had found it plenty satisfying.
The screen was wall-to-wall with things like "Gojo is so cool," "That felt so good," "This side story was a blast," and "More please."
The comments piled so thick they nearly buried the whole panel.
With that satisfaction delivered, his Popularity Points climbed steadily, and by a substantial margin.
A single side story had earned back everything he'd spent on the Gastrea Virus enhancement, with a surplus on top.
By the end of it his Popularity Points had reached two hundred and seventy thousand, closing on the three hundred thousand mark, which put Adaptation or the Divine Protection of the Phoenix within reach.
At this rate he wouldn't even need to leave the Gastrea world before he'd banked enough to trade for the ability he wanted.
The thought lifted his mood further. The smile hadn't left his mouth in a while.
But it wasn't over. The system had flagged earlier that a new trailer would follow the side story.
The comments cared about that a great deal.
Not one viewer left when the side story ended. They stayed and spammed "trailer," "play the trailer already," and "can't wait for the new content." The heat didn't drop a degree.
The system didn't make them wait. A few seconds of black screen, then the panel lit again, and the new trailer began.
[Is this Re:Zero season two?! I saw Felt!] [So hyped, rubbing my hands together, finally something new!] [If it's a whole new world I'd be fine with that too, I want to see Gojo cause problems somewhere else!] [Honestly, I'm curious. Unlike other anime, this looks like a series with Gojo as the lead where every season is a different world. That format is so fresh!] [A new kind of anime, huh, feels really fresh, and Gojo's gorgeous and strong on top of it, I could watch him forever!] [I miss Felt so much, and Emilia. I hope this season puts them onscreen with Gojo!]
Comments poured past, packing the screen with speculation.
Everyone was arguing over whether the trailer showed a new world or a continuation of the Re:Zero one they'd already watched. The energy ran hot.
Satoru watched with some curiosity of his own, wanting to see what a trailer for Black Bullet looked like.
The screen brightened, and the footage came.
The trailer ran only a few minutes, but the system's editing made it hit like a hammer.
It opened on Earth from orbit, and the planet looked infected.
Crimson spread from a single point like a tide going out in every direction, so fast that within moments the whole globe had gone red.
A cut, and a Stage 5 Gastrea filled the frame.
Those enormous horrors weren't stills in a briefing file anymore.
They moved.
Tanks, aircraft, guns, ammunition, none of it did anything against a thing that size.
A river of steel counted for less than the endless swarm of Gastrea beneath it.
The regeneration alone was enough to strip hope out of a person.
Worse still, there wasn't just one of them. There were many.
Humanity stood at the edge.
A handful of shots sketched the whole situation, clean and clear.
And despair came through the frame with it.
Another cut.
A peaceful city now.
Except the Monoliths spearing into the sky looked like fencing around livestock.
Every part of it read as absurd.
Outside sat Gastrea beyond counting, packed shoulder to shoulder past the horizon.
The picture shifted again.
A flash of Rentaro Satomi fighting with his mechanical modifications.
A flash of Enju Aihara, a small adorable girl, going toe to toe with something snarling and monstrous.
The contrast was extreme, sharpening how vicious the Gastrea looked while making the world itself more intriguing.
In so little time it had already put so many different elements on the table.
Viral infection, biological invasion, mechanical augmentation, a tiny girl who fought like a god of war...
If Re:Zero, which had launched without any trailer at all, had drawn its audience slowly through Gojo's everyday interactions with the people around him, then Black Bullet led with the strongest hand it had.
Every hook it owned went straight into your face, and left you wanting all of it.