Clara (main body) woke up.
Because she hadn’t paid attention all night, Sista had completely treated her like a doll, hugging her tightly with all four limbs wrapped around her. Fortunately, she was wearing pajamas, which spared her the embarrassment of skin-to-skin contact.
Even so, seeing Sista’s still-sleeping face, Clara couldn’t help but feel shy. Even if she regarded the other as a little girl in her heart, that face was still undeniably handsome.
Since her mind hadn’t been here, her body was able to get a full rest. Clara’s mental state was also quite good.
“Hehe, time to get up.”
She reached out her small hand to gently pat Sista’s sleeping face. Only when Sista’s eyelashes fluttered slightly did Clara free herself from those slender arms.
Turning her head toward the bed, she saw Lucia and Fran rubbing their eyes as they sat up, both with messy hair, clearly still not having slept enough.
“Hm? Where’s Bunny?”
The first thing Lucia asked upon waking up was about the whereabouts of the Moon Rabbit, sounding just like a child with their first pet.
Clara answered, “It went out on a scouting mission.”
For now, it couldn’t come back.
“Eh?”
With no bunny to hug, Lucia’s disappointment showed openly. Just how attached was she to that Moon Rabbit?
Next, Clara glanced at the blue-black short-haired girl beside her—how could she sleep wearing a lab coat?
“Fran, I have some questions I want to ask you…”
She gave a little glance outside the room.
“Can we talk before the assembly?”
In the seaside courtyard of the guest house’s first floor, Clara and Fran sat on a dew-damp bench after freshening up and changing into their regular clothes.
There was no livestream today, so Clara wasn’t wearing her swimsuit.
Fran, who’d stuck a lollipop in her mouth right after brushing her teeth, listened unhurriedly to Clara recount the events of last night before commenting.
“Pfft, those Moon Rabbits even have higher-ranking individuals? But ‘Rabbit Soldier’ as a name… Clara dear, your naming sense is really something else~”
“I don’t care about the name. Is your poison effective against those things?”
“No idea. But even if the virus doesn’t work on them, as long as we kill as many ordinary Moon Rabbits as possible, we’ll buy ourselves time.”
The “materials” used to make “Rabbit Soldiers” are just the flesh and blood of ordinary Moon Rabbits. If the regular Moon Rabbits are wiped out, the number of Rabbit Soldiers can’t increase.
Fran didn’t think her plan needed changing. She just said,
“But… if your avatar doesn’t come back, we can’t carry out the plan here, can we?”
“Don’t worry.”
Nyx’s voice came from Fran’s phone.
“The avatar can be dispersed at any time and recreated. It’s no problem.”
By the way, Clara’s Moon Rabbit combat form had already returned to the Rabbit Hole to work.
It refused to become food for the Big Rabbit, but wasn’t given a hard time either, still doing its usual job of serving the Big Rabbit—while secretly investigating the Rabbit Hole’s secrets.
Though the Moon Rabbits kept reproducing and their young grew rapidly, the population hadn’t actually increased much.
Because the slaughterhouse was also consuming Moon Rabbits in large quantities.
It took about seven or eight regular Moon Rabbits to make a single Rabbit Soldier, an astonishing rate of material consumption.
“Mm~ Sounds like that ‘Big Rabbit’ you mentioned is actually the real tool, just a shapeshifted shell? If you get me one, I can unravel the secrets of the Moon Rabbits.”
“I’ll try.”
“No, you must get me one.”
Just as Fran said this, Lucia called out from behind.
“Clara-senpai, Miss Fran, let’s go get breakfast before the meeting?!”
“Mm, let’s go then.”
Since this matter involved too many secrets, Clara decided not to tell Lucia too much and ended her conversation with Fran early.
Everyone headed to the resort’s dining hall. On a morning without a livestream, they enjoyed the ocean view and the breakfast prepared by the chef.
Fried eggs, sandwiches, yogurt salad, seafood soup.
Simple ingredients, extraordinary flavor.
For Lucia and Clara, the poor siblings, there was nothing to complain about with resort life, except perhaps the lurking threat of the so-called “Fourth Calamity” terrorist organization, and the Moon Cockroaches set loose by those terrorists.
Also, since there was no livestream today, there was no need for Sista to disguise his gender—they could simply treat him as a girl.
Especially Fran, who was fascinated by the “superpowered artificial human” topic, insisted on sitting right next to Sista at breakfast, leaning in to examine her body up close.
[She’s not treating her like a girl—Fran is treating her like a research sample.]
“Hm? Is the seawater a little red?”
Hearing Lucia’s mutter, Clara squinted and turned to look at the distant sea.
Just as Lucia said, the entire sea surface was tinted with a faint red hue.
“Is it an algal bloom?” Fran guessed.
Usually, when seawater changes color, that’s the reason, but this time it seemed different.
“Maybe… it’s stained with blood.”
If it were the boundless ocean on Earth, a little blood would be quickly diluted, but this was only a limited artificial sea.
If the Moon Rabbits devoured all the abundant fishery resources in the sea, naturally the surface would be dyed red.
The Moon Rabbits had stopped pretending.
They were going to eat everything in this outpost.
They’d tried to stay hidden before, but now that their existence had been exposed, they would plunder every food source to the maximum.
“Those rabbits must have multiplied a lot overnight, huh?”
Witnessing the scene, Fran looked at Clara, unhurried as ever.
“So, what we’re facing isn’t a ‘Fourth Calamity’ officer, but a full-blown ecological disaster. You’d better call your Moon Rabbit back soon.”
“No rush, it’ll return on its own.”
The mastermind apparently wouldn’t enter that Rabbit Hole. Clara hadn’t seen any sign of them all night, but before leaving, she had to figure out where those Big Rabbits came from—they definitely weren’t born from ordinary Moon Rabbit breeding.
…
It’d be best to find a way to get one out.
Even while Clara’s main body was eating breakfast, her Moon Rabbit combat form was still working in the Rabbit Hole. As long as it didn’t try to escape or slack off, the other rabbits left it alone, and it could slip around the Rabbit Hole under the pretense of carrying meat.
But there was always a Rabbit Soldier watching it, so some areas were off-limits.
“Ugh, morning… good morning.”
A thoroughly exhausted Anya, carrying a tray, sat at the next table over from the four of them. She looked drained, her head constantly drooping forward, almost closing her eyes as she ate.
“Did you stay up all night again, Miss Anya?” Lucia asked.
“…Not really. There wasn’t much work last night.”
The others had gotten up for breakfast, so she came to eat as well. But after eating, she would go back to sleep—so for her, this was more like dinner.
Clara tried probing, “Miss Anya, did anything happen last night?”
“Hmm? Nothing major, just that the rabbit Labi brought to the infirmary escaped.”
Clara wasn’t bothered by this, since the escaped Moon Rabbit was her in the first place.
But Anya went on, “I just can’t understand, it was wrapped up like a rice dumpling with tape—how did it still manage to escape?”
She yawned widely as she spoke, and her head tipped back so far her baseball cap nearly fell off.
Clara couldn’t help but find it strange; there seemed to be something between her hair and her hat?
Otherwise, how could that hat always sit so unsteadily?
Invasion of the.Bunny Snatchers