In the end, Labi brought Clara to the infirmary, and it really was just a routine physical examination.
Labi picked her up and tossed her onto the operating table, then used the equipment here to examine every inch of her Moon Rabbit body, inside and out, from head to toe.
After all, Moon Rabbits don’t wear clothes anyway.
After a thorough check, Labi had no choice but to conclude that this was a completely ordinary Moon Rabbit without any abnormalities.
In fact, she was even a bit weaker than a normal Moon Rabbit.
“Sigh, in that case, I’ll send you back to the Security Department.”
Labi’s decision caught Clara off guard.
“Chirp?”
So I’m getting sent back just like that?
She thought she was going to be quietly disposed of.
At least Fran really did kill a Moon Rabbit here once, using it as a test subject for the synthetic virus.
Now that she thought about it, was there any chance the air still had traces of the virus?
Knock knock—
A knock on the door.
In the middle of the night, besides Labi, who else would come all the way to the infirmary so far from the resort?
“Come in.”
Labi responded, and the door was pushed open.
A blonde woman wearing a baseball cap stood at the door, hands on her hips.
“As I thought, there are still people up late at night.”
“If I recall, you’re the mechanic for Sigma Heroes, right?”
“Yeah, my name’s Anya.”
The visitor was indeed Anya.
“I was over in the hangar repairing the damaged exoskeleton. You must have heard? Our hero was taken out by those people from the Fourth Calamity. I’m trying to extract the footage from the exoskeleton’s recording at the time.”
These past two days, Anya had been living a reversed schedule, up all night and sleeping through the day.
She was nowhere to be seen during daylight, spending her nights working overtime alone in the hangar.
Everyone else could relax and enjoy the resort in their free time, but she’d been working non-stop since she arrived, rarely interacting with the others.
“So, what brings you to the infirmary?” Labi asked.
“Sigh, it’s just so boring working alone this late. I noticed the lights were on in the infirmary, so I came to see what was up.”
Anya grumbled as she walked in, grabbed a chair and sat down, then glanced at Clara—the Moon Rabbit—who was tied up with tape, and asked:
“So, did you catch another rabbit?”
Anya hadn’t attended the meeting at the mountaintop.
However, Okada Daruma had already filled her in on the meeting and the operational arrangements.
“Not~ Don’t be surprised when I say this, but we didn’t catch this rabbit. It came here to surrender on its own.”
“Huh? Surrender?”
Anya looked up in surprise, pressing her cap down before it could slip off her head.
Then she muttered, “Didn’t expect there to be a surrender faction among the Moon Rabbits.”
“It’s highly unusual. I suspect it’s a trap by the enemy, so I brought it here for an examination…”
“A trap?”
Anya didn’t quite get it, so Labi explained:
“For example, the Fourth Calamity could’ve hidden a small bomb in its body, then detonate it when it gets close to a hero or something?”
What kind of terrorist attack is that.
So that’s why Miss Labi brought me here for a check-up?
Just what kind of experiences has she had to make her think like this?
Anya nodded thoughtfully, then asked, “So what are you planning to do with this surrendered Moon Rabbit?”
“No idea. For now, I’ll just throw it back in Security’s holding cell and wait for someone from the Hero Corporation to handle it when they wake up…”
Labi yawned as she spoke, her eyes glistening with sleepy tears.
Anya suggested, “Tomorrow morning, we’re all gathering at the hangar. Why not just leave it here? It’s a hassle to keep moving it around, and with it tied up like that, it can’t get away anyway, right?”
Labi considered this, and it seemed reasonable.
“Yeah, that works. I’ll head back and get some sleep, then.”
She stretched, letting out a lazy, tingling sigh from her throat.
Clara lay silently on the operating table, listening to their conversation.
It sounded like they really were planning to leave her in the infirmary overnight.
Labi was the first to leave the infirmary.
With her sharp rabbit hearing, Clara could catch the faint sound of the tour vehicle growing distant. Anya checked over Clara’s examination report one more time before finally turning off the lights and leaving as well.
In the end, the only ones left in the infirmary were Clara and two deactivated medical robots.
The place fell into the kind of deep silence only the late night brings.
For Clara, this was a chance.
No one was watching her at the moment—this was the best opportunity to disengage from the Moon Rabbit combat body.
[Not recommended. If you disappear now, it’ll be hard to explain and will easily arouse the spy’s suspicion.]
Nyx disagreed, suggesting instead:
[You’re about out of energy, so you might as well get some sleep.]
I’m already wrapped up like a rabbit zongzi! How am I supposed to sleep like this?!
Even so, Clara still closed her eyes.
But it wasn’t long before she opened them again.
Nyx.
[Nyx heard it too.]
Clara’s upright rabbit ears swiveled toward the door of the infirmary.
Approaching footsteps.
Since she was only reading the operation briefings through an avatar, the Nyx Driver wasn’t installed in this body, so there was no way to scan the area. Nyx couldn’t get any more information than Clara.
With both Labi and Anya gone, anyone coming here now was clearly suspicious.
Was the spy finally making their move?
Clack—
The doorknob turned, and Clara tensed, even the fur on her head fluffing up unconsciously.
“Dao~”
But what came from outside the door was just a rabbit’s cry.
Could it be the ones from the holding cells escaped?
How useless was the resort’s security to let a few Moon Rabbits escape right under their noses?
But as it turned out, Clara was overthinking it.
It was indeed a rabbit head poking in from outside, but the height was clearly off for an ordinary Moon Rabbit; below the head was a muscular, inverted triangle torso.
It was a rabbit soldier.
Why had this guy come to the surface? Did the spy send it to silence her?
Either way, now wasn’t the time to dwell on it—Clara struggled fiercely on the operating table, but being trussed up like a zongzi, she had no way to control her own fate.
The rabbit soldier came over, grabbed Clara’s rabbit ears, and since she couldn’t reach to bite back when held like this, she had no choice but to let it carry her out of the infirmary.
Once outside, Clara tried to call out loudly, hoping to attract Anya’s attention.
But the rabbit’s shrill cry barely carried any distance outdoors.
Why didn’t this guy just kill her in the infirmary?
Was it trying to make it look like Clara had escaped, and then kill her somewhere else?
No matter what, this time there was truly no escape.
The rabbit soldier clearly didn’t want to be noticed either; it moved stealthily, carefully avoiding the cameras. It didn’t act like a mindless animal at all.
We’re all rabbits here—why must we make things so hard for each other.
Clara wanted to reason with it, but she couldn’t speak.
The rabbit soldier, carrying Clara, avoided the cameras and made its way to the waste treatment center, not far from the hangar and the infirmary.
Why am I back here again?
Because of Clara’s discovery earlier in the evening, the engineers had brought over a batch of building materials to seal up the rabbit hole in the waste center and repair the damage caused by the Moon Rabbits.
But clearly, they didn’t share Anya’s habit of working through the night—they left the materials piled at the entrance and disappeared, not even bothering to lock the door. The rabbit soldier simply took the elevator down with Clara.
Maybe the engineers left the door open to air out the stench.
While the elevator was descending, the rabbit soldier even started unwrapping the bandages from its own body.
Clara was completely baffled—after all that trouble to drag her out of the infirmary, it still didn’t seem ready to kill her…
What on earth was it trying to do?