Part 4: Chapter 4

    At about the same time, in the branch office of Fourth Kangyo Bank in Inai, four female employees were in the operations room, entering data in the host computer to write a patch to send the day's transfers to other bank branches. None of the four were looking down at their keyboards; their glances only turned back and forth from their displays to the numbers on the display vouchers they had been working with.
    "Why is my terminal always the one to break!?" One of the workers irritatedly got up from her seat.
    Her name was Mida Yoshie. She had been working at the bank for two years and was brilliant but somewhat short-tempered, her bob-cut appearance appropriately complimenting her energetic personality. Yoshie looked closely at the other workers' terminals, but it appeared that she was the only one experiencing the problem. Her screen was completely dark, and didn't respond to any keyboard input at all.
    "Isn't that what normally happens when you send data to the host computer?" Shimamura Yuko--whose appearance and personality were the polar opposite of Yoshie's--looked over at her while continuing to enter data into her own terminal.
    Yuko had been at the company a year longer than Yoshie and thus was slightly higher on the chain of command.
    "Is it just mine then? Oh well, I might as well go make some tea." As Yoshie left the room discontentedly, a blue haze started to seep from the display behind her. A pungent musky smell started to waft throughout the room, but engrossed in their work, nobody seemed to notice it. The blue haze started to coagulate and take form behind the chair that Yoshie had previously been sitting in.
    As if she was tired from all the data entry, Yuko thrust her arms toward the ceiling and stretched. A strange jelly-like substance grabbed onto her white throat.
    "Yoshie, cut it out."
    Yawning and turning around, Yuko found herself staring into the bronze face of Loki, his head atop a bizarre pillar of gelatinous flesh. She tried to scream but found that her vocal chords were frozen and she could not make a sound. The demon's tentacle constricted and crushed Yuko's skull with a lound crunch. From the neck up Yuko was nothing more than a grotesque lump of disfigured flesh, yet her hands continued to tap on the keys of the terminal out of sheer inertia. While the other two women sat paralyzed with fear, other tentacles grabbed them and pulled them inside the demon's body.
    Behind Loki, there was a sound of porcelain shattering. Yoshie had returned with tea and dropped her tray at the sight of the unbelievable bloodbath she had walked into. Loki's tentacle stretched out to her stomach. Heat shot through her chest along with a sticky sensation, and the next instant, blinding pain shot through her as fresh blood spurted out of her rent skin.
    "What's going on!?" Hearing the strange sound within the room, a male employee carrying a load of bills to the safe opened the door. Loki mercilessly threw Yoshie's now-decapitated head at his chest with incredible force.
    "Agh!"
    Knocked hard against the wall, the man just barely managed to search for the emergency alarm and press it with all his remaining strength before passing out.
    The shrill sound of the alarm echoed throughout the building. In the midst of the clamor, Loki calmly completed the transformation into his bronze human form, and turned his pitch-black eyes toward Asuka.