Manufacturing Plant
Konoko immediately heads to Musashi Manufacturing. Her lead as to Musashi not being a legitimate corporation is soon proven when Syndicate goons attack her team. She eventually intuits that the resistance she is facing is merely a decoy while the Syndicate makes another move. Griffin tells her that until they know that for a fact, she should continue gathering evidence against Musashi. Konoko's suspicions are confirmed with word that a nearby research facility is under attack by the Syndicate, but before she can head there, Konoko has to stop a Deadly Brain, which, before being shut down, attempts to hack its way onto the Internet, and then tries to self-destruct. Its Xiox destruct mechanism is quite powerful, so Konoko rushes to shut it down before it vaporizes the surrounding city block.
Added Value
- We get our first glimpse of both Muro and Barabas in the chapter opening. We don't yet know how significant Muro is, but he's clearly Barabas' boss, and anyone who can boss that guy around must be dangerous indeed. Just looking at Barabas, he's clearly not normal. Pale skin, a superfluous horn and malformed skull, and strange veins and a messed-up eye are what set him aside from ordinary humans. We'll see what he's physically capable of in the next Chapter.
- Konoko shows an almost preternatural intuition here, when she randomly decides halfway through her battles within Musashi that it's "a wild goose chase".
- The Deadly Brain at the end of the Chapter seems at first like a big time-waster when you're just trying to finish the level so you can get to where the Syndicate really is. But we'll revisit the concept of the Deadly Brain once again, this time with an artificial (but very human) brain in the frame, instead of a real human one. And the
Xbox Xiox bomb that will later nearly kill Konoko is first introduced here so it doesn't seem completely out of the blue when it becomes more important in Chapter 8.
- Those playing with subtitles will note that the Deadly Brain may only seem to be grunting, but actually has a lot to say. The transcript of his monologues is here for your edification.
