Dante wakes up from their boredom-induced nap, and is unable to sleep again when seeing Charon run people over with the bus. They turns their attention to the Sinner known as Gregor, while trying not to pay attention to his mutated arm. Charon explains that Vergilius needs them to go to District 4. Don Quixote begins to loudly talk about popular fixers who worked there, but Heathcliff tells her to be quiet. He gets into an argument with Ishmael only for both of them to be killed by Ryōshū only to get killed herself by Don Quixote. Vergilius disappointedly orders Dante to turn back their clock to revive them. Faust is brought over to remind them how to do this, and Dante gets a vision of himself opening a massive door to Hell and pulling out the Sinners who just died. He recovers from the ensuing blackout to find the Sinners alive without any injury, but Heathcliff prepares to fight Ishmael again, and smashes Sinclair's head in for trying to stop him. Vergilius threatens to ensure that anyone who fights in the bus begs to stay dead. Heathcliff backs down, but Dante is hesitant to rewind again. Outis tries to defend Dante, but they decide to concede rather than make things worse for everyone.
Charon stops the bus, causing thugs to come by. The Sinners are brought out to fight them without completely killing them, and the bodies are fed into Mephistopheles' engine. Faust explains that the bus ran on something called Enkephalin, which the company Lobotomy Corporation produced as energy before its collapse. Once they're done gathering bodies, they meet up with Yuri, a Grade 8 fixer hired to guide them through the abandoned L. Corp facility in District 4. As they move towards the facility, they find people with similar features to Gregor blocking their way. After dealing with them, the Sinners then meet up with two more Grade 8 fixers, Aya and Hopkins.
The party travels into the facility and find more mutated people who, like Gregor, were veterans from the previous G. Corp. They push their way through, but then Aya gets impaled from behind by the Ebony Queen's Apple abnormality. They move on after defeating the massive creature, much to Yuri's reluctance, and run into Gregor's head manager from G. Corp. He calls out Gregor for deserting from the Smoke War and coming back to kill his fellow subordinates. They fight the old veteran, and Gregor leaves one of Ryōshū's cigarettes with his corpse as a sendoff.
The Sinners get trapped in a corridor filled with a poisonous gas, and Hopkins takes the opportunity to leave them all for dead. Once he's gone, Gregor reveals that he took a gas mask from Aya's body to hand over to Yuri, whom he relates to as another worker of a fallen Wing. Once the gas subsides, Yuri and Dante, whose clock head made them immune to the gas, move out with the bodies to resurrect them. The Sinners later find the corpses of a L. Corp worker, whom Yuri seemed to recognize. Heathcliff reasons that they must have sacrificed each other to keep an Abnormality at bay, but Yuri finds it hard to believe. They proceed to defeat the Doomsday Calendar abnormality.
The Sinners find a containment unit where a bright light was radiating from, and Gregor approaches it. The scene around them suddenly changes, and they find themselves in a chaotic battlefield, which Outis concludes is 70 days into the Smoke War. Gregor demands an explanation from Faust, and she tells him they're in the "fathoms of your ego," which means they're all seeing into his heart and mind. A vision of Gregor being told to cut an apple appears, with someone congratulating him on his 15th birthday. He wakes up again, and the Sinners find themselves in the same battlefield, only this time the soldiers around them look more hideous than before. Gregor gets another flashback from after the war ended. He notes that some people were always looking down on ex-workers of G. Corp, as he finds himself on a subway. He wakes up again, and finds that giant hands were coming down from the sky and crushing the soldiers around them. Despite Heathcliff suggesting otherwise, Gregor decides they should let themselves be grabbed by the hands, since it reflected his waiting for the inevitable to happen, even noting that the nail polish on the hands looked familiar.
The Sinners wake up from Gregor's nightmare, and find the containment unit still open. They face the Golden Apple abnormality, which had somehow consumed the Golden Bough. Yuri moves ahead to ensure they've suppressed it, but is then swallowed by the now rotting False Apple. Gregor furiously attacks it but stops when Yuri's disembodied head appears. Suddenly, three people appear and finish off the abnormality themselves to take the Golden Bough. Gregor recognizes their leader as his mother, Hermann, who was accompanied by Gubo, Yi Sang's old colleague, and Jia Huan, Hong Lu's brother. The Sinners return to the bus and confess their apparent failure. He tries to scold Dante for this, but Gregor asks to take responsibility for it. Vergilius is impressed by this camaraderie, and decides to let it go when Outis suggests that his expectations were too high for their first mission. Gregor later hangs the gas mask Yuri wore beside where Charon is sitting.
Tropes
- Downer Beginning: Gregor ends up letting his mother seize the Golden Bough for N. Corp, with Yuri getting killed off not long before.
- Journey to the Center of the Mind: This Canto sets up the basic pattern for most other Cantos - the Sinners get into a facility containing a Golden Bough where the Sinner associated with that Bough has to relive an Old Shame before they can retrieve it. In Gregor's case, he had to be reminded of his experiences during the Smoke War, and the fact that he could never truly escape his mother's control.
- Shout-Out: Gregor himself is a reference to the main character of The Metamorphosis, and even quotes the first line of the story during his flashbacks.
- Taking the Heat: Gregor decides to take responsibility for the mission's failure when Vergilius scolds Dante for it.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Aya ends up getting killed by an Abnormality not long after meeting up with the Sinners, a fate that Yuri shares soon afterwards.
