As Kaname throttled the man, Kyoko and the surrounding Bonta-kuns tried to pull her off.
“Kana-chan, calm down!” Kyoko pleaded. “Those are just rumors!”
“Hahh... hahh... Sorry. I really lost my cool for a minute there...” Kaname eventually came back to her senses and returned to her Shikidouji-style art.
“But the fact remains that they attempted to throw Molotov cocktails. They’re clearly mad,” said Sousuke.
“That’s funny,” grumbled Kaname, “coming from the guy always throwing grenades around our school...”
“Still, it’s very strange,” he continued. “Why do they think they have the right to the facility? Fumozawa-san, you did rent the hall through the proper channels, didn’t you?” Sou-Bon asked Whi-Bon, ignoring Kaname’s comment.
“Yes, of course I went through the proper channels. However...”
“However?”
“It appears Achsheros holds their biggest concert on this day in this venue every year,” Fumozawa admitted. “Aomi Hall is considered something of a holy land in the fandom, and today is its most holy day...” He made it sound like Christmas among Christians. But recently, the fans and organizers had behaved so rudely at one of their concerts that the venue had refused to book them again.
“Just constant incidents of arson, broken windows, and violence,” he continued. “And so...”
And so, he explained, the Fumoffu Market organizers’ committee had booked the hall for that day, completely unaware of the circumstances behind the opening. They usually rented the Ariake International Hall every year, but since a massive terrorist attack in June had left it half-demolished, they’d used the Aomi Pier one instead.
“H-Huh... I-Is that... so?” Kaname nodded along with the explanation, looking uncomfortable.
Kyoko watched dubiously. “Kana-chan, you’re not looking well,” she observed. “Is something weighing on you? You’re looking like you did a year ago, when the principal gave a lecture over the PA the morning after you set the forest behind the school on fire trying to bake sweet potatoes and then ran away...”
“Th-Thanks for the really specific comparison,” Kaname groused. “But seriously, I’m fine.”
“Really?”
“May I continue?” Whi-Bon waited for them to finish before going on. “The truth is, even before the day of the convention, we had received a few threats from their fans. They’re convinced the arena’s owners only rejected them due to some plot on our end. They said that if we didn’t cancel our event today and hand over the venue, they’d resort to force...”
“What do the hall’s owners say?” Kaname asked.
“They said they don’t get involved in conflicts between clients.”
“Creeps.”
“Well, I never would’ve imagined they’d start acting like this, either. The lack of foresight is my own fault. It almost ruined our fun day...” Whi-Bon sighed and then sagged in despondency. The rest of the Bonta-kun staff around him shared in the motion.
It was here that the leader of the arsonists broke out in a cackle. He must have stolen a headset from a member of the staff at some point to listen in on the whole conversation.
“What’s so funny?”
The man kept laughing sinisterly. “Hah... What we did was just the start,” he informed them. “It was the signal flare for our fans to swarm the convention hall. Look outside.”
There was a large metal shutter backstage used for bringing in and taking out props. Whi-Bon nodded, and a member of the staff hit a button beside the shutter. It began to open. On the other side, across the river from the reclaimed land that housed the arena, was a massive crowd of people. It was thick, spreading out as far as the eye could see.
From the event hall, it looked like more than ten thousand people... but if they were surrounding the whole pier, there would have to be several times that many in all. Tens of thousands of people on the verge of a riot—the ones at the station had turned out to be just a fragment of the total. The massive crowd, all of them dressed similarly to the cackling leader of Achsheros, carried bats with nails in them, bike chains, and steel pipes, which they waved around as they shouted, their voices loud enough to shake the very ground at their feet.
“That’s the thirty thousand fans who come to our concert every year,” the man snickered. “They’re gonna mob the place soon. What do you think’ll happen then?”
They’d overrun the Fumoffu Market, burning their humble shops and crushing the goods they’d worked so hard on. The Bonta-kuns themselves would surely not make it out unharmed.
“Fumo...” Whi-Bon and the others trembled, but so did Kaname and Kyoko. This was going way beyond a passion for music; this was like an evil crusade motivated by religious zealotry. To think that a band this evil could attract so many followers!
“I think... maybe we should just call the cops at this point.” Kaname took out her phone and worked the dial for 110. But the call wouldn’t go through. None of the numbers she dialed went through. All the phones, both wired and wireless, were down.
“Wh-What’s going on?” Kaname asked shakily.
“Sabotage,” said Sousuke. He seemed to be using the electronic weapons mounted on Sou-Bon to scan the environment around the hall. “The base stations for cell phones and lines for landlines have all been neutralized. With that many people, they’re bound to have a specialist or two.”
“Oh, no!”
“We currently have no way to contact civilization,” Sousuke announced, and a heavy silence fell over the Bontas. There was a horde of 30,000 rioters shouting from the opposite shore, ready to fall upon the venue and rampage to their hearts’ content.
“Sh-Shall we evacuate the participants?” the staff Gree-Bon asked.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to call off Fumo-ket,” Fumozawa agreed reluctantly. “Let’s work with the fire brigade and get the participants clear—”
“We can’t evacuate,” Sou-Bon declared, pulling a map of the venue from somewhere or another and unfolding it in front of the others. The Bonta-kuns crowded around it. “This is a reclaimed island, cut off from the mainland,” he explained. “The only way out is the bridge on the north side, but they’re concentrated on the other side of the bridge. In other words, they’ve cut off our only escape route.”
There was a bridge under construction on the west side as well, but at the moment, the reclaimed island was basically Dejima—and the only way out was blocked.
“Isn’t there a ferry that goes around the bay coast?” Kaname asked. “Could we escape via sea?”
“It can only carry fifty at a time. It would take all night to get our thousands of attendees out.”
“Ergh...”
“We have no choice but to fight,” Sousuke concluded. “The committee staff must take them on.”
“Take them on?!” Gree-Bon shouted in despair (though to anyone around them it just sounded like “Fumofumoffu?!”) “Y-You saw how many of them there are, though! Tens of thousands! And there’s only thirty staff members. We can’t possibly fight them!”
“Yet we have no other choice. What shall we do, Fumozawa-san?” asked Sou-Bon, his button eyes glimmering.
The answer was obvious, but the group waited to hear Representative Fumozawa’s response.
“We really have our backs to the wall, don’t we?” Whi-Bon said in fumo-speak, eyes closed and stubby arms folded as he listened. “If we let our event get trampled on with no resistance, Fumo-ket will become the laughing stock of the mascot business!”
“There’s a mascot business?” Kaname muttered.
But the others ignored her again, and the representative said, in a dramatic whisper, “I’m scared, too. But we have a duty to protect our attendees.”
“Representative! (Fumoffu!)”
“Representative! (Fumoffu!)”
Whi-Bon’s eyes snapped open. “We must prepare for battle. Let us recruit volunteers.”
An announcement played throughout the venue. “All suit attendees, please come to the event stage at once. I repeat: we have important fire safety measures to explain, so all suit attendees, please come to the event stage at once. This includes non-staff participants...”
“What are ‘suit attendees’?” Kyoko asked Sousuke.
“You’ll see soon enough.”
Soon, all the present “suit attendees” arrived at the stage—three hundred Bonta-kuns.
Every single Bonta-kun at the event was now here, a mass of button eyes gazing up at Whi-Bon on the stage. Red, blue, black, emerald, sapphire, gold. Halloween-style, Santa-style, kimono-style, camouflage-style—they were Bonta-kuns of all colors and types.
“Th-There’s so many...” Kaname said, her mouth agape. “You beat all those yakuza with just seven of these guys, so this might be enough, right?”
“Well, they’re all non-combat mascots. They’re just wearing normal suits,” Sousuke clarified, “not the enhanced kind.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about there being combat mascots...” muttered Kyoko.
The Bonta-kun suit that Sousuke wore was a kind of power suit, mounted with an array of electronic weaponry. It had a power assist function, along with bullet and blade resistance. Without going into how Sousuke came to have such a suit, suffice it to say that the other Bonta-kuns present were pure hobbyists.
Ignoring their conversation, Whi-Bon AKA Representative Fumozawa explained the situation to the suit participants. “Fumoffu, fumoffu,” Whi-Bon said. “Fumo fumo fumoffu. Fumo moffuru. Moffu fumo-fumo, fumofumoma...”
Upon hearing those words, the three hundred Bonta-kuns fell into a panic.
“Fumo fumoffu!” a Bonta-kun said accusingly.
“Fumo fumo...” Whi-Bon said, admitting his fault. Then he went on to passionately explain, “Fumoffu. Moffuru moffuru, fumo moffu. Fumo, fumo fumo, mofurufumo? Moffu! Fumo fumo fumoffu, fumo fumo!”
The three hundred were taken aback by his grim determination, but stoically nodded to each other with exclamations of, “Fumoffu! Fumoffu! Fumoffu!”
Whi-Bon explained even more fervently. “Fumoffu, fumo fumo? Moffu, fumo!”
Yes, it was true...
“Fumo, fumoffu!”
He was right, but...
“Moffu! Fumoffu! Fumoffuru!”
These words resonated deeply within them:
Behold us here, heaven and earth. We gather together with paws bound. This we swear: bring freedom to the fumos! We will fight. We will put our lives on the line so that this day will be known throughout history as a second Thermopylae!
Well... that might not have been exactly what Fumozawa was saying. But nevertheless, his words still inspired the three hundred Bonta-kuns, and they all raised their stubby arms before letting out a dramatic war cry that shook the event hall.
“Fumoooooo!”
Taking directions from the staff, the three hundred began preparations to meet the attack.
With help from the regular attendees, trash can lids and mops were gathered from all over the venue in order to arm the Bonta-kuns—trash can lids as shields, and mops as spears. Due to the unexpected nature of the engagement, this Bonta-kun brigade didn’t have any firearms. The battle would be fought entirely in melee. Sousuke, who’d been appointed special advisor to the Fumoffu Market Organizers’ Committee Special Forces Division, had set the site of the battle at Terumo Bridge, which connected the pier to the mainland.