“Excuse me for asking, but do the two of you have plans for summer vacation?”
We turned and looked at one another in response to Migiwa’s unexpected question. It was the end of July, and we were in his office. He’d called the two of us here, saying he had something to discuss, but then that was the first question he threw our way.
“Plans...” Toriko echoed.
“Do you mean like going on a trip, that kind of thing?” I asked him.
“I do mean that kind of thing,” Migiwa confirmed.
I shook my head. The idea of planning some sort of event during summer break was a novel one to me. Now that he mentioned it, maybe people did do that sort of thing, but all I had thought of it was that I was glad to have a bunch of time to explore the Otherside and get things set up there.
“I don’t have any. How about you, Toriko?”
“I figured you wouldn’t have thought of anything, Sorawo.”
“Well, sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“I mean, listen, the summer break’s short. We’ve got, what, ten days or so? And even if we went somewhere, there’d be a ton of people.”
“Is it short? My image of summer breaks in university was always that they were long,” Migiwa said, a dubious expression on his face.
“I thought that too, but they’re short...” I grumbled, checking my schedule. “It’s from August 9th to 19th... That includes Saturdays and Sundays. It’s not even two weeks. I never thought it’d be shorter than in primary school. Hey, Toriko, weren’t you shocked too?”
When I looked over, Toriko’s eyes shifted sideways.
“Hm?”
“...”
“Why did you avert your eyes?”
“...”
“Wait, don’t tell me... Toriko, is your summer break longer than mine?”
“Just a little bit.”
“From when to when?”
“August 1st to September 26th.”
“Whaaaaaa?!” I shot to my feet in surprise. “The hell?! That’s almost two months!!!”
“Ahh, yes, I thought that the summer break in university would be about that long,” Migiwa said, satisfied with what he was now hearing. I sure as hell wasn’t satisfied, though.
“Why’d you keep quiet about it...? Okay, look, I know I never asked, but you could have told me this last summer.”
“I couldn’t bring myself to...”
“Gahhh! I can’t take this!!!”
Feeling desolate, I plopped myself back down on the sofa.
It’s not that I don’t get how she’d miss the chance to bring it up.
And it’s not that I don’t think there’s something wrong with me not having even the vaguest sense of when the person I spend so much time with will have their summer break.
Ignoring my desolation, Migiwa seemed to be thinking about something.
“Ah, I see... I had considered that the dates might vary between universities, but I never anticipated there would be such a difference. Well, I am sure it will not take that many days, so I do not expect it will pose a problem.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked for the sake of asking, even as apathy crept in. Migiwa raised his head.
“Oh, pardon me. Assuming that this is possible for the two of you, I was wondering if we could trouble you to come camping with us.”
I was left confused by the unexpected word in that sentence. “Camping? What’s that a euphemism for? Is it along the same lines as when you ‘played in the water’?”
“It is not.”
“Pitching tents and sleeping outdoors? Is that the camping we’re talking about?”
“Staying in tents outdoors will be part of it.”
He was beating around the bush. Was it because Migiwa was overly serious, or was it some sort of joke on his part? As I sat there, perplexed, Toriko asked, “Is it boot camp?”
“That is closer to my meaning, yes.” Migiwa nodded.
“Boot camp? Is that the thing where you do a bunch of exercise?”
“It originally refers to basic training for new recruits in the military.”
“Huh...? So, basically, you’re saying you want to train us?”
I recoiled, imagining us exhausted while a drill sergeant cussed us out.
Migiwa laughed and shook his head. “Heavens no. You two are beyond being treated like fresh recruits, surely. I wanted to ask you to serve as instructors.”
The drill sergeant in my imagination was replaced with Toriko and me. Now I was even more confused.
“Who would we be teaching, and what? Toriko may be one thing, but I’m a total amateur.”
I wasn’t being modest here. Unlike Toriko, who had learned to shoot at a young age, I barely knew anything about firearms. The one thing that I had mastered was muzzle discipline, which Toriko had patiently taught me, so that I wouldn’t carelessly put a bullet in myself, or anyone else. I figured even someone as dense as me needed to do that much right.
But when it came to actually hitting what I shot at, I was still awful. We didn’t have much ammunition on hand, so I wasn’t practicing much either. But I didn’t really feel the need to get better at shooting. I figured that as long as I had the minimum technique necessary to shoot when I needed to, that was good enough. I wasn’t a highly motivated shooter, not me.
Having come into possession of a handgun and rifle, I was glad to use them, but I had no passion for guns. Obviously, I took good care of the Makarov because Toriko gave it to me, and I felt a sense of attachment to the CQB-R that I’d gotten during the difficult escape from Kisaragi Station. If either of them got lost or destroyed, it’d probably hit me pretty hard. But in the more general sense, they were nothing more than tools for exploration to me, the same as the hatchet that I used when bushwhacking.
“The ones I would like you to instruct are the operators from Torchlight...”
Hearing Migiwa say that only confused me more. Torchlight Inc. was a PMC that did work for DS Research.
“But they’re professionals, aren’t they?” I objected.
“I’m not sure I have many tricks I can teach the pros either...” Toriko agreed.
Seeing our confusion, Migiwa seemed to come to his senses and bowed his head. “I am terribly sorry. Allow me to explain again, starting at the beginning.”
It looked like we’d jumped ahead in the discussion around the point where boot camp came up. Migiwa started his explanation over.
“First, the premise is that we wish to reorganize the security of DS Research. This facility has suffered two breaches in a span of half a year. The first by Runa Urumi’s cult, and the second by T-san the Templeborn. In both cases, there was no major damage, but to this day we still have yet to come up with a fundamental solution. This could be said to be an extremely bad situation.”
During Runa Urumi’s invasion, some of the staff were hurt when they got shot with nail guns, and T-san had killed the fourth kind patients. Looking at it objectively, that was the worst outcome.
“But I don’t know what you could have done differently. There’s no resisting Runa’s voice, and T-san was on a whole different level...”
“We cannot afford to excuse ourselves in that way. We have no idea the next time a hostile fourth kind contactee or ultrablue entity might appear, and at present we have no means to counter them.”
“She’s not hostile, but the same goes for Kasumi too, huh?” Toriko interjected. Migiwa could only let out a dry laugh.
“Yes... She would be a nightmare for anyone in charge of security. In fact, I have jumped out of bed many times after having dreams where she took something terrible out of our UBL artifact warehouse.”
“It sure is a good thing she hasn’t, huh...” I said, speechless.
“We have no guarantee of that,” Migiwa responded before continuing, “We introduced Torchlight as part of the lessons learned from the incident with Urumi Runa. Even against someone with the abilities of a Fourth Kind, a professional security would still be able to provide some deterrence and defense. Or so we hoped, but...”
“T-san wasn’t playing fair.”
Toriko was right. No matter how much they had hardened their defenses, there was little they could do if the enemy suddenly appeared inside.
“But what can you do, then?” I wondered. “If the same thing happened again, hrmm... The only thing that comes to mind is laying traps.”
“Even if we train Torchlight for you, Sorawo’s eye and my hand aren’t exactly things we can impart to others...”
Migiwa nodded. “That is why I have called Tsuji-san back in.”
Tsuji. The woman I’d met here before who called herself a magician.
“Erm...sorry, who’s that again?” asked Toriko.
“Someone I believe you have yet to meet, Nishina-san. She manages the UBL artifacts warehouse for us, but has been away on leave for some time.”
“Oh, the warehouse manager. Didn’t you say you’d met her, Sorawo?”
“Yeah.”
My first impression of her was that she was slippery and hard to get a handle on. I’m not sure whether she was serious when she said she was a magician, or if it had been meant as some kind of joke. But what was certain was that she had resisted my right eye without being a Fourth Kind. Assuming she hadn’t cheated somehow.
“Will Tsuji-san be able to protect DS Research?” I asked.
“That, I cannot say. If she can, then all the better,” Migiwa answered. “That said, we cannot rely on Tsuji-san alone. I would like to put a system in place that will allow us to rotate through multiple personnel capable of defending against hostile entities. It is to that end that I wish to train Torchlight.”
Finally, I saw how all of this fit together. He wanted us to be in charge of their training.
“Can I take what that person said about being a magician seriously?” I asked.
“Of course you would be suspicious of her. Honestly, although I can be deceived by smoke and mirrors, I do believe we can assume that, at the bare minimum, she has some psychological tricks at her disposal.”
“Like hypnosis?”
“When I inquired about that, I was told, ‘Hypnosis is a type of magic.’”
I could just imagine it. She wasn’t the type to give a straight answer to any question.
“I sort of understand what this is about now. But what kind of training do you want us to give them...?”
“Ah, yes. Let me get into that. First, I would like to set up a dedicated facility for the training of operators. What you might call a simulation environment modeled on UBL.”
“Operators” was what Torchlight’s soldiers were called.
“If it’s a simulation, are we talking about VR or something?”
“No. Utilizing virtual reality might be an option in future, but first we will use a physical training environment. Fortunately, we have a facility that is suitable for that training.”
“There’s a place like that?”
“Yes, a convenient place, out in the mountains, away from prying eyes.”
“Hold on, do you mean...”
Migiwa nodded. “I do. I think that we will use the Farm in the Mountains out in Hannou, which you manage for us, Kamikoshi-san.”