Even after all the beers, the Torchlight people eagerly went to work after lunch was over. They carried the lumber from the trucks to the Cattle Barn, and the sound of electric tools immediately began to echo through the building.
“You can keep resting a little longer. Your job isn’t until later.”
Deciding to take Sasazuka up on that offer, we stayed under the canopy tent where we shifted to afternoon nap mode. With some shade and cool drinks, we could beat the heat for now. The mountain breeze felt nice against my skin, which was flushed from drinking beer.
About an hour and a half later, the sound of tools ceased, and one of the operators came for us. We left the canopy tent, crossed the yard under the beating sun, and entered the Cattle Barn. It had been completely transformed.
The smell of fresh lumber hung in the air, while the original cattle enclosures had been sectioned off into simple rooms using plywood and rectangular lumber. It looked obviously hastily built, and there weren’t even doors. Still, it was good enough for our purposes. This area, taking up two thirds of the Cattle Barn, would be our kill house for the training.
Sasazuka came over, and led us to the corridor connecting the rooms.
“Will this do?” she asked.
I took a peek inside. In the first room, there was just a torso mannequin, like you might see at a clothing store. The next room, across the corridor diagonally, had a urinal lying on its side. The room after that had a dirty vinyl curtain hanging in the middle of it. The trend continued, and each of the rooms had a single object inside. If I came here not knowing any better, I might’ve thought it was a modern art exhibit.
“I don’t know, but let’s see if we can work with it,” I replied.
“Understood.”
These objects had been taken from the second floor of the Cattle Barn. This building, like the Residence Building, had a number of rooms where they had been recreating the scenes from different ghost stories. If we could use the tools as catalysts, I thought we might be able to artificially create an interstitial space.
That meant what we were trying to do here was experiment with controlling the interstitial space in order to create a training field for battles against the other world. That was also why we’d brought Runa.
“Come along, Runa,” I turned and called back to her.
Runa lethargically walked over. It was probably awkward for her, having to walk in between these burly operators, but she wasn’t scared. If anything, she seemed to enjoy the attention.
At a glance, she looked like a heinous criminal being escorted to review the scene of the crime after her arrest. But Runa herself probably didn’t see it that way, because she knew that, if it came to it, she could use her Voice to unleash utter chaos.
I might be the only one here who understands that feeling.
“What do you think?”
Runa looked around the room, then scowled.
“Just one torso? Is that it?”
“If we get too crazy with the set pieces, we’ll end up opening a gate, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s hard to get excited about this.”
“We don’t want to get too excited. These are rookies we’re dealing with here.”
With a “yeah, whatever,” Runa went to check out the next room. “Hrmm...”
“Listen, I know how you feel,” I said.
“Right?”
I could just tell Toriko was looking at us dubiously as we talked like this.
“Why didn’t a gate form on the second floor? The Residence Building was full of them.”
“We weren’t trying to make gates in the first place. I mean, we didn’t even know that those were a thing.”
“Oh, that’s true, now that you mention it...”
The first time Runa went to the Otherside would have been when she attacked DS Research. Up until then, she only had a vague concept of the “Blue World,” so there was no way she’d have had the idea to open gates.
“The idea wasn’t to go to where Satsuki-sama was. I thought we had to call her to this world. That’s why we started renovating this place, and this was the first building that we worked on. Next we moved on to the one beside it. What did you call it? The Residence Building? And we did the same thing there. As the work continued, everyone gradually got better at it, so I just thought we’d managed to get the mood right. Every once in a while, someone would go crazy, and turn into one of the Gifted—but they’d be good once I talked to them.”
She was talking about the Fourth Kinds who had been on the Farm. I’d heard about all of this from Migiwa, so it wasn’t new information to me, but as I listened to Runa talk about what she’d done in such a unemotional manner, it made me see once again how abnormal her actions had been. Runa had interacted with the Fourth Kinds at DS Research without any feeling of repulsion, despite the horrific changes they had undergone, but perhaps that “lack of discrimination” was something that came from the same lack of morals that had let her to carry on without feeling any guilt even when one of her followers transformed into a Fourth Kind.
“You said you had no idea gates were a thing, but what about the Round Hole?”
“Ohh, that’s another thing that everyone started building without me knowing. You know how we had that one kid? With the big head. And the fluffy hairs growing out of it.”
She was referring to the Fourth Kind whose head had been enlarged and had gained the ability to open and close gates. He was killed by Satsuki Uruma, along with the Fourth Kind who had lots of hands.
“That kid told me we could go to the other side of the Round Hole. It was super convenient, but y’know, there were limited situations when I could, right? If I just appeared in the middle of a place with people, I’d stick out like a sore thumb. That’s why it went largely unused until we decided to drop in on DS Research.”
“Hmm, is that right?”
I had figured anyone who got their hands on the ability to teleport like that would use the heck out of it, but when she put it that way, maybe she was right. It would’ve been one thing if she could have moved through it on her own, but if she’d shown up in town with a big gate like that and a Fourth Kind, she’d have caused mass panic.
“Besides, the Round Hole could only move us around in this world. That’s why it never occurred to me that the rooms we’d made were connected to the Blue World until you told me they were, Kamikoshi-san.”
Runa’s tone had an “if only I’d known” vibe to it. But I think it was a good thing she hadn’t. Because there was no way she’d have used it for anything good.
“Well, whatever,” I said. “So, how did you go about doing those renovations?”
“I don’t think we were doing anything that unusual,” Runa said, stepping into the first room. “It was basically like decorating a haunted house. You find some things that fit the vibe, and arrange them in a way that feels right...”
As she continued speaking, she seized the torso by the hips and lifted it up. “Like you’d expect, we weren’t very good at it at first, but we gradually got the hang of it. You know the way that how scary a ghost story is can change completely based on who’s telling it? It was kind of like that.”
Runa carried the torso to the corner of the room, and set it facing the wall. She moved away a little to look at it, then went and changed the angle slightly. Turning around, she looked up at the light hanging from an electrical cable.
“Do you think we can change the position of that?”
One of the operators fetched a stool, and adjusted the light as Runa instructed. The change in lighting made the whole floor a little bit darker. Finally, after making some more slight adjustments to the position of the torso, Runa let go of it, seemingly satisfied with her work.
“Hmm, that about does it,” she said.
I let out an involuntary, “Huh?”
Even though she had only made minor changes, it was fair to say that the atmosphere in the room had completely changed.
Looking in from the door, my eyes were naturally drawn to the torso against the wall. There should have been nothing unusual about it, but it stood facing the wall, facing slightly downward, as though it were staring at something with the head it didn’t have. It was frightening to imagine what it might be looking at, or to imagine it suddenly turning to face us.
“Urumi-kun, you’re amazing. You could be an interior designer,” Tsuji said behind me with admiration.
“There you go, joking again... Don’t just say things you don’t mean.”
“No, I’m totally serious. Don’t you think so too, Kamikoshi-kun?”
I nodded.
“You surprised me,” I admitted. “You could make a living as a haunted house designer.”
“Hmm, could I? I’m not really feeling it. I mean, I could do so much more, but there’s limits when this is all I have to work with...”
It had been an earnest compliment, but Runa wasn’t happy about it. The way she was grumbling with a difficult look on her face was just like a professional artisan.
“No, if anything, it’s incredible you could extract so much atmosphere with so little. I never thought you’d be so talented.”
“I don’t think it’s talent or anything like that... And hold on, if you didn’t think I could do it, why’d you let me?”
“I thought you’d been doing something with your Voice. But it turned out that wasn’t the case at all, so...”
I looked at the room with my right eye. There was no silver mist. But I could definitely sense the presence of the interstitial space. It was a tingling sensation, like there was only a thin skin separating us from touching things that were not of this world.
Toriko’s translucent left hand stroked the air.
“Well?” I asked.
“It’s chilly... And though it’s faint, I feel something like a breeze too.”
There wasn’t any wind in here, so what she was feeling wasn’t of this world. Toriko could perceive the Otherside as a cold flow using her left hand. That settled it. Runa’s renovations could turn an ordinary space into an interstitial one.
I turned to Sasazuka, who had been watching from behind, and said, “I think this is going to work. You can start getting ready.”