Runa’s skill for spacial design was the real deal. Just by changing the position of the urinal, she turned that room into the site of a horrific murder, and by adding a little more grime to the vinyl curtain, she made it seem like there was something on the other side that you wouldn’t want to look at directly. With her masterful hand, the makeshift kill house was transformed into a haunted house. It was frankly amazing how she could create so much atmosphere when she had nothing actually scary to work with. If Kozakura were here, she’d have probably run away screaming.
It made me think about how you never know what talents might lie sleeping inside a person. It was a mystery to me how she couldn’t understand her skill for herself. She’d never made it as a streamer, the cult she’d built got crushed, and even the object of her worship had betrayed her, so I never imagined she’d blossom like this. I had to wonder how her life could have been if she’d found out before she went off the rails, but unfortunately this was the kind of talent she could only have discovered once she did.
We returned once she had given all of the room a rework and found Torchlight ready to go. They had no fixed uniform, so they used their Tomoshibi Engineering work clothes as a base, and added vests and helmets over top of that. They looked heavily armed, with rifles and shotguns, but because of the earlier explanation I knew they were all electric airsoft guns. Even if we got raided by the police, they could pass themselves off as a group of overenthusiastic survival gamers. The only ones who couldn’t pass ourselves off that way were Toriko and me.
“Let’s give it a once through to start off,” Sasazuka said, then gave orders to the first team to go in. “Clear all of the rooms, and then return. You don’t need to fire. Just go through the basic motions, like always.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the team leader.
The team of five pressed themselves against the wall near the hallway. Sasazuka pressed the button on a stopwatch.
“Go.”
The five quickly entered the hallway. The way they moved smoothly despite their large builds was so professional. For me, it was just a “Wow, that’s awesome,” but Toriko was observing them more closely with obvious interest.
When the operator who was taking point peered into the first room, he stopped moving for a moment, like he was intimidated. I saw the second had the same reaction, pulling back a little. From there on, they moved through the tight corridors bunched together, and I couldn’t see them very well from outside, but it made me think, “Even the pros can get scared.” As for Runa, she didn’t seem satisfied with the reaction. She had a difficult look on her face and was thinking about something. I never expected her to have the disposition of an artisan.
The team returned, and Sasazuka pressed the button on the stopwatch.
“That was pretty slow. How was it?”
“Yeah... That was scary. We thought we were ready, going into it, though. It’s like a haunted house made by a minimalist.”
The leader glanced in our direction, then shook his head in an exaggerated manner. “You gave it one hell of a renovation. I didn’t expect to get scared like that.”
Runa said nothing. She just smiled.
“You think they’re looking at me with some deference?” Runa said somewhat proudly once the first team left.
“They have since the beginning, Runa.”
“Wha, do you really think so?”
“Everyone knows what you’re capable of. I think everyone in Torchlight is constantly thinking about how they can neutralize you the moment you start saying something strange.”
“Yikes. That’s scary.”
She said that, but Runa was grinning.
The remaining operators split into two teams and charged in. When they returned, they all said it had been scary, and they looked at us—Runa especially—with a sense of horror.
“Especially that kid in the last room! How the hell did you pull that off?”
“Kid?”
“There was an Asian kid. What even was that? I thought I was gonna wet myself.”
The operator who had been bringing up the rear in the third team said that as he was leaving. The object in the last room was a metal locker. With Runa’s masterful touch, it had been left open at the perfect angle to make it look like someone might poke their head out of it at any moment, but apparently they’d experienced more than just that atmosphere: they’d seen a kid who couldn’t exist. Even though I didn’t think it was possible, I still felt like I had to go check. There was no child, obviously. I felt like I’d just witnessed the birth of a ghost story.
“Oh, thank goodness. I was worried that Kasumi had tagged along without permission,” Toriko said, sounding relieved.
The possibility had crossed my mind too. With her talent for appearing and disappearing, maybe she could come all the way from Shakujii-kouen to Hannou.
“Now then... I do believe we can call this first experiment a success,” said Migiwa.
Sasazuka nodded in agreement. “Phase 1 is a bigger success than expected. We have a means of building a kill house specialized for anti-UBL training, and after some testing, it seems like it will stand up to practical use.”
“It truly was unexpected that Urumi-san would have such skills. Thank you for your efforts.”
“Uh, sure, it was no big deal, really.” Runa apparently didn’t know how to react to these words of gratitude.
“When it comes to the actual training, I believe they will enter the same setting repeatedly in order to raise their degree of proficiency. What do you think about that point?” asked Migiwa. “If the objects of fear are the same every time, then even if they find them frightening at first, might they not develop a resistance to them from the second time onward?”
“We’ll want to run some tests and see how that goes,” Sasazuka agreed. “Even with ordinary training, we make subtle changes to the positioning of the enemies and furniture so that it doesn’t become simple routine work. It may be necessary to ask Urumi-san to handle that sort of engineering. The other thing I’ll want to see is whether they build up a resistance to fear. And even if they do, if it will be transferable to other objects of terror.”
“The question becomes whether there can be a generalized resistance to fear, one that is not limited to a specific object. What do you think, Kamikoshi-san?”
I was just listening to them talk, so when Migiwa suddenly threw the question over to me, I panicked and wasn’t sure how to answer.
“Uhh, well... Wh-What do you think, Toriko?”
“Huh? Me? Let’s see... We’ve had a lot of scary experiences, but each time it happens, how do I say this...we’re properly frightened, I think.”
“Ah, yeah, that’s right. We get frightened every time.”
“So, in that sense, I don’t think we’ve gotten used to it, and as long as the Otherside is using fear as a means of making contact, there’s no way to avoid getting scared. Because they’re poking at our human weaknesses. But in our case, we don’t get paralyzed by fear anymore. Whether we fight or flee, we’re able to take some kind of action despite how scared we are. A large part of that is because of my hand and Sorawo’s eye, and because we have guns, but I think the biggest thing is that we’ve figured out that our fear is something that the other party is making use of. It feels like it should be possible to train them so that, even if they haven’t built up a resistance to each kind of fear, they can still avoid panicking.”
“I see. That was quite easy to understand.”
Migiwa and Sasazuka nodded.
“If I might add one thing,” I interjected, “I think that how we operate together plays a big part in it too. If I go down, I know that Toriko’s there to help. And when Toriko can’t act, I can do something.”
“Ah-hah,” said Migiwa.
“Even when I’m really scared, when I think that my partner might be in trouble, I find I can keep hanging in there in ways I wouldn’t have expected I could. Maybe because it makes me feel I have to get my act together. There have been several times when it would have been all over for me if we weren’t together. I don’t even think braving the Otherside alone is an option anymore.”
“S-Sorawo...!”
Oh, wow. I felt like I could see hearts flying out of Toriko in my direction. Maybe I shouldn’t have said all that stuff. Hopefully none of them could see the hearts.
If Sasazuka did notice Toriko suddenly firing her Love Beam at me, she didn’t let it show.
“It’s not at all common for the team to have to take note of the other members’ mental states and act accordingly, so that was a blind spot for us. The more coordinated a professional team is, the more they act with an implicit trust in their teammates, so they wouldn’t think their comrades might do something abnormal out of fear. For anti-UBL operations, we may be able to apply some of the training methods used to teach how to deal with a comrade who loses morale due to high stress, or how to handle a situation where the team has taken casualties.”
I didn’t really know about any of that professional stuff, but I was glad that my comments had given her some sort of hint.
“Now then,” said Migiwa. “Shall we move on to the next experiment? If you don’t mind, Tsuji-san.”
It was time for Phase 2 of the plans we had discussed in advance.