Chapter 59

1 “Protect the children and the crablings! Don’t give them another inch! We’ll hold the line here!” “Dammit, they got Takuboku! I need another crab! Doesn’t matter if it’s a young’un!” South of the village, near the gates, shouts filled the air and a great battle was taking place. Strange clumps that shone blue in the night sky rained down upon the land like meteors, destroying whatever they touched, be it hut, crab, or man. In their place appeared telegraph poles, phone lines, tarmac roads, and other things of a municipal nature. The battleground was now a disordered mixture of the Mushroom Keepers’ rustic settlement and the harsh concrete and metal of the cities of old. The seasoned Mushroom Keepers of the village wove deftly between the buildings that sprang from the ground, and though they fought bravely with their bows and crabs, one after another they fell to the overwhelming might of their mysterious foes. To Tirol, who moved from shadow to shadow, trying to remain out of sight, it was clear the Mushroom Keepers were fighting a losing battle. “Sheesh! This whole thing’s really gone to hell! Is the sky fallin’ at last?” she said as she watched from her hiding spot. The strange invaders moved even faster than the Mushroom Keepers, and Tirol found it difficult to focus on one long enough to work out precisely what it was. All she could hear was the occasional Clang! of a blade or a mushroom arrow as the villagers’ weapons found their marks. “What kinda force can take on the Mushroom Keepers and win…? Grrr… No use thinkin’ about it. I gotta gather my stuff and get the hell outta here!” Tirol hoisted her rucksack onto her back and was just about to dip out of cover when something landed at her feet with a Crash! Tirol squealed in fright before approaching the strange object and peering toward it. It seemed to be one of the assailants. One of the Mushroom Keepers must have brought it down, Tirol thought, noting the string of fungi eating away at its belly. It was some kind of humanoid automaton, superbly engineered, still throwing off sparks as it died. Its arms were most striking. They were about 50 percent longer than the average human’s, while the rest of its body was smooth and glossy, with incredibly pale white skin, and its head was partially covered with a crimson metallic weave that looked not unlike human hair. “…What the heck is this?” Tirol leaned over curiously, gazing at its white, expressionless face. Suddenly, the top half of the figure sprang to life, and it shot out its right arm. In a matter of moments, a small blue glowing cube materialized in the robot’s palm. “Launch… Ci…ty… Ma…ker…” “Nnnwaaah!!” Tirol leaped back and, drawing the crowbar at her waist, bashed the figure hard on the cranium, caving its skull in. The robot subsequently missed its shot, and the glowing blue cube flew past Tirol and hit a stone lantern behind her. With a scraping, metallic sound, the lantern was immediately transformed, leaving only a telegraph pole where it had once stood. “Holy macaroni! What the hell is goin’ on here?” Tirol barely had time to shiver in fright before she heard a tremendous explosion coming from the village gates. Next, she heard the cries of the Mushroom Keepers and the crashes as their steelcrab mounts hit the ground. Every fiber of her being was telling her to get out of that place as quickly as possible, but as the earth shook around her, Tirol found herself rooted to the spot in sheer terror. There was something out there. Step. Step. Step. Out in the wilderness, there was something distinctly human drawing closer. Tirol heard its echoing footsteps. Step. Step. Step. As the sound cut through the chaos, the cluster of urban invaders terrorizing the settlement seemed to respond to its presence, turning and focusing their bright lights on the approaching figure. “People used to call you apes…,” said a voice, “but I didn’t think you’d actually become apes! You could never hope to defeat the White Apollos with Stone Age weaponry like that! And you truly think yourselves human?” There stood a man dressed in a lab coat, his hands in his pockets and a sour look on his face, staring straight ahead with his oddly bright-red eyes. His hair, a deep crimson, billowed in the wind like a flame. With every step he took, asphalt spread out beneath his feet like ripples on a pond, so his boots never once touched the earth. Several more of the white automatons lined up behind him, and it was obvious now that they were all modeled after him. “Die, you monster, diiie!” The man seemed almost lost in thought, when suddenly a furious scream came from above, and down flew a Mushroom Keeper atop his trusty steed, swinging his greatclaw toward the intruder. There was a Boom! as the claw ripped the air, but the redheaded man didn’t even look up at the oncoming attack. Right before the claw could connect, it came into contact with a layer of glowing particles that formed a barrier around the man and disintegrated into a pale-blue mist. “Wh-whaa?! That thing took out Yasunori’s claw!” “Riding crabs now, are we? How incomprehensible. How inconceivably absurd. The world’s gone mad. Utterly mad…” The redheaded man raised his hand, and a gust of the blue particles swept forth. The giant crab flew backward as though hit by a wrecking ball, and it sailed through the air before crashing into a small house, which then exploded into a block of flats. “Yasunoriiii! Curses, you bastard!” The dismounted Mushroom Keeper now drew his blade in anger and came at the redheaded man like a wild dog. However, the intruder effortlessly grabbed him by the neck and forced him to his knees with superhuman strength. “The bugs in the restoration program were particularly pronounced here in Shikoku. Some other kind of particle was nullifying the effects of the Apollo Particles, and I thought for sure I sensed their presence here…but I must have been mistaken. There’s no way primates such as you could possibly create something like that.” “…Heh. Heh-heh. Laugh while you still can…” “And why is that?” “There’s a god protecting our village. A mushroom god. Bisco will… Bisco will—” Suddenly, a small office building burst from the Mushroom Keeper’s throat, silencing him for good. Spreading from his neck, where the redheaded man gripped him, little buildings and telegraph poles sprouted through his skin and tore the man’s lifeless body to shreds. In moments, all that remained was something that looked like a tiny model city, which the redheaded man cast aside in frustration. “I was not laughing,” he said, completely missing the point. “These primates need to learn some manners.” He turned to the fleet of white robots behind him and said, “Phase one of the cleanup is complete. Now we must pull up the roots. Four of you, head to the elder’s house. Three of you, destroy the—I can’t believe I’m saying this—the crab farm, and—” But before the redheaded man could finish giving his orders, a single arrow landed in the white chest of one of the robots. The others all turned to look, their expressionless faces devoid of emotion, before… Gaboom! …the explosion of fungus smashed the robot back while the others leaped away. The redheaded man, however, stood still, frowning at the newly appeared mushroom. Gaboom! Gaboom! Gaboom! A boy with sky-blue hair jumped between the buildings, firing off arrow after arrow and covering the white robots in mushrooms. Then one of his arrows exploded into a spiderweb-like fungus that entangled multiple nearby robots in its snare. As the bundle fell helplessly to the ground, the boy’s giant crab raised its greatclaw high… “Get ’em, Actagawa!” Sssmash! The earth shook as the weight of the crab’s claw shattered the robots into tiny little fragments. One of those fragments fell at the feet of the red-haired man, who grimaced in anger. “…Such a violent people. Have you just been killing each other all this time? You don’t even have humidifiers…or air-conditioning!” An arrow twinkled in the air as it shot toward him. The man swept his arm, deflecting the arrow from its path, and it hit a nearby building, exploding into a glittering mushroom. “…Hmm? That arrow… It tingled…” “You’re the boss man, huh? You must be if you can deflect an arrow like that.” The finest of the Mushroom Keeper tribe landed before the man. His fluttering cloak was filled with twinkling stars, and as he drew the next arrow from his quiver, he snarled through gritted teeth, “I don’t appreciate you actin’ like you own the place with your fancy magic. Now, who the hell are you?” “A-Akaboshi! Wh-where the heck have ya been?!” yelled Tirol as she scuttled out from wherever she had been hiding and ducked behind Bisco like a frightened child. Leaving Actagawa to finish off the remaining robots, Milo landed beside Bisco, too, like his shadow, and eyed the redheaded man cautiously. “I could ask you the same question…,” said the man, looking up casually at the shining Rust-Eater before locking eyes once more with Bisco. “Who are you? Or to be more precise, my question is this: Can a person who leaps an average of 1.86 meters in a single bound truly be considered human?” For the first time, Bisco and the red-haired man looked at each other and froze. Milo and Tirol both froze when they saw it as well. “Hey, Milo. Doesn’t this freak look just like Akaboshi?!” “Y-yeah…! He seems a lot smarter than Bisco, though…” Indeed, the intruder looked exactly like Bisco might if he’d cleaned himself up and let down his bangs. The tough, manly look of his face was the same. The only differences were the color of his eyes and his bearing: He had none of Bisco’s wildness, and instead possessed an intelligent, sophisticated air. “You’re the one who killed Yasunori and Iwakura! Tell me your name, bastard, so I can kill you and offer it to their graves!” “It’s considered good manners to give your own name before asking it of others,” replied the man, “though I wouldn’t expect a monkey to be well-versed in etiquette…” As he raised his gloved hand, the blue particles surrounded him once more. From the frown on his face, it seemed he realized this monkey standing before him was not like the others. “By Iwakura, would you perhaps be referring to that one over there? Before he died, he did mention that ‘Bisco’ would be able to kill me… I suppose you are this ‘Bisco’ of whom he spoke?” “How can ya not know Bisco?! The Man-Eating Redcap, Rust-Eater Bisco? Have ya been living under a rock?!” cried Tirol. “Come on, it’s your turn now. Who are you and whaddaya want?” At first, the red-haired man simply extended his arm toward Bisco, but then he muttered something to himself, apparently changing his mind. He looked Bisco in the eye. “My name is Apollo,” he said. “And, put simply, I came here to destroy you.” “Look out, Bisco! He’s not going to listen to reason!” shouted Milo. “I can see that!” Bisco replied. “I have now fulfilled my courtesies, you filthy apes!” said Apollo, and a blue cube shot from his palm like a comet toward Bisco. Bisco fired off a Rust-Eater arrow in retaliation, which collided with the cube mid-flight, shattering it. Where the fragments fell, tiny miniature cities sprouted from the ground. “…! You dismantled my particles! As I thought, the source of the bug is here after all. But… Could it really be these mushrooms?!”