Gazing at the manacle on her left hand, Ice Doll asked one last question. “Then what will you do, Fuubi Kase?”
The police officer gave a thin smile. She was wearing a pure-white military uniform. “I’ll keep on fighting. In the process, I’ll take the color of justice that a certain somebody aimed for and missed and dye it a nice shade of red.”
✦ ✦ ✦
When Siesta and I left Ice Doll and walked out of the palace, we found ourselves on a continent of ice—which was currently a battlefield.
Long, thick roots covered in ice were thrashing around as if they had a will of their own. They looked almost like big snakes or dragons. These were what had attacked the palace we’d just left.
“That’s Charlie and…”
Looking into the distance, Siesta narrowed her eyes. There were two figures fighting the aggressive ice roots. One was the blond-haired agent, and not too far from her was…
“Lot. Charlie’s dad.”
I didn’t know what had happened between the two of them after I’d left, but they were fighting Yggdrasil together now, their military swords cutting down roots one after the other. The father and daughter hadn’t seen each other in ten years, yet they still trusted the other person to look after their back and could fight together without having to exchange a word. That was a skill that was only possible because they had both kept slashing down naive ideals and remained standing on the battlefield.
“Nagisa’s gotten strong, too.”
There was one other person. A figure ran across the roof of the enormous palace, fighting dynamically with a red saber. She leaped from roof to roof, luring ice roots that stretched like whips, then turning back and slashing them all down in a single attack.
“I bet that’s not just Nagisa on her own, though.”
She was probably getting help from the remnants of her other personality. It was something that was only possible on this battlefield, where the enemy was Yggdrasil.
It wasn’t long before Nagisa noticed Siesta and me and ran down to us, using broken ice roots as footholds.
“Nagisa, what’s the situation?”
“It’s anybody’s guess, really. Frankly, there doesn’t seem to be an end to it. No matter how many roots we chop away, they grow back.”
Even as Nagisa spoke, the plant she’d just cut through started to regenerate. It was a battle of attrition, plain and simple—and at this rate, we’d get steamrollered.
“I was able to control it at first, but then it got like this… It doesn’t matter how much I cut away or how I try to coax it, nothing works.”
Was Seed’s will driving Yggdrasil’s rampage, or was it being cleverly manipulated by this doomed world? They’d said the Ark was the one place that was supposed to be safe…
As I was thinking, my smartphone rang. It was almost impossible to get a signal here, but luckily, the call had come through. Mia’s name was on the screen.
“Oh, finally! You picked up! Hello, Kimihiko?”
“…Is that you, Rill?”
The anxious voice on the other end of the line belonged to the Magical Girl, not the Oracle.
Right, those two were together at the moment. A Federation Government dignitary had been threatening them. However, that situation should have been cleared up as soon as we talked Ice Doll down, so was this about something else?
“It’s really bad. Damage from Yggdrasil has suddenly started spreading all over the world… Mia got a vision, and she’s relaying evacuation instructions to the relevant locations now.”
“No way… Yggdrasil’s really destroying the world…?” Had the System worn down sooner than we’d predicted? In that case, we didn’t have a moment to lose. “Are you and Mia both in England? Are things okay there?”
“…Barely, to be honest.” Rill’s tone grew dark. “The view from the clock tower has a lot more green in it now. There’s no telling when this place will fall.”
“Rill, what’s it like in Japan?!” Nagisa asked, leaning closer to the phone.
“Actually, there was a prophecy about that just a minute ago. Um…apparently the dome where the idol girl is giving her concert will be swallowed up by Yggdrasil in another thirty to forty minutes.”
“Yui…! Have you given them the order to evacuate?”
“It’s a show meant to be broadcast live around the world, and there’s no audience. They should have only had to evacuate the staff and the performers, but…”
The call switched to a video chat. The picture was grainy, but we could still see Rill, along with the screen of a computer right beside her. The computer showed an idol singing alone on stage.
“It can’t be— Is this the live broadcast? Yui hasn’t evacuated?”
“No. She’s sent all but one staff member home, and she’s still singing. She said it was her duty to protect everyone’s ordinary days. That her job was to create a place everyone could feel safe coming home to.”
I see. She was doing this because the world was panicking right now. The one staff member who’d stayed was probably Noches. If things got genuinely dangerous, Noches was bound to protect Saikawa.
“Just one thing, Kimihiko,” Rill said from a corner of the screen. “Global crises seem to strike unfairly, but a careful look at history shows that the cause is always lurking somewhere. Make sure you don’t miss it.”
Rill’s current job was compiling a record of past global crises and the activity of the Tuners who’d resolved them. That would definitely give her a unique perspective on all this.
“Rill has a vague idea of your current situation. Please be safe.”
“Yeah. We’ll meet again, I promise.”
Thanking Rill, I ended the call.
“So there’s a reason for disasters, huh?”
Why had Yggdrasil suddenly been given the role of destroying the world?
“Is it a coincidence?”
There was no way. That word hadn’t contributed anything to our story, not even once. Either that or there had been a detective who wouldn’t allow anybody to use it to tidy everything away.
That meant there had to be a reason for this situation, as Rill said. There was a cause lurking somewhere. Where had the countdown to the end of the world originally started and why?
“Abel has to be the trigger, right?”
That meant the story I needed to remember was his. —Where was it? Where was the link between Abel and the Yggdrasil crisis?
“At some point, we started calling the enemy Abel.”
Siesta had gone to fight the rampaging ice roots while I was taking that call, but now she was back again.