Sensei wanted him to stop. Stopping was clearly the smarter decision.
So what?
He wasn’t doing this for Sensei, or for himself. He was doing it for her.
He walked past Sensei, picking up the pace with every step. Sensei couldn’t touch him or stop him. He was grateful for that now.
Without looking back, he ran down the dark, deserted street toward the high school.
Deep inside the darkened library, Naomi flipped on a single desk lamp. He wasn’t about to turn on the overhead lights and risk a security guard discovering him.
Some careful sneaking had brought him undetected to the second floor of the library. He didn’t have a key, of course, but he’d used his glove to open a convenient hole in the entrance door.
The hole-opening part wasn’t too difficult, but he’d struggled a little bit with repairing the door afterward. He’d always thought of the school doors as nothing but planks of wood, but they were actually composite objects with layers of veneer and protective coating; he couldn’t recreate all that instantly. It would have been easier to make his hole in the glass part of the door, in retrospect.
Naomi checked his watch; it was 12:30 a.m. By 6:30 or so, the teachers and students with early morning activities would start trickling in. He needed to make as many books as possible in that time.
Crouching down next to his lamp, Naomi held his right hand out a few inches above the floor.
The first ninety minutes slipped by before he knew it.
Naomi focused on his task intently. His glove vibrated. And in the space under his palm, a book materialized out of thin air. This was his third creation so far. The first and second were nowhere to be seen, however. He’d erased both of them shortly after creating them.
The book had taken form quite nicely this time. Naomi remembered it clearly as one of the volumes he’d seen in Ruri’s storage building. Although it was technically brand new, it looked appropriately worn and aged; a glance at the side showed that the paper was visibly yellowed.
The moment he picked it up and opened it, though, Naomi grimaced. Its contents were pure gibberish.
There were letters on the pages, aligned in neat sentences and paragraphs, resembling a novel in their length and spacing. But there wasn’t a single coherent phrase to be found in any of it. It was the kind of nonsense you’d see when a computer screwed up encoding a text file. There were even a few bizarre symbols mixed in with the real characters. This wasn’t something you could read.
His first and second tries had the exact same problem. Naomi understood why he’d failed. He’d been practicing with the God Hand for two and a half months by now, after all. He had a good sense for the way it worked in practice.
It could only create things he could imagine. There was no way he could use it to recreate the text of a book he’d never read.
Sensei had asked him if he planned to copy out the books word by word. That was clearly the only real way it could be done. He’d need to flip through a book while creating a copy of it.
But the original books had been destroyed. They were only ashes at this point, and even those had been dumped in the trash by now.
Sensei knew all of this. He’d warned Naomi in advance that this project simply wasn’t possible. If he really wanted to, he probably could have taken the glove back somehow, but he hadn’t bothered. Maybe he’d decided to let Naomi frustrate himself instead.
Maybe he knew Naomi would come back beaten and defeated.
A dark, miserable feeling spread through Naomi’s mind. He knew this sensation very well—he’d experienced it countless times. It was like an old friend by now.
Resignation.
Everything was telling him to give up, that there was nothing more to be done. There was no time. His goal was impossible. The glove couldn’t do what he wanted it to.
He understood that all too well.
“So what?” he muttered defiantly to himself, picturing her face. “So what?!” It didn’t matter if this was pointless. He just didn’t want to give up. He wouldn’t.
He felt his face distorting like a frustrated toddler’s. He crumpled up the useless book in his hand.
He felt the glove quivering.
Blinking, he looked down at it. It really was quivering. He wasn’t consciously trying to create anything at the moment; it was moving all on its own.
The part on the back of his hand began to shift and ripple. A long, thin cord emerged; at the end there was a bit that looked like a camera lens. It wriggled into place, then began emitting light—almost like a projector.
A holographic image took shape in front of him. His eyes went wide. This technology was familiar—he saw images of things like it nearly every morning at his training sessions, as a part of his daily lectures.
This thing was far more advanced than any technology in Naomi’s world. There was only one person who could be using it.
“Sensei?”
There was no reply, but the blurry, vague image grew sharper, forming a clearly defined holographic model. He was looking at an old, stuffed bookshelf, one of the shelves from the old storage building.
Naomi reached out to the 3D model. As his hand drew closer, one of the books popped off the shelf and floated up in front of him.
He moved his hand experimentally; the holographic book responded, spinning in midair. After a moment, he managed to open it.
“Wait, is this…”
Closing the 3D model of the book, he reached out for another. It popped out just as easily.
Finally, he understood.
This was his source material—the guide he needed to reconstruct those burned books. Somehow, Sensei had provided him perfect reproductions of the books as they had been. This was the breakthrough he’d been hoping for. It was his chance to succeed.
Naomi looked up at the ceiling of the library—something told him Sensei was in that direction. “Thank you so much!” he whispered fiercely.
There was no reply, of course. But Naomi thought he could hear someone mutter, “What a moron,” anyway. And then add, “Focus on the job at hand.”
Naomi checked his watch. It was 1:35 a.m.
With this reference material, he could recreate the books perfectly. The only question now was how many he could finish before his time ran out. He had five hours—or only five hours, really. How far could he get?
Snapping the 3D book shut, he held his hand out once again. He didn’t have any time to waste on thinking about it. He might not even get through ten books at this rate. Even five might be tough.
But despite the risks, he felt joyful as he threw himself into the task. A part of him was scared he might not succeed, but a bigger part of him was happy that he didn’t have to give up yet.
11.
NISHIKI HIGH STUDENTS flowed down Horigawa Street. It was a perfectly ordinary morning and a perfectly normal day—just another weekday in June. The Culture Festival and Sports Day were still far away, exams weren’t for a while, and there weren’t any special events scheduled.