“Sago-san, you’re being scary.”
“Hmm? Ahh, it’s fine. I’ll just have Ig heal me—Ouch!—heal me up later.”
“......Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Don’t worry. It really does hurt—Ouch!—like it’s supposed to.”
As I continued talking while continuing to stab myself the entire time, Kaburagi-san clenched her eyes shut and clapped her hands over her ears.
Is this training really that hard to look at? I might indeed die if I was abruptly stabbed with a powerful PSI drive, but a weak mass-produced piece of junk like this couldn’t threaten my life even with a thousand stabs...... But I suppose that’s not the issue here, is it. Someone who’s repeatedly plunging a knife into his own arm and looking chill about it probably comes off as a totally deranged madman. I guess I might have gotten a bit too used to be hurt. Let’s be a bit more mindful going forward.
When the assembly line at Kaneyama Tech was up and running, we immediately began to mass produce PSI drives. After some final tuning by Baba, PSI drives in the form of clubs, shields, spears, pocket watches, bracers, and so much more were packed away into their own specialized cases and then lined up in rows in the storehouse of our secret base.
By then, the year had turned, and it was already February. It was perfect timing, as Shouta-kun and Touka-chan had just finished their high school entrance exams.
It’s curtains up for this traitor event!
⚔
Considering how it’s said that rumors last 75 days, the attention garnered by the Super Water Sphere Incident could be said to be on the longer side. However, regardless of how it was a scoop that shook the entire world, people would naturally move on after a whole year. Only when shows on TV did special episodes talking about “One Year After the Super Water Sphere Incident” did the matter come back to people’s minds.
No matter how enormous an incident is, people still have to fill their stomachs. They still have to go to work. They have to clean their house, have to go to the toilet, and have to pay taxes. Their everyday life goes on. The eccentrics and oddballs hailing from a whole rainbow of nationalities who had filled Tokyo to bursting in their search for the supernatural had become part of the norm. The police had also gotten experienced with patrolling around and mediating the troubles they caused.
People bearing conspicuous tattoos or wearing weird roots dangling from their neck now drew only glances at best, a far cry from the days when people would stop to gawk. The unnaturalness that the Super Water Sphere Incident had brought on had ceased to be unnatural. People had adapted, taken it in.
Growing used to something means becoming dulled to it. Even the song that brought you to tears the first time you heard it would cease to touch you after a hundred, two hundred, or three hundred replays. The gradually creeping familiarity and forgetfulness from the passage of a whole year caused the sense of fear from the Super Water Sphere Incident to become diluted in people’s minds.
So then what happens? The shadows of the world gain momentum, of course.
In place of the receding fear, greed began appearing on people’s faces. Although they wouldn’t say it out loud, thoughts like “I, too, want to feel the rush of power from blowing away an enemy like that” would begin surfacing in their minds.
However, if they did it to their actual enemies in real life, they would get arrested. Thus people would suppress their desires. And their suppressed desire for power and violence would flow into the World Shadows as a torrent of energy.
......At least, that was how the cover story went.
And it was the duty of the secret organization Amaterasu to fight against such World Shadows. One such member of this very organization, the Buddhist-attribute girl Touka Hasumi was, on this night, yet again engaged in battle with a World Shadow.
Under the light of a full moon, Touka-chan was fighting within a forest on the grounds of a shrine that housed a minor local Shinto deity, sandwiched between towering skyscrapers of concrete. As she had received the urgent summons at night, she was wearing an extremely simple outfit composed of a tracksuit thrown over her pajamas.
Thanks to the prototype triangular-shaped telekinetic fuel PSI drive set up on the ground, there was a telekinetic barrier in place that prevented the sounds of fighting and the light of Touka-chan’s flames from leaking out. Although the pure black dome would look super conspicuous during the day, it made for quite the effective camouflage at night. It basically made for a battle ring that existed for the sake of espers and World Shadows alone.
The World Shadow that Touka-chan was fighting this time was tall and slender. Its jet-black body wiggled all over the place and, with inhuman movements, it evaded every single swing from the flaming sword that Touka-chan was brandishing, a mass of 4,000°C flames compressed into a well-defined katana shape. Every single swing that missed generated a heatwave that caused the air to become distorted, leaving sizzling furrows in the gravel ground and burning off leaves and small branches from nearby trees.
“Stop... moving!” In her frustration, Touka-chan ramped up the output of her sword to its maximum range of 3 m and swung it in a mowing attack. However, the World Shadow bent its upper body backward in evasion, before immediately snapping back upright and resuming its boxing-like movements.
The World Shadow this time was a boxer-type specialized in dodging. It was likely that this was a manifestation of the unconscious desire for violence from all the people who had been affected from watching the livestream of last night’s world championship title defense fight. That fight was freaking on fire! It’s definitely going down in history, take my word for it.
The boxer Shadow loosened its shoulders, lowered its stance while bringing its fists close to its chest, then charged straight in. In response, Touka-chan dispelled her sword and expelled a torrent of flames from her entire body while holding her ground.
“Avīci Hell!” A thick tornado of flames sprang up around Touka-chan. The World Shadow that dived into the tornado had its membrane burned to nothing in a split second, quickly followed by its entire body pathetically evaporating into mere water vapor.
Touka-chan retracted her flames, then stomped onto the stone core that had gotten brittle from the scorching. Only after taking a look around and confirming that there were no stragglers nearby did she finally lower her guard.
With that, the battle part was over. Possibly due to Shouta-kun’s influence, Touka-chan had also taken to shouting out the names of her techniques while using them. Yep, she really is cute.
Without any delay, Touka-chan smoothly shifted into kicking over the scorched and overturned gravel within the grounds, which had been heated so much that it seemed one might make the perfect roasted sweet potatoes with them. Then she took out a foldable-type PSI drive in the shape of a Buddhist monk staff called a khakkhara from her pocket and activated it. The cold air that blasted out from the khakkara immediately cooled the area down, preventing against the possibility of a fire incident.
After taking care of all the clean-up in a clearer state of mind than she had been in when she first got here, she disabled and retrieved the telekinetic barrier contraption and turned to head home. Matching her timing perfectly, I gave a call to the Part-Time-kun that I had on standby and hung up after one ring, which was the GO sign that we had decided on.
Just as Touka-chan was about to get onto the bicycle that she had parked in front of the shrine grounds, a man came out from the shadows behind a light pole to stand in her way. He had a very flashy appearance, which included hair dyed blond and piercings in his ears. However, most likely due to the fact that he had been on standby for thirty minutes out in the cold, his lips were slightly blue, and he looked very cold. Oops. I forgot to tell him to come wearing warm clothing.
But thankfully, Touka-chan did not realize the tiny tell-tale signs. She simply brought her guard up, bracing herself.