“And you’re sure the emergency lever on the outside hadn’t been pulled…?” Sawa had come running over to see the capsule for herself. Yuuma nodded emphatically. “Yes. Absolutely sure… Remember what that lady told us during orientation? About how we shouldn’t touch the levers under any circumstances because they can’t be reset without restarting the Caliculus…?” “Yeah, she did say that.” It was Kenk who spoke. He was still dressed in his tattered hoodie and capri school pants. Like Yuuma, his QREST now reached to just below his elbow. The circuit pattern on Kenk’s QREST glowed orange. Fortunately he hadn’t grown horns or put on a swimsuit like Sawa had, but that still didn’t explain why Sawa had been the only one to change. At the moment, however, Nagi’s disappearance took priority. Sawa climbed onto the edge of the capsule and peered inside. “The internal emergency lever hasn’t been pulled, either,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Which means…the capsule wasn’t opened before you got here, Yu. Not from the outside and not from the inside.” “But…how is that possible?” protested Kenk, glancing back and forth between Sawa and the capsule. “Nagi was with us during the playtest, inside Actual Magic, so she had to be in there, right? Did something happen to her after we beat the boss dragon…?” There was still a faint scratch across Kenk’s right eyebrow, which twitched as he spoke. He’d always had a habit of twitching his eyebrow like that whenever he was thinking really hard. “Remember how she was talking about something before it happened…? Something like b…beam-sys? Beamster…?” “BSIS. Brain Signal Intercept and Scan,” said Yuuma, correcting Kenk. “But the BSIS is the reason Nagi wouldn’t have been able to get out of the capsule on her own until the power went out, just like the rest of us.” Kenk, however, nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly, the beam system thing! It was right after that, that the floor in the boss room turned red. The floor suddenly disappeared after that, and I dropped into some kind of darkness… The next thing I knew, I was back in my Caliculus capsule. I called for help, but no one came, so I used the lever to get out by myself.” Yuuma’s memories of what had happened were mostly the same. But there was one difference. As he was falling down into that virtual darkness, he seemed to recall seeing something down there… Something had happened in there, he was sure of it, but he couldn’t seem to remember what. His head throbbed painfully, as if resisting the memory. He put the thought aside for the time being and replied to Kenk. “Same thing happened to me… I pulled the emergency lever, the lid lifted, and I stepped outside… Your capsule was already open at the point, but Sawa’s and Nagi’s were still closed, so I just assumed they were both probably still inside…” Hmm…? Yuuma suddenly furrowed his eyebrows, scouring his memory. “What is it, Yu?” Sawa stepped forward, thrusting her face close to Yuuma’s as if trying to peer into his brain. Yuuma stared back at her in turn. Up close, he realized that her hair, which should have been completely black, was now tinged purplish. Her eyes, likewise, seemed to have developed a reddish line. Sawa’s eyelenses had probably fused with her corneas, just like Yu’s had. Maybe that explained the change. Instinctively, Yuuma reached out and grasped his sister’s hair between his fingers. Even the texture seemed different than before. It had been several years since he’d last touched Sawa’s hair, but this hair felt different. It was incredibly fine and silken and felt chilly to the touch, like metal. It felt nice. “Hey…! Knock it off, buttbrain!” Sawa hadn’t called Yuuma “buttbrain” in years. That was her old insult for him as kids. She pulled away and kicked the side of his sneakered foot lightly with her taloned boot. “Anyway, what is it? Did you remember something?” she asked. “Oh… Y-yeah, actually. Right before I left my capsule, I thought I heard someone scream. That wasn’t you, was it, Kenk?” “Me? A scream…?” Kenk crossed his arms, his face clouding over momentarily. “Yeah… Nah, that wasn’t me. I think I got out of my Caliculus capsule just a few moments before you did. It was so dark, and there was that smell. I didn’t know what to do. Once I climbed down to the walkway, I was too scared to move, so I just sat huddled under my capsule instead.” “You’re actually kind of a scaredy-cat, you know that, Kenk?” Sawa said point blank—no mercy. “Nuh-uh! You are!” Kenk shouted back, sounding like a little kid. “I don’t remember you being scared back in AM when we entered that dungeon,” Yuuma noted. “That’s ’cause I was leading the party. I had to put on a brave face… Anyway, I thought I heard a scream, too, while I was hiding. But once I came out, I saw you fighting with Watamaki. That scream wasn’t you, Yu?” Yu tried to replay events in his mind. “Y-yeah, I’m pretty sure I shouted, too, when I saw Watamaki’s face. But I definitely heard someone scream before that.” “A man or a woman?” Sawa asked curtly. Yu shook his head softly. “It sounded high-pitched, but I was hearing it through the capsule walls…” “I see…” Sawa looked concerned. Yuuma’s throat tightened up for a moment when he saw her expression. “Sawa…,” he started fearfully. “You don’t think…it was Nagi, do you…?” “I don’t know!” Sawa shouted, suddenly losing her composure. She looked distraught, but she quickly got herself back under control. “No, it probably wasn’t her… If Nagi had exited her capsule, either the inside or the outside emergency lever would have been pulled. Since they hadn’t been…Nagi must not’ve left her capsule.” But if she hadn’t left her capsule, where was she? Neither Yuuma nor Kenk asked the obvious question. One strange thing after another was happening at Althea. The ordinary laws of reality were in shambles. No one could say for sure anymore that Nagi hadn’t simply disappeared from inside the sealed capsule. Still— “If she disappeared, she still has to be somewhere…,” muttered Yuuma. Sawa’s ruby-tinted eyes widened in response. She nodded emphatically. “I agree. She’s gotta be somewhere.” “Then what are we doing standing around?! We have to go look for her. You know what a crybaby she can be!” said Kenk. Back when they were little, kids used to make fun of Nagi a lot and call her a crybaby. Her response was always to shout back, “I’m not a crybaby!” and then immediately burst into tears. She had actually matured a lot in the past couple of years—but she was still that same softie they had all grown up with. “Once we find her, I’m gonna tell her you said that,” Sawa teased. “I take it back! I take it back!” Kenk shouted in a panic. Yuuma just patted Kenk on the shoulder. “All right: new objectives! Turn Sumika back to normal and find Nagi!” “It’s a plan!” Kenk turned back toward Yuuma, and they fist-bumped once more. This fist bump was pretty hard, but it didn’t seem to hurt. Kenk grinned, but then suddenly his jaw dropped. He kept his fist frozen out in front of him. “What’s wrong, Kenk…?” “It just hit me… If we can use our QRESTS, why don’t we just make a phone call or send an email?” “Ah!” Yuuma’s mouth opened in a picture-perfect look of surprise. Kenk was right—why hadn’t he thought of that sooner?! Yuuma’s virtual desktop had changed into the game screen layout now that Actual Magic was running, but there was still a System Menu icon in the bottom left to access basic QREST functions. Both Yuuma and Kenk tapped their System icons and then their telephone apps once the home screen appeared. A moment later…they both sighed in disappointment. The telephone app displayed a red icon indicating that they were offline. It wasn’t just Nagi; there was no way for them to contact any of their classmates, let alone their teachers, their homes, or their school. “Did you guys seriously think I wouldn’t have tried that already…?” said Sawa, exasperated. They both nodded sheepishly and swiped their home screens shut. “Guess that would’ve been too easy,” replied Kenk. “We’ll have to look for Nagi ourselves, then.” “I suppose so,” said Yuuma, trying to sound casual. He made a new mental note: Search for a landline and find out if it works. Stepping down from the Caliculus platform and returning to the walkway, Yuuma removed his jacket and held it out to Sawa. She didn’t seem at all embarrassed to be wearing only a bathing suit, but she had to be cold—she just said, “no thanks,” and shoved the jacket back toward him. There was no use arguing with her when she got like that. Yuuma put his jacket back on and added finding clothes in Sawa’s size to his mental list of things to do. After touching base again, the three decided that the first thing they should do was to search the playroom from top to bottom. The circular room was about thirty meters in diameter. Multiplying by 3.14, that meant that the outer walkway was around ninety-four meters long, give or take a little. So far they had explored around just one-fourth of that, and there was an interior walkway as well. “Wish we had a flashlight…,” Kenk muttered grumpily. It had been just about five seconds since they’d begun circling around the walkway counterclockwise. The emergency lights on the ceiling were dim and illuminated the path only in certain spots. Even with their lenses’ vision correction activated, it was impossible to make out anything beneath the rows of Caliculus capsules lined up on their left. If somebody—or something—was hiding underneath one of the capsules, they would have no way of knowing until they were right on top of them. Sawa, however, walked briskly in front of the boys, almost as if she could see in the darkness. Eventually she stopped in front of one of the more mangled capsules. Yuuma thought she was going to investigate it, but instead she reached into the pile of rubble, which had spilled out halfway into the walkway, and pulled out a long, stout steel bar—part of one of the Caliculus support frames. It was about a meter in length. She held it up in her right hand. “Kenk, here,” she said, thrusting it toward him. “It looks—” Kenk was about to say heavy, but after taking the bar from her and swinging it around in the air a few times, he clearly changed his mind. Yuuma had already retrieved the fifty-centimeter bar that he had used to fight Sumika. He didn’t think he could handle anything much heavier than that. But Kenk had been a Warrior in AM, so naturally his STR would be a lot higher than Yuuma’s after his awakening. Yuuma’s head felt like it was spinning. This was supposed to be the real world. He was still having trouble getting his head around the fact that things like classes and stats now applied here. “This is crazy… It’s like a game…,” he whispered quietly. Sawa drew near. “It is a game,” she whispered back gravely. “But if you die now, that’s it.” “It…?” “In AM, when you die, you just come back. But these aren’t avatars; they’re our real bodies. What about your injury? It hasn’t healed all the way yet, has it?” That was true. If Yuuma moved funny, he could still feel a dull pain in his back and shoulder. Sawa spoke a little louder. “You need to get this through your head now, too, Kenk… There’s no respawning out here in the real world. And there’s no guarantee that revival spells will work, either. Besides, we’re not nearly high enough level to use them… So whatever happens, our first priority has to be survival. Do you understand?” “…Yeah.” Yuuma and Kenk both nodded at the same time. Yuuma, however, still felt uneasy. Yuuma and Sawa were twins, but Sawa had always been the more even, level-headed one. Naturally, whenever they played MMORPGs together, Sawa usually picked a backline magic-user, and Yuuma typically went with a frontline fighter. So even though the circumstances were unusual, it still felt natural that Sawa would be the one to take charge and give orders. But natural or not, Sawa seemed to be taking things a little too in stride. Almost as if she knew something that Yuuma and Kenk didn’t… I’m probably just overthinking things. Sawa’s always been smart, and I know she hates to lose. She’s probably just doing what she can to keep it together. It’s hard being the leader. She probably figures that if she falls apart, we’ll all go down. Besides, Yuuma was the older twin. And since he was Sawa’s big brother, maybe it was about time he stepped up. Think, Yuuma! Use your head… What could have happened here? To Althea and to all the other playtesters in Actual Magic? “Let me see that club for a minute, Kenk,” said Yuuma, stretching out his left hand while still holding the steel bar in his right. Kenk pursed his lips in displeasure. Apparently he wasn’t upset at the idea of lending Yuuma his weapon but rather at the fact that Yuuma had referred to it as “that club.” “I’ve dubbed it Durendal, and I’ll have you both remember that, thanks very much,” he said, holding it out to Yuuma. “Aye-aye,” Yuuma replied, taking the club from Kenk. It was nearly twice as heavy as the steel bar. Yuuma found it hard even to stand straight while wielding the thing without first planting his feet more firmly. Still struggling, he glanced up and to the left and then nodded. “Just as I expected…,” he said. “Expected what?” Kenk asked. “The Overloaded icon just appeared underneath my HP/MP bar.” “For real…?” Kenk’s eyes opened wide. As Yuuma handed the club—Durendal—back to him, the icon immediately disappeared. He readjusted his grip on his metal bar and nodded. The game system of Actual Magic seemed to be encroaching on this space—on everything inside Althea. Reality was being eroded, and things like the laws of physics and their own physical capabilities were being either amplified or distorted by the game. That must have been why they could wield magic now or swing around big heavy steel bars. However…this was still reality at the end of the day, and Yuuma and his friends were still flesh-and-blood humans. There would be a heavy price to pay should they forget that. “I get it now, Sawa,” Yuuma said, summing up his train of thoughts. Sawa smiled faintly and nodded. “Okay then, let’s get back to our search. Speaking of which: I finally found one.” “Found one what…?” “A capsule that hasn’t been opened.” Yuuma turned in the direction she was pointing. A Caliculus capsule sat enshrined atop an undamaged support frame, its lid still closed. They glanced around cautiously as they approached, before climbing up onto the capsule platform. “The emergency lever hasn’t been pulled yet,” said Kenk, peering toward the bottom of the capsule. “Should I open it…?” “Do it,” urged Sawa. He grabbed the lever and pulled. The lock opened with a thud, and the lid rose up slightly. Yuuma carefully lifted it up the rest of the way. This one was empty, too, just like Nagi’s. Yuuma wasn’t surprised. “All of the closed capsules are probably empty…,” he said. Standing up, Kenk peered around at the gloomy shadows. Playroom 01 had forty-eight Caliculus capsules situated along its outer walkway, and thirty-two along its inner walkway, for a total of eighty Caliculus capsules. Of those eighty, around 30 percent remained closed. The Yukihana Elementary sixth-graders accounted for forty-one of the room’s eighty playtesters. According to the math, that meant that about twelve students, give or take, had likely vanished into thin air while still inside their Caliculus capsules. “But the people who were inside the open capsules must have gotten out just like we did. What happened to them…?” asked Kenk. “The most likely answer would be that they’ve gone back down to the lobby on the first floor,” replied Sawa. “At least the ones who were able to make it that far,” she added under her breath, which Kenk didn’t seem to hear. “Of course… I almost forgot there was even a door out of this place,” he muttered. The three turned their gazes toward the south end of the playroom. The door was located directly opposite from where they stood. They couldn’t see the wall at the moment as the ring of Caliculus capsules along the inner walkway were situated a step higher than the outer ring and blocked their view, but they knew there should be a door there that would lead to the elevators. “Maybe we should go down to the lobby, too,” Kenk suggested. “Ms. Ebbers and Frankfurt probably started gathering the other students together by now…” Ebbers and Frankfurt! Yuuma had forgotten all about them. Those were the nicknames for their homeroom teacher, Yukari Ebisawa (Ms. Ebbers) and the school’s vice-principal, Mineji Haragishi (no one actually knew where the nickname Frankfurt had come from). They hadn’t joined the playtest and were instead sitting in the café in the first-floor lobby, waiting for the students to return. There were plenty of other adults besides Ms. Ebbers and Frankfurt who wouldn’t have been inside Caliculus capsules: the Althea employees, the people behind the counter in the shops, the engineers, the security guards… There had to be at least a hundred other people in total. What had happened to all of them? Maybe nothing happened… Maybe this is all confined to Playroom 01, and once we walk out that door and go down to the lobby, the world will be peaceful like normal, with no such thing as monsters or magic… Yuuma gritted his teeth and shook his head. He knew that was just wishful thinking. Sumika Watamaki, every boy’s dreamgirl, had been turned into a monster and had attempted to kill Yuuma and Kenk, only to be sealed inside a card that was currently in Yuuma’s pocket. And Minagi Sano—his childhood friend for as long as he could remember—had disappeared without a trace from inside her sealed Caliculus pod. Meanwhile, his twin sister, Sawa, had sprouted horns and wings. There was no going back to normal now. “We should go back down to the lobby, but let’s finish checking the playroom first… We might find some clue to help us figure out what’s going on,” said Yuuma, trying to take charge. Kenk nodded, his face turning serious. Sawa just chuckled, apparently amused. “What are you laughing about…?” “Nothing,” she said, trying to look innocent. Yuuma elbowed her lightly in the side, and Sawa hit him back immediately. It was their usual routine. They were brother and sister, after all. Kenk just rolled his eyes as if to say he was above such childish games. They elbowed him a few times, too, for good measure, before all three of them climbed back down to the walkway. They continued investigating the room, but the Caliculus pods on the outside perimeter all fell into one of three patterns. Either they were mostly unharmed and the lid had been opened, they were unharmed and closed but the inside was empty, or they were mangled almost beyond recognition. They would have liked to examine the damaged capsules more closely, but the staircases leading up to those platforms had been destroyed, and they couldn’t get close enough. After exploring three-fourths of the outside walkway, they discovered a huge set of automatic doors in the wall on their right-hand side, across from a short stairway that connected to the inner walkway on their left. The automatic tinted glass doors had been toppled outward, almost as if someone had rammed a vehicle into them, and the lights in the elevator lobby beyond the doorway were dark. “Oof… I don’t wanna think about what could’ve hit the door hard enough to do that…,” whispered Kenk, taking a step closer. Sawa reached out and grabbed the tattered hem of Kenk’s hoodie, yanking him backward. “Ack! Whaddya think you’re doing…?!” “Kenk, Yu, over there!” she hissed. Sawa pointed at a spot on the floor in front of the cracked glass door. Squinting, Yuuma could vaguely discern some sort of large lump lying on the ground. It definitely wasn’t a piece of Caliculus debris. It was about the size of Yuuma’s own body, with no distinct shape. Yuuma breathed in sharply. He smelled it again, that same metallic scent from before. A chill ran from the bottom of his spine up to the nape of his neck, and the hairs on his arms stood on end. As much as Yuuma wanted to keep his distance, they needed to find out what it was. He gripped his steel bar tighter and took a step forward, glancing around cautiously. If only they had a light. No sooner had he thought it than Sawa whispered quietly from beside him. “Flamma.” A small orange flame appeared at the tip of her extended finger, illuminating their surroundings. It was the element word of power for flame magic—Sawa didn’t follow up with a word for the form, however. It took Yuuma a moment to realize what she was doing. “Of course… If you just chant the element, you can use it as a light. Can you keep that going?” “No, if I don’t chant the next word within ten seconds, the spell fumbles automatically and I lose some MP.” “Then we’d better hurry…” Ignoring his fear, Yuuma began to walk faster. Yuuma already suspected what he would find. All the same, once the light revealed that the black lump was, in fact, a person—another child—every muscle in his body refused to carry him another step farther. Sawa reached out and caught Yuuma by the hand before he could trip over his own legs. Sawa’s skin felt cool and dry. That skin-to-skin contact was like a splash of cold water, stopping Yuuma’s oncoming panic dead in its tracks. But Sawa had to be scared, too. Even if they were twins, Yuuma was still the big brother. It wasn’t right for him to lean on her all the time. “Sorry,” he muttered briefly before striding boldly across the remaining two meters. Just then, the ten seconds were up, and the flame at the end of Sawa’s finger sputtered out with a sad little hiss. This time, Yuuma extended his own left hand and chanted the word of power for the element of light. “Lumen!” A ball of white light appeared at his fingertip, illuminating the ground beneath them even more than Sawa’s flame had. The body belonged to a boy around the same age as them. He was lying face down on the floor and was dressed in a light blue jacket and navy capri pants. That meant he was from their class. He was dead; that much was obvious at a glance. His left leg was broken and jutted backward at a hideous angle, and the end of his fractured shin bone stuck out raggedly from a gash in the skin. His right arm was missing entirely, sleeve and all. The blood from the wound had pooled into a dark red puddle beneath his body. That had to be the source of the metallic smell. Kenk was standing behind them. A strange retching noise suddenly escaped his lips. He ran to the other side of the walkway and began violently throwing up. Yuuma couldn’t blame him. His own stomach felt like it might betray him as well. His eyes watered as he fought through it. A few seconds later, the nausea had passed. Yuuma gathered up his nerve. He crouched next to the body and laid his weapon to the side. “Forgive me,” he said before using his right hand to roll the body on its side. The body was soft, tepid—and surprisingly heavy. Much heavier than he had imagined a body would be. Come to think of it, if the average weight of a sixth-grade boy was forty kilograms, rolling the body over with just one hand should have been a fairly difficult task, even if it was missing an arm. Yuuma lowered his hips and braced his feet, using all his amplified game strength to turn the body over. Yuuma wanted to see the face, but the first thing that caught his attention was actually the boy’s torso. His clothing—shirt, necktie, and undershirt—had been torn open, revealing a large gaping hole in the center of his chest. His heart is missing, Yuuma realized intuitively. “…Must have eaten it…,” Sawa muttered quietly. Another ten seconds had passed, and the light at the tip of Yuuma’s finger disappeared. His MP bar decreased slightly. Yuuma was level 7, though. As long as Actual Magic was still running, a point or two of mana would probably recharge in no time. Sawa, however, had used Flame Arrow earlier in order to attack Sumika, and then she’d used magic twice more in order to heal Yuuma and Kenk with Healing Droplet. Her MP probably hadn’t recovered very far yet. Yuuma hurriedly chanted the element again, refreshing his light before she could use more of her own MP. With the body now turned over, Yuuma’s light illuminated the boy’s face. The moment Yuuma saw it— He clamped his free hand over his mouth, overcome with a nausea even greater than what he had felt earlier. It wasn’t just that he recognized the face. It was the expression of raw, abject terror etched there, like nothing he had ever seen before in his life. The boy’s eyes were open so wide that they looked like they were going to pop out, and his mouth was twisted into a sideways grimace, his bloodstained tongue protruding from within. It looked as if he had died in the middle of a scream. “That scream…,” Yuuma croaked hoarsely, somehow managing not to throw up. “The one that Kenk and I heard. It was him. It was Miura…” Yukihisa Miura. Student number 37, a bit of a class clown. Sometimes the girls in class would get annoyed at him, but he never let that bring him down. It was a close-knit class, and Miura had always been ready with a joke or a prank to make them laugh. At first, Yuuma had been unsure whether the scream he’d heard had belonged to a boy or a girl, but thinking back now, the shrill pitch matched perfectly with his memory of Miura’s frenetic, high-pitched laughter. The scream that Yuuma had heard right after waking up, while still inside his Caliculus capsule, had apparently belonged to Miura. Yuuma opened the lid to his capsule almost immediately after he’d heard the scream and then encountered the monstrous Sumika just moments after climbing down to the walkway. That would mean— “Is that…Beloshi…?” asked Kenk, returning to their side. His voice sounded hoarse, but apparently there was nothing left in his stomach to throw up. Yuuma just nodded wordlessly. Beloshi had been one of Miura’s nicknames. Like Frankfurt, Yuuma wasn’t sure where it had come from. Yuuma had never really hung out with Miura, but he knew Miura and Kenk used to play minigames together on their QRESTs. Another ten seconds passed, and Yuuma’s light went out again. Yuuma didn’t want to see Yukihisa’s sad death mask anymore anyway. He grabbed his steel bar and stood back up. “Do you think…Watamaki killed him?” Kenk asked. Yuuma had been thinking the same thing mere seconds earlier. It wasn’t just likely she had killed him; it was almost certain. Considering the timing of Sumika’s appearance, and the direction she had come from, it all lined up too perfectly… And of course, there was also Miura’s right arm. It had been torn from his shoulder. The monstrous Sumika had used a severed human arm as a club to attack Yuuma and Kenk. That arm must have been— “…!” Yuuma suddenly had an idea. He reached into his pocket and pulled out Sumika’s monster card. In Actual Magic, users could tap monster cards to open the familiar’s character screen and see things like their stats. If Yuuma could see his own HP/MP bar, he figured he could probably access character screens as well. Yuuma tapped the card with a stiff finger. There was soft ding, and a blue window appeared. He peered closely at the tiny letters, reading the information on the screen. Sumika Watamaki Night Fiend Level: 17 HP: 75/279 MP: 38/40 Loyalty: 64 Skills: • Exceptional Strength (Skill Level: 31) • Sword Transformation (Skill Level: 24) • Blindsense (Skill Level: 48) • Resist Pain (Skill Level: 42) • Resist Darkness (Skill Level: 67) • Resist Cold (Skill Level: 43) Equipment: • Short Jacket (DEF: 4, M-DEF: 0) • Long-Sleeved Shirt (DEF: 2, M-DEF: 0) • Pleated Skirt (DEF: 3, M-DEF: 0) • Leather Shoes (DEF: 2, M-DEF: 1) • Right Arm of Yukihisa Miura (Blunt ATK: 18, M-ATK: 3) As Yuuma read the last item on the list of equipment, he retched quietly, experiencing his third and strongest wave of nausea yet. Fortunately Sawa was there to rub his back gently, and Yuuma managed to resist vomiting all over Miura’s corpse. But he could feel the stomach acid in the back of his throat. He really wished he had some water right about now. Yuuma took several deep breaths to regain his composure. Kenk was standing next to him. He peered over at Sumika’s character screen. “How can Beloshi’s arm be equipment…? He’s not some character in a game…” Isn’t he, though? Me, you, Sawa, Miura—we’re all characters now. Or we might as well be. Actual Magic is eroding reality and forcing us to play its game. Yuuma just nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself. “Hey, Yu…? Couldn’t we at least give him back his arm…?” Kenk had been friends with Miura, so naturally, he wanted to put Miura properly to rest and to return his arm to its rightful place. Somewhere private, not dumped in the middle of a hallway like this. Yuuma agreed. Since they were his classmates, it was the least they could do. Unfortunately— “In order to do that, I would need to summon Watamaki from her card…,” Yuuma said softly. Kenk opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again immediately. Yuuma watched as a jumble of emotions washed across his friend’s face. “Sumika is one of my familiars now, and her loyalty stat is higher than I expected. If I summoned her now, she probably wouldn’t attack us… At least, I don’t think she would. But under the circumstances, there’s no way to be sure. She’s also recovered a lot of HP while in card form. If she attacked us now, we would need to damage her again before I could recapture her…” “Yeah… Forget I asked,” Kenk said, staring down sadly at the body on the floor. “But can we at least lay him to rest somewhere?” “How about in one of the empty Caliculus capsules?” Sawa suggested. Kenk and Yuuma made eye contact then nodded simultaneously. “Okay. I’ll open that capsule over there. You two carry Miura’s body,” Sawa said calmly as she began to walk toward the nearest closed capsule. Yuuma placed his weapon on the floor once more and circled around to Miura’s feet, grabbing his broken left leg and his unbroken right leg firmly in each hand. Kenk took up position at Miura’s head. He placed Durendal down on the floor and thrust his arms under Miura’s back. They took a deep breath and lifted him carefully. Once again, Yuuma’s Overburdened icon appeared in the upper-left corner of his vision. Together, they were carrying about twenty kilograms each. Before Actual Magic, Yuuma would have struggled to stand while carrying that much weight. Even now, with the increased STR from his class upgrade, he was worried his knees might give out if he wasn’t careful. “My oldest brother is a mountain climber…,” Kenk whispered, taking careful steps backward. “He told me once that while people are awake, they’re easy to lift, even by yourself, but once they’re asleep, or…or dead…they become heavier, and it’s almost impossible to carry them. I remember not believing him at the time. Like, a person has to weigh the same, whether they’re asleep or awake…” Yuuma understood what his friend was trying to say. Sometimes, at school, during gym class, or when they were playing out in the yard, the boys would give each other piggyback rides. It wasn’t easy, but they could still move around with another kid on their back. Yet even missing one arm, even with all the blood he had lost, even with two of them carrying him, Miura’s body was so heavy, they could barely lift their sneakers off the floor. Somehow they managed to make it across the walkway. There were only seven steps up to the Caliculus, but by the time they’d reached the platform, Kenk and Yuuma were completely out of breath. Using every muscle in their bodies, they managed to hoist Miura and gently place him inside the empty capsule that Sawa had opened for them using its emergency lever. Yuuma and Kenk panted heavily as Sawa leaned over the open capsule and pressed Miura’s eyes and mouth closed. In movies and anime, it always looked so easy, but Sawa had to use both hands and push hard for several seconds to get them to close. The three stood side by side in silence for several moments before descending the staircase and returning to the walkway in front of the automatic door. Yuuma picked up the two steel bars and handed the longer one to Kenk before casting another glance around the playroom. They had already investigated the forty-eight Caliculus capsules along the outer perimeter, but they still hadn’t touched the inner thirty-two. After everything they had seen so far, Yuuma didn’t expect to learn anything new from the capsules themselves, but there was always a chance they would find something else. Perhaps…even another one of their classmates’ bodies. “We should check the upper walkway, too…,” Kenk said, looking glum. Apparently he had been thinking the same thing. But Sawa suddenly cut him off sharply. “Shh…!” She raised a finger to her lips and then pointed to the elevator lobby with her other hand. “I heard something.” “Huh…?” Yuuma furrowed his eyebrows, but then he heard it, too. Thud. A dull, heavy thumping sound accompanied by the high-pitched voices of children. No, not voices. Screams. It sounded like the noises were coming from far away, but the general direction was still obvious. They were coming from below. Yuuma realized instinctively that someone was being attacked by something downstairs, in the first-floor lobby. “We have to go help them…!” Yuuma whispered urgently. He began rushing toward the elevators, but Sawa grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him back. “Yu. Kenk. Wait.” The two turned around to stare at her. Before they could reply, however, Sawa began speaking at a rapid-fire pace. “If you want to go help, we can, but if we run into another person like Sumika who’s been changed into a monster, you can’t fool around this time. I don’t care if it’s one of our classmates. If they attack us, you can’t hesitate. You have to fight back. Healing Droplet is my only recovery spell, but that’s an ultra-slow HoT effect—it only heals over time. It won’t help in the moment against burst damage. If you think you’re in danger…” Sawa trailed off, but it was clear what she was going to say. If you think you’re in danger, run. Yuuma nodded sharply. No more hesitation. “I understand—now let’s go.” This time it was Sawa’s turn to nod quietly. Yuuma and Kenk made eye contact before hopping over the toppled remains of the automatic door and entering the elevator lobby. There were three massive elevator doors lined up along the wall on their right, but the floor lights above the elevator doors were dark. Yuuma rushed forward and pressed the down button repeatedly, but nothing happened. “Everyone else probably used the stairs,” said Sawa. Glancing to the right, Yuuma saw a fire door with a stairwell logo on it. It was propped half open. There were also several black smears along the wall and the floor—likely bloodstains. “I’ll go first,” said Kenk. He stepped toward the door, gripping Durendal in both hands, and peered inside briefly before nodding for the other two to follow. The stairway was even darker than the playroom had been, but the emergency lights embedded in the wall continued to glow weakly. There was no need to use magic in order to see. At the moment, they were on a landing. The staircase to the right went downward; the one on the left went up. Yuuma was curious to know what was happening on the upper floors, but the screams they heard were coming from the first floor. They needed to hurry. Yuuma, Kenk, and Sawa raced down the stairs, which were full of bloody footprints, with Kenk in the lead. They passed through another ajar fire door at the bottom of the stairs before arriving at the first-floor elevator lobby. Yuuma could see the spacious main lobby to their right. He groaned quietly at the unexpected sight that awaited them. “Why…?” Why was it dark? It shouldn’t have been. Unlike the playroom, which had no windows, the walls along Althea’s first-floor lobby were mostly plate glass. When Yuuma and the other sixth-grade students had arrived at Althea at eleven that May morning, the sun had been streaming in through the glass on the east side of the building, flooding the mostly black lobby with bright light. According to the clock displayed in the lower-right-hand corner of his vision, the current time was 3:20 PM. There was no way the sun could have already set at this time of year. Outside the giant plate glass windows that enclosed the lobby, however, all was dark. It looked like the middle of the night. No, not even night was this dark. It was pitch-black outside. Althea had been built in the center of Nozomi City, which had a population of 140,000 people. Even in the middle of the night, the adjoining streets, and lights from nearby businesses, would have still been visible. That was all gone now. What was happening—? “Ahhhh…!” This time, the scream could be heard more clearly. The sound pulled Yuuma back into the present moment. This was no time to worry about what lay outside the windows… Right now Yuuma’s classmates were in trouble inside. The first-floor lobby, which took up the entire south half of the first floor and was shaped like half of a Bundt cake, was divided by double walls. The ticket counter was located near the southernmost entrance. To the right of that was a shopping area, and to the left was the café. There were no signs of any staff members on the other side of the counter. Or were there? A number of large lumps, faintly illuminated by the emergency lights, lay piled up across the floor. There were fewer than ten in total, but they were likely the bodies of adults. Yuuma’s mind froze for a moment, but another scream and a loud metallic clang brought him back to his senses. “That way!” he shouted, forcing his legs to move. There were bodies slumped throughout the lobby. Yuuma cut straight across the room, passing the ticket counter and heading toward the shopping area. As they drew closer, new sounds began to emerge. It was chaos. Huge thuds and crashes, accompanied by multiple screams and the deep, guttural grunts of some vicious, slovenly beast. The entrance to the shopping area was located on the other side of a trusswork partition and was closed off by a grated metal shutter. The banging sounds, and the bestial grunts, were being made by somebody—no, something—repeatedly ramming into the shutters to break them down. Yuuma, Kenk, and Sawa quickly concealed themselves behind the partition, peering around the corner to see what was making all that noise. The thing was huge. At 165 centimeters, Kenk was pretty tall for an elementary schooler. The creature, however, easily dwarfed him. It had to be at least two and half meters tall and was nearly just as wide. Every time it moved, its flesh jiggled beneath its ashen skin. Its arms and legs were short but enormously thick, and as for its head—whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t human. Its head, which jutted out from the fleshy folds of its neck, was shaped like a tricorn hat fashioned out of meat. Of its two-and-a-half-meter height, the pointed head accounted for around fifty centimeters. There were no eyes or nose to be found on the area where its face should have been, but there was a slit-like mouth where the head joined the body. Drool sprayed from the creature’s mouth in all directions with each of its fearsome, low-pitched roars. “What the heck is that…?” Kenk asked, his voice raspy. Yuuma had no answer. Although Sumika also hadn’t had eyes or a nose when she’d attacked them, she had still been shaped like a human. But with the odd proportions of its arms and legs, its sagging leathery skin, and of course, its strange, pointed head, nothing about the creature ramming into the shutter suggested that it was human. Could it be another player from Actual Magic who had been transformed into a monster just like Sumika Watamaki? Or…were actual monsters now showing up at Althea in the real world? A barricade made of large display racks had been hastily erected inside the shutters, and the screams were coming from behind that barricade. It sounded like several children were back there, trying to hold the barricade in place. But in the short time that Yuuma and the others had been watching, the metal shutter had already begun to buckle, pushing the barricade back inch by inch. It wouldn’t last much longer. “…We have to do something,” Yuuma whispered despite himself. “That pinhead’s HP and physical defense are probably pretty high,” Sawa replied sharply. “We’re not going to be able to defeat it with a couple of metal sticks.” “But…we can’t just leave. Those must be our classmates in there…” “I know. We’ll have to fight it with magic… My MP is still less than half full, though.”
Chapter 8
36 min read