Chapter 53

SUB.03 Saflee Opendays was a participant in the martial arts tournament Natural Selector. She was around twenty years of age. Her shoulder-length blond hair and fair skin were distinctive, and her figure was by no means unattractive. She looked like someone who could have been doing modeling work for some magazine or other, but she much preferred fistfights to striking a pose. In the contestant waiting room filled with lockers, Saflee double-checked her outfit. For a competitive sports complex, the accommodations were fairly austere. She felt a chill creeping up through the soles of her feet despite the heating—perhaps it wasn’t enough to stave off the cold of this snowy Eastern European region. Or were huge arenas simply frigid as a rule? That all aside, her outfit was another reason she was feeling the cold. While it resembled a deep blue cocktail dress, the material itself was much different, as was the sturdiness of its construction. She also wore leather belts along her upper body, restricting it. The belts weren’t some sort of trick to give her a tactical advantage, though. First, this was a martial arts tournament—meaning, show business—so the competitors needed to look at least somewhat striking. Second, the belts would give her opponent easy handholds with which to perform grabbing techniques on her. Despite Natural Selector’s eighty-kilogram armament limit, Saflee had kept her nonclothing gear to five hundred grams to give herself an advantage. Her only gear was a pair of fingerless urethane gloves that would keep her from hurting her fists when she threw a punch. “…All right. Outfit looks perfect,” she murmured. Talking to oneself was the prime example of mental abnormalities manifesting externally, but on the flip side, it could be an easy path to autosuggestion. Obviously, stabilizing your mental state was hugely useful when it came to sports and fighting. That said… “I wonder when that spiky-haired Asian is going to explain why he suddenly burst in on me while I was changing.” This time, however, it hadn’t been a one-woman show—she wasn’t just trying to get her emotions under control. She was actually talking to someone. The spiky-haired boy hadn’t been slapped and gotten away with an adorable reddish mark on his cheek. No, he’d been beaten to a pulp by the expert elbows and kicks of a master martial artist. He now lay limp on the competitors’ bench, his face even more tragically swollen than it would have been if a bunch of wasps had stung him in the cheeks. “…I-I’m Touma Kamijou,” he managed. “Pweeved to meet youph…” “I’m Saflee Opendays. My hobby is anything involving strikes. Sorry if I broke a few teeth. I can’t do anything more than apologize, though.” “I, uh, fink I’m ofay.” “…You know, I’ve been acting cool, but I’m actually kind of worried about you. You’ve got some muscle, but you’re an amateur, aren’t you? Seriously, do you need me to call the doctor or something?” “A-actually, could we just keep talking…?” “I heard you while I was changing.” Saflee leaned back against a locker, folded her arms, and sighed. “Natural Selector—or should I say, the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians—didn’t just spring out of thin air. Someone is behind it. And you want to crush their ambitions and restore the relationship between Academy City and its partner organizations. Does that sound about right?” “Leivinia Birdway,” said Kamijou, still mumbling somewhat. “She used the incident in Hawaii to strike fear into the leaders of those organizations, making them split off and go independent. I don’t know how she’s linked to the sorcerer’s society Gremlin—er, they’re like a terrorist organization—but I’m pretty sure Gremlin is gonna try to join forces with the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians and do something bad.” “And Natural Selector is the public portion of their scheme?” “Yeah, probably.” Kamijou took in a breath. “I don’t know what they’re after, but Natural Selector has gotta mean more than they’re telling everyone. And I don’t think it’ll benefit any of the contestants, either.” “You mean they’ll, like, throw us all into a big fridge to use as human experimentation materials or something?” “…That might actually be possible.” Saflee was taken aback. She had only suggested it as a joke, but the boy had repaid her with seriousness. “Not that I know what Gremlin’s actual goal is,” said Kamijou quietly. “But looking at Radiosonde Castle and the landing operation in Hawaii… No matter what they’re after, the things they end up doing in public to achieve their goals will hurt a lot of people. I can’t ignore that—not when I know it will happen. And I’m part of why things got so out of control, too.” He wasn’t overdoing his explanation in an awkward attempt to get her to agree with him. Instead, his added footnotes made the whole thing seem strangely more real. Personally, though, Saflee had her own reasons for taking part in this competition. “Why are you telling me all this, then?” she asked. “No reason, actually… Sorry. I kind of just wandered in here by accident. Baggage City is one big confusing place to me. I’d accept any help you want to give, but it’ll be dangerous, so I don’t recommend it.” “So I shouldn’t be in the contest, but I shouldn’t try to stop it from happening? Then what do you want me to do?” “Uh, just run away if you could.” “That’s the last thing I want to do.” “I thought so.” “I might think about it, though—if you can take me down in a single three-minute round.” Kamijou quickly raised his hands to cover his face, having already been beaten up when she reacted to him entering the locker room. Saflee grinned a little. “Anyway, I’m not with you or against you. I just have an objective of my own. I don’t really care if Natural Selector gets canceled after I accomplish it or if the Guardians get disbanded.” “An objective?” The shrill buzzer in the contestants’ waiting room suddenly went off. That was the signal to head into the arena—an invitation to a deathmatch. Saflee Opendays pushed off the lockers, her motions cool and relaxed. Then, in a leisurely tone, she answered Kamijou’s question. “I want something—something you kids in Academy City all take for granted, but people like us can’t ever get, even if we try till we’re blue in the face.”