Chapter 58

PERIOD.07 Weissland Strynikov’s eyes went wide in shock. He’d thought he and his guards had cornered Touma Kamijou and Saflee Opendays at the commercial entrance to the off-limits resort hotel. Now, however, he wasn’t even standing. On the top story of the high-rise hotel he often used, in a large room with piles of papers stacked high, Weissland lay face down on the floor. What…just…? He could barely move. Every time he tried, his joints would twitch awkwardly, as though he’d been stuck in a refrigerator for a long time, cooling all the while. And then an unfamiliar, grating voice pricked his consciousness. “Oh, great. Just great. Just great! This won’t do. No, it won’t do at all. Spent all that time making sure the compound was just right. But in the end, there were too many contradictions, and he woke up?” A young man’s voice. Not like Urtgardaloki’s. To begin with, this one was speaking Japanese. “Hello, hello! It’s me—Ransuu Kihara. I came all the way here from Academy City. You predicted this would happen sooner or later, I’m sure. So… You obviously don’t need me to explain, do you?” Kihara sat on the large desk and spoke, but Weissland wasn’t listening. Something disturbing had entered his vision. Just past the high-rise hotel’s windows, in the white scenery of the sprawling Baggage City, something ominous swayed—a bright red light. The scene should have been white and white alone, but a strange color was mixed in with it. And not just in one place, either, but several. Despite scarcely being able to move, Weissland still managed to snap at the man. “What did…you do? What the hell did you do?!” “Hmm? Uh, you mean, like, to you personally? Or y’know, to… What was this place called again? To Baggage City?” “Tell me what you’ve done with the innocent civilians and unrelated spectators in the city, damn it!” “Oh, come now. You silly thing, acting like a righteous superhero. Just drop it. I bet you don’t even know the difference between justice and a sense of justice. Not that I like either, mind you.” “What…are you…?” “Innocent civilians? Unrelated spectators? No such thing.” Ransuu Kihara’s tone was casual, but his words were biting. His was a frivolous wickedness—the kind you could find lying around just about anywhere. But it was like all of that had come together and congealed into a single whole, creating an even deeper, more incomprehensible man. He smiled. “The members of the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians are in constant fear of retaliation and retribution from their progenitor—Academy City. Some of them only joined under the condition that you’d protect them from the city… But there lies the rub, eh? Getting rid of one or two people—easy. Moving several million at once? Backbreaking work, let me tell you. Costs time and money, and no matter what you do, word will get out. Get attacked on the way there, and it’s all over.” Behind Kihara and outside the big windows, a red blaze had risen, disturbing the white scenery once again. “What I’m saying is this: Everyone spectating the Natural Selector martial arts tournament is either a member of the Guardians or their family members, friends, and lovers. Nobody there is unrelated. Including the civilians that you’re claiming lived here from the start. First, you brought millions of people into one place for the tournament, and now you’re assigning personnel to the Guardians’ fortress under the pretext of bringing them back home. Obviously, those of us over at Academy City got real suspicious about that. But before we can find proof, you can just load everyone up into the fortress.” Kihara crossed his legs and grinned. “Anyway, the details don’t concern me. I hear they let a few other Kiharas loose besides me, too. Bet they’re really up in your business now. Not that I care. I had—what was it?—a quota to fill, so I attacked this block, only to have it end in seconds! The other Kiharas will probably need more time for their jobs, so now you have the honor of letting me kill some time.” “It ended…in seconds…?” The meaning of those words wasn’t sinking in for Weissland. It wasn’t that he was rejecting reality. His understanding just hadn’t caught up yet. And yet Kihara’s words rang so terrifyingly ominous that he found himself unable to discount them. Meanwhile, Kihara spread his arms and shrugged theatrically. “Yeah, that’s right! You heard me! I thought you Anti–Academy City Science Guardians would be a little more dangerous, considering they put all these Kiharas to work on it. But what the hell is this?! I’ll tell you what it is. Full of holes. It’s like a damn colander! It doesn’t even count as security. It’s just an obstacle course. Something to enjoy, something to laugh about and have fun with. Look, I gotta ask. Are you underestimating us? We sent a bunch of Kiharas here to eliminate all the rebels—the regulars, the substitutes, the spectators, the guests, the organizers!” “Wh-where’s Utgardaloki…?” The man dispatched from Gremlin. He wasn’t part of their fighting forces per se, but rather a powerful individual whose true worth shone through when irregulars like Kihara showed up. But the man calling himself Kihara frowned, casual as a kid talking about how they weren’t interested in legendary musicians of a genre they didn’t care about, acting as though they knew all of humankind like the back of their hand. “Holy shit, what was that word you just said? Some weird term for experts? Wait, is it supposed to be someone’s name? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! And I don’t care, either! I probably took him out with all the other goons! Hmm. Was there anyone like that? Maybe, maybe not. I heard some of Natural Selector’s competitors use sorcery. And I definitely remember crushing one of them. Didn’t catch their name, though. The way he begged for his life was pretty unique—I thought he was a decoy. Wait, maybe he wasn’t the one after all.” “……” “Well, none of it matters. Either way, I killed him. Same as those other so-called authorities. If they died here, that just means they were weak.” It was so casual, the way Ransuu Kihara talked about the end of one of Gremlin’s official members, scratching his head about it in mild confusion. No, it went beyond that. When he said authorities, he meant he’d already laid hands on the representatives of the twenty-seven corporations that comprised the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians. With casual ease, he’d overturned the basic premise underpinning everything. “Impossible… How the hell did you…?” “I mean, hey, I don’t know how the other Kiharas are doing. This is all my job is. Get it?” Ransuu Kihara waved his fist in the empty air for seemingly no reason. “My actual specialty is world peace, you know. Or is that too hard for you to wrap your head around? Let me give it to you nice and simple. You know that famous international tournament for track-and-field and soccer and whatnot, yeah? While people are all getting their kicks from global rules, they can feel released from issues like race, ideology, and national borders and feel at one with everyone. So what if you created that sense artificially?” “I don’t…follow what you’re saying. Does that have anything to do with what’s happening here?” “Ugh, you still don’t get it? Man, are you stupid. It comes down to chemical substances. They’re supposed to control the ebb and flow of individual emotions. We’re attaching tiny particles with the same effects as your brain secretions to mold, then scattering it on the wind. This kind of tech is an offshoot of Number Five from the Five Over series—and it’s big now.” “Five…Over…?” “If you’ve never heard of it, then whatever. It’s not exactly hard to control the wind or temperature changes or static electricity once you get used to it. You only need one computer program to scatter it in the direction you want or to create a safe zone. But while they’re having their sweet, sweet dreams, everyone just ends up standing there doing nothing. Do you get how it works now?” Hallucinations. When put like that, it was simple. But showing the desired images to the desired people—how much tech did they have to use for that? “But it’s still pretty tough, you know. The chemicals are all called stuff like Red Fury 03 or Blue Fear 07—easy to understand what individual emotions they can stimulate or suppress. It’s backbreaking work to use the right combinations to create an actual experience. And when several people have to be affecting each other, that experience needs a master chef. It’s like how what you eat influences your body odor. The matter inside your blood affects you on the outside, so we’re literally working off of zero hints.” That wasn’t right. If Ransuu Kihara’s words were true, then when had Weissland started hallucinating? What about his confrontation with Saflee Opendays? His conversation with Utgardaloki? Or maybe that was information being exchanged through a larger experience, all the hallucinations interacting with one another? “Still, I gotta say. Touma Kamijou showed up at a very convenient time. At first, it was a tough fight—but in the end, he said he’d save everyone? Enemy and ally alike? Doesn’t that strike you as strange? You’re the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians, right? You’re definitely on different sides. The world isn’t so optimized that an irregular human like him could suddenly show up at the perfect moment. And besides, Kiharas like us don’t have a place to go back to anymore.” By spreading mold containing chemical substances that scrambled people’s brains, Kihara could cause Baggage City’s security forces to hallucinate, rendering them passive. Once they were temporarily disabled, he could kill them all, one at a time. Weissland didn’t know how much of this was true. Maybe it was all a lie. But whatever the answer to that, the facts remained: Baggage City was being attacked, Weissland had been trapped in a situation where he could barely move, and an unknown aggressor was now right in front of him. His back was against the wall. Ransuu Kihara, the man controlling the situation, slowly lowered his feet to the floor. He was holding a smartphone. Was he using it to command the mold he’d mentioned? But there wasn’t a complicated control panel on the screen. It was just a video recording app. “All right, let’s get this started.” “What…what else do you plan to do to Baggage City?” “Like I said at the start, the other Kiharas are in charge of that. My job ended pretty quickly, so I’m just killing time since I have nothing else to do.” “……” This wasn’t even a battle. He had procured a member of Gremlin, but the man had been useless. As Weissland started to lose his grip on the reality of their huge difference in combat power, Ransuu Kihara came even closer. When he got to Weissland, he squatted down, then showed him what was on the phone. “Look familiar? It’s your wife, your daughter and her husband, and your two grandchildren.” “…?!” The enemy already knew they’d been plotting the mass movement of several million related parties during the Natural Selector martial arts tournament in Baggage City. Weissland should have imagined a scenario like this transpiring. Nevertheless, he felt a shock to the chest as he came face-to-face with the undeniable reality of the situation. “Okey dokey! Let’s start the killing, heh! With some Russian roulette! It’ll be a bit irregular, but let’s do it!” On the screen, there were five chairs sitting in a row. Someone very familiar to Weissland was bound to each one, and there was a gun attached to a pole aimed directly at each of their faces. Every gun had a slip hanging from it with a number on it. “Presenting our quiz contestant: Weissland Strynikov! Allow me to explain the rules! Only one of these five guns is loaded! You can only choose one. And if it’s not the bullet, everyone gets to go free! Oh, how nice of me. Now then! Can you safely choose the wrong gun and reclaim your bonds with your family members?!” “Wh-wha…?!” “You can try to gauge the answer from the questioner’s mental state! You can try to look for hints in the picture itself! You can pray to God and pick at random! Or you can even choose a family member you’ve always hated! But be careful, Weissland! You only have one minute to decide. If you don’t make a choice within sixty seconds, your time will be up, and the real gun will fire—just to show you which one it was, you know!” “Was this…all a sideshow to them…? Did Academy City… How did they do all this in such a short time?!” “Not that I care, but c’mon, make your choice. Though I guess if you die, it’ll just mean another seed plot, so I wouldn’t mind that, either.” Those incomprehensible words seeped into Weissland’s ears like a thick liquid. “If a person scrubs themselves too much and gets rid of the good germs, mold will start to grow. Did you know that? But if you write a person’s flavor into mold, it has a different way of sticking to you. Not that any of this has scientific backing, of course. It’s just that the cultures fed to living humans survive better than those fed to corpses, which is the only drawback.” “……” This man is serious, thought Weissland. This was no empty threat. He was acting way too casually. Ransuu Kihara had no qualms about covering a living person in mold. If he chose someone to shoot, the trigger would be pulled. In one of those guns was a real bullet. In terms of simple probabilities, there was a much greater chance the members of his family would survive than not. However, the chance of picking the one in five paralyzed him. But he couldn’t afford to do nothing, either. If the time limit elapsed, someone would definitely die. “C-can I have a hint?” “You’ll have to look for one yourself.” “Shit! Anything, please! You can have an arm, or an eye, or anything in exchange. Give me a hint!” “Twenty seconds left! Looks like we may need a countdown soon!” No time. Someone in his family would die. That was Weissland’s thought as his eyes welled up with tears like a child’s. He didn’t even have time to think anymore. Funneling his strength into his already near-petrified arm, he used a trembling fingertip to touch the smartphone’s screen. “Number three, eh? That your lucky number?” “……” “Can’t say I’m surprised to see you pick your son-in-law, though. You must be one of those types who cares most about his bloodline. Or were you always against your daughter’s marriage?” “G-give me the answer.” “You want to know? Wait, are you hoping he’ll live or die?” “You know damn well which!” “Well, all right. I do have to answer you, after all. Okay, time to reveal if you got it right!” Ransuu Kihara twirled the smartphone in his hand, then showed the screen to Weissland again. “This smartphone video wasn’t a live recording at all. Got you! It’s already been filmed!” “Wh-what?!” “But touching the screen was actually linked to the real trigger! In other words, that trigger has actually been pulled in the real world!” Weissland felt a chill. His finger began trembling something awful, as though delayed, his resolve having missed its proper timing. But Ransuu Kihara’s horrific game didn’t stop there. “And now presenting the greatest climax of all time! I gotta level with you, buddy. When I told you only one of the guns had a round in it, that was a big fat lie. The answer to the quiz is that every gun has a bullet loaded! Gosh! That was such an easy quiz that you’d have to get it wrong on purpose! You really went for the shock value, didn’t ya?” “???!!!” “And so with that, Weissland Strynikov has pulled the trigger, killing his own family! One hundred percent! There’s a one hundred percent chance of your son-in-law’s head exploding! Tell us how you feel!” Overwhelmed by the situation, Weissland let his jaw go slack. Eventually, Ransuu Kihara gave a smile that implied he’d finally achieved his goal of killing time. “It seems our contestant is trapped in a swirling storm of emotions and can’t properly form words. Now, let’s go to the video…or rather, the live stream for the answer!” “No… Stop…” “By the way, all we said to the family was that our contestant would be choosing one of them. Pay close attention to the faces of the ones who survive! Do their familial bonds remain unbroken?! Could the contestant’s four-year-old grandson remain sane after seeing his dad’s head blown off right in front of him?! And now presenting the shocking video you won’t want to miss!” “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!” Too much blood had gone to Weissland’s head, and the capillaries in his eyeballs had burst. He screamed, literally crying tears of blood. But his wails didn’t get to Ransuu Kihara. Or rather, they did but didn’t stop Kihara from fiddling with his smartphone in amusement. The phone then displayed the post-tragedy reality. And there they saw… “…Huh?” Ransuu Kihara made a different noise this time—he sounded confused. And the screen of his phone was to blame. Ordinarily, it would have shown fresh, red blood and hysterical civilians tied to their chairs. It would be strange if anything else was there. But things had played out differently in reality. There was a line of chairs. The guns were all in position. But the hostages, the most important part of this setup, were nowhere to be seen. Not just Weissland’s son-in-law—every single one of them were gone. The ropes they had been tied up with now lay on the chairs and floor, but there was no sign of any people. Something had happened after Ransuu Kihara looked away. But what? “Who…who the hell just ruined my leisure time?! Giving me a problem to solve like this—you think you’re some kind of famous MC, you…you…?” His yelling turned into an expression of doubt. Something had appeared in the corner of the smartphone’s screen. A person, only partly visible. Likely whoever had set Weissland’s family free. And that person was… …an Asian boy with spiky hair. “Hey, if you’re still in a state to watch this, then don’t worry.” On the stream, someone spoke. A boy who had proven his character not by talking about doing something but by actually doing it. And he was ignoring Ransuu Kihara, whom he knew would be at the center of all this, speaking directly to the captive Weissland Strynikov instead. “I’ll knock the lights out of the guy with you real soon. That’ll fix everything.” The image shook. After some terrible static, the signal dropped. He’d probably grabbed the camera and crushed it. Naturally. As he’d declared, the boy would be here soon. “……” Ransuu Kihara stopped thinking for a moment. Once he’d finally considered the possibility someone had actually gotten in the way, he shook his head. “No. No, that’s not possible…,” he muttered before reinforcing that idea in his head. “No! It’s too convenient! This timing? With no context?! A hero swooping in to save the day?! Not possible! So then… Then what is this?! How is any of this ridiculous bullshit even happening?!” And then it hit him. The only reason why Touma Kamijou would show up in a place he shouldn’t have been able to. The trick Ransuu Kihara had personally used to launch his attack on Weissland’s group, Baggage City, and the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians. He could think of only one possibility. And it was certainly more realistic than Touma Kamijou actually coming here. “…Could this…be an illusion, too?” “Bhahh, hah… Ha-ha…!” And then the Gremlin sorcerer Utgardaloki slowly got up, knocking over a few piles of papers as he did. He was covered in blood, as were the fallen documents. Ransuu Kihara had pushed him to the brink of death, but in the end, he had succeeded in inducing a hallucination. Utgardaloki’s namesake was a giant from Norse mythology. In his original story, the giant is an expert in all kinds of hallucinations. He even manages to get one over on the god of thunder, Thor, a major character in the myths. Naturally, if a sorcerer had chosen to name himself after the character, he would obviously be good at one thing in particular. “That…that was close… That asshole pulled out some crazy moves right at the start…!” One of his front teeth was broken, and he couldn’t see out of one eye because blood had gotten into it. And yet he’d survived. The magic he used could shift the information acquired by one of your five senses to another of your five senses. Broadly speaking, he could show someone a photograph of flames to make someone experience the pain of burning. It could be incredibly powerful, depending on how he used it. But in order to induce a long-term, more intricate illusion, he needed a lot more raw materials to do it right. And yet he’d survived, for the time being. Utgardaloki wasn’t sure if Weissland, who was in the same room, was alive or dead. But getting himself to a safe zone came first. For that, he’d need to do something about Ransuu Kihara, who stood stock-still in the middle of the room. He didn’t know how long the illusion would hold. “And you know something?” His movements sluggish, Utgardaloki grabbed a random pile of papers. They were A4-sized, and the stack was about ten centimeters thick. It had a good weight to it—heavier than a brick. Without any hesitation, he swung the blunt weapon. “I’m an illusionist! I’m intelligent! How dare you! How dare you force me to do manual labor!” Crick, crack, crush, thump, smash, crack, shrick, shhhk, crshhh! Swinging to the side, he knocked the man to the floor, then straddled him and swung the stack down again and again. Part of the way through, the sound changed to something stickier, and Ransuu Kihara began to spasm, powerless to resist. Utgardaloki tossed aside the papers, which were now damp from all the blood, and picked up a new stack nearby. “Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I won, damn it. Finally, I’m in a safe zone. I’ve returned to the world of the living! I’m…I’m aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!” He had no idea how valuable the information printed on the documents was, but he used them to wipe off the blood stuck to his hands, then did the same for the splatters on his face. The paper was rough and painful, but it also proved to him that this was real, that he was alive. Then someone from behind softly tapped Utgardaloki on the shoulder. The illusion expert turned back—and then laid eyes on him. Standing there. With spiky hair. An Asian. A boy.