Chapter 64

MAIN.12 Oumi gave a little groan. She could tell she was lying on the floor. The very person who had knocked her out, Maria Kumokawa, was peering at her face. In the girl’s hand was a lemon cut into round slices. Apparently, she’d used it to wake her up. They were no longer in the corner of the hallway from before. Now they were in a large space with desks set up in concentric circles. And lots of monitors. It could have been the control room meant to supply hot water heat to the rest of Baggage City, but strangely, nobody else was here except for the two of them. Maybe it was okay for the place to be empty if they weren’t having any system troubles. Though perhaps all the employees had abandoned their posts and fled. Or maybe the attackers had already disposed of them all. None of that mattered to her, though. What mattered was that she was now far away from that battle between the Kiharas and Gremlin. She’d lost her once-in-a-lifetime chance. “Ngh!” As she got up, Oumi tried to shove her garden spade kunai into Kumokawa’s throat, but the girl effortlessly held it back. And then, as she assumed an upside-down position around the kunai, she spread her legs wide and whirled like a helicopter. This maneuver yanked Oumi’s weapon out of her hand. Kumokawa, who had her right foot on the floor, twirled the bladed weapon around in her hand. “I told you. You can’t beat me. And if this is enough to hold you back, then you shouldn’t be peering into the depths. You’ll find more than your pride shattered. Nobody who can’t physically feel the danger would be able to function properly. Or are you not even on a level to comprehend what I’m telling—” Her words cut off part of the way through. The reason was simple. Because without any forewarning whatsoever, a bazooka had been fired into the room from the entrance. Kumokawa instantly put just her left foot on the floor, then bent over backward like a bridge. The shot passed through the area her upper body had just left, but it crashed into the wall on the other side of her, detonated, and sent shock waves in every direction—which she had no way of dodging. “Ngh…urgh…?!” Kumokawa lost her balance, then was thrown over. She rolled up as she smoothly slid along the floor. By not going against the momentum, she avoided direct hits from the shell’s fragments and wall debris. Even as she rolled, she immediately tried to recover— Grooong. A dull sensation. At some point, a third party had entered the communication control facility. Kumokawa, still rolling, collided directly with their leg and stopped. Oh no. The bazooka was just to distract us while someone else ran in here?! The woman looking down at them reaffirmed her grip on the giant tube that rested against her shoulder. It was the bazooka she’d clearly just fired—and her stance made it look like she was about to use it as a blunt weapon. For the first time. Kumokawa had immediately taken evasive maneuvers when the bazooka had been fired into the room, too, but for the first time, she felt a chill crawl up her spine. And that caused a subtle but definite pause in her movements. Instantly, her consciousness flashed and exploded. “……” Oumi heard a heavy clunk. It was the assailant tossing away her blunt weapon, its usefulness at an end. It had taken less than ten seconds to get rid of Kumokawa, despite how the girl had had an upper hand the entire time. The threat level of the situation setting in, Oumi recounted the number of weapons hidden inside her clothes. She was just trying to calm herself down, but it had the opposite effect, as she realized none of those weapons could bring her to victory. The assailant, on the other hand… “Umm. Yeah, I really don’t like this. It would be best if we could settle this without fighting…” It was a short girl, probably about middle school age. Her black hair was tied into a bun on either side, and she wore a fluffy, baggy sweater, a miniskirt, and black stockings. None of it quite fit together, like she’d just bought everything the store clerk had recommended—and that strangely suited her somewhat nervous aura. The thing that most stood out about her was the rope hanging from her neck. From it dangled all kinds of precision devices with tiny screens, like a cell phone, a small television, and a tablet. “But I’m a Kihara, so I guess I don’t have a say in this.” Then she heard a sound. Bhhh-yoo! It was the sound of every last monitor in the communication control facility turning on at once. Graphs appeared on them, each changing by the millisecond. Oumi couldn’t understand any of them at a glance, and the assailant’s pupils seemed to suck in their glow. In her eyes, the innumerable hordes of graphs continued dancing like living creatures. “I know, Uncle Amata. It hurts. It really does, but a Kihara would do it like this!” Her movements clearly changed. With a smooth, swift motion, the female assailant charged at Oumi. Ngh! What? Is she getting some kind of information fed into her?! Oumi shot to her feet, her index finger coming out of her sock. She’d pulled out something—a couple of metal plates, sharp on both edges, about the size of nail trimmers. They were throwing weapons but not bo-shuriken. She directed her aim at the floor between herself and the assailant, then threw several of them. They lodged into the ground. Typical caltrops. While she doubted her attacker would be dumb enough to step on them, the girl would still need to avoid them, which would slow her down. Intending to wait for that moment to land a mortal blow, Oumi took out a new garden spade kunai. But the situation did not play out according to her expectations. Not only did the assailant maintain her speed, but she also perfectly kicked one of the foot spikes straight at Oumi’s face. “Rgh?!” Oumi immediately tried to guard her face with the kunai, but the assailant bent her leg, then kicked the airborne caltrop a second time. The metal plate, now on a very different trajectory, stabbed into the center of Oumi’s gut. It wasn’t a fatal wound—the thing wasn’t exactly a chef’s knife—but the intense pain still caused her to tense up. In the meantime, the assailant got past the caltrop danger zone easily, then advanced into close range. “Yup. Yup, I got it.” The swarm of graphs on the nearby monitors began to squirm and writhe even more madly as the girl’s eyes absorbed some kind of information from them. “I’ll compress a hammer’s level of destructive force to a microscopic size. Because that’s the combat pattern you would use, Uncle Amata!” …Am I done for?! Wham! Then came the girl’s right fist. Oumi had raised her kunai out of a defensive instinct, but the attacker had smashed into her arm, sending the tip of that kunai plunging straight at Oumi’s own face. Her throat dried up. She couldn’t stop the blade. Wanting to at least avoid a mortal wound, she brought her head down slightly so the kunai would hit her harder forehead, and— Another right fist was thrown. And it belonged to neither Oumi nor the assailant. It was from a complete outsider. A white ankle-length coat and a white full-face helmet. Neither of them knew when the person had even gotten that close. The outsider struck Oumi’s kunai with their right fist, knocking it away to protect her skull at the last possible instant. The girl assailant changed her target, delivering an accurate, precise punch straight to the outsider’s face. But it didn’t make much of a sound. Realizing it wasn’t possible to defend, the helmeted man had thrown out a kick at the same time the girl had punched. Without the assailant’s weight behind it, her punch misfired, only tipping the man back a few degrees. On alert now, the girl backed off in order to put distance between them. “…Enshuu Kihara, eh?” murmured the helmeted man. “I thought I heard you weren’t even given passing marks as a Kihara.” “Huh?” said the girl. “Who are you?” “If you want to kill these two girls, then that makes you my enemy.” “If you want to save these two girls, then we’ve gotta be enemies, huh?” The graphs in the girl’s eyes wriggled and squirmed. “Can I have some advice please, Uncle Amata?” In time with her remark, the patterns on the graphs began to change. They’d already been changing color each instance Enshuu Kihara had said that person’s name. “No, no, Uncle Ransuu, Konny, Soku, Auntie Kaihou… No, no, not that, not that. Yeah, I don’t mean that. Umm, umm! Right, that’s right, Yui!” “…Ah, so you’re compensating for your dull thought processes with external scripts. Bet that came from the same field as Testament. The big question is whether your personality retained its original form.” “Yep, yeah, Yui. At a time like this, a Kihara would do this!” Zrrk-zrrk-zrrk-zrrk! All the graphs in the room began to change dramatically. As they reflected in the small girl’s eyes, she stuck up her middle finger. “Right, so I’m gonna fuck up all the carbon dioxide in your body and rip all your blood vessels to freakin’ shreds! …Well, apparently that’s how a Kihara would say it, so there you go!” “Not exactly.” As Enshuu charged him, the helmeted man calmly placed his hand on his coat button. Then from out of his coat came… “A convex…directional land mine?!” “This is what a Kihara would do.” Without hesitation, he triggered it. A directional land mine was a type of land mine with a set direction for the blast. For example, if one wanted to penetrate an armored weapon like a tank, they could attach an explosive to a concave—or craterlike—plate, thus directing the entire blast toward the tank and multiplying its destructive force. Conversely, to spread the blast over a large area, they could attach the explosive to a convex—or hill-like—plate to cause the blast to disperse out in a fan shape. This variety was usually used for antipersonnel land mines, which took lots of people out at once, so they were mostly filled with small metal balls. The helmeted man had a convex directional antipersonnel land mine set up inside his coat. The blast fanned out three hundred meters, with a maximum breadth of two hundred meters, sending five hundred pellets spraying through that area. That’s…insane…! Even though the Koga were well-versed in explosives, Oumi still gasped in awe. By adjusting the direction of the blast like that, a directional explosive pointed destructive force at a target. In other words, one could be close to the explosive and not be hurt as long as they were outside that range. That said, everything had a limit. Carrying the land mine inside your coat and setting it off there? The man couldn’t possibly emerge unscathed. Yes. As long as this was an issue of common sense—and not supernatural powers. “…She got away,” murmured the helmeted man, the edges of his coat blown away. He’d been wearing a metal sheet on his chest almost as an excuse. Now it was twisted, and it fell to the floor with a clunk. Naturally, that wouldn’t have been able to absorb the impact alone. “Maybe there was too little distance. Did I have it too far back? The lethal zone wouldn’t extend far to the sides closer to the base of the fan…” The helmeted man turned to look at the still-unconscious Maria Kumokawa, then at Oumi, who put her kunai back up out of reflex. “Don’t bother,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to beat me with that.” “……” “Not that I’m making light of you. What I mean is it’s too powerful to kill me.” His reasoning was incomprehensible. Or maybe she didn’t even have the right to stand on the battlefield if she didn’t understand it. She was struck by a sensation much like getting the answer “Don’t be nervous” when asking a major-league player what the secret to victory was. It was her very goal to eradicate such irrationality. And yet… “And to be honest, fighting you wouldn’t benefit me. I’m specialized for Kiharas, after all.” …So we have the Kiharas, we have this “Gremlin” group, and now there’s an expert on Kiharas separate from them? How many factions are even in Baggage City right now? As the seething rage in Oumi’s eyes grew stronger, the helmeted man kept his tone casual, like none of this meant much. “Since neither of you has a reason to fight, I’ll tell you how to survive. Prioritize this above all else: Find Touma Kamijou.” “…?” “He’s here in Baggage City, too. Getting tossed around, of course, the situation being what it is. Your ability to get to Touma Kamijou is directly linked to your lives continuing. To give it to you short, find him or die.” He spoke so smoothly. So nonchalantly. “Enshuu Kihara attacked you two because she doesn’t think much like a Kihara. She was only being considerate toward Byouri Kihara, trying to eliminate any uncertain factors near her. That said, now that they’ve perceived you two as characters in this story, you’ll need more than normal methods to survive. You need someone of Touma Kamijou’s level.” “And who is this…Touma Kamijou?” “Just a normal boy. He can’t solve every crisis, and he won’t be able to stop Baggage City’s downfall—not with the Kiharas and Gremlin fighting. But on the other hand, he has the ability to save every single character he sees—just like how the Kiharas will destroy every character they see. To escape the Kiharas, you need to use a person of his level… Normally, Accelerator would be the best to fight the Kiharas, but if he’s not here, then there’s no other choice. You’ll just have to hit them with another factor.” The helmeted man squatted down next to the unconscious Kumokawa and checked her pulse and breathing. Once he knew for sure there were no major problems, he looked back at Oumi. “Tell her that, too, when she wakes up. You’ll have a high chance of death otherwise.” “…And what are you going to do?” “Unfortunately, I have my own objectives. I mentioned I was specialized for fighting Kiharas, right? Most importantly, I’m not confident I can ensure your safety,” answered the helmeted man, his ragged coat dragging behind him as he walked toward the exit. His voice was at most a murmur, and yet it seemed to ring clearly in Oumi’s mind. “After all, I’m a Kihara myself.”