Chapter 66

SUB.14 Byouri Kihara was crooked. Her legs, made from her disassembled wheelchair wheels, had been twisted by powerful impacts and no longer functioned properly. Several firearms and wires extended from her backrest, but those appeared unreliable as well. Marianne Sringeneier. A sorcerer of Gremlin. With her golden saw and hammer, she had taken complete control of the battlefield. She’d already driven Byouri Kihara into the incinerator section of the garbage disposal plant, a big pool made of steel where the burnable garbage would be temporarily held. It was probably set up to allow its contents—wood, paper, and anything else that couldn’t be composted, like big bones and other raw garbage—to dry before they were burned all at once. And the stench was horrible. They’d likely extended the definition of “burnable garbage” because Baggage City, situated in a place with such heavy snowfall, demanded it for the heat. As Byouri sat by the edge of the steel pool, Marianne twirled her saw around. “Guess that’s as far as you go, huh?” she said. “I’ve gotta take care of all the other ‘Kiharas,’ or what have you. I’ll be quick. It’s time to modify you into a piece I can use.” “My, my, my. It would seem I’ve been driven right to the edge.” “You won’t have to worry about much. If I’m making you into a tool I can use, I’ll optimize you. You can’t move your legs, right? I could give you eight working ones. Or even ten. In fact, you want ’em to spin like a helicopter?” “I’d just like to ask one thing to be sure. I don’t think I have any reason to surrender yet—do you?” “Yeah, I figured you still had some weapons left. That’s what your wheelchair’s for, right? It’s totally busted now, though. If you can’t move, then how will you fight?” “Like this, I suppose.” Snap! A dull noise, and then suddenly the bottom half of Byouri’s pajamas ripped wide open. From out of them came not the soft, bare legs of a woman…but instead a synthetic resin machine that covered her legs entirely, extending around them from the backs of her knees. It wasn’t like armor—it was more like ribbons. And as the motors behind her knees began to whir, Byouri smoothly stood up. Marianne clicked her teeth in annoyance. “Right, so you were even lying about not being able to walk.” “I’ve given up on so much, you see, that I didn’t want to bother trying to stand up using my own strength.” “…Hence the motorized casts for hospitalized patients. A car company made those, if I recall. They reused the tech from that dancing robot. I saw it in a commercial.” “Well, that by itself is something you can make even with outside technology. But I highly doubt anyone outside could boost the power to the point where an infirm person could kill a tiger with one kick.” Grrrk-grrrk-grrrk. A grating noise echoed through the facility. It was the sound of Byouri removing a billhook-like bladed object from her wheelchair’s backrest. “I must say, though, that you seem to have exhausted many weapons to bring me to this point. Shall I say it? You’re out of ammo. Nobody else is here—and you need people for your tricky tactics. And it seems like that grease you use for sliding around your saw needs to be pretty fresh to work. Meanwhile, you don’t seem very suited for close combat without them… Which means I’ll make you give up now.” Marianne glanced at the saw and hammer in her hands. Then she sighed a little in resignation. The things she carried were no more than tools. They weren’t weapons in and of themselves. You could kill people with them, of course, depending on how you used them, but they’d be far from 100 percent capacity. The fleshy debris littered around the area had been so fundamentally destroyed that she couldn’t alter the shapes anymore. Marianne’s entire field of specialty was working with raw flesh. Using the dead was not the field of the dvergr—it was the realm of gods and giants. And she could only functionally use the blood and grease that spewed from people’s bodies for about twenty or thirty seconds before they “died,” at which point the fat and fluids would become worthless. “Looks like you got me,” she said. “I doubt I could beat you in a brawl. I do feel like you have way too many transformations, though.” “Oh, but that’s just part of Japanese culture. And for someone so hated to live this long—it takes a lot more hard work and real ability than popular people need, don’t you think? People naturally grow when faced with adversity.” “Must really suck, having people hate you even if you’re really strong and better than them.” “You don’t know the half of it. That’s what led me to give up on so much. Then again, I’ve made others give up on just as much, so it’s not as though I have a grudge against the entire world or anything.” One step. Then another. Byouri was closing in. Marianne backed away, stepping on the flesh-colored debris littering the floor as she did, but she doubted she’d be able to escape. If the mechanically enhanced Byouri got serious, she could easily speed right at her faster than a tiger or a lion. “So will you give up now? For me?” “Not quite yet.” “Then resist like your life depends on it—because it does. I’ll crush all your hopes. When I do, please give up on this.” “Far be it from me to refuse.” Right as she said that, Marianne used her heel to kick the thing at her feet up into the air. Like a tricky soccer keep-up, it launched from her heel to her head. Then she grabbed it—a small device. A machine. Something one of those flesh-colored stains on the floor had once held. A radio for contacting the shadowy combat personnel led by the Kiharas. “Testing. This is the underground waste disposal plant. I’ve cornered my Gremlin target. All nearby combat personnel, assemble at my location at once and provide fire support.” She had purposely called in additional foes. But Marianne didn’t see them that way. Any hostile elements under a certain power level were just fuel for her weapons. Byouri’s face tensed a bit. “…I see what you’re doing.” “I wonder how long it will take for your talented subordinates to come running. The more adept they are, the sooner they’ll arrive, I’m sure.” Marianne tossed aside the radio, then adjusted her grip on her golden hammer and saw. “After all, they’re serving you, their super-scary boss. If they mess up, they’ll be in for some discipline, won’t they? As long as they’ve been trained in fear, they’ll run here as fast as they can.” “……” Roar! Byouri, still gripping her billhook-like blade, charged directly for Marianne at full speed. But the well-trained subordinates’ swift arrival worked to the boss’s major disadvantage, putting her in a predicament. Byouri’s blade got within three centimeters of Marianne’s throat. The dvergr swung her golden saw, and the pitiful honors students’ right arms suddenly inflated to twice their size. At her instructions, the onetime-use pitching machines grabbed fire extinguishers, then twisted around so hard they’d break themselves—and as they did, they fired their “bullets.” Boom, boom, boom!!!!!! With a series of dull sounds, Byouri was knocked into the air and dropped into the garbage disposal pool. “Boy, did I make a mess out of her…,” muttered Marianne as she returned her golden tools to her overalls. Now that no enemies were visible, she could finally react to the damage warnings going off throughout her body—to the pain, in other words. She staggered, putting a hand on the wall before following the path along like that. Marianne’s primary objective was to defend the core of the water-heating facility, so she wouldn’t be leaving the waste disposal plant. Despite how it sounded, though, the workers here had rather nice living quarters. She had taken one such room and modified it into a hotel suite, essentially renting it out. Normally, her room would have been protected by a sorcerous barrier, but it seemed the building’s entire structure had been damaged, thanks to all the rampaging the Kiharas and Academy City were doing. They’d used brute force to mess with the positioning of the symbols, cutting off their effects entirely. “Well, I can protect the building, but if they start rocking the foundation, it’s gonna take some damage.” As she’d suspected, it wouldn’t be enough for her to do her work at the behest of Baggage City—or rather, the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians controlling it—and expect that things would take a turn for the better. She was just operating on far too small a scale. The Guardians had lost to Academy City in the planning stages. So now she would be taking the initiative on her own. And if she was, then a little barrier around one room wasn’t something to worry about at the moment. She’d have to get tools that were a little more heavy-duty now. “Where’d I put that thing? Ah, here.” She removed the lid from the wooden chest in the corner of the room, but as she was about to reach inside, she stopped. She then pulled a pair of metal tongs—they looked like giant pliers—from her overalls and used them to grab the Soul Arm. As she brought it out, the tip of it cleanly sliced through the chest. “…Why let them rock the boat even more, right? I think it’s time for a little counterattack.”