Chapter 70

SUB.18 “Phew! I thought I was dead. This has got to be a joke. Maybe we really should have brought someone purely combat oriented—even if it inconvenienced the plan. I’m definitely not cut out for war.” Marianne headed back to her private room inside the waste treatment plant, whose magical barrier was still broken. The battlefield was too chaotic for her to use the Loki’s Nets optimally. Instead, she decided to reach for her secret weapon. Taking a seat on the chair in the room, she picked up a clear jar on the table. Inside it was a juice made from wheat. While the stuff was perhaps unusual in Japan, Scandinavian sorcerers had an affinity for it. Naturally, beer was both easier to get and more appropriate as a symbol, but Marianne was well aware of her low alcohol tolerance and stayed away from the stuff. She put the jar to her lips and took a gulp of the wheat juice before pulling out her smartphone. While she didn’t need the device, she did need to adjust her mouth and ears, which were responsible for sending and receiving signals. Only after applying a perfect encryption—one specialized to handle contingencies where her voice was digitized—did she dare to use this technology belonging to the science side, her enemy. “Mind telling me where you are right now, Sigyn?” she asked. “Umm. Where am I? I’m not sure myself. Baggage City is so big, it’s easy to get lost in. They should have just kept it simple. I wish they had just kept it simple.” “Never mind that. Could we meet up as soon as possible? I told you so many times that I’m not cut out for battle. Why pick me anyway? Aren’t there better users for Mjölnir?” “They’re very busy right now. Don’t bother them. You understand exactly why.” “Yeah, so join up with me!” “Like I said, I don’t even know where I am. You know I’m useless on my own. Just like you, Mari—you can’t modify your own body.” “And your advice is the same?” “That’s right. My sacrifices generally need to share something I have with someone else to make up for what they lack. If I try to make up for what I lack—well, I don’t have anything for that.” Sigyn was the name of Loki’s wife. The sorcerer who had taken her name offered advice that may not even be magic at all—Sigyn didn’t know. Thus, it was a mystery whether Sigyn was a sorcerer. But it didn’t matter. Gremlin would gobble up anything that they could put to use, no matter what it was. That was how they expanded. Grew. The Norse goddess name gave it away—just like Utgardaloki, Sigyn was an official member of Gremlin. “All right, then why not give me some advice? Y’know, something that’ll let me find you.” “Oh! Wait, that’s a good idea.” “You’re hopeless at using your power, you know that? The advice you give is always one hundred percent correct. If you used it for yourself, you might even be strong enough to be a magic god.” “Oh, I don’t care about that. If someone uses my suggestions to succeed, then I share in their success.” “Just give me your advice already!” “All right, all right. Here’s what you should do…” Neither Marianne nor Sigyn were the type of person who could accomplish much on their own. But with someone else’s intervention, their power would explode to the point where they could slice through history itself. They didn’t know how many of the Kiharas were left, but if Sigyn could make up for what Marianne lacked—the skills she needed to get involved in direct combat—then she would have some leeway, unlike her perilous fight with Byouri Kihara. She would need real-time advice matching the changes in the situation, but with it, she could obliterate all the Kiharas without issue. Thanks to Sigyn’s advice, Marianne now had a search skill she could use to meet up with the lost sorcerer. Just then, Sigyn said something. “I’m sorry. It sounds like it’s been tough for you.” “Yeah. Definitely put the wrong girl on the job. I’m super beat. You know, I was even thinking about calling Bersi here.” Marianne leaned back against her comfortable chair, swishing her legs under the table, as she took another sip of her wheat juice. “And going back to the very start. This whole, uh, Natural Selector thing? It’s a tournament, right? We shouldn’t be defending it at all. The cost is clearly way too high. I can’t even get pumped for this.” “Yeah. What did they call it—the Proof of Global Standard Equal to Academy City Supernatural Ability Development? That was a lie, right?” Despite Sigyn’s bombshell, Marianne’s tone remained casual. “Yeah, but I think I know what those old sponsors were thinking—not that they can tell us, since they’re basically mincemeat now. Basically, the way the competitors in Natural Selector participate reveal their reasons for fighting. Like, fighting for a sickly family member, or for protecting your research team in an academic clique war, or for getting money to your famine-wracked home country. Anyway, it tells them what those people would gain by getting the Global Standard.” A goal they could never give up on—every contestant had one. And their objectives wouldn’t simply vanish forever if they lost in the tournament. They would stick around. They would simply be quietly absorbed, somewhere out of sight—a hell that forced you to watch that which you truly wished to keep ground to dust. And that was why… “And as long as the organizers know that, they can control all the competitors by threatening them. Whoever wins Natural Selector gets the Guardians’ full support and a cooperative relationship. Meanwhile, the organizers turn around to the losers and tell them that they’ll never accomplish their personal goals unless they do something. Then they can clamp another collar on them—the hope that they can turn things around.” In other words, it just was the opposite. They weren’t trying to have the masses fight to select the strongest from them. They would gain connections to everyone in the tournament, regardless of if they won or lost. Support, threats—they’d use every means at their disposal to force the fighters to work for the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians’ fold and make it impossible for them to escape. UFOs, dinosaurs, OOParts, EM waves, microorganisms, cryptids, subterraneans… While the modern world called these things preposterous, there were still people out there researching them and organizations funding that research. And those funds were a much more useful power. The Guardians had put on the martial arts tournament to cast a net and reel all of that in at once. In other words… “The Guardians don’t want the hundred-odd competitors in the tournament. They’re after the hundred-odd organizations backing them. They just want to add as many new groups into their circle as possible. They just want to expand their influence to fight back against Academy City. Natural selection? Ha. They reached too far, and now they’re piles of mush.” “And that gives us the opportunity to bring our own goals into the mix.” “Yep. At least there’s a silver lining to this stressful work.” Marianne sighed, then collapsed over the table. “Ugh. I’m glad I brought something to cheer me up. Without it, I think I’d be totally off the rails now. Gotta satisfy the body and the mind, right? Especially for people like us doing intelligence work.” “A piece of advice—your work is in poor taste.” “You think so?” Marianne wondered aloud. “Come on, of course it is. You dismantle living people and remake them into furniture. Try putting yourself in the shoes of your tea party guests for once.” “You think so?” Marianne repeated, tilting her head in confusion, not really following. Her chair had a name. It was Telerie. Her lamp had one, too—Frank—and her table was named Cendrillon. Occasionally, she’d hear something akin to a moan come from them. The furniture-shaped objects still had all their insides. They had faces on their surfaces, and they breathed, ate food, and took naps… They were all alive, in other words. She hadn’t just broken them and split up their corpses. No, she’d kept these people alive after retooling them into furniture—such was her skill as a craftswoman. Marianne ran a finger over an expensive piece of skin-colored furniture and smiled thinly. “I’m only optimizing their forms to meet my goals. In this case, it’s a punishment. You only have one life, right? So how is it fair that any crime above a certain severity warrants the death penalty? It just encourages criminals to kill a hundred people instead of just one. You get your money’s worth that way. So I retooled these three into forms that would let them atone for their sins. Though I suppose I did also make sure they were naturally soothing for me. Can’t deny that.” “And it’s in poor taste.” “You think so?” wondered Marianne. “Yes. And now you have me concerned that Utgardaloki is one of them.” “I mean, yeah, I’m annoyed he slipped up and things ended up that way. But there’s no need to go that far, is there? It’s not like he turned traitor and hurt us somehow. Faeries like me don’t go after hard workers and honest folk, you know.” Sigyn always gave ultimately appropriate advice, but it was just that—advice. Apparently, she didn’t care how the person used it—or even if they could use it. “Anyway, you’re my secret weapon, Sigyn,” Marianne continued. “So stop wandering off on your own. I was supposed to be fighting with your support all along. If they take you out first, the balance of power falls apart—” And then. She stopped speaking abruptly. Her expression evened out, too. A moment later, the dvergr smiled—very thinly. “…But I have to wonder why poor victims always come stumbling to me at times like these. It’s not like my voice encryption works if it isn’t going through a communication device, you know.” Marianne took the jar of wheat juice and threw it at the door to the room. As the glass shattered, the half-open door swung open the rest of the way. Two people appeared: Maria Kumokawa and Shuri Oumi. Marianne took her golden saw out of her overalls and, twirling it, said to them, “You know, I’ve been wanting a footrest for this chair and a mini fridge for my drinks. I’ll let you decide between yourselves who will be which.”