Chapter 80

SUB.28 Kumokawa and Saflee burst out of the domed facility whose infirmary they’d borrowed and into the sheer white outdoors. The next instant, however, rather than the cold stabbing into their skin, one of them felt a splitting pain instead. “Ow,” said Saflee. “What’s wrong?” asked Kumokawa. “I think it was a paper plane. Like how Japanese ninjutsu uses letters attached to arrows, I guess? Ooh-ryah!” As Kumokawa frowned in confusion, Saflee threw the paper plane back somewhere. Fed up, she looked to the sky. “Negative twenty degrees… How long do you think we can survive in these clothes?” “Just think of it like a cold storage room,” explained Kumokawa. “About thirty minutes should be the limit, after which we’ll fall unconscious. After an hour, our biological activities will hit dangerous levels.” “Does that go for Enshuu Kihara, too?” “Not if she has a countermeasure. Don’t forget she’s the attacker here.” The vegetable plants in question weren’t that far away. Apparently, they’d co-opted the parking lot attached to the huge dome for them, and the container-shaped plants were stacked up there like building blocks. She doubted there would be any gigantic fixed cranes like in big ports; she expected they’d mainly be using forklifts and crane trucks. It was easy to imagine it in her head, but when she actually saw it, she was overawed by the sheer scale of it all. “…There’s hundreds,” breathed Saflee. “And we don’t know how many are winners. How annoying,” muttered Kumokawa. “Looks like my pride will be wounded again.” “?” “Enshuu Kihara is trying to use ultraviolet light to destroy the special mold’s genetic information and turn it into a bioweapon. But how many samples does she have? If she’s performing the process in several containers at once, we’ll need to destroy them all. And she’d want to do it that way as insurance to make sure she doesn’t fail. But…” “But we won’t know how many we need to destroy before we’re done,” finished Saflee, clicking her tongue in annoyance. “…Might as well try destroying every single one of them at that point.” “All of them? Oh. Right. We don’t have time to determine which are the right ones.” Kumokawa had latched on to Saflee’s self-deprecating words in a surprising way, so Saflee, the person who had suggested it, was taken aback instead of her. “No, no, no! There’s hundreds of them! I don’t know how long it’ll take Enshuu to make that moldy biological weapon, but it would take days to destroy every single one!” “It’s not like we have to crush them all like empty cans,” said Kumokawa, holding up her index finger. “All of these container vegetable plants run on electricity. The illumination, air-conditioning, and nutritional fluid replenishment happens twenty-four seven. You’d need a lot more than a car battery for that. There’s hundreds of them. They’d have to drag in AC generators to supply them with power.” When using such things on a battlefield, solar panels were generally employed alongside them. But they couldn’t hope for much sunlight in such a snowy region. They’d need to compensate with electrical cables. “In that case…,” said Saflee. “I have our answer,” said Kumokawa. “It looks like my pride will get inflated again. If we destroy the external power source at the root of it all, it’ll shut down all the blacklights providing ultraviolet rays! Enshuu won’t be able to create her bioweapon!” Kumokawa scanned the surroundings. She couldn’t see any power poles or other electric lines, probably because they would have been damaged by the weight of all the snow. The power cables must have been located underground. Saflee clicked her tongue in annoyance. “I knew it wouldn’t be that easy. Want to head back underground?” “Wait…” Kumokawa approached one of the stacked-up vegetable plants. There was a caution sign on it written in English. “The power unit is three hundred volts and fifty amps…,” she said. “That’s pretty specialized. It’s not like Japan, of course—but it’s also not the same as Baggage City’s own home power. It must be some sort of military format.” “Look, I only understand numbers when they’re talking about protein. Don’t expect me to know what you’re talking about.” “What I’m saying is that even if they brought electricity in on power lines, they wouldn’t be able to use it. There must be a transformer somewhere in this facility. If we can destroy that, it should bring all the vegetable plants to a screeching halt!” The girl in maid clothes looked around, then spotted one area through the veil of white that was surrounded by a square fence. The area was about ten by ten meters, and the things inside it resembled a big crowd of vending machines. “Found the transformer!” Kumokawa called out—just as one of the doors of the grounded containers was kicked out from inside. A girl emerged. A variety of devices, including a smartphone and a one-seg TV, were hanging from her neck. She was holding a can of tea in both hands. When she spoke, it was with a troubled voice. “…Well, a little thought and that would be the obvious weak point, right?” Saflee caught part of Kumokawa’s clothes and whispered, “Hey. The vegetable plant she just came out of…” “Whether it’s one of the right ones or not,” Kumokawa whispered back, “as long as we destroy the transformer, they’ll all stop for sure.” “I get it,” said Enshuu. “Man, I would have won if you’d just destroyed this one and decided you were finished.” The girl cringed, seeking the heat from her can of tea. “But if you know how important the transformer is, then you must have planned for a vicious counterattack if you did anything to it, right?” “…I thought we were the ones counterattacking.” “Yep. Yeah, you’re right. I got it, Uncle Amata.” Suddenly Enshuu wasn’t talking to them at all. The smartphone and one-seg TV around her neck began to show a series of strange graphs. “Now that it’s come to this, I can’t avoid fighting by threatening them anymore, right? It’s a shame; it’s a real shame. But that’s how a Kihara works! Now I just have to beat them into paste!” Saflee swore, dropping her center of gravity a bit to adopt a fighting stance. “Here she comes! Are you ready to fight a real monster?!” “Ready enough to correct you—we’re going to her!” Whoom! In the negative-twenty-degree blizzard, the three clashed. And all the while, the countdown on the biological weapon left behind by Ransuu Kihara ticked away.