Book 8 Chapter 8
It felt a lot like having returned from Ryugujo.
I found myself zoning out whenever I relaxed. I would only realize time had passed after the fact.
The constant tension probably had something to do with it. Visiting a metropolis like Tokyo would have been enough of an adventure for me, so outer space and a tropical island was too much. It scared me how well I could adapt to such extreme circumstances. My usual home didn’t even feel like home for a while.
After all that, I did go to the hospital and spent an entire day getting a detailed examination, like some kind of reorientation, and I had been like this ever since. I had gone to space without any kind of suit, but I had no organ damage or radiation damage. Did I have luck or technology to thank for that?
Anyway.
I was zoning out in my room.
“I’m amazed you made it back alive, Senpai,” said Itou Helen, my underclassman with short blonde hair.
Since she was pouting her lips on my phone’s screen, she must have been irritated that I hadn’t called her for help. Cute.
“I’m amazed too. Really, I’m glad we could settle things on that island. That JB guy could manipulate even a being known as a god. If he had gotten away, I would’ve been stuck in a living hell of playing an extended game of hide-and-seek or tag with him.”
“I still don’t really know what a god is exactly, so I’m just going to think of them as some super amazing people. Then again, you could say the same thing about that…Bokor was it?”
“Yeah…”
Valkyrie Karen was the living proof of that.
Back when the Archenemy Echidna was talking about taking revenge for her dead children, I had taken her talk of “the gods” as an anthropomorphization of something intangible like fate or faith.
But that was wrong.
They did exist.
Gods really did exist and they didn’t just have some ethereal influence on the world. They had a solid presence here.
They could commit crimes, they could cause sickness, they could trigger disasters, and they could expand wars.
And certain special methods could take advantage of their nature and take control of them.
I felt like I could kind of see what the Echidna had been so upset about. How could she stand it if her family – the children she had worked so hard to create – were killed one after another using the gaps left open by the gods? I did not want some great being to be managing every last part of this world, but this world felt sloppy in a lot of ways.
Then the free video call was interrupted by a social media app from the same company. Maxwell spoke using the speech bubble there.
“I apologize for interrupting, but you should really hear about this sooner rather than later.”
“What is it?”
“First, a report on the situation in Tokyo. Recovery personnel – mostly JSDF – have entered the city sooner than expected. The pet shop that Ayumi was worried about has been rescued without issue.”
That was fortunate. That had nothing to do with JB or the gods, but it would have left a bad taste in my mouth otherwise. Now that they were not working against us, the JSDF did not seem all that bad.
“Archenemy Scylla is recovering in the hospital where you sent her. She has been freed from the bonds initially placed on her by the old Bright Cross, so we should treat her with care.”
“…”
Itou-san was a similar kind of witch and she too had overcome the Colosseum, so she apparently saw this other girl as some kind of rival. Cute. But we had only left the Scylla in the hospital, so I had not been there when she woke up.
The empress is more of a mystery,” continued Maxwell. “There was no sign of the pod having been opened, yet the contents had entirely disappeared.”
“Maybe because she is a god, Senpai,” suggested Itou Helen.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I replied.
Should we assume she had returned to her original state once JB and Freischutz’s influence had been removed? But how much of what she had been was JB’s doing? I could only hope she hadn’t always been an evil goddess who couldn’t be judged by human standards.
“Maxwell-san is so incredible. She can gather information from all over the place.”
“Please, please. So soon after a disaster, a lot of the equipment has been jury-rigged together to make due for the time being, so security flaws are much easier to find than normal. I would not typically be able to infiltrate government and medical agencies quite so easily. Blush.”
Uh, oh. My underclassman was about to steal administrative control from me using nothing but the power of her cuteness! And since when did that program learn to blush!?
“Now, the rest of this is going to be a bit of a different topic.”
“With a leadup like that, I doubt it’s going to be good news.”
“Sure.” Maxwell paused for a beat. “It is about JB who was transferred to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department since that remote island is technically under their jurisdiction.”
“D-did he tell them something? I mean, the entire incident hasn’t shown up in the newspapers or on TV.”
“No. Unfortunately, he has not provided any sort of testimony.”
“So he’s still exercising his right to remain silent? But that skinny guy didn’t seem like the most patient or determined person.”
“Again, no.”
“?”
“A moment ago, I learned that he has been confirmed dead after being shot in his holding cell. Even though this means it occurred within the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s own building.”
I didn’t understand.
I mean…what?
Who? Why? How’d they get a gun in there!? I had so many questions I couldn’t figure out where to start!
“Like I said, all of Tokyo must be in a state of confusion so soon after the disaster, but even accounting for that, this qualifies as highly unusual. It may have been an inside job by someone who had already infiltrated the police, or an extremely powerful processing device may have been used to neutralize all of the security.”
An extremely powerful processing device.
But hold on a second.
“Come to think of it, we never did figure anything out about the Freischutz that JB was using. But is that really possible? Could Freischutz have killed its own owner?”
“Umm.” Itou Helen asked a hesitant question. “Where did Maxwell-san hear this from? There was nothing in the newspapers or on TV about that JB person being arrested.”
“Sure. That is a simple matter, Miss Itou Helen. An anonymous user uploaded a video of the shooting to a video sharing site.”
“Eek!?”
“Maxwell.”
“My apologies. Perhaps I should not have been so blunt.”
Maxwell apologized but immediately continued on. That was a machine for you.
“The site administration deleted the video two minutes after upload, but that only seems to have convinced people of its authenticity. It is being omitted from the trending search lists, but I imagine it actually holds the #1 spot.”
“Then it must have spread all over the place by now. Do you have the original before any third parties modified it? Oh, and don’t display it for Itou-san.”
“Understood.”
“Senpai.”
She tried to protest, but I decided it was best not to back down on this one. I didn’t want to see it myself, but I had no choice in the matter.
The video was grainy and had no audio.
A hallway of rooms covered by iron bars – holding cells? – was shown from diagonally above. This may have come from a security camera.
Someone was walking down the hallway.
They stopped in front of one of the cells.
They pulled something from their pocket.
A flash of light.
They returned the something to their pocket and walked toward the camera until they moved out of frame.
“…”
That was all. A normal person may not have known what they were seeing. This depicted a murder, but you never actually saw a grotesque corpse or anything. It was filmed from the hallway, so you did not have a clear view of who was behind the bars. There was no sound, so you could not hear if the person begged for their life or screamed in pain. None of it felt taboo. It was perfectly watchable – or rather, I wouldn’t have given it a second glance if I wasn’t paying close attention. It was all so mundane that it did not feel like a life was being lost, but that only made it seem all the emptier and bleaker. It nearly made you mistakenly conclude that human lives were not all that valuable.
But…
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“I have no answer for you,” said Maxwell.
“That was JB. The one who shot the gun, I mean. The gray hair and glasses were exactly the JB we saw on that metal-covered island! So…what? Was that not JB behind the bars!?”
Maxwell would have carefully examined this video before choosing to show me this one out of the countless ones spreading around the internet. It was unlikely to have been doctored.
But.
However.
“Whether or not JB was the shooter may not be the real issue.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Did you know that realistic masks are sold during a certain powerful nation’s presidential elections? With a printer and some cardboard, you can create a 3D mask of a human face by complexly folding it like polygons. The shooter may have had JB’s appearance to the point of passing any mechanical facial recognition test, but that does not mean they were actually JB. Especially when we only have this low-quality security camera footage to go on.”
“I see.”
My thoughts were finally catching up.
This didn’t require him to have escaped his cell and it didn’t require twins or clones. There was a simpler answer.
A cardboard mask or special makeup would do the trick. But what did the shooter gain by hiding their identity?
“I thought it didn’t quite make sense for Freischutz to work toward killing JB and I was right. Freischutz isn’t a personal-use simulator. It’s a shared model for a group or organization.”
Had JB only been an end user?
Or was this a case of a torture tool or execution device’s developer being used to test it out?
Either way, the same problem remained.
We could not solve this problem without doing something about Freischutz and its owner.
“Then what about the Scylla? Is she okay!?”
“I do not mean to brag, but after learning of the shooting in the holding cell, I took it upon myself to fill in all the hospital’s security holes. There is no report of an attack there. However, it may be more accurate to say she has been abandoned. I doubt the Scylla had any direct contact with JB and they may be prioritizing the missing empress and the servant species that was left on an uninhabited island.”
“Contact Anastasia and get her help in strengthening the security there. They’re sure to spread confusion on the digital front first. If we can nip that in the bud, they should have a harder time staging a physical attack.”
“I have already contacted her. She was delighted, saying this was the perfect chance to test out her latest counterattack software. Tremble, tremble.”
But anyway.
Things were safe for now, but we had no guarantee at all that this was truly over. Not for the Scylla and not for us. Would we have to live out the rest of our lives constantly looking over our shoulders? Would we have to wonder who was behind every single oddity we encountered?
This may not have been enough to obtain true peace of mind.
We had to think about taking the fight to them before they could do anything to us.
“…”
But that would be different from before.
Previously, I had gotten caught up in an incident or a disaster and used Maxwell and the other’s help to escape. But I was talking about something else here.
We would be making the attack.
Before someone with ill intentions could cause the next incident or disaster.
I would have a hard time claiming I had always followed the rules and a dedicated hacker like Anastasia would probably laugh her ass off if she heard this, but I felt like I would be crossing a line if I did this. I could tell. It might be the right thing to do, but did I have the right to do the right thing here? That was the question.
My thinking here was not much different from the Bright Cross who had decided Archenemies were dangerous and thus had to be isolated or even eliminated if they refused to cooperate.
But.
As much as I wanted to believe otherwise, it seemed unlikely I could let the ordinary police handle this.
Based on the tragedy in that holding cell, Freischutz was clearly superior to the security systems of a government agency. This was too much for them. The enemy here could get in anywhere, steal anything, and kill anyone. I doubted they could be tracked and investigated by doing everything by the book.
For one thing, we were talking about someone who could freely bring about crimes, disasters, and even wars using UFOs. The police, firefighters, and JSDF were too compartmentalized to handle that. Everyone who lived in adult society would be too bound by red tape to take action.
So what was I to do?
Really and truly, what would I do?
It looked like they had already been trying to kill me. And defeating JB would have drawn negative attention to Erika and Ayumi. That was enough to send a chill down my spine, but they might not just target us. They might want retribution or hostages. We could not run around watching over everyone we knew at all times. In the worst case, the entire city or country could be caught in some artificial disaster.
“Senpai.” There was no malice in these words. “What do we do now?”
Would I wait until something was taken from me?
Or could I really let myself become one of the takers?
I…
“There’s no time to lose. Let’s go attack Freischutz ourselves.”
“No, that is a line we must not cross.”
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