solar plexus.

“G-geh!! Cough cough...!!”

“Don’t mumble and hide shit from us! Who do you think you are!?”

As Suzukawa Izumi fell to her knees and held her stomach with both hands, Coward-kun went in for another kick.

The other prisoner suddenly cut in.

“Wait! Didn’t you hear her start to say something!?”

“Then why didn’t she say it from the beginning instead of trying to hide it!? If we tell you to show us everything your hiding, it’s your job to show us everything down to your asshole! That goes for you too, you old bitch. Who do you think you’re talking to!? If you do anything to upset me, I might just break both your legs!!”

...Ahh ahh, does he not understand the situation here?

If the culprit was one of us, it was entirely possible the game master behind it all could be one of the prisoners. Mystery novels were my sister’s territory, but the culprit would often commit a murder not in the original plan if things grew inconvenient.

And even if the culprit was one of the jailers, the odds were not all that low that they would decide to kill the person causing trouble for the prisoners to divert suspicion away from themselves. That would send everyone’s suspicion toward the prisoners.

Sunekosuri-chan.

Stop letting out that rare growl toward that lame coward over there.

He’s probably the first to die even if we do nothing.

“I-I know...” began Suzukawa Izumi while faintly breathing and being held in Gogan Sakura’s arms. “I know of a rumor passed between the prisoners about a fr-free pass. I don’t know what it is, but it seems there’s a special category of the well-behaved prisoners who are chosen to go above ground to clean. If they return by assembly time, they are free to leave the factory grounds.”

“Don’t make shit up!!”

I held out a hand to calm down the “badass” Yamada-chan who was about to grow violent again.

“What about you?” I asked the prisoner in her fifties.

“I have heard of the free pass.”

“Even though you are all in solitary confinement?”

“It is possible to speak with the other prisoners while cleaning outdoors. That refreshing feeling is one of the reasons that periodically acquiring the ticket for cleaning duty is the difference between living on and being driven to suicide.” Gogan Sakura turned a blatantly hostile look toward Yamada. “But I do not know if it actually exists or not. It might be a rumor the jailers tell to toy with the prisoners or it might be a lie one prisoner made up to take advantage of another.”

In a corporate prison without money or stores, I saw little reason for fraud.

Or...

Perhaps without any money, something else held value in this prison.

When I asked, Itou Takeru the head jailer sighed in annoyance

“I have occasionally heard of alcohol showing up. Both those selling it and those buying it are ‘dealt with’ as soon as it is found.”

“That isn’t too uncommon.”

Secretly making wine or brandy or growing hallucinogenic mushrooms was common in prisons where few pleasures were to be found. It was well known enough to appear in mafia movies. I was not surprised to hear something similar had occurred in this corporate prison.

“Alcohol is not something that can simply be left in place. The temperature and humidity need to be carefully managed. To adjust for that, wouldn’t someone need to use this free pass to periodically check on the barrel?”

“Perhaps. By the way, have you ever found the secret distillery itself?”

I had meant it as a casual question, but Itou Takeru’s shoulders drooped. Cowardly Yamada-kun and gaudy Sakai looked awkwardly away from the old man.

I sighed and said, “If they were able to hide that, they could have hidden other things as well, right?”

“Alcohol can be used to make money. We had feared one of the delivery workers that brings parts in from outside might be involved. Then again, the system we have created is not one that allows a jailbreak with only a shovel.”

“Yet that security was completely useless when a Youkai was involved.”

Instead of Itou the head jailer, all of the subordinate jailers glared at me.

It seemed none of them wanted me to give him a reason to grow angry.

I continued regardless.

“Then maybe we should start there. Where was this occasional supply of alcohol made? If we know where it was hidden, we might find signs of some other trick.”

“We checked,” said cowardly Yamada-kun in annoyance. “We checked every inch within the walls! Our only achievement was finding some termites. We didn’t find any barrels. And I’ve never seen any suspicious Youkai or anything.”

“U-um, we could check over everything again now, but it might take more than a day with the number of people we have,” added Kurumaya-chan, the nervous female jailer.

I simply replied, “Then maybe there isn’t anything within the walls.”

“You’re the one that brought it up! You keep jumping from topic to topic!”

“I only said it isn’t within the walls. Could the distillery be hidden outside the walls?”

After all, the Four Mountains area was a clean water jug for the semiconductor factory.

It contained nothing but overly untouched nature and an abandoned village that had been submerged in bloodshed several decades ago.

There were more than enough places to hide a distillery, acquire a Youkai, or put together a Package.

“It’s possible,” agreed Itou while sounding annoyed. “But that leaves the crucial question of how they periodically left the walls.”

“That would be the free pass. It seems to have been even more convenient than we thought.”

The jailer group turned toward Suzukawa Izumi and Gogan Sakura.

The high school aged Suzukawa shrank back.

“H-how should we know!?”

“That’s right. And if this free pass really exists, why would they come and go? Why not leave once and then run off?”

That was exactly right.

However...

“If the person using the free pass was planning a large scale jailbreak, escaping alone would not be their ultimate goal.”

“Wha-...!?”

“That means the prisoners really are the most suspicious!!”

Cowardly Yamada seemed to mistakenly think his IQ would go up every time he grew violent because he tried to lash out at Suzukawa-chan again. I spoke up to stop him.

“However, nothing says only the prisoner group could use the free pass. If there is a way to get a heavily guarded prisoner outside the prison walls, one of the jailers could easily sneak out as well.”

“Wait, wait, wait!! This is no time to be joking around. Why the hell would we need to do that!?”

“Maybe you were dissatisfied with the prison’s power structure or you were following some idea of justice. There were several thousand jailers, after all. It wouldn’t be surprising if one or two felt sorry for the prisoners and tried to destroy the system here.”

Was it one of the jailers, one of the prisoners, or some newly-formed group spanning both sides that wished to destroy the corporate prison?

Itou Takeru, the head jailer and supervisor, could not have liked the sound of any the possibilities.

Or was he intentionally giving off such a nervous aura to turn suspicion elsewhere?

“By the way, do you have any ideas concerning this free pass?”

“I doubt there is a hole through the walls and your security is not foolish enough to allow a tunnel to be made, right?”

“Of course not!? Are you fucking with us!?”

“In that case,” I said while winking and resisting the urge to cover my ears. “Keep in mind that this facility functions as a semiconductor factory, so it is not a completely isolated and closed off place. Materials are brought in and products and waste are brought out. Would it be easy to hide in one of those trucks?”

A few of the jailers turned toward Sakai Haruka’s gaudy face.

Come to think of it, she managed the main gate.

“Wait, wait, please wait! We check through every single truck! Anyone would think of that!!”

“I thought as much. But there is a corporate prison truck that has to be kept secret mixed in with the official semiconductor factory trucks. That one goes without an inspection, right?”

“?”

“A truck is needed to dispose of the dead. I hear prisoners die here quite frequently, but you don’t just bury them around here, do you? You must have a corpse disposal infrastructure. There has to be some cycle set up to quickly and surely dispose of them. Am I wrong?”

Itou Takeru, the head jailer, clicked his tongue.

The look on his face plainly said he did not want to explain this.

“Any corpses in an unusual state for suicide are left to another division in Kuroyama. We freeze them and load them aboard a refrigerated truck.”

“Do you know what happens after that?”

“I have had it explained to me, but I have never been involved in it myself. They completely freeze them with liquid nitrogen or something and smash them to pieces. Supposedly, they are turned into a sherbet, bones and all. This is made into fish food. Kuroyama makes electronics, so it runs tons of freighters. In the middle of international waters, the fish food is scattered into the ocean, so no one is aware of it.”

The two prisoners, Suzukawa Izumi and Gogan Sakura, both paled.

I looked down at the Sunekosuri who looked oddly irritated.

“So someone could hide inside the corpse-filled truck and not be found. I don’t know how often the trucks come and go, but someone could make it back the same day if it’s more than twice a day. Right?”

However...

If that thinking was accurate, the situation was very bad.

Even the corporate prison grounds were too large for us to search through in a day. Now it was possible the area had expanded to the entirety of the Four Mountains area.

We would of course eventually find the answer if we performed a thorough search.

But would the culprit wait that long? They could cause mysterious phenomena as much they wanted, so wouldn’t they block us from reaching their mysterious hiding spot and cleverly work to achieve their goal?

“What the hell?” muttered cowardly Yamada in annoyance. “Outside the prison? Is some ghost of Zenmetsu Village wandering around?”

“Now that you mention it.” Inspired by cowardly Yamada’s comment, the prisoner Gogan Sakura spoke up. “I heard something about a ghost of Zenmetsu Village.”

“?”

“The semiconductor factory – or rather, the corporate prison – is made up of people who came from outside Four Mountains. Eight thousand people work and live here, but they are all outsiders.”

“And?”

“But I hear there is one mixed in,” said Gogan Sakura while stroking the girl’s back. “I do not know if it is a jailer or prisoner, but there is a survivor of the slaughter in Zenmetsu Village somewhere in here.”

The atmosphere suddenly froze over.

It seemed the incident at Zenmetsu Village was a taboo topic here.

I was curious what these people had to be afraid of when they had created this corporate prison that systematically mass produced suicides by giving people nothing to do.

“That’s just a ridiculous rumor and desire,” spat out Itou Takeru the supervisor. “Let me guess. Does the story claim this survivor is waiting for a chance to take revenge against those living comfortably in the factory? It’s just a dream of someone doing to the jailers what the prisoners cannot.”

“Th-that’s right. And the incident at Zenmetsu Village happened 30 years ago during the conflict between the villagers and the corporation over who could use the underground water. To have been around back then, they would need to be-...”

The nervous jailer Kurumaya Nozomi trailed off and her face paled in shock.

That’s right.

Itou Takeru is a dandy in his fifties.

“Ridiculous.”

“Well, that would make me a suspect, too,” laughed the middle-aged Gogan Sakura self-deprecatingly. “And the term ‘survivor’ is pretty vague in the first place. I’ve also heard versions of the rumor that say a survivor sent a descendent to the factory, so age might not be much help. The rumors are clear about one thing though: this person is definitely here.”

I see.

So is the murderer taking a U-turn?

No, Itou mentioned taking revenge against those in the factory, so maybe Zenmetsu Village was systematically wiped out by an assassination group hired by the corporation.

If that’s the case, it might be time to add a subtitle saying “the true murderer has arrived!”

“Heh! That’s just a dream of you losers!! That’s just you pathetic prisoners coming up with a convenient hero in your heads because you can’t do anything yourselves!!”

“It does not sound convenient to me,” replied the prisoner Suzukawa Izumi as if spitting out the words. She averted her gaze from cowardly Yamada. “After all, some of the rumors say the survivor of Zenmetsu Village will indiscriminately slaughter both jailers and prisoners.”

Now, everything had warmed up nicely.

There were three things we needed to look into for the moment.

1. What Youkai had carried out this bizarre phenomenon?

2. Was the rumor of a free pass true?

3. Was there really a survivor of Zenmetsu Village within the factory?

Of course, the biggest question was the following:

Who was the culprit behind all this?

Part 19 (Jinnai Shinobu)

Sounds similar to people walking through the dead grass continued through the run-down shacks in the remains of the village.

Madoka tugged on arm to get me to run, but I could not move.

This was partly due to my hips feeling like they were going to give out.

But this intense fear also made me want to see what this was. I wanted to sweep it away. I could not stand any more, so I wanted to settle everything here. That pessimistic courage led me to focus on what lay beyond the thick fog.

And...

I saw something glitter at a very, very low position through the fog. It was as low as someone’s shoelaces.

...Metallic luster?

The identity of what was approaching showed itself.

It was not troops from the Kuroyama Electronics Group as Yokoeda Tadashi had suggested.

“Sn-snakes?” said Madoka in confusion. “Shinobu-kun, it’s a swarm of snakes!! They’re everywhere!!”

She was exactly right. They were black snakes about 30 centimeters long and about as thick as a little finger. They spread out enough to cover one entire compass direction.

Humans tended to view something in large enough numbers as a single whole and give it special meaning. For example, a city nightscape. This was the same. The writhing mass of snakes had become something different from simple reptiles. They were a single monster. A sense of disgust rushed from the tips of my fingers and up the thick nerves of my spine.

Madoka’s face paled and she shouted out.

“We need to go, Shinobu-kun. We don’t know what kind of snakes these are. They might be venomous! If we’re bit here, we have no way of being treated!”

“No, wait a second...”

The snakes had something like a gold ring around their heads.

Every single one of the snakes had this artificial sign that would never be seen on a wild snake.

Where have I seen something like this...?

“That’s right! Below the floor in Zenmetsu Village! A broken jar had held a bunch of gold rings. Are those the same as what’s on these snakes!?”

If so, did that mean these snakes had been raised in the houses of Zenmetsu Village?

A large number of snakes, a jar, and gold rings.

What is this? I feel like I’ve heard something similar to this before.

Dammit. It’s right on the tip of my tongue...

“Shinobu-kun!!”

When Madoka shouted at me from close by once more, I finally realized the swarm of snakes was about to reach my feet.

“Wah!”

I frantically jumped back and left with Madoka. We ran. We fled.

We did not know where Yokoeda Tadashi had gone, but we did not have time to search for him. We ran through the thick fog in a random direction.

“Y-you’ve got to be kidding me. We’ve been doing nothing but running around! And without any chance for warm up exercises. I had better not get a leg cramp and hurt my Achilles tendon.”

“Hey, where are we?”

We ran and ran and ran and ran.

By the time I suddenly came to a stop, the run-down shacks were nowhere to be found. Only the rotten dead grass continued on ahead of us. The fog did not help, but the lack of any visible landmarks was more frightening than I would have thought. It felt like being abandoned in the middle of a desert.

“I don’t know. We haven’t run all the way to Mars, have we?”

“I think I see something up ahead.”

After catching our breath, Madoka and I headed deeper into the fog.

Something was neatly lined up like desks in a classroom.

They were giant stones.

“...Another graveyard? We already saw one.”

“But this isn’t the same place as before. The surface of these gravestones looks a lot more carefully carved.

Did they have some reason for splitting their graveyard into two places?

If Yokoeda Tadashi was with us, we might have been able to ask him, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Also, these gravestones did not really matter at the moment.

We had no idea when that swarm of snakes would arrive and there could easily be more than one swarm. In the worst case, the entire Four Mountains area could be the snakes’ habitat and they could fill the entire area.

I was worried about our classmates, but this was no situation in which to begin a random search.

We had to ensure our own safety first.

We walked past the graveyards and the feel of the area changed. Everything was still falling apart, but a wall made of piled up stones cut across. It did not match my impression of the people who had lived in storage shed sized houses made of plywood and galvanized sheet iron. It felt like the basic standard had suddenly shot up.

“It looks like we can get in here,” said Madoka.

Instead of a gate, she had found a crumbled area of the wall.

We stepped over it and continued on.

Two thick wooden pillars stood side by side. Madoka commented that they looked like a torii. This was not an explosion of deductive reasoning on her part. Beyond it, we found a wooden shrine that had been crushed into nothing but a pile of wood.

Compared to the plywood and iron from before, the building had likely had a fair bit of style.

If it had not been smashed into pieces, that is.

The shrine had been smashed down to its foundation and the pile of wooden material had plenty of parts that had been scorched black. It would take quite a bit of persistence to destroy a building to this extent.

“Why would you destroy a shrine? What happened?”

“Was there a coup d’etat by the people?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the grade of the shrine was clearly greater than those dilapidated shacks. There must have been a pretty big class divide. If you cannot resolve your dissatisfaction, it simply builds up. Once it passed a certain level, it can explode out in the form of physical violence.”

We circled around the destroyed shrine and realized a few houses existed beyond it.

That’s right. Houses.

These large rural houses were a lot like my own thatch-roof house. They were quite different from the plywood and iron shacks. It seemed the people belonging to a special class had been gathered within that stone wall.

But unlike the shrine, these houses had not been destroyed.

The thatch roofs had rotted away from neglect and about half of the roofs had crumbled into the buildings, but that was simply due to the passage of time. There was no sign of blunt weapons breaking pillars or fires being set like there was with the shrine.

“It looks like that shrine received special treatment.”

“These are a lot different from the plywood and iron shacks from before. These buildings make me think the owners had some money.”

Really?

I had lived in an Intellectual Village’s thatch-roof house all my life, so I did not actually know how much a house like this was worth.

How much would one of these cost?

“But these houses are falling apart as much as the others, so I doubt they can protect us from those snakes.”

I stepped inside one of the houses with my shoes on.

The wood floor of the hallway creaked so much I was worried about breaking through. I could see old dressers and hanging scrolls, so it had a very different atmosphere to the plywood houses where people had seemed barely able to survive.

“They look wealthy enough, but they still didn’t have gas or running water.”

“There’s something that looks like a hastily written account book again.”

I touched a bundle of Japanese paper placed on the wall. I used my phone to photograph a few of the pages that looked like they were about to crumble from the moisture.

I stepped into the kitchen that had a furnace and a giant water jug. That was a sight you did not even see in an Intellectual Village. I crouched down and tapped on the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“I thought there might be one here too.”

After I checked around a bit, I found a spot that made a different noise. I slid my hand across and found a rusty latch. It was a door to a storage area under the floor. I pulled it open and found a small rectangular space. And inside...

“Look at that jar. It’s on its side, but it isn’t broken yet.”

“Are those things spilling out of the jar the gold rings that were on those snakes’ heads?”

I had a feeling those snakes were some kind of Youkai.

I scooped up the jar from the storage area. It must have held quite a few gold rings because it made a jangling noise when I shook it slightly.

A piece of Japanese paper that had yellowed with age was attached to the side of the jar.

The characters were written too sloppily to read, but they appeared to be the same as the ones from that plywood shack.

The paper had two kanji on it.

“...Tou? I think that first kanji is Tou.”

“But the second one is way too complex to read. I’m not even sure if that’s a kanji we use anymore.”

These jars existed in both the wealthy houses and the plywood shacks.

The jars contained gold rings identical to the ones on that swarm of snakes.

Are those snakes a Youkai that sticks with a house like a Zashiki Warashi?

However...

I had never heard of a Zashiki Warashi that continued protecting a house even after its residents were gone. From what I had seen of Zenmetsu Village, a house Youkai would have no reason to remain here for decades afterwards.

The only exception was Yokoeda Tadashi who had lived here the entire time.

But he had mistaken the swarm of snakes for human assassins, so it seemed unlikely that he was those snakes’ family and that they were all under his control.

Thirty years before, the villagers of Zenmetsu Village had been slaughtered. If those were normal snakes, those gold rings would have to be placed on any new snakes as they were born, but Yokoeda Tadashi, the only person here, did not seem to know about them.

That left no one to put those gold rings on them.

Yet all of those countless snakes had the gold rings.

Were they always like that?

Are they Youkai that never age and never change form?

“What should we do now?” asked Madoka. “This is probably the most extravagant and sturdiest part of the village. ...Even this wealthy district is falling apart. If those snakes arrive again, they will be able to get in through all the gaps.”

“True. Just hiding isn’t going to cut it.”

“Where should we go?”

“If those snakes are a type of Youkai, there might be some kind of text explaining how to use them. And conveniently enough, this is the home of some of the most influential people of the village.”

“But it’s all written so sloppily we cannot read it.”

“It’s better than not trying at all.”

After all, Youkai could not be killed by any normal means. Making a Molotov cocktail from the fuel in the generator outside would not be enough to protect us. There was only one way to deal with Youkai: investigate the characteristics of that type and remove yourself from the conditions causing them to attack you.

And so Madoka and I began a thorough search of the mansion.

We passed by a pillar that was bent like a bow, crouched below a rotting ceiling that looked like it could collapse at any moment, watched it actually collapse behind us, and walked across rotten straw from the thatch roof. A few documents stored in an old bookshelf were still intact, but everything else was much more difficult to deal with. Most of them had fused into a single mass like a bundle of wet toilet paper.

“But we can’t read any of this...”

“I told you.”

Madoka tossed a bundle of Japanese paper aside and leaned up against a nearby wall.

And then she disappeared.

Or so it seemed.

She had actually broken through the rotten mud wall and fallen backwards out of the building.

“Gyah!!”

“Try for a cute ‘kyahn!’ next time, Madoka!”

I ran out the square hole that had once held a sliding door and ran over to where she had fallen out into the backyard. Madoka was lying on her back while covered in rotten building material. For better or for worse, the squishy material seemed to have cushioned her head. Her uniform’s skirt was flipped up by quite a bit, revealing gray boxer shorts that were so disappointing I wanted to cry.

The world grew dark before my eyes.

“You idiot!! Do you think you’re a guy!?”

“But this is more comfortable! And it matches the sports bra!! And why are you the one getting angry when my underwear is on full display!? ...Wait.”

Madoka then seemed to spot something.

She pointed through the fog.

“Shinobu-kun, look at that.”

“Hm? What is it?”

I had not noticed it before, but it seemed a sharp upward slope began right behind the house. It was either a cliff or one of the mountains around Four Mountains.

But Madoka had not been referring to it.

“No, that over there.” She pointed at the same spot once more. “There is a cave.”

Part 20 (Uchimaku Hayabusa)

We had decided to drive to a service area where we could use our cell phones to gather data. But that plan quickly failed.

It happened once we had arrived near the interchange.

“Dammit, what is going on?”

Our speed dro-->>

next page