Volume 17, 3: Or Isolation Surpasses a Group - Engage_U.F.O.(1/5)
Part 1
It was midnight. The date had changed.
But in her burial clothes with bewitchingly exposed cleavage, Maya did not even think about moving away from the Sphere which was opened like a lotus flower. She continued her long-term information warfare with her two partners: the vegetable sticks and a high quality smoothie made from peaches, milk, 100% acacia honey, vanilla extract, and no artificial additives whatsoever.
Ghosts did not sleep.
Sleep was important for the organization of memories and crucial for maintenance of the brain, but that meant nothing to Maya who did not rely on a physical body. Or perhaps the vengeful spirits in most ghost stories were so fixated on a single thing because they could not carry out that maintenance.
She was in District 7’s college shelter named Academy.
She would do anything for Kamisato Kakeru. Even obey someone like Kihara Yuiitsu.
“Hm, hm, hm, hmmm.”
She hummed quietly while hunched forward. She pulled a piece of yellow paprika cut long and thin from the colorful sticks in the glass cup.
To chase down Kamijou Touma and Karasuma Fran, she was spreading largescale misinformation from her multiple regional stations to cause trouble across Academy City. Once those two were caught in the trouble, they were sure to use some kind of special methods to escape it and she only needed to reveal the traces of that. This kind of information warfare was her specialty, but while in contact with the Sphere, she developed an obsession that ignored efficiency and logic.
The seeds she sowed did not always bloom the way she wanted.
Rumors would change form bit by bit as they were spread from person to person. And once they passed a certain point, they would become something else entirely as if going through a mutation.
And since Maya had a specific objective, she did not want that kind of unordered and uncontrollable change. When the changes passed the acceptable range, she would inject new information to change it back and course correct. But that was not a total overwriting of the data. It was a lot like giving different types of food to an all-consuming amoeba to see which way it grew.
She felt like she was raising a child.
As a bodiless ghost, she may have been treating this like an alternative to that, but she did not delve that far into self-analysis. She was still a ghost. The memory of her death slept somewhere inside her and she knew she must not uncover that.
Currently, there were three major rumors swimming through the city-wide network created between the shelter Spheres.
First, the heat wave was caused by the powerful microwaves sent out by Karasuma Fran’s personal space station and that was deeply connected to the Elements that had attacked Academy City.
Second, the heat wave was caused by abnormal solar winds caused by a great distortion in solar activity. The drop from 55 degrees to below 0 would not end and an ice age would soon arrive.
And third, the heat wave and Elements never actually existed. They were all a largescale virtual reality project run by Academy City’s leaders.
“What have we here...?”
Maya focused on that last rumor as she shook her long black hair and toyed with the radish stick between her lips like it was a cigarette or a chocolate covered snack.
There were of course countless other smaller topics of discussion, but those would burst like soap bubbles all on their own. Only the virtual reality theory stuck around like a truly stubborn bubble.
It was not exactly large, but it would not pop and disappear on its own.
That ember had a disconcerting presence, like a cigarette butt thrown into a dry mountain forest during winter.
(A multi-station rival channel? Would that be Fran? But it’s strange she isn’t painting us as the villains...)
She pulled a carrot stick from the cup, pictured the rabbit-ear antennae girl in her mind, and bit through the carrot with her front teeth.
She kind of understood how this sort of rumor could spread so easily.
First, if everything was virtual reality, everyone could stop worrying about all of the previous damage. Instead of working toward recovery, they could just wake up to their normal lives, so it would be an attractive idea.
Second, the theory was helped by the fact that surviving during a heat wave and encountering Elements modeled after mimicry animals sounded like something from a video game.
And finally, Academy City had too many mysteries. No one knew if they had practical technology for virtual reality, but there was a general atmosphere that “this city could pull it off” or “I can totally see them trying that”. Also, most of the boys and girls had been helplessly hit by the disasters, so they would want a clear villain to blame. In other words, all responsibility was shifted onto the adults. They might want to shout that this was all due to some strange project and raise their fists to show they had not simply lost.
And what would the spread of this rumor actually accomplish?
Or more specifically, what was in it for Karasuma Fran?
“...Ohhh, I see.”
Needless to say, everyone would stop struggling if they truly believed this was all virtual. They would only need to wait until they woke up, so there would be no need to put themselves through any difficult experiences. They might starve to death in a week or two like that, but Useful Spider was moving around outside. Their 48 Hours to Restore Order project was underway. Nearly a full day had passed, so the crucial power, gas, and water infrastructure would be back up in about 24 more hours. The students could survive that long without eating or drinking.
This would stop the simultaneous riots triggered across the city by the baseless rumors.
If that was Fran’s top priority, then it was an effective one.
And “it’s all virtual” was a quite adaptable. Maya could come up with all sorts of clever stories, but they would all be swallowed up by a single phrase: “But it’s all virtual, right?” And since no one knew the true level of Academy City’s technology, it would be difficult to find evidence to dispute that assertion.
(The biggest flaw is how she’s relying on the strangers in Useful Spider to preserve everyone’s lives. Isn’t she afraid we’ll attack Useful Spider and slow down the recovery until that apathetic group starves?)
They could do that, but they did not need to. And in addition to the risk of starvation, it was possible the desperate people would begin an even greater riot once they were convinced this was a virtual world where they could do whatever they wanted. Whether Fran was behind the rumor or not, the virtual reality theory would not be easy to get rid of if it mutated in a negative direction. This could be a good opportunity to drive that group out wherever they were hiding.
(I don’t like leaving Salome and the others with that tyrant, so I should probably check on that before deciding.)
She could see the rumors she had created and spread and she could see another rumor that may or may not have been hostile. What kind of artistic transformation would occur when they were linked together? The girl in white burial clothes giggled and traced her slender fingertips across one petal of the Sphere’s lotus flower.
And as soon as she did, she heard a voice amplified by a loudspeaker even thought it was past midnight.
“This is Useful Spider. We are now entering Phase 3 of the 48 Hours to Restore Order. We will be collecting any weapons or dangerous objects that could impede the recovery. The threat of the Elements has passed. The aforementioned objects are bound to have a negative influence on your lives and property, so we are using our special authority to temporarily freeze your human rights to collect them.”
(Useful-...?)
One of Maya’s eyebrows shot up, but she did not have time to turn around.
The chic college building made of heavy bricks was torn apart like it was made of thin Japanese paper.
At first, not even the ghost girl understood what had happened.
When she saw the destruction start at one edge and the materials fly up into the night sky, she finally thought of an iron sheet roof being destroyed by a typhoon or tornado.
Yes.
“A gust...of wind...!?”
As soon as she found the answer, the girl in white burial clothing was blown several dozen meters into the sky. Maya called herself a ghost, but her existence was reliant on the physical objects known as Censers. Those crane fly shaped drones secretly emitted aromas and low-frequency waves too insignificant for a human’s five senses to detect. That would destabilize people’s minds and Maya generally appeared below them.
In other words, there was nothing she could do if the Censers themselves were thrown high into the air.
The ghost girl spun around and around and finally regained her balance at the height of a high-rise building’s rooftop. The will-o’-the-wisp-like phosphorescent drones could still fly. The triangular headdress with a cut that made it look like a heart had shifted out of place and the white burial clothing was falling off in places, so her alluring thighs and surprisingly large breasts were about to slip out. However, bugs and small fish caught in a tornado could apparently be thrown higher than Everest, so she may have been fortunate this was as much as had happened.
But she could not exactly rejoice.
“Oh, honestly. Where did my vegetable sticks and smoothie go!?”
With a dull sound, something large passed through Maya’s head from the side. The device had originally been a 2 meter sphere but had opened like a lotus flower to allow access to the controls. The Sphere had flown as high as she had. Since the Censers had finally stabilized, Maya reached out her translucent arm while floating in midair, but it was no use. Gravity pulled the precision device down toward the late night disaster scene.
Maya’s gaze followed it down and she spotted a strange device.
The Academy shelter was using a college building, but she saw something strange outside the campus. It was a giant cylinder 20-30 meters wide. The flat circular end was producing a grinding sound while rapidly rotating, so the girl in burial clothing initially though it was a large tunnel boring machine.
But it was not.
(A giant fan...? Is it used for wind tunnel experiments?)
Wind tunnels were the facilities used to test the air resistance of airplanes, high-speed trains, sports cars, and such before actually using them. The artificial wind created by a giant fan or vacuum pump would simulate the air resistance it would meet in use, but the latest generation could apparently simulate the gales(?) needed for the Mach 7 instantaneous wind speeds seen by supersonic fighters or ballistic missiles.
If that was used against a building, a house of straw and a house of brick would meet the same fate. The students of Academy were preparing their handmade defense weapons such as a giant slingshot made from bicycle tire tubes and a metal frame, but it was likely futile. They would have a hard time getting close with that giant fan in front of them and their projectile’s ballistic path would be far from stable. In fact, it was possible the wind could send the projectile right back toward the people who had fired it.
The ghost girl placed her hands on her hips and stared down at her crumbling kingdom as she hovered in the moonlight. She had only borrowed that key station after hijacking it, but this was still not fun to watch. She still had a few Spheres in stock since she had been using them as regional stations for her multi-stage attacks, but she doubted Useful Spider was attacking just the one place. If the same thing was happening across Academy City, she could lose all of her Spheres.
It was bad enough having the possibly hostile virtual reality theory growing ominously in the background, so she wanted to avoid being completely cut off from the network.
It did not matter how much the “enemy” knew when they took action.
What mattered was whether or not it would impede with the actions meant to help Kamisato Kakeru. It all came down to that for the girl who clung to the world of the living even after losing her body.
And as her eyes glared brightly from behind her disheveled black hair, the vengeful spirit spoke in a low voice.
“Do you have any idea who you’re picking a fight with, you fools?”
Part 2
Kamijou Touma was also soaked with unpleasant sweat as he held Mikoto’s limp form in his arms and pressed his back against a building wall.
They had a chance at saving Kamisato Kakeru thanks to Mikoto’s sacrifice, but they could not leave her there unconscious. Even if it took a fair amount of time, they had decided to send Mikoto back to the frog doctor’s hospital before beginning the ceremony using the A.A.A. in the container yard.
As a high school boy, Kamijou did not normally think about it, but the lack of cars was a problem. They could not call an ambulance and they could not move any of the heavy industry containers.
But something else happened first.
It was just after he, Fran, and Luca had left the pyramids of metal containers in District 11.
The entire scene was swept away by a powerful gust of wind.
The target was a nearby shelter and not Kamijou’s group, but it was obvious what would happen if a stray blast hit them.
“Commencing nonlethal suppression. Please set down your weapons and surrender. The threat of the Elements has passed. Useful Spider shall protect your lives and property. There is no more need for you to arm yourselves with weapons and dangerous objects.”
“Nonlethal...? Did they just say nonlethal!? They’re using giant fans that could blow down reinforced concrete or a small building!!”
“Adult society is all about categorizing things,” said Fran. “A hunting slingshot is considered nonlethal and thus does not violate the Swords and Firearms Control Law. Even though it has the word ‘hunting’ written big on the label.”
They were pressed against the corner of a building and winds moving at who knew how many thousands of kph were flying along the road around that corner. Orange sparks flew from a large abandoned truck. Pirate Girl Luca gulped with her clothes stretched to the bursting point after growing to her adult size for more weight against the wind.
“It’s that white sand. The wind is carrying the remains of the Elements and that’s scraping at the metal like a file.”
“Not to mention the lighter cars on the side of the road are flying like leaves. It’s too dangerous to cross the street like this.”
After learning her lesson about getting sand in her clothes, Rabbit-Ear Antennae Fran had zipped her hoodie up all the way to the neck.
As ridiculously large as it was, it was still a fan, so Kamijou watched the timing as it turned back and forth and ran out across the street with Mikoto in his arms when the gust of wind was pointed the other way.
They had no detailed information on the shelter under attack, but they could tell it was as frenzied as a disturbed wasp’s nest despite the late hour. A lot of the students were armed with large water guns with pressurized pumps, but after that heat wave, Kamijou doubted they were armed with equipment that would waste water.
He then recalled how Fran and Luca had tried and spectacularly failed to wash off their bodies with sterilization ethanol.
“Are they combining water guns full of oil or alcohol with a Pyrokinesis esper? That’s pretty damn dangerous when we don’t have a ready supply of water!”
“Maybe their shelter’s name is just Esper.”
Whatever the case, they were outnumbered. Useful Spider used their powerful wind to tear apart the building. Wind and fire were a poor match. Using a flamethrower now could easily fill the air with heat and provide the wind with a temperature measuring in the hundreds or even thousands of degrees. Breathing in that deadly wind would blister the lungs.
Kamijou knew it was hopeless, but he performed a lariat on the neck of a boy who ran around a nearby corner with two water guns in hand. While the shocked shelter warrior struggled to breathe, Kamijou dragged him behind the building and yelled into his ear.
“It’s no use! Look, there are people sneaking around out back. Your ruler and his or her aides are escaping on their own! They’re sending the rest of you into an unwinnable battle to keep themselves safe!!”
“My little sister’s in the shelter. She has asthma and can’t run around much, but she has Level 3 Pyrokinesis, so she’s being used as the ignition for our fighting force! She can’t leave with everyone gathered around her like that!!”
“You’re kidding, right? You aren’t actually Tsuchimikado, are you?”
“Who!?”
“Argh. If you really care about your family, then grab your sister’s hand and get the hell out of here. With the pillar of your resistance force gone, everyone with the water guns will be forced to retreat. Betray them all to save them all. If you don’t want to regret this, then get going! Hurry!!”
Kamijou slapped the boy’s back to send him off and then slowly exhaled with Mikoto still in his arms.
Then he spoke.
“Let’s gather the attention of those Spider bastards. Helping the shelter win is a lost cause, so let’s focus on giving them a clean loss so they can retreat. That’s how we can save their lives.”
“I get that, but what exactly do we do?” asked Adult Luca with her clothes stretched tight in places.
Kamijou pointed at her large breasts. No, he pointed at the leather belts emphasizing them like a waitress’s suspenders. Needless to say, he was focused on what the belts held: her pirate musket, the skull container of gunpowder, and the bullet case modeled after an arm bone.
“They’re hunting the weapons we have. Luca, you don’t actually have to fire the gun. Can you detonate the gunpowder to make it sound like gunfire? It can be something as primitive as a mosquito coil, but you should be able to delay the detonation to create a safe decoy.”
“I see.”
As she responded, the girl in a thick naval coat and bikini reached for the skull container on her belt. She hopped a bit to shake the container at her hip.
“Since the shelter is primarily using flamethrowers, there should be embers all over the place, right?”
They had a plan.
But then a roar much like a large sheet striking the air passed by overhead.
They looked up and saw multiple transport helicopters using thick wires to carry a giant cylindrical device that looked a lot like a tunnel boring machine.
“They’re headed elsewhere,” said Fran.
“Dammit,” cursed Kamijou. “District 11 is that way.”
And given Useful Spider’s current actions, a very troubling possibility came to mind. They were in the process of hunting down all weapons.
“This is bad. If we don’t do anything, they’ll confiscate and scrap the A.A.A.!!”
Part 3
Frigid moonlight fell on one of many high-rise building rooftops.
Overhead, several transport helicopters used wires to carry a large fan known as the Breath of Blessing, but on that rooftop, a thin man in a shabby work uniform faced the ruler of the city.
“How do you do, Board Chairman?”
“...”
“Yes, yes. Don’t worry. I don’t mind at all if you don’t recognize me or remember my name. In fact, just being some faceless person helps me represent the will of all such invisible people.”
This was the pathetic man who had been lifted up as the ruler of Trial in a certain park but was ultimately nearly executed by the very people of that shelter. And that faceless person was hiding nothing. He was not sealing away his true power and he was not deceiving everyone with an act. That such a pathetic man could meet face-to-face with the head of Academy City held great meaning.
This was something Academy City’s #2 had once failed to accomplish, but this perfectly ordinary man had proved it was possible for anyone.
The “human” kept this target in a position where he could be killed at any moment.
“What do you want with this city?”
“Surely someone of your intelligence already knows.” The work uniform man made it sound simple. “I’m not a very useful pawn, so you can’t accomplish much of anything whether you kill me here or do anything else with me. Otherwise, you wouldn’t even be meeting me face-to-face like this. No, I was never thinking of anything as frightening as defying you.”
He was not like Group or Item where bizarre talents gathered. He was even lower than the Hound Dogs or Scavengers who reported directly to the Board of Directors. He was part of an organization that was often sent out to clean up after the Kihara family or someone else made a mess.
“But the thing about history is, none of that really matters. Seemingly trivial things can have surprisingly large effects. If it hadn’t been so hot or it hadn’t rained, they say Nobunaga would have lost his very first battle.”
When making water overflow from a cup, only a fool would turn the faucet on full blast. The clever person would wait until someone else had filled it with water until the surface tension was about to break and then they would put in a single drop themselves. Preparing the environment like that was the only way for an unimportant person to set history in motion.
To repeat, he was just one of the masses. He was a faceless person who no one would remember. Normally, he could never accomplish something that Academy City’s #2 monster had failed at.
Then who was it that had filled the cup full of water?
“This is catastrophe you brought on yourself,” announced the man. “The key to disaster prevention is prediction and avoidance, not recovery after the fact. In that way, your sin was negligence. Someone with your intelligence should have predicted this. Both the appearance of the Elements and the unnatural heat wave used to combat them.”
“...”
“You knew it was coming, but you overlooked it. All for your own goal. Then that is a sin. All I did was place a single drop in the cup you had filled to the brim.”
“I see. In other words...”
“Unlike you, I don’t stand out and I have no grand ambitions. If I had control of the recovery, I could probably build a system to my liking, but wanting that is only natural. Everyone wants a society in which they need not fear disaster. And to that end, I want to stand in front of the leader who stood idly by and let disaster strike. That’s all this is. And there’s no real need for an empty person like me to take that role.”
“...”
“Boring, isn’t it? But that pointless crap can become the crack that ultimately shatters grand ambitions. You should be more aware that it is the great men who build the world, but it is the normal people who gradually distort that world.”
Several more helicopters passed by overhead. Those crude hunks of metal would have been defeated in the blink of an eye if water, gas, and electricity still circulated through Academy City like blood, but now several of those devices were carried out to the city.
“Disasters are full of superstition and jinxes. When a powerful earthquake hits, people say the dolphins predicted it and it was the work of an earthquake weapon. When a hurricane hits land, people say it was redirected by a government bombing experiment and it was spreading chemtrail chemicals. Countless rumors will spread as if people want to dramatize the tragic situation.”
The Breath of Blessing devices had originally been designed to artificially alter the wind direction and redirect toxic smoke away from densely populated areas when a dangerous chemical fire began in an Academy City laboratory. But the current situation made it clear that nonlethal firefighting usage was only an excuse for the paperwork. And the process that led to that excessively powerful machine’s development was exactly what this faceless person had to fight.
“Disaster situations are extremely dangerous, so the people must be disarmed. ...That is another superstition with no basis behind it, but no one can shake it. The thing is, Aleister, we are fighting people like you so we can let go of those things.”
He had likely said what he wanted to say.
At the very least, that “human” decided he had.
The frigid rooftop echoed with the sound of something wet being crushed.
Aleister did not even bother watching as the remains of a man slowly collapsed backwards without even uttering a scream. There was no more information there. It was impossible to tell with his head thoroughly crushed, but that faceless person had likely been smiling even as a corpse.
Part 4
Adult Luca’s black powder had been even more effective than hoped, so Useful Spider’s attention had gathered elsewhere long enough for the shelter students to escape safely.
“Dammit, Luca! Did you really have to throw the ‘firecracker’ there!? They probably captured the ruler and his or her aides who had already escaped!!”
“I’d really prefer you called that a clever plan.”
“Yay!”
For some reason, the hoodie bikini girl and the feathered pirate hat and eyepatch girl exchanged a high five. Kamijou really wished he could ask Kamisato how he had scolded these girls.
Several large fans had been carried to District 11 while they secretly assisted the Esper shelter, but there was nothing they could do about that. Even if they had stopped helping and focused on that, they could not have reached the airborne transport helicopters.
Kamijou did his best to find something to be positive about.
“Are they really going to check though the entire container yard?”
“What do you mean?”
He heard the quiet sound of scraping metal. With the wind attack finally over, Fran had unzipped her hoodie again. The bright skin from her flat chest to below her navel came into view. She did not seem aware of the youthful allure she was exuding, so she tilted her head with unreadable eyes.
“They keep talking about the 48 Hours to Restore Order. By the way, Fran, do you know what time it is now?”
“Just before 2 in the morning. A fair bit of time has passed.”
“If Useful Spider is serious about that, then they only have about a day left. Meanwhile, it would take months to check through everything in that distribution base’s container yard. They’ll run right through their limit if they perform a real search.”
“Then why did they send a unit to District 11...?”
“If they’re trying to confiscate weapons, they don’t actually have to inspect all the containers. They just have to seal off the entire container yard and keep everyone out. That would take far less time than checking through each and every one of those hundreds or thousands of containers.”
In that case, Kamijou and the girls’ efforts had not been in vain.
In fact, staying in District 11 with the A.A.A. might have left them surrounded by Useful Spider and unable to do anything.
Fran puffed out her soft-looking cheeks.
“But we need that hunk of junk to save Kamisato-chan.”
“I know that.”
They had avoided being surrounded, but now they could not reach the A.A.A. which was the key to rescuing Kamisato. They knew Useful Spider’s firepower all too well after supporting that shelter. They felt like they might be blasted out of the solar system if they faced those things head-o-->>