Everything was dyed orange.

Evening had arrived and we had no time left. In less than an hour, night would fall. Our sister had already turned things in her favor more than once and now her time to shine would truly begin.

I was still separated from the Class Rep.

She was being treated like the flag in the zombie and vampire’s game of capture the flag.

If she was killed in this disaster environment simulator, that result would be sent to the uptight researchers at the university and lab. They would learn about the swimsuit dance and make fun of me. And that would eventually lead to my death. But not in virtual reality! The Class Rep’s iron fist punishment would kill me in the real world!! Yet she was now trapped in the center of the vampire army led by my older sister.

Ahh.

I think my smile is going to be faintly visible in that sunset before long..

Ayumi and I had left the flat coastal shopping district and moved to a mountainous region. The area included a dam, an observatory, and a hot spring inn. The ski slope was the biggest draw, but a partially bald mountain was all you’d be able to see at this time of year. I pedaled my collapsible bike up the zigzagging turns of the mountain road. With both of us on the bike, Ayumi had to press up against my back, but her hunger did not seem directed at my raw flesh for the time being.

Thanks to leaving the crowds, we were freed from that iron smell and that may have helped.

Hooray for negative ions.

A few images reached me from the balloon drone I had left in the city.

Smoke was rising from buildings here and there, but the commotion seemed to have entered a lull. There were no more swarms of panicked people. But that was not because rationality had returned; they had likely realized that panicking would only get them killed.

There was also no sign of a largescale conflict between the zombies and vampires.

The city center was already dyed in Erika’s colors. The eerie stillness seemed to indicate the arrival of a new order.

“What do we do now?”

I may not have asked that question because I was hoping for an answer from my little sister.

What were we going to do now?

I was asking myself. Before, I had felt like I was a bystander watching Erika and Ayumi’s sisterly fight. Even if they started grappling or the virtual city grew soaked with blood, I could have observed it impartially.

But that was off the table now.

I had to get the Class Rep away from Erika. I had to rescue her and regroup with her. And to do that, I clearly had to join the fight.

I had to fight Erika.

Ayumi had the unfair advantage of being a zombie and she had set everything up in her favor, but not even she had been able to stand up to that vampire. This was too great a foe.

How much help would I really be if I joined in?

No, how far was I willing to go?

“What do you think you can even do?” asked Ayumi in a muffled and sulking voice as she wrapped her arms around me and pressed her face against my back. “What do you think you can do after joining in right before checkmate?”

“Oh, c’mon. This is bad enough as it is, but now I have to help motivate my capricious little sister? I’m not getting paid for this, you know?”

“Fuguu.”

“Okay, okay! Don’t cry!! I’ll do everything I can, I swear it!! So don’t get your tears and snot all over my back!!”

“Really?”

“I have to do something about the Class Rep problem anyway. Even if things aren’t looking good, I’m bound to have a better shot if I have a swarm of zombies on my side. I mean it!”

I tried saying everything I could, but my little sister did not respond.

Only the sound of the pedals filled the evening mountain road.

Finally, she spoke.

“Um, Onii-chan?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you seriously love the Class Rep?”

“Bfhh!!”

The bike just about fell over, but I swerved in an S-shape and somehow managed to regain our balance.

“Why would you ask that without any warning, you incarnation of youth!!”

“Fuguu!! Fuguuuuuuuuuu!!”

“Aggaggh!? And why are you squeezing my torso like a vise!? It might be wrong to ask this of a zombie, but try to control your emotions!!”

Unable to bear it any longer, I placed my feet on the road.

After we stopped on the slope, my little sister began pressing her face against my back again. Thanks to that, I couldn’t see her expression even when I twisted around.

“Fine then, Onii-chan. The one with you now and the one teaming up with you is me, not the Class Rep.”

“Oh, is your tantrum finally over?”

“Hmph!! Zubiii!!”

“Gyah! Why would you blow your nose on my back!?”

She finally removed her face from my back and climbed down from the bike.

“Ayumi?”

“I’m hungry. That’s a problem for a zombie like me, but you need to refuel too, don’t you? Stay here and I’ll go get us some food.”

“H-hey!”

Before I could stop her, the zombie girl ran off into the underbrush.

Was she going to kick a vending machine to break it or was she going to swipe some vegetables from a farmer’s unmanned stand? Or maybe she was going to find some wild fruit or catch some wild animals. I wasn’t going to get my hopes up. As her big brother, I would be happy as long as she didn’t start feasting on a pot full of rotting arms and legs.

But when she returned, Ayumi held something unexpected.

“What’s that? Barbecue?”

“There’s a campground nearby. I remember going there on a field trip.”

She held several metal skewers and their contents gave off the lovely aroma of cooked fatty meat. Speaking of which..

There’s meat, meat, meat, and..um..meat..and..huh? More meat..???

“Why did you only grab the skewers of meat!? You meat-obsessed zombie!!”

“Sh-shut up!! Have you ever heard of a health-conscious zombie that eats vegetables!? You should be thankful it isn’t raw meat!!”

I could not figure out why Erika was jealous enough of the meat-obsessed idiot that she forced herself to drink a stomach full of blood!!

Anyway, after crawling through all that blood and gore, I didn’t have much of an appetite..or so I had assumed. But once I saw the freshly-cooked food, I started salivating. Biological reactions were a frightening thing.

“Now that I think about it, this is a simulator, so I can eat whatever I want without gaining weight. That’s crazy.”

“But I think I read some reports that it’s so realistic that it can trick your brain into producing some weird chemicals. Y’know, like growth hormones and stuff.”

“You’re kidding. So you can gain weight without actually eating anything? B-but I’m a zombie, so if I need to I can just pull out some of my own flesh to lose weight. Ah ha ha ha ha ha.”

“Ayumi, I don’t think liposuction counts as a diet.”

Ayumi must have noticed the hunger on my face because she obediently gave me a few of the skewers.

“But what are we going to do now?” she asked while munching on the meat.

“That’s the real question..”

“Night will be here soon. And that’s the vampires’ time..Onee-chan’s time. My zombies didn’t spread as far as I’d hoped and the vampires under Onee-chan’s command are just going to hunt them all down. In fact, it’s probably already happening.”

That was when we heard something slicing through the air. I looked up from the mountain road and saw several small camouflage-painted helicopters. They were flying in formation from the mountains to the plain.

Ayumi spoke quietly while tearing into the barbecue meat.

“JSDF observation helicopters? That was fast. It must have really shocked the city council and police to be taken out so easily. They may have stopped worrying about appearances and given up on protecting their own turf. Normally, they would never ask for outside help.”

“Ayumi, what’s with the monologue?”

“I guess it’s a habit for recon flights, but they’re pretty dumb to make a low-altitude entry like this.. They won’t stand a chance against Onee-chan.”

“You just don’t feel like explaining any of this to me, do you? A little sister is supposed to listen to her big brother, you know?”

I tried tracing a finger along the stitch running across Ayumi’s soft belly.

It was dramatically effective.

“Heeyan!? F-fuguuu!! Onii-chan, what are you doing!?”

“Why did you entire body convulse like that!? What kind of feeling just ran through you? I think that scared me more than you!!”

“W-well, it’s like the feeling of tickling a half-healed scab but amplified several dozen times over.. Mutter, mutter. Zombies have their own unique issues..”

But this was no time to be messing around.

It could be easy to forget, but my little sister had just predicted some deaths with a pitying look in her eyes.

And her prediction proved accurate.

As the military helicopters approached the high-tech office region with its tall shop buildings and broadcast towers, a change occurred.

As they flew between the fifty-story buildings and broadcast towers, they seemed to start malfunctioning and crashing, one after another. I couldn’t tell what was happening from this distance, but it was obviously more than just engine trouble. I could sense intentional malice.

“There’s a bunch of smoke rising from the ground,” said Ayumi as she stared into the distance.

My zombie little sister may have had better eyesight than me, but I swore in my heart I would start touching all over her stitches if she tried to show off any more.

“But that’s a decoy. While they focus downward, the vampires under Onee-chan’s control are jumping down. It can be from the high-rise building rooftops or the top of the broadcast towers. They fall down, hit the rotors, and blind the pilots by covering the glass with red tomato juice. Then the helicopters crash.”

“Wait, hold on. But..wow..”

Even I could see what happened next.

A giant broadcast tower made from dozens if not hundreds of steel beams was broken off at the base and swung down as if by a giant. The few helicopters that had survived the first attack were caught by the mas of metal and brought down. Nothing remained after that.

“That was only a recon unit, but even military helicopters moving at 400 kph wouldn’t have escaped. The plain is quickly becoming Onee-chan’s empire. At this point, it’s like figuring out how to enter a territory that doesn’t allow even a needle through.”

“Erika sure is an S.”

“Well, she is a queen.”

“When I mentioned the bathroom scale the other day, she hit me with a cushion. And I was only saying I would buy a new scale since she had been going nuts on top of the old, malfunctioning one.”

“That was entirely your fault, Onii-chan.”

Then something else happened.

Heavy noises reverberated in my gut.

But this did not come from the city center where our sister lurked. It was the opposite. Black smoke was rising from the edges of Kukyou City.

Ayumi didn’t even bother looking over this time.

“After what just happened, the JSDF blew up the bridges and tunnels. They’ve given up on rescuing the survivors and are preventing the damage from spreading.”

The police, the military, and even the zombies were no match for Erika.

A hopeless atmosphere surrounded us.

But..

“Ayumi.”

I spoke up to break free of my negative thoughts.

“Let me ask you something instead: how far are you willing to go?”

“Onii..-chan?”

“I’m talking about more than just biting people to make more zombies. Are you prepared to defeat Erika even if it means destroying the entire world?”

“Do you..do you have an idea?”

“Vampires often go through individual mutations that give them unique skills: turning into a wolf or a bat, shrinking down to slip through the cracks in window frames or coffins, and more. So if we were going to search out their weaknesses, it would require analyzing every single individual vampire in the city.”

“Well excuse me for only being able to create stupid zombies that can’t learn anything. Fuguu.”

“Hear me out, Ayumi. But the basic aspects of a vampire are shared by all of them. They’re all weak to direct sunlight, they can all be defeated by destroying their heart, and all the rest. And a lot of those are a lot like fairly illogical jinxes: they need permission from the owner to enter someone else’s house, they can’t cross running water, and they don’t show up in mirrors. Compared to the virus-dependent zombies, they seem to have a lot of excess fat.”

“What about it?”

“Did you overlook one of those, Ayumi?”

I focused in on the one important point.

“Vampires can’t cross running water.”

Ayumi the zombie girl remained silent for a while.

She blinked her eyes.

Finally, she seemed to realize what I was getting at. Even though she was a zombie, I could see her face growing pale.

“Wait a second, Onii-chan. Are you saying what I think you’re saying!?”

“For better or for worse, we escaped to the mountains instead of along the coast. We’re in the right place, so let me ask my initial question again. ..Ayumi, how far are you willing to go? How much will you do to get back at our sister?”

“Fine, then,” said Ayumi as she bit into the barbecue. “Let’s do it.”

The feeling welling up inside her was not avoidance or anxiety. It was a sense of catastrophe. The look in her eyes was enough for me tell she was wrapped in the inappropriate elation and expectation of someone secretly enjoying the night of a typhoon.

I too devoured the skewered meat like it was our last supper.

“We don’t have time. Let’s get started once we’ve finished eating. The vampires will rule the scene once night falls. ..And that assumption will lead Erika to let her guard down, giving us an opening to attack.”

“And her advantage comes from having an organized group. If we break down that coordination, it should damage her even more than it would zombies like us!”

After our meal, we climbed back onto the bike.

Our destination was quite nearby.

On the way, I mentioned something I had been curious about.

“By the way, Ayumi, you always leave the housework to Erika, but you can pull off some surprisingly wild cooking. Are you the type that’s second to none with an iron plate and a spatula? Sizzle sizzle! Clank clank!!”

“Eh? What are you talking about? I just attacked some of the people camping out there and stole their food.”

“..”

A zombie was still a zombie.

I just about threw it all back up, Ayumi!!

Japan’s Top 100 Spiritual Spots!!

Do you think it’s too soon for a test of courage? Summer is just around the corner and it’s too late to choose a spot once it begins! So here’s some advice for you!!

You can see the full list with the links below, but I’ll be going into more detail on one in particular. Tah dah! It’s the Kukyou Dam!!

The dam looks pretty old, but, well, maybe you’ve heard of it as a famous suicide spot? It’s the standard place for the climax of that Something-or-Other Mystery Theatre. But, but! A surprisingly few number of people actually know where it is.

The stars are of course the ghosts of the suicide victims! A couple overwhelmed by debt drives their car right off the edge, a crazed addict strips naked and jumps off, or someone lights themselves on fire in some kind of ritual and then dives off. (Man, I really don’t want to drink the water that comes from there.) But that isn’t all. People hang themselves in the nearby forest or slit their wrists in the public bathroom. Not to mention the carbon monoxide poisoning, tongue biting, or plastic bag over the head.. A lot of them make you wonder why anyone would go all that way if that’s the method they were gonna choose!

But there are also some unconfirmed rumors.

Apparently, some bad people hang out there, taking advantage of all the suicides. The tours for people hoping to spot a corpse and the people waiting around hoping to film a suicide are the relatively decent ones. There are apparently some twisted people who pursue the people there to commit suicide and use hateful methods to take them for everything they’re worth. Really, it’s a lot like a variation on the rumors about Fuji’s sea of trees. There are even rumors that a murderous group in search of a convenient but lesser-known spot moved here after the sea of trees grew too well-known.

The credibility seems about 50/50 to me, but it is true there are a lot of weird deaths and people going missing.

Maybe there’s something even bigger than the rumors suggest.

If you’re visiting during summer break and feel like taking a ghost picture, it might be best to keep a GPS tracker and a security alarm with you.

Of course, electronics are well known for malfunctioning in spiritual spots. Ha ha.

Satori-kun next door hasn’t been very happy lately.

His dad and mom are always fighting.

His family might break apart soon. I overheard them talking about it.

Satori-kun is always smiling, but he sometimes looks really sad when no one’s looking.

I don’t know how it would feel to have that happen.

I mean, a family is an absolute. I don’t think I would know what to believe if I saw mine fall apart.

But.

Even if you can’t believe in anything in the world, it doesn’t mean the world has changed. There have to be lots of things around him he can believe in. No, because he’s having such a hard time, all those things have to come to him.

But I can’t just expect it to happen.

I can’t hope someone else will do it.

I need to start by becoming something like that.

Even if everything he can believe in falls apart, I need to be something that will never betray him, that he can always believe in, and that will never change.

I will become someone like that.

I have to.