Volume 3, Chapter 4: The Demon Lord’s Young — the_LIGHT.

Part 1

“Where have you been, Risako!?”

“Mister, Risako-chan is back!!”

The gym clothes girl laughed when she saw the other children gathered around.

“Eh heh heh. A doggy and an older girl saved me.”

They must have been preparing for another move because all the trucks had their engines running. But they had waited until they had found the girl with red hair done up like candy. She was relieved. Having a home to return to was a wonderful thing.

“A doggy, huh?” said the artificial ghost called Frillsand #G.

“..”

Her comment made the young researcher fall silent for a bit.

His name was Drencher Kihara Repatri.

That family name was so well known in the dark side that it had become a more powerful classification than beneficial or harmful. The man who bore that name sighed softly to help refocus his mind.

“There is a chance we’ve been located, but we’re faster at the moment. If we move before they catch up, we can reach Academy City’s Greatest Taboo without issue.”

“Do you really think this world will allow any of this to go ‘without issue’?”

“It’s our job to make sure it happens.”

The adults exchanged their views with their voices too low for the excited children to hear.

But a certain boy kept his voice low for a different reason.

“Risako.”

“Oh, Sodate-chan.”

The tall boy in the same kind of gym clothes looked troubled for some reason. In fact, he looked close to tears. Risako tilted her head, thinking he was afraid she would get after him about the ball and chemical soap, but this was different.

“So you came back,” he said.

“Eh?”

“I was hoping maybe you were gone for good.”

He had wanted that? Did he hate her that much? Risako’s face clouded over, but this was again different. He shook his head and explained.

He was the only one of the children who had started to question these motion sensors they wore for some kind of experiment.

“Because then at least you might have been safe.”

Part 2

He was afraid of screwing it up, so he started by drawing marks on her back with a marker.

“Hamazura, that tickles.”

“Stay still.”

The old book had a brush-drawn diagram with no perspective or attempt to make it look three-dimensional. The indicated locations of the organs were clearly not right. Maybe it was like the difference between an aerial photograph of the clouds and the isobars on the weather forecast map. He wondered if this was what all traditional Japanese medicine was like as he drew Xs on his girlfriend’s body. She had even removed her bra and was holding her chest in her hands while showing him her smooth back. He thought his heart was going to burst every time she squirmed from the ticklishness. Even he knew that reaction was inappropriate given the circumstances. Once he finished that, it was finally time to start. He faced the girl while she lay face down on the container lab’s work table like she was sunbathing.

The moxa used for the moxibustion was like fluffy cotton, but he actually had to set it on fire.

It felt wrong doing that on her soft skin and he could even permanently scar her if he screwed it up.

“..”

His fear came to the forefront now that it was time to do it, but this was the only way to help her with the fever.

He fought the desire to shut his eyes and placed a small pile of “fuel” on her soft skin. He worked at the lighter with a trembling hand, but he kept failing. Once he finally had a small flame, he slowly moved it in close.

“Nh.”

“A-are you okay, Takitsubo?”

“I’m fine.”

He continued the process a few more times. He had his doubts, but when she wiped the sweat from her brow, no more sweat beaded up. It did seem to be working.

He could not thank the hakama girl enough.

He could not waste this chance she had given them, so they had to approach Academy City’s Greatest Taboo.

That card-sized hard drive had been labelled with the word “Lifeline”.

Aneri must have decided the data would be too small to see on his phone because she displayed it a flat screen monitor in the lab instead. It was a series of numbers.

It looked like a calculation sheet made with spreadsheet software, but even that was enough to make the delinquent boy’s head hurt. Maybe it was important data, but he had no idea what he was supposed to focus on.

“This looks like materials data,” said Takitsubo after peering at it from the side.

“Materials?”

“Whether they’re beneficial or harmful, the dark side does a lot of research.” She pointed at one of the numbers. “They’re also building a lot of military weapons. But doesn’t it seem odd? Academy City is a mass consumer and it only has so much land since it’s surrounded by walls. You can’t just dig into the ground here and find oil or ores. So where do they get all those materials from?”

“Where? Isn’t that what the cooperative institutions around the world are for? They can work out a deal with them.”

“But how can they do that without leaving any record of it?”

She pointed at another number.

If a citizens group monitoring the flow of money and materials could reveal a secret, then it had never been part of the dark side to begin with.

“Look at this. The dark side is using far more materials than the total amount brought in from outside the city. Cutting off the fat and redistributing it to themselves would not be enough for this. The amount the dark side uses is several times larger. This would show up in the records no matter what you did. Important people like the Board of Directors and its Chairman can only cover up so much. This is too much. It’s well past what you could hide by cooking the books.”

“But then..”

He trailed off when Aneri opened a new window. A single point on a map of Academy City was colored in red. There was a secret there.

“They have an entrance and exit that doesn’t leave any records,” said the track suit girl while viewing the screen.

There were several files that appeared to be saved from message boards and social media pages. Reading through them showed a certain point in common.

If you boarded a train between 4 hours and 30 minutes, you would be taken to another world.

Takitsubo pointed at that bizarre statement.

“There is a way of reaching it and we should see hints of it in the rumors told around the city. Like the ‘!’ signs, a deadly train, kidnappers at the amusement park, babies in the coin lockers, or an underground construction zone where you can dump anything you don’t want found. But none of that gets at the real truth.”

“You mean..?”

“Academy City doesn’t promote recycling so much just because it wants to make the most of its limited resources. Sending things back to be recycled over and over again masks how much materials are actually being used. They can’t have an investigation revealing that we dump out several times more trash than materials we take in, right? That would violate conservation of mass. So they needed to make it hard to compare those two values. It’s a form of laundering.”

Why was that sleight of hand necessary? How did they reach the impossible result of more waste than raw materials? What was this secret that no one wanted getting out?

Academy City’s Greatest Taboo.

This was the identity of that term they had heard so many times today.

“It..isn’t closed off? There’s a secret route through the walls surrounding Academy City!?”

That could not be. For better or for worse, Academy City was cut off from the outside world. Those thick walls prevented their tech from spreading to the world at large because that could lead to disorder and chaos.

Hamazura used to be part of Skill Out. That was a group of the boys and girls who had dropped out of Academy City but had nowhere to go since they could not get out of the city.

They had been trapped. They had dropped out of school, but those walls had kept them here. If you wanted to take a trip outside the city for just a few days, you needed to submit a ton of paperwork and receive a nanodevice injection. Because if you tried leave without using the official gates, you could be killed to prevent a data leak. There had been burglars and muggers in the back alleys, but none of those expert thieves had dared go anywhere near the walls.

If there was a way to freely move in and out, they may not have felt so much pressure. They could have made a place for themselves.

Their former leader, Komaba Ritoku, might not have had to fight and die.

“..”

But the dark side had torn down that number one assumption like it was nothing.

That counterfeiter had stored that information on a card-sized hard drive labeled “Lifeline”. Had he thought he could use that information to get some dark side bigshots to save him?

He must have never imagined he would instead have his brains blown out by a paparazzo. Hamazura was at the center of all this, but he still did not know if that had been planned or a spontaneous decision.

“It’s deep below Academy City.” Takitsubo Rikou calmly read aloud something on such a large scale that talk of an alternate dimension would have sounded more realistic. “The world’s largest particle accelerator is built directly below the city walls, so people are told that digging in that area could break the accelerator’s seal and expose them to radiation and other risks. That was meant to convince everyone that no one would be dumb enough to try it.”

The diagram they found looked like a puzzle ring. It seemed to carefully avoid the circular accelerator facility, but this was a tunnel built by the dark side. There was no chance it met all the proper safety standards.

That was the dark side’s lifeline.

They had built it to continue pumping fuel into their illicit research and its construction showed they did not care at all if they brought chaos to the world. It really was the greatest taboo. It was a dark umbilical cord that could wipe out the Kiharas and everyone else if it was cut off.

“I doubt Anti-Skill knows about this,” said Takitsubo. “So they won’t be able to block it off. We can safely escape the city if we use it.”

“..”

The red light displayed by Aneri was in District 10, the city’s biggest slum. The taboo no one wanted was hidden below the district everyone had abandoned.

It was unclear if it had always had this name. They may have changed the name periodically to help hide the truth. All the scattered information was fragmentary witness accounts and some of it would likely be intentional misinformation.

But that taboo’s gaping mouth had sat deep underground all this time.

Like a nightmarish symbol of freedom.

The dot on the map displayed on the small screen had the following name displayed next to it: Vanishing Tunnel.

That was the name of their final destination. Anyone who arrived there was given a ticket to another world.

Part 3

They were deep, deep underground in District 10.

Few people would think too much about the layout of the subway tunnels below the city. They might know a track took an unnatural curve at one point, but no one would question the online news article about them running across some kind of ruins during construction.

An underground passageway was surrounded by cold concrete and supported by the pillars positioned at even intervals.

The few fluorescent lights on the walls were not enough to fully sweep away the darkness.

That underground blind spot had become the biggest hot spot in the world. A great many people had gathered there. They had not all arrived along the same route. They had each gathered the hints scattered around the city and started to question the city’s biggest assumption. Academy City was surrounded by thick walls, but it was not in fact sealed off.

The brawny men in work jumpsuits were a courier group called Secret Express. The men and women in dress clothes were Concierge, a group that provided hideouts to meet a criminal’s demands. The girls in plain clothing and hiding their faces with sunglasses and hunting caps may have been an extremely popular idol group. The parade of scum included Controller, who used personal information and fictitious bills to threaten the girls he targeted until he had them in digital chains, and Flare, who left behind harmless powder identical to the real deal in order to confuse criminal investigations.

A ruler of the back alleys was there.

A major corporation’s lawyer was there.

A university headmaster was there.

A major entertainment producer was there.

And a few Kiharas from different fields were there.

All sorts of people flooded that underground passageway. People did not end up on the dark side because they were low class, poor, stupid, or criminal. It took all types. The dark side had reached every class of person equally. From worlds no one knew existed to industries everyone envied.

Some had fallen before making it this far and others had attempted a different route instead. In a way, finding this tunnel and setting foot inside made them the chosen ones.

And.

Every last one of them were obstructed and crushed by a certain figure.

The woman had long blonde twintails and she wore a skintight light blue dress and a long loose skirt.

Frillsand #G was like an impassable wall.

All who challenged her crashed into that wall with the intensity of their challenge. After seeing a few of them turned to hunks of flesh and splattered blood, the others must have started wondering if she literally was a solid wall because all of those dark side members had come to a stop. They were pushed back even though she had not taken a single step.

Of course, the ghost was not going to spare them just because they gave up now.

“Next stop: skewering. Repeat: skewering.”

With a wet sound, a muscular man in black was destroyed from groin to head. But he may have been one of the lucky ones. He was gone before he even knew what had happened to him.

“Please look out for the burning and severing.”

Screams of pain echoed through the tunnel. Before long, the dark side members were fighting amongst themselves too. They appeared to have begun an ugly struggle over the concrete column they could use as a shield. However..

“We will arrive at gouging soon.”

Just as the ghost silently circled behind the column, a wet sound exploded out. The victors and losers of the struggle were all turned to mincemeat together while Frillsand #G looked on in disinterest.

“Ah..gahh,” someone groaned.

It was one of the idol girls. Her bottom half was gone and the bottom of her torso was sticking to the floor like a slug.

“But..why? We found the taboo..so aren’t we part of the dark side too? Can’t we all use..the path out together?”

“I have children to take care of. A lot of them.” Frillsand #G did not even look in her direction. “Inviting all of you in with us would only put them at risk.”

“Just..” It was already too late for her, but the top half of a girl still clawed at the concrete floor. “Just in case? You took people’s lives for no more than that!?”

“Next stop: running over. I repeat: running over.”

With a wet splat, the complaints were silenced.

The ghost seemed to be rejecting the idea that grudges lacked the power to kill.

“The rear guard is an important job,” she said in a singsong voice. “But I cannot let that crybaby see this. Knowing of it and seeing it are two very different things.”

The artificial ghost glanced over at something else.

But she soon lost interest, turned around, and vanished into the darkness.

A mere ten meters away, Hamazura Shiage was hiding behind a column and holding his hand over the track suit girl’s mouth.

If she noticed them, they were dead. He felt like his heart, his breathing, his body odor, and the slight static electricity on his clothing could all give them away. He could not even wipe the unpleasant sweat from his cheek as he desperately waited for time to pass.

That ghost really was an enemy.

She had some kind of plan of her own and had saved them on a whim before, but that did not mean he could trust her. If she had saved them on a whim, then she could also choose to throw them out on a whim. And they only had the one life.

This was worse than a sea of blood.

Flesh and blood had lost any hint of their original form, fingers extended into empty space, facial skin was frozen in a look of agony while plastered to the wall. At this point, they were only “things”, not people. There was no dignity remaining.

Each of them was a dark side member who had arrived at Academy City’s Greatest Taboo along a different route than him.

Their endless possibilities had been reduced to zero.

Or so it felt to him.

Was this tunnel really the right path? The further they went, the more likely they were to encounter that ghost woman, so he began to wonder if it would be safer to turn back now and return to the surface.

“Pwah.”

His girlfriend escaped his hand. He was holding her from behind, so she leaned her head back to look him in the eye.

“Hamazura, I don’t sense her presence anymore. We can keep going now.”

“..”

“We can’t give up after coming so far. Blindly returning to the surface won’t save us. We’ll never find peace if we don’t go through here.”

“R-right.”

He would have long since broken if he were alone.

But when she pulled on his hand, he managed to work up some small semblance of courage.

Even with the evenly-spaced fluorescent lights, the tunnel was dark. And they had no idea who was in charge of that sparse lighting. What if the ghost could shut off the power? His phone felt all the more important to him now.

“This is a long tunnel.”

“Yeah.”

They were not speaking much anymore.

This was Academy City’s Greatest Taboo, but did this tunnel really lead toward hope? No matter how far they went, the darkness never went away. As they trudged deeper and deeper, he felt like they had passed a point of no return. Also, who had built this enormous underground facility? Someone must have drawn up the plans, dug the hole, set the foundation, and brought in the rebar and concrete. This was a far bigger project than a bank robber’s hand-dug tunnel into the vault. Such a vast and well-made underground space could not have been built without the involvement of a major construction company.

Who had done it?

It might be a company whose ads he saw on TV every day.

Would all of this come to light one day? But those meaningless thoughts were cut off by Takitsubo.

She had noticed first because she was not holding the light.

“Hamazura, there’s a door.”

“..”

It was a thick metal door.

Just the one door sat at the end of the long, long tunnel. There may have been another route, but he did not recall seeing any other paths branching off along the way.

He slowly approached.

It did not appear to be locked. He doubted there were any grenades or other “gifts” left for them.

But that was not what scared him. He had seen all of those corpses along the way. The sight had left him so terrified he barely had it in him to keep his heart beating. He had started to view their fallen predecessors as no more than a piece of the scenery. Because otherwise that shadowy murder scene would have overwhelmed him too much to continue on.

The taboos were piling up.

He and Takitsubo had started this simply wanting to survive, but they too had been corrupted along the way.

Hamazura Shiage reached his fingers toward the doorknob.

He touched it. He squeezed it.

He turned it.

Part 4

A flood of light revealed a world no one was ever meant to see.

“..”

The other world turned out to be a cavernous pit.

This abyss slept deep below the earth, yet it was filled with much more artificial light than the tunnel. That was thanks to the construction lights set up here and there.

It was easily more than 250 meters across and maybe more than twice as deep. The perfectly circular space made of reinforced concrete at the very bottom may have reminded different people of different things.

Some might see it as a common utility duct, a circular colosseum, a switchyard’s turntable, or an underground temple dedicated to a god one must never offer any prayers.

But there was one crucial piece that helped solidify the proper image.

“A train?” muttered Hamazura while peering down over the railing.

It was a turntable.

Concrete columns were installed at even intervals around the edges, but there were none in the central circle. The flat concrete floor had a smaller circle built into it. That would rotate to change the train’s direction. The tracks outside the circle extended in 12 different directions. That made it all look like something else: a giant metal flower.

Yes, there were tracks, signal lights, transformers, maintenance equipment, a control room, and a fifteen-car train in here. It was a freight train.

“That’s the dark side’s lifeline?”

For him and Takitsubo, it was the plank of Carneades that would save their lives.

He doubted that turntable was all of it. There would be a container yard and maintenance zone hidden further out from the center.

They walked along the narrow catwalk built along the circular wall and descended the stairs. There were no corpses in here. Whoever had gotten here first must have used the ghost woman to eliminate any nuisances before they reached this point.

And since the train was still here, that person would still be here.

They shared this space with the slaughterer.

“Hamazura.”

“Don’t worry. I’m with you no matter what.”

“Not that. There’s someone down there. And they’re not alone.”

That was a shock. Takitsubo Rikou could accurately locate people by sensing their AIM Diffusion Field. She could not use that power as well as she used to, but she could still sense it to an extent.

The tension grew.

A single person with a bizarre power was certainly scary, but having a large group approach you brought a different sort of fear. He mentally switched his priorities to at least allowing Takitsubo to escape if things looked bad.

The only exit was up here.

Leaving that would mean being surrounded by dead ends in every direction.

“..”

After descending the last flight of stairs, they arrived at the deepest depths.

It felt so much different from when they had been looking down from above. But that was not too surprising since 250 meters was larger than a domed stadium. This was the same as a sports field looking so much bigger from the stands than on TV.

Yes, Hamazura Shiage now stood on the stage. He was no longer an outsider looking in.

“Oh, dear. You actually showed up. What a shame.”

He lasted one second.

His knees suddenly dropped to the ground. He could not keep his shoulders at the same height and his lost strength would not return.

“Wha—!?”

It was the ghost woman.

Was she a beneficial or a harmful?

She had left that tunnel far too bloody to claim she was trying to escape Academy City because she disliked conflict. If anything, she felt more like a vengeful spirit that refused to let anyone leave the city.

She looked like a Western doll with her long blonde twintails and light blue dress. She did not actually punch or kick him. Simply seeing her out of the corner of his eye had done critical damage to him.

A rusty-smelling liquid dripped from his eyes and nose.

He was trying to scream and flip over onto his back, but he was actually curled up and unable to move.

Encountering her meant death.

That was far too sinister a thing to be connected with a simple equals sign like that.

“It is no use.”

The ghost woman walked without audible footsteps. She moved herself from the corner of his vision to the center.

“No one is talking about anything as silly as defending against something with a shield or dodging a projectile with super speed. From the moment you see my face, the attack is complete. If I so much as casually stand in the corner of your vision, I can do continual damage without you even noticing my presence.”

He realized the strange things had always happened when the ghost woman spoke to him. And why had she turned the lights on in that tunnel? Because it was more convenient for her.

If you saw a ghost while driving, you would crash.

If your face, hands, or feet were missing in a ghost photo, you would find unnatural wounds or marks on your body.

Did this mean she even artificially reproduced those aspects of a ghost? He did not want to believe it because it would mean there was nothing he could do.

“Hamazu—!?”

“You noticed? You must have sharper senses.”

The track suit girl quickly pulled him close, but the ghost woman did not seem to care.

Besides, if seeing her really did mean death, then Takitsubo would have been killed too, but she was fine.

“But I am not talking about anything as poorly-defined as a sixth sense for ghosts. Do you have a power related to AIM Diffusion Fields?”

“There’s no AIM Diffusion Field around you? No, some strong but invisible power is scattering that weaker field.”

“It is known as High Voltage Cutting,” said the ghost woman. “The principle may be similar to the shock diamonds seen in a rocket engine’s flame or the cavitation of air bubbles created around a propeller. The constant emission of a powerful energy will create irregular waveforms and images while it interferes with itself.”

“Gh!? What energy???”

“You can find energy everywhere.” Her tone was light, so understanding how it worked must not have helped avoid its effects. “The carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide you thoughtlessly spread around forms acid rain when it bonds with the moisture in the air. You can acquire electricity simply by sticking two electrodes into a fruit, you know? Copper and zinc are such necessities that you can find them anywhere. Using that, you can produce hydrogen gas in addition to electricity. I only need to absorb power from a civilization battery the size of a city or even greater. That is enough for me to construct a single outlier point within that stable energy.”

“..”

“What are the common types of haunted locations? Old homes full of drafts, cliffs and caves eroded by the waves, and mountain roads late at night. They are always full of noise, such as static electricity, pressure differences, the creaking of rusty doors, or the rustling of the trees in the wind. Have you e-->>

next page