Volume 3, 4: The Demon Lord’s Young — the_LIGHT.(2/4)
This was too much.
He could not understand her explanation. And even if he thought he did, it still did not tell him how to destroy her.
Takitsubo gasped and spoke while holding onto him.
“I get that the constant use of a massive amount of unseen energy would eventually create something unnatural. But if seeing you is deadly, how do you choose specific targets to—?”
She trailed off.
She had seen something out of the corner of her eye, but not the artificial ghost this time. A unified set of colors could be seen peeking out of at them from a gap in the door to one of the freight train’s containers.
They were small children wearing gym clothes and some kind of device. There were more than just ten or twenty of them.
All of them were a part of the ghost experiment.
The children must have seen the ghost woman as they nervously spied out. And they seemed to be expectantly waiting to see if she would repel these unknown intruders. They did not know. They had not been told what they were being used for. Simply viewing a ghost photo was harmful and the longer you viewed it, the more damage it did. She embodied that power so perfectly that she had eliminated so many dark side elites.
Yet she had managed to accurately select one out of the many candidates.
That was like shooting the apple off someone’s head. Without explaining any of it to the children who had those sensors attached to them.
“..”
The delinquent boy clenched his teeth.
He could barely move, she held his life in her hand, and he had no idea how to fight back. He had to avoid angering her if at all possible. He understood that, but he still shouted up at her.
“You scum!!”
“Call me what you wish. In fact, I see it as a compliment.”
The ghost woman who resembled a fairy tale princess held her palm out toward him. He only had to see her impossible presence for her to attack, so that gesture was meaningless.
But then her eyes turned unnaturally away from him.
To the side.
A spare container sitting near the train was sliced in two. Something had dropped down from far above like a bolt of lightning.
A red figure wielded a thick machete made of heavy metal.
The android wore a racing swimsuit colored the orange and black of an insect. The bangs of her long crimson hair were cut straight across and she had a slender build.
Cartoony flowers were displayed in her mechanical eyes.
“Smug face.”
“Hello, hello,” said a twig of an old man in a blue jumpsuit and lab coat. “I hate to interrupt when you seem so busy, but I must insist.”
The ghost woman shrugged.
“Were you hoping to use the train? I thought you were one of the harmfuls who would remain in the city and resist to the bitter end.”
“I have no interest in those categories forced onto the dark side from the outside. All I care about is continuing my research. Academy City was a wonderful environment for that, but if that has changed, I need to leave and search out a more comfortable place.”
“You can see me, can’t you?”
“You should be able to tell by observing my eye movements.”
“And you know what that means?” She gave a suggestive glance over at the machine that had arrived with him. “In case you were unaware, I am capable of causing malfunctions in mechanical lenses and sensors just as well as in the human body. Ghost photographs are a result of ghosts interfering in optical machinery, are they not? That might be your masterpiece, but isn’t it presumptuous to assume she can wield her full power against me?”
She remained untouchable. She could kill someone just by placing herself in the corner of their vision and machines could not do anything to her either. Did she have no blind spots?
“Yes, I imagine so.”
But the old man did not seem to mind.
That mysterious old man known as a Kihara was not bothered that she held his life in her hand.
“You are the strongest when it comes to an individual. Looking at deadliness alone, you might outdo the #3 and the #2.”
“..”
Evidently, even ghosts could find something to be ominous.
This world may have been infected with a disease that caused all bad premonitions to come true.
“But in this specific location, I believe you too will find you cannot wield your full power.”
“What are you—gah!!!!????”
He had given her plenty of warning, but she suddenly arched her back and then froze unnaturally in midair. An ominous straining sound continued on and on as her body grew distorted. She bent and stretched, almost like a face pressed against a wall of glass.
Something was happening.
Hamazura had thought the ghost woman was an intangible being, like a mist or apparition. But she was not. She clearly had a spine to strain, muscles to cry out in pain, and organs to writhe unnaturally.
Then a bizarre creaking and cracking noise came from her. Her volume shrank more and more like she was being crushed in from all sides. The old man was holding something up in his special engineering glove. It looked like an empty candy box, but it was not. It had a small pinhole at the very top. The ghost woman was sucked into that small hole like a liquid or a gas. Hamazura did not want to imagine what things were like inside there. He could only say one thing in a daze.
“A pinhole..camera?”
“High Voltage Cutting? I see, a strange theory, but she is still a form of unstable energy. And all energy will move from high to low—unstable to stable. This is enough to break down her form and burn in her image.”
The old man let go of the candy box.
He had the look of a mischievous child who had just realized he could create his own spark show by sticking a metal clip in the microwave.
“This is the appropriate choice for a ghost photo, don’t you think? A digital camera just wouldn’t fit the aesthetic.”
After dropping it to the cold concrete, he crushed it below his heel. He did not even glance down at the flattened box.
“Academy City’s Greatest Taboo.” He tapped on his lower back. “Surely you didn’t think a construction company building a secret tunnel out of the city was enough to earn a name like that. With something like her around, you really should have thought of a different possibility.”
“Wh-what?”
Hamazura felt like the unnatural “curse” had weakened, but he still could not bring himself to get up from the ground. The old man only now seemed to have realized that there was another person here reaching for the plank of Carneades.
Hamazura knew any attention on him would only lead to disaster.
Kihara Hasuu smiled.
“Let me make one thing clear. There is a member of the Board who built a vast fortune by doing unofficial construction work for the dark side, but he knows nothing of this. This massive underground structure just appeared out of the blue one day.”
“..?”
Out of the blue?
Hamazura had operated construction machinery before, so he knew how absurd that was. Did that old man have any idea how long it would take to dig out a hole of this size?
But the old man appeared to be serious.
Deadly serious.
“The Vanishing Tunnel does not actually exist.”
Hamazura had no idea what that was supposed to mean.
It made no sense. If that were true, then where were they now???
The old man gave the answer.
“Kazakiri Hyouka was not just a single individual. She is more like one piece of the Imaginary Number District, an entire city created from the aggregation of AIM Diffusion Fields. ..It all began with a project meant to cut out a portion of that territory and extract it as a new resource. Unlike the microscopic alchemy performed in the particle accelerator, this would have been on the macro scale and cost very little. But not even the group of researchers who guided all that power through the city could have predicted it would take this form. Academy City’s Greatest Taboo is such a dramatic name. In truth, it was a major failure that needed to be covered up. Everyone involved was at their wits’ end.” He tapped his lower back again. “A nonexistent pathway unofficially connected Academy City to the world outside, increasing the risk of the outer world’s collapse through cultural exchange and technological contamination. The entire world very well could have been destroyed from this single point. While the researchers had hoped to extract materials from the Imaginary Number District, whatever came from there might have transformed the outside world into something truly grotesque. ..Yes, that the world still exists as it does now was no more than dumb luck. It was nothing we did on our end. Kazakiri Hyouka and the other inhuman monsters simply showed no interest in that. If something had occurred to them and they had tried it, the world would have ended.”
“You mean..” Takitsubo replied since she had a better understanding of things related to AIM. “You were researching the exact opposite of that ghost? A ghost made from powerful energy and an aggregation of weak powers are opposites, so when they came together, it caused the ghost to malfunction.. You were trying to extract inorganic materials from that unseen city, weren’t you?”
“Hard to say if that research was a step forward or a step back. Like I said, they failed. They could not control it, so even the remains of their project you see here cannot be erased. I believe the natural half life was about 12,000 years. In the worst case, the Imaginary Number District could have been converted into real numbers, crushing Academy City in the process. I think the project could have found success if they could have cut off a piece at a workable size and found a way to control it. In that sense, that ghost really is the strongest as an individual and an enviable success.”
Now even Hamazura had a vague idea why the ghost woman had suddenly malfunctioned.
They could not be in the same place.
Two ghosts could not coexist. Just like installing two different pieces of security software on the same computer would cause a conflict.
“It was still a risky gamble, though. The odds were low, but if the tunnel had lost, this temporary space itself would have vanished and we would all have become fossils after being buried deep below the surface.”
Hamazura heard a swooshing sound and looked over to see the android swinging her thick machete next to the old man. Those two had won their bet, so now no one could stop them.
Kihara Hasuu looked away from Hamazura and turned to someone else.
“Now, I have eliminated your bodyguard. Isn’t it time we talked this out like adults?”
Part 5
“When’s the train going to leave?”
“Oh, mister just left.”
The children dressed up in gym clothes were whispering to each other while peeking out through the cracked-open door of a freight train container.
But among them..
“Ow, that hurts.”
The girl named Risako spoke up in protest.
But Sodate ignored that and continued tugging on her skinny wrist. The bigger boy was kind of scary when he was not saying anything.
“Listen, Risako.” He spoke quickly while walking through the shadows to stay hidden. He seemed to be speaking to himself more than the girl. “You can still escape. It’s not too late. And once you get to the surface, go tell the grownups about this. I know you can do it.”
“Why? The train is about to leave.”
“You still don’t get it!?” He shouted with his hands on her shoulders. “They make us wear these clothes and devices, they keep us separated from the rest of the city, and they don’t let us go to a normal school. We’re Child Errors, so no one will even notice if we just disappear one day. They’re only raising us because they can use us for something. They’re fattening us up to eat us!”
“But..”
“We don’t even have phones to call for help. It isn’t normal to be this isolated. That’s why I kept leaving behind some sign of our presence: building blocks, picture books, balls, and so on. I left them outside before the trucks moved on and I made sure to write our names, the trucks’ license numbers, and other information on them! But none of it ever reached the grownups. Our efforts never reached anyone!!”
She had thought he kept stealing things because he was selfish. She had thought he would forget those things in his secret bases because he was sloppy. But that was not it.
“They’re relatively peaceful beneficials? Don’t make me laugh. What’s going to change after we board that train and leave Academy City? There won’t be anyone monitoring them anymore!! Once that happens, I just know he’ll stop holding back. He’ll take it even further! So you at least need to escape before that happens!!”
“Sodate-chan..”
“I’ll give you an opening.” He looked the girl in the eye and spoke clearly. “I won’t let him turn you into a guinea pig no matter what!!”
Part 6
A somewhat slender man stepped out. He wore a short-sleeved safari jacket and a rash guard, making him look something like an old-fashioned adventurer, but the webcam attached to the side of his head gave him a more modern outdoorsy look. He appeared to be a different sort of researcher from the old mechanic in a lab coat and jumpsuit.
He was an expert at visiting so-called haunted locations around the world and revealing the scientific cause of the strange phenomena there. But he had apparently also artificially recreated such things to use them for his own purposes.
He grinned and raised his hands in a jocular way. Kihara Hasuu asked him a question with the deadly weapon girl still by his side.
“What is your name?”
“Drencher Kihara Repatri.”
“I see. So that’s you.”
The young man’s eyebrows moved slightly in response to the old man’s impressed tone.
“I didn’t expect someone like you to have heard of me.”
“You are rather..well known.”
The way he said that told Hamazura he did not mean that in a positive way.
This was a confrontation between two harmfuls.
The two researchers ignored the boy and girl entirely as they began a verbal rally. Hamazura knew he could not just sit and watch as a referee or spectator, but he had no way of intervening.
“As you can see, we come from different levels of the dark side. If there is no place for us in Academy City anymore, then leaving the city is a valid choice. But is that plank of Carneades really only big enough for the one group? I think it can support both of us just fine.”
That suggestion seemed surprising..but maybe it wasn’t. It was the ghost woman who had been slaughtering all of the other dark side members trying to reach this point. The android may have attacked Anti-Skill, but she had never actively tried to eliminate her fellow dark siders. She had attacked Hamazura near the counterfeiter’s tents, but if she had been trying to slaughter everyone she came across, the ordinary people in the amusement park would not have escaped alive.
The young man shrugged.
“If that means less fighting, it’s okay with me. Not that I really have a choice, do I?”
“Assuming you have no other trump cards.”
“Then I surrender.”
He did not hesitate to respond. Hamazura was actually surprised to see he was willing to back down to save his own life. Hamazura had gotten the impression that the extreme members of the dark side were willing to sacrifice their own life to achieve their goal.
That surprise scared Hamazura. He could tell he had let the dark side influence him too much. He was afraid the damage would be permanent if he went much further. Once he became a harmful, there was no going back.
“She was my prized project, you know? Frillsand #G, I mean. Now, I knew Academy City’s Greatest Taboo would pose a challenge, but I never imagined it was a giant mass of AIM Diffusion Fields.”
“Everything has its compatibility. In fact, I could never have won if we were not down here. Keep this girl from working and I’m helpless.”
The crimson-haired girl did nothing to fight the wrinkled hand rubbing her head.
The two men were reaching an agreement. That was not good. Hamazura and Takitsubo had nothing they could offer in a negotiation. At this rate, they would probably each get a bullet in the head as a parting gift. The only other option he could imagine was being made into a guinea pig for some bizarre experiment.
“Oh, right,” casually began the old man.
If he said “what should we do about those two lumps of flesh”, they were screwed. And Hamazura could not predict what that Kihara would do. He felt a terrible squeezing at his heart.
Finally, Kihara Hasuu continued.
“While we can share the train, I will be in charge there. So if you want a ride, it’s only natural you pay a small fare, don’t you think?”
“Do you want my research notes on Frillsand #G?”
“I’m no barbarian. A scientist’s research notes are a part of his very soul. Those are the fruits of your labors, so take them to your grave.”
“Then what do you want?”
“A few of them.”
The old man’s voice was as casual as ever as he pointed his engineering glove in a different direction entirely. He pointed at the gym clothes children who were peeking out from behind cover, without a clue what was being discussed.
“Just select a few at random. I intend to restart my research once things have calmed down, but the rules are different outside the city. I can’t start abducting people off the street until I have a proper base set up, so I could use an initial supply for that settling-in period.”
Hamazura froze as he listened in.
This was the dark side. This was how the elites of that stagnant world thought.
“That Frillsand #G is important to your research, but not so with those lab rats, right? How many experimental observers’ lives were lost until you managed to properly reproduce that artificial ghost? If your research has entered a stable period, I would assume you are not running through those Child Errors as quickly as you once were.”
“Heh,” laughed Drencher Kihara Repatri.
He weakly lowered his raised hands. He must have decided that was no longer necessary. He too had seen the darkness, so he spoke with the same look in his eyes as the old man.
“It’s true those are all Child Errors. And however they would be treated in the ordinary world, we all know exactly what that term means in the dark side. Yes, I gathered them together and invited them into my lab. I made sure to have a plentiful stock of convenient lives that could be spent as I liked if other forms of research were not enough.”
“Then I can have a few?”
“Go to hell, you son of a bitch.”
Part 7
Several dry gunshots rang out.
Part 8
Hamazura Shiage did not understand what had just happened.
“Hamazura!!”
His body still refused to do what it was told, so track suit girl Takitsubo had to push him to the ground.
The young man had pulled out a handgun. It was no more than a small revolver, but he still fired it repeatedly from just a few meters away.
However..
“Ugh..”
“That won’t work,” said the old man.
The android’s crimson hair fluttered while she held her thick machete at the ready with her bare feet planted a step in front of Hasuu. Not only had she deflected all of the bullets, she had used their ricochets as a counterattack.
No more than a small revolver.
Something had gone horribly wrong when you started thinking of things in those terms in this country.
The young man had several holes in his upper body and dark red stains spread across his clothes. Doubling over did nothing to help, so he finally collapsed to the ground.
The old man in a jumpsuit and lab coat spoke up in exasperation while the strongest doll protected him.
“They’re just kids. And it’s not like I’m asking for all of them. Just two or three will do.”
“I wanted to..protect them from the dark side scum who think like that,” spat the young man while struggling to breathe down on all fours. He had given up trying to hold his wounds. “But nothing I did above board did anything to help. I couldn’t even get information on where those children were. The only way to fight the dark side..was to become the dark side. I almost laughed when I saw how many people came running to me then, claiming my research was so valuable. When I said I needed children’s lives to do it, they slapped me on the shoulder and agreed to it all. While happily sipping on a glass of the year’s finest red with their other hand. This city is rotten to the core.”
“Aren’t you Drencher Kihara Repatri?”
“Claiming to be a Kihara was the quickest way to get what I wanted. Ha ha. Those VIPs really were terrified of me.”
“Dammit,” spat out Hamazura Shiage.
The young man saw his own condition as of secondary importance.
It was true the ghost woman had used the children. They had been placed in a position where she could crush their lives at any moment. But had Hamazura ever seen her actually kill a child? What if they had been living in a world where they had to take the charade that far to be believed?
The old man had asked how many experimental observers’ lives were lost until he managed to properly reproduce the artificial ghost, but the young man had never answered.
That was in fact the answer. He had not sacrificed anyone. Not one. He had wanted to gather up those children known as Child Errors and drag them up out of the darkness. There were adults willing to dive into the dark side for no other reason than that.
There really were.
And yet..
“You’re lying.”
Hamazura suddenly rejected that entire premise. Because if he accepted this, he would have to admit to his own ugliness. Even if saying this would mean revealing he was ugly enough to put up a struggle like this.
“I’ve seen you before. You were at that counterfeiter’s place! You were preparing a passport for yourself so you could abandon those kids and leave the city!!”
“This all would have gone so much more smoothly if that had worked.” The young man smiled weakly. “If I had shown off how I escaped with the passport, Anti-Skill and the dark side’s focus would have turned toward District 23’s airport. Then the children would have had a safer escape underground here. I was never supposed to be down here with them.”
“~ ~ ~!!!!!!”
It felt like they lived in two completely different worlds.
And that young man was definitely the one in the right.
Hamazura felt so pathetic and contemptible for only ever acting to protect him and his girlfriend.
“I know I shouldn’t be asking this.”
The young man looked his way. As if to say it did not matter if he really was a Kihara or not.
His eyes knew how to view the light, but for some reason he now looked to someone as corrupted as Hamazura.
“Maybe it’s for the best if the dark side is destroyed, but please take care of those kids. You’re the only person I can leave them with now. When you saw your girlfriend suffering, you panicked and dumped medical supplies across the ground in your haste. I could see the conscience in your eyes. You had no choice but to fall this far, but you should still have some resistance to the dark side left inside you.”
“Wait, I’m not like that for everyone. Don’t shove this onto me! She’s my girlfriend, so of course I’d work to save her!!”
“Ha ha. Thinking that’s an ‘of course’ is what makes you such an oddity in the dark side. Don’t worry, I know you can do it. Because after falling into this shitty world, you still managed to find someone you care for and you decided to find peace instead of another thrill.”
Hamazura and Takitsubo had first heard of Academy City’s Greatest Taboo from this man.
Hamazura had been cautious because there was no righteousness in the dark side and the man must have had his own reasons.
Was this why?
Had it been some insurance, just in case? Instead of worrying about his own survival, he had wanted some insurance for after he died.
Yet he had also slaughtered the dark sider people rushing toward this exit.
All because he could not let any harm come to the children as those people fought each other. He had rushed down a dark path to prevent a mere possibility.
But on Hamazura and Takitsubo’s way here, hadn’t the ghost woman glanced their way after slaughtering everyone else and then left, as if sparing them?
“Why did you do all this?”
That was the only question Hamazura could find.
That was not something to say to a dying man. He knew that. But after letting the dark side corrupt him while he worked so hard to ensure his and his girlfriend’s survival, this answer was too pure and upright to accept.
“How could you throw away your own life over this!? When you get down to it, those kids are just strangers! How could a goddamn harmful go this far just because you ‘wanted to save them’!? How!? Tell me!?”
The young man smiled.
There was already blood dripping from the corners of his lips.
“Do you need a reason to protect someone? Of course you don’t.”
That was the end of it.
Time stopped for him with the smile still on his lips.
He had no reason. He did not know why. And he had rushed in to save those children without ever finding a reason.
Hamazura Shiage had to admit defeat.
“A..”
The loser boy clenched his teeth. He moved his battered body, swiped the bloody handgun and some ammo from the young man, and shouted at the top of his lungs.
Losers had their own etiquette to follow.
That scummy old man was still here. Hamazura was not going to let him trample on the young man’s victory.
“Aaaneriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!”
A dull kachunk echoed through the circular space.
The support AI had taken control of the train and shifted it out of standby, so it slowly began to move.
The turntable had tracks in twelve directions, but he knew where to send it.
He just had to remember what the card-sized hard drive labeled Lifeline had said.
If you boarded a train between 4 hours and 30 minutes, you would be taken to another world.
In other words..
(Hours and minutes. If I apply that to an analog clock..)
“Send it down the five o’clock track!!”
The train took off with so many children in gym clothes on board.
That had been his top priority.
“Is justice contagious these days?” asked the old man with the look of someone viewing a crazy person.
He had already proven that the gun would not work, so he gave Hamazura a look of partial pity now that he h-->>