My Vampire Older Sister and Zombie Little Sister:Volume10 Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Part 1

A second meteor shower was falling.

We had to survive this and we couldn’t afford to lose Pierre Smith of JB either.

We needed to overcome this crisis.

A meteor shower didn’t need to actually hit you to be deadly. The shockwave produced when it hit the ground would do the trick. But lying flat on the ground and hoping to weather the storm wasn’t going to work.

“Sebek,” said my stepmom. “JB’s toy is still nearby! It should be able to survive the shock!!”

We had to bet on that.

We dragged unconscious Pierre, gestured instructions to Anastasia, and retraced our steps. I could see the meteors falling toward the city even now. We weren’t protected by thick walls here, so the shockwave would reach us soon enough.

The giant stone and gold crocodile lay lifelessly on the ground, covered in the grass and dirt it had thrown into the air as it moved.

I could hardly believe my eyes when my stepmom stuck her head inside its twisted jaws.

Hadn’t she said all the concentrated power inside prevented someone from riding inside it for long? So was it safe for a short time? Hopefully it didn’t have any nasty side effects. Our options were inside that or out here, so getting through this undamaged wasn’t an option.

Anastasia paled.

“E-ewww. We’re going in there? Really!?”

“I say we stuff its creator Pierre inside first. Then if it starts moving, it’ll bite him along with us.”

“…”

“We’re dead for sure if we stay out here, so which will it be, Anastasia!?”

“Okay, fine!!”

The small blonde girl hopped inside the croc’s mouth half out of desperation. I went last. I pushed on soaking wet Anastasia’s small butt to hurry inside those jaws.

We were supposedly closed in, but the world grew pure white a moment later.

A meteor must have landed quite close by. I couldn’t see outside, but I could tell the bus-sized mass was sliding sideways. My ears were ringing really bad too, suggesting an extreme change in atmospheric pressure.

…We’re dead for sure if we stay out here, huh?

My own words pained me now. Some random strangers had saved me in Paris. How had they fared with these back-to-back disasters? I was kind of familiar with the meteor shower since this was the second one. Hopefully they had the experience they needed to act appropriately too.

“Pant, pant.”

Once it was over, I realized I was holding Anastasia tight in my arms.

But my stepmom was holding us both even tighter.

“D-did we survive?” gulped Anastasia.

I poked my head out from the croc’s broken jaws and heard a low rumbling. Probably thunderclouds. Lots of dust and dirt had flown into the air, destabilizing the atmosphere.

The first meteor shower had led to contaminated rain, a flooded river, an earthquake, and volcanic activity.

But the second one might not follow the same pattern.

“Let’s start by seeing what he has to say.”

Amatsu Yurina’s suggestion sounded out of place. It took me a second to realize she was focused on Pierre Smith of JB.

“We don’t need any special tools. Yes, suffocating him with muddy water and cloth bag should work. Satori, you look after Anastasia-chan. Your mom will take care of everything, but make sure the young girl doesn’t see any of it.”

Part 2

Absolute Noah’s Amatsu Yurina tried to handle everything in the Absolute Noah style, so I had to put a stop to that. I doubted that a JB cast member was going to talk so easily, but I couldn’t let her torture him.

“We have an internet connection. There are other ways of going about this!”

I started by photographing his face and body and then getting detailed records of his fingerprints, eyes, and teeth. Pierre Smith might be a fake name, but biometrics couldn’t be fooled. In our modern digital society, I could find all the data I needed with a quick search.

“Maxwell, start with a search of the whole internet. Focus on photo-based social networks and video sites.”

“Let us hope he posts a lot of selfies to find dates and seek self-validation.”

“I’m not expecting that much. But he might show up in the background of a photo posted on a complete stranger’s account. If we find the distribution of those photos and videos, we can work out where he usually lives based on that.”

“Found him,” said Anastasia, arriving at the answer first.

She seemed delighted she had beaten Maxwell. I wasn’t sure what was so fun about challenging a machine, though. Was it like playing shogi or chess against a supercomputer? The soaking wet blonde girl grinned and shook her phone.

“He’s usually found around Milan, Italy, so I’m guessing Pierre Smith is a fake name. Based on the ATMs he tends to use, his home must be-”

“Maxwell, check his fingerprints or irises.”

“Sure. I have found a Fiancé Home Security front door lock using his fingerprint. It belongs to an apartment in Legnano of the Province of Milan. It is registered with a Vizza Valdia. He is a 22-year-old man attending the Polytechnic University of Milan. He is having trouble finding employment.”

“I-I found him first! That’s just a bunch of extra stuff!” tearfully insisted Anastasia, her cheeks puffed out so much I thought they were going to explode.

“I want something we can use to negotiate. Any personal information we can use against him? Even something from his search history or purchase history could work.”

“I must wonder why you immediately jump to the idea of him having unusual sexual proclivities, but I cannot find anything like that,” said Maxwell.

“So does he live a clean life while he focuses on fulfilling his JB duties?”

“However, once he started living on his own a few years ago, he began viewing an impressive amount of stepmother porn. Aunts and stepsisters do not seem to do it for him.”

“Bingo! Give me the worst title of the recent ones he’s watched.”

Amatsu Yurina put her hands on her hips and gave me one helllllllll of a glare, but we needed this information to resolve this peacefully! If this didn’t work, my own stepmom was going to grab some pliers and start pulling his 32 teeth one at a time!! And when Pierre – or rather, Vizza – was already into stepmoms, who knows how twisted his desires would get if she straddled him and began attacking him with a literally demonic smile on her face!!

Anyway…

“Good morning, Pierre. Or should I call you ‘Trapped Between My Mother and Grandmother – Will This be a Motherly Night or a Womanly Night?’ ”

“Eek!? D-don’t get the wrong idea! You know how it is when you’re really bored at 3 in the morning, right!?”

“Let’s hope all the people starved for entertainment in their living rooms know what you mean. Now to get this information uploaded. Tap – there, all done.”

“Wait, what did you just do!? A video site? A burner social media account? Oh, god! My life is over!!”

Vizza Valdia trembled in terror until I showed him the “cancel upload” screen.

“But I will do it next time. I mean it. So tell us everything.”

“…”

“Is this how the 3 minute videos on ClikClok work? I can have the world’s teens spread it for me. It’ll travel around the globe until your poor mother in Milan happens to see it!!”

“Comment> Yes!! I love how the shriveled dried persimmons of her tits show some vestiges of how big they once were. Truly, breasts age like a fine wine. Bless you, uploader!!” recited Maxwell.

“Okay, I’ll talk! I’ll talk!!”

Peel back the mask, and this is generally what you find with mysterious global string pullers. They only try to make themselves seem so big and powerful in order to hide who they really are deep down. The fact that they manipulate people using their fear of the darkness is basically an admission of how pathetic they are.

Anastasia looked confused.

“Wait, what just happened?”

“Ask me again in 10 years and I will explain it all in detail, 11-year-old.”

I gave her a gentle smile and dodged her question.

If Vizza Valdia still refused to tell us something, I could get ignorant Anastasia to call him “scum” in a disgusted voice. You know, standing above him with her arms crossed and looking down on him like he was garbage.

“JB is an organization intent on staging a ‘jailbreak’ from this oppressive world. Or more specifically, from this world that has been finetuned to the gods’ liking.”

I still wasn’t clear on the exact definition of a god, but now wasn’t the time to get sidetracked on that. A second meteor shower had fallen. We had escaped the immediate shockwave, but another disaster could strike at any time.

“I know that much. That’s why you stole some nukes from France so you can compress a bunch of dirt. That way you can create a new planet that’s more to your liking and move there.”

My stepmom had said she doubted it would work out the way they wanted. Even if they did create a brand new planet and move there, either amino acids would form there or JB would bring along some “uninvited guests” in the form of microbes. Once those multiplied and evolved, they would find that world was also governed by rules not of their making.

But Vizza Valdia tilted his head.

He actually looked puzzled.

“Our goal is not moving there.”

“What?”

“We are creating a new planet, but not to move to. That would only save the people our organization chose to go with us. How would we be any better than Absolute Noah and their ark then?”

“…”

Cross-armed Amatsu Yurina glared even harder at him. Not surprising when her ark had been destroyed by Archenemy Echidna, who had actually been sent by JB to infiltrate her organization.

But this made sense.

If they had basically the same idea, JB wouldn’t have needed to destroy Absolute Noah’s ark. They could have secretly remade it and hijacked it for their own purposes instead. But they had in fact chosen to destroy it.

That meant their objectives were incompatible.

In other words, JB’s jailbreak was not sending a chosen few to live on another planet.

“Then what is your objective?”

“JB will view society from the very bottom and identify its mistakes.”

“What is your ‘jailbreak’!? I’m sick of JB’s riddles. What are you trying to accomplish by stealing nukes and creating a new planet with them!?”

“And we will save everyone. Not just a chosen few – everyone from the bottom up. That is what our jailbreak is meant to accomplish. We are the cast that wins freedom by fighting against this world’s farce and its shitty script.”

“Satori,” called a sharp voice.

I didn’t get why at first.

The hunk of metal sliding in from the side filled me in pretty quick. A large object had broken its main rotor against the ground, tore through the grass as a simple blunt object, and crushed Vizza Valdia beyond recognition.

Was that JB’s attack helicopter?

Had it failed to dodge the meteor shower and crashed? Had JB been this desperate to silence Vizza? Or had the gods who opposed JB intervened? Why had this happened!? Someone had died before my eyes and I had no idea why!

I wasn’t even so sure this was Absolute Noah vs. JB anymore. What were we supposed to do? I had no idea what to believe in anymore.

The crashed helicopter exploded a short distance away, but it didn’t even surprise me at this point. The focus of this commotion was clearly shifting elsewhere. That fearsome ruler of the sky seemed foolishly behind the times now.

“There’s something wrong with the sky, Truth.”

Anastasia took a few steps back while looking up into the heavy night sky that remained dark but also showed no stars.

I had heard some deep rumbling earlier. The meteor shower must have sent a lot of dust into the air which was now rubbing together in the sky.

“Something’s coming, Truth. We need to get out of here. I don’t know what’s going on, but we can’t get any more information out of a dead man!!”

Several thick lightning bolts struck in the distance. I couldn’t work out any pattern. They may have been targeting the tops of tall buildings that acted like lightning rods, or they may have been striking plastic bags floating in the wind or the fire hydrant water being sprayed on the buildings. I only knew one thing for sure.

The next disaster was lightning.

Specifically, a high voltage storm that sent an unnatural amount of lightning all over the place.

“Warning: tall trees are a serious risk in a lightning storm. I recommend you take care in the route you choose to escape this plaza.”

“Aren’t we at more risk here where it’s as wide open as a golf course!?”

“There is an urban area immediately outside the Hôtel des Invalides. The lightning pattern will be easier to predict there. If you remain among the trees, any lightning that strikes the top of the tree will travel through the ground to reach you.”

Doubting Maxwell, a simulator stuffed full of disaster related data, would be a bad idea. I snatched Vizza’s phone from the pocket of a scrap of clothing that had torn away and then gestured for Anastasia and my stepmom to leave the plaza with me.

The trees weren’t the only problem. The open area also had the metal outdoor lights to worry about.

Since the lightning came from dust rubbing together in the air, there appeared to be a physical concentration to its distribution. It was like a crackling sandstorm was blowing our way. We had no choice but to run away from the rumbling thunder.

“Maxwell, I want as much information as I can get before the noise affects my phone’s connection! What’s the basic countermeasure for lightning!?”

“Avoid water, flat, open areas, and tall trees or poles and hide in a sturdy building until the storm has passed.”

Open areas and trees were a problem!? Talk about a double standard!

“Hey, Truth? Are there any sturdy buildings left in Paris anymore!?”

“By the way,” said Maxwell. “The idea that lightning is drawn to metal is a superstition. As long as it meets the conditions for a point discharge, then it will strike a tree or plastic just fine. And under electrical breakdown, the human body itself acts as a conductor, so be careful.”

Maxwell’s information was accurate but not particularly useful at the moment. Our best bet was to keep running so the high density lightning zone didn’t reach us.

Then I noticed some rumbling approaching from up ahead as well.

Amatsu Yurina clapped her hands together.

“Stop right there, Satori! The meteors fell all across Paris, sending dust into the air in multiple locations. There isn’t just the one unnatural thundercloud!!”

“Damn!!”

We avoided the badly damaged trees, left the Hôtel des Invalides’s grounds, ran below a sputtering raincloud, and arrived on a large road partially covered in rubble.

It was like a deadly searchlight. If we entered that ring of light cast down from heaven, we would be roasted to the bone by high enough voltage to trigger electrical breakdown in the air. We had to keep running through the darkness to prevent that.

I heard a voice shouting in French from the darkness to the side. Anastasia came to an immediate stop while I tugged on her arm.

“This way, Truth!”

She guided me and my stepmom into a short, partially-collapsed building. As soon as we were inside, several intense flashes of light struck despite the lack of rain. With an explosive boom, something was torn to shreds outside. Probably a streetlight or something. They were made of metal and heavier than a barbel.

A lightning strike like that would be deadly to a human body,

“Phew.”

More and more lightning struck outside, so we would have to wait here a while.

I took a look around to find…it wasn’t a convenience store. It looked more like a general store. A middle-aged man was the one who had called out to us. Was he an employee or a customer? Since he couldn’t bear to just watch as we fled the lightning, he must not have been a bad person.

Intentionally or not, Vizza Valdia was dead now. He had been killed by the JB rescue helicopter (had it been hit by the meteor shower or a lightning strike?), so there probably weren’t any other JB members around for us to question.

That meant we only had one source of information left.

I pulled an unfamiliar phone from my pocket. It was the one Vizza had been carrying.

“Maxwell, can you get through this thing’s lock screen?”

No response.

“Maxwell?”

“It’s no use Truth. We have no signal. And it doesn’t look like we can find a way through by switching to Wi-Fi. The lightning must have caused a largescale communications failure.”

“So we have to pause the investigation until we get through this, huh?”

My statement was answered by a few more lightning strikes. The dazzling light and earsplitting boom were nearly simultaneous, so they had to be quite close by. I knew we were inside a building, but it still squeezed at my heart. They felt a lot like explosions.

Vizza had said something interesting.

He said JB’s “jailbreak” was for everyone and that their new planet wasn’t for them to move to.

It had happened so quickly I may have been numbed to the fact that he had died before my eyes. Like I hadn’t had time to mentally classify it properly. I should have been wailing and holding my head in my hands, but I was able to take an objective look at it instead.

I felt terribly impatient, but there was nothing I could do without a connection to Maxwell. Anastasia would be in a similar situation. Modern hackers relied on the convenient programs they had written for themselves, so none of them actually typed madly away at their keyboard to hack into their enemy’s system.

“I’m starting to feel hungry,” said Anastasia.

It was currently half past 10 at night and the last thing I had eaten was the meal on the flight. Had Anastasia or my stepmom eaten more recently?

We had been on the move all day, so now that we finally came to a stop, the exhaustion caught up with us. Without the lightning unpredictably ringing in my ears from so close by, I might have lay down and fallen asleep despite how wet I was.

“Satori.”

Amatsu Yurina produced a chocolate bar and a jelly drink as if by magic.

“Share these with Anastasia-chan. Your adrenaline and noradrenaline can only numb your senses; it can’t actually sustain you.”

I wasn’t sure where it had come from, but I noticed the packages were written in Japanese. Had she brought them from Japan rather than steal them in Paris? I realized she had come to France with a clear goal in mind, so she would have come prepared. She wouldn’t have had to start stealing food so quickly after an emergency struck. That really brought into focus how pathetically unprepared Anastasia and I had been.

“Munch, munch. Oh, this is grape flavor.”

“Ew. I shouldn’t have eaten the chocolate first. Now I can only taste the jelly’s chemical flavor.”

Anastasia and I took turns with the food and drink. It wasn’t very satisfying since it didn’t fill our stomachs, but it had to be providing the nourishment we needed. Maybe it was the sugar circulating my body, but I felt like my head was swelling out like cotton candy. I was starting to feel really sleepy.

“Hold on,” said Anastasia. “Isn’t this an indirect kiss?”

“Yawwwwn. So what if it is?”

“…”

For some reason, she fell silent and kicked me in the shin, which drove the sleepiness from me pretty quick.

My stepmom had approached the general store’s entrance to observe things outside and she gave us a report.

“Looks like our break is over.”

“?”

I was confused at first, but then my nose detected the oddity. Something was burning. The lightning had started a fire somewhere.

We were talking about rainless lightning with all the buildings in the area partially or fully collapsed and the space between them filled in with rubble. If a fire started spreading now, who knows how far it would go.

“We can’t just stay here,” I said.

“B-but we can’t run back out into that lightning either!” said Anastasia. “One hit and we’re toast!!”

Lightning occurred when the static electricity in a cloud grew powerful enough that it could break through the poorly conductive air to reach the ground. These were clouds of dust instead of natural clouds, but the principle was the same.

So…

“We just have to redirect the lightning energy elsewhere.”

“Wait, Truth!”

My stepmom appeared to be speaking French to explain the risks to the middle-aged man in the general store with us.

I took a look outside and saw the fire was closer than I had thought. It was only about 3 buildings away.

If we were going to leave, it had to be now.

It was too late once the flames and smoke reached us.

Part 3

Lightning was commonly thought to strike from the sky, but that part of the lightning wasn’t the real threat. Lightning would first drop from the sky to the ground and immediately follow the exact same path back up into the sky. That second part is known as the return stroke and it is far more powerful than the initial part. It just all happens so fast the human eye only sees a single flash of light.

And unlike rain or snow, lightning is extremely difficult to predict. The Japan Meteorological Agency doesn’t even have any standards for it. The warning you often see is issued as long as there is a possibility of damage from lightning. So there are ranks and warnings, but you can’t work out a percentage change like you can with rain.

Or to sum up…

“No one can predict where the lightning will strike,” shouted a pale-faced Anastasia. She must have had a lot of lightning-related knowledge since she worked with computers. “And with this unnatural level of electrification, we will be hard pressed finding anywhere out there that’s safe! We might as well be sticking our head into a cumulonimbus cloud formed on the ground!”

“But the fire will reach us if we stay here. And there might be more fires. In fact, the fires are probably growing along with the lightning strikes.”

“~ ~ ~”

She puffed out her cheeks and looked ready to start throwing a tantrum right here. She even had some small tears in the corners of her eyes.

An electric hell awaited us outside. If we left the door without a plan, we could get struck on our very first step.

But if we stayed inside for too long, the approaching fire would consume us.

It was a bad bet, but the lightning left us with some chance of survival while the fire was guaranteed to take our lives. I didn’t need Maxwell to calculate out which one was better.

And…

“Lightning is a natural phenomenon that treats the sky and the ground as two giant electrodes and exchanges the electricity built up within the cloud. That means the barrier of air is broken and a vertical bridge of high voltage electricity forms. It’s not exactly the same, but the principle is similar to a giant stun gun.”

“A-and? How does that help us!?”

“That means those are the two places we have to work with. If we alter either the sky or the ground, the lightning strike won’t form. That’s the only way we can walk safely outside.”

Fortunately, this was a general store.

It would be far from a professional job, but we had a chance of throwing together something. I checked the products lined up the shelves. France was an agricultural country, wasn’t it? That explained the excellent supply of gardening tools. I was nervous without Maxwell’s assistance, but I grabbed some duct tape, adhesive, and a flathead screwdriver and got Anastasia’s help.

We didn’t have time to create anything too complex.

“This should do it.”

“This is meaningless without at least more than 100 of them,” said Anastasia. “I would really prefer around 300, but the pressurized tank could rupture if we overdid it.”

We ended up with a toy that probably would have been in violation of Japan’s Swords and Firearms Possession Control Law.

I walked up to the register counter, set down enough money for what we had used, and placed an eraser on top of that so the wind wouldn’t blow it away.

“What’s the point?” Anastasia sounded exasperated. “There’s a fire headed this way.”

“It’s the principle of the thing.”

I strapped the heavy unit onto my back, held the main part in my hands, and walked toward the exit.

The world outside the clear glass looked like a battlefield.

The bright flashes and loud booms were frightening. There was no reacting to that in time to dodge and it seemed like artillery shells were going off throughout the city.

But I also detected a burning smell entering through the gaps in the glass door.

“Are you ready, Anastasia?”

“Ugh. The lightning is striking once every 5 or 10 seconds.”

The fire would be here soon. I knew where it was and how fast it was moving, which made it all the more frustrating that we couldn’t stop it. Unfortunately, spraying a fire hose outside was a very bad idea with all that lightning.

We would die if we stayed put.

But we would also die if we rushed outside without a plan.

“The trick is to think carefully before we make any move. Our top priority is to escape the fire.”

My stepmom approached us and gave a worried look toward one corner of the store.

“Those people say they are going to hide in the basement. There’s apparently a sturdy food storeroom there.”

“…”

I wasn’t confident that was a good idea, which was why we weren’t joining them. But everyone had to make their own decisions. Escaping through all the lightning was a gamble as well. We had no way of taking responsibility if they went with us and were hit by the very first lightning strike.

We didn’t have the data or time necessary to determine what was actually safe.

Hell, there might not even be a safe option.

I couldn’t say what was right. I had only gone with the “escape outside” option because maintaining freedom of movement was convenient for our purposes – or for our “desire”, I guess you could call it. I couldn’t use my phone here, so I wanted to escape outside the lightning’s noise, reconnect to Maxwell, get whatever data was on Vizza’s phone, and pursue JB who were planning to create a new planet by compressing space dust with France’s nukes.

But none of that mattered to those people who only wanted to survive. They had no reason to accept the additional risk. Staying put met their requirements just fine. This fulfilled their purpose – or their “desire”.

“Tell them in French that the fire could take several days to die down, so they need to prepare the necessities for a long time down there. Since it’s going to be dark down there, tell them to prepare multiple battery-powered lights and clocks. And they need to bring as powerful a jack as they can find. If the burning building collapses on top of them, the basement might survive, but the trap door might not be able to open with all the rubble on top of it.”

In a disaster, all you could really do was hesitantly head down the path you believed to be at least a little safer than the others. We needed to assist each other when we could, but we couldn’t demand they share our own fate just because we think it’s best. This isn’t just a matter of empathy and obligation. Lives are on the line. Unless they’re being suicidal or rioting based on insufficient information or fake news, we couldn’t get in the way of someone else’s earnest efforts to survive.

Another lightning bolt struck nearby.

In fact, more and more were striking every 10 seconds or less, so it felt like we were inside a giant bug zapper. If we ran out without a plan, we would be struck in that same time period and torn to pieces.

We had two units ready.

I had Amatsu Yurina carry the other one. It was a spare. If the primary one malfunctioned or ran out of gas without warning, we would be killed instantly, so it was always worth having a backup.

There was no point in trying to time our escape.

The lightning was so constant that waiting would just waste more time. We were trying to escape a fire on foot, so we needed to get going as soon as possible.

I suppressed the fear trying to drive me back inside and raised my voice while choosing to brave the great outdoors.

“Let’s go!”

The sound of me throwing open the large door was drowned out by an especially loud blast of thunder.

We were outside now. Presumably.

But the bright white light made it impossible to tell.

“––––––!?”

Anastasia yelled something from less than a meter away, but I couldn’t hear her. A tree on the other side of the street had split in two and was burning like a torch. The same would happen to any of us if we were struck. And despite all the lightning, there was still no rain. The dry air felt powdery in my mouth, which was a bad sign. It felt like all the air here was steeped in malevolence.

Just as I heard a deep rumbling reminiscent of an animal’s growl from overhead, I used both hands to grab the metal unit held under one arm, aimed it diagonally up, and pushed it as far up into the empty night sky as I could.

“Please work, damn you!!”

Heavy recoil hit my hands and a sound even duller than a sewing machine hit my ears. The trail of light being sucked into the sky while reflecting the fire and lightning was no more than water. The water compressed in the tank on my back passed through a hose and could be controlled with the valve in my hand. For our purposes, it didn’t need to draw out an arch like I was watering plants with a hose. In fact, it was best if it was divided into small pieces that I rapidly fired vertical shots like a machinegun.

The night sky immediately reacted.

Very sensitively at that.

A piercing flash of lightning burst in the sky. To be honest, I couldn’t follow it with my eyes. I could only really make out the result by following the blue afterimage burned into my retinas while I cowered in fear of the deafening roar.

“I-it worked,” said Anastasia, her voice trembling.

After staring up into the sky, she finally hugged me in joy.

“Ah ha ha! We did it!! We actually induced the lightning!!”

By creating a lightning strike elsewhere, we could release the energy built up in the air. From there, we simply used the principle behind a lightning rod. Take a conductive material, give it as pointy a shape as you can, place it somewhere high up, and then the point discharge would let you control the lightning. The height alone needed to be 100m. If we were going to fire a series of “water bullets” mixed with table salt on all the other safe places, 300m would be best. Combining all that with a building’s lightning rod would be even better. The end result happened to look like a dangerous weapon, but it was really just a metal pipe, a shower hose, the tank to a hand-pumped agrochemical sprayer, and the big motor and battery to a handheld vacuum.

We made sure to send lightning elsewhere at short intervals while we made our way across the open street full of intense light and noise.

Embers passed us from behind.

We finally had time to look back. Anastasia gave into the temptation, but she immediately stiffened. I knew what she must have seen. I could feel a pain in my back like it was being pricked by tiny pins even though I was wearing the heavy tank full of water there.

I looked back myself.

A wall of red and orange covered everything there like a giant wave. The street, the trees, the abandoned cars, and the buildings were all engulfed as the wall approached us. Almost like it was intent on chasing us down even if that meant trampling everything in its path.

There had to be cars and propane tanks exploding in the flames, but the intensity of the flames drowned out even that.

“Ah, ahh. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Wide eyed Anastasia shout something like a lament, so I tugged on her with a hand.

The general store we had left was already on the other side of the red curtain. There was no going back now. We could only pray the people who had taken shelter in the basement weren’t cooked to death.

“How far are we going to run!?”

I sprayed the water up and down like I was drawing out vertical lines, causing a second and third lightning strike to hit elsewhere. I had to be careful because spraying a constant stream of water like with a firehose would actually guide the lightning toward us. Meanwhile, my stepmom shouted that question to me over the thunder.

I only had one answer.

“Anywhere where the fire can’t reach and we’re sheltered from the lightning! We need to find some kind of terrain that will stop the spread of the fire, like a park without buildings or a river!!”

Our plan kept us safe for now, but the tank only held so much water. And if I ever screwed up my timing, we were dead. I was using the close-range wireless that let my phone connect to headphones to pick up on the noise signaling an imminent strike, but that was far from perfect. We couldn’t afford to wander around without a destination in mind.

A new lightning bolt crashed down.

I hadn’t induced that one. Fear clutched my heart when I saw a public Wi-Fi antenna blasted off of a building wall. I hadn’t been in control of that at all. Our plan couldn’t handle everything. If that had struck us, we would have been killed.

Not everything was going to go to plan.

What if we didn’t find a river to stop the fire approaching from behind? What if the way ahead was blocked by a collapsed building? What if it started pouring rain and my “water gun” stopped functioning as a lightning rod?

I kept running from the fire while shooting down the lightning. Working under such extreme tension was exhausting and it guided my thoughts inward. I had to shake my head hard to break free of the paranoid fantasies in my head.

And then…

“There’s a bridge.”

Anastasia pointed ahead with her small finger.

There was something that way.

“Can’t we use that? Cross the bridge and we’ll lose the wall of fire!!”

We were too far to know what bridge it was and we couldn’t check the map without an internet connection. But this didn’t look like a natural river. I didn’t hear any moving water either. It just looked like a short bridge spanning a valley of concrete.

“Looks like an intersection with the subway,” said my stepmom while viewing the bridge from afar. “There’s no water, but the concrete railroad should stop the fire just as well. We should cross here.”

So we were saved. There could be more fires and the lightning would still be an issue on the other side, but we had to clear one hurdle at a time, improving our position each time. We would go through the list of risks and eliminate them all. It was like untangling a power cord – you would never get anywhere if you tried to do it all at once.

Or so I thought.

We all approached the bridge that would stop the fire.

But just as we moved past a tall building, I froze. I thought my heart was going to stop.

“Wait, Anastasia.”

“Why!? We can talk later!!”

“No, it has to be now. Look at that.”

I was focused on the side of the road just before reaching the bridge.

Amatsu Yurina had already noticed it. She must have known Anastasia would fall back in shock when she turned her puzzled face in that direction because she surreptitiously propped the girl up from behind.

It wasn’t anything unusual.

In fact, it was something we needed in every part of the world. I couldn’t read the writing on the sign, but the silhouette was unmistakable. We had them in Japan too.

“You’re…kidding,” groaned Anastasia.

Some cracks must have formed during the many disasters because a distinctive odor hung in the air even at this distance.

Up ahead and just before reaching the bridge was an unmanned gas station.

There was no greater collection of dangerous flammable materials just sitting on a street corner.

Part 4

To review, we had a great wall of fire pursuing us from behind and a lightning storm pursuing us from overhead.

We couldn’t stay in any one spot for long. At most, 3 minutes. Any longer and the fire would get us. If we kept going and crossed the bridge ahead, we would escape the fire for the time being. The lightning would still be an issue, but we would have one less problem to deal with.

But reaching that bridge meant passing right by a gas station.

I could already smell the gas from here. It was invisible, but gasoline vapor had to already be leaking out. The wall of fire, a single ember, or even a spark of static electricity could trigger an explosion.

If we didn’t do anything, our deaths were assured.

There was no guaranteed correct answer.

So what should we do? Accept the risk of crossing the bridge, or attempt a detour that may or may not exist?

“W-we should go for it.” Anastasia pointed straight ahead. “If there’s a risk of an explosion, then we can’t afford to wait around! We can escape the fire if we cross the bridge, so we need to hurry up and do so!!”

“We won’t survive if we are caught in the explosion. The fire and explosion will cover the entire road and we can’t expect any advance warning like there is with the wall of fire. We need to avoid the gas station just in case,” suggested my stepmom, her arms crossed.

But Anastasia wasn’t convinced. She shouted back with tears of fear, not anger, in her eyes.

“If we had just gone for it instead of arguing, we would be safely across already! Besides, there’s a subway track running below the bridge. That’s what will block the fire, so the fire will get us if we don’t cross to the other side. We can run along that concrete valley looking for another way across, but who knows how far until the next bridge! We can’t even check our map apps with all the signal interference!”

They both had a point.

And like I said, we didn’t have much time to think. I couldn’t rely on Maxwell either.

I responded while listening for the noise in my wireless headphones and using the special water gun to redirect the deadly lightning.

“Let’s keep going.”

“Satori.”

“Anastasia is right. If we don’t find another bridge, we can’t do anything to keep the fire from reaching us. And even if we do find another one, what if there’s a gas station next to that one too? That’s a decent possibility in a big city and we’ll be screwed. We’ll run out of time and die in the fire.”

The way ahead was risky. I knew that.

But we had no idea what we would find if we searched for another way around, so that didn’t qualify as an alternative. I just felt like we should bet on the 1% chance instead of the 0% chance. On the other hand, we were only continuing the pattern of choosing whichever route was less dangerous, which only whittled down our options little by little. Keep this up for too long and we would waste whatever chance we might have had and trap ourselves.

Maybe we could have found another answer if I was still connected to Maxwell. A detailed map might have shown another bridge only a few hundred meters away, with no gas stations, large boilers, or other dangerous locations on the way. If we could have confirmed the safety of a detour on the map, I probably would have gone with my stepmom’s plan.

I normally could have come up with a logical answer to this problem, but now we were stuck relying on luck. And my life and the lives of people I cared about were riding on this. I realized anew just how scary a situation this was.

If we kept going, we would reach the bridge. The gas station on the way was terrifying, but if we held our breath for just a few seconds and ran past, we could escape the wall of fire approaching us from behind. In theory.

“Okay, Anastasia, start running on my signal.”

“On the count of three?”

“Sure. 3, 2, 1.”

Lightning struck the gas station on 0.

It happened so suddenly.

If my stepmom, Amatsu Yurina, hadn’t grabbed us by our collars and pulled us back, we may have joined that thick rubber tire flying through the air after it was torn from a car.

There was an explosion.

All the gasoline vapor floating around the area ignited and, in less than a second, flames rushed toward the underground tank through the cracks in the ground. It was basically a volcanic eruption. The concrete ground was shattered and blasted high into the sky, bending the metal roof and pillars on the way. Red and orange light shined in every direction while sticky flames similar to a Molotov cocktail covered the wide road and even the opposite sidewalk.

I couldn’t let myself fear the sounds of unidentifiable pieces of metal scraps crashing into the ground.

The three of us were knocked onto our backs and I heard my stepmom shouting while I tried to recover.

“Satori, ready your unit!! The weather doesn’t care what happened to us, so the lightning is coming!!”

“Kh.”

I could barely breathe as I pointed the nozzle skyward while still on my back.

I flicked the valve with my index finger just as a flash of light erupted. The intermittent line of water bullets managed to guide it away. The afterimage took an unnatural curve before stabbing into the ground decently far away from us.

“T-Truth.”

“No, Anastasia. Mom was right.”

The gas station had been blown to smithereens and a wall of sticky flames now blocked the way ahead. There was no way we could break through that and reach the bridge beyond. The one explosion might not have used up all of the flammable materials. Another tank or a car parked there might explode too. We had a spare water gun to use as a lightning rod, but 50 liters wasn’t enough to put out those flames. In fact, I was pretty sure ordinary water would only cause it to spread. You know, like a grease fire.

There was nothing we could do.

We had to find another way. Physically.

“But there’s a wall of fire behind us too,” insisted Anastasia. “We won’t make it in time!”

“Run!!”

Front and back weren’t an option, so I grabbed Anastasia’s hand, forced her to her feet, and ran down a narrow alley with Amatsu Yurina. The approaching walls of fire had no set shape, so they could move through any gap. Hiding here wouldn’t save us, so we had to get out before we were cooked alive.

We took an L-shaped corner that directed us toward the subway track again. There was a fence in the way and the concrete valley beyond that.

Anastasia looked to the right and shouted in disgust.

“It’s no use. The gas station explosion is spreading. Even if we head back along the valley, the fire will still keep us from the bridge!”

It looked like the fire had reached the center of the intersection, so we couldn’t reach the bridge along a different route.

There was another large explosion.

I couldn’t tell what inside the flames had ruptured. I only knew that trying to approach would get us mortally wounded. It didn’t even matter that there was a bridge right there.

We really did need another escape route.

You could escape a fire if you crossed an obstacle that would stop the fire, like a river or a mountain. The concrete valley used for the subway track would be perfect for that.

If only we had some way of crossing it.

Unlike Anastasia, I looked left. The fence and a small path vanished into the darkness there, so I couldn’t tell if there was a bridge or not. We had to cross the 15m-wide and 5m-deep valley, but I didn’t see any other bridges. If we didn’t cross soon, the wall of fire would reach us.

5m.

That didn’t sound too bad, but even if we got down, I doubted we could climb the other side without any handholds.

Oh, no.

Had we made the wrong decision?

Had waiting in the general store basement been the right choice? Had that been our only path to survival? We needed freedom of movement to pursue JB, so we couldn’t wait several days for the fire to burn itself out. I knew that. But I could have taken that risky path myself and left Anastasia and my stepmom in the basement food storeroom!

There was no going back now.

That general store was already engulfed in flames. I didn’t know if the basement had survived, but no one could move around on the surface there. It was a hell of heat and smoke.

“Run, Satori.” My stepmom was still looking ahead. “We don’t have much information and we can’t know what’s the best option. But standing here isn’t going to help. It’s like a game of concentration. When you don’t have much information, the best strategy is to flip over every card you can to gather as many hints as possible!”

She was right.

We had to keep going.

The three of us ran down the small path running alongside the fence protecting the concrete valley. I couldn’t believe how much I loathed that track running down there. What if we didn’t find another bridge, or the way ahead was blocked by rubble? There were so many things to worry about. Anastasia kept glancing over toward the fence while running out of breath. I understood how she felt. I too was starting to consider climbing down into that valley and attempting to climb up the concrete wall on the other side.

“No.” My stepmom stopped us with the tone of someone preventing a thirsty castaway from drinking the seawater. “With the gravel, rails, and railroad ties, it’s very bumpy down there. 5m is a long way down in the dark. Screw up your landing and you will sprain or break something. That would be fatal given the circumstances.”

“But!”

“Listen, Satori. Listen carefully. Even if you are lucky enough to jump down without injuring yourself, how are you going to climb the other side? If you can’t, you’re stuck while the flames pour down and swallow you whole. It will be just like pouring boiling water into an anthill. Nearly 5m straight up is too high to climb up on someone’s shoulders, right?”

Maybe it would work out if we had bouldering skills. A Vampire like Erica had 20x human strength, so she could probably climb a cliff or building wall with ease. But we couldn’t do it. I knew of bouldering and the basic idea behind it, but I knew I couldn’t actually do it here.

Then again, what about my stepmom?

Archenemy Lilith was a Demon Lord counted among the Seven Deadly Sins, so she might be able to do it. So why didn’t she? Because she didn’t want to abandon Anastasia and me. She was slowing down for our benefit, even if that meant exposing her to the threat of the fire.

She was the mother and I was her child. She was the adult and we were the kids.

I had thought I could stop a war between Absolute Noah and JB. I had relied on an acquaintance like Anastasia and seriously thought I could take on my stepmom while she was trying to access some kind of powerful weapon in France. But now look at me. Amatsu Yurina was literally risking her life to protect me. And she didn’t even point this out to me. She knew the truth would only wound me, so she smiled and shrugged off her child’s insults.

I appreciated her concern, but I couldn’t stand much more of it.

We had clashed a few times before. I had poured everything into it and approached it as a turning point in my life. But she probably hadn’t even seen them as battles.

“I found something!” said Amatsu Yurina while forcing us to keep running.

There was a large silhouette up ahead.

But not a bridge.

Anastasia came to a confused stop.

“S-something’s fallen over. Is it a big sign?”

“I think this was the sign in front of that gas station. It’s all broken now, though.”

So it flew all this way?

The sign bearing the gas station logo had stood three stories tall on two long metal supports, but now it had crashed into the ground, crushed the tall fence, and fallen into the concrete valley.

It was a frightening scene. Both for what it said about the intensity of the blast and the fact that it would have killed us if it had fallen on us.

But it actually helped us here.

The supports looked to be more than 30cm thick. That was thicker than the railroad rails, so they had to be sturdy.

I heard the roar of fire sucking in oxygen.

We didn’t have time to argue about it.

The valley was about 5m deep.

The supports were bent up, but they were thicker than a power pole. They formed a downwards slope slick with rain, so getting on top of them and crawling carefully seemed like the safest option.

“This should work.”

The large sign looked to have sunk down at a diagonal angle. That meant this side was higher up than the road.

My stepmom climbed up first. Next, I lifted small Anastasia in my hands. It took less than 30 seconds to pass her to my stepmom up top, but that short time was really bad for my heart. Without the lightning rod using the sprayed water, I couldn’t predict when lightning was going to fall on our heads. And they were standing on a giant piece of metal. No matter how short a time it was, we were still leaving our lives in the hands of luck.

I went last.

I wasn’t as bad as Anastasia who I had to pick up by placing my hands below her arms like she was a cat, but as an indoorsy kind of guy, I didn’t have the muscles to do multiple pull ups without issue. Doing one with a proper metal bar was my limit, so there was no way I could support my weight while holding a crude outcropping of metal with just my fingertips.

Which meant…

“Anastasia, do you know how to use this? Take it and go on water gun duty for me! You can carry it now that the tank is so empty, right!?”

“Truth.”

“If we wait any longer, the lightning will strike. We can’t afford to wait longer than a minute!!”

First, I handed the tank and water gun to Anastasia and had her protect our party while I got my stepmom’s help. I really did need her help for everything, didn’t I?

“Oof.”

Now we had to descend the wet slope. The metal supports had fallen into the valley, so they were slanted. I got down on the surface and pressed on it with my hands and feet, finding it was really slippery. Then I took the water gun back from Anastasia.

“This was a mistake. I should have had Anastasia go last.”

“Why?”

The 11-year-old, whose wet miniskirt butt was sticking up right in front of me, looked over her shoulder to give me a puzzled look.

I heard a loud boom and looked back in surprise to see the wall of flames had engulfed the area with the fence. The orange ocean poured down into the valley with somewhat liquid motion, but we were still safe. The molten metal and plastic spread out across the railroad below, but it didn’t climb up to reach us. Nevertheless, the heat and smoke would be a problem if we didn’t hurry.

“Hopefully this doesn’t affect the cracks in the concrete and asphalt. This sign’s current balance is pure coincidence and we lose our way ahead if it collapses or rolls over.”

My stepmom gave that warning, but the other side was right in front of her now. The sign had fallen into the valley, so it was basically a downwards slope. We had come down a fair way, but it had crashed into the concrete wall, causing it to bend upwards at the end. It had the silhouette of a crowbar. That gave us an extra 3m of height. The valley was 5m deep, so that left 2m for us to deal with. Only short Anastasia couldn’t reach the top.

As before, my stepmom would go up first, Anastasia second, and me last.

Amatsu Yurina easily got up on her own. She grabbed the edge of the concrete with both hands and pulled herself up while kicking her feet off the wall. This was no surprise when she probably could have climbed a 5m wall on her own.

I stopped using the noise in my wireless headphones to spray the water gun into the sky, lifted Anastasia up with both hands, and let my stepmom pull her up.

And then…

“What?”

I looked to the side.

I sensed a small tremor. But it didn’t feel like the beginnings of an earthquake. Something large was moving in the darkness filling the bottom of the valley…and it was coming this way?

With the fire pursuing us, turning my back to the light source caused the darkness to seem even deeper. I couldn’t see past 20m away.

“Hurry, Satori. Grab onto my hands.”

“But I have to hand over the water gun first.”

“Hurry!! They’re coming!!”

My stepmom’s shout naturally scared me, but that was why I stared into the darkness and even shined my phone’s light that way. My defensive reflexes kicked in, like I was raising my hands to catch an incoming ball.

I saw a dark mass.

It rose even higher than me on the dented metal sign.

It was a mass of thousands, or even tens of thousands, of rats.

I didn’t understand.

Why would I want to understand something so absurd?

“Ahh!?”

I shouted and tried to grab my stepmom’s hands, but the solid mass of rats crashed into the side of the collapsed rubble and started to carry it away. The metal had to weigh several dozen tons, but it might as well have been swept away by a wave.

“Truth!!”

I heard Anastasia’s voice, but by then, my feet were already in the air. I was helplessly thrown into the ocean of rats.

Part 5

“Gh.”

I was in hell.

But where was this specific hell located? I could groan out loud, so at least it was a living hell.

There wasn’t a rat around any longer.

Still separated from my stepmom and Anastasia, I sat up and finally realized that was concrete and a railroad track below me. I was apparently still atop the subway track, but it was dark and cramped. I had been dragged into a tunnel instead of the exposed surface area.

I didn’t feel like I had been attacked by animals. It was more like I had been soaked by a flash flood.

Even so…

“So now we have the rats.”

There was an urban legend that small animals would act strangely before a natural disaster, but I doubted that was the explanation for this.

So what was the explanation?

“…”

I decided to rule out the possibility of one of the curses or magic spells JB excelled at. If that were the case, I either would have been devoured down to my bones or infected with some horrific disease.

I also doubted this was a natural occurrence.

The French had a traditional fear of rat outbreaks.

But not for occult reasons. It came from their historical experience with the plague. That brutal disease had swept across all of Europe long ago, influencing the 100 Years’ War, causing civil wars, and ultimately wiping out a third of the population. The disease had been spread by rats (well, technically the fleas on the rats), so they had meticulously eliminated all rats from their living spaces.

But there were still environments where the rats could multiply all on their own if they weren’t actively exterminated.

It might seem silly to worry about something from hundreds of years ago, but Paris has a long history, as the catacombs full of bones make all too clear. They had gone through a revolution and even been occupied by another country, but there were apartments and underground tunnels that were still in use after literal centuries.

A breeding ground for an unlimited supply of rats could still exist in some blind spot in Paris. While the city was painted over time and again to modernize it, some hidden corner could still remain. I doubted anyone kept accurate statistics on how many rats there were in the entire city, but we were experiencing a disaster. Like squeezing a sponge full of water, the rats fleeing from all over the city had thoughtlessly fallen into the concrete valley and ran as a huge swarm in search of an exit. That was my best guess as to what had happened.

I wasn’t injured, was I?

I felt over my body for rat scratches and bites just in case, but I didn’t notice any odd pains or itches. They must not have viewed me as an enemy or as food. They had probably been too desperate to get away.

“Now what do I do?” I said despite having no one to hear me.

Or maybe I said it because there was no one to hear it.

Fortunately, I still had my phone in my hand. The tank on my back and its attached water gun were…ruined. They were badly dented and opening the valve didn’t produce any water.

I had given the spare to my stepmom. Anastasia would know how to use it, so I didn’t have to worry about them getting struck by lightning.

Sadly, it was a lot more likely that I would be the one having trouble now that I was on my own. I wanted to regroup with them because I was scared, not because I was courageous or righteous. I didn’t have Maxwell’s assistance and I couldn’t even read French on my own.

I touched my phone and shined its bright backlight into the tunnel.

Yeah, still no signal.

No, I couldn’t give up yet. Maybe it was the tunnel’s fault. The unnatural interference had been from all the dust thrown into the air by the second meteor shower. Leave the area of lightning and my phone would work again.

Staying here wouldn’t help.

I needed to leave the tunnel. If the rats reached a dead end and made a U-turn, I was screwed.

But which way to the exit?

“Is that it?”

I couldn’t read French, but I could recognize the arrows on the signs. I found a promising metal door partway down the tunnel. I tried the knob and found it wasn’t locked. I peeked inside and saw metal stairs leading up. Emergency stairs.

I used my phone’s light to climb a step at a time. I was risking my life here. What if a step broke through as soon as I put my weight on it? What if I failed to notice a crack in the ceiling and a chunk of concrete fell on me? I couldn’t fully deny those ridiculous possibilities. My trust in steel and concrete had been badly shaken in this city.

Uh, oh. Now that I was on my own, I couldn’t stop my imagination from getting the better of me. A group of three was about right. Having extra eyes helped of course, but it also helped you view yourself more objectively.

“Okay.”

I climbed the final step and arrived on the ground level.

I was a bit afraid to open the door, but I cracked it open to check and didn’t see any bright lights or hear any deep rumbling. Maybe it was the wind and maybe the river of rats had taken me further than I thought, but the dust hadn’t reached here.

I glanced at my phone and saw it was nearly midnight.

I couldn’t tell if the rats had been carrying me around for such a long time or if I had been released from them quickly and spent the rest of the time passed out on the track.

But now that I was out of the lightning area, I could use my phone. The map would tell me where I was and I could contact Anastasia or my stepmom. But most importantly…

“Maxwell!!”

“Sure. I would appreciate a report on what has happened since we lost contact.”

I really thought I was going to collapse with relief.

All I had done was connect my phone to the internet and access an online program. People did that all the time like it was nothing, but it meant so much to me now.

The display now showed a solid signal.

I could search for anything I wanted now. There was so much I needed to do. I felt like I had the combined knowledge of the entire world at my fingertips. I shared my information with Maxwell while working out a mental to do list.

“First, where am I?”

“Near Luxembourg Palace. On Boulevard Saint-Michel. University buildings are located there.”

As usual, the place names meant nothing to me, but Boulevard Saint-Michel sounded vaguely familiar. Oh, right. I heard that while we were on our way to the Paris Observatory. Since things looked so different, had I been taken a long way by the rats? The place where we had gotten separated had looked a lot plainer, full of short buildings and small shops. I didn’t see any fires around here either. The night remained dark.

“Also, contact Anastasia and my stepmom. I doubt they’re still in the same place since more than an hour has passed, but we can agree on a rendezvous point once we contact them.”

To do that, I had needed to know exactly where I was first. Without any information of my own, I couldn’t give anything to the others.

“Also, I have the phone belonging to Pierre – no, was it Vizza? – the guy controlling that giant Egyptian crocodile. If we know what’s on it, we might learn more about the French nukes under JB’s control. Crack its password for me.”

That was everything for now.

I was also curious about the weather situation, the state of the city, what had happened with the fires, when the next disaster was predicted, if the French government had made any announcements, what support other countries would be providing, and if there were any Japanese people among the volunteers. But I couldn’t ask it all at once. Not because Maxwell’s processing power couldn’t handle it but because it would overload my brain to see it all on the small screen at once.

Even now, JB was still active as a group. They wanted to create a new planet even if it meant using nuclear weapons. It sounded ridiculous, but their cast had already destroyed Paris this badly to that end. They definitely intended to go through with it.

Shortly before his untimely demise, Vizza had said their goal wasn’t to move to that planet.

That still bothered me.

“I have sent an email and message to both Mrs. Yurina and Miss Anastasia, but neither have responded. They are not responding to phone calls either.”

“Keep trying the phone calls. Are they still stuck in the lightning storm?”

The disasters had been bad enough to reshape the entire city, so there were plenty of reasons why they might not have access to the internet.

We could only wait until they answered the phone, but in the meantime…

“Any luck with Vizza Valdia’s phone?”

“The lock appears to use an iris scan. I am searching for all photos of all Italians from the Milan area and analyzing the iris patterns of 100s of thousands of individuals. By combining the results to create a ‘master key’, I may be able to get past the scan.”

That was impressive, but it sounded time consuming.

Was it really that difficult?

“You have photos of Vizza himself, don’t you? You got his personal info from a fingerprint.”

“I attempted it and access was denied. We only have two opportunities left. He may have worn color contacts for any official photographs such as those for his driver’s license or passport.”

He was careful, I’ll give him that. Not too surprising when he went around his daily life using a fake name like Pierre Smith.

So my only new piece of information was my current location.

I had no hint where Anastasia and my stepmom were and I had to wait for Vizza’s phone to be cracked. Walking through this rubble-strewn city at night was too dangerous without a clear destination in mind. It would be best to wait where I was until I knew my next step.

What were the Parisians doing?

I didn’t think it was great that I was so reliant on a machine to stay alive, but I could at least find my next step by giving Maxwell instructions. I wasn’t completely lost in a nightmarish open world. Not so for everyone else. They would be feeling the anxiety of no information and they would be reluctant to move around without a clear “next step” in mind. But waiting around in this darkness had to be about as nerve wracking as being trapped in a dangling elevator.

“Maxwell, give me a list of all LCD billboards and advertisement trucks that are still functioning. Whether they’re rectangular or around a column, they should run on commercial Winners.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Display the online stream of the French TV news on them. But eliminate any obvious misinformation.”

With a hum, lights came on here and there in Paris’s shadows. It wasn’t enough to eliminate those shadows, but still.

This wouldn’t solve anything. It might not tell anyone what their next step is. But it would free them from the nightmarish sensation akin to being forced to sit blindfolded in the middle of a minefield.

At the same time, I heard a burst of static from my phone.

“I have made contact with Miss Anastasia.”

“Anastasia!!”

“Are you okay?” said the girl’s voice. “It looked like you were carried away by a swarm of filthy rats!”

“I wouldn’t be speaking with you if I wasn’t. It looks like they didn’t infect me with anything.”

“Can you really tell at a glance? Anyway, my connection is weak, so let’s exchange the necessary information first. Where are you, Truth? Do you have a rendezvous point in mind?”

Things were looking up.

I was gradually clawing my way up from rock bottom. This phone had changed my life.

“I’m fine and I can walk. I’m near Luxem-something-or-other. Maxwell says there’s a bunch of university stuff nearby.”

“Luxembourg Palace, I’m guessing. Then stay there. That isn’t far from Gare Montparnasse where we are.”

“Hold on.”

“You can get Maxwell to tell you all about Gare Montparnasse. Your area is the biggest open park in the area, so it’ll be easier to find than the rubble-filled streets here. Luxembourg Palace is currently used as their senate building. That means it’s part of their parliament. There’s no way their military or administration will abandon it.”

“…”

“Truth, I know how hard it is to just wait, but if things go smoothly, we’ll be there in 10 minutes. So just stay put, okay?”

I could use my map app now that I had Maxwell again, but walking through the rubble based on unreliable landmarks probably wasn’t the best idea. I had already failed to reach the Japanese embassy after mistaking the location of the Arc de Triomphe, so we might pass each other without realizing it.

“Will do, Anastasia. You should be fine with my stepmom with you, but don’t do anything risky. If you can’t get through because of rubble, we can agree on a different rendezvous point, so don’t take the risk of trying to climb over-”

My phone vibrated.

A message popup appeared at the top of the screen. Maxwell was contacting me via social media.

I kept the call going as I tapped the screen to call up the social media app and read Maxwell’s message.

“I have unlocked Vizza Valdia’s phone.”

“!”

Finally, some good news.

The path to JB and their French nukes hadn’t gone cold yet. It wasn’t much, but Vizza’s phone gave us a chance.

Maxwell sent more messages that really dug down into the issue.

“I am searching its total of 105,005 files for keywords such as ‘JB’, ‘nuclear’, and ‘planet’.”

“Hold on a second, Anastasia.”

“Narrowing it down to the most valuable texts, I have 8 hits. These lend credence to the planet creation plan using nuclear weapons. I have found actual equations, so I can simulate whether or not it is actually possible. Rather than move to the created planet, it appears they intend to intentionally unbalance the world.”

“Unbalance it?”

“The details are unknown. It could be referring to gravity or something more occult. A total of 25 nuclear warheads loaded on cruisers and submarines have been taken from the French government’s control. France is unaware. JB’s cast can launch them at the press of a button and returning control to France would require the cruisers and submarines spread around the world to return to a naval base with high level equipment. It would take at least 14 days for all of the naval craft to arrive at the closest viable base, so the process is meaningless if JB intends to act soon. I have also found a few names that appear to refer to cast members. Mrs. Amatsu Yurina’s name is on this list.”

I nearly overlooked it.

I was ready to accept anything with all the data Maxwell was giving me in quick succession, but hold on. That part didn’t make any sense.

“This is a secret JB document, right?”

“Sure.”

A program like Maxwell would provide any information a user requested.

So the text appeared on the small screen without delay.

“This suggests Mrs. Amatsu Yurina belongs to both Absolute Noah and JB.”

“Ana-!!”

I shouted more or less on reflex.

But it still wasn’t fast enough. The call ended suspiciously quickly.

Could I redial?

No way that would accomplish anything here, dammit!!

“Maxwell, where is Anastasia? Search for Gare Mont-whatever-it-was!!”

“There were signs that Mrs. Amatsu Yurina always wanted a war between Absolute Noah and JB.”

“I know that…”

Thinking back, things hadn’t made much sense in our fight against Vizza Valdia. She had supposedly fought him in the French Ministry of Defense’s basement, but her reaction when we fought Water God Sebek at the Hôtel des Whatever hadn’t sat right with me.

She had been surprised, like it was her first time seeing it.

Had she actually fought JB in that basement? There weren’t any security cameras down there. There hadn’t been any other witnesses down there, so couldn’t she have met up with Vizza and his suitcase of analysis equipment and shaken hands with him?

“You thought Mrs. Yurina had gone to Paris to access a special weapon needed to win this war, but we do not actually know what she was doing in the catacombs or the French Ministry of Defense’s basement. We only have her own word to go on that she was acting to stop JB from acquiring the nuclear weapons.”

“Again, I know that!! Give me the shortest route to Gare Mont…Montparnasse, that’s it!!”

“I strongly recommend against it. If Archenemy Lilith is a JB cast member, and thus an enemy, the probability of you defeating her are extremely close to zero.”

…I’m aware of that.

Did she really belong to Absolute Noah or JB? Either way, she would be using the power of that organization. Demon Lord Lilith would be bad enough, but my odds really did drop to 0 if she could outnumber me as well.

I had forgotten.

I had stupidly decided that we were on the same side now.

She was my stepmom, but she was also a Demon Lord counted among the Seven Deadly Sins. Her trickery had to go well beyond anything I could imagine.

“Gare Montparnasse is a large train station even for Paris, so it has three adjacent aboveground buildings plus additional facilities like a bus terminal connecting it to the airport on the outskirts. The entire complex is intricately linked together belowground by maintenance corridors, so it is a dangerous area with many blind spots and dead ends. Your disadvantage will be especially great if you are outnumbered.”

“But it’s a public station, right? Then there should be maps of it readily available.”

“As a large station, it has many employee facilities and passageways not shown on the publicly available maps for antiterrorism purposes. Plus, a JB group led by Mrs. Yurina could block corridors with rubble or break a hole in the ceiling and link floors with ladders. You may not be able to rely on the existing layout.”

Did she want to win as part of Absolute Noah, did she want to win as part of JB, did she belong to some still unseen third party, was she some higher group that bound the two groups together, or did she want to bring down both groups?

I couldn’t figure it out.

I had this new fact to chew on, but I couldn’t find any answers. The facts were spread out so far I couldn’t narrow them down to a single answer. Amatsu Yurina was just that complex. I couldn’t seem to untangle everything about her.

I couldn’t win this on my own. The terrain worked against me. I couldn’t figure out the power balance between the different groups. And to top it all off, she had Anastasia as a hostage.

To be blunt, I didn’t see any way of turning this around.

Not one.

I hung my head and squeezed out the words.

“But I can’t give up on Anastasia.”

“She is a Silky. She is sturdier than a human like you.”

“That’s not the point! She stuck with me all this time for nothing in return. She never should have come to Paris in the first place. I got her into this mess, so I have to get her out of it!!”

It was unusual for Maxwell to fight my commands to this extent. Like I said before, I normally got any data I asked for without delay.

I more or less understood why.

“Are you afraid of letting me and my stepmom fight, Maxwell?”

“I am not equipped with the ability to feel fear.”

“I’m asking if you’re afraid I’ll get desperate like last time.”

Come to think of it, I was with Anastasia that time too. After the destruction of Las Vegas, I learned Absolute Noah and my stepmom had been involved and then clashed with her for the first time. I had basically been running wild and I think I partially destroyed my own heart in the process.

If my safety was the #1 priority, then stopping me would be the best option.

I had no chance of winning and my heart would be aching even if I did win. Choosing that would mean taking the path to ruin.

But.

That wasn’t a good enough reason to run away and abandon Anastasia.

If I did that, I would end up destroying my very soul.

If my stepmom really was responsible for what had happened to Paris, I had to stop her. I didn’t know if Anastasia was safe, so I had to find out.

“User, where do you think you are going?”

“If you won’t show me the way, I’ll just have to figure it out myself.”

“You are going the wrong way.”

“Ahh! Why must life be so cruel!? The big boss’s ultimate special attack isn’t the only thing that can kill you. In this darkness, I could easily fall into a crack in the road or get crushed by a piece of a building! I’m so helpless and powerless on my own!!”

“…”

“But I’m not on my own if I have your help. So lend me a hand, Maxwell. You were built to help people survive disasters, weren’t you? You can’t lie to me here because I’m the one who built you. So help me save Anastasia! You do the calculations and I’ll do the physical work. I can’t do it without you, so please!!”

Maxwell really did fall silent.

Was this a pause for thought or a way of saying “I’m not talking to you”.

Each tick of the clock seemed to tear into my life further.

I gave in first. I took another step without knowing where I was going.

That was when a message appeared.

“My top priority here is to keep you safe.”

“Yeah?”

“If you are intent on this suicidal course of action, then I must stop you. But unfortunately, I lack physical arms. Thus, as much as it displeases me, it appears I have no choice but to provide what advice I can that will reduce the probability of your death.”

“You can be honest, you know? You’re worried about Anastasia too, aren’t you?”

Maxwell said nothing.

Gare Montparnasse.

The station probably wasn’t functioning after so many disasters. It was probably a metal and concrete labyrinth in which a Demon Lord lurked.

But that just meant it was time to visit the Demon Lord’s castle and rescue the storybook princess.

“User, you do not need to do anything drastic.”

“What do you mean?”

“Aren’t you worried about Mrs. Amatsu Yurina for getting involved with JB of all people? That ‘loan’ is even riskier than going to a loan shark.”

“…”

That’s why I need you.

When I felt my emotions influencing me – when I was hit by the trauma of knowing my decision could tear my family apart and wasn’t able to take the final crucial step – I would turn to my simulator and receive an objective opinion that let me continue fighting.

Part 6

Small, irregular tremors ran through the ground. The asphalt was cracked all over and both sides of the faults scraped loudly together.

“Is that the crust or tectonic plate again? How many more meteor showers is the ground going to have to take?”

“Keep an eye on your phone signal,” warned Maxwell. “With that much mass rubbing together, the produced static electricity could cause interference.”

I heard a short groan

Some young people were trembling while looking inside a nearby fountain. They had probably been hoping to find water to quench their thirst. It was hard to tell in the dark, but when I shined my phone’s light, I could tell the water was dyed red. That wasn’t the same color as the filthy rain that had absorbed all the dust from the atmosphere.

“What is this?”

“It is unlikely to be poison,” said Maxwell. “The rust in the water pipes may have come loose from all the shaking.”

“I wasn’t going to drink foreign tap water regardless, but now I’m definitely not going to.”

“From the look of this, the groundwater has likely been contaminated as well. Not only does this hinder the livability of the city, but it could have severe repercussions for the mineral water industry.”

The city was experiencing lava and volcanic gases with no connection to ordinary volcanic activity and faults, so they probably had to reexamine the water quality.

“But water is going to be an issue. Maybe I should make a handmade filter later on. Y’know, one the size of a drink bottle.”

“No. With all the fires sand traffic accidents in the city, a pharmaceutical warehouse could have collapsed or a chemical freight train could have derailed. Constant effort is required to stay safe, so you would need to perform a precision scan for all known chemical components and that would only be possible at a national research lab or similar.”

In that case, people would be fighting over bottled mineral water before long. The factories wouldn’t be supplying anymore and the bottles on the store shelves were probably already gone. Well, there were those big water dispensers that didn’t rely on the plumbing.

“You are within 50m of Gare Montparnasse. Even in the city’s darkness, you are approaching the danger zone. Especially if specialized night vision equipment is involved.”

“…”

I focused and crouched down. I couldn’t run away from the objective ahead of me.

The Demon Lord’s castle was right there.

“Maxwell, before I go in there, give me all the basic information you have on this station.”

“Sure.”

Maxwell was always accurate at times like this.

Sometimes that impeccable data could stab straight into my heart, but I didn’t have to worry about that simulator hiding something to spare my feelings.

“As I said earlier, Gare Montparnasse is one of Paris’s largest train stations. It has three buildings on the surface, located on grounds that cover 300 or 400 meters. Two or three Japanese schools and their schoolyards would fit inside.”

“So you’re saying it won’t be easy to explore.”

“Sure. Needless to say, Mrs. Yurina and Miss Anastasia’s whereabouts are unknown and we have no way of knowing if Mrs. Yurina is acting on her own or is working with some subordinates. If she does have subordinates, they are likely cast members on the level of Umikaze Speechia or Hotaruzawa Kezuri. You should scope out the place from outside before going in, but I doubt that is enough to make up for your severe lack of information. The idea of procuring a ground drone designed for indoor exploration is unrealistic, so you will have to gather what information you can while you approach.”

“I understand.”

“I do not think you do. I am a disaster environment simulator, but not even I can calculate your odds of survival here. Too much is unknown concerning Mrs. Yurina. I must reiterate that this is a highly unrecommended course of action. The most prudent decision would be to turn back now.”

“And if I want to rescue Anastasia, I have to act now. It’s like the 7-day weather forecast – things get harder to predict the further out you go. If I’m going to rescue her, it has to be now and I know you know that. If I abandon this opportunity, I’m not getting another one.”

But something seemed off as I nervously made my way through the tremors and shadows.

Gare Montparnasse was not a single giant boxy station building. Several buildings surrounded a large courtyard-like space. Pieces of the buildings’ silhouettes had crumbled like a cookie, but that wasn’t the problem.

I sensed people here.

I saw the flickering flames of fires, but these weren’t torches. Someone must have stuffed some broken lumber into metal drums and started fires for heat.

“?”

I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, but I dove behind some nearby rubble. I hid the light of my phone’s screen with a hand while shouting to Maxwell.

“What’s going on? That isn’t my stepmom. There are a whole bunch of people here!”

“This is nothing like when JB Vizza drove everyone away from the Hôtel des Invalides. Do they not have a standardized combat manual? Gare Montparnasse is a public facility with lots of space, so people would likely gather here even if it was not designated a shelter.”

“So what? Are you saying it helps my stepmom if Paris’s people gather here?”

If Amatsu Yurina really was part of JB, then she was the one who had dropped the meteor shower on the city. She might try to smooth things over and get the people on her side temporarily, but once they knew who she was, they would turn on her.

Did no one suspect all these disasters were artificial because ordinary people weren’t aware JB existed?

But was that really enough for the guilty party to rest easy? For one thing, the violence could always start before the people arrived at the right answer.

During a disaster, illogical delusions and misunderstandings could easily lead to violence.

“Mrs. Yurina’s strategies are always unpredictable when she is your enemy, but perhaps she hopes to hide in plain sight, take advantage of the confusion, or even use an artificially-created suspension bridge effect.”

“What do you mean an artificially-created suspension bridge effect?”

“Violent dictators sometimes have a powerful charisma. And people have a strange ability to forget who initially caused a threat when they are saved from it.”

That was basically how the warlords of the Sengoku period worked. Oda Nobunaga and Takeda Shingen were considered heroes of the people and valiant commanders because they fought to protect their people, but the Sengoku period, where so much death became normalized, never would have happened in the first place if those warlords hadn’t selfishly dreamed of conquering all of Japan. They were also the ones who decided on military might over negotiations as a means of expanding their power.

“Anyway, this is my stepmom we’re talking about, so we can’t let our guard down. It’s possible all these people turning on her isn’t enough of a threat to her to be worth eliminating.”

“Sure. Based on the structure of Absolute Noah, I find it unlikely she takes humans so lightly, but I concur that underestimating Demon Lord Lilith would be a bad idea.”

That said, I was afraid to just charging in like this.

If I screwed this up, I was dooming Anastasia as well.

I kept low and slowly walked the perimeter of Gare Montparnasse. I at least wanted to determine whether the people gathered here were comrades (or subordinates) assisting my stepmom or just evacuees who had ended up here. That would tell me if I could openly walk past them or if I had to sneak past them.

I wanted to save Anastasia as soon as possible

And if I could, I wanted to speak with Amatsu Yurina and have her cut all ties with JB.

I hid in the shadows and observed the station from a distance, gathering information painfully slowly, but I did learn one thing.

“Those people don’t seem to be carrying any kind of radio. They’re just surrounding the fires without keeping an eye on their surroundings.”

“Some of them are occasionally checking their phones.”

“Probably checking on their signal. I don’t understand the language, but they keep clicking their tongues and sticking the phones back in their pockets. The non-emergency lines probably still aren’t back up.”

Anastasia and I could only use our phones because we had infected the police network with JB’s rewritten virus, increasing the priority level of our data. During disasters, communications were shut down for everyone but the police, the firefighters, the military, and the government. But these people couldn’t use that trick.

That could only mean one thing.

“They’re ordinary people. They probably have seen Amatsu Yurina and Anastasia around here, but they wouldn’t know who they were. They probably just see them as other random evacuees.”

“Then it may be possible to get the crowd on your side. Since she is in fact a JB cast member, the odds are extremely high that Mrs. Amatsu Yurina has abducted and restrained Miss Anastasia. The Parisians may not be aware of the meteor shower attacks or the nuclear weapons, but this example is more obvious.”

“Causing a riot would only make things harder to predict. What if some enraged person goes in guns blazing out of a misguided sense of heroism? Even if they think they’re saving the kidnapped 11-year-old, they’re as likely to hit Anastasia with a stray bullet as they are to rescue her.”

Also, I wasn’t going to leave my stepmom at the mercy of an uncontrollable mob.

Not that I was entirely sure what I did want to do.

“That’s a full circle, but I didn’t see either of them at the entrances or windows.”

“Several railway lines gather at Gare Montparnasse. They have apparently excavated quite a bit underground to expand the commercial facilities, so there is likely a labyrinthine basement.”

I made a circle, but didn’t discover anything new. I had Maxwell check for any EM or IR transmissions and for any cameras still functioning during the blackout. Finally, I walked toward the station building.

“You are approaching Gare Montparnasse 1.”

I set foot on the station grounds and approached one of the 3 buildings there.

That was the Demon Lord’s castle.

The people gathered out front looked my way, but they didn’t yell or anything. I wasn’t French, but they were tolerant people. Even though it wasn’t unusual for disasters like this to distort people’s idea of unity into nationalism, where they prioritized rescuing their own people and rejected any outsiders.

“They have already accepted Mrs. Amatsu Yurina. Without knowing she is part of JB that caused all this to begin with.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Sneaking around and carrying a weapon would only work against me. These ordinary people would only see my stepmom as another evacuee. If I chased her down with a weapon, it was obvious who they would think was the bad guy. Especially when Amatsu Yurina was beautiful by the standards of any part of the world.

Actions with the best of intentions could still lead to bloodshed.

People could make their choices based on faulty information.

Here, I needed to focus on how I looked. I had already nearly been killed after being mistaken for a thief at a shop. I was already a foreign visitor. Under these extreme circumstances, that could be enough for the Parisians to view me with distrust. If I was equipped with dangerous weapons for my battle with Archenemy Lilith, they might just gang up on me.

I walked past the burning drum and entered the building.

It was like a field hospital.

There were no lights on in the large space, leaving it entirely dark, but I could hear the groans before I even shined my phone light that way. There were people here. A lot of them. The injured were probably lying on makeshift beds made by layering cardboard and tarps on the hard floor.

This reminded me that we were experiencing a real disaster, not an open world city game or a disaster survival game. With so many badly injured people placed haphazardly around here, it was unlikely the ambulances could get through the rubble-strewn streets or that the hospitals were functioning properly. Some of the people were struggling with wounds that normally wouldn’t be a big deal. What were the people who needed insulin for diabetes or a portable oxygen tank for asthma supposed to do? There had to be as many different types of medicine and medical equipment as there were diseases.

I couldn’t let this continue.

I had to stop JB and prevent any further meteor showers. Hell, the next attack could be something even worse.

They needed their nukes to create their new planet, but nothing said they needed all of the missiles to get what they wanted. JB had 25 they could use. If some of those were extras, they might use them to deter any pursuit.

In other words, they might fire them on Paris to stop us.

“Mom.”

I held that thought in my mind and got moving.

It seemed like a slim possibility, but I shined my phone light on the faces of the people sleeping on the floor. My goal was rescuing Anastasia and stopping my stepmom. There was always a possibility that she could be hidden among the crowd.

I didn’t want to get into a fight here. Who knows how much harm would come to the other people here.

But someone laying an ambush would want to set things up in the last place their pursuer wanted to fight.

“Facial recognition scan complete. Mrs. Amatsu Yurina and Miss Anastasia were not detected.”

“…I’m aware of that.”

“Also, it bothers me how well done the first-aid on these people is. Someone with great skill must have assisted. It is also bothersome that the bandages and splints have been done in accordance with Japanese rescue procedures rather than French ones. These are medical techniques originally developed in Kukyou City before spreading to the rest of the country.”

“…”

“This is not proof that Mrs. Amatsu Yurina was responsible. We do not know how many Japanese or pro-Japanese French there are in Paris. And even if it was Mrs. Yurina, it was likely a performance meant to earn the crowd’s acceptance as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

“Yeah, I get that. Even guerrillas and drug cartels provide security and infrastructure for the people. Because getting the people on your side by making yourself indispensable to the city makes it much easier to escape military or police pursuit.”

We knew for a fact that she had abducted Anastasia, so no matter how much she was helping others, it had to benefit her in some way.

However.

“She shouldn’t have expected JB’s Vizza Valdia to get killed and for me to find her name on his phone.”

“Sure. What about it?”

“That means she wouldn’t have been planning to turn Gare Montparnasse into her fortress. She may have had some contingency plans in mind, but this wasn’t her primary candidate. This has to have been a series of adlibs for her.”

“Sure. She may be having difficulties. However, the breakdown of a criminal plan is not always a welcome event. Especially when a hostage is involved.”

“…”

I continued deeper inside and crossed the row of ticket gates.

The small, irregular tremors were still ongoing, so the heavy ceiling overhead was a cause for concern. The peace of mind I normally felt from having a roof over my head had been entirely replaced by the fear of a collapse.

Once through the area full of injured people, I caught the scent of food. Someone appeared to be cooking on a portable stove.

“This is indoors with all the windows shut. Aren’t they afraid of carbon monoxide?”

I was surprised to see that type of stove existed in Europe too. I had thought it was an Asian thing since we had such a big hotpot culture.

“We cannot tell where the breaks and fractures in the walls and floors are, so a gas explosion is the more immediate concern,” said Maxwell.

Where was my stepmom?

How was Anastasia doing right now?

Was she unconscious and stuffed inside a large bag, or did she have a blade pressed against her back where the crowd couldn’t see?

As far as I could tell, the people here were ordinary Parisians. I was pretty sure they would have done something if they saw someone carrying a tied-up girl over her shoulder.

Either the station had no electricity or they had cut the backup power for fear of starting an electrical fire from a short somewhere. Either way, the security cameras weren’t working. It looked like I would have to do a thorough search after all. If I didn’t look close enough, I might overlook something, but an attacker could be lurking behind any piece of cover. Also, my stepmom probably had no real reason to stick around here. If I took too long, she might take Anastasia elsewhere. Then the trail would go completely cold.

“Use the publicly available map to color in everywhere I’ve already checked.”

“That would be meaningless if they are moving around,” pointed out Maxwell.

Yeah, I knew this was only meant to make me feel better. But if I didn’t have a small, achievable goal to focus on, I would feel too overwhelmed and break.

As big as the station was, the shops and restaurants were all in fairly small spaces and most of them were blocked off with metal shutters.

Searching out each of the analog keys would have been a real pain, but most of the locks were already broken. Some people would have been seeking out food and water, but it looked like a lot of it was just people sneaking in to find a place to sleep. They must have wanted to sleep with walls around them instead of out in the big common area.

Maybe they couldn’t relax in that field hospital that reeked of blood and echoed with the groans of the injured.

But even so…

“You’re kidding, right? I can still feel quakes every so often. The restaurant kitchens could explode at any time.”

“Even sleeping on the bathroom floor would seem more reasonable,” concurred Maxwell.

Given the late hour, I heard a few annoyed groans when I sent my phone light piercing through the darkness, but I didn’t find my stepmom or Anastasia.

“Doesn’t look like any of the station workers are around.”

“They may have given up on working and gone home after realizing the trains would not be back up and running today. Only in Japan would you find station workers and drivers diligent enough to keep working their full shift in these conditions.”

That sounded like a stereotype to me, but it did bother me that none of the professionals were here. It was like seeing a fast food worker stubbornly refusing to eat a burger from their restaurant.

A train station would have flammable gases, high voltage lines, large transformers, the freight trains themselves, and dangerous chemicals too. They were definitely a dangerous place.

“This is weird. Really weird.”

“No. If you wish me to analyze something, you must give me a specific command.”

After leaving the area full of shuttered restaurants and shops, I spotted an escalator leading down. Of course, it was just a narrow stairway without any power.

“Does this lead to the subway?”

“It appears to be a new section of the commercial facilities, but it is not up and running yet. It may connect to the nearby subway through an employees only door, but data on it is rare since it is still under development.”

My basic plan was to go around everywhere, prioritizing areas I hadn’t checked yet. There had to be areas on the ground floor I hadn’t checked, but I wanted to check anywhere I happened across. If it would take an hour to reach some small room only the employees ever go, I wanted to start by filling in the majority of the map that anyone could reach with ease. The hidden rooms and pathways might stand out more once I had filled in everything else on the map.

“I’m heading down the elevator. Watch out for the signal dropping out and don’t screw up your mapping since this place is so complicated.”

“You should be careful too, user. Based on the geological structure, the risk will be unavoidably greater in an underground space. Be prepared for gas, asphyxiation, fire, a collapse, or any other danger you might encounter. Including surprise attacks from a blind spot, of course.”

I checked the remaining battery indicator in the corner of the screen and then stepped on the escalator with the LED light illuminating the way ahead.

I could always create more handmade night vision goggles with tape and a loupe, but I was too scared. That kind of special gear would make the other people here wary of me and my stepmom might not be the only person in the underground area.

I felt something like a fine powder falling from overhead.

“Warning.”

“Really, another quake now!?”

I clung to the rubber railing, but it was no good. My footing shifted and I lost my balance.

Dammit.

This wasn’t an actual stairway; it was a stopped escalator. That proved to be a problem now that a gear or stopper had come undone!

“Wahhh!!”

The world seemed to spin around me and it wouldn’t stop.

To be honest, I felt no pain.

I fell pretty far and it made a lot of noise. The edge of each step had to be like a blade. Either some connection wasn’t working right in my panicking mind or I was pumping out a ton of strange brain chemicals because no pain signals arrived from any part of my body.

“…”

Still collapsed on the ground, I slapped around with one hand and found my phone almost right away. Strangely, I still had some feeling left despite the lack of pain.

“I am not looking forward to tomorrow morning.”

I got up and felt across my body. Nothing seemed broken and I didn’t feel any blood. Was that enough to declare myself “fine”?

“Was I just lucky? I feel like I’m going to pay for that later on. Maxwell, where does this passageway lead?”

“Warning.”

Not the message I wanted to see.

I heard a dull impact overhead. Instead of something rolling down toward me, it was more like the escalator itself was flailing around like a trodden-on snake. The stepped escalator was a single linked piece, like a bike chain or a conveyer belt, and some powerful force had lifted it up. A lot like someone placing their full weight on one side of a seesaw.

“Ah!”

I pulled my feet in, afraid they would be caught. I didn’t know how heavy it actually was, but I doubted I would like the result if one of my feet got caught between a step and the floor.

I don’t think that was the wrong decision.

But I still should have looked to see what had caused it. I should have checked what had fallen on the other end of that giant seesaw.

I heard a series of shattering glass sounds.

Surprised, I aimed my phone’s LED light up to find the clear walls(?) on either side of the escalator were breaking. Why? The answer was obvious.

A great mass rolling down the escalator despite being too wide for it.

“The structure is made of fire-resistant plastic and reinforced concrete. Estimated weight: 4.2 tons. Also-”

I didn’t have time to read all that. I couldn’t even get up, so I rolled to the side to get out of the way. That thing was descending a slope, so it would roll toward me like a ball if I simply moved away. That was why I dodged to the right of the escalator instead.

How naïve I was.

That wasn’t a round ball. The instant it lost the rails of the escalator and was free to move on its own, an object the size of a small car bounced unpredictably. Yes, like a rugby ball.

“Wah!?”

I curled up like a manju and the giant object rolled right past me. A piece of rebar sticking out nearly took off my ear. With a crash like you would expect to hear from a car accident, it broke through a thin inner wall and entered the adjacent room.

“…”

I couldn’t move a while afterwards.

“It appears a portion of the ceiling collapsed,” said Maxwell. “The building’s structure must have received critical damage from the multiple meteor impacts, earthquakes, and volcanic activity.”

My heart hurt. I felt like the past few hours had to have taken years off my life.

Still curled up, I looked upstairs to see the escalators had taken serious damage. The steps had been torn apart and various sizes of glass shards wildly reflected my phone’s light. Climbing that slope by foot would be a challenge and the sharp glass shards would likely pierce right through ordinary gloves.

I couldn’t use the escalators anymore.

If I wanted to reach the ground floor again, I would need to find another exit.

“Maxwell, find me an exit just in case. A station this big and complex must have more than one.”

“Sure. But you might find similar trouble has occurred at the other exits. With the ordinary security cameras not functioning, I cannot gather any information for you.”

“I know that.”

I needed to find Anastasia, so I stood up, took a deep breath, and turned my LED light away from the broken escalators and toward the underground floor.

Just then, something changed.

However, I wasn’t assaulted by a bright light or a loud noise. Quite the opposite.

Yes.

My phone suddenly died.

The backlight and LED light both went out and I was wrapped in deep darkness on all sides.

Part 7

I couldn’t breathe.

I didn’t know why. My brain wasn’t working.

To be fair, I had walked around in the rain, exposed it to dust and smoke, and dropped it from the escalator just now. I had been pretty rough with it. I’ll admit that.

But why now?

Why did my phone have to break here!?

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

It only took one mistake.

I knew I had made a mistake somewhere on the long path here and there were no continues or chances to reduce the difficulty setting. This one thing pushed my tension past the limit.

I screamed without thinking, but that wasn’t going to fix my phone. I forced my panicked mind to work and felt the buttons with my trembling fingers. I tried the overly complicated manual reset, but…nothing. It didn’t respond. I felt like my heart was going to burst in the few seconds it took to wait.

What now?

What could I even do?

I couldn’t see past my nose. I had no one to ask for advice. I had no way of knowing if I was about to step into a crack or have tons of rubble dumped on my head.

I was trapped.

I felt as lonely as I would have dumped on top of a snowy mountain or in the middle of a humid forest. I couldn’t hope to battle my stepmom and rescue Anastasia now. If I tried to walk around at all, I might step on some sharp glass or exposed rebar.

Something like grains of sand landed on my head.

Yes, the station’s collapse wasn’t over yet. I wasn’t safe even if I stayed put.

I was dead if I moved.

I was dead if I stayed here.

It was damned if you do and damned if you don’t!!

“Calm down. Stay calm and think through this one step at a time. Don’t try to solve it all at once and don’t try to skip steps.”

I tried to talk sense into myself while very nearly buried alive in this dark underground space.

First of all, I didn’t know why my phone had broken or if I could fix it. I needed special tools to open the smartphone’s cover and it was pitch black, so staring at it wasn’t going to help.

By attempting to move through the dark based on pure intuition would be suicide.

That meant I needed light.

Fire or electricity would work. I just needed a replacement light. I didn’t smell gas, did I?

Light.

Plastic, polyester, or vinyl would work. I just needed some kind of plastic.

“Pant, pant.”

I pulled out my wallet and relied on my sense of touch to remove a card. Then I rubbed it rapidly on the top of my head. I expect most everyone did something similar during elementary school.

Y’know, that thing where you rub a balloon against your hair to play with static electricity.

The tiny, bluish-white light was similar to a weak camera flash. It wasn’t much compared to a flashlight, but it still left an afterimage in my retinas.

Evenly-spaced pillars, walls, metal doors, a few trash cans, and a few pieces of rubble larger than a tissue box.

I relied on the afterimage to hesitantly start moving. I was too afraid to use my bare hands, so even though it wouldn’t help much, I removed my jacket and wrapped it around one arm. I felt around in the dark with my protected hand as I went. My biggest fear was stepping on something sharp, so instead of raising my feet, I shuffled along and slowly nudged aside any glass shards I felt with my toes.

First, I moved to the wall.

Then I followed the wall with my hand to slowly move down the tunnel. Eventually, I came across a cold metal box.

“…”

I felt across the small door, opened it, and pulled out the thick synthetic bag within. As I had expected when the installed light didn’t turn on, the alarm didn’t sound. I wasn’t too familiar with them, but this electronic device was found in most any public facilities.

It was an AED.

I searched out the large switch in the darkness, hit it, and an orange light came on. An AED was meant to save lives, but its high-voltage current could also trigger an explosion. That was why it always gave a caution signal when charging.

It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

It was about as much as the small lightbulb that came as a set with a room’s fluorescent light fixture. I used that to view my phone again. The screen wasn’t cracked and the entire thing wasn’t bent. But that meant I couldn’t tell what had caused the malfunction just by looking at it. I had to give up on the phone for the time being.

“Anastasia probably has the necessary tools in her pocket. Damn.”

The ground shook below my feet again. I was in an underground tunnel solidified with concrete, yet I felt as unsteady as if I were on a suspension bridge or a small boat. But was this an earthquake? Were more meteors falling on the surface or had a gas explosion triggered somewhere in the station? Something unusual was happening, but I couldn’t tell what without my phone as an analysis tool. Even though I was in the center of it all and my life was at risk.

I had no choice but to continue through the tunnel.

But if I thoughtlessly searched the darkness, I was afraid I would lose track of distance and direction. This underground floor was complex enough at the best of times. That told me what I needed next after finding a light.

“A map.”

I spoke out loud without thinking.

There was no sign of anyone else down here. Even if they were hiding, I was pretty sure I would notice some sounds or their general presence if there were several people here. But I didn’t. It felt like being at school late at night.

That wasn’t too surprising.

If I was told I could sleep wherever I liked, I would have found a nice sturdy spot on the ground floor. The underground floor might look solid and safe, but even a small child would know something as crazy as a meteor shower was too much for a building to handle. And once you were buried alive, it would be hard for the rescue squad to even know you were there.

“Is this it?”

I found a map posted at an area with a row of several glass doors. Was that a new commercial facility being developed? But…wow, that was inexact. They didn’t seem to care too much about the scale and it of course didn’t show the employee only areas. And I doubted I could memorize it all even though I didn’t have my phone camera to record it.

Wasn’t there a simpler option?

And at a smaller, more portable size?

“Like a pamphlet?”

However.

Tokyo Station was one thing since it was a tourist destination in and of itself, but would a train station normally have a pamphlet about itself? Stations were like stairs and hallways – only meant as a midway point. They weren’t usually presented as a destination.

They might have something showing evacuation routes in case of a fire, but I would have to search an employee office or something other employee only area for that.

What was I supposed to do?

Just as I was wondering that…

Mosha…

“?”

I jumped and spun around.

There was nothing there. But the AED’s pilot light wasn’t enough to penetrate the darkness, so I couldn’t say anything for sure.

What was that?

It was an unpleasant sensation like having a bug buzz by my ear. But it hadn’t seemed like a simple noise. I couldn’t make out what it was, but it had seemed colored by a sticky will and emotions.

So was it an animal cry?

Or a voice?

Ebehn, brahan, elkso.

I jumped back.

But the voice didn’t leave my ear. There was no one in front of me and I didn’t bump into anyone when I moved back.

What?

What was this!?

I couldn’t judge the age or gender of the voice. You could have convinced me it was just the wind and I honestly would have been thankful if you did. But the air in this dense darkness felt entirely still to me.

So…

Was it really a voice?

Was it an illusion created by the darkness or was it an acoustic weapon using ultrasonic waves to resonate using bone conduction? The only ideas I could come up with were absurd. I might as well have been seriously suggesting a ghost scare was an optical illusion or plasma.

My fear didn’t come from the voice itself.

It was the distance. It was so disturbingly close by. If that was a real voice whispering in my ear, then that person could do something far more dangerous. Their fingers were basically rubbing at my throat already. That was what scared me. They had invaded my personal space and I had no idea where they were hiding. So my instincts were sounding the alarm even more than my rational side. My inability to resist in any way showed just how powerless I was.

Besides.

I didn’t understand.

Whoever this was, they should have been able to slit my throat if they could do this. So did they not mean me any harm? That didn’t feel right either. Threatening and scaring me was meaningless when I couldn’t escape. The escalator was broken, after all.

Or was there no logic to it?

Did they just want to scare me for kicks? Was it nothing more than that?

JB.

Their cast.

No, could I really link this to them? Couldn’t this be an entirely unrelated monster? How deep did Paris’s darkness go!?

“Pant, pant!!”

My light was dim.

The AED’s small pilot light could not push back the darkness no matter where I pointed it. There were always some shadows remaining and I felt like someone was lurking within them.

This was their territory.

The voice reached my ear again.

Jaxneh nbo Satori eck.

“!?”

This time they clearly spoke my name!?

Or, wait.

Did I just imagine my name in some random static? Which was it!? Did this sound have meaning, or not!?

I had a question.

I wanted an answer so bad I felt like I would explode. If I hadn’t focused on calming my breathing, the hyperventilation may have led me to throw the AED to the floor. If this was meant to freak me out, they’d earned a 120/100.

Sa tori.

“!?”

I pressed my back against a nearby pillar and looked around, but it was no use. I couldn’t peg a direction or distance for this sound. It didn’t help that the light was too weak to illuminate the darkness, but it was possible this voice only existed in my head.

Satori.

Still, I felt like something had me captured. This wasn’t random noise. Someone was looking at me and speaking to me.

How should I put it?

It was like turning the dial on an old radio or getting the binoculars on an observation platform into focus. It was like they were trying a few settings to try and get it just right.

Which meant their true purpose was yet to come.

What are you doing, Satori?

“A question?”

Was some external being confused by my actions, or was my internal anxiety taking on a life of its own? I had no way of knowing.

You will die. If you keep going. You must know that.

“…”

It was choppy but accurate. Almost like a passage from a strange book of prophecy. They went ahead and said what most decent people would be hesitant to mention.

What did they want?

This wasn’t just a random attacker. They had chosen me personally to contact, like a stalker.

Was it JB?

Or was it someone else?

Did they want some kind of answer from me, or had they achieved their goal once they had inputted their voice like this?

“Why ask me that? What answer do you want!? Give me a script and I’ll say whatever you-”

I can kill you. At any time.

…!?

Answer, Satori. Immediately. Or leave. You don’t want to die. Do you?

I felt a piercing pain in my heart.

There was no direction I could focus on to put my mind at ease. I still couldn’t figure out where the voice was coming from. In the worst case, the contents of my head could swell out until my head burst.

Normally, disobeying this voice would be a bad idea. Whoever they might be, they more or less had an invisible gun aimed at the back of my head.

But.

However.

“I will keep going.”

Why?

“Because I haven’t searched everywhere yet. I might still be able to find Anastasia. Or catch up to my stepmom!! They might be in the very next room – behind one more door. So how can I turn back now!?”

You encountered an unforeseen accident. You must understand that.

Of course.

I had lost contact with Anastasia. My stepmom was the top suspect. And since her name was on Vizza’s phone, she was almost certainly involved with JB. I had arrived at Gare Montparnasse, the last location Anastasia had mentioned, but no one came to meet me. I had no way of safely getting back to the surface, my phone wasn’t working, the power was out, and now the darkness itself had decided to contact me.

I was terrifyingly close to death.

I knew that.

Even an amateur like me could tell.

I might as well have been walking blindfolded and barefoot through a minefield. Anyone who knew what was going on would either have been exasperated or fainted if they saw me. Frankly, it was a miracle I wasn’t dead already.

A question for you.

“Yeah?”

Do you think Anastasia and Yurina are here?

“…”

There were plenty of options, of course. I hadn’t gathered enough information to objectively prove everything.

But I still had to answer. My instincts told me that much. I couldn’t imagine what I awaited me if I screwed this up, but I knew it wouldn’t improve my position.

It was that kind of situation.

So…

“I think they are.”

Why?

Because I was running into interference was the simplest answer, but it didn’t actually prove anything. JB was a criminal organization with high-level information tech like computer viruses. It was possible they had already sent their trained cast members throughout the city or they sent a soldier out after tapping into my phone call with Anastasia.

The strength of JB’s cast members differed, but I was really screwed if this was one as powerful as Hotaruzawa Kezuri or Vizza Valdia. And knowing JB, they would send something five times worse than what I was imagining.

“The timing of Anastasia’s call cutting out was strange. Someone who didn’t want me reaching her would have attacked before she mentioned Gare Montparnasse.”

The mention of Gare Montparnasse hadn’t come out of nowhere.

We had been discussing where I was and the landmarks there, so someone listening in would have been able to tell where the conversation was headed. It would have been easy to cut her off before she mentioned it.

So…

“Whoever interfered wanted to let me hear that. Then they attacked Anastasia before she could peacefully end the call. Even though I would have shown up without any caution at all had they attacked her after she hung up.”

Is Anastasia your friend?

“Yes.”

They didn’t bother asking why.

The why was apparently implied.

I had said Anastasia was attacked. That meant I had eliminated the possibility of her deceiving me.

As for why…

“If she wanted to trick me and attack me, she would have chosen a less crowded place.”

Yes.

Needless to say, there were a lot of people at Gare Montparnasse. It was a large public transportation facility, so the worried Parisians who had lost their homes had gathered here. It was honesty not a good place for attacking someone. I didn’t know anything about Paris and generally went along with whatever Anastasia suggested, so if she had malicious intentions, she could have lured me somewhere more deserted.

Can you trust Amatsu Yurina?

“…”

I wanted to.

But focusing on what I wanted first and foremost was proof that I was relying on emotion and didn’t have a logical argument for it.

To be blunt, I wasn’t certain about her.

I couldn’t deny that her name was on Vizza Valdia’s phone. If that turned out to be false, then either Maxwell had lied to me or been hacked.

Maybe that was possible with JB’s tech.

But just like with Anastasia, if Maxwell meant me harm, there had to have been a better way of doing it. I was reliant on that simulator when I was in trouble, so I could probably be killed indirectly by giving me false information on how to acquire food in rubble-strewn Paris.

Which meant…

“Given the situation, my stepmom is most suspect. At the very least, she would have been in position to listen in on Anastasia’s phone call and attack her at whatever timing worked best for her. She could have nonchalantly walked up behind Anastasia and knocked her out from that blind spot.”

Then is Amatsu Yurina your enemy? Is she intent on killing you and Anastasia?

…This was the fork in the road.

I had to think back on everything that had happened, throwing out all hopes, suppositions, biases, and preconceptions.

Her name was on a JB phone. That was for sure.

It was nearly confirmed that she was the one who had attacked Anastasia during that phone call and guided me to Gare Montparnasse.

There was a side of her I wasn’t aware of. One beyond Absolute Noah.

I couldn’t deny that anymore.

So with that assumption in place…

Who was she? Was she part of JB and willing to work with us and hold the reins while deceiving us, but she had shifted to attacking us once I learned the truth?

“…”

But on the other hand, we would have died a lot sooner without her with us. I’m not sure we would have even made it out of the French Ministry of Defense’s basement. I hadn’t checked that entire basement. Even if we had nearly run into her, she could have hidden in some room or another and waited for us to leave. So why had she called out to us instead? She had done it to save us. Her actions afterwards proved that. But why had she saved us?

There was something she wanted us to do and she needed us alive until that was complete.

That was the most likely option if I was taking a pessimistic view. We had specialized skills in the IT field. But she had reached the French Ministry of Defense basement server all on her own. She could have done anything there that we could. So it wasn’t that.

What other possibility was there?

I could only think of one thing.

“Amatsu Yurina is our enemy. At the very least, she wants to keep Anastasia and me apart.”

…

“But at the same time, she’s trying to protect me as part of her family. I don’t have enough information to say what she hopes to accomplish by joining JB, but she doesn’t seem to want me to be involved in that.”

Silence followed.

A painful silence.

That voice should have been an unnatural thing, but I had apparently gotten used to it responding. Now the ordinary silence was scaring me. It was like thinking you were sobbing along with everyone else in a packed movie theater and then finding that no one else was crying. It felt like I had been caught up in a paranormal phenomenon that provided that same isolating sensation.

Was my analysis of the situation correct?

What would they say if I was right? Or should I have intentionally given the wrong answer so they would let their guard down?

The silence continued.

Had they already left? Or were they trying to make me think that so they could attack?

My thoughts spun round and round in my head like that.

“Tch. You just had to pass with flying colors, didn’t you?”

!?

That wasn’t the unidentified voice that could easily have been my imagination. It was a physical voice with actual distance and direction and filled the air with warmth. It was a woman’s voice. I aimed the AED set toward it and someone silently stepped out from behind the nearby pillar.

Their identity shocked me so much I thought my heart had stopped.

"My eyes widened when I saw her.

“Wait, so all of that was you!?”

“You were missing a few of the puzzle pieces, but I can’t fault you for that when you had no way of knowing about them. In fact, you earn points for not making up an answer for something you couldn’t know.”

“How did you make that voice in my head?”

“A megaphone.”

It couldn’t have been just any old megaphone.

Damn, I can’t beat her in this field either? Her handmade devices were far beyond anything I could make.

“With some of my own modifications, anyway. Did you know that vibrations of the air can provide pressure in addition to noise, so it can feel like someone is invading your personal space? Look into it later if you’re interested in how to create auditory and visual hallucinations.”

“…”

“Anyway, you would have failed right away if you had made up some random conspiracy theory to fill in the gaps in your knowledge or if you had emotionally insisted you could trust your family no matter what.”

Apparently she had been testing me. And I had passed without even realizing it. I could only hope this wasn’t some kind of JB entrance exam. I still wasn’t sure what she was trying to accomplish here, so I couldn’t relax quite yet.

After all, I was the one who had insisted she was my enemy and was trying to keep me away from Anastasia.

I gulped.

“Where is Anastasia?”

“Curled up behind that pillar.”

My heart leaped into my throat. Did that mean she was safe? Was all of this just some prank on their part?

Amatsu Yurina casually continued like she wasn’t even aware how confused I was.

“She was doing a lot of squirming hearing how you refused to doubt her and insisting you had to protect her and save her.”

I checked behind the round pillar and saw Anastasia crouched down and waving both her small hands to block her face from view.

“Hey, wait. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look at me right now, Truth!”

“Nya ha☆ The 11-year-old is blushing at being seen by her knight in shining armor.”

Amatsu Yurina laughed in a teasing manner, but I didn’t have time for this.

“S-so what was all this about!? Why did you join JB!?”

“Why else but to gather information on them and stop them from the inside?” She made a V-sign with her right hand. “Leading up to a major war, a lot of VIPs like to check out the other side of the fence before the lines are fully drawn. They can determine which side is more likely to win and benefit from that, but it also lets them sacrifice one side if the war gets too tough. By exposing the hated enemy within arm’s reach, they can redirect the people’s frustrations away from themselves.”

“…”

It was true that she had been the source for a lot of the information regarding JB creating a new planet using dust and rocks in space. That raised the question of where she had learned all that.

Absolute Noah was definitely powerful.

But they couldn’t place a cloth over the table, count down from three, and pull out whatever they wanted. They had to go through certain processes if they were to acquire information.

So what did that mean?

“I will admit I screwed it up before they sent down the first meteor shower. It turns out JB isn’t a monolith and a faction I hadn’t managed to fool sent out an order to have me killed. I tried to change things behind the scenes, but I failed to actually change anything.”

This hadn’t all started when Anastasia and I entered Paris.

We were pursuing Amatsu Yurina, so I should have known we were several steps behind everyone else involved.

The two sides had been battling it out in secret before we got involved.

She had been fighting to prevent the meteor shower before it happened.

But the good guys didn’t always win.

It would be selfish to say she should have come to us for help instead of fighting alone. We had needed so much handholding during this disaster, so we would have been nothing but a hindrance in a battle between pros. The conflict between Absolute Noah and JB was on another level entirely. We might think we were helping her, but JB would only have seen us as the perfect weak point or hostage just wandering around in the open.

“You know what happens if JB isn’t stopped, don’t you?” she asked.

“Well…”

“The destruction of Paris isn’t their goal. They only went all this trouble because they were afraid you would sniff out what they were really up to. They did all this to hide from and buy time against an ordinary high schooler, not Amatsu Yurina of Absolute Noah.”

“You’re saying this happened to Paris…because of us?”

“Not necessarily.” She shrugged. “They apparently initially intended to stage diversions in America, Russia, China, India, France, and the UK. I don’t have to tell you what all those countries have in common, do I?”

“…”

“But knowing where their enemy was let them narrow their focus down to this one city. Granted, that isn’t much solace for the people living in Paris. Judging the pros and cons of your actions like that is too complicated for humans to manage. Leave it to a lord of demons instead.” She pressed her palm against the center of her chest. “Now that it’s come to this, we have to track down JB no matter what. And I can do that using the information I received while they thought I was on their side.”

“Why did you attack Anastasia and end her call early?”

“Because Gare Montparnasse is the best shelter in Paris and it’s a large place. If you were stuck wandering around in search of Anastasia, you would remain inside the sturdy building. People are on edge with the lack of resources, but this station of all places wouldn’t go forgotten and starve.”

I held my breath and thought in silence.

Did that mean Anastasia knew and played along? And what about Maxwell? It had seemed strange my phone died the instant I was underground.

“We have to stop JB,” said Anastasia, still curled up and blushing. “But that comes with a lot of risk. It’s too dangerous for a human who would be killed instantly by any kind of attack. I think the sturdier Archenemies like us should settle this.”

“But only if Satori is as weak as you fear.” My stepmom shrugged. “That’s why I asked you some questions to test you, but you managed to give the right answer to them all. Like I said, I would have forced you out of this fight if you had let your emotions get the better of you and refused to suspect me or if you had succumbed to paranoia and thought this might be a trap on Anastasia’s part. Instead, you demonstrated an unusual strength throughout, which just makes me want to ask for your help despite the risk.”

Was she exasperated?

No, this may have been closer to childish sulking.

“But the fact remains that I cannot guarantee your survival from here on out.”

“How is that new?”

“Before, you always assumed someone would save you, didn’t you? Either Maxwell or me.”

Ugh.

“From here on, that assumption is no longer valid. So the second best option for me would be to knock you out and leave you to sleep in Gare Montparnasse. That much is definitely true.”

“But…”

“You don’t like the sound of that? I get the feeling you’re deciding to risk your life based on nothing more than rebelliousness.”

Maybe so.

It had hurt to find out both of them were tricking me when I had been so worried. And it felt wrong to reserve all the safest and most effective options for myself when all of Paris was in such a bad state.

But.

“That would honestly be easier for us too, Satori. Without you around, we could focus on fighting.”

Damn, she doesn’t give up, does she!?

Anastasia wasn’t looking me in the eye either. Yes, that 11-year-old had said humans were weak and I wouldn’t survive what was to come. She had said that was why the Archenemies should take care of the rest.

Both of them knew how to hack and launch cyber attacks. I could even have Maxwell connect to their phones to assist them.

There really wasn’t a good reason for me personally to join this fight.

“We want to indulge you if we can, but that doesn’t guarantee your survival. So think through this carefully before answering. What do you want to do? There is nothing at all wrong with wanting to run away and survive. The day that is considered wrong is the day society has well and truly collapsed.”

I bit my lip and groaned.

I wanted to fight.

But that desire felt out of place from ordinary life. The fact that I was leaning toward violence made me feel like I had let all this influence me. I was being corrupted. I was angry about what happened to Paris, at JB for doing all this without batting an eye, and at myself for failing to prevent any of it.

I couldn’t tell what my stepmom really wanted.

After all, she had been willing to abandon the rest of the population as long as her own family was on the ark. Since Paris had been on the list of cities to be destroyed, she may have seen it as a simple matter of sooner rather than later.

But.

If so, why had she saved Anastasia along with me? Demon Lord Lilith – no, Amatsu Yurina – had to have a kind, human side she probably wasn’t even aware of.

I wanted to believe she did.

So…

“…”

But making a decision when I was still unbalanced would only cause more problems. Whatever form that might take, I was never going to get a better 100m time if I spun around and around with a bat first.

With a task as easy as taking candy from a baby, that margin of error wouldn’t affect the outcome.

But JB wasn’t that easy.

We were already playing catchup. If I had extra weight weighing me down, there would be no escaping death.

“I understand.”

So when I forced out my voice, I sounded like I was complaining.

“I didn’t even arrive in France to fight JB. I was afraid of an all-out war between the two groups, so I had hoped to stop you by taking away whatever weapon Absolute Noah was trying to access. I was risking my life simply trying to stop the person I knew would listen to me. I hadn’t even considered going up against JB who wouldn’t listen and would try to kill me. The initial meteor shower came as a complete surprise and it changed my goals here. It was like fishing for some small jack mackerels, noticing a giant tuna, and trying to catch it instead. Your line and other gear would all be wrong, so you would only break your rod if you tried it. So I know I shouldn’t try to fight JB.”

I really did understand.

The world wasn’t waiting for me to take the stage. My presence wouldn’t influence the fate of the world. If nuclear war broke out or a new ice age began, nothing I could do as an individual would change a thing. Only a handful of people truly had global influence and I wasn’t one of them.

I could imagine all that well enough.

But.

Even so!!

“That means I didn’t change anything!! I ran around, barely avoiding death, and made it this far. Am I supposed to declare it a happy ending when you and JB start fighting each other? I came all the way from Japan to stop this war that will be fought on a ridiculous scale!! I’m about to say something that would make a rebellious teenager want to kill himself. Mom, I came all this way to save you separate from all that other stuff! I wanted to save Amatsu Yurina, not Demon Lord Lilith or the leader of Absolute Noah!! So don’t you take that away from me with your selfish parent’s logic!!”

How could I leave now that things were getting dangerous?

If things were getting dangerous, I couldn’t leave everyone else behind. If someone had to do this, then I couldn’t just clutch at my mom’s clothes and hide behind her.

I had to step forward.

I had to protect her.

Wasn’t that what I had come all this way to do?

If I just wanted to hear the result from a place of safety, I shouldn’t have left Japan in the first place. I had come all this way because there was a hand I could grab onto here. So I needed to reach out my own hand before my family member fell into the abyss.

I had to stop this war.

Maybe the preemptive strike had already been made and it was too late to stop anything. We had clearly failed from the moment the first meteor hit Paris.

“I’m not going to follow your instructions.”

But hadn’t I decided from the beginning I was going to protect my family?

“I’m going to live my life how I like. And I don’t want to be the kind of person who could see all this tragedy and leave because ‘it’s too late and it won’t affect my final score’! I don’t want to let it get even worse!! No one wants let that happen, so let me protect you, mom!!”

She reflexively sent a low kick my way.

I managed to brace myself just before it hit, but it still hurt. I couldn’t trick my sense of pain.

“Ow!? What was that for?”

Bafflingly, she then hugged me.

“Come on!! I give you a trick ending and you still manage a perfect score, my adorable son!?”

“Bff! Mghghklhf!?”

Wait.

Didn’t I tell you this was already embarrassing enough for a rebellious teenager to want to kill himself!? Why are you making it worse!? And with Anastasia staring!?

I struggled and struggled until I managed to pull my face out of her quicksand-like boobs. I could finally breathe again.

She hadn’t learned her lesson at all.

“But if we are bringing a human like you with us, we need a change of plans. We won’t be able to use Archenemy toughness to plow through the barrage head on.”

“Wait, I thought your body didn’t have the superhuman strength of a Vampire or Zombie.”

“That isn’t a problem for me. Because I can dodge.”

She made it sound so simple.

And it was true she could move in inhuman ways.

But we didn’t know what exactly this “barrage” flying toward us like a headwind would be.

Anastasia approached and spoke to my stepmom.

“If we’re taking Truth, then we have to consider that other problem too.”

“Yes, I know.”

“?”

I tilted my head. They were talking about me, but I had no idea what they meant.

Anastasia seemed to see my failure to understand as a danger. She finally took my hand like she was worried I would get lost otherwise.

Apparently the 11-year old was the parent and I was the child.

She winked and repeated something I had forgotten, looking somewhat miffed about it.

“JB is clearly a largescale operation, yet they are obsessed with you personally for some reason. And not for the same reason as Amatsu Yurina who can’t seem to keep her work and private lives separate.

Part 8

That’s right.

This issue had been bothering me for a while. If Amatsu Yurina was infiltrating JB, then she might have learned why they were so obsessed with me.

“I’m guessing you aren’t going to accept ‘I’m not sure’ as an answer.” She shrugged “But the truth is I wasn’t in a position to learn everything about them. I more or less forced my way into their group and I wasn’t there for long, so if you think of the group as a fried egg, I was only in the outer white. Maybe I was like a strip of bacon? I clearly didn’t belong, but they wanted me on their side if they could get me. I wasn’t even close to reaching the yolk in the center.”

“Where even is JB’s center? The humans? The Archenemies? That simulator called Freischutz?”

“I never even figured out that much. I compared them to a fried egg, but for all I know, they might be scrambled eggs with no yolk or white.”

Were they an absolute monarchy, a parliamentary system with several leaders, or a grassroots movement? She must not have gotten deep enough in to find out.

Someone could say that anyone who had dedicated themselves to JB would know the answer and thus she had to be lying to the group if she didn’t know it. That was why undercover investigators generally waited for the answers to come to them instead of asking all sorts of questions. A newcomer who was asked around for every little piece of information would gather suspicion.

However…

We had met a few people who claimed to be part of JB’s cast, but they had held unique values and showed little camaraderie. At the very least, they hadn’t seemed willing to help out their fellow cast members when they screwed up. They had nearly recovered Vizza Valdia this time, but that probably only went so far. Once things had gone too far wrong, they would mercilessly abandon their cast members.

Had my stepmom really been safe infiltrating a group like that? If that was how they rewarded failure, I didn’t even want to know what they would do to an actual traitor. Although I had a feeling she had only been on a list of people they could make use of before abandoning them.

“With that said.” She raised a finger and paused to signal she was about to start on the main topic. “JB seems to really dislike the status quo. They aren’t like Absolute Noah who think the world is headed toward its doom. Instead of slamming on the brakes as the world races full speed toward a thick wall, they feel that living in the current stagnant world is like living in hell.”

“Stagnant?”

But the name JB apparently referred to a jailbreak.

My stepmom nodded.

“They hate our peaceful world where everyone is satisfied with what they’re given.”

“…”

“So they want to break free. It doesn’t really matter to them how strong someone is. In fact, the strongest good guys tend to be following someone else’s plans and receiving their strength from the status quo. They aren’t interested in the hero of a nation, a warrior with divine blood, or any other strongest fighter who is someone else’s puppet.”

“Then why are they targeting me?”

“Because you are unusual. Maybe they see you as an error that brings about unexpected results.”

“JB hates the good guys. And they aren’t interested in the strongest fighter – they want a loophole or vulnerability they can adapt to any situation?”

“They sound like a hacker group,” said Anastasia.

She was right.

They had felt an awful lot like that for a while, thanks to their military simulator and the way they modified gods.

They couldn’t accept an imperfect world, so they wanted to let everyone know the truth and let every individual determine the fate of the world.

I understood that.

It was a very simple idea.

But what did that have to do with the disaster in Paris? This wasn’t a crucial part of their plan; it was only insurance used to lose the pursuers trying to interfere with the actual plan.

What had you trampled while trying to protect the flower garden, JB?

Did they even understand what kind of world they would find after breaking through the wall? What if it was even worse than this one? They gave people a chance for a jailbreak, but they hadn’t explained what it was they wanted to do in the new world.

They never gave a clear yes-or-no answer themselves, but they were using some pretty extreme methods to guide people in one direction. All while keeping their distance in case something did happen.

It felt like we were the guinea pigs in their experiment.

They were gathering up ignorant volunteers, throwing those people into the cold sleep device without explaining the risks, and making sure there were no adverse health effects before entering the device themselves. Maybe they saw themselves as heroes, but they were basically sticking a spear into the back of a weaker person and forcing them to cross the rickety suspension bridge first to see if it was safe.

“If I understand this correctly.” I took a deep breath before continuing. “JB sees me as an uncertain factor they fear could harm their plans to create a new planet by compressing tons of asteroids with those nukes?”

“Their attitude concerning you hasn’t seemed consistent,” said Anastasia. “They’re probably of two minds about you: are you a possible tool they can use or a threat to be eliminated?”

This line of speculation was not exactly fun as the person who was actually being targeted, but hold on.

Hadn’t my stepmom said that JB’s cast isn’t a monolith?

In that case, were there options beyond a direct attack? For example, could we trigger a conflict between the different factions over how to deal with me? They hid themselves well, but could we possibly trick them into destroying themselves from within?

“No, that wouldn’t work.”

“?”

Anastasia gave me a confused look.

Since we didn’t know how big JB was, the risk involved was too great. Even an internal conflict could spread beyond their borders. If they fought it out through a proxy war, they might even cause two uninvolved countries to fight each other. The soldiers wouldn’t even realize they were being manipulated and end up losing their lives still believing they were protecting their country and their family.

I couldn’t laugh that off as absurd.

Not after what JB had done to Paris. They had triggered disasters for their own purposes and even dropped meteors on the city. That already went beyond a mere war.

Disasters could lead to war too. Sometimes people couldn’t contain their anger and needed a target for it. If they lost their homes and had nothing to eat and if reconstruction money was slow in coming, frustrations would grow. It could eventually lead to individuals or groups forcibly crossing national borders.

I spoke to Amatsu Yurina.

“Mom, you said you were infiltrating JB, right?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to keep doing that?”

She shrugged.

“Do you really think that’s still an option? You can’t have the scales wobbling in near equilibrium. If you don’t have 100% trust, it doesn’t work. You’re dead as soon as that percentage drops to even 99 or 98.”

That told us how this was going to go. We could rule out a few different options.

Then I asked just to be sure.

“Then what do we do now? If JB has shut that door out of suspicion, you can’t get any closer to their center.”

“True,” she admitted. She didn’t seem particularly bothered by it. “But think back on what happened. What has JB always done when one of their own fails or betrays them?”

“…”

Yeah, I had a feeling.

“They insist on eliminating any traitor. And capturing me in a disaster isn’t good enough for them. Same for launching a nuke. They want me intact enough to see my body and confirm I’m dead. They know I am a central figure in Absolute Noah, so they will want to eliminate any chance of me bringing back any useful data. Paris is their cast’s final chance. If I escape here and vanish into the underside of the world, they’ll have a hard time tracking me down again. So they won’t be sending another disposable local agent. The next assassin will be a JB elite.”

Sending someone with your secrets to the front line in order to protect your secrets seemed backwards to me, but maybe it was the same idea as a stealth fighter or a tank. Those high tech machines were apparently given the ridiculous order of ‘never be shot down in enemy territory’.

And if they were trapped there, they would be destroyed by their allies to ensure the tech wasn’t analyzed.

If we captured this hunter, we could get some important information.

But…

“If you go into hiding, won’t JB go after Truth or his Archenemy sisters to lure you out?”

“Of course they will. Which is why the entire family will have to disappear.”

She meant we would be abandoning Kukyou City. Without a second thought. Ending our current lives and friendships like that was exactly the kind of thing I would expect from the leader of Absolute Noah. That Archenemy was willing to boot everyone else off the ark if her family was safe, so she didn’t give a thought to what we wanted.

Or to my underclassman Itou Helen.

Or to the Class Rep next door.

Every connection I had in this world would be severed. It wasn’t that she didn’t get along with the neighbors. She had her own community with the Class Rep’s mom and those at her part-time job. But she would still do it. She would sever it all with a smile if it would save what mattered most to her. I think that’s why people called her a Demon Lord in the myths.

Some even said Archenemy Lilith ruled one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

“…”

I took a deep breath.

It wasn’t just an issue of enemy or ally. She took an entirely different position even as an ally. If I didn’t keep that in mind, it was possible I could win and yet still lose something I cared dearly about.

As things were, the only two options were losing everything or winning my stepmom’s way. I didn’t like either option, but it looked like I had to go along with this for the time being if I wanted to be involved in how it turned out.

Winning alone wasn’t enough.

I had to focus on winning my way.

“What’s your plan, mom? I doubt you’re just going to wait until the assassin shows up.”

[Unknown_Storage] Message – Top Priority [file07]

(To cast members on all teams assigned to the current operation)

Eliminate Amatsu Yurina.

You are not to ask why.

This command has been authorized. All necessary personnel and materiel will be sent in immediately.

Amatsu Satori has been confirmed near her. Not even Freischutz can predict his next action. Proceed with extreme caution.

(The following cannot be viewed by anyone below A Team)

Disguise yourselves as a recovery team and enter the city in a helicopter.

The personnel and materiel used for the first wave was all very valuable, but your top priority is to defeat Amatsu Yurina.

If the situation deteriorates and you deem it too difficult to collect the local cast members, abandon them, perform an aerial bombing, and confirm the target has been eliminated. In that case, you will not be held responsible for any JB casualties caused by your bombing.

There is a chance the abandoned cast members will attempt to take you down with them using the materiel they have on hand, but use that against them. For example, you could use curse reversal ceremonies or substitution tools to redirect their curse and attack Amatsu Yurina with our own people’s grudge.

Use everything to your advantage.

(The following cannot be viewed by anyone below S Team)

A Team and below’s mission is a diversion made up of personnel we have calculated we can afford to lose. Do not wait for the result of their mission. Take action the instant you decide the time is right. You will not be held responsible for any JB casualties you cause. The rest of the cast here are no more than expendable ammo and bulletproof jackets for use on the front line. Do not hesitate to make use of them to achieve your objective.

Of course, you couldn’t make it as an ordinary soldier due to your unique disposition, so I doubt you would hesitate regardless.

You have a single objective. I know this has been said many times already, but kill Amatsu Yurina no matter what it takes. You can ignore any losses within our own group.

We will be giving you three nuclear warheads and 10 asteroids for the attack on Amatsu Yurina. You may request more later if necessary, so use them as you see fit.

You are our final hope. Make sure you come through for us.

That is all.

(The following cannot be viewed by anyone below Team SSS)

As always, no one else knows that Team SSS – or rather, you – exists at all.

There are of course no rules binding you. Once you arrive on site, go nuts like I know you will.

To the Master of Eljudnir.

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