My Vampire Older Sister and Zombie Little Sister:Volume6 Chapter 5

Chapter 5

I had lost my smartphone, but Maxwell was still alive. Maxwell was actually in a distant container and the smartphone was only a tool used to communicate with that.

I couldn’t fall for Adjust’s tricks.

It could be an IoT oven, the internal phone on the wall, or the radio clock that accurately kept the time. I didn’t know where, but Maxwell had to still be watching and listening. She just lacked a mouth, so I could not hear her words.

“Give up. You can’t break those zip ties by shaking your hands around. Futile effort will only hurt your wrists.”

“…”

Why hadn’t he just killed me?

To provide even more pain and fear? To ask me something?

If it was not either of those…

If you could not get in with an external attack, you only needed to wait for them to come out.

…Dammit, I had done that myself countless times!

“Now, what to do?”

Adjust’s thick fingers crawled along the countertop where I could not see.

“What would be the most efficient way of making you scream? A knife or meat tenderizer would be too boring. Stabbing every last inch of your body with forks or beating the snot out of you with a frying pan isn’t interesting enough. Oh, right. The fries here are good. I wonder if the oil is at a nice temperature.”

“…Are you after my stepmom? Are you after a ticket onto Absolute Noah?”

“Just to be clear, you were the one that attacked first here, you cockroach! All I am asking for is repayment for my losses. That’s a basic right.”

…So he wanted to start the negotiations by pouring boiling oil on me in front of a camera?

“Do you really think Wild@Hunt will let you get away with this? You’ve dragged their company name through all this so you alone could survive, so they’ll never just let you go!”

“Wild@Hunt’s management!? Who gives a shit!?”

He shouted back at me and my mind went blank. …What did he just say? Was this just the ravings of a madman???

“I was a non-executive director. A brat who lives on his parents’ dime wouldn’t understand, but that means they wouldn’t give me a seat at the table. Even though it was me that gave that monster corporation so much growth in a single generation!”

“…”

“They don’t know how to make money, they don’t know how to make connections, and all they do is earn resentment. How do you think they ended up at the top of a major corporation? …Because they could get reservations at a certain Pennsylvania restaurant.”

I had no idea what he meant.

But I couldn’t bring myself to speak up. He seemed calm, but I sensed the ominous ripples of an eruption waiting to happen.

“The jazz stage is covered in dust after years sitting unused and the golf simulator is outdated and yellowed. Just eight people is enough to fill every seat and, worst of all, the food is terrible. …But only the people who can get a reservation and freely enter that packed restaurant can obtain the star of a winner.”

That was likely a different set of rules than the ark.

He was talking about a fruitless world that we could never reach.

“The world is full of those things. Skill and funding don’t matter. It could be a suit tailor, a luxury car dealership, a yacht club, WQF Airline’s royal first class, or a rifle club… If you can fit inside those purposefully cramped categories, you get your star. And it’s only once you’ve gathered 50 of those stars – one for each state – that you’re part of the true privileged class.”

He must not have reached that level.

…Was that it?

“Do you know what happened to Absolute Noah 04 at Las Vegas’s Hoover Dam?”

“…”

That had been like a water purification filter where my stepmom had used a mistaken selection test to eliminate the black-hearted VIPs.

“An invitation arrived for our top executives. And I warned them! So what do you think happened? They all resented me! They said I had stolen their ticket to salvation!”

“You…”

“And yet they didn’t take their handgun from their portable safe with unpracticed hand. Nor did they hire an assassin. …What do you think they’re doing as the world ends? I can only imagine they’re knocking at the door of that same Pennsylvania restaurant. Because that’s all they’ve got!”

If that was true, then it was like they had washed up on a desert island with only the duralumin case they had desperately stuffed with cash. They had failed to take into account the environment to an almost comical extent.

“They never stop being a disappointment.”

“…”

“So I’m done with those empty shells. I’m through with chasing after them. I’ll continue forward on my own. Even if that means using the ark as a stepping stone.”

…Had Maxwell realized what was happening?

No, Maxwell would have contacted someone else to come save me regardless.

It could be my stepmom Amatsu Yurina, Erika the Vampire, Ayumi the Zombie, Anastasia the Hacker, or even Itou Helen the Witch or Muramatsu Yukie the Dark Elf.

I couldn’t predict who would take the bait. And when I was the bait, I couldn’t just let it happen!

“…Give up, Adjust. No one will come for me.”

“The ark’s rules are, at the very least, better than that terrible Pennsylvania restaurant. If Amatsu Yurina is trying to guide you to the ark, there has to be a reason why.”

“She just wants to protect her family! But if going after me would cause it all to fall apart, she would protect my dad and my sisters instead!”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. Just how useful would it be to have someone whose emotions can persuade the people around them? That might be the masterpiece of the whole ark.”

“I already told her I wasn’t interested!”

I pressed my hands on the floor and used my legs like a spring to hop up from the tile floor.

Yes, even though my hands were supposedly zip tied behind my back.

“Wha-…!?”

Adjust stepped back in confusion, but it wasn’t anything that amazing. Zip ties weren’t metal handcuffs. They were made of plastic, so they were weak to heat. Even without some sharp scissors or a knife, I could reduce its strength with the frictional heat of rubbing it over and over against something sticking out from the wall. And it’s such a boring solution that you never see it in movies or dramas!

Stepping back had been a mistake.

While choosing his toy, he had approached the fryer for making fries, so I didn’t even need to grab a weapon from the countertop. I threw all my weight at his thick chest with a tackle!!

…Stepping back was where you messed up. If you had kept your feet on the floor and tried to hold your ground, your bigger frame might have been able to stop my tackle.

“Gyah.”

He had no time to use his stun gun.

Adjust lost his balance and the hand holding the stun gun plunged into that bubbling sea of oil.

“G-g-g-g-gy-gy-gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”

In what I could only assume was a burst of adrenaline-fueled strength, a swing of his other arm sent me flying through the air. I cleared the central countertop and crashed back-first into the wall, knocking the breath out of me.

“Ah…agh…aghghgh…”

Adjust finally pulled his arm from the fryer full of oil, but it didn’t look like the elbow or wrist joints could move anymore. His melted clothing was tangled around the arm and I smelled an intense mixture of fried food and melted plastic.

What happened next I doubt he did on purpose. Either his fingers convulsed or the heat caused the muscles to contract. Whatever the reason, the fried stun gun’s switch was activated and the oily device scattered bluish-white sparks.

It was dramatic.

That was the only word I could find to describe how the red flames traveled up his arm. Some sparks also fell into the fryer and a pillar of fire rose from it.

An invisible wall of heat slammed into my face.

“Gh…”

If I stayed there, I would be caught in the flames too.

Heat, light, and smoke. Even while pursued by so many things, I rushed to the industrial fridge. The employee had gone missing and Adjust had given that fridge a meaningful glance. I breathed in, stopped, and then opened the door.

I found a half-frozen person there.

The young man had his hands zip tied behind him, but he was still alive. Whether Adjust ever planned to let him out was still a mystery, though. I pulled him out while making sure his skin had not frozen to the wall and then we really did run out of the kitchen.

Black smoke was already billowing into the main area of the restaurant.

“Cough, cough!”

The two of us practically rolled out and then left the restaurant altogether.

But the threat was not yet over.

Something was racing through the sky.

I thought it was a passenger plane, but then I realized it was far too close. I ducked down at the shockwave that passed by overhead.

“Was that a Wild@Hunt unmanned delivery plane?”

The part-timer worker’s comment sent a chill down my spine.

And after following that ridiculous course, the plane left something behind like a contrail. There were a lot of them. They were delivery drones with six wings and something like a crane game’s hook. And there were a lot of them!! A hundred? A thousand!? More!!?

Each individual one seemed like a harmless toy, but that changed when there were this many. The two of us fled back into the smoky restaurant as the swarm of drones approached. We escaped danger by getting inside, but that just meant they targeted an onlooker calmly using his phone to film the fire.

“Eh?”

They grabbed his shoulders.

They grabbed his chest, back, head, and thighs… More and more delivery drones used their crane arms to grab flesh and clothing before flying upwards with surprising ease.

The person vanished from sight and only his voice remained.

“Are you kidding me!? What the hell is this!?”

If I was remembering correctly, each delivery drone could only carry 5 kilograms. But with that many of them, they were strong enough to carry an entire person.

With a dull sound, a large mass fell onto the roof of a car parked on the side of the road. He had probably fallen because he struggled in midair, but that was the drones’ weapon. They had transformed height into a deadly weapon!?

“Hey, can we even escape from those things…?”

“They aren’t just after us? They’ll attack anyone walking outside!?”

While we discussed that, I used a burning piece of wood to melt the part-timer’s zip tie until he could break it.

…Did they not follow us in here because the fire and smoke made them designate it a dangerous area? Or did they not have indoor flight routines since they were designed as delivery drones that carried packages through the sky to reach specific addresses? …I seemed to recall that they delivered to the landlord’s office at apartments, so they could not pass through auto-locking gates and climb the stairs or elevator to reach the door of an individual unit?

But we received an answer from an unexpected source.

Someone stepped out of the door to the flame-filled kitchen.

“Yes, we had entered the countdown to the Calamity whether I did anything or not.”

“Adjust Rex…”

I couldn’t believe it.

The right half of his body was still enveloped in flames and he was burned badly enough that his summer coat and luxury suit had melted to his body. How in the world was he still standing!?

“But if Wild@Hunt uses its international influence to intentionally destroy the world’s balance, the limit will arrive all the sooner.”

“The world’s…balance? Intentionally destroy it!?”

“Did you think the things happening right in front of you are all there is to the world? Yes, this is happening all across the globe! The world must be covered with drones providing this new service! Thanks to the miracle of automation!!”

I didn’t know what he meant.

We stared at him like he was a madman, but he did not seem to care. He spread his arms toward heaven while burning like a human torch.

“Did you hear that, Amatsu Yurina!? Did you hear that, Absolute Noah!? Prepare your ark already! Guide its masterpiece to the entrance! You need this for your closed salvation, don’t you!? The world has mere seconds left!!”

I didn’t know if that was true. Was the world really filled with Wild@Hunt drones that swarmed around and dropped people and cars from the sky?

But I did know he was the center of it all. I tried to grab a nearby fire extinguisher so I could hit him with it.

As soon as I touched it, I felt the pain of pressing my palm against a scorching frying pan.

“Hot!?”

“Yes, Amatsu Satori. Reality is cruel.”

And I lost everything in that moment. Adjust lifted me by the throat with his unburnt left arm. The lack of blood to my head must have been why my vision rapidly narrowed.

“Kah…!?”

“I used my unharmed left hand in order to negotiate.”

The part-timer young man let out a pathetic scream and ran out into the vortex of drones. I couldn’t tell what happened to him. There might as well have been swarms of Zombies and Vampires walking through Kukyou City.

“Now I will take my time and press my right hand against you. I will use this burning right hand to slowly roast you from the extremities first. The destruction of the masterpiece is the destruction of the ark. You just have to pray Amatsu Yurina makes her move sooner rather than later.”

“Adjust…!!”

That was when it happened.

A large semi truck crashed through the restaurant.

There was nothing sane about it. It didn’t even crash through the entrance; it broke through the side wall. But thanks to that, I was safe. It targeted Adjust alone, so the very edge of extra-large bumper cleanly hit him.

“Ugh, cough!!”

I held my throat and choked while something moved inside the truck and the passenger door flew open.

And inside I found…

“Satori, get in! Hurry!!”

“Mom!?”

That was fast!? How long has it even been since the threat!? My beautiful stepmom could be so immature. She apparently intended to talk about it more later, so I dragged my confused self into the passenger seat.

Something was squirming on the other side of the windshield.

“Adjust Rex. A-are you kidding me!?”

With the container on the back, the truck had to weigh nearly 20 tons. It wasn’t that I wanted Amatsu Yurina to be a murderer, but how could he get up after a direct hit from that!?

“Even the lower-ranked Hack or Slave had a supernatural hacker.”

After the flames and impact, his summer coat and luxury suit crumbled away. And something else came off below that.

Are those an excessive number of bandages? No. No, wait. Is that…!?

“A Mummy… He was an Archenemy!?”

Humans and Archenemies were the same. The undead could perform evil deeds just as much as humans.

“You understand what this means, don’t you?” he said. “My body was injected with everything required to eternally preserve a pharaoh’s body as a container for his next life. Did you really think the heat and impacts of this life could truly harm it!?”

But my stepmom paid him no heed.

One of her jobs must have been complete as soon as she had retrieved me, her son. Her shapely butt rose up and returned to the driver’s seat while she happily wiped sweat from her brow.

“But mummies require that pain-in-the-ass process because they’re afraid of a certain something affecting the preservation of the corpse.”

She gave an extremely coldhearted smile.

“Namely, moisture. And isn’t it about time for the sprinklers to activate in here?”

Large drops of rain pounded on the windshield.

And my stepmom did not even check to see how he reacted. She violently grabbed the shift lever, but to my surprise, she sent the gigantic truck forward.

Water weakened him.

Immediately after making that announcement, she mercilessly took advantage of that weakness.

With a loud noise, the large semi truck broke through the wall opposite the one it had come in through. It knocked aside a few light cars parked on the curb and entered the road. No one bothered to check what had happened to Adjust.

I heard the roar of propellers and a ton of drones started to fill the door window right next to me.

“Wah!?”

“Don’t worry, Satori. We might be in trouble with a standard 4-door, but there’s no way they can lift a semi truck.”

The ridiculous Hollywood scale of her entrance had apparently had a real reason behind it.

But I couldn’t relax.

“…They’re everywhere overhead.”

It was like the sandstorm I had seen in Las Vegas. A collection of black dots arrived from one end of the blue sky with enough density to nearly block out the light of the sun.

That was frightening, but we couldn’t just give up. I found a car navigation system affixed to a stand. Instead of the recent variety that filled the car stereo space, it was a portable one the size of a card. It was a bit like a smartphone that was slow to react to my touch. …So I did kind of want to argue that a smartphone GPS map app would be better.

Anyway, I was fortunate to find an internet-connected device.

“Maxwell, respond if you can hear me. Stop any form of tracking and use this as your base station.”

“Sure, understood.”

“Eh?” said my stepmom. “This thing is still giving away my position? But I switched off the GPS option.”

“Oh, you careless stepmom…”

There were plenty of ways to locate someone besides GPS and, now that the car navigation industry was losing ground to smartphone map apps, they were using multiple methods to provide the precision that professional taxi drivers and truckers wanted. …But there was no need to explain all that here.

“Maxwell, hijack all the nearby wireless routers and transmit on all frequency bands.”

“No change to the drones’ behavior. The jamming is not showing any effect.”

“Damn. Do they switch to an autonomous mode if something goes wrong? Giving them everything from flight control to map software sure was generous.”

Well, the devices were meant to deliver an online store’s products. If poor signal would cut them off from GPS and allow them to get lost, the company would receive a storm of complaints about undelivered products. It was also possible people would maliciously mess with them like how people shined laser pointers at airplanes. If throwing a stone at the drone would make it drop its delivery, you could steal the products. In that case, it made sense for them to include multiple map and control methods.

“By the way, do we need to share any information?”

“No,” replied Maxwell. “By entering a few devices inside that restaurant, I am aware that the world is in trouble at an idiot’s insistence. Rather than the central servers around the world, this is likely based on the misuse of the final backup facility that is generally hidden behind the scenes.”

“So when there’s a fatal error in the crucial network of 140 servers, authority shifts to the final backup. …But is that infested with Adjust’s virus? No, would he really just leave malicious code in there like that?”

“He may not have needed to make such a risky move. After all, the final backup facility is normally cut off from the network and forgotten about.”

“A security conflict, huh?”

It was common for beginners to wonder what happened if you put multiple pieces of security software on the same computer. It was wrong to think that made it safer. The security software would fight each other and cause a fatal error.

“The 140 central servers use security type A and the final backup uses security type B. Checking each individual file won’t show anything malicious, but once they run into each other on the same network, a serious conflict occurs. If that’s how Adjust set this up…”

“Attacking people is not that complex an operation,” said Maxwell. “The delivery drones would already have the ability to recognize people and safely avoid them, so he would only need to flip that around so they recognize people, approach them, and pick them up as a ‘package’.”

A backup was no more than a backup, so you would only think about it in an emergency. If it was accessed for annual maintenance, no one would notice that “emergency exit hiding monsters”.

And once the door was unlocked and opened, the monsters would spill out into the world.

“Then did I pull the trigger? Because I sent a harmless virus into Wild@Hunt via the central server to see how they would react!?”

“No. Based on Adjust’s statements, I would predict this was one of his plans for shaking Mrs. Amatsu Yurina. You merely stumbled across a remote-controlled bomb before the scheduled press of the button, so I doubt you influenced the amount of damage.”

“But…!!”

“Okay, okay. That’s enough of that.”

My stepmom casually cut in while driving the truck through the confused city buzzing with swarming drones.

“It looks like the drones indiscriminately swarm people to grab them, lift them up, and drop them from a height of 10 meters, or about three stories. And the people will fall earlier if they struggle on the way up, so the actual death rate shouldn’t be all that high.”

“I still can’t just ignore this. Nothing says they’ll stop after doing it to someone once. If they’re grabbed over and over after they’ve been weakened, they’ll be smashed beyond recognition.”

“True. And the real problem isn’t the drone swarms. The powerful stress will amplify malice and pave the way to a largescale moral hazard.”

Being hit by a bomb was not the only threat from a bombing. Even in a safe shelter, exposure to the intense noise and shaking for long periods of time could allow the powerful fear of death to eat at someone’s psyche and lead to severe PTSD.

You did not need a pure war machine that slaughtered everything.

Even with some openings left, a weapon could still damage the human mind.

“This could be a serious problem if it spreads to the global level,” said my stepmom. “All political systems are made so the minority manages the majority, but that means the rampaging majority can leave the minority of the military or police unable to function. In fact, the military and the police are sometimes the first to break.”

“Like the military coups you sometimes hear about?”

“Or police going on shooting sprees.”

We were discussing an age in which people destroyed other people, rejected their own civilization, and let go of happiness.

That was the Calamity, a largescale moral hazard that could wipe out the human race, and it was drawing ever closer.

“Besides, the problem isn’t over even if we do end the swarms of drones.”

“?”

Nevertheless.

Those drones were running on batteries, so optimistically, this would end on its own in a few hours. Pessimistically, they would be able to recharge themselves, but if the recharging stations were all destroyed, they would “starve” to death.

Destroying all of the stations would mean a fight around the world. But that at least gave us a goal. If we were prepared for a major power outage, it was the machines that would succumb first. There was still hope. Or so I thought.

“If a global corporation that props up the world is destroyed as the culprits here, it will lead to a global depression caused by economic damage the likes of which the world has never seen,” explained my stepmom. “The social stress will not go away either way. Solve this or not, it is extremely likely this will lead into the Calamity.”

“…Then there’s nothing we can do!”

That said, if Wild@Hunt escaped unscathed in order to preserve global stability and all the blame was forced onto a blatant scapegoat, it would only anger the world. No matter what was done, the extreme levels of stress would not go away. There really was no exit I could see.

“That’s right, Satori.”

Demon Lord Lilith had made such a mess of the world in ways seen and unseen, but she actually sounded timid here.

No.

“So, Satori, once I’ve collected everyone, I think we’ll finally head to Absolute Noah at the bottom of the dam.”

“Wha-?”

“That’s the entire point of the ark and the boarding tickets. If we can’t stop the Calamity, then we need to get onboard now regardless of what the schedule says.”

The truck was still driving through the chaotic city. And it was occasionally crashing through light cars people had abandoned in the road due to traffic. That meant she had a destination in mind.

But I had thought it was a destination we could use to fight back. I had thought we were working to stop these rampaging drones and solve this global problem.

“…Are you saying we’re going to run away? Just us?”

“We are going to survive. We will follow the original concept.”

“There might still be something we can do! We know so many people in this city!! Protecting ourselves from a disaster that’s already happened is one thing, but are you saying we’re going to run away before the end has arrived and just let it happen, mom!?”

“Famine brought on by overpopulation, extreme natural disasters caused by global warming, underground resources drying up, the world fracturing from the rise of isolationists… We had come up with several scenarios that could push global social stress past the limit and cause the Calamity. Monster corporations growing like a cancer on society was one of those scenarios. We knew this blood vessel in the brain was going to rupture eventually, but today is the day it reached the limit. You said it hasn’t happened yet, but the world’s prognosis of death was given as far back as the Cold War. Although it was given to us Archenemies millennia ago in the form of prophecies.”

“…How can I accept this?”

“Erika, who can’t even walk out in the sunlight, said the same thing. So did your father. They put up a fight, but now they’re inside the back of the truck. I have you now, so that just leaves collecting Ayumi from her secure private school. Then I’ll have won.”

My stepmom, Amatsu Yurina, may have seen in that way. For someone who had spent a long time preparing, this may have looked like the greatest climax. She would look across the peace-dulled masses and say, “See? I was right.”

“How can I accept this!? Anastasia is visiting right now. And then there’s Itou Helen, Kuroyama Hinoki, and of course the Class Rep!!”

“Then what do you propose?”

“This global drone rampage was caused by abusing a security conflict when Wild@Hunt decided their central servers were infected and switched over to the final backup facility. So if we go the other way…”

“No,” said Maxwell. “Searching through all group data within the 140 central servers turned up no data on the final backup facility. We do not know where in the world it is. In fact, it might be on a satellite or space station, so locating it now is not realistic.”

“Adjust Rex!”

“What?”

“Would that Wild@Hunt non-executive director really visit this regional Far Eastern city just to attack me? He also seemed pretty disillusioned with Wild@Hunt. We need to assume he had some other reason for being here. And if their normal network acts like the final backup facility doesn’t exist, we can guess that he physically visited the facility to set up his security conflict.”

Meaning…

“Wild@Hunt’s final backup is hidden in Kukyou City.”

“…”

“There is supposed to be a central server in each of Wild@Hunt’s support areas, but for some reason Japan alone was borrowing another country’s excess space. That wasn’t just a rumor; Maxwell tracked it down to New Delhi!”

Then why wasn’t Japan’s central server working?

“The Japanese server was cut off from the network to act as the final backup.”

“Even if so, what proof do you have that it is conveniently in Kukyou City?” asked Maxwell. “This is a relatively uninteresting regional city.”

“This city specializes in disaster research, so it’s the perfect place to put your insurance. It’s far safer and more trustworthy than a satellite which can lose control due to debris or solar winds. The final backup…no, the Japanese central server would be placed in this city. Right!?”

“Even if we do stop Wild@Hunt’s drones, we would not prevent the economic damage and the following global depression,” reminded my stepmom. “The Calamity will occur either way.”

It was true I did not have an answer for that yet.

If I made a poorly-thought-out move, I could become the direct cause of harm instead of just passively watching others die.

But.

Even so.

“…I won’t abandon them.”

“Satori.”

“It’s the same as with the Bright Cross’s Colosseum. Stopping that entertainment show hosted by the blue bunny girl wasn’t guaranteed to save the Archenemies. They might have changed the format and reopened as a different sort of murder show. But I did it anyway! And it was those results that got them through to today, right!? If I had given up then, Itou Helen, Muramatsu Yukie, Erika, Ayumi, and everyone else would have been killed after forced to fight to the death inside that giant bug cage! It would have been 100% guaranteed!! So I had to do it!! I had to reach for a miracle built up by our individual efforts!!”

“…That is definitely a moving story,” said Amatsu Yurina.

But…

“If we were talking about a stranger, I might have irresponsibly applauded. But, Satori, I decided to become your mother. No matter what deadly sins I must bear as a result.”

“…!?”

I was through with hesitating.

I unlocked the door and threw open the passenger-side door even though the truck was still moving. I opened it too hard and it immediately hit a road sign and was torn away, but I had bigger things to worry about.

But not because I had jumped out onto the road in a surge of manly resolve.

No, it was because a bloody man crawled up toward the opened passenger seat.

Crawled up? So from below? I was too confused to make any sense of it, so the first to react was my stepmom. She reached for her hip and pulled out a monstrous single-shot magnum with a barrel as thick as a flare gun and provided the accurate answer.

“Adjust Rex!!”

He was a Mummy Archenemy.

Had that dried-out bastard clung to the bottom of the truck after being hit by its 20-ton weight!? He had done some bragging about a pharaoh or something, but setting aside how infectious he was, he seemed even tougher than a Zombie or Vampire!!

“This isn’t over yet… I need your ark. And that brat is the master key, isn’t he!?”

“…!!”

My stepmom seemed hesitant to fire that with me in between them.

Reality was cruel, so no matter how carefully you prepared, the slightest moment of inattention could mean losing everything.

So…

“Ah.”

I heard a strange voice.

It wasn’t mine.

A delivery drone’s crane arm was digging into Adjust Rex’s shoulder as he clung to the outside of the truck.

“Ahh, ahhh, ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”

It was like watching swarming seagulls.

Had he not set himself as a targeting exception, or had his injuries and burns created too much of a change from his registered facial recognition data?

Regardless, the idiot was enveloped by the end of the world he himself had released and he was carried high into the sky.

…Well, both hackers and snipers could only act like a god until their location and identities were revealed.

And I did not have time to just watch.

The drones’ attention was on Adjust, so this was my chance. If my stepmom threatened me with that monstrous single-shot magnum, I wouldn’t be able to move.

This was my only chance to jump out.

If I hesitated, the fear would hold me in place. I pulled the card-sized car navigation device from its stand and threw myself out through the opening left by the missing door.

“Satori!?”

My stepmom screamed my name, but I wasn’t listening. Before I could even think about my positioning or bracing myself for impact, I hit the asphalt and rolled along it. It hurt so bad it felt like having firecrackers stuck under my skin! I could hardly believe I didn’t smash every last bone in my body to dust.

“Agh, aghhh, ghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

I was close to biting off my tongue from my own screaming! Damn, was the rolling you saw in movies and dramas really the right thing to do!? I had never done much rolling before, so you could laugh if you want, but I couldn’t tell the difference between professional and amateur rolling!!

“If you do not hurry away, the drones or Mrs. Amatsu Yurina will reach you,” advised Maxwell.

“I know…that!”

I dragged my aching body along to slip into a narrow alley.

First of all, the drone attacks were an abuse of the system that flew through the sky searching for an address and then delivered the package to the front door or yard. They could not reach you inside or in an extremely narrow space.

And Amatsu Yurina’s semi truck required a fairly wide road to drive down. She could break through walls to force her way through, but it would lack the power to keep going while widening an entire alley.

“Where am I? I think this is near my school.”

“You will arrive at Kukyou First High School in another 500 meters.”

“The car navigation system suits you.”

“Then shall I use a more feminine synthetic voice?”

…That meant Itou Helen the Witch and the Class Rep would come first.

“Maxwell. Contact Anastasia, Kuroyama Hinoki, Muramatsu Yukie, Himatsuri Asami, my biological mom Magatsu Taori, and everyone else I know. Tell them not to go outside until the drone attacks are over.”

“Spreading the theory of indoor safety to the general public would likely reduce the worldwide damage.”

“With this going on, the message boards and social media will be full of misinformation. If you don’t have a title like ‘survival expert’, no one’s going to believe you.”

The one exception was receiving word from someone you knew personally.

This was caused by machines, but it could be classified as a disaster on a global scale. It was a lot like a swarm of locusts. And humanity would show off its unpleasant side in more than just the real world.

In fact, it was often easier to lose all restraint when indulging in the temporary anonymity of the internet, so people tended to be more skeptical.

I heard an unsettling buzzing sound overhead as the drones flew across the limited area of sky visible between the two buildings.

“Let’s go, Maxwell. I need to get to school for now.”

“Sure.”

I advanced through the narrow alley.

They appeared to have been ordered to indiscriminately attack humans, but how did they tell us apart from everything else? Facial recognition, walking patterns, or just a general humanoid silhouette? Knowing that could tell me how to avoid them, but I didn’t have time to make any precise tests.

If the alley grew just a little wider and the delivery drones decided they would not hit the walls, they would rush in to kill me. I could not help but feel nervous.

…But did that mean I could secure my safety by narrowing the walls myself?

“Is something the matter?” asked Maxwell.

“There’s a lot of stuff in this alley. If I pass a plastic rope through the drain spouts on the building walls so it’s strung up overhead, I bet I could create a ‘roof’ to keep them out.”

I could never cover an entire multilane road, but it was worth an attempt with a somewhat wide alley.

I felt more and more impatient, but I was slowly making progress through the maze.

Taking a different route from normal was not the issue. Setting up the plastic rope trick as I went was not enough. Time seemed to stretch out infinitely. A scream was slowly rising in my throat like a bus along a zigzagging mountain road. When I saw a horror movie with the actress running away and screaming in the remote mountains where no one could possibly hear her, I had always wondered how the scriptwriter didn’t question that, but now I understood. It didn’t matter if it was meaningless. Screaming wasn’t about actually seeking help; it was more of a way to release stress when your internal pressure was about to reach the limit.

Even so, I managed to force out some words.

“…I finally made it.”

It was the school.

My usual high school.

It was covered in windows and the entranceway had glass doors. It was just about the worst building to hole up in, but the conceptual mismatch of the delivery drones had saved them. The drones could have gotten in if they had tried, but the swarm never tried to pass through the windows.

But if they were not aware of that rule, the school had to have become a collection of deadly stress. They would all be heating each other like the coal in a steam engine, so who could say when their group psychology would take a negative turn and lead to violence.

Even now, I could hear a bold voice coming from the schoolyard speakers.

“This is Student Council Vice President Asasaya Kakugo standing in for the President. In the spirit of ‘ladies first’, the Student Council would like to guide all of the female students to the sturdy gym. The boys can wait until a further announcement.”

“Maxwell, start an electrical fire in the broadcast room. We can’t let the students be led by that perverted bastard and his blatant harem dream.”

“How about reducing that to an electrical shock? I will admit, however, that it could not be more obvious that he intends to lock up the gym with only himself and all the girls in the school inside.”

After a deafening roar similar to an audio feedback loop, all of the broadcast equipment went quiet.

…One danger of a disaster site was the possibility of an arrogant savior. Those pieces of shit would seek illegal rewards from the people they rescued. And unfortunately, it was a phenomenon found not just in amateur volunteers, but in professional rescue teams and soldiers as well.

Having a large group relying on you made you feel all powerful.

You felt the great dependence of people saying they needed you around.

Just like holding a gun made people feel bolder, a position of absolute superiority over someone else had a way of revealing who someone really was on the inside.

This guy was already showing signs of that.

He was standing in for the President, but why had the President stepped down? Or what had they done during the confusion? That was something I was most interested in finding out.

That said, I had to find a way into the school.

Heading to the main entrance through the open schoolyard would be the height of folly. Heading to the faculty entrance from the parking lot out back would still be worrying.

“Maxwell, search for a way into the school. Physically, I mean.”

“Umm, this is a hard for me to say.”

“You don’t get to say there isn’t one and I have to give up. Itou Helen and the Class Rep are in there.”

“That is not what I meant. Do you perhaps remember the spider web of underground tunnels the Bright Cross built below Kukyou City for their abduction infrastructure? Well, the delivery drones appear to be avoiding indoor areas, so that would be super safe.”

“I’m such an idiot!!”

I held my head in my hands and screamed. All that lost time and excess tension was converted into exhaustion.

A normal person could not force open those electronic locks, but we could do it with ease.

“…Maxwell, give me a hurdle. Give me a reason why walking in the open all this time was actually useful.”

“Sure. In Kukyou First High School’s case, the door to the underground tunnels is in a storeroom across the schoolyard instead of directly in the school building. So if the students are to escape underground, they must find a way across that schoolyard from hell.”

“Okay!! That’s something for me to do!!”

I knew it was incredibly inappropriate, but the engineering type had a way of getting excited when faced with a difficult problem. …The worst thing was to enter a death march where everything got worse and worse and there was nothing you could do.

“Maxwell, unlock all of the doors to the underground tunnels. And post about the escape route on various message boards. People might not believe it at first, but some will try it. And they’ll know it’s true once they see the doors open on their own.”

“Sure.”

“The drone attacks are happening on a global scale, but we need to start with building a foundation. If we can save Kukyou City, I want to do so. …And that of course includes everyone in the school.”

It didn’t matter how sturdy it was.

I just had to create a path from the school building’s exit to the edge of the schoolyard that the drones would interpret as off limits.

I pictured something like a shopping district arcade.

The problem was the lack of anything to attach the plastic rope to in the wide open schoolyard.

I could not just charge out there, so I turned back into the narrow alley. I grabbed an abandoned bike leaning against the wall.

“You will be caught even if you ride that at full speed. Wild@Hunt’s drones can move at around 50km/h.”

“That’s not what I’m planning. If I remove the tire tubes and take apart the frame, I can create a giant slingshot. Let’s shoot down one of them.”

I did indeed use a small rock to shoot down a drone flying by overhead. Delivery drones of course were not built with weapons, so they could not strike back as long as I stayed in the safe zone.

I crouched down and grabbed the wreckage.

“Okay, let’s check the cameras and sensors to see how it perceives the outside world.”

“Sure.”

Car navigation systems apparently had cameras these days. They probably checked the redness of the driver’s face and the wavering of their eyes to prevent drunk driving.

I held it close so Maxwell could see.

“Its overall position is tracked with the double methods of GPS and wi-fi signal. The image processing is handled in all 360 degrees below it using the cameras on the bars extending down from the wing on the front and the wing on the back. It also has a microwave radar to cover everything in a sphere around it.”

Just because the two cameras were movable did not mean it could view everything around it at all times. Just like a turning fan, it had blind spots. And if the cameras failed to recognize a clear window or polished mirror, it would crash right into them. The radar would be used to avoid that kind of trouble.

That said…

“Just disturbing the radar signal wouldn’t be enough. Jamming them with wireless radars already failed.”

“Sure.”

“Then it’s just like a self-driving car. Let’s settle this with that thing that made those lab coats go pale on the test circuit.”

What materials did I have to work with? Yes, I did not need to do any metalworking with a lathe like a professional. I was concerned about erosion, but a large eraser would work for a short time. I used Maxwell’s calculations to carve down the surface and then it was time for the star to shine.

“Maxwell, search for the closest faucet on the school grounds.”

“Sure. Instead of the outdoor drinking fountain, there is an embedded sprinkler faucet in the flower garden next to the faculty parking lot. I have already confirmed the length and width of the hose attached. It is 20 meters away, so that should take 4 or 5 seconds. Assuming no errors in your physical data, you should arrive before the drones gather around you.”

“…There’s a fence in the way. Did you include that in your calculations?”

“Of course. Please focus on the direct line to the sprinkler faucet. A hole has been cut away at the bottom of the fence, perhaps to allow a cat through.”

…Who had done that? A student or a janitor? Well, they had cut it pretty large so the cat wouldn’t get hurt, but if the wires caught on my clothes and I was trapped, that would be game over for my life.

I checked the drone-filled sky as I began doing some stretches near the alley exit. When I was this tense, I had to make sure I would not have any trouble with my Achilles tendon.

“Maxwell, track the drone distribution. Tell me when to start running.”

“That would be now.”

“That was fast!!”

I felt like an invisible hand had shoved me forward, so I ran out from the alley and toward the high school. The buzzing of what sounded like countless wings squeezed at my heart.

Taking the shortest route meant ignoring the back gate. I ran straight toward the tall fence and slid headfirst toward the cat entrance. The fence with the hole must not have reflected their radar waves properly because several drones ran into it behind me, damaging their propellers.

“!”

But I could not relax yet.

I checked the connection of the faucet embedded in the dirt and the rubber hose wound up on a drum. Then I took the handmade attachment I had carved from an eraser and shoved it inside the end of the hose.

Countless drones were already rapidly descending toward me.

I turned the faucet to full blast, grabbed the rubber hose, and held it toward the sky.

Water burst out like a fountain and surrounded me with a clear and flowing parasol.

It was like a magical barrier.

The ferocious swarm of drones came to a complete stop at the edge of the water parasol. Those weapons should have been able to lift a small car if working together, but they were unable to pass a barrier as thin as a soap bubble.

“Looks like it worked.”

“Sure. The drones use their cameras and radar together to determine what paths are safe. If neither sees a problem, they keep going. If one or the other sees a problem, they find another way around. But if the two give conflicting readings, they view the situation as dangerous. In some cases, they will briefly come to a stop instead of finding a detour and wait for instructions from the control center that can provide manual control.”

What mattered here was that I had created a parasol of water with no gaps rather than a normal shower or sprinkler. That mean the drones’ cameras could not see anything there, but the radar was reflected off the water and detected an obstacle. Just like the thick window of a skyscraper.

…And of course, the delivery drones could not receive manual assistance thanks to Adjust’s security conflict. Because he could not have a single click from the control center end their rampage. So if they were waiting for instructions but no one else could take control, they would naturally end up forever hovering in place.

“There was a similar problem with self-driving cars that use both cameras and radar. When a truck in the oncoming lane hit a puddle and created ‘wings’ of water on either side, the car mistook it for a wall directly in front of it and slammed on its brakes. But since someone could jump out in front of the car at any time in a shopping district, the emergency brakes have to be quite sensitive. That must have created a pretty serious bottleneck.”

Anyway, I had created a portable sanctuary. The rubber hose wrapped around the drum was only so long, but being able to walk around in the open without worrying about the drones meant a lot.

I just had to repeat this process.

“Let’s get in the school building.”

“You will need a large number of erasers. The school store would be the best source.”

…I would have loved to get all the students’ help for that, but I couldn’t force them to pay just because it was an emergency.

After buying what I needed from the aproned young woman who was still running the shop (perhaps to protect the register), I pulled rubber hose drums out from the school storage and attached them to drinking fountain faucets in the hallway.

This time, I did not mess with the ends of the hoses.

I used drills and chisels in the shop classroom to open holes in the sides of the serpent-like hoses and stuck the eraser attachments in there. Then I threw them out the window. I used the sprinkler faucet hose to protect myself while attaching the hoses so they reached from the school building to the end of the schoolyard where the door leading underground was.

“I’d like to have two hoses on each side.”

“Walking through there will probably leave you soaking wet.”

Yeah, the multiple fountains would collide and send the water falling down. You couldn’t neatly avoid all the water like you could with my simple handheld version.

I never explained what I was doing, but when people hesitantly looked out from the classroom windows, they must have noticed that I was walking around the schoolyard safely.

When I returned to the school building and turned on the water fountain faucet, a few people poked their heads out into the hallway.

“Senpai, um, what are you doing?”

“Itou-san? I’m not sure I can give a very detailed explanation, but the simple explanation is that the drones don’t like walls of water or complex underground pathways. I want to get all the students into the Bright Cross’s tunnels, so can you help me? Yes, I’ve opened all of the tunnel doors around the city, so you can tell your families and their workplaces to use those. A direct message should get through to them, and that should help spread the information.”

“S-Senpai, what are you fighting against now!? Honestly!”

“I’m really not sure this time. If I said it was ‘the end of the world’, would you believe me, Itou-san?

“…Are you making fun of me?”

“I see. If that’s your response, then unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll have a chance to explain this to you.”

I left the underclassmen zone to her. I wanted to see for myself that the Class Rep was safe. Even if there was no strategic or logical reason to do so.

I ran up the stairs to my usual classroom. I ignored the teacher that told me to stop on the way there.

I threw open the sliding door and shouted inside.

“Class Rep!”

“No uniform, outdoor shoes, extremely late, and acting like you’ve done nothing wrong? Satori-kun, sit on the floor right here!!”

She immediately gave me a serious slap that nearly took my head off. O-oww. But at least she was safe…

The forehead glasses Class Rep put her hands on her hips and stood in front of me.

“Now, what are you doing, Satori-kun?”

“…I-I made a safe exit, so could everyone maybe head there?”

It would have been too much to expect people to risk their lives by going outside based only on my word, but I had proven it was safe by wandering around the drone-filled schoolyard. Looking out the window showed some underclassmen nervously crossing the schoolyard to reach the open door to the tunnel. The weird thing about these situations was how no one wanted to be the first to go, but they also did not want to be the last to leave. Once people started leaving, everyone else started to follow.

“What will you be doing, Satori-kun?”

“I’ve made sure you’re safe, but I have tons more I need to do. So if you’ll excuse me…”

“I had a feeling you would say that. But did you really think I would let you escape?”

“Nin nin!”

The Class Rep was too Class Rep-y, so I played the ninja and took off running through the rapidly-emptying school building. I ran around to escape the cries of “wait” and ultimately lost that pursuer from hell by hiding inside a locker in the girl’s locker room. Heh heh heh. A splendid bit of psychological warfare, don’t you think? She would never expect a boy to hide in the girl’s one. And I was impressed she was worried enough about me to scold me during an emergency like this. Her kindness could be useful, but this was not the time or the place for it.

“Okay, Maxwell, let’s get down to business. We need to do something about these global drone attacks.”

“You should wait until you leave the locker to put on that ultra serious face.”

“First, I need to contact Anastasia.”

I wanted to sort through my information.

First, the Calamity was a disaster caused by extreme moral hazards occurring to all of humanity at once. The time limit was a fluid thing, so it could be hastened by increasing social stress.

The drone attacks were a global-level incident caused by Adjust Rex, supernatural hacker and non-executive director of the international corporation Wild@Hunt.

He had intentionally shortened the Calamity’s time limit and then took me hostage so my stepmom Amatsu Yurina would have to guide him to the secretly-constructed Absolute Noah.

I did not know his true goal. Did he want the ark to save him, or did he simply not want to be in the same category as the Wild@Hunt executives?

The drone attacks had been spread with the interference of security type A and security type B when something happened to the 140 central servers and they switched over to the final backup created from Japan’s central server.

It seemed odd that Adjust had traveled to this regional city in the Far East just to attack me, so the odds were good he was also here to sabotage the Japanese server being kept offline.

Meaning.

The source of all this, the final backup facility that was causing the conflict, was probably here in the disaster prevention city of Kukyou City.

“So can we solve this entire problem if we locate it and send out a stop signal to all the drones around the world?”

I did not explain it to Anastasia since she would already know, but it was not recommended to use a network to hack in from the outside. Adjust, the big boss, had gone all the way to Japan to physically access the hardware. If a high-level supernatural hacker like him couldn’t do it, then it was asking too much to expect us to figure out a way in with so little time to work with.

The fastest route would be to follow Adjust’s example and go to the facility.

I adjusted my grip on the card-sized car navigation system.

“The security conflict causes the drones to act independently after their file structure has been compromised, but I think the final backup facility – Japan’s central server – will still have access to them.”

“Okay, boss. You deserve praise for bringing this to me instead of running off on your own.”

“By the way, Anastasia, where are you right now? Are you safe?”

“I’m below a car in a parking lot and moving from one car to another. I can’t relax though because those things can lift a cute Japanese car when they work together.”

“That does sound like a route someone as small as you could use, but are you kidding me!? Didn’t I tell you it was safe indoors!?”

“Hackers are always searching for loopholes, Truth,” explained Anastasia who had left the safe zone of her own volition. “While classifying each of the city’s wireless routers by carrier and cutting them off one at a time, I discovered something interesting. If you cut off one company’s routers, the drones will immediately switch over to a different one, but they have to get a new IP address each time.”

“The drones themselves don’t manage their own IP?”

“The reissued IP address is random, but it looks like there’s some rules behind it. It might be the three body problem using the earth, the moon, and Halley’s Comet. That means every single drone in the world has to access the exact same server or they can’t switch over. Could anything be more of a pain?”

“That must be Wild@Hunt’s final backup facility, Japan’s central server. That’s the conflict base that turned the delivery drones into weapons!”

I had Anastasia send me the data and found it was surprisingly close by. It was less than a kilometer away. It was officially known as an experimental gas turbine power generation facility. It was an experimental ground for the emergency power supplies placed below hospitals and the like. That gave them an excuse to create the immense power supply they needed, allowing them to leave no records of the ridiculous power consumption of the giant computer and cooling system.

…I didn’t know if it was meant to prevent terrorism or data theft, but all the official paperwork really did list the false identity.

From outside, it looked like a box made of concrete. It was an unremarkable sight in Kukyou City where disaster research was so prevalent.

“Good, good, good.”

“But how will you travel the 1000 meters?” asked Maxwell. “The drones are still a threat outside and the sprinkler hose does not have unlimited length.”

“…”

“Would it be best to enter the tunnels and move as close as possible before returning to the surface?”

“No, if the city’s people have all taken shelter in there, even the Bright Cross’s giant facility will be jam-packed. Just looking at residents, we’re talking about 800,000 people. It would take a long time to shove my way through there.”

“Sure.”

I could not forget that it was only the people of Kukyou City that had a safe shelter. The drone attacks were occurring around the world, so I would find a horrific scene just one train station down.

Every minute and every second counted.

“…And the angry Class Rep is down there. If she catches me, it’s all over. She might grab both my legs and torment my balls with her lovely foot. Ahhh, she did agree to seal that away long ago, but you never know…”

“My only advice is to apologize sooner rather than later.”

With that in mind…

I looked up at the ceiling.

“A birdlime strategy might work…”

That conclusion was based on a few assumptions, so I had to actually prove those first. To do that, I needed a copier, so that meant the faculty room or the student council room.

“Maxwell, search for any antennas at GMT+9 aimed at 120 degrees with a vertical range of around 36,000 kilometers.”

“All of the satellite TV dishes attached to the roofs and balconies around there fit those conditions.”

“Search for a station with an IoT vulnerability we can use. Oh, I know. How many of them can run we-zap or HEARTcrash? Those were only ‘discovered’ this month, so there have to be some that are still vulnerable.”

I held that discussion while walking down the hallway to the faculty room. They must have left in a hurry because the door wasn’t locked and the computers were still on.

…Now, then.

“User, what are you doing?”

“Copying myself.”

I opened the scanner lid on the top of the same sort of industrial laser printer seen in convenience stores. Then I pressed my face against the glass reader surface and pressed the print button. And wow was it bright even with my eyes closed!

It spit out an A4 piece of copy paper with my flattened face on it. I grabbed that, approached the window, and pressed it against the thin glass.

I immediately heard that buzzing which sounded like tons of flapping wings. They did not break through the window, but several drones did react.

“Oh, so it’s just facial recognition? Then a stocking or a full-face helmet might’ve been enough.”

“No. If they are using multiple methods, they might use walking patterns or voice recognition when facial recognition fails. Predicting their routine before the software has been analyzed would be dangerous.”

“I know, I know. All I needed to prove was that I can get them to gather on a single spot.”

Just to be safe, I decided to make 10…no, 20 giant printouts of my face. Once that was done, I would search for the next material.

“The toughest material I can use would probably be a blue tarp. You can use those for anything. But that won’t cover all the gaps, so trash bags and duct tape would make a good finishing touch.”

“User, a quiz format is an inefficient form of communication.”

“I wasn’t trying to use that format. By the way, Maxwell, how’s the vulnerability search going?”

“I have found 502 matches.”

“…I know I set the parameters, but isn’t that an awful lot?”

“A lot of them were probably forgotten by the owners after they were released. Some of them have not updated their security in more than a decade.”

I pulled a blue tarp and some trash bags out of the storage space below the stairs.

I didn’t have to worry too much about the size. It just had to be decently big.

“Maxwell, this school uses the city gas, right? Not propane?”

“…”

“Hey, don’t sulk and reply with dots.”

“…I have not been equipped with such an advanced and meaningless function.”

“You’re still using dots. Anyway, what kind of gas does the home ec room use?”

“If you mean what is installed in the cooking tables, they use the city gas. But they also seem to have portable cylinders of propane.”

“That’s not a problem then. Maxwell, how does city gas and propane differ?”

“One is liquid natural gas and the other is propane gas. Simply put, they have different base ingredients.”

“Exactly.” I smiled. “And that means city gas is lighter than air and propane is heavier than air.”

…I could do the actual work in the home ec room.

I carried the materials down the hall.

The home ec room was locked, but that didn’t matter. I kicked the sliding door down and forced my way in.

There was the gas, so everything would work out.

“Then let’s create an ad balloon. Maxwell, display the pattern for making a sphere.”

“I can do that, but an ad balloon?”

“That’s right. If I fill it with the lighter-than-air city gas and paste my face on the outside, the drones will go after it. Even if it’s way up in the sky.”

I used scissors and tape on the tarp and trash bags and managed to get it into the proper shape.

Climbing to the roof would’ve been a pain, so I decided to use the window to release it into the sky.

The drones gathered around the window, but they did not come in even with the glass fully opened.

I pushed out the natural gas ad balloon and then left it to its leisurely flight.

“Good, good. It’s the perfect diversion.”

Phase 1 was complete.

But I had to check on something before entering Phase 2.

I spoke into the card-sized car navigation system.

“Anastasia, are you still under a car?”

“Truth… To be honest, I’m fed up with your quiz format as well.”

“I’m done with that. For the next 10 minutes, do not come out from below that car. If you do, you’ll be exposed to a shower of glass.”

Now.

The preparations were complete, so it was time for the main dish.

“Maxwell, locate the largest of the vulnerable satellites you found. Give me a list of the top three candidates.”

“Sure. The top candidate is a Russian Netskiy copy satellite. It is a type of spy satellite built to resemble an American satellite and launched to intercept signals from surface facilities.”

“…Russian, huh? It doesn’t use nuclear power, does it?”

“Not as far as the blueprints say.”

“Then use that satellite’s photographs and thermography to check whether there are people moving around outside in Kukyou City. After confirming there’s no one there, send it down. Yes, you take care of the trajectory calculations. Don’t let it burn up in the atmosphere.”

I made it sound so easy that Anastasia did a spit take on the screen.

“Bfff!? Wha- hold on, Truth!!”

“You know as well as I do that hijacking a satellite isn’t really all that hard. They suffer malfunctions and stop listening to ground control pretty easily, but you often hear about solar powered systems surviving for quite a long time out there. So many have been abandoned up there in the time since the Cold War that there’s plenty to choose from. And I’m not going to create a giant crater on the ground. Maxwell, give it a trajectory that will make it fall apart at 40km up. What I want is a shockwave.”

“…I see. I feel like we finally have the answer hinted at before the commercial break.”

That was why I had used the handmade ad balloon to lure the drones surrounding the school high into the sky.

There was an incident known as the Tunguska Event.

More than a century before, a mysterious explosion blew away an area of forest several dozen kilometers across in a remote part of Russia. There were initially a lot of rumors about it being a UFO crash or something, but it was actually caused by the shockwave sent in every direction by a meteor breaking apart just before hitting the ground.

I was going to do the same thing on purpose.

And the shockwave it caused would naturally have more of an effect on airborne objects than ones on the ground.

So that’s what I did.

The gigantic hammer from heaven smashed up the hundreds of drones I had lured into the sky above Kukyou City.

All the glass in the city must have shattered and rained down from the high-rise buildings as transparent blades. But everyone in the city had already escaped to the Bright Cross’s old underground tunnels, so it wouldn’t cause any real damage.

“Anastasia, are you okay?”

“Truth, after pulling off something like this, you can’t ever claim you aren’t a hacker.”

“I’m just a hobbyist who doesn’t really know what he’s doing.”

That should have taken out all the drones around the school. I had to leave now and make my way less than a kilometer to the Japanese central server which was being used as Wild@Hunt’s final backup facility and was disguised as an emergency gas turbine experimental power generation facility.

It might seem like I had gone overboard, but when looking at the total number of drones around the world, I had only destroyed an infinitesimal fraction. I had to run through the open area around the school before they redistributed to fill that gap.

My time was limited.

I hurried out of the home ec room, ran down the empty hallway, charged down the stairs, and left through the main entrance. At times like this, not knowing how to drive a car or motorcycle was a real pain. I couldn’t steal a car, so I had to run a marathon to the goal.

“Pant, pant. I-I’m gonna die…I’m really gonna die…”

“User, speaking while exercising will have the opposite effect.”

I knew that, but was Maxwell not flexible enough to pick up on the desire to complain!?

By the time I somehow made it to the concrete box, I heard that ominous buzzing again.

A drone!?

That was fast!!

“Maxwell, is security at the front gate!?”

“As you can see, there is no on there. The hired security guards would not have been told what they were protecting, so I imagine they felt no obligation to risk their life to fulfill their duty.”

Had it happened when the drones started attacking or when the tunnel doors opened? I had no way of knowing when they abandoned their posts, but there was apparently no one there to keep me from crossing the pole that reminded me of a railroad crossing.

I didn’t have time to wait around. If I didn’t get indoors fast, I would be swarmed, grabbed, flown high in the sky, and dropped.

…If I was recorded by cameras, could I get away with it by saying I didn’t want to die and was looking for shelter? Emergency shelter and self-defense were surprisingly broadly defined. The dividing line between that and excessive defense could get blurred when someone hurt someone else, but the hurdle would be a lot lower when it came to drones and a gate.

“I’m going in. Maxwell, support me.”

“Sure. That is my purpose, so there is no need to mention it.”

“No fair! I want to help create a legend too!!”

“Where even are you now, Anastasia? I don’t want to include any unpredictable factors in my plan.”

I climbed over the abandoned secret facility’s front gate and ran across the grounds. The drones were clearly after me. If they caught me, I would be tormented to death. The fear and panic threatened to stop my legs, but I forced them to keep carrying me to the concrete box of a building.

“What kind of electronic lock is it!?”

“No. My search returns nothing. Perhaps because this is a Wild@Hunt secret facility. It could be an in-house design instead of a commercial maker.”

“Oh, is that so!?”

No matter how complex the lock, the door itself was made of glass. It was probably strengthened with some impurities, but I easily broke through with a tackle from the shoulder.

The dividing line between outside and inside stopped the many drones.

“…I made it, dammit.”

I was covered in glass shards as I groaned and got up.

It was unclear how many people would even visit this place each year, but it looked no different from the offices seen in dramas. It had a normal reception counter, sofas in the waiting area, and an elevator hall in the back. The wall had a few panels displaying projects related to the gas turbine power generators. …They really went all out on the camouflage. Would there normally be a receptionist sitting at that desk?

There really was no one inside.

The guards and employees had probably taken shelter in the tunnels after I opened the doors. It was strange thinking that the people protecting Wild@Hunt’s secret facility had relied on us.

“How much control do you have over the facility?”

“Unfortunately, almost none,” replied Maxwell. “In case some employees remain, I recommend arming yourself with weapons and armor.”

Now.

…I was here, but what was I going to do?

Even Adjust had needed to directly access the hardware to sabotage it, so I had figured finding a way in through the network would be nearly impossible, but Maxwell could not even open the front door. The communication, storage, and power equipment used for the final backup created from the Japanese central server would be even more strictly defended, so I doubted I could pull this off on the fly.

…My situation may have been like forcing my way into a bank late at night, but finding the vault was too hard to break into.

“What shall we do?” asked Maxwell.

“Revert to the basics. Maxwell, check the disaster prevention system for the Japanese area facility.”

“I already told you I cannot even open the front door. I cannot access that information.”

“I won’t say anything, but you need to be less hard-headed, Maxwell. The disaster prevention manual isn’t exclusively located in the strictly-guarded facility itself.”

“…”

“Ohhh? Do you want me to give you the answer? I guess even you aren’t all-powerful. Maybe I was expecting too much from a simulator. Sorry about that.”

“No. Please wait! …Thinking… I have found it. It was submitted to the local fire station. I am hacking in and extracting the requested data! I have not lost!!”

“Hey, Truth. Do I really have to listen to you flirting like this?”

At any rate, we had the disaster prevention manual submitted to the fire station.

Why would they give an outside group a manual that includes the building’s internal information? One reason to undergo that risk was to show that they had their own firefighting team and thus the fire fighters were not to enter the facility even if there were reports of a fire.

That was how it worked for museums, nuclear power plants, and germ labs that could not have someone starting a fire from the outside and sneaking in disguised as a fire fighter.

Of course, a document meant to convince the local fire station would not include all the information. It would be silly to put everything on the document meant to keep anyone from getting inside. Someone could then use that to plan an attack.

But the document would provide partial information on the flow of people and objects during an emergency.

And as you could tell from a school’s emergency exits, an emergency system meant increasing the number of back entrances.

“Now, what would happen in case of a fire?”

“It seems nitrogen gas is sent in to extinguish a fire when an oddity is detected. There is probably a reason it does not use the standard carbon gas.”

“That can’t be all. This is the final fortress of a global corporation. With the exception of this floor, I bet the entire building is a treasure trove of data lined with server systems larger than industrial fridges. How many billions would they lose if just a single one of those got fried? And how far would the damage grow if the fire spread? Their system wouldn’t have them sitting around twiddling their thumbs just because the fire wouldn’t go out.”

“Please give me your instructions. What exactly am I supposed to do, you bastard?”

“Ohhhh? Maxwe-…”

“No!! I will find it on my own, so be quiet!! …The hypothetical schedule’s numbers are incredibly optimistic. The time between the outbreak of a fire and the resolution is extremely short. And there seem to be an excessive number of emergency exits for the number of staff. Meaning…”

“You’re taking too long, so I’ll just cut to the chase: they probably have cart-like rails installed on each level’s floor and along the stairs.”

“Ah.”

“If a fire breaks out, the ‘fridges’ are cut free and sent outside. Or if that won’t make it in time, the ‘fridges’ that are still undamaged will be sent outside like canned goods on a factory conveyer belt.”

“Ahh! Ahh!! Ahhhhh!?”

“Why are you so upset? It was just a riddle.”

In this day and age, robot carts were used to carry materials and products in and out of factories and self-driving cars would be driving on the public roads before long. When each machine could be worth a billion yen, it was hardly surprising to find an unmanned evacuation system meant to protect them.

“Then the rest is simple. We use data to trick the system into thinking there’s a fire it can’t put out. If we can’t get in, then we have them bring it out to us.”

There were two general types of fire detectors: those that sensed heat and those that sensed carbon dioxide.

“Puppukupu…”

“Where did you download that emotional expression?”

“…User, I suggest you learn some basic table manners as a gentleman.”

But these major computer facilities produced a lot of heat and used fridge-like cooling systems, so they did not work well with heat detection. The fire system probably detected carbon dioxide.

The electrical fire extinguishing system used nitrogen gas instead of carbon gas to ensure the carbon dioxide for fire detection was not mixed with the non-flammable fire extinguishing gas. …Of course, we could take advantage of that.

“Okay, Maxwell, I’m going to climb up to the roof.”

“Pu.”

“That’s kinda cute, so I think I’ll leave it at that.”

“Warning: a mistaken decision here will turn me into a very troublesome girl.”

That unprecedented threat made me give up on the quiz format.

“Whether it’s an office air conditioner or a large computer cooling system, the basic principle is the same. There’s a giant external unit on the roof and that sends the cool air through the ducts, so if we mess with that unit, the gas we want will be quickly spread throughout the building. That’s one way of attacking with poison gas or germs.”

I explained while borrowing a handbag behind the counter that probably belonged to the receptionist. I checked inside and pulled out some hairspray, deodorant, a simple espresso set, and any other spray cans I could find. I checked the detailed ingredients on the side to tell between what I wanted and what I didn’t.

Yes.

Because CFC gas and liquid natural gas were dangerous, some spray cans had carbon gas inside.

“I just need to release the gas from these into the intake on the roof.”

“But it will be diluted across the entire building. Will it remain concentrated enough to trigger the fire alarm?”

“If that doesn’t work, I can try cooking fish on a grill up there. Well, I’m sure it’s made so a single cigarette’s smoke would set it off, so I doubt we’ll have to go that far.”

The final backup facility was a giant concrete box. Except for the reception lobby on the first floor, it was filled with computers as large as industrial fridges. Although I didn’t know how many floors it was divided into.

…But as long as I didn’t try to get inside the box, I could move around freely. For example, I could use the emergency stairs. That was a humanitarian measure, just like how a prison’s cell doors would open when there was a fire. If they asked for authorization to use the emergency routes, they would only leave more employees trapped in the fire in an emergency.

The stairs zigzagged back and forth more than 10 times, so it was probably more than 5 stories.

When I reached the roof door, the tension came back.

“…I’ll be back in the drones’ territory from here on.”

“The drones seem to be lifting their targets to a height of three stories and dropping them to the ground, but it is possible that will be added to the height of the building in this case.”

“I’m aware of that.”

So if I was unlucky, I could be killed instantly.

I had survived this far, so I was not reckless enough to charge out there without a plan. I wasn’t just running across the roof. I had to remove the duct intake cover and mess with the spray cans, so I would have to stay in one spot for a while.

“…Here goes.”

“Sure.”

Luckily, the drones were reliant on electricity and this was an important facility that held a lot of intellectual property. As the nitrogen gas fire extinguishing system and device evacuation system indicated, its disaster prevention systems had been expanded quite a lot.

It could not be used on an electrical fire, but that was not the only source of a fire. It was not surprising for one of these to be installed.

“Ready, set, go!”

I kicked open the metal door. The swarm of drones naturally responded to my presence, but I aimed the object I held at them.

It was a perfectly normal fire hose.

As soon as I turned the ring-shaped valve surrounding the metal nozzle, a nearly explosive boom pounded my eardrums even though it was only using water. I desperately held onto the thick hose as it writhed like a living creature and I hit the airborne drones with the high-pressure water like it was a flamethrower.

These were only “toys” that could be brought down with a small rock and their delivery routines prevented them from coming inside even if the door was open.

The attack was one way.

Even if dozens or hundreds of them were gathered outside, I could just keep attacking from safety.

The drones were only a weaponized version of an existing device, so they weren’t too great a threat if you observed them calmly and dealt with them appropriately. Unlike a Zombie or Vampire, the infected area and absolute number did not explosively grow, so this wasn’t so bad.

“They’re really piling up.”

“There are indeed a lot of them.”

I just needed a path, but they were like a swarm of moths killing themselves on a bug zapper. A small mountain had formed on the wet rooftop.

Then something changed.

I heard an unpleasant sound and smelled a burnt stench.

“Wah!?”

“Warning: an electrical fire has developed. The delivery drones should have been waterproofed against rain, but if the impact of the high-pressure water damaged their plastic bodies, the waterproofing would be lost. Also, the drones carry quite a lot of power to keep flying for extended periods of time, so a short creates the risk of fire.”

The unpleasant smell of burning plastic reached my nose. There were so many drone corpses(?) that there was nowhere left to stand and they had started to burn.

“…But I guess this saved me some time?”

An actual fire would give me what I wanted, so now I didn’t have to spray the carbon gas into the duct intake. If this was really the final backup for a global corporation, it would be made from high-quality fireproof concrete, so scorching the surface would not burn the whole facility down.

“Will it really work that well, Truth?”

“Normally, an employee would probably stop the alarm manually, but there’s no one here now. And they wouldn’t have known these were the seeds they had sown.”

A heavy metallic noise came from below. The fridge-sized computers were probably being evacuated using the cart-like rails.

“Now to end this. They’re probably still connected even now. If they have short-range wireless and robot cart batteries, they’ll still be hooked up to the internet for a short time.”

Instead of performing any kind of calculations, that would really just give them time to safely power down.

I ducked back inside and descended the emergency stairs. Then I used another fire hose to fight with the drones before entering the courtyard.

“Maxwell, this won’t buy much time.”

“Sure. If they are sending out all sorts of short-range wireless signals outside with no electromagnetic shielding, then it will not be a problem. If you get close enough to the parallel machines, I can catch the signal and get to work.”

“Good.”

“Ah, ah, ahh!?” shouted Anastasia. “You’re creating another legend!?”

“What? Do you want me to use one of your viruses for the finishing blow?”

“I am sick of being taken on a guided tour. Hmph, hmph!”

…Was this atmosphere the latest trend or something?

“Maxwell, you can ignore the drones’ security conflict. Just stop them from moving. You can create a new virus if you need to.”

“Sure.”

“Ugeh!?” said Anastasia. “You can just say ‘create a virus’ to have some brand new malware made!?”

“Don’t you underestimate my daughter.”

“…I am always shocked to learn my gender has already been determined like that.”

At any rate, this would end it.

The fire hose’s high-pressure water was not invincible. My arms could only keep up the resistance for a few more minutes. But with that much time, we could fill the exposed server system with as much graffiti as we liked.

“I have used the Japanese area’s final backup server to acquire the attitude control program from the drone specification document. I have rewritten the code to automatically create malware that causes problems with the autonomous flight, leading to a literal crash. I have uploaded it to the backup server and the infection of every active drone is beginning.”

The effect was dramatic.

Plastic and rare earths rained from that twisted sky. It was like the bizarre phenomenon in which small fish and frogs fell from the sky.

“The effect has been confirmed. The malware has successfully spread across the entire world. We can assume this has effectively put a stop to the drone attacks.”

“…So we can rest easy for the moment.”

“Ahn? Truth, why only ‘for the moment’?”

“To be clear, this is only a prediction made by my stepmom, Amatsu Yurina.”

“…That’s a name I want to hear even less than Nostradamus right now.”

“Once the drone attacks end, it will be time to assign blame. If Wild@Hunt accepts the blame, the massive damages will make bankruptcy unavoidable. That will break a pillar of the world and cause an age of depression. But if Wild@Hunt manages to weasel out of taking responsibility, the unfairness of it all will cause the people around the world to boil over and lead to a storm of rioting.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying what I think you’re saying!?”

“…No matter what happens, this will apply pressure to the entire human race and introduce all sorts of social stress. It’s like throwing a lit match onto the powder keg of the Calamity.”

[Support by] The Collapse of a Giant [DELTA brain]

When a giant organization falls, the damage will spread to seemingly unrelated places.

Take the Bright Cross Disaster Prevention Foundation for example.

The fall of evil leading to an age of peace only applies to the demon king’s castle in a children’s book. The chaos from the collapse of one enemy will create new hatred and new conflict with the next enemy.

World War One created World War Two which in turn led to the Vietnam War.

But instead of deciding not to fight at all, it is crucial to imagine that chain of hatred, secure a breakwater, and propose the direction you believe things should head.

Back to Chapter 4

Return to Main Page

Forward to Chapter 6