Volume 5, Jinnai Shinobu's Apocalypse — Side A — OP_code "Personal_apocalypse". Part 26-30
This chapter is updated by wuxiaworld.eu
Part 26 (Day 10/04 09:40 - 09:52)
“Now, just to be sure, can you tell me your blood type?”
“AB. Thanks.”
After going through the necessary steps, I was at long last reunited with my suitcase. It was plastered with stickers of countless sizes, so there was no mistaking it.
I had been worried about my ID, but opening my cell and showing them the page displaying the monthly details was enough. They wouldn’t have accepted that normally, but they were probably more flexible with lost baggage since it was their mistake.
“Now, then.”
At the very least, I had avoided a scenario where I was killed as soon as I took the suitcase.
I had made it to the next phase and I still had a chance to save the Zashiki Warashi, but this didn’t exactly guarantee my safety.
I had tried to throw them off my trail to a certain extent, but I didn’t know how many more were inside the airport. For the time begin, I dragged the suitcase out of the airport building.
Once I entered the roundabout, I saw a familiar face.
It was the middle-aged driver of that white limousine taxi.
“Oh, what’s this? You look a lot more confident than yesterday. Did you win some at the casinos? Then how about driving on out to a beach filled with girls?”
“This isn’t Hawaii and I’m not about to go swimming in the ocean during October.”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s due to rising sea levels or what, but I hear the beaches have been getting smaller recently. Still, the casino city has a fully-indoor artificial beach. It runs year round like a ski slope in a desert.”
“Oh, yeah. Someone had left some swimsuits lying around.”
As I spoke, I climbed into the crazy-luxurious vehicle.
“Wait just a sec,” said the driver while messing with his cellphone. “I’ve gotta log out.”
I frowned.
“Oh, are you on the VR casino? Do you play the slots when you’re bored?”
“Of course not. I’d be broke in no time if I did that. The VR Casino City lets you make an avatar and buy a house or a shop. Just by putting your avatar’s old clothing up for sale, you’ll automatically get some virtual money.”
He finally stuck the phone in his pocket and smiled as he answered.
The limousine worked for me since it gave me the space to open the suitcase and it prevented anyone from grabbing it.
“Where to today?
“Just drive me around.”
“Wow, you’ve gotta be rich to say that. Did you really hit it big?”
While wildly setting off in the limousine taxi, the driver spoke casually to me.
“But be careful. Winning too much in a casino city isn’t always a fun thing. It can also earn you a lot of resentment.”’
“You mean a loser will stab me in the back?”
I kept the conversation going while pulling a small key from my wallet. It was for the suitcase.
The driver occasionally glanced back at me through the rearview mirror.
“It’s not just that. The locals won’t like you either.”
“?”
“Wait, really? You hadn’t noticed? Just to be clear, I’m not a local. I came here looking for work.”
He gave a deep laugh.
“In a casino city, all the brightly-lit buildings are built by outside corporations. I hear the truly local people really lose out in the deal.”
“But the inns and mine on the other side of the island make a lot of money, right? And aren’t the tours of the ruins popular?”
“Are you serious? While the locals do own the mine, outsiders from big companies ended up taking the mining rights by offering to lend them younger workers to keep the burden off the older locals. They tried to turn a remote island into an Intellectual Village, but they failed to keep control from the very beginning. All of the people born and raised on Goldmine Island only get a tiny fraction of the profit.”
“…”
“For a while now, the locals have been saying they suddenly couldn’t mine any gold anymore. I’m not sure how much truth there is to that, though.”
“Hm?”
“It seems work ships have been stopping in the harbor quite a bit and that they’re always loaded with a bunch of dirt that must have come from somewhere. The island’s miners claim it’s illegal mining and they suspect the casinos are digging up the island without giving even the bare minimum of notification.”
“But they aren’t actually running across new tunnels while working, right? Even if the casinos are digging somewhere, I don’t think it would change what the locals find in their usual mining spots.”
“Yeah, but when you hate someone, you hate everything about them. I mentioned the beaches shrinking due to rising sea levels, remember?”
“What about it?”
“The locals are blaming the casinos for that too. They claim all the electricity the casinos use is creating a bunch of carbon dioxide and advancing global warming.”
Well, yeah…
“That isn’t exactly wrong…”
“Gather enough dust and you’ll have a mountain, it’s true. But this little island alone isn’t going to affect the beaches. Unfortunately, the locals don’t really care about that kind of consistency. They refuse to forgive the people running the casinos or the guests who win a ton of money there. If you don’t want to get caught up in some kind of trouble, you shouldn’t show off even if you do win.”
So there was friction between the outside companies and the locals.
It wasn’t necessarily directly related to the problem I was facing, but it couldn’t hurt to know about the local power games.
And as I thought about that, I inserted the small key in the suitcase’s keyhole and unlocked it.
I found my vacation funds in an envelope, a few days’ worth of clothes, a handheld game system, a few games, an electric razor, my cellphone’s charger, and my nice underwear. I checked through it all, but I didn’t see anything someone would want badly enough to break the law. In fact, there was nothing in there I didn’t recognize.
“…?”
I packed it all up again.
Even if they were planning to slip something suspicious into someone’s suitcase, would they really unlock it and throw whatever it was inside? That seemed like too much effort for getting it in and back out again.
But my suitcase didn’t have any external pockets.
I locked it again and felt across its outside surface.
“Wait.”
I checked more carefully. Specifically, I began peeling off the countless stickers plastered all over it.
They all ripped as I pulled them off, except for one that came off as smoothly as a brand new sticker from its backing.
And something was hidden on the underside.
To prevent it from being crushed, they had carved a perfectly-sized groove in the side of the suitcase and a device about the size of a cheap lighter had been hidden inside the groove.
It was a USB memory stick with a red, translucent body.
“Is this it?”
Instead of a label, it had a small scrap of Japanese paper attached and serpentine writing seemed to slither along the surface. The writing was so sloppy that I couldn’t tell what it said, but I knew someone wanted it so badly that they were willing to use explosives and threats.
It would clearly act as a trump card.
I held up the USB memory stick and glared at it for a while, but I couldn’t see what was on it with a simple cellphone. I ended up sticking it in my pocket.
That was when my cellphone rang.
I answered the call from an unfamiliar number and was immediately greeted with the following words:
“Have you forgotten we have a hostage?”
“Not at all, and that’s why I felt the need for a plan. But thanks to that, I now hold what you want.”
“Then I wonder what we should do. Perhaps we should sever one of the hostage’s arms to prove we really can kill a Youkai.”
“I think burning an electronic device would be much easier,” I said in an intentionally low voice. “I don’t know what this is, but it’s obviously important to you. If I melt it down, you can’t fix it just by cooling it in the fridge. If you don’t want it to go to waste, then I’d stop looking down on me like that.”
The man on the phone fell silent for a while.
The sound of a scratching fingernail continued the entire time.
It lasted a few seconds or maybe around a dozen.
Finally, he responded.
“Do as you wish.”
That was all. He even hung up.
As I stared at the cell phone screen, the driver’s voice reached me.
“Hey, we just entered the casino city, so where do you want to go now? Should I just take you around to the other side of the island?”
“No, let me off here,” I said. “I’ll pay you some extra, so take my suitcase to the Gold Crane.”
I added an extra banknote as I paid and left the limousine taxi. I was in the same spot as the earlier car bombing. It was definitely dangerous, but anywhere would be dangerous on such a small island.
My mind focused on the crinkling of the old Japanese paper in my pocket.
That USB memory stick was my only lifeline.
Depending on how I used it, all of my efforts would pay off or be for nothing. It was the deciding factor.
“Now, then.”
For a change of pace, I walked back behind a certain casino. The fox, tanuki, badger, and I had previously arranged to meet up here afterwards. It was the alley behind the casino where I had defeated Kodama Ryou.
By the time I got there, the fox and tanuki were already waiting.
“Where’s the badger?”
“I doubt he was captured. No human can outrace us once we reach the mountains.”
The normally-hesitant tanuki looked completely nonchalant as she said that, so it didn’t seem to be a bluff. I couldn’t sit still here and it looked like continuing on was my only option.
“What are we going to do now?” asked the fox.
“I found this.”
I pulled out the contents of my pocket. The object was a little larger than a cheap lighter and looked like a USB memory stick with a red translucent body, but the label was made of Japanese paper and covered with serpentine writing.
“This is what they hid in my suitcase to carry in safely. It’s also why they were attacking me and why they took the Zashiki Warashi hostage. It must be really important to them.”
“That says Usuhiki Warashi.”
“What?”
I frowned at what the tanuki said.
After all this, we were back to the Usuhiki Warashi? Wasn’t that just what Kodama Ryou had used to swap out the cards?
The fox wagged his tail back and forth.
“What is this?”
“How should I know? All I know is that some people are willing to kill humans and Youkai to get their hands on it. That means I can definitely use it in an exchange for the Zashiki Warashi. But that will definitely fail if I let them continue to control what happens.”
For one thing, I only had the one small USB memory stick. If I was told to pack it in a plastic bag and wash it down the river or to place it in an envelope and mail it, I’d be out of luck. If I refused, they’d kill the Zashiki Warashi, but obeying wouldn’t bring her back.
I needed for the “exchange ceremony” to occur at the same time, in the same place, and in person.
“Just to be sure,” I said slowly. “You all can transform into people but not objects, right?”
“Yes. We can’t turn leaves into coins, so we can’t turn that Yu-Ess-Bee thing into something else or create a thousand fakes.”
If they could do that, they would have been able to handle things better during the poker game. Transforming into people was certainly enough, but it wasn’t all powerful.
“Th-then what do we do?”
“Fox, tanuki, two Youkai who can transform into someone else is enough.”
“Are you going to duplicate yourself to confuse them?”
“That’s an option,” I agreed. “But you can also transform into the Zashiki Warashi. If they’re monitoring us, they might begin to question whether their hostage is real or-…”
I trailed off because my cellphone rang.
“…”
The fox and tanuki fell silent too, so I answered the call and heard a voice that had become familiar by this point.
“Have you managed to cool your head?”
“I want to hear about the trade. How exactly are we going to do it?”
“I doubt you would agree to attach it to a balloon and release it into the sky.”
“If you insisted on that, I’d use a fake. You can buy cheap USB memory sticks at any convenience store, so I’d just transfer the label over and send that one.”
“Come to the ruins of the old mining days at the center of the island. We will not specify a time. We will know if you show up.”
“No forgetting anything. If I don’t see the Zashiki Warashi there, I’ll snap this thing in two.”
“Do as you wish. But be prepared for what that will mean.”
Just like in the limousine taxi, something didn’t seem quite right.
Even when I threatened to damage the USB memory stick, they didn’t threaten me in the slightest. Did they have a way of restoring functionality even if I destroyed it?
I glanced down at the translucent red device.
Should I check it on a computer and make a few copies of the data? But that could cause problems if it keeps an access log or if carelessly trying to view the data will automatically delete it.
I couldn’t decide whether to rely on a trick or not.
But then I heard a small girl’s shrieking voice. Rather than an urgent scream, it sounded more like a teasing shout.
Confused, I looked down the alley and saw a kimono-wearing girl of about twelve or thirteen running my way. She wore a short mini-yukata with her shoulders exposed like a courtesan. Overall, it looked like a tube top mini-dress and I knew who she was.
“The Usuhiki Warashi?”
She did not reply.
She continued shrieking as she ran past me and disappeared down the opposite end of the alley.
And…
“Wh-why…are you…here…?”
A man’s voice seemed to rise from the depths of the earth and someone appeared with a rustling sound.
The man had been robbed of his regal appearance. The con artist’s prized snakeskin suit was stained here and there and his hair was a complete mess. He looked like he had been beaten all over and thrown out with the trash. His face was badly swollen and he barely resembled the man I had seen before, but I could tell when I looked in his eyes.
“Kodama…Ryou?”
“Where did she go? My…my Youkai! She’s supposed to bring me unlimited fortune!!”
Seeing the man shouting in confusion brought a weight to my chest.
This was the fate of those who were left behind.
He was one of those abandoned by a Zashiki Warashi or Usuhiki Warashi and thus forced to bear a fate of decline and ruin.
“I…”
He unsteadily approached.
Strangely, I found myself unable to move aside or back away. It was like having a snake looking you in the eye. He simply walked up to me as I held my cellphone and the USB memory stick.
“I wasn’t supposed to lose! I wasn’t supposed to lose here on Goldmine Island!! At the very least, I was never supposed to lose on this island!!”
“What…what are you talking about?”
I directly voiced my doubts, but he did not answer me.
He instead grabbed my shoulders using hands with filth crammed below the nails and he shook me violently.
“Was I abandoned? You’re with them, aren’t you? There’s no other way that system using the Usuhiki Warashi – a Zashiki Warashi subspecies – would fail! But that’s not possible. There’s no way that plan can succeed without me and my influence in so many different fields!! You’ve just chosen your own doom. But too bad. Now every last one of you will-…!!”
He never finished speaking.
His eyes suddenly rolled back in his head.
There was no time to say anything.
All strength left the hands grabbing my shoulders and the man fell limply toward me. Perhaps because his eyes had rolled back, I was no longer petrified like a snake was staring at me. And I felt no inclination to catch the con artist.
I stepped back.
With nothing supporting him, the snakeskin man collapsed to the dirty ground.
The tanuki gave a girlish scream, but I couldn’t even do that.
I simply stared blankly as Kodama Ryou’s limbs twitched. I was no longer looking at a human. This was merely an object.
Something like orange sparks scattered from his silenced mouth. I watched them rise toward the blue sky and seem to dissolve on the way.
“That was a Kechibi,” said the fox as he too looked up into the sky. “That was a Kechibi’s feedback.”
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant.
More importantly, the utterly unchanged voice coming from my cellphone seemed to squeeze at my heart.
“We will wait as long as it takes, but try to hurry.”
That cold voice seemed to be saying they would unilaterally and utterly eliminate anything that stood in their way.
The sound of his scratching fingernail sent my heart racing even faster.
“We can’t have you ruining everything with some amateur mistake.”
Part 27 (Day 10/04 10:00 – 10:15)
I called for the police and an ambulance, I didn’t have time to sit around answering questions. We left right away, leaving the con artist’s corpse behind.
“Does this mean the Usuhiki Warashi isn’t the only Youkai they’re using?” I asked while walking.
When Kodama Ryou had died, the fox had said it was a Kechibi’s feedback.
“A Kechibi is a difficult Youkai,” said the fox. “Unlike us, it has no actual body. According to witness accounts, it looks like…well, something like a Hitodama or Ikiryou.”
“An Ikiryou? Isn’t that like an out of body experience?”
“That is correct. They are souls of the living rather than of the dead. A living person’s powerful resentment or longing removes just their soul – generally while they sleep – which will then harm people. However, it should be impossible unless the person undergoes extensive training or experiences a mutation.”
“This Kechibi simply helps the process along. Maybe we should call it an invisible Youkai with the power to remove or release an Ikiryou from people’s bodies.”
I understood what they were trying to say.
This thing was off the charts when compared to the Zashiki Warashi or these animal Youkai. This one barely seemed like a living creature at all.
But…
“How does that let you kill people?”
“If a Kechibi is cut down with a sword, legend has it the person it belongs to will die a bizarre death, covered in blood. It’s a lot like a form of feedback. The same things are said about normal Ikiryou, so the Kechibi that removed the soul probably doesn’t matter. It must be the traits of the removed Ikiryou that matter.”
After the fox’s explanation, the wet nurse tanuki hesitantly opened her mouth.
“A-a Kechibi is supposed to appear when you rub the bottoms of your sandals together and call the person's name. If you could set up a system to summon the Youkai, call in the person’s Ikiryou, cut it down, and kill the person…”
“You’d have an Ikiryou assassination Package to kill anyone you wanted, huh?”
It sounded like cursing someone with a straw doll.
But here, you didn’t need one of their hairs and you didn’t have to wait seven days and seven nights for it to take effect.
If they had free use of something like that, our chances shrank considerably. It might not work on Youkai like the fox and tanuki, but a human like me had almost no chance.
However…
“Doesn’t that seem odd?”
“How so?”
“They took the Zashiki Warashi hostage to control me, but if they had an Ikiryou assassination Package using a Kechibi, they wouldn’t need that. They could have just held my own life in their hands. Just because you have a way of killing Youkai doesn’t mean you want to have one around. That’s like living in a cage with a lion or tiger while armed with a hunting rifle. The second you turned your back, the beast could easily chomp down on you.”
Maybe they couldn’t activate it without meeting some complex conditions. Maybe it was like a cheap cellphone and it didn’t work if you took even a step inside a building. Maybe it cost way too much each time it was used.
I thought of a number of possibilities, but I had too little information.
I couldn’t find an answer as thing were, but I knew it was my life on the line.
“Speaking of strange things, Kodama Ryou said something odd.”
I was never supposed to lose on this island.
There’s no other way that system using the Usuhiki Warashi – a Zashiki Warashi subspecies – would fail.
You’re with them, aren’t you?
But too bad.
There’s no way that plan can succeed without me.
“He was acting odd from the beginning. Although it’s possible he was just confused and it was all meaningless.”
“It’s possible, but it still bothers me.”
Still, we didn’t have time to slowly find answers one at a time.
I wouldn’t be suspected of killing Kodama Ryou after he died in such a bizarre way, but it was true I had fled the scene. If the police caught up to me now, I would be stuck going through a long questioning. That meant I was being pursued by the police as well as the criminal group using the Usuhiki Warashi and Kechibi. I was also limited to this small island and I probably didn’t have much time left.
“Wh-what are you going to do now?” asked the wet nurse tanuki.
“There’s a lot I have to do, but let’s take care of it one at a time.”
Someone had died before my eyes.
I was just a high schooler, so if I let that hit home, my legs were sure to tremble and refuse to move. So I tried not to think about it too much while I spoke quickly to move things along.
“First up is the Zashiki Warashi.
Part 28 (Day 10/04 10:22 - 10:35)
As I walked deep into the forest, I spotted a group of boxy concrete buildings. I could see twenty to thirty of them from where I was, they had all grown dark and discolored, and they were covered with countless slug trails. No glass remained in the windows, but I couldn’t tell if it had been removed or just thoroughly broken.
I meaninglessly bent down a little and looked around while unsure if I was actually hidden by the trees or not.
“I don’t see any obvious guards. No cameras or sensors either.”
Of course, they weren’t about to put their security devices out where anyone could see them.
Whether due to her wild instincts or her love of nature as a Youkai, the tanuki had been full of life from the moment we entered the forest.
“I wonder which building the Zashiki Warashi is in.”
“I can’t tell from the sounds or smells,” said the fox while his ears twitched and his nose sniffed.
I crouched all the way down and exchanged a glance with the two Youkai.
“Okay, I’ll go on alone. You two hide in the forest and keep watch. You’re good at that, right? Don’t let them spot you.”
“Hey, young one.”
“If anything happens and it gets dangerous, grab the Zashiki Warashi and get out of here. Don’t worry about me. We still don’t know what conditions are needed to activate the Kechibi’s Ikiryou assassination Package. If they actually use that, I won’t be able to escape on foot. Even if I abandoned the Zashiki Warashi and tried to escape, the Kechibi’s remote attack would still kill me. So…”
“You saved our master and her granddaughter. Do you really think we can leave you to die?”
“Please,” I said quietly.
The fox groaned and refused to answer, but the tanuki hesitantly spoke up.
“U-um, Youkai like us generally don’t die, so how about we take that USB memory stick and try to negotiate in your place?”
“They have a method of killing a Zashiki Warashi. I’m guessing it’s a glass fiber knife or bullet made from a stone mill. The method won’t work on a fox or tanuki, but that isn’t the point. You understand, don’t you? Unlike the casino guards who just borrowed the method, these people have the skills to analyze a Youkai and build a countermeasure. They might just dispose of you two without batting an eye.”
In other words, it was possible they were similar to Hyakki Yakou.
If so, a Youkai’s immortality wouldn’t last and we couldn’t rely on it.
But at the same time, their methods of killing Youkai had to be less convenient than the Kechibi’s Ikiryou assassination Package. After all, they had needed to abduct the Zashiki Warashi before killing her. It wasn’t like a cursed doll that could kill someone on the other side of the planet as easily as making an internet search.
In other words, if the fox and tanuki were killed right away, I would be killed too, no matter where I tried to run.
But if I was killed, those two still had some options open.
After explaining it all, I said the following:
“Let’s get started.”
“But…!!”
“I already explained this. Either way, they’re already locked onto me. Even if I run away now, they can kill me whenever they want. …I just have to make sure this deal works out. You might be able to save me if you barge in partway through. The only situation that ensures my death is if I run away now. If we want even a 1% chance of victory, then we have to move forward.”
With that said, I stood partway up and started walking.
With each step I took, the con artist’s dying face flashed through my mind. This may have been what it felt like to enter a forest where a sniper lurked. However, I wasn’t being targeted by bullets that could only fire in a straight line. My enemy was armed with something far more convenient and deadly.
Filling my lungs with air wasn’t going to change anything, but I still lost control of my breathing.
I tried to calm it down and quiet it down, but the more I thought about it, the worse it got.
Someone in this forest and among the ruins was clearly after my life.
And as soon as that thought filled my mind…
“Dwahp!?”
My right leg caught on something and I tripped quite spectacularly. The fox and tanuki must have blended in with nature already because they didn’t come running out. Of course, I didn’t exactly want them causing a fuss just because I ahd tripped over a root.
But then I looked down at what I had tripped on and my throat immediately went dry.
It wasn’t a root.
It was the corpse of young woman with her eyes rolled back in her head and foam spilling from her mouth.
Part 29 (Day 10/04 10:35 - 11:03)
The silence was deafening.
Neither the fox nor the tanuki screamed. They were either focused on blending into the forest or they simply hadn’t noticed yet.
Either way, I was alone with the corpse.
That fact was incredibly disturbing.
“What…is this?”
I instinctually slid back along the ground while collapsed on my butt. I finally noticed the rustling of the leaves in the wind, but they sounded like eerie laughter to me. This sniper forest was so quiet and a mere high school boy had no way of knowing where the guards were posted, but that silence seemed to take on a whole new meaning.
I stood up in a crouch and ran to the nearest abandoned building.
With all of the furniture and equipment gone, it was nothing but an empty box and something seemed intensely wrong from the moment I set foot inside.
There were two more. A man and woman wearing janitor’s uniforms lay unmoving near the center of the room. Not a drop of blood had been spilled. I didn’t actually check their pulse, but I could tell. My mind automatically placed them in a category separate from a living human, so it was painfully obvious.
“What is this?”
I ran from the building and to another. On the way, I saw a few more corpses littering the ground. I didn’t know how large the group had been, but a disturbing thought gradually seeped through my mind: there wasn’t a single living human being here.
I checked a few other buildings, but all I found were more dead bodies: a man in a suit who seemed to have expired while climbing the stairs, a woman in a dress who seemed to have made a desperate attempt to leave through the window, etc., etc. Each time I found one, the weight of the silence seemed to double.
“What the hell is this!?”
Once I could no longer bear the weight, I cried out.
Who were they? Who had killed them? What had happened to the Zashiki Warashi? Weren’t the villains controlling the Usuhiki Warashi and the Kechibi and wasn’t I supposed to solve the mystery and rescue the Zashiki Warashi!?
My greatest enemy had already been destroyed, but I couldn’t exactly rejoice. I felt like I was only now realizing that something far worse was underway.
That was when I heard a footstep.
“!?”
It didn’t come from outside. Someone was descending the stairs inside the building. That meant it probably wasn’t the fox or tanuki and it was even less likely to be a survivor of this group. So who else could it be?
“The Zashiki…Warashi?” I muttered.
It was mostly wishful thinking, but it started to feel more realistic as soon as I said it.
I wasn’t being naïve or overly hopeful.
A bunch of corpses. A Youkai as the sole survivor. A being that could not be killed by normal means. Even if she was categorized as harmless, bullets and blades were meaningless to her and she could not be easily stopped if she did grow violent.
The footsteps continued.
Something was definitely approaching me.
Was it possible she had done this? What if they had been bluffing about having a way to kill Youkai or what if it was difficult to activate in a hurry? How far would the Youkai’s counterattack spread? Once they thoughtlessly claimed to have a way of killing her, she wouldn’t have been able to calmly assume she would survive no matter what happened. She would have to put up a thorough fight to secure her safety.
What if that was what had happened?
“…”
Unpleasant sweat poured down my face.
My eyes were drawn toward the stairs and my body wouldn’t move.
These footsteps would mean a reunion, but I could also feel something changing inside me.
And finally, a familiar voice reached me from the stairs.
“Shinobu?”
I think I must have screamed some nonsense that clearly wasn’t Japanese.
To be honest, the color white exploded deep in my mind and I couldn’t remember anything afterwards. But I think I must have tried to run from the stairs with my eyes still glued to them. And as soon as I awkwardly started moving backwards, my heel caught on something and I landed on my butt. But instead of hard concrete, I felt something softer. When I realized it was another corpse, I screamed again.
I felt like a fish out of water that had finally made it back to the fish tank only to find the tank was filled with sulfuric acid. I have no idea how I moved my muscles, but I somehow managed to jump up and move away from the corpse.
Meanwhile, the Zashiki Warashi with black hair flowing across her red yukata tilted her head a little, shaking her hair a bit in the process.
“What are you doing? Don’t tell me you took a turn for the truly disturbed and were trying to kiss that dead body.”
“Eh? What?”
My mind went blank yet again.
I had assumed a crazed killer Youkai was approaching, but it was the same Good-for-Nothing Youkai as always.
“Wait. How…why…?”
“Oh, they had me tied up, but I got out on my own. The rope was made so a Zashiki Warashi couldn’t break it, but it didn’t have a curse that kept me from moving or anything.”
She rubbed together the rope marks on her wrists.
“Did you know that the standard way to slip free of a rope is to create a gap? For example, if you press your palms together and move your arms apart when they tie your wrists, you can make a gap between your wrists and the rope just by squeezing your arms back together. I didn’t really believe it when I heard it, but I tried it and it worked pretty well.”
Then I saw something like orange embers floating from the mouth of the corpse I had tripped on.
“Is this from the Kechibi’s Ikiryou assassination Package?”
“I don’t know. They just all started collapsing around me. Youkai can’t be killed by normal means, so I thought maybe some gas had leaked from the mine.”
“…”
What in the world is going on?
The Usuhiki Warashi and Kechibi were supposed to belong to the enemy, so was this infighting within the group that had kidnapped the Zashiki Warashi? Or had they lost control of the Package?
“Hey, Indoor Youkai.”
“I see you’re skipping right past the emotional reunion. What is it?”
“Do you know how many people were here?”
“Not exactly. About twenty maybe?”
That led to some depressing work.
I decided the threat had passed for the time being, so I called out to the forest. The fox and tanuki showed up immediately. They naturally freaked out when they saw the corpses, but I had no time to deal with that. From there, we split up and got to work. We dragged over all of the corpses and gathered them inside a single building.
We found even more than reported. There were twenty-four and there was no guarantee we had found them all. It was possible more victims existed in the forest somewhere.
By this point, my senses had numbed over.
I dug through their pockets and gathered their wallets and cellphones.
“Based on his license, he’s a local. Of course, this could be a fake.”
“Hm? Wait just a second. The ruffian at the airport was a local too, wasn’t he?”
“Shinobu, this one is too. I’m guessing they all are.”
The limousine taxi driver had mentioned friction between the locals and the outside companies that had turned Goldmine Island into a casino city. It was looking like that was the situation here.
“Anything concerning the Kechibi Package? It would be a bad idea to ignore that. While it looks pretty unlikely there are any survivors, someone else might pick it up. I’d like to destroy it if possible.”
“I don’t see anything like that.”
The fox was exactly right.
The corpses only had wallets, cellphones, and dangerous-looking knives or stun guns. We couldn’t find anything that might be a controller to or component of a Package. Of course, it might have been something that blended in so perfectly that an amateur couldn’t tell.
“Shinobu.”
The Zashiki Warashi cut in after the tanuki explained things.
“Have you considered the possibility that your initial assumption was wrong? In other words…”
“The Kechibi Package is used by someone else entirely and they’re just the victims?”
My vision very nearly went dark.
If that was true, what had we gotten ourselves caught up in? This was completely different from the plan to use the Zashiki Warashi as a way to get the USB memory stick from my suitcase. It would mean Kodama Ryou had been killed before my eyes for some other reason entirely. Would it now bare its fangs toward us? Or wouldn’t it? I had nothing to go on there, so I just had to give up.
I searched their phones, still hoping I would find something. Most of them were password locked and I couldn’t do anything with them, but a few of them had been more careless. I checked through those phones that had not been set up properly.
Oh.
“What is it, Shinobu?”
“Um…wait. Fox, a Kechibi is similar to an Ikiryou and it’s something like a human soul that leaves a living person, right? And if they cut it with a sword, the distant person will be injured in the same way and might even die?”
“Yes. What about it?”
“Tanuki, but didn’t you say you can call in a Kechibi by rubbing sandals together and calling the person’s name?”
“Y-yes. They must use a Kechibi to remove an Ikiryou from a specified human, summon it, cut it, and kill them. And they would have an Ikiryou assassination Package that uses that process.”
“I might have figured out how.”
They all tried to look at the (victim’s) cellphone. Although, it seemed too much to ask for the fox and tanuki to stand up that tall.
“The sandals are probably a metaphor for the person’s footsteps. You follow their footsteps, reach them, and kill them. In that case, they need those ‘footsteps’ to identify the target, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be actual tracks on the ground.”
The Zashiki Warashi seemed to catch on first.
“Shinobu, are you saying their internet history counts as their footsteps?”
“Close but not quite.” I lightly waved the cellphone. “The answer is probably big data.”
“Big data?” asked the fox. “Enough of those Western words!!”
“Isn’t that a method of gathering lots of information without specifying the individuals?” suggested the tanuki. “I heard on the news that they can automatically tell what people are buying at train station vending machines and stuff like that.”
“This phone’s GPS was on. Or rather, they didn’t check over their contract very well and it can’t even be turned off. I think there was a notice about this in the inn’s entranceway. In addition to the normal casinos, this island has an online VR casino called Heavy Cruiser Island. But to make sure you can only use the gambling app on the island, you have to agree to give them your location.”
“But.” The Zashiki Warashi shrugged. “Isn’t big data set up so they can’t tell who it came from? If everyone was identified with a number, I think everyone would be too creeped out to go anywhere near Goldmine Island.”
“With only one kind of data, sure.”
I tossed aside the dead man’s phone and pulled out my own.
“But they just have to gather several different kinds. For example, just knowing where a taxi picked up and dropped off a customer doesn’t tell you who that customer was, but if you add in vending machine surveillance cameras, a store’s point card usage history, and other types of data, you can figure out who used the taxi when and where. You can bring the data back to its original form.”
“But that would mean…”
“I don’t know if they’re actually using different kinds of big data to find an individual, but I bet the enemy has rigged a huge server or base station so they can pull out all its data. …Hey, Zashiki Warashi. Turn off my smartphone right now. I don’t know how exactly they’re locating people, but a phone is a collection of personal information. Sealing that should buy some time.”
“No, not that.”
Just as I hurriedly started to turn off my cellphone, the Zashiki Warashi cut me off.
I looked confused.
“What is it?”
“Doesn’t that make this Kechibi Package pretty inconsistent and unreliable as a way of killing people?”
“?”
I didn’t know what she getting at.
Even if the target did nothing, they could gather different kinds of data, select their target out of the 150 million people in the country, and kill them. Once they fished out an individual from the great sea of big data, they were ready to go. It didn’t matter if the person fled to the other side of the world and holed up in a nuclear shelter, so how much more reliable could it be?
But the Zashiki Warashi gave a simple answer.
“This wouldn’t do anything against the oddities that don’t have a cellphone.”
The situation did not even wait for the chill to run down my back.
Suddenly, I heard several dry gunshots ring from a building to the side.
Part 30 (Day 10/04 11:03 - 11:17)
Someone was still alive.
The repeated gunshots were enough to tell me that.
“…Ah…”
I truly thought I had died as the deafening sound reached my ears and my vision grew white. The world seemed to fade into the distance and I felt pain squeezing at my heart.
But then someone grabbed my right shoulder.
I was pulled back with the great force of heavy machinery and the white world around me shattered. In its place, the red of the Zashiki Warashi’s yukata stepped in front of me.
I heard several blasts like small explosives had gone off under her skin, but she did not cry out.
Her yukata tore in places, but she did not shed a drop of blood.
That was what it meant to be a Youkai.
Her body was shaped the same as a human’s, but its structure was entirely different.
The tanuki supported my unsteady body as I watched the Zashiki Warashi move toward the source of the gunfire. She did not think about defending or evading. She simply walked forward.
“Eek!?”
I heard a panicked shriek. I couldn’t see past the Zashiki Warashi, but it sounded a lot like the voice I had heard on the phone.
The Zashiki Warashi did not speak a word.
Without even running, she walked forward and grabbed the collar of the person holding a handgun in his hands. She then threw him. It looked a lot like someone tossing a trash bag with one arm, but the adult man flew five meters through the air, slammed back-first into a dirty concrete wall, and fell to the floor. The tremendous sound it caused may have been even more violent than the gunshots.
“Gh…ghe…g-gh…ah…! D-damn…damn you!!”
It was a young man.
He groaned and struggled to breathe while reaching a hand across the concrete floor.
Don’t tell me.
He spoke like he knew who I was and I recognized his voice despite never having met him before.
But before I could think, he grabbed the gun he had dropped and exchanged the magazine for one marked with a different fluorescent color.
The dry gunshots were met by bursts of red liquid.
It was fresh blood.
That Youkai could stand tall as a bomb went off nearby, but this had injured her.
Most likely, these bullets had been made with the glass fiber created from crushing a stone mill which was deeply linked to the legends of the Zashiki Warashi. Dark red holes had appeared from her right thigh to her stomach as if someone had taken a giant sewing machine to her.
But…
“…”
Her expression did not change in the slightest.
She continued to walk forward, crouched down, and grabbed the fallen man’s shoulders.
She then swung him around in a horizontal circle and let go to throw him.
This time, he flew from one end of the building to the other. And fast enough that the Doppler effect was noticeable in his scream. After the disturbing sound of something soft being crushed, the young man fell to the floor again and his gun flew far away from him. He wasn’t even screaming anymore. Still, his hand squirmed. He had given up on the gun and instead pulled something like a large barber’s razor from his pants.
And that meant the Zashiki Warashi could not stop either.
She threw him.
And threw him.
And threw him.
“Hey, fox. Or the tanuki.”
The next thing I knew, I was speaking.
“Just hold that man down. Restrain him! If you don’t that Good-for-Nothing Youkai will kill him!! Hurry!!”
I knew I was just about screaming and the two animals finally reacted. They were caught in the Zashiki Warashi’s violence on the way and were sent bouncing around, but they still managed to hop onto the collapsed man’s back. That kept him from moving.
“It’s over!” I shouted. “It’s over now, Zashiki Warashi!! So you can stop!!”
“…”
“It” turned toward me with the movements of an automaton that needed oil.
The inhuman look in her eyes threatened to instantly destroy a relationship of over ten years.
“Ah…gh…”
I heard a gurgling sound as the man on the floor opened his mouth.
His mouth was dyed red and most of his teeth seemed to have broken, but he did something other than complain about the pain.
“Hand it…over.”
At first, I didn’t know what he meant, but it soon came to me like I was gradually solving a puzzle.
“Hand it over. Hand over the final piece you have!! Gbgh!? That isn’t something you should have!!”
“Why not?”
I pulled the translucent red USB memory stick from my pocket, stared at it, and asked again.
“Why do you want this so badly!? Is it really worth trying to kill someone or almost getting killed yourself!?”
“You…don’t…don’t understand…anything…”
The bloody man might have even broken his back, but the look on his face changed as soon as he saw the USB memory stick. He was still pinned down, but he stretched his hand and its broken nails out toward me. Not only that, he began dragging himself along the ground despite having the fox and tanuki on top of him.
His persistence made me back away.
I knew he really cared about the device, but so what? I didn’t know how it affected their Package, but it had to just be a way of making easy money. A fortune was only useful when you were alive. Not only had his partners in crime and subordinates lost their lives, but he was wearing away his own life. Why did he want it that badly? How could he go this far?
However, it turned out I was looking at it all wrong.
“If we don’t do something soon, unrelated people will be dragged into this!!”
“What you…what you all unknowingly carried to this island was the final safety needed to stop the destruction that is already underway!! I…We knew the secret, so we had to stop it!! And yet…!!”
After abducting the Zashiki Warashi, the villains had ordered me to bring them the suitcase.
Yet when I threatened to destroy the USB memory stick I found, they didn’t provide much of a reaction.
But…
They weren’t the end of this? There’s some other, larger plan and they were in a position to stop it?
Wasn’t that something we had concluded not long before?
There were two sets of villains on Goldmine Island. One was the group that had kidnapped the Good-for-Nothing Zashiki Warashi and used the Usuhiki Warashi, a Zashiki Warashi subspecies. The other was a different group that used the Kechibi’s Ikiryou assassination Package.
In that case, which group had hidden the strange USB memory stick on my suitcase so I would carry it onto the island?
Which of the two plans would it benefit?
“What?” I asked without thinking. “What did I bring onto this island? What is this thing!?”
“Hurry up…and use it.”
The collapsed man reached out with his bloody hand and spoke quietly.
“That is a method of inducing national suicide. We happened to stumble onto the system. We tried to use it for ourselves, but someone interfered. Hurry, hurry! If you don’t drive that wedge into the gears of destruction and stop them from turning, the entire nation of Japan will be wiped from the map!!”
The man seemed very confused and I had trouble following what he was saying.
Plus, I wasn’t given time to think about it.
A moment later, some overwhelming violence interrupted us.
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