Shrine Maiden of the Sacred Fire

by Reki Kawahara

  At that moment, he heard the crunch of feet behind him. Turning with a start, he saw two students coming toward him from the direction of the front yard. One girl, one boy. Their ribbon and necktie were the same blue as Haruyuki’s, but he didn’t know their faces, which meant they were probably in different classes. Which also meant they had to be his colleagues, newly assigned to the Animal Care Club like him.

  He took a step forward, thinking to at least say hello, but before he could, the boy shouted loudly, “Uuuugh! The hell! It’s filthy! And there’s a ton of leaves there!”

  “I know, right?!” The girl followed his declaration with an emotional announcement of her own opinion. “What’s even the point of cleaning a mess like this? Seeeeeriously.”

  From the way they were talking, neither had come of their own volition; they’d likely been selected by lottery. But Haruyuki was in a similar position. He had stood up with such force entirely by accident.

  However this ended up, having come this far, he had no choice now but to amicably work on this club with these two. He took a deep breath and yet called out in a relatively weak voice, “Um…Anyway, let’s decide who does what.”

  According to the document he had been sent after being assigned to the club, there were two items of work for that day. One was the selection of a president, and the other was cleaning this hutch. They wouldn’t be able to go home until they completed both and submitted a signed log file to the in-school server.

  It was obvious from looking at the disastrous state of the hutch that the cleaning would be fairly tough, so he wanted to at least quickly knock out the job of assigning jobs. Haruyuki waited a few seconds with the faint expectation that one of them would say, I’ll do it. Club activities were an extra bit of grading data and also had an impact on high school entrance, so students generally wanted a positive history of being the president of whatever club.

  But they hadn’t volunteered for this, so obviously, no one there cared about any of that. After a full five seconds had passed, he checked that neither of them were going to open their mouths before smiling weakly and saying, “Okay, then I guess I could take it on. Being the president, I mean.”

  Annoyed with himself that he couldn’t have phrased it more like he was doing them a favor (which he was), he waited for a reaction. The boy, who was rather tanned for being in the go-home club, and the girl, whose hair was permed so that it curled inward, both got unabashedly relieved looks on their faces and nodded together.

  “Great.”

  “Thanks.”

  All three ran their fingers over their virtual desktops at the same time, opening the newly appearing club activity tab and setting Haruyuki’s name in the position column before touching the SIGN button. And with that, Haruyuki was registered in the school local net as the president of the Animal Care Club.

  Taking the opportunity to check the names of the other two, he saw the boy was Hamajima and the girl was Izeki. Since there were only three people in the club, a vice president and any lower positions were not required.

  If I knew this was going to happen, I would’ve volunteered for library aide at the beginning of the term.

  Grumbling to himself, he wiped the window away with a wave of his right hand. At any rate, that was one job done. But the problem was the other job—cleaning the hutch.

  He looked over at it again. It was pretty clear that the layer of leaves would indeed be a difficult task, not to mention the filthy plank walls. The leaf layer was at least five centimeters thick, and there was nothing they could do about it without tools of some kind. According to the document, they had been given permission to use the equipment in the cleaning shed in the courtyard.

  “Okay, first we need a broom and dustpan. I’ll go get them. Just wait here, okay?” he said, and trotted off toward the courtyard on the opposite side of the second school wing. He had the thought that this was still way better than having people behind him shouting, Run! Run! Run! and forcing him to go buy bread and things, like they had in seventh grade.

  When the three of them actually got to work, the job of cleaning out the hutch was far more difficult than he had expected.

  If the matted leaves had been dry, they might have been able to simply sweep them up, but it was the rainy season. And the leaves had apparently been piling up bit by bit for years, so that the ones toward the bottom were basically mulch glued to the floor. With the old-fashioned bamboo brooms—and of course, they were not actually made of bamboo, but hard plastic fibers fashioned to look like bamboo—they were just scraping the surface; they didn’t even make a dent in the sticky layers.

  “Aaah!” the girl, Izeki, abruptly cried out, after battling the mess of mulch for twenty minutes or so. “Geeez, my hands and my butt seriously huuuuurt!”

  “Heh-heh-heh! You’re like an old woman!” the boy, Hamajima, jeered, and received a fierce glare, a look that would have turned Haruyuki to stone.

  “God, you’re seriously annoying. I mean, you’ve been barely sweeping the same place over and over for forever,” Izeki half demanded, half snapped.

  “Tsh!” Hamajima clicked his tongue. “Shaddap. All you’re doing is putting outside the leaves that we sweep up, and you’re taking your time at it, too. Taking it easy, huh?”

  “What? I don’t get your point, though. Are you seriously talking to me like that?”

  The exchange between his fellow club members was growing stormier by the second, and Haruyuki started sweating profusely, moving his broom at top speed. He knew he should interrupt and defuse the situation before it turned into a full-blown fight, but he couldn’t lift his head, much less open his mouth.

  No. No matter how it happened, I volunteered for this club. I even went further than that: I volunteered to be president. I can call these two out, be harsh. I have a responsibility here, don’t I?

  “Uh, um!” Haruyuki called out, this resolution filling his heart. Izeki and Hamajima, both about to explode, turned their gazes on him together.

  “…Uh, um.” He took a deep breath, put some strength into his abdomen, and readied himself for the harsh law he was about to lay down. “At any rate, we’re not going to finish before it’s time to go home, so…if you guys just sign the log, you can go now. I’ll just hang around so we look good.”

  In less than a minute, his comrades were retreating at top speed with smiles of pure joy, leaving only their thanks. Alone in the small yard, Haruyuki heaved a deep sigh.

  If he were to confess the truth—

  He had to say that somewhere in his heart had been at least a milligram of the hope that the other two club members would turn out to be kindhearted, animal-loving girls, and that the club work would be unexpectedly heartwarming. But now that he thought about it, this Animal Care Club would have been formed long ago if there were actually any students like that at Umesato; disgruntled and reluctant comrades were the only logical outcome of a hastily ordered club. In the worst-case scenario, the other two members could have been the type of outlaw students who had so mercilessly bullied him last year. He should be grateful for his good fortune.

  With this consoling thought, Haruyuki looked around the hutch once more.

  Half of the leaves on the floor were still untouched. The clock in the lower right of his field of view indicated that it was 4:15 PM. The school closed at six, which was when everyone was kicked out, so he did still have some time, but it was pointless to try and attack with his lone broom that black layer, which had practically turned into dirt. If he seriously wanted to make the hutch clean, at least.

  “Well, we don’t need to get it all done in one day. I mean, there aren’t even any animals, so…” Muttering, Haruyuki tossed the broom in his right hand to the ground. He would just kill time with some game app until school closed, put up a show of having tried but still been unable to get it finished, and pick up where he left off the next day. He was about to sit down on the steps at the foot of the exterior wall, when—

  Kuroyukihime
. Her name flashed through his mind, and he stopped dead.

  Kuroyukihime had to be still there, too. In the distant student council office, she was no doubt busy with work for the school festival coming up at the end of the month. And Chiyuri and Takumu, too. They were on the field and in the kendo area, moving their bodies with determined focus.

  “So after classes end every day, they’re here doing stuff like this.”

  A hoarse sigh of admiration slipped out as he took a hard look at his dirty hands. It wasn’t as though anyone was going to high-five him or give him some kind of reward for working hard now. So then why on earth do extracurricular activities anyway?

  Kuroyukihime had told him before that she joined the student council so that she could have a hold on the in-school local net as a Burst Linker, but he had a feeling that wasn’t the only reason. Right: Kuroyukihime, Takumu, and Chiyuri must have been constantly proving something to themselves. And yet Haruyuki was very close to abandoning the resolution he had made not even an hour earlier to actually work hard on things now.

  “Honestly. What is with me…” He let out a long breath, stooped over, and picked the broom up off the ground.

  After about five minutes of work, when he had gotten rid of as many of the leaves in the hutch as he could sweep up, he stopped and thought for a while. Ditching the whole project to play games wasn’t going to help anything. To take care of the mulch layer before the school closed, he needed to find a better way of doing this. The best thing would likely be to flush it out with a lot of water, but the only thing nearby was the tiny faucet in a corner of the hutch, apparently for drinking water for the animals.

  He turned it on to test it, but as expected, the dribbling, unreliable stream of water was basically nothing more than droplets. Filling even one bucket would take far too long. Racking his brain, he finally remembered that club presidents were given the right to higher-level access in the in-school net than regular students were.

  He called up a map of the school grounds on his virtual desktop and used the infrastructure information to display an overlay of the water lines. A very thin light blue line stretched up into the hutch, but a thicker pipe and a stopcock were apparently buried in the ground very close by. When he tapped on the position and looked around, his AR displayed an arrow pointing downward in a corner of the campus about three meters away.

  “So the water line’s there…Um…,” he murmured, reset the map, and then selected hoses five meters or more in length from the list of school equipment. When he overlaid the positional information on the map, he found there was one in the tool locker in the first-floor boys’ washroom in the second school wing before him. He clicked on a flashing mark and in the window that popped up, requested permission to use the hose. Normally, students were not permitted to touch equipment outside their authorized access, but a second later, his request was approved.

  “Ooh,” Haruyuki said unconsciously. “The rights of a club president. And now…”

  He scrolled through the equipment list again and pulled up a large shovel. There was one in the tool shed in the courtyard, so using it posed no permission problems. Last, he searched for a deck brush, found one for scrubbing tiles in the tool shed in the front yard, and got permission to use it.

  “And that’s everything. So now gotta fight, maaan!”

  If a certain someone had heard him, he would’ve cried out angrily, Hey! No imitating my masterful self! Haruyuki set his sights on the front yard and trotted off.

  Tackling the leaves on the floor with the water jetting out of the hose connected to the garden spout was unexpectedly fun, and Haruyuki found himself wondering if this was what Reds felt like with their long-distance attacks.

  Naturally, however, the strict school system was not allowing him unlimited access, and the bar showing his water allotment dropped before his eyes. He took careful aim and peeled away one glued-on section after another. But he couldn’t very well use up all the water now, given that he would need to scrub the floor with the deck brush later, so he turned the tap off when he still had about 20 percent of his water left.

  The floor of the hutch was covered in a muddy soup of old leaves melting in huge puddles, making him think he had only made things worse. He very nearly regretted his choices, but he steadied himself and traded hose for shovel before stepping into the hutch. Fortunately, he was wearing high-cut, water-resistant sneakers to fend off the damp of the rainy season; the dirty water didn’t penetrate into his shoes. He would, of course, have to wash them thoroughly once he got home, but he could think later about things that had to happen later.

  “Oookay!” he shouted and thrust his shovel into a mass of dirt. The tip sliced straight through to the floor, encountering no resistance. He started scraping away, shoveling up hunks of the black dirt. He staggered under the weight as he tossed his shovel-load outside through the doorway.

  It was just barely twenty by forty centimeters, but a piece of actual floor had been revealed. Haruyuki stared, and a somehow strange sensation came over him. A profound reaction, different from when he finished off some troublesome homework or took down a boss character that had killed him countless times. Involuntarily, he very nearly shed a few thin tears, and he hurriedly shook his head. It was way too early still to be feeling any sense of achievement.

  He stuck his shovel back in the dirt and tossed out another shovelful. Then another. He took a step forward, tossed out another. His shoulders and back were starting to hurt already, but Haruyuki kept working as though something were spurring him on. He could feel his strength being consumed each time he threw out a heap of dirt, but at the same time, he was learning how to use the shovel and how to put his back into it, so his efficiency gradually improved.

  While he was focused on the repetition of this straightforward task, he abruptly felt a prickling stab in the corner of his memory. He had done work like this before sometime, somewhere, hadn’t he? But even in childhood, he had barely touched real dirt, and cleaning the house was left to a housekeeping service his mother hired to come in once a week.

  Forgetting the pain in his back, he dug intently around in his memories and after about five minutes, he finally hit on it. This wasn’t a memory from the real world. It was the Accelerated World—the higher-level Unlimited Neutral Field.

  Two months earlier, on their first meeting, Sky Raker had pushed him from the top of the old Tokyo Tower. To climb the sheer face of that three-hundred-meter wall, Haruyuki had undergone serious training. He had held the image of swords in his hands and pierced the wall, hard like steel, thousands, tens of thousands of times. The exact moment when he stood on the threshold of the ultimate power in Brain Burst, the Incarnate System…

  “……?” He had the sudden sensation that his thinking had gotten close to something very important for the briefest of moments, and he furrowed his brow. He tried to catch the tail of that thought as he continued to scrape the floor with the shovel.

  The Incarnate System. A logic to influence the truth of the Accelerated World and overwrite actual phenomena with a strong imagination, the very definition of tremendous power. The Incarnate of a master surpassed the limitations of the rules of the game and cracked the earth, ripped open the sky. Obviously, a supernatural power, not something that actually existed in the real world.

  But…

  But the real root of it. Cause leads to effect—this simple structure was perhaps…

  Crack! The tip of the shovel hit the wall, making the nerves in Haruyuki’s hands sing. “Ow!” He started blowing on his palms. Once the pain had passed, he lifted his face.

  At some point, the mass of old leaves, which had been piled so high, had been almost completely removed from the hutch. A small mountain had appeared instead on the other side of the chicken wire, a mountain Haruyuki couldn’t actually believe he’d made himself with a single shovel.

  “When you put your mind to it, you can do anything!”

  The aggressively positive thought
sprang up from nowhere, and he stretched long and hard as he shouted it. His stiff back creaked and cracked, but not only did he not feel pain, he felt almost refreshed. It would be incredible to just collapse into sleep like that, but he still had one thing left to do. He needed to take care of the remaining dirt and leaves on the floor.

  Coming out of the hutch, he changed the weapon in his right hand from shovel to deck brush and readied the hose in his left. The place would shine if he brushed the floor now, applying water bit by bit as he went. The hands of the clock were swinging around to five PM, but summer solstice was near, so it was still plenty bright out. It was totally possible for him to finish this job before six, when the school closed.

  Returning to the hutch in high spirits, Haruyuki gasped at a sudden realization. To turn the stream of water from the hose on and off, he had to turn the stopcock on and off. But he would have to head back to the water pipe each time he did so, which made the whole enterprise extremely inefficient. But if he just left the water running, he would quickly use up the water the system had allowed him.

  “Hmm.” He put his brain to work on the problem, glancing back and forth between the hutch and the spigot. This time, at least, however, no clever solution came to mind. He had the chiding thought that if they were going to go so far as to monitor water usage, they should set it up so that he could open and close the stopcock from a distance, but it was too late for that now. The only thing to do was go back and forth between the hutch and the valve, even if it would take a lot longer that way. He readied himself for this unpleasant end and trudged toward the door.

  He had walked a few steps around the mountain of mulch when in the center of his field of view, a yellow radio-wave icon flashed. This was followed by a display below it: AD HOC CONNECTION REQUEST.

  An ad hoc connection was used to connect several Neurolinkers wirelessly without passing through a server, but it was almost never used at school. Transmission speed and anonymity were worse than with a wired connection, and more importantly, if you were logged into the in-school local net, it was a fairly pointless function.