Enrollment Arc, Part II

by Tsutomu Sato

  “So they came crawling back while the authorities wouldn’t realize it?”

  “Meaning the groups are related?” Mari had phrased it as a question, but he could tell from her expression that she felt the same as Mayumi.

  “If they left it as it was, then I suppose they didn’t bring any deadly poisons with them,” noted Katsuto.

  “Yes. Our own investigations have not turned up any biochemical weapons,” nodded Haruka.

  “A car would be faster.”

  “Will we be detected with magic?”

  “We’d be detected anyway. They’re waiting for us to come to them, after all.”

  Tatsuya hadn’t said he was a related party just because he was enrolled at the attacked First High. The terrorists had attempted to steal private magic technology. That meant they must have been after his own techniques, too. Kinoe Tsukasa attacking him was probably a test to gauge how effective they were. That was Tatsuya’s reasoning.

  “Straight in through the front door?”

  “That would be the best way to catch them off-guard.”

  Tatsuya was one thing, but even Miyuki spoke belligerently, as though it came naturally to her, as they decided on their plan of attack.

  Katsuto indicated his agreement with them. “Yes, that’s an appropriate plan. I’ll provide the car.”

  “Huh? Juumonji, are you going, too?” asked Mayumi—Tatsuya had been thinking the same thing.

  Katsuto didn’t look like the sort to stand on the front lines alone and not let subordinates participate. “As a member of the Juumonji, one of the Ten Master Clans, it is my natural duty. But above that, I cannot close my eyes to this situation as a student of First High. I can’t leave everything to the underclassmen.”

  “…Then—”

  “Saegusa, you’re not going.”

  “Mayumi, the student council president needs to be here right now.”

  “…All right, fine,” she said, nodding grudgingly to the two-pronged persuasion. “But you can’t leave either, Mari. There might still be remnants in the school. What will we do if the disciplinary chairwoman isn’t here?”

  This time it was Mari’s turn to nod grudgingly.

  After watching the two female students’ staring contest (?) Katsuto looked at Tatsuya. “Shiba, are you going now? It may turn into a night battle at this rate.”

  “It won’t take that much time. I’ll wrap things up before the sun sets.”

  “I see.” Perhaps he felt something from Tatsuya’s attitude then, because Katsuto didn’t ask any more than that. He simply said, “I’ll get the car,” and left the nurse’s office.

  “I know the chairman and president are from the Ten Master Clans…but who is Haru, anyway?” asked Leo, though everyone else had intentionally avoided asking it.

  Tatsuya shelved the question. “We’ll talk about that later. Let’s go!” Then he left the nurse’s office behind, with Miyuki, then Leo and Erika in his wake.

  The car was a large off-roader, and in its passenger seat was an additional member of their team.

  “Yo, my man, Shiba!”

  “Kirihara…”

  “Man, you never get surprised.”

  “…No, I’m actually quite surprised.” At how you referred to me, he thought, thinking better than saying it.

  “Anyway, my man, I’m gettin’ in on this, too.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Tatsuya had no idea what was going through Kirihara’s mind to make him suggest any of this, but there was no time to press him with questions. He just got into the off-roader, followed by his little sister and friends.

  The world was painted in a madder red.

  The big off-roader sprinted down the road, reflecting the evening sun from its body.

  And then it smashed through the closed gates to the factory.

  “Thanks a bunch, Leo!”

  “…That… That was nothing.”

  “Ha-ha, you’re wiped out!”

  They had demanded high-level magic from Leo, such as suddenly hardening the entire big vehicle plowing down the bad road at over a hundred kilometers per hour at the exact moment of impact. He was considerably exhausted from the immense drain on his concentration.

  “Shiba, this is your plan. You give the orders,” said Katsuto, handing the reins and the responsibility to Tatsuya.

  He nodded without a second’s pause. “Leo, you stay here and secure our exit. Erika, you help Leo and take care of anyone trying to escape.”

  “Shouldn’t we, like, capture them?”

  “No need for more risks than necessary. Keep yourself safe and deal with them. Chairman, please take Kirihara and go around the left side of the building to the back entrance. Miyuki and I will walk in this way.”

  “All right.”

  “Sure, whatever. I’ll slice up any rats who think they can get away.”

  “Tatsuya, be careful,” said Leo.

  “Don’t do anything crazy, Miyuki!” urged Erika.

  Both of them, ordered to stay behind, didn’t complain about any unfairness.

  Kirihara, brandishing his naked katana—though it had no edge—ran off, and Katsuto calmly went after him.

  Tatsuya and Miyuki proceeded into the dimly lit factory casually, as though walking into a hypermarket.

  Their encounter happened surprisingly early.

  That was because Tatsuya had been advancing without a mind to securing cover, and the enemy had lined up on the floor of the hall-like room without concealing themselves.

  “Welcome, and so nice to meet you,” said one man, spreading his arms theatrically and bowing in welcome. “Tatsuya Shiba! And the lovely lady must be Miyuki Shiba, no?”

  “Are you Blanche’s leader?” asked Tatsuya indifferently. The man’s age must have been around thirty—younger than he’d expected. With his gangly build and rimless decorative glasses, he gave the appearance of a scholar or lawyer.

  “Oh, yes, how rude of me. As you say, I am the leader of Blanche’s Japanese division, Hajime Tsukasa.”

  Tatsuya didn’t feel any intimidation from him. The impression he entertained of the man, prejudiced though it may have been, was that of the common intellectual and fashionable revolutionary—big-headed and a failure.

  But behind his exaggerated, narcissistic tone and gestures, there was a dark abyss peeking out. The thick madness Tatsuya glimpsed in it was something he’d expect the leader of a terrorist organization who fooled around with people’s minds and lives to have.

  “I see.” Despite being aware of the man’s insanity, though, Tatsuya’s face remained stone cold. Hell and purgatory were no more than close friends of his. He didn’t bother asking after his relationship with the kendo club captain, Kinoe Tsukasa. He just said two words and nodded.

  He displayed his intent with his actions, not his words. He pulled the silver CAD from his shoulder holster.

  “Hmm, a CAD. I figured you would at least bring a handgun with you. Very bold, very bold for you to come in here so openly. You may be a magician, but you will die if shot with a gun, you know.”

  “I am not a magician.”

  Blanche’s leader opened his eyes wide with affectation at the unexpected response from the one he’d threatened to shoot. “Oh, I see. You are still a student! You seemed so very brazen I had nearly forgotten.”

  “You like to talk, do you? I suppose that’s the selling point for an agitator.”

  “You’re so young, and yet so strict. Is it not stiff, not uncomfortable to have such keen viewpoints from such a young age? At this rate, you’ll suffocate on them before long.” His tone and gestures were theatrical. His statement was self-absorbed.

  But Tatsuya didn’t feel like going along with Hajime Tsukasa’s clown performance. “I will give you the option to surrender. Lay down your weapons and place your hands behind your head.”

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Weren’t you a Weed? Bad at magic? Oh, I do apologize—that is a discriminatory term. But what do you sti
ll draw confidence from? If you think magic is some sort of absolute power, you’re making a big mistake.” With a bout of loud laughter to make his lunacy even more pronounced, Hajime Tsukasa raised his right hand.

  The members of Blanche lined up on either side of him, numbering over twenty, and all raised their firearms. Handguns weren’t their only weapons—some even held submachine guns and assault rifles.

  “Negotiations must be fair, so I will grant you the opportunity as well. Become our comrade, Tatsuya Shiba. My little brother told me about your Cast Jamming that doesn’t require antinite, and I am extremely interested in it. This operation has us all working overtime. Just training ignorant students so we can use them takes quite a bit of time and money. It is truly and annoyingly difficult to forgive you for letting it all go to naught, but if you become our comrade, everything will be water under the bridge.”

  The thin smile on his face, the insanity disguised as sanity in his eyes—they would have struck fear into their target’s heart were it not Tatsuya. If he hadn’t been with Miyuki, she, too, would definitely have at least gotten goose bumps.

  “So that’s what you’re after. You used Mibu to contact me and your brother to attack me, all to investigate that Cast Jamming imitation?”

  “My, my, you are a smart child. How insightful. But you are still only a child—you understood all that and still came wandering in here. Having said that, children are stubborn creatures. They don’t listen to what you tell them, even if they have zero chance of winning.”

  “What would you do in that case?”

  “Let’s see… How about this?”

  He made a gesture that looked more like that of a street magician than a scholar.

  Tatsuya’s already-mostly-empty expression disappeared from his face as, seeming exhausted, he dropped the hand holding his CAD.

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You are already our comrade!”

  Hajime Tsukasa stopped hiding his inner insanity, and he no longer evoked awe and respect—but he was equipped with a sort of charisma.

  “Then for starters, why don’t you put an end to your sister, with whom you walked here? She would want her beloved brother to be the one to do it!”

  His commanding tone was not hastily prepared—he was quite familiar with using it.

  In the past, he’d probably gotten many to obey him.

  That twisted smile, that expression certain of his own authority.

  “…Quit it with this monkey show. I’m too embarrassed to even watch.”

  But that expression froze the instant Tatsuya delivered his cold insult.

  “Evil Eye, a type of outer magic that interferes with awareness. Or so it’s nicknamed. It actually flashes patterns of light signals with hypnotic properties more quickly than humans can perceive them, giving them a direction and projecting them onto the person’s retina—light-wave vibration magic. A simple hypnotic trick derived from brainwashing concepts, possible to create even with a video player. Because it can be performed without any grandiose machines, you can catch an opponent off-guard with it—but that’s all it really is. If I recall correctly, it’s a trick zealously researched in Belarus before the formation of the Federal Soviet Republics.”

  Tatsuya froze his enemy—not with magic, but with words.

  “Was this what you used to substitute Mibu’s memories, too?”

  “Tatsuya, you mean…?” Miyuki’s eyes were already wide, but she opened them wider in surprise.

  He nodded, still expressionless. “Mibu’s mistaken memory was so extreme it verged on unnatural. You do get shaken up after mishearing something like that, and sometimes people do fall into such an extreme misunderstanding. But normally, that cools down as time passes.”

  “…This… This trash.” Wrath surged from Miyuki’s noble lips.

  Perhaps its heat thawed the man. “…You, how…” he groaned, appearing to struggle. He wasn’t smiling madly. Now that the madness had withdrawn, all that was left was a slender, intellectual leader accustomed only to giving orders, never to getting his own hands dirty.

  “You’re a boring one.” Tatsuya wasn’t bothering to hide his contempt any longer. “Drawing my attention to your right hand as you took your glasses off, averting it from the CAD you used in your left hand… You think a parlor trick will work on me? I can tell what sort of magic you’re casting by looking at the activation program, and I can deal with it. That shoddy magic you used? I only needed to delete part of the activation program. Without the parts describing the all-important hypnosis pattern, Evil Eye just becomes a series of lights.”

  He had no interest in exposed street magicians.

  “Impossible… How…how can you… You bastard…”

  “And you were speaking so politely before. It looks like your regal skin has peeled away.”

  It was then that Hajime Tsukasa finally figured it out.

  This boy, when his expression went away—when he looked exhausted—it was because he had observed and nullified his spell and calculated he could consign Hajime to oblivion with certainty. The boy in front of him had never seen Hajime as another human, right from the beginning. He hadn’t viewed him as human. His face, his name, his traits, his intentions—Hajime instinctively understood none of those had any meaning for the boy. They were nothing more than simple enemies to him. Obstacles. And now, by establishing his means of elimination, they weren’t even obstacles anymore.

  “F-fire, open fire!” He no longer had the leeway to keep up his appearance of dignity. His comrades—no, his subordinates—looked at him with misgivings, but he didn’t have the leeway to notice them, either. He had been taken by a primordial, animallike fear as he ordered them to shoot the boy.

  However…

  “Wh-wha…”

  “What is this? What happened?”

  …not a single bullet fired.

  Panic spread throughout the room. On the floor were the scattered, dismantled remains of handguns, submachine guns, and assault rifles. When the men had tried to pull the trigger, their weapons had reverted to their component parts.

  And amid the panic, without attempting to quell it, Hajime Tsukasa ran away.

  He completely ignored those at his back—his allies.

  “Tatsuya, please chase him. I will handle this.”

  “All right.” Tatsuya started walking toward the hallway farther in. The men naturally made way for him. Without doing anything, he arrived at the passage Hajime Tsukasa had run down. If they let him through like this, all that would need to happen was for the remaining Blanche members to be arrested.

  But one of the members leaped for Tatsuya’s back, a knife in his hand.

  Or at least, he tried to. “Fool.” Miyuki’s sweet tones would normally prompt no end of fascination in others, but now they carried with them judgment without hope.

  “Don’t go too far. No need to dirty your hands with the likes of them.”

  “Yes, Tatsuya.”

  Between the siblings as they exchanged words, there was a carved statue covered head to toe in frost, which had tipped over and was falling to the floor.

  Only one attempted to bring harm to her brother. The fool was already frozen solid.

  For her, that alone was sufficient, and yet that alone was also insufficient.

  The reason had been enough. The result had not.

  The men before the single slender girl, numbering in the double digits, could no longer take a step. Their frozen legs could not move forward or retreat backward. Both mentally and physically.

  The entire floor was shrouded with frost. Only within a small circle surrounding the girl was it the same season as it was outside.

  The white rime swirled. The frost was creating cold. She brought up her right hand. Her form—the realization of an ice queen delivering judgment upon the deceased.

  “You are unfortunate.”

  Her tone was different from normal. But her wording—her commanding, judging, authoritative expression—was not strange
in the slightest.

  “Had you not attempted to interfere with my brother, you would only have needed to suffer minor pain.”

  The cold slowly, steadily, crawled upward. Cold to dig into the cores of their bodies. Their faces blanched in dread and despair.

  “I am not as benevolent as my brother.”

  The white frost had climbed to their necks.

  “Now, pray—that you will at least keep your lives.”

  When the cold reached the crowns of their heads, it immediately increased in severity.

  The vibration-deceleration wide-area magic, Niflheim.

  Voiceless death agonies writhed within the frost.

  Nobody was there to ambush him.

  At least he was smart enough not to split his forces, thought Tatsuya. There was no point in sneak attacks against him—he could sense living presences. Hiding would have been meaningless, too.

  There would be eleven terrorists still waiting for him in the next room. Eleven submachine guns. From the other side of the wall, he pulled the trigger on his CAD. Physical barriers were no obstruction to magic. With one of the only two spells he could use freely, Dismantle, he overwrote the eidos in the submachine guns. Once again his ears were greeted by voices rising in dismay.

  He was able to sense living presences. He was able to analyze not only magic programs, but activation programs. But these were side effects of this spell and one other.

  To perceive an object’s construction, and to dismantle it.

  For physical objects, he overwrote the construction’s information into a state in which it was dismantled into its component parts. For a body of information, he just dismantled the information itself. It directly interfered with construction data; it was a spell counted among the most difficult magic in existence.

  He had possessed these abilities since birth, though not of his own volition, so he couldn’t use other magic properties. He could only create mock-ups. Virtual fakes. His magic calculation region was entirely occupied by these two spells of the highest level.