by Yusuke Kishi
Wordlessly, Satoru motioned for us to come together. Then he carefully opened the door that we had come through minutes earlier.
He had taken off his clogs at some point and now held them in his hands. Okano and I did the same. With Seki sandwiched between us, we quietly entered the hospital again. Satoru slipped in after us and shut the door carefully.
Just in time. Before we could even catch our breath, we heard footsteps outside the door. It was only two or three meters away.
At the same time, I heard a strange moaning sound. A deep, throaty sound like someone chanting a spell. Then a high, hissing sound, the kind a snake makes when it’s threatened.
The fiend… Outside, just a thin plank of wood away, was the fiend.
I prayed for my life.
God, please. Don’t let it find us.
Lead the fiend away.
Just let everything be…I stopped.
There was no sound. No footsteps. No creepy moaning.
I didn’t hear it leave, so it was probably still standing right outside. It was being quiet for a reason.
The fiend was listening. I didn’t even dare to swallow. In the silence that stretched on endlessly, I saw the thing I feared most. The doorknob turning slowly…
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I felt myself losing consciousness.
But the door never opened.
“Grrrrr…★_＊∀§▲ÆAÄ!” the fiend let out a strange, high-pitched sound.
The next instant he gave a victorious shout. Before I could even react, I heard a bone-chilling scream.
I clamped my hands over my ears. It was Dr. Noguchi’s voice.
“Shit! Get away! Fucking fiend!”
The unbearable scream came again. The fiend was toying with him.
“Hurry, this way!”
Satoru sprinted back through the hospital toward the front entrance. He stopped beside the hole in the wall and peeked outside. The three of us followed close behind him. My bare feet were bleeding from being pierced by dozens of splinters, but I strangely didn’t feel anything.
“Who…Who the hell are you?” Dr. Noguchi’s dying shrieks echoed through the hospital.
I gritted my teeth and turned away. There was nothing I could do. Don’t ask. Don’t think. Right now, if I didn’t focus on getting out of here alive…
“The boat looks intact. Hurry!”
Satoru stepped outside and waved for us to follow. We ran as fast as we could, but came to a halt mere inches outside the hospital. Seki had planted her feet and was fighting tooth and nail against going any farther.
“What are you doing? We have to get out of here…hey, snap out of it!” I shouted desperately.
“Saki, hurry. Leave her there,” Satoru said calmly.
“But…!”
“At this rate, we’re all going to die. If we don’t go back and warn the others, the entire district is doomed.
“The two of you should go,” Okano said quietly. “I’ll hide here with her. Please come back for us later.”
Her voice was calm, as if she had already accepted death.
“No way. I could never!”
“There’s no other choice. Plus, fleeing by boat could be more dangerous. After all, he wouldn’t expect anyone to stay here. …now hurry!”
“Saki! Let’s go.”
Satoru grabbed my arm again and started dragging me away.
“I’m sorry…” I said to Okano, tears flowing down my face.
I turned my back on her and ran as hard as I could toward the boat.
We passed a charred, blackened corpse. It was still smoking. Then Fujita came into view, his limbs twisted in all the wrong directions. I tried to shove my emotions aside, but that didn’t stop me from shaking uncontrollably.
Satoru cast off the moment we got into the boat. He slowly turned the boat around and pushed off. We laid down below the gunwhale to keep out of sight.
Against the dark sky, all I could see were ghostly images of the hospital. I kept thinking that the fiend would appear at any moment. My entire body was limp with fear.
Satoru deftly maneuvered the boat through the narrow waterway away from the hospital. How was he controlling the boat when he couldn’t see where he was going? I looked over at him and saw that he was using the starlight reflecting off of a small mirror to guide him.
Eventually, the boat rounded a large bend.
“…we’re safe now. He can’t see us from the hospital anymore,” Satoru whispered.
“Then hurry, go as fast as you can!” I said.
Satoru shook his head. “We should stay quiet for a little longer. Even if the fiend isn’t here, there still might be queerats around. We’re too close to the banks; we won’t be able to escape if they fire at us. There’s a wider canal ahead. We’ll go full speed from there.”
We peeked timidly over the side of the boat. There was only the quiet whisper of the boat moving through the water.
“I wonder if Okano is okay…”
Satoru didn’t answer. He probably knew there was nothing he could say to give me any real peace of mind.
“Was that really a fiend?”
Satoru cocked his head, thinking.
“I don’t know what else it could be.”
“But…where did it come from? There aren’t any abnormal people in the district. The Board of Eduction has been watching everyone with eagle eyes.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. There’s only one thing that’s clear.”
“What?”
“The reason Kiroumaru’s army was annihilated. No matter how skilled his warriors were, they were no match for a fiend.”
“That makes sense…”
“And one more thing. Why did Yakomaru start the war? I don’t know for sure what connection the fiend has with the queerats, but if it’s what I think it is…”
He went quiet.
“What’s wrong?”
“Quiet… Don’t make any sudden movements. Just keep talking normally.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t change the pitch of your voice.”
“Alright. Like this? Tell me. What’s going on?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
“There’s a boat following us about a hundred meters behind us.”
“Huh? …no way.”
I felt the blood drain from my body.
“It’s the boat we used as a decoy. The fiend’s on it, I’m positive.”
I looked around slowly and saw, by the starlight reflecting off the water, the silhouette of the other boat.
“What do we do…? Why isn’t it attacking? And…”
“Don’t raise your voice. The second it realizes we’ve noticed him, we’re done for. …as for why it hasn’t attacked, it’s probably letting us lead it to where all the townspeople are.”
This was the worst situation possible. If we kept going, we’d invite the murderer right into our midst. But I couldn’t think of a way to get it off our tail either. I racked my brain desperately, but fear had numbed my mind and I couldn’t come up with anything.
“If we go as fast as we can…can we escape into the canal?”
“No, we won’t make it,” Satoru said shortly. “The canal is a straight line, there’s nowhere to hide. Even if we went as fast as we could, it would capture us with cantus in a second.”
We couldn’t stop its boat, or hinder it in any way either. The fiend would attack the second it saw any sort of opposition from us. As long as we were in its line of sight, it held all the power.
“Then…wait. Are you saying we have no chance?”
“Hold on. I’m thinking. Just keep talking.”
All I could rely on now was Satoru’s steady calmness. I kept talking about whatever came to mind.
“I never thought we’d be in a situation like this. I still can’t believe everything that’s happened tonight. It’s the Summer Festival too. A lot of people died. Some right in front of my eyes. No on
e saved them. …and not just that. We abandoned Okano and the others…no, we left them to die. Why did it come to that? What in the world went wrong?”
Tears spilled down my cheeks.
“I don’t want to die here. I don’t want to die not knowing anything. It’d be like a bug that got stepped on out of the blue. At the very least, I want to know why I have to die. I can’t just die and leave things the way they are.”
Satoru was still thinking with single-minded concentration.
“I don’t believe that Maria is dead. I don’t want to believe it. I love her. …but she saved us tonight. Remember? When we were about to go to the square, I saw a younger version of her. And in chasing after her, we avoided the queerats’ surprise attack. If we had gone to the square, we might have been shot and killed. …like Hiromi Torigai. I hated her. After all, she wanted to kill us like we were just disposable lab rats. Wanted to kill us with those terrible impure cats. But now I understand. She was just afraid. She felt she had a duty to prevent the horrible events that happened tonight. …but that doesn’t mean I’m about to forgive her for what she did to Maria. And not just that. Even the things she did to our friend, the faceless boy.”
My chest hurt so much I could barely get the words out.
“I loved him. Loved him from the bottom of my heart. It kills me that I can’t remember his name. …I love you too, Satoru. But I still can’t deal with my feelings about him. And as long as I can’t figure that out, I can’t move forward. So…”
Satoru looked at me. “I feel the same way, Saki. It’s embarrassing to admit this as an adult, but I can’t get over my feelings for him because my memories were taken from me.”
“Satoru…”
“That’s why we can’t die here. …we might not be able to defeat the fiend, but I think we can trick it and get away.”
“How?”
This was the ray of hope I had so desperately hoped for. Satoru explained his plan.
“…the problem is how to get ashore. It’ll be hard once we enter the wider canal. We have to find a spot before that. A place where the waterway narrows.”
I perked up. “…no, the wider canal works better! The fiend wouldn’t be suspicious if we went ashore there.”
Satoru smiled as he listened to my reasoning.
“Alright. Let’s do that. I’ve never levitated a person before, but I think I can manage it. We’ll do it right when we enter the canal.”
“Got it.”
I went over the plan in my head. Although much of it depended on Satoru executing two techniques at the same time, it was up to me to make sure everything went well. If I failed, it would all be for nothing. We only had one chance.
The boat continued at the same slow pace, wearing down my patience bit by bit. If we sped up, it would attract suspicion, so all I could do was wait.
Finally, the way ahead of us was open. The narrow waterway would soon join the canal.
I realized that my vision was becoming clearer. Not because my eyes were adjusting to the dark, but because dawn was approaching.
Our trick would work much better in the dark, but apparently we didn’t have that luxury anymore.
Satoru kept checking over his shoulder, measuring the distance between our boats. The fiend was about a hundred meters back, still following intently.
Our boat entered the intersection of the waterway and the canal and went left. The canal was dozens of meters wide, almost the same as the Tone River. The fiend was still in the waterway and had an unobstructed view of our boat.
Timing the moment carefully, Satoru waited for the moment the fiend’s boat entered the canal and conjured a mirror behind our boat. It was probably larger than any mirror that had ever been created, spanning the entire width of the canal.
Just like that, we had doubled the distance between us to two hundred meters. The fiend was still traveling toward us, but it was now following its own reflection instead of our boat.
“Ready? I’m sending you over.”
“Okay…!”
My body lifted off the boat and flew over the side. I skimmed over the water with the speed of a falcon.
We couldn’t float freely through the air like Maria, but we could manage to move each other a fair distance.
In a few moments, I was far away from the boat. A pillow of air slowed me down and I fell onto the bank of the canal.
As soon as I dropped down on the grass, I flipped over and lay low to the ground, scanning for the positions of the boats. Satoru’s boat was already well ahead. Next came the mirror, then the fiend’s boat. The fiend was still concentrating on chasing its own reflection and didn’t seem to have noticed me flying through the air.
Now it was my turn. I lifted Satoru out of the boat, and being careful to stay in the shadow of the mirror, brought him ashore.
Satoru had his arms around his knees as he sped toward the bank. I realized he was going too fast, but it was too late to slow him down. He bounced when he hit the ground and went rolling across the grass.
The mirror shattered in a puff of mist and disappeared. It was still dark enough that the fiend probably didn’t notice the sudden change in the boat’s appearance.
There was still more to the plan. I pushed the now empty boat as fast as I could. The bottom of the boat lifted out of the water and began skimming the surface of the canal. It was a lot easier controlling the boat once I wasn’t in it. The fiend didn’t speed up and gradually fell behind.
Then, Satoru’s speculation came true. The boat we had been riding in suddenly burst into flames.
I drew back my cantus to prevent it from coming in contact with the fiend’s. The burning boat continued traveling forward by momentum until it bumped against the bank of the canal. The flames ate away at it until it slowly sank beneath the water.
With the fire extinguished, the surrounding area was once again enveloped by darkness.
Satoru approached, still crouched low. He crawled the last few meters and came up beside me. He seemed to have landed hard on his side and kept rubbing at it. We grasped each other’s hands tightly.
The fiend approached the place where the boat had sunk and circled it almost longingly. What was it doing? We watched impatiently. As long as the fiend kept hanging around, we couldn’t move. If it spotted us now, there would be no escape.
Finally, it slowly turned the boat around. We held our breath as it passed in front of us. Every hair on my neck was raised in anticipation, but nothing happened. The fiend returned the way it had come. My body went weak with relief.
But there was no time to celebrate. As the fiend headed back in the direction of the hospital, my spirits fell again.
I hoped Okano had managed to escape. If they were still hiding in there…
“Alright, let’s go,” Satoru said, pulling me to my feet. “Since our boat’s gone, we’ll have to continue on foot. We have to hurry.”
“Do we have to throw each other all the way over the hill this time?” I said as casually as possible to hide the fact that I was near tears.
“Give me a break. I’ve suffered enough thanks to you.” He smiled wryly.
It was now light enough that I could see him clearly.
Faint rays of light were coming from the east. The hills near the horizon were dyed a deep crimson.
It was an unsettling sight, a blood-red dawn.
We had to get back to town as soon as possible to let everyone know what we had seen. That thought drove us relentlessly onward, but we were forced to move slowly in case there were queerats lying in wait.
Moreover, we were both barefoot. The bleeding gashes in my feet had gotten worse, and even after Satoru fashioned a makeshift boot for me with strips of cloth from his yukata, it still hurt so much that we weren’t making much progress.
Various thoughts flitted through my mind. Terrible thoughts that I tried desperately to drive away. I tried to concentrate on the situation at hand. That meant thinking about the pain in my feet, and no
t about all the scary things that had happened since last night.
But eventually, my mind started trying to escape the present reality altogether.
I thought about the ancient civilizations.
Despite the fact that cantus didn’t exist back then, there appeared to be numerous accounts of miracles being performed. Of course, there were an infinite number of things we were capable of now that were impossible back then, but our current society had fallen far behind the ancients in two important areas.
The first was our lack of communication methods. The old civilization used radio waves and machines to send large amounts of data almost instantaneously. Now, we used speaking tubes to communicate over short distances, but naturally it wasn’t enough to cover the entire district. Shisei Kaburagi’s ability to write in the sky aside, the carrier pigeons and smoke signals we used to communicate over long distances were so low-tech the ancients would have laughed their heads off. Normally, these methods worked just fine, but in emergencies, communication is more important than anything else. I don’t think anyone truly realized this until today.
The second was our limited ability to travel. Kamisu 66 was full of waterways that acted like blood vessels in a body, carrying people and goods wherever they needed to go, but when the canals were frozen over in the winter, there were only a few roads we could travel by. Though in this case, we didn’t think it was a problem.
Soon, Yakomaru would exploit this very weakness with his brilliant planning and show everyone that our district was more vulnerable than we had ever imagined. But of course, we didn’t know that yet.
Let’s get back on track. As we marched toward town on our bloody, injured feet, we came across an empty house in the fields and decided to take a short break inside.
I felt that Maria had led us to find this house. Earlier, when we were lost and trying to decide which way to go, I was sure I heard someone, a guardian angel, whisper in my ear and give me a push in this direction. Satoru said I was overthinking it. In any case, I thought that coming across this place was something close to a miracle, since there were no other houses within a five kilometer radius.
Usually, we would never have considered breaking into someone’s house while they were gone, but in an emergency like this, finding shelter was our first priority.
