by Yusuke Kishi
We took off our torn yukata and put on clean clothes we found in the house. Unfortunately, all the clothes were made for men, either in an adult or a child size. I put on cotton shorts and a khaki T-shirt. Satoru chose jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Amazingly, we both found shoes that fit well.
In the kitchen, we found dough that was left to rise. We put it in a pot along with miso and whatever vegetables were at hand and made flour dumpling soup.
There was a cart sitting behind the house. It had two large wooden wheels and was basically just a big handcart, but to us, it looked like just the vehicle we needed to travel quickly.
I felt bad for stealing, but we took the cart anyway, intending to come back and thank the owner later. The axle and wheels were sturdily made, so we were able go at a good speed, but the road was bumpy and there being only two wheels meant the cart tilted back and forth constantly. I started feeling sick.
“I…I can’t take this.”
I got off, trying my hardest not to throw up. The dumplings I had just eaten were sloshing around in my stomach.
“Yeah, this thing really isn’t meant to carry people.”
Satoru looked a bit green too. It probably didn’t help that we had gone an entire night without sleep.
“Let’s take the canals. I don’t know how long it’ll take us to get there at this rate.”
“But we don’t have a boat.”
“Let’s make one out of the cart. It might not be buoyant enough, but we can make up for that with cantus.”
I looked at the cart. If we could get it to float, it could work as a kind of raft.
“But what if we get ambushed by queerats while we’re on the water?”
We were completely visible in the canals, so there was no telling where or when an attack would come.
“We’ll have to take that risk. It’s probably too late to worry about that anyway. …well, there’s two of us, so as long as the fiend doesn’t appear, we’ll manage somehow.”
I wasn’t sure if Satoru’s optimism was founded on logical reasoning, or if he was just too tired to think things through.
As we made our way through the tall grass toward the canal, sounds of explosions came from far away.
“What now?” Satoru asked, looking grim.
“The fight’s still going…”
There came a second explosion, and a third. They were getting louder.
“Without knowing what’s going on, all we have are useless guesses. We just have to hurry back as soon as possible.”
After that, I think I heard another seven or eight blasts.
Each explosion was like a whip spurring us onward. I still had no idea what was happening, except that if the humans were attacking, they wouldn’t be using explosives.
Finally, we came across the main canal that led to the center of town and Satoru lowered the handcart into the water. It floated, but water sloshed over the side when we tried to sit in it. We removed the metal rims on the wheels to make it lighter, but even then, a moderately big wave could have sunk us in an instant.
We couldn’t afford to waste any more time, so we set off down the canal. Satoru propelled us forward while I focused on keeping the cart afloat. I had hoped that spinning the wheels would help us float better, but unfortunately it had absolutely no effect. All it did was make the cart tilt back so much we almost fell off. We grabbed on to the front edge of the cart to steady ourselves and discovered that this was a fairly stable position. Keeping the front slightly above the water and pushing from behind, like riding a surfboard, gave us twice the speed we had before. We sped ahead, leaving a wake trailing behind us.
The next few kilometers passed quickly. We were both soaked through, but since it was summer, it didn’t feel too terrible. However, clinging onto the raft for dear life in addition to constantly using cantus was exhausting. On top of that, I couldn’t see what was in front of the cart, so I kept tensing up in preparation for possibly hitting something.
Still, compared to walking the entire way on my injured feet while keeping watch for a surprise attack, this was positively enjoyable.
We were nearing a smaller canal that branched off of this one. The wheels hit something underwater and a dull shock ran through the cart.
“What was that?”
Satoru stopped the cart and lowered the front so it was now lying flat on the water The waves came dangerously close to spilling over the edge.
“…the right wheel, I think. It’s stuck on something.”
“A rock?”
“There shouldn’t be a rock this big in the middle of the canal. It’s at least four or five meters deep here.”
We peered over the edge of the cart.
At first, the thing was so large that I had no idea what I was looking at. But the water was clear enough that I was able to make out that something was lying at the bottom of the canal.
“What the heck is that…thing?”
Satoru was at a loss for words. The thing blended in with the sandy bottom of the canal, but I could tell that it was twenty or thirty meters long and tapered at both ends like a spindle. In other words, it looked like a gigantic sea cucumber.
“Was that what we hit?”
“I don’t think we could have reached it in that position…”
He lowered his head to the water’s surface and stared hard at the thing. I did the same. A rock a little ways away drifted slowly toward the thing. Satoru was moving it. I didn’t even get a chance to tell him to be careful. The rock bobbed close to the thing’s tail (I didn’t actually know which end was which, but for convenience’ sake, I’m calling the end that’s pointing in the direction we were going the head) and thumped against it.
The reaction was instantaneous. The sea cucumber thing wriggled its giant body and swam off with unbelievable speed.
Right away, I grabbed it by the tail with cantus. As if it could feel my touch, the thing twisted its head back toward us and spewed a pitch black cloud of liquid. It was a surprisingly large amount of liquid and the water all around was dyed black. I couldn’t see a thing.
“Shit. Get to shore!”
We pulled away from the water and pushed the cart onto the left bank. Looking at the dark water, I couldn’t guess where an attack would come from. We jumped off the cart and hid in the grass, trying to find a higher vantage point that overlooked the river.
Looking out at the water again, I saw that about a hundred meters of the canal had turned black.
“It’s not poison, is it?” I asked.
Satoru looked at his hand that had been dyed by the water.
“No…but it’s not ink like an octopus’s or squid’s either.”
I peered closely at the inside of my forearm.
“The black stuff isn’t liquid…”
I could see clear water and tiny black particles suspended in it.
“It’s some kind of fine black powder.”
Satoru looked at the water and chanted his mantra.
The water began to clear. He was making the particles sink to the bottom.
When the canal was about three-quarters clear, I spotted the monster. It seemed to notice that its smokescreen was disappearing and started swimming away again.
But this time, we were ready. I clamped down on its slug-like body and pulled it up out of the canal. Water streamed from its body, sending up giant sprays of mist.
The monster seemed to have a pretty good idea of what was happening and twisted around violently, trying to see where its captors were.
I gasped when I saw its face. As large as its body was, its head was no bigger than a human’s. It had big, black eyes like a seal’s. Even stranger was its mouth, two or three meters long and pointed like a crocodile or a bird’s. If it wasn’t for its size, I would have said it had a mosquito’s mouth.
“It’s one of the mutant queerats,” Satoru said.
I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen the Ground Spider’s leaf fighters, or blowdogs befor
e. There were some mutants that were able to move underwater and on land, like the frog soldiers, but this monster seemed to live exclusively in the water.
“…I see. This thing was trying to fog up the whole canal.”
In order to gain control of the river leading to the center of town, Yakomaru had it dyed black. Once again his ingenuity scared me.
“But is this really that creature’s only purpose?” Satoru asked, staring at his hand again. “If it was, they could have just used squid or octopus ink. Why the black powder…”
He gasped. “No. It has another purpose…I got it! The explosion from before!”
“What are you talking about?”
At that moment, the monster’s eyes fell upon us. It looked at us unblinkingly. A long spike I hadn’t noticed earlier stood up on its head, swaying in the wind. It looked like a flag or a fin.
“Watch out!” Satoru shouted.
The creature’s mouth pointed this way and blew out an enormous cloud of black powder.
Chapter 5
The black cloud completely obscured my vision. This was the crossroad between life and death.
If we breathed in the powder, it would choke us to death. If we built a wall around us, we’d still be stuck inside the cloud, unable to move. And we wouldn’t have time react to what came next.
I released my hold on the creature and its fifty-ton body hit the ground like a sack of jelly. It lay flattened, undoubtedly dead from massive internal damage. Except it raised its head again and let out another blast of powder. In seconds, it emptied all the black powder stored in its body.
This is what I imagine happened next. The friction caused by expelling so much powder through its tubular beak heated it up hundreds of degrees. Then, either the monster created a spark itself, or a tiny piece of its beak broke off from the heat and flew into the cloud, effectively turning it into a flamethrower.
Whatever the cause, the entire cloud burst into flames. A so-called dust explosion. Whereas chunks of coal will burn slowly, powder or dust combines easily with oxygen in the air and burns explosively.
The blast was over two hundred meters in diameter. No one could have escaped from it, except maybe Shisei Kaburagi.
The second the black cloud surrounded me, my first thought was not to protect myself, but to save Satoru. Satoru seemed to have the same thought about me. I guess we were lucky we had a chance to practice throwing each other when we were escaping from the fiend.
As Satoru was obscured by the cloud, I called up the image of a catapult, hooked his body into it and flung him up into the sky as hard as I could.
At the same time, I felt a burst of speed so intense I almost passed out. When my vision cleared, the ground was already far, far below me.
Satoru had thrown me into the air at the same time I catapulted him, and I had instinctively protected my ears with cantus to prevent my eardrums from bursting from the rapid change in air pressure. Breathing through my nose, I equalized the pressure in my ears. As I free-fell through the air, my stomach floated weightlessly inside me and made me nauseous. The wind tore at my shirt.
How far up was I? I could see all of Kamisu 66, the surrounding forests and even Mt. Tsukuba all in one glance. But Satoru was nowhere to be seen.
A large area below was shrouded in a mass of black dust, like some nasty mushroom slowly growing larger and larger.
I was about to fall right back into it. I flailed my arms around and tried desperately to make myself float, but had no idea what kind of image I was supposed to conjure up.
The black cloud below started exploding in dazzling flashes of light.
I was lifted up once again by the wind coming off of the blasts. In a few moments, I would be carried far away.
Flying felt neither wonderful nor frightening. Even though I had never been this far off the ground in my life, I knew I could soften my landing to an extent.
The sun shone blindingly down on me and white, cottony clouds drifted lazily across the sky.
That’s when the hallucination started.
The bright sky suddenly turned dark as if light and darkness had been inverted.
The moon illuminated the earth below, and I could see each individual crater on its surface.
Ah, this…
I knew I was seeing something I had physically experienced before.
A memory that had been erased. It felt like it had been reassembled from bits and pieces of other memories.
The moon illuminated ■’s bungalow below.
Everything I could see was full of pits and craters.
The area around the bungalow was half-buried in dirt, like there had been a landslide. There was a deep rumbling coming from the ground along with the creaks and snaps of trees being pulled up by the roots.
This frightening apocalyptic scene grew smaller and smaller. I realized that I was flying backwards in a big arc. The wind buffeted my sweater this way and that. It blew away my barrette and my hair trailed out in front of me in the night air.
If I just crashed into something and died, that wouldn’t be too bad.
With that thought, I closed my eyes.
And opened them again.
■ had saved me with the last of his strength.
I had to live.
I turned to face forward and opened my eyes against the stinging wind. My tears were whipped away behind me.
The vision had lasted just a second. The sky had returned to normal and sun was shining just as brightly as before.
I remembered clearly now. The faceless boy had saved my life once. Just like Satoru had just saved me.
Riding the wind from the explosions, I flew far away from the blast site, falling toward earth at breakneck speed all the while. It seemed like I was headed toward the center of the district.
I finally got a good look of the scenery below.
It was the main street of Hayring, usually the most crowded place in town. What I saw now shocked me. Almost everything had been destroyed, leaving behind mountains of debris and ruined buildings. There wasn’t a single person to be seen.
I was descending too quickly. Gravity was pulling me down faster and faster. I pushed on the ground with cantus and slowed a little.
My next thought was to try a water landing. If I land in a canal, I should be able to avoid major injuries even if I couldn’t slow down completely.
Then I saw that the canals were dry.
The water had been drained…
There was no time to wonder why. I immediately switched gears and called up the image of a pair of wings. I had to keep going, to glide just a bit farther.
A soft place to land, that was all I needed. Something yellow caught my eye. A field of sunflowers. We planted dense fields of them for their oil.
I struggled to change my trajectory toward the sunflower field. How in the world did Maria make flying look so easy?
The yellow flowers whizzed past below me. Crap. I couldn’t slow down with the image I was using. I switched to the image of a pair of arms and slammed them down into the field. Flowers went flying everywhere.
The moment before impact, I closed my eyes instinctively. Broken stalks grazed my cheeks.
I hit the ground. Despite having the flowers as a cushion, I still had all the air knocked out of me and passed out on the bed of blossoms.
When I came to, I was lying facedown. Slowly, I moved my arms and legs, checking to see if they were still working. My palms were scraped raw but it looked like that was the worst of it.
I listened carefully to the noises around me and quietly stood up.
It was a beautiful summer morning. Birds were singing. Other than that, all was silent.
Where was Satoru? I tried to remember where I catapulted him, but my memory was hazy. I believed that he was okay, but couldn’t help worrying anyway.
My head was spinning from overusing cantus. I probably only passed out for five or ten minutes, not nearly enough time to recover my strength.
If the queerats or that creature showed up now, I would have a hard time protecting myself. Fighting the fiend was completely out of the question. But I didn’t have time to sit around pitying myself. I had to get to town.
I started walking, still keeping an eye on my surroundings.
Leaving the sunflower field, I entered a thicket of trees. After a while, I saw an area where the trees had been torn up. The explosions we had heard on the way here came to mind. No doubt some other monster similar to the creature in the canal had been blowing up the town and the shockwaves had reached all the way here.
But if the blasts were this powerful, the creature must have died along with them. A suicide bomber, in other words. Whereas the blowdog had protected the Ground Spider nest at the cost of its life, this powder-spewing creature had been bred as a decisive assault weapon against human enemies.
All the queerats were no more than pawns in a greater game. They didn’t mind sacrificing themselves, or rather, they launched their attacks fully intending to die in the process.
This was something I had never imagined. We believed in the omnipotence of our power and underestimated what the queerats were capable of.
But what was driving the queerats to go to such lengths?
I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I had stopped paying attention to my surroundings. I was almost out of the thicket when it happened.
A large boulder came flying right at me.
I was so taken by surprise that I couldn’t even block with cantus. I fell back onto my butt. Luckily, its aim was off and the boulder flew over my head.
A second attack came as soon as the first had failed. The few trees that had survived the creature’s blast creaked and groaned as they were pulled out of the ground. No matter how I looked at it, this was a cantus user at work.
Could the fiend have come here? My mind went numb. If it was, I was done for…
I stopped the trees and felt the jarring sensation of two cantus coming into contact. A shimmering rainbow appeared in the air.
“Wha-what…?” came a surprised voice.
