by Yusuke Kishi
Inui shook his head. “If only I had been able to return sooner and given the people more notice…we could have avoided the number of casualties.”
“You left to annihilate the colony a week ago, right? What happened after that?”
Slowly, Inui began telling his story.
The Security Council had sent a team of five Wildlife Protection officers to exterminate two hundred thousand members of the Robber Fly colony within three days. But they didn’t kill a single one. Somehow, the queerats had gotten wind that the officers were coming and the entire army had simply vanished underground.
They scoured the mountains for an entire day, and sent a message to the Department of Health by bird the next morning. The next two days were all the same, and their search ended unfruitfully. The event happened on the fourth day.
The five Wildlife Protection officers on the mission were all veterans and familiar with the queerats’ fighting strategies and weaknesses, so they knew that when the queerats went into hiding, the worst thing to do would be to split up and search for them separately. It was a common tactic they used when dealing with multiple cantus users.
So that morning the officers set out together to hunt down the queerats. After a few hours, they finally came across the traces of a camp.
They found the troop about an hour later. About ten queerats were moving in and out of a cave dug into the foot of a mountain, bringing out weapons that had been hidden inside. Umino confirmed that they were members of the Tiger Moth colony, which was allied with the Robber Flies. The five officers split up to surround the queerats, though they kept close enough to provide backup for each other if needed.
Eliminating a small number of queerats is about as difficult as getting rid of a hornet nest. Two officers defend against counterattacks while the third kills the queerats and the two remaining officers keep watch over the area and either kill the queerats that try to escape or capture them for questioning. Inui was one of the patrols and had circled around to the right and perched himself on top of a large rock that gave a clear view of the battleground. The other patrol, Aizawa, had gone around to the left and was concealed in a hollow on the ground.
The attack began. If they realized they were being attacked by humans, the queerats would probably try to escape through other tunnels in the mountain and there was no way of knowing how many exits had been dug into the mountain. Kengo, who was attacking, used pebbles to create the sound of fake gunfire.
As expected, the Tiger Moths assumed it was a hostile colony attacking and began preparing to fight. They came out, sheltering behind stone and bamboo shields and began counterattacking. Kawamata shot the fake bullets into a wooded area a short distance away, and the Tiger Moths began concentrating their fire in that direction. After a while, the firing ceased and Tiger Moth soldiers started swarming out of the mountain.
At that moment, a soldier appeared from a tunnel higher up on the mountain and spotted Aizawa down below. Before it could even raise its bow, Inui killed it without making a sound. Judging from the camouflage cloak it was wearing, the soldier was probably a sniper who killed enemies from afar.
The battle below was decided within moments. Kawamata killed the oncoming queerats with brisk, practiced movements, while the defenders, Umino and Kamoshida, barely had to raise a finger.
Then something else appeared from the cave, its face hidden under a grey hood. Thinking that the remaining queerats were surrendering, Inui didn’t kill them. The other four officers appeared to come to the same conclusion. No one attacked the approaching figure, but they all felt there was something strange about it.
Kawamata, Umino, Kamoshida, and Aizawa all went forward carefully, even though there was usually no need for four people to confront one queerat.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Kawamata asked.
It was then that Inui realized that the figure was human. It was difficult to tell from his position, but he estimated that it was about as tall as the average queerat, roughly the size of a human child.
What happened next was the stuff of nightmares.
Kawamata’s head burst like a ripe melon, sending blood and brains flying everywhere. Umino, Kamoshida, then Aizawa all met the same fate.
Inui was too shocked to react. His heart pounded wildly in his chest and he broke out in a cold sweat. The only thing in his mind was the word ‘fiend’.
When had calmed down a little, a thousand questions flooded through his head. Why was a fiend here? Why did it come out of the queerat tunnels? Who in the world was it?
But he had no time to ponder the answer to any of these questions. His mind immediately switched to a more pressing matter. How could he escape unscathed?
His first and strongest instinct was to just run as fast and far as possible. But Inui forced himself to calm down and think carefully. Then he stripped the camouflage cloak from the queerat he had killed earlier. He thought through his plan again. Yes, this was the correct choice.
If he were to leave his current position, he would end up in the middle of the queerat troops with no way to escape. There was no guarantee he would be able to fight them all off alone, and the appearance of the fiend only made the situation more dangerous.
Inui inched his way over to a better hiding spot and waited for the enemies to disperse. Unfortunately, the queerats seemed determined to stay. Inui suspected that they knew the “gods of death” always worked in teams of five. In that case, he was trapped.
The camouflage cloak proved to be a godsend. It even had a hood, so Inui was able to wrap the entire thing around himself, effectively concealing his own scent beneath the original owner’s pungent odor. Even so, there was a moment when he was almost discovered. The queerats were marching right at him and Inui had to pass through their field of view in order to take cover in the woods. Thankfully, he was slight enough to pretend to be one of them by slouching and mimicking their movements and so remained undiscovered.
“…but it took all my skill to avoid being discovered, and escaping was impossible,” Inui said bitterly. “Four days passed, and as I didn’t have any food and no water apart from the dew I collected from the plants, my body was at its limit. In the middle of the fourth day…yesterday, the entire army started moving out. At first I wondered if this was some trap, but then I realized I had no time to waste. The moment the sun went down, I headed toward the district to warn everyone about the queerats and, more importantly, the fiend.”
Inui crept over the hills toward Outlook. He had planned to ask for help from the first person he saw, but he didn’t come across anyone. Then he remembered it was the night of the festival.
Most of the town would be empty. Inui was dismayed, but he knew there was one place where there would definitely be people around.
The nursery at the hospital.
The main hospital is in Gold, which is quite a distance from Outlook, but as luck would have it, the nursery is located in the center of Outlook. Inui changed course and headed to the nursery. He could see the fireworks bursting over Hayring and faintly hear the cheers of the crowd drifting over the air.
When he finally arrived at the nursery, he was greeted with the most shocking scene he had ever seen.
“Of course, I knew it was their custom. We saw at the end of every war between colonies, but we simply considered it another tradition of an inferior culture. But that they would do it to humans…!” Inui sputtered.
“Wait, you aren’t saying that they-” Satoru couldn’t even finish the question. He looked like he had been punched in the stomach.
“Yes. Those despicable creatures kidnapped the infants.”
I recalled a scene from summer camp.
A large number of Giant Hornet soldiers came flooding out of the nest. Some of them carried something carefully in their arms.
“Those are…?” I realized before I finished asking.
Nestlings.
“There are many nurseries within the nest. These nestlings we
re all birthed by the Ground Spider queen.”
“But, why?”
The satisfied look on Kiroumaru’s face was almost repulsive. “These are treasured spoils of war. They are the workforce that will serve our colony in the future.”
One of the soldiers brought a nestling to Kiroumaru. It hadn’t yet opened its eyes and was reaching out with its front paws as if trying to touch something. Its pink skin made it look much more like a rat than its adult counterpart.
I remembered what Squealer had said.
“The queen is executed and the rest of the members become slaves. As long as they live they are treated as less than scum, and when they die they are left out to rot and fertilize the fields.”
The nestlings had only a dismal future ahead of them.
My mind was reeling from this realization. I thought I was going to throw up.
Yakomaru’s true goal that night had been to kidnap the infants.
“They slaughtered all the nurses with help from the fiend and rounded up all the infants. Not only that, but they tattooed them on the spot in that strange script they use.”
After joining the Exospecies Division, I’d seen their script a number of times. It resembled kanji, but was somehow different. It was more like the Jurchen, Khitan, or maybe Tangut script.
“They’re not just looking to double their investment…” Satoru said, his face going white. “They started with Maria’s child. He grew into a fiend that even Shisei Kaburagi couldn’t defeat. When the children they abducted awaken to their cantus in ten years…”
I understood what he was saying. This was the grand design Yakomaru had nurtured in secret.
Ideally, he would take Kamisu 66 with a single fiend. But if that didn’t work, he only had to wait another ten years. I didn’t know exactly how many children were in the nursery, but there had to be at least a hundred. Under the queerats’ care, the children would all turn into fiends, and there wouldn’t be a single community in Japan that could stand in his way. If Yakomaru then kidnapped all the children from those communities, he would have an entire army of fiends, and he could expand to the rest of the Far East and even Eurasia. World conquest would not be out of the question. It would be the birth of the great queerat empire.
“I still don’t know what I should have done at the time. I probably should have headed to town immediately to report what I’d seen. But I couldn’t. I was so disgusted by what I saw that I couldn’t just leave without doing anything. So when a queerat appeared in front of me gleefully clutching a crying baby in its arms, I blew its head off without a second thought.”
Inui’s face was flushed with emotion.
“Of course, there was this big commotion. They were panicking because what had happened was obviously a cantus attack, but they couldn’t pinpoint where it had come from. I managed to slip away in all the confusion. Of course, I hadn’t planned any of it, I killed simply in the heat of the moment.”
“But you still escaped unscathed,” Satoru said.
“Not entirely. Even with the camouflage cloak, one of the soldiers got suspicious and shot me in the left arm. I tried to flee, but ran straight into the fiend. I didn’t actually get a look at its face, but I’m positive it was the fiend.”
“What did you do?” I asked, hardly daring to breathe.
“I was saved by the skills I learned. I ran away crying ‘It hurts! It hurts!’ in their language. My face was covered well enough that no one could see what I looked like, and I managed to get away.”
Inui seemed happier now that he had gotten this off his chest and he began to speak more easily.
“Since Outlook was already under their control, I had no choice but to escape back into the wilderness. But then I started to lose consciousness. I was sure I would be captured this time, and to be honest, I was ready to accept that. But someone helped me when I had almost passed out. I opened my eyes, relieved that I’d finally found another human, but the one staring down at me was clearly a queerat. I thought this was the end. But he brought me all the way here.”
“What do you mean a queerat helped you…” Satoru looked doubtful.
“It was Yakomaru’s chief opponent, the leader of the Giant Hornet colony. Kiroumaru. I always thought he was a remarkable guy, but I never dreamed that he’d be the one to save me.”
“So Kiroumaru is still alive? Where is he now?” I asked.
“Hm, good question. I’d just come to when Jakujou-san told me you had arrived, and I asked to see you. I completely forgot about Kiroumaru.”
“Excuse me.” Jakujou’s voice came from outside the door. “Watanabe-san, I have the item your parents left in my care.”
The plain wooden box was larger than I had expected, about 60 centimeters long. It felt quite heavy and there was an envelope stuck to the top.
“Thank you very much.”
“Inui-san told us that Kiroumaru brought him here. Where did he go after that?”
“Oh…the exospecies member?” Jakujou said indifferently. “It’s being held at the temple. Probably still being questioned.”
“Can we see him?”
“I’m not sure.”
I set the box down on the table and opened the letter.
Chapter 7
The letter was hastily written with a brush pen in my mother’s familiar handwriting. Just seeing that was enough to make me start crying.
Dearest Saki,
I write this letter, confident that you have made it safely to the Temple of Purity.
Although I do not know how we’ve arrived at the present situation, I do know that many have already died at the hands of the fiend that has descended upon the district. Right now, we must do everything in our power to stop it, so we are returning to the district. If we should die there, then that is our duty. It is said that knowledge is power, and knowledge is necessary to defeat the fiend. As the head librarian, I now pass that knowledge on to you.
Do not come after us. We will do everything we can to stop the fiend, but in the event that we fail, there is something you must do.
What I am about to write falls under class four, category three, “catastrophic”. As such, please burn this letter after you have read it. Do not let personal feelings hold you back. Keep the best interests of the district in mind. Do not forget that you were chosen by Tomiko-sama.
Do you remember what I said about weapons of mass destruction at the Security Council meeting?
There was a time when weapons that could annihilate mankind many times over filled the earth. Most of them have been destroyed, and time has rendered the rest useless. I said that it’s possible that supercluster bombs still exist, but even if they did, I can’t imagine that they are still in working condition.
However, when I was looking through information on the bombs, I found another report. According to it, there is one weapon that could have survived a thousand years and into our time. Ironically, it is a weapon designed by those without cantus to wipe out cantus users. It had the disgusting nickname “Psychobuster”.
The psychobuster was developed by the Americans and secretly brought over by the military when they were stationed in Japan.
The section after that was titled “Tokyo” and filled with mantra-like script interspersed with numbers. I couldn’t really understand what exactly the psychobuster was supposed to be.
Saki-chan, I’m sure you’ve already figured out the reason we need this horrible weapon.
We can’t kill the fiend with cantus.
In the past, every time a fiend appeared in a town, mountains of corpses filled the streets and the rivers ran red with blood. Perhaps one way of looking at the fiend is as the result of our collective karma. In that case, there is no way for us to eliminate it.
After reading the accounts of attacks throughout history, I know that every era has had to suffer their share of fiends. There are also records of what I can only describe as divine intervention. Once, when buildings were being torn down and piled together
to act as obstacles against the fiend, a piece of rebar just happened to ricochet right into the fiend’s chest, killing it. The people tearing down the building died of death feedback, but ultimately, many lives were saved.
However, attempts to replicate the event all ended in failure. People who tried to destroy buildings near a fiend were all immobilized by attack inhibition. There were also attempts to hide the intent to murder through alcohol or narcotics, but unfortunately, none succeeded. No matter how hard you try, it is exceedingly difficult to deceive yourself.
Still, there was a hint to the solution in the most recent occurrence. 257 years ago, the fiend K was killed by one doctor’s heroic actions. The doctor injected K with a lethal cocktail of drugs. Although he was killed by K soon after, K also died.
I don’t know what would have happened to the doctor if K hadn’t killed him. It’s very possible that he would have died of death feedback., but the most important point is that he was somehow able to kill K.
I don’t know to what extent the doctor was aware that he was injecting poison into K. Just writing this down makes me shudder in fear, but I believe that given a certain kind of medium, we would still be able to kill another human without using cantus.
As you would expect, records show that attempts to use bows and arrows and guns all ended in failure as it’s impossible to use these weapons without a definite intent to kill your opponent.
But the weapons of mass destruction developed by the ancient civilization have no such limitations. Hundreds of thousands of people can be killed with the press of a button, but while you may understand logically what you are doing, it doesn’t feel real. In other words, it’s a device that can override our conscience and abhorrence toward killing and make it possible to commit mass murder.
The psychobuster is considered a weapon of mass destruction, but it does not operate on as large a scale and is more suited for assassinations and terrorism. In any case, it’s a weapon that does not make the user feel like they are killing, so attack inhibition will most likely not prevent you from using it. Perhaps even death feedback can be avoided as well.
