by Yusuke Kishi
The voice retreated into the distance and was replaced a different sound.
“Watanabe-san! Please get a hold of yourself. Are you okay?” Inui said loudly.
I returned to reality.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I was just nodding off…”
The two halves of my mind slowly came together.
“We’re surfacing?”
“Now?”
“The flow has slowed and I can see what I believe to be the surface. There appears to be a large tunnel above.”
The boat floated up through the still, dark water.
Inui opened the top latch, listening carefully for any sounds.
I breathed a sigh of relief as fresh air came into the cabin.
“This is a rather spacious tunnel. It was probably built a long time ago.”
He climbed out onto the deck and I followed. We seemed to be inside a giant stone dome.
“Stars?” I asked when I looked up.
I immediately realized they weren’t stars. The green, twinkling lights on the ceiling of the dome looked familiar.
“Glowworms…”
This was on a different scale than the ones I had seen in the queerat tunnels years ago. There were so many glowworms that it seemed like there was an entire galaxy above us. The dark water looked like the dark night sky as it reflected their light.
“It’s my first time seeing them too. They attract insects with that light,” Inui said, sounding fascinated.
“Without any of their competitors, the flytrappers, around, the glowworms have taken over. …I see. There are no holes in the ceiling. The driller worms don’t seem to be able to penetrate the stone. Maybe it’s too thick, or too hard. In any case, that’s why there aren’t any flytrappers.”
At that moment, an unrelated scene appeared in my mind.
A ripple spread out from our boat, and the waves disappeared.
“Wow, that’s amazing…”
It was as if the water had been frozen over. Any imperfection was been smoothed out and the surface looked like polished glass–a giant mirror reflecting every star in the sky.
“Beautiful. It’s like I’m in space.”
I would remember this night until the day I died.
We floated not on a river, but the Milky Way.
“What’s the matter?” Inui asked when I suddenly froze.
“No…it’s nothing.” I turned and looked around at the dome, trying to hide my tears from him.
A perfect moment, a perfect world…
Then I remembered. The one who had shown me that scenery was the faceless boy.
“It’s almost done charging.” Inui looked up, his forehead covered in sweat from intense concentration.
“Thank you…it’s amazing you’re able to do that. If I were here alone, I really don’t know what I’d do,” I said sincerely.
“From a technical perspective, it’s not difficult. I figured you just have to give it light of the same wavelength as sunlight so…” he looked over at the lantern and torch he had struggled so hard to make. “If we can start this thing up and ask how to make a solar battery, the rest will be easy. I don’t know how the solar panel converts light to electricity, but I can feed it electricity directly with cantus if that’s all it needs.”
He unfastened the battery cover and pointed at the wires.
I had no idea what image to use for something abstract like electricity. Satoru was also good with machines, so maybe this was something boys were naturally better at.
It only took a short while before the fake false minoshiro was running again. Even though it had appeared to be off this whole time, it had still been keeping track of our position and was able tell us where we were instantly. Fortunately, we had gone up the correct tunnel.
I asked Inui to go back into the boat so I could wash in the river and change my clothes. Once the stinking slime was off of me, I felt much better, though still not entirely optimistic, about the task ahead. All we had to do now was to meet up with Satoru and Kiroumaru and use the fake false minoshiro to find our way to the old, abandoned building.
I immediately realized how naive my thinking was.
In the time it had taken for us to travel up the river, evening had deepened into night.
Satoru and Kiroumaru were nowhere to be seen when we arrived at the meeting place.
We waited for a while, but Inui finally made the decision to move on.
“Let’s go. We can’t waste any more time.”
“But we can’t just leave them behind…” I protested, even though I knew it was the right thing to do.
“We’ll have to trust that they’re safe. They might be hiding somewhere trying to lure the fiend out. …it’s taken a lot of time to get here. We have an important mission, so we need to put that first.”
We set off in the boat again.
Compared to the tunnel earlier, the river here was much narrower, but thankfully the ceiling wasn’t too low. For some reason, there were no stalactites here, and the tunnel appeared to be completely manmade…like an old railway tunnel or something.
The fact that we couldn’t see any holes from the driller worms probably meant this was high-quality concrete. I had a feeling that Central Government Building No. 8 wasn’t far ahead.
In no time, we entered a wide space. It wasn’t as large as the dome with the glowworm planetarium, but it was still quite high. The fake false minoshiro said that this was a subway station.
As we moved through the darkness, the lantern slowly revealed traces of human activity from long ago. It gave me a creepy feeling.
The boat went slowly up the wide river, then suddenly came to a halt. There was a wall in front of us.
“The river ends here…?”
“It probably goes underground again. Let’s dive down and see.”
As if complaining about being overworked, the boat creaked and groaned as it dived.
We searched along the wall from the little window and realized two things. One, that there were many openings through which water was flowing, and two, none were big enough for the boat to pass through.
“This is bad. It’s impossible to continue in the boat.”
“Can we widen the hole?”
“Water might burst through all at once, and if we’re really unlucky, the entire tunnel could collapse.”
Why did we come all this way, I thought bitterly to myself.
“How far are we from the building,” I asked the fake false minoshiro.
“Roughly a hundred meters. Once you go up exit A19 ahead, you’ll be in the building.”
I felt my resolve strengthen. We had come this far. There was no reason to hesitate for the last hundred meters.
“Will you function in water?” Inui asked.
“The Toshiba Solar Autonomous Archive SP-SPTA-6000 is fully water resistant up to 13 bar pressure, and operational up to a maximum depth of 120 meters,” it reported proudly, having no idea what sort of fate it was about to meet.
“I’ll go first and come back if everything looks okay.”
I shook my head. “We’ll go together. It’s better to have two people if something happens.”
“But…”
“If anything happens to you, I won’t be able to continue on anyway. So we might as well throw our lots in together,” I said.
We went back and forth for a while, but Inui gave in in the end. We resurfaced and exited the boat.
Underwater walking was not one of my strong suits. I wished I had worked harder at it in Sage Academy, but it was too late for that now.
We gathered air from the tunnel and forced it underwater, creating two giant bubbles.
Inui went first. I followed, a little reluctantly since I had just changed into clean clothes. The water was cold as ice.
With weights on our back, we sank slowly to the bottom of the river. The bubble enclosed the lantern and the upper half of my body. There should be enough air for a few minutes.
Walking underwater was more t
iring than I imagined. There was a lot of resistance, and the flow of the river, slow as it was, kept pushing me back. The weight that prevented me from floating up to the surface also impeded my movements.
The inside of the bubble reflected the lantern light, making it almost impossible to see out. I had to stick my head out of the bubble every once in a while to make sure I was on the right track.
Thankfully, the bottom of the river was a lot flatter than I had anticipated. The walls too retained most of the shape from when they had been built during the ancient civilization. Maybe concrete lasted longer when it was covered with water.
A dozen meters into the tunnel, Inui began waving the lantern around, signaling that he had found the exit mentioned by the fake false minoshiro. I poked my head out of the bubble and saw a rectangular opening. The stairs must be just after that.
Just a little more. I unconsciously sped up. No, wait, something wasn’t right. Inui was waving his arms around wildly. What was going on?
The next instant, I was wrenched from the bubble. Inui threw me up against the top of the tunnel. Before I had time to wonder what was happening, a large shadow flashed by beneath the water.
It was a giant bristle worm even bigger than the one before. Having lost me as a target, it turned and made a beeline for Inui. He had no time to dodge. The worm’s jaws snapped down on his neck. At that instant, the worm burst into a million pieces, dyeing the water completely red.
The lantern light vanished, plunging everything into darkness. I fought desperately to keep myself from panicking. Because of the weight on my back, I felt myself sinking down again. I threw off my knapsack and floated back up. The wind had been knocked out of me when I was thrown against the ceiling and now I was running out of air. I reached out and felt around blindly.
There. A pocket of air against the ceiling. It must be the part of the bubble we brought. There wasn’t enough air to enclose my head, so I had to put my mouth against the bubble and breathe that way.
There was no time to lose. All I could think of was survival. There wasn’t enough air for me to go back, so I had to make it the next hundred meters to the exit.
The exit should be right ahead. As I was about to swim toward it I suddenly dived again and retrieved my knapsack. The fake false minoshiro was in it.
I went step by step. Don’t think. Don’t breathe, I thought to myself as I groped my way forward.
But I never arrived at the exit. Maybe I had gotten the direction wrong. Just as I felt my heart drop, I touched a wall. I ran my hands along both sides to make sure. My left hand felt emptiness. The exit. I kept going. One step, two steps, three steps in the darkness… My foot hit something. The stairs. I went up carefully. I couldn’t breathe. I needed air.
Don’t think. Just walk. One step at a time.
My consciousness began to fade. I couldn’t hold back the urge to exhale anymore.
The stairs continued endlessly. I couldn’t do it anymore. I dropped my knapsack and paddled upward with everything I had. My last bit of air escaped from my nose.
I broke the surface of the water, wheezing and desperately sucking in the stale, moldy air. There might have been harmful gases mixed in the air, but I didn’t care. Tears ran down my face as I breathed as deeply as I could in between fits of coughing.
Safe. I stumbled up the stairs and collapsed on the ground, sobbing. Inui had given up his life to save me, and now I was all alone in this hell.
It was strange that the wooden interior of the building had withstood a millennium of weathering better than what was supposed to be the most advanced concrete.
The first and second floors of Central Government Building No. 8 were preserved in near-perfect condition. There appeared to be a few reasons for this. First, the high-tech concrete had kept the shape of the building even after all the rebar inside it had rotted away. Second, the underground levels and foundation had been covered with water. Third, it had been covered by concrete from other collapsed buildings, so after all the fighting and destruction was over, and the area had been covered by karst formations, the building remained protected.
With the fake false minoshiro held in my left arm, and a torch in my right, I made my way through the dark building. The fake false minoshiro apparently had a lighting function, but I couldn’t afford to waste its battery. Now that Inui was gone, there was no way to charge it but to go back up to the surface.
Earlier, when I had turned back to get my knapsack with the fake false minoshiro, I had thought I would die. But when I thought about how Inui had risked his life to protect me, it seemed almost trivial. The fact that he had managed to take his enemy down with him was a testament to the skills of the Wildlife Protection officers. Thanks to him, I was still alive now. If the bristle worm happened to have survived, and I came across it again, I would be nothing more than bait.
If that happened, I would be breaking my promise to Inui. I had sworn to stop the fiend no matter what.
I took a few slow, deep breaths.
Before me was a building that had been left in cold darkness for ages. Something about it provoked a deep, primal fear within me.
The once-pleasing decor in the rooms had collapsed and melted together into unrecognizable blobs. Even more surprising was that tree roots from the surface had penetrated the building, covering part of the floor in sprawling tendrils. I had thought that Tokyo was nothing more than a barren wasteland, but it seemed that some plants had managed to survive. Just as I was wondering how the roots had manage to pierce through concrete that even driller worms couldn’t, I came across a shaft behind a crumbling metal door. The fake false minoshiro told me that it was called an elevator and was used to transport people from one floor to the next.
I cut off a couple of thick roots and made a torch. The wood was full of water and would not have burned without continual use of cantus, but the upside was that it burned slowly.
But did the thing I was searching for even exist in these ruins? The more I thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed.
There had been two room numbers listed in my mother’s letter, but the doors in the building were so rotten that I couldn’t read anything on them.
I found nothing on the first floor, apart from two skeletons that made me shriek when I came across them. Judging by the tattered rags lying around them, the seemed to have been wearing some sort of white clothing. The bigger one was probably male, and the smaller one a female. The bones were too damaged for me to guess their cause of death.
I went up a floor and found a room that was different from the other ones I had seen so far. It had a metal door that hadn’t been corroded, and although the words on it had faded, there was a symbol that stood out clearly.
“What does this mean?” I asked.
“Biohazard. There is some sort of biological danger, such as disease-causing bacteria, inside this room.”
So that meant it was logical to assume the psychobuster might be in there.
Holding back my excitement, I pulled on the metal door, but it didn’t budge. Maybe it was locked, or the bolt had rusted.
I stepped back and opened the door with cantus. The metal made a horrible screeching as I ripped it off its hinges and stepped inside.
The room looked like a laboratory. There was muddy water and broken glass all over the floor. Against the wall was what looked like a safe with the biohazard symbol on it. If the psychobuster existed, it was probably in there.
I tied up the fake false minoshiro with some roots and set it on a table. My heart raced wildly as I put my hand on the safe door. We had sacrificed so much just to get here. Would I finally get the devil’s weapon?
The safe opened without needing a key.
It was empty.
I let out the breath I had been holding.
It seemed like the broken glass had once been some sort of container holding the psychobuster inside the safe. I didn’t have to ask the fake false minoshiro to know that the muddy water would have dest
royed it.
I looked around the room again just to make sure, but there was nothing.
Carrying the fake false minoshiro, I went up another floor. As I expected, there was nothing. What could I even expect to find in a building that had been abandoned for over a thousand years?
I decided to check all the floors. I had no idea how much time had passed. Even as my hopes waned, I wanted to see things through to the end. If I didn’t, it would be an insult to those who had died.
I finally emerged onto an aboveground level.
The whole place was buried under the sand, so the only evidence that this floor was once aboveground was that all the rooms had large windows. Some of the sand had spilled into the building, and rain seeping in had turned them into pools of muddy water. The puddles that had been in the lab were probably from rain as well.
The room I was in was situated in the middle of the level. It looked about the same as all the other rooms, except for the very large wooden table sitting at one end of it. I was sure that this room had once belonged to some executive officer.
Looking around, it seemed to be just a normal office, without any spaces to hide dangerous biological weapons. Just as I thought that, the torchlight fell upon a rectangular shape against one of the walls.
I went closer to examine it. A forty square centimeter area of the concrete wall was covered by metal. It looked like a door of some sort with a knob on it.
“What’s this?” I asked without much hope.
“A safety deposit box. They are used to store valuables, and the one here appears to be a concealed safe. The wallpaper or painting that had once hidden it must have disappeared at some point.”
I didn’t need any further explanation. I tried violently to break the door open with cantus. The safe was much thicker and stronger than the one in the lab and I couldn’t damage it at all. The concrete around it started to crack and looked like it was going to collapse.
I changed tactics and attempted to bore through the door. I had never seen this kind of metal before and was surprised to find it so resistant to cantus.
Eventually, I managed to carve a lopsided hole into the door and pull it out with a loud screech. It was over ten centimeters thick.
