by Yusuke Kishi
My heart began to beat again and sweat broke out all over my body.
“Why is he joining them?” Satoru asked, sighing with relief as he spoke.
“Yakomaru’s probably afraid that we’ll stake everything on an attack against him and his soldiers. Guns are useless against cantus, so just one of you could kill their entire army.” Kiroumaru cocked his head. “But now they’ve lost the ability to attack us from both sides, and left us with an escape route. It’s like he’s inviting us to run…”
“Even if it is a trap, we should still go. There may be more troops waiting for us, but we won’t get another chance to run,” Satoru said, starting back toward the main tunnel.
“Wait!” I shouted.
I understood. What Shun had been trying to tell me suddenly clicked.
He wasn’t a fiend. If he really had Raman-Klogius syndrome, it would be just like Tomiko had described, and we wouldn’t be able to raise a hand to him at all.
But he wasn’t a fiend. That meant…
“Saki?” Satoru said, looking incredulously at me.
“We’re so blind. We’ve had so many perfect opportunities this whole time, and we’ve just let them slip through our fingers.”
“What do you mean?” Kiroumaru asked.
“But there still might be a chance. It’ll be harder than before… …but, what if it’s the other way around? If only we could use it against them…”
“Saki, just explain it to us already!” Satoru blurted out, unable to wait any longer.
“There’s just one way to kill the fiend…!”
Chapter 5
“I’ve always wondered about that. Why would Maria’s child, of all people, be a fiend?” I licked my lips, trying to sort out the thoughts in my head. “The chance of giving birth to a fiend are extremely small. And for the first child the queerats capture to be a fiend, that probability is astronomically low.”
“…but couldn’t they have done something to the child? Like give him their psychotropic drug?”
“That’s probably what everyone would assume. But this was Yakomaru’s first time raising a human child. Do you think that a drug that had never been tested on humans before would have let Yakomaru manipulate him exactly the way he wanted to?”
“There are many types of drugs that we use,” Kiroumaru cut in. “Our ancestors, the naked mole rats, consumed a substance extracted from their queens’ urine to control their workers. Although our queen still possesses the ability to produce the substance, our mental capacities are far beyond mole rats, and it is impossible to fully control soldiers without adding other drugs such as marijuana to eradicate their fear. …but you are right that since we are different species, it is hard to imagine that our drugs would be able to turn off attack inhibition and create a fiend on demand.”
“Then, if he’s not a fiend, then what is he?” Satoru sounded bewildered.
The wound on his head was still bleeding, and looked extremely painful.
“…I mean, no matter how I think about it, he has to be a fiend. You’ve seen what he’s done!”
“That’s exactly what has blinded us this entire time.”
As I said that, the logic of the situation fell into place.
“Letting us see the child kill humans without batting an eye was designed to be an emotional attack that would overwhelm our rational side and cause us to leap to conclusions. Only once we decided that he was a fiend could we feel marginally safer.”
“Safer? What are you talking about? How would knowing he’s a fiend make you safer?”
“Raman-Klogius syndrome is at least something we know exists. Humans are more afraid of the unknown than anything else.”
Satoru crossed his arms and thought.
“I have good reasons for saying he’s not a fiend. Fiends completely lose the ability to think rationally, and simply kill everything around them. If the child really is a fiend, how come he hasn’t hurt Yakomaru?”
“…couldn’t they control him with drugs?”
“That’s impossible. You can’t tame a fiend. If it were possible, we would have done it ages ago and prevented all the attacks in the past, or at least brought the casualties down to a minimum. Also, if his mind is being influenced by drugs, you couldn’t be sure that he’d be able to attack and kill people.”
“Well then why doesn’t he have attack inhibition and death feedback?” Satoru asked.
“He probably does.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What’s the simplest answer? The child has been separated since he was born and raised by queerats. So it would view itself as a queerat, not as a human.”
“That might be true, but how…”.
Realization dawned on his face.
“Maybe, you mean, the fiend…the child’s attack inhibition works on queerats instead of humans?”
“Exactly.”
The swirl of thoughts in my head turned into firm conviction. The child thought of himself as a queerat, and therefore could not kill “his own kind”. To him, humans were a different species.
“But still, why would it kill people so viciously and indiscriminately?”
“Well, we kill them without a second thought as well, don’t we?”
“Huh?” Satoru said, looking shocked. “But they’re queerats.”
He became aware that Kiroumaru was still listening.
“…I see. You’re right. I never realized that’s what we were doing.”
Kiroumaru’s eye widened. “I should have realized something was wrong earlier. When my elite troops were annihilated, he didn’t kill them directly with cantus, but only took their weapons away. We were completely helpless and I thought that he was just having fun playing with us… but right after, when I encountered the fiend as I ran away, he didn’t attack me even though there were only twenty or thirty meters between us. There’s no way he didn’t notice me.” He let out a groan of frustration. “And earlier too. When the two of you were face to face with the fiend, I managed to intervene just by throwing a rock. Since killing you two is critical to their plan, I never expected that he would let you run away. Even getting rid of one of you would have been a minor victory, but again, the fiend just let us go. He wasn’t choosing to not attack, he physically couldn’t do it because I was there!”
“Wait, so if he’s alone, then Kiroumaru can attack…?” Satoru’s voice shook.
“Yes. He can’t do anything to Kiroumaru. It would be easy to kill him, or capture him alive.”
“Shit!” {A crack appeared in the wall next to Satoru.} “We had victory in our hands this entire time! But we let it slip away. Why didn’t we think more carefully earlier?”
“Calm down, it’s not too late yet,” I said as calmly as I could. “We still figured it out, even if it was at the last possible moment.”
“We should have figured it out before the fiend…before he passed by through the main tunnel. He’s joined up with Yakomaru by now. Even if Kiroumaru goes in now, he’ll still be killed,” Satoru sighed.
But there was still another way. It was a slim chance, but not impossible. It was the only thing we could gamble on.
Still, I couldn’t help but hesitate doing something so cruel. If the positions were reversed, Yakomaru definitely wouldn’t hold back for a second. But part of me still resisted the plan. Whether it was humans or queerats, we were all living things with beating hearts and warm blood running through our bodies. As intelligent beings, we were capable of happiness, sadness, anger, contemplation… We weren’t pawns to be thrown away for the sake of some greater game. After spending so much time with Kiroumaru, I felt this even more strongly.
Seeing that child reminded me so much of Maria and Mamoru I thought my heart would be ripped to shreds.
Yet he had attacked the village, destroyed our homes, and killed thousands of innocent people. An irresistible wave of hatred and desire for revenge washed over me.
But he wasn’t a fiend.
&nbs
p; He was innocent. His parents had been killed by queerats, then the queerats had raised him and commanded him to kill. He believed himself to be a queerat, so he didn’t question it, and none of it weighed on his conscience. To him, humans were devils that enslaved them and had the power to kill them on a whim.
And not just that. He couldn’t go against the queerats because of attack control and death feedback, but the queerats could punish him however they wished.
In short, he was literally their slave.
What kind of life had he lived? My heart hurt thinking about the way the queerats must have treated him after Maria and Mamoru died.
And what would happen if we died here?
The surviving people in the towns would have no choice but to flee far away to escape being killed. With the child, Yakomaru would be able to fend off attacks from other districts. And in a decade, all the infants he had kidnapped would be old enough to use cantus. Then he would be unstoppable. Queerats would take over Japan.
There was no time to think of alternative plans.
I had to do it.
I’m sure Tomiko would have come to the same conclusion.
“Saki,” Satoru said, looking up. “You said that what you did to the fiend earlier would only work once, right?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “You need to know where the enemy is in relation to you first.”
Quietly, we crept back toward the main tunnel until we were four or five meters away from where it crossed the path we were on.
It was silent in the tunnel.
At my gesture, Satoru made a tiny mirror from the water vapor in the air, and slowly moved it until we could see the enemy.
There. As soon as we saw them, Satoru let the mirror dissipate, and we retreated back down the small tunnel.
Although I only saw it for a split-second, I knew where they all were. Outside the small tunnel, about twenty meters away, a group of five soldiers lay in wait. And five meters behind them was the child.
“The fiend…he didn’t come this way just to meet up with Yakomaru. They’re setting a trap,” Satoru whispered. “If we try to make a run for it, we’re done for.”
“Positioning the soldiers ahead of the fiend is a good strategy,” Kiroumaru added. “I can’t penetrate the group on my own; the soldiers would swarm me if I tried. And once you guys show up behind me, the fiend would have an open shot at you.”
“Did you see Yakomaru?”
“No… He is no doubt hiding far behind them all.”
I had more or less expected that the fiend…the child would be protected by the queerats.
And on one hand, the fact that Yakomaru wasn’t on the front lines was good news. That meant victory could be decided in an instant. If Yakomaru were there, he might see through our plan and counteract it. But since he’s in the back, he wouldn’t have time.
It was rare for Yakomaru to make a mistake like this. His confidence in the “fiend” was making him sloppy.
We needed to take advantage of this before he noticed.
And Kiroumaru would be our trump card.
“There’s something I must ask of you,” I said.
“I will do anything in my power. …is it a strategy to defeat them?”
I explained my plan.
Kiroumaru looked stunned, and was temporarily speechless.
“Is that possible…? How did you even think of it?” Satoru asked, looking just as shocked.
“Shun told me.”
“Shun? Who…oh!”
It seemed like his memories had finally been unsealed.
Kiroumaru suddenly broke into a smile.
“Fantastic. You are a first class strategist. …I had thought we were completely out of luck; I can’t believe the only solution left is this simple.”
“Will you do it?”
“Of course. The problem now is how to hide my scent. I’m upwind, so the soldiers will smell me coming from a mile away.”
“That’s true…”
Looking around, I saw that there was a stream of water running down the wall of the tunnel. The rain seemed to be coming down as strongly as before, so there was no worry that we’d run out of water.
Kiroumaru carefully washed all the mud off of himself. Satoru took of his clothes.
“It would be best if we had guano, but this should work in a pinch,” Kiroumaru said, sniffing himself.
“But it’s still not enough. …Satoru, can you change the wind direction? Even just a few seconds will do.”
He grimaced. “I have to make a mirror at the same time, but if it’s only for a few seconds, I think I can manage.”
A small smile appeared on his face. “It would have been easy for Shun to use two techniques at the same time …if we get out of here, I want to hear what you remember about him.”
“Alright.”
Satoru seemed to want to say more.
Kiroumaru was having a hard time with Satoru’s clothes, so we went over to help. Their bodies were different, so it was impossible to get a good fit, but we managed to put everything on. Now all that was left was to cover his face.
“Oh, we can use this,” Satoru said, undoing the bloody bandage on his arm.
As he peeled the bandage off, the wound started bleeding again, but it didn’t look too serious.
“I see, this would help trick them as well. The fiend might think that your face was injured when the psychobuster exploded…”
Kiroumaru wound the cloth around his head.
“Now we’re prepared. But before we go, may I make a request of the two of you?” Kiroumaru said formally, looking uncannily like a reanimated mummy.
“We’ll see what we can do.”
“Once this is over, I believe everyone in the village will call for the complete eradication of the queerat species. But please, spare the queen of the Giant Hornet colony. She is the life and hope of every member of our colony…she is our mother.”
“Very well. I can promise you that.”
“I promise as well. No matter what happens, I will not let your queen be killed. And your colony will be restored.”
Although his face was hidden by bandages, I could sense that Kiroumaru was smiling.
“Now that I have your word, I no longer have any reservations. I can’t wait to smash that smooth-talking bastard’s wild delusions to smithereens.”
We crept up to the intersection of our path and the main tunnel.
“So like we decided earlier, I’m going to count down from ten, and we’ll start at zero. Then I’ll start counting up by seconds. On one, Satoru will stop the wind, on two, three, four, he’ll change the wind direction and create a mirror. On five, six, seven, I’ll attack. And we’ll run at eight…”
“Got it.”
“I understand.”
I took a deep breath.
Everything would be decided within the next minute. The thought made my legs go weak. Having survived for this long already, I thought that I would be braver in this moment, but I was still terrified.
I might die.
There were still so many things I wanted to do. I couldn’t stand the thought of disappearing, my body rotting beneath the earth.
No, that wasn’t what I was truly afraid of.
I was scared that I would die in vain. That I wouldn’t be able to stop the fiend, and end up dying for nothing. That on the verge of death, I would hear the trumpets heralding Yakomaru’s victory and be unable to do anything except apologize to the rest of humanity for my failure.
I felt lightheaded and my mouth was dry with nervousness.
Calm down.
Concentrate on what you have to do.
I tried desperately to calm myself.
“Okay, ready? Ten, nine, eight, seven…”
My heart began to beat furiously as I counted, and my body tensed to prepare itself for the fight.
“Three, two, one, zero.”
The wind weakened suddenly. Satoru had created a wall on the far left of the tunnel,
blocking the wind. Then he made sealed vacuum in front of the wall
“One.”
A mirror began to form in the air.
“Two, three, four.”
Satoru released the seal on the vacuum slightly. The negative pressure sucked air into it, reversing the wind. The wind was too weak for me to feel, but I could see tiny dust motes starting to move in the other direction. The mirror was also slowly rotating to show the soldiers on our right.
I picked out one of the soldiers. Its death needed to be as flashy as possible; I couldn’t just snap its neck silently. I chanted my mantra under my breath.
“Five.”
The soldier’s head exploded in a spray of blood.
“Six.”
The rest of the soldiers began firing the guns wildly in terror. They couldn’t seem to hear Yakomaru ordering them to stop. Once the arquebuses were fired, they needed time to reload.
“Seven.”
The firing stopped. I chose two queerats and smashed them into the ceiling. Rocks, blood, and flesh rained down on them. Three soldiers remained. One turned and ran, and the others followed.
“Eight!”
Kiroumaru flew out of the tunnel with me right behind.
He looked a bit awkward, but being such a large queerat, it was difficult to distinguish him from a human as he ran on his hind legs through the dark tunnel. Squinting over Kiroumaru’s shoulder, I spotted a small figure standing ahead. It had blood-red hair. The child. He was glaring at us with open hatred.
Kiroumaru’s human imitation was amazing. It could have beat out Inui’s performance at pretending to be a queerat. As he ran, he pretended to use cantus, muttering and gesturing at the retreating soldiers.
Immediately, I slashed the head off one of the soldiers. The stink of blood in the narrow tunnel was beginning to make it hard to breathe.
“ヸ★＊∀§▲Æ…AÄヺヹ!”
The fiend…the child’s howl was more animal than human.
Kiroumaru suddenly stopped as if he had hit a wall.
The hole that suddenly appeared in his body was so large that I could see right through it. Blood drenched me from head to foot as Kiroumaru’s guts flew through the air and landed with a loud splat.
