Even though the wait wasn’t an issue for Kojou, he asked, “Want a hand with the cleaning?”
“Just wait here!”
He was only trying to be considerate, but Asagi’s eyebrows rose as she glared at him. Peek and I’ll kill you, her look suggested. Apparently, she was ditching Kojou because there was something she really didn’t want him to see.
After Asagi left, Yukina gazed at the entrance and quietly murmured, “Security certainly is tight here.”
Kojou seemed a little surprised as he looked around the area. “You can tell?”
“I do not know about the mechanical trappings, but it uses a fairly high-end enchantment for repelling intruders, and a curse reflection ward besides.”
“Huh.” Kojou nodded in admiration.
“Well that’s ’cause Asagi’s dad is an Itogami City councilor.”
“Councilor?”
“It’s kind of like a city parliament. Apparently, that’s how Asagi was brought to the island.”
“Oh…”
Suddenly, Yukina seemed to understand her situation. Many of the students living in the Demon Sanctuary had their own circumstances, and Asagi was no exception to the rule.
She’d been living on Itogami Island since before entering elementary school. At the time, Itogami Island still had numerous law enforcement issues, and many mainlanders looked upon its residents as bizarre. The daughter of a statesman of that same Demon Sanctuary, Asagi couldn’t have had an easy time growing up. That she never talked about it was probably her pride at work.
“Oh my… Guests?”
Perhaps Kojou and Yukina’s conversation had been overheard. They noticed the patter of someone rushing down a corridor, and an unfamiliar woman poked her head in. She had an unadorned and fairly youthful look. Her long, tied-up black hair went nicely with her light velvet kimono.
As Kojou and Yukina stood rooted at the entrance, she gave them a smile of approval, almost like an innocent child’s.
“Sorry for imposing.”
Kojou and Yukina reflexively bowed their heads before they could think of anything else. I thought no one was supposed to be here, he grumbled at Asagi in his own mind.
“H-happy New Year.”
“Happy New Year.”
Seeing Yukina’s awkward greeting, the woman’s eyes narrowed in delight. It was a shockingly friendly attitude toward visitors arriving in the dead of the first night of the New Year.
“Friends of Asagi, yes? Splendid. To think she would bring friends here. You must be hot over there. Come on in—no need to be so reserved.”
“Um, uhh… Asagi…said to stay right here, so—”
“By any chance, would you be Kojou?”
Just as Kojou was trying to beat a hasty retreat, he was intercepted by the woman’s direct line of questioning.
“Yes. Kojou Akatsuki.”
“My, is that so…? So you’re the one. Tee-hee—I’m glad to finally meet you… And this lovely young lady must be Himeragi. Nagisa is off to see family, yes?”
“Y-yes. Pleased to meet you.”
Yukina, completely swept up in the kimono-clad woman’s momentum, bowed her head once more. The woman’s inquisitive eyes glimmered as they scrutinized the pair’s reactions. Though her demeanor was pleasant, it was oddly difficult to get in a word with her. They were going on the assumption that she was Asagi’s mother, so they didn’t know how to react.
“Aaah…?!”
Asagi, returning from tidying up her room, noticed the woman’s presence and let out a puzzled yelp.
“Sumire, what are you doing here?! Weren’t you supposed to be going back to your parents’ place tonight?!”
“Sensai’s work ran late, so the schedule changed.”
As she gave her reply with the utmost nonchalance, Sumire Aiba lifted her head to see Asagi standing on the ascending stairway.
Sumire was Asagi’s father’s second wife; in other words, Asagi’s stepmother. It seemed like the relationship between Asagi and Sumire was a bit complicated—not exactly bad, but it looked like Asagi had a hard time dealing with her stepmother, though that didn’t seem to be the case the other way around.
“After such a long trip, you simply must relax for a while. I’ll prepare some tea. We even have the Iris House dorayaki Asagi is so fond of. Those little red-bean pancakes really are quite tasty.”
“Never mind that. No need for snacks today. I just brought them here ’cause there’s something I need to take care of in a hurry.”
Asagi was desperately trying to shoo her stepmother away. However, Sumire displayed the mysterious strength of her persistence as she said, “Is that so? But they’ve come all this way…”
“You two go ahead without me! Up the stairs—it’s the room on the right!”
“Ah…pardon us. Let’s go, Himeragi.”
“Right.”
Thus ordered by Asagi, who sounded like she had her back against the wall, Kojou and Yukina ascended the stairs which were made from a rare breed of tree native to Itogami Island, something flat-out extravagant.
Upon locating the room Asabi mentioned, Kojou opened the door and went inside.
Boasting a baby-blue and pink color scheme, it was a stereotypical girl’s room.
A closet was crammed chock-full of Western-style clothing. Various magazines, cosmetics, and stuffed animals were strewn around the room. There was a school uniform on a hangar on the wall, perhaps fresh from dry cleaning. The scattered pillows and rumpled sheets made the room appear very lived-in. Of course, Kojou, whose little sister would be furious if he was ever caught in her room without permission, could not help feeling a bit unnerved.
“So this is Asagi’s room… Well, it suits her.”
“Is it really all right for us to let ourselves in?” Yukina asked without budging.
“She told us to, so it should be fine,” Kojou answered, almost for his own benefit.
It being an unfamiliar room of a female classmate made it hard to relax, but on the other hand, devices characteristic of Asagi’s other side were there as well: a Spartan, office-use monitor and a rack-style PC cluster. She did most of her part-time job from home, so she had a ridiculously high-spec computer. The instant he noticed its presence, Kojou faintly understood just why Asagi had invited them to her room in the first place.
“Sorry for the wait. Sit wherever you’d like.”
Asagi returned to the room, carrying a tray packed with tea cakes and drinks. Surely, her looking fairly exhausted wasn’t just a figment of Kojou’s imagination.
“You didn’t go and touch anything you weren’t supposed to, did you, Kojou?”
“I did not. More importantly, is everything okay with Sumire? You didn’t get much of a chance to say hi…”
“It’s fine. To be honest, I didn’t even expect to see her tonight.”
Asagi spoke through a pout like a stubborn child’s.
But after placing the tray on a table, Asagi sat at her computer and revealed an impetuous smile, like she was finally back in her own element.
“More to the point, you want to know how Nagisa’s doing at the moment, right? Just wait a sec—I’ll check things out.”
“‘Check things out’? What do you think you’re gonna do? I don’t think Grandma’s temple is connected to the Net,” he asserted with a rueful tone.
It was a low-tech, run-down temple to begin with, plus it was in a mountain range where even cell tower signals could not reach. He didn’t think Asagi could check on Nagisa’s safety against that backdrop no matter how good a hacker she was.
However, as if such things were minor inconveniences, Asagi smiled boldly and said:
“Computers aren’t just for checking the inside of buildings. Mogwai, put the data I extracted through these filters.”
“My goodness, we only just started the new year. You really run your AI ragged, li’l miss.”
An oddly human-sounding synthetic voice could be heard over the speakers of As
agi’s computer. This was the avatar of the five supercomputers that controlled Itogami Island—the supporting AI that Asagi had dubbed Mogwai.
“Stop flapping your lips and do it!”
“Yeah, yeah. Happy New Year…aaand—!”
Mogwai began analyzing the image according to the program Asagi had input.
Mogwai had a calculation ability on par with the finest in the world, but it was quirky and difficult to use; it was said that Itogami Island had virtually no engineers able to bring out its full potential. But for some reason, it got along with Asagi and dutifully followed her orders—and hers alone. Thus, in the blink of an eye, Asagi and Mogwai completed complex work that would have taken ordinary engineers months to finish.
The screen displayed a shady-looking man with a trench coat and a lively looking middle school girl walking around an airport: Gajou and Nagisa Akatsuki.
“Surveillance cameras…!” Kojou exclaimed when he realized what he was looking at.
Even as he did, the images of Gajou and Nagisa were continually replaced. Using the security cameras in the airport and matching running the image through Itogami Island’s face recognition data, Asagi was analyzing their every movement.
“There are aircraft boarding records, after all, so I thought I’d retrace their path from that point on. If I can get to the credit card history, I’ll know what they bought, too.”
Asagi proudly thrust out her chest, looking very satisfied with herself. Kojou understood the logic of it, but actually executing it had to be far easier said than done. She was invading the servers of public infrastructure and credit card companies, stealing their data, and isolating it to those two individuals. It was enough to make your head spin.
However, if she kept this up, it was indeed possible to check on Nagisa’s current whereabouts.
“Incredible…”
“This is the so-called surveillance society, huh?”
Yukina exhaled in admiration as Kojou’s shoulders cringed in fear.
“Keh-keh.” Mogwai laughed cynically right around when Gajou and Nagisa were coming out of an airport lobby.
“Daddy got a rental car at the airport—under a false name.”
“What’s my dumb dad using an alias for…?”
Thanks to Mogwai, nothing came of it, but if circumstances were different, they might have lost track of Gajou and Nagisa then and there. No, clearly that was Gajou’s intention. He was acting with all the caution of a mafia boss. Geez, just how shady are you? wondered Kojou, beside himself.
Asagi was using police license-plate-recognition cameras to follow Gajou’s car along the freeway. It was a system that checked license plate numbers to assist in searching for wanted criminals.
However, Asagi nervously exclaimed, “Huh?! There’s no route data left… He switched license plates?! Since when?!”
“Keh-keh… Thorough one, ain’t he? I’ll find him using driver-image data.”
“From Haneda, he headed for Tokyo…but he got off the freeway just before Shibuya.”
“Shibuya?” Kojou asked.
Why’d he go to a place like that? he wondered, knitting his brows. It was still a considerable distance to Grandma’s place in Tangiwa.
“There’s a purchase record from a secondhand clothing store in Harajuku… Also, they stopped for cake and drinks.”
“That’s a store Nagisa wanted to go to. She said she learned about it from a TV show a while back,” Yukina added, albeit reluctantly.
What the heck is she doing? thought Kojou, amazed. Incidentally, at around the same time, he was back on Itogami Island being attacked and nearly killed by Divine Beasts and an evil deity, but that was another story.
“They checked in to a hotel and… What is this, a strip club?”
Asagi checked the ticket from Gajou’s credit card purchase history and shot Kojou a look of disgust. Apparently, Gajou had slipped out of the hotel in the dead of night to have some fun at a strip bar.
“I don’t know anything about that! That moron just did that on his own!”
“They went to Dreamland the next morning, huh…and they stayed at the hotel on the grounds, too.”
“Is there even a point to tracking ’em like this…?” Kojou murmured, disheartened.
He’d expected to find out if Nagisa was safe and sound, but before long, it had become an operation to expose the various stupidities of Gajou Akatsuki’s actions. The last image on the amusement park security cameras was of Gajou wearing kitty ears on his head, enjoying himself in a manner disgraceful for a man of his age. As his son, Kojou couldn’t help but be ashamed.
“They’re on the move.”
After that came images of Gajou at a cabaret club and Nagisa visiting old friends of hers from her elementary school days who she hadn’t seen in ages, both thoroughly enjoying themselves; and after that, they finally seemed to remember just where it was they were going in the first place.
After switching to a new rental car, Gajou and Nagisa left the metro. They had finally reached the fourth day since leaving Itogami Island. Seeing this, Kojou breathed a sigh of relief as he said, “Looks like this time they headed for Grandma’s place.”
“This matches up with the dates on the texts Nagisa sent…,” Yukina asserted calmly.
Using the cameras placed along the freeway as a measuring device, it was easy to follow the rental car. Gajou and Nagisa’s four-wheel-drive vehicle did not encounter any particular trouble, finally arriving at Kannawa Lake. Kojou and Nagisa’s grandmother lived at an old temple constructed on the edge of that artificial lake, the product of Kamioda Dam.
The time stamp on the image data left by Nagisa’s smartphone roughly coincided with when Asagi calculated the rental car would have arrived. The difference was about fifteen minutes at most. In other words, Nagisa had witnessed that giant magic circle moments after arriving at the temple they were heading to.
Or perhaps it was possible that the magic circle was triggered precisely because Nagisa and Gajou had arrived.
If the activation of the magic circle waited until their arrival, it would be no mere coincidence: It meant that either Nagisa or Gajou was the target.
“Mogwai, have you noticed?”
“Yeah, it’s odd.”
For their part, Asagi and Mogwai lowered their voices, apparently sensing that something was off.
“What is?” Kojou asked.
“The travel was too smooth,” Asagi replied. “The roads should be packed this time of year, but the car Nagisa and Gajou were traveling in didn’t slow down from traffic congestion at all.”
However, Kojou didn’t really understand why Asagi was so on guard.
“It’s not just a coincidence? Besides, GPS systems tell you the shortcuts nowadays, right?”
“Naaah, because the other roads are like this.”
Mogwai displayed a road map of the area. Apparently, red dots indicated congested roads. The massive congestion breaking out on the major thoroughfare made it so crammed that you’d think it was faster to get out and walk.
“In Tangiwa District…only the road to Kannawa Lake is clear. It’s more like everyone’s subconsciously avoiding the road. Maybe they went onto the other roads, making them even more packed.”
“Subconsciously avoiding the road…? Hey, you don’t mean…?”
“Someone placed an aversion ward…?!”
Kojou and Yukina gasped when they realized the cause of the deviation in traffic.
Without Gajou and Nagisa knowing, someone had cast a curse to drive everyone except them away from Kannawa Lake. Put another way, the ward invited in Nagisa and Gajou—and only them.
Kojou had assumed everything had begun with the magic circle Nagisa had photographed. But he was wrong. This curse was already active before she approached Kannawa Lake.
There was no longer any room for doubt. Someone was after one of them: Gajou or Nagisa.
“There’s a ward on the entire area around Kannawa Lake? You can
do that?”
“You can. However, it requires considerable preparation and many casters—”
“So it’s not the sort of curse a single person can fling, yeah…?”
Irritated, Kojou gritted his teeth.
An aversion ward was Sorcery 101. At one extreme, you could establish a minimum strength ward just by planting a single DO NOT ENTER sign on the side of the road. The aversion spells used by Yukina and her kind put ritual energy into small objects, but the basic principles didn’t change.
But however simple the principle, the power and effort involved in maintaining a ward increased exponentially the more you expanded the scale. Something on the scale of driving all unrelated human beings from Kannawa Lake’s environs was a fairly large-scale undertaking.
“Mogwai.”
“Got it.”
Asagi didn’t even need to spell it out for Mogwai to look into it. Once you knew a large organization was in play, deducing its identity was not so difficult. After all, the organizations able to muster an aversion ward of this magnitude were few and far between. Furthermore, the more people involved in something, the more difficult it was to cover it up.
Food, sleep, travel, communications—the traces of the various actions required to sustain activity as a group and the resulting flow of money told you the organization’s identity.
“I see. I get how they’re doing it.”
Mogwai laughed sardonically as he brought up an image on the monitor. It displayed a group of people, all in camouflage and bearing firearms.
“There are reports all around Kannawa Lake that roads are closed due to avalanches or landslides. The Self-Defense Forces have been dispatched in the name of disaster relief.”
“Self-Defense Forces…?”
Rather than be surprised, Kojou was simply confused. Certainly, Gajou’s semi-criminal fieldwork made him an archeologist of some notoriety, but he wasn’t a dangerous enough individual to be targeted by the SDF. That went double for Nagisa, a simple middle schooler. There has to be some mistake, he thought.
“But the group actually calling the shots seems to be called the Sorcerous Disaster Commission. They’re the ones who put up a spell ward.”
The Fugitive Fourth Primogenitor Page 6
