The Destruction of the World by Fire (9 page)

Suddenly, the shrill sound of something shattering to pieces echoed around the basement room. There was a dull pain in Rentaro’s hand, and when he looked at it, he slowly realized that his left hand had moved on its own and broken the mirror he was looking at. Fragments were piercing his fist, and lines of blood dripped onto the tile that covered the ground.

“Stop! It’s making me sick!” he shouted.

“Rentaro, it’s not like you believe that the Children outside of Tokyo Area are living heavenly lives, right? Thinking that you can solve all their problems is arrogant. Even the strong acts of discrimination against the Children in Tokyo Area are happening because they’re
supposed
to happen. Everything has a reason and a consequence.”

Rentaro finally understood where Sumire was going with her charade. “Are you saying that foreign Initiators have it much worse, so it can’t be helped if Enju and Tina get dirty words thrown at them or are stepped on?”

“If you take the argument to the extreme, that’s exactly it. Since it’s you, you’re probably worrying about useless things and thinking about something stupid.”

“Let me say this, Doc. I hate people like you, who act so cold.”

“You are powerless, Rentaro. If you really want to change the world, then you shouldn’t have left the Tendo family, which controls the politics and economics of this country from behind the scenes.”

“I…” Was he wrong? The next words wouldn’t come out, and his breathing was quick and shallow. He shook his head once and
closed his eyes, forcing his heart and breathing to calm, searching for Sumire’s meaning.

“Then, I will drive off the Gastrea from this world as a civil officer in the place of those politicians,” he said finally. “There’s no way there’s only one way to change the world, right? Tokyo Area is small. Without the civil officer guards, aircraft can’t fly, and because of the dangers of marine Gastrea, we can’t really swim in the ocean, either. I want to give Enju the freedom to look around at a wide world. Doc, I will reform the world for Enju’s sake. That’s why I’ll defeat them. Even all of the Stage Five Gastrea.”

Sumire was frozen, her mouth slightly open. But in a moment she looked up at the ceiling, slapped her forehead, and burst out laughing. “I see, so that’s how you took it. ‘All the Stage Five,’ huh? Well, I’ve lost. Leaving aside whether or not you can do it, that was well said, Rentaro.” Her laughing suddenly cut off and she sat back down in her chair, eyeing him with a smile on her face. “You’re different from me after all. You’re so bright, it’s blinding.”

“That’s not true. Doc, you’re—”

Sumire shook her head gently. “No, I’m no good. Once humans think they know something well, they start looking at only the useless stuff. I’m more suited to this dark basement, after all. I can’t walk under the light of the sun.”

Rentaro didn’t speak.

“Rentaro, do you know what the most beautiful thing in the universe is?”

“No… What is it?”

“From the Buddhist worldview, it’s said to be the flower of the sacred
ren
lotus. In other words, it’s you.
Ren
taro. Your soul is beautiful.”

Rentaro felt a knot in his chest and looked at Sumire, at a loss for words. Coming from Sumire’s roundabout personality, this could be said to be the greatest praise.

“Doc……”

Sumire stood and spread both arms. “As you are right now, it’s probably okay if I showed you
that.
”

There it is
, he thought, and braced himself. In the first place, Rentaro did not come to Sumire’s lab today to watch Tina and the doctor meet each other.

With last month’s Seitenshi assassination case, he had defeated the sniper who had an ingenious plan and saved the Seitenshi. For his services, Rentaro had been promoted to IP Rank 300, and he had risen to a Level 5 top secret–information access key. He was far from the Level 12 access key that was given to those within the top ten IP Ranks, but even so, there might be details about his parents or the Gastrea War that he could find out with his newly opened levels of access, so he had entrusted his access key to Sumire and had her look into the details for him.

He guessed from Sumire’s sharp words until now that she was trying to prepare him for what she was about to show him; she always did things in such a roundabout way. Before he knew it, the palms of his hands started sweating, and he wiped them on the cuffs of his pants. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end.

Sumire pulled out a disc from the top of her desk and inserted it into her laptop. Pointing a remote control at the wall, she pushed a button and a screen Rentaro had seen before slid down, connecting wirelessly to the projector. It was probably what Sumire used for her hobby of watching movies. Sumire started to do something with her back turned toward him, and then snuck a glance at him and laughed with meaning. “I hesitate in uploading this information to the cloud. It’s that kind of information. There’s pretty shocking stuff in there, too.”

Rentaro held his breath and waited for Sumire to finish what she was doing.

“First, this.”

Suddenly, a picture was brought up on the screen. The large image was covered with small writing, and Rentaro squinted as he leaned
over. It looked like it went back twenty years, counting back from the current year of 2031.

Rentaro read over it and scowled. The items from the year 2021, when the Gastrea War broke out, until the end of the war were mostly blacked out. Taking the mouse from Sumire, Rentaro clicked on the blacked-out parts and got an error sound accompanied by the message “Access Key Level Too Low.”

“Have you noticed, Rentaro?”

“Yeah…” Rentaro nodded as he glared at the chart. The chronological tables of recent history everyone, including Rentaro, studied at school did not have these black lines in them. This was because the items themselves were completely erased from public view.

In the history textbook used at Rentaro’s school, Magata High School, there were surprisingly few pages that touched on the Gastrea War. He had heard that the documents relating to it had been lost in the fires during a period of confusion during the war, and many of the data centers that housed servers had been destroyed, so there were no accurate records left. That was the reasoning given, anyway.

When he had first heard that, he had nodded in agreement. That was because ten years ago, in 2021, the world population, which was in a glorious spring and had grown to almost eight billion people, was slaughtered until less than ten percent were left.

However—

Rentaro glared at the blacked-out chronology once more and tapped his foot in irritation. The message “Access Key Level Too Low” meant that as long as he had the right access key, he could open the censored parts and see the truth. In other words, the public reason given by the government that documents had been destroyed during the Gastrea War was a flat-out lie. But why was the government hiding the details of the War? Or…what was under those black lines that was so bad it had to be hidden?

“Rentaro, look at this.” Sumire approached the screen, extending a pointer and indicating one side of the display.

When Rentaro looked closely and double-clicked the words to enlarge them, parts of the words that had been blacked out were revealed and turned red. Apparently, this was the information that could be revealed with a Level 5 access key.

He skimmed it and saw that most of it was the war history. There was the Gastrea Legion’s fight against the self-defense force in the Kanto Battle and the Second Kanto Battle, and the recent Fox-Hunting incident where Tokyo Area almost broke out in a Pandemic. There was also what was declared the most beautiful destruction in the world where poisonous butterfly scales caused group hallucinations in the Morphe Butterfly Incident, and the Kagetane Hiruko Terrorist Incident, which of course was hard for Rentaro to forget. All these names were still too fresh in his memory to be called nostalgic.

Jumping to the items on military affairs, the Stairway to Heaven Project and the New Humanity Creation Project—which were thought of by the general public as an urban legend—were both evidenced here as truly extant. Rentaro tried going to the detail screen of the New Humanity Creation Project, but there was nothing more than what Rentaro already knew written there.
That was only to be expected
, Rentaro thought, crossing his arms. If he wanted to know more about the New Humanity Creation Project, instead of fishing for information in documents, it would be faster to just ask the head of the Japan branch of the project, who was standing in front of him. He would get more details, too.

Rentaro input all the information into his brain at once and fell into a slightly excited state. He felt his pulse quicken.

“Rentaro, the problem is this.” The words were so small that if Sumire had not used the pointer, he would have almost missed reading them. There it was.

It was as if his spine was struck by lightning, and his eyes opened wide.

“On a certain day, in a certain month, in the year 2021, Seven Stars Village was annihilated.”

Rentaro’s body felt numb, and he couldn’t move an inch. His throat was dry. “Doc…is Seven Stars Village…?”

Sumire nodded gravely. Rentaro and Sumire both knew the name
Seven Stars
.

The Inheritance of the Seven Stars
—It was hard to forget the key item of the Kagetane Hiruko Terrorist Incident that had rocked Rentaro’s fate. Rentaro had chased down the mastermind, Kikunojo Tendo, but not even he could figure out why the mysterious item was a catalyst that could call out the Zodiac Gastrea Scorpion.

The duralumin case the Inheritance of the Seven Stars was in contained a broken tricycle…

His instincts screamed to not get involved with this case. Rentaro was sure that once he knew the truth, he wouldn’t be able to run away and would be screaming until the end of the world. That almost certain premonition ran through the back of his head.

“Strangely, this is the only account of Seven Stars Village. Looking around on maps online, Seven Stars Village had been erased from all of them. It was hard to find this, you know.” Saying that, she threw a thick book of maps on the desk in front of Rentaro. It was dirty and faded from the sun and ragged with tears, but Rentaro could just barely make out the words
Atlas of Japan 2020
. This was a map of Japan from before the Gastrea War.

Rentaro turned the pages with shaking hands. Sumire had marked it with a tab, so he didn’t have to go through the trouble of looking for the exact spot.

It looked like Seven Stars Village was in the northern part of Old Nagano prefecture. It was somewhat near the boundary with Old Toyama prefecture, at the foot of the three-thousand-meter mountains that made up the Hida mountain range. Of course, not just Seven Stars Village, but all of Nagano prefecture had turned into Unexplored Territory long ago, so it was not possible to approach it sans preparation.

Anyway, Rentaro carved the location of Seven Stars Village deep into his heart.

“There’s one more thing. This one is a video. I acquired this in a remarkable way.” Sumire raised her head as she operated the laptop. “A government worker uploaded it by accident. Whoever it was noticed right away and deleted it, but it was still cached. The file was corrupted, but I used some software to restore it. Thanks to that, the video is rough. Normally, you would need a Level 10 access key to see this data.”

“Level 10?” If he remembered correctly, Level 10 was for those with an IP Rank in the top thirty. Rentaro now could barely dream of having an IP Rank of 30.

Sumire’s unusually serious eyes were staring at Rentaro. “This is the really bad one. Proceed with caution. This is the Ardi File.”

Ardi File?

Just as he opened his mouth to ask, Sumire double-clicked the mouse. Suddenly, the screen turned black, and there was sound like the breathing of a monster. The sound and video skipped and there was a loud noise artifact that repeated from the bad video quality, making the strange breathing seem even more eerie. He knew it was impossible, but Rentaro even felt like there was a nasty smell coming from the video.

It looked like it was recorded on something of handycam size, and the photographer was trembling terribly.

Rentaro licked his upper lip nervously and couldn’t decide if he wanted to stare at the screen so he wouldn’t miss a single word, or run away desperately out of the basement room the second he was given permission to. However, the video that was filled with noise suddenly became clear.

As soon as that happened, Rentaro’s whole body stiffened.

Some
thing
had been put on top of an operating table and was looking at him with its enlarged right eye. Its whole body was covered in bandages, and if it didn’t just barely retain a human shape, then Rentaro would not have been able to identify what it was.

Its left shoulder was gigantic, and its left arm was shriveled awkwardly as if the shoulder had stolen all its nutrients. There was a third leg at the crotch by its right thigh, and its sternum was enlarged. Even worse was its face. Only its completely red right eye was swollen, suppressing its left eye and nose and other organs, and drool dangled from its uneven yellow teeth, making a large stain on the sheets of the operating table. There were a large number of tubes going through its arms, legs, eyes, genitals, and everything, and the wiring on the operating table looked like a bundle of spaghetti.

Rentaro’s knees felt weak, and he put his hands on the table at once to stop himself from falling over, but when he put his hands on the table, glass test tubes were pushed off and fell to the ground, breaking one by one.

“Rentaro, are you all right?” Sumire approached him uneasily, giving gentle commands with her hands.

The back of his right eye throbbed with pain. He bore it and forced himself to look. Seeing the bulge of the chest, and not seeing the bulge of the male genitalia, Rentaro discovered that it was female.

He hadn’t noticed the words
DEVIL VIRUS
coming onto the screen. The monster was panting and staring at the person behind the camera with its red eye. The person behind the camera took a long shot of the monster from the front, as if it was their job, and then without warning, it was cut off.