Book 3 (6): Beacon in the Dark — Chapter 2: |
Chapter 2
I continued forward carefully, lantern raised high. It was just as humid in here as the previous cave, and water dripped down the walls and ceiling, flowing under my feet in little rivulets. It was difficult to see and I thought I would slip if I lost my concentration for even a second.
“Are you okay?” Inui asked over his shoulder as he pushed ahead with a nimbleness that belied his age.
“Yes. …I could do without all this water though,” I grumbled.
“But because of all the moisture, the ‘shadow’…the mites don’t come here.”
Although mites usually preferred humidity, the walls here were so wet that they had difficulty moving. The black widow mites were small enough that the surface tension of the water was enough to trap them, so I really shouldn’t complain about it being wet.
The four of us had split up according to Kiroumaru’s plan. Inui and I were on our way to the beach to retrieve the boat, and Satoru and Kiroumaru were leaving a fake scent trail.
Satoru had asked me to go get the boat because he said his injury was preventing him from traveling long distances, but his real intention was obvious: he wanted to take on the more dangerous task. Even with Kiroumaru around, it was risky putting yourself right in the enemy’s path. Just one misstep and it would be the end.
I knew all this, but accepted Satoru’s suggestions anyway.
“Inui, we’ll be fine, right?” I asked, hoping to be comforted.
But his answer was not what I expected.
“To be honest, I don’t know. Everything here has been beyond my imagination.”
“I see…”
An oppressive mood fell over us.
“But I’ll make sure you survive no matter what, Watanabe-san. I will do my utmost to that end.”
“Thank you. It’s reassuring to hear that from you. You’re the only survivor from our fierce Wildlife Protection officers after all.”
I regretted this immediately after I said it.
“Survivor?” Inui smiled slightly.
“Sorry, that’s not what I meant.”
“No, no, I just never considered myself a survivor. To me it seems more like I escaped death.”
“But…”
“That’s how it is. The comrades I lost were closer to me than my family. Surviving them was mere chance…nothing more. I’m like a ghost. I want to avenge my friends; that’s all that keeps me bound to this life.”
I felt like I had recently heard the same words from someone else.
“The fiend will pay for this,” Inui said, his usually placid expression replaced with one of fury. “Please promise me that you will stop the fiend even if I fall before our mission is complete.”
“I promise.”
Stop… Although we were psychologically restrained from using language stronger than that against humans, I knew what he meant.
“This is what the queerats mean when they call us the gods of death. I guess I can imagine what the people who were hunted back then felt like.”
“Me too… I suddenly feel like this world has become a nightmare. That nothing that has happened so far is real. Tomorrow morning, I’ll wake up and someone will tell me not to worry, that everything was just a dream…” I was too choked up to continue.
“I know, I can’t say I don’t feel the same way. But the reality is that we’ll need to prepare if we are to wake up tomorrow at all.” Inui sighed deeply. “There is something I must say about Kiroumaru.”
“Kiroumaru?” I had not expected this topic.
“To be completely honest, I don’t know how much we can trust him.”
“But…didn’t he save you? And without him, where would we be now…?”
“Of course, I’m not denying that.”
Inui came to a stop.
“Watanabe-san, under what circumstances do you think people let down their guard?”
I thought for a moment. “When everything is going smoothly, I guess? When you’re feeling safe, you tend to lower your defenses.”
“It’s true that people easily become complacent under those circumstances. But a cautious person would actually be even more alert.”
“Then when?”
“In my experience, it’s when people think the situation is at its worst. I have never met someone who, in the midst of abject despair, thought that things would get even worse. People want to grasp onto every sliver of hope they can find, and easily overlook signs of further danger.”
“You mean we’re currently in that situation?”
“Well, you wouldn’t expect that, with things as they are now, someone would betray us, right?”
“You mean Kiroumaru is a traitor?”
“I have to consider the possibility.”
“Why? Because he’s not human? Or do you have some concrete reason?”
“I have two.”
Inui held the lantern aloft and began walking again. I followed behind.
“First, it’s already suspicious that he’s been here before. What did he come for?”
“That…wasn’t it because he needed to survey the area? They were fighting with other colonies, so it would be advantageous to find out if the area is of any use to them, or something…”
“Would he really sacrifice a third of his troops for that? A leader like Kiroumaru would usually abort his mission once there was a single loss of life.”
“Then why do you think he came here?”
“I don’t know. But if it wasn’t something he wanted to hide, don’t you think he would have explained it to us?”
I had to admit that this had crossed my mind briefly at one point, but had believed that it just wasn’t possible. If Kiroumaru really turned out to be a traitor, we’ be done for. Now I wasn’t sure what to do.
“If he is…” I paused.
There was a strange sound coming from somewhere.
We stopped and listened carefully. Inui pressed his ear to the wall.
It was a deep, rumbling sound coming from far above us.
“What is that sound?”
“Probably one of the tunnels collapsing.”
I gasped. “Then maybe our trap worked.”
“No…it’s not just that, I think. I’ve already heard that sound intermittently about four times now.” Inui thought for a moment, but did not say more.
“Earlier, you said you had two reasons for suspecting Kiroumaru. What’s the other reason?”
“You’ll find out soon.”
“We’ll know once we arrive at the shore,” Inui said mysteriously.
Although we were much faster going back to the ocean, it still took a number of hours to make the trip. At one of the crevasses that led up to the surface, we consulted the fake false minoshiro, which confirmed that we were less than a hundred meters away from where we had hidden the boat.
I was exhausted and the pain in my feet was unbearable, but there was no time to rest. Supporting myself with cantus, I hiked up the steep slope toward the surface. A disturbing sound came from deep beneath the ground, a cacophonous screech like a million cackling demons.
Startled, I froze on the spot.
“Don’t worry, it’s just the bats,” Inui said.
From the far side of the cave, hundreds of thousands of Tokyo giant bats came streaming out amid deafening screeches. They flapped all around our heads, but did not run into us, thanks to their echolocation abilities.
The bat colony flowed out of the cave like one giant organism and disappeared into the sunset. That’s when I realized that it was almost dusk. After entering the tunnels in the morning, I had lost all sense of time. Even though I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, I didn’t feel hungry. I was so focused on forcing myself to keep going that I couldn’t feel hungry even though I was dizzy from low blood sugar.
The sky was quickly deepening from blue to ultramarine. When we finally reached the surface, the curtain of night had already been drawn across the sky.
We looked out from the lip of the crevasse. The bats looked like a swarm of black mosquitoes dancing in the sky. There had to be at least a hundred million of them. It would be impossible for the enemy’s birds to see anything through this. We ducked and ran toward the place where we had hidden the boat.
The boat looked to be undamaged. We quickly hoisted it up with cantus.
As I was about to head toward the shore, Inui stopped me.
“Please wait.”
“Why? If we don’t hurry, we might be discovered.”
“It’s dangerous to go near the shore at night, remember?”
I bit my lip. It had completely slipped my mind.
“I’m so careless…”
I opened Inui’s knapsack and asked the fake false minoshiro, “People and queerats have been attacked near the shore at night. What’s the most dangerous animal here?”
The fake false minoshiro was silent for a moment. I was just starting to worry that it was broken when it started to speak haltingly.
“…is considered to be the giant Bobbit worm…a type of bristle worm. It probably evolved from the Bobbit worm…only within Tokyo Bay…two eyes and antennae…two large pairs of jaws…apex predator…nocturnal…particularly dangerous during mating season.”
It went silent.
“Oh no, it’s broken!”
“It must be out of power. It’s been without sunlight for a while.”
“But how will we get to the underwater tunnel…”
“We’ll figure out how how to get it working again later. Right now we have to think about how we’re going to board the boat safely,” Inui said, turning my attention back to the most pressing matter. “Kiroumaru’s soldiers were probably attacked by the bristle worm.”
I couldn’t remember what that looked like.
“You mean the little earthworm-looking things in the ocean?”
“It’s related to the Bobbit worm, but think of it as a centipede that lives in the sea. If it attacked and killed a number of queerats, it’s safe to assume that it’s not small.”
Inui suddenly looked grave. “This is my second reason for being suspicious of Kiroumaru. It’s easy to predict that it will be dark by the time we get to the shore. But he didn’t warn us of any of the dangers that would be present at night. What’s more, he didn’t give us any information about the bristle worms.”
“But isn’t it possible that Kiroumaru doesn’t know anything about the creature apart from the fact that it attacked his soldiers?” I countered. “Plus he might have assumed that we’d be able to manage with the fake false minoshiro’s help.”
“…well, perhaps he simply had more pressing matters on his mind,” Inui admitted. “Anyway, let’s go. If the thing really is a bristle worm, we’ll be safer in the boat.”
Following Inui’s instructions, I got in and closed the top. He levitated the boat and set it down gently a short distance out onto the water.
The bottom of the boat touched sand. It rocked gently left and right to the rhythm of the waves.
The window at the front was at exactly water level and I couldn’t see anything. If I hadn’t been warned beforehand, I would never have suspected anything dangerous here.
Inui waded carefully into the water and approached from the left. I waited with bated breath to see if the bristle worm would attack, but nothing happened.
I heard him climb up to side of the boat and knock on the door. I opened the latch and looked out at Inui.
“At this time, the creature is…”
There was a crackling sound, like something scrambling up the side of the boat. The next instant, Inui vanished, and a thin, black creature started crawling in through the opening. It looked just like a centipede and moved so quickly that its legs were a blur, but its body was so long that I had more that enough time to attack it.
I set fire to it and the creature let out a hair-raising scream that sounded so human I almost thought it was Inui screaming.
The creature fell back into the water with a huge splash. I scrambled up the ladder and looked down.
What I saw was the most horrible monster in the world. Its legs wriggled disgustingly as it wrapped its undulating body around the boat.
Its head popped out from beneath the water and looked right at me. The creature’s face had surprisingly human features; it had no antennae, but was covered in black hair and was glaring at me out of a pair of glittering eyes.
But that was far as its human resemblance went. Apart from two bulging eyes, it had nothing else on its face. Looking along its body, I saw what I assumed was its mouth somewhere around its chest region. Its jaws were like elephant tusks and they clicked ominously open and shut.
I screamed.
The creature rose up like a marionette three meters above the water and lunged at me with its jaws open wide.
The monster’s head suddenly exploded a split second before it clamped down on my head.
It writhed around wildly. There was a second, then a third, explosion. The creature convulsed, then fell back into the water and stopped moving.
“Are you okay?” Inui shouted from the water.
“Yes.”
It took all my energy just to say that one word. I was still paralyzed with fear, and if Inui hadn’t come to the rescue at the last second, I would have been eaten by the monster.
“There might be more of them. We need to get out of here now!”
Inui climbed quickly up the side of the boat and shut the latch as I ducked back inside.
The boat moved forward and slowly began to dive.
I was covered from head to toe in the juices of the exploded worm. It was sticky and smelled like rotten meat, but there was no time to deal with it now, as we had to get out of the creature’s hunting grounds. Inui had me turn the outer wheels as he searched for the river mouth from the forward window.
The ocean was already completely black. Inui pressed his face right up against the window to prevent the lantern light from reflecting off the glass. I couldn’t help but imagine another one of the worms coming out of nowhere and biting down on the window with its oversized jaws.
Luckily, that didn’t happen. Inui discovered a large cave entrance whose entrance was full of waving seaweed, and I was certain that this was the river mouth.
We entered the river. The darkness was even more concentrated here, as if we were traveling through ink instead of water.
I became more and more nervous as we traveled through the tunnel. The boat had a small volume, so we would probably run out of oxygen soon. There had been four of us when we dove in the Tone River, and now there were only two, so theoretically we’d be able to stay under for twice the amount of time. But I didn’t know how much oxygen would be used up by the lantern.
“Watanabe-san. Thank you for saving me earlier,” Inui said.
“You’re the one who saved me.”
“No, I mean before that. When I suddenly jumped back into the ocean to escape the creature, but it moved so quickly that it was already waiting to bite where I was about to land. If you hadn’t set it on fire, I would have been torn in half.”
Without cantus, we wouldn’t have stood a chance against the worm. Once again I thought that this place was pure hell. If it wasn’t for the psychobuster, I would’ve ran from here long ago.
Then I thought that it was a good idea to lead the fiend here. If we were lucky, some nasty monster lurking underground might kill the fiend for us.
I let myself be absorbed in these dark fantasies. It was the only way for me to stay sane. To live in hell, you had to become a demon. I tried not to think about my town, my parents, the people I love. I had to concentrate solely on surviving.
The tunnel looked the same no matter how far we went. It was just gently flowing water. No light, no air.
Maybe our fate was to suffocate here. Sweat began to drip from my forehead, though I wasn’t sure if it was because of the humidity or my own anxiety. All I knew that it was getting harder to breathe, and it wasn’t just because of the stinking worm entrails.
What if we had gone into the wrong tunnel? It was a terrifying thought. But there should only be one underground river in this area.
Or the tunnel might be a dead end where all the water seeped into the water table.
As I turned the wheels of the boat, my mental vision of fantasy and reality began to blur.
I remembered having the same experience before, when I was a child. I was in summer camp, wandering aimlessly around the queerat tunnels.
It appeared that after being in darkness for a long time, even the slightest trigger could put me into a hypnotized state. It was probably because of the ceremony with Head Priest Mushin at the Temple of Purity from a long time ago.
That time too, I had slowly entered a trance and felt my physical body disappearing as my mind floated in a dark void.
I started hearing things.
“Saki. Saki.”
A voice was calling me from somewhere.
“Who is it…?” I whispered.
“Saki, it’s me,” said the familiar voice.
“You’re…”
The faceless boy.
“You can’t remember my name anymore, can you? It’s alright. I’m always with you. I live in your heart.”
“In my heart?”
“Yes. Cantus is the power that etches our thought onto the outside world. Our souls are, in the end, our thoughts. A part of my soul is etched deep within your heart.”
“But why? What happened to you?”
“You’ve forgotten that too? That’s fine. You’ll remember eventually.”
“At least tell me your name.”
“You know my name. Somebody’s left a barrier in your mind that prevents you from remembering.”
“Watanabe-san? Are you okay?” Inui asked uncertainly.
“Yes…I’m fine.”
I felt like my mind had been split in two and someone else was answering for me.
“Saki. Saki, there’s no need to worry. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”
“But can I really defeat the fiend?”
“Fiend? You’ve misunderstood. That’s not a fiend…”
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 tiring 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 destroyed 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.
Torch in hand, I peered into the safe.