Chapter 381: Pushing Forward |
Shirayanagi Ayaha and Carole stared at each other for quite a while. From the looks of it, it seemed as though Carole would absolutely refuse to proceed unless Ayaha gave her nod of approval.
"...Alright, I promise you," Shirayanagi Ayaha agreed.
Carole flashed a light grin, then turned back to face the screen and resumed her work.
The data stream interface quickly vanished, replaced by a dense, overlapping cluster of small video windows. Inside them, surveillance footage played in varying degrees of clarity.
Carole enlarged one of the interfaces, adjusted the timestamp, and then turned to Shirayanagi Ayaha, who had already leaned in close. "Alright, this is the surveillance footage of the corridor outside your classroom. Anyone leaving the room will definitely show up here. Take a look."
She did not even need to say it; Shirayanagi Ayaha's gaze was already fixed intently on the screen.
In the video feed, students could be clearly seen exiting the classroom door one by one. Evidently, Carole had deliberately adjusted the footage to three-thirty this afternoon, the exact time their school let out.
The figures in the frame were a bit chaotic. Carole rested her chin on her hand, watching alongside Shirayanagi Ayaha. Naturally, she had no idea what her friend's childhood friend looked like, nor what his name was, and she did not particularly care to know either. But since things had already reached this point, she could not help but feel a little curious.
One figure after another appeared in the frame, only to step past the borders and vanish from view.
But Carole had pressed the pause button on her own even before Shirayanagi Ayaha called out.
At almost the exact same time, both of their gazes locked onto the aloof silhouette that had just stepped out of the classroom door.
Carole recognized Hoshino Gen as well, because just earlier today, they had briefly crossed paths...
Her mind naturally conjured up the image of that person's indifferent expression, completely identical to the one currently displayed on the surveillance footage. She then automatically matched it with that ridiculously overpowered status panel covered entirely in question marks.
The corner of her mouth twitched involuntarily. She pointed at Hoshino Gen on the computer screen and looked over at Shirayanagi Ayaha. "Ayaha, please do not tell me your childhood friend is this guy..."
"Eh?! How did you know, Carole?" Shirayanagi Ayaha exclaimed in surprise, before relaxing with sudden realization. "Oh, right. I think I told you before that he is super handsome. It is perfectly normal that you were able to guess right away."
"..." Carole rolled her eyes, too lazy to explain. She simply slapped her forehead in mild distress. "It is actually him? But this afternoon he was still... how did he just go missing?"
"For a Transcendent of that caliber to go missing, I get the feeling that if we keep digging into this, we are going to be dragged into something incredibly troublesome..."
Carole started to mutter to herself, vigorously scratching the ends of her blue-and-pink highlighted hair. Then, she turned to Shirayanagi Ayaha. "How about we just drop this? This childhood friend of yours is incredibly powerful. He is renowned on an international scale—he even beat down that whoever-it-was in the UK. This whole disappearance might just be you guys being overly paranoid. Who knows, maybe he will sort out the problem himself and be back tomorrow, or even in a few hours?"
"Carole!" Shirayanagi Ayaha puffed out her cheeks and glared at her. "You promised me..."
"...Tch." Carole clicked her tongue in helplessness. "Fine, but let us get one thing straight. I never expected your childhood friend to be a monster of this level. An incident capable of making him disappear is highly likely to be unfathomably complex and dangerous. Even if we do find the location where he went missing, do not do anything rash."
"Mhm, I know." Shirayanagi Ayaha nodded obediently. Yet, beneath her concern for Hoshino Gen, she could not help but mutter softly with a hint of pride, "I told you he was super strong, but you refused to believe me earlier..."
Carole curled her lip, responding speechlessly as she continued to adjust the surveillance feed. "How was I supposed to know the person you were talking about was the Divine Punishment Agent who soloed the Holy See?"
"Soloed the Holy See? Divine Punishment... Agent?" Shirayanagi Ayaha tilted her head, her face full of question marks. "What do you mean?"
"Those are the deeds and the title of your childhood friend. Back in July of this year, a man named Hoshino Gen brutally slaughtered a Cardinal of the Holy See in London. Then, he ran straight to the gates of St. Peter's Cathedral to block their path, and beat their High Priest half to death. Because the way he invoked heavenly thunder at the end of that battle looked exactly like divine judgment descending from heaven, the Dark Web gave him the title of Divine Punishment Agent—"
When it came to critical intelligence work, Carole, as one of the world's top hackers, was incredibly thorough.
Furthermore, Hoshino Gen's battle against the Holy See's High Priest was the highest-level and most widely broadcasted conflict in the mystic side world this year. Naturally, Carole had gone out of her way to look into it.
Beside her, Shirayanagi Ayaha listened with sparkling eyes, looking as if literal stars might pop out of them. "I do not really understand all of it, but that definitely means he is amazing, right!"
As soon as she spoke, she hurriedly shook her head. "No, no, wait. Now is not the time to be focusing on that. Finding him is what matters most..."
"..."
Carole remained silent for a moment before saying, "We are out of luck if we just rely on normal surveillance. Your childhood friend showed up this afternoon at that abandoned school we visited today. There are barely any cameras in that area, so we can only rely on satellites."
"Ah... will that take a long time? Hacking into a satellite must be really hard, right?"
"That depends entirely on who is at the keyboard," Carole laughed playfully. "For an ordinary person, it would indeed be incredibly difficult. But for me... if I were simply using a computer to execute the commands, it would definitely waste a bit of time. However, if I add my inherent ability into the mix—"
As she spoke, a pale blue halo began to swirl within her beautiful eyes. The computer in front of her suddenly blacked out, followed immediately by violent flickering and a rapid refresh of scrolling code.
About ten seconds later, the screen lit up once more. This time, it displayed a bird's-eye view from a high altitude.
Carole raised her hand and used the mouse to continuously zoom in on the image. A cluster of buildings grew from a tiny speck until it filled the entire screen.
Shirayanagi Ayaha recognized the structures in the video feed. Was this not the very same abandoned school she and Carole had visited earlier today?
The image began to shift as the video rapidly rewound.
And so, the scene of Hoshino Gen sitting at the piano, performing with Hoshino Rin's help, only to abruptly disappear into thin air the moment the performance ended, was replayed—albeit somewhat blurrily—on the computer screen right in front of Carole and Shirayanagi Ayaha.
"Did... did the frame skip?" Shirayanagi Ayaha's eyes widened. "How did he suddenly just vanish?"
Carole cast a sidelong glance at her. "Obviously, this right here is the source of your childhood friend's 'disappearance'."
"But... but if he just disappeared into thin air like this, how are we ever supposed to find him?" Shirayanagi Ayaha asked, growing frantic.
"It is not completely impossible." Carole cupped her cheeks with both hands and said calmly, "For situations where someone disappears into thin air like this, there are generally two possibilities. The first is that he was teleported to another location. The second is that he became hidden within a subspace.
"However, subspaces are usually incredibly fragile, and they require a continuous, stable, and completely unwavering supply of energy. It is almost impossible for one to form naturally, and if it was created artificially, it could not be sustained for very long. Therefore, we will only consider the first possibility here."
"Based on the characteristics of a spatial jump, a person who disappears into thin air in one place must appear out of thin air in another."
Carole sighed and continued, "With enough computing power backing us up, we can continuously scan through the satellites. As long as the landing point of the spatial jump was not somewhere with overhead cover, we will find it eventually. But the workload for this is absolutely massive. Even for me, I will have to hijack the computing power of Japan's supercomputers to run the search. I might even need to network multiple supercomputers together. Furthermore, the search radius can only cover Japan at most, and the time required will still have to be measured in hours. And all of that is assuming I enter 'overclock' mode—"
"It is going to be super exhausting."