Chapter 1: A Girl with No Name
Chapter 1
A Girl with No Name
“Aah…”
He woke up feeling like crap.
It was hard to imagine anyone would be pleased to discover their little sister excitedly sambaing on top of their chest and head.
…With the exception of a few enthusiasts.
April 10. Monday.
Spring break had ended the day before, which meant it was the first day of the new school term.
Shido Itsuka rubbed his bleary eyes, groaning. “Aah, Kotori. My adorable little sister.”
“Huh?!”
Kotori whirled around to face him, one foot firmly planted on his stomach, the skirt of her junior high school uniform swaying. She had finally noticed he was awake.
Her long hair had been parted into pigtails, and she stared down at him with eyes as round as walnuts.
She didn’t look particularly guilty or apologetic—no cries of “Yikes!” or “Caught in the act!”—even though she’d just been stomping on him. In fact, she looked genuinely pleased with Shido’s awakening.
He could see her underwear from this position. And it wasn’t just a glimpse. This was beyond inappropriate.
“My adorable big brother! What’s up?!” Kotori cried, showing no sign of lifting her foot.
Just to be clear: Shido was not adorable.
“Ugh. Get off. You’re heavy.”
Kotori nodded theatrically, launching off his stomach to leap from the bed—and to deliver one final body blow.
“Gouf!”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha! ‘Gouf!’ he says! That’s a Gundam Ground Type! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
“…” Shido wordlessly pulled the covers over his head.
“Aaah! C’mon! Why are you going back to sleep?!” Kotori started to shake him violently.
“Ten more minutes…”
“No! You have to get up!”
As Kotori rattled Shido’s sluggish brain in his skull, he frowned, straining to speak. “…R-run…”
“What?”
“…I’ve been infected with the T-virus—short for the ‘Ten More Minutes in Bed, or I’ll Subject My Sister to Tickle Hell’ disease…”
“Wh-what?!” Kotori was shocked, as if she’d just decoded a secret message from aliens.
“Run…while I’m still conscious…”
“B-but what will happen to you?!”
“Just leave me here… Save yourself…”
“I can’t do that! Big Bro!”
“Gaaah!” Shido threw off his blankets and wriggled his fingers.
“Eeeeeeeeek!” Kotori shrieked, scrambling out of the room.
“…Geez.” He sighed, pulling his blankets back up. It wasn’t even six yet, according to his clock. “Why did she have to wake me up at this ungodly hour…?” he grumbled.
As his foggy mind started to clear up, he remembered what had happened the previous night.
Their parents had departed the day before on some kind of business trip, which left Shido in charge of the kitchen. Since he’d never been much of a morning person, he had asked Kotori to be his alarm clock.
“Ohhh…”
I shouldn’t have done that. He sat up in bed, scratching his head. With a big yawn, he smoothed down his bedhead before tottering out of the room.
The small mirror on the wall caught his attention. He squinted at his reflection—looking through his bangs, which had gotten too long to be considered bangs. He hadn’t had a chance to get his hair cut.
“…”
Just like his visual acuity, his appearance had gotten worse over the years. He sighed before trudging down the stairs into the living room.
“…Huh?”
The house looked a little different from usual. The wooden table had been dragged away from the middle of the room, acting as a barricade against a wall. He could see pigtails quivering behind it.
“…” He stealthily tiptoed to the side of the table.
Sure enough, Kotori was sitting there, trembling, her arms hugging her knees.
“Boo!” He grabbed her shoulders.
“Eeeek! Eeeeeaah!” Kotori flailed her arms and legs, but her shriek wasn’t exactly cute.
“Whoa there! Calm down! It’s me.”
“Aaaaah! Eeeek! …Uh? Wait. Big Bro?”
“Yup.”
“N-nothing scary?”
“Nothing scary. I come in peace. Me, friend.”
“O-oh.”
Kotori’s tense face relaxed, almost like a wild squirrel that had given him its trust.
“Sorry. I’ll make breakfast right away.”
He took her hand to pull her to her feet before righting the table and heading toward the kitchen.
From time to time, their parents went out of town on business trips for their shared workplace—a major electronics manufacturer. That meant Shido was in charge of cooking. He’d gotten used to it. In fact, he was confident that he knew his way around the kitchen better than his mother did.
As he fetched some eggs from the fridge, Shido heard the television turn on behind him. Kotori had apparently lowered her heart rate enough to turn it on.
Part of her morning routine was to channel surf for daily horoscopes and fortune-telling segments. That said, those readings always marked the end of the program. After flipping through all the channels, she watched the news, bored.
“Early this morning, in the outskirts of Tengu…”
“Hmm?” Shido rarely paid attention to the background noise, but this made his eyebrows shoot up. The reason was simple: The announcer had clearly stated the name of a familiar city. “Huh? That’s pretty close. Something happen?” He leaned over the kitchen counter to get a better look at the TV.
Everything on the screen had been absolutely decimated.
Buildings and roadways had given way, broken down into a pile of rubble. It was a disaster on par with a meteor strike.
Shido frowned, sighing. “Aah… A spacequake?” He shook his head.
The phenomenon known as a spatial quake encompassed a broad scope of tremors. Because no one knew how or why they occurred, it was impossible to predict one or know the scale of one’s damage. Spacequakes included everything from explosions to earthquakes to evanescence.
It made as much sense as a giant monster destroying the city on a whim.
The first instance of such an anomaly was observed thirty years ago.
Over the course of a night, something had gouged out the middle of the Eurasian continent—in a territory containing the former Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia. Shido’s generation had seen one too many photographs of the disaster in textbooks.
There had been nothing left. It was as though a giant eraser had been taken to the region, leaving approximately 150 million people dead.
A disaster on this scale was a first for recorded history. In the six months following that first incident, this phenomenon occurred in areas around the world, albeit on a smaller scale.
If Shido’s memory served him right, there had been around fifty events. Spacequakes had been seen on every continent, at the north pole, in the ocean, and on smaller islands.
Naturally, Japan was no exception. Six months after the Eurasian disaster, a perfect circle of scorched earth had materialized over a zone south of Tokyo and north of Kanagawa Prefecture. Everything had simply been deleted. That was the very region where Shido and his family now lived.
“Didn’t they stop for a while?” he asked. “I wonder why there’s more of them now.”
“I dunno!” Kotori cocked her head to one side, eyes glued to the TV.
After the Kanto incident, time and space had been spared the disturbances for some time. That was, until five years ago, when there’d been a spacequake in the redeveloped city now known as Tengu. Ever since, there’d been sporadic tremors of unknown cause—the majority of them in Japan.
Of course, it wasn’t as though humans had been twiddling their thumbs during the twenty-five years between the Eurasian spacequake and the Tengu one. The nationwide construction of underground shelters had exploded thirty years ago, beginning with the redeveloped areas. It had become possible to measure the warning signs of a spacequake in advance. Above all else, they had the disaster relief corps in Self-Defense Forces.
The corps had been formed with the objective of rebuilding the devastated facilities and roadways in the disaster zone. They worked their “magic” and managed to completely restore these ravaged towns in an impossibly short time.
The nature of their efforts was classified, so what happened behind the scenes wasn’t public knowledge. Still, it did feel like witnessing a magic trick to see obliterated buildings restored to their original form overnight. However, these speedy repairs didn’t make the spacequakes any less of a threat.
“Don’t you think there’s been one too many quakes around here?” Shido inquired. “Especially in the last year.”
“…Hmm, I guess. Maybe faster than scheduled,” Kotori said, leaning over the armrest of the sofa.
“Faster? What’s faster?”
“Mm, naafing.”
He gave her a quizzical look. He was less interested in what she had said than the fact that her voice was oddly muffled.
“…”
Without a word, he went around the counter and walked over to where she sat on the sofa.
As he approached, she slowly turned her face away.
“Kotori, look this way for a sec.”
“…”
“Now.”
“Ngah!”
He planted his hand on her head and forced her to face him. A strange sound escaped her throat.
“I knew it!” He saw exactly what he had expected to see in her mouth.
They hadn’t even had breakfast, but Kotori was already enjoying her favorite candy: a Chupa Chups lollipop.
“C’mon! I told you: No candy before meals.”
“Mm! Mm!”
He yanked on the stick to try and tug the candy out, and Kotori clamped her lips together to resist. Her face started to distort in the direction he was pulling, making her adorable countenance kind of ugly.
“…Honestly. You have to eat a proper breakfast. Got it?”
In the end, he gave in, tousling her hair before heading back to the kitchen.
“Yup! I love you, Big Bro!”
He shooed her away and got back to work. “…Oh, that reminds me. Isn’t today the entrance ceremony for junior high?”
“So that means you’ll be home around noon… Anything you want to eat for lunch?”
“Hmm.” Kotori bobbed her head back and forth as she considered the question. Then she shot up in her seat. “A Deluxe Kid’s Meal!”
It was an item from the children’s menu offered by a local restaurant.
Shido snapped to attention and inclined his upper body exactly forty-five degrees forward. “I’m afraid we don’t offer that at our establishment.”
“What?” she cried unhappily, flicking the lollipop stick from side to side.
He sighed and shrugged. “…Oh, fine. I guess it’s a special day. How about we go out for lunch?”
“Oh!” Kotori squealed. “Really?!”
“Sure. Meet at the usual spot once school’s over.”
Kotori waved her hands excitedly. “You swear? It’s a promise?! Even if there’s an earthquake or a fire or a spacequake, even if the restaurant gets taken over by terrorists, you have to promise!”
“Wait. If it gets taken over, they’re not going to be serving food.”
“Promise!” she insisted.
“Okay, okay, I promise.”
“Whoo-hoo!” She threw her hands up into the air.
Shido thought he might be acting too nice, but well, today was special.
I’ll be in charge of cooking for a while anyway. And today, we’ll both be attending our own entrance ceremonies. We can indulge a little. Although I’m not sure how much of an indulgence a kid’s meal is at seven hundred eighty yen.
“Hmm.” He reached up to open the small kitchen window.
The sky was so clear, it almost promised it would be a good day.
The clock had just hit 8:15 AM when Shido arrived at school. He checked the class list posted in the hallway and then headed to the classroom that would be his home for the next school year.
After the spacequake turned this region into a wasteland thirty years earlier, the area had been redeveloped as a test city with cutting-edge technologies. Raizen High, the public school Shido attended, was one product of this.
In addition to the facilities that seemed impossible for a public school, both the interior and exterior were in pristine condition, since the place had only been built a few years earlier. Naturally, it featured the latest in underground shelters, seeing it was on the site of a disaster.
Perhaps that was the reason for the institution’s low acceptance rate. Shido had struggled to get in when he’d decided to take the entrance exam solely because the school was close to his house.
“Hmm.” He quietly groaned and then looked around the classroom for no particular reason.
There was still some time before homeroom, but a fair number of his classmates were already seated at their desks. Some were chatting happily, excited to be in the same class, while others sat alone, looking bored. He couldn’t see too many familiar faces.
He decided to check the seating chart on the blackboard.
“Shido Itsuka.”
He heard a quiet, inflectionless call from behind him.
“Hmm…?”
Curious about the owner of this unfamiliar voice, he looked back and saw a slender girl standing there.
Her hair skimmed her shoulders, and she looked like a doll, which caught Shido’s attention. It was hard to imagine anyone would object to that. It was like her parts had been precision machined to perfection. At the same time, her face was completely devoid of anything that could have been called an expression.
“Um…?” He checked to see that there were no other Shido Itsukas in the area. After he confirmed he was the only one, he raised an eyebrow, pointing at himself. “…Me?”
“Yes.” The girl gave him the tiniest nod as she looked directly at him without any emotion whatsoever.
She seemed confused by the question. “You don’t remember?”
“…Uh.”
“I see,” she noted, without sounding particularly dejected. She walked over to a desk near the window, where she drew back her seat, pulled out a thick engineering book, and began to read.
“Wh-what the…?” Shido scratched his cheek and furrowed his brow.
This girl acted like she knew him, but where had they met?
“Hi-yah!” A perfect karate chop slammed into his back.
“Oof!” He rubbed at the sore spot. “Ow! What do you think you’re doing, Tonomachi?!”
He knew the culprit immediately.
“Oh-ho! You seem to be in good spirits, sexual beast Itsuka!” Instead of commenting that they were lucky to be in the same class, Shido’s best friend, Hiroto Tonomachi, crossed his arms and leaned back, cackling, showing off his toned body and spiked hair.
“Sex… What?” Shido frowned.
“Sexual beast, you dirty boy. I let you outta my sight for one second, and you turn into a horndog. When did you get all chummy with Tobiichi, huh?”
With a huge grin, Tonomachi slipped an arm around Shido’s neck.
“Tobiichi…?” Shido asked. “Who’s that?”
“Don’t play dumb. You were literally just talking to her.” Tonomachi jerked his chin in the direction of the window seats. And the girl sitting there.
Maybe she sensed Shido’s eyes on her, because she lifted her head from the pages of her book and turned toward him.
“…” Shido held his breath and looked away awkwardly. Tonomachi, meanwhile, smiled and waved.
“…” Without reacting to either of them, the girl returned her gaze to the publication in her hands.
“See? Check that out,” Tonomachi said. “The most difficult girl in the school. They call her Permafrost, Cold War, Kacrackle. How the hell did you reel her in?”
“Huh…? Wh-what are you on about?”
“No way. Don’t tell me you seriously don’t know.”
“…Hmm. I don’t remember her from last year.”
Tonomachi threw his hands up with a surprised look on his face, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He was always overreacting to everything.
“It’s Tobiichi,” he said. “Origami Tobiichi. Super genius. The pride of our school? You never heard of her?”
“No. Never… So she’s pretty great, I guess?”
“It’s not a matter of being great,” Tonomachi informed him. “She always gets the highest marks in our grade. And on the mock exams, her score was wild—number one in the whole country. Brace yourself to drop a rank in this class.”
“Huh? Why would she be in a public school?”
“Dunno. Maybe some kind of family sitch?” Tonomachi shrugged dramatically. “And it’s not just that. She’s a killer athlete, and she’s turning into a real cutie. She was number three on last year’s Thirteen Most Dateable Girls list, y’know? You didn’t see that?”
“I didn’t even know such a list existed,” Shido replied. “And thirteen? Why would they pick such a random number?”
“The girl who put together the list was number thirteen.”
“…Ohhh.” Shido smiled wanly. Apparently, she just had to be on the list.
“By the way,” Tonomachi continued. “There were three hundred fifty-eight boys listed for the Most Dateable Guys.”
“That many?! Coming in last means would mean you’ve made it onto the Least Dateable list! Who decided on three hundred fifty-eight? Was it the person who ran the poll?”
“Yeah. Some people seriously don’t know when to give up.”
“And what number were you, Tonomachi?”
“Three hundred fifty-eight.”
“You’re the one who put it together?!”
“Apparently, my love feels ‘suffocating,’ I’m ‘too hairy,’ and the space under my big toenail ‘probably stinks.’”
“That is the Least Dateable list!” Shido cried.
“Well, to be honest, the guys at the bottom didn’t get a single vote. It was like a contest to see who had the least negative points.”
“That’s some kind of self-inflicted torture! You could just not do it, you know!”
“Relax, Itsuka. You got a vote from someone who wanted to stay anonymous, so you were fifty-two.”
“What am I supposed to say to that?!”
“Well, the general public said you ‘don’t seem that interested in girls’ and that you’re ‘probably gay.’”
“You didn’t have to tell me that!”
“Calm down, man. For Best Couple, the shippers chose you and me for number two.”
“That doesn’t make me happy at all!” Shido wailed, unable to hold back. Unfortunately, he was morbidly curious about who ranked as the number one couple.
Tonomachi didn’t seem bothered by it (or rather…he seemed like he had already moved past it), and he crossed his arms as if to say they should get back to the point at hand.
“Anyway, it’s no exaggeration to say that Tobiichi is the most famous person at school. The fact that you don’t seem to know her, Itsuka, does come as quite the surprise to your good pal Tonomachi.”
“Ugh, could you please drop it?” Shido groaned. No sooner had he done so than a familiar bell chimed, reminding him that he still hadn’t checked where his desk was. “Whoops.”
Following the seating chart on the blackboard, Shido set his bag down in a spot in the second row from the window and looked around.
“…Oh.”
In an odd twist of fate, his desk was right beside that of their grade’s leading lady.
Origami Tobiichi closed her book before the bell finished ringing and tucked it away in her desk. Then she looked forward, displaying a beautiful profile of impossible precision.
“…”
Feeling a little uncomfortable, Shido turned his attention to the chalkboard.
As if on cue, the classroom door rattled open. A woman with a small build wearing thin-rimmed glasses stepped inside, marching up to the podium at the front of the class.
He heard the other students whispering around him.
“It’s Tama…”
“Aah, we got Tama.”
“For real? All right!”
The chatter seemed to be positive overall.
“Good morning, everyone,” the woman said, her voice lilting and slow. “I will be your homeroom teacher for the next year. My name is Tamae Okamine.”
Licensed educator in charge of social studies, Tamae Okamine (aka Tama) bowed to the class. Her glasses slid forward—they must not have been the right size—and she hurriedly pushed them back up with both hands.
Even her harshest critic would assume that she was the same age as her pupils upon seeing her youthful face and small build. She was a student favorite, given her generally easygoing personality.
“…?”
While Shido’s classmates grew more excited, his own face stiffened. Origami was now staring hard at him.
Their eyes met briefly, and he hurried to look away.
Why on earth was she looking at him? Well, it wasn’t like she wasn’t allowed to look at him, and she might have been looking at something on the other side of him, but either way, he felt flustered by the whole exchange.
“…Wh-what is going on…?” he muttered, too quiet for anyone else to hear, a trail of sweat running down his cheek.
Three hours later, Tonomachi came over to Shido.
“Itsukaaaa, you must be free, right? Wanna grab a bite?” he asked, bag slung over his shoulder, while the other students got their things together and left the classroom after the entrance ceremony.
School never ended at noon except during exam periods, and groups could be seen discussing where they should go for lunch.
Shido was about to say yes and then remembered he couldn’t. “Oh! Sorry, I have plans today.”
“What? A girl?”
“Uhhh, well… Kind of?”
“What?!” Tonomachi threw his arms up and lifted a leg, in a pose like the famed Glico running man. “What happened over spring break?! First, you’re chatting all chummy with the Tobiichi, and now you got a lunch date with a girl?! I thought we swore we’d try to be virgins until we’re thirty and ascend to further greatness?!”
“Uh, I don’t remember agreeing to that… And, like, the girl is Kotori, okay?”
Tonomachi let out a relieved sigh. “Don’t scare me like that.”
“You got worked up all by yourself.”
“But, well, it shouldn’t be a problem if it’s just little Kotori. Can I come, too?”
“Hmm? That’s probably fine…,” Shido accepted.
Tonomachi set an elbow on Shido’s desk, leaning in dramatically.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Kotori is already in her second year of middle school, right? She got a boyfriend?”
“Huh?”
“Oh, no ulterior motives here. Just wondering if she would go for a guy three years older.”
“…Actually, I take it back. You can’t come.” Shido glared at his friend and shoved his face back.
“What?! Bro!”
“Don’t ‘bro’ me. Ugh.” Shido scowled.
Tonomachi pulled himself back up and shrugged. “Ha-ha! Well, I’m not crass enough to crash a sacred bonding moment between brother and sister. Have fun, but don’t take it too far. Don’t wanna break any laws.”
“You always go too far,” Shido said, his cheek twitching.
Tonomachi made a shocked face. “It’s just, Kotori is supercute. Living under the same roof must be heaven.”
“If you actually had a sister, you wouldn’t think that.”
“Ah… I’ve heard that before: Kid sisters aren’t so cute when you actually have one. So I guess it’s true?”
“Yeah, I don’t see her as a girl… She’s just a creature called a sister,” Shido declared curtly.
“So that’s how it is, huh?” Tonomachi grinned wryly.
“That’s how it is. It’s the kid part of kid sister.”
“What about big sisters then?” Tonomachi pressed.
“Like a giant woman?” Shido asked.
“Whoa! Think of enormous ladies roaming the earth!” Tonomachi laughed.
Vwnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnmmmmm.
“…gh?!”
At that moment, the panes in the classroom started to rattle, and Shido could hear an eerie siren wailing throughout the town.
“Wh-what…was that…?” Tonomachi opened a window and poked his head outside. Several crows took off into the air, perhaps startled by the siren.
The students lingering behind in the classroom all stopped talking, and their eyes grew wide.
The siren stopped, and a voice came over the loudspeakers, enunciating each word clearly to make the message easier to hear.
“This is not a drill. I repeat. This is not a drill. A foreshock has been detected. A spacequake is coming. All residents, please evacuate immediately to the nearest shelter. I repeat…”
The silent students gasped. A spacequake warning. Their hunches turned immediately to conviction.
“Whoa, whoa… For real?” Tonomachi’s voice was hoarse, and sweat beaded on his forehead.
Although everyone in the classroom looked anxious, they were relatively calm, including Shido and Tonomachi. At the very least, no one was spiraling into total panic. Because the city had been seriously damaged in the spacequake thirty years earlier, Shido and his cohort had marched through an annoying amount of evacuation drills since they were in nursery school.
Plus, they were in a school equipped with an underground shelter large enough to hold every student on the register.
“The shelter’s right there,” Shido said. “We just have to evacuate calmly, and we’ll be fine.”
“R-right.” Tonomachi nodded.
They hurried, not quite running, out of the classroom. The hallway was already full of students forming lines and heading toward the shelter.
Just one of them was going in the opposite direction—a girl racing toward the doors that led outside.
“Tobiichi…?”
Running down the hallway with her skirt flapping in the wind was the Origami Tobiichi.
“Hey! What are you doing?! The shelter’s this—”
“It’s fine,” Origami stated, stopping briefly before racing off again.
“Fine? What’s fine?” Shido craned his neck dubiously as he lined up with Tonomachi and the other students.
He was worried about Origami, but maybe she’d forgotten something. Just because the alarm had gone off didn’t mean that there would be a spacequake right that second. She’d make it in time if she came back soon.
“P-please stay calm! I-it’s all right! Don’t panic!” Tamae called out, guiding the students. “Remember the three don’ts!! Don’t push! Don’t run! And don’t t-t-twalk!” she squeaked.
Shido could hear some students snickering in response.
“…It’s weird,” Tonomachi said. “But seeing someone more freaked than me makes me feel better.”
“Aah, I totally understand.” Shido smiled wryly.
In fact, Tama’s helpless panic seemed to be putting the majority of the students at ease instead of making them more anxious.
Shido suddenly remembered something and reached into his pocket for his cell phone.
“Hmm? What’s up, Itsuka?”
“Oh, just, you know,” Shido muttered vaguely as he selected the name Kotori Itsuka from his call history and redialed.
He couldn’t get through. He tried a few times, but no dice. “…That’s not good. I hope she’s getting to safety.”
He was sure she’d be fine, as long as she hadn’t left school. The problem was if she had already started out for the restaurant.
There was a park shelter right near there, though, so that wasn’t really an issue, either. The thought didn’t reassure Shido, however. He could easily picture Kotori ignoring the alarm and waiting for him in front of the restaurant like a faithful dog. Her “Promise!” from that morning echoed in the back of his mind.
“I—I did agree to be there, even if there was a spacequake…but she couldn’t actually be that stupid… Oh right. I know.”
Shido could use an app to check the GPS location of her cell phone. After fiddling with his phone, an aerial map of the town was displayed on his screen, together with a red icon.
“—!” Shido’s heart stopped.
The icon indicating Kotori’s position was parked in front of the restaurant where they were supposed to meet.
“That idiot…!” Cursing under his breath, Shido closed his flip phone and stepped out of the line of students.
“H-hey! Itsuka!” Tonomachi shouted. “Where are you going?!”
“Sorry! Forgot something! You go on ahead!”
Shido ran in the opposite direction of his gathered classmates until he reached the school’s main entrance. He grabbed his outdoor shoes from his shoe cubby, stuffed his feet into them, and scrambled outside. Practically tripping over himself, he raced through the gates and down the hill in front of the school.
“…Th-this situation obviously calls for an evacuation!” Shido shouted, moving his legs as fast as they would carry him.
Before him was a disturbing sight. Deserted sidewalks and carless roads. There wasn’t a single person left on the street, in the parks, in the shops—anywhere. There was a lingering sense that people had just occupied these spaces moments ago, but they were nowhere to be seen now. It was a scene out of a horror movie.
The city of Tengu had been redeveloped with an almost neurotic sensitivity to spacequakes after the catastrophe. Naturally, it ranked first nationwide for the number of underground shelters at public facilities and came in at the top for shelters in residential homes. With the recent spate of spacequakes, the evacuation had been immediate.
“Why would that idiot stay put?!” Shido shouted, flipping his phone open as he ran.
Her location had not budged from in front of the restaurant. He decided that her punishment would be a barrage of forehead flicks. He kept pumping his legs at full speed.
There was no pacing himself. Shido simply struck at the asphalt as hard as he could. His feet hurt, and the tips of his fingers went numb. His throat closed up, his vision started to spin, and the inside of his mouth was desert dry. But Shido didn’t stop. All thoughts of danger or exhaustion had left his head. He simply ran toward Kotori with no regard for anything else!
“…Ngh—?”
And then Shido spotted something in the corner of his eye. Or he felt like he did anyway. Frowning, he turned his face.
“Wait—! What is that…?”
Three—no, four—human silhouettes were floating in the air. But he didn’t get the chance to ponder them for long.
“Whoa…?!” He instinctively covered his eyes as the buildings up ahead of him were suddenly enveloped in a blinding light, followed by an earsplitting explosion. A powerful shock wave slammed into him.
“Wha…?!”
He reflexively covered his face with his arms and braced his feet, but it was no use. The shock wave’s pressure was on par with that of a large typhoon, and it easily blew him back. He lost his balance and tumbled over.
“Ow! What the hell was…?” He sat up, rubbing eyes that were momentarily blinded by the intense flash. “Huh?” The scene left him gaping.
In that brief instant he’d had his eyes closed, the town he’d been staring at had…disappeared without a trace.
“Wh-what? Wait. What is this…?!” Shido stammered.
It was like an asteroid had fallen from the sky. No metaphor. No exaggeration. If he had to describe it, the scene resembled what might’ve happened if the uppermost layer of the ground had been carried off like a platter with the town on top of it. It had been hollowed out like a shallow mortar.
The neighborhood had become a giant smoking pit, and Shido could see a mass of metal rising in the center of the desolate landscape.
“What the…?”
He was too far away to really make out the details, but it kind of looked like a throne, the sort of thing a king would sit atop in an RPG. But that wasn’t the important part.
The real mystery was the girl wearing a bizarre dress standing there with one foot on the armrest.
“What is she doing?” Shido couldn’t see much more than her long black hair and her glowing skirt, but he probably wasn’t wrong in assuming it was a girl.
She lazily turned her head in his direction.
“Hmm…?”
Had she…noticed him? The young woman was too far away for him to be sure.
While he was craning his neck to get a better look, the girl kept moving.
On unstable feet, she grabbed hold of what looked like a hilt sprouting from the throne’s back, slowly pulling it out to reveal a massive sword with a broad blade. It emitted a fantastical light, like a rainbow or a star. The girl swung the weapon in his direction, drawing a luminous arc in the air.
“Ah…?!” He immediately lowered his head. Or to be more precise, the arms that were holding him up off the ground where he lay turned to jelly, and his head dropped with a thud. “Wha—?”
The blade cut through where his head had been a mere heartbeat earlier.
It had to have been too far away to actually strike him…right?
“…Ah—”
Shido’s eyes flew open as he turned to look behind him. The houses and shops, tree-lined streets and signposts had all been bisected at the same height from the ground. A moment later, he heard the destruction—a rumble like distant thunder.
“Eek…?!” Fear beyond his comprehension made his heart sink.
I don’t get it.
What he did get, however, was that if he hadn’t ducked just now, he would have been downsized like the world behind him.
“Th-this can’t be real…!” Shido retreated as though his weak knees were being yanked back by an invisible force. He had to get as far away from this place as he could—as fast as he could.
However.
“You too…huh?”
“…Nngh?!”
The voice he heard from above sounded exhausted.
His vision caught up with his thoughts a beat later.
Standing before his eyes was a girl who had not been there a moment earlier. It was…the same one who had just been in the center of the crater.
“Oh,” Shido said without thinking.
She was around his age, maybe a little younger. Black hair down to her knees, a face that was sweet yet imposing. In its center were eyes that shone with a curious glow—like crystals glittering under rainbow lights. Her outfit was also strange. Shido couldn’t tell if the material was fabric or metal, but either way, it was shaped into something like a princess’s dress. The seams and trim down the skirt were made of a mysterious film of light without any kind of physical substance.
The young woman’s hands gripped an enormous sword that was maybe as tall as she was.
An unusual situation.
A peculiar appearance.
A unique existence.
Any one of these was more than enough to capture Shido’s attention.
And yet… Ah.
None of these external factors was the real reason he was so captivated by her.
Instantly, Shido’s eyes were glued to this girl, making him forget his fear of dying and even the concept of breathing. That was how beautiful she was. She was almost aggressively beautiful.
“Wh-who…?” Shido stammered, stunned.
He knew this might be sacrilegious—and that he might be divinely punished for it.
The girl slowly lowered her gaze.
“My name?”
Her voice was pure honey, decadent sound waves traveling through the air.
“I don’t have one,” she admitted, sounding somewhat distressed.
“—Nngh!”
It was then—he met the girl’s eyes for the first time.
At the same time, the face of the nameless young woman grew gloomy, like she might burst into tears at any moment. She readjusted her grip on the sword.
The faint sound of this movement revived fear in Shido’s heart. “Hey… Stop! Stop!” he cried out desperately.
The young woman only looked down at him curiously. “…What?”
“Wh-what are you doing…?!”
“Killing you quickly, of course,” the girl stated, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The color drained from his face.
“Wh-why…?!”
“Why…? That’s obvious, isn’t it?” Looking down on Shido wearily, she continued, “I mean, didn’t you come to kill me, too?”
“Huh?” Shido’s jaw dropped to the ground. “…Of course not.”
“…What?” She stared at him with a mixture of surprise, suspicion, and bewilderment. It didn’t take her long to shrug and look away from him, tilting her face up to the sky.
Following her lead, Shido moved his gaze upward.
“Wha…?!” He gasped, eyes widening an impossible degree.
Several people in strange outfits were flying through the sky—and the weapons in their hands were launching things that looked like missiles at Shido and the girl.
“Wah—Aaaaaaaaaah?!” he shouted involuntarily.
A few seconds later, however, he was still there, very much alive. “Huh?”
The explosives had all stopped several meters above the girl, as if held back by an invisible hand.
She sighed languidly. “…You never learn. All this is futile.” The unusual young woman raised her free hand and clenched it tightly. The missiles folded in on themselves, crumpling, and exploded on the spot.
The scale of the blast was frighteningly small, as though the girl had absorbed the power of the weapons.
Shido could tell that the people in the sky were flustered, but they didn’t stop attacking. They kept launching missiles at her.
“Hmph,” the girl sighed, looking as though she were about to burst into tears—the same look as when she had turned her sword on him earlier.
Shido’s heart pounded even harder at this sight than it had when he nearly lost his life to her blade.
The whole thing was bizarre.
He didn’t know who the girl was, nor who the people in the sky were. But it was somehow clear to him that the curiously dressed young woman possessed greater power than the fliers.
This called a vague question to mind.
Why would someone so strong make that face?
“…Go away. Get out. Disappear…once and for all!”
She turned the sword, which shone with the same strange light as her eyes, up toward the sky. The swing came down—with marked sorrow and with exhaustion.
The air whistled.
“…Wh-whoa…!”
A shock wave shook heaven and earth. The attack shot into the sky, extending out from the sword itself. The people flying above dived to the sides to escape a direct hit.
In the next instant, a beam of unbelievably powerful light flashed from another direction, this one aimed at the girl.
“…Ngh!”
Shido covered his eyes on instinct.
This luminous ray was abruptly severed, like it had hit an invisible wall in the air above the girl. Like fireworks in the night sky, the light scattered and bounced away in every direction.
And then someone dropped down behind him.
“Wh-what the—?! It just keeps coming!”
He still had no idea what was going on. All of this seemed like a daydream of the nightmare variety. When he looked up at the person now standing to his rear, his entire body seized up.
He had to assume she was wearing some manner of machine. She was dressed in a bizarre bodysuit with large blasters on the back, and she was carrying a weapon shaped like a golf bag in her hands.
The reason Shido froze in place was simple. He had seen this girl before.
“Origami…Tobiichi?” he murmured the name Tonomachi had told him that morning.
The young woman with the extremely mechanized look was his classmate—Origami Tobiichi.
She glanced down at him.
“Shido Itsuka…?!” Origami shouted his name as if that were an answer to his question—no change at all in the blank expression on her face, but there was just a hint of surprise in her voice.
“…Huh? Wh-why are you wearing—?” Shido began, knowing it was a stupid question even as he started to ask it. Too many things were happening all at once, and he didn’t even know where to start unraveling the mysteries.
Origami quickly looked away from him and turned her attention to the girl in the dress.
That would make sense.
“Hmph.” Just as she had before, the girl swung the sword in her hand at Origami.
Origami immediately kicked off from the ground, dodging the attack. Then she used the momentum to bear down on her opponent at lightning speed. In the blink of an eye, a blade of light materialized at the end of the weapon in her hands. She brought this sword down on the girl with everything she had.
“Mm!” The girl frowned slightly and stopped the blow with her own sword.
An intense shock wave rippled out from the point where their blades had crossed.
“Hey… Unh. Waaaaaaah?!” Crying out pathetically, Shido curled into a ball and made it through the chaos somehow.
Origami bounced back, so there was some distance between the two girls again. They glared at each other silently, weapons raised, ready to go at any moment, with Shido stuck in between them.
“…”
“…”
The situation was explosive. The battle threatened to start again at any moment if there was even the slightest trigger.
“…”
Shido was on tenterhooks. Sweat pouring down his forehead, he started wriggling along the ground to try and get away, want desperately to be anywhere rather than there.
At that moment, the phone in his pocket suddenly chirped, informing him of an incoming message.
“—!”
That was the signal.
The girl and Origami launched themselves off the ground and clashed right in front of him.
“Eeeeaaaaaah!”
Shido screamed as the overwhelming blowback flung him up into the air. And then he slammed into a wall and blacked out.
“Status report,” demanded a girl sporting a bright red military jacket draped over the shoulders of a white shirt as she stepped onto the bridge of the warship.
“Commander.” The man waiting next to her saluted neatly, like something out of an army manual.
The young woman called commander merely glanced at him and kicked his shins.
“Ungh!”
“Forget the greetings,” she barked, sitting down in the captain’s chair. “Give me a status report.”
The man’s expression had been less agony—more ecstasy. He snapped back to attention. “Yes, ma’am! The Spirit appeared at the same time as the attack began.”
“AST?”
“It appears that way.”
AST. Anti-Spirit Team. Modern wizards clad in mechanical armor, more than human, not quite monsters. They hunted, captured, and killed Spirits. That said, the reality was that even their superhuman abilities didn’t stand a chance. The power of the Spirits was on an entirely different level from anything the AST wielded.
“Ten confirmed on the scene. Currently, only one is attacking.”
“Get me video,” the commander ordered, and a real-time feed was displayed on the warship’s largest monitor.
Two girls were visible in the center of the scene, brandishing massive weapons on a wide road about two blocks away from the shopping district. Each time their blades clashed, beams of light shot out, the ground cracked, and buildings collapsed. It was an impossible sight.
“That AST girl is not too shabby, hmm?” the commander noted. “But, well, she’s got no hope up against a Spirit.”
“That is indeed the case. But it’s also a fact that we are unable to do anything, either.”
“…” The commander lifted a foot and jammed the heel of her boot into the top of the man’s foot.
“Hngh!”
Ignoring the look of sheer bliss that spread across his face, the commander sighed softly. “I already knew that. I’m getting sick and tired of just sitting back and watching.”
“So then, you mean?”
“Yes. Rounds finally gave the go-ahead. We’re commencing the operation.”
This announcement drew gasps from every member of her crew.
“Kannazuki.” The commander leaned back in her chair and slightly raised her right hand, snapping her index and middle fingers up. Almost as if she were asking for a cigarette.
“Yes, ma’am!” The man immediately put a hand in a pocket and pulled out a small piece of candy attached to a stick. He peeled off the wrapper—quickly but neatly. Then he knelt down next to the commander and placed the lollipop stick between her fingers. “Here you are.”
The commander thrust the treat into her mouth and flicked the stick back and forth. “Oh, that reminds me. What about the critical secret weapon? Didn’t answer the phone before. Tell me our weapon managed to evacuate, right?”
“I’ll investigate. Here—hmm?” Kannazuki tilted his head to one side.
“What?”
“Oh, there.” He pointed at the screen.
The commander turned her eyes in that direction and then let out a short cry. “Oh!”
A boy in a school uniform was laid out next to the Spirit and the AST member crossing swords.
“Perfect timing. Collect him.”
“Roger that.” Kannazuki bowed at the precisely correct angle once more.