Chapter One: They’ve Got the Whole World In A... Pinch?

Our capital, a sight so familiar to us we almost took it for granted, was suddenly very different.

“A most distressing picture...” whispered our Prime Minister, Zahar, from beside us.

Distressing, indeed. When we looked out the window of our bird-drawn carriage at the street as it went by, the first thing we noticed was the injured. Many of them were sitting on the ground. Those who knew something of medicine, or had learned some healing magic, were flitting from one person to the next as quickly as they could.

These people were out here on the street, we suspected, because they knew it was more dangerous still to be inside, under the roof of a building. Some were sobbing, others simply staring into the distance, but all appeared shocked by this unfamiliar catastrophe.

We spotted one man sitting with his back against some rubble, cradling a crying child in his arms. From their respective ages, we took them to be a father and child. But there was no sign of the mother we might have expected to see with them. Injured and taken somewhere? Run off, leaving her husband and child behind? Or... was she still trapped under the rubble against which the man rested?

Few buildings had fallen down wholesale, but even fewer were entirely in one piece. Most were partially damaged, tilting crazily, or had prominent cracks spidering through them. Even those that looked undamaged on the outside were probably chaotic within. Broken vases and fallen pictures might be little more than a nuisance, but if some larger furniture had fallen over, the floor itself might be damaged. It was all but impossible to go back for anything—not precious heirlooms, not supplies and medicines for first aid.

We doubted anyone had expected anything like this. And so no one had prepared. The ground was supposed to be immovable. We had never doubted it.

Earthquake. Earth quake.

We knew the word, but had never expected that we, or our capital, would experience one firsthand. At the very least, we did not recall any such thing happening in our nation since we, Petralka an Eldant III, had taken the throne. Prime Minister Zahar said there had been one when he was a boy, but only on the border—he had no recollection of any such phenomenon occurring in Marinos.

“Your Majesty, I urge you not to expose yourself too much,” Zahar said now.

“We understand. But there will be no point to this survey if we simply huddle inside the carriage.”

“That is as Your Majesty says...”

Presently, we were on a tour of the quake-affected areas of the castle town. Thankfully, there was no obvious damage to Eldant Castle itself, carved as it was from a mountain. Some broken furnishings and upset decorations were the worst of it.

But the same could not be said of the commoners’ homes. They certainly hadn’t been built with any expectation of being subject to an earthquake. We fully expected extensive damage. For that reason, we thought that a personal survey would both enable us to offer support to our subjects and prove helpful in considering administrative choices in the future. If we carelessly allowed ourselves to be seen, though, the people would trip over themselves trying to be the first to beg for our assistance, and trouble could result. That would only cause more chaos in the city, and further breakdowns in public order and security. Or at least, this was the opinion of Zahar and the head of my royal guard, Garius. Thus we were prevented from doing more than stealing glances out the carriage window. We found it most upsetting, but we had no other choice.

We were just lamenting our own powerlessness when...

“Look there,” we said. On the edge of the scene, we suddenly saw something unfamiliar. No—not unfamiliar, precisely. We had seen it before.

“It’s the Jay Ess Dee Eff,” Zahar said.

Yes: those people who had come from Ja-pan. The army of that nation. (Ja-pan’s ambassador Matoba, as well as Minori, who was herself a member of the Jay Ess Dee Eff, both insisted that it was not, in fact, an army, but we shall ignore that for the time being.) The soldiers wore dark-green uniforms and metal helmets, and rode in carriages of some kind that were not pulled by any birds at all. They appeared to be trying to help the people of the city.

“Immediately before Your Majesty set out, Matoba sought permission for the Jay Ess Dee Eff to engage in relief efforts,” Zahar told me. “Considering the urgency of the situation, I thought it best not to trouble Your Majesty with this matter, and granted permission on my own authority.”

“You did well. Your judgment in such matters remains swift and wise.”

For better or for worse, in order for a prime minister to take some of the burden of rulership off of a ruler’s shoulders, he needed power equivalent to that ruler himself. And he had to be able to make snap decisions about what should and should not be brought to the ruler’s personal attention. A prime minister was not simply a message boy, and one who felt he could do nothing without the ruler’s direct intervention would not be much help.

“You are too kind, Your Majesty.” Zahar bowed his head.

“It appears their vehicles move without the aid of magic.”

There had been reports that, whether due to the earthquake or through sheer coincidence, the sprites had been acting strangely. Magic was proving difficult to use in Marinos, showing less effect than it should have. This was something that was thwarting efforts to help the injured. We recalled a situation from some time ago—a moment when magic had been temporarily unusable here in the capital. At that time, Shinichi had...

We sighed without quite meaning to. Zahar looked as if he was going to ask about it, but he was not so uncouth as to interrogate us about every little thing. Then, too, Zahar knew our heart as well as anyone in the Empire, and he may well have realized that we grieved for more than the tragedy unfolding in Marinos and the suffering of those who lived there.

Shinichi... We couldn’t help but think how heartening it would have been to have him by our side.

Kanou Shinichi. The evangelist of otaku culture who had come from Ja-pan. What was he doing now? If he had been here, he would have promptly come up with some bizarre but remarkably effective solution the likes of which we ourselves could never have imagined. That was how we felt, anyway. When had we fallen into the habit of turning to him first with all our troubles?

But at this moment he, and several other women who admired him greatly, were not in Marinos. They were not even in the Eldant Empire.

What did that man think he was doing? Of all the times...

No doubt he is off being intimate with Myusel and Elvia.

Myusel had recently begun to take deliberate steps to insinuate herself into Shinichi’s affections, while Elvia likewise seemed different from before. Perhaps it was our collective experience with the forbidden armor, which had compelled us to divulge our innermost feelings—we no longer had unduly negative impressions of the other two, but for that very reason it disturbed us to see them getting closer to Shinichi, leaving us behind.

We couldn’t quite let go of the idea that they might take advantage of their current distance from our gaze to establish a “fait accompli.”

No, no. This was, of course, no time to be exercised by matters of romance. And yet...

“Argh...”

Even recognizing that it was distinctly silly, we could not help feeling some anger that he was not here now.

It was like a scene out of hell. Like something from Resid*** Evil. Or Devil *** Cry. Or even Dark S**ls. Anyway. My point is, it was that sort of dark, bleak vista I saw before me. There was no blue in the sky above, no green grass on the ground below. There was only uniform dark rock—and, though I wished desperately otherwise, the red-orange of bubbling, boiling magma.

The rock walls created an isolated space. It was large enough you could have done a bit of running around in it; it wasn’t claustrophobic or anything. There was no light from outside, though, no breeze... The only illumination in this chamber came from that molten rock.

Even from a distance, the stuff scalded like an open flame. If you fell in, obviously, that would be it for you, but even just standing where we were, you could easily collapse, overwhelmed by the heat. It was not a welcoming environment for human beings. It would be a tall order even to stay here for very long. It was downright perplexing to me how they had managed to ever build this facility.

“But I can’t turn back now...” I insisted to myself. The fate of the world was riding on me. “It must be in here somewhere... The dark energy that will destroy the world...!”

I had come here to find its source and stop it. Because it was, you know, dark. Because it was going to, you know, destroy the world. We couldn’t take any half measures here.

You could say that for me, Kanou Shinichi, to confront this thing on my own was suicide.

Suddenly I caught my breath: something rose up out of the lake of molten rock. It threw off a geyser of searing lava (what a pain)—a bizarre monster. It was long and black, seemingly made of stone, its craggy surface streaked with fissures like red lines all over its body, lines that glowed and faded rhythmically as if it were breathing. For a second, I thought it must be some kind of dragon or giant snake, but it didn’t have any eyes or a nose. Instead, a cross shape scored the front of it. The front opened like a flower—those were its jaws.

Oh, gross!

It was more like some sort of worm. The jaws, opening in four quarters, were thoroughly toothed, and the inside of its mouth glowed red as well. In place of a tongue I could see a licking flame. Maybe it was magma and not blood that ran through its body. That seemed like the sort of thing you would expect from a monster that lived in a pool of the stuff.

And it was a monster, all right. I wasn’t going to be able to reason with it. Its existence defied logic. And it didn’t look like something a barehanded human was going to beat...

“Hrk!” I jumped to the side. The space where I was standing a second before was roasted with flames, a few stray embers landing on me. I felt the singe, but I put my hands in front of my chest and prepared to fight. “You’re not going to stop me!”

Through my mind flashed the images of all my friends who had died to get me this far. “You’re not going to stop us!” I shouted, and took a step forward. It was so hot. It was painful. Small flames started licking at my shirt; one of the embers must have caught. Just an instant later I was enveloped in the fire, like a walking torch. My skin started to char and fall off. The pain was immense, consuming my consciousness.

“Aaaarrrrghhhhhh!”

But I never stopped working my way forward. If I let myself take a step back, the world would end. If I ran away, the world would end. Death was ahead, and death behind—so let me die facing forward. That was my resolution.

I tried to cry out, but I no longer had a voice. My vocal cords—my entire throat—must have been incinerated. My eyes couldn’t see. My eyeballs must have boiled away long ago. And yet...

There’s a mythical creature called the phoenix. When it dies, it consumes its own body with flames, and then is born again from the ashes, transcending death. If I was to transcend being human, my human body would have to be destroyed. Death was the crucible through which I would pass, becoming at once human and not human. Superhumans were inevitably created by undergoing death as humans; it was almost a rite of passage. And so...

“Aaaaaaaarrrrgggggghhhhh!”

And so I screamed. My skin sloughed off like a snake’s, the flesh melting away so that a new me could emerge from beneath. A body invincible, unthreatened even by this monster’s fire. I would go beyond death in order to save the world.

“Agggghhhhh!”

My whole body was burning hot, especially my chest. When I looked down, I saw a white pattern glowing faintly there: the mark of the hero. The proof that I possessed the power of light that would save the world. It was said the light was given to the Chosen One when the world was in danger. And now, it resided within me. It seemed to be telling me that all the legends, all the prophecies, were true!

“Aaaarghh!”

The light enveloped my body, and my feet began to levitate above the stone floor. Ensconced in the energy of the true and holy light, I launched myself at the terrible beast before me.

“Yaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!”

I struck out with my fist, and out of nowhere a massive fist made of light appeared, mimicking my motion and colliding with the monster. Animated by the energy of evil as the beast was, the holy light was like poison to it. I could see a fist-shaped burn where I’d struck the monster, and the next instant it blazed forth with light and flame as if they had exploded out under too much pressure.

“Gsshhhaaaa!” The monster gave a death rattle and was destroyed. Bits of its body, neither flesh nor rocks, went flying everywhere. But I was hardly paying attention to them.

“Huff... Puff...” Breathing hard, I proceeded forward. My real fight lay within. The source of the dark energy. That evil power was twisting this world, rotting it from the inside.

With a low rumbling, the rock wall across from me began to slide open. The last boss making his entry, presumably. I got into a fighting stance. And then...

“Wha?!”

“Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo.” Soft laughter greeted me. I could only stare in amazement. The twisted ruler controlling the dark energies of the world... The ultimate evil seeking to destroy all things...

“No... It can’t be... You?!” I said, dumbfounded. Yes. Someone I knew well. “Minori-san...!”

“I’m impressed you made it this far, Shinichi-kun.” She slid her glasses up the bridge of her nose with her middle finger. The lenses caught the reflected light from the magma, making it impossible to see her eyes. “Yes, I must give credit where credit is due. And that leads me to a proposition.”

Koganuma Minori smiled openly. She looked just like she had the last time I’d seen her. Or, not quite—now she was wearing a form-fitting black-leather suit, like a bondage thing or maybe a “bizarre kei” costume. But her body still looked like the body I knew and remembered. What I’m trying to say is, she looked great—like, unfairly sexy.

Uh, but moving on...

“Join forces with me. I’ll give you half the world.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I hardly need to tell you that you have no chance of beating me as you are now. You lack the final weapon, the enchanted, evil-cleaving blade... The Hetero Sword.”

It’s true. She was right. I didn’t have the weapon I needed. And yet...

“Join me. Become my right hand. You of all people are capable.” Minori-san smiled at me, almost kindly, as if to emphasize that I had no choice at this moment. It was true. She was right. And so I said...

“You won’t deceive me, Minori-san.”

“Oh no?”

“‘Half the World’ is probably the name of some chair or something! And when it breaks into pieces, you’ll probably dance around masked and half-naked, crowing about how you’re the king or something stupid like that!”

“Was my plan that obvious?” Minori-san said, raising an eyebrow.

Truthfully, it was a close call. It was that expression, “half the world,” that snapped me back to my senses. If she’d said something like “I’ll let you feel me up all you want” or something, I probably would’ve just nodded along...

Er, uh. Ahem. Never mind. I’ll be serious. Sorry.

“Besides, I know the kind of world you would rule over—one where men can only marry men! It wouldn’t last two generations!” And who wanted half of a place like that?

“Oh, it’s no problem. Mara**h and Banco**n got pregnant in Patalli**, didn’t they?”

“That exception only proves the rule!”

“Yaoi holes are all-powerful!”

“I keep telling you, those things are fictional!”

“Details, details.”

“Is that all it is? A detail?”

“All right, so negotiations have failed. I guess the time for mercy is over.” Then she pointed directly at me.

“You weren’t even trying to negotiate, were you?!” I said. That creature I encountered, it definitely would have been the end for any normal human.

“That’s enough out of you. Let’s go!”

“Can’t wait!”

We both got ready to fight. The evil aura rolled off her like the stench of rottenness, battling the light I emitted. It was harmagedon, the last battle of the light and the darkness. And it was starting right now.

“Get ready, Minori-san!” I whispered, but the next second, a fist landed on the back of my head. “Hrgh! Ouch! It’s like my head is splitting open!”

The Demon lord attacks!

Shinichi takes 99 damage!

“A potion—I need a potion! Hell, even an emergency spray!”

“What are you muttering about?”

“Huh?!” I blinked and turned around to discover... “The Demon Queen who controls the power of darkness and rottenness?!”

“Excuse me, who?”

There was Minori-san, dressed normally, with her arms crossed, looking down at me. She was in her JSDF tank top, not a bondage suit, and her field pants. Dang.

Of course, in her case, a tank top was already plenty sexy, especially the way her bra peeked out around the edges of—okay, anyway, moving on.

“When you started to sit facing the wall and mumbling to yourself, I thought you’d finally broken.”

“What do you mean, finally? You just assumed I would snap?” I said, getting up.

“So what were you doing?”

“Oh, just enjoying a little escapism.”

“Yeah? Well things are pretty urgent here, so maybe you could do that on your own time,” Minori-san said—quietly, maybe out of respect for the people around us. Then she sighed.

“Shinichi-sama?” An adorable elf maid-san, pointy ears and everything, was looking at me, her pale, violet eyes gazing with concern from behind her flaxen hair. Myusel Fourant. The half-elf maid who worked at my mansion. Standing directly behind her, incidentally, was a woman who looked very much like her, though she exuded an aura that was much more like... well, a woman. It was her mother, Falmelle Faugron-san.

“Are you all right?” Myusel said.

“Oh, uh, yeah, thanks, I’m fine,” I said, trying to muster a smile.

“The way ya just turned to the wall and sat down, it surprised us,” said a lively looking young woman with animal ears and a tail. She was dressed in her usual baggy pants and tube top, exposed midriff and everything, a constant source of healthy eroticism. This was the werewolf, Elvia Harneiman, and she was the resident artist at our company, Amutech, a general entertainment firm. Elvia was originally a spy sent by the Kingdom of Bahairam, but here we were. With her was her twin sister—or really, her triplet sister—Amatena, and Amatena’s subordinate, Clara Belberith. Both of them, incidentally, were fully covered by military uniforms. Dang.

...Ahem. Moving on once again.

“I know what he was doing. Running from reality with some bizarre fantasy, no doubt.” This exasperated comment came from someone also leaning against the wall. Long black hair, clad in a black Gothic-Lolita dress that looked almost frighteningly good on this gorgeous young woman—I mean, gorgeous young man. This gorgeous young man who looked an awful lot like a gorgeous young woman. But anyway, he was definitely a gorgeous young man. (It’s an important point, so I repeated it three times.)

That was Ayasaki Hikaru-san, an employee of Amutech just like me. He was pretty intelligent—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse—and it looked like he had seen right through me. I guess it proved he was a good personnel choice, anyway.

“Have you made up your mind?” asked someone I wasn’t quite so close to. Her name, as I recalled, was Theresa. She was just as lovely as Myusel and the others, and looked human at first glance—but she wasn’t actually. She was a doll. A geometric pattern glowed faintly at her neck, like there was something embedded there, and there were more glowing things around her hair, wrists, and ankles, the light visible from under her thin outfit.

Apparently, she was a moving doll made quite a long time ago—a gynoid made of nanomaterials. But all the stuff she had told us—the facts she had revealed, the truths she had laid bare—were just too much for me, and I had ended up trying to escape into a, well, fantasy world.

But Minori-san was right: I couldn’t stay like this forever. For one thing, there was Theresa, who put her hands on her hips and said: “Let me reiterate. I believe you can stop the rogue reactor.”

“Reactor...” I gazed past Theresa, taking a fresh look at the room we were in. It almost felt like we were standing in a giant hole.

This was an ancient facility that Bahairam had considered very important; they called it the Dragon’s Den. It was an underground structure located beneath a small hill. Right here near the entrance there was a semi-spherical dome, if you will, made of bricks and apparently erected by the Bahairamanian army. It must have been about a hundred meters in diameter, just large enough that maybe you could have held a soccer game inside. I was pretty sure dwarves must have had something to do with the building process, but I had to admit I never would have given Bahairam credit for having the engineering skills to pull off something like this.

Funny thing about that, though, was that just beneath our feet was a massive, hypertechnological facility that made this dome look like child’s play. And Theresa ran the place. From what she said—and as the administrator, she ought to know—the deepest part of the facility housed a huge reactor that was currently on the fritz. If it gave out, the devastation might encompass several surrounding countries. Disaster wouldn’t even begin to describe it. And obviously, we weren’t going to come out alive, either.

Even if the reactor only took Bahairam and Eldant with it, we could be talking tens of thousands—maybe millions—of casualties. But that probably wouldn’t be the end of it, if we were being realistic.

Heck, it might take out this entire world.

It was sort of like how people predicted a “nuclear winter” if there was ever a large-scale nuclear war. The expression didn’t refer to the radiation from the weapons, but the possibility that particulate matter left over from the attacks—ash and smoke generated in huge quantities by the devastation—could be sucked up into the atmosphere and block out the sun around most or all of the world for anything from hours to years. It would be like the cloudiest day in history, all over the globe, and it would never end.

Obviously, that would kill most of the plants, meaning herbivores would starve. The temperature would drop—that’s where the “winter” comes from—and the whole global environment would change dramatically, possibly squeezing out the majority of all life on earth. That was the theory, anyway.

My point is about the ash and smoke generated by a massive explosion. We weren’t dealing with a nuclear weapon, but we were dealing with a potentially big, big blast. It could mean the end for a lot more than a couple of nations.

Oh, and one more thing: we didn’t have much time until the rampaging reactor reached that critical phase. No chance to sit and hypothesize about the possibilities. Like Minori-san said, things were urgent.

And yet...

“Okay, but why me?” I asked, knowing how pathetic I sounded. Saving the world sounds great at all, but when you’re actually in a basically impossible situation, and somebody says to you, “You’re the only one who can save us—go for it!” it turns out it’s not always obvious what to do. It can even start to feel like a punishment. Here in reality, I wasn’t some warrior of light, and I didn’t have cheat mode enabled. If I took a cue from the phoenix and got burned to cinders, I wouldn’t reincarnate or anything. I would just be plain dead.

And yet for some reason, Theresa wanted me to do this job. Strictly speaking, it was really Myusel’s mother Falmelle-san who had started this, by prophesying that I could resolve this situation if I came to Bahairam. So here I was, and then all of a sudden Theresa, the living doll, was agreeing with Falmelle-san and putting the whole thing on me. At least, that’s how it felt.

“Because you’re the only one who can possibly approach the reactor,” Theresa said, sounding annoyed to be having this conversation at this stage.

“What makes you so sure about that?” I said. Theresa was a doll; you would assume she was more durable than any human, but she said she couldn’t get near the reactor. That she would burn up in literally a few seconds, long before she could do anything useful. So why wouldn’t I be incinerated instantly?

“How?” Theresa walked over to me, placing her pale hand on my jaw.

“Hey, uh, er, what are you...”

Um, and also, you’re very close to me...

From this distance, close enough she could have felt me breathing, I got a little nervous. Even knowing she wasn’t exactly human, even knowing that whatever was driving her used to be a military commander, and not necessarily a young one, the body I was looking at right now was that of an awfully attractive young woman, and I couldn’t help feeling a little intimidated.

Then her fingers traced their way from my jaw down along my neck. It was sexy. I mean really sexy. It’s sort of tickled a little, but, ah! I had to keep quiet.

I almost feel Myusel and Elvia glaring at me. Not much I can do about this, though...

“Because you have this.”

“What?!” Myusel exclaimed.

“Huh? What, what?” I asked, confused.

“Shinichi-kun, your neck—I mean, your chest!” Minori-san said, pointing at me.

“Huh?” I looked down at my chest, sort of the area around my collarbone. “Huh?!” There it was: the mark of the hero, almost exactly as I’d imagined it in my fantasy. “What the heck is this?!”

There on my pale, indoorite skin was some sort of sigil, full of complicated lines that made it look almost like an electrical circuit. Obviously, I could only bend my neck so far, so I could only see the edge of it. But when had that gotten there?! I wasn’t still fantasizing, was I?!

My name is Kanou Shinichi. I’m the general manager of a parallel-world-first company, the general entertainment firm Amutech. That’s the position I was given when the Japanese government decided that I, a former home security guard otaku, would be the perfect fall guy to lead their company, which was involved in exchange with this other world—at least allegedly. It was really a front for a cultural invasion by Japan.

I didn’t take it lying down when I found out about that, and eventually they sent Ayasaki Hikaru-san in an effort to replace me. There was a bit of a kerfuffle, but let’s just say that since then, my otaku evangelistic efforts have been going pretty smoothly. In fact, they’re like water on dry earth—this world was starving for entertainment, and the stuff we’ve brought in has spread like wildfire. Otaku culture took root almost immediately. Almost before I knew it, there were even people creating their own doujinshi. Heck, I was thinking that we were on track to have the first pan-dimensional doujinshi convention in a few years’ time.

But after that, things started to change, and fast. Something serious was happening in the Kingdom of Bahairam, the nation next door to the Holy Eldant Empire, where I was based. Apparently a facility called the Dragon’s Den in the country’s “Third Capital” was at the epicenter of several earthquakes and a large-scale outbreak of fires. The city itself was on the brink of complete destruction.

Not only that, it just so happened that my maid Myusel’s mom, Falmelle-san, was right in the middle of the city when it happened. She used her unique magic, or ability or whatever it was, The Foreseeing Eye, to discover that I was the only one who could stop this disaster from getting any bigger, and she begged Amatena—the older sister of my friend Elvia—and her subordinate Clara to bring me to Bahairam.

I couldn’t say no to Falmelle-san, Amatena, and everyone else, so off I went to Bahairam. There we ran into wild dragons, were attacked by naked werewolves and weretigers, and were ultimately separated. It was tough, but we eventually managed to reunite at the Dragon’s Den, where Falmelle-san was waiting for us. Which was great and all, but that’s also where we ran into Theresa, the doll-like young woman who was the facility’s true administrator. And she let us in on the terrifying truth of this world.

Namely, that all the elves and dwarves and werewolves and lizardmen here, all the people we called demi-humans, were actually so-called BOUs, Bionic Organoid Units, the ultimate products of genetic science. And what we thought of as magic was actually a cloud of nanomachines in the atmosphere. (These machines were referred to as “sprites” here.)

So it turns out that the Dragon’s Den was a relic of a former civilization, and the creatures we called dragons were themselves a form of BOU. The Den was a factory that produced them. Bahairam had stumbled across it, decided it could be useful, but then lost control of it. And the ultimate outcome? The reactor that lay deep beneath the Dragon’s Den was going critical.

It was some trouble, I can tell you that. But it wasn’t our biggest problem.

Theresa’s explanation had included a few words I recognized. Words like America and China. That’s right: what we had taken to be the remains of a past civilization in this world were actually the remains of the future of our own world.

I guess if you were being a stickler, there was no way to be sure that our world would become this world in the distant future. Maybe, for example, they were literally parallel worlds, and it was pure coincidence that this one happened to have had nations with the same names as countries in my own world, and similar technology. Sci-fi is full of stories that posit that time isn’t a single straight line, but sometimes branches into similar but clearly distinct worlds. But then, it was just so weird how this place that I had been sure was a straight-up fantasy world had a sci-fi setting hiding just under the surface. I guess that’s common enough in manga and anime and games, but I never figured I would go to a place like that myself. Let alone be standing at ground zero when the truth came out.

Our land, the Kingdom of Bahairam, prides itself on the strength of the ties that bind. Some criticize us in comparison to the nations around us, alleging that individual freedoms are too limited or groupism too powerful. But while these things might in some sense be true, they are also mistaken. It is precisely the existence of the nation that gives the people secure and bountiful lives. No nation means no laws, no laws means no safety. Therefore the first duty is to ensure that the state is sound and secure; the individual whims of the people cannot be allowed to take precedence over this. If that means limiting certain freedoms, so be it.

From that perspective, our kingdom is a most accomplished country. All subjects are equal under the father-ruler, each supporting the nation by completing his or her assigned task. This was how our land generally operated. Its subjects saw laboring for the health and safety of the state as their first priority, and they gave everything to it and served it with zeal. One might even say this was a nation’s ideal form.

However...

“I’m telling you, it was those Eldant dogs that did this!” The captain of the Undertakers slammed his fist down on a desk. We had bivouacked about a half day’s journey by dino-drawn carriage from the Third Capital. We’d set up roughly a hundred tents. Most of the Bahairamanian population had been nomads for most of their history, and even children knew how to set up a tent and ride the lizards. It was tradition for parents to teach their children these things as soon as they were able to learn, and they came as naturally as breathing to everyone in our land. And those of us in the military practiced and refined these abilities until they were even more deeply ingrained.

Suffice it to say, our army could move quickly.

It had been just four days since the trouble began in the Third Capital. The army promptly deployed an emergency reserve, and plans were made to evacuate the city. The surviving Undertakers had been summoned to the largest tent, the military command post, to be briefed on the situation.

The Undertakers were a special regiment tasked with protecting the Dragon’s Den, the most important facility in the Third Capital. They generally reported directly to the father-ruler, and had a large degree of autonomy. Only the father-ruler and a select number of important military officials knew what the unit was up to at any given time. It tended to give the Undertakers inflated egos, such that even their fellow soldiers rarely thought highly of them.

The general coordinating the evacuation effort and his staff—including myself, Jijilea Harneiman—shared the general distaste for the unit.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling us what exactly you think they did, and how,” the general said, squinting at the captain of the Undertakers. “We, at least, have not been apprised of any movement by the Eldant military.”

“I’m sure it was a... a small force. Probably... sappers! Demolitions experts!” But the captain seemed to be stretching.

“Probably? Am I clear that you did in fact say probably?”

“Ahem—! I...”

“Probably,” the general said, cutting the man off. “Yes?” He looked at us, his subordinates, as if for confirmation. We nodded. “In other words, this is speculation. You’re guessing.”

“No! I—”

“Allow me to speculate as well. This wasn’t an Eldant attack. Your unit screwed something up. Well? How’s my guess?”

“No, absolutely not! On the day of the catastrophe, we did everything normally, exactly the way the project plans said to...”

“Very well, then.” The general leaned forward ever so slightly. “One concludes that it’s the existence of your unit that was the screwup.”

“Wh—What did you say?”

“There is, in fact, no one who understands exactly what the Dragon’s Den is, nor who built it nor why. Not a single person. That’s why you were so eager to keep too many people from fiddling with your little toy.”

“That’s ridiculous—you’re insane!” The Undertaker captain was obviously agitated. He saw clearly that the general was talking not about the incident at hand, but about the very existence of his unit. “I don’t care if you are a general, I’ll have your head for insubordination! The Undertakers report directly to the father-ruler! The puppet drakes and everything else that has contributed so much to our nation’s military strength exist because we excavated the Dragon’s Den, we researched it, we worked day and night to understand its workings—”

“And you were so taken by your own success with the puppet drakes that you dug deeper and deeper before you truly understood what you had, is that not so? Undertakers? Heh. Maybe we should call you the Grave Robbers.”

“You—”

“Do you know what you look like to me? You look like children playing with a knife, with no idea how to handle it. I always assumed it was only a matter of time until someone got mortally wounded.” The general heaved a sigh. “And it would appear that time has come.”

The Undertaker captain opened and closed his mouth with a sort of voiceless groan; no words came out. He understood the general would never trust or believe him, no matter what he said. In our country of Bahairam, as I have said, the health of the state is every citizen’s first concern. Personal priorities are not given much weight. But the longer our system goes on, the more reckless fools appear to decide serving the country is not as important as protecting their own hides, raising their own position, or even enriching themselves.

The rest of us understood well that there were many such among the Undertakers. When there’s special treatment to be had, more and more people will naturally seek to have it. That’s the way of things. Pathetic as it may be.

“All right, enough,” the general said with a placid shake of his head. “Whatever or whoever may have caused it, the fact is that the Third Capital is currently not under our control. This is a disaster and a very significant problem. We need to regain the city as quickly as possible. However...” Here the general smiled for the first time. Push and pull. Our superiors knew how to do both equally well. “I don’t know if I can quite bring myself to wipe your collective ass, Undertaker.”

“Excuse me?”

“The facts are what they are. But if we don’t pin this on Eldant, I dare say it might be... silly.”

The captain was speechless.

“We are in an ongoing struggle with Eldant. And if they were to make the first move, well, what better excuse could there be to take the fight to them? So I’d like you and yours to continue insisting that it was the Eldant Empire that did this to you, for the time being.”

For some time now, Bahairam had been involved in ongoing border skirmishes with the Eldant Empire, but no major battles had broken out. Many members of the military were dissatisfied with this state of affairs, including my commander. A soldier’s pride is on the battlefield, striking down every enemy she can. This was why the general wished—and I had no doubt he was sincere—to create a pretext for major engagement.

To do that, the Undertakers would have to consistently allege that what had happened in the Third Capital was the work of the Eldant Empire. They would have to treat it as a genuine theory of what had occurred—not some slapdash excuse they had come up with on the spot to deflect blame from themselves.

“Just you consider how to make a really convincing case for that perspective,” the general said to the captain. Then he glanced at us soldiers. “Prissken. Go talk to the other Undertakers and the civilians they’ve brought with them. Reconstruct in as much detail as possible the circumstances of their escape from the city. Check the escape route taken by the soldiers against our maps. I want the clearest possible idea of where there’s a passable route into the city.”

“Sir!”

“Harneiman. Help the captain here make his story a little more robust. Then take the Tenth Regiment and get to work. Special duty.”

“Yes, sir.” I nodded.

“Prissken, after you’ve got all the information you can, take the Seventh and Eighth Regiments on a tour of inspection to confirm the accuracy of the intel. Then link up with the units behind and proceed forward.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The rest of you, make sure the troops and the lizards are ready to go. First through Sixth Regiments, stand by to move at any time. Regiments Seven and Eight, take the intel and move on the city from three directions at once. If there really are any Eldant operatives in there, we’ll scatter them. I doubt they’re there, but if they are, it can’t be more than a small group. Surround them and squeeze, and there won’t be any problems.”

“Sir!” everyone called out.

“I grant this may seem like a boring job, ladies and gentlemen, but consider it a necessary prelude to that battle we all dream of. Cherish the dream and carry on with your work.” Then the general clapped his hands. We all smiled, just like him, as we got ready to go about our tasks. Only the captain from the Undertakers looked like he barely understood what was happening.

“You’re the only one who can stop that rogue reactor,” Theresa repeated. But I could hardly understand what she meant. I know I’m repeating myself, too, but I was completely average physically and intellectually. Okay, so maybe I had better-than-average otaku knowledge (for better or for worse), but I didn’t think it was going to help me when I was standing in front of that reactor.

“And what the heck is this?” I asked. On my chest—really, my collarbone—where Theresa had touched me, a gently glowing pattern had appeared. In fact, it wasn’t just a pattern. It looked like...

“A barcode?” Minori-san murmured.

Yeah, that’s what it looked like, a barcode. Or maybe more precisely, one of those QR codes that you see in magazines and on advertisements that you scan with your smartphone. A box shape filled with an elaborate black-and-white pattern. A bit like the graphics from an early NES game.

“It’s a 3D code,” Theresa explained. “Strictly speaking, it’s a type of MM-pigment tattoo. It’s normally invisible. We wouldn’t want just anyone to be able to copy it, so only those with proper authorization or special equipment are able to view it.”

“Uh...huh.” That really didn’t explain much of anything as far as I was concerned. When had this thing been imprinted on my body? Did “MM” refer to micromachines? And if it did...

“You used the PDWS, yeah?” Theresa said, studying me.

“PDWS?”

“The armor, I guess would be your word for it. Code suggests it was the prototype Iron Crab Form F. I know it’s got an emergency mode, but still. Takes some balls for a guy to want to try out one of those. Heh... which is exactly the problem.”

“The armor? You can’t mean...” There was only one set of armor I’d put on recently—which is to say, ever since coming to this other world. It wasn’t some kind of fantasy-knight armor, either. It had been...

““The forbidden armor?!”” Minori-san and I exclaimed together.

“Hrm? Is that what the BOUs call it?”

“Yeah, um, I mean, I think so,” I said, remembering all the trouble we’d had at the mansion thanks to those suits of powered armor. “They gave it that name because it forces you to say what you’re thinking and stuff...”

And that was a great way to start a fight. Or several fights. It was like it took away your ability to be diplomatic. It was even said that one of the fights the armor had started, long ago, had resulted in the destruction of an entire city.

“That’s obviously because you never lowered the level on the support AI,” Theresa said, openly amazed we hadn’t thought of this.

“Support AI...?” It was true, when I’d put on the forbidden armor, I’d had a feeling like someone was speaking directly into my head. Was that the AI or whatever? Come to think of it, Minori-san had speculated that the armor behaved the way it did in order to enable inexperienced soldiers to communicate with their comrades in the chaos of battle and take appropriate action even when they weren’t sure what to do. It was all lining up. It could definitely be hard to speak in times of crisis—something I knew from experience. Even so, I hadn’t liked the feeling that the armor was controlling my actions and forcing me to speak.

“To be fair, we knew back during development that the support AI was likely to be problematic.” Theresa shrugged. All the gestures I’d seen this doll-like girl makes seemed almost exaggeratedly human. She talked with a pronounced roughness, too—and all of this seemed to be on account of the personality inside her, an actual former soldier. I had this dim picture of a woman with her hair cut short, wearing army pants and a tank top that revealed a muscular physique. You know, the sort of kick-ass soldier-lady character you might see in a James Camer** movie. Of course, there was no trace of that now; she just looked like an adorable young woman.

“And that brings us to this,” Theresa said, pointing at the pattern—the code—on my chest. “PDWS units are primarily designed for defense. At least on the spec sheet, the Iron Crab has a specialized force field. As long as it has power, it can operate in virtually any environment. Even, theoretically, in molten rock.”

I looked at Theresa, trying to fight down the very bad feeling I was getting. “.........You’re not saying...”

“I want you to put on the PDWS and make for the reactor control unit. From there, you should be able to shut it down. That control unit is the heart of the reactor—it’s tougher than even a PDWS, and should still be functioning. Or at least, still able to take our inputs.”

Theresa put her hand to a nearby wall. A blueprint of the innermost area of the Dragon’s Den—in other words, the reactor control center—floated up from the wall as if the rock were some sort of projector. “The only thing you actually have to do is activate the emergency stop mechanism.” A second image appeared over the blueprint, like a photograph. It showed a pillar, maybe fifty centimeters in diameter and cut at a slight angle, with a few small levers on it. Presumably the mechanism she was talking about. “Basically, if you can flip even one of these levers, the job’s done. It’s a milk run.”

“Hey, that’s great and all, but...”

“What the hell is it?” Theresa squinted at me.

Not sounding very confident, I said, “Um, the forbidden armor... the PDWS, you called it? We don’t have it with us...”

“What?” Theresa said, in a tone that implied: What on God’s green earth is wrong with these people?!

“So, uh, I’d like to go in there and stop that reactor, believe me, I would, but... See...? The armor, it’s somewhere in the basement of the castle in Eldant. Nice and safe. But it’s not here.”

Theresa spent a long moment glaring at me. Can what this complete and utter buffoon is telling me possibly be true? the look asked. Then she looked around the room: first at Minori-san, then Myusel, Elvia, Hikaru-san, Amatena, Clara, and finally Falmelle-san.

It might be worth pointing out that she and I had been speaking in Japanese this entire time. So Minori-san, Hikaru-san, and I were the only ones who fully understood what she was saying; the other people from this world probably hadn’t followed. Especially Amatena, Clara, and Falmelle-san, who didn’t know a word of Japanese. Myusel, who was actually pretty capable, and Elvia, who knew a few words, were both looking at us blankly. I didn’t blame them; Theresa had used a lot of jargon. At the very least, though, everyone would have understood my side of the conversation, which the magic ring was translating...

“Shinichi-san told her we don’t have the forbidden armor with us, and she’s asking if that’s really true,” Hikaru-san explained for their benefit. It didn’t necessarily help, because not everyone here knew what the “forbidden armor” was, but Myusel and Elvia nodded at Theresa.

“Point is, he’s telling the truth,” Minori-san said. “The PDWS isn’t here.”

“Really,” Theresa said disbelievingly. “Jesus Christ!” she yelled at the ceiling, punching the wall with her fist.

The reconnaissance by the Seventh and Eighth Regiments reported no problems, so we decided to begin the reclamation proper of the Third Capital.

“First through Sixth Regiments will work with the Undertakers to surround the city from three sides and commence the operation. Seventh Regiment is to join First and Second Regiments and move in from the north. Eighth Regiment, you’ll be with Third and Fourth Regiments coming in from the east.” The general stood addressing the assembled soldiers in front of his tent. “As for you, Undertakers, we’ll be trusting you to be our guides. Be so kind as to steer us the right way.”

“Y-Yes, of course, sir!” the Undertaker captain said, nodding frantically. He had been responsible for the oversight and defense of the most important facility in all of Bahairam, yet he had gone running at the first sign of trouble. This attempt to recover the city might be his one chance to redeem himself militarily and escape the full wrath of the father-ruler. If he was lucky, he might simply be executed. If not, his entire family and clan might be wiped off the face of the nation.

“Guide” sounded so innocuous, but this operation was akin to a siege. Those on the front line would be the shields—or if you will, the stepping stones. Whether the captain realized that or not was hard to say. He struck me as less of a soldier than a bureaucrat, perhaps even a scholar, someone with no practical experience of combat. Perhaps he didn’t know—perhaps none of them knew—the use they were being put to.

But personally, I felt scant sympathy for them. It was the likes of them, incompetents talented only at saving their own skins, who stood in the way of progress in Bahairam. If there was a chance to get them off the public stage—even perhaps off the mortal coil entirely—it would be to the nation’s benefit, I thought.

The general ran through a few more details, and then concluded: “Move out!” The First through Sixth Regiments started to leave in orderly rows. The footsteps of soldiers, lizard mounts, and dino-drawn carriages sounded in a rumbling cacophony. Dust rose at our feet as an innumerable mass of soldiers proceeded slowly but surely, proudly, toward our Third Capital. From the north, the south, and the east, we would enter the city. I silently watched them go.

“General,” my colleague—the commander of the Ninth Regiment—said, turning to our superior officer. “Shall we?”

“Mm. Go, quickly.” The general nodded.

“As you command.” With that, the commander set off running for a large tent, colored differently from the others. It wasn’t ordinary soldiers who waited there, but a specially requisitioned unit. They had been ordered to stay in their tent; the Undertakers hadn’t been told about them, and presumably didn’t know the capabilities they represented—or what their role in this operation would be.

“Son of a gun. Finally get to come out and play, eh?” The soldiers who appeared from the tent were not Bahairamanian regulars. They had first been invited to our country to assist with construction: a regiment of dwarves. About twenty of them. Nothing to write home about in terms of real combat strength, but combat wasn’t their purpose. They were engineers; they wouldn’t be meeting the enemy on the front lines.

“Yes, finally. And believe me, you’re going to have some fun now,” the commander told them.

“That’s all well and good,” one of the dwarves said. “But you need to realize, we can’t dig a tunnel this long all by ourselves. We’re gonna need some extra hands to carry out the dirt.”

“I have a thousand troops from the Ninth Regiment whose job is going to be exactly that. You just dig as fast as you can.”

“Roger that. All right, you louts, put down your cups, we’ve got work to do!” the lead dwarf shouted. The others gave a lusty cry and began trotting after the captain of the Ninth Regiment. My Tenth Regiment had spotted a good place to start digging during our reconnaissance, so that’s where we were going.

When it came to handling earth, no one bested the dwarves. Their magic gave them a special affinity for soil and metals, and they were far stronger than their diminutive frames would suggest—perfect for mining. They might have been the only ones, in fact, who could dig a tunnel as long as we needed as quickly as we needed it.

“General,” I said. “I’ll get to work as well, then.”

“Mm.”

The Tenth regiment, which I led, was also a fairly specialized unit, if not quite so much so as the dwarves. We didn’t focus on standard combat ability, but rather on observation and assassination. Destruction and general mayhem. That meant our role in any given operation was typically at the very beginning or the very end. In this case, we would use the tunnel the dwarves built to be the very first eyes on the theater of operations.

To that end, our unit included personnel suited to observation and infiltration. They would have a significant role to play in the work we were about to do.

That’s right. You see what I’m saying.

The Undertakers, and the eight different regiments that were with them, were all a massive diversion, a way of distracting the enemy. We were looking at a combat zone occupied by enemy forces of unknown strength and affiliation, patrolled by wild dragons in the skies above. A frontal assault would unquestionably produce casualties, and probably had little real chance of achieving anything useful.

That’s why we would be coming from underground, where the massive dragons were unlikely to be able to reach us. Our main strength would reclaim the Dragon’s Den, after which we could commence a joint operation with the other regiments that would hit from both inside and outside the city.

That was the true nucleus of our strategy.

Oooookay.

So let me see if I’m following so far. Bahairam thought the Dragon’s Den they had excavated was some sort of ancient ruin. But it was actually a superscientific production lab, powered at its core by a reactor that could conceivably destroy this entire world. Plus, this power source was a so-called Annihilation Reactor—a facility that generates power by colliding matter and antimatter, something far more advanced than any nuclear power plant. You didn’t have to worry about radiation with one of these things—that was the good part. Great, even.

The only problem was that the people of Bahairam had been messing around with it, introducing some abnormalities into the functions and causing it to go on the fritz. TL;DR, we were on the brink of a catastrophe that could destroy the entire world, or come close enough to amount to the same thing. To stop it, someone would have to go down to the facility’s lowest level, seven floors underground, and manually deactivate the reactor using the emergency stop mechanism.

The only problem was, thanks to the rogue reactor, going to that lowest level would be like stepping into hell, at least in terms of heat. Even the most rudimentary calculations suggested it would be well over 300° C in there. Obviously, if a regular person went in there and took a breath, their lungs would be incinerated and they would die instantly.

That wasn’t all, though: according to Theresa, a person had to have a certain “authority” level in order to activate the emergency mechanism—meaning only a full-blooded human could do it. The reactor had been viewed as too important to trust to anyone else. So even though Myusel and Elvia had both worn the forbidden armor, too, they wouldn’t be able to stop the reactor. Even Petralka, supposedly a human, probably wouldn’t have been able to do it, had she been here. It would hardly have mattered anyway—we couldn’t let someone as important as an empress go into danger like that. Everyone would have stopped her.

So when Myusel’s mother Falmelle-san had prophesied that I, Kanou Shinichi, could stop the catastrophe that was happening, this was what she had meant.

This much, I understood. I got it. I could even accept it. But...

“What are we gonna do?” I asked, looking around and then back at Theresa one more time.

The forbidden armor, what Theresa called the PDWS? It wasn’t here. We didn’t have it with us. But it was the only thing that could get us safely into the reactor area. Maybe there was no choice but to go back to Eldant, head for the castle, and try to get a hold of it...

“Give it to us straight. How long have we got until that reactor is completely out of control? Until it’s too late to do anything at all?” Minori-san asked.

“Good question. I’d say... about twenty-five hours.”

“Wait, hardly more than a day?!” I exclaimed. We were almost out of time! We certainly didn’t have long enough to go back to Eldant, explain things to Petralka, get the forbidden armor out of storage... “Aww, what do we do?”

Even if we were low enough to just turn tail and run, pretend we hadn’t seen anything here and didn’t know what was going on—it wouldn’t have saved us. We could jump on a dragon—designed as a living weapon and probably the fastest thing around right now—and try to get as far away as we could, but there were no guarantees it would get us out of the blast radius, and even if it did, who knew what kind of massive environmental changes would result from the destruction, whether we would even survive the aftermath? Running away wouldn’t help much if the entire world just went poof.

And there were other questions. If this world was entirely destroyed, how would it affect Japan and the rest of the world on the far side of the hyperspace tunnel? I guess the tunnel had a sort of lid on it for the moment, and maybe it wouldn’t affect them much at all. But still...

“It’s no use,” I moaned. I was out of ideas. If I could just get in touch with Petralka and the others somehow right this minute, I might have been able to get them to bring the forbidden armor here, but I had no way of doing that. Minori-san had brought her wireless radio, true enough, but it had been destroyed when our puppet drake got attacked. Even if it hadn’t been, distance was distance, and I doubted we could have gotten in touch with the JSDF back in Eldant.

“Hey, so, uh,” I said, turning to Theresa. “You don’t just happen to have one of those PDWS things around here, do you? Like, an emergency unit for just in case the reactor goes nuts?”

“Of course we did. But the facility where we kept it was destroyed by the recent seismic events.” Theresa scowled. “A little bit of smashing isn’t enough to take out an active PDWS. But in storage mode, they lack their defensive force fields. They’re just ordinary machines.”

“Um, okay, well... Theresa-san, you’re more, you know, durable than a normal human, right?” She was a cyborg, or maybe more like an android with a human personality. She’d referred to the doll-like substitute body she inhabited as an avatar.

Wait...

Avatar?

“I am, obviously. But I’m no PDWS. This body isn’t even intended for combat duty. This delicate little thing wouldn’t last a moment against 300-degree heat. You realize wood and paper spontaneously combust at that sort of temperature, don’t you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“And anyway—hey, are you listening to me?” she demanded.

But I said: “Hikaru-san!”

“Huh? Yeah?” he blinked, surprised. “What is it?”

“I’ve got it! You’re the answer!” I said, thrilled by my own idea. “You’re using an avatar right now, just like Theresa-san, right?”

“Yeah...” Hikaru-san shrugged, looking like I was scaring him a little.

I was right: the Hikaru-san standing there with us wasn’t the real one. There had been this thing that happened once where he’d put on an accessory that had been dug up from a dwarven mine, and it made this other thing that had been dug up, something that looked like a Slime, turn into a copy of him. If what Theresa was saying was true, then the slime thing was really made of nanomaterials, or so I suspected. There were no obvious dangers to using the avatar, and Hikaru-san had gone on using it periodically ever since then. It was stronger and sturdier than his human body, but also highly flexible, making it all kinds of convenient—anyway, that’s what he told us.

“You don’t seriously mean to send me into that reactor and destroy this avatar, do you?”

“No, that’s not it at all. If it were that simple, Theresa would have already gone in there and stopped that thing herself! No, listen—if you cut your connection to the avatar, you’ll be back in Eldant, won’t you?!”

“Oh!” Hikaru-san said, finally getting my point.

“I get it! That’s perfect!” Minori-san added, nodding, clearly impressed.

At the moment, Hikaru-san was controlling his avatar remotely—it only hosted his consciousness. If he severed the connection, his mind would return to his original body. A body that was currently at our mansion in Eldant. In other words, he could be back home in an instant.

Petralka and the others knew him, of course, and because they were aware of all the drama surrounding the forbidden armor, they might actually be willing to listen to Hikaru-san and get the suits out of storage.

“Explain this to me,” Theresa said.

“I’m using an avatar right now,” Hikaru-san replied. “My actual body, I mean my organic form or whatever, is close to where the forbidden armor—the PDWS—is being kept. So if I just stop using my avatar, we don’t have to go all the way back there to try to get our hands on the armor.”

“Still, even at that, it’s not like we have a lot of time.” Minori-san frowned. “You’ll have to get to Her Majesty and Minister Cordobal, explain things to them, get them to understand, and get the armor out of storage... It’s going to eat up a lot of time. Besides, people around here aren’t likely to know what nuclear winter even is.”

True enough, and just exclaiming “The world’s in danger!” might not get the point across. Us, we didn’t have to have personally experienced a nuclear attack to understand how fearsomely powerful nuclear weapons could be. We’d seen the effects imagined plenty of times in fiction. “A world in crisis” was such a familiar expression from those kinds of stories that it was almost a trope.

“Not to mention, it would still involve crossing the border of an enemy nation,” Minori-san went on. “Bahairam knows the Third Capital is in a serious situation, and they’re going to realize Eldant might take advantage of that to mount an attack. They’ll be on guard. I don’t know if this is going to be easy...”

“Maybe not. But if we don’t try something, then we all die anyway. So we might as well see what we can do,” Hikaru-san said, and then he turned to me. “After I sever the connection, it’s not possible to reestablish it for a while. So I’m not sure I’m going to be able to come back here. Don’t let anything happen to my avatar, okay?”

“Er... Sure.”

“And Shinichi-san?” Hikaru-san cocked his head like he’d just thought of something. “Don’t try to cop a feel on my avatar just because it’s got a female body.”

“I wasn’t going to—!” I exclaimed, scandalized. But Hikaru-san said, “I’m just kidding. All right, time’s a-wasting. I’m heading out.” He gave us one last look—and then he crumpled as if he had gone unconscious.

“Hikaru-sama?!” Elvia cried and rushed over to support the avatar, but his body didn’t so much as twitch. The avatar didn’t return to its original gel-like state, but everything on the surface vanished, and the eyes were still open. It was sort of like having a dead body around, and every bit as creepy. But I guess the connection was cut. Had Hikaru-san successfully woken up in Eldant? That was the question.

We had no way to know. In other words...

“We’ll just have to trust him,” Minori-san said. We all knew she was right.