Chapter Three: Fire? Fire!!

Five pairs of wings cut through the bright blue sky.

Faldras flew via wind magic cast on their wings, so they didn’t “flap” to speak of, but there wasn’t any engine sound, either. The ride was smooth and quiet. Well, quiet except for the roar of wind rushing past us. From the ground, though, I imagined the Faldras would have been nearly silent.

The forbidden armor delivery unit successfully crossed the border and entered Bahairamanian territory. It was possible one of the Bahairamanian Army units on the ground near the crossing spotted us, but from below, it would have been awfully difficult to tell a Faldra from a real dragon. The only things that might have given us away were the unnatural touches, like the fact that we were flying in formation, or that just one dragon was bright red. At this rate, it would take us barely another hour to reach the Third Capital.

For the record, we were currently strapped into seats on the Faldras’ backs. Thankfully, that meant we couldn’t look straight down and get vertigo, but on the other hand, we could look out over the wings and see the scenery stretching away as far as the eye could see.

With a small handful of major exceptions like Holy Eldant Castle, there were no very tall buildings in this world. That meant you didn’t have to gain a lot of height in order to see a very, very long way. Getting up higher lets you see more: it can change your perspective on the world.

There was an astronaut once, quite a while ago, who said that “a person who has known the vastness of space is never the same again,” an indictment of the foolishness of human division and hostility. I might not have been as high up as he was, but flying through the air, I was starting to think I understood what he meant.

“This is quite something,” Minister Garius en Cordobal breathed. The knight had a reserved beauty, and always came across as calm and composed, but at that moment his pale face was tinged with visible excitement. He didn’t share my twenty-first-century experience of flying in an airplane, or Loek and Romilda’s experience of having previously operated a Faldra. This was all new to him. So the shock was that much larger, the emotion that much greater, the impact unmistakable.

“Are you frightened, sir?” I asked, but Minister Cordobal gave me a wry smile and shook his head. “No. In fact, I feel rather more calm than I expected to. I thought there would be more shaking—but this Faldra is steadier than a carriage.”

“That’s flying for you, I guess,” I said. None of the bumps and dips that made ground travel so bouncy. Of course, I didn’t know what would happen to us if we hit any turbulence...

“Are those the Welhoss Mountains?” Minister Cordobal said to himself, looking to the north. I could tell from his tone that he was impressed, even moved, and I said, “You mean those mountains over there?”

It didn’t strike me as much of a mountain range: not very steep or tall, more like the hill equivalent of a kid just starting to grow his first mustache. The mountain range that spanned the border between Bahairam and Eldant was craggy and mean and looked like it would take forever to cross on foot, but not these mountains.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Minister Cordobal said, shaking his head. “When I was younger, I once spent time studying in the country on the far side of those mountains.”

“Oh...” I said. So that was it. He was talking about Zwelberich, a country there had been some friction with a while back, when their fifth (or was that sixth?) prince had wanted to marry Petralka. Rumor had it that this prince—Rubert was his name—had once been Minister Cordobal’s lover.

Minister Cordobal looked wistful, a little sad... In short, if Minori-san had been here, she would have been beside herself. As for me, I had no special interest in BL. So I didn’t make any tactless remarks, just quietly looked forward again. At least until Romilda, sitting in front of us piloting the Faldra, called out, “Huh?!” (Loek, meanwhile, was busy being the engineer, focusing on keeping the wind magic flowing over the wings.)

“What happened?” I asked.

“There was a shadow...” Romilda mumbled.

Just at that moment, we gasped as a dark shadow enveloped us. Which had to mean it was...

“Above us?!” I instinctively looked up to see a strange, dark shape calmly keeping pace with the Faldra, as steady as if we were casting a shadow on the sky. But that was no shadow—it was the real thing!

“Dragon!” I cried. The dragon probably didn’t care what I said, but it just so happened that at exactly that moment, the great, dark creature arced its huge neck slightly and looked at us. I could see what appeared to be a metal spike driven deep into its head.

“Puppet drake!” Minister Cordobal said. “One of Bahairam’s?”

He was right. We knew what these were: Bahairam’s living weapons. And it was right above us...

“Crap, my magic!” Loek exclaimed.

“Romilda, get us some distance,” Minister Cordobal instructed.

“Believe me, I’m trying!”

Our Faldra began a large circle, but the puppet drake followed us. I looked back and saw the other Faldras likewise accosted by other puppet drakes.

The dragons of this world were said to be part-sprite. That meant offensive magic pretty much didn’t work against them. Or more precisely, the moment the magic got close to them, it was absorbed by the dragon’s magic-metabolizing system and the spell would fail to manifest any real power.

And it wasn’t just offensive magic that was affected. A nearby dragon would weaken and eventually extinguish other kinds of magic, too. Like the dwarven puppetry spells that worked the Faldra’s innards—or the wind magic that kept it flying. And you can guess what would happen then.

I saw our rear guard take some direct body slams from the puppet drake; their Faldras went into tailspins.

“It’s no good, I can’t shake him!” Romilda cried. It looked like the Bahairamanian dragon had the upper hand in maneuverability.

“Have they known about us since we crossed the border?” Minister Cordobal said, a pained expression on his face.

This wasn’t the first time a Faldra had entered Bahairamanian airspace, after all: Loek and Romilda had brought one to rescue Shinichi-san after he was kidnapped. And the production of the Faldras was something of a point of pride in Eldant. So it shouldn’t have been surprising if Bahairam had gotten word that Eldant had a new weapon that looked like a dragon. And if you knew something about how real dragons looked and behaved, the way the Faldras were flying would probably have seemed off. Who could blame Bahairam for taking us for an incursion force from the Eldant Empire and sending their drakes after us?

I didn’t see anyone riding on the backs of the puppet drakes, which made me think the wizards controlling them had to be nearby somewhere, but I had no idea where that might be, or even how far the puppetry magic could reach.

“This doesn’t look good...” I said. We were really in trouble. At this rate, every one of us was going to be shot down. Even if we managed not to wind up as a smoking crater in the ground, this was costing us time. Time we needed to get the forbidden armor to the Dragon’s Den before that reactor blew...

“We’re going down! We’re going down! Loek!”

“There’s nothing I can do! My magic—”

“Oh, for... arrrgh—!” Romilda pulled hard on a control-stick-like thing at her seat. There was a metallic sound and the Faldra’s wings, which had been moving lazily up and down, locked into place. At the same time, the movement of the tail suddenly became quick and mechanical. Presumably this was some kind of backup control system for emergency situations when magic wasn’t working. We had been losing altitude fast without Loek’s spells, but now our Faldra leveled off and drifted along. At least we hadn’t done a nose dive into the ground. But we weren’t in for a soft landing.

“Yikesyikesyikesyikes!” Romilda said. There was a series of violent impacts as the fuselage bounced along the ground, tearing up chunks of earth. Normally we would have landed neatly on the Faldra’s feet, but without magic, we couldn’t control them, and instead had to land directly on the body.

“Well, this isn’t good.” Minister Cordobal had undone his seatbelt and stood up, looking overhead. The other Faldras were being forced to land just like we were. Above the false dragons that had been run into the ground, real, albeit magically controlled, dragons circled.

Faldras didn’t have any air-combat capability, but the puppet drakes did have that most famous of dragon abilities, fiery breath. If any of that stuff came raining down from above us, we’d be roasted before we knew what was happening. We could try to protect ourselves with magic, but all the dragons would have to do was get a little closer.

This was bad. We were out of cards to play. The best we could hope for would be to try to run as fast as we could.

“Grr...” Minister Cordobal grabbed a bow and arrows he’d stashed beside his seat for a crisis just like this. “Hikaru!” he shouted. “Take the forbidden armor and run! I’ll hold them here!”

“Minister Cordobal?!” I said. He fired one arrow after another, but he had no chance of hitting dragons who could move freely in the sky. I’m sure he knew he wasn’t going to bring those things down that way. He was just bait, a delaying tactic so the rest of us could get away with the armor. And yet...

“It’s impossible!” I said. Even packed up into a wooden crate, the forbidden armor would be hard to handle. It would be difficult at best for me, Loek, and Romilda to escape with it. Even if it was light enough to carry, just think how hard it would be trying to run along with what amounted to a huge piece of luggage. Maybe we could tie a rope to it and try to drag it behind us, but I didn’t think the drakes would wait politely for us to get that set up.

“Hrm,” Minister Cordobal grunted.

It was hopeless. We were done for. Two puppet drakes closed in the above us, their jaws open to dispense the deadly flame.

“Huh?” It happened literally out of the blue: no context, just happened. “What?!”

Everything around us changed.

Oh, the “cast of characters,” so to speak, stayed the same. We and the Faldra and the puppet drakes were there. But the scene around us went from a wasteland of sand and rocks to something... else. A vortex of rainbow-colored light sprang up, and the sky and the earth all ran together. Streaks of color were painted over the parched landscape, and now the brush seemed to be going crazy.

“Whoa, whoa, what’s happening?!” Loek exclaimed, his panic letting me know that whatever this was, it wasn’t something that was normal in this world.

“This... It can’t be...” Only Minister Cordobal seemed to have some idea what might be going on. And then the two dragons who’d had their mouths open to attack us—and in fact, even the three others—slowly drifted to the ground in a wide spiral and landed. They folded their wings, bowed their heads, and sat still where they were. It was like if you told an obedient dog, “Sit.”

“Is this... Bewitching magic?” Minister Cordobal said.

“Bewitching?” I said, tilting my head in confusion. Did he mean all this was just an illusion? But even if it were, why had the puppet drakes stopped attacking us?

“Huh,” someone said from behind us, interrupting my thoughts. “Close shave, eh?”

I know that voice!

“So it’s you. I might have guessed,” Minister Cordobal replied. The emotions in his tone were, well... complicated. “Rubert.”

“Gracious, don’t act too happy to see me, Garius. I know it’s been a while, but... well, not that long, I suppose.”

Mounted on a massive riding bird was the Prince of Zwelberich—Rubert. He didn’t appear to have any entourage with him; it was as if he had simply popped up out of nowhere. In its suddenness, his appearance was almost as surprising as the change of scenery.

“Why are you here?” Minister Cordobal said.

“Why? You ask why?” Prince Rubert shrugged his shoulders and grinned. “It was Eldant that went to all the trouble of sending an urgent magical communiqué to Zwelberich. Unless that was merely the meddling of that old man Zahar, and you knew nothing about it?” Rubert seemed to be enjoying this.

Minister Cordobal frowned. “No, we—”

It was true that Minister Cordobal and Prime Minister Zahar had agreed to send urgent communications to other nearby countries in hopes of avoiding any interference by third parties. Even I knew that. Maybe they’d included notice that Minister Garius en Cordobal would be part of the Faldra unit entering Bahairam. And maybe Prince Rubert had seen that, come to the border with Eldant and Bahairam, and watched things develop. That was my speculation, anyway. It would be easy enough to claim that he was just keeping an eye on the situation at the border.

Come to think of it, Zwelberich has highly developed mind-control magic, don’t they?

So this weird stuff that seemed to be happening, was it the same sort of spell?

“Let’s say I just happened by,” Rubert said, grinning again. “You’re not the only ones who know about Bahairam’s puppet drakes. I was simply making sure our defenses were ready and that we have a plan should we need one. My good luck that it proved the perfect opportunity to try out one of our little stratagems in actual combat.”

According to Prince Rubert, the spell he used took advantage of amplified communications magic, and was designed to interact not with the dragons themselves, but with the magical formulae in the spikes in their heads, so as to minimize the chances of its being thwarted by the dragons’ magical metabolism. This meant, he said, that there was a good chance that the wizards controlling the puppet drakes, or at least the people operating the magical spikes, were somewhere nearby—if not right with the dragons, they would be within visual range.

I guess this magic worked a bit like radio control. These days, stuff that could be controlled electronically, like drones, was ubiquitous, but even then, whoever was controlling them had to be able to see what was going on around the drone. If they were too far away, they wouldn’t be able to respond to whatever happened. So Prince Rubert and Minister Cordobal seemed to infer that if the drakes’ pilots weren’t actually riding on the creatures, they must be close. By blanketing the entire area in mind control magic, or bewitching magic or whatever it was, the prince could startle the pilots and slow down them and the puppet drakes. That would give us time to find whoever was controlling these monsters and subdue them, whereupon hopefully the puppet drakes would wait obediently for their next command.

“I’m hearing a lot of maybes and speculation,” Minister Cordobal said.

“Of course you are. This is an experiment,” Prince Rubert responded, smiling easily. “Or what? Do you suppose I rode as fast and as hard as I could, running my mount ragged, and rushed here just to rescue you?”

Minister Cordobal frowned even deeper and refused to meet Prince Rubert’s eyes. Oh, hey, he was blushing.

“Then I suppose I needn’t thank you,” he managed to squeeze out after a moment.

“Certainly not.”

“Then we’ll take our leave. We’re in quite a hurry.” Minister Cordobal returned his bow and arrows to the spot by his seat, and ordered Loek and Romilda to lift off immediately.

Prince Rubert watched this with an amused look on his face. “Garius,” he called after us.

“Yes, what?”

“Be careful, you hear me? You play cool, but I know you can let passion get the better of you at times.”

There was a beat, and then Minister Cordobal said somewhat stiffly, “I thank you for your advice.”

The next instant, Prince Rubert vanished like smoke.

“Oh!” I said.

“Even his very presence here was part of the bewitchment,” Minister Cordobal said. “Smoke and mirrors, all of it. How very like him.”

“Huh...” Now I understood why Prince Rubert hadn’t had anyone with him. If he was just a projection, then there was no need for bodyguards. The real prince, the physical one, was probably a short distance away, working with several other wizards to pull off this feat of large-scale bewitching magic. They weren’t trying to cast their spells directly on the dragons, so being at a distance probably helped prevent the magic from being absorbed by the monsters. It was actually a pretty good strategy to counter the puppet drakes.

There was a chance Prince Rubert and his mages hadn’t even crossed the Zwelberich-Bahairam border. I didn’t know what the effective range of magic like that was. It would be a terrific way to help out: they hadn’t used offensive magic, and maybe they hadn’t even entered Bahairamanian territory, so even if the Bahairamanians found out about it later, it would be easy to dismiss any diplomatic responsibility.

Had Prince Rubert really used Minister Cordobal as nothing more than part of an experiment in a national defense strategy? Or was even that explanation part of the deception?

Loek and Romilda were looking at each other as if they wanted to say something, but they were silent as the Faldra lifted into the air. Probably a wise decision. Always a good plan not to make any smart remarks about someone else’s love life.

As Loek began working his wind magic again, the five Faldras slowly gained altitude. The scenery was still weird, like flying through a kaleidoscope, but now that we knew it was just an illusion, we could ignore it and head for our destination.

“We’re losing time,” Minister Cordobal said firmly, as if to make clear that all that had just happened was behind us. “Let’s go!”

We were still locked in battle with the Eastern Second Unit. Minori-san and Theresa and I between us had mauled them pretty good with our antics, and the unit was having trouble responding cohesively—but individual soldiers were still fighting. We weren’t exactly whittling down their numbers, either. In hopes of not involving our friends and allies—people like Falmelle-san and the Faugron staff, and the Bahairamanian citizens, not to mention Elvia, Amatena, and Clara—I was fighting with the proverbial one hand behind my back, not killing the enemy soldiers, just knocking them down. But all too often, that meant they got right back up.

“Myuuuseeelll!”

It didn’t help that I wasn’t actually, you know, fighting right now. I had other things to worry about. I’d lost track of how many times I had shouted Myusel’s name down into the huge crevice. But all I got in response was a face full of scalding hot air. Nothing from Myusel. Maybe she was too deep to hear me. Or maybe she couldn’t answer. Or maybe...

“Shinichi-sama!”

For a second, I thought the voice had come from the hole... but it was from behind me. It was Clara, rushing up and grabbing my arms as I had been about to tumble into the fissure. Clara wasn’t very large and looked young, but she was still a weretiger, and that meant she was awfully strong. She dragged me away from the edge, and I fell down on my behind.

“Shinichi!” Amatena shouted. She and Elvia were fighting nearby, I guess to keep me safe. Like I said, the Eastern Second Unit people hadn’t given up yet. If anything, they had redoubled their attack, sensing an opportunity when I left the battle. “Focus on the fight in front of you!” Amatena ordered.

“But I—! But Myusel—!”

“She may already be dead,” Clara said bluntly, giving voice to the one thought I had refused to even put into words.

“No! That’s ridiculous, what are you—”

“The only thing you’ll find here is air hot enough to make you sweat,” Clara said. Her tone was flat as ever, almost as if she didn’t feel emotion. “I don’t believe it’s merely the heat from the imarufe bisurupeguze, either. Deep down there—”

“Shut up!” I shouted, almost before I could think. I felt Clara, still holding my arms, quake with surprise.

“Shinichi-sama...” For the first time, she almost sounded scared.

That snapped me back to myself. “Argh, I—I’m sorry. But...” I looked back over my shoulder at her as I spoke. “I’m basically in invincibility mode right now...”

Theresa had increased our authority or privileges or something, so that we could use magic without so much as an incantation, just by picturing what we wanted to happen. Nothing should have been impossible for me. Nothing should have been so hard.

“Shinichi!” Amatena said again. “I know how you must be feeling, but if you jump into that hole it’ll only mean another lost ally.”

Elvia added her voice to the chorus: “Y’ can’t do it, Shinichi-sama! I know you’re worried about Myusel—I am, too, but y’ just can’t!”

“I told you, the way I am now, I would be all right...”

“No, I think you’d better not!” Theresa said from a distance away, her voice shockingly cold. “The privileges I granted you only work inside this facility, and they only work where the administrative system is functioning properly. I don’t think they’d do you any good anywhere near that reactor. The micromachines might still exist there, but they won’t have access to the calculation functions of the network. You’d have to give every single one individual instructions.”

“So you’re saying—”

“I’m saying you won’t be popping any fireballs out of your hands or what the hell ever.”

That brought me up short. I should have realized it. If “administrative privileges” or whatever gave you control over the micromachines—that is to say, allowed you to use magic freely—then there wouldn’t have been any need for the forbidden armor. But the high temperatures around the reactor were preventing the nanomachines there from using the network’s calculation capabilities. In other words, communications with that area were cut off.

Argh, dammit! Stupid, stupid logic!

Myusel—Myusel was down there. And it was because of me. Because I made a split-second choice to screw up. If she was dead...

I looked up, and my eyes happened to meet those of Falmelle-san. She’d been about to jump into that pit herself, but her subordinates had just managed to hold her back. She seemed to be doing a better job than I was of regaining her composure, though, because she just cast her eyes to the ground, clearly in pain.

No! No, you can’t give up! You of all people!

I almost let the words come out of my mouth in a yell, but I just stopped myself. I was sure she didn’t want to give up on her daughter. She’d just realized that flinging herself into that hole wouldn’t do anyone any good.

But then...

“Huh?” Among the ringing of swords and shouting of soldiers and general chaos, I heard a voice, clearly and distinctly. I can’t say how I was able to hear it over the din. Maybe because it belonged to someone I knew.

“What? What are the two of you doing here?”

Yes. It was someone I’d met once before...

Elvia was the first to call her name: “Big Sis Jiji?!”

I looked toward the voice in shock. There was Elvia and Amatena’s older sister, Jijilea Harneiman. Unlike when we’d met at the mansion, she was wearing light armor, a sword hanging at her hip—you couldn’t miss her. She looked practically identical to Elvia and Amatena, but she gave a completely different impression. There was none of her sisters’ mischievous streak, and while she was beautiful, she also came across as the consummate tactician. In a word, not someone you really wanted to mess with.

“Jijilea! Order them to stop fighting, now! This battle is meaningless!” Amatena shouted.

“Hm?” Jijilea responded, and for an instant she tilted her head, so calm she almost looked out of place, and simply gazed at us. “But this boy—Shinichi, was it? And the woman. They’re from Eldant, are they not?” She was looking at Minori-san. “And is Eldant not trying to take over the Dragon’s Den? The boy himself said something about laying the groundwork for a further invasion.”

“No, Shinichi was—”

But before Amatena could explain, the doors of the Dragon’s Den opened with a great crash. Something huge, the size of a dragon, had kicked open the massive doors. And it seemed to be looking right at us...

“Speedy delivery!”

“You moron!” Minori-san shouted—at Loek, who was standing proudly atop a red Faldra.

“Huh?” he said. “Wha? Minori-san...”

“Could your timing be any worse?”

I had to agree. Through complete coincidence, the leader of the group that had infiltrated the Dragon’s Den from below turned out to be Jijilea, and she could have helped put a stop to this pointless fighting. We had been so close. But there was going to be no explaining this.

So, screw it.

“What took you so long?” I demanded, rushing up to the foot of Loek’s Faldra.

“Huh? Shinichi-sensei?”

“Umm...”

Loek—and beside him, Romilda—were taken aback to find themselves upbraided not just by Minori-san, but even by me. Now that I was a little closer, I could see they weren’t the only ones on the Faldra; Hikaru-san and Garius were there, too.

“What do you mean, so long?” Hikaru-san said. “We went as fast as—”

“Myusel fell in that hole! I need the forbidden armor or we’ll never get her back!” I said.

“In the— Oh...” Hikaru-san had apparently noticed the fissure.

“Just give it to me! Give me the forbidden armor!”

“I’m goin’, too!” Elvia exclaimed, rushing over. “Y’all brought one for me, didn’t you?!”

“Ahem, yes, of course. And we have Myusel Fourant’s suit as well,” Garius replied. Like the others, he didn’t seem to quite grasp what was going on. Not that I could really blame him.

“We’ll take that, too. Just give it to us!” I smacked the Faldra’s side to emphasize my sense of urgency.

Thankfully, the Eastern Second Unit, Jijilea included, was so startled by what had happened that they hadn’t reacted yet. They’d probably never seen an actual Faldra before, and on top of that, they saw me and Minori-san getting very upset with Loek and the others despite the fact that these were obviously reinforcements. We could add them to the list of people this stuff wasn’t making sense to.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite confusing enough to make them call a halt to the fighting.

“Amatena, Elvia, what’s going on here? Explain this to me!” I heard Jijilea saying irritably behind me. Meanwhile, Elvia and I grabbed the crates of forbidden armor off the Faldra’s back and wrenched them open.

I was just reaching for mine when Theresa, still beating up on the Bahairamanian soldiers, shouted, “Hey, kid—Shinichi! Start it up in maintenance mode!”

“Maintenance what? Huh?”

“You know by now that the Iron Crab is supposed to be for women. Not a lot of fun for a guy, even in emergency mode. Maintenance mode disables the F-type’s waste-disposal unit, so your crotch ought to be a little more comfortable!”

“Okay, but I’ll tell you what I’m not comfortable with—girls saying words like crotch!” I cried.

Still, it was pretty good advice. The whole thing with this armor being made for females did make things pretty uncomfortable for me. I did recall the armor saying something flippant about how I was plenty small enough to enable the emergency mode, but let’s just say I wasn’t always that small!

Look, it was bearable during an emergency, but if anything got, you know, even the slightest bit bigger, there was a whole lot of pressure—like, enough to make me regret having been born a man. It wasn’t an experience I was eager to repeat. But I guess by enabling this maintenance mode or whatever, I could disable the part that put so much pressure on my, uh, parts. Maybe “maintenance” meant maintenance on the armor, and the “waste-disposal unit” was retracted to make things easier to clean and disinfect.

“Shinichi-sama!” Elvia was already in her armor and urging me to hurry up.

“Right, right! Uhh... Start up in maintenance mode... Please?” I said to the armor in the box, and then I reached out my hand.

I was lucky I had been right in the middle of using a wind magic spell. I believe the magical garments gifted to me by Her Majesty played a major part, as well. Whatever the case, I was still alive and uninjured, though I had fallen from a substantial height. The wind swirling around me had formed a series of layers and softened my landing, not to mention protected me from what was down there in the pit.

“It’s so hot...”

A brutal heat awaited me down here. Even with the protection of the magic, I felt as if it could scorch my skin. Without it—well, I suppose I would already have died when I hit the ground, but if I hadn’t, the heat would quickly have roasted me. I didn’t have to touch the flames; the radiant heat was more than enough. (Believe me, you learn that quickly if you spend enough time in the kitchen.)

“Shinichi-sama... Mother...”

I looked up. How far had I fallen? I couldn’t judge from here. That was partly because of the wind blowing around me, but also the heat; everything looked wavy and it made distances hard to estimate. I looked around, but I encountered largely the same problem. No matter where I turned, the scene had the unsteady quality of a mirage, and I couldn’t really tell where I was. I had to assume it was somewhere close to the lowest level of the Dragon’s Den.

“I wonder... is everyone okay?” Shinichi-sama appeared to have contained the explosion of the imarufe bisurupeguze, thankfully, and nothing seemed to be coming down after me, so I thought the battle now above my head must be over. The way Shinichi-sama and Minori-sama had looked the last time I saw them, they had seemed perfectly capable of winning the fight by themselves.

I thought about calling out to those above me, but I doubted my voice would make it past the magical winds; I couldn’t hear anything that was being said overhead. My ears were completely full of the roar of the wind around me. I couldn’t afford to end the spell, so conversation was out of the question.

“Shinichi-sama...” I looked up once more, but everything still quavered, and I couldn’t make out much of anything. In fact, it threatened to make me sick to my stomach.

No, wait. The ill feeling I was having...

I could feel my whole body covered in sweat. That was actually a good sign. When one has been exposed to too much heat for too long, ultimately one ceases even to sweat, and then death by desiccation isn’t far off.

How long did I have left? I wasn’t eager to try to walk when my vision seemed so unsteady, but I had to do something to get away from here. Maybe I could find some way to get back upstairs. The moment I tried to take my first step, however, the entire world seemed to tilt crazily, and I collapsed to my hands and knees. No, no, that explained it. It wasn’t the world that had tilted. It was me. My brain was still functioning enough to understand that.

I don’t know if I can do this... I thought, my consciousness starting to fade. I would still be able to manage my magic for a little bit longer, I thought, but I had to be conscious for that, and I wasn’t sure when that was going to fail me. It made perfect sense, really. The wind magic could reduce the amount of heat that got to me, but it was a reduction. Not a complete elimination. And meanwhile, the temperature was slowly climbing.

Hot. So hot. I was sweating from every pore, and I felt awful. Those thoughts, that feeling, seemed to have completely taken over my brain.

“Shin...i...chi...sa...ma...” His name escaped me in a whisper. Would I ever see him again? Would I ever talk to him again?

Oh...

I just wanted to hear his voice one more time.

I wanted to see his face one more time.

I wanted to touch his hand... one more...

“It’s delicious, Myusel.”

Shinichi-sama complimenting my cooking with a big smile.

“Let’s take a picture together!”

Yes... That’s what he’d said, even though we’d only just met...

“Myusel.”

Shinichi-sama saying my name with that smile on his face.

“Myusel.”

Shinichi-sama, his eyes cast shyly to the ground.

“Myusel.”

Shinichi-sama...

“Myusel.”

“Myusel.”

I... What? What was I—?

Shinichi-sama. It was all... Shinichi-sama.

Memories of him, overflowing in my mind.

Everything that had happened. Some of it seemed so long ago.

I’d met him first, but thanks to him, I’d met so many others. Like Her Majesty. Like Minori-sama. Matoba-sama. Elvia-san. Hikaru-sama. Amatena-san. Clara-san. Even... Falmelle-san... my mother.

It had all been so much... fun. I was so happy.

So, now, it was okay if I.........

“Myusel!”

Shinichi-sama was shouting.

He sounded so panicked for some reason.

When was that? When had that happened?

I couldn’t seem to remember...

“Myusel! Myusel! Hold on! I’m going to get you into the forbidden armor now! But you have to deactivate your magic the instant I do!”

Shinichi-sama.

Shinichi...

“Shinichi-sama?!”

My mind, which had been growing dimmer and dimmer, miraculously snapped back to reality. Shinichi-sama’s shout, that was what had done it.

“Myusel!”

He was the first thing I saw as I came to. But he wasn’t alone. Elvia-san was with him. Both were wearing the forbidden armor that had caused such an uproar at our mansion.

All I could think was: Oh. He made it. He was in time.

“Myusel! Myusel, can you hear me?!”

“Y-Yes, sir... Shinichi-sama, I... I can hear... you...” I shook my head and tried to focus my thoughts. It was all right now; Shinichi-sama was here. So long as he was with me, I had nothing to fear. He would figure this out, somehow. He always did. So I...

“All right, Myusel! I’m going to count to three, then I’m going to put the armor on you!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Three, two, one—now!”

I ended my spell. The wind around me briefly vanished, replaced by a scorching heat that threatened to burn my skin. I hardly felt heat; I just felt pain. I screamed. But then...

“Protection of wearer, confirmed. Analyzing environment. Activating cooling subroutine.”

It was the same voice I had heard the last time I put on the forbidden armor. Cold air rushed around me and the pain faded. I forced out several long breaths, hoping to expel the rest of the heat inside me. Then Shinichi-sama was embracing me, armor and all. “Myusel, are you okay? Myusel?” He looked terrified.

“Yes, sir. I can’t believe it, but... I’m okay.”

“Thank god!” Shinichi-sama held my shoulders and let out the deepest breath I had ever seen.

“That’s terrific!” Elvia-san said from behind him, openly joyful.

“Yes, that’s wonderful,” said someone else, who appeared from behind Elvia-san.

“Wha?”

Whoever it was, they were on fire. Literally; their body was covered in flames. To my amazement, the person wore no armor and protected themselves with no wind magic, but simply stood there as their body was consumed by the heat.

“Theresa-san?!” It was the doll-woman who claimed to be the rightful overseer of the Dragon’s Den. “Y-You’re on fire!”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s just an avatar, after all,” she said as if it really didn’t mean anything to her. Burning the whole time.

She slapped at a few stray flames, the way you might brush dust off your clothes, but she quickly began to smoke again and the avatar was soon burning once more. She could try to put them out all day, and they would keep coming back.

“I can change avatars like you can change clothes. My meatsack’s long gone, anyway. Don’t expect this avatar’ll last long now. I’ll take you guys as far as I can, but when this body craps out, you’ll have to do the rest on your own.”

The rest? As I registered the words, I remembered. Shinichi-sama wasn’t here just to rescue me. He had needed the forbidden armor to get close to the “re-act-torr,” the thing that had once powered the Dragon’s Den and now threatened to destroy us all. Shinichi-sama had to shut it down.

“Sorry about this,” Shinichi-sama said to me. “I’d really like to take you upstairs and let you get some rest first, but—”

I shook my head. “It’s all right. Let me go with you.” I might not be much help, but then again, if I wasn’t there, I would be no help at all. If there was anything I could do to enable Shinichi-sama to complete his mission, I would do it.

“Okay. In that case, Myusel, Elvia, let’s go. Theresa-san, whenever you’re ready.”

“Attaboy,” Theresa-san said, and then she marched into the raging heat. In a few places, her hair was already igniting.

The lowest level of the Dragon’s Den, the home of the rampaging Annihilation Reactor, turned out to be two levels down from where Myusel had fallen.

“Urgh,” I groaned. I know it probably sounded silly, but I couldn’t stop myself. We were walking down a slope through a place of terrifying, hellish heat. In fact, “hellish” didn’t seem like a strong enough word to describe the temperature.

The forbidden armor—or the PDWS, I guess—adjusted the image on the invisible force field in front of me so there was a minimum of visual distortion from the heat, but that only left us with the awful scene down there on the lowest level. Anything made of plastic or resin had either melted or caught fire, so you couldn’t tell what used to be scientific equipment. There were a bunch of holes in the wall, revealing a structure of what I thought was metal pieces. There was rubble from pillars and such that showed signs of having been scorched by fire—but when I thought about it, it was really present tense; the whole place was actively burning.

The metal was so hot it was glowing, and in places it looked like it might start to melt at any moment. I could see that if I was foolish enough to remove my forbidden armor here, I would go up like a torch on the spot. I was curious exactly what the temperature was down there, but I was too scared to ask the AI on the PDWS to check. I was given to understand that 451°F—that’s 233°C—was the temperature at which books burned. I figured we were way past that point.

There was actually this old sci-fi novel called Fahrenheit 451 about a future society where they burned books. It had been turned into a movie, paid homage by another film called Equilibrium, and even became a light novel at one point, so the number at least stuck in my head.

......Er, okay. I admit it: I’m just trying to escape reality now.

The point is, I was very, very frightened by that bottom level.

“Sorry...” Theresa said. “I think this is about it for me.” For a while now she had been in actual flames, and at this point she simply sat down on the ground. Frankly, I was amazed she had managed to function as well as she had for as long as she had. She didn’t show any sign of experiencing pain from it, but I have to admit, it was tough watching her burn and melt right in front of my eyes. The technology around here made her avatar almost indistinguishable from a flesh-and-blood human, so it was like watching someone sustain horrific burns. If the damage had revealed wires or motors or something, anything that made her look like a robot, a machine, it would have reminded me that she was basically a living doll, and maybe it all would have seemed less grotesque.

“You’re going to have to go ahead on your own. Just keep going straight, nice and easy.”

“Sure, we can do that, but, uh, are you going to be okay?” I guess she had said something about her consciousness escaping into the network with her personality data when her current body was destroyed. But was the network even active right now? “I mean, didn’t you say the network might not be accessible on the lowest level?”

“Damn... Remembered that, huh?” Theresa grimaced. Or at least, I think that’s what she was trying to do, but her face was so ruined at this point that all she really managed was a twitching at the corners of her mouth. This was definitely bad. She couldn’t even smile anymore. But she said: “This body was never anything more than an avatar. A container for someone who was physically dead a long time ago. I’m like a ghost. So don’t worry about it.”

“Hey, what the heck is that supposed to mean?!” I rushed over to Theresa and knelt beside her. “‘Don’t worry about me—just go’? That’s, like, a guaranteed death flag, isn’t it?!”

“Don’t know what a ‘death flag’ is, kid. But seriously, just go.”

“I can’t do that!”

Okay, so maybe the “real” Theresa was already dead, and whatever was with me here was just some sort of mechanical copy of her personality. But she still looked like a real, living person, and it was more than I could do to simply say, “Okay then, see ya.” I don’t care if you’re a demi-human or a robot or what. If you look human, then in my opinion, you’re human. That’s the power of an otaku who can get moe even for a robot-girl heroine, and don’t you forget it!

Okay, not really the point right now.

“Shinichi-sama’s right,” Elvia said, crouching in front of Theresa. “I dunno what exactly’s going on, but ya can’t just give up! You’re just like Hikaru-sama, right? So you must be human!”

“Er, Elvia...”

Her logic seemed to be that because Theresa was using an avatar just like Hikaru-san, she must be human. I don’t think she understood that in this case, the consciousness or personality could exist completely separate from a human body that was long dead. I didn’t blame her; cyberpunk and sci-fi stuff where the plots relied on networks and that kind of technology would be difficult to grasp if you weren’t used to them.

“Elvia, take Theresa-san upstairs,” I said, touching her shoulder (or more accurately, the shoulder of her forbidden armor).

“Wha?” she said.

“There should still be time, if you go right now. Once you get a few floors up, the network should be active—the point is, you might be able to save her!”

“R-Right, I’m on it!” She nodded a couple of times, then grabbed Theresa in the big, bulky arms of the forbidden armor and set off running. “Shinichi-sama, Myusel, be careful!” she called back to us.

Aw, man... Look where you’re going! The heat haze was getting so severe that the image improvement routine couldn’t always keep up with it, making it hard to be sure where we were putting our feet. We might be looking straight ahead and still fall down.

“We will! Eyes forward when you’re running!” I shouted back.

“Yessir!” Elvia said, and then she and Theresa vanished up the long tunnel.

At last I turned to Myusel. “I’m sorry, Myusel. I should have taken this moment to get you out of here, too.”

“No, sir, Shinichi-sama. I’m going to help you,” she said firmly. “It looks like I can still use my magic.”

“Huh? Oh yeah...” Now that she mentioned it, I realized it was true. I hadn’t noticed because of the way everything looked through the PDWS’s display, but Myusel was still using her wind magic to help deflect the heat from me ever so slightly. Wow. So the nanomachines were still working, even under these circumstances. They must be tougher than I thought. In fact, come to think of it, I remembered reading somewhere—maybe in one of my dad’s research books or something—that the ideal power source for nanomachines, especially medical ones, at the current state of the art was infrared. Parts of the human body naturally emit infrared radiation. It’s already there inside us. It’s a minimal amount of energy, of course, but it’s more than enough to power something as small as a nanomachine. If the magical sprites in this world—which was to say, the nanomachines—also used infrared radiation as power, then maybe they would function even better than normal in a high-heat situation like this.

Unfortunately, with the connection to the network broken, I couldn’t just bust out with whatever magic I could imagine, but maybe we could still use our normal spells.

“Don’t know how long it’ll last, though. Let’s hurry.”

“Right!”

We took off running. I’d been a little freaked out to watch Elvia run earlier, but when I was doing it myself, I realized the forbidden armor was very comfortable to move in, automatically correcting for any bad footing—I guess it was designed for battlefield use, after all.

“I know it’s a little late to be saying this, but this armor is truly amazing,” Myusel said.

“I agree. Heck, if all it did was keep the heat off us, that would be awesome enough.”

We were very lucky whoever had built the PDWS had thought it through enough not to make the whole thing out of metal. That might have made us feel like we were in literal walking tanks, but it also would have fried us in a few seconds flat down here. What a nasty way to go.

Come to think of it, there was that thing—the brazen bull; is that what it was called? It was said to be a metal statue in the shape of a bull. It was hollow, and a person would be locked inside of it and a fire lit under it, so they roasted to death. I thought it was supposed to have been invented in ancient Greece or Rome or something...

No! No time now for discursive excurses on bovine statuary!

Suddenly I saw Myusel smile slightly behind the transparent force field protecting her. “I... I really thought I was done for back there, until you came to rescue me, Shinichi-sama.”

“Oh, uh... Yeah?”

“For some reason, I was flooded with memories of you. Of our earliest moments together...”

“Yikes! They say your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to go...”

In other words, it had been a very, very close call.

“Really? What do they mean by that?”

“I guess when a person is dying, scenes from their life supposedly go through their mind really fast. So it would be... I mean, better if you didn’t see that stuff.”

“Oh... But...” She giggled. “I remembered so many things we did together. Like when we went to Ja-pan.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember hitting Akiba.”

“Shinichi-sama.” Myusel’s smile widened, and she said, with a touch of sweetness, “When this is over, I want to go to Ja-pan again.”

“No, stop!” I exclaimed. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. “You can’t do that, Myusel!”

“Wha? Oh, I—I’m sorry... I forgot my place...” She lowered her eyes, downright frightened.

Enunciating very clearly for emphasis, I said: “You must not say anything like, ‘When this is over, I want to go to Ja-pan again.’” I clenched my fist—or rather, clanked the PDWS’s claw fingers together. “That’s a guaranteed death flag!”

“Wha...?”

“Any character who says something like that, you know they’re going to bite the dust! It’s a law of nature! More dangerous than seeing your life flash before your eyes!”

“I’m sorry? Er... Oh...” She blinked rapidly.

Okay, so it wasn’t exactly like I believed Myusel was really tripping a death flag and was going to get killed. But she was such a quick study... And if I may say so, I was a little worried that if worst came to worst, she might not fight all the way to the bitter end, but just say something like, “If I must die, Shinichi-sama, as long as it’s with you...”

“In any case, we just need to focus on stopping that reactor!” I said.

“Y-Yes, sir!” Myusel was smiling again as she nodded, and then the two of us headed deeper into the Dragon’s Den.

The “hyperspace tunnel.” That was the mysterious thing that connected our Holy Eldant Empire to Ja-pan, which was somehow both far away and very close at the same time. Nobody knew when or how this connection had been established. Not the wizards of our country, nor the scientists of Ja-pan. While it was, in effect, the border between our land and theirs, it was also a unique connection between two countries. No other portal like it existed anywhere, so far as we knew. Nor had we heard of anything similar in any other nation in the vicinity.

Hence we made it our business to be quite careful with this mysterious hole and to protect it by all means at our disposal. When we discovered that magic from our world was being sucked away through the portal to Ja-pan, we had a large “lid” constructed and placed over the hole to stop it. We certainly did not wish for the tunnel, which had been the source of so much abundance and so much cultural enrichment for us, to be the source of any trouble. Thus it was opened only when absolutely necessary for transit, while at all other times the lid prevented anyone or anything, including sprites, from passing through it.

The hole had once opened onto a simple grass field, but now there were military barracks there, along with a tower and a wheel to move the great chains that opened and closed the lid, and a number of other structures. At first glance, it could look like a building site, and to prevent any other nation from getting the idea of taking it over, it was constantly garrisoned by nearly a hundred troops, including many who could use magic.

That was not even including the Jay Ess Dee Eff troops from Ja-pan, who lived and worked alongside our own soldiers. Therefore, when we arrived at the hyperspace tunnel and observed a Ja-panese military vehicle parked there, we were not surprised. We admit, however, that we did not expect Matoba to emerge from it.

“Your Majesty.” As the chief Ja-panese diplomat here, this man routinely went back and forth between our empire and Ja-pan, but the terminus of the hyperspace tunnel was nothing more than a stopping-off point for him. It was unusual for him to spend any significant time here. In our experience he was more typically to be found either at the Jay Ess Dee Eff barracks established near the practice grounds, or else at Shinichi’s—that is to say, Amutech’s—mansion.

“Matoba. What brings you here?” We tried to look neutral as we spoke. This man was not an enemy as such, but there remained some doubt as to whether he was truly trustworthy. He was the type who could hide a trick up his sleeve, or a plot behind his smile. So we always attempted to play things close to the proverbial vest when speaking to him.

It wasn’t entirely a façade, however: although Zahar had briefed us on the general state of the hyperspace tunnel on the carriage ride over, we didn’t know many details.

“Apparently there’s some sort of anomaly with the hyperspace tunnel,” he said.

We glanced at Zahar for a second before we responded, “Did one of the guards tell you that?”

Matoba shook his head. “Our people have confirmed it as well. Some of the elevator machinery is malfunctioning, and a crack has appeared in the ground near the tunnel, according to reports. We can assume that much is a consequence of the earthquake...” Here Matoba frowned, a most unusual expression from the normally taciturn man. “But it seems the elevator wires have gone slack.”

“Yes, so it does.” We had heard much the same from Zahar.

A slackening of the wires. That wasn’t inherently dangerous; it wasn’t even necessarily a bad sign. They need simply be wound up again. The real question was why the wires had gone slack.

“I think it would be quickest if you observed the situation yourself, Your Majesty,” Matoba said.

“That is what we are here for. Zahar.”

“Majesty.” He nodded smartly, and the soldiers around the area got to work slowly pulling on the chains that opened the lid on the tunnel. They must have been advised that this would be expected when we arrived.

“Observe, Your Majesty,” Zahar said. We walked toward the wooden fence that had been set up around the tunnel. We leaned on it and peered over...

“What is this?!” we said, unable to hide our shock.

We had seen this hyperspace tunnel more than once before, and had even passed through it ourselves on one occasion to reach Ja-pan. Some brave souls had descended directly into the tunnel in order to study it, and they reported that it was of long, narrow construction, constricting somewhat in the middle. In other words, the shape was roughly that of an hourglass. Thus when we leaned over the side of the railing, we could see a dark space with a tiny white dot deep within. Or at least, that’s what we should have seen. It was what we had always seen before. But not this time.

The tunnel had expanded. Had the constriction in the center opened out? Or had both ends come closer together? Whatever the case, it was no longer a white dot that we saw within the tunnel, but a clear image of the scene on the Ja-panese side. Their end of the hole was covered by a roof, so that instead of the sky, a gray, warehouse-like ceiling was visible.

“What is going on here?!” we said.

“In the opinion of our physicists,” Matoba said slowly, “the hole was originally opened by some kind of massive energy burst. The fact that it’s expanding raises the possibility that the energy is increasing.”

We said nothing.

“We’ve measured the distance, and it has grown perceptibly smaller. At this rate, we project that within a month or so, the two ends of the hole will collide.”

“That seems like it would make transit far easier. Is that not a good thing?”

“To the extent that it’s impossible to say what might happen when the collision occurs, we don’t know.” Matoba produced a handkerchief from his bag and began wiping away sweat. “If our two worlds were themselves to collide...”

We were silent once again. We exchanged looks with Zahar. Country and country—nay, world and world could collide. It was true indeed that it was impossible to speculate what might happen. It was bad enough when two ships ran into each other, but two entire worlds?

“According to our measurements, the tunnel isn’t shrinking consistently. It’s unstable; the size fluctuates. There’s always a possibility it might return to its former state if left to its own devices. However...” At this point Matoba stopped talking, studying us and Zahar. He seemed to be hesitating over something. We attempted to encourage him with a nod. “We believe,” he finally continued, “that the safest course of action would be to seal off this tunnel entirely.”

“What?” But that would mean...

Matoba didn’t continue, but only wiped away more sweat. We, though, were already looking away from him, back into the hyperspace tunnel. It was true: the scenery on the other side of the tunnel seemed to waver, as if it was unsteady. The strange hole connecting our two worlds shook and trembled. It was enough to give one pause.

“Matoba, it can’t be possible that Ja-pan...”

“I’m afraid, Your Majesty, that it is.” Then Matoba gave a very, very long sigh.

It was... weirder than I expected.

A reactor that used matter annihilation. Colliding matter and antimatter to produce huge amounts of energy—as far as I knew, theoretically the most efficient power source imaginable.

I guess I’d sort of pictured it looking like a nuclear reactor. You know, a big, metal cylinder with lots of pipes coming out of it. And I wasn’t wrong about that. The cylinder was there, and the pipes, too. But there was more.

“What’s this?”

Around the canister were five ring-like things, continuously rotating. I judged them to be a good ten meters in diameter. They were each rotating in opposite directions, like they were sealing something in...

“An Annihilation Reactor... and magnetic field rings?!” I said suddenly, the words tumbling out.

Obviously, I wasn’t a scientist or a scholar or anything. Frankly, the best we could do would be to call otakuism part of the humanities. But I’d seen enough sci-fi stuff to have an idea what this was. Matter and antimatter, as I recalled, began to react the moment they came into contact with each other, with most of the material transforming into energy. Get enough of it in one place and pressurize it, and it begins to split. We’re way beyond nuclear fission, here. This is just by letting matter and antimatter get a sniff of each other.

That’s why antimatter is so difficult to handle in a world that’s completely made up of, well, matter. If you put it in a containment vessel, it’ll interact with the matter of the vessel and explode. So instead you have to put the reactive material in a vacuum container, and keep it stored in a vacuum. The magnetic field is how they do that. They use the magnets to fix the antimatter in place, keeping it stable.

Those rotating rings were probably creating complicated magnetic fields to keep the matter and antimatter from coming into contact. It’s sort of like the primer bulb or injection pipe on a gasoline engine, except with a force field that controls the flow of matter and antimatter.

“And they want us to stop that thing?”

No... We couldn’t just turn it off. If those magnetic rings stopped functioning, the stuff in the reactor would be pulled down by gravity and end up coming into contact with matter. Then the reactor wouldn’t be going rogue anymore—because it would all be over in one instantaneous explosion.

What was the story here?! This was, like, Super Nightmare Hell Difficulty!

Okay, slow down. Theresa said there should be an emergency shut-off. We should be able to use that to stabilize the vacuum inside the reactor without turning off the magnetic rings—or so I hoped. She’d said the controls would be on the wall to the right as you came in.

I looked over... and froze. Someone was there. No. Something. Indistinct figures advancing toward us. Wait—figures?! Here?!

“Shinichi-sama, look...”

Maybe the PDWS’s AI could detect me straining my eyes, because it increased the zoom on the 3D image directly in front of me. Suddenly, the silhouettes became clear.

“They can’t be zombies... can they? But what are they?!”

They looked human enough, but they clearly weren’t. Or maybe they used to be. Or maybe they had been avatars, like Theresa’s or Hikaru-san’s. The details were different, but they had the same shimmering pieces of light in their chests.

Dolls. Probably put here to oversee the facility, just like Theresa...

“What are those?” I said. The PDWS started narrating: “What are those. Request for object identification and information. Search complete. Presumed to be facility administration devices, chassis number MD033M. Gynoids with simple onboard artificial intelligence.”

Simple artificial intelligence? Did that mean...

“There’s nobody in there?”

“Affirmative. No biological components present. No artificial or composite humanoid personality present.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. In other words, they were maintenance robots. No smarts to speak of. You wouldn’t need that to do repetitive maintenance and upkeep tasks. If anything came up that demanded real judgment, I assumed it would have been left to someone “authorized” like Theresa. The humanoid shape was probably just because that was the most convenient thing when working in a facility used and run by humans. It would make all the hallways and staircases accessible and so on.

“Still... It’s kind of unsettling...”

It was like Theresa earlier, but worse. The bots’ faces, arms, legs, and bodies were all in various stages of melting. From the heat down here, I assumed. The stuff made of softer material, to mimic biological human bits—in other words the skin and the muscle underneath—weren’t built to stand up to these sorts of temperatures. In places, the robots were so badly melted that they were half skeleton. And then...

“Warning,” the PDWS intoned. “All MD033M units currently in security mode. No IFF response. Probability you have been judged an intruder: high.”

“Uh?”

IFF—I recognized that from my anime and novels, too. It stood for “identification friend or foe,” and was a radio signal used to distinguish friendly and enemy units. Hey... Wait a second! So that meant the bots’ IFF detectors were on the fritz, and they thought we were enemies?! And did this thing say security mode?! If those droids were supposed to be protecting this facility, then naturally...

“Shinichi-sama?!” Myusel cried.

The robots, which had been wandering around zombie-like until that moment, all turned and looked at us at once. Their eyes, an eerie blue that stood out all the more starkly in this burning hellscape, blinked in unison.

“Oh, shit!” I yelped, and at that exact moment all of the dolls lurched toward us, arms outstretched. It was exactly like something out of a zombie movie. I mean, I didn’t think they were coming to shake our hands. It was all too easy to see what was going on... and it was creepy as heck. The dolls closed in on us. There were too many to count. I thought there had to be at least fifty of them.

“They think we’re enemies!” I said.

“C-Can’t you tell them we’re not?!” Myusel said. She was so sweet. And I appreciated that she understood that was the sort of thing I would think of. If they had been avatars like Theresa’s, receptacles for human consciousness, I might even have tried it.

But instead I said, “There’s no way!” With their IFF sensors broken, there wasn’t going to be any reasoning with the simplistic onboard AIs. And even if we could have managed it, I didn’t think we had the time. These things were supposed to be taking care of the reactor, and they were already melting piles of parts. Who knew when that thing was going to blow?

“They’re just broken dolls! Let’s blow them away and get through!”

“Tifu Murottsu!” Myusel and I both exclaimed, hitting them with our magic. Either the dolls were never designed for combat duty, or they were just that badly impaired by the damage they’d already sustained, because it wasn’t hard to fling back the ones at the front. And that was great and all, but then...

“Wha?!” I cried. As the robots flew backwards, they grabbed onto a pipe. And either they were hitting really hard, or the pipe had been weakened by the heat, too, because it broke right off and started spewing hot steam.

“Not good, not good!”

“Shinichi-sama?”

“Myusel, we can’t rely on projectiles or anything flying around. It might destroy this entire facility!” I said, not taking my eyes off of our enemies. We could handle one broken pipe, I guessed. But if we broke those magnetic rings, or the control mechanisms for them, that would probably be it for us. “Let’s just forget about these guys for now—we have to get over there!” I pointed to the control panel Theresa had told us about.

“Yes, sir! B-But...”

“If they come at you, use your fists!”

I figured that wouldn’t do too much harm to anything. Thankfully, equipped with the strength-boosting PDWS suits as we were, I had a feeling we could get in a wrestling match with a gorilla or a black bear and have a decent chance. “If you have to use magic, only use it defensively, like you did earlier! And no beam weapons, either!”

“Yes, sir!”

After that, it all started to become a blur. Myusel and I pushed our way through the crowd of dolls, lashing out with the suits’ arms to drive them back. The PDWS’s inherent defensive capabilities, combined with Myusel’s wind-magic shield, kept the bots from getting close, and we worked our way arduously toward the control panel.

In some sense, I was glad the maintenance units were out of control. They might not be quite as strong or as smart as Theresa, but if they had retained some measure of autonomous judgment, they might have figured out what we were after and done something to the control panel before we could get there—and that would have been the end for us. But they were in no state to have complicated thoughts like that, so they just attacked us.

“Huff... Puff...”

In less than five minutes, though, we’d started to breathe dangerously hard. Obviously, the PDWS suits did a perfect job of helping us do what we wanted to do, but they couldn’t stop all the heat from getting to us, and the temperature in the cockpits was climbing. Without Myusel’s wind magic, it would have been even worse. Maybe we would have collapsed by now. I had to get to the control panel as soon as possible. The dolls kept getting back up, but we kept pushing them back down and forged ahead.

“Shinichi-sama...!” Myusel’s voice sounded choked. With all the heat and the constant use of magic, she was probably exhausted. “Oh!” Her leg collapsed and she fell to the ground. The bots were on her immediately.

“Myusel!”

“It’s... It’s all right... You have to go on!” She was actually grabbing the robots with the PDWS’s arms, not letting them go.

“But... Myusel...!” I swallowed heavily.

She managed to smile, though, and said, “Um, I think... I think this is where I say, ‘Leave this to me! You go on ahead!’”

I shook like a shock of electricity had run through me. Of course! Yes—this was the moment, that most famous of situations! Those words every guy—in fact, probably every girl, too—ranked high on the list of things they wanted to say once in their lives! Okay, so sometimes it was also a death flag! But I couldn’t believe Myusel had stolen a march on me when it came to famous expressions!

Right, right, even I knew I didn’t have the time for this sort of internal monologue anymore.

“A-All right. Sorry—I’ll let you handle this!” I could barely bring myself to do it, but I left Myusel and pressed forward.

We were out of time.

Just about five meters to the control panel. Beyond the squirming mass of dolls, I could see a lever surrounded by a yellow-and-black striped pattern as if to say, Emergency controls, right here! Maybe there’d been a cover over it once, but it had melted away, and the lever was sitting right out there.

Suddenly, though, I came to a halt, my path blocked. It was the dolls, yes, but they were acting different. Five or six of them had gotten together and were hugging each other. It was... weird. Like they had been trying to make a wall but had ended up with a rugby scrum.

“Wait... Are they... m-merging?!”

They wound up with one leg and one arm each. A single torso. But where they had bent together, a single head emerged. They had turned themselves into a giant nearly five meters tall—even if it did have a lot of weird bits sticking out. It was grotesque, with half-subsumed parts protruding here and there. I couldn’t even tell if it was more mech or more bio-monster.

Okay, not the main problem...

“Is that even possible?!” This wasn’t one of those old robot anime! All right, so I admit, having the shrimp minions combine into a massive last boss was pretty classic, but still! It wasn’t fair! But none of this arguing (or whatever) on my part was going to get me anywhere. “What the heck do I do about it?!”

As I stood there in shock, two crab-like claws—or really, robot arms that had been appropriated as claws—came at me. Robots wriggled on it like fingers, like a bunch of insects. It was really profoundly creepy.

I tried to counter with the PDWS’s arm. But I gasped as my arm didn’t stop the giant’s hand. Instead, the finger-like things broke apart, sucking me downward. I found myself leaning forward, and the robots were collectively about to headbutt me... Er, I mean, the giant was hitting me with its fist.

I was slammed to the ground as if I’d been hit with a huge metal hammer. “Urgugh!” I blurted. Weird sound, I know. The PDWS’s force field shielded me, of course. Otherwise, my face would have been in a million pieces on the ground and that would have been the end. But the force field couldn’t completely neutralize the impact, or my acceleration.

“Gurguh!” I exclaimed next. Another weird sound. It was because the giant had stepped on my back. Of course, my body wasn’t (etc. etc).

“How come it gets to be this smart when its IFF sensor isn’t even working? That’s not fair!” I whined. It wasn’t like I expected the giant to go, “That’s a good point.” Then again, maybe it wasn’t the case that the maintenance bots had figured out how to do this giantizing thing on the spot. Maybe it had been in their programming all along. It was probably pretty helpful for doing jobs that a human-sized robot couldn’t do, or lifting heavy objects. Great innovation.

But anyway...

“Hrgh...” The giant lifted its foot, preparing to stomp on me again. I took the momentary opportunity to half-roll away, jumping to my feet before the giant could react.

“Okay. I see how this works.” I was privately shouting at myself to keep my brain working, my thoughts threatening to slip away in a haze of heat.

Here was the reality: I didn’t think I could beat this thing with brute force. But my opponent was so big that its movements were slow, exaggerated, every gesture larger than life. With all that weight, it probably didn’t balance very well. It couldn’t move too fast or it would fall clean over. More evidence that it was originally designed for work, not combat.

Well!

“Classic problem, classic solution!” I started to run. Straight toward the giant. The robot raised its fist, ready to hit me again, but he wasn’t fast enough. “Yaaaahhh!” I was sliding. There was no nice, obvious shoom! sound, but the PDWS slipped right between the robot’s legs. Perfect!

Again, this was the way every character in anime dealt with a big, lumbering opponent. Making yourself gigantic might make you look powerful, but there was a big question mark over whether it was actually more effective. Think back to the Second World War, when a fixation on bigger and bigger battleships with bigger and bigger guns ultimately produced the battleship Yamato. But she was sunk by a group of Allied aircraft, proving that with resources and maneuverability, a group of smaller enemies could take down a single larger foe.

A giant has a lot of blind spots and a lot of openings. Especially a humanoid one.

The moment I made it past the robot, I half-spun and hit the deck. As I’d expected, the giant was twisted around, trying to follow me. Since it was made from a bunch of dolls, it could twist itself unnaturally far around. Its punch was simply following me. But then:

“Cable!” The PDWS’s AI read my mind, launching the steel claw at the end of my arm. It was attached to a cable; in other words, it was effectively an anchor. And it ran straight into the left leg of the unbalanced giant. The claw bit deep. The robot lost its footing and stopped.

“All right!” I jumped up and started running. “When youuu reaaach for your dreaaaam,” I chanted melodically, tugging hard, “onnnlyy triaaals awaaaiiit!”

The cable wrapped around the giant’s leg went taut, pulling the leg into the air. For an instant the thing looked like it had slipped on a banana peel—before it came crashing down.

“That’s the only way to deal with giant, walking opponents!”

If it was good enough for the Empire’s A*-*Ts in Star W**s, it was good enough for me—even if they’d had four legs. Big and heavy might give better handling on uneven terrain, but it also made it that much easier to knock them down.

Anyway, back to business!

“Awesome!” Once I was sure the giant was down for the count, I retracted my arm wire. I turned toward the control panel and resumed moving. I could see the floor twisted by the heat in places, preventing me from running and forcing me to proceed at a delicate walk.

Four more meters.

Three more.

Two.

Aaand...

“Right, this should do it!”

I reached out with the PDWS’s arm and grabbed—

Thunk. Suddenly I, or rather the PDWS, keeled over. I looked back to see one of the maintenance robots clinging to the left leg of my suit. Its legs were broken, and it couldn’t walk. It must have followed me at a crawl. I assumed it had come from somewhere inside the giant, which must have broken itself back into its individual pieces.

“You little...!”

I tried to kick the thing away, but I was off balance and didn’t do a very good job. In fact, I fell flat on my face. Not good. At this rate, other bots would start to catch me.

“Heeek!”

The robot was looking at me through the suit’s transparent force field, its face half melted, a metal skeleton visible underneath. It looked less like a zombie and more like the Termi**tor.

“Crap, get out of here! Let go of me—I don’t have time to play Termina**r with you! I swear I’ll throw you right into that reactor!” I shouted, but none of it intimidated the doll.

I couldn’t have been more than thirty centimeters away, but I just couldn’t reach.

“Damn it all to helllllll!” I gave a shout that was very unlike me, then reached behind myself to grab the robot off the back of my suit. I held it up by the neck. “Yaaaarrrhhhh!”

Clasped in my mechanical hand, the robot snapped in half almost immediately with an audible crack. It felt a bit like being in a splatter movie, but I was in no mood to get all upset about it. I figured I could finally get on my way now—but the instant I thought that, I felt two more robots attach themselves to my PDWS. Didn’t they ever give up?!

But no matter how I shouted or cursed, they refused to let go. And even with the PDWS, I didn’t think I was going to last ten or twenty or thirty minutes in this heat. Just thirty more centimeters. If I could only make it thirty centimeters...

“Hang on...” I said, registering the half a doll still dangling from my hand. I reached up with it... “Thanks for the help!”

Using the doll, which was still in the “grab” position, like a reacher device, I was able to reach the lever and flip it.

“An authorized person has requested to activate the manual emergency shutdown,” the PDWS intoned immediately. “Please confirm: would you like to activate the manual emergency shutdown?”

I guess this was some sort of final confirmation with the administrator of the facility. So it wasn’t going to turn itself off just because I threw a lever.

“Confirm! I would like that! Anyway, just shut down!” I exclaimed.

“Fixed-temperature Annihilation Reactor, shutting down.” No sooner had I heard the voice than the massive magnetic rings circling over my head came to a halt. “Entering antimatter stabilization mode.” The rings began to circle again in a slow drift, with noticeably less urgency than before.

“D-Did I do it?”

I felt the air around the reactor cooling rapidly; I guess it was also venting excess heat. Still, it seemed like it would be a while before anyone could get anywhere near this thing without protection.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. I had somehow managed to keep the reactor from exploding. The other world was safe.

All I had to do now was...

“Get home... Somehow.”

I located Myusel, still thrashing under a pile of maintenance robots, and started forcibly peeling them off her, one by one.