2

“Fu—”

Heavy combat boots slamming against thick steel wall drowned out the second half of the word.

Vassago Casals, one of the Hispanic members of the assault team, was not satisfied with just putting a few dents in the wall, so he stomped on a package of snacks left behind by one of the Rath engineers who’d occupied this control room less than an hour ago. Only then did his stream of obscenities stop.

He brushed back his wavy black hair, marched to the console desk, and grabbed the collar of the man standing there.

“Say that one more goddamn time.”

Hanging from Vassago’s whip-strong arm was a scrawny-looking young man. His blond hair was shaved short, and his skin was almost pathologically pale. Thick, metal-framed glasses rested over his sunken cheeks.

This was the team’s only noncombatant. He was a hacker named Critter, a nonregular employee of Glowgen Defense Systems’s cyber operations (CYOP) division.

He had an arrest record for cybercrime, and his name was obviously a handle, not given. The same was true of Vassago. That name came from one of the seventy-two demons listed in the infamous medieval demonology tome Ars Goetia, where Vassago was described as one of the princes of Hell. No parent would actually give their child such a name. He, too, was a member of the CYOP division, but his specialty was not in computing but in active combat—in a full-dive setting, that is. Like Critter, he had a sordid past record, but his ability to fight in VR was unparalleled.

As a matter of fact, outside of the leader, Gabriel Miller, the rest of the twelve-man Ocean Turtle assault team were pet dogs with sordid pasts who were promised new, secure identities for their work.

As one of those dogs, Critter didn’t seem particularly scared, hanging from Vassago’s grip. He continued chewing his gum. “I’ll say it as many times as I want. This system’s locks are tougher ’n dried shit. I could have this laptop work on cracking it, and you’d die of old age before it got in.”

“That’s not what I meant, Four-Eyes! You said it got locked because the rest of us were taking too long to break through, you son of a bitch!!” Vassago snarled back. He had the kind of wild good looks that might’ve actually earned him a living as a model, and because of that, he was positively feral when angry.

“I’m just stating the facts.”

“Yeah, you talk a real big game now, but you were shivering in the back during the action!”

The other members just sat and watched, grinning, rather than stepping in to stop the argument. Once he determined it had gone on long enough, Gabriel snapped his fingers to draw their attention.

“That’s enough, you two,” he said. “This isn’t the time to be placing blame. We need to focus on what to do next.”

Vassago’s head swiveled around, his lips pouting like a child’s. “But, Bro, I just gotta teach this punk a lesson, or…”

Gabriel swallowed his usual demand not to be called bro. Vassago called Gabriel his bro out of respect for his VR combat-training chops, but it was an oddly displeasing moniker to Gabriel. To him, friends and comrades and other human relationships based on fickle and indistinct things like emotions were indecipherable.

When humanity finally had the means to extract and save the soul, all human emotions could be neatly described and arranged by the color and shape of that cloud of light. That would be a very good day, indeed.

Gabriel assumed the tone of a team leader as he announced, “Vassago, Critter, I’m happy with the work of the team so far. We’ve taken over the control room, our primary target, with the only damage being a little scratch to Gary.”

Begrudgingly, Vassago let go of Critter’s collar and put his hands on his hips. “Okay, Bro, but what’s the point if the actual control system we’re after is locked? Our final target, the Lightcube Cluster thingy, is on the other side of a wall of steel, yeah?”

“My point is that now we merely have to think of a way to break through that wall.”

“You don’t think those JSDF guys are just gonna hide in their safe space the whole time, do ya? Once the defense ship that patrols for this turtle busts in with a whole platoon of soldiers, the eleven of us plus one extra ain’t gonna get far.”

Vassago had a better grasp on the situation than your average stray dog, which was why Gabriel had selected him to be the vice-captain of the team. Gabriel thought it over and shrugged.

“It would seem that our client and the higher-ups of the JSDF arrived at a deal of some sort. The defense ship isn’t going to act for a whole twenty-four hours after the start of our operation.”

“…Ooh,” Critter said with a little whistle. His glasses were thick as goggles, magnifying his pale-gray eyes narrowed in eagerness. “Meaning this ain’t just a simple smash-and-grab job…Actually, I’m bettin’ I’d be wiser not to call it that at all.”

“I would agree with you there,” Gabriel replied with a thin smile. He addressed the team. “Let’s reexamine the situation. At present, it is 14:47 hours Japan Standard Time, forty minutes after we breached the ship. We are now in the Ocean Turtle’s main control room. We succeeded at taking over the desired location but did not capture any Rath engineers, and we’re now locked out of the system. Our next goal is to take over the sub-control room…Brigg, can we break through the door in the pressure-resistant isolation wall?”

The hefty team member sauntered forward. “It’ll be tough. It’s made of the latest composite material. With the portable cutters we brought, it’s gonna take more than twenty-four hours to break.”

“Japanese money’s not dead yet, huh? Can we blow a hole in it with C4, Hans?”

This time, a tall man with a neatly groomed mustache spread his hands in a flamboyant gesture. “I wouldn’t try it, honey. The containment chamber for the Lightcube Cluster’s right beyond that wall. No guarantees we can destroy that door without harming what’s beyond it.”

“Aaah,” Gabriel murmured, folding his arms. “Well…our mission is to identify just one of those countless lightcubes and retrieve it, along with the interface. We already have that cube’s unique ID. So as long as we can use the console, it should be easy to search for that cube and eject it from the cluster. We could be enjoying a beer on the return voyage right now.”

“Can you believe this dickweed in the glasses bragged that he broke into the Pentagon’s servers, and now he can’t crack one stupid little server lock?”

“Those are real big words coming from a gamer whose entire gunfighting career is virtual and online.”

Gabriel glared at Vassago and Critter before their argument could resume at full force and cautioned them, “Do you want to go home empty-handed and get mockery for your bonus pay?”

“No!!” they all shouted.

“Are you a collection of incompetents who are going to get shown up by a bunch of amateur engineers?”

“No!!”

“Then think! Prove to me you’ve got something other than oatmeal above your shoulders!!” Gabriel ordered, acting out the hard-assed commander routine half out of habit. On the inside, however, his thoughts went elsewhere.

As a searcher of the soul, Gabriel’s greatest goals were to gain Alice, humanity’s first bottom-up artificial intelligence, and to have exclusive access to Soul Translation technology. Once he had them both, he could eliminate the rest of the team with his secret stash of nerve gas and escape to Australia, like he’d planned.

Up to this point, the operation the NSA hired him for perfectly matched Gabriel’s own goals. Now that they were locked out of the admin access they needed to operate the system, he had to gain Alice’s lightcube through some other means.

Alice…A.L.I.C.E.

The NSA had found out that code name through their mole within Rath. He didn’t know the personal data of the mole. But if the reason for betraying his company was a massive sum of money, he wasn’t likely to make any actions now that would put himself at risk.

In other words, they couldn’t rely on the mole on the other side of the pressure-resistant barrier to help them out. They’d have to achieve their goal with the information and gear they had, and they didn’t have much time to do it.

Time. Time was the problem.

Gabriel was capable of entirely controlling pointless emotions like stress and anxiety, but even he couldn’t avoid feeling a certain unpleasant pressure at the knowledge of their time limit, about twenty-three hours and closing fast.

When the NSA agents asked him to undertake a top-secret theft, they told Gabriel, Rath’s activities represent a clear threat to the interests of Japan’s military-industrial complex. Therefore, a faction exists in the upper echelons of the JSDF that does not think highly of Rath—and might even seek to actively sabotage it.

The core of Rath was a group of young SDF officers who had little political power. The NSA made use of that, sending a CIA agent with the embassy’s office to make a deal with a high-ranking minister of the Maritime SDF. The Nagato defense ship for Rath’s de facto headquarters, the Ocean Turtle, would stand down for twenty-four hours following the attack, under the guise of prioritizing hostage safety.

But once that grace period was over, the ship would have to move, as a defense against the media. Once the fully armed soldiers burst in, they’d wipe out the outmanned and outgunned team Gabriel had assembled.

Even in that worst-case scenario, he was planning to escape on his own with the miniature submarine. However, if he failed to gain the lightcube in question, he would be retreating from his grand journey in search of the human soul without any means of getting back.

Gabriel already had a detailed plan for the rest of his life after the conclusion of this mission.

First, he would escape to Australia with Alice and hide the lightcube and STL tech at his mansion on Sovereign Islands. Then he’d fly back to San Diego and report to the NSA that the mission was a failure. When everything had cooled down, he would return to Australia, install an STL machine in his mansion’s spacious basement, and create a virtual world of his own design and tastes.

The first residents of the world would be just Alice and Gabriel. But that was too lonely. For the sake of his soul research, he would need to expand the materials he was working with.

He’d go to Sydney or Cairns and find the owner of some soul full of youthful vitality, kidnap them, rip the soul out with the STL, then discard the unnecessary husk. And someday, he might even cross the sea to visit his homeland of America—or Japan, the place where full-diving was born.

Gabriel was deeply charmed by the unique mentality of Japan’s VR gamers. A number of them—but not all—treated virtual reality like it was more real than real life and spared none of their actual emotions within the game. Every time he recalled the sniper girl he met in Gun Gale Online, a powerful desire throbbed within him, even now.

That couldn’t be unrelated to the “real virtual world” that had existed for only two years in that country. Those young players, hacked by the creator of the device, experienced a game of real life and death. The souls of those survivors had an aptitude for the virtual world that others did not share.

If possible, he wanted as many of their souls—especially the Progressors, if you will, the ones who stood at the forefront of the game. He didn’t know whether that sniper girl belonged to them or not, but he wanted her soul, too. When a lightcube contained such a precious thing, it would surely shine with a brilliance greater than any jewel’s.

The ultimate luster—something that even billions of dollars from the world’s richest people could not purchase. And he would gaze at them, lined up in his secret chamber, load those souls into whatever world he wanted, and do with them as he liked.

Best of all, the souls extracted from a human being and contained in a lightcube could be copied or saved however he wanted. A broken or warped soul could easily be rewound until Gabriel fashioned it into the shape he wanted. Until he had given it the perfect cut, like a gemstone, for maximum brilliance.

Once he reached that stage, Gabriel’s long, long journey would finally circle around to where it all began. To that moment in his youth, under the big tree in the forest, when he saw the beautiful shine of Alicia Clingerman’s soul as it left her body.

Gabriel’s eyes closed, and his spine shivered as he indulged in a brief moment of fantasy. When he opened them again, his ice-cold logical mindset was back.

If the souls of these young people from around the world were rubies, sapphires, and emeralds lining a crown, then the giant diamond that deserved to be set front and center had to be Alice. As the ultimate, pristine soul, she was the only one truly worthy of being his eternal partner. Which meant he had to find and gain her lightcube for himself.

However, it would be physically impossible to seize it without breaking the pressure-resistant door to the Lightcube Cluster room.

That left system manipulation as his only option. But even the first-rate hacker Critter claimed that he couldn’t overcome the defenses on the main console.

Boots clicking against the ground, Gabriel walked over to stand behind Critter, whose fingers were flying over the keyboard.

“How goes it?”

His response was raised hands, palms up.

“Absolutely no way to get in on an admin account. All we can do is steeple our fingers and peer into the little fairy-tale kingdom where all those fluctlights in the cluster are enjoying themselves,” Critter said. He tapped some keys, and a window opened on the big screen on the wall, displaying a rather odd sight.

It was not at all what you would define as a fairy-tale kingdom. The sky was an eerie red color, and the ground was as black as fresh asphalt. A number of primitive tents constructed of simple tanned hides sewn together sat at the center of the image. Next to them, there were about ten creatures with squat bodies and bald heads squalling about something.

They were vaguely humanoid but not human. Their backs were hunched, their arms long enough to drag along the ground, while their twisted legs were much shorter.

“Goblins…?” Gabriel muttered.

Critter gave him a little whistle of surprise and delight. “Bingo, Captain. Got it in one. They’re not quite like orcs or ogres, so they would have to be goblins.”

“I dunno, they’re pretty huge for goblins. They gotta be hobs. Those are hobgoblins,” commented Vassago, hands on his hips. Given his expertise in VR combat, it came as no surprise that he’d know his fantasy RPG design tropes.

As they watched, the clamor of the ten hobgoblins escalated, until two at the center grabbed each other and started grappling. The others formed a perimeter around the fight, waving their arms and screeching in excitement.

“…Critter,” Gabriel said to the buzz-cut man on the chair as an idea took shape in his mind.

“Yeah?”

“Are these…these monsters part of the system?”

“Hmm, doesn’t seem like it. In a sense, these are real people. They’re artificial fluctlights loaded onto the Lightcube Cluster…They’ve got souls.”

“Really?! Oh my God!” Vassago abruptly screeched, leaning forward. “These hobs are humans?! They’ve got souls, just like us?! If my grandma back in Frisco heard that, she’d fall over dead on the spot!!”

He smacked Critter on the head and continued, “Talk about research that spits in God’s face! Does that mean everyone in those lightcubes is a goblin or an orc? Even our sweet Alice?”

“Obviously not,” Critter replied, slapping Vassago’s hands away in annoyance. “Listen up—the Underworld, as Rath created it, is split into two main areas. Just to the west of the middle is the Human Empire, where normal people live. And around it is the Dark Territory, which is chock-full of monsters. Alice is obviously going to be somewhere in that human realm, but it’s super-huge, so finding her will be impossible if we’re just peering in from out here.”

“It should be easy. People understand words, right? So just dive into the Human Empire, ask around if anyone knows an Alice, and we’ll find her in no time.”

“You’re an idiot. Hey, everyone, we’ve got a live one!”

“Shut the hell up!!”

“Listen, the Underworld was created by the Japanese. So obviously, the language those folks are gonna speak is Japanese, too. Can you speak Japanese?” Critter asked with a mocking smile.

But Vassago just grinned back. “Namete moraccha komarunda yo na.”

Instantly, Critter’s smirk vanished, and the rest of the team was similarly stunned. Even Gabriel was stunned at his natural, fluent Japanese: “We’re gonna have a bad time if you underestimate me.”

The Hispanic young man switched back to English. “I got no communication problems. You got anything else you wanna say to me, Four-Eyes?”

“Y-yeah…I do.” Critter snorted, recovering admirably. “There are tens of thousands of people living in the Human Empire. And you think you’re gonna go around alone and ask every…last…one……?”

He trailed off, then shot upright as though reaching an epiphany. Vassago swore when the man’s head struck him in the jaw, but the hacker ignored him. “Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait. It might need to be alone…”

At that point, the vague suggestion of an idea inside Gabriel’s head began to coalesce into a rough shape. “Ah…I see. The accounts prepared for logging in to the Underworld probably aren’t all simple level-one commoners. Is that what you mean, Critter?”

“Yes. Yes, Boss!”

The hacker banged on the keyboard as if it were a percussion instrument, scrolling through a number of lists on the big screen. “They should have accounts that correspond to all different classes so that Rath’s operators can log in and observe or manipulate the simulation. Military officers…or commanders…or nobles, royal families…Maybe even the emperor himself…”

“Damn, that’d be pretty cool,” Vassago muttered, stroking his chin. “So you could log in to play the shogun or president or whatever and just order everyone around? Full military procession! Right face! Search for Alice! That would be so easy.”

“…Y’know, after you said it, my brilliant idea sounds so stupid now,” Critter grumbled, scrolling through the lists as fast as he could. After a few seconds, he came to a stop and swore, which was rare for him. “Shit—no good. Direct input or logging in on a high-level account from this point on has a friggin’ password on it, too. Sadly, it looks like the only way for us to dive into the Human Empire is in a low-level commoner account.”

“…Hmm…”

Critter and Vassago were clearly disappointed, but Gabriel merely inclined his head without twitching a single facial muscle.

The amount of time they had left to work with was limited. But that was only a limit prescribed in real-world time. The Underworld displayed on the screen ran on incredibly compressed time, hundreds of times faster than the real world.

In other words, the twenty-three hours they had in real life would be over an entire year in the Underworld. With that much time, it was certainly possible to log in as a common person, find and secure Alice, then eject to the real world from the common console within the simulation.

But it was also a very tedious and unnecessary approach. If anything, trying it from outside the Human Empire might be faster.

“Critter, are there any high-level accounts outside the empire…in the Dark Territory?”

“…Outside? Wouldn’t the likelihood that Alice is on that side be way, way lower?” Critter wondered, even as he tapped at the keys to figure out the answer to the question.

Gabriel glanced up at the new window and said, “I suppose it would be. But the boundary between the two areas isn’t completely impregnable, is it? Depending on the access level of the account, there might be a way to pass that boundary.”

“Oh, hell yeah, Bro! You got all the best ideas! So you’re saying…rather than being some human boss, we’ll be the monsters’ boss instead and invade them?! That sounds way more exciting!” Vassago hollered, whistling in excitement.

As usual, Critter was the one to dump cold water on him. “You’re free to get as excited as you want,” he deadpanned, “but if you log in to the Dark Territory, you’re gonna have to be a hobgoblin or an orc or whatever. I mean, it suits you…Oh, hey, I found it!”

He smacked a key with a flourish, and two more windows appeared.

“Let’s see. Unlike on the human side, there are only two super-accounts here…but hey, no password! Let’s see…One of them is apparently a dark knight. Its access level is…seventy! That’s pretty good!”

“Yeah, very nice! I’ll use that one!” Vassago clamored. Critter ignored him and brought the other window on top.

“And the other one is…What is this? The status field is blank, and there’s no listed level, either. All it has is the account name. It says…how do you read this? Emperor…Vecta?”

“Holy crap, an emperor? Never mind, I’ll take—,” Vassago started to say, until Gabriel clapped him on the shoulder from behind.

“No, I will use that one.”

“Huh? But, Bro, can you even speak Japanese?”

“Omae hodo janai gana,” Gabriel replied, the result of three years of Japanese study. While he might not speak it as well as Vassago—as he had just said—and he’d given up on reading or writing, he knew he was good enough at speaking it for casual conversations.

“Ohhh, damn. Okay, Bro, you can be the emperor, and I’ll take the dark knight. Yeah, this is getting fun now! Can we log in yet, Four-Eyes?!”

Critter just typed away, completely ignoring Vassago. He was absorbed in the information popping up on the monitor. Gabriel approached him and quietly asked, “What is it, Critter? Is there another problem?”

“…It’s not really a problem, more of a curiosity…I’m seeing some strange terms popping up in the data files. I just don’t exactly know what it means…”

“Oh? What would that be?” Gabriel asked.

Critter took a deep breath.

“…Final stress test.”