Chapter 8

Saturday, October 29, AD 2095: All of today’s classes were designated self-study.

For the most part, everything excluding practicums was basically self-study, and for Course 2 students, half of their practice was self-study, too, so today wasn’t a day too different from normal…except that things weren’t usually this rowdy.

“Practice” at First High often came with the noise of explosions thundering through the school, so saying that it was ordinarily quiet enough to hear a pin drop would be a slight overstatement. Still, the noise was usually a little more orderly; today’s unruly commotion was the sound of final checks for the Thesis Competition, which was coming up tomorrow at last.

But amid all that, Tatsuya—directly related to this cacophony—was at his classroom terminal, hammering away at his schoolwork in silence.

Tatsuya was tackling work unrelated to tomorrow’s event. But it wasn’t because he was slacking off on his preparations or because he’d been dismissed from his representative spot—though perhaps, considering a high school student’s modus operandi, “slacking off” would mean ignoring schoolwork for prep work rather than vice versa.

In terms of competition-related tasks he could do today, there was only the rehearsal of the presentation, in which he’d watch the spells and fix any bugs that came up (he’d done every other check besides that). Unfortunately, they couldn’t do the rehearsal yet because the all-important Suzune hadn’t come to school. She’d contacted him yesterday to say she’d come in the afternoon, so he wasn’t panicked or bewildered, but Tatsuya found himself with nothing to do.

As first period ended and he was stretching lightly, a voice called to him from ahead. It wasn’t Leo—who was turned around in the seat in front of him with his elbows over the back—but Erika, who stood next to him. Tatsuya turned to her.

“Tatsuya, what time do you get there tomorrow?”

She was careful to feign nonchalance, but next to her, Leo ruined her efforts by making it very clear that he was paying close attention.

Now what are these two conspiring…? Tatsuya thought dubiously, but he had no real reason to hide anything. “We arrive at eight, and it opens at nine. There will be a thirty-minute ceremony to start things off, and then presentations begin at nine thirty. Each team has thirty minutes, with a ten-minute interval between each presentation. After four teams go in the morning, we’ll break for lunch from noon to one. The five other teams present in the afternoon, and they finish at 4:10. After that is judging and the awards ceremony, with everything planned to wrap up at six.”

Erika looked bewildered at the mass of information she’d received—which was much more than she’d asked for—but she eventually seemed to piece it together in her head. “…Umm, and what time is our school presenting?”

His attempt to befuddle her failed, Tatsuya shifted to a more up-front answer. “First High goes second to last. We start at three.”

“Doesn’t that leave a lot of time left over?” she pressed.

“I suppose. That’s why our main presenter, Ichihara, is getting there in the afternoon. Isori and I are going in early to keep an eye on the machinery and do emergency maintenance if there’s trouble.”

“I see…” she murmured. “Well, I guess that answers when everyone will be there. How are you getting the demo machines there?”

“The student council arranged a carrier. Hattori will be riding with them.”

“Wait, wasn’t Hattori supposed to be Ichihara’s bodyguard?”

“Saegusa and Watanabe said they’d be going to get Ichihara the day of,” he said with a casual shrug. “Anyway, why did you want to know?”

Erika faltered, hesitating.

Glancing at the flustered girl out of the corner of his eye, Leo, who had been silent until now, opened his mouth and asked, “Hey, could you let us help out with keeping watch?”

Erika frowned, unhappy, but didn’t say anything. They seemed to have agreed ahead of time on what they were going to ask him.

“I don’t mind, but…why would you want more work?” Tatsuya asked.

One might consider his question a natural one, but Leo gave him an awkward grin. “Well, I mean, uhh… We did all that training, so it would be a little frustrating if things ended before we got a chance to do anything…I guess.”

Tatsuya looked at him, then at her, but Leo only returned his gaze with a self-deprecating smile, while Erika made no attempt to meet his eyes at all.

“I took off from school to put him through the wringer. If they settled this incident without giving us a turn, that would be stupid!” added Erika, voice sullen, still without looking at him. She seemed to know about the unpublicized incident at the special detention facility and was unhappy they weren’t around for its resolution. Ganghu Lu was exactly the kind of opponent Erika had in mind when she’d trained Leo, so maybe her regret was inevitable.

“Whatever your motive, we could always use more hands,” he said. “And there’s nothing saying it’s been fully resolved, either.”

“Huh? Isn’t that whole business done with?” Suddenly, Mikihiko barged into the conversation with timing that could only mean he’d been listening the entire time.

Without noting his eavesdropping—because there was another friend in the seat next to him who would panic and get bent out of shape if he did—Tatsuya answered, “There’s no rule that says only one incident can happen at a time, you know.”

Xiangshan Chen, the alleged mastermind, was still on the loose, but Tatsuya didn’t tell his friends that. He didn’t plan to, either. His answer was just a common-sense argument, which he decided was enough for the moment.

“Apparently,” he continued, “people target the Thesis Competition every year. Including people on their way home afterward, too. Just because they resolved one thing before the event, it doesn’t mean a different one won’t happen the day of, right?”

“Right… I guess so.” Mikihiko nodded, appearing to mull this over. Then, with an energetic expression, he asked, “But if that’s the case, you think I could help keep an eye on things, too?”

“Sure. It’d be a big help.”

They couldn’t let their guard down just because one incident was resolved—Tatsuya’s dedication was correct in that.

Speaking in hindsight, however, Tatsuya was wrong.

Suzune was visiting the hospital, having taken this day before the Thesis Competition off from school and postponing the group’s rehearsal until this afternoon. She had only Hattori with her. She’d wanted to come alone, but with all the dangerous incidents happening, Mayumi and Mari and Azusa and Hattori and…well, everyone had strongly opposed that, so she compromised and let Hattori come with her alone.

She tapped twice on a room door.

“Come in,” answered a calm alto voice from inside.

“Excuse me.”

“Welcome, Ichihara. Could you sit over there?”

Suzune left Hattori in the hallway and entered the hospital room as Satomi Asuka, school nurse at National Magic University Affiliated First High School, welcomed her in. She had come to check on Chiaki.

On the bed was a girl, sitting still and upright, eyes downcast. Chiaki didn’t react to Suzune’s visitation.

“Ms. Asuka, has Chiaki Hirakawa been afflicted with a mental illness?” she asked, the question perhaps insensitive, since she didn’t particularly lower her voice.

“No. We didn’t find any emotional trauma, communication disorder, or any other symptoms of the sort. Of course, without directly examining her mind, I can’t say for sure she’s healthy.”

“As long as she can hear my voice, that’s enough.”

Upon hearing Asuka’s answer, Suzune rose. She went around the bed to the window and stood with her back to the bed. Then, without looking at Chiaki, she began to speak:

“Chiaki Hirakawa, with your methods, you can’t get your hooks into Shiba.”

Her voice was persistently cool and collected. It held no comfort or encouragement, nor was it sarcastic or scornful. She simply pointed out the truth.

“You can’t draw goodwill out of him, of course, nor hostility, nor even malice. Right now, to him, you’re just one more face in the crowd.”

The way she spoke made it seem like an invariable truth.

“So what?!”

And that was probably the reason Suzune succeeded in drawing words and emotions from the stubbornly reticent Chiaki. Even if the emotion was 100 percent negative, it was still a first step.

“I know I’m no more than a face in the crowd to him. I really don’t need you pointing that out to me!”

Chiaki had shown only rejection to Sayaka and Kanon, and now continued that stance with Suzune as well.

But Suzune didn’t react like the other girls had.

“I believe your opinion of Shiba is, in a way, quite pertinent.”

Suzune kept talking indifferently, her back still to Chiaki, as though she hadn’t heard her cry out.

“He’s certainly pompous. The crowd could wail and cry and scream, and he probably wouldn’t care. He wouldn’t show sympathy—he wouldn’t even take the time to mock them. Even if someone pulled a prank on him, he’d just brush it off as a minor annoyance. The crowd is probably all just flies and mosquitoes to him.”

Chiaki, still looking down, bit her lip in frustration. She could tell Suzune had given thought to the club-recruitment week in April. At the time, she’d thought he simply had no way to deal with the pranks people were pulling on him, but now she, as well as most of the students at First High, knew that was incorrect.

If he’d wanted to catch the people launching surprise magical attacks on him, he could have. The only reason he hadn’t was because he wasn’t interested. Anyone actually firing magic at him just felt like flies or mosquitoes to him. So wasn’t she, who couldn’t do anything at all, even less than an insect…?

Chiaki had to clench her fists tight enough to drive her nails into her palms to hold back the frustrated tears welling up.

Without looking at her—or maybe pretending not to notice—Suzune continued, her back still to her: “Do you know this, Chiaki? During the written portion of the first semester’s examinations, Shiba scored so highly that second place and lower didn’t even come close. He even scored perfectly in magical engineering.”

“…Why does that matter?”

“Among the freshmen, the second-highest score on the magical engineering portion of the written exam was you.”

Suzune turned around to face her. Her expression was cool and calm, not deriding, with her eyes and lips narrowed into a smile. “Ninety-two points out of a hundred. That score is so high that normally it would be on top.”

“…So what?”

A tinge of surprise colored Chiaki’s voice. She’d known her own score, but she probably hadn’t thought it was enough to put her in second place in her grade.

“Unfortunately, you aren’t able to threaten Shiba in anything other than magical engineering. But there, I think, it’s possible for you to overtake him.”

Chiaki’s head shot up.

Her eyes were wide, speaking to both disbelief and a faint, dark hope.

“After working together with him for three weeks, I learned that Shiba isn’t nearly as specialized in hardware as he is in software. Of course, his hardware-related skills are still far above normal high school standards, but they didn’t seem out of this world. During freshman year, software is the focus of magical engineering, but come next year they’ll weigh hardware more heavily. Of the two, you were better at the hardware side, weren’t you?”

What Suzune was implying was this: If hardware became more important in class as a junior, there was a chance to turn it around—at least, that’s how Chiaki understood it.

A voice briefly told her that was too convenient an idea, but she ignored it.

As Suzune watched the color of desperation fade from Chiaki’s face and her earnest feelings begin to lighten her eyes, Suzune’s expression softened. “If you can hold on to how frustrated you feel right now, I’m sure you’ll be able to accomplish it one day.”

She didn’t say what it was.

And Chiaki didn’t ask.

It didn’t need to be something concrete.

She was fine with it being vague.

“Please come to the competition tomorrow. I’m sure you’ll find something there.”

As Suzune left the hospital room, Chiaki didn’t watch her go.

Maybe, just maybe, she could accomplish that “something”—it was the drug called possibility.

She’d been injected with that drug, one that could, at times, resuscitate a mind on the verge of a breakdown, and it started a dramatic change in Chiaki’s heart.

“Um…Ichihara? If you’re not feeling well…”

As Suzune exited the room, Hattori’s voice was clouded with concern over how terrible she looked.

“It’s nothing that needs worry. Just a bit of self-loathing.”

Suzune certainly wasn’t the talkative sort. She was an excellent debater, but she didn’t generally say things she didn’t need to. She was relatively loquacious around Mayumi, but other than that, she was pretty much silent.

Hattori knew this, so even though the term self-loathing bothered him, he refrained from asking anything more and followed her quietly.

For Suzune, this trait of Hattori’s to read the mood was why she’d allowed him to come. And as she’d expected, she didn’t want to talk about her mental state right now.

I swear…I would be a great swindler.

Behind her cool poker face, she was mass-producing verbal abuse.

Her goal had been to get Chiaki back on her feet, but only because she valued her ability. And it wasn’t for her sake, nor for Chiaki’s sister’s, who was in the same grade as Suzune.

It was for their school.

The Ichihara family was one of the Extra. Nobody shirked the Extra Numbers or held them in contempt these days (at least on the surface), but that had only happened within the last twenty years. Her parents’ generation had grown up in the midst of deep-rooted prejudices. Her father had experienced harsh isolation from the magician community, so her family had hid the fact that they were Extras from her. They were formerly the Ichihana, with the ichi meaning one rather than city.

But Suzune had grown up feeling its shadow in her child’s mind. And when she’d gone to middle school, she realized the truth her father had kept from her, and his reason for it. Perhaps that was why she’d never felt much camaraderie with the magician community.

The first time she’d felt like she belonged somewhere was when she came to her current school, the National Magic University Affiliated First High School.

Mayumi was the one who had given her that opportunity, which was why she felt indebted to her—and why she had such a firm, undying devotion to her school.

At the Nine School Competition, Suzune and the other First High officers had felt a sense of impending crisis about their underclassmen having few prospective magic engineers. They all agreed that the freshman boys’ poor performance was partly due to that.

Sure, there was talent—Azusa, Isori, and Tatsuya were all outstanding. But talent was spread thin. After those three, the technical level plummeted.

They recognized that securing engineering talent among their underclassmen, especially the freshmen, was the most urgent mission they had in their half year before graduation. Digging out excellent Course 2 students was especially important; the Course 1 students had teachers personally instructing them, but they wouldn’t see the Course 2 students. Discovering noteworthy talent from within their ranks was something only the student council and club committee could do.

And now, one among them had caught Suzune’s attention: Chiaki Hirakawa.

She’d been a mere freshman caught loitering with an illegal tool, but when Suzune looked into her background, she’d found, other subjects aside, high marks in magical engineering and a high degree of proficiency in repairing and upgrading hardware.

Suzune had to get her to put her abilities to use for their school.

Eventually, she concluded that the most efficient way to do that was to plant the seeds of rivalry toward Tatsuya Shiba within her.

Well, I suppose nobody will be unhappy for it.

…And that was how Suzune wrapped up her inner conflict. The word coolheaded was definitely a fitting adjective for her.

As this year’s venue was in Yokohama, the First High representative team would be assembling on-site the morning of the competition. But last year, when it was in Kyoto, they had gone the day before and stayed overnight.

For the same reason, the school teams far from the capital would be entering Yokohama the day or two before and staying overnight. It was the same for Third High, in the running for first place this year thanks to Shinkurou Kichijouji, aka Cardinal George, leading the team.

Third High’s representatives would be presenting last. Given the speed and livability of modern public transportation, they would have plenty of time to travel to Yokohama from Kanazawa the day of, but they had no insurance that trouble would stay away on the way there. Therefore, the team and all the support members planned to leave school early in the afternoon the day before and stay the night in Yokohama.

“George, it’s almost time,” Masaki summoned.

“Already? Okay, I’ll be right there,” answered Kichijouji, absorbed in reading some unrelated materials.

I wonder if they’d let me take this along…

The three hours to Yokohama would be a little too long to spend doing nothing, and he gave the e-bookshelf, with its half-read literature, a baleful look. Unfortunately, the data it contained was for reference only, and its usage was restricted to National Magic University–affiliated facilities. Any request to borrow it would certainly be denied.

He sighed, cutting himself off from his lingering regrets (albeit not in such an exaggerated way as that might entail). Kichijouji returned the reader to the rack, then picked up the travel bag at his feet and stood up.

The plan was to use a jumbo bus with all their stage equipment onboard to move to the venue in Yokohama. More specifically, they would take the bus to the freight terminal, then load the entire bus into a long-distance, high-speed train (containers big enough to fit an entire bus were common these days), and finally head for Yokohama at a max speed of 370 miles per hour. Either way, it would be a straight shot to their destination, with no transfers (at least, the kind you had to get off the train for).

It was hard to call Kichijouji normal, but he was still a high school student in his midteens. No other passengers meant he and his friends could talk all they wanted, which probably wouldn’t leave him with any time to be bored anyway, he decided.

And in Yokohama, he would probably meet that man again.

Or perhaps the term confront would have been more accurate.

As his thoughts lingered on his secret First High rival, he also figured it would be fun to spend the time using said man’s little sister to tease his good friend Masaki, and he smiled mischievously.

Yokohama Bay Hills Tower: a skyscraper complex overlooking the Port of Yokohama. In a bar lounge close to its top floor, one couple was tilting glasses filled with ruby liquid, with the nightscape as their side dish.

“The new wine this year is quite good, isn’t it?”

“You know, I don’t really understand the tastes of wine. So I must apologize—as you’re the one treating me to such a fine drink.” Fujibayashi smiled elegantly, not in her usual business casual, but fully decked out, with makeup and clothing to the nines.

Chief Toshikazu Chiba waved an empty hand at her, seeming flustered. “No, they serve this wine to everyone whenever their private winery makes a new batch, regardless of the open date… It’s not all that expensive…”

“Oh, but isn’t it wonderful to drink something freshly made?” Fujibayashi brought the glass near to her nose, looked down, and swished the wine around a little, then turned her gaze back up to him.

Toshikazu gave a stiff, insincere smile. “…Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying it. Our prospects for figuring this case out look brighter thanks to you, so I wanted to extend our gratitude.”

“I should say the same to you, Chief. I wasn’t about to leave them alone, either.”

“Do you mean as a member of the Fujibayashi family? Or…no, I’m sorry,” Toshikazu deferred, remembering his promise to her as she gave him a sobering stare.

The first term of their bargain for her to supply information and assist the investigation: not to investigate her lineage or goals. The former condition was a strange one, coming from her. He’d known from the start that Kyouko Fujibayashi was the daughter of the Fujibayashi family, renowned for its old magic, and granddaughter of the Old Master of the Ten Master Clans, Retsu Kudou. Her attaching that condition outright actually implied that she possessed some additional circumstance that shouldn’t be readily revealed.

“By the way, Chief, was thanking me the only reason you invited me here tonight?”

“What?!”

The eldest Chiba nearly spilled the contents of his glass.

The daughter of the Fujibayashi, who had set up the surprise attack, let out a giggle. “If it’s all right with you, Chief, I’d like to stay with you tomorrow as well, not just tonight.”

“Uh, I, um, right! If that’s what you want, then gladly!”

It wasn’t that Toshikazu had led a life of no relationships with the opposite sex. There were female students at the Chiba dojo, and he used to fool around enough in his student days that his younger sister called him frivolous and undisciplined.

It was less that he wasn’t used to women, or bad with them, than it was that this one was special.

“Thank you,” she said. “Would meeting in the morning at eight o’clock at the station in Sakuragi Town be acceptable?”

“…In the morning?” Toshikazu’s face grew flustered before Fujibayashi’s graceful smile.

“Tomorrow, the All-High Magic Thesis Competition will be held at the international assembly hall. Were you aware?”

“Well, I was, but…”

“A boy I’m acquainted with will be performing, and I’d like to go cheer him on.”

“Oh…”

He couldn’t exactly say it, but the words that’s not where I thought this was going were written all over his face. He’d interpreted her invitation as a request to be with him tomorrow—night.

This was easy for Fujibayashi to read, but her smile never wavered. “Oh, yes. If you can, I’d like you to mention something to your subordinates. If they could prepare armament devices and live ammunition instead of just CADs, it would be a great help.”

“Ms. Fujibayashi, you mean…?” He wheeled around, his timid expression pulling back as though someone had dumped ice water on it.

“It would be best if nothing happened, of course,” she answered, quietly tilting her wineglass up again.