The intelligence bureau has been attacked and the people killed by the parasites detained there

Struggling to suppress the desire to get in contact right away and ask for details, Tatsuya steered himself to the bathroom. As he washed away the sweat from training in a hot shower, he summarized his thoughts and considered what to do next.

He hadn’t told Miyuki yet.

Coming home from Yakumo’s temple and taking a shower. That was his usual pattern, and just because she’d seen that he got a message before he hopped in the water, she wouldn’t assume anything had happened.

Well…I probably can’t hide it from her, he thought, immediately rejecting the idea of not telling her at all.

His sister was sharp, and she’d have to figure it out at some point. It would be one thing if she hadn’t been involved at all, but after all, she was just as deeply connected to this incident as Tatsuya was.

Deciding to be straight with her instead of tiptoeing around the subject so she wouldn’t realize it, Tatsuya got out of the shower.

Tatsuya’s fingers danced over the console at his workstation set up in the basement. Although if one was to describe how he did it, something along the lines of “swiftly” or “accurately” would be more fitting for his personality than “beautifully.”

Even though it was morning on a Saturday, they had classes. But if it looked like his investigation would take more time, he was ready to play hooky for the day.

But if he did, his sister, who was always at his side as though that were natural (and in fact, it was unarguably natural for her), would take a mandatory day off for herself as well (and this time, it would be less natural and more necessary for her clarity of mind), so he planned to put off his decision of whether to play hooky until the last possible moment.

Fortunately, he quickly found the data he was looking for.

He’d been illegally accessing the JGDF intelligence department’s distributed server, but the division’s local systems, despite belonging to the intelligence department, seemed quite ill-equipped to oppose a quality hacking program made by the Electron Sorceress Kyouko Fujibayashi. Still, the segmentation of information systems was a form of risk prevention, stopping one division’s vulnerability from leaking all their information, so perhaps it had both advantages and disadvantages.

Anyway, it meant Tatsuya got some expedient results, so he wasn’t in a position to gripe.

The video recorded there was a shocking one.

Not in the sense that it delivered a physiological impact like cruelty or coldness.

No, it was the thing performed there and the person who carried it out, which gave the siblings no small shock.

A small figure blending in with the darkness as it broke in.

Illuminated by the lights coming on with the alarms—a girl with crimson hair and a mask.

With one glare from her golden eyes, she sent the civilian-clothed soldiers flying out of her way, then headed for a door engraved from top to bottom in complex patterns and gave four wide swings of her knife. As she stepped aside, the door fell into the hallway.

Beyond the door was a small room. It was about wide enough to fit two single beds and had a low ceiling of about two meters. In the room were three beds, one on top of another, placed along the wall.

A man, his hands’ freedom stripped by a straitjacket and his legs bound together with shackles, lay on the second bed of the three-level bunk. He had a different impression since every last bit of the color had drained from him, but his face was, without a doubt, the parasite who had called himself Marte.

A white puff of air escaped the girl’s mouth. The temperature in the room must have been quite low.

The redhead’s hand now gripped an automatic pistol instead of a knife.

A bullet fired from her hand, boring a hole in Marte’s chest.

Suddenly, the man’s body went up in flames.

The only plausible source was the bullet shot into him. It probably had a combustion spell on it that would trigger when the bullet stopped inside its target body.

The girl with the crimson hair, Angie Sirius, fired another bullet into the upper bunk and the lower bunk. A homicidal act, clearly without any thought given to the “substance.” The goal was only to burn the “containers” to cinders. It had been an execution.

As Tatsuya watched the video of the girl leaving calmly, he unconsciously let out a sigh.

He’d known the Sirius’s mission had included the execution of rebellious and deserter magicians. He was also keenly aware that the “humane treatment of magicians” were no more than empty words, but he still couldn’t stop himself from feeling like sighing.

They do cruel things, thought Tatsuya.

Saddling a sixteen-year-old girl with the role of a killer—what were the USNA military brass thinking? Even the mafia probably took a little more consideration when choosing people. Was this any different from religious idealists driving children to terrorism in the name of a holy war?

“Brother, was that…Lina?”

He’d let Miyuki know about Parade, Sirius’s secret.

She seemed to have realized the killer in the rough image was Sirius—Lina.

“Probably.”

Miyuki also seemed to have taken quite a shock, but Tatsuya couldn’t find the right words to soothe it.

He wasn’t about to nitpick about the mere act of killing at this point. He didn’t think he had the right to anyway. There were plenty of missions that couldn’t go public. When it came to the dirty jobs, one might actually put assassinations into the cleaner category.

But at the same time, it was a lonely, cheerless one.

Without a high degree of affinity personality-wise, it was too heavy for a teenage girl. So heavy she wouldn’t be able to endure—it would crush her heart, little by little.

And as far as Tatsuya could see, Lina didn’t have the affinity to be an assassin.

He understood from Miyuki’s voice and expression that she had the same opinion.

The way things were going, they might have spent the entire day in a gloom.

Fortunately (?), though, an even more shocking event occurred a moment later to drive away the melancholy. Suddenly, the onscreen image, which Tatsuya had hacked into Section Three’s video server to get, changed over to a completely different one.

Blonde hair and blue eyes—the bust of a boy who appeared to be Anglo-Saxon. He looked childish, but he was probably around Tatsuya’s age.

Miyuki covered her mouth before a confused squeak could get out, but Tatsuya was calm.

This workstation was meant for hacking to begin with, so it was cut off from other systems. It used a dedicated line, too. The room was free of any sort of microphones or cameras. He knew that they were the only ones looking through and that the person on the other end of the line had no way of knowing what it was like on this one.

“Hello? Can you hear me? I’m going to assume you can, if that’s all right.”

As expected, the boy on the monitor didn’t attempt communication. Instead, he started talking by himself.

“I’ll start with an introduction. My name is Raymond Sage Clark. One of the Seven Sages.”

At some point, Miyuki had tightened her grip on her brother’s shoulders.

The sensation caused him to realize that he, too, was tense.

“I heard about you from Tia—or rather, Shizuku. Pleased to meet you, Tatsuya.”

I see. The boy seemed to be a student at the school Shizuku was studying abroad at.

And probably her information source.

If Shizuku’s information was coming from one of the Seven Sages Lina had talked about, it wasn’t strange that he could gather intel off-the-record.

But what did the Seven Sages want? And so much that one would expose himself to Tatsuya?

It wasn’t impossible that this video was a dummy, but Tatsuya’s instincts told him this was Raymond Sage Clark’s real face.

“I’ll cut to the chase… Oh, I like that expression.”

Incidentally, Raymond was speaking Japanese. His pronunciation of “cut to the chase” had a little awkwardness left in it, but he otherwise sounded fluent. Of course, the way he went on like that was clearly not cutting to the chase.

“I’m the one who told Angie Sirius about what’s happening here.”

Tatsuya reflexively thought, You used the expression wrong. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any way to point that out.

And he didn’t have to think about what “here” meant—it was obviously Section Three.

“Although, it seems like she somehow learned of this before I informed her.”

What does that mean? Tatsuya wondered. If she already knew, then he wouldn’t have been informing her of anything.

But there was no point making quick retorts to a recorded video. Tatsuya decided to watch the message through to the end.

“And I also wanted to give you the scoop, too.”

He seemed to know quite a bit of slang Japanese with the “scoop” bit. Maybe he’d learned the word from the media?

“I think you’ll find it highly beneficial. I’d like to say ‘watch now, pay later,’ but I’ll give it to you for free this time, as a symbol of our acquaintance.”

“Nobody asked you for it,” Tatsuya muttered reflexively, even knowing he wouldn’t be heard. But that was the last he could remain so calm.

“The magician boycott movements raging fiercely in the States right now—the ones starting to gain traction in Japan—were set up by one of the Seven Sages: Gide Sage Hague.”

It was so sudden that even Tatsuya couldn’t help being surprised.

“Gide Hague—also known as Gu Jie. A stateless overseas Chinese person and supreme leader of the international terrorist organization Blanche. He’s the boss of Hajime Tsukasa, leader of Blanche’s Japanese branch, who you caught.”

As the familiar names listed out one by one…

“And also a senior member of Richard Sun’s group—the previous leader of the international crime syndicate No-Head Dragon. In No-Head Dragon, they called Gu Jie ‘the Black Elder’ or ‘the Great Hague.’”

…Tatsuya stared fixedly at the monitor.

“Oh, and just to be sure, just because he’s one of the Seven Sages doesn’t mean I’m in conspiracy with him. Seven Sages isn’t the name of a single group—it refers to the seven operators with access privileges to Hlidskjalf.”

The fact that he couldn’t converse—couldn’t question—was, for once, tantalizing.

Hlidskjalf… He’d heard a rumor about it once before. It existed on the level of an urban legend. Did this mean it actually existed? And furthermore, was it just like the rumors said or different…?

“You see, Hlidskjalf…”

With timing as though Raymond had predicted Tatsuya’s train of thought, he began to explain.

“It’s one of the additional expansion systems for Echelon III, the global monitoring system. Maybe calling it a hacking system lurking within the system would be better, since it uses a backdoor in Echelon III? What do you think, Tatsuya?”

Ask he did, but of course there was no way to answer. Raymond knew that and continued his prerecorded explanation without leaving time for response.

“Even the operators don’t know where the physical Hlidskjalf is. It might just be pure programming code, without any hardware setup at all.”

Raymond shrugged his shoulders on the screen. The gesture was somehow cartoonlike.

“Anyway, Hlidskjalf collects information from throughout the world with even better efficiency than the main system, Echelon III, and gives information along with search matches to the operators. The system itself decides who the operators will be, and we haven’t found any logic to how it chooses people. Ostensibly it’s completely random.”

Raymond pantomimed swinging a pipe around. He was probably quite disappointed he’d forgotten to get a small item to use.

“If there’s any commonality, I guess it’s that you need capital to use an advanced information system on your own. But you don’t need to be filthy rich, either. You can just be an average middle-class citizen in the States or Japan.”

This was insane.

That was Tatsuya’s impression of what Raymond had explained so far.

What the hell could Hlidskjalf’s creator been thinking? They seemed like a hacker purely out for the momentary thrill of committing crimes.

“Anyway, it’s not actually that great a system. Hardware-wise, Hlidskjalf depends wholly on Echelon III. It’s not doing anything except optimizing information search results. And since it’s a monitoring system to begin with, we can’t fish around for data saved to its storage. Plus, there’s a system guard in place that prevents you from saving search results to external storage. The only place the info it gives you can stay is in your head. The Seven Sages are really just people who have the ability to gather that information internally.”

Well, just that made them a huge threat. At this point, virtually all data of relevance moved through networks. How much of it sat localized, having never been transmitted even once?

“And using Hlidskjalf is a risk to the operators, too. In order to optimize its searches, it uses two types of agents called Huginn and Muninn. And the operator’s search history is saved to Muninn. Whatever one operator looks up, the other operators will know about. Muninn’s records are how I learned about Gide Hague.”

That struck Tatsuya as odd. By that logic, wouldn’t Gide Hague now know Raymond Clark’s identity, too?

“When Blanche’s Japanese branch went under and No-Head Dragon lost its Japanese headquarters, Hague lost all his ways to influence Japan. Hague was the one who set up the parasites to come to Japan, too. His goal is to rebuild his spy base in Japan by taking advantage of the chaos.”

On the screen, Raymond had stopped his little performance. He seemed to be serious about this story as well.

“I’ve deciphered that his goal is to destroy magic through social means. If he can get rid of it, the Great Asian Alliance, which is behind the curve when it comes to magic, will immediately see its military might improve compared to Japan. To reign over a world without magic—I think that’s what Hague and the people behind him are after.”

Tatsuya felt like the logic had leaps in it, but as a whole, it made sense. And the GAA wanting to eliminate magical proficiency was something he himself had already felt.

“And that isn’t what I want… You can laugh at me, because this is going to seem romantic, but I think magic is a way toward a reformation of humankind.”

He only did it because he knew Raymond couldn’t hear, but Tatsuya actually did burst out laughing. It seemed like their views were misaligned on a fundamental level.

“Anyway, I’d like to keep on providing you with necessary information in the future. Tatsuya Shiba—the strategic-class magician, Shiva the Destroyer.”

At the nickname, Tatsuya’s face fully transformed into a scowl.

That was the kind of name you’d expect a boss character in a cheap video game to have, wasn’t it? Was this kid an otaku—a word that, by this point in history, had become common in all languages?

“Sorry, this all got a little long-winded. Basically, I’m proposing to help you get rid of the parasites.”

A little? thought Tatsuya, but he didn’t switch off the monitor.

“The info on Gide Hague was free. Believe that or not—it’s your choice. And I’ll leave it up to you whether to trust what I tell you in the future. But if you do trust me, then I’d like you to compensate me for my work.”

Raymond paused for a moment. Not to put on airs—Tatsuya could tell over the screen from his expression that he was tense.

“Tomorrow, at nine PM on February twenty-ninth your time, lure all active parasites to the outdoor training area behind First High. Then I want you to annihilate them.”

He had given no proof whatsoever, but at this stage, Tatsuya was ready even now to accept Raymond’s proposal.