Vol 1 Chapter 7 (1/2)

Chapter 7

There wasn’t much we could do on the museum floor. Holing up there would only get us cornered, so we left the dark floor and moved elsewhere despite the danger.

Luckily, this was Kukyou City, known as a disaster prevention city. A small storeroom had plenty of supplies: canned fish, an umbrella built to survive intense gusts of wind, synthetic fiber bags, powerful battery lights, rope that could be used for mountain climbing, and a bag with an insulated surface that looked like aluminum foil. With a little bit of tinkering, it could all be used as a weapon.

“Can we really defeat vampires with this!? This looks like some kind of craft made over summer vacation!!”

“Ayumi, vampires come in a variety of types. But in this case, all of the ones in Kukyou City were turned into vampires by Erika earlier in the day. Meaning…

We ran into a vampire on the landing while heading down the stairs.

Before the young man could move, Ayumi opened a one-touch umbrella. Aluminum foil had been pasted across the surface. It looked like a reflector in a photography studio and she s.h.i.+ned a powerful disaster battery light on it.

The concave lens focused the violently bright light into an even more powerful spotlight which s.h.i.+ned on the vampire’s face down the stairs.

“Vampires are weak to light!!” I shouted.

“Kh.”

When he flinched back, I took my next action. I swung around a synthetic fiber bag attached to the end of a rope. It felt heavy and there was a reason for that: it was filled with cans, creating a morning star that would crush a normal human’s skull in a single blow.

I used centrifugal force and the height difference to swing it down on the vampire.

He seemed unable to move with the light and the fear squeezing at his heart, but a part of his heart must have proudly known no physical attacks would work on him.

But he was wrong.

The dull sound was reminiscent of a blow from a heavy sandbag. At the same time, something sharp burst from bag. It was solid fuel that had been broken to pieces before stuffed in with the cans. In other words, it was ash wood kindling. I had been able to tell it was ash wood because it had smelled the same as the sticks used in the previous bombs.

Vampires were annihilated when stabbed through the heart by stakes made of specific types of wood.

“Gyaaah!?”

For the first time, I did real damage.

The vampire’s arms were taken out, so I went for another hit. This time, he was unable to block the morning star and took it to the center of the chest. I felt the heavy blow land.

The sound of his annihilation was horribly dry.

Before he even collapsed, his body turned to ashes and scattered across the stairs.

“It worked…” Ayumi sounded shocked as she held the umbrella and battery light. “It really worked!! But they’re only supposed to be weak to sunlight!!”

“Erika would’ve seen through it right away, but the new vampires don’t know the difference! By confidently declaring our victory, we can trick them and they’ll tense up. Then we trick them again by using a morning star with ash wood hidden inside. We can make it like this. Vampires might have insane specs, but we might be able to settle this without letting them use those specs!!”

We descended the stars and walked down the hallway. We ran into a few vampires on the way, but we broke the sprinklers on the ceiling, shouted that vampires couldn’t walk over running water, threw soap with wooden stakes stabbed into it onto the floor for them to step on, and otherwise tricked them to keep them from moving. And I used that slight bit of time to swing around the can morning star.

I was scared, but this wasn’t impossible.

We could defeat the vampires!

“User, our previous entrance point is beyond that door. The boat should still be there.”

“Okay. We can escape. I’m not sure what to do once we do, but we can at least avoid dying here!”

“Onii-chan, if we write in our owners.h.i.+p of another building with the doc.u.ments there, we’ll have a place to hide. a.s.suming, that is, someone doesn’t let himself be seduced into letting her inside!!”

Meanwhile, we opened the door.

As soon as we did, I heard a forgotten voice from my smartphone.

“You’re mean…”

“Eri-…”

“You’re mean, Satori-kun. I’ve heard the reports. You’re killing all my vampires, aren’t you? Now I’ll have to make more…urp.”

“Quit drinking yourself sick on blood! You don’t have to force yourself! Now do some exercise to help your digestion!!”

“Fuguu!! Are you saying it’s okay if the zombies are taken out!?”

“Hmm,” said Erika. “Aren’t zombies kind of meant to be taken out? I mean, they really s.h.i.+ne when they keep attacking while the panicked police officers shoot them like crazy.”

“Kh. You have a point!!”

“And I’ve had enough.”

She sounded like she had lost her nerve.

As I worked with the Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep to push the rubber boat out onto the dark water, I felt a shudder run down my spine.

Something wasn’t right.

Something was horribly off about things outside.

“Satori-kun, if you won’t give in and if you’ll bare your fangs against your own sister, then I’ll have to go all out too. Yes, it’s too late to come running to me now.”

“User.” The Cla.s.s Rep looked up into the night sky and gave a report. “There is no moon. The weather is clear and there is no apparent meteorological explanation.”

“Wait a second. Then is something covering the night sky…? No, wait. Ayumi, get back here! The doc.u.ments don’t matter!! Get on the boat! Hurry!!”

“Eh? Ehh?”

Ayumi’s confused voice was drowned out by flapping wings.

Yes.

This wasn’t just a million or ten million. Far, far more bats than that covered the entire area like a sandstorm. I had no idea how many bats a single vampire could separate into, but this was far too many. A pillar of bats rose from the city like a tornado. And they gathered toward a single point in the night sky. They concentrated there and became a black sphere. This was the process a vampire used to become bats and then return to being a vampire. It looked like several vampires’ worth of bats gathered together into a single giant ma.s.s of flesh.

“I don’t know where you’re hiding, Satori-kun, so I’ll just wipe the entire building from the map.”

Vampires were said to transform into bats.

They were thousands if not tens of thousands of meters up and who knows how many vampires’ worth of bats they were.

“The Varcolaci. That Eastern European vampire is said to fly through the sky and devour the moon or the sun. Obviously, literally eating a celestial body would be a tad difficult, but don’t you think they could figuratively pull it off by causing an eclipse?”

Only Erika’s voice surrounded me.

This was the all-encompa.s.sing scale of a queen.

“Eh heh. Let’s say the average weight of a man or woman is 65 kg. For 10 people, it’s 650 kg. For 100, 6.5 tons. For 1000, 65 tons. So what would it be for 10,000 people? Now, what if a ma.s.s of that weight appeared at an alt.i.tude of 25 km? What if it appeared up there at the thickest point of the ozone layer which deflects the sun’s harmful rays? Satori-kun, I know this is a silly thing to ask of a sciency person who built his own disaster environment simulator that’s all about physics calculations, but are you good at math?”

“…”

650 tons. Some large pa.s.senger planes or military transportation craft were more than 300 tons, so it might not seem like too much. Dropping an airplane or two isn’t going to cause an earth-shaking crater, right?

But even the biggest confirmed meteorite was only about sixty kilograms.

It was all about the conditions. What would happen if something more than ten times larger than the world’s biggest was dropped on the earth? Even if the starting point of its fall and its initial speed were different, it would still reach terminal velocity from that height.

I was left speechless, so Erika made her announcement over the phone.

“I call it Moon Mortality. …A solar eclipse during the middle of the day wouldn’t be possible, though. There’s also a risk of being exposed to sunlight even at night when sending them up to the ozone layer, but it’s still better than being exposed to direct sunlight during the day. The rest is just like the human parasol. Now, now. It’s time for a surefire trump card that only works during the sunless night. Are you ready for the false asteroid strike? I hope you enjoy it☆”

This is insane!!

Erika, I know you’re a clean freak, but have you never heard of restraint!?

Something large enough to cause a lunar eclipse was going to drop straight toward the earth. Something 25 km up should have been invisible if it did not emit a powerful light, but I could indirectly sea it because it blocked out the moon. We would not survive no matter where in the building we hid. The Cla.s.s Rep, Ayumi, and I pushed the rubber boat out onto the dark water and planned our escape.

“A dark ma.s.s is moving in the sky. This is faster than expected. I estimate it will land in twenty seconds.”

“Twenty? That means it’s moving faster than a kilometer per second! That isn’t a free fall, so is it actually accelerating? And what kind of name is Moon Mortality, Erika!? I didn’t realize you were such a difficult adolescent!!”

“Eh heh heh. It’s because I have such a pure heart.”

The ma.s.s covering the moon did not pursue us. Maybe Erika did not have an accurate idea of our location, maybe she could not overturn her initial command to crush the real estate building, or maybe the building was just a demonstration to break us mentally.

I didn’t know the answer, but the moment still arrived.

Ayumi alone wasn’t sure what was happening, so her eyes darted around.

“Eh? Eh? What? What’s happening, Onii-…”

“Just grab onto something!!!!!!”

The next thing I knew, all light and sound were erased from the world.

No, it must have been the scenery before my eyes that was erased.

I could not tell up from down.

As soon as the rubber boat curved sharply behind a giant building, a tremendous shockwave pa.s.sed by overhead. Not only did all the gla.s.s shatter, but it looked like a giant arm had knocked over the reinforced concrete. We were behind shelter, but the boat still flipped entirely over. And hunks of concrete larger than trucks rained down.

“Uuh!?”

There was no strategizing or tactics here. It was almost all up to luck.

We sometimes sank below the water, sometimes brought our heads above the water, and swam around without knowing which direction to go.

Luckily, Ayumi, the Cla.s.s Rep, and I all avoided a direct hit.

But we had no time to relax.

I looked to my smartphone and checked the footage coming from the balloon drone that was still airborne. I saw a giant crater.

The real estate building had been annihilated and something spread out from there.

My clean freak of a big sister was not done cleaning up.

“Oh, no… A huge wave is coming!!”

I knew this was dangerous, but there was nothing we could actually do.

We were swallowed up and tossed about.

I felt like a s.h.i.+rt in the was.h.i.+ng machine.

I had no idea how far I had been taken. A few dozen meters? Hundreds of meters? Ayumi and her zombie strength holding onto my hand may have been the only reason I survived.

“Puhah!!”

We all reached the surface.

Luckily, the overturned boat was nearby. We managed to flip it back over and climbed on. d.a.m.n, my collapsible bike must be at the bottom of the water.

“The central financial business district appears to have been annihilated,” calmly reported the Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep.

She kept her eyes on the night sky where the moon was hidden once more.

“And I believe the false asteroid strike may not be a one-time thing. My sample data is too small to say for sure, but I believe it takes a total of eight minutes for the countless bats to form a black bullet, fire, and land.”

“If she starts stamping districts off the map like that, there’s nothing we can do. Are we toast? Please tell me no! If the Cla.s.s Rep finds out about the swimsuit dance set, she’ll beat me up!!”

“…”

We began to lament, but my twintail little sister remained silent.

No, she was muttering something under her breath.

She was apparently lost in thought.

“We need someplace capable of enduring an asteroid strike level of catastrophe… There would work…but…no, I can’t get my priorities backwards… What door wouldn’t have been flooded? Yes, if we were swept four hundred meters from Hughes Real Estate…but if that’s the only route, they’ll be rus.h.i.+ng there…”

“Ayumi! Hey, Ayumi!! She’s off in her own little world. Take this!! (tap tap tap).”

“Unyaaahn!!!??? Y-you stupid Onii-chan! Do you want attention from your little sister so bad you’ve gotten in the habit of touching her st.i.tches!? Stop that!!”

“Next time, I’ll count them one by one and figure out how many you have across your body. Anyway, what do we do!? I’m not some brilliant detective, so if you have an idea, tell me!!”

“C-count them…across my body…even those embarra.s.sing places…count all of them…”

“Ayumi!!”

“Cough, cough!! R-right, we need to get to the hospital on the hill! We need to start there!!”