Volume 3 Chapter 4 (1/2)

I couldn't trust anything in the abandoned hospital. Even if there was protective clothing in a locker, I could never trust that it was durable and airtight.

That said, the radiology department awaited me on the bas.e.m.e.nt floor. If the equipment had broken down and just been left like that, who knows what it would be scattering around. Going there without any kind of preparation would be reckless.

”This should do for now.”

”An X-ray screen?” asked Maxwell.

Using the light of my smartphone, I checked through the medical office's shelves, found a screen that reacted to X-rays by emitting visible light, and pulled it out.

”I'm pretty sure a.n.a.log camera film also reacts to X-rays. If things really are dangerous in the bas.e.m.e.nt, this X-ray screen will light up on its own. This will let me judge the safety as I continue on.”

The situation was different from the virtual reality, so I wouldn't have the guidance of the glow sticks on the floor and I wouldn't have the night-vision ability of the garlic body. No external light could reach the bas.e.m.e.nt floor, so I only had my smartphone's backlight to rely on.

The Cla.s.s Rep was surprisingly light and soaked with the rose blood as I carried her over a shoulder bandit-style. Then I made my way to the stairs down to the bas.e.m.e.nt floor where Erika and Ayumi had vanished.

…And if my sisters hadn't come back, then that bas.e.m.e.nt floor sounded suspicious as h.e.l.l. What was I going to find there?

I spotted a hammer on the way and stuck it into my pants belt along with the X-ray screen, but how useful would that actually be? One arm was occupied by the limp Cla.s.s Rep and the other was occupied by the smartphone I was using as a flashlight, so I had no way of using the weapon anyway. Besides, if those two sisters working together couldn't defeat whoever or whatever it was, I doubted a hammer would be much use. It was mostly just a good-luck charm to make me feel better.

Just to be sure, I stopped by the third-floor pediatric department and rehabilitation room.

I aimed my smartphone backlight inside, but there was no one there. Not too surprising, that. Just because it was a creepy abandoned building didn't mean it would have corpses lying around.

”But that means I don't have the key. Maxwell.”

”Sure.”

”The radiology department entrance uses an IC card. That means it's an electronic lock. Can you force it open?”

”The virtual reality supplied by the enemy is not the most reliable source of information and I will have difficulty saying anything with certainty until we see it, but given my considerable skill, it would be worth trying.”

”Okay.”

The door to the all-important storeroom used an a.n.a.log lock, but we would open everything we could. Not only did I want to reach the coffin, but I was worried about Erika and Ayumi.

I started down the stairs with the soaked Cla.s.s Rep over my shoulder. Hmm, if a patrolling cop saw me like this, it could easily devolve into a firefight. No, I might take it a step further and make my urban legend debut.

The place was as covered in trash in actual reality as in the virtual reality, so the stairs were blocked partway down. I moved back into the hallway and used the opposite stairs to continue down. I had originally come from the bas.e.m.e.nt morgue, so I knew the way.

There was no sign of anyone on the way.

Not Erika and Ayumi and not some strange Archenemy.

…What had happened to them? I had seen how violent those sisters could get in the simulator. They truly had enough power to destroy a city or country if they made a wrong move. It was hard to believe that both of them could be taken out.

I arrived at the deep dark opening of the stairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt. It was somehow different from the darkness of the night. It was denser or stickier or something. It literally felt like gazing into the maw of a giant beast. Instead of avoiding danger as I continued, it was like I had to leap down the monster's gullet to find any answers at all.

Not only was night the time for Archenemies, but the depth of this darkness was not normal. This had to be a labyrinth or demon cave where an Archenemy could fully wield their fangs and claws as an Archenemy.

”What will you do?” inquired Maxwell.

”Keep going, obviously.”

I couldn't bring the Cla.s.s Rep back to the city as a Dhampir. If this was caused by the Polish Vampire Princess, obstructing her path back to the coffin would turn the princess into a human once more, but the story had the knight sit on the coffin lid to get in the way. That meant it might not count as obstruction unless I discovered the coffin's location and directly contacted it.

Besides, if I just left with the Cla.s.s Rep, I wouldn't know what had happened to my sisters. I couldn't just leave them here.

I took a deep breath.

And I took the first step down the stairs into the darkness.

The route was the opposite of before, but this change was not an improvement. There really weren't any glow sticks on the floor at even intervals. That meant the young man had not been here, he had not died in front of the radiology department's door, and he would not get back up as a vampire.

My smartphone's backlight was all I had to rely on.

The bas.e.m.e.nt was even dustier and damper than the aboveground floors. The air was more stagnant than in the virtual reality and it smelled somewhat mildewy.

”…? What is this?”

Plus, the smell was mixed with a rusty odor. I aimed the backlight toward the wall and saw something written with dark red paint. The writing was crammed in tight. It looked like the alphabet, but it wasn't English. However, it seemed to have some kind of system to it, so it wasn't just random.

The darkness likely played a role, but I hadn't noticed it while heading up from the bas.e.m.e.nt with Ayumi. Your feelings could really change your field of view.

”That is Latin, but there is no grammatical structure. It is no more than isolated words.”

”Latin? As in Latin music?”

”If you are referring to the cultures of Central and South America, then no. Think of it as an old European language that formed the basis of English.”

There were also drawings of some kind.

A square was drawn inside a large red circle. The points of contact between the circle and the square's corners were filled with even more illegible writing.

”Fire, water, wind, and earth. There are also the occasional terms that correspond to heat and cold. I detect traces of someone from before the discovery of atoms and elementary particles trying to use what knowledge they did have to express the structure of all things. Although the result is as mistaken as the heliocentric theory versus the geocentric theory.”

I didn't understand the details, but the creepiness of the drawings allowed me to imagine what this probably was.

”So is it something like a magic circle…?”

Whether or not it actually had any effect, someone must have believed in them to thoroughly cover the wall of this long, long hallway. That was enough to send a chill down my spine.

This was a different sort of fear from the Bright Cross's Colosseum which had thoroughly calculated everything out using statistics. There should have had no basis to it, but I felt the rails s.h.i.+fting out of place as if it was judging all of the lives here. Kind of like the Salem Witch Trials. Whoever had written this, I doubted we would understand each other enough to even talk about the weather.

…But had this been in the virtual reality? I might not have noticed it with only the faint light of the glow sticks to go on.

”Maxwell. This rusty smell…is it some kind of blood?”

”I cannot say without an external accessory to a.n.a.lyze the chemical makeup, such as a centrifuge or particle observer. However, this is a hospital. It would depend on when this was written, but if the hospital was still running, they could have used transfusion blood.”

”…I thought as much.”

The smell seemed awfully strong for something that might have happened years ago, but it didn't feel like it had been written using blood taken from a living person who was here now. There was just too much of it. The blood writing and magic circles covered the entire wall of this bas.e.m.e.nt floor, so a full bathtub of blood wouldn't be enough. Even if the Bright Cross had controlled Kukyou City until recently, I doubted they could gather more than 200L of fresh blood all at once. Investigating the accidents, suicides, hospital deaths, and missing people over the years would probably make my b.a.l.l.s shrivel up, but this was still just too much. They could never cover it all up.

”This might not be a rusty smell. It might be actual rust.”

”Something like an experiment to make calligraphy ink out of rusted nails?” asked Maxwell.

…I had indeed seen that mentioned on a summer project recommendation site.

Living sacrifices were not so easily acquired in this day and age. That meant they would have to use something else instead. Just like some cultures started burning dolls instead of people or used soybeans or pomegranate as a replacement for the flavor of meat. Making ink from rusty nails and mixing it with a bit of human blood was still insane, but it didn't require ma.s.s murder.

”Or is it pig or chicken blood? The symbolic meaning would probably be different than with human blood, but I have no idea what this occult ritual was meant to accomplish. I can't exactly judge the right or wrong answer here.”

Either way, it wasn't exactly pleasant to look at. It felt like being thrown in a cage at the zoo in a foreign country and having everyone pointing and laughing at me. I didn't know what exactly it meant, but I could tell there was definite malicious intent.

…The wall didn't explain where my sisters were or how to return the Cla.s.s Rep to normal. I didn't need to put myself in a worse mood by going along with some lunatic's nonsense.

I removed the backlight from the wall and adjusted the Cla.s.s Rep's position on my shoulder. Strangely, carrying her didn't feel like a burden since she was a cute girl. It would have been h.e.l.l if it were a 50kg bag of cement instead. It was possible a mysterious Cla.s.s Rep effect had numbed the exhaustion with endorphins and dopamine.

”…Now, then.”

I glanced down at the X-ray sheet, but there was no reaction yet. My cells were apparently not being roasted by invisible radiation. I could continue my investigation.

This hospital was made by connecting two T-shaped buildings so they formed a square with the lines sticking out, and the bas.e.m.e.nt seemed to follow the same pattern. I continued on to the radiology department, but I noticed something after turning a corner.

The blood writing(?) covered one of the walls, but not both. It only covered one side.

Yes.

”What is this? Is it only covering the inner wall?”

The abandoned hospital formed a crooked square and the bas.e.m.e.nt did so as well. And it turned out only the walls on the inside of that square were covered in this blood writing or magic circles.

Almost like they were closing something into the underground s.p.a.ce below the courtyard.

It kind of reminded me of covering the bare wall in talismans before adding new wallpaper to hide the human-shaped stain on a wall in a cheap apartment known for being haunted.

”Maxwell…”

”Sure. Whether it has any actual effect or not, it would seem someone here believed in this power and took action accordingly. That raises the question of what that person thought they were sealing away with this graffiti on the wall. Or to put it another way, perhaps there is a s.p.a.ce beyond these inner walls that is not on the blueprints and perhaps something slumbers within.”

However, that did not mean we could get in from here. The entrance might be a different set of stairs or an elevator accessible from the surface. And if whoever it was had truly prioritized forming a ”seal” without thinking of the consequences, the door might have long ago been filled in with concrete. They might have drawn the blood writing and magic circles on top of that.

Whatever the case, they must have been really afraid of whatever was inside that square. Enough so that they had to go this far to rest easy.

Who had done it? And to whom?

The crucial subject and object were missing, but those walls were plenty creepy without that information. This immense amount of blood writing was not a sign of an eccentric. It was a sign of someone's fear. Fear could lead to bizarre actions such as chopping up a corpse and burying pieces in different places because you feared having the supposedly dead person come back to life. A more close-to-home example would be checking the lock or gas several times before leaving home.

And at the same time, I realized something.

”The Cla.s.s Rep's coffin probably isn't here.”

As my sisters and I had discussed, if it was the Polish Vampire Princess affecting the Cla.s.s Rep, then she would lose her vampiric traits if she could not periodically return to the coffin to sleep. Just like the cleaning robots on the top floor, she needed to recharge. So it would be pointless to place her coffin in a thoroughly sealed place she could not get in or out of. She could not maintain her current state unless she could return there herself.

The convalescent hospital's Ghost wanted to track down the valuable sample that happened to turn the Cla.s.s Rep into a Dhampir and it would want to find a way of ma.s.s-producing that method even if that meant dissecting her, so it would not want to ruin that balance until it could figure out how this worked. No idiot would pull out a hair drier while investigating a snow crystal under a microscope. I doubted the Ghost would use its unmanned weapons to seal away the coffin.

”Maxwell, map out the place, at least as far as you can see while I walk around.”

”Sure. If possible, could you point out some landmarks?”

Either because thick s.h.i.+elding was more easily built in the bas.e.m.e.nt floor or because people would not see the things down here much, it contained a lot of creepy facilities: the autopsy room, the morgue I had been inside, the medical waste disposal room, the backup power room, the boiler room, etc. I checked each doorplate, opened the door, and s.h.i.+ned the backlight inside, but I didn't find Erika or Ayumi collapsed inside any of them.

”Odd… They're all unlocked.”

”Yes, and yet Miss Erika and Miss Ayumi mentioned finding almost all the doors locked during their exploration.”

What did this discrepancy mean?

Someone went around unlocking the doors after my sisters disappeared.

My sisters went around unlocking the doors during their exploration before they disappeared.

My sisters had lied and the doors were unlocked from the beginning.

There were a few different possibilities, but all of them provided a glimpse of something more sinister. Possibility #2 seemed to be the most peaceful option, but that would mean some third party had not liked that my sisters were opening the doors and ”eliminated” those Archenemy sisters while they worked.

An unpleasant shudder ran down my spine. Even as a hypothetical, that was not something I wanted to think about.

As I walked around the bas.e.m.e.nt floor, I arrived at the radiology department. I had not run across anyone on the way here. Not Erika or Ayumi and not some dangerous third party.

Had they all gone back upstairs?

If not, this deepest area was the most suspect.

”…Maxwell.”

”No. There is nothing for me to do. The electronic lock has already been opened.”

Here too?

I gulped and pressed my palm against the metal door. I leaned my weight against it and opened it.

The radiology department.

I held my breath as I entered and, instead of the room itself, I first looked to the X-ray sheet held between my pants and my stomach. Luckily, there was no reaction. Apparently nothing dangerous was leaking out.

I checked around with my smartphone's backlight and saw a rusted examination table in the center of the room. A donut-shaped piece of scanning equipment waited at the head to surround it like a tunnel. I didn't know much about these things, but I doubted it was for X-rays. I guessed it was a CT scan. That was the thing that had its impact stolen by the seemingly superior MRI. They were completely different, but I imagined it as something like the relations.h.i.+p between ICs and LSI or records and Blu-rays.

I had no business in this room.

I checked behind the equipment just in case, but neither my sisters nor a young man's corpse were there.

”…Are they in the storeroom at the back?”

”No. You have no basis for thinking that.”

Well, it was true that had been simulation data created by the abandoned hospital's Ghost. It might not have all been accurate.

”If it was setting a trap for my sisters, that whatever storeroom would be the most suspicious place. By making it look like the goal, the Ghost could set up whatever traps it wanted.”

As brazenly as I said that, I had only realized it after Erika and Ayumi failed to return. So really, I was no more than an utter moron who had sent his family off to their deaths.

”Warning: If we are a.s.suming this is a trap that Miss Erika and Miss Ayumi could not escape, wouldn't it be dangerous for you to follow?”

”Of course. But I'm curious about one thing.” I slowly spoke as I gathered my own thoughts. ”The convalescent hospital's Ghost pretended to be you to approach me, right? It used that to confuse the situation by having me repeat the same virtual scenario over and over with slight differences from reality. That muddled my memories. But why?”

”There is too little data to do anything but guess, but I would a.s.sume that Ghost concluded that was the best course of action. The Ghost is the system management agent remaining in the Peace Committee Convalescent Hospital, so it would have had an easier time deceiving someone who is highly dependent on a mobile device. And your actions manipulated Miss Erika, Miss Ayumi, and myself. You saw through it eventually, but I think it achieved some results.”

”That's true.”

Looking at it rationally, this was all my mistake. This was no time to be calmly nodding my head, but I couldn't make any progress without owning up to my mistake.

”But if it could adopt your character so perfectly, couldn't it have sent messages directly to Erika and Ayumi's phones? If it sent a fake SOS message pretending to be me and I said I had been trapped in the radiology department, I bet they would've fallen for the trap.”

”You have a point.”

”That meant it wanted to control me first and foremost, even if that meant ignoring Erika and Ayumi. And it must have had a reason worth trapping me in that morgue locker for about three hours.”

”Such as?”

Needless to say, I was only human, so I would lose in a serious sibling brawl with a zombie or vampire. I could never win. Not even arming myself with everything I could think of would be enough. If an amateur was handed a speargun and shoved into an aquarium pool containing a man-eating shark and a killer whale, did they stand any chance of winning? The answer was obvious.

But…

”What if the trap up ahead only works on Archenemies? I don't know if it would be an exorcising seal or a holy light, but what if it's focused on Archenemies and doesn't affect a normal human at all? Wouldn't that give the Ghost a reason to separate an amateur like me from them?”

That would greatly increase my value. If my sisters had been captured by holy water or a charm on the forehead, it was possible they could regain their freedom if I tore it from them.

”Those killer motocross bikes were armed with obvious weapons like machineguns and gas-operated pile-drivers, so it's possible they weren't meant for my sisters; they might have been meant for me since I'm immune to anything as silly-sounding as holy power. If so, then it means a lot that I managed to reconnect to you, Maxwell. The occult weapons don't work on me and you can hold back the unmanned physical weapons. That leaves the Ghost with no options left. …Other than taking my sisters hostage and insisting I obediently surrender.”

”So you want to use every trick in the book to retrieve them as soon as possible?”

”The Ghost hasn't used them as hostages yet, but I think that's because it can't imagine our relations.h.i.+p. There are exceptions like Itou Helen and Kuroyama Hinoki, but it's extremely rare for humans and Archenemies to live together. The Ghost is an agent specialized in anti-Archenemy technology research, so it would probably have trouble thinking of humans and the undead getting along.”

But that would not last forever. As it gathered data, it would gain more material with which to arrive at the correct conclusion. For example, it could check my captured sisters' phones and a.n.a.lyze the call records and saved photos. Or it could intercept the cell signal and access the external storage or home server.

So I had to act before then.

Once the Ghost took action, it was checkmate. But if I settled things before my opponent learned how to move the pieces…

”Maxwell, let's end this.”

”Sure.”

I approached the door to the adjacent storeroom. I turned the k.n.o.b and found it was indeed unlocked.

Had it been unlocked for the Cla.s.s Rep? Had my sisters unlocked it? Or had it been some entirely unrelated third party?

I couldn't sit around wondering. This was a race against time. I used my experiences from the virtual reality to s.h.i.+ne the backlight on the floor and open the hidden trapdoor much like one for underfloor storage.

I found a far-too-steep stairway. It was nearly a ladder and I walked down, step by step.

”Maxwell, prepare for a cyber attack. I want to avoid being shot by those deadly motocross bikes the instant I step inside.”

”Sure.”

All I had to do was defend against the ordinary bullets and special steel spikes. Something like anti-zombie incense was not a problem for me.

With that in mind, I stepped from the bottommost step to the floor.

And immediately afterwards, that happened.

———A stairway led down.

I had to get to the bottom of the stairs. Erika and Ayumi awaited me deep underground, so I couldn't stand still. I had to hurry. Hurry as much as possible. I had to find and retrieve them before the Ghost caught on.

———A stairway led down.

I felt a slight vibration in my cheek.

Without thinking, I came to a stop and stopped breathing. The roar of an engine came from directly behind me at the entrance we had just come through. It was lighter than a car and more like a chainsaw or lawnmower.

Or a light motorcycle, such as a scooter or motocross bike?

———A stairway led down.

”M-Maxwell!”

I was surrounded by the sound and the unpleasant odor of exhaust faintly reached my nose. But I would be fine if my opponent was the deadly motocross bikes. Maxwell could neutralize them with a cyber attack.

With that in mind, I adjusted the Cla.s.s Rep on my shoulder and checked my smartphone. This is what I saw:

”Warning: Be caref…this is———coustic effe…”

”What, Maxwell!? I can't see! The screen's dark!”

Or was that not it?

Was the screen's light fine and it was my vision having problems?

———A stairway led down.

My sense of balance wavered. I tried to resist, but it was no use. I fell down the solid stairs along with the Cla.s.s Rep. I couldn't brace for impact, but I couldn't feel the pain either.

Where was the Cla.s.s Rep? I couldn't see the smartphone's light either.

In fact, I wasn't sure where my arms and legs were or how I needed to move them to get up.

A corner of my muddled morning provided some kind of warning.