Volume 4 Chapter 6 (1/2)
Anastasia and I were alone.
A rich person's surgery truck was parked in the underground parking lot of a casino that could collapse at any moment. Inside there, she gave me the answers while still lying down.
”Wall Street is the biggest name in money, but it's so important that there are a lot of watchful eyes there. Enough so that they make movies about the people there. They're the stereotypical villains in the States. It would be difficult to infiltrate Wall Street without anyone there noticing.”
”So you made Las Vegas your base?”
”Yes. After all, 20% of all money on the planet pa.s.ses through this city. And there are tons of huge servers for verifying cards. With slots, roulette, and video poker, there are a lot of electronically controlled games. There are some casinos that don't even use dealers to shuffle the cards. To prevent cheating. Think of it like a fully automatic mahjong table. By controlling this city and influencing the gambling wins and losses, you can alter the exchange rate of the dollar and the value of gold. That's the purpose behind Mephistopheles. The watchful eyes with too much time on their hands will be focused on Wall Street like always while we gradually influence the world economy from Vegas. This was the kind of underhanded method needed for the few to defeat the many, Truth.”
It was a ridiculous concept.
And it was on a very American scale.
”How many people are involved in this plan? They're Archenemies too, right?”
”Hey, Truth. Vegas is an extremely unnatural city built in the middle of the desert. No one thinks about the local population here. The people are always on the move, so anyone could move in or out at any time. That too makes it more convenient than Wall Street. It's known as a racial salad bowl, but New York tends to be tough on outsiders. It's hard for newcomers to work their way in very deep.”
”Wait a second, Anastasia. You're getting sidetracked.”
”No, I'm not.” the 11-year-old girl grinned. ”Half of the people in Las Vegas are made up of us.”
I was dumbfounded.
I lived in the same house as my vampire older sister and zombie little sister like it was normal. My stepmom was apparently Lilith, so my family had more Archenemies than humans.
”We did it by gradually having more and more move in. People frequently move to and from Vegas for financial reasons, so it's hard to notice this sort of thing happening.”
But an entire city?
And if they had reached 50%, then it had to be pretty much everyone excluding the tourists there for easy money and the people like Herbal Science. The city had more tourists than residents, so they had to have nearly filled the entire resident group.
A large city taken over by reversing the population ratio was a shocking revelation. But how shocking it would it be for a normal person with no real connection to Archenemies?
”Then there are...nearly 2 million Archenemies living here in secret?”
Not even Romania, holy land of vampire legends, or Haiti, origin of zombies, was on that level. Archenemies were accepted by general society, but in a lot of cases, only if they remained a minority.
But to look at it in reverse, this meant the human casualties from all this had been half what I had thought.
Was that a relief?
Like h.e.l.l it was.
”We were supposed to change the entire world from here, but that ended when those gels attacked on the ground and the bombs fell from the sky.”
”!? That's right! What are those gels!? Are those some of the Archenemies who came to Las Vegas?”
”Truth. Did your precious sisters never tell you this?” Anastasia sighed. ”There is no Archenemy like these gels. In fact, slime types are hard to find in any myths or legends. Those are more like UFOs or cryptids than fantasy creatures.”
”They're not...Archenemies?”
”Not a naturally-occurring variety, at least.”
Wait.
Wait, wait.
Las Vegas had been secretly taken over by Archenemies. The gels had attacked there. And then the military had bombed the city as a forceful solution.
Didn't something smell really fishy about that?
”If the humans had realized the truth behind Vegas, they never would have had a better chance,” said Anastasia. ”They could drop all those bombs while claiming they were taking Vegas back from the Archenemy gels and actually be bombing us Archenemies. None of the housewives in their living rooms would notice. What will people think when their cable TV channels only show them monstrous gels attacking humanoid silhouettes and silhouettes bursting into flames as they fled along with the monsters?”
It would look like humans were being eaten by the gels.
It would look like humans were burning.
...It would look like Archenemies were wronging humans when it was really the humans bombing the Archenemies.
The humans were the attackers, but no one would realize that. They would see themselves as the victims and end up criticizing the Archenemies. Like they were whipping a corpse.
”Then did the military make those gels? To give themselves a justification to bomb Las Vegas!?”
”I was taken aback at first, but now that I think about it, it makes sense. Hey, do you know what state Las Vegas is in, Truth?”
She gave a stiff smile.
And she made the world's worst joke.
”Nevada. Given the location, the answer is obvious. That bomber formation flew here from the Area 51 airbase infamous for UFO research and alien autopsies.”
They were more like UFOs or cryptids than fantasy creatures.
This was the true origin of those bizarre Archenemies that could not possibly be natural.
It sounded ridiculous and nonsensical, but we had no theory that was more convincing.
Thinking back, why had the military used incendiary bombs from the very beginning? How had they known the gels were weak to heat? This should have been their first direct confrontation with them, so they should have started off with machineguns or tanks.
The answer was obvious.
If they had created them, of course they would know how to deal with them.
I ended up holding my head in my hands.
”I can't believe this!!”
”A world famous tourist destination was wiped off the map by Archenemy gels. Sending out bombers was the only way to resolve the situation. If they interrupt a boring baseball game with that emergency news, there will be a backlash against Archenemies around the world. It's the perfect turn of events for the human supremacists.”
This was insane.
It was nuts.