NOVEL WEB Book 7: Chapter 9
It was over.
Was it a testament to my resilience or my insensitivity that I could sum it up so easily after just a day had passed?
The Class Rep had never had her soul removed and those three morons had not had a falling out or been turned into a monster by the Bokor. …Although I was worried what would happen if we simply let them go, so I did warn them I would show them hell the instant they tried anything.
Those girls were the perpetrators here, so I had no reason to go easy on them.
Karen either wasn’t feeling well or couldn’t bear to look me in the eye because she had been hiding under the covers trembling ever since. How could I know that without knowing her email address or where her hideout was, you ask?
“Satori-saaan. Can you bring me some pudding from the fridge?”
“Don’t break into an injured person’s house and then hog their bed! This is a teenage boy’s bedroom, widow!!”
Then again, having her suddenly disappear would have been an even bigger problem, so I couldn’t complain too much.
The 13 Eastern European Families had been a little more polite, so they had apparently escaped Japan when the time was right.
…The Hidden Cloud has roots everywhere. Even within this friendly group here.
Had the Evil Spirit Bokor been telling the truth, or had it been a curse using his words?
Whatever the case, it was afterschool.
My arm was in a sling as I walked to the harbor container yard where Maxwell was located.
“You could have received my support via smartphone instead of coming here, you know?”
“We’re talking about Anastasia here. Who knows what she’s going to try while pretending to cooperate. I want to be ready for anything.”
Yes, I had to contact that white hacker who was in America.
“Truth, I’m ready to give you a follow-up report.”
“Warning: During the span of that one sentence, I have detected and stopped 169 different forms of cyber-attack.”
“You wanted to know where the Hidden Cloud began, right?”
That 11-year-old Silky maid fairy had long blonde hair and wore a red silk dress. She may have been in a university lab because she was spinning around on a rolling chair.
“I took the data you gave me and sent it to the police as an anonymous report, but the SWAT team ended up at a junkyard on the outskirts of Detroit.”
“A junkyard?”
“You know, one of those places full of squashed and rusted cars.”
That didn’t seem like the place you would find precision machinery. I didn’t know the true amount if you accounted for people with multiple accounts, but that system had supported more than a trillion people. I had pictured something special like an entire warship or a jet’s modified airborne early-warning system.
“I do know that the Hidden Cloud itself was destroyed, so I can imagine the hardware was physically disposed of.”
“Yeah, I imagine so.”
“But what do you think that hardware was?” Anastasia kept her voice low on the phone. “Calculators, pedometers, car navigation systems, voice recorders, portable CD players, PDAs, electronic dictionaries, digital thermometers, wristwatches…”
“Hold on, Anastasia. What are you talking about?”
“I’m not joking. It really was just a bunch of junk stacked up in enough of a pile to pierce the heavens. You could call it a mountain of the trash that had its place in the world usurped by smartphones.”
“…”
“Someone had gone to the trouble of hooking them all up in parallel to secure their processing power. That was the true identity of the Hidden Cloud. Maybe it was meant as a form of irony or a way of displaying their beliefs.”
A collection of abandoned machinery.
Each individual piece was harmless, but that changed entirely when they gathered into a single giant system.
“The production regions and eras were all different. It looks like that Evil Spirit group dug through reclaimed land around the world to collect all the electronic junk and then sent it all to someone.”
This reminded me of something.
Yes, none of this was that special. Not for me, anyway.
“It’s the same as Maxwell. I didn’t use chips developed for use in a simulator. I hooked together 1400 defective mobile game systems that were sold for almost nothing and remade them into a disaster environment simulator.”
Of course, the original development company and manufacturing plant had never planned for that. Maxwell had left those original creators’ control and had been remade into a simulator by me.
This almost felt like some sort of revenge.
No, was it meant as a message that only I would recognize?
“Truth, just like you breathed new life into machinery meant to be disposed of, whoever-this-is may have given meaning to all those usable-but-unwanted tools by having them support the billion accounts of the Hidden Cloud that has no beginning or end.”
“Hold on. Then what was this data scientist trying to accomplish? Does this mean the Hidden Cloud and its attack on the gods didn’t really matter?”
“It may have been meant as a benchmark test.” Anastasia seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “The data scientist may have only been interested in how deeply their processing system could work its way into the center of the world. Perhaps revenge against the gods was nothing more than an obvious goal and they just wanted to accomplish something that would force the world to respect them.”
The Evil Spirit black market had been destroyed.
The Hidden Cloud’s never-ending circle had been broken and it had fallen apart.
But.
It still wasn’t over.
“So to them, the Hidden Cloud and its billion accounts were no more than a test,” I said.
“If so, the data scientist will keep going. Until their creation is recognized by the world. And they are apparently willing to trigger the Calamity in the process.”
Revenge against the gods had been just one method of proving themselves.
That had failed, but they would just try another idea now. Like someone starting to draw with a red crayon, not liking how it looked, and switching to a yellow one.
What would happen?
What accomplishment would rival the Calamity, that manmade disaster which would destroy the human race? I couldn’t even imagine in which direction to focus our defenses.
“The data scientist will begin something else soon,” said Anastasia. “No, they may have already begun on their next plan.”
“…”
“Never let your guard down. You need to be ready. …I guess that’s the takeaway from this.”
[crucial notice] Conclusion [on the pinup board]
This is what truly scares me.
The ability to suppress overwhelming influence, near-unlimited wealth, direct combat ability on the level of a natural disaster, and the infectiousness of an Archenemy. Those with great power hate losing their power because they know just how painful it was to gather it. Holding back is simple. There are countless methods: negotiation, threats, persuasion, compromise, etc.
But he alone is different.
If you include the Bright Cross as a previous example, I find it hard to believe this was a simple coincidence.
Amatsu Satori.
The massive Hidden Cloud and its more than one billion accounts were lost, but perhaps that was a small price to pay for reaching a conclusion on him.
He is a destroyer.
If he feels it is the right thing to do and can protect the people close to him, he will not hesitate to destroy even humanity’s history and civilization.
I am registering him as a top priority individual: an Over Enemy.
I must recalculate his influence on the plan.
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