NOVEL WEB Book 8: Chapter 3
Unidentified intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms?
As in…aliens?
“Eh? Huh?”
This was supposedly the answer I had been hoping for. I had supposedly escaped that state of craving for information like tropical fish moving their mouths and gills for the air pumped in by the fish tank.
Yet now I felt like I had a fist-sized rock stuck in my throat.
I couldn’t swallow it.
I just couldn’t.
This wasn’t about whether I liked it or not. I had been hit by something so far beyond anything I expected that I could only stare in confusion.
“What the hell? You mean an Archenemy that looks that way, right???”
“No.”
“But there’s no way I can accept this! Sure, I’ve run into a Valkyrie and a Demon Lord, but this is entirely different, isn’t it!?”
“Some hobbyists who are intercepting the emergency radio channels have posted quotes and recordings to message boards and video sites. At the very least, the police and medical personnel appear to be calling them aliens or extraterrestrials.”
What was going on?
We’d been through a lot already, like the extreme moral hazard called the Calamity and Absolute Noah created to escape that. But this? It was so insane and unrealistic it felt like the gears filling the underside of the world were audibly crumbling away.
“Fugu.” Ayumi had been directly attacked, but she took a more rational stance than me. “There’s no point in continually asking about something you can’t bring yourself to understand. Let’s just say someone is calling these things aliens and leave it at that. Think of it as a codename and worry about what they actually are later.”
She tended to take the simpler route, but it helped at times like this. When she didn’t understand something, she could just file it under the “I don’t understand this” category.
“Okay, I get it… So next problem: it’s the police or the JSDF who have sealed the city off, not the aliens?”
It still felt weird using that name myself, but Maxwell was quick to respond.
“Sure. It is growing more accepted that the intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms have an excellent sensory deception effect on the surface of their bodies. Simply put, they are effectively invisible. If they are allowed out, there will be no stopping them, but capturing them all individually is not feasible since there is still no known way of detecting them using cameras, sensors, radars, military dogs, or whatever else.”
“They use weird patterns to mess with your mind’s recognition, right? But you’re saying mechanical cameras don’t work either?”
“Sure. There are reports saying cameras work at first, but it seems they can alter those patterns at will. In other words, they can learn and constantly produce new patterns. We should assume they have reached the level where they can fool not just human eyes but mechanical analysis as well.”
We lived in an age where you could easily buy masks and sunglasses meant to hide you from facial recognition if you hated big data, but this was worse even than that.
Cameras had wavelengths and speeds they worked best at. For example, if they created images out of reflected microwaves and ultrasonic waves, they could ignore the darkness but could not capture color. Similarly, keeping the shutter open for high sensitivity meant they could not capture objects moving at high speed.
Those boomerangs sent crop circle patterns across their frog-like skin and took advantage of the weak points of the various devices used to detect them so they could “disappear” from view.
“So they gave up on capturing them individually and instead sealed off the area where they knew the so-called aliens were, huh? And then they give themselves a wider area than that to feel safe.”
It sounded logical, but really was not. If no one could find those things, they had no proof all of them were inside that area.
“The off-limits area appears to be growing as time passes,” said Maxwell.
“So no one’s confident of their calculations concerning that, huh? If anything, it’s probably meant to put everyone at ease by setting up a barrier that defines their space as ‘safe’.”
I couldn’t believe it.
Those dry brown boomerangs could crawl around on their own and who even knows how many were out there. At 150cm, they were at the upper limit even for larger breeds of dogs. You could only call them “beasts” at that point. I hated the idea of so many being out there and it was creepy how they had proven their chaotic potential by shutting down the 23 wards with their mere presence. Since that one had hidden in the darkness and leaped at us without even trying to talk it out, they seemed completely different from a Zombie like Ayumi or a Vampire like Erika. Of course, it was possible they were sending out desperate warnings using IR or ultrasonic waves that humans could not detect, but that honestly seemed unlikely.
Creeeeak!!
The office’s ceiling – no, the entire tower – groaned.
“Maxwell, I have to know. You say the aliens are filling the city and harming people and the humans are using the police and JSDF to seal everything off. Then what about the broadcast tower? Is it in trouble due to the normal storm instead of some kind of plan!?”
“Details are difficult to come by with so much confusion in the information, but according to multiple live online news broadcasts, the Tokyo Skytool is tilting northeast at a maximum of about three degrees. With the emergency power and all other disaster-prevention equipment knocked out, my guess is it could not handle the violent winds from the extraordinary bomb cyclone.”
“I’m having a hard time trusting those sources right now!”
“The major civilian satellite image services and various press companies are being pressured to keep everything hidden, so they are no use. But it is primetime, so despite the chaos, they are airing a special on ‘one little trick’ for improving your yakiniku sauce. The Tokyo studio and broadcast station should be unusable, so they appear to be airing prerecorded footage using a regional branch. Anything that requires the Skytool is off the air.”
“What kind of monster tells that to people who’ve been stuck inside an elevator without a bite to eat, Maxwell? Ahhh, I’m starving.”
But anyway, three degrees, huh? That might not seem like much when you think of a 45-degree set square or a 180-degree protractor, but you can’t forget that the Skytool was 650m tall. Once it lost its balance, it would collapse all at once.
“Whether or not they have successfully sealed the city off is questionable enough given how little information there is and how paranoid everyone is being, but the discourse has grown even more out of control thanks to a third-rate sports paper revealing a request of silence sent to them by the government,” said Maxwell.
It made you wonder if that request for silence was meant to reduce or spread the chaos. I just hoped people did not start targeting some unrelated Archenemies because of it all.
“If this really is a disaster with no mastermind or grand ambitions behind it all, then this is basically a countdown to doom,” I said. “There’s no stopping it. And either way, we have to get out of this tower.”
“Sure.”
“Erika, Ayumi. That’s okay with you two, right?”
“Fugu.”
“Yes, but that elevator scares me, what with the snapping wires and falling elevators,” said Erika. “Are there stairs we could take instead?”
For that matter, what had happened in that elevator anyway?
Had the top of the tower twisted enough to damage the pulleys, or had the mysterious lifeforms carelessly touched them and gotten caught?
Well, it was dangerous no matter what had caused it. Using the elevators was not a good idea.
If there were stairs we could use, it would be best to do so.
“Maxwell, can you calculate how many steps there would be?”
“I can of course, but I do not recommend it. I doubt that is a useful task. It would be a very efficient way of reducing your motivation, but shall I continue?”
Tokyo Hour was a little over 300m, and they gave out a prize for taking the stairs all the way up and down, right? The Skytool was more than twice that, so did they do the same?
Did they not have an escape tool like that synthetic fiber tube that let you slide down from the school hallway? Or did those have a height limit? And did the time it took to ride it down take into account that you would be running around in a panic if there was a fire?
“Do not worry, user. You are on the general viewing deck, which is not at the very top. It is only about 450m from the ground. That lets you take about a third off of the calculation. Hooray.”
“If that’s the most comforting thing all your processing power could come up with, then I’m going to assume this route is a living hell.”
I was still in my teens, but I was seriously worried that I was going to wear out my knees today. But delaying the inevitable would not change anything. In fact, if it was going to take hours to walk down, then the tower could always fall over before we reached the ground. We already knew the elevators were falling, the viewing deck’s reinforced glass had shattered, and the entire tower was tilting, so anything could happen.
I breathed a soft sigh.
“Search for information on hiking, trekking, or anything else really. Just find the best walking methods and tools for keeping the burden off your legs. And I’ll let you see this office, so highlight anything in here that could be used as a weapon against that sticky alien.”
“Their physiology, instincts, objectives, and level of intelligence are all unknown, but carrying a weapon could communicate hostile intent to them,” warned Maxwell. “That will needlessly put them on their guard.”
Was I starting to think the same way as the Bright Cross that had insisted on oppressing the Archenemies? But I didn’t have the guts to walk around unarmed and cheerfully talk to 150cm sticky creatures that I couldn’t detect even when they right in front of my face. It may have been a surprise attack, but they had knocked down a Zombie who had 10 times the muscular strength of a human. In the worst case, a hit from them would be like getting hit by a car.
So.
I borrowed a thin synthetic staff jacket from the office wall, tied the sleeves as grips, and tied off the bottom to make a large bag. The weapon was complete after I tossed in three cans of coffee that were chilling in the fridge. Those boxy bottles of tea would have been nastier, but this gave me a simple morning star I could swing around by the sleeves. And if I never had to use it, we could always share the contents to quench our thirst. After all, the emergency stairway was long and we would badly want some hydration along the way.
“Um, what will you two do?” I asked my sisters. “Do you have a favorite weapon?”
That was not the question I wanted to ask the girls in my family. What, had I traveled to another world where I was trying to sell some steel swords? I wasn’t ready to die and take that kind of journey quite yet.
“Fuguu. Handmade weapons might be too fragile to be useful. They’d break the second we swung them with our full strength.”
“And while we might have good night vision, we’re up against something that can mess with our recognition even in the dark. With a sharp blade or a ranged projectile, we could easily end up attacking each other or trip and stab ourselves in the gut.”
“Do you think I’m some kind of clumsy girl who trips over her own feet?”
“Of course not. I’m worried about myself here.”
Having 10 or 20 times the strength of a human was not always a good thing. I was getting the feeling they really could cause a handgun to go off unexpectedly by squeezing the grip too hard. I really wanted something to protect my fists, but they must have known the best way to use their Archenemy bodies. Forcing them to do things my way would only trip them up.
Creeeeeeak, groaned the entire space around us in the dark.
“Maxwell, we’re going to leave the office now, but can you stay connected to my phone?”
“Sure. The online environment remains intact; it is simply rejecting any connections not using the emergency tags for the police and firefighters. I have already acquired the key data from this computer, so I can remain connected with just your phone. The cable connection no longer serves any purpose beyond charging the battery.”
The charge was at 68%. That was a fair amount for such a short time. The battery had not deteriorated either, so I could trust the display. It would last a while.
“Okay, then it’s time for Round 2.”
“Understood.”
There were aliens who could mess with our recognition to disappear from our vision and there was a bomb cyclone powerful enough to knock over a broadcast tower. Now, which one was scarier?
We started off quietly.
I touched the office’s doorknob and gently turned it.
At the very least, this was a worst case scenario where the door or wall had bent too much for it to open. But it was too soon to relax. If our estimations were correct, that thing had escaped from the office using this door. We no longer had that temporary safe zone. We had no idea when a sticky thing with frog-like skin would attack. I aimed my phone’s light around, but didn’t notice anything. And if we used up too much time being cautious, we could get caught in the collapse of the entire Skytool.
We had to be cautious but quick.
If we tilted the balance too far in either direction, it was all over.
“Looks like some windows broke elsewhere too,” my vampire sister whispered in my ear.
I looked around and realized the flow of the wind had changed from before and the blowing rain seemed stronger.
Was that small shards of glass crunching below our feet? The floor was soaked and slipping would likely mean getting very bloody.
“Ayumi, stay away from the windows.”
“Onii-chan, do you think I’m a clumsy girl too?”
I only meant that the blowing wind did not just come in from outside. It sometimes blew back out like a vacuum cleaner sucking things out. Plus, we did not know where those boomerang-shaped aliens were. If one suddenly tackled us from behind, there would be no recovering from it.
“Idiots tend to be clumsy because they smugly refuse to listen to the warnings other people give them,” said the AI.
“Fugu!? Maxwell!!”
“No, no. I am merely using my language assist functionality based on my observations of my user, but did I not express his thoughts properly here? (・ω・)?”
“So this was all an indirect attack from Onii-chan, was it!?”
“Let’s not turn this into an ultra-heavy case study of future social problems like the responsibility for the actions of lifeless AIs being sent straight to their owners! By which I mean, I’m innocent!!”
That wasn’t so bad, but if Maxwell did that on purpose, didn’t this count as the beginning of an AI rebellion!? If AIs started blowing up dams and industrial complexes using cyber-attacks of their own volition, and that same sliding responsibility scheme was used to determine who had started the war, it could easily start a worldwide Armageddon!
“Anyway, it’s time to escape. Go go♪（≧∇≦）☆”
“Don’t you have anything to say to me!? My brotherly dignity is hitting rock bottom as my little sister tugs on my hair here!”
Did she not know how precious a boy’s hair roots were? If my kind older sister hadn’t intervened, I would have had to aim for being one of those old Hollywood stars who somehow manage to look good despite being bald. Although I’d have to get plastic surgery to give myself an Italian skull shape to pull it off!
“Look, Ayumi-chan, I have barbecue flavor Tater Sticks,” said Erika.
“Grr, grr, grrr.”
“Oh, dear. I’ve opened the seal and everything. But if you don’t want them, I guess I’ll just have to throw them away.”
“Wait! Don’t waste the Tater Sticks!”
We had been stuck in the elevator without much of anything to eat or drink, but Ayumi still lost the instant she accepted those. On the other hand, Erika’s taste in snacks was more on the macaron and eclair end of things, so was she carrying those around as an emergency anti-Ayumi weapon?
Anyway, once Ayumi had calmed down, we could carefully make our way to the emergency stairs.
“Man, Tater Sticks are so good.”
“Is that so?”
“Here, Onii-chan. You can have this as a sign of us making up.”
There was nothing to make up for when it all came down to Maxwell’s conspiracy and the idiot’s misunderstanding, but whatever. Accepting rather than restarting the argument was the clever choice here. And when had they come out with a barbecue flavor? Tater Sticks came out with so many new flavors it was hard to keep up. Drool.
“Doesn’t this taste more like yakiniku sauce than barbecue sauce?” I asked. “Y’know, the Nibara brand.”
“Isn’t that how it always works? This is a minor difference compared to the vegetable rice cracker one that doesn’t taste at all like veggies.”
Yet again, you have shown how dumb you are, Ayumi. That doesn’t mean it’s vegetable flavored; it means it’s fried with vegetable oil. It’s supposed to taste mostly like salt.
The wind blew through and the floor was covered in glass shards and water, so we did our best to walk along by the light of my phone and arrived at a different metal door than the one to the elevator hall.
I aimed the light above the door and saw an emergency exit light that was not currently functioning.
“Yeah…looks like this is the emergency stairs.”
My hands were full holding my phone and the heavy staff jacket, so I let Ayumi turn the knob while she (for some reason) pressed against the wall next to the door like she was in a spy movie. She was going all in on this, but it made me think of a child wanting to hit the button at the bus stop.
Once she opened it and I shined the light in past her shoulder, all I saw were the stainless steel stairs given a coat of rustproof paint. These only led down, so just like with the elevator, there must have been separate stairs leading up to the special viewing deck.
Staring may not have helped, but I still froze in place with the light aimed at the next landing down.
I heard the disconcerting creaking of the tower, but I could not see any of those sticky things with crop circle patterns on their dry brown surface.
“Let’s get going then.”
“Fugu.”
It was hard to tell whether it was safe or not, but we slowly walked toward the stairs regardless. I could not help but shine the light more toward our feet than the way ahead. Those 150cm sticky boomerangs scared me, but tripping and spraining or breaking an ankle would be the worst. No one would come to save us.
One, two, three…ten, eleven.
“Eleven steps, huh? Then you turn around at the landing and take another eleven steps down to reach the next floor. Um, altogether that would be…”
“Warning,” said Maxwell. “You will not like the answer, so I do not recommend continuing this calculation.”
All this did was connect the surface to the general viewing deck, yet there were metal doors in places. They must have been locked because they would not budge.
“Are those maintenance doors for personnel?”
There had been nothing like that in the ordinary elevator shaft, but I doubted they were climbing and descending these stairs on a daily basis. Was there a staff elevator that could stop partway up?
And.
Creeeeeeak, groaned the tower. It terrified me every time I heard it. And just as I was thinking that…
“That’s odd,” said Erika. “The creaking isn’t stopping this time.”
“Wah, wah, wah!” shouted Ayumi. “Are we in trouble!? Fuguu! We need to get out of this tower right away!”
Ayumi tried to charge forward even more than before, so I quickly grabbed at her arm.
Just then, I thought I heard a cracking sound.
Then a thick breaking sound burst out from below. Followed by a vibration. This was not the same as the entire tower being pummeled in the wind like before. This shaking was much closer, much more vivid, and much more a chain reaction of destruction.
I aimed my phone’s light at the floor below.
All I saw was darkness.
“That was…the stairs.”
I finally realized what had happened.
“The stainless steel stairs are falling!? If we’re caught in this, it’ll be a freefall to the bottom!”
I didn’t know whether they were held in place by bolts or metal stakes or what, but the twisting of the entire tower was causing them to pop out. Some piece partway up had come out and the ones above it had started coming out in a chain reaction. Right up to the one just below us.
There was nothing but empty space below.
We had no choice but to head back up.
As my sisters and I turned around and ran up the stairs, I felt a sinking feeling. The thick bursting sounds surrounded us. By the time we reached the landing, the entire floor was tilted diagonally. I looked back in shock to see the stairs we had just climbed were no longer there. Were the landing and 11 stairs above them a single set? That whole piece must have been scraping along the wall as it fell because I could hear the screaming of metal and see orange sparks.
“Satori-kun, please don’t stop moving! Hurry!!”
“Kh, I know!”
I did, but still!
I really should have kept track of how many floors down we had gotten. I couldn’t think about keeping a reasonable pace now. We could only sprint full-speed up these seemingly endless stairs. My thighs were feeling worn out in no time. How much further was it? Was it the next turnaround? Surely we didn’t have more than 10 more stories to go!?
“Fugu.”
“No, Ayumi. Ignore those metal doors!”
“But if we could open one…”
“We have no idea where they lead! If it’s only a small supply closet and you turn back around to find the landing and stairs have fallen into the abyss, then it’s all over!”
I was scrambling as fast as I could while I shouted. I couldn’t think about looking good at a time like this. My short-sleeved jacket felt so heavy while wet. Should I have removed it beforehand? We ran past landing after landing to rush up the stairs that never seemed to end, but then the endpoint finally came into view.
The metal door was still sitting partway open.
That was the entrance to the general viewing deck.
“Bwah!”
My little sister in the white shorts had passed by me partway up, so I half-collapsed out onto the wet floor in last place. Erika reached out her right arm in the torn sleeve and pulled me on in.
The landing directly behind me had seemed so sturdy, but it vanished into the abyss. I aimed my phone’s light back there, but there was nothing at all. The emergency stairs were no longer an option.
We only had the disconcerting creaking of the tower for company.
We had survived, but that was all. The Skytool’s tilt was getting worse. Next time, the floor might fall out from under us, a gas leak in a restaurant could cause a fire, or the ceiling panels could collapse on top of us. In the worst case, the entire tower could break apart and fall over. We could no longer assume our safety just because so many calculations had gone into the architecture. There was no predicting what would come next. Not even a few seconds into the future.
“What…do we do?” I asked while still collapsed on the wet floor.
Waiting out the storm on the general viewing deck had stopped being viable a while ago. At this rate, the Skytool would probably collapse before then. But what else could we do? The elevator and elevator shaft were too dangerous and the emergency stairs had just vanished into the abyss, but what other way was there to descend the 450m from the general viewing deck?
The creaking sound squeezed at our hearts.
“This may be the time for desperate measures.”
“Erika, do you have some kind of idea?”
“Fuguu. You aren’t thinking of spreading out that huge skirt and gliding down like a flying squirrel, are you?”
With an idiot, it could be hard to tell how serious she was being with that question, so we decided to ignore her.
“There may still be a method left. But in this storm, it will require the powerful muscles of an Archenemy.”
“What is it?” I asked.
For some reason, Erika moved the slender arm extending from her torn sleeve to point out the broken window.
She wasn’t actually suggesting the flying squirrel plan, was she!?
I trembled in fear at the thought, but in a way, her plan may have been even more reckless.
“For example, what about the window washing gondola handing on the outside?”
You know how on stormy days the wire will bang against the metal flagpole in the schoolyard? I could hear that sound but 20 or 30 times worse from directly below.
“There it is, there it is, Satori-kun. That’s what I was talking about.”
Erika grabbed the metal edge of the viewing deck and leaned out through the shattered window while sounding as delighted as a child, but…
“That is!? So you’re saying you plan to climb down while clinging to that!? That’s blowing around way more than a playground swing!”
“Vampires have 20 times the strength of a human and Zombies have 10 times, so we just have to hold you tight in our arms to support you. Kyah☆”
“A-also, don’t window washing gondolas use electricity to move?”
“There are multiple varieties, but based on the zoomed-in footage from your phone, the wire reel is on the gondola rather than the roof,” said Maxwell. “With that design, it should have a safety device allowing you to release the wire with a manual lever and descend to the ground yourself. Searching manufacturer website…”
Wait, Maxwell! You’re supposed to reject Erika’s idea here. Why would you support her!?
“Given the wind’s direction, it will be blowing the gondola against the tower wall,” continued the AI. “It is making a lot of noise, but it should not be shaking all that much.”
“Hey, try to read my mind better next time, you stupid AI! Arrrgh!”
“I take issue with being called stupid for finding the correct answer. (・Д・) Hmph.”
“Staying anywhere in the tower would be dangerous, so isn’t it best to head outside and find a safe route even if it requires some brute force?” asked Erika. “That’s why I support the gondola plan.”
“I’m fine with that too,” said Ayumi.
“That idiot is all talk, so I recommend ignoring him and continuing with the plan,” said Maxwell.
Oh, no. At this rate, I really was going to be stuck out there in the raging storm on a window washing gondola blowing wildly while we descended the rain-slick wall. Majority rule during emergencies could be scary, but doing something just because the clever machine said so seemed just as scary to me. I mean, how would this ever work? It was about 30 meters down. Use your heads, everyone! Think!!
“Complain if you want, Onii-chan, but do you have a better idea?”
“…”
“Oh, you don’t have to force yourself to come up with something. Just leave this in the capable hands of your big sister. …Okay, Maxwell, it would help a lot if you could tell us when to jump out based on the wind direction.”
“That would be now. Like, right this instant.”
Ayumi and Erika each grabbed one of my shoulders.
“No, wait! This is a bad idea! A really bad ideaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
They had 10 and 20 times the strength of a human, so there was no way I could hold my ground. Waaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!
To be honest, none if it felt real.
That was thanks to the storm.
It was almost like having a thick translucent plastic sheet pressed over my face. I couldn’t even open my eyes or breathe properly. I couldn’t tell right from left or even up from down.
But Maxwell’s simulation must have paid off because the wind happened to be blowing inwards such that it pushed us back toward the tower as we jumped out. It also helped that Erika had taken the staff jacket I had picked up, wrapped it around her hand, and then grabbed the gondola wire running vertically by.
I heard the sound of scraping cloth and smelled the stench of melting plastic.
And the next thing I knew…
“H-hey, you’re kidding, right?”
“And we’ve arrived. Wow, it really is pouring out here, isn’t it?”
“We really landed right in the gondola. Ah, ahhh!? Now we can’t get back up!!”
I looked regretfully back up from the wobbling window washing gondola just as a gust of wind slammed into a glass wall and shattered it. I crouched down and covered my head on reflex…but the shower of glass never arrived. The wind must have blown it to the side.
“Ugh, I feel like I’m going to drown just standing here. Onee-chan, is this the manual lever?”
“Even I will be mad if you pull too hard and break it, okay?”
Ayumi gave a casual yank on the lever and…whoa! The lock really came undone and the gondola started to slowly descend!!
“Come here, Satori-kun. A sudden gust of wind could shake us side to side, so come to your big sister here. You don’t want to be thrown out of the gondola, do you?”
“W-wah!?”
“Hee hee hee. There, there♪ If only you always let me spoil you like this.”
Oh, no. At this rate, it would look like I had a serious sister complex and was entirely useless in an emergency, but what was I supposed to do while the wind tossed around the gondola at 400m above the ground? That’s just too much!!
And then…
“Look, it’s the moon.”
Ayumi suddenly spoke up. Without the large nametag of her usual tank top, her chest was in a fairly risqué situation at the moment. And Mr. Chicken here looked over while clinging to my soaked older sister’s chest. Ayumi was right. Was this what you called a sunshower…or a moonshower in this case? The round moon was perfectly visible despite the blowing rain.
And.
Was it because of the moonlight?
No, was it because my phone and the moon provided multiple light sources at once?
I once more saw a texture like dry brown frog skin with crop circle patterns dancing atop it. I saw a 150cm mass with a boomerang-like shape. If Maxwell’s report was correct, then this was an intelligent extraterrestrial lifeform. It was surprisingly close by. The luster was clinging to the Skytool’s outer wall right next to the window washing gondola that was slowly lowering while wobbling side to side.
However, that was not the most shocking part.
They were everywhere.
A great number of those sticky things fully covered the wall.
Before I could swallow a gasp, Erika covered my mouth by holding me to her chest.
“(Quiet.)”
The Vampire whispered sweetly in my ear while I was on the verge of panic.
“(They don’t seem to have noticed we can see them. Since they aren’t moving to attack, we should be able to get by if we pretend not to notice. But if we freak out, don’t you think they might all attack at once?)”
She was right.
Now that she mentioned it, the sticky boomerang thing on the whiteboard in the restaurant office had only attacked Ayumi when she moved in close to see what it was. If we hadn’t noticed it, it may have just stayed there on the whiteboard.
I swung my phone’s light from the tower and into the sky before slowly shutting it off. Erika and I actually turned our backs toward the wall covered in those sticky things. The gondola had a weight limit, so if they all jumped on, the wires might snap.
“(Huh, where they there the whole time?)” I asked. “(Were they covering the other side of the glass while we were looking out from the viewing deck?)”
“(I’m not so sure,)” said Erika. “(Their patterns mess with our ability to recognize them, so I doubt light can pass right through them.)”
“(Meaning?)”
“(They might be focused on this one side of the tower. Although if they’re doing it to intentionally overbalance the tower, that’s a problem in its own right.)”
“(?)”
She seemed to be making more progress than me despite no help from a phone or program.
But anyway.
“(Not letting them know we’ve noticed them is of the utmost importance. It would be best not to tell Ayumi-chan. It will look more natural that way.)”
This was just like the urban legend of the Man Under the Bed.
If they realized you had noticed, it was all over.
I used the black glass panel of my phone screen as a mirror to check over my shoulder. With the moonlight as the only light source now, the dry brown with crop circle patterns was vanishing from the wall.
I took a deep breath.
The disaster prevention equipment did not work while the power was out and we were in the middle of this extraordinary bomb cyclone. That was enough of a threat, but there was apparently more. How many of those supposed aliens were covering the tower from top to bottom? Like the straw that breaks the camel’s back, their weight was no laughing matter.
Even from close up, I couldn’t detect any breathing, smell, or heat from them. It was like facing an incorporeal ghost.
Even now, the window washing gondola (which had to weigh more than 100kg) was banging against the broadcast tower wall, but those things did not so much as stir. What the hell? It’s true one had knocked Ayumi down, but until now, they had not seemed as dangerous as a tiger or a lion. And now they had these ridiculous numbers. They had no hunger or survival instincts. They were not even afraid of getting hurt. I had no way to predict what they would do, so I felt a damp chill soaking into my spine. It felt like having my arms and legs strapped to a bizarre cult’s altar and hearing some mysterious chanting. I had no way of knowing if they were preparing me as a sacrifice or getting ready to release me.
Besides.
Why were they ignoring us while we attempted this reckless escape? We had nowhere to run on this narrow gondola, so they could defeat us without having to worry about the Zombie or Vampire using their full strength.
Or were we not their target?
Could they be after the Tokyo Skytool itself?
I glanced behind me using my phone’s blank screen and Erika gently stepped on my foot.
“(Satori-kun.)”
I knew what she meant. As natural as I tried to make the action, it wasn’t natural. I wasn’t struggling to get my soaked and broken phone to work, so it was weird to continue messing with the phone while the screen was off. I knew perfectly well what she meant, but if you could not worry about something just because you were told not to, then you should go to Hollywood and become a movie star. The more you knew you shouldn’t, the more your attention was tugged in that direction.
It wanted to control myself.
I wanted to suppress the fear.
This was probably how the Bright Cross soldiers and researchers had felt when they set cameras up around the city, dug a vast network of underground tunnels, and otherwise prepared for the trouble that “they knew” the Archenemies would cause. Knowing I was acting on the same level as them made me want to vomit, but I couldn’t completely stop the fear and impatience that grew all on its own.
Even though this was my own mind I was talking about.
So I kept doing it. Just like someone repeatedly checking the lock after parking their bicycle in front of a shop.
The one silver lining was how their wriggling presence distracted me from my fear of being on that window washing gondola blowing in the stormy night. If I hadn’t been aware of those things, I probably would have been clinging to Erika or Ayumi and screaming my head off.
But that’s aliens for you…I guess? They may not have known too much about how the humans of earth worked.
Or was it the opposite?
Were they trying their best to not let us notice they had noticed us? Not that we had any way of checking. It was hard to tell who was trying to fool who here.
“I still can’t see anything down below,” said Ayumi while dangerously leaning half her body over the railing despite the blowing rain.
Was she playing dumb, or did she have a talent for forgetting things? Either way, she could not have survived in the Bright Cross’s underground base with nothing but physical strength. She could be dumb, but she always worked hard to survive.
But…wait.
Hold on a second.
“You can’t see anything down there?”
“Yeah. I have good night vision, but it isn’t perfect. How about you, Onee-chan?”
“Unfortunately, while there is plenty of light, the storm is creating a curtain of water.”
…
Yes, that’s right.
The police or the JSDF had shut people out of the Tokyo city center and covered it in darkness to seal off the sticky boomerangs that could slip past our recognition using their weird patterns.
Then was this really over once we escaped the Tokyo Skytool?
In fact.
What were things like on the surface?
If there were that many aliens on the single broadcast tower, then how many were there in that dark world below?
The fear rose up within me.
It was like my stomach alone was pushing up to fight back as my body sank into the darkness. A scream threatened to escape from my throat and it took all my strength to push it back down into my warm stomach.
Shaking my head in protest was not going to change anything at this point. No electronic commands could reach the window washing gondola. That was why we had pulled the manual lever to slowly release the wire from the reel and let gravity take us down.
Now that it had started, going back up was no longer an option.
A change came over the powerful wind whirling around the area. Our gondola had finally lowered into the forest of buildings. The area around the Skytool was a surprisingly low-lying area, so the buildings were not very tall. That meant we had descended a good ways. I had so longed to reach the surface, but now it felt like sinking into the dark sea with concrete solidified around my hands and feet.
“I can see it,” said Ayumi. “Fuguu, I can see the wet ground.”
But was she seeing everything that was there? I didn’t know how it worked, but we really couldn’t see those things with just our eyes. Even if the ground looked peaceful, it could be covered in those 150cm sticky things like a marsh of bottomless sludge.
We had pressed the gun to our temple and pulled the trigger, but we were only now being faced with the result of that Russian roulette game. Opening or closing our eyes was not going to change what happened.
We sank.
We sank and sank and sank.
And then we heard an especially loud metallic clang.
“We’ve…arrived, haven’t we?”
Erika’s anticlimactic tone seemed to say it all.
This was not an asphalt road. It was the giant facility with a shopping mall and aquarium that covered the first five floors of the Skytool. We seemed to be on a large rooftop garden built atop that five-story structure. Grass and tiles covered that artificial land to create something like a park. We were on that hard tile.
The gondola had arrived and come to a stop almost too easily. I thought we might have crushed those sticky frog-skinned things and splattered their slime around or have them rush in at us from every direction, but…no?
The ground really was wide open? Or were they leaving us alone to test whether or not we had noticed them? I couldn’t exactly celebrate when I didn’t know that.
But there was no time for that regardless.
That was because of another sound altogether.
Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak.
The Skytool screamed just like before except far louder and heavier. I looked up without thinking and that was when it happened.
I felt a sharp pain in my cheek.
I rubbed it with the back of my hand and saw a red liquid mixed in with the rain.
“Satori-kun!?”
“Something’s, fugu, something’s falling!”
?
My sisters were panicking, but I wasn’t sure what had happened to me.
Both my ankles were tugged to the side.
No, was it the entire gondola that was tugged to the side? While I rolled across the wet tile, I saw the side of the gondola swinging like a playground swing or a Buddhist temple bell ringer.
“Onii-…!?”
There was no time to hear Ayumi’s cry to the end. She tugged on my arm so forcefully I thought she would dislocate my shoulder and I just barely avoided the mass of stainless steel.
That was not due to the wind.
Had the tower itself bent and swung the gondola around? The disconcerting creaking was still continuing. Burst screws and bolts must have been falling down because I saw orange sparks scattering on the tile. I couldn’t just focus on what was above us. The rain was blowing in from the side, so the tower’s wreckage could be blown right back at us like a boomerang.
Yes.
The fragments made as the Tokyo Skytool broke apart.
“It’s…falling.”
In other words.
In other words.
“The Skytool is falling!! Dammit, Maxwell, create a new stimulation task ASAP! Which way is it going to fall!?”
[Mobile Temp] Preparation Standards for Work in Elevated Areas [File 05]
Supervisors must ensure that all their personnel are familiar with and strictly obey the following rules. If any problems occur due to a failure to communicate, the legal department will place responsibility on the supervisor’s shoulders, so keep that in mind.
1. Safety equipment such as helmets and lifelines must be used and checked over by at least three people including the wearer.
2. Personnel may not bring personal items with them, including in pockets. All equipment necessary for work must be attached via safety belts and must only be used after confirming the safety net covers that area.
3. For screws, bolts, and other small equipment that cannot be attached via safety belts, confirm that the safety net covers that area, contact the ground team via radio to ensure no one has entered the estimated danger zone below, and only then remove them from the designated container with the utmost care.
Whether intentional or accidental, any personnel who violate the above rules will be immediately removed from the work site. Potential energy changes based on altitude. Do not forget how dangerous even the small screw or bolt in your hand can become if it falls from a height of 400-600 meters.
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