XCEL

“How long have I been sitting here?” Katsuro murmured. “Seven hours?! You’ve got to be kidding…”

The clinical glare of the lights overhead had worsened his headache the longer he looked at the page. He set down his pen, and rubbed his eyes free of the strain. You couldn’t blame him for losing track of time. Ever since the discovery, he’d been consumed by frenzy. Translating the walls of glyphs inside the tomb took time, but the sheer euphoria had overwritten any and all fatigue.

The armoured vans from the research headquarters arrived soon after Hayakawa made the call. They searched with floodlights and forensic teams, but all they were able to recover was the perfectly preserved corpse, and the strange ritual knife it held. A hammer made small work of the glass casing, but the shattered box mysteriously left no fragments. The body was removed and taken to another wing of the facility for further study.

A sharp twinge in his stomach reminded Katsuro he hadn’t eaten anything since midday. He’d organise and make sense of his rough translations in the morning. The quality of his work would suffer if he didn’t eat and rest. Once he’d organised the myriad loose sheets of paper strewn across his desk into his satchel, Katsuro stood and immediately winced. His back was just another reminder he wasn’t getting any younger. Leaving the inner chamber, two armed guards opposed Katsuro at the other end of the corridor.

The security detail was suspect. The guards outside wore ballistic armour, visors and carried semi-automatic rifles—he didn’t know which ones. Katsuro knew better than to question the people holding guns, but that didn’t stop him from wondering. His studio better resembled a prison cell, too. The walls were white and bare, save for the far end. The low-light photos of the tomb’s walls hung as reference material for him to translate. They’d taken a while to develop; he’d always cherished analogue photography, especially suited for the tomb’s darkness. The ritual knife sat on a pedestal in front of the desk. The bright lights were a hellish condition to work in. It made one lose all sense of time. He’d be glad to get a change of scene.

“You done yet?” One of the guards barked at him in Arabic, and Katsuro flinched.

“Um, not yet—” Though functionally fluent in writing and comprehension, Katsuro’s spoken Arabic was a little out of practice. His next sentence came with difficulty. “Near complete. I need more time for the—” He snapped his fingers, searching for the word— “translation.”

The guard’s lip curled. Katsuro frowned. Why the hurry? You couldn’t rush good research and expect good results. Then again, they were muscle. He didn’t expect them to understand, much less care.

“I want to go home. Tired,” Katsuro asserted as best he could—difficult, given how intimidated he felt. He pointed beyond the door. “You let me out?”

“You know the rules,” said the other guard. “The research material doesn’t leave this room.”

Katsuro nodded. That would certainly prevent him poring over the notes he’d made that day instead of getting much needed shut-eye, but at the same time—

“Why?”

The reply cracked like a whip. “Don’t ask questions. I dunno why, so don’t ask. Those were just our orders.”

Katsuro duly handed over his satchel.

One guard gave him a quick pat down with the back of his hands. “You’re clear to leave.” Swiping his card through the heavy metal door, it swung open. “Get moving.”

On the cusp of striding away, Katsuro paused when he heard footsteps from the other end. He spared a quick glance over one shoulder. Two women, clad in white laboratory detail, approached the pair of guards and began a hushed conversation in Arabic.

“When will it be finished?” One asked the guard.

A pause. “When does he want it done?”

“As soon as it will be useful… to him.”

Katsuro felt a bead of sweat trickle down past his right eye. Four pairs of eyes had trained on the back of his head. Avoiding suspicion, he hoped, he made haste, a brisk stride down the clinical corridors. He’d only managed to catch snippets, but those worried him still. He’d never anticipated such tight security. Yes, the discovery was important, but no excavation he’d ever been on had ever been kept so far under wraps.

JPRO, the Japanese Parapsychological Research Organisation. Katsuro had never heard of it before they had reached out to him. It turned out he was just out of touch; one internet search later revealed it had been set up over fifteen years ago. The name betrayed their specialism: research into fringe psychiatric conditions, connections between the disorders in the mind, and the occult. They had facilities established across the Japanese mainland. Their research was heavily accredited by many chief medical authorities, and the company had gathered significant funding, including government contracts! No-one seemed to agree on who the company figurehead was, either. As far as he understood, the company was led by a board of scientific directors. Katsuro recalled three names: Chisori, Nori, Tekkori. Oddly convenient naming convention aside, none of them held top title. Research wasn’t their only exploit. They had opened mental hospitals and care homes across the country.

Clearly the company had decided to branch out its philanthropic exploits lately. Either that, or whoever had decided on funding his project had a pet interest in Egyptology.

Why else would they have reached out to him?

At first, it had just been an offer of sponsorship, that quickly turned into JPRO taking over the entire project. Katsuro didn’t want to argue. This was his lucky break, after all. The last thing he wanted to do was open his mouth and risk ruining his chances.

The dawn of the new day brought promise of more exciting discovery.

Katsuro was scanned and patted down on entry, and all his belongings were thoroughly searched. Following retrieval, the artefacts had been retrieved, the expedition was over. The tomb had been resealed, and the camp packed up by the following morning. The drive back to the facility in Cairo was agonising. Katsuro still remembered the twitching in his fingers, grin pinned to his cheeks.

“Anything to declare?”

The guards had changed from yesterday.

“No. I have nothing,” Katsuro responded in broken Arabic. He raised empty hands. “Can I have research back?”

What danger did a middle-aged researcher like him pose? Katsuro grew weary of all this security theatre already.

“Alright.”

One guard opened the door. The other handed Katsuro back his satchel, and the man made a beeline for the inner chamber door. He’d be grateful to be free of this suffocating scrutiny. Shutting the door behind him, relief shot through his veins like morphine. The sight of those glyphs once more was a comfort. The transcription, at least, was already complete. All that was left for him to do now was make sense of it. It’d take multiple parses. Rough translations of long-forgotten script never make sense the first time through, after all.

Katsuro sat himself down and shook his pen. The implement creaked in complaint, faced with a long day ahead.

Some hours later, Katsuro’s hand had grown so sweaty he couldn’t maintain good grip on his pen. A shiver ran down his spine, cheeks tingling and clammy. The man dragged fingers through greying hair, a horrified gaze down at his page. His focus had been all over the place, his eyes darting left and right. He hadn’t thought much of the snippets of conversation he’d overheard the previous night, but the mounting context had festered into a wicked terror. Katsuro felt his breathing seize up. His blood ran cold in light of his crucial mistake.

He should have never opened that tomb.

The Excel Ritual was the Banished Disciple’s true secret. Despite numerous neuroscientific breakthroughs, parts of the brain's true function remained misunderstood. The ritual all centred around an organ called the pineal gland. Thought responsible for hormone secretion, the small organ served as the linchpin between the body and the soul. The knife was crucial. Piercing the pineal gland was stated to link two disparate parts of the brain, merging the conscious and the unconscious mind, giving access to a limitless source of energy.

The carvings continued on to state that this power, once in the hands of man, had caused the near-decimation of an entire society; the fall of a mighty king, and a war that had claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Katsuro reverently cradled the Ascension Blade in both hands. This relic had been shattered. The blade curved like a snake, the metal a mirrored surface so clear he could see his own reflection undisturbed. A jagged crack split it lengthways, deliberate sabotage. A complementary message had been scratched into the shattered edge.

These runes were incomplete. The runes on how to complete this ritual must have been, “on the other half of this blade,” Katsuro murmured, the rest of his train of thought spilling from dry lips.

Why did JPRO, a psychiatric research firm, take interest in uncovering an tomb that, by all accounts, only existed through inference? They wouldn’t, unless…

“…they knew.”

Katsuro looked over his shoulder. His eyes whipped to the corners of his secluded enclosure, checking for the blinking red dots of security cameras. There were none, none that he could see.

“They needed me.” Unaware, or perhaps not caring that he could be overheard, he started voicing his rapidly growing paranoia out loud. “There’s another half of this blade somewhere out there. Whoever owned it knew about this ritual, but clearly not enough.”

He stood. The metal legs of his chair screamed against the floor. He paced back and forth. “They knew it existed, but didn’t know where to look.” Katsuro chewed on his fingernails. “They needed me,” he repeated. “They needed to get their hands on this blade… but only when it was useful to them.”

A deranged grin warped his features. He stared ahead into the white void. “Just taking the blade wouldn’t be enough. They needed to know the truth of the ritual. Only I know enough to translate these runes.”

The extent of the truth hit him like a freight train.

“They were after that power.”

All doubt about the legend had evaporated. Before, he had convinced himself the glowing of the handle on the door of the tomb was a trick of the torchlight, or late-night delirium. Hayakawa reportedly couldn’t remember what he saw. Now, however, with the extent of the security detail onsite, he was more than willing to believe in the supernatural. Whoever cast JPRO’s lengthy shadow evidently did.

Whatever power this ritual bestowed, he could not let this knife fall into their hands.

He set the blade down on its pedestal, picking up his pen. Until night fell, the remaining hours in that room were filled with Katsuro Harigane fervently scribbling into his notebook. What he now wrote was functional gibberish. The one he intended this for would surely work out how to read them.

His heart ached with the silent apologies he muttered with each and every symbol. They didn’t deserve to be involved like this, but he had no other choice.

“All good?” One guard asked.

Katsuro had emerged from the smaller room, drenched in sweat. Fanning himself with one hand, he nodded.

“In there... um... air conditioning!” He pointed back over his shoulder with one thumb. “Very too hot.”

“We’ll take a look.”

Both guards approached inner door. Both saw the runes still intact on the walls, and the knife back in its proper place. One had a hand on the door, about to go in and investigate, when Katsuro spoke again.

“Also, I see something… before.”

The guards turned.

Katsuro paused, tapping his chin. “One hour. I get drink of water, yes?” He mimed drinking. “Hard work. Thirsty.”

They seemed to be following so far. That was good.

“I see man in black clothes open door.” He tapped two fingers against the side of his neck, thinking. “Service corridor door.”

Katsuro then pointed at the guards’ uniforms. “He not wear that.”

Both exchanged worried looks.

“Service corridor go to the air conditioning, yes?” Katsuro continued. “Access hatch. Control panel. I—” He fought for a moment to recall more vocabulary— “I see schematic when I first come here. Reception show me. Is that why so hot?”

The worry turned to rage.

“Why didn’t you say that before?” One cried.

Katsuro took a step back, eyes wide.

“Was anyone else there?” Asked the second.

“No!” Katsuro put up his hands. “No-one… No-one there. He not see me.”

One guard swore loudly. For the first time, Katsuro was grateful he wasn’t fluent enough to understand the nuance.

“Ali!” This, to his colleague. “We’ve got a possible breach! Call headquarters and sound the alarm!”

“Got it.” Ali, pulled his radio from his belt. “HQ, this is Gamal. Any communication from Maintenance within the last hour?”

A pause. All three men held their breath.

“Negative, Gamal.”

Ali was the one to swear this time. “Sound the alarm! An hour ago, the researcher saw unauthorised personnel enter the service corridor. We have a possible breach in the West Wing, with access to the central containment chamber. I repeat, a breach!”

“Out of the way!” The first guard pushed Katsuro out the way as he made haste to unlock the door. The lock opened and the metal door swung open. Both guards made their way into the hall, just as a loud alarm sounded. The bright white lights overhead cut, and another set cast a menacing red over the corridor.

Katsuro called after them. “You search me, yes?”

Ali was about to double back, but the first called after him. “We don’t have time! We’ve got to secure the building!”

“Researcher!” Ali pointed at Katsuro. “Stay in that room until the all clear! You are prohibited from leaving this area, understand?”

With the alarm still blaring overhead, the two armed guards turned and ran off down the corridor, their combat boots hitting the floor in synchronised thuds. Katsuro was left standing there, bewildered, his ears ringing.

That worked better than he thought it would. He looked from left to right. More footsteps echoed from around the corner. He had to make his move, and fast.

Five more armed guards, previously manning the secure entrance, clattered down the corridor. One held an arm out to Katsuro. The rest continued on. “The lockdown alarm has sounded!” He shouted. “What are you doing?”

Katsuro stopped jogging, his breathing laboured. “I finish work, when alarm sound! Other guards tell me, “evacuate!” Sorry. My Arabic not good. Where exit?”

The dim red lights proved in Katsuro’s favour. The guard that stopped him didn’t see the strap of his satchel over one shoulder. The man pointed down the corridor, where there stood a door marked by the familiar green sign. “Get moving!”

A hurried thanks, and Katsuro bolted down the corridor. The guard ran off to catch up with his troop. Slamming his weight against the push handle, the door gave way. Carried by wings of desperation, Katsuro flew down the corridor, following the green signs until he burst out of the facility and into the cool night air. The cover of darkness mostly made up for his innate lack of stealth. Katsuro soon spied a queue of other personnel exiting the compound in single file. Slipping underneath a fence, he joined them midway, and did his best to calm his heaving chest. Eventually, he was escorted out with the others by the guards at the perimeter, and told to go home.

The walk back to his hotel was an anxiety trip he’d rather not relive. He’d never had to look over his shoulder so frequently. Good thing was, he hadn’t been followed. Locking and double bolting his hotel room door, Katsuro felt his knees give out. He slumped down against the door, and sat there for a while, panting.

There had been no intruder. The lack of correspondence from the service and maintenance division was just a helpful coincidence. Katsuro could not believe just how lucky he had been. The metal of the ascension blade gleamed when he opened his satchel, reflecting the overhead light onto the pages of his notebook. He tossed both unceremoniously to the floor. He needed to get them far away from Cairo, as soon as possible.

The cover he had created for himself wouldn’t hold for long.

Just then, he spotted a small cardboard box by the far end of his bed. Still filled with packing peanuts, it’d be perfect. Shoving both items inside, Katsuro wrapped the box in copious brown tape. The next he knew, he strode toward the Embassy.

All he hoped was that he hadn’t missed the last collection that day.