“Haa…”
Ryoko Kusakabe sighed as she leaned on her crutch, carefully lifting her newly casted leg onto the bed before letting her whole body collapse onto it.
In the end, everything still followed the same old cycle: a spirit appears, then vanishes.
Although no combat operation was carried out this time, they at least managed to withstand the aftershock and prevented the city from being affected.
The citizens also evacuated in an orderly manner.
For the residents of Tenguu City, this had long become just another part of daily life.
To students, the alarm was practically a heavenly announcement of half a day off, while office workers had to drag their work into underground shelters and still meet their performance quotas on time.
…If spacequakes were merely ordinary natural disasters, all of this would actually seem rather commonplace.
If Ryoko Kusakabe were just an average citizen, she might not get the half-day off, but at the very least she wouldn’t be here, frustrated and punching pillows on a hospital bed.
…Spirits.
The calamity that descended upon the world thirty years ago.
Thirty years may not sound long, but it is more than enough time to raise several generations.
From birth to adulthood, driven by the sense of justice she was born with, she graduated from the National Defense Academy and was originally supposed to be assigned to logistics in the Ground Self-Defense Force.
Yet because she was told she possessed “certain qualifications,” she underwent testing to see if she could become a wizard, and thus came into contact with the truth of this phenomenon.
Back when she was still young and easily fired up, Ryoko had once questioned her superiors like a partner of justice:
“Why do we have to disguise the spacequakes caused by spirits as natural disasters?
If we mobilized the military might of every country, even spirits wouldn’t be that hard to deal with!”
That was what the old her firmly believed.
No senior bothered to explain it to her at the time, but afterward, Ryoko gradually came to understand.
Humanity’s enemies were not only the spirits; there were also fellow humans.
Even among the Self-Defense Forces, organizations created with the sole purpose of killing spirits, there was infighting.
How much worse, then, was the gulf between nations, between people?
It was a barrier that could never be crossed.
And even if the existence of spirits were made public, what then?
Would it be to showcase the incompetence of the Self-Defense Forces?
To prove that humanity had fought spirits for so long yet still couldn’t solve the problem?
In that case, hatred would simply shift toward those of them who were fighting the spirits.
There was even the possibility that ordinary people burning with vengeance would refuse to enter shelters when the spacequake alarm sounded, choosing instead to throw their lives away for nothing.
It had to be concealed…
Even though evacuation measures these days were nearly perfect, five or ten years ago, there were still people who lost loved ones to spacequakes and had their families torn apart.
…Yet if we must conceal it, why not conceal it more thoroughly?
Why drag children who are still in school into the AST?
Why force them to directly experience this cruelty while leaving them powerless to do anything about it?
It’s true that most who join the military do so out of a sense of justice, but there are always some, like Origami, whose families were destroyed by spirits.
Ryoko could not untie the knots in their hearts; those were things beyond her reach…
But at the very least, she once believed—no, still believed even now—that she should create opportunities for them to take revenge with their own hands.
However…
If one day the belief that spirits are the malice of the world, natural disasters, ugly and cruel monsters fundamentally incapable of coexisting or communicating with humans, were to be forcibly shattered…
“…This is so damn annoying…”
She stopped venting her anger and buried her face into the pillow.
This kind of crap should be something for the higher-ups to worry about!
That eternal major?
Headquarters leadership?
The Minister of General Affairs?
Anyone!
Let any of them have the headache, damn it!
Why the hell does it have to fall on me?!
The footage shown on the screen in Fraxinus’s data room still echoed in her mind.
The loudspeaker intermittently transmitted the ROAR of helicopter engines, the voice of what seemed to be a male reporter, and occasional BOOM of explosions mixed in.
The footage was shaky and far from clear; after all, it was recorded at a fire scene five years ago.
That was only natural.
In the records, the scene resembled a volcanic crater, cruel and hellish, with smoke and flames scattering everywhere.
For footage meant for ordinary media to be this clear was already considered exceptionally good equipment.
The video itself lasted only a few dozen seconds, not even reaching a full minute.
In it, a little girl surrounded by flames was crying, helplessly shaking the body of a boy.
The burns and tattered clothing proved just how terrible his condition was…
Yet that boy—no, the young man he had grown into—suddenly spoke up and pointed at the screen, at a mosaic-like glitch that appeared for only a few seconds.
“Who is that?!”
…It was nothing more than a video error; anyone would reach that conclusion.
Yet the young man insisted that 【that】 was someone, that someone had been there at the time.
When the image was enlarged again, the girl did indeed turn her head toward that direction the moment the mosaic appeared, then leaned down, and the footage ended.
It was a recording taken by a certain media outlet, but before it could be released, it was seized by 「Ratatoskr.」
There was only this single copy; neither the Self-Defense Forces nor anywhere else had any further records.
Ryoko Kusakabe didn’t know how to determine the authenticity of the recording, but Origami Tobiichi apparently did.
The analysis performed using the equipment in the data room left her speechless.
“Look… I’m not trying to make excuses or anything. It’s true the fire was caused by the Commander, but from beginning to end, the Commander was just crying there like an ordinary little girl, holding her brother without ever moving.
There is absolutely no possibility that the pillar of light that fell from the sky, as Tobiichi claims, came from the Commander.”
How could hatred stop just because of a few words?
Even if she saw the recording with her own eyes, even if she couldn’t tell whether it was real or fake…
“But the only one present at the scene was Efreet!!!”
“That’s the conclusion you reached because AST privileges couldn’t access more information, right?
At that time, even excluding the mosaic Shidou. pointed out, we were able to observe the spiritual wave reactions of at least two spirits in the vicinity.”
“Two—?!”
“Yes, at least two spirits were there. It was judged as an observation error at the time, but reports still had to be filed. Even after maintenance was later performed on the equipment, no faults were found.”
“There was one spirit in the sky recklessly releasing vast amounts of spiritual power that went unrecorded. That manifestation didn’t even last twenty minutes.”
“We know nothing of her appearance, figure, or abilities; all we captured was that unfamiliar spiritual power and the houses destroyed by what appeared to be an extremely penetrative bombardment. In that fire, it wasn’t particularly conspicuous.”
“Just your one-sided—!!!”
“…We at Ratatoskr are willing to help Tobiichi-san find the real culprit. Besides, if I were lying, wouldn’t having opportunities to get close to the Commander make revenge much easier for you?”
“…But of course, we’ll need just a tiny bit of assurance from you, Ryoko.”
“Of course we won’t go against the original intent of the Self-Defense Forces… We definitely won’t stop you from attacking spirits… but… um… however~”
Ryoko rolled over, irritably pulled the blanket over herself.
“If we encounter 【humans】 who have no spiritual reaction yet look exactly like spirits, just turn a blind eye? You damn pervert, you’ve really given me one hell of a problem…”
Covering her head with the blanket, Ryoko simply stopped thinking.
When you encounter difficulties… just sleep!!!