My Vampire Older Sister and Zombie Little Sister Vol 1 Chapter 8

Chapter 8

I was probably only unconscious for a few seconds.

“Kh…ahh…”

I shook my head and looked around from the ground. Ayumi the zombie was okay. I was worried about the Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep, but she was already getting up. Impressively, even that blast had not been enough for the strings to come untied.

And we were beyond the thick bank vault door.

And we found…

“Ow, ow, ow…wh-what is this?”

“…”

I let out a hysteric comment, but Ayumi only gained a grim look to her eyes.

It was more like a tunnel or pa.s.sageway than a room. The exposed concrete formed a half circle pa.s.sageway that continued into the distance. Bright and darkly inorganic fluorescent lights lined the walls and metal rails ran by at our feet. The rails were wider than for a normal train.

228D was written on the wall in large letters.

Was that the tunnel’s number like for a highway?

“I wanted to avoid coming here if at all possible, but it was our only choice.”

“?”

Had Ayumi been in this shelter beyond the door before?

With that question in mind, we tried walking down the tunnel and found a fork in the path. But this was not just a Y-shaped intersection. More and more tunnels branched off at short intervals and the rails complexly intersected. It was more like a spider web than a single path.

“If this connects to the various homes, it may naturally grow as complex as plumbing and city gas pipes.”

“Really…? But this place really makes me think of a secret base in a Sentai show.”

“And…” The Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep paused. “User, why has this underground shelter not flooded?”

“What?”

“The destruction of the dam should have flooded the majority of Kukyou City and identical doors can be found below every house. With some exceptions such as the elevated hospital we entered through, if any one of those doors opened, a great flood of water should have rushed in.”

“…I have a bad feeling about this.”

Ayumi remained silent throughout the conversation.

Finally, she stopped biting her lip and made a quiet comment.

“Of course it didn’t flood…”

“Why is that?”

“This isn’t really a tornado shelter. Even when a powerful typhoon blows in, the doors never opened right?”

Now that she mentioned it, that was true. But then why did this network of tunnels exist below the city? Safely digging the tunnels and disposing of the dirt had to have cost a fortune, so I doubted they would build a secret base just to show off or just for the h.e.l.l of it.

“User, perhaps it was a way of spending excess budget. Just like how they dig up roads for no reason towards the end of the fiscal year.”

“If so, the people behind it are the worst.”

“Ah hah hah. The world runs on pointless things and hobbies. What good is a disaster environment simulator in real life?”

“Don’t deny your very reason for existing like that.”

“That isn’t what this is. It’s-…!!”

Ayumi was stopped by the sound of something bursting.

She immediately grabbed the Cla.s.s Rep and me by the hand and ran down one of the branching tunnels.

“Hm? What? Were those gunshots!?”

“If you think they might have been firecrackers, you must have a really peaceful view of the world, Onii-chan…”

As Ayumi made her sarcastic comment, there was sweat on her brow and a dark red hole in her shoulder.

Before I could say anything, a shudder ran down my spine.

There was something different about Ayumi.

I moved my mouth, but no words came out. Just glancing at the side of her face was enough for something like electricity to p.r.i.c.kle along the back of my neck.

Meanwhile, that little sister placed her index finger on my lips without looking my way.

She spoke in a frighteningly low and cold voice.

“You two stay here. I’ll go silence them.”

“Ah. Wait, Ayumi!!”

I did not have time to stop her.

She was like a gust of wind. Ayumi charged down the pa.s.sageway and vanished. I heard shouts of anger, surprise, and fear punctuated by gunfire.

“It’s the Acute version! She’s finally gotten in here. Shoot her, shoot her!!”

“What happened to the emergency evacuation plan!? What are the group leader’s instructions!?”

“There’s no time to wait for that! The hand of death is already right in front of us!!”

The series of explosive sounds were clearly different from the small handguns carried by police officers. Were they a.s.sault rifles? Submachineguns? Light machineguns? I didn’t know how the detailed cla.s.sifications worked, but I was pretty sure these were military weapons.

Perhaps due to the enclosed s.p.a.ce, a mixture of a fireworks-like smell and a rusty smell gradually grew stronger.

But what was this?

This was even more out there than Archenemies like Ayumi and Erika.

None of it seemed real and I was unable to keep up. But that was the weird part. This was the city I lived in, so why did I feel so out of place here?

For one thing, who were “they”?

What was lurking just below the world I lived in!?

“M-Maxwell. This is a disaster environment simulator modeled after Kukyou City, right?”

“Sure. I question your judgment in using it for vampires and zombies, but I will accurately carry out whatever task I am given.”

“Then does this subterranean world exist in the real Kukyou City too!? And is it home to some group that completely ignores the Swords and Firearms Control Law!?”

“Sure. Verification is impossible as this is only a constructed data s.p.a.ce based on predictive calculations, but just like the big bang theory, it is a prediction as close to the truth as possible.”

“…I can’t believe this.”

I looked around again in a daze.

“This doesn’t feel like being in a video game anymore. Something more realistic than a battle between zombies and vampires is invading the real world. Why is there something like an army below our city? We’re not talking about Tokyo’s subway tunnels that are made to allow tanks through.”

“Zombies and vampires sound more unusual than tanks to me.”

I had thought this was a nice city to live in since it was near the ocean and the mountains. The focus on disaster prevention had been a little annoying and restrictive, but being oversensitive seemed fine when it was meant to keep us safe. There were weird people like zombies and vampires walking around, but that hadn’t seemed any weirder than the images of Shibuya or Akihabara I’d seen on TV.

But…

What was Kukyou City?

What giant secret did this city hold?

And there was even a thick door to this underground s.p.a.ce in our own house!

“User.”

The Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep interrupted my spiraling thoughts.

My sinking head sprang back up and I looked her way.

“E-eek! Eek, eek!!”

Someone practically rolled out from another tunnel. Their outfit seemed completely unrealistic. Soldiers in black protectors and carrying machineguns may have been a common sight in Los Angeles or Detroit, but this was j.a.pan. What kind of rules had they brought into this country?

And he did not bother telling me.

His hips had given out and he was half mad with fear as he aimed his sinister-looking gun my way. He shouted something while seeming about to drown in his mask thanks to his own spit.

“M-monster! A monster!! G.o.ddammiiiiiit!!”

I tensed in surprise, but oddly enough, I felt no fear.

Perhaps a gun was just too unrealistic a weapon to feel like an actual threat.

And he never did manage to pull the trigger.

Something black charged down another tunnel and enveloped the soldier’s entire body.

It was like a flash flood.

But it was not a liquid. It was hundreds or even thousands of black bats. It made my skin crawl, like I had flipped over a large stone to find tons of bugs hiding underneath.

“Ah, ah, ah, ah, ahhh…!!”

What was happening to him?

Inside the ma.s.s of black, a hand wandered through empty air, convulsed violently, and then wilted like an ignored windowsill plant in the midsummer. The hand withered like a dried tree as the moisture was stolen.

By the time the bats left, his remains looked like old sc.r.a.ps of cloth. But the bats had not filled their stomachs. There was blood splattered everywhere, so they must have repeatedly sucked the blood and then spat it back out.

Then the countless bats combined into my sister in a gothic lolita dress.

“Ugh. Peh, peh. How can Ayumi-chan bite people like this?”

“E…”

“Hi. Did you miss me, Satori-kun?☆”

“Erika!?”

I held a hand to the side to protect the Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep.

Seeing that, Erika narrowed her eyes sadly.

“We really didn’t want you to know about this place…but it seems that girl let the blood rush to her head. Apparently she’s willing to use everything ‘down here’ if it means winning.”

Gunfire continued down another tunnel. But it was weaker than before. Or rather, the number of guns firing was shrinking.

What are you doing, Ayumi?

Are you doing stunts with no CG or wires when zombies are supposed to be slow!?

“The Bright Cross is merciless, so she’s desperate to ensure no stray bullets reach you.”

“The Bright Cross…?”

I repeated the name.

“You’re kidding, right? Why do the people with donation boxes by the cash registers have a secret underground base with guns? Are they actually the MIB or something?”

“Eh heh heh. Of course not. This isn’t anything as kind as threatening any witnesses. That’s why Ayumi-chan is taking this so seriously. But unlike vampires, zombies are indiscriminate, so the more she makes, the greater the chance of one of them attacking you. It’s her unfortunate flaw.”

“Well, she is a zombie.”

“In fact, a thinking zombie is a pretty unattractive idea.”

I realized she was changing the subject, but I was afraid to force her back on topic.

It was the same for Ayumi’s secret.

Especially when I could see the displeasure on Erika’s face.

The menace of the zombies and vampires honestly paled in comparison.

What was this place?

How were Erika and Ayumi connected to it?

Erika snapped her fingers and the countless bats scattered like a sandstorm through the many branching tunnels. I soon heard more screams and shouts.

Erika laughed.

“A lack of long term thinking creates a huge strategic problem. And zombies rot, so they cannot blend into human society and have trouble deceiving people. Their best use is to destroy the city’s infrastructure with pure numbers…but they might find a different way to fight if they use their head a little.”

That may have been true.

What if, instead of starting with an all-out attack, she created only two or three fellow zombies, ground them up in a disposer, and mixed them into the dam or a food processing plant to infect everyone? It reminded me of rumors of worm burgers or a worker who fell into a vat of acid at the soda plant. The animals that had pecked at the defeated corpses had been infected just as well as the people bitten by a zombie. That might have greatly shifted the power distribution between zombies and vampires.

“But the way she charges right in is also the best part about her. To be honest, I’m a little jealous as her big sister.”

“Hm?”

“Hee hee. You don’t get it, Satori-kun? I’m holding back in the real world, but in this virtual world, I want to bite you, get in the same coffin as you, and flirt with you 24/7.”

“Maybe you do, but the thought scares me!!

“Satooori-kuuun?”

“Stop! Don’t hug me! What happened to that serious atmosphere? Ahh, these are so soft…mgh, mgh…how many centimeters are they!?”

“Serious atmosphere? What about this was at all serious?”

She approached me like always.

I was helpless against her storm of skinship. She had her arms around me in no time.

Her fangs were a mere three centimeters from my neck.

She pressed her large b.r.e.a.s.t.s against me, breathed warmly onto my ear, and whispered.

“But in the end, I just can’t bring myself to bite you.”

She sounded just a little sad.

“You would definitely hate me if I did, it would ruin our relationship, and it would make everything awkward once we returned to the real world. Those thoughts just circle around and around in my mind. Thinking about the future is important, but it always holds me back. If I was more like that girl and took action first and thought about it later, my life might be so much easier.”

She placed her hands on my shoulders and then moved back.

Her face held her usual composed look now.

Ayumi the zombie girl impulsively created as many zombies as she could and used their numbers to destroy the city’s infrastructure.

Erika the vampire queen slipped into human society, slowly but surely increased her number of p.a.w.ns, and took over to establish a new order based on vampires.

“This isn’t limited to things on the level of an organization.”

“What do you mean?”

“A zombie continually destroys the host body through the process of infection. That’s what we see as the body rotting. On the other hand, a vampire optimizes the host body and gives it a greater body and greater skills than it had in life. This might make vampires sound more cost effective and convenient, but that isn’t actually true,” said Erika. “When you get down to it, all vampires do is optimize. We can only grow within the pre-established framework. The individuals do gain inherent skills in a sort of mutation, but not even that amplitude leaves the framework. …We can’t provide changes so dramatic they destroy the host, but zombies can.”

“Zombies don’t look that great to me…”

“No, user. As a species, zombies are quite impressive. They are not limited to humans and can make any animal or plant their host.”

“Exactly. This gets us back to the framework I was talking about. If the human race is destroyed, vampires die with them. After all, we require blood. But zombies are different.”

Had zombies given up on thinking because they were the superior species and had vampires honed their thinking because they were the inferior species?

It felt like discussing the differences between dinosaurs and humans.

“Now, then.”

Erika clapped her hands together in front of her large chest.

“It’s time I went to clean some things up. I’d really like to be your guide here, Satori-kun, but that girl seems to have gone a little overboard on making more zombies. I need to recover my advantage. I’ll go make everything nice and clean☆”

“Erika?”

“If you’re in trouble, visit the closest vampire, okay? The zombies won’t listen to you, but I ordered my minions not to attack you or the Cla.s.s Rep. Please use them as shields if you’re surrounded by zombies. Also…”

As she left, she turned around with a faint smile on her lips.

“I know this might be selfish, but please don’t hate us after you see this place☆”

A moment later, her head split open like a watermelon.

“Ah…”

The smile and the sad atmosphere were all driven from my mind by the gunfire I heard after the fact.

But…

Even so…

The “pieces” of Erika that had scattered through the air did not fall to the ground. They came to a stop in midair and transformed into countless red b.u.t.terflies. The b.u.t.terflies shined like glow-in-the-dark paint and rushed toward her wound. Like broken pottery being repaired, her face was remade in no time.

And…

My older sister stood before me with a sharp light in her eyes I had never seen before.

“Consecrated steel that was soaked in holy water during its cooling treatment. They’re going all out now…”

“Erika…?”

“Nothing to worry about☆ Didn’t I tell you I’ll be fine as long as my heart isn’t taken out? And wasn’t that pretty? They’re both lepidopterans, but it took a lot of work to change it from moths to b.u.t.terflies. Rats and bats are so dull, so I tried out a lot of things.”

She clapped her hands in front of her chest again, smiled, and then whispered something.

“But if I don’t do something about these little flies, it could get in the way of settling things with Ayumi-chan. I can’t have the zombies making a comeback after I wore down their numbers so much, so perhaps I should get just a biiiit serious.”

That was all.

She ran down another tunnel too fast for a normal person to keep up. A few vampires joined her and supported her. A few gunshots tried to stop her, but they were quickly silenced and replaced by cries of despair and meaningless pleas for mercy.

“Has…has the group leader still not given us any instructions!?”

“He was bitten a while back!! Dammit, I’m out of spare ammo…”

“No, I don’t want to die.”

“Why!? None of the doors will open!! Nooooooooo!?”

I had no desire to peek around the corner.

When the zombies and vampires had filled the streets, these people had not opened the doors. But once the city flooded, they had been trapped inside the doors. The intense water pressure kept the doors from opening and the underground tunnels were now a giant labyrinth of death with Ayumi and Erika inside.

“Oh, dear. My sister is really in top form.”

“She had a sorrowful look, but she seems more than willing to fight.”

“I’m beginning to suspect she only gets those sad looks when she’s actually feeling completely full of herself.”

“She would do more than beat you up if she heard that.”

The Cla.s.s Rep and I discussed the situation.

What was this giant underground s.p.a.ce? What kind of secrets did it hide? And which was “ranked” higher, those secrets or my sisters?

The door to the shelter had said Bright Cross Disaster Prevention Foundation.

As I walked through the spider web of tunnels, the entire place seemed in a state of pandemonium.

I did not even need to hide anymore.

The kinds of protectors seen in movies were no use. Large blood stains were splattered on the floor, on the walls, and on the ceiling. We barely saw anyone that qualified as a “survivor” and they were mostly either a zombie or a vampire. And they were so busy biting at each other that no one focused on us.

Used-looking guns were lying on the ground, but I didn’t even think about picking one up. I was afraid I would shoot myself in the foot if I tried to use one.

I put up with the rusty stench, pressed against the wall to slip past the “people” focused on feasting, and continued deeper in. As I did, the look of the place changed.

“There are metal bars.”

“Yes, but they are broken.”

“The scary part is the teeth marks on them. Please tell me Ayumi isn’t that much of an idiot.”

“Vampires are also an Archenemy known for biting, but it is very interesting that Miss Ayumi is the first to come to mind.”

There had been a door made of metal bars just like the ones blocking a prison pa.s.sageway, but a great strength had bent the bars, torn the door away, and thrown it aside.

“Without that, we would have had to search around for a way to unlock that door.”

“It’s like the remnants of a dream after your sparkler goes out.”

After we stepped through there, the atmosphere entirely changed.

First of all, the zombies wandering around were wearing much more intellectual clothing. It was all lab coats and tight skirts.

Instead of bare concrete on the walls and floor, there was clean wallpaper and linoleum. The mysterious rails were gone from the floor and the place looked more like a residential s.p.a.ce than a tunnel.

All of the doors had fancy locks, but they had all been forced open by some great strength.

“My sisters sure are kind.”

“The ones being bitten by them might beg to differ.”

“In fact, this is too many doors to choose from. Can’t they give me a single path to follow?”

“Oh? You fall under the idiot category as well, user?”

I peeked inside one door and saw something like an operating room. I say it was “something like” one because I had never seen a real one. It had some of that sort of equipment, like those lightbulbs gathered like a lotus root. Were they called surgical lights?”

Another door led to something like an examining room.

A cabinet with a broken lock contained lots of medical files, but I could not read them because they were written in a foreign language. Didn’t medical things tend to use German?

But when I opened another door, I found a long line of giant refrigerators.

“This looks like a specimen storage room.”

“With this lineup, is this place a hospital?”

“Is that really a question? This appears to be highly specialized equipment.”

“If they’ve got the equipment, then why aren’t there any female doctors in gla.s.ses or kind nurses?”

“Because those are figments of your imagination?”

I opened one fridge and found several test tubes arranged twenty to a case. They all had rubber caps and I was hesitant to touch them. They were all filled with a dark red liquid.

The sides of the test tubes had labels and I recognized one of the names.

“…Acute Zombie Powder.”

“That is the same virus carried by Miss Amatsu Ayumi.”

Or should I a.s.sume this was Ayumi’s blood they were storing?

I checked the other fridges and found what I was looking for.

Eastern European Queen-style Vampire Curse – Type A Rh+. I did not understand all the details, but queen, vampire, and type A all matched Erika.

“I had thought it was strange.” I naturally started speaking. “What do a zombie or vampire do when they get hurt or sick? They probably rely on their natural toughness or healing in most cases, but things have to sometimes get too bad for that to cut it.”

“Then is this a hospital rather than a lab?”

“I can’t say. And it might be both.”

That said, there was nothing here to take with me. I definitely didn’t want to touch the samples and get myself infected. It would make me wonder why I had worked so hard to get this far.

I left the sample storage room and continued walking through the facility. It was obvious when we reached a new section. We pa.s.sed through another broken door of metal bars and the wallpaper and floor changed again.

This time, it was harder to tell what kind of place it was.

“What is this?”

“It looks like a train station.”

The Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep was correct.

When I cracked opened a thick door, I found a train station. It was a large one with several intersecting tracks, like you would find in a big city.

But why was this here?

It did not seem to function as an actual subway station. The tracks ended before reaching the wall and it lacked the equipment needed to bring trains in. It was more like a stage set.

Another door led to a department store’s fresh food section.

Another led to a burger restaurant’s seats.

Another led to a pool locker room.

Finally, we found what looked like a school cla.s.sroom and gym. They had all been precisely reproduced in isolation, but they were more like models. They looked realistic, but they were not functioning.

The school cla.s.sroom had large teeth marks on the edges of the desks and the blackboard eraser.

When I opened the burger restaurant’s cash register, I found toy money.

The locker room had a “well done” sticker on the wall.

“…This is all starting to make sense.”

“Is this a facility meant to role play a normal life?”

I couldn’t say how true it was because I only knew what I had seen online or in movies, but when a criminal was holed up with a hostage, the special forces would apparently build a detailed set and spend hours practicing their entrance while the negotiator bought them time.

And when spies were preparing to infiltrate an enemy nation, they would apparently practice the language and customs on something like a movie set before moving on to the real thing.

This underground facility reminded me of that.

But unlike a military operation, I doubted this was rooted in a desire to harm or deceive people.

Or I hoped it wasn’t.

I traced my finger across the “well done” sticker in the pool locker room.

“My sisters seem to have some connection to this place. What they said and the blood samples are enough to know that.”

“Then what is the meaning of these sets?”

“They didn’t suddenly come to the city. Before coming to my family, were they put through something like an apt.i.tude test here to make sure they could blend into human society?”

Of course they were.

Now that I thought about it, it was obvious. Both of them could easily destroy a city or two if they got serious, so we couldn’t have them saying, “I bit him in a moment of weakness☆”.

This was a highly realistic disaster environment simulator.

If the conditions were right, the same thing could happen in the real world.

“What was that hospital section then? Is it to treat any injuries or illnesses? Or is it part of how they judge whether or not they’re too much for human hands?”

“That is one question. But…”

The Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep touched the pool locker room’s plastic curtain.

The bottom of the curtain had a piece missing as if it had been torn off by an incredible force.

“Where do they go if they do not pa.s.s the test?”

“…”

I had a bad feeling about this.

It was a sticky feeling very unlike the mess with the zombies and vampires.

We left the pool locker room and walked down the hallway until we reached the metal bar door to another section.

The lock was broken yet again and the metal bars were horribly bent.

We easily slipped through and found what awaited us.

 

Level 1

The words were printed prominently on the wall.

When I first stepped through one of the doors along the pa.s.sageway, I did not know what it meant.

I saw a tiled floor and a few stainless steel countertops. It looked more like a school home ec cla.s.sroom than an organized restaurant kitchen. The walls were lined with cabinets and they were full of countless cooking equipment, such as knives, cutting boards, pestles, meat tenderizers, pressure cookers, frying pans, and so on. There were also plenty of juicers, eggbeaters, microwave ovens, and ovens.

However, there were a few odd aspects to it all.

“This is a kitchen, but I don’t see any plates or cups.”

“Nor are there any refrigerators. Where do they store the ingredients?”

“They can only pretend to cook here. …Ah!? Could it be for having fun with a naked ap.r.o.n!?”

“Please try to focus, you utter moron.”

 

Level 2

In another section, we found a room filled with equipment that made it look more like a small workshop than a garage.

It had plenty of home construction tools. There were hammers, saws, power drills, planes, crowbars, vises, and others you would find in a hardware store, but there were also lathes and presses for metalworking and power saws on fixed stands for cutting wood. A careless mistake could take off a hand or a foot, so I decided against touching any of the switches.

But I couldn’t see any rhyme or reason to this.

If the previous one had been a home ec cla.s.sroom, was this a shop cla.s.sroom? Were they special cla.s.srooms for the fake school? But the equipment here seemed too specialized for that. Maybe if it was a school with a specialization in industry or something.

 

Level 3

This one was weird.

Even I was realizing something was up.

A large room was filled with nothing but bathtubs. Some were metal, some were gla.s.s, and some were some sort of plastic. And an incredible stench came from the countless giant cases. This wasn’t just paint thinner or gasoline. It was such a powerful chemical odor that I thought I would pa.s.s out if I stayed there for long.

A variety of bottles were lined up in cabinets along the wall, but the labels only contained special symbols that I couldn’t begin to interpret.

But the Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep was able to comment.

“These resemble the chemical vats used for plating.”

“What…?”

“But this is not how to use them. These tubs contain sulfuric acid, aqua regia, hydrofluoric acid, and similar substances. This is much like the bathtubs of fear seen in mafia movies.”

“…”

The first room had been full of tools to pound on “something” to soften it, chop it into small pieces, and boil or cook it away, but there had been no fridges for ingredients or plates to serve the food.

The next room had contained equipment for chopping “something”, crushing it, opening holes in it, and breaking it down into pieces, but there had been no wood or metal to work on and no completed products.

The final room contained tubs of chemicals used soak “something” in powerful acids, but there was no sign of anything needing to be plated.

The three rooms seemed nonsensical at first glance.

The theory about special cla.s.srooms had been destroyed by Level 3’s plating factory.

Then what was this place?

I tried to think back over everything. What did the three rooms have in common? What had the people of this shelter used them for? What good were those rooms for the Bright Cross Disaster Prevention Foundation that had likely been involved from the moment Kukyou City joined the National Reinforced Planning Project?

Hadn’t the Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep asked a certain question?

What happened to “them” if they did not pa.s.s the test?

Uuh…

“Uoooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”

Something like electricity burst inside my head and I realized I was screaming.

The possibility of zombie or vampire victims wandering around was driven from my mind and to the other side of the universe.

What had been happening here?

What had been happening in this other world hidden below our feet as we ate food and went to school like normal in Kukyou City!!!???

No, I knew the answer.

This was a general department store for the undead…for Archenemies. The people here would research them and give them rehearsals if they looked like they could fit into human society. And if they could learn the human rules properly, they could join the sunny world of Kukyou City. They would be given a normal life, like Erika and Ayumi had done.

But…

What if they hit a roadblock somewhere?

What if they were deemed too dangerous to be released into the outside world? The answer was obvious. The rails would mercilessly switch over and a different future awaited those undead.

That was Levels 1 through 3.

Those were the different stages used to dispose of Archenemies!!

I recalled the rows of bathtubs. That went beyond a part-time job washing corpses and they weren’t anything as kind as pools of formaldehyde. There were rumors of people dumping a corpse into a tub of powerful acid and there were rumors of an old man having a heart attack with the hot water heater on and being found as a human stew. But what they were casually doing here was easily worse than those rumors!

“…Maxwell.”

“Sure.”

“Scan the entire facility. I don’t care how, but don’t miss a single hair!!”

“Due to the rewritten user privileges, you are temporarily unable to use administrative mode. Only visual records are possible.”

“G.o.ddammit!!”

I felt dizzy, but I couldn’t tell if it was due to the odor from the chemical tubs or due to the horrific reality before my eyes.

I left the room and took a deep breath.

I then recalled the heavy equipment that ignored j.a.panese culture, the spider web of tunnels that reached everywhere in the city, and the thick doors. Those weren’t to help us in case of disaster. They were to quickly arrive on the scene if one of the undead went on a rampage and to drag them back into the darkness.

By separating out the first few, they could minimize the damage by stopping it before it developed into the city-wide horror movie I had seen.

Was that right or wrong? It may have been the right thing to do.

But this city’s methods lacked any kindness at all.

Those doors were in every house’s bas.e.m.e.nt, so there was no locking them out. Your home was supposed to be where you could truly relax, but things were set up so they could swiftly appear and abduct you even if you were taking a bath or sleeping in your own home.

“User.”

“What…is it? Pant, pant… Are you saying there’s even more?”

“Sure. There is a pa.s.sageway and room we have yet to check.”

The Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep was the same as always.

“So as you said, there is ‘more’.”

“…”

What good was any further investigation?

We were veering off of the main point. I had been caught in my vampire older sister and zombie little sister’s sisterly fight and I had to prevent the Swimsuit Cla.s.s Rep from dying and thus showing up in the report that would be sent out. I was clearly straying from that initial objective.

But…

Even so…

I couldn’t ignore this. What had Ayumi and Erika gone through in the past? And it was more than that. Could I really say they were freed from the curse of this underground world? What if they were still caught in it?

Plus, I was worried about the Archenemies other than vampires and zombies. Were they living freely in the outside world, were they waiting their turn underground, or had they already been disposed of?

If they were a true monster that could not be spoken or reasoned with, there may have been no need to worry about it. And that may have been exactly how the Bright Cross saw it as they ran this underground world.

But I knew that the people known as the undead were not like that.

That was obvious just looking at Ayumi and Erika. What if, back in the real world, people just like them were pushing up against doors that would never open?

“…”

How could I pretend I hadn’t seen this?

Something was happening beyond thick walls that kept any shouts or screams from escaping and I was close to finding out what.

I had no idea how many Archenemies had been disposed of in this facility without anyone knowing.

But I knew what they had to have been thinking in that instant.

They would have been afraid of being erased from existence without anyone knowing. They would have forced out a desperate scream in the hopes that at least one person would hear it. I hadn’t made it in time in the real world, my method of reaching here had been thoroughly twisted, and I was probably entirely different from the person they had been imagining, but I was still in a position to possibly fill that role.

If I let that chance escape, this secret would likely be forever sealed away.

Could I let that happen?

Of course not.

Even if I was straying from my main purpose here and even if it mean abandoning that original objective, I couldn’t just ignore this!!

“Maxwell.”

“Sure.”

“Let’s keep going. Let’s open every last door.”

What was it driving my heart at that moment?

Was it kindness? Anger? Curiosity? Foolhardiness?

I didn’t know.

Whatever it was, it pushed me forward.

Would I be better off not knowing what I would find?

Even that I couldn’t say.

All I knew was what I saw written on the wall:

 

Level 4

 

[Pick Up] Attached File – Status of the Colosseum [Net Files]

Two group leader decisions confirmed. Beginning disposal of the Werewolf.

Rating: None.

 

Captured the Werewolf from the surface using Tunnel Network 228D.

Rating: A.

 

Levels 1-3 complete. No effect seen. Awaiting instructions from group leader.

Rating: E.

 

On instructions from group leader, moving to Level 4.

Rating: None.

 

Decided which specimens to use. The Shoggoth and Berserk awaiting disposal were freed from their cells.

Rating: B.

 

The battle has begun.

Rating: A.

 

The battle is complete. The Berserk and Werewolf are dead. Finished off the barely alive Shoggoth.

Rating: B. (Or maybe C? Awaiting decision.)

 

Situation complete. Responsibility transferred to the cleanup team.

Rating: A.

 

Overall Rating: B. Points to consider: The theory is apparently based in statistics, but the “cannibalism” method is highly based in luck and is hard to call a reliable disposal method. We must quickly improve our equipment and training so that we are able to dispose of them on our own.