My Vampire Older Sister and Zombie Little Sister - Book 10: Chapter 4

Book 10: Chapter 4

Part 1

I felt a tremor.

The shallow shaking was a lot like an earthquake, but it was a little different from the ones I occasionally felt back in Japan. This fearsome rumbling was more like a dangerous energy building up. I could only compare it to the anxious feeling of peering straight down into a pot of hot water that was moment’s away from an explosive boil.

“Another one,” casually said my stepmom, Amatsu Yurina, while looking up at the ceiling.

That was a very Japanese response to an earthquake. Fluorescent lights with the cord hanging from the ceiling weren’t all that common anymore, but those habits were hard to break.

At this moment, she really did look like no more than my stepmom.

Neither of us were supposed to be in a place like this. We were out of place in the secret basement floor of the French Ministry of Defense.

She slowly lowered her head to look at me flattened on the floor.

She smiled and reached out a slender hand.

“You need to get up, Satori. I can’t let you us that toy here…and it’s probably too late anyway. JB was faster.”

“?”

“You will die if you don’t escape now.”

That was a shocking claim, but Anastasia and I still weren’t sure where she stood on this. She claimed to be here to stop the threat, but the top of Absolute Noah was here within arm’s reach of resetting the nuclear control system.

And I wasn’t the only one with doubts. Little Anastasia knocked my stepmom’s hand away from me.

“Don’t touch Truth.”

“That’s quite the stomach you have there. I do hope that isn’t real, Satori.”

Come to think of it, Anastasia’s stomach was still big (in order to protect her phone and pet robot). But nothing my stepmom said got Anastasia to move out of the way.

“Do you really expect us to trust you when we don’t know whose side you’re on!? For all we know, firing the nukes was one of your options!”

“Your point is well made, girl, but why bother asking the person you don’t trust?”

Amatsu Yurina bent her knees.

She smiled and peered up at Anastasia’s face from below like she was dealing with a tantruming child.

“You can only take someone at their word if you would already trust them with your life. It doesn’t work with your top suspect. And if you did already trust me that much, you wouldn’t be asking me any of this in the first place. Right?”

“…”

“So if you do want to ask these embarrassingly youthful questions, I recommend asking someone else who knows me well. And someone who can logically clear those suspicions without resorting to an emotional argument. Satori, shouldn’t you have gone to your father to ask about this?”

Another shallow tremor shook us.

My stepmom sighed.

“That’s the limit.”

“What is happening here, mom?”

“Don’t ask me. Just so you know, I am very upset with you right now. And here I thought my own son might trust me a little more than this. But, Satori, are you sure you can safely escape this underground space once it’s flooded with magma? And with young Anastasia-chan with you?”

Mag- eh?

Flooded with!?

“Why are you being so helpful all of a sudden!?”

“That’s your first question? Get distracted by that and you really won’t be able to escape. I knew things were going to get bad from the moment the meteor shower triggered an earthquake. Part of the crust must have broken, creating a new fault. If the magma flows up from there, this is going to get a lot worse. A phreatic eruption if we’re lucky, the magma directly if we aren’t.”

So much blood drained from my face my sense of pain faded.

“M-Maxwell.”

“Warning: I have detected 500 tremors in the past 10 minutes. But their distribution is too concentrated to be aftershocks. I believe Mrs. Yurina’s assessment is accurate.”

Damn, is this how it ends!?

Magma would probably be flooding this area soon.

Since it was a side effect of JB’s meteor shower, Absolute Noah wasn’t to blame. But it still prevented us from discovering what my stepmom was doing underneath the French Ministry of Defense. If we focused on escaping safely, all the evidence would be destroyed in the magma. Then we would only have her words to go on.

Could I really let that happen?

Could I really let the answer slip from my fingers after coming so far!?

“Mom, what were you doing here?”

“Again, what good is asking me that? Or are you willing to trust your mama now?”

“Then what’s down that hallway!?”

One of Amatsu Yurina’s eyebrows twitched.

“You showed up when you did because you didn’t want us interfering with whatever’s going on down there, right? Then I’m going to check it out for myself. I need more than your word to go on!”

“Even if I say I won’t let you waste what little time you have to escape?”

She sounded more amused by the situation than afraid I was approaching the truth. Her smile was a devilishly mischievous grin.

I slowly got up and pushed her aside.

I stepped forward.

I wasn’t just going to take what she would give me. I would head back there and find the answer myself.

“Anastasia, you get out of here ahead of me.”

This was mostly a gamble.

I knew I couldn’t waste time here if the magma eruption was real. The ceiling was entirely sealed and there weren’t any stairs or ladders leading onto the main building above. Leaving meant returning to the labyrinthine catacombs, so it wasn’t going to be easy. Things might look different on the way back and I didn’t remember every turn we had taken anyway. And if the path back was cut off by steam or magma, there might not even be a detour for us.

So it was a gamble.

A bet.

It was my own life on the table and winning meant rattling Amatsu Yurina and securing peace of mind. But I couldn’t drag Anastasia into this terrible bet.

I grabbed my phone.

“Maxwell, I need some analysis done.”

“You mean where Mrs. Amatsu Yurina came from when she attacked you?”

“No. Which direction was I looking then?”

I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t remember. But she had only attacked me because she hadn’t wanted me investigating something. I had been bringing my foot closer to some kind of landmine.

“You were focused on the third door on the right.”

“Got it.”

I threw open that door.

I didn’t find the large server room I had expected. Instead, a single fridge-sized computer sat in the middle of a room smaller than a school classroom. But that felt symbolic. It had the sinister scent of a system cut off from the other networks.

There was something written on it in what I assumed was French, but I couldn’t read it.

It had a laptop-sized LCD monitor installed on its side, but it too was in a foreign language. The programming language probably did its reading and writing in English, but they were insistent on the UI being in French.

So…

“Is this it?”

“The exterior simply says Computer 01,” said Maxwell. “Not that I would expect them to plainly label a dangerous device related to the launching of nuclear weapons.”

The contents weren’t what I was interested in. I moved my phone closer and snapped a pic of the screen.

“Maxwell, check for fingerprints.”

“It has been wiped off.”

“I know. But what about the wiping pattern? Compare it to the windows and tables in my house.”

Everyone had a distinctive way of doing that. You would be hard pressed getting that accepted as legal evidence, but I wasn’t trying to win a court case here.

“It is a greater than 97.88% match.”

“That means my stepmom wiped this off.”

“However, there are a few other wiping patterns mixed in. Mrs. Amatsu Yurina’s is the most recent.”

“So someone was here before here?”

I fell silent for a moment.

The French Ministry of Defense owned them, so they wouldn’t need to wipe them off. Unless someone there was a fastidious clean freak, of course.

Someone working for or with my stepmom was even less likely. They would wait until everyone who needed to touch the device had done so and then have one person wipe it off at the end. They wouldn’t bother wiping it off each and every time.

Which meant…

Someone else entirely?

“It was JB.”

I jumped and turned around to see my stepmom shrugging.

“The full reset of the nuclear control system is probably already complete. It would have taken less than 10 seconds to reboot the many security devices, but who knows how many warheads had their privileges rewritten in that time. We also don’t know if the French government is even capable of determining the number and exact location of the infected warheads during all this chaos. My guess is they aren’t. For one thing, none of the government workers are even aware JB or we got in here or that the full reset was carried out. Even if they began checking the warheads right this instant, I estimate it would take them at least an hour to find their answer. JB can launch all the nukes they want in that time.”

Couldn’t the French government lock down all the warheads and check to see which ones refused their command? No, that wouldn’t work. The system surrounding nuclear weapons wasn’t that simple. Things weren’t as bad as with the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War, but nukes generally ensured everyone’s safety through mutually assured destruction. The diplomatic and defense diagram would collapse if just one side of the equation couldn’t use theirs anymore.

Those things really were nothing but trouble. There were other bombs just as destructive as a small nuke these days, but no one did anything to update this troublesome system.

“Maxwell.”

“Performing a full reset would require a lot of data transfer in both directions. That means at least a thick laptop specially tuned for use in 3D esports. A smartphone or other mobile device could not handle it.”

Amatsu Yurina winked and raised both hands to say I could search her for such a device. Her unusually curvy bodylines were plain to see and I doubted she could be hiding such a large tool in her tight-fitting blouse and jeans.

I had to accept that the odds were very good some third party had been here.

We had arrived following the wet wheel tracks of probably a suitcase. That had probably contained the analysis computer. I didn’t need to stick my hands in Amatsu Yurina’s pockets and feel around to know she couldn’t be hiding something like that.

So.

Someone else had brought that suitcase here and then left with it.

I still couldn’t say if my stepmom was trying to stop that person or was working with them, but I would find out either way if I kept a close eye on her.

“Maxwell, what can we do from here?”

“Not much. A Ministry of Defense’s nuclear control system is beyond even my abilities. And if the full reset is complete, then destroying the central hardware will not return control of the warheads from the terminal stations.”

“What about JB’s virus we found at the Paris Observatory? It’s a remote control virus, so couldn’t we infect them from this station to take back control?”

“And what if JB uses the original virus in response? They would simply take control again.”

“Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t be that easy. Damn.”

That settled it.

The entire subterranean space shook unnaturally.

“Anastasia, we’re leaving!”

“Hwehhh? B-but we went to a lot of trouble getting in here, so why not leave behind a keylogger or a backdoor for future use?”

The next tremor was different. It was larger, sharper, and oriented vertically. It became painfully apparent that even this wide open space was located underground with thick concrete overhead.

The tremor was unstable but large. I clung to the wall to wait it out, but it wouldn’t end. In fact, wasn’t it getting worse!?

“Satori, you support the girl. You’re the one that brought her down here.”

Amatsu Yurina was the only one standing steady without any assistance. She didn’t even have a hand on the wall. More than muscular strength, this had to be her sense of balance letting her shift her center of gravity along with the shaking. I got the feeling she could skip across a tightrope.

Small pieces of something sprinkled down from overhead. I looked up at the ceiling just as several thick cracks formed there.

“Here it comes!! Anastasia!?”

I couldn’t wait for her response. I grabbed the reluctant 11-year-old’s small hand and dragged her away from the device. We had so much trouble standing that we more or less ended up rolling along the floor together.

“This way.”

My stepmom stood tall and walked casually across the floor. We had no choice but to follow her. We had to get aboveground somehow. I knew that without even taking another look at the ceiling that suddenly felt so much heavier than before.

We rushed into the side hole leading to the catacombs.

I heard a monotone rumbling sound, but I failed to realize what it was at first. I just thought some rocks were rolling along the ground somewhere.

Then a dusty blast of wind slammed into Anastasia and me from behind.

Everything was so dark.

Our phone backlights suddenly jumped in importance, but that light was dulled like they were wrapped in two convenience store bags.

“Cough, ugh!?”

I choked and looked back to find the way back was gone. The basement of the French Ministry of Defense was so full of rocks and concrete that there wasn’t the tiniest gap left.

The lights were out.

“For the bottom to fall out, the surface buildings must have collapsed,” explained my stepmom, sounding unconcerned.

I really hoped a government office like that would be empty at night. Then she looked down at the two of us with her hands on her hips.

“I wouldn’t breathe in too deeply if I were you. The standards are different from Japan and they couldn’t keep any records when constructing this secret basement anyway. Who knows what kind of materials they used.”

I was more worried by how hot it felt. Why was it so humid? The catacombs had been dark and cold on the way here. This was more than just having another source of body heat this time around. It was like getting a face full of steam in the bath or sauna.

“Watch out,” said my stepmom.

All of a sudden, the wall split open nearby and the color white flooded out. Arms, legs, ribs, and skulls. The neatly stacked piles of old human bones were toppled as a blast of steam entered the tunnel.

“Anastasia!!”

“This is weird.”

I quickly grabbed her small hand while the odor of rotten eggs hung in the air, but Anastasia seemed in a daze.

“I’ve never heard of Paris having an active volcano or hot springs. So why is a sulfur spring erupting from underground here!?”

“The rules have changed.”

My stepmom crouched down and waved us forward. She apparently wanted us to crawl below the steam sharply erupting horizontally from the wall.

She wasn’t even using a light like we were, but that didn’t seem to matter.

“The concentrated meteor strikes did severe damage to Paris deep underground. I said the crust had broken, remember? This phreatic eruption is only the beginning. Magma will be bursting from all over like blood from a wound. And rapidly at that.”

So was this steam from an underground water vein or something that had boiled? I was familiar with the concept of a phreatic eruption, but I hadn’t realized how largescale they were. I was about ready to give up already.

The scorching lava was already right below our feet.

“We need to reach the surface,” I said.

“Agreed,” cheerfully said my stepmom.

She led us through the unnaturally shaking catacombs. With the ceiling collapsing and the floor falling out, simply following a straight tunnel was a dangerous task. We clung to the wall and hurried forward using the bit of floor that remained like the extra bits of a gyoza or taiyaki. It was like wandering into an action movie where we were searching for a secret treasure in some ancient ruins.

Even the walls could explode with steam at any moment and the way back was already filled in with rubble.

“Pant, gasp.”

Anastasia was out of breath just from keeping her feet on the remaining floor. This wasn’t just tension. The heat and rotten eggs smell made breathing a laborious task. And it kept getting more oppressive. How large were these underground tunnels? Wasn’t hydrogen sulfide dangerous? I didn’t know the exact concentration needed, but if it was in the steam, wouldn’t we find ourselves in tunnels of death before long?

I doubted Anastasia and I could have escaped to the surface on our own. We were only making any progress through the labyrinthine tunnels because we had Amatsu Yurina with us.

How long did we even keep walking?

“There it is,” my stepmom finally said.

We were back to that trendy underground tunnel.

“That’s the exit.”

I should have rejoiced.

We had plenty of problems left. The French Ministry of Defense’s nuclear control system had probably been fully reset. The top suspect was now JB instead of Absolute Noah. If I was going to believe my stepmom, then she had actually been trying to prevent JB from taking control of the nukes.

So had JB sent those meteors into Paris to keep anyone from noticing the reset or to slow Amatsu Yurina long enough to complete the reset?

If it wasn’t Absolute Noah who had stolen the nukes, didn’t that mean JB had two trump cards!?

We had to do something about the nukes. With all the other chaos, the French government probably wasn’t even aware. We could try telling them, but how would we explain what happened underground there? Wouldn’t they assume it was all fake news? And even if they did believe us, they would see us as terrorists who had broken into a secret government facility. Either way, they weren’t going to take our warning seriously.

How many nukes did the French military have? How many were ready for use in silos or subs? And how many of those had been hijacked? Figuring all that out was not going to be easy. And if the culprit noticed our attempt, they would probably go ahead and use their missiles while they still could.

But.

Even so.

We were finally freed from the danger of having hundreds of tons of rock and dirt over our heads, where gas or steam could kill us at any moment. Shouldn’t I set aside all of those longer-term goals and tasks and take this time to feel some relief? But I couldn’t. I didn’t feel happy. I didn’t feel relieved. None of it felt over.

Yes.

I didn’t want to keep going.

This was only the beginning. Something even worse awaited us. I had no real proof, but I couldn’t help but think that way.

My stepmom must have seen it on my face because she beckoned me over.

I couldn’t look up at her face. I was afraid to see her expression.

Anyway, we had left the tunnels and climbed a bicycle slope to arrive aboveground.

I regretted doing so.

I saw red.

Scorching hot red.

It wasn’t that long ago that the Paris night posed the threat of cold water with its filthy rain and flooding river.

But not anymore.

The filthy rain had let up at some point.

Instead, the reds and oranges seen in a blast furnace were flooding the city. It gurgled up from cracks in the ground and it scorched the night sky. A curtain of countless embers and steam colored the city in the clutches of a fiery threat.

The earth was wounded and bleeding.

The immense heat must have disturbed the air because the unnatural rainclouds were dispersing.

A wall of erupting magma rose far higher than the smaller buildings’ roofs. This was my first time seeing magma in person, so it was actually pretty awe inspiring. I was probably numbed to the terror I should have been feeling. So much was happening that my ability to feel appropriate emotions had broken.

Roads just ended, asphalt bubbled and melted in the heat, and the stone and concrete buildings glowed orange from the flames engulfing them. The ground jutted up unnaturally in some areas. Some streets suddenly had a cliff of several meters at their fault line.

The rules had indeed changed.

“Now, let’s survive this,” said Amatsu Yurina in a challenging way. “It won’t end here. The nuclear warheads are only a means to an end for JB. They need them for their true jailbreak.”

Part 2

Where even was the goal?

Where could we go and what could we do?

“…”

Lava erupted higher than the traffic lights. But this wasn’t the summit of a volcano. It was an ordinary road people had been using not long before. But now a red glow was rising from the thick cracks like barriers.

It was flowing through some areas like rivers. The first thing we had to watch out for were the slopes. End up at the bottom of one and you were screwed.

“Watch your head, Satori.”

“?”

My stepmom gave a casual warning and yanked my head back below the steel or aluminum roof of the bus stop. A loud banging sound pounded on my eardrums afterwards.

“That’s eruption debris,” explained Anastasia as she pulled the ball of plastic from the stomach of her thin dress and extracted her phone and pet robot from it.

She was staring up at the flimsy roof.

“And not just volcanic ash. They’re only the size of pebbles. But I’ve heard they can break the sound barrier. Get caught in that downpour and you won’t be having a good time.”

A hit from that unpredictable solid rain would mean instant death.

That was scary enough, but Anastasia had mentioned another concern as well: volcanic ash.

“This is really bad,” I said. “We can’t use the electricity or the water right now.”

“The infrastructure was already down and the roads are in ruins,” said Anastasia. “Won’t the underground pipes and power lines be badly damaged regardless?”

“I wonder how the fiber optic cables are doing,” said my stepmom.

That led me to check my phone.

Like I said before, cellphones and smartphones did not connect directly to each other – they always went through a base station. And it was fiber optic cable that connected those base stations. So if the cables spread out like a spider web were destroyed, our phones wouldn’t have internet either.

Losing access to Maxwell again now was a terrifying thought.

“A bigger concern would be a mass of invisible hydrogen sulfide.” My stepmom was pointing somewhere. “Or if the heat of the lava creates a rapid spiraling updraft that sucks in the embers.”

With a deep roar, a stone home or shop was ripped from the ground. It traveled up a red elevator as it was sucked into the dark sky.

What the hell was that?

A tornado made of fire!?

“It’s called a firestorm. You can figure out what happens to us if it hits us, I hope? Then let’s get out of here!!”

We ran full speed from the red tower ignoring the layout of the roads and destroying everything in its path as it approached us.

The intermittently falling eruption debris was frightening, but we couldn’t hide under a roof forever with that firestorm approaching. Would it tear the roof from over our heads or just burn us to death in its flames? With all that oxygen supplied to it, that fire could probably melt steel. And what could we even do if it sucked up one of the scorching rivers of lava and splattered it in all directions? It didn’t even need a direct hit when just getting close would scorch us!

“Maxwell!!”

“I only have bad news. The firestorm is weaving as it approaches you. I cannot overstate the threat.”

We had our hands full simply surviving.

We didn’t have time to pursue JB or the nukes. We needed to protect ourselves and find more secure footing first!

“Warning: you cannot travel north.”

“Why not!?”

“Look,” said my stepmom. “Something like a cumulonimbus cloud has formed, blocking the way ahead. It’s probably ultra hot steam.”

She pointed at what looked like a screen reflecting an orange light while I ran and pulled young Anastasia along by the hand.

“The lava has flowed into the Seine. The other side must be in serious trouble with all the phreatic eruptions caused by the magma. That won’t just burn you. I’m guessing it’s more like a giant steam oven, so even the bridges and boats will have been destroyed. And even if a bridge has survived, we wouldn’t survive crossing it. Heat and steam rise, so we would end up like steamed chickens in only a few seconds.”

That meant it was unlikely JB had fled that way. I doubted they were dumb enough to get killed in the disasters they had caused themselves.

We couldn’t go north.

And the firestorm wasn’t going to wait around.

We were cooked if we stopped moving.

“On, no! Oh, no, no! Truth! Maybe we should have stayed in the catacombs!”

“Sorry, but I’m not a fan of being buried alive in bones or suffocating on poison gas!”

We had no way of knowing where the lava would erupt from. The eruption debris and hydrogen sulfide were just as unpredictable. Our fate should have been entirely in the hands of lady luck.

“This way, Satori.”

My stepmom casually stepped over some rubble and reached out a hand.

“Make sure to look after Anastasia-chan. I doubt she would follow my instructions.”

Damn.

Her actions were about as suspicious as could be. She had to be hiding something. But she was also correct.

What was this irritating feeling?

She kept telling me to do the things I was already planning to do. Yes, like being told over and over to do your homework.

Amatsu Yurina.

Archenemy Lilith.

I definitely had her to thank for not having to rely on luck here. Without the unfair power of a legit Demon Lord spoken of in myth, I would have already died here even with Maxwell’s support.

But.

She was also hiding something. I was safe for now if I followed her lead, but I would never escape that “for now”.

The answer had to be outside her umbrella of safety.

I had to figure out how to break free without getting hurt. Quite the rebellious phase I was having here. Most people didn’t get nukes and meteor showers involved when they left their mom’s care.

“We can’t outrun that firestorm! Maxwell says it’s weaving across a wide enough area that running to either side is no guarantee we can escape!!”

“This way!”

My stepmom led us into a subway tunnel.

As soon as we were inside, the deafening sound of flames consuming oxygen swept across the open world overhead.

We finally came to a stop.

I hesitantly looked up at the ceiling. It hadn’t collapsed and there was no superheated wind or volcanic gas traveling down the tunnel.

I couldn’t manage much more than crouching down and trying to catch my breath.

“Get ready,” said my stepmom. “We’re leaving on my cue.”

“It’s hell out there. Can’t we wait here for rescue?”

“Silly boy, no one can say for sure where the ground will split open next. We can’t stay below sea level for long. Where do we run to if the lava pours in here?”

Another low tremor shook us.

Was that an earthquake or a distant eruption? We stopped speaking to look up at the ceiling.

Cracks ran through the thick concrete like bulging blood vessels.

“This way, Anastasia.”

I beckoned the small girl over with my eyes still on the ceiling. If those cracks worked their way around a piece of heavy concrete, it would break away and fall. Maybe the entire ceiling wouldn’t collapse, but a soccer ball sized piece hitting you in the head was still plenty dangerous.

“We can’t rest no matter where we go,” said Anastasia while sticking close to me. “If this lasts long enough, we’ll have to think about water and food. Where will we sleep tonight? What about a bath? With all this magma around, maybe we can find a hot spring.”

The hotels…probably weren’t functioning. Even if the building had survived, I doubted the employees would still be there. And without any power, the elevators would be down and the rooms’ electric locks wouldn’t open.

What about a shelter?

We didn’t know where any were and did they even allow foreigners like us? There was a decent chance we would be turned away for not being Parisians.

Dirty water was leaking from the ground at our feet.

“Ew, what is happening now?”

“Warning.”

“We’re leaving.”

Maxwell and my stepmom spoke up at the same time.

“A spring?” Anastasia sounded puzzled. “Why here?”

“If this is soil liquefaction, it would warrant a maximum threat level,” said Maxwell. “Please leave at once.”

I had thought it was a threat because the lava could contact it and cause a phreatic eruption or a downed powerline could electrify it, but the real threat was more direct.

“An unnatural spring is the most blatant sign there is,” explained Amatsu Yurina.

“?”

“That this area is about to collapse due to the damage to the crust. We need to leave here immediately!”

Dammit, here too!?

Just as I began rushing toward the exit, my feet caught on the ground and I fell. This was worse than running on the beach. Nothing was worse than running through sticky muddy water!

Looking out the tunnel exit felt like looking into a furnace.

The city out there had to be scorched red by the lava and firestorm, but we had to leave.

The instant we arrived on the rubble-strewn surface, I heard several explosive booms from directly behind us. The tunnel walls or ceiling must have collapsed, but there was no time to examine the damage. I felt a cold sweat as I tugged on Anastasia’s hand. The air pushed out by the collapse sent wind and dust rushing past us. That gave plenty of oxygen for the fires outside to burn even brighter.

It was like an explosion.

A mass of fire moved against the wind like a dragon’s fiery breath directed toward the tunnel.

I picked up Anastasia and rolled to the side just beforehand, but we would have been swallowed up by the rapidly expanding fire otherwise. It was like a steel-melting flamethrower.

The surface was hellish in its own right.

The lava itself wasn’t the only threat. It was hard to find a building that wasn’t on fire at this point. All the destruction must have blocked the roads because there were no firetrucks to be seen. One person was doing his best to attach a hose to a fire hydrant, but as soon as the water shot from the nozzle, an explosion knocked him on his rear. All the water had triggered the explosion by making contact with the petroleum blaze.

The man’s desperate efforts had only caused more damage.

I could see yellow shapes here and there. They were probably cooled and hardened sulfur crystals. I didn’t know if it was more acidic or alkaline now, but the unseen soil or water quality must have changed. This place was gradually departing from the usual earth environment.

“This won’t last forever.”

My stepmom was unfazed.

She made it sound like she saw things like this all the time and it was well within the range of “normal” for her.

“The magma didn’t build up here over a long period of time. The broken crust will eventually harden. The lava itself will cool like a scab forming over a wound.”

“Maxwell.”

“I believe she is correct. However, this will not happen right away.”

So it would stop eventually, but not right here and now. That meant we still had to protect ourselves.

Also…

“JB did all this to France’s capital. If they can do this with just a meteor shower, why do they even need the nukes?”

Did they just want to claim the title of a nuclear power?

My stepmom smiled and responded while wiping sweat from her brow and using the movement of the floating embers to determine the direction of the wind.

“They aren’t after attack power.”

“?”

We set out, avoiding the large cracks and overflowing lava. Simply climbing onto the buildings and traveling between rooftops wouldn’t keep us safe. If the ground collapsed, the building on top of it went with it.

“They want those nukes for some other purpose. They are only gathering the materials they need for their true goal.”

“Surely they aren’t planning to remove the warheads and remake them into fuel rods. That would be such a waste of time!”

“Admittedly, most people will only think of weapons and power plants when it comes to nuclear power. Maybe proton and electron collision experiments too.”

Rocks were raining from the sky a short distance away. That was eruption debris. The tearing sound accompanying them probably meant they were breaking the sound barrier. The orange glow showed us that building walls and windows were being destroyed in the process. It was like machinegun fire.

It didn’t seem that impressive once it had passed, but a direct hit from that solid rain would be deadly. That was why my stepmom kept checking the wind as she led us around.

“So Satori. What is JB’s objective?”

“How should I know. They just said something about staging a jailbreak from the world.”

“Then can you tell me why that jailbreak would require technology to control meteors?”

I came to a stop despite the dangerous situation.

That question cut way too close to the heart of the issue.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you that would cost a tremendous amount to develop. But if they just wanted to run away or hide, they wouldn’t need a meteor shower or nuclear warheads. That means those are extras. JB has some grand objective and they have converted pieces of it into weapons. Their meteor control tech is not meant as a weapon.”

“Then…then what is it meant for!? What is JB trying to do with the ability to manipulate astronomical orbits!?”

“That’s it right there,” replied Amatsu Yurina. “JB is sick of this world.”

“…?”

“And they would rather create a new world than put up with this one.”

Her answer was so far out there I felt completely lost for a moment.

But the answer had been right there in front of me all along.

“But that can’t be- that would mean- what!?”

“The earth was originally no more than dust floating in space.”

My stepmom laughed.

For most disasters, there was no one surefire way to survive. Oftentimes, staying put and waiting for it to pass was your best bet.

Yet she seemed to be taking us to higher ground. The randomly falling debris was a threat, but it was better than being swallowed up by the flowing lava.

“It just so happened that sufficient mass gathered somewhere in orbit around the sun. As long as the conditions are right, it doesn’t have to be here. There are tens of thousands of asteroids, dwarf planets, and other small astronomical bodies floating between Mars and Jupiter. There are even more past Pluto. Gather those up in a single location and compress them from all sides with a great power and you have a 2nd home for yourself.”

A great power?

Was that what the nukes were for?

“Do they have no respect for the miracle of life?”

Anastasia couldn’t believe her ears. She didn’t even seem to notice all the embers falling nearby or her face reflecting the orange glow.

“You don’t just magically get life if your planet is the third closest to the sun. The current environment slowly formed over 4.6 billion years and the slightest difference would have drastically changed the outcome! It was a product of coincidence! And the odds of intelligent life like us evolving there are even lower!! You can’t create an identical planet by adding up all the right numbers!!”

“The miracle of life?” scoffed Amatsu Yurina.

She may have been showing her Demon Lord Lilith side more than her stepmom side.

“Even the hunks of ice flying in elliptical orbits have methane and ammonia in them. Shine a bunch of solar cosmic rays on there and amino acids will form. And I hope I don’t have to tell you those are the building blocks of life.”

“…”

I couldn’t keep up. The scale had grown too large.

“If you ask me, life will take root on this new planet whether you want it or not. Either the powerful gamma rays produced when the dirt is compressed by the nuclear warheads will produce amino acids or the JB transplants will bring microscopic face mites and gut bacteria with them. Once lifeforms start to live in a livable environment, it can’t stay entire devoid of bacteria forever. Take a look under the microscope and you’ll see people are crawling from head to toe with microbes.”

It wasn’t about whether or not it was possible.

A group was acting on the belief that it was possible. They were moving around the dust and rocks floating in space and they had stolen the right to use several nuclear warheads from a nuclear power. And since they only needed this planet to last long enough for them to depart for the new one, they didn’t care how much damage they did to it. And worst of all, no one in this world could catch them at the moment.

“Absolute Noah isn’t exactly a charitable organization that can make public announcements,” said Amatsu Yurina. “But we have fought in our own way to save the world from this crisis. We can’t agree with JB’s view that the current world is disposable.”

So it all came down to their worldview.

If what she was telling me was accurate, then at least JB wasn’t planning to detonate the French nukes in population centers. That was some good news, wasn’t it?

But look around me.

They had destroyed this city just because they didn’t need it, so would they really bother to spare anyone?

“Not a chance.”

“Truth?”

Anastasia sounded worried. She hadn’t been saying much after Amatsu Yurina’s revelation. She may have thought I was still sensible, so she didn’t like that I was saying things with zero context.

If she was looking for a pacifist, I was just going to disappoint her.

I was going to choose to fight.

“JB doesn’t particularly hate the city of Paris or the country of France. They just wanted to eliminate the people standing between them and something they wanted. They created this much of a hell for no more than that. If we let them, they’ll do this to the whole world. If they decide it’s the most cost effective method or the quickest route, they’ll wipe New York or Shanghai off the map. It doesn’t matter to them how many people live there. They’ll do it just because they need a star screwdriver to dismantle a trap or because they want to stock up on recovery items before facing a tough boss.”

“…”

We had no idea if JB’s preparations were now complete or if they still had 5 or even 10 more steps left to go.

And those steps might not be obtaining something they needed; they could always be eliminating something that stood in their way. They might launch a preemptive strike on a radar facility or airbase that would keep them from leaving the planet.

If JB considered something necessary, they would take action. What if they decided they needed a full set of backup materials after acquiring everything they needed? Then JB would destroy another city. There was no rule saying this could only happen once. Whether or not we could rest easy was entirely up to them.

All we could do was curl up here and wait for the disaster named JB to pass us by. If we didn’t do anything now, that is.

If nothing fell directly on our heads now, would we really be right to celebrate? There was no guarantee we wouldn’t be harmed next time. Leaving them out there to strike again was the biggest threat of all.

“It was no more than chance that Paris was chosen this time. They might choose to destroy our or Anastasia’s city next time. So how can we ignore this? We don’t have to play along with this game of Russian roulette JB started.”

In fact, we couldn’t.

I couldn’t let the overwhelming scale lead me astray. It was wrong for JB to be in charge here. Paris was supposed to be in charge of Paris’s fate, Moscow in charge of Moscow’s, and Tokyo in charge of Tokyo’s.

If they wanted to play Russian roulette, they needed to aim the gun at their own head first. We weren’t interest in playing their game.

“We need to defeat JB here,” I said clearly. “We need to make them pay for the mess they made here. I don’t care how much it costs us. We need to make sure they never want to try something like this again.”

“I agree with you there,” said Anastasia, sounding less than convinced.

She couldn’t hide her doubts that we would be better off focusing on keeping ourselves safe or dragging people out from under rubble.

“Yes, that is probably what we’ll have to do.”

My stepmom, however, sounded amused. She may have been happy I had made the decision she wanted.

She climbed to the top of a collapsed stone wall and looked across the world below.

“No matter how carefully we prepare and work out our disaster plans, none of it matters if JB decides to attack on a whim. The only way to keep ourselves safe is to attack and crush JB at the source of it all. And thoroughly enough that they can’t strike back ever again.”

“Are you saying they’re close enough that we can reach out and attack them? They aren’t launching a cyber attack from the other side of the planet?”

“Of course. They slipped past me in the Ministry of Defense’s basement, after all.”

Someone had evaded Archenemy Lilith’s notice, set up their sabotage, erased all evidence, and then safely left the Ministry of Defense basement. Whoever this was was unbelievably skilled.

Was this going to be another Demon Lord like the Leviathan I once had to deal with?

Or…

“It’s always humans at times like this,” said Amatsu Yurina with a hand on her cheek.

Magicians, fortunetellers, alchemists, shamans, necromancers, witches, witch doctors, onmyojis, summoners, sorcerers, fengshui masters.

Those were all people who wielded the occult while remaining human. They went by many names and I had no idea if my mental image of them was accurate. A lot of my knowledge came from movies and RPGs after all.

But I had seen some of them already.

I had seen that voodoo bokor who had controlled Valkyrie Karen and that initial JB man who had transformed some kind of god into the queen of that phony spaceship.

The Scylla was apparently working with them too, so they weren’t a human-only organization. And that witch goddess Hecate had been lending her power to humans just for fun during that microplastics incident.

The common factor among them all was controlling the divine.

JB wanted to stage a jailbreak from this stifling world, so was that just one attempt at breaking through the rules and creating a loophole, or was it meant as a twisted form of revenge?

“And when a magic user knows they are weak, they will make up for it by fighting with information. This is going to be trickier than a demon who carelessly reveals his own name. This is going to make it sound silly when anyone calls us an embodiment of evil.

“Who is it?”

“Pierre Smith.”

The name didn’t sound remotely familiar to me.

This was someone even more foreign to me than Anastasia. But if that was their real name, they probably came from France.

And they still did all this?

They had done this to their own country’s capital for their jailbreak?

“He is the ruler of the pyramids and of the mummy who compiled the Book of the Dead. But he could not abandon his ties to this world and wanders it as a human. Just barely, though.”

“…”

“So he rejected the stable path and chose to walk a much more difficult one. …We are not dealing with your average person here. Nothing drives a human quite like the seven desires.”

[Unknown_Storage] The Foundational Theories of Egyptian Magic [file05]

(The following is a modern translation of the hieroglyphics, but carbon dating suggests the hieroglyphics were drawn unusually recently. This was likely written by an eccentric academic.)

In Egyptian mythology, the priests have two major jobs: controlling the sun and managing the dead.

Those are two very different things, but if you base this on the human body and divide them between the outer world and the inner world, then they can be said to describe everything in the world.

Also, the sun and the dead are management techniques rooted in the idea of preserving the current state of the current world. A wide variety of gods are featured in this massive religion, but similar to other polytheistic religions, the Egyptian gods are not perfect beings. Even the sun god Re grows weak as he ages.

This line of thinking also applies to the human pharaohs, so ancient Egyptian society was constructed under the assumption that the pharaoh’s strength and charisma would one day fade. In other words, their civilization was built so they could accept the death of someone powerful and continue on from there. This is rooted in the ideology of reincarnation and the technologies of the pyramids and mummies are so complex and intricate as a means of ensuring that reincarnation was successful.

Magic of this sort is extremely attractive.

However, if you witness anyone using Egyptian magic and not as an unpaid service to a god, a pharaoh, the world, or society, then you should be extremely cautious of this person.

Supernatural acts that ignore the world’s stability and are carried out to fulfill a personal desire are known as a Dark Ritual and that was the most loathed power in ancient Egyptian society.

Magic of this sort has drawn in so many people. Even though it can be used for personal and wicked deeds – no, because it can be – it comes in an unusually large number of varieties.

This powerless editor hopes a user of the good and decent rituals appears before you.

And that the world still has some sense left.

Back to Chapter 3