- Location
- a place
Nozomi has good taste.
The Troubled Schooldays of Nishifune Nozomi
Nozomi has good taste.
Tayta Malikai
200% Space Whale
- Location
- Australia
I first balked at the size of this update, but it went really quickly for some reason. That's probably a good thing.
We got some Aratani-based intrigue, some warm and fuzzy Manako moments, and some more neat tactical espionage action from Nozomi. I like how she's got a move for seemingly everything under the sun. I'd question where she found the time to learn it all, but this is anime Japan, if you aren't a master of seven arts by the time you graduate you're doing it wrong.
I'm not sure what the deal with getting knocked out at the beginning of the chapter was all about, but eh can't be that important ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
TL;DR Nice update.
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
It's not a proper conspiracy until there's already politicking and people playing games inside the conspiracy~
*cough* Well, it's looking like she might not even make her own lifespan at this rate, so yeah.
Wow, harsh. "Even if you're a shit tutor and not thinking properly, she can still be salvaged so at least don't get her killed"
typo
(This is when the player asks the GM if they can roll against their background for a clue.)
Nope, nope, nope, out of the city.
At least she probably still looks good? *laughs*
needs a comma
This is missing some words, presumably about how the fiberoptic was cut or something
There's prooooobably some nasty fine print. Getting rezzed in trade for eternal service is not necessarily a great deal.
space
missing some words or something
wait what hold on now
There
probably should be capitalized
Really? I'd think she'd have gravitated to Berseria or something. ;X
It was nice to see her sneaking around and showing some competence solo.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I actually typed the tutor thing should be other way around. Nozomi has so far taught Manako pretty well, though in a very focused fashion.
I'm not unfortunately going to explain my own setting beyond the fic cause it's a good way to get confused lol. If you search back for some of the stuff on espers it should become clear. . . I hope.
That's the sequel she means
I'm not unfortunately going to explain my own setting beyond the fic cause it's a good way to get confused lol. If you search back for some of the stuff on espers it should become clear. . . I hope.
That's the sequel she means
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Jim Starluck
CO, ICS Vanguard
- Location
- Cincinnati, OH
Dunno how I missed this until now. Very nice, maximum stealth bonus. Wonder what she'll spend the xp on?
Chapter 2-8: Stalking
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Finding who'll be kidnapped next is anticlimactically simple. Whatever Porphyrion is measuring, these guys are moving down from top to bottom of it. If their little pet is in the process of breaking out, they probably don't have time to do anything fancy to patch up its cage. All we have to do is watch them steal someone else off the street.
The problem is what comes after we witness a kidnapping. Effective tailing needs a big team - at least four cars, which construct a "box" around the target. A car to the rear well back, a car closer in up front, and two others travelling on parallel roads to replace the rear and front cars as they peel off to avoid detection. Then you need people to do it. People who can drive confidently.
Laplace taught me a very British distrust of tradecraft but there are some tricks to tailing that she swears by: Avoid lone male or male/male driver/passenger pairs of the same age. Avoid people who look like cops, gangsters or military. This unfortunately rules out most of the people I could use. I could hire a bunch of detective agency guys, a common enough thing in Japan, but after a little thinking I decide that even this will just be too time consuming. It would be easy for my enemy to have gone around to every private detective agency they could find with a frog throat and told them to call me if they were asked to conduct certain jobs. Or at least, I can't take the risk of them doing so. To be compromised that way would be a clear lose state.
As with people throughout history faced with a shortage of manpower, I'll substitute technology: drones. They're hardly an unknown on the Japanese crime scene, but not particularly used by most magi. I made use of them back when I was with Aratani, but I'll need higher performance models for an actual car chase. A lot of commercial quadcopters are kind of slow, and don't have that much battery life. I end up going out to a specialist drone shop to buy higher spec models and become a story to the staff about the hot girl who seemed to know a lot about them.
I end up buying four - two primaries and two backups - and get to work on them. First I check everything actually works. Then I dump them on Manako and tell her to extend the battery life and speed. This kind of thing is a pretty standard working for apprentices, and she should be good enough to do it now. She spends some hours on it and comes back to me with four drones, both well enchanted for speed and battery life, and painted up with blue grey bottoms and camouflage tops, two coloured for urban tokyo, two in wilderness multicam.
I spend a keyed up day at school while the adults run watch duty, and get a call just at the end of volleyball practice. It's happening. The surveillance team has a bag of holding, and we crawl through it to join them, arriving just in time to see the deed being done.
The girl's name was Miura Himari. She's eighteen years old, and likes divination apps, dogs (she has two puppies), cats (she has an old Siamese cat called Gure), and secretly still watches Precure despite being too old for it. The snatch team take her on her way out to a chain restaurant where she was studying with her friends Ono Aoi and Sugawara Reina, who they grab as well, probably to disguise their targeting priorities.
We're watching through the lenses of one of the quad-copters. I had it already positioned to with just one person trailing the four from a distance to cue it. A second drone is higher up, in reserve, and the remaining two are in the back of a surveillance van. Tanigawa and I were alone in the back of this one, with an unseen servant driving, while Yoshitaka and Manako are in the second vehicle, giving us enough to do an impromptu tailing pair if we need a plan to go to hell with.
The cameras make it a coldly distant view, watching Miura stop and freeze still. One of her friends shakes her arm, looks around and calls out for help as people around her move. Then the man called Van steps out of the crowd, his team around him, a heavy black SUV pulling up behind them. The three women board with the team and the vehicle pulls away into traffic.
"Are you alright?" Tanigawa asks.
I realize that my fist is clenched with that uncontrollable red rage that comes to my skin sometimes. "I'm fine." I hope the flush isn't too noticeable in the van's dark back compartment.
"I'm glad. I almost can't stand this." She sips at one of the cans of coffee she brought. "Just watching I mean."
"Why did you become a prosecutor anyway?"
"My Mother was a prosecutor, briefly. She retired to raise me. She never really seemed to feel like she had a full life after that. I guess I wanted to carry her dream forward."
"Bet you didn't expect to be working in this kind of case."
"Not at all." She looks at me. "How about you? You don't seem like the average teenage mage girl."
"You know a lot of those?"
"Mostly we deal with drunk teenage mages getting into trouble."
"Have you read my file?"
"Some of it." she admits. "A lot is classified above my level. I know you were one of Aratani's companions a few years ago. I know you've grown apart. I know you used to be short, and Aratani told me about the curse after we got in contact. Why aren't you with him anymore anyway?"
I shrug, and give her an answer that's the truth, without the bad parts. "I guess I got tired of people needing to save me."
"It sounds a little lonely."
"Most mages wouldn't save me even if they could. Darkness within, darkness without."
"But Aratani would, right?"
I look over at her, and realize like so many women of his acquaintance, she's probably in love with him.
The truth is, ever since I was saved from death for the first time, I've felt like my life is slipping out of my own control. That I dance to the whims of others. How do I explain it to her? This woman without a spark of magic in her? That invisible loss of control that comes to the one who is saved. That loss of respect. The fact that every time Aratani saves my life, I see the conviction grow within him that he also owns it.
"I guess I'd like to be the one who saves people."
"Hmm." She says. "Looks like they're headed for the freeway."
"I'm going to call the others." I pick up the handset. It's routed through my phone's spatial link, so no worry about detection. "Oscar Two, this is Oscar One."
"Go for Two." Manako on the other end sounding elated to be able to talk in radio code like this.
"Are you in position?"
"Yeah, we're good to go."
"Okay, they're headed your way."
A pause, then Manako speaks again: "Oscar One, this is Two."
"Two."
"There's a helicopter over the freeway. It's high up but uh, Oscar Two-One thinks it might be a surveillance craft. It seems like it's moving parallel with the van."
"Okay, thanks Two. I'll look into it."
I swing the drone cameras around. "Gain some altitude." I tell the operator. The shadow maid inclines its head, fingers moving across the controls. The helicopter is there, flying at a fairly sedate pace for a helicopter, following the freeway at high level. The kind of commercial aircraft that CEOs, or Yakuza bosses sometimes use. Dumpy and bubble cockpitted. More interesting is what's hung underneath. I zoom in the camera and spot a camera eye pod mounted under it. It's not pointing towards the drone, but rather down at the road, swinging back and forth. Looking presumably, for follower vehicles.
"I wonder if they have a ground team as well." Tanigawa frowns. "There's probably observers in the craft with binoculars and stuff as well, cueing the camera where to look. Those pods are like looking through a straw."
"Do you have any idea what kind of radius they can see?"
"Let me ask Yoshitaka." She takes up her radio and they have a brief conversation. "She thinks several square miles."
"We should look for hostile drones as well." The Japanese police make quite a bit of use of drones. "They must be going quite some distance if they're using a helicopter. That's not going to be a problem in the city but once we get beyond it it'll be a pain to keep the drone in control range."
"You have some trick up your sleeve here?" Tanigawa asks.
"Maybe. Something I didn't have time to do the drones." I pull out one of the spare phones I brought in the van. It's spatially linked into the spatial link servers just like my main phone. I download the drone control program onto it then plug it in to the drone's USB and duct tape it to the side.
The drone whirls to life, running through a series of test movements. Good control. Okay. "Oscar two, come back."
"Go ahead."
"I'm going to put a drone into the shared bag. I want you to take it to the edge of the city and prepare to launch it."
Once we get out of the town then we'll be able to pull back further, perhaps just track the helicopter rather than the van, making us able to get out of the city more easily. But still, there's a twinge of unease here. If you've taken precautions such as this, what other ones might they have taken?
What would I do in their position?
I'd swap vehicles. I open up google maps and start to look for anything with a multistory carpark.
In the pursuit car, Manako holds on for dear life as Yoshitaka powers down suburban streets. She's never seen anyone drive like the detective, always ten moves ahead of the traffic. Passing, accelerating and decelerating, automotive parkour. Before they started, Yoshitaka methodically plugged every traffic camera location anywhere near their likely route into her phone's map function. Around them, Manako can only remember a blurred confusion of leafy suburban streets, cheap mid rise housing and closely packed alleys. She hopes Yoshitaka knows where they're going because she's been lost for quite a while. With each turn, the hood of her hoodie jerks, and her baseball cap threatens to fly off her head.
"How did you learn how to do this?" She asks as they rocket past a slowing van and them rocket through a traffic light still just on green.
"Police driving courses. And my dad was a delivery driver." Yoshitaka speaks without taking her eyes off the road. "He had this incredibly old van with a gear box you needed to set up ahead of time. It really teaches you how to drive!" She grins, starts to slow down, her pace steadying. "Besides, I've got to do it here, as we get closer we have to worry about spotters."
Manako relaxes, checks the map and wishes there was an icon for the helicopter and van. All she has is the feed from the drone camera, which currently shows it moving along the freeway.
"If they don't stop here we'll wait them out, then head down one of these side roads and launch the drone." Yoshitaka pushes a strand of hair back behind her ear.
"Sounds good." The car slides onto the freeway and the ride smooths out even further, Yoshitaka is going fast but it's the kind of casual speed of any freeway driver. "So what's our cover story in here?"
"I guess mother and daughter going shopping?"
"You're kind of young to be my mother. How about you be treating your younger sister?"
"Alright." Yoshitaka nods. "Are you armed?"
"Yeah." Manako has a gun in a concealed holster on one side, her zip up hoodie loose and baggy to hide it.
"Don't use it unless I tell you to."
"Alright." Manako is intending to use it if it looks like the frog throat is about to speak to her directly. She's decided she will let herself be taken if it comes to it, she'd prefer to let Nozomi rescue her than die, not just because life is generally superior to death, but because her death would break Nozomi for good, and because she hates the thought of ending a love story between two women in such an awful fashion. But she doesn't intend to let herself be taken easily.
The store they're approaching seems the most likely destination for a change of cars. It's a bit off the freeway, a large supermarket above a parade of shops. The store is at ground level compared to the freeway but the carpark winds down below it, hidden from view.
Yoshitaka finds a space in the open air part of the carpark and then fishes through her bag. "Go buy some drinks. I'll wait in the car and we can pretend to be taking a break."
Manako gets out and heads for the store. She spots the guy as she steps in. She's always been good at spotting things. Maybe it's the glasses. She denied needing them for years and toughed it out before her parents finally forced her to get a pair. Now she notices everything. Or maybe it's because she never wants to feel that awful feeling of strong hands closing around her from behind ever again. She's still mad at herself for that. She put herself, and Nozomi in danger. She hates that. Hates to be a burden.
The guy is standing in the screened smoking area in the front of the store, smoking and playing with his phone. He's a big man, thick set. Like a rough private detective in a TV drama. Nothing too odd there, except Manako can see at least two cigarettes that are still recent enough to be giving off smoke in the ashtray in front of him. He must have been there quite a while.
She pulls out her phone, careful not to glance at the guy again, and texts Yoshitaka:
<<Sentry, smoking area.>>
<<Get the stuff, we'll move and re-approach on foot. The target is still 15~ minutes out.>>
Manako hurries over to the drinks area, picks out a few of her favourites, then quickly feeds them through the automated checkout and heads back to the car. "Easy." Yoshitaka says as she sits down. "No hurry." She makes a show of pulling out a bottle and taking a drink before putting the car into gear and pulling out onto the freeway, then takes the next exit, pulls around the corner and parks in the shade. The street is a leafy shopping street with a pronounced down angle, one of the sub centres where a village or town was consumed by the sprawl of greater Tokyo.
"Won't pulling off right here be a problem if the helicopter is observing?"
"We're under the trees." Yoshitaka says. "We should be okay."
Manako frowns, wondering if she forgot about the airborne spy.
"Anyway, let's walk."
The two get out and begin to head down towards the store.
"This is going to be tough. We can't just watch them go in from the top."
Manako looks around then points up at one of the other buildings. "It looks like there's a cafe up there. Why don't you go wait in it and watch for the van. I'll go wait in the stairs and check what vehicle they transfer to."
"I should be the one to go in. I'm the detective."
"You can't silence yourself. I can." Manako has been very careful to know the exact rune for that, and has several copies pre-drawn.
Yoshitaka gives her a look, then makes a face. "Alright. but stay on call with me. We'll use the encrypted VOIP so your girlfriend can hear us too. You have earbuds?"
"Yes." Manako plugs her phone in and the pair split up. Manako pulls the hood of her hoodie up. She moves up to the lower door of the carpark and looks inside.
As she checks the floors she becomes increasingly sure this is the place. For one thing, every security camera globe she passes has been vandalized. Sprayed over with paint, cracked open. Some of the damage looks quite old. At least she won't need to worry about being caught on camera herself.
"Okay, the SUV is almost here, get ready."
There's an elevator but Manako ignores it and runs up the stairs, keeping her pace just slow enough not to seem too strange to anyone coming down, reaching the top floor only marginally out of breath. The track training pays off. At the top she pauses, peaks through the fire door's panel. The SUV turns in and keeps going, headed for the down ramp. Manako descends again, holding the handrail and taking the steps two or three at a time, arriving at the next floor, and then the next as the black car rolls down.
On the third floor down, the SUV stops, pulls into a space and the doors open. Three dazed schoolgirls step out, the fat form of the frog throat she killed before. A slim college girl looking woman and a pair of guards follow them out. They walk off deeper into the garage. Manako curses, then pushes the door open just enough to get through and runs forward to one of the pillars.
Something, perhaps instinct or perhaps the number of times she's revised being caught in her head makes her glance back and she ducks around it, going low as the lookout from earlier steps down and gets into the SUV. A moment later it's departing. Manako stays back.
A man passes, walking carefully under a load of shopping. Manako moves up to the end of the pillared area and peaks around the back of a car. The frog throat and his crew are loading into a hopelessly generic monochrome people carrier, its back windows blacked out. She takes a picture of the plate with her phone, then rolls back as the frog throat looks up. Moving so the pillar blocks any view she walks back towards the door.
At the car, the man who goes by Van pauses and looks around. The shopper is walking to another car. "Hey." Van calls out to him. The man looks up. "Come here." The man comes, looking confused. Van pulls a knife, carefully wipes it down with a cloth then offers it to him. "There's something I need you to do."
"Manako." I hear over the call. "There's someone following you." I have the drone in orbit of the shopping complex. No point in following the van. It's battery is almost exhausted anyway.
"Who?" Manako's voice is calm but slightly panicked. "The vehicle is a people carrier. I'm sending a picture of the plate."
"He just looks like a normal guy but he's definitely following you. He's closing the distance."
"I'm speeding up."
We're on the freeway some ten miles behind everything. We need to launch the fresh drone ASAP and get on this people carrier before it gets too difficult to see in freeway traffic.
Can I get there?
I could teleport. If I can find a strong enough leyline I should be able to deal with the velocity differential between the van travelling at freeway speed and the ground but the suburbs of West Tokyo are terrible terrain to draw geomantic power from. The mountain's shadow divert the best energies elsewhere. If I mess it up I'm going to break my legs at best.
"Manako." I say. "Do you hear me?"
"Yes."
"I have no way to support you right now. Resolve the situation as you see fit."
A pause. A deep breath. "Yes."
"Show me what you can do Apprentice." I say it to fire her up and hope it won't get her stabbed.
The guy is not quite running after her. She can hear his steps. He sounds unfit. "I think he's just some normal guy." Yoshitaka says in her ear. "I'm on my way down. Can you keep out of his way until then."
Manako looks back and measures. Without breaking into a run, which will grab the attention of everyone in the street, she can't.
"No. I'm going off call for a sec. I need to concentrate."
"Hey, wai--" Manako pulls her earbuds and turns rapidly into the nearest alley. There's a lot of thin alleys even this far away for the centre. She saw them from above. She just needs a turn, somewhere momentarily out of sight. She saw on the map view that there's a small yard at the end.
She draws the gun and keeps it blocked in front of her body. She doesn't need to worry about killing him because she's pulled the gun's velocity way down. Deep breaths. She's scared, but not like she thought she'd be. She'll go around the corner, raise the gun as she does, and shoot, aiming for the centre of mass.
Running footsteps behind her.
Manako doesn't hesitate. She swings into her own spring, dodges around the corner, the guy comes around, puffing hard, knife in hand. Then silence as Manako's hand caresses the rune she's drawn onto the scrap.
His mouth opens in surprise as he sees the gun, and she shoots him three times.
After a heart stopping minute, Manako comes back on call. "Okay he's down. What do I do with him?"
"Leave him and get out of there." Hopefully the command will fade out of him. And if not, well, he's unlikely to ever see my apprentice again in a city the size of Tokyo. "Yoshitaka, how long before you can deploy the drone."
"Shit…" A pause. "I can just deploy it here. There's hardly anyone around."
"Alright. Do it."
"I'm sending you the picture now." Manako sends it. A monochrome people carrier, blacked out windows, a number plate. I stare at the google map screen, trying to figure out which road that they'll follow. The helicopter is still heading up the freeway, so that presumably means the green car will take another route. Or is that a double bluff?
The drone comes online after an agonizing thirty seconds. "I'm at the car." Manako says.
"We're mobile." Yoshitaka says. "Switching back to radio."
"Acknowledged." I check the drone's camera, pan it across the freeway, searching for the plate on the back of anything that looks likely but what betrays it isn't its shape, colour or plate, but its darkened windows. There it is, on an off ramp heading into the suburbs as the helicopter orbits the freeway.
"We've got it."
The rest of the chase isn't difficult, just long. We just keep the drone locked on. The empty roads just make it easier to follow but I pull the drone up a little higher as I'm sure there are still watchers on the ground. Manako is getting scolded by Yoshitaka for taking her earbuds out, and is babbling adrenaline soaked apologies. She says he's still alive at least. When we're sufficiently far from the site, I'll call an anonymous 119.
My only gnawing worry is that the frog throat might have arranged for him to call in after everything, but perhaps not. It would make the asset far less deniable. There's also the possibility of them monitoring 119, but an actual death is going to create even more noise.
Either way, we have the target location. Manako guesses it before we even get there. Uemi Seishinka Byouin. An old mental hospital built in the 1970s. Unless they were headed all the way across the mountains to another city, this, she declared, was where they were going. As it turns out, she's right.
It's a big, oblong building, five stories of concrete, on a flat plateau where the trees have been cleared back to give sightlines. There's a checkpoint, so far down the road it must be out of sight of the main complex, and several outbuildings, which seem to be the centre of activity. One of the outbuildings glows hot on IR. A generator plant.
Men go in and out of outbuildings at regular intervals while the central building is more or less shut tight. I lose sight of the car for a moment behind a ridge as we approach, and when the drone pops over the trees it's standing outside. I focus on that, watching in fascination. I expected them to have the girls inside by now, but they don't. Rather there's an elaborate procedure being performed, the snatch team chatting with another crew in full hazard suits. They put the girls into what look like old style straightjackets, then lift them up onto gurneys and inject them with something. There seems to be some discussion as to who gets what injection, then they lift the three on and push inside.
"It looks like they're keeping the girls in the main building."
"I wonder why they need hazmat suits."
"It might not be so healthy to be near the containment system."
Effort had obviously been taken to make the facility secure. A pair of drones swing around above it. There's an observation point on the roof, with some heavy duty optics, which looks like it'd spot anything crossing the clear zone. On the ground more guards are moving about on patrol, all in the same blue security overalls. A lot of them. There must be a hundred guys either camped around the building or out on local patrols. I keep my drone back in a long orbit, higher up than the patrolling quad copters and scan. None of them appear to have guns, just batons. However I'd be willing to bet that if someone like me turned up they could put an armed team together before we breached the building.
There's a frog throat on the gate and, slipping in the etheric lens, a seriously heavy duty ward on the whole place. No teleporting or scrying into there, but it doesn't seem quite powerful enough to stop a double ended gateway like a bag of holding. Or maybe the mage who made it doesn't know the trick.
"There's no way we're just going to storm this place with the resources we have." I look up from the monitors and sigh. It would have been too simple if we could just take it over. If they have a ward that strong, then they also potentially have firearms. A hundred guys with firearms is a much more difficult prospect. And once we get inside, I still don't know what we're going to do to the alien horror itself. "We're going to need a plan."
Even getting to the point of being able to get a plan together takes a whole day. I set Yoshitaka and Tanigawa to doing the most part of the prep work with Ii. I tell them they all have more than a decade more experience of this than me. The truth is I also wanted to give Yoshitaka and Tanigawa something else to do while I do something else. They're Aratani's women, and after this is done they'll certainly report back to him. The fact I possess a black book and the means to read it. . . is probably something Aratani knows already, but there's no reason to confirm it. The leverage of "I have reason to suspect (because I set you up) that you raided a private depository of eldritch lore and a criminal club, burned down both and killed more than two dozen people (and not people) in the process." is far less than "A police officer and a prosecutor literally saw you reading a banned book."
For this reason I keep the black books on a concealed shelf in the section of the house I've previously kept strictly for Manako and myself, and lock the doors before I retrieve it from its resting place.
I've read through it before a bit, received those maddening insights as to the nature of what I'm facing that don't quite make sense. Now it's time to try again.
Before I go back to the book itself I start to work through the theory that the alien logic of the book implied last time. That creature isn't just a being from another realm, but rather a constitutive element of that realm. It's words make the realm around it real. Simply releasing it is obviously not an option. With enough power it could potentially remake this world as it does its own, at least on a local scale.
There's a few avenues worth pursuing as a way around this. The first is to simply reverse the ritual that they did, or physically destroy it. There's certainly a physical manifestation of the creature so it stands to reason it can be exploded. The problem with either of these solutions is that the link to the mature creature is all that's keeping the lesser versions from maturing themselves. If it's killed, they'll all start to mature fully at once. Rather than one potentially all powerful reality altering horror, we'll have dozens of less powerful ones.
Given the spatial links Alice found between sections, a more profitable approach if destruction is required would be to send an attack spell down each link to the target. The problem with this is that it'd be very obvious. I would be on the hook for making a bunch of very prominent Japanese people spontaneously combust or explode. The most sacred law of the Mage Trust is to conceal magecraft. All else can be justified. I can certainly justify their deaths, but not in such an obvious way. Even doing a bunch of black magic would be far less of a crime than so publicly breaking the ban.
What I need is a way to send them all back. This may well kill everyone implanted with one, but it should do so in a much less obvious fashion than them all lighting on fire at the throat.
It strikes me as I think about it that there's a very easy and elegant way to do this, especially if all the frog throats have geomantic grids. If the parasites are constituent parts of another realm controlled by speech, then I can have a frog throat speak a dismissal. Forcing speech is not a particularly difficult magical feat when you can hijack someone's muscles through their primitive geomantic grid.
From this, and from a set of papers on hacking and interspatial networks, I develop the actual plan, which I then present to the assault team the next day when we have our morning briefing.
Eight hours later, I walk down into the Witch's House's basement. I really should try to get more sleep, I'm pushing five days without now, but there's no time for anything more than a stimulant with my breakfast.
We're using the basement because I've become increasingly paranoid about laser microphones and other high tech bugging systems, so we're doing it in the shooting range with all the equipment lugged down there by the shadow maids. The whole forward team is present, plus everyone extra we'll take on the storm; Junya, Ii and four of her people - three men and a woman.
I don't really know how Ii stands working with so many men. I think I've got a complex about it honestly. Maybe it's something to do with the four men in my life being Junya, who is handsome, reliable and sadistic, Aratani, who is handsome, unreliable and manipulative, Kondo who is handsome, standoffish, and almost certainly the repository of unknown and evil powers, and of course, my real father, of whom the less said the better.
Ii's men are two Japanese introduced as Kikuchi, who was a JSDF special forces operative, and Wada, a former coastguard SST, and an ex-Kazakh Spetsnaz, a thin, utterly handsome lady killer by the name of Sadykov. He and Junya keep throwing one another glances in a way that's either the handsomest guy in the room postering, or the much more interesting sign that they're planning to sleep together.
The woman is an American, good looking in that dialed back, really kind of trying to play it down, way that a lot of US military women have. Her name is Palmer. Ii gave me a file on her. According to that she was combat engineer, qualified through the US army's sapper school, which, according to Ii, is the way that hard charging female soldiers proved how tough they were until the US opened up ranger school to them.
There's something off about Palmer though. Something that makes me think the file isn't telling me everything. I think it's her eyes. They're haunted in a way that even Sadykov's aren't, and given events in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, that must be saying something. I suspect, though I've done nothing to really check, that Palmer was probably a female operative who at least worked with one of the US army special forces units, maybe Green Berets, but probably Blue Light or SOF-Delta, both of whom have been known to make large scale use of female operatives in the recent insurgency in the US, and who the mage trust is much more involved in than the larger US special operations community.
A lot of them have also died in that insurgency, broken against the wave of supernatural power flowing out of the US youth. Many of them have also done, let's be clear, some very bad shit.
She and Ii definitely know one another more than Ii's other operatives. I don't think they're sleeping together, but the way Palmer looks at her sometimes is intense. I'm not going to tell Ii her business but I do worry about how much professionalism there's going to be from Palmer if Ii gets hit. Then again I'm the one taking my girlfriend on the mission.
We're assembled in the basement, with a rack of weapons arranged at one side.For this assault it's time for the big guns to come out. I've laid out everything I brought in from my latest arms purchase. There's M4s, several M16 variants, BR18s, the automatic variant of the CMCR and a pair of Howa type 89s. The Howas are kind of a rare sight, even now. It used to be almost impossible to get Japanese guns on the international black market, but Japan's increasingly external posture and the esper wars that led to it have ended with large numbers of Japanese small arms shipped out to arm various 'forces for stability' across Asia. As for the M16s, Manako keeps trying to tell me that the dizzying variety the US produces are actually really different guns, but I don't really believe her.
"We should all use the same gun as much as we can." Ii looks at Manako and I. "How do you like the balance on the CMCRs?"
"They're nice enough." I shrug. "I prefer my UMP though, it's a little lighter, and you'll never get Junya to use anything but his ironic sten gun." Junya grins. He knows that the amount of bling and magic he's put into that stamp metal piece of shit actually offends me.
"Having interchangeable guns is better I think. And it makes us less likely to stick out. No offense Itome-san, but your gun is kind of distinctive."
"Mm." Junya says. "Well, I'll give it a shot." he looks dubiously at the CMCR. "Strange looking weapon. Did they grow it in a vat?"
We have a short discussion about optics and attachments, and the benefits of magnified holographic vs scout scopes. There's something very distracting about guns. I can see why Manako is so into them as a hobby, but you can easily become obsessed with small arms. I tap the map table and start unrolling the plans.
"Alright, so here's the target." I let Tanigawa, who did most of the research beyond this part take us through the hospital, then look at Ii and lay out the actual plan. We talked about this earlier this morning and she signed off on my work, still, it's intimidating to present it to this group of mature special operatives.
"The mission here is to destroy or banish the eldritch abomination so we can safely free the girls inside. They won't be able to vanish this number of women again without their mind powers. To neutralize the horror, we need to get inside, gain control of a frog throat with an implanted geomantic grid. We will then destroy the central summoned creature and through some spatial networking tricks I won't bore you with, elect this frog throat as the new centre of the network and the most mature creature. We will then have it speak a word of dismissal and send them all back whence they came."
"I don't like this open ground around the place." Ii says. "Even with a lot of magical misdirection, I'm not sure we could get through it." She runs a hand over the map. "I wish we had some way of knowing what kind of opposition they have inside."
"With that in mind." Kikuchi looks at Yoshitaka. "Should the cop really be going in? What's your training detective?"
Kikuchi bristles. "I'm not just a detective, I'm Tokyo Metropolitan Special Police. I've trained with esper down and the SAT. I can handle myself. I've probably been in a lot more firefights than you have."
Kikuchi raises his hands placatingly. "Alright, but we're a pretty eclectic group you got to say. We've got a cop, five soldiers, a gangster and two schoolgirls against who knows what opposition. We're going to need to train this properly."
"That's already being arranged." I rub my eyes. Another administrative headache. "The question is how do we get inside."
"Sneaking through the woods should be no problem. It's the open ground around the hospital that's going to really stop us." Kikuchi leans forward, highlights areas on the map. "There's a lot of stuff watching this, close circuit, thermals, and patrols. There looks like a few gaps but I don't think we could get across there undetected."
"So we need a way inside." I have the twinkle of an idea on that, but get rather rudely interrupted by Wada.
"We're also going to need a way to get the girls out once we've freed them. Eight people isn't enough to defend them in there. We really could use the support of some kind of local authority like the police."
"I wonder if the prefectural police know about this." Tanigawa looked at the image and frowned. "It feels like someone must be looking the other way, but the knowledge can't be general. If a whole police department to the dispatchers knew that there was a secret government facility up here then it would have leaked, at least to the level of being known about among the police. We're not that far from Tokyo."
"You have a plan prosecutor?"
"I was just thinking, we could make a big distraction by calling the police on them. All we'd need to do is get in there and give one of those girl's a phone. Though with a frog throat maybe it's useless." She rubs her eyes. "Unless you're willing to reveal the existence of magic to silence them."
"No." I shake my head. "I'm not breaking that rule."
"There might be another way." Yoshitaka said. "The real problem is where we'd get speakers loud enough and close enough."
"We could move them up through the woods no problem." Kikuchi says, "but where are we going to get a bunch of large speakers from?"
I consider for a moment. "Well actually, there is someone I can ask about that."
The problem is what comes after we witness a kidnapping. Effective tailing needs a big team - at least four cars, which construct a "box" around the target. A car to the rear well back, a car closer in up front, and two others travelling on parallel roads to replace the rear and front cars as they peel off to avoid detection. Then you need people to do it. People who can drive confidently.
Laplace taught me a very British distrust of tradecraft but there are some tricks to tailing that she swears by: Avoid lone male or male/male driver/passenger pairs of the same age. Avoid people who look like cops, gangsters or military. This unfortunately rules out most of the people I could use. I could hire a bunch of detective agency guys, a common enough thing in Japan, but after a little thinking I decide that even this will just be too time consuming. It would be easy for my enemy to have gone around to every private detective agency they could find with a frog throat and told them to call me if they were asked to conduct certain jobs. Or at least, I can't take the risk of them doing so. To be compromised that way would be a clear lose state.
As with people throughout history faced with a shortage of manpower, I'll substitute technology: drones. They're hardly an unknown on the Japanese crime scene, but not particularly used by most magi. I made use of them back when I was with Aratani, but I'll need higher performance models for an actual car chase. A lot of commercial quadcopters are kind of slow, and don't have that much battery life. I end up going out to a specialist drone shop to buy higher spec models and become a story to the staff about the hot girl who seemed to know a lot about them.
I end up buying four - two primaries and two backups - and get to work on them. First I check everything actually works. Then I dump them on Manako and tell her to extend the battery life and speed. This kind of thing is a pretty standard working for apprentices, and she should be good enough to do it now. She spends some hours on it and comes back to me with four drones, both well enchanted for speed and battery life, and painted up with blue grey bottoms and camouflage tops, two coloured for urban tokyo, two in wilderness multicam.
I spend a keyed up day at school while the adults run watch duty, and get a call just at the end of volleyball practice. It's happening. The surveillance team has a bag of holding, and we crawl through it to join them, arriving just in time to see the deed being done.
The girl's name was Miura Himari. She's eighteen years old, and likes divination apps, dogs (she has two puppies), cats (she has an old Siamese cat called Gure), and secretly still watches Precure despite being too old for it. The snatch team take her on her way out to a chain restaurant where she was studying with her friends Ono Aoi and Sugawara Reina, who they grab as well, probably to disguise their targeting priorities.
We're watching through the lenses of one of the quad-copters. I had it already positioned to with just one person trailing the four from a distance to cue it. A second drone is higher up, in reserve, and the remaining two are in the back of a surveillance van. Tanigawa and I were alone in the back of this one, with an unseen servant driving, while Yoshitaka and Manako are in the second vehicle, giving us enough to do an impromptu tailing pair if we need a plan to go to hell with.
The cameras make it a coldly distant view, watching Miura stop and freeze still. One of her friends shakes her arm, looks around and calls out for help as people around her move. Then the man called Van steps out of the crowd, his team around him, a heavy black SUV pulling up behind them. The three women board with the team and the vehicle pulls away into traffic.
"Are you alright?" Tanigawa asks.
I realize that my fist is clenched with that uncontrollable red rage that comes to my skin sometimes. "I'm fine." I hope the flush isn't too noticeable in the van's dark back compartment.
"I'm glad. I almost can't stand this." She sips at one of the cans of coffee she brought. "Just watching I mean."
"Why did you become a prosecutor anyway?"
"My Mother was a prosecutor, briefly. She retired to raise me. She never really seemed to feel like she had a full life after that. I guess I wanted to carry her dream forward."
"Bet you didn't expect to be working in this kind of case."
"Not at all." She looks at me. "How about you? You don't seem like the average teenage mage girl."
"You know a lot of those?"
"Mostly we deal with drunk teenage mages getting into trouble."
"Have you read my file?"
"Some of it." she admits. "A lot is classified above my level. I know you were one of Aratani's companions a few years ago. I know you've grown apart. I know you used to be short, and Aratani told me about the curse after we got in contact. Why aren't you with him anymore anyway?"
I shrug, and give her an answer that's the truth, without the bad parts. "I guess I got tired of people needing to save me."
"It sounds a little lonely."
"Most mages wouldn't save me even if they could. Darkness within, darkness without."
"But Aratani would, right?"
I look over at her, and realize like so many women of his acquaintance, she's probably in love with him.
The truth is, ever since I was saved from death for the first time, I've felt like my life is slipping out of my own control. That I dance to the whims of others. How do I explain it to her? This woman without a spark of magic in her? That invisible loss of control that comes to the one who is saved. That loss of respect. The fact that every time Aratani saves my life, I see the conviction grow within him that he also owns it.
"I guess I'd like to be the one who saves people."
"Hmm." She says. "Looks like they're headed for the freeway."
"I'm going to call the others." I pick up the handset. It's routed through my phone's spatial link, so no worry about detection. "Oscar Two, this is Oscar One."
"Go for Two." Manako on the other end sounding elated to be able to talk in radio code like this.
"Are you in position?"
"Yeah, we're good to go."
"Okay, they're headed your way."
A pause, then Manako speaks again: "Oscar One, this is Two."
"Two."
"There's a helicopter over the freeway. It's high up but uh, Oscar Two-One thinks it might be a surveillance craft. It seems like it's moving parallel with the van."
"Okay, thanks Two. I'll look into it."
I swing the drone cameras around. "Gain some altitude." I tell the operator. The shadow maid inclines its head, fingers moving across the controls. The helicopter is there, flying at a fairly sedate pace for a helicopter, following the freeway at high level. The kind of commercial aircraft that CEOs, or Yakuza bosses sometimes use. Dumpy and bubble cockpitted. More interesting is what's hung underneath. I zoom in the camera and spot a camera eye pod mounted under it. It's not pointing towards the drone, but rather down at the road, swinging back and forth. Looking presumably, for follower vehicles.
"I wonder if they have a ground team as well." Tanigawa frowns. "There's probably observers in the craft with binoculars and stuff as well, cueing the camera where to look. Those pods are like looking through a straw."
"Do you have any idea what kind of radius they can see?"
"Let me ask Yoshitaka." She takes up her radio and they have a brief conversation. "She thinks several square miles."
"We should look for hostile drones as well." The Japanese police make quite a bit of use of drones. "They must be going quite some distance if they're using a helicopter. That's not going to be a problem in the city but once we get beyond it it'll be a pain to keep the drone in control range."
"You have some trick up your sleeve here?" Tanigawa asks.
"Maybe. Something I didn't have time to do the drones." I pull out one of the spare phones I brought in the van. It's spatially linked into the spatial link servers just like my main phone. I download the drone control program onto it then plug it in to the drone's USB and duct tape it to the side.
The drone whirls to life, running through a series of test movements. Good control. Okay. "Oscar two, come back."
"Go ahead."
"I'm going to put a drone into the shared bag. I want you to take it to the edge of the city and prepare to launch it."
Once we get out of the town then we'll be able to pull back further, perhaps just track the helicopter rather than the van, making us able to get out of the city more easily. But still, there's a twinge of unease here. If you've taken precautions such as this, what other ones might they have taken?
What would I do in their position?
I'd swap vehicles. I open up google maps and start to look for anything with a multistory carpark.
***
In the pursuit car, Manako holds on for dear life as Yoshitaka powers down suburban streets. She's never seen anyone drive like the detective, always ten moves ahead of the traffic. Passing, accelerating and decelerating, automotive parkour. Before they started, Yoshitaka methodically plugged every traffic camera location anywhere near their likely route into her phone's map function. Around them, Manako can only remember a blurred confusion of leafy suburban streets, cheap mid rise housing and closely packed alleys. She hopes Yoshitaka knows where they're going because she's been lost for quite a while. With each turn, the hood of her hoodie jerks, and her baseball cap threatens to fly off her head.
"How did you learn how to do this?" She asks as they rocket past a slowing van and them rocket through a traffic light still just on green.
"Police driving courses. And my dad was a delivery driver." Yoshitaka speaks without taking her eyes off the road. "He had this incredibly old van with a gear box you needed to set up ahead of time. It really teaches you how to drive!" She grins, starts to slow down, her pace steadying. "Besides, I've got to do it here, as we get closer we have to worry about spotters."
Manako relaxes, checks the map and wishes there was an icon for the helicopter and van. All she has is the feed from the drone camera, which currently shows it moving along the freeway.
"If they don't stop here we'll wait them out, then head down one of these side roads and launch the drone." Yoshitaka pushes a strand of hair back behind her ear.
"Sounds good." The car slides onto the freeway and the ride smooths out even further, Yoshitaka is going fast but it's the kind of casual speed of any freeway driver. "So what's our cover story in here?"
"I guess mother and daughter going shopping?"
"You're kind of young to be my mother. How about you be treating your younger sister?"
"Alright." Yoshitaka nods. "Are you armed?"
"Yeah." Manako has a gun in a concealed holster on one side, her zip up hoodie loose and baggy to hide it.
"Don't use it unless I tell you to."
"Alright." Manako is intending to use it if it looks like the frog throat is about to speak to her directly. She's decided she will let herself be taken if it comes to it, she'd prefer to let Nozomi rescue her than die, not just because life is generally superior to death, but because her death would break Nozomi for good, and because she hates the thought of ending a love story between two women in such an awful fashion. But she doesn't intend to let herself be taken easily.
The store they're approaching seems the most likely destination for a change of cars. It's a bit off the freeway, a large supermarket above a parade of shops. The store is at ground level compared to the freeway but the carpark winds down below it, hidden from view.
Yoshitaka finds a space in the open air part of the carpark and then fishes through her bag. "Go buy some drinks. I'll wait in the car and we can pretend to be taking a break."
Manako gets out and heads for the store. She spots the guy as she steps in. She's always been good at spotting things. Maybe it's the glasses. She denied needing them for years and toughed it out before her parents finally forced her to get a pair. Now she notices everything. Or maybe it's because she never wants to feel that awful feeling of strong hands closing around her from behind ever again. She's still mad at herself for that. She put herself, and Nozomi in danger. She hates that. Hates to be a burden.
The guy is standing in the screened smoking area in the front of the store, smoking and playing with his phone. He's a big man, thick set. Like a rough private detective in a TV drama. Nothing too odd there, except Manako can see at least two cigarettes that are still recent enough to be giving off smoke in the ashtray in front of him. He must have been there quite a while.
She pulls out her phone, careful not to glance at the guy again, and texts Yoshitaka:
<<Sentry, smoking area.>>
<<Get the stuff, we'll move and re-approach on foot. The target is still 15~ minutes out.>>
Manako hurries over to the drinks area, picks out a few of her favourites, then quickly feeds them through the automated checkout and heads back to the car. "Easy." Yoshitaka says as she sits down. "No hurry." She makes a show of pulling out a bottle and taking a drink before putting the car into gear and pulling out onto the freeway, then takes the next exit, pulls around the corner and parks in the shade. The street is a leafy shopping street with a pronounced down angle, one of the sub centres where a village or town was consumed by the sprawl of greater Tokyo.
"Won't pulling off right here be a problem if the helicopter is observing?"
"We're under the trees." Yoshitaka says. "We should be okay."
Manako frowns, wondering if she forgot about the airborne spy.
"Anyway, let's walk."
The two get out and begin to head down towards the store.
"This is going to be tough. We can't just watch them go in from the top."
Manako looks around then points up at one of the other buildings. "It looks like there's a cafe up there. Why don't you go wait in it and watch for the van. I'll go wait in the stairs and check what vehicle they transfer to."
"I should be the one to go in. I'm the detective."
"You can't silence yourself. I can." Manako has been very careful to know the exact rune for that, and has several copies pre-drawn.
Yoshitaka gives her a look, then makes a face. "Alright. but stay on call with me. We'll use the encrypted VOIP so your girlfriend can hear us too. You have earbuds?"
"Yes." Manako plugs her phone in and the pair split up. Manako pulls the hood of her hoodie up. She moves up to the lower door of the carpark and looks inside.
As she checks the floors she becomes increasingly sure this is the place. For one thing, every security camera globe she passes has been vandalized. Sprayed over with paint, cracked open. Some of the damage looks quite old. At least she won't need to worry about being caught on camera herself.
"Okay, the SUV is almost here, get ready."
There's an elevator but Manako ignores it and runs up the stairs, keeping her pace just slow enough not to seem too strange to anyone coming down, reaching the top floor only marginally out of breath. The track training pays off. At the top she pauses, peaks through the fire door's panel. The SUV turns in and keeps going, headed for the down ramp. Manako descends again, holding the handrail and taking the steps two or three at a time, arriving at the next floor, and then the next as the black car rolls down.
On the third floor down, the SUV stops, pulls into a space and the doors open. Three dazed schoolgirls step out, the fat form of the frog throat she killed before. A slim college girl looking woman and a pair of guards follow them out. They walk off deeper into the garage. Manako curses, then pushes the door open just enough to get through and runs forward to one of the pillars.
Something, perhaps instinct or perhaps the number of times she's revised being caught in her head makes her glance back and she ducks around it, going low as the lookout from earlier steps down and gets into the SUV. A moment later it's departing. Manako stays back.
A man passes, walking carefully under a load of shopping. Manako moves up to the end of the pillared area and peaks around the back of a car. The frog throat and his crew are loading into a hopelessly generic monochrome people carrier, its back windows blacked out. She takes a picture of the plate with her phone, then rolls back as the frog throat looks up. Moving so the pillar blocks any view she walks back towards the door.
At the car, the man who goes by Van pauses and looks around. The shopper is walking to another car. "Hey." Van calls out to him. The man looks up. "Come here." The man comes, looking confused. Van pulls a knife, carefully wipes it down with a cloth then offers it to him. "There's something I need you to do."
***
"Manako." I hear over the call. "There's someone following you." I have the drone in orbit of the shopping complex. No point in following the van. It's battery is almost exhausted anyway.
"Who?" Manako's voice is calm but slightly panicked. "The vehicle is a people carrier. I'm sending a picture of the plate."
"He just looks like a normal guy but he's definitely following you. He's closing the distance."
"I'm speeding up."
We're on the freeway some ten miles behind everything. We need to launch the fresh drone ASAP and get on this people carrier before it gets too difficult to see in freeway traffic.
Can I get there?
I could teleport. If I can find a strong enough leyline I should be able to deal with the velocity differential between the van travelling at freeway speed and the ground but the suburbs of West Tokyo are terrible terrain to draw geomantic power from. The mountain's shadow divert the best energies elsewhere. If I mess it up I'm going to break my legs at best.
"Manako." I say. "Do you hear me?"
"Yes."
"I have no way to support you right now. Resolve the situation as you see fit."
A pause. A deep breath. "Yes."
"Show me what you can do Apprentice." I say it to fire her up and hope it won't get her stabbed.
***
The guy is not quite running after her. She can hear his steps. He sounds unfit. "I think he's just some normal guy." Yoshitaka says in her ear. "I'm on my way down. Can you keep out of his way until then."
Manako looks back and measures. Without breaking into a run, which will grab the attention of everyone in the street, she can't.
"No. I'm going off call for a sec. I need to concentrate."
"Hey, wai--" Manako pulls her earbuds and turns rapidly into the nearest alley. There's a lot of thin alleys even this far away for the centre. She saw them from above. She just needs a turn, somewhere momentarily out of sight. She saw on the map view that there's a small yard at the end.
She draws the gun and keeps it blocked in front of her body. She doesn't need to worry about killing him because she's pulled the gun's velocity way down. Deep breaths. She's scared, but not like she thought she'd be. She'll go around the corner, raise the gun as she does, and shoot, aiming for the centre of mass.
Running footsteps behind her.
Manako doesn't hesitate. She swings into her own spring, dodges around the corner, the guy comes around, puffing hard, knife in hand. Then silence as Manako's hand caresses the rune she's drawn onto the scrap.
His mouth opens in surprise as he sees the gun, and she shoots him three times.
***
After a heart stopping minute, Manako comes back on call. "Okay he's down. What do I do with him?"
"Leave him and get out of there." Hopefully the command will fade out of him. And if not, well, he's unlikely to ever see my apprentice again in a city the size of Tokyo. "Yoshitaka, how long before you can deploy the drone."
"Shit…" A pause. "I can just deploy it here. There's hardly anyone around."
"Alright. Do it."
"I'm sending you the picture now." Manako sends it. A monochrome people carrier, blacked out windows, a number plate. I stare at the google map screen, trying to figure out which road that they'll follow. The helicopter is still heading up the freeway, so that presumably means the green car will take another route. Or is that a double bluff?
The drone comes online after an agonizing thirty seconds. "I'm at the car." Manako says.
"We're mobile." Yoshitaka says. "Switching back to radio."
"Acknowledged." I check the drone's camera, pan it across the freeway, searching for the plate on the back of anything that looks likely but what betrays it isn't its shape, colour or plate, but its darkened windows. There it is, on an off ramp heading into the suburbs as the helicopter orbits the freeway.
"We've got it."
***
The rest of the chase isn't difficult, just long. We just keep the drone locked on. The empty roads just make it easier to follow but I pull the drone up a little higher as I'm sure there are still watchers on the ground. Manako is getting scolded by Yoshitaka for taking her earbuds out, and is babbling adrenaline soaked apologies. She says he's still alive at least. When we're sufficiently far from the site, I'll call an anonymous 119.
My only gnawing worry is that the frog throat might have arranged for him to call in after everything, but perhaps not. It would make the asset far less deniable. There's also the possibility of them monitoring 119, but an actual death is going to create even more noise.
Either way, we have the target location. Manako guesses it before we even get there. Uemi Seishinka Byouin. An old mental hospital built in the 1970s. Unless they were headed all the way across the mountains to another city, this, she declared, was where they were going. As it turns out, she's right.
It's a big, oblong building, five stories of concrete, on a flat plateau where the trees have been cleared back to give sightlines. There's a checkpoint, so far down the road it must be out of sight of the main complex, and several outbuildings, which seem to be the centre of activity. One of the outbuildings glows hot on IR. A generator plant.
Men go in and out of outbuildings at regular intervals while the central building is more or less shut tight. I lose sight of the car for a moment behind a ridge as we approach, and when the drone pops over the trees it's standing outside. I focus on that, watching in fascination. I expected them to have the girls inside by now, but they don't. Rather there's an elaborate procedure being performed, the snatch team chatting with another crew in full hazard suits. They put the girls into what look like old style straightjackets, then lift them up onto gurneys and inject them with something. There seems to be some discussion as to who gets what injection, then they lift the three on and push inside.
"It looks like they're keeping the girls in the main building."
"I wonder why they need hazmat suits."
"It might not be so healthy to be near the containment system."
Effort had obviously been taken to make the facility secure. A pair of drones swing around above it. There's an observation point on the roof, with some heavy duty optics, which looks like it'd spot anything crossing the clear zone. On the ground more guards are moving about on patrol, all in the same blue security overalls. A lot of them. There must be a hundred guys either camped around the building or out on local patrols. I keep my drone back in a long orbit, higher up than the patrolling quad copters and scan. None of them appear to have guns, just batons. However I'd be willing to bet that if someone like me turned up they could put an armed team together before we breached the building.
There's a frog throat on the gate and, slipping in the etheric lens, a seriously heavy duty ward on the whole place. No teleporting or scrying into there, but it doesn't seem quite powerful enough to stop a double ended gateway like a bag of holding. Or maybe the mage who made it doesn't know the trick.
"There's no way we're just going to storm this place with the resources we have." I look up from the monitors and sigh. It would have been too simple if we could just take it over. If they have a ward that strong, then they also potentially have firearms. A hundred guys with firearms is a much more difficult prospect. And once we get inside, I still don't know what we're going to do to the alien horror itself. "We're going to need a plan."
***
Even getting to the point of being able to get a plan together takes a whole day. I set Yoshitaka and Tanigawa to doing the most part of the prep work with Ii. I tell them they all have more than a decade more experience of this than me. The truth is I also wanted to give Yoshitaka and Tanigawa something else to do while I do something else. They're Aratani's women, and after this is done they'll certainly report back to him. The fact I possess a black book and the means to read it. . . is probably something Aratani knows already, but there's no reason to confirm it. The leverage of "I have reason to suspect (because I set you up) that you raided a private depository of eldritch lore and a criminal club, burned down both and killed more than two dozen people (and not people) in the process." is far less than "A police officer and a prosecutor literally saw you reading a banned book."
For this reason I keep the black books on a concealed shelf in the section of the house I've previously kept strictly for Manako and myself, and lock the doors before I retrieve it from its resting place.
I've read through it before a bit, received those maddening insights as to the nature of what I'm facing that don't quite make sense. Now it's time to try again.
Before I go back to the book itself I start to work through the theory that the alien logic of the book implied last time. That creature isn't just a being from another realm, but rather a constitutive element of that realm. It's words make the realm around it real. Simply releasing it is obviously not an option. With enough power it could potentially remake this world as it does its own, at least on a local scale.
There's a few avenues worth pursuing as a way around this. The first is to simply reverse the ritual that they did, or physically destroy it. There's certainly a physical manifestation of the creature so it stands to reason it can be exploded. The problem with either of these solutions is that the link to the mature creature is all that's keeping the lesser versions from maturing themselves. If it's killed, they'll all start to mature fully at once. Rather than one potentially all powerful reality altering horror, we'll have dozens of less powerful ones.
Given the spatial links Alice found between sections, a more profitable approach if destruction is required would be to send an attack spell down each link to the target. The problem with this is that it'd be very obvious. I would be on the hook for making a bunch of very prominent Japanese people spontaneously combust or explode. The most sacred law of the Mage Trust is to conceal magecraft. All else can be justified. I can certainly justify their deaths, but not in such an obvious way. Even doing a bunch of black magic would be far less of a crime than so publicly breaking the ban.
What I need is a way to send them all back. This may well kill everyone implanted with one, but it should do so in a much less obvious fashion than them all lighting on fire at the throat.
It strikes me as I think about it that there's a very easy and elegant way to do this, especially if all the frog throats have geomantic grids. If the parasites are constituent parts of another realm controlled by speech, then I can have a frog throat speak a dismissal. Forcing speech is not a particularly difficult magical feat when you can hijack someone's muscles through their primitive geomantic grid.
From this, and from a set of papers on hacking and interspatial networks, I develop the actual plan, which I then present to the assault team the next day when we have our morning briefing.
Eight hours later, I walk down into the Witch's House's basement. I really should try to get more sleep, I'm pushing five days without now, but there's no time for anything more than a stimulant with my breakfast.
We're using the basement because I've become increasingly paranoid about laser microphones and other high tech bugging systems, so we're doing it in the shooting range with all the equipment lugged down there by the shadow maids. The whole forward team is present, plus everyone extra we'll take on the storm; Junya, Ii and four of her people - three men and a woman.
I don't really know how Ii stands working with so many men. I think I've got a complex about it honestly. Maybe it's something to do with the four men in my life being Junya, who is handsome, reliable and sadistic, Aratani, who is handsome, unreliable and manipulative, Kondo who is handsome, standoffish, and almost certainly the repository of unknown and evil powers, and of course, my real father, of whom the less said the better.
Ii's men are two Japanese introduced as Kikuchi, who was a JSDF special forces operative, and Wada, a former coastguard SST, and an ex-Kazakh Spetsnaz, a thin, utterly handsome lady killer by the name of Sadykov. He and Junya keep throwing one another glances in a way that's either the handsomest guy in the room postering, or the much more interesting sign that they're planning to sleep together.
The woman is an American, good looking in that dialed back, really kind of trying to play it down, way that a lot of US military women have. Her name is Palmer. Ii gave me a file on her. According to that she was combat engineer, qualified through the US army's sapper school, which, according to Ii, is the way that hard charging female soldiers proved how tough they were until the US opened up ranger school to them.
There's something off about Palmer though. Something that makes me think the file isn't telling me everything. I think it's her eyes. They're haunted in a way that even Sadykov's aren't, and given events in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, that must be saying something. I suspect, though I've done nothing to really check, that Palmer was probably a female operative who at least worked with one of the US army special forces units, maybe Green Berets, but probably Blue Light or SOF-Delta, both of whom have been known to make large scale use of female operatives in the recent insurgency in the US, and who the mage trust is much more involved in than the larger US special operations community.
A lot of them have also died in that insurgency, broken against the wave of supernatural power flowing out of the US youth. Many of them have also done, let's be clear, some very bad shit.
She and Ii definitely know one another more than Ii's other operatives. I don't think they're sleeping together, but the way Palmer looks at her sometimes is intense. I'm not going to tell Ii her business but I do worry about how much professionalism there's going to be from Palmer if Ii gets hit. Then again I'm the one taking my girlfriend on the mission.
We're assembled in the basement, with a rack of weapons arranged at one side.For this assault it's time for the big guns to come out. I've laid out everything I brought in from my latest arms purchase. There's M4s, several M16 variants, BR18s, the automatic variant of the CMCR and a pair of Howa type 89s. The Howas are kind of a rare sight, even now. It used to be almost impossible to get Japanese guns on the international black market, but Japan's increasingly external posture and the esper wars that led to it have ended with large numbers of Japanese small arms shipped out to arm various 'forces for stability' across Asia. As for the M16s, Manako keeps trying to tell me that the dizzying variety the US produces are actually really different guns, but I don't really believe her.
"We should all use the same gun as much as we can." Ii looks at Manako and I. "How do you like the balance on the CMCRs?"
"They're nice enough." I shrug. "I prefer my UMP though, it's a little lighter, and you'll never get Junya to use anything but his ironic sten gun." Junya grins. He knows that the amount of bling and magic he's put into that stamp metal piece of shit actually offends me.
"Having interchangeable guns is better I think. And it makes us less likely to stick out. No offense Itome-san, but your gun is kind of distinctive."
"Mm." Junya says. "Well, I'll give it a shot." he looks dubiously at the CMCR. "Strange looking weapon. Did they grow it in a vat?"
We have a short discussion about optics and attachments, and the benefits of magnified holographic vs scout scopes. There's something very distracting about guns. I can see why Manako is so into them as a hobby, but you can easily become obsessed with small arms. I tap the map table and start unrolling the plans.
"Alright, so here's the target." I let Tanigawa, who did most of the research beyond this part take us through the hospital, then look at Ii and lay out the actual plan. We talked about this earlier this morning and she signed off on my work, still, it's intimidating to present it to this group of mature special operatives.
"The mission here is to destroy or banish the eldritch abomination so we can safely free the girls inside. They won't be able to vanish this number of women again without their mind powers. To neutralize the horror, we need to get inside, gain control of a frog throat with an implanted geomantic grid. We will then destroy the central summoned creature and through some spatial networking tricks I won't bore you with, elect this frog throat as the new centre of the network and the most mature creature. We will then have it speak a word of dismissal and send them all back whence they came."
"I don't like this open ground around the place." Ii says. "Even with a lot of magical misdirection, I'm not sure we could get through it." She runs a hand over the map. "I wish we had some way of knowing what kind of opposition they have inside."
"With that in mind." Kikuchi looks at Yoshitaka. "Should the cop really be going in? What's your training detective?"
Kikuchi bristles. "I'm not just a detective, I'm Tokyo Metropolitan Special Police. I've trained with esper down and the SAT. I can handle myself. I've probably been in a lot more firefights than you have."
Kikuchi raises his hands placatingly. "Alright, but we're a pretty eclectic group you got to say. We've got a cop, five soldiers, a gangster and two schoolgirls against who knows what opposition. We're going to need to train this properly."
"That's already being arranged." I rub my eyes. Another administrative headache. "The question is how do we get inside."
"Sneaking through the woods should be no problem. It's the open ground around the hospital that's going to really stop us." Kikuchi leans forward, highlights areas on the map. "There's a lot of stuff watching this, close circuit, thermals, and patrols. There looks like a few gaps but I don't think we could get across there undetected."
"So we need a way inside." I have the twinkle of an idea on that, but get rather rudely interrupted by Wada.
"We're also going to need a way to get the girls out once we've freed them. Eight people isn't enough to defend them in there. We really could use the support of some kind of local authority like the police."
"I wonder if the prefectural police know about this." Tanigawa looked at the image and frowned. "It feels like someone must be looking the other way, but the knowledge can't be general. If a whole police department to the dispatchers knew that there was a secret government facility up here then it would have leaked, at least to the level of being known about among the police. We're not that far from Tokyo."
"You have a plan prosecutor?"
"I was just thinking, we could make a big distraction by calling the police on them. All we'd need to do is get in there and give one of those girl's a phone. Though with a frog throat maybe it's useless." She rubs her eyes. "Unless you're willing to reveal the existence of magic to silence them."
"No." I shake my head. "I'm not breaking that rule."
"There might be another way." Yoshitaka said. "The real problem is where we'd get speakers loud enough and close enough."
"We could move them up through the woods no problem." Kikuchi says, "but where are we going to get a bunch of large speakers from?"
I consider for a moment. "Well actually, there is someone I can ask about that."
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- She/Her
Also sorry it took like 9 months to do this update. It's been a journey.
The rest of it is still being edited but it should be updated relatively regularly from now on, and I'm hoping to have the next parts prepared and finalized in a better period of time.
The rest of it is still being edited but it should be updated relatively regularly from now on, and I'm hoping to have the next parts prepared and finalized in a better period of time.
- Location
- Academy City
- Pronouns
- They
Man, it took me while to remember what was going on in the plot here. I'm glad to see things went well in their tracking efforts this time - of course, that does just mean things are going to go poorly in the rait itself, or they aren't going to make a clean sweep of it.
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I feel like this requires some kind of a joke, maybe about Nozomi's health problems or something so just imagine I came up with a clever one.
9 month refresher summary of part 2
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Okay a couple of people have reminded me that it's been 9 months so they're a little lost, so for those of you who don't wanna reread the whole giant story, I'm going to do a short bullet-point summary of what happened so far in the book 2 of the Troubled Schooldays of Nishifune Nozomi.
- Across Tokyo, teenage girls are going missing.
- Nozomi's friend and volleyball partner Akari was almost kidnapped by a team of kidnappers using an all but irresistable form of mind control.
- Nozomi was informed a figure in the Tokyo underworld involved in human trafficking had been mysteriously killed
- Manako, Nozomi's girlfriend and apprentice found her Uncle was missing a grey market import export guy, was missing. When they went to his building they found a hostile reception and his business partner dead.
-Nozomi begins working with a female detective and a female prosecutor associates of her old flame and nemesis Aratani to find out more about what's going on
-Nozomi is involved with Reijou, a powerful exorcist who is her junior at school in trying to identify an otherworldly monster with similar mind control powers to the team that tried to kidnap Akari
-Nozomi and her team realize that the kidnapping of teenage girls in Tokyo is to contain some kind of eldritch abomination the children of whom are being introduced into selected people's throats in order to provide them with strong mind control abilities. Previously this was supplied via human trafficking, but the disappearance of Manako's uncle has broken the chain, and left the conspiracy scrambling.
-Nozomi meets Manako's family, and they make out and start to get more serious. On the way back, there's a kidnapping attempt made on them by the mind controller who's been stalking Nozomi.
-Nozomi and Junya deal with a newly matured abomination inside the home of a strange new religion in Ginza
-Attempting to abduct a head prosecutor who is a high-level member of the conspiracy Nozomi is framed for his murder instead.
-Nozomi works out that all of the women kidnapped have been subject to psychometric testing from a particular tutoring company and the team set out to rip off their records, they succeed and this allows them to figure out who will be kidnapped next.
And that's where things have got to.
If you notice any inaccuracies in this summary then feel free to point them out. It's been a while for me as well.
- Across Tokyo, teenage girls are going missing.
- Nozomi's friend and volleyball partner Akari was almost kidnapped by a team of kidnappers using an all but irresistable form of mind control.
- Nozomi was informed a figure in the Tokyo underworld involved in human trafficking had been mysteriously killed
- Manako, Nozomi's girlfriend and apprentice found her Uncle was missing a grey market import export guy, was missing. When they went to his building they found a hostile reception and his business partner dead.
-Nozomi begins working with a female detective and a female prosecutor associates of her old flame and nemesis Aratani to find out more about what's going on
-Nozomi is involved with Reijou, a powerful exorcist who is her junior at school in trying to identify an otherworldly monster with similar mind control powers to the team that tried to kidnap Akari
-Nozomi and her team realize that the kidnapping of teenage girls in Tokyo is to contain some kind of eldritch abomination the children of whom are being introduced into selected people's throats in order to provide them with strong mind control abilities. Previously this was supplied via human trafficking, but the disappearance of Manako's uncle has broken the chain, and left the conspiracy scrambling.
-Nozomi meets Manako's family, and they make out and start to get more serious. On the way back, there's a kidnapping attempt made on them by the mind controller who's been stalking Nozomi.
-Nozomi and Junya deal with a newly matured abomination inside the home of a strange new religion in Ginza
-Attempting to abduct a head prosecutor who is a high-level member of the conspiracy Nozomi is framed for his murder instead.
-Nozomi works out that all of the women kidnapped have been subject to psychometric testing from a particular tutoring company and the team set out to rip off their records, they succeed and this allows them to figure out who will be kidnapped next.
And that's where things have got to.
If you notice any inaccuracies in this summary then feel free to point them out. It's been a while for me as well.
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
No worries, just happy to read more.
As opposed to a hot girl who does actually know a lot about them, which is clearly made up.
tense change fwiw. 'spent'
It's interesting to examine statements like this and try to figure out how much is this Nozomi's fears and how much is reality.
Girls wanting to be the knight instead of being the princess is 👍
Unless they're tricksy enough to have swapped and actually use the helicopter as a decoy trail...
AFAIK that's not how it works. Especially if she's aiming center mass. If the velocity is down, all that means is it'll either 1) be so low as to bounce on the first layer of bones, which means it's not very useful against an amped up target or 2) be low enough to get through the first, then start ricocheting inside after hitting the second (look into what .22 cal does inside a person). They're very dead in the second case.
That's kinda horrifying, honestly.
Half snark/half real, but that really just means she's not using the right attack spell. ;P Well, I can respect the first inclination to light it all on fire, but systems details aside I'd think that generically you can use it for other things? Poison transmission, etc...
missing space
FWIW pop culture hasn't really caught up. ;X CQBR? IAR now? It's hard to keep track of. (Nevermind the just existing M16/M4/AR-15/etc differences)
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I'm not going to worry about this to much but basically it's an enchantment that turns the bullet into something like a riot round. It might include something to spread the force over a wider area or whatever. This is fairly simple for mages.
No matter how good for your career it sounds, do not allow yourself to be implanted with eldritch throat parasites.
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Welcome back. Though I might have to reread the story... not that I mind. You do good work, author-person.
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As a note, here's the Singaporian Conventional Multirole Rifle that the team will be mostly using for the rest of the story. It's based on the AR-18. In real life it's purely conventional and meant it seems for the US civilian market. In Troubledays's much more worrisome world, they've created a full auto variant for use by friendly forces across East and South East Asia.
Edit: I hadn't noticed before but it looks kind of like an X-com rifle lol.
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Noz: "'Assault Rifle Eighteen', right?"
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Funnily enough I actually think it's actually ArmaLite rifle.
Though it looks really different so Nozomi would totally not ID it as an AR-18.
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- she/her
It's definitely an Assault Rifle 18, you can tell because the clip holds 18 rounds.
NHO
Dumb is a state of existence
- Location
- ᓚᘏᗢ
I mean, most major rifles today are based on AR-18 tech? Which is AR-15 tech but without Stoner patents, so a rifle with rotating multi-lug bolt, with short stroke gas system vs direct impingement and different location of main recoil spring.
Forgotten Weapons are useful channel!
Forgotten Weapons are useful channel!
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It'd definitely be on the inspiration chart for this story.
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- She/Her
Fate/Wish Original - Crossover
A young woman fights for a simple wish: her life.
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
As an update, I rather selfishly have also been working on a crossover fanfic for this. Because I am trash.
- Location
- Wingmaiden's Reach, the Near Roofs, Town
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I -
I was just idly browsing, you know, grazing on fic, basically -
And then this comes barrelling through, knocks me over, and in the confusion suddenly @FBH has stolen all of my attention and run off with it and now it is somehow literally mid morning - wasn't it nighttime when I started reading? - and I haven't slept and now I'm out of story.
Good gracious.
It has been a long, long time since anything caught my attention that quickly and that strongly; and held it so effectively.
Instead of saying anything else i'm going to sleep now before I fall asleep on my keyboard.
I was just idly browsing, you know, grazing on fic, basically -
And then this comes barrelling through, knocks me over, and in the confusion suddenly @FBH has stolen all of my attention and run off with it and now it is somehow literally mid morning - wasn't it nighttime when I started reading? - and I haven't slept and now I'm out of story.
Good gracious.
It has been a long, long time since anything caught my attention that quickly and that strongly; and held it so effectively.
Instead of saying anything else i'm going to sleep now before I fall asleep on my keyboard.
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- She/Her
Yay! That's awesome to hear.
I hope to be able to fix your "run out of fic" problem shortly. We're just doing final editing on the next part.
Chapter 2-9: Gang Fight
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- She/Her
"Gokigenyou Houshi-san!" Houshi Rei makes a kind of cute noise as I kabedon her against the corridor wall. She's a bit shorter than me, and while she's elegant and athletic, figure skating has not given her the kind of tallness and bulk I built into myself. Her cheeks redden and I see her mouth open a little, an expression of shock.
"N-Nozomi-s-san!" she blushes. "W-what are you doing. I-I-um…"
"I was wondering if you could put me in touch with your girlfriend." That makes her blush even further.
"Ah…" she sighs and pushes her glasses up. "You're so horrible sometimes."
I suppose I am.
She sighs. "I'll send you her number." she fumbles with her phone a bit.
"Thanks Rei-chan, you're the best."
"I still owe you for not telling anyone."
"I'm not going to court trouble I might get into one day." I wink at her, and she grins.
"So you and Murakawa a thing now?"
"I guess so." I brush my hair back. "I didn't think I was the gets a girlfriend type, you know?"
"You just needed someone to chase you. Same as me."
Now I'm the one starting to colour. I try to regain the initiative. "What a lewd thing to say Rei-chan."
Houshi grins and steps back. "Anyhow, I've got to go."
I've just about got done with my explanation when I get a call from Manako, crying desperately that they have her Uncle.
The voice call is countermeasure distorted, its golden power sucked away by the phone, but the mocking tone is clear. "That you Little Witch?"
I keep my own voice calm, radiating cool badass, as much for Manako and Reijou as myself. Manako's not taking this well "If I have to keep killing you Truck-kun, I'll make you pay for the privilege. It must be two or three times now, and you're coming against me again?"
"That's your problem, Little Witch. You can kill me ten thousand times and it'll be just like the first. I'll keep coming after you." He laughs. "You want proof of life?"
"Live video."
We connect to a webcam, Van in frame with several toughs and the mage Ichika. Manako's uncle is a tough looking man, sea weathered and tanned, only slightly softened by age. Thinner than it seems like he should be. He looks into the camera. "Manako! Don't do what they say, they'll just--"
Ichika pivots smoothly up and kicks him in the face. He coughs, slumps forward. Van pulls the phone up to face me with a smirk. "You got the GPS location of this video? Well you and your girlfriend better come right now. Otherwise we'll start mailing him to her family in bits. If you're not here in forty minutes, I'll start with an eye."
"And you'll release him if we do?"
"Sure. I can reprogram him to do anything I want. He'll still be alive. So will you. You'll just wish you weren't."
"We'll be there." I cut the call before he can get the idea to get any more theatrical. Manako is shaking, I pull her into a hug. "Hey, it's okay."
"Can we get him out?" She blurts.
"I think so." I I consider for a moment. "But we'll need some help. Do you know what club Reijou Yuuko does?"
It's an insane, harried car journey across Tokyo to a quiet complex of warehouses in Yokohama. In the seat next to me, my companion looks terrified. We're still in school uniforms, but with heavily warded body armour underneath the jackets.
"I'm okay." She say in Manako's voice. The disguise was hasty, but I've become very familiar with every part of Manako. "I suppose I'm just not used to things like this."
"You fight much worse things than people."
"I have power over spirits, not people."
"Remember, when it kicks off, just hit the ground. They have at least one mage and a frog throat, they're your targets." I tap her on the stomach. "That armour comfortable?"
"Yes." She nods, quickly, then more deliberately. "Yes." A pause. "Should I summon Miso?"
"He's still vulnerable to mortal weapons right? And it'll blow the disguise. Keep him for emergencies."
"Alright."
I take a deep breath and push the car door open and we step out. The gates to the complex ahead are open, a long concrete path leading between warehouses and slipways. There's only the sound of the gulls, the waves, distant traffic. No human activity.
We walk forward slowly, looking around. I'm expecting an ambush, though the enemy's plans haven't been too subtle so far. Maybe it'll be at the exchange. I quarter the environment with my eyes, looking, looking. The warehouses are old, all but derelict, and there's mostly short sightlines, if there is an ambush here, I can't sense it. No good positions for snipers, just the close-in stack of warehouses, the bay, a few ships far out on the ocean. I catch the glitter of something on a deck. I fucked up. I was expecting a close ambush.
I push Reijou one way and hurl myself the other. Not quick enough. A .50 cal round hits me in the stomach. It's trailing some kind of penetration enchantments and punches right through my ward. I feel the plate of my body armour shatter and see a distinct spray of blood. Agony lances up my body and I land awkwardly. I grab for the wound, applying pressure, feeling the curse that was carved into the bullet unfolding, lapping against my defenses.
"Nozomi!" Reijou screams. She gathers herself as if to rush to me, then thinks better of it. She opens her mouth to speak again then something knocks her down. For a horrific instant I think whoever is out there with the anti-material rifle just shot her through the boxes, but no, she's intact, just with a nasty bruise spreading across her head.
Ichika steps out from around the side of the building, a galaxy of small objects whirling around her. She looks at me and smiles, and I see something rushing in towards my face.
I wake up to the cold sting of an injector. My stomach hurts, but less. I'm tied up in the air, elaborately suspended so nothing touches the ground in what must be a second floor room. Something has discharged my grid, and I am distressingly short of power. Suspended off the ground, with no major ley lines nearby. A good position to hold a geomancer.
Around me the floor is a simple, dusty office with a curtained window. Sheet metal walls, a closed door, A chair sits opposite me, beside my bloodied jacket and body armour. Looking down it seems like the bottom half of my shirt is cut away from a wound that's no longer there. I am obscurely relieved I didn't wear anything I like.
There's a long paper seal hanging down in front of my eyes. It's laminated. An exorcist seal. It akes local mana all but impossible to collect. It feels like overkill with the suspension bondage.
Ichika steps around from behind me with a medical kit. "Hi there." She gives me a V sign. "We've not spoken before."
"I'm not a vampire you know." I blow on the seal.
"No? Your soul looks pretty ruined to me." She smiles, dumps the kit and steps forward, lifting my head a little. "When you die you're going to become something much worse than a vampire. If you're not already."
"How did you even get something like this? Is Compliance just giving them out to criminals?" Usually that kind of restraint is something they guard jealously.
She laughs loudly, hand still playing across my neck. "You foolish little girl, I'm an agent in Compliance. You don't think a simple mercenary could be trusted with something this black do you?"
I don't say anything, but I have a sinking feeling. That's not something she'd tell me if she planned for me to get out of this alive.. She laughs again and looks into my eyes, her hand squeezes slightly on my neck, not enough to actually present a danger but letting me know it's there. That she could very easily kill me right now "No more bluster or quips huh? No weak threats?"
"Why are you here and not your frog throat? If you want to interrogate me then you can just go into my mind and get whatever you want."
"You've taken Van a few times. I thought I'd give it a go." her words are light, but the hand is still there. "We can have some fun."
I try to think of an option. I don't really have one. My die is cast. The arrow is already off the bowstring. Apparently not liking my reaction, she pulls out a cloth hood, a clear plastic bottle of water and begins to work the drawstrings open.
"Let's see how you take a little water."
"Wait! Don't!" I pull my head away. "Don't waterboard me! You haven't even asked me any questions!"
She laughs. "Only fooling. Here. Have a drink." She opens the bottle and holds it to my lips. Her eyes hold some empathy as she does so. "You were going to mana crash Van and I with that exorcist huh? You figured we'd actually fight you. Sorry, no such luck. It's going to be tricky figuring out how to anaesthetise her just enough that she can't use her powers but we can still reprogram her. A really deep problem."
"Whatever you do to me doesn't mean anything. There are others that know."
"I'm afraid we're going to clean them up. We'll have you call your girlfriend and then betray her. Van is really eager for that part. He's going to leave your mind intact so you can know exactly what you're doing. Trapped in your own skin as you bring her to her doom. Same for your tailor boyfriend. We've already made arrangements. He'll get married and be a good little moth priest once Van is through with him. You and your girl aren't going to be so lucky though, Van is angry at how many times you've killed him." She says it conversationally, as if it's not so important. "As for the Aratani heir, well, you'll be a useful pawn in betraying him too won't you? If he ever tries to contest us."
"And your offer is?"
"Someone like you must have a lot of secrets." She grins. "Ancient lore, cash, all kinds of things. That's true right? I don't really want Van to have them. I want first dibs."
"And you're offering me what if I give them to you?"
"I'll kill your girlfriend quickly. Van can content himself with just you." She sees my expression and smiles. "You really think I can afford to let her stay alive?"
I think of the spider. Of the preparations I've made. Of what will happen if I die. Of my desire to keep her talking. When things are really bad, the thing to do is to just keep playing. Do whatever you need to not to die, just keep going as long as you can. "Alright. What do you want to know first?"
"One sec." She reaches into her bag and pulls out an old style palm top. "I keep my magic on this, pretty cool huh?"
"You must be older than you look."
"Nah. I just like old electronics."
Behind her the door opens a crack. I don't let my eyes focus on it. "That's funny. I find new stuff a lot more user friendly."
"Yeah, but that's 'cause you've got no character. What the fuck is even this black and white thing you do anyway? An empty doll of violence only thinking of prolonging its own existence. So doll, continue to live until the end of this conversation. First, tell me the passwords to your house, and then tell me what tomes of lore you possess."
The door closes, held gently down so it makes no sound. "What guarantee do I have you'll hold up your end of the bargain?" I'm honestly just being prideful here, trying not to have to give her any secrets. On the other hand if I crack too quickly that might seem suspicious as well.
"Why, none at all. But if you don't do what I say, what hope do you have?"
I let myself smile. "Just one."
Ichika pauses, starts to turn, and Manako shoots her in the face.
"Are you okay?" Manako drops the BR18 she's carrying back on its strap and pulls the seal off my forehead quickly, then steps behind me and starts to cut me free. Mana trickles back into my grid, and I feel a rush of strength return to my body.
"Better now." I really want to pull her into a kiss or something dorky like that, but there's no time. Ichika is moaning, clutching her face. Manako's less lethals were not quite enough through the strength of whatever ward she has, even with the penetration charm I put onto them. I walk over and kick her, hard and brutal, then pin her arm and kneel on top of her. She gasps, looking up as I fix the paper charm to her forehead. "Well, now it seems the tables have turned."
She goes limp, looking up at me, hands gently on my knee. "You won't kill me. You know what happens if you kill a Compliance agent."
"What? They'll feed everyone I know to a psycho they helped attach an eldritch horror onto?"
"There are worse things than Van." She grits, not sounding convinced.
Should I just execute this woman? A part of me wants to. She's a really terrible person. Of course there's also the chance her mind has been manipulated as well. I wonder if there's anyone in this project who hasn't been subject to some form of manipulation. On the other hand it would be so easy. So convenient to just snap her neck right here.
"I'm just a professional doing a job." My silence is really starting to panic her.
I laugh, I can't help it, it almost turns into a full villainess chuckle, a little hysterical. "Y-you. You literally just tried to use your position for the purposes of corruption instead of doing it, and you come at me with that?"
"I have a family! A mother and two sisters and, well maybe a boyfriend."
If I do it, Manako won't ever look at me the same way.
"Sure." I get up, raise one foot. "They're better off without you." She whimpers, turning her face away and closing her eyes. I laugh and lean in close as she opens her eyes again. "Don't worry. Only fooling." And then, with some gentleness, I kick her in the face.
The warehouse is labyrinthine. This must be the office complex part of the dock. Just blank concrete corridors and metal walls, bare offices and identical corridors. It reminds me of a level on one of the first person shooters that my old friend Mizushiro used to covertly play.
A couple of unconscious guys outside. Both look like minor criminals, the kind of guys the Yakuza hire to do the scut work, both armed with large knives. We must have made some kind of noise because two more guys come up, one with a machete, the other with a Russian pistol. Manako shoots them both, and I move in and keep them down, then retrieve the pistol. We go down to the ground floor and I feel the sweet wash of mana into my grid.
Manako really is a natural at stealth. She turns her feet carefully on every step, picking her position to make no sound at all. At the bottom, I hear talking, two men guarding an unconscious Reijou, tied to a chair. One has a rifle, an old looking Russian or Chinese gun of a kind I'm not familiar with, not an AK, I wonder where he got that from, few Japanese criminals use guns and that's two so far. I tap Manako on the shoulder and we swap places, then I throw silence around the corner. Both men try to cry out then Manako sweeps round, hitting the rifleman with two rounds. The other man lunges with a knife but I catch him from the side and fold him up with a middle kick. He's still struggling a bit so I kick him when he's down to be sure. The silence effect ends and sound rushes back in.
I go work on Reijou. Her medical kit is still next to her and quickly find the right injector. They didn't dose her too hard, and quickly comes out of it, blinking at me in surprise. I put a finger to her lips and she cuts the shout she was going to do to a whisper.
"You're alive! I thought--"
"I'm tough to kill." I lean in and cut her bonds. Manako is keeping the corridor covered."How about you? Are you okay to move? No dizziness?"
She gets up experimentally then nods fiercely. "Alright. Get behind Manako and grab her shoulder. Stay close to her. If you see the fat guy, mana-crash him, alright?" I pick up the rifle. Always handy to have.
"Alright!" There's a flicker in the air beside her and her giant dog steps out of the air. It's still crazy to me that her spirit animal is a big, sort of miso colored Shiba Inu.
I cover one eye and make a brief chant, letting the wisdom of the building flow into me. It's a trick Kondo taught me, more than simple wall penetrating magic, not something most mages can do. Hopefully it'll catch them unprepared
A large warehouse space. Stacks of packing cases and boxes. About a dozen guys plus Van, beating on Manako's uncle with bored brutality.
"There's maybe a dozen of them." Manako says, voice quiet. "They all seemed to be in the room at the other side of the warehouse."
"I guess our friend wanted some privacy." I'm still annoyed she got the better of me. "We don't have time to get fancy here. Let's move up and storm."
We move quietly. I silence us, partly because Van is in there, and partly because Reijou is kind of loud. There's a guard outside the main warehouse door, and I sneak up on him. I feel a presence at my side and glance down to find Miso prowling along next to me. He gives me a look which says he's watching me as much as the guy, and then we leap on him together. He has another one of the non-AKs, which I grab and yank out of his hands, then Miso knocks him down, grabbing his arm and hauling him around while he yells silently in the bubble until I kick him.
Manako and I stack on either side of the door, with Manako kneeling so that Reijou can look over her head. I move the silence into the doorway so I can chant, and summon up a glowing ball of energy, something I can hold onto even when I bring the silence back. Manako looks at Reijou and nods for her to open the door. "Pull it towards us and stay behind it."
"Okay." Reijou grabs the door and I toss the energy ball in. There's a massive flash, the bang swallowed by the silence and we breach into the room. Van turns, grabbing for a gun in his belt then convulses as Reijou's power reaches him. He grabs his neck, then bursts into fierce blue fire.
Other men are turning, shouting in the silence. Some are clearing weapons, more firearms, even rifles, just how well equipped are these guys? Manako fires into the group of them. There's a gust of dog shaped shadow and Miso erupts out of the air into another group of them, knocking a man down then turning back to smoke when another shoots at him I suck in the energies of distant ley lines and pull it up as a shield in front of us with desperate gestures. Pistol bullets and rifle rounds hit the barrier and stop dead, hanging in the air. Manako's bullets go through it easily the other way. Quick single shots and pairs, men drop clutching themselves.
Others charge, coming at us with knives and Machetes, trying to flank the field. Reijou's dog bounds back to land on one, bearing him to the floor. I anchor the shield and charge into others, fists and feet and a giant doge throwing men to the floor not to rise again. Manako moves the other way, dividing the room between us and I can honestly say that only at the moment she rescued me did I find her more beautiful.
I let the silence field drop. It's still quiet. Only the groans of downed foes and the low growls of Reijou's hound.
The figure in the chair groans, breaking the spell. Manako runs forward, letting her gun swing on its strap and running forward and embraces her Uncle. "Uncle! Uncle!"
He blinks at us, face bloody. "Manako?"
I kick the last man in the face then draw a symbol of metal on the air which sucks all the guns in the room to it. Manako's gun bangs on her strap and she pushes it down annoyed, while I let the pistol and rifle I retrieved go. The warehouse's walls clank alarmingly, and various small detritus is sucked up towards the symbol. Doesn't matter, I'll bag the whole lot up into the bag of holding in Manako's backpack before we leave. I don't want to interrupt her right now. Reijou sits down limply, hugging her dog.
Manakos uncle is in a bad way, both eyes blacked, with big bruises on his face. "Manako?" He murmurs, not seeming to quite understand it. Manako hunts in her webbing, pulls a blue banded injector and puts it to his neck. There's a sharp hiss and it dumps a load of healing potion and a dose of anti-hypnotics into his system. He blinks again, seems to stabilize himself, not moving as Manako cuts his arms free of the chair. "This is that friend of yours who you talked about?" He asks, looking at me.
"Yeah." Manako pulls an injector from her medical kit and applies it. "This is Nishifune Nozomi." She takes a deep back, helping him up. "She's my girlfriend."
And then the anti material rifle, which I didn't see, swings back up from the side and thwacks her across the head.
Not having anything else to do with him I send Manako's Uncle to my home. He's in bad shape, even with the healing potion I gave him. I call Alice right away, then get the three of them out of there while I SSE the site, scooping phones and guns into my bag of holding, taking fingerprints and photographs of downed men. I call a car, and then retrieve one final item from upstairs, loading it into the trunk before sitting in the back and let it drive me home. I could crawl through a bag of holding but I don't want to leave anything behind.
When I get there I find a text from Manako saying she has to rush home and she's in trouble with her parents, pleading of a dead phone and a sudden study date. Reijou texts as well, telling me she's also in trouble for helping me out again without her bodyguard. I think I'm basically out of Reijou charges for now unless I can bring the Exorcist Association something very juicy.
When I get in, Manako's uncle is already being taken care of by Alice, face hidden by a medical mask They're settled into the house's medical room. I dump the item in a prepared room in the basement and go get cleaned up.
By the time I've cleaned up and changed, she's done, giving me a thumbs up and heads down to the basement to deal with the other matter. Manako's Uncle steps out and offers a hand, American style. I take it. It's a solid grip, not quite dry, heated by age and exhaustion. Into middle age, he looks like he should be fat, but months at sea, probably on short rations have thinned him down unhealthily.
His name, when he introduces himself, is Murakawa Mitsue.
"Nishifune Nozomi." I say.
"Manako wrote to me about you." He drops heavily into one of the armchairs and looks around at the strange forest scenes that decorate the house's walls. "She didn't tell me about this house."
I sit down in the chair opposite, carefully elegant. Behind me the trees spread out like wings. I am the centre. The Witch whose house this is. This forest is mine. "She told me a lot about you too. You were the one who taught her to shoot."
"When she went to America, she was pretty scared." He leans back. "A middle-school girl you know? Her parents filled her head with stories of crime. 'Don't go out, you'll get mugged by a drug addict.' They let her watch the news. She thought America was just cops and criminals. So I took her shooting so she could learn to protect herself." He smiles, then his stomach rumbles loudly.
"When did you last eat?"
"Ah, a few days ago I guess. I was low on supplies, that's why I came into dock." He rubs his eyes. "Stupid. I should have gone further afield. I was thinking of going down to Korea but I was worried they'd go after my family here." He rubs his eyes. "I didn't know about you."
"It's alright. House, get my guest some water, and tea, and a light meal. I'll have tea and the cake of the day."
"Yes Mistress." The house is being formal, I have a guest. "I have bacon, lettuce and tomato baguette with cheese, and avocado toast. Today's cake is marble."
"Does that suit you?"
"Sure. Is that a computer, like Siri?" His questions fade out and he looks on in fascination as a shadow maid comes in with a tray of refreshments. Two more bring a table, fit him with a napkin and place everything down next to him. "I feel like I've fallen through the looking glass." He reaches out and brushes one of the shadows, his fingers passing through as if it's not there. "What are these? Ghosts?"
"Why, do I seem like the kind of person who would enslave spirits just to do my domestic work?" He looks back at me, a little sharp and I give my best villain smile. I'm not sure why I've fallen back into this old character, maybe something about him, some implied challenge. "In truth I'm not much of a necromancer. They're shadows which have been bound into human shape. I have a lot of robotic systems to help them out. You'd be surprised what you can get these days in terms of robots. But these are much more impressive."
"So this is all magic." He doesn't sound like he quite believes it.
"As magic as my doctor's treatment of you. And of the voice of that man you couldn't disobey."
He takes a sip of water. Urgh, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that. I've read descriptions of high end mind control and it can be bad. Your conscious mind starts to play tricks on you, make up excuses for why you're obeying. Still, there's no real way around it.
"They're involved in a human trafficking ring." He rubs his eyes. "I helped set it up, I thought I was just smuggling drugs or collectors items. Maybe ivory." He looks down at the sandwich. "The truth was I didn't care all that much what I was doing. I wanted the money. The success. I wanted to be able to look my brother in the eye and say I'd got rich following my own path. That he was wrong to abandon what we used to have."
"I should have known earlier. I deceived myself. I didn't want to think that I was trafficking women. Not until I saw it one day, not until it was right in my face." He slumps in the chair.
I sip my tea, trying to think how to play this. What should I do here? Do I empathise? That could come off as fake. What do I need from this man?
For him to remain sane to ensure Manako's happiness.
For him to tell me everything he knows about the network he set up.
But how to keep him sane? He's got a thousand-yard stare and seems to be winding down. I need to say something to him, or he's going to go into 'jump off a building' territory. "Did your partner bring you into it?"
"That snake Shiba." He growls, rubbing his eyes "I wish he was dead. It was all his idea at first but I got aboard. We'd always been a grey market operation but we didn't--"
"He is dead." I cut in brutally, seeking to jar him out of the downward spiral of introspection I can see him sinking into. He looks at me again, as if I slapped him. I sip my tea, extending the moment, then put it aside. "He had an implant like the man who took you. Less powerful but the same thing.It's likely that you've actually been mentally affected for a longer period than when you met Van. Maybe he was himself under the influence as well. Did you notice him suddenly becoming more persuasive?"
"I--" he stops, thinking. I see the hope I just gave him begin to take root.
"Mind control can get in a few ways. It can affect the conscious mind directly. Either affecting decision making or emotions. But the most powerful types just lock the conscious mind out. It makes up excuses for why it did what it did, but ultimately it obeys. You may well not have been responsible for your actions."
He takes another drink of water. "And you're trying to stop it?"
"That's right."
"Why?" he asks. "Sorry, but even if you're my niece's girlfriend, you don't seem like a hero of justice."
I laugh. I can't help myself. Even if I wasn't playing the role, he'd say this. This is what I get for dressing gacha game villainess by way of european fashion house. "Neither are you, but you couldn't let something like that happen in front of you right? Well I'm the same." I shrug. "Besides, as a woman, I hate traffickers."
"Fair enough." He looks down at the sandwich and then takes a bite, then another. It quickly disappears as does the cheese and avocado toast.
"Would you like more?"
"In a little while. You shouldn't overeat after a period of fasting." He sits back, more alert, and drinks some of his tea.
"I want to know everything you can tell me about the network. Names and places on both sides. Contacts you have." I wanted to know about him. I wanted to know what he could do and how he could be useful to me. "Do you think you can stand, this might be easier if we use a board."
"I'm fine now. I feel much better." He gets up, follows me into the main room. We set to work, a shadow made writing out cards as he describes people and objects. The smuggling network had been well set up. One end is offshore. Variously off shore or picked up from major ports across East and South East Asia. The other, the Tokyo end is the one that I'm most interested in.
As it grows, cards and wires spreading out across a map, I see why the conspiracy was forced into such a panicked reversal by the loss of a boat. Murakawa has a rare set of skills, an extremely good memory. He'd kept most of the details of contacts, payoffs and the like in his head, shared with no one, not even his partner.
"We split the job between us. He knew the guys on the other end. I knew Tokyo." He laughs. "I have connections with everyone here. The Yakuza, the police..."
"I'd have thought that being out of the country so much you'd have run the other end."
"Oh no. That's no good at all." He shakes his head. "Like, what am I going to offer a senior police officer or a Yakuza boss that he can't get in Tokyo? You need to visit Tokyo often, but the best way to run things is to be out of the country."
I consider the map. "How do you think your police contacts would react to knowing what they'd been involved in?"
He laughs. "Badly. They might arrest me." He sobers, realizing I'm asking a serious question. "What exactly are you thinking?"
"One of the biggest obstacles I have is the police. I actually know where the girls are being housed, but if I just call any police officer it'll leak. I can't afford that. I need officers who aren't corrupted. By them at least. I think your network would be a good place to start."
"So you want me to find you people who they obviously don't have their claws into, because if they did they'd have recreated the network. Clever." He frowns. "Unless the location is in Tokyo though it's going to be difficult."
"Police officers know other police officers.You set up this network, you can do the same here. Set things up so that when it comes to it, there's no delay. Or minimal delay."
"Make a counter conspiracy within the police. Alright." He sits back. "It's going to take money. A lot of money. I may need to engage people and I need to run it my way. Emergency backup too. I'm not going to go through that again."
"Money has never been an issue for me." I look around. "There's another thing too. I want to get Manako's family to safety. She's my girlfriend, so I can look after her, but them is harder. I have some people on them but that's a short term solution. I want to get them out of the country."
His eyes become more calculating. He's thinking and you want her all to yourself. Which is true. "Getting my brother out of Japan again is going to be hard. He's trapped in that job he hates. I think it's the responsible thing for a man to do." He laughs.
"We could get him fired. That's not impossible."
"I'd need to go into business with him overseas. Just how much money can you give me? Do you want a business plan or the like?"
"Not particularly. I want your family to be safe, and I have a lot of money."
He gives me another calculating look. "But not Manako."
"I'm teaching Manako magic. You wouldn't deny her that would you?"
"Of course not." He says, but his eyes are set in a way that makes me think that we're not friends, we're just allies, and if he can snatch her out of danger then he'll do it in an instant. He's certainly going to try to take Manako from me.
"N-Nozomi-s-san!" she blushes. "W-what are you doing. I-I-um…"
"I was wondering if you could put me in touch with your girlfriend." That makes her blush even further.
"Ah…" she sighs and pushes her glasses up. "You're so horrible sometimes."
I suppose I am.
She sighs. "I'll send you her number." she fumbles with her phone a bit.
"Thanks Rei-chan, you're the best."
"I still owe you for not telling anyone."
"I'm not going to court trouble I might get into one day." I wink at her, and she grins.
"So you and Murakawa a thing now?"
"I guess so." I brush my hair back. "I didn't think I was the gets a girlfriend type, you know?"
"You just needed someone to chase you. Same as me."
Now I'm the one starting to colour. I try to regain the initiative. "What a lewd thing to say Rei-chan."
Houshi grins and steps back. "Anyhow, I've got to go."
I've just about got done with my explanation when I get a call from Manako, crying desperately that they have her Uncle.
*****
The voice call is countermeasure distorted, its golden power sucked away by the phone, but the mocking tone is clear. "That you Little Witch?"
I keep my own voice calm, radiating cool badass, as much for Manako and Reijou as myself. Manako's not taking this well "If I have to keep killing you Truck-kun, I'll make you pay for the privilege. It must be two or three times now, and you're coming against me again?"
"That's your problem, Little Witch. You can kill me ten thousand times and it'll be just like the first. I'll keep coming after you." He laughs. "You want proof of life?"
"Live video."
We connect to a webcam, Van in frame with several toughs and the mage Ichika. Manako's uncle is a tough looking man, sea weathered and tanned, only slightly softened by age. Thinner than it seems like he should be. He looks into the camera. "Manako! Don't do what they say, they'll just--"
Ichika pivots smoothly up and kicks him in the face. He coughs, slumps forward. Van pulls the phone up to face me with a smirk. "You got the GPS location of this video? Well you and your girlfriend better come right now. Otherwise we'll start mailing him to her family in bits. If you're not here in forty minutes, I'll start with an eye."
"And you'll release him if we do?"
"Sure. I can reprogram him to do anything I want. He'll still be alive. So will you. You'll just wish you weren't."
"We'll be there." I cut the call before he can get the idea to get any more theatrical. Manako is shaking, I pull her into a hug. "Hey, it's okay."
"Can we get him out?" She blurts.
"I think so." I I consider for a moment. "But we'll need some help. Do you know what club Reijou Yuuko does?"
*****
It's an insane, harried car journey across Tokyo to a quiet complex of warehouses in Yokohama. In the seat next to me, my companion looks terrified. We're still in school uniforms, but with heavily warded body armour underneath the jackets.
"I'm okay." She say in Manako's voice. The disguise was hasty, but I've become very familiar with every part of Manako. "I suppose I'm just not used to things like this."
"You fight much worse things than people."
"I have power over spirits, not people."
"Remember, when it kicks off, just hit the ground. They have at least one mage and a frog throat, they're your targets." I tap her on the stomach. "That armour comfortable?"
"Yes." She nods, quickly, then more deliberately. "Yes." A pause. "Should I summon Miso?"
"He's still vulnerable to mortal weapons right? And it'll blow the disguise. Keep him for emergencies."
"Alright."
I take a deep breath and push the car door open and we step out. The gates to the complex ahead are open, a long concrete path leading between warehouses and slipways. There's only the sound of the gulls, the waves, distant traffic. No human activity.
We walk forward slowly, looking around. I'm expecting an ambush, though the enemy's plans haven't been too subtle so far. Maybe it'll be at the exchange. I quarter the environment with my eyes, looking, looking. The warehouses are old, all but derelict, and there's mostly short sightlines, if there is an ambush here, I can't sense it. No good positions for snipers, just the close-in stack of warehouses, the bay, a few ships far out on the ocean. I catch the glitter of something on a deck. I fucked up. I was expecting a close ambush.
I push Reijou one way and hurl myself the other. Not quick enough. A .50 cal round hits me in the stomach. It's trailing some kind of penetration enchantments and punches right through my ward. I feel the plate of my body armour shatter and see a distinct spray of blood. Agony lances up my body and I land awkwardly. I grab for the wound, applying pressure, feeling the curse that was carved into the bullet unfolding, lapping against my defenses.
"Nozomi!" Reijou screams. She gathers herself as if to rush to me, then thinks better of it. She opens her mouth to speak again then something knocks her down. For a horrific instant I think whoever is out there with the anti-material rifle just shot her through the boxes, but no, she's intact, just with a nasty bruise spreading across her head.
Ichika steps out from around the side of the building, a galaxy of small objects whirling around her. She looks at me and smiles, and I see something rushing in towards my face.
*****
I wake up to the cold sting of an injector. My stomach hurts, but less. I'm tied up in the air, elaborately suspended so nothing touches the ground in what must be a second floor room. Something has discharged my grid, and I am distressingly short of power. Suspended off the ground, with no major ley lines nearby. A good position to hold a geomancer.
Around me the floor is a simple, dusty office with a curtained window. Sheet metal walls, a closed door, A chair sits opposite me, beside my bloodied jacket and body armour. Looking down it seems like the bottom half of my shirt is cut away from a wound that's no longer there. I am obscurely relieved I didn't wear anything I like.
There's a long paper seal hanging down in front of my eyes. It's laminated. An exorcist seal. It akes local mana all but impossible to collect. It feels like overkill with the suspension bondage.
Ichika steps around from behind me with a medical kit. "Hi there." She gives me a V sign. "We've not spoken before."
"I'm not a vampire you know." I blow on the seal.
"No? Your soul looks pretty ruined to me." She smiles, dumps the kit and steps forward, lifting my head a little. "When you die you're going to become something much worse than a vampire. If you're not already."
"How did you even get something like this? Is Compliance just giving them out to criminals?" Usually that kind of restraint is something they guard jealously.
She laughs loudly, hand still playing across my neck. "You foolish little girl, I'm an agent in Compliance. You don't think a simple mercenary could be trusted with something this black do you?"
I don't say anything, but I have a sinking feeling. That's not something she'd tell me if she planned for me to get out of this alive.. She laughs again and looks into my eyes, her hand squeezes slightly on my neck, not enough to actually present a danger but letting me know it's there. That she could very easily kill me right now "No more bluster or quips huh? No weak threats?"
"Why are you here and not your frog throat? If you want to interrogate me then you can just go into my mind and get whatever you want."
"You've taken Van a few times. I thought I'd give it a go." her words are light, but the hand is still there. "We can have some fun."
I try to think of an option. I don't really have one. My die is cast. The arrow is already off the bowstring. Apparently not liking my reaction, she pulls out a cloth hood, a clear plastic bottle of water and begins to work the drawstrings open.
"Let's see how you take a little water."
"Wait! Don't!" I pull my head away. "Don't waterboard me! You haven't even asked me any questions!"
She laughs. "Only fooling. Here. Have a drink." She opens the bottle and holds it to my lips. Her eyes hold some empathy as she does so. "You were going to mana crash Van and I with that exorcist huh? You figured we'd actually fight you. Sorry, no such luck. It's going to be tricky figuring out how to anaesthetise her just enough that she can't use her powers but we can still reprogram her. A really deep problem."
"Whatever you do to me doesn't mean anything. There are others that know."
"I'm afraid we're going to clean them up. We'll have you call your girlfriend and then betray her. Van is really eager for that part. He's going to leave your mind intact so you can know exactly what you're doing. Trapped in your own skin as you bring her to her doom. Same for your tailor boyfriend. We've already made arrangements. He'll get married and be a good little moth priest once Van is through with him. You and your girl aren't going to be so lucky though, Van is angry at how many times you've killed him." She says it conversationally, as if it's not so important. "As for the Aratani heir, well, you'll be a useful pawn in betraying him too won't you? If he ever tries to contest us."
"And your offer is?"
"Someone like you must have a lot of secrets." She grins. "Ancient lore, cash, all kinds of things. That's true right? I don't really want Van to have them. I want first dibs."
"And you're offering me what if I give them to you?"
"I'll kill your girlfriend quickly. Van can content himself with just you." She sees my expression and smiles. "You really think I can afford to let her stay alive?"
I think of the spider. Of the preparations I've made. Of what will happen if I die. Of my desire to keep her talking. When things are really bad, the thing to do is to just keep playing. Do whatever you need to not to die, just keep going as long as you can. "Alright. What do you want to know first?"
"One sec." She reaches into her bag and pulls out an old style palm top. "I keep my magic on this, pretty cool huh?"
"You must be older than you look."
"Nah. I just like old electronics."
Behind her the door opens a crack. I don't let my eyes focus on it. "That's funny. I find new stuff a lot more user friendly."
"Yeah, but that's 'cause you've got no character. What the fuck is even this black and white thing you do anyway? An empty doll of violence only thinking of prolonging its own existence. So doll, continue to live until the end of this conversation. First, tell me the passwords to your house, and then tell me what tomes of lore you possess."
The door closes, held gently down so it makes no sound. "What guarantee do I have you'll hold up your end of the bargain?" I'm honestly just being prideful here, trying not to have to give her any secrets. On the other hand if I crack too quickly that might seem suspicious as well.
"Why, none at all. But if you don't do what I say, what hope do you have?"
I let myself smile. "Just one."
Ichika pauses, starts to turn, and Manako shoots her in the face.
*****
"Are you okay?" Manako drops the BR18 she's carrying back on its strap and pulls the seal off my forehead quickly, then steps behind me and starts to cut me free. Mana trickles back into my grid, and I feel a rush of strength return to my body.
"Better now." I really want to pull her into a kiss or something dorky like that, but there's no time. Ichika is moaning, clutching her face. Manako's less lethals were not quite enough through the strength of whatever ward she has, even with the penetration charm I put onto them. I walk over and kick her, hard and brutal, then pin her arm and kneel on top of her. She gasps, looking up as I fix the paper charm to her forehead. "Well, now it seems the tables have turned."
She goes limp, looking up at me, hands gently on my knee. "You won't kill me. You know what happens if you kill a Compliance agent."
"What? They'll feed everyone I know to a psycho they helped attach an eldritch horror onto?"
"There are worse things than Van." She grits, not sounding convinced.
Should I just execute this woman? A part of me wants to. She's a really terrible person. Of course there's also the chance her mind has been manipulated as well. I wonder if there's anyone in this project who hasn't been subject to some form of manipulation. On the other hand it would be so easy. So convenient to just snap her neck right here.
"I'm just a professional doing a job." My silence is really starting to panic her.
I laugh, I can't help it, it almost turns into a full villainess chuckle, a little hysterical. "Y-you. You literally just tried to use your position for the purposes of corruption instead of doing it, and you come at me with that?"
"I have a family! A mother and two sisters and, well maybe a boyfriend."
If I do it, Manako won't ever look at me the same way.
"Sure." I get up, raise one foot. "They're better off without you." She whimpers, turning her face away and closing her eyes. I laugh and lean in close as she opens her eyes again. "Don't worry. Only fooling." And then, with some gentleness, I kick her in the face.
*****
The warehouse is labyrinthine. This must be the office complex part of the dock. Just blank concrete corridors and metal walls, bare offices and identical corridors. It reminds me of a level on one of the first person shooters that my old friend Mizushiro used to covertly play.
A couple of unconscious guys outside. Both look like minor criminals, the kind of guys the Yakuza hire to do the scut work, both armed with large knives. We must have made some kind of noise because two more guys come up, one with a machete, the other with a Russian pistol. Manako shoots them both, and I move in and keep them down, then retrieve the pistol. We go down to the ground floor and I feel the sweet wash of mana into my grid.
Manako really is a natural at stealth. She turns her feet carefully on every step, picking her position to make no sound at all. At the bottom, I hear talking, two men guarding an unconscious Reijou, tied to a chair. One has a rifle, an old looking Russian or Chinese gun of a kind I'm not familiar with, not an AK, I wonder where he got that from, few Japanese criminals use guns and that's two so far. I tap Manako on the shoulder and we swap places, then I throw silence around the corner. Both men try to cry out then Manako sweeps round, hitting the rifleman with two rounds. The other man lunges with a knife but I catch him from the side and fold him up with a middle kick. He's still struggling a bit so I kick him when he's down to be sure. The silence effect ends and sound rushes back in.
I go work on Reijou. Her medical kit is still next to her and quickly find the right injector. They didn't dose her too hard, and quickly comes out of it, blinking at me in surprise. I put a finger to her lips and she cuts the shout she was going to do to a whisper.
"You're alive! I thought--"
"I'm tough to kill." I lean in and cut her bonds. Manako is keeping the corridor covered."How about you? Are you okay to move? No dizziness?"
She gets up experimentally then nods fiercely. "Alright. Get behind Manako and grab her shoulder. Stay close to her. If you see the fat guy, mana-crash him, alright?" I pick up the rifle. Always handy to have.
"Alright!" There's a flicker in the air beside her and her giant dog steps out of the air. It's still crazy to me that her spirit animal is a big, sort of miso colored Shiba Inu.
I cover one eye and make a brief chant, letting the wisdom of the building flow into me. It's a trick Kondo taught me, more than simple wall penetrating magic, not something most mages can do. Hopefully it'll catch them unprepared
A large warehouse space. Stacks of packing cases and boxes. About a dozen guys plus Van, beating on Manako's uncle with bored brutality.
"There's maybe a dozen of them." Manako says, voice quiet. "They all seemed to be in the room at the other side of the warehouse."
"I guess our friend wanted some privacy." I'm still annoyed she got the better of me. "We don't have time to get fancy here. Let's move up and storm."
We move quietly. I silence us, partly because Van is in there, and partly because Reijou is kind of loud. There's a guard outside the main warehouse door, and I sneak up on him. I feel a presence at my side and glance down to find Miso prowling along next to me. He gives me a look which says he's watching me as much as the guy, and then we leap on him together. He has another one of the non-AKs, which I grab and yank out of his hands, then Miso knocks him down, grabbing his arm and hauling him around while he yells silently in the bubble until I kick him.
Manako and I stack on either side of the door, with Manako kneeling so that Reijou can look over her head. I move the silence into the doorway so I can chant, and summon up a glowing ball of energy, something I can hold onto even when I bring the silence back. Manako looks at Reijou and nods for her to open the door. "Pull it towards us and stay behind it."
"Okay." Reijou grabs the door and I toss the energy ball in. There's a massive flash, the bang swallowed by the silence and we breach into the room. Van turns, grabbing for a gun in his belt then convulses as Reijou's power reaches him. He grabs his neck, then bursts into fierce blue fire.
Other men are turning, shouting in the silence. Some are clearing weapons, more firearms, even rifles, just how well equipped are these guys? Manako fires into the group of them. There's a gust of dog shaped shadow and Miso erupts out of the air into another group of them, knocking a man down then turning back to smoke when another shoots at him I suck in the energies of distant ley lines and pull it up as a shield in front of us with desperate gestures. Pistol bullets and rifle rounds hit the barrier and stop dead, hanging in the air. Manako's bullets go through it easily the other way. Quick single shots and pairs, men drop clutching themselves.
Others charge, coming at us with knives and Machetes, trying to flank the field. Reijou's dog bounds back to land on one, bearing him to the floor. I anchor the shield and charge into others, fists and feet and a giant doge throwing men to the floor not to rise again. Manako moves the other way, dividing the room between us and I can honestly say that only at the moment she rescued me did I find her more beautiful.
I let the silence field drop. It's still quiet. Only the groans of downed foes and the low growls of Reijou's hound.
The figure in the chair groans, breaking the spell. Manako runs forward, letting her gun swing on its strap and running forward and embraces her Uncle. "Uncle! Uncle!"
He blinks at us, face bloody. "Manako?"
I kick the last man in the face then draw a symbol of metal on the air which sucks all the guns in the room to it. Manako's gun bangs on her strap and she pushes it down annoyed, while I let the pistol and rifle I retrieved go. The warehouse's walls clank alarmingly, and various small detritus is sucked up towards the symbol. Doesn't matter, I'll bag the whole lot up into the bag of holding in Manako's backpack before we leave. I don't want to interrupt her right now. Reijou sits down limply, hugging her dog.
Manakos uncle is in a bad way, both eyes blacked, with big bruises on his face. "Manako?" He murmurs, not seeming to quite understand it. Manako hunts in her webbing, pulls a blue banded injector and puts it to his neck. There's a sharp hiss and it dumps a load of healing potion and a dose of anti-hypnotics into his system. He blinks again, seems to stabilize himself, not moving as Manako cuts his arms free of the chair. "This is that friend of yours who you talked about?" He asks, looking at me.
"Yeah." Manako pulls an injector from her medical kit and applies it. "This is Nishifune Nozomi." She takes a deep back, helping him up. "She's my girlfriend."
And then the anti material rifle, which I didn't see, swings back up from the side and thwacks her across the head.
*****
Not having anything else to do with him I send Manako's Uncle to my home. He's in bad shape, even with the healing potion I gave him. I call Alice right away, then get the three of them out of there while I SSE the site, scooping phones and guns into my bag of holding, taking fingerprints and photographs of downed men. I call a car, and then retrieve one final item from upstairs, loading it into the trunk before sitting in the back and let it drive me home. I could crawl through a bag of holding but I don't want to leave anything behind.
When I get there I find a text from Manako saying she has to rush home and she's in trouble with her parents, pleading of a dead phone and a sudden study date. Reijou texts as well, telling me she's also in trouble for helping me out again without her bodyguard. I think I'm basically out of Reijou charges for now unless I can bring the Exorcist Association something very juicy.
When I get in, Manako's uncle is already being taken care of by Alice, face hidden by a medical mask They're settled into the house's medical room. I dump the item in a prepared room in the basement and go get cleaned up.
By the time I've cleaned up and changed, she's done, giving me a thumbs up and heads down to the basement to deal with the other matter. Manako's Uncle steps out and offers a hand, American style. I take it. It's a solid grip, not quite dry, heated by age and exhaustion. Into middle age, he looks like he should be fat, but months at sea, probably on short rations have thinned him down unhealthily.
His name, when he introduces himself, is Murakawa Mitsue.
"Nishifune Nozomi." I say.
"Manako wrote to me about you." He drops heavily into one of the armchairs and looks around at the strange forest scenes that decorate the house's walls. "She didn't tell me about this house."
I sit down in the chair opposite, carefully elegant. Behind me the trees spread out like wings. I am the centre. The Witch whose house this is. This forest is mine. "She told me a lot about you too. You were the one who taught her to shoot."
"When she went to America, she was pretty scared." He leans back. "A middle-school girl you know? Her parents filled her head with stories of crime. 'Don't go out, you'll get mugged by a drug addict.' They let her watch the news. She thought America was just cops and criminals. So I took her shooting so she could learn to protect herself." He smiles, then his stomach rumbles loudly.
"When did you last eat?"
"Ah, a few days ago I guess. I was low on supplies, that's why I came into dock." He rubs his eyes. "Stupid. I should have gone further afield. I was thinking of going down to Korea but I was worried they'd go after my family here." He rubs his eyes. "I didn't know about you."
"It's alright. House, get my guest some water, and tea, and a light meal. I'll have tea and the cake of the day."
"Yes Mistress." The house is being formal, I have a guest. "I have bacon, lettuce and tomato baguette with cheese, and avocado toast. Today's cake is marble."
"Does that suit you?"
"Sure. Is that a computer, like Siri?" His questions fade out and he looks on in fascination as a shadow maid comes in with a tray of refreshments. Two more bring a table, fit him with a napkin and place everything down next to him. "I feel like I've fallen through the looking glass." He reaches out and brushes one of the shadows, his fingers passing through as if it's not there. "What are these? Ghosts?"
"Why, do I seem like the kind of person who would enslave spirits just to do my domestic work?" He looks back at me, a little sharp and I give my best villain smile. I'm not sure why I've fallen back into this old character, maybe something about him, some implied challenge. "In truth I'm not much of a necromancer. They're shadows which have been bound into human shape. I have a lot of robotic systems to help them out. You'd be surprised what you can get these days in terms of robots. But these are much more impressive."
"So this is all magic." He doesn't sound like he quite believes it.
"As magic as my doctor's treatment of you. And of the voice of that man you couldn't disobey."
He takes a sip of water. Urgh, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that. I've read descriptions of high end mind control and it can be bad. Your conscious mind starts to play tricks on you, make up excuses for why you're obeying. Still, there's no real way around it.
"They're involved in a human trafficking ring." He rubs his eyes. "I helped set it up, I thought I was just smuggling drugs or collectors items. Maybe ivory." He looks down at the sandwich. "The truth was I didn't care all that much what I was doing. I wanted the money. The success. I wanted to be able to look my brother in the eye and say I'd got rich following my own path. That he was wrong to abandon what we used to have."
"I should have known earlier. I deceived myself. I didn't want to think that I was trafficking women. Not until I saw it one day, not until it was right in my face." He slumps in the chair.
I sip my tea, trying to think how to play this. What should I do here? Do I empathise? That could come off as fake. What do I need from this man?
For him to remain sane to ensure Manako's happiness.
For him to tell me everything he knows about the network he set up.
But how to keep him sane? He's got a thousand-yard stare and seems to be winding down. I need to say something to him, or he's going to go into 'jump off a building' territory. "Did your partner bring you into it?"
"That snake Shiba." He growls, rubbing his eyes "I wish he was dead. It was all his idea at first but I got aboard. We'd always been a grey market operation but we didn't--"
"He is dead." I cut in brutally, seeking to jar him out of the downward spiral of introspection I can see him sinking into. He looks at me again, as if I slapped him. I sip my tea, extending the moment, then put it aside. "He had an implant like the man who took you. Less powerful but the same thing.It's likely that you've actually been mentally affected for a longer period than when you met Van. Maybe he was himself under the influence as well. Did you notice him suddenly becoming more persuasive?"
"I--" he stops, thinking. I see the hope I just gave him begin to take root.
"Mind control can get in a few ways. It can affect the conscious mind directly. Either affecting decision making or emotions. But the most powerful types just lock the conscious mind out. It makes up excuses for why it did what it did, but ultimately it obeys. You may well not have been responsible for your actions."
He takes another drink of water. "And you're trying to stop it?"
"That's right."
"Why?" he asks. "Sorry, but even if you're my niece's girlfriend, you don't seem like a hero of justice."
I laugh. I can't help myself. Even if I wasn't playing the role, he'd say this. This is what I get for dressing gacha game villainess by way of european fashion house. "Neither are you, but you couldn't let something like that happen in front of you right? Well I'm the same." I shrug. "Besides, as a woman, I hate traffickers."
"Fair enough." He looks down at the sandwich and then takes a bite, then another. It quickly disappears as does the cheese and avocado toast.
"Would you like more?"
"In a little while. You shouldn't overeat after a period of fasting." He sits back, more alert, and drinks some of his tea.
"I want to know everything you can tell me about the network. Names and places on both sides. Contacts you have." I wanted to know about him. I wanted to know what he could do and how he could be useful to me. "Do you think you can stand, this might be easier if we use a board."
"I'm fine now. I feel much better." He gets up, follows me into the main room. We set to work, a shadow made writing out cards as he describes people and objects. The smuggling network had been well set up. One end is offshore. Variously off shore or picked up from major ports across East and South East Asia. The other, the Tokyo end is the one that I'm most interested in.
As it grows, cards and wires spreading out across a map, I see why the conspiracy was forced into such a panicked reversal by the loss of a boat. Murakawa has a rare set of skills, an extremely good memory. He'd kept most of the details of contacts, payoffs and the like in his head, shared with no one, not even his partner.
"We split the job between us. He knew the guys on the other end. I knew Tokyo." He laughs. "I have connections with everyone here. The Yakuza, the police..."
"I'd have thought that being out of the country so much you'd have run the other end."
"Oh no. That's no good at all." He shakes his head. "Like, what am I going to offer a senior police officer or a Yakuza boss that he can't get in Tokyo? You need to visit Tokyo often, but the best way to run things is to be out of the country."
I consider the map. "How do you think your police contacts would react to knowing what they'd been involved in?"
He laughs. "Badly. They might arrest me." He sobers, realizing I'm asking a serious question. "What exactly are you thinking?"
"One of the biggest obstacles I have is the police. I actually know where the girls are being housed, but if I just call any police officer it'll leak. I can't afford that. I need officers who aren't corrupted. By them at least. I think your network would be a good place to start."
"So you want me to find you people who they obviously don't have their claws into, because if they did they'd have recreated the network. Clever." He frowns. "Unless the location is in Tokyo though it's going to be difficult."
"Police officers know other police officers.You set up this network, you can do the same here. Set things up so that when it comes to it, there's no delay. Or minimal delay."
"Make a counter conspiracy within the police. Alright." He sits back. "It's going to take money. A lot of money. I may need to engage people and I need to run it my way. Emergency backup too. I'm not going to go through that again."
"Money has never been an issue for me." I look around. "There's another thing too. I want to get Manako's family to safety. She's my girlfriend, so I can look after her, but them is harder. I have some people on them but that's a short term solution. I want to get them out of the country."
His eyes become more calculating. He's thinking and you want her all to yourself. Which is true. "Getting my brother out of Japan again is going to be hard. He's trapped in that job he hates. I think it's the responsible thing for a man to do." He laughs.
"We could get him fired. That's not impossible."
"I'd need to go into business with him overseas. Just how much money can you give me? Do you want a business plan or the like?"
"Not particularly. I want your family to be safe, and I have a lot of money."
He gives me another calculating look. "But not Manako."
"I'm teaching Manako magic. You wouldn't deny her that would you?"
"Of course not." He says, but his eyes are set in a way that makes me think that we're not friends, we're just allies, and if he can snatch her out of danger then he'll do it in an instant. He's certainly going to try to take Manako from me.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Hm... If they've captured Ichika, she might be a goldmine of information, provided she'll talk.