My Vampire Older Sister and Zombie Little Sister - Book 10: Chapter 1

Part 1

Outskirts of Paris, France. 4 PM.

“So tired.”

My shoulders were already slumping.

It was evening when I arrived at the closest international airport to Paris, but my body thought I should already be in bed. I was completely jetlagged. The in-flight lunch I had eaten had felt more like a late-night snack to me.

“Truth!”

Someone was calling me a weird name. And in English even though this was France. The name was fairly well-known online, but only one person in the world called me that in real life. I was pretty sure not even my Vampire older sister and Zombie little sister knew that name.

To be clear, I chose the screenname because Satori means enlightenment, which means the truth. I ended up blushing pretty hard when I looked into it later and learned the word is also used to refer to the omnipotent and omniscient god.

“Yawwwn. Anastasia, doesn’t it defeat the purpose of a screenname to use it out where people can see my face? You’re basically doxxing me when you do that.”

“Oh, come on. The world is flooded with surveillance cameras, phones, and drones, so online and offline are basically the same thing. Your information is getting stolen no matter where you are.”

The fact that she called them “surveillance cameras” instead of “security cameras” and said my information was being “stolen” instead of “collected” proved she was a true hacker. Her hostility wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. At her age, she wanted to attack the entire large system.

Anastasia was an 11-year-old girl.

She had long blonde hair and skin so pale it nearly looked transparent, but she actually attended one of America’s foremost universities and constructed computers larger than harbor warehouses.

Also, she wasn’t human.

She was an Archenemy known as a Silky. That’s a fairy that protects a home, much like a Zashiki Warashi, but they would also harass a resident they don’t like or strangle a malicious guest. As their name suggests, they love silk and Anastasia was in fact wearing a red silk dress.

I knew red was a dangerous color for a Zashiki Warashi, but I could only hope that wasn’t the case for the Western version.

“You contacted me at just the right time. I had hit a dead end in my research and really needed a break.”

“Is that research related to quantum computing?”

“Oh, that stuff was completed ages ago at the lab level. It’s only the corporations still working at trying to bring the material costs down to make the tech profitable. Of course, the real value of a quantum computer vanishes the instant they become commonplace. If you don’t use bullet transistors and amino acids together, it’s pretty obvious the quantum encryption will be completely useless eventually. They say the encryption is unbreakable if the signal itself breaks down once a third party observes it, but that doesn’t matter at all if you mess with the base device and fully sync its contents. They really need to remember that the observers here are machines, not people.”

So was she allowed to take off school and go on an overseas trip just because she had hit a snag in her studies? I really didn’t understand how colleges worked. Erika’s night school seemed to take an “anything goes” attitude as long as they got their course credit in the end, but this felt even more lax.

“So what color is your suitcase, Truth? I’ll help you find it.”

“Hot pink with a big red X on it.”

“That’s an awfully avant-garde color scheme.”

“I don’t want to lose it and I doubt I could explain my predicament to whoever’s in charge here, so using an unusual color makes it easy to spot.”

Once I grabbed my bag from a conveyer belt similar to a sushi place, the trip could truly begin. Anastasia had arrived a few days ago and gotten settled in, so she had nothing to do.

“Will you be taking a taxi into Paris?”

“Too expensive. I’m taking the bus.”

Foreign money was scary because it didn’t seem real and you ended up spending it like it was monopoly money. Add in cashless payment with your phone and you could completely lose sight of how much you were spending. Anyone out there who’s hesitant to pull money from your wallet but spends way too much on mobile games? That’s the frightening effect of replacing it with another word like “stones” or “coins”.

Or maybe I was being overly cautious because I wasn’t used to traveling overseas. Anastasia only had a small bag that wouldn’t even hold a bento box. Veteran travelers could probably relax a lot more.

Anyway.

I loaded my suitcase into the belly of a big bus, entered through the tall door, and searched for my seat. Numbers worked the same all around the world, but it still made me nervous.

But then Anastasia plopped down in the next seat over without a care in the world. The seats were made to fit adults, so it was much too big for her. It was really cute, like she was a tiny queen on a big throne.

However…

“Umm.”

“Yes?”

“How did you get that seat? This is a long-distance bus. Where’s your ticket?”

“A digital society where you order everything online and check in with your phone is a scary thing. Anyone can come along and rewrite the logs. And they could prevent that if they just printed off paper tickets.”

“…”

“I-I only shuffled around the seating a bit! See, the person who was supposed to sit here is in the seat behind me. There were empty seats all over the bus, so I just reordered things like a puzzle game. No harm done!”

This was a bad habit of self-righteous hackers. She wasn’t at all aware that hacking in and rewriting things itself was wrong. I was honestly impressed she was willing to do this in a foreign country with different rules. What if they caught her?

The trip to Paris’s center was about 25km. We had nothing to do on the bus, so we decided to check over a few things.

Yes.

Including what a Japanese high schooler like me was doing in France.

“Absolute Noah and JB are preparing to fight.”

No normal person would know what we were talking about.

But the two groups really were at each other’s throats.

Absolute Noah wanted to protect the world from devastation and JB wanted to stage a jailbreak that would tear down the world’s order. A lot of mysteries remained about both, but I knew they both had some dangerous power. In my opinion, they were nothing but a threat to the people living ordinary lives.

This was bad news for me for two reasons.

First, my stepmom, Amatsu Yurina, appeared to be leading Absolute Noah. That had me on their list of survivors against my will. They saw me as one of the rich and powerful who would board their ark and let everyone else die.

Second, JB viewed me as an enemy for some reason. I don’t think Absolute Noah had anything to do with that. It was hard to say anything for sure without knowing JB’s overall stance on anything, but it sounded like some of them feared me and others saw promise in me. Perhaps the group was not a monolith.

“JB seems to have played a role in Absolute Noah’s destruction, so Absolute Noah is preparing to strike back. That’s what we need to stop from happening.”

“Ugh. And by Absolute Noah, you mean that group, don’t you?”

The 11-year-old blonde girl groaned from the seat next to me.

Anastasia was a fairy trying to create a world where the Archenemy minority was not oppressed by the human majority. Her chosen method had been building a supercomputer named Mephistopheles and to indirectly control the financial and economic worlds. That had failed when her base was blown away along with the city of Las Vegas, but Absolute Noah had been the ones to push Area 51 and the US Congress into making that attack.

“My stepmom has apparently gone to France,” I explained.

Amatsu Yurina was the top of Absolute Noah, so she could leave most things to her subordinates. Something big had to be starting for a top member to cross national borders like this.

In other words…

“She’s preparing to retaliate. I don’t know if she’s here for people, money, or weapons, but it looks like she’s accessing something that was left here. And once those preparations are complete, the war between Absolute Noah and JB will begin.”

That might sound like an exaggeration, but Absolute Noah had arranged an attack on Las Vegas with military bombers and JB had turned “something” into an alien queen and attacked cities all around the globe. They really did have enough firepower to equal a nation’s military. The extent of the damage if they clashed was a complete unknown. Partially because I didn’t know the full extent of their fighting forces, but also because they were secret organizations without a public HQ or branch offices. That meant the conflict could occur anywhere in the world or a large-scale war could break out. You couldn’t assume war was impossible because you were in peaceful Japan, in highly-secure New York, or protected by the international treaties regarding Antarctica or outer space.

National militaries bound by ordinary national borders would probably be helpless to fight a threat like this. For example, if America launched a giant missile at Russia, there was no guarantee America had really done it. Retaliating based on what the map told you would only lead to more senseless harm. This was a new kind of war that operated under different rules.

It felt like the entire planet had been replaced with a giant bomb and the fuse had been lit.

We had to extinguish that flame before it reached the bomb.

That thought made me impatient, but I had to take things a step at a time. I wanted to start with whatever solid information I had.

So…

“I want to stop both sides, but JB’s actions are a complete unknown to me. That’s why I’m going to start by investigating my stepmom.”

“Roger. Absolute Noah’s the one entering ‘kill ‘em all’ mode, so they must know what JB is up to. Stealing data from the people who have all the answers is usually the quickest method.”

This was the only option.

I wasn’t a true hacker. I just had a lot of knowledge in that field after messing around with computers for so long. I wanted to draw a clear line in the sand there, but I had to make an exception this time.

Because if I didn’t, I would lose everything I hoped to protect with that line in the sand.

“We need to learn what Amatsu Yurina has stored here in France and when and where she plans to retrieve it. Then we need to stop her. A direct clash between the two groups is the real threat. There is no stopping this once that war breaks out, so we need to nip this in the bud.”

“Sure, I’ll help.”

Anastasia sighed.

She was in a rare position of having been involved with Absolute Noah and JB thanks to helping out with my troubles at other times. And her personality meant she never hesitated to tackle a large mystery.

However.

“But are you sure about this? Digging up your family’s secrets is something even pro hackers are hesitant to do. In a way, it can be even more painful than ego searching. I just hope you can see this through to the end.”

“I’ll do it.”

I had already had an argument with my stepmom and run away from home over what happened in Las Vegas. I knew this secret would likely be even worse than that. This was the first time she had stepped away from her ordinary life as a part-time cashier to travel overseas. I felt certain something in Paris was connected to her identity as Demon Lord Lilith instead of Amatsu Yurina.

But I couldn’t just pretend I hadn’t noticed this.

“This is my family’s problem, so I will see it through to the end. This is something I have to put a stop to no matter what.”

Part 2

The large bus entered Paris.

The bus wouldn’t take me all the way to the hotel. It instead let off the passengers near a conspicuous train station. The hotel I had a reservation at wasn’t all that large, so it didn’t provide its own bus service.

Anastasia placed her small butt down on my suitcase so she could ride it. I could feel her additional weight while dragging it around.

“What do you think you’re doing, fairy?”

“Consider it a free service☆ This ensures no one can steal your suitcase.”

Was she serious about that or not? Either way, I followed my phone’s map to the hotel. There were signs along the way, but the French language might as well have come from another dimension. It confused me even more than English. I couldn’t even read the names on the signs.

Instead of straddling my suitcase, Anastasia had both legs together on one side and she kicked her legs as I pulled her along.

“You won’t have any trouble if you remember that the Seine River runs east to west through Paris and that most roads gather together on their way toward the Arc de Triomphe. If you ever get lost, you can use the river or a major road to get your bearings.”

The super-veteran traveler girl had some advice for me, but I doubted I would be able to make use of it.

I had been imagining an older-fashioned city, like a castle town in an RPG, so I was surprised by how high-tech the scenery was. It was like the heavy stone buildings were filled in with car dealers and phone shops made of polished glass and silicon. The traffic lights all used LEDs and wireless LAN antennas could be seen here and there. It should have been obvious, but the place was full of people who lived in the modern era. The places they showed on TV and movies were separated from those ordinary lives, but that left you with something similar to a jidaigeki set.

Anyway, it was incredible how stone apartments built centuries ago existed right alongside colorful plastic burger shops and gas stations. I decided to snap a photo with my phone.

“What, did you think every part of France looked like it came from a fantasy movie? The place has every kind of architecture you can imagine: from ancient Roman structures to modern reinforced concrete and tempered glass. There are some buildings so big that their construction spanned more than one era and they use multiple styles.”

“So are you saying that marble column with an LCD ad in it is part of the history and tradition of this city?”

“Basically. Honestly, I think Japan has been even more affected by the changing times when it comes to architecture. Hasn’t your country’s scenery been reset several times due to war and disasters? I doubt there are very many private residences there more than 200 years old. And even that only refers to the land because you redo the building roofs and walls pretty frequently, don’t you? With those roof tiles and thatching or whatever.”

Personally, I felt like the Japanese just weren’t all that interested in old buildings. I mean, who wants to gather around a traditional irori if that meant going without the modern convenience of plywood and reinforced concrete? No one was willing to give up their air conditioning, wireless internet, and home security system to live like they did in the “good old days”.

“I guess you could say this is neat to look at, but I wouldn’t want to live here?”

“You could say the same about most any tourist destination around the world. Like Venice or a cabin in the Alps.”

We passed by a café on the way. A quick glance suggested they were serving more tea than coffee. Odd. I thought France was all about lattes and cappuccinos. The croque monsieur or croque madame or whatever you called that bread with a fried egg on top looked pretty good, if fatty. I made a mental note to try one later. Also, Parisians apparently didn’t open up their Pear laptops at the café for no other reason than to look smug about it. Please tell me that wasn’t unique to Japanese cafes.

Anastasia held a hand over her mouth and giggled while taking a relaxing ride on my suitcase.

“They’re allergic to globalization.”

“?”

“Remember, this is the country that belongs to the EU but still insists on domestic manufacturing for everything from cars to weapons. You see a lot of people using minor phone brands you never see in Japan, right? Oh, excuse me. I should probably call them ‘local brands’.”

We arrived at the hotel in about 10 minutes. It was about the size of a small multi-tenant building and I doubted it had anything other than single rooms. It of course didn’t have a parking lot.

“20 euros a night? This was a nice find for the middle of Paris.”

“Ha ha ha. Never underestimate Maxwell’s searching skills.”

“Yeah, but did you have her look into why it’s so cheap? Can a machine really understand these delicate matters? Let’s hope there wasn’t a rotting corpse in your bed or a dismembered body in the bathtub.”

“…”

It scared me that a maid fairy that served old mansions was so suspicious of this.

Once inside, she hopped down from my suitcase. Her short skirt was always worrying when she moved around too much.

I couldn’t speak French, but you could do everything with your phone these days. No talking necessary. I held my phone up to the receptionist to check in and then we took an old birdcage-like elevator up to the 8th floor. We walked down a narrow hallway with no emergency exit in sight and arrived at my room.

It was a long, skinny room.

It really only had a single bed and enough room to get past the bed without bumping into it. I worriedly opened the door to the bathroom and found the tub was large enough to just barely fit if I pulled my knees up. It looked more like it was meant to pack in a folded-up person than to bathe in. Maybe it was more to keep the shower water off the floor than anything.

Not a delightful discovery.

“I see.”

“Now, I wonder where the putrefied corpse was found?”

Anastasia seemed awfully convinced that was a thing. She got down on all fours like a cat and peeked under the bed with no concern at all for her short skirt.

For now, the room was probably going to function as a place to store my suitcase.

Anyway.

There was a table smaller than a study desk by the window, but there was no chair. Were you meant to sit on the bed? Anastasia threw her small body onto the bed to take a seat, so I had to sit on the table itself.

The blonde girl innocently tilted her head.

She kicked her feet and patted on the bed next to her.

“You can sit next to me.”

“I need to find my stepmom and then get ahead of her.”

I didn’t know how many millions of people there were in this city, but finding a specific person without any leads was going to be difficult. Especially when that person was the head of Absolute Noah. They were a legit secret society, so no ordinary searching methods were going to turn up anything.

However.

“Anastasia, where are the city’s cable centers located?”

“One to the east and one to the west. I said the Seine runs through Paris, remember?”

“Then we start there.”

People tended to think of the internet as laid out like a spiderweb, but that wasn’t really accurate. Laying out hundreds or thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cable was expensive, so they tried to follow the shortest possible routes. The submarine cables are the most well-known examples, but it’s more like countries and cities are linked by a few major arteries with capillaries that spread out over the local areas.

The same was true of wireless communications like phones. Cellphones did not actually communicate wirelessly with each other. The local base station would receive the signal and then fiber optic cable would carry the data to the closest base station to the other person’s phone. The same would happen if I sent a 16-character message to Anastasia while she sat in the same room as me. There were no shortcuts no matter the physical proximity of the recipient.

My stepmom was in hiding and sneaking around.

I wanted all the data throughout Paris if I was to win this game of hide-and-seek. I especially wanted the lenses of the security cameras, phones, and drive recorders. All the city’s data would run through the spots where all the fiber optic cables gathered, so Amatsu Yurina – no, Demon Lord Lilith – would definitely have done something there.

By spying on that data herself, she could find the blind spots where no one could see her moving around.

“So you’re saying you want to find the bug Amatsu Yurina set up and secretly hijack its data?”

“Correct. If we can see what she’s seeing, we can know what she’s focused on and what she wants to keep people’s attention off of. That will tell us where she’s hiding and what she wants to keep hidden.”

I didn’t know if this “bug” was a physical piece of hardware or a virus infecting the system. The best way of finding out was to physically visit the location myself.

“We need to get started right away. We only have so much time to work with.”

I knew I might have to stay multiple nights if things dragged out long enough, but I also knew this wasn’t like a trip inside my own country. There were issues with visas and passports and whatnot. If it came to it, I might end up doing some things that would delight Anastasia, but I wanted to settle this before it came to that if possible.

Besides, this was all over if my stepmom managed to reach whatever she had stored here. Then the unpredictable war between Absolute Noah and JB would begin. Even a moment’s delay could have devastating results.

“Fine, but are you taking the bus again?”

“Yes? I’m not rich enough to take taxis everywhere.”

“That long-distance bus was one thing, but can you read the complicated bus schedule in the city?”

“…”

“The same goes for the subway, I’m sure. It doesn’t match up with the actual map, so you can’t just check the direction you want to go and hope for the best.”

Then what was I supposed to do?

I was about to fail at the very first step, but Anastasia winked and made a suggestion. Thank goodness I was with someone who knew what they were doing.

“Then we just need a method of transportation that doesn’t cost much and even you’re familiar with.”

“?”

“Like rental bikes. Bicycles work the same no matter where in the world you are.”

Part 3

Holding up my phone and paying in euros still didn’t feel real, but I could guess this was the equivalent of paying some pocket change.

I pulled out one of the many identical bicycles gathered at a dedicated space on the sidewalk.

Anastasia secured her own bike and turned the lever to lower the seat as far as it would go. She was bent over and focused on the work, so her miniskirt butt was in a rather risqué position.

“So are we headed west or east?” she asked.

“Whichever’s closer.”

“Okay. That’s only about 5km west along the Seine.”

Ugh, that was pretty far. And that warranted an “only”? Did people from a large continent really think of distances so differently?

Anastasia and I rode our bikes alongside the river.

Neat. The world looked a little different now that I wasn’t walking. It was closer to night than evening. It was still a little too early, but I switched on the LED headlight.

The Seine was a pretty wide river.

Anastasia had said our destination was 5km to the west, but the river actually meandered quite a bit. I also spotted a few sandbanks. But the bridges spanning it were generally flooded with people. And unlike Odaiba or the Seto Inland Sea, there were a ton of bridges. Maybe they were all popular date destinations.

As we rode our bikes alongside the river, I noticed several old buildings that had to be landmarks on the other side. They looked like stone palaces with lots of pointy towers. Were they political or religious? Either way, they appeared to still be in use. The buildings were old, but bright white light shined from their windows. Had they swapped out the traditional lighting for power-saving LEDs?

“That over there is an art museum and that one with the model look is the legislature. Only the lower house, though.”

Anastasia told me what it all was while pedaling alongside me. But her descriptions were so subjective that I was never quite sure which building she meant. Most every building in Paris had a model look if you asked me. A stuck-up and disagreeable model.

“Wow, what’s that? A TV broadcast tower? Ah ha ha. The plain metal really sticks out like a sore thumb.”

“Truth… That’s the famous Eiffel Tower. Does it look that different in person?”

“…”

Overseas travel had a way of revealing who you were deep down. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t disguise how much of an idiot I was.

A while later, I saw something that looked out of place in a big city: a deep forest.

“What’s that? A zoo or something?”

“The forest itself is the attraction. It’s the Bois de Boulogne.”

How tasteful. It felt like I could run into an elf there, so it really fit the European local color.

At this point, it finally felt like we had left the city center.

“I see it now,” I said.

“Paris has been really busy building highways lately. First they built a buried tunnel and then they built an elevated road. Is it a campaign to sell more of their economical electric cars?”

Our destination was directly below a complex interchange between several highways. The core cables connecting all the city’s fiber optics to the outside world were built along the shortest route.

In Paris’s case, everything gathered together at two points: one in the west and one in the east. You can think of it like a candy wrapper.

Oftentimes, these things used the preexisting long-distance infrastructure for roads, railroads, power cables, or oil pipelines. It’s the same idea as how power lines and phone lines used to be sent through the utility poles as a set.

Highways were especially useful since they already needed to install emergency phones and speed detection cameras at set intervals. And in recent times, ground antennas for self-driving cars too. Anyway, it was the perfect spot to place the fiber optic cables. Using what was already there was cheaper than building something entirely new, so everyone went for that in both the public and private sectors.

We rode past our destination and stopped our bikes near a sign a short distance away.

“There wasn’t anyone there, was there?” I asked without looking back.

“I didn’t detect any drone signals either.”

Anastasia waved her phone that doubled as the face for her pet robot animal.

This wasn’t the destination for my stepmom, her bodyguards, or her negotiators. They had only needed to access all the cameras around Paris so they could find the blind spots, so once that work was complete, they would have left.

I was honestly relieved.

Not only was my stepmom Demon Lord Lilith, but Absolute Noah’s other members were nothing to sneeze at. I had already encountered a Banshee and a Sylpheed among them. I had thought the odds of encountering one here were low, but our lives could have been at risk if they had left a single subordinate here on a whim.

“I’m pathetic.”

“Truth?”

I needed to do everything within my power to stop Amatsu Yurina, yet here I was getting scared over the thought of a single lookout. How could I stop an all-out war between Absolute Noah and JB like this?

I shook my head and refocused my mind. I got off my stopped bike and lowered the kickstand.

“Let’s go check. If my stepmom has taken over all the security systems around Paris, we can sneak a peek at that data too. Once we know what Absolute Noah did here, we can mess with it. We should be able to monitor which of the millions of cameras they’re interested in.”

We approached a metal door that would have looked at home on a submarine.

Where was it located?

At the base of one of the metal supports for the circular interchange. This support had an emergency exit sign on it, so it was actually hollow like a candlestick and had a spiral staircase inside. The space inside was used to let people through, but also power cables and water pipes for electricity and drainage. It of course carried communication cables too.

But it worried me that the support pillar was hollow inside. How would that survive an earthquake? Construction in countries without many quakes felt weird. Maybe Japan’s standards were unusual from a global perspective.

“Here it is.”

We didn’t even have to climb the stairs.

A few metal tubes were attached to the curving wall. They were arranged vertically and I unscrewed one of them to open its cover. Glass fiber cables and a signal booster were installed inside. The booster had a smaller device attached with tape.

“A noncontact device? But how?”

When electricity ran through a wire, a magnetic field formed around it. This was unavoidable since electricity and magnetism were inextricably connected. So if you had a device that could read that weak magnetic field and convert it into an electrical signal, you could safely steal the data without actually messing with the cable itself.

But that method wasn’t supposed to work with a fiber optic cable because it used an optical signal. So did it use heat or vibrations? No material could perfectly reflect light, so some of it had to be converted into some other form, but that was such a tiny amount. This was an impressive feat. Building an experimental device to detect neutrinos was probably easier.

Meanwhile, the hacker next to me was growing restless.

“Th-that’s an Absolute Noah toy, right? Can’t I take it home with me? I just have to remove it so carefully they don’t notice.”

“Anastasia.”

“Okay, fine! But at least let me open it up and snap a photo of its circuit board layout!! I mean, this came from the Absolute Noah! I’m practically looking at lost technology here!”

“Anastasia.”

I was afraid she really would try to swipe the device, so I gave her a stronger warning. Who knows what kind of traps could be built into that lost technology. We couldn’t risk it when detection would mean game over here.

The device also seemed to use a noncontact method for charging itself as well. It appeared to be gathering the microwaves in the surrounding air – which meant ordinary cellphone and wireless LAN signals. It could run pretty much forever in an urban area like this.

“Ohh… Drool.”

“Down girl. I truly hope you wouldn’t stoop this low, but don’t get overexcited and eat the thing.”

But no matter how advanced the device was, all it did was steal the signal passing through the fiberoptic cable.

I didn’t even need to touch the device itself. By messing with cable 5cm above and below it, I could see exactly the same thing my stepmom was spying on. With Absolute Noah’s device sandwiched between my stuff, every signal passing through it had to pass through our checkpoints first.

Sending a software virus to the other side of the planet wasn’t the only kind of cyber attack. Infections and signal interceptions could be done on the hardware side of things too.

“Truth, you scare me the most for learning how to do all this on your own.”

“Stop exaggerating. You can buy fiberoptic cables at the hardware store. I learned all this while messing with Maxwell’s container.”

“The academic world and their obsessions with academic records might overlook inventors like you, but I know I need you in my lab right this instant. Even if I have to drug you and drag you there myself.”

Anyway, this was Phase 1 complete.

We still didn’t know what my stepmom was trying to acquire in Paris to start this war, but once we knew what she was focused on, we would know where the action was going down. I wanted that information before I tried to stop her.

I tried checking my phone.

Good.

It was working.

An unfamiliar section of an unfamiliar street popped up. Several security cameras stared at one point of Paris from multiple angles. My stepmom really was hiding in Paris and monitoring something in real time. I had already known that, but it felt so much more real now.

“Where is this, Anastasia?”

“Give me a second. Which street is this? There are a lot of hospitals around and is that the Paris Observatory in the background? Are the lights off because of that remote control virus? That would make this – yes, that’s Avenue de l’Observatoire. Which makes this the 14th arrondissement.”

A lot of hospitals?

That brought to mind the possibility of a biological or chemical weapon. I doubt many people would ever suspect their mother of using those.

But Anastasia had more to say.

“That’s directly above the catacombs.”

“The cata-whats?”

“An underground burial site containing the remains of 6 million people. It’s Paris’s giant dungeon.”

That changed how I looked at this. Could the threat be on the occult side of things? Like a curse or an Archenemy?

Regardless…

“Then we’ll have to investigate those catacombs next. While making sure we aren’t detected by the cameras my stepmom’s side controls.”

Now we could see through Amatsu Yurina’s eyes.

But we still didn’t know when she would make her move or what that move would be. It was possible she would be meeting someone “here” this very night and acquiring what she needed to go to war. A moment’s delay could mean losing everything. My body was protesting thanks to the jetlag, but I needed to keep going. I didn’t want to regret taking a break because the fighting began in the meantime.

We left the candlestick-like metal bridge support.

It was 7 at night, but it was still fairly bright out. Did sunset come at different times in other countries? Or was it just being in a big city? I puzzled over that, but Anastasia tilted her head too after stepping out of the metal door. The motion made her dress’s shoulder strap slip from her skinny shoulder.

“Odd.”

“What is?”

“It’s too bright. We’re near the forest located outside the city center, remember?”

So this was unusual after all.

The phone in my pants pocket started to vibrate while we looked up into the night sky together.

I pulled it out, checked the screen, and grimaced. Yes, there was a reason I hadn’t received word until now. I had given Maxwell another job. There was only one reason to be receiving a message now.

“Warning.”

“What is it, Maxwell?”

A social media speech bubble appeared on the screen, but I wasn’t speaking with a human. This was the disaster environment simulator I had built myself. The actual machine was made from 1400 handheld game systems I had bought at a discount and it was located inside a container at a Japanese harbor.

“Have you finished the job I gave you!?”

“I am contacting you to provide a progress report.”

I had long feared a war between Absolute Noah and JB. I could tell Absolute Noah, led by my stepmom Amatsu Yurina, was headed in that direction.

So what about JB?

They were skilled enough to remake a legendary god into their puppet, so do you really think they would sit idly by and wait for an attack?

“As you feared, I have found traces of a simultaneous attack on observatories around the world. You speculated that JB was using their remote control virus called dollgirl.c to secure the number of infected computers necessary for a DDoS attack.”

“Yes, and what did you find out?”

“You were incorrect. Look at this.”

The screen changed.

It displayed a round orb and some arrows. I couldn’t quite tell what it was trying to convey. Was it some kind of diagram? There were a lot of arrows, but they were all curving along almost the same course.

And if it was a diagram, what was it a diagram of?

“Maxwell, what am I looking at here?”

“Sure. This is the accurate data found when the data hidden by the virus is restored. Various telescopes and radars have picked up 33 targets, but the early-warning systems have been deactivated and the targets have been erased from all reports.”

“But what are they!? What is JB hiding!?”

“Sure.”

The text appeared as plainly as any other from Maxwell.

It was my own mind that made it look like it arrived in small chunks.

The mechanical message was simply displayed on the small screen.

“Those are 33 meteors of various size on course to strike the city of Paris without burning up in the thermosphere.”

J-

“JB!!!???”

We weren’t the only ones who wanted to stop Amatsu Yurina and Absolute Noah from completing their task here. In fact, JB was their actual target, so JB would want to stop them at all costs.

I had known that.

I really had.

But how could they take it this far!? Did those dumbasses not know that the earth itself was a limited resource!?

“Warning: you have less than 20 seconds until impact with the surface. The night sky looks unusually bright because the falling objects are burning in the upper atmosphere. But that will be insufficient to fully burn them away. The impact is coming, so please immediately evacuate underground or within a sturdy building.”

I couldn’t stand around any longer.

“Ana- run!! Back inside!!”

“Kyah!”

I grabbed Anastasia’s skinny wrist and rushed right back the way we had come: below the interchange and into the metal support for the giant bridge spiraling overhead. We made it inside the candlestick-like hollow interior.

I slammed shut the thick metal door and applied the lever from the inside.

The door wasn’t meant to open inwards, but a moment later, the thick door slammed into me and I flew all the way over to the railing of the spiral staircase.

Something had definitely happened outside.

[Unknown_Storage] Contact with Celestial Objects [file02]

Contact with celestial objects such as comets and asteroids can be divided into the following three levels.

These are all assuming an object of at least 20kg.

Level 1

In this case, the object fails to pass through the thermosphere and is destroyed. The object does not technically make contact with the surface in this case, but that does not mean there is no damage. If the object is metallic, it can release a lot of dust with a major impact on the magnetosphere or ionosphere with a risk of major electromagnetic fluctuations. This is estimated to mean the destruction of all computers on a city-wide or even country-wide scale directly below the affected airspace, which would lead to the failure of vital infrastructure and the collapse of social order. The scope of damage from the loss of power would be greatly affected by the population density and the local moral levels.

Level 2

In this case, the object passes through the thermosphere and the rest of the upper atmosphere but breaks apart from air friction in the lower atmosphere below an altitude of 3000m. This would create a major shockwave that sweeps across the land below it. The power of the shockwave would depend on the size of the object, but during the Tunguska Explosion that burned down a Russian forest, the damage covered an area of 2000 square kilometers.

If the breakup occurred in the middle atmosphere, the shockwave would not reach the surface, so there would be no major risk other than small pieces hitting the surface. The damage would be little different from large hail, assuming there are no aircraft in the affected airspace.

The middle atmosphere is often said to be the last chance when it comes to astronomical risk.

Level 3

In this case, the object actually hits the surface. The friction would cause heat, the air would be disturbed over a large area, and the impact to the ground would send a shockwave in every direction, tearing up the ground further and launching objects into the air. The scope of the damage could be calculated based on the object’s mass.

An object of more than 2000tons would be considered above Level 3. In that case, the explosion upon contact would send up a large cloud of dust that would linger in the upper atmosphere and block sunlight on a global scale. That would ensure another ice age.

(For reference, objects such as these appear in many theories, including the origin of the moon and the extinction of the dinosaurs, but the heaviest object that has actually been retrieved and preserved is around 60 tons.

It might not look possible when you simply look at the numbers, but do remember that approximately 40 thousand asteroids float powerless and rudderless in the gap between Mars and Jupiter.

The giant impact hypothesis is considered a likely candidate for the formation of the moon and it claims the moon came from all the dust scattered into space when a celestial object the same mass as Mars struck Earth.)

It might seem absurd to worry over such things, but our facility handles samples with a high risk of contagion. We need to develop procedures on how to handle the combination of a powerful impact reaching deep underground and a loss of power.

It is too late to develop procedures once disaster has already struck.

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