[559] The Steel Gate Once More (4)
"Shirone...?"
Sobbing echoed through the room.
Amy couldn't find any words at the sight of Shirone collapsing into tears.
"Amy."
Shirone's jaw trembled as he spoke.
"Peope is dead."
The news hit Amy like a stone in the chest.
She remembered the small, adorable fairy who had helped Shirone, Rian, and Tess in Heaven.
That Peope was dead also meant Shirone had been to Heaven.
"She died because of me. She tried to save me... she gave up her lifespan..."
He couldn't tell Miro, Irukina, or Nade—just thinking about it made it unbearable.
But Amy knew Peope.
"I went to see Ikael. She was in my hands..."
At the image of Peope, horribly withered, both of Amy's hands began to tremble. Even now she could still feel the fragile weight in her palms.
"She said she loved me... but she was too small... I..."
Amy closed her eyes.
This was why she had tried not to hear it—because Shirone wouldn't just leave a suicide note for no reason.
"I was so angry I used Valhalla Action... but after that my memory—"
"Okay, Shirone. You don't have to pull up painful memories."
Tears slipped from Shirone's bowed face as his voice cracked.
"Peope..."
Amy felt anger and grief mixed together.
'Idiot—I'm the one who should be crying.'
Sitting on the bed, Amy drew Shirone into her arms. His face collapsed against her chest and he began to cry in earnest.
His voice thudded against her, and the locked iron bars around him started to loosen bit by bit.
"Hah, really..."
Amy patted his back and looked up at the ceiling.
'Just this once. If you do that again, I won't be moved anymore.'
So Amy buried Shirone's sorrow against her heart.
* * *
The next morning.
Shirone headed straight for Istas as soon as he woke.
His eyes were puffy from crying, but what embarrassed him more was something else.
"Ah! Why did I do that?"
Amy's blunt words had made his heart lurch, and since then he'd been left with nothing but sorrow.
'Still, at least we made up.'
He didn't feel that bad. Thinking of Peope still crushed him, but it was a relief to have someone beside him to share the grief.
Sometimes you live on while crying.
'I'm kind of nervous, though.'
At Istas, Shirone frowned as the uncanny feeling from the previous day came back to him.
Istas: a multipurpose complex of eighty-nine warehouses. Many prestigious schools had such a facility, but Alpheas School of Magic's Istas was special, both historically and functionally.
'The Gate of the Griffin is here.'
Sein had reset the supernatural psychical science society to square one, but the gate itself wasn't something they had made.
'It's probably tied to some incident back then.'
Lost in thought, Shirone reached the warehouse where Istas' entrance was located.
'I should investigate before lunch.'
Up to now he'd triggered Shibulsangpokmae in the lab, but this time he planned to go to where he'd heard the sound.
"There was noise from the ceiling..."
Using the Master Equation to calculate coordinates, Shirone turned for the stairs.
'Hmm, so it's here.'
He was a bit scared to go alone, but it would be the polite thing to do for the friends helping him to at least check it out.
Shibulsangpokmae.
The Avatar of the Radiant Angel swelled as if about to explode, then was drawn inward, and phantom voices echoed in his ears.
"Captain! We can't hold them!"
"Either way, we're dead! Aim for the child!"
Shirone ran toward the sound and stopped at the corner, grimacing at the scene.
"What is this?"
Corpses lay broken along the stairs—mostly soldiers armed with military gear, a few mages among them.
Shirone examined the bodies carefully, some in states too horrific to look at closely.
"This is..."
The weapons bore the crest of the Tormia Kingdom.
'Why are Tormian soldiers here?'
A shout from upstairs pulled his gaze up and he hurried up the stairs.
As if time and space had shifted, the line of bodies abruptly ended at the warehouse boundary.
Checking his current position by the mark on the ceiling, Shirone stopped when he saw the back of a woman standing in the center of the intersection.
"Miro?"
He couldn't be sure what year this scene came from, but recognizing Miro—who hadn't aged a day in nearly twenty years—was no problem.
Miro, facing the soldiers who held the forward position, turned her head slightly.
"Who are you?"
'Can she hear my voice?'
It didn't feel like a hallucination. For a moment Shirone wondered if he might actually be at the scene of an event.
"Really... is that Miro?"
Miro turned back to the soldiers.
"You must be a student—go back. This isn't a place for you."
A moment later she muttered, bitterly, "Still, it's time for us to be captured anyway."
"Huh? What do you mean—"
As Shirone moved to follow the charging Miro, a group of soldiers surged from the right corridor.
"Who's that guy?"
"He looks like a student! What do we do?"
"A student? How did a student get in here?"
The captain narrowed his eyes with murderous intent.
"Kill him! There's no way out!"
"Take him down!"
The soldiers accelerated. They were elite troops, clearly skilled in schema techniques.
They rushed in, using ocular techniques, and Shirone's body felt constricted as if caught in snares thrown from all sides.
"Ugh!"
His first thought was whether their blades would cut him down.
Since he'd been able to talk with Miro, it didn't seem impossible, but he still couldn't quite accept that he was actually in the present.
'Idiot!'
Wasn't this exactly the situation to teleport out of, not engage?
He resisted the ice technique with Geumgangtae-level mental discipline and teleported; countless spears and blades sliced through where he'd just been standing.
"Tch! Still a schoolkid, huh?"
"Kid's a rookie! Finish him!"
Blades flew toward the point where his teleportation flash had landed.
'This is bad...!'
A Tormian common longsword aimed for his throat—Shirone's eyes flashed.
'Shibulsangpokmae!'
Suddenly his head snapped back; the blade skimmed past his throat.
"What... what is that?"
If time could be represented as space, Shirone's range of movement was far wider than someone trapped in a mold.
But because it was time, it felt eerie, and even the trained elite soldiers were thrown off.
"It's just magic! Kill him!"
At the captain's shout, the soldiers' killing intent spiked like blades.
"Ugh!"
Pushed into a dead end, Shirone pressed his back to the wall and watched the encircling soldiers tighten their ring in a semicircle.
The captain who broke through swung his sword with lightning speed and charged.
"Try dodging this one!"
The instant he saw the swordlight rake the air around him, the smell of death hit his brain.
'I can't dodge!'
"Die!"
Shirone gritted his teeth and released Shibulsangpokmae; the blades that had almost reached him vanished.
"Haaargh!"
But to the one under attack it felt like being pierced—his breath stopped.
"...."
The corridor fell silent.
"Hah! Hah!"
Shirone, breathing hard and eyes wide, slid down the wall and dropped.
'I almost died.'
He couldn't be certain, but the sensation was painfully clear.
'What did I just see?'
One thing was certain: he must never perform incarnation techniques here.
Meanwhile, about seventy meters from where Shirone rested, two voices whispered.
"What the hell? Why's he acting like that? Going berserk on his own."
"Isn't he crazy?"
"Maybe he's just training. He even did teleportation and stuff."
Their voices were low and their figures unseen.
Having regained his composure, Shirone headed back toward the research society.
'Wait until lunch and ask the others...'
A flash of insight lit his eyes.
'...I'll check.'
Through a brush of synesthetic perception he sensed an intruder passing by.
His senses were sharp from the recent fight, so he could pick it up, although the intruder wasn't particularly skilled.
'Who are these guys?'
Shirone kept walking as if he hadn't noticed. When the intruders showed no sign of revealing themselves, he veered away from the research society.
'They're still following. I'm definitely the target. In that case...'
He stopped in the middle of the corridor that connected the warehouses in a straight line.
"Come out."
No answer.
"I know everything. Come out, or I'll attack."
Counting three seconds in his head, Shirone suddenly expanded his Spirit Zone to locate them.
But perhaps they'd expected that—the wall peeled away like wallpaper as three transparent cloaks slipped off, revealing their wearers.
"Damn! We're spotted! Run!"
Shirone, who'd equipped a powerful photon cannon, watched in dumbfounded surprise as the others fled.
They were all familiar faces.
"Aren't these advanced-class kids?"
Even as the juniors hurried down the corridor, Shirone relaxed and deactivated his magic.
Instead, he studied the ceiling marks, the color of the iron doors, and the number of forks in the passage.
"Let's see, this coordinate is..."
* * *
"Ugh, this is annoying! Who messed up?"
The girl scowled while the two boys running beside her pointed fingers at each other.
"It must've been you who got seen!"
"No, you did! My hide-and-seek skills are way better than yours—"
"Eeek!"
When the girl screamed as if she'd seen a ghost, the two boys skidded to a stop.
"Huh, how—?"
Shirone had already stepped in front of their path.
"How did you catch up so fast?"
Shirone sighed and approached.
"How did you catch up? You barely moved ten meters on the map."
They were speechless.
"All right, Shuamin, Alt, Gerein. What's going on here?"
They were juniors from Class Five who'd recently taken combined advanced lessons with Shirone.
Shuamin had once performed the trick of counting coins inside a Spirit Zone when Shirone had jumped the Alpheas wall at about twelve. Back then she had been a little kid; now she was a girl, shrugging her shoulders slyly.
"What's it to you? We're here on a teacher's errand to fetch teaching materials."
At the childish lie, Shirone snorted.
"Is that so? Then just ask the teacher."
Alt's lip trembled.
"Haha, do the graduates really have so much free time that they'd bother checking in with the advanced class?"
"Yeah, it's fine. I refused the graduate evaluation. I've got plenty of time."
Shirone watched the juniors' faces fall and closed the distance.
"Be honest. Why are you here?"
Shuamin and the others exchanged looks, then, as if decided, they reached toward Shirone.
"Huh?"
"Wind Cutter!"
They cast an attack spell out of the blue. It felt ridiculous, but Shirone's body responded reflexively.
'Frenzy.'
A sphere of light flashed; the wind blades shattered and spun into the air.
Wind Cutter was a flashy spell, sure.
But at the advanced-class level, piercing Shirone's defensive magic had been impossible from the start.