“Wait...!” he called out to her, but she ran off towards the backstage area.
“Oh, jeez...!”
He followed after her, but of course, Junko and Fujiko were right on his tail. And the rioting students were behind them.
“Uwah.... I’m gonna get them all trapped in here... She’s running towards a spot without any exits, so I guess I’ll be okay...” Akuto whispered.
He jumped up onto the stage to follow Nozomi. When he did, he looked up to see her on the second floor of the backstage area, next to the control panels that controlled the lights and curtain.
“Hey! Don’t be scared! I’m not going to hurt you!” he yelled, but when he looked into her eyes he saw no trace of sanity at all.
“You’re lying! You’re going to catch me and do all kinds of horrible, naughty things to me, aren’t you? Yeah! I know what’s going on here! That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it?”
“I am not!”
“Then why are there so many people with you?” Nozomi pointed behind him.
Akuto looked to see that the gym was completely packed with people.
“Uwah... Well, this isn’t my fault...” Akuto said, but Nozomi shook her head.
“Even if it’s not your fault, there’s no way for me to escape now! So you know, there’s only one thing left for me to do!”
She put her hand on the control panel.
“Do? What are you going to do?” Akuto asked, a little afraid, but Nozomi simply said “Hmph!” and slammed her fist on the control panel.
“This!”
Rain started fall down behind Akuto, covering the whole gym. Cold water began to fall on the students.
“That’s not rain... The sprinkler?”
Akuto was right. The sprinkler system had activated. The whole gym was covered in water.
“It’s cold!”
“What is this?”
“Does he really think this will help him get away...?” the students began to yell. The whole gym was filled with students now, they had to yell just to be heard.
“...Water? No way!” Akuto gasped and looked up at Nozomi.
Nozomi began to scream. By now she’d totally lost it. “I told you, this is the only thing left for me to do!”
The students’ yells began to turn to shrieks.
“Hyaaaah!”
“Kyaaaah!”
“Uwaaah!”
“Iyaaaah!”
The whole gym began to shake with the cries of boys and girls. The scene was beginning to turn the color of exposed skin. Everybody was either naked, or in their underwear. In other words, everyone had lost their uniform.
The girls began to use magic to blast the nearby boys away,
“This is... awful.” Akuto said, looking down on the crowd below him from the stage.
“I think a painter once drew a picture of hell that looked like this,” Fujiko said casually. Of course, she was on the stage and had avoided the carnage.
“I finally understand what’s going on, but... Now what?” Junko said as she glanced from Akuto to Nozomi.
Akuto looked up at Nozomi and sighed. “If we can just explain...”
Nozomi was shaking, now that she’d lost her only path to escape.
It wasn’t clear whether sanity had returned to her, but now she looked like a poor, frightened girl. It was a sad sight to behold.
“...No, I don’t know if we can have her explain anything.” Akuto whispered quietly.
Reluctantly, he looked down. The students had seemed to realize that if everybody else was naked, it wasn’t embarrassing. They’d stopped fighting and were all glaring up at Akuto. He could see several red, bestial eyes shining against a backdrop of dark skin.
“So how do we calm them down, then?” Junko said to Akuto in a way that made it clear she had no idea what to do.
“Well...” Akuto began. There was a darkness in his eyes that made it clear that he was reluctant to do what he was about to do.
“...I’ll do something bad.” He whispered, and walked forward.
“Wait,” Junko said, trying to stop him, but it was too late. Fujiko leapt in front of him.
“If you and I make love here, nobody will be able to stop us...”
“I’d really rather not,” Akuto said immediately. But he didn’t have any ideas except letting himself get beat up. He no longer had the strength to fight the whole school without hurting anyone.
“Well, if that’s how it has to be, then fine. I can take the hits, at least.” He said casually, and then stepped in front of the assembled students.
The students began to swarm the stage. Akuto simply closed his eyes so as not to scare them. But then a voice echoed throughout the gym.
“Stop this at once!” It was a voice clear and loud enough to drown out the yelling students.
Everyone froze and looked towards the voice. It was coming from above. Keena was slowly descending from the window. She had a speaker in her hand, and Korone was riding on her back. The sunlight shining in from the window behind her gave her an almost divine aura.
“Keena...” Akuto whispered as his eyes opened wide. The students all froze and began to murmur among themselves.
“I apologize for this incident. It was my failure to keep control of him that led to this. I apologize here and now for the trouble I caused you. I will officially have new uniforms prepared for you,” she continued in a clear, unhesitating voice.
The students were listening quietly. But Akuto could see that she was occasionally looking down at Korone’s hand. She was reading off of cards.
“But that’s not enough for an apology. I’m going to punish the Demon King here and now!” Keena declared. The students murmured among themselves.
“What? Punish me?” Akuto said in surprise. He knew Keena could supposedly control his power, but this was the first he’d heard about any kind of power like that. Keena landed in front of him. And she looked up at him with a rare look of anger.
“Ackie”!
“Y-Yes...?” Akuto mumbled.
“Ackie! The rice got hard because of you!” She pointed a finger at him as she scolded him.
“Huh? Rice...? Hard...?” As Akuto stood there confused, Keena called Korone over.
Korone walked over and took out a large plastic bin from her bag. It was what the school used for trash bins.
“We ended up with extra rice in the cafeteria. It will have to be thrown out at this rate,” Korone said expressionlessly.
“You made more than you were supposed to! It’s all dry and hard now, but your punishment is that you have to eat it!” She opened the trash bin, which was filled to the brim with dry, hard rice.
“W-Wait...” This was enough to cause even Akuto to take a step back. Korone thrust a ladle into the rice. There was a cracking sound.
“It’s totally dry!” Akuto screamed.
“That’s right! It’s dry! Now, eat it all up and don’t waste a single grain!” Keena grabbed the ladle with one hand and Akuto with the other, and began to force the rice down his mouth.
“S-Stop it! It’s so hard! My teeth...!”
“Don’t worry! You can still eat it if you just ignore the pain! I know I could eat this much rice if I really tried, so as long as you ignore how hard it is, it’ll be fine!” Keena said, forcefully. By now Akuto had fallen to the ground, and she was on top of him and jamming rice down his throat.
“She’s forcing him to eat hard rice...”
“Without even steaming it again?”
“There’s so much of it...”
“This whole thing is starting to feel stupid...”
“Yeah... let’s just go home...”
The anger had completely drained from the students. They were watching in shocked silence as Akuto was forced to eat dry rice. Korone walked in front of the students and opened her bag.
“Now line up. Just tell me the size and type and I’ll give you a new uniform...” The students began to peacefully form a li
ne.
Thus, the whole mess came to an end with one great sacrifice made by a single man.
○
And now, Akuto was lying alone on his bed. He had no idea how he’d managed to digest it all, but a full trash bin of rice had disappeared into his stomach. The price he’d paid was a stomachache worse than being punched.
“Oh... my peaceful life seems so far away...” He sobbed as he looked up at the ceiling.
Suddenly Korone appeared in his field of vision. She was looking down on him from above the bed.
“What is it?” Akuto asked. Her answer was immediate, but also awkward.
“I was curious if you were mad.”
“Mad?” Akuto said, and for once she took a moment to answer.
“...You must be aware who was responsible for all of this. Even if it was in large part a series of coincidences.”
“Yeah...” Akuto sighed a little and shook his head.
“...If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s that girl’s. And whether I’m mad or not is a separate issue. I am pretty sad, though.”
“I want to make it up to you, then.”
“Make it up to me?”
“Yes. I was thinking I might be able to make you feel better.”
“...You’re not teasing me again, are you?”
“You don’t trust me?” Korone said expressionlessly. But her voice sounded very sad.
“N-No, I do...” Akuto stammered.
“Good,” she said, and gently smiled at him. If he remembered right, this was the second time he’d seen her smile. Then she lifted a leg up and over his body, and crouched over him.
“Hey... If you’re not teasing me, then please don’t try and do anything dirty,” Akuto said, stammering.
“Don’t worry. I’m going to give you what you want. I just want to make you feel better. Fortunately, I was given an exterior which humans do not find displeasing, so I will sleep next to you and sing you love songs.” She slid into his bed and wrapped his arms around her.
“...Hey.”
“Is it not okay?” she said, looking up at him. Her eyes were shining like precious jewels, and he couldn’t help but put a hand around her shoulder.
“Um, it’s... okay, but...”
“Did an erection occur?”
“Huh?”
“No, I mean, did you get erect?”
Akuto stared at her. She was looking at him expressionlessly.
“...You tricked me again, didn’t you?” Akuto said, and the corners of her mouth curled up into a grin.
“I’ll tell the rest of the girls that this is how you trick a man. Now, let’s check on that erection...”
“Let’s not!” Akuto slapped away her hand and yelled.
Korone lay on her side in the bed, and this time answered with her usual tone.
“Then, will you not get mad if I tease you again?” Akuto stared at her, and when he was pretty sure that this time it wasn’t an act, he sighed.
“If it’s something that doesn’t cause any real harm, and if it helps Keena. But don’t go too far, okay?”
“As you wish.” Korone nodded.
“Okay...” Akuto said, and closed his eyes.
“Um...”
“Hmm?” He opened them again upon hearing Korone speak.
“You’re not kicking me out of bed, then, are you?” she said mischievously.
“My stomach hurts, so I was trying to go to sleep!”
“I’ll also record the fact that men make excuses like that. Now, if the Empress were to see us like this, you might be forced to eat rock-hard rice again. I’ll be returning to my shelf.” she said as she stood up from the bed.
“Sure. You know, I never saw Keena after that...”
“She went to take that trash bin back to the cafeteria... I wonder what happened to her?”
○
“Waaaaaah! It’s so sticky I can’t get it off! Help me, Ackie! Korone!” Keena screamed. She’d gotten stuck on the glue on the wall of the school building’s second floor.
“I tripped on a banana peel, and then I saw a flyer talking about a sale on rice, and then I went to grab a bag of rice when a metal wash basin fell down and hit me on the head, and then I staggered onto a trampoline that knocked me into the air and I got stuck on the wall!” she sobbed. But Nozomi, the girl who’d set the trap, was now curled up in her futon in the janitor’s room, shivering and shaking.
“Scary! This school is scary!”
In the end, it was an hour before anybody found Keena.
2 - What If You Made a Copy Human?
A dark room, filled with all sorts of strange machinery.
Glowing panels, monitors displaying graphs going up and down.
The sound of endlessly whirring cooling fans.
In the center of the room, a girl was controlling an electric screwdriver attached to a robot arm. She must not have cared about her appearance, because she was wearing an unpressed white lab coat and her short hair was uncombed. There were goggles on her forehead and oil stains on her cheeks.
Yoshie Kita. That was her name.
Her talent for researching Virtual Phase Space had caused her to be caught up in a huge conspiracy, and at the end of it, she’d ended up joining Akuto in the Demon King war. Now that it was over, she’d gone back to her job, but she spent most of her time on her hobbies. Even on weekdays she was usually found here in a Constant Academy warehouse, working.
“Heheheh... It’s finally done,” she looked up, grinning.
There was a doll in front of her. “Dolls” were Liradans without high-class AI. They were often used for simple jobs, and often didn’t even resemble humans. This particular doll had a flat, featureless surface that made it resemble a mannequin, and it looked like it hadn’t been fully assembled. It was lying on a large work table. Yoshie went to press the round button on its nose, but then stopped.
“Hmm... I don’t know if it was god or the devil that created this invention. Perhaps it’s like summoning some accursed being from the black depths of darkness...” She talked like that all the time. It was a habit she’d picked up after playing too many video games.
“Master, you sound like a dork.”
Suddenly there was a voice behind her. It was a tiny Liradan. She was a strange looking girl, clad in the clothes of a samurai. She had a long ponytail that reached down to the toes of her tiny body, and she carried a katana that seemed to be twice her size.
She was Keisu. A Liradan made to seal away the first demon king. But now her job was done, and she spent her days helping Yoshie.
“Mph. What are you doing here?” Yoshie turned around.
“That’s a strange question. You’re the one who asked me to come here. You have a visitor.” Keisu pointed behind her.
“Oh, right.” Yoshie grabbed some cleaning spray off the ground and sprayed it into her hands, then wiped them with a cloth. Then she kicked the wheeled chair next to her across the room and motioned for her guest to sit down.
“You seem pretty busy.” It was Akuto. He sat down in the chair like he was meeting with an old male friend. Maybe it was Yoshie’s unfeminine personality, or maybe it was the fact that they both were prone to weird speeches, but Akuto was more open with Yoshie than he was with others.
“No, I was busy. But I just finished.” She put her elbows down on the table next to Akuto.
“That doll? No, is it a Liradan?” Akuto jerked his head in the direction of the work table.
“Doll,” she said. “But it’s a little dangerous.”
Yoshie grinned proudly.
“Dangerous? Is it illegal?”
“It can’t be illegal if there aren’t any laws about it. This is something that the modern legal system has never had to deal with,” she said confidently.
“But it’s still dangerous, right?” Akuto asked, and she nodded.
“That’s why I called you. No, there’s no risk of it exploding or going out of control or anything. I wanted your opinion.�
��
“My opinion?”
“Yeah. This is a doll that copies somebody’s personality, you see.” She pointed a thumb in the direction of the doll’s smooth, empty face.
“Copies somebody’s personality? Like necromancy?” Akuto asked, his eyes going wide in surprise.
“Necromancy uses the data logs stored in the gods. This makes a copy of somebody’s personality inside virtual phase space, so it’s different.” Yoshie said. Akuto leaned forward, interested.
“That’s right. There was a time when we were sent into VPS and our bodies stayed here, right?”
“Yup. I used that same idea to make a robot that copies personalities. I got started when I was thinking about where a human soul actually is.”
“And you ended up with this thing? Does that mean that the soul is real, and that you can copy it?”
“Yup. Weird, huh? But this means that the gods are right, and it’s possible to take human souls to another dimension and recreate them there. That’s why I wanted you to hear it.”
“Seems like something I’d better remember,” Akuto said, nodding.
“But the immediate question is: what do we do with this thing?” Yoshie sighed.
“What do you mean?” Akuto asked. Yoshie beckoned him over to the table.
“Here, come take a closer look.”
“It seems like its body is pretty big,” he said as he looked down at the doll.
Yoshie put her hand over it and spoke.
“You see, I made this thing, and then I realized there were all kinds of evil uses for it. It’s featureless because when you press this button on the nose, it copies the appearance of the person who pushes it. It’s like Hattori’s clones; it uses condensed mana to cover itself.”
“So you get two of the same person? That could be weird.”
“Yup. That’s why I put in a safety device. I made it so it knows it’s a fake, and also so it won’t hurt anybody.”
“This is interesting, yeah. But since there’s so much potential for misuse, you should destroy it after one test,” Akuto said as he crossed his arms.
Yoshie nodded.
“Well, I figured you’d say that. I just wanted somebody to give me a little push. Also, I wanted to get some data.”
“Data?” Akuto asked. Yoshie responded by grabbing his hand and using it to touch the button.
Demon King Daimaou: Volume 10 Page 4