The Igniter

by Reki Kawahara

  Nakakubo put his left hand on the bottom of the pool for support and slowly stood up out of the water.

  That Accelerator girl should have been blown away without a trace, but her companions behind her might still be alive. He still had to finish them off with an oxygen-deprivation attack, he thought, and turned his gaze to the thick clouds of water vapor floating in the air.

  But shocked, after seeing something he could not believe, he groaned.

  Just as something was about to be said from Yumiko’s lips, Minoru saw movement out of the corner of his eye to the left and immediately transferred his attention to it.

  Beyond the steam from the explosion, that man was standing.

  Yousuke Nakakubo—Igniter. The Ruby Eye with the power to manipulate oxygen. His thin face and teacher-like intellectual air… There was no mistaking that this was the man Minoru had seen in Ikebukuro. His face showed his age, but he did not at all look decrepit or infirm. As if projecting the swirling emotions within him, both of his eyes glinted with a harsh light.

  The emotions expressed in his eyes went from shock then anger to rage and the intent to kill. His lips twisted, and he seemed to shout something, but Minoru could not hear him.

  Holding up his wounded right hand, the crimson sphere embedded in the center of his palm overflowed with a dazzling light.

  How?

  How were they still alive?

  That boy carrying that girl in his stiff-collared school uniform…, Nakakubo thought. This is the first time I have seen his face, but I remember his presence. It’s the same one who was riding on the back of that motorcycle in Ikebukuro. No matter where he looked he couldn’t find a single scratch on either of them.

  Nakakubo’s shock immediately lit up and burned in an incredible rage.

  How dare they reject the Purifier’s flames…

  “Don’t think you can get away with this!!” he screamed, throwing his broken right hand out toward them.

  Ignoring the pain, he clenched his fingers and pulled all the oxygen away from the black hunters. A wind picked up and blew away the steam.

  Those two who should have had the oxygen needed to breathe taken away from them, they should have immediately collapsed into the water.

  However…

  “……Why?” Nakakubo groaned.

  The girl and boy stood still in the wave-tossed water, without moving an inch. Their expressions didn’t even change. The light in all four of their eyes did not waver one bit.

  “Why?!?!” he screamed again and tried to grip his right hand together with all his might.

  But before his five fingers were able to grasp it, an intense feeling of resistance ran up his entire right arm.

  It was too hard, he couldn’t grasp it.

  It was an absolute rejection unlike any he had felt before. A thin layer of air surrounding the two black hunters was completely out of his control.

  “Ahh!! Aaahh!!!!” No matter how he yelled, no matter how much force he put into it, he could not close his right hand.

  This was impossible. Absolutely impossible.

  All oxygen in existence was on Nakakubo’s side. At his will they would move, split, combine, and lay down judgment on humans, and yet…

  Within the burning anger racing through his veins, Nakakubo felt a slight, barely there chill spreading inside him.

  “Is this…fear?” he thought.

  At that moment the boy took one step forward.

  The stun baton and knife had both flown off somewhere, but Minoru knew that they were no longer needed. All he needed to do was take a step and kick off from the ground.

  “…Accelerate me,” Minoru whispered, and Yumiko in his arms gave a vigorous nod.

  With his right foot, Minoru kicked off from the bare concrete freed of its sand by the explosion.

  Yumiko took Minoru’s step and accelerated it.

  While still wrapped in Minoru’s invisible defensive shell, Minoru and Yumiko shot forward at an incredible speed. The water’s surface at Minoru’s feet parted left and right and shot up in tall walls on either side of them.

  The more than thirty meters between them and Igniter went to zero in an instant, and Minoru’s left shoulder collided with Igniter’s thin chest.

  Minoru hardly felt any recoil, but even across his shell Minoru could feel the old man’s ribs and sternum break. From the Ruby Eye’s wide-opened mouth came trails of blood, and after being thrown backward, he landed in the sand a great distance away.

  Of the body’s four limbs, Igniter’s right hand alone rose unsteadily upward, as if it had a mind of its own. But after a short while its light faded, disappeared, and his right hand fell back into the sand.

  Igniter didn’t try to move after that, and it didn’t appear that his Third Eye would go berserk.

  Minoru let out the breath of air he had been holding in and deactivated his shell. Upon which the warm surrounding water rushed in and swallowed his lower body.

  “Wha—! Hey! If you’re going to deactivate your shell, wait until we’re out of the pool!” Yumiko cried out, flustered, in Minoru’s ear.

  “Oh… I-I’m sorry,” Minoru replied, finally realizing that he still had his arms wrapped around Yumiko’s back.

  Whoa! thought Minoru, but instead of heeding his intention of letting Yumiko go, his arms just wrapped around her more tightly.

  “…” Minoru heard Yumiko taking a deep breath, but she didn’t try to push him away.

  There was a short silence.

  “…I’m so glad you’re all right…,” Minoru said, his voice shaking. “…If you had been thrown out of my shell and only I was unharmed…I just don’t know what I would have done.”

  “…Huh? You mean… You weren’t sure that wouldn’t happen?”

  “N-no… I thought that it might have been about fifty-fifty…?”

  “Are you serious?!” This time, Yumiko put her hands on Minoru’s chest and pushed him away, glaring at him from up close. “Let’s say that you activated your shell while hugging me and I was rejected. Wouldn’t all of the bones in my body have cracked and broken?”

  “…That’s a good point.”

  “Geez…,” Yumiko muttered, pursing her lips, before shrugging and—while about 30 percent of it was wry—giving Minoru a smile.

  She wrapped her arms around Minoru’s back again and hugged him as tightly as she could. With their noses almost touching, she added in a short whisper from her glossy lips, “But still… Thank you.”

  As they continued to embrace in the water, Minoru thought it strange that he felt he wanted to stay like this forever. In the future, a time might come when he would want to forget this memory as well. But Minoru hoped from the bottom of his heart that that would not happen.

  Yumiko’s eyes, bordered by long eyelashes, reflected the light coming up from the surface of the water and shined. Minoru could see her white teeth like pearls from behind her slightly opened lips.

  Just then.

  “Hey now, just how long do you plan on staying like that, you lovebirds?”

  As soon as that voice rang out, boom! The air shook as Minoru’s arms suddenly went empty. Yumiko had accelerated herself as she jumped away.

  Yumiko landed on a sandy beach a long distance away from Minoru, who had frozen in a bit of a stupid-looking pose, and with her face bright red she pointed past the row of palm trees.

  “What are you two doing, peeking at us?! I’m going to blow you away!”

  “Talk about mean, we actually had to deal with that giant explosion, you know?” said Olivier Saito as he walked out from behind the line of palm trees shaking his head, leaves stuck in his curly hair. DD followed behind him, smirking.

  Both of them had been hidden behind Igniter, and even though they didn’t look like they had sustained a lot of damage, they should have been hit by the shock wave. Olivier’s long sword was unsheathed in his right hand, so he must have done something about it with his power.

  DD, who looked on
for a while as Yumiko went around chasing Olivier as he fled, walked over to Igniter, who hadn’t moved since he collapsed.

  After putting his hand on Igniter’s neck to check his pulse, he took a syringe from his waist pouch and quickly administered some kind of drug.

  Minoru, who waded through the water out of the pool, asked in a small voice, “Is…he still alive?”

  “Yeah. A Third Eye host isn’t going to die from just an external shock like that,” DD replied. “You would need to completely destroy their heart or brain…or you could cut off their supply of oxygen. In that sense, this guy really was a ‘Third Eye killer.’ We’re lucky to have you on our side, Utsugi.”

  “I-it’s nothing like that, all I did was…,” Minoru started.

  “Don’t be modest, Mikkun,” said Professor Riri suddenly over the intercom. “You played a vital part in everything from confirming the enemy’s identity and seeing through his power to the actual battle. You have done well. No longer does anyone in the SFD doubt your power or your determination.”

  After hearing that, Minoru reflexively looked at Olivier.

  Divider Olivier, who seemed to have been listening to the same transmission, smiled with his pretty face and let out a big laugh before giving Minoru a thumbs-up with his right hand. His beautiful voice rang out over the destroyed pool with a volume level rivaling an oncoming siren.

  “Good job!”

  DD and Yumiko both shook their heads at the same time.

  12

  “…kubo. Mr. Nakakubo.”

  His shoulder shaken, the man opened his eyes.

  “If you sleep here, you’ll catch a cold.”

  The voice was that of a young nurse wearing a white frock. The man, after giving a short answer, lightly shook his head back and forth. He felt as if he had been having a long strange dream, but he couldn’t remember what had happened in it.

  As he watched the nurse smile and walk away, the man readjusted himself on the hard sofa.

  The hospital’s lounge area was, as always, wrapped in a heavy, sluggish sort of atmosphere. The smell of snacks and the heater turned up too high was enough to make it difficult to breathe, but the man really didn’t have anywhere else he could go.

  On a large flat-screen television that was hung from the ceiling, commentators on a variety show were talking in raised voices.

  “…It had to be a terrorist attack! A new kind of terrorist attack! There’s no way that could have been an accident. I mean, how does a pool just explode?!”

  “But they couldn’t find any traces of explosives, right? Wasn’t it just some sort of gas leak?”

  “That’s why I said before, do you think they’re really running gas pipes under a pool?!”

  Then, an aerial photograph of a large dome-shaped building with its roof blown off was displayed on the screen.

  It was the same news that Nakakubo had gotten bored of watching over the past week. In the first place, he couldn’t care less if a theme park exploded or fell apart. It wasn’t like it was a place that he would ever visit anyway.

  After all, he had dragged his family into a murder-suicide and yet brazenly survived himself.

  Nakakubo shook his head and let out a deep sigh, then grimaced from the pain of his fractured ribs.

  He couldn’t at all remember what he had done in the three months between the time he had driven his car off of Ooi Pier and was admitted to the hospital.

  Given the fact that he had been found with five of his ribs and sternum broken, not to mention the hideous state of his right hand, it was clear that he had gotten wrapped up in some sort of incident, but no matter how he thought about it, he didn’t feel that those memories would ever return to him and had already given up on it.

  With another sigh, the man stood up and walked over to the glass-enclosed smoking area in the corner of the lounge. He took a lighter and a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit up.

  After taking a deep breath of smoke, he felt a prickling sensation at the back of his throat. It was as if he had abstained from cigarettes during those three months he had forgotten, but that was impossible. Before he attempted suicide, he had smoked two packs a day.

  Letting out a long puff of smoke, Nakakubo looked at his right hand holding his cigarette.

  It looked terrible. Most of his hand was in a cast, and he could only move the tips of his fingers. He couldn’t see it now, but there was also a strange wound in the center of his hand. There was a circular depression, as if someone had scooped out the middle of his palm with a spoon. The doctor said that he must have hit it against a sharp object, but the wound didn’t go through to the back of his hand.

  Apart from that…

  As he looked at that wound, Nakakubo felt a strange sense of loss. He felt far more lonely than he felt toward the loss of his fashion-crazed wife and unemployed middle-age son. He felt as if he had lost something truly important.

  “Hmph,” he said with a wry smile and took his eyes away from his cast-wrapped hand. He looked up at the ceiling and let out a long, narrow stream of smoke.

  Suddenly, in the back of his mind, a melody popped up, and subconsciously with his raspy voice he began to hum.

  “Hmm-hmhm, hmmm-hmmhmm…”

  He couldn’t remember any lyrics, but he still hummed the melody ceaselessly, tirelessly.

  Hmm…hmmhm…

  The smoke, which was separated by the beats in the rhythm, twisted into a strange form as it rose before it was sucked up into the filter of the air purifier.

  The End

  AFTERWORD

  Thank you for reading my first volume of the year, The Isolator: Realization of Absolute Solitude, Volume 2!

  But really, I can’t believe it’s already the year 2015… Since my first book was published in February 2009, when this book is published it will be a full six years since my debut. It feels like it all happened in the blink of an eye. At this rate, it won’t be long before we get to the year 2019, which is when Isolator takes place. I really hope that the consumption tax won’t have risen to 12 percent by then!

  Next, I’m going to touch on the story, so beware of spoilers from here on out. The “Igniter” arc marks the beginning of when the story really gets set in motion. While the nature of the headquarters and members of the SFD, which Minoru has just joined, has been mostly made clear, there was also a sprinkling of information about the enemy Ruby Eyes’ formation. Additionally, near the beginning of the story, the SFD’s acting commander, “Professor,” explained a little about how the Third Eye’s power manipulates objects on an atomic level.

  Last year, I went to see the KEK (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization) in Tsukuba City, and really, the more you learn about the world of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles, the less you understand what anything is anymore! For example, the cover of the book that you are holding right now may be smooth, but if you zoom in to the atomic level, it’s a rough grouping of carbon, hydrogen, and metallic atoms, and if you zoom in even more, there are electrons and protons and neutrons that make up the atoms and you can’t even pinpoint where they exist at any given time… It’s like, what’s even going on?

  Currently, plans for the construction of the International Linear Collider (ILC), headed by the KEK, are proceeding. It is planned to be the world’s largest particle collider, consisting of an underground tunnel thirty kilometers in length, designed to collide electrons and positrons. So in other words, Third Eyes can see, touch, and manipulate a world of particles that you normally would have to go to these great lengths just to observe. If Igniter, who appeared in this volume, had just started a company to generate hydrogen gas from separating water molecules instead of going along with his plans to make Tokyo explode, he probably could have made a lot of money…

  Anyway, I’ve gotten off track. But even so, I think I’d like to continue writing The Isolator along the lines of a sort of science battle story. Since this author’s an “Absolute Liberal Arts” kind of guy, I ge
t the feeling I’ll make a couple of mistakes along the way; if you could just send me a message on Twitter or something to correct me, that’d be great!

  I want to give my thanks to the illustrator, Shimeji, who has drawn all of the new characters full of charm and appeal, and to my editor, Miki, who has done a lot to help me draw out the charm and appeal of those characters; you have done a lot for me this volume! I also want to thank you, the reader, and ask for your continued patronage in 2015, this year as well!

  A certain day in January 2015

  Reki Kawahara

  Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Yen On.

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