by Sato Tsutomu
This was the operation.
‘Stardust’ members disguised as robbers would break into the restaurant, and make a non-lethal attack. And if it was possible to capture the target, abduct him. If they received a counterattack then, exchange battle while fleeing and lead the target to the park where Lt. Sirius was waiting.
It was a vague plan, but under conditions with a large number of uncertain elements, this was as detailed a plan as it could be; she didn’t just practice combat operations in order to make a good show for her superiors, Barans had learned to practice in conditions as close to actual combat as she could.
After all, in chess, you were able to see all of your opponent’s moves, so only elaborate tactics were useful in it.
(There was concern that Stardust might be completely destroyed in the first phase however……)
That possibility is slight, Barans tamped down on her own uneasiness.
She could however decide to abandon the operation in case of failure, but Stardust were also modified magicians whom the USNA had poured their magic technology into. That these five men could be destroyed by one boy in the middle of his teen years was unthinkable .
Even if the target was as she believed him to be a user of an unknown strategic class magic, there were numerous cases where magic that was aimed at causing large scale destruction was useless in personal combat. If the target possessed destructive power of the strategic class magic, then it was even more likely that he could not use it unless he was prepared to kill himself as well.
Unless he had a special tool like Brionac.
(Even if they were wiped out, all records of Stardust had been erased so it was impossible to determine their identities.)
Therefore, even if the operation failed, it wasn’t necessary to worry about consequences, thought the Lt. Colonel putting an end to her speculations.
She seemed to be purposely not thinking about Murphy’s Law.
◊ ◊ ◊
After she had finished her business with Barans, Lina did the final check on the tactical magic weapon, ‘Brionac’, in the station wagon that was parked in the park’s parking lot.
It was constructed for her use, and no one but her could use it; it was a super weapon such that even she who was the commander of the USNA magician troops was not allowed to choose when and where she could use it. While it was a portable weapon, its maximum power was equivalent to the main armament of a battleship; although it had such destructive power, its range and output could be freely controlled. It had an absurd outward appearance: it was a thick pole about four feet in length.
About two thirds of it was about the same width as the handle of a tennis racket, and the remaining one third was a cylinder with a bigger circumference; at the border between the two, a box shaped stick about the right width and thickness for her hand was placed cross-like.
Even though it was called an inspection, the weapon worked purely by magic power.
The armament was combined with a CAD, it was a magic weapon.
The Brionac did not use electrical powered movement or springs. So naturally, she did not perform a mechanical inspection. So even if it was called an inspection, she was only checking the responses in stand by mode prior to invoking magic.
She knew that by this tool’s very nature, it could not have a complicated structure. However, when she carried the Brionac which looked kind of like a cane, a spear or a club, she had the strange feeling that she had become a heroine in a fantasy novel (or a game).
Speaking of strange feelings.
(There was no way she felt any doubts about the colonel’s abilities but…..would it go well?)
Essentially, Lina doubted that the crude operation would be effective against Tatsuya.
Lina also understood that a too detailed operation wasn’t combat effective.
Nevertheless, the main phase of the operation was to be completed by the five men who were operatives at the ‘Stardust’ level, and she felt that she wasn’t going to have to endure a difficult wait. She was concerned that the possibility of them being wiped out quickly was probably quite high. Tatsuya is satellite class, no, he had fought above the level of four Stars member in an actual battle.
Tatsuya was a dangerous opponent; however, at first, Lina had thought Miyuki the tougher adversary.
Nonetheless, such thoughts had now completely disappeared.
Any inclination to treat Tatsuya lightly due to his lower rank were gone now.
She was able to realize recently that the embarrassing defeat she, herself, had suffered was not in any way due to her being careless.
If she had called his bluff, she might have been able to see his weirdly limitless true strength. And then, she really had no idea what would have actually happened to her.
—What could the magic that turned ‘Dancing Blades’ to dust be?
—What on earth was the technique that cancelled the effects of 'Muspelheim’?
At the time, she thought it was simply the bonds of the intermolecular forces being destroyed.
She thought the activation sequence had been neutralized.
But the instant she started to think about what could possibly do that, Lina’s mind froze.
She became aware that such a thing couldn’t be done.
At least, no one in the Stars could, herself included.
Destroying the bonds of intermolecular forces was one thing.
On the other hand, cancelling the effects of Muspelheim.
Neutralizing magic required interference power exceeding that of the magic being neutralized.
Even if she conceded that he had greater interference power than herself who was a Sirius, at that time, he had also affected Miyuki’s magic.
In that frozen area, her own Muspelheim and Miyuki’s Niflheim had battled for supremacy.
As the two opposing activation sequences had clashed, only the effects had cancelled each other, the magic had not been neutralized. In order for magic to be neutralized, a calculation sequence must overwrite the magic sequence.
In short, at that time, if the resources that Tatsuya commanded had neutralized the magic then he had invoked over twice Lina’s interference power.
The moment she thought of that, Lina became unable to quell the shaking in her body.
If that was really possible, then Tatsuya must secretly posses a technique that used power of that magnitude.
If there was a method other than neutralization to cancel the effects of magic, then it would also destroy more than the magic sequence.
Lina also knew that attacking with a high pressure stream of psions was also a means of destroying a magic sequence but at that time, there was no sign of that.
It had not been destroyed by an outside attack, it had been destroyed by interfering with the inner information structure — the Stars vice commander, Benjamin Canopus might have been able to figure out that Tatsuya had used ‘Gram Dispersion’ to do that. However, Lina was unaware of the magic known as Gram Dispersion.
She had been young (immature might be more appropriate) when she joined the Stars troop; unlike a normal girl, she had an abundance of combat experience but aside from that she had not been able to take enough time to acquire enough knowledge. Of course, compared to a normal (magic) high school student, she had a large variety of knowledge, but the quantity of knowledge you have is limited by the time spent acquiring it. No matter how well she was versed in the knowledge she had, information she hadn’t learned could not exist in her mind.
The unease gripping Lina was brought about by the lack of time studying caused by the deficiency of her ability to expand her experience. To put it simply, the girl was too young to be the commander of the Stars.
It might be better to say that it was the embodiment of the weaknesses of the abhorrent practice of the doctrine of complete relying on strength to determine leadership.
Until now, that weakness hadn’t really affected her, but now she had a mission outside her home country wit
h insufficient support staff against an opponent like Tatsuya who had not only had opportunities to acquire combat experience but had formidable knowledge and technical skills, and she was paying the price for her deficiencies.
◊ ◊ ◊
Tatsuya was not a battle junkie. At least he thought so, and so far any fights he had taken part in hadn’t actually been started by him. Essentially, they were all for the sake of defending Miyuki’s safety and prestige.
That being said, he was not a practitioner of nonresistance. He possessed the youthful(?) idea that it was necessary to fight and win to protect peace.
(Hmm, five men…..)
They were parked across the street in an SUV. Tatsuya deliberately hesitated to confirm the number of men in position to spring from the car even now.
In this situation, if you wanted to flee, you should be able to do so. It should be alright to retrieve the car by remote control later.
The decision only took a second.
He finished settling his bill on the table terminal and stood up.
They probably saw that, as they hurriedly opened the SUV’s door.
Tatsuya went to the entrance at a quick pace.
The shop’s entrance was directly across from the SUV.
The five men who were wearing something like ski masks stood in the road. They had gotten there about the same time Tatsuya left the shop.
The eyes in the masks were blue, red, black, brown, and gray.
They were color contacts worn to completely disguise the fact that foreigners were committing a crime, but it’s possible that that wasn’t the reason. On the contrary, it didn’t really feel like they were trying all that hard to conceal their appearance. Perhaps, they had confidence that they had concealed everything about their identities aside from their faces.
The attackers seemed a little perplexed at the fact that Tatsuya was standing right in front of them.
Nevertheless the exchanging of stares did not continue for long.
Tatsuya moved.
He neither advanced or retreated, he walked out on the road past the line of vision of the men.
A feeling of astonishment came from them,
Tatsuya was distancing himself from them without changing his pace.
Just as the distance of five meters was going to become ten meters, the attackers came to their senses.
The small clink of a gun being leveled at him reached Tatsuya’s ears.
This was not a gun shaped CAD, this was a weaponized device that combined a CAD with a submachine gun.
This armament alone was enough to serve as a confession from them that they were USNA magicians.
Western European, Eastern European, and New Soren did not use complicated mechanical weapons.
The only ones aside from the American army who might use such an elaborate weapon would probably be Japan’s Independent Magic-Equipped Battalion.
From the unfolding of the activation sequence, he understood that the rubber bullets would be electrified upon firing and release their charge upon impact. Probably, it was some type of taser gun. Apparently, they had received some kind of order to take Tatsuya alive.
Tatsuya had already thrust his right hand into his pocket and was holding the grip of his CAD. And he had used his fingers to find the trigger and put his finger on the switch.
With his back facing the masked men, Tatsuya pulled the trigger on the CAD.
He quickly turned around and kicked the surface of the road.
The parts of the submachine gun made a dull sound as they scattered all over the pavement which Tatsuya could hear as he was running away.
All these actions were stuffed into the interval when his opponents were frozen in shock.
Just as Tatsuya entered the period where they were all without weapons, his enemies were finally released from their stupor.
The shock was probably too much for them, Tatsuya thought, but all this might be unavoidable.
Under normal circumstances, in order to interfere with an object under the influence of someone else’s magic, it was necessary to have interference power that obviously exceeds the other person’s magic power.
In the cases where the other magician was physically touching the object, the level of difficulty went way up. So it could be said that it was close to impossible for the CAD and Armament devices to be instantly destroyed by magic for a number of reasons.
However, it would be a mistake to believe that this is why the men were surprised.
The magic used by them was the magic that would make the rubber bullet electrified upon firing and release their charge on impact. The target of their magic hadn’t been the guns but the bullets. The bodies of the guns were connected to the CADs but the breech-blocks, the percussion devices and the rest were mechanisms completely isolated from the CADs.
Originally, for the sake of maintenance, the weapons were constructed to be easily taken apart into pieces; something Tatsuya’s magic could easily manipulate. The reason they had been shocked until now might possibly be because until now they had believed that the Japanese were probably aficionados of swords, the way Americans were probably aficionados of guns.
Of course, Tatsuya was not just casually thinking about such a thing.
Those thoughts he had made out of reflex when he saw his adversaries’ shocked faces were only running in the back of his mind. The focal point of his mind was on taking out whatever means they were going to use to attack him in this interval.
To Tatsuya there was no reason not to capitalize on this.
However, this was a public thoroughfare.
This was not a busy street, this was not late at night, there were passersby, and traffic cameras here and there. Killing them would cause various problems.
Therefore in the presence of so many reliable witnesses, he did not want to display ‘disintegration’ magic. So it was best if he did not disintegrate the parts.
All that thinking was packed into that interval.
Tatsuya stuck out the back of the palm of his hand.
His target was the stomach.
Aiming at the solar plexus didn’t take much work.
He used flash cast just as the bottom of his hand struck.
The invoked magic was an oscillation type.
From the touch of his palm, his opponent’s body was filled with oscillating waves — that was what was supposed to have happened.
However, his magic splattered. Tatsuya realized that not from the feelings from his hand but from the ‘eye’ he observed with.
He immediately jumped to the side.
He felt a wind blowing up from below.
His afterimage was pierced by a glossy black knuckleduster worn on his adversary’s fist.
He escaped to the side and switched to the back and sent a vibration wave through the man one more time.
The man’s body fell to the ground from the single attack that came from his blind spot.
Even so, the man’s ability to resist magic was astonishing.
In spite of physical touch increasing the amount of information about how to weaken the armor that was part of the magic he was launching against the man, the man’s reflexively invoked interference power had wiped it out. No matter how power is put out, the magic was emitting from an inferior virtual magic area; so ordinarily, this was impossible.
(Modified body — no, probably a reinforced human.)
While he was jumping and dodging the attack from his enemy who had stood up and resumed his stance, he was accessing information on his opponent’s body and investigating this living organism.
From the report on the warped structure, this was not simply DNA modification; unmistakably the report showed results of multiple preposterous reinforcements.
(With their bodies like this, how are these guys even moving?)
To Tatsuya who had ‘observed’ hundreds of people on the brink of death, the fact that these guys could collapse at any time was obvious.
It wo
uld be more appropriate for them to be in hospital bed receiving intravenous drips than to be waving around knives and guns.
Despite that, they had this vitality.
They were like shooting stars just before they burned out.
Without a doubt, they were stardust trapped by the earth; their bodies whittled down by the blaze of the radiance they could not endure emitting.
If it was at this level, then they would never accept themselves failing; there was no way to know what kind of recklessness this type of irregular opponent would commit.
It was somewhat risky, but he had to finish them off quickly.
With that, Tatsuya’s objectives changed. Within his mind, he quickly redrew his plan for his upcoming attack.
—After jumping even further back to gain distance, his hand reached toward the CAD in his pocket.
—As he took it out, he performed a fourfold invocation of part separation.
—This would certainly be able to halt his opponents.
As Tatsuya was solidifying the image, by coincidence just as he was doing that.
A man intruded on the scene.
Chiba Naotsugu was rushing.
Unbelievable, a street fight suddenly starting was unanticipated. The excellent data on the classroom educational records had left him with the preconceived notion that Tatsuya had a timid introverted personality.
He was about eight hundred meters away from the boy who was the focus of his observation and protection assignment on the third floor terrace of a mid-sized building. The dossier said his target was extremely sensitive to his surroundings, so he had kept his distance and it led to this screw-up.
Running down the stairs was also a waste of time.
Maintaining his specialized skill, he jumped off.
Continuing in that fashion, Naotsugu kicked the surface of the road.
Naotsugu’s mastery of the acceleration magic (formerly a sage’s skill) made it possible for his running speed to reach 120 kph for a short distance.
At this distance running was faster and swifter than using a car.
It took him about thirty seconds to arrive.