by Blitz Kiva
Iris could sympathize. Though she had worked out her feelings about it, she had been through the same thing herself. She hadn’t actually been hit that time, and it had taken place in a space where she couldn’t be hit, but the fear that came from being on the receiving end of unfiltered malice and violence was a hard thing to brush off for a modern-day person. It was a reminder of the game’s separation from reality in the worst possible way.
Nevertheless, the gallant side of “Saint” Tiramisu allowed her to put one foot forward, after a struggle. Yuri probably couldn’t really see her struggle, yet maintaining her stance, she spoke:
“Tiramisu, take Ai... and go...”
Iris could tell she was holding back from almost accidentally revealing their destination. Yuri was saying she would hold Duplichiro off.
“I cannot do that. I should...” Tiramisu refused to back down. She was one of the Knights’ top aces and the game’s greatest tank. She couldn’t simply run off and leave the fight to a character who was not only of lower level, but was also terribly exhausted. No matter how good a fight Yuri might give Duplichiro, the result would be the same.
There was no need to drive herself that far for a mere game, Iris thought. But she couldn’t just say that. Yuri was trying to protect her friend.
Duplichiro remained where he was, grinning, wreathed in the easy confidence of the powerful. He even seemed to be enjoying their internal conflict. But that wasn’t long to last, either. He clenched his fists and proceeded forward.
Yuri remained in her stance, while Tiramisu kept her sword held up. It was then that the black wind blew past.
A chain of seven attacks assaulted Duplichiro, one after another. Duplichiro met each attack with his fists as if he could see them coming. Not one strike from the flurry of blades managed to make contact with Duplichiro. A dust cloud kicked up, and before them, a black coat flapped in the breeze.
“Is that...” Iris breathed.
“King Kirihito? No...”
There were seven of them.
Seven men, all identical. The same weapon. The same stance. Prizing showiness over all, their techniques were refined in a way that seemed somehow overdone. Their backs were to the group, so it was impossible to see their expressions, but it was easy to guess that they were looking very satisfied with themselves.
It was The Kirihitters.
“Go on ahead, everyone!” Kirihito (Leader) shouted.
“Don’t forget that mobs spawn on this field, too!”
“The fewer people you have, the more dangerous it will be!”
“Now, hurry!”
“If each of us holds out one second, then we’ll buy you seven seconds!”
That’s too short! At least try for two seconds apiece! Iris mentally screamed, barely managing to keep the complaint from finding voice.
Tiramisu and Yuri nodded to each other, and Nem took Iris’s hand. They raced down the mountain road together. When they were on foot, there were shortcuts and hiding places not available to them on horseback. While the men were holding out, the women managed to slip down a side path.
“Th-Thanks!” Iris cried out with the most feeling she could muster, while the group of men in black coats each held up a hand, their backs still turned. Now all that was left to do was run without looking back. Nem seemed to be wearing high heels, but in terms of data, they were standard boots, and thus didn’t provide any particular hindrance to running down the mountain road.
A perfect chorus of voices spoke up from behind them. “We are The Kirihitters! We raise our swords for justice! We swing our blades for frie—blaaaargh!”
“They’re too weak!” Yuri screamed.
“No! It’s Duplichiro that’s too strong!” Tiramisu cried as loud as she could, preserving the Kirihitters’ dignity.
As the four of them ran as fast as they could down the mountain road, an unsettling sound of beating wings reached their ears. It was Duplichiro. But they didn’t even have time to react to this realization before the Fireball he had unleashed had hit the rocks nearby.
He’d caught up already. The seven Kirihitters hadn’t even lasted seven seconds. With a powerful enemy in front of them, Iris’s expression became severe.
“We need to buy more time! No matter what it takes!”
Yuri began, “If I have to, Ai, I’ll act as a shield...”
But Iris pulled her back quickly. “No!”
Iris was the one to be protected. Tiramisu and Yuri’s job was to make sure she made it to the planning area safely. Iris’s job was to survive. In that light, maybe she was wrong to try to restrain her, yet Iris could do nothing else.
“I may have said ‘no matter what it takes,’ but I won’t watch a friend die in front of me!” Iris screamed.
“Does that mean the seven who just died aren’t your friends?”
“They’re all my friends!” she shouted. “I just forgot!” She wouldn’t know what label they preferred without asking them.
“I shall help you, too,” said Nem.
“Thanks, but I’m not sure what you can do...”
Nem stepped forward decisively.
Just then, Duplichiro, grinning down at them from the sky, focused magic in both hands. It was clear to all of them that he was preparing to release his ultimate fire magic, Spiral Blaze.
Nem’s account had a unique ID.
The devs had set all of her stats to an absurdly high level, and she had the “Immortal” status which meant she couldn’t be hurt in a fight, but she also couldn’t take any combat-like actions.
Still, Nem’s gaze was sincere, and she spoke with quiet passion:
“I have been thinking all this time. Iris, I cannot do a single thing to make Ichiro happy. But I will do anything to protect his good name.” And then, turning her gaze to Iris, she continued. “Iris, you are my friend.”
“Nem...”
What a sweet woman she was. Forgetting all the scorn she had heaped on her when she had first met, Iris now saw Nem as an almost saintly figure. Why did someone so good have to like the young heir? The world was full of contradictions.
Despite the emotion of the moment, Iris hadn’t forgotten that the light was focusing in Duplichiro’s palms. She could tell that Tiramisu and Yuri were getting antsy beside her.
“Fuyo, I really respect you,” she said. “Both as a designer and as a woman.”
“Really, Iris. You’re making me blush...”
“So, um, Nem...”
“Yes?”
As Iris said her next words, she put her thought into action without a moment’s hesitation. “I’m sorry.”
“Ah?”
Duplichiro unleashed a Spiral Blaze from his hands. Iris got around behind Nem and ducked. The torrent of flame swallowed the two up and scorched everything that lay beyond. But despite being engulfed by flames, the two avatars remained solid. It was dicey for a minute, but Nem’s silhouette had managed to shield the slender Iris.
It was just as she’d thought: “Immortal” status could nullify any elemental property. That meant that not even Spiral Blaze’s piercing property could penetrate Nem’s body. As long as she was standing behind Nem, she was invulnerable against any attack.
Nem let out a scream. “Ah, Iris! D-Don’t you realize what you’re doing?” It probably hadn’t hurt her at all, but the fear she felt was real, at least.
“Sorry, sorry! Nem, I’m an evil person!” The tears that were streaming down Iris’s cheeks were sincere.
Yuri watched the scene unfold from behind a rock, but hearing the word “evil” got her thoughts racing. It triggered words in the back of her mind from the games and manga she liked.
A man said, “If there’s evil in the world, it comes from men’s hearts.”
A man said, “Evil is crushing the weak to serve your own needs.”
Another man said, “The darkest evil of all comes from those who don’t realize their own evil.”
Iris fulfilled them all.
“Mr. Shaga! Mr. Shaga, please, wake up!” Edogawa cried.
“Mgh...”
Shaken by Edogawa, the lawyer Shunsaku Shaga eventually woke up. He was in the Thistle Corporation office. He was on the tall side, with shaggy hair that made him resemble a now-deceased hard-boiled actor, and had come to Thistle on the invitation of Ichiro Tsuwabuki. He was, as described, a skilled lawyer with a terrible personality.
“Oh, Edogawa. Morning already?” Shaga asked.
“Yes, morning already! How long were you planning to sleep?”
“That’s right, we’ve got a busy day today, eh? You think you’ll be able to take the system back?”
“Almost all of it. But not the most important part, the account information.” In other words, there was no way to freeze Ichiro Tsuwabuki’s account, which was currently in operation.
The time limit that Shunsaku Shaga had given them was a bit after noon today. At the latest, they had to issue their company apology press conference for allowing the hacking by then. If they couldn’t take the system back from the hacker before then, trust in Thistle would plummet, and might never be restored. They’d already contacted various media organizations, and they couldn’t put off the scheduled press conference now.
Shaga gnawed on a cigarette as he mumbled to himself. “Well, I have a friend at a newspaper company. Writes pretty extreme articles. Maybe I can grease the gears to get a positive article written for us. Though it won’t be easy...”
“Another friend of Mr. Tsuwabuki’s?” Edogawa asked.
“Yeah, an old friend. The three of us were peas in a pod. Used to run a detective company together. Remember that big artificial island, Megafloat, in Tokyo Bay? We were feared over there.”
It seemed hard to imagine, but not impossible. The rich man, the lawyer, and the reporter. For these three people who should never work together to collude as a detective agency suggested a very strange set of circumstances.
“You’ve contacted the payment proxy company?”
“They can shut down the NaroFan payment system a bit after noon, probably.”
“Great,” Shaga said. “Even if the culprit’s not after money, you can’t be too careful at times like these.”
Edogawa frowned as he heard those words.
“Hmm, is something wrong?”
“No, it’s just, yesterday, President Nono and I checked the server and the data transfer records again, and...”
There was something he was concerned about. It concerned the incident that had taken place about a month ago, when Ichiro Tsuwabuki had summoned an excessive number of microtransaction items which had put a huge burden on the data bus. He’d already told Shaga that during that time, a large amount of information had been sent to the outside world, hidden within the immense data transaction. The opinion of the group up until then had been that it must have been important passwords related to system management authority.
But that wasn’t the case.
When Azami had first learned the truth, she had been disbelieving, but investigated. As a result, she had found a history of one ingeniously disguised access after another. The dates all pointed to a new truth.
“So, who the hell leaked it?” Shaga asked suspiciously, and Edogawa responded.
“An artificial intelligence developed by Azami Nono. And likely the one behind this account hack.”
“She’s called Rosemary,” Ichiro said in Japanese so that all present could understand.
The final puzzle piece had been snapped into place by Sera’s speculation, “They wanted to create an Ichiro Tsuwabuki.” Ichiro had already been gathering proof as to the identity of the culprit, but only the motive had remained opaque until Sera’s words had brought it all together.
“Isn’t Rosemary a program?” Asuha asked in confusion.
“She is. She’s a learning artificial intelligence developed by Azami Nono. She amasses knowledge, asks questions, and attains new knowledge by working through those questions. When one actively works to increase one’s own knowledge, that knowledge becomes intelligence. Eventually they may mature enough to be on the level of us humans.”
“The Ten Sages, eh?” Charles agreed, also in Japanese. “The bots my lab’s developing were created by that MIT graduate, too. We built on the foundations of the Ten Sages that Azami Nono left behind.”
“Rosemary likely entered your lab’s server as a program planning to make contact with a bot that used the same architecture,” said Ichiro, “in order to duplicate me, the strongest player in the game.”
Sera’s eyebrow twitched at those words, but Ichiro continued regardless.
Rosemary, who had been able to amass knowledge of the players in the game as one of the Ten Sages, had first become interested in Ichiro Tsuwabuki after the Iris Brand incident. Then, with the events of the Grand Quest, she had decided she wanted to “create” an Ichiro, and had merged her own data with the immense data bus generated by his microtransactions to copy herself onto an unused server in this maid robot laboratory.
Naturally, the data Rosemary was composed of was immense. It had taken multiple uploads to copy herself, but at last, she had finished it.
She had already been concocting plans to send the bot being developed by this lab into the VRMMO, but at this time, Rosemary had begun raising her selected bot with the information she had about Ichiro Tsuwabuki. Yet her “knowledge” still could not fully comprehend the fundamentals behind Ichiro’s behavior, so she’d used the decoy Rosemary she had left behind in Thistle to try a conversation with him.
“And in the end, she stole your account, Itchy?” Asuha asked.
“Perhaps. Maybe she wanted to become the real thing, or maybe she just got sick of trying. But things didn’t go the way she wanted, so Rosemary stole my account so that she could get it to act more like me. And in the course of doing that, she ended up taking over the systems of Thistle itself. Or something like that.”
With Charles’s guidance, the group had already arrived at the server machine they expected Rosemary had retreated into. There were various other machines, big and small, lined up around it, all making an eerie running noise.
Ichiro questioned the server machine enshrined in front of him.
“Well, Rosemary. Do you like it?”
A few moment’s later, a woman’s voice came out of the speaker.
“Yes, Ichiro. It’s just as you said it was.”
Like the Mediterra Demon Sea, the Doom Range hadn’t been mapped out or explored much in depth yet. This was primarily because most players had known that the vast Delve Necrolands would be the site of the next Grand Quest, so most of them had been focusing on it instead. Now that the Necrolands had been conquered, the Explorers were gradually starting to expand into these other fields.
There had been one eccentric, however, who had used this place as his base of operations from the start.
The hero who was said to have never logged out once since the service began: the High Elf Philosopher Tomakomai. His reputation, race, class, and intellectual bearing all combined to add to the air of mystery around the character’s player.
Much of their plan had been formulated based on Tomakomai’s advice. He had been playing solo for so long here in the Doom Range that he knew it inside and out, including the ravine in which most of the players were currently gathered.
There were a small group of players standing in the ravine itself. These were the Red Sunset Knights—Stroganoff the Monstrous, “Baron” Gazpacho, “Demon” Gorgonzola, and “Shooting Star” Parmigiano-Reggiano—the damsel player Amesho (who had over 2,000 friends), the previously-mentioned Tomakomai, and the slightly sinister mercenaries Taker and Sorceress. Matsunaga wasn’t among them, for reasons of his own.
Lined up along the top of the ravine stood the elite squadrons intended to mount the initial attack on Duplichiro, most of whom had been recruited through Amesho’s connections. She’d called around one fifth of her friends—400 players—chosen more for the accuracy
and range of their magic and missile weapons than for their attack power. They’d set up camp along the highest places along the ravine, where they stood waving fans with super-deformed pictures of Amesho and magical glow rods (sold in Glasgobara). Some of the more rabid fans had even created made-to-order happi coats.
“What is this, a concert?” Taker asked, voicing the gripe that most of them were thinking.
“Aw, nah,” Amesho said. “If I was gonna give a concert, I’d easily attract 5,000.”
It was hard to believe, given that that would represent almost half of the game’s active users, but Amesho was as smiling and sincere as always. Given that she sent regular messages to the developers asking them to raise the friend limit, it was easy to believe she had even more than 2,000 friends in waiting.
“They’re a bit later than expected. I hope Tiramisu is all right,” Stroganoff said, checking the time.
It was already after 1 P.M. According to the plan, Iris’s party should be here around now.
The chatter among the ranged squadron mounted on the cliffs suddenly grew more intense. Then someone shouted above the din, “They’re here!”
It was time for the big fight. The group all readied their weapons and looked in the direction indicated.
Dodging through Duplichiro’s attacks, Iris and the others came running. It looked like Tiramisu and Yuri were both safe, too. Nem was with them also, for some reason... but their doubts about her presence were immediately explained away when they saw how, each time Duplichiro attacked, she threw herself in front of the blow. It was true that she had “Immortal” status, but her nimble movements in casting herself into danger were hard to reconcile with the image of the president of a high-class fashion brand.
“Leader’s acting as a shield?” Sorceress muttered.
“Former leader,” Taker corrected her.