The Trancer

  “I see…”

  If most of the STS’s members had been recruited like Minoru, it would certainly explain Kakinari’s laid-back personality. Nonetheless, he found it reassuring to think they’d have battle-trained professionals from the Self-Defense Forces fighting alongside.

  As he reached this conclusion, Minoru abruptly realized the meaning of a phrase Nishikida had used some time before. Hurriedly restoring the communication channel, he impulsively posed a question.

  “Um, excuse me, Mr. Nishikida… You said you would be our ‘escorts’ today, right? Does that mean Ruby Eyes might try to interfere with our mission?”

  “We haven’t received any concrete information to indicate that. This is simply part of our duties here,” Nishikida responded, his tone much stiffer than Kakinari’s. “The Tokyo Bay Nuclear Power Plant is an obvious target for the Ruby Eyes who want to wage war on humanity, so it is closely guarded by the STS. If they were to destroy the containment building before the nuclear-decommissioning process is complete, all of Tokyo could be contaminated with radioactive materials, and we would effectively lose our capital city… We cannot allow any such attempts.”

  Nishikida’s words held such firm resolve that Minoru felt himself automatically thinking, No, never! in response.

  The two Ruby Eyes he had fought, Biter and Igniter, had both been driven by personal motives, using the powers given to them by their Third Eyes to kill for pleasure. If they had turned their abilities on the nuclear power plant, they could have thrown Tokyo—no, all of Japan—into chaos, but their own everyday lives would be ruined as well. Surely they wouldn’t go that far… But before he could voice his thoughts, Yumiko cut in with another huff.

  “Those are fine words, Mr. Nishikida, but I can see right through them to your real objective.”

  “And what would that be, Miss Accelerator?”

  “I’m sure that part of your duties today includes spying on us, right?”

  “…!”

  This thought hadn’t occurred to Minoru, and he listened for Nishikida’s response with bated breath. Instead, though, Kakinari chose this moment to break her silence.

  “Ah-ha-ha, you’re something else, Accelerator! Must be tough on your boyfriend, huh? You better not cheat on her, Isolator!”

  “Wh…” Yumiko’s voice cracked with rage, and Minoru attempted to stammer out an answer instead.

  “I…I wouldn’t! I mean, wait—I’m not her boyfriend!”

  At that moment, Nishikida slowed the vehicle to a halt.

  “Here we are, you two.”

  Yumiko looked for a moment as if she was struggling to decide whether to say anything more, but in the end she stood up in silence, opened the back doors, and hopped out of the truck, Minoru following shortly behind her. When he closed the doors and looked up, a smooth gray tower loomed before his eyes.

  Tokyo Bay Nuclear Power Plant, No. 1. Built in 2001 with the latest technology of the time, it had now been sitting in disuse for several decades, simply waiting to be decommissioned.

  At the base of the enormous gravestone-like structure was an air lock with double doors, though of course they were no longer in use. Two large radiation shields loomed on either side of the door, giving the impression that the place was the ancient ruins of some bygone era.

  Getting out of the car and walking up to stand next to Minoru, Nishikida pointed at the air lock.

  “Go in through those doors and you’ll find the entrance to the containment vessel about eighteen meters down the hall. This is as far as Kakinari and I can accompany you…”

  “Ah, that’s all right, thank you. We received a map of the building and such.”

  Minoru pulled up the map on the fifteen-centimeter LCD screen of his wrist communicator. Bending down to look at it, Nishikida tapped near the entrance.

  “Once you get inside, the radioactivity levels in this immediate area will be around three millisieverts per hour. In front of the doors to the containment vessel, it’ll rise to ten, and inside the vessel, it could be anywhere from several thousand to ten thousand millisieverts. At those levels, even Third Eye hosts like us wouldn’t be able to survive if exposed unprotected… Are you sure this is all right with you?”

  Whatever orders he might have been under, the concern in Nishikida’s voice was undoubtedly genuine. Minoru looked up at him through his mask and nodded.

  “Yes. I’ll be fine.”

  “This kid’s not talkin’ about his suit, is he? Do you have some kinda Jet Eye power that’ll protect you from all that radioactive junk, Isolator?” Kakinari once again muscled into the conversation, but her question was intercepted by Yumiko.

  “That is highly confidential SFD information!”

  “Aww, gimme a break!”

  “Kakinari, please refrain from engaging in idle chatter before an important mission,” Nishikida reprimanded his colleague, then turned back to Minoru’s wrist communicator, scrolling across the map with a rough gloved finger. Zooming in on the round containment vessel, he tapped part of the interior.

  “This is where we lost contact with the probe robot, Muser. Your job is to open the double doors, enter the room, and locate and retrieve Muser. Of course, there are no lights inside the containment vessel, the heat and humidity levels are considerably high, and the room will be completely clouded with steam. It won’t be an easy mission…”

  “Yes, I know… I’ve already been lectured extensively about it. But it’s all right… I think I can do it.”

  Giving another nod to the tall Self-Defense Forces personnel, Minoru looked at the clock in the top right of the LCD screen. Ten fifty-five a.m. The mission was set to start at eleven, so there were only five minutes… No, there were still five minutes left. Though the response he’d given Nishikida had been brimming with confidence, it wasn’t as if Minoru wasn’t nervous. He was eager to get in and out as quickly as possible and get the mission over with.

  As he stared intently at the painfully slow progression of the clock, Yumiko, standing next to him, clapped him on the back. Once again disconnecting their communication channel from the STS members, she brought her mask in close to his.

  “…Utsugi. We’ve already seen in countless SFD experiments that your protective shell can completely block out radiation like alpha, beta, gamma, and X-rays. But on the other hand, that also means that if you drop that shell for even a second, you’ll be exposed to lethal levels of radiation. You know that, right? If anything goes wrong… No, if anything even seems like it might go wrong, turn back immediately. That’s an order.”

  “Right…understood.”

  As he responded, Minoru glanced at Yumiko’s face, which he could just barely make out through the thick lead glass of his mask. Her beautiful features, normally set into a cold and distant expression, were currently so full of concern that Minoru unwittingly held his breath.

  It had been only three weeks since he’d first met Yumiko Azu, a Jet Eye and member of the Special Defense Forces with the code name Accelerator.

  But in that short time, they had paired up to defeat two terrifying enemies, the Ruby Eyes Biter and Igniter. And Yumiko had been the one to come up with Minoru’s code name, Isolator. Minoru could still barely wrap his mind around the idea that he was a member of a secret organization that protected humanity, but he knew one thing: The reason he had been able to carry out his duties so far was because his partner, Yumiko, had been there, urging him on.

  But this time, he would have to take on this difficult mission without Yumiko there to back him up. Even with the 150-pound protective suit, she wouldn’t be able to withstand the radiation inside the containment vessel, which far exceeded the sievert levels that a normal human being could survive for even a short period of time. Professor Riri had mentioned the possibility that a Third Eye might be able to restore DNA damaged by radiation, but that hypothesis was still being investigated and could hardly justify jumping into a nuclear reactor containment vessel.

  But it
’s all right—I can do it by myself. Professor Riri and Chief Himi both told me I could decline if I wanted to, but I said I would do it.

  As Minoru took deep breaths and said this to himself repeatedly, Yumiko lightly slapped him on the back again, then sighed loudly and made a remark that caught him by surprise. “Honestly, Utsugi. If you had been able to pull it off in that last experiment, I would’ve been able to come, too.”

  “Wh…what?! It wasn’t my fault that experiment failed…”

  “Hmph! Are you saying it was mine?!” As she responded in a disgruntled voice, Yumiko nevertheless pressed her goggles up against Minoru’s mask.

  “I-I think it was half your fault, at least!”

  As he pushed back against her, he recalled the events that she was referring to: Christmas Eve, just four days earlier.

  2

  “Hey, don’t touch me in weird places!”

  Minoru was perplexed by Yumiko’s sharp words, unsure of how he was supposed to judge which places were weird and how to avoid touching them.

  After all, the entire front of his body, from head to toe and even to his fingertips, was currently pressed up against Yumiko. More specifically, she was standing upright with her arms spread wide, and he stood directly behind her in the same position, with virtually no space in between them. It was therefore completely unreasonable to ask him to somehow not touch her, but nonetheless, Minoru automatically leaned his hips away from her. Immediately, another voice chimed in from nearby.

  “Don’t move apart, Mikkun! Your desire to put distance between yourself and Yukko is going to cause this experiment to fail!”

  “A-all right…”

  Minoru nodded, and the tip of his nose brushed against Yumiko’s hair, so that he caught a slight whiff of the sweet smell of her shampoo. Instinctively, he bent his head away this time.

  “You’re doing it again!”

  The Professor—Riri Isa, an elementary school girl who also happened to be the commander of the SFD—shook her head with a sigh, her pigtails swaying back and forth. “Hrmph…the ability to do the same thing over and over with very little show of improvement is one of our species’ special gifts. According to my research, a young man your age should be thrilled to press his body up against a girl of the same generation as his…”

  “Don’t say creepy things like that, Professor!” Yumiko exclaimed before Minoru could get a word in.

  The Professor’s retort was immediate.

  “It’s not creepy! That’s how normal high school girls and boys are. And you’re to blame, too, Yukko! Mikkun wouldn’t want to get away from you if you weren’t being so crabby! You’re his senior in this organization, so you should be leading by example!”

  “……I don’t think I like your tone…,” Yumiko grumbled, but she leaned into Minoru anyway as if out of spite. “See, Utsugi? I’m not rejecting you one bit. So make sure this next attempt works, got it?”

  Sure you’re not, Minoru thought to himself, nodding nonetheless.

  “All right…here goes.”

  “Okay! This is attempt number twenty. Recording now… Whenever you’re ready!” The Professor pressed a button on the video camera and stepped aside.

  Minoru took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and focused.

  Accept her.

  This person is not an intruder who needs to be rejected. This is a friend who has fought alongside me, who I can trust with my life. And I’ve done this once before. It was only a week ago that I managed to bring her into my protective shell to keep her safe from the shock wave of a hydrogen explosion. I just have to remember what I did that time…

  Minoru pressed himself tighter against Yumiko’s body, and with his eyes still closed, he brought out his protective shell.

  His sense of sound, temperature, and finally touch all vanished.

  Cautiously, he cracked open one eye. The sight before him was bathed in pale-blue light: Yumiko in front of him, moving farther away in a straight line. Flailing her arms wildly, the Accelerator crashed into the polyurethane-padded wall of the small room and stuck there.

  Two minutes later…

  In the center of the large room on the fifth floor of a musty old apartment building in Toyama Park, Shinjuku, Tokyo, which served as the secret base of the SFD, Yumiko sat on the couch and glared at Minoru out of the corner of her eye.

  “So, basically, the fact that you were able to accept me in the battle against Igniter was a total fluke, right? If you hadn’t happened to get lucky, then I’d either be dead or at least covered in burns and compound fractures. Delightful.”

  “Erm… Well…I wonder…” Minoru placed a cup of black tea down on the glass table in front of Yumiko and gave a small shrug.

  Glancing at the experiment space in the room’s west corner, he noted sheepishly that the faint outline of a sprawled-out human body could still be seen in the padding on the wall. Privately, he felt it was a little unfair to think it was entirely his fault, but considering that Yumiko had now been launched into the wall and stuck there twenty times in a row, he couldn’t exactly say so.

  Instead he silently handed the Professor her drink of choice, a café au lait that was mostly just milk, which she blew on a few times as she spoke.

  “No, no, it’s not necessarily all Mikkun’s fault, Yukko. If you are mentally rejecting him, it’s entirely possible that…”

  “No, it’s not!”

  In a flash, Yumiko took a big gulp of her milk- and sugar-filled tea, then shook her head furiously. “When it happened that time, I didn’t even know Utsugi was nearby until I was pulled into his shell! Doesn’t that mean my will has nothing to do with whether it works or not? If anyone’s rejecting somebody, it must be Utsugi!”

  “No, that’s… I’m not rejecting you or anything…” Minoru made a reserved attempt to object as he sat down across from Yumiko, dropping a lemon slice into his own cup of black tea.

  “I’m very well aware that I’ll be much more useful in the next fight against a Ruby Eye if I learn to control my ability at will. And I know I have to put my duties above my emotions. So I think in the end, the fact that Yumiko didn’t notice me might have been a big reason it worked that time…”

  Through the steam rising from his tea, Minoru saw Yumiko throw another glare in his direction.

  “Now wait just a minute. Is it just me, or did that phrasing sound a lot like ‘I personally don’t want to, but if it’s for the sake of the mission, I’ll just have to bear it’?”

  “I-I didn’t say that at all! Aren’t you just looking for reasons to reject me now?!”

  “And while we’re at it, don’t you think you should stop acting so stiff and formal around me? It’s so obvious that you want there to be distance between us!”

  “I can’t help it if you’re going to be so scary all the time!”

  The pair’s back-and-forth argument was interrupted by a loud sigh from the Professor.

  “Ugh…listen, you two. From where I’m standing… Ugh, how do I say this…? Could you just start dating already, please?”

  Like clockwork, they both sprang back, widening their eyes and protesting in unison:

  “N-no thank you!”

  “No thanks! Who would want to…… Wait.”

  Midsentence, Yumiko stopped and turned slowly and deliberately toward Minoru, a dangerous glint in her eyes.

  “Just a moment. Hold it right there, Utsugi.”

  “…Y-yes?”

  “Did you just say ‘No thank you’? You did, didn’t you? You said ‘No thank you’ without a moment’s hesitation, did you not?”

  “…But, w-well, you said it, too, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I did! Oh, forget it already. I’ve had quite enough of being paired up with you! It’s obvious what happened that time was just a fluke, end of story!”

  With that, Yumiko threw back the rest of her tea in one gulp, slammed the cup back onto the saucer, stood up brusquely, and stomped toward the elevator.

&
nbsp; However, she stopped partway across the room and looked over her shoulder with a toss of her long hair.

  “You’d better be making a nice Christmas dinner tonight to make up for your rudeness today! I expect a cheesy seafood gratin and a nice meaty beef stew, got it?”

  Then, with a dramatic flourish, she used her accelerating abilities to propel herself to the elevator in a single step, jabbed the down button, and disappeared into the elevator.

  Minoru, incredulous, watched her leave and then sank back onto the sofa, muttering into his lemon tea:

  “…It’s impossible… I can barely pair up with her as a team, never mind as a couple…”

  “Ugh…well, I guess that’s it for today, then.” The Professor shook her head. “I’m still not giving up, though. The combination of your protective shell and her acceleration powers has incredible potential, after all. If you could master it, you’d have an attack that would be almost impossible to counter or defend against.”

  “Ah… Well, that may be true, but…”

  One week ago, in the battle against the Ruby Eye who could manipulate oxygen molecules freely, Igniter, Minoru had somehow absorbed Yumiko into his protective shell in order to defend her from the hydrogen explosions she had rushed into. Still inside the shell, Yumiko had used her accelerator powers to slam them into Igniter, knocking him out in a single blow. If they could use this same tactic at will, they would essentially have nothing to fear from any future Ruby Eye attacks. Between Minoru’s protective shell, which was harder than any known substance on Earth, and Yumiko’s ultrahigh speed, they would practically be invincible.

  Therefore, one week after the battle with Igniter, Professor Riri Isa had ordered a series of tests in an attempt to re-create that situation. However, Minoru had failed to envelop Yumiko in his protective shell every time he produced it, instead sending her flying into the polyurethane wall, which still showed the vague outline of her repeated impact.