Episode 9 Side Story — Otherworldly Survival Lecture Notes 1

"Son~! Wake up! Son!"

Mmph....

"An emergency patient came in, so Dad and I have to head out right now. Son?"

"Yeah, I knooow..."

"All right. Breakfast is on the table, so make sure you eat before you leave for school, understand? Son?"

"Mm-hmm..."

I was dying of sleep, but Mom kept a grip on my shoulder and wouldn't stop shaking, so I gave her a limp answer. If I didn't, she'd just keep shaking me....

"Honestly.... Your sister left early today, too...."

Something rattled, rattled, rattled. Click. Nnngh....

"Then this alarm clock.... If I set it by the door, that ought to do, right? Son! Mom's heading to work, so you absolutely have to get up and eat breakfast before you go. Understood?"

"Mm."

A latch clicked. Footsteps pattered away. The door locked with a clack and a thud.

Forget it. I'm going back to sleep.

Zzz....

......

Brrrrrring! Brrring! Ring!! Ring!!

...Ah.

Ring!! Brrrrrring!!! Ring, brrrring!!

Ugh....

The bell was loud enough to split my eardrums. I forced my eyes open, looked toward the door, and there it was—my alarm clock, planted right in front of it!

"Ugh, seriously.... Mom, I swear."

I threw the blanket off, rolled, and fought my way down off the bed—

Thud!

Ngh. Ow.

Rubbing my stinging backside, I crawled on all fours toward the alarm clock—still ringing like it meant to shatter itself—and slammed the bell switch with everything I had.

Wham!

"This bell is seriously annoying.... Haaawn."

Water roared and splashed.

"Phew. Hoo."

A splash of cold water on my face, and my head finally cleared. Washing my hair was too much trouble, so a comb-through would do. Sis was already gone, and with no one left to nag me, half-assed was fine.

I changed into my summer school uniform and stepped out into the living room, and the wide, empty apartment—some two thousand square feet, and not a soul in it—met my eyes. I stared blankly around for a moment, scratched my stomach, and wandered into the kitchen, where breakfast was laid out on the table. I roughly stuffed down toast, a fried egg, and salad, and by the time I finished it was eight.

"I don't wanna go to school. Heh."

Still, if I didn't show, the school would call Dad right away and I'd be found out.... I grabbed my empty leather bag and pointed my heavy feet toward school.

The sun was blazing down, and sweat poured off me in sheets. As the school came into view the kids grew thicker and thicker, but around me it was as if a barrier had been drawn. Nobody came close. Same as always, so nothing worth getting newly worked up about. I pulled out a handkerchief and wiped my forehead, but my collar was already soaked through.

This is why I hate summer. It's only early July, and it's already this hot.... The only reason I can stand it is that summer break exists. If it didn't—ugh. I don't even want to think about it.

It was a twenty-minute walk from home to school, and class started at eight-thirty, but I deliberately slowed my steps and arrived right as class was about to begin. Like Moses parting the sea, I split the kids to left and right and stepped into a classroom where the air-conditioning was blasting. Only then did it feel like I might actually live.

I opened the classroom door and walked in, but aside from a few kids sneaking the usual glance, not one of them acted like they knew me or offered a hello. Well, obviously. Even I wouldn't want to talk to a guy like me.

...Enough of the pointless self-loathing.

Today fell in that stretch piled up right before summer break, when they crammed Aberrant Biology and Otherworldly Survival into intensive lessons. Whether it was summer break or winter break, the moment vacation ended, kids from school kept getting dragged into the Phase World and dying, one after another—so they'd started running concentrated courses from twenty days before summer break began. It had been that way since before I was born. A long time, then.

"Er, so. You might say there are two kinds of worlds in our world. No—more precisely, not two kinds, but one kind, and a great many plus-alphas."

Our school had five Aberrant Biology teachers and five Otherworldly Survival teachers, and the one explaining things now was a bone-thin survival studies teacher, his hair gone snow-white and halfway gone besides.

"The one kind is the reality we live in now. The remaining plus-alphas are Phase Worlds, but there are as many Phase Worlds as there are Anomalous Ability Users added to the people whose survival is being tested so they can become Anomalous Ability Users. Er. There's a famous theory that the world where Aberrants live is an altered timeline of the world we currently inhabit. Famous, learned scholars have written all sorts of papers—multidimensional this, parallel worlds that—but Teacher here has a hard time understanding what clever people say."

Ah.... It would have been so much better if pretty Teacher So Yoojin were the one explaining. We'd been learning this since middle school—where were the kids who didn't already know it? Wouldn't it be so much nicer to just call it the Phase World? But no—multidimensional, parallel world, parallel world.... Ugh. Wasn't that all the same thing?

"Matters concerning the Phase World and Aberrants have been studied by eminent scholars and scientists from every field, at the cost of enormous time and money. Thanks to that, the reason the Phase World appeared still hasn't been discovered!! But the reason Aberrants come into being, and the reason one becomes an Anomalous Ability User, were figured out quite a long time ago. Anyway, this thing called the Phase World first burst onto the media in earnest about two hundred years ago."

If this had been middle school, by now kids would have been nodding off all over the room, reading scanned comics, or playing games—and I'd have been goofing off too.

"The rumors first started going around when people began vanishing all of a sudden, and in their place these droplet-shaped things—every color, every size—started floating about. A person disappears, and a droplet appears where they stood. When the phenomenon first showed up, the religious folk were saying all sorts of things. The end had come. It was a sign of the last days. You name it."

Aaah~. Sure enough, for a school packed with model students. Every one of them was listening to the teacher's explanation with sparkling eyes, earnestly watching the videos and related materials popping up on their tablets and scribbling notes.

"Probably, since there was no visible collapse of civilization, it amounted to nothing more than a passing fuss. You children wouldn't know this, but—what's it called. Before the New Chronicle, there was the Western calendar, Anno Domini, A.D. for short, a Western Christian reckoning that takes the birth of Jesus as its starting point...."

"Teacher~! We already know that, so please keep explaining the survival studies!"

Ooh. Spirited as ever—the moment he drifted into useless talk, the class president's hand shot up and the shout came, bold and unashamed!

"Oh, is that so? All right then. In A.D. 1995, in the city of Kobe in neighboring Japan, there was once a great earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or higher. It struck the city itself, so most of the buildings collapsed flat. Right after the quake, though, everyone showed the world nothing but orderly lines and perfect discipline—and then, as time passed, out of the cameras' sight, ruthless crimes were committed. Riots, murder, robbery, rape, arson."

...But the teacher was still off on another tangent entirely.

"Scholars claim that incidents and accidents were covered up in that same way. Anyway, a great many people vanished, and every sort of cult raised a tremendous ruckus... but people disappearing didn't mean some huge disaster broke out around them, and it wasn't like a science-fiction novel where monsters appeared in their place and went around slaughtering everyone. So of course it played out that way, don't you think?"

The teacher cleared his throat with a pointed ahem.

People, it turns out, don't seem to feel a thing deeply unless it happens right in front of their own eyes. For those whose perfectly fine family, friends, or lovers had vanished, it must have been a bolt from the blue like no other, so surely some of them went to the police demanding their precious people be found. People would have taken all sorts of actions. It simply never escalated into chaos like riots. The teacher, though, was guessing that every kind of crime had broken out wherever no one's eyes could reach.

"Er, and another thing. If people had simply kept on vanishing in that state, it truly would have grown into a disaster. But although the timing varied a little from person to person, once about fifteen days had passed, the droplets would gradually deepen in color, grow larger, and merge, and then the people who had vanished began to appear from inside those droplets. Even so, the number who returned was extremely small compared to those who never came back. Does any student know why?"

Hands went up all over the room, and the teacher, looking satisfied, pointed at a girl.

"Because they failed to survive in the Phase World. The droplets gradually shrank, their color faded, and they vanished just like that—and those people never came back, right?"

The teacher nodded at the girl who had answered so smartly, and went on.

"The problem is that the latter never came back. Not ever. Put the returnees' stories together, and it wasn't hard to guess they'd failed to survive and died, now was it? This phenomenon didn't occur only in our country. It happened simultaneously all over the world. The targets, man or woman, were people from the age of twelve to thirty-five—or so the World Phase Ability User Association announced in New Chronicle Year 47—but by then it already felt a step too late. Before that, there had been no end of talk. Ten-year-olds had vanished, people over forty had vanished...... Those people were all later determined to have been victims of crime, mind you."

Well, anyway, the real chaos began after the number of people who never came back started climbing at a terrifying rate.

They said that a little while after the Droplet Crisis began, once an exposé hit the media, the situation started to change fast. The reason was that a famous American news program had broadcast an exclusive interview with someone who had lived through the Droplet Crisis. But who even named it the Droplet Crisis.... Did the fashion for slapping on painfully obvious names start around then?

The teacher chattered on enthusiastically for a good while, working the LED panel that covered the entire wall behind the lectern and pulling information up onto it.

"So, anyway, the appearance of Anomalous Ability Users started making the world noisy in a different sense. The full text of that interview is easy to find even now—on the internet, or as a book if you go to the library. You've all heard it at least once, haven't you? Here."

He worked the touch panel, and the interview began to play. On the screen, a Western host in a navy suit sat facing the camera across from a man who looked a good thirty, dressed in an ordinary denim jacket, jeans, and a white T-shirt.

Boisterous laughter burst from the screen. Was that supposed to be funny? I couldn't understand Westerners' sense of humor.

The video stopped, and the teacher started explaining again.

"Ahem. The reaction right after this interview aired split, broadly speaking, into two. The first was that people who had experienced the Droplet Crisis needed to be examined in detail. Call it an examination all you like—how is that any different from saying you'll grab them and dissect them? Naturally, the ability users pushed back. The second was that nations began gathering Droplet Crisis survivors. The high-and-mighty war commanders instinctively sniffed out that this so-called special ability would prove quite useful in any number of fields."

Anomalous abilities weren't limited to recovery. There were attacks that used attributes. Abilities that governed nature. Abilities that turned the body itself into an attribute, or strengthened the physique far beyond an ordinary Anomalous Ability User, and transformation abilities besides.... Anyway, there were all kinds. So they must have figured that if they gathered ability users like that, they could build a superpowered corps—and that it would help enormously when fighting over hegemony of the world.

"Abilities can be broadly divided into four types. Any student who knows?"

And once again, kids raised their hands. So enthusiastic.

The boy the teacher called on opened his mouth.

"There are four: the physical enhancement type, the attribute type, the recovery type, and the detection type. But those four are only the representative types. Since the detection type falls under R-class, it should be regarded as three types plus one special type."

"Yes, correct. Er, and another thing. The New Chronicle—that is, counting from the day that became humanity's first step into change—two hundred and fifteen years have now passed. There has been an announcement that the people swept up by droplets and forcibly sent into the Phase World—the examinees, in other words—appear at a rate of about one per thousand per cycle, each cycle lasting a hundred days. But for the ten years after the droplet phenomenon first appeared, it was closer to one per hundred. Back then the cycle was all over the place, the targets looked random, and in some years forty million people vanished, in some years seventy million, in some years a hundred million...... Anyway, it was completely arbitrary."

Well, with so many people vanishing out of nowhere, population decline was the least of it. Among those who disappeared and never came back were plenty of highly skilled personnel, and countries all over the world, they say, were tottering in more senses than one. But no nation actually fell. Apparently there were always plenty of people ready to snatch the empty seat the moment someone vanished.

"Ahem. The numbers are so large they won't feel real to you. On top of that, the survival rate back then was absurdly low compared to now—if ten people vanished, only one or two of them came back. Imagine how bad it was. The world population at the time was about seven billion, and over fifty years it dropped to six billion, which means a billion lives vanished in the Phase World. Of course, that figure excludes natural deaths, accidental deaths, and deaths from illness here in reality."

They put the tally at a billion, but that's a count made by human beings, isn't it? If you consider that some countries have crowds of people who never enter the numbers because births aren't registered, wouldn't the total climb even higher?

"Ahem. If, in the early days, they had collected and compiled the stories of those who survived, then informed the public and warned them through the media, far more people might have lived. But at the time they didn't even know the principle by which people vanished ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and reappeared, so they focused only on uncovering the cause—and there's been plenty of criticism that the initial response was too slow. Anyway, the Droplet Crisis didn't end with a single incident. It kept on. And when the number of people who vanished in the United States alone, in that first year, approached a million, only then did they seem to judge it a national emergency. The White House released to the public, through the media, all the information they had grasped so far."

The materials released back then were, quite literally, enough to fit on a single palm. They weren't systematically built into a curriculum and a course of study the way they are now—more like a scrap of notes pieced together from survivors' testimony. Still, better than knowing nothing.

"Ahem. Even so, America's underlying strength was nothing to sneeze at. In that short time, they managed to fill it with reasonably efficient content. If we mark only the important parts—let's see."

The teacher worked the panel again, brought a palm-sized scrap of paper up on the screen, and magnified it hugely.

"This content pinpoints only the most important points—so much so that it forms the foundation of Otherworldly Survival even now. You can see just how outstanding America's crisis response was, can't you? And what was even more astonishing was that greedy humans didn't hoard, among themselves alone, the information that would have been their cash cow. They spread it quickly!"

...That didn't seem like the sort of conspiracy theory a teacher ought to be peddling.

"Er, and another thing. Those fellows had no choice either. The Droplet Crisis kept continuing, even their own families were vanishing, and once they realized they themselves might be flung into another dimension, money wasn't the issue, was it? To survive, they needed as much information as possible, so securing useful information to stay alive must have mattered more than controlling information to make money. In the United States, then the world's greatest superpower, the president gave an address to the nation and, at the same time, began distributing the guidelines for free on the government website. The real showstopper was this: an aide standing beside the American president, mid-speech on a live broadcast, was engulfed in light and sucked into another space, like light being drawn into a black hole. The droplet phenomenon was relayed live to the entire world."

With that, he worked the panel again, and this time the president of that era appeared on the screen.

On the screen, the space around a female aide who looked to be in her late thirties rippled and warped, then drew even the light into a single point, the way a black hole swallows it—while the aide herself only stood there in a daze, eyes slack. A moment later a huge metallic clang rang from the screen, and with a dull thud the aide vanished. In that spot, droplets shimmering with rainbow light appeared.

"Er, and another thing. High-ranking figures in other countries who witnessed this broadcast finally realized this was no joke, and they hurriedly took the materials America had released, added their own flesh to them, and began distributing materials inside their own nations. People were vanishing at random even past forty, outside the supposed range, so they figured they themselves weren't safe either. And sure enough, the United States—first to announce anything about the Droplet Crisis—once again took the lead, stressing that if the crisis were left as it was, it would become a grave threat to humanity's survival, and proposing that an international organization be created. Does any student know what that organization is?"

At that, cries of "IWO!" burst out all over the room, and one kid shouted, "International Waterdrop Organization!"

"Yes, yes. Once America stepped forward—and given that the present situation wasn't a problem for only a few countries—every place on Earth that had the framework of a nation came flocking in. The international organization born that way was the IWO. The International Waterdrop Organization. And with that, anyone with a decent head, anyone people called clever, was gathered in one place regardless of nation or race, and they began researching the Droplet Crisis."

"Er, and. After that, there were several occasions when ugly adult business set off dog-eat-dog fights that later got cleaned up. There's a very famous person tied to all that. None other than Geral P—"

Haaawn.... So sleepy. I ducked my head, covered my mouth, and yawned, and the girl sitting beside me shot me a glare. What! What did I do!

"...And yet it came out that they had kept the most outstanding scholars and scientists researching in their own countries and sent only the less capable ones, and several nations were disgraced when that was exposed. Even so, they kept gathering only the stories of people who returned alive, forced those stories to fit their own common sense, and poked around from every angle—and bit by bit, as if mysteries were coming undone, information began to loosen about roughly where the people caught in the Droplet Crisis were going. So many people died. So many people fell into the otherworld. And yet, among those who returned alive, not a single one had ever met another person, they say."

Tch. And I'd even kept my head down to hide the yawn, so I wouldn't bother anyone!

"Er, and another thing. Since the droplets in reality disappeared as well, the way back vanished with them, and where those people go, what becomes of them, remains a question even now. After that, a proper survival handbook—its pages filled with the experiences and advice of those who lived—was distributed into each nation's curriculum under names such as Aberrant Biology and Otherworldly Survival, so that anyone, man or woman, young or old, could learn and master it within the period of compulsory education. Of course, they also began selling it as an ordinary book, so even adults could get a copy and read it."

Perhaps his throat had gone dry. The teacher took a mouthful of the bottled water he'd brought, swallowed, and went on.

Not that there was much worth hearing.

Obviously. In Otherworldly Survival they were supposed to teach things that actually matched the title on the textbook, through hands-on ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠practice—how to start a fire with wood, how to secure drinking water, how to preserve food by smoking it, how to make weapons. And the teacher was just reeling off weird stories about the past! If you're going to teach the class, run the practicals!

...Not in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠summer, though. In autumn or winter. Of course, when those seasons came around they did hold practicals again, and practicals were a lot more fun than this useless talk.

The afternoon Aberrant Biology class used a book that recorded the looks and habits of the monsters that appeared in the otherworld, attached the accounts of people who had faced them, and taught how to deal with the things. And every one of the teachers was a pretty woman, so I was a little bit looking forward to it.

"Er, and another thing. Otherworldly Survival is still steadily adding all sorts of terrain and environments, and Aberrant Biology, too, keeps adding new entries—including the monsters that have begun appearing in reality—little by little raising the survival rate."

"If you look at this or that disaster novel, or novels in the post-apocalyptic vein, you often see plots where people squabble themselves into exhaustion and then, well, humanity was destroyed~ That sort of thing. But this is a passage that shows reality really is different from ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠imagination. If they want to keep themselves fed and alive, other people have to survive first, so when the lifeline is right there in front of their eyes, one fray from snapping, wouldn't they thrash around, patching and mending however they can, just to stay alive?"

Look at him. Nothing he won't say in front of the kids.

"The reason we carry out this kind of education, and steadily teach and drill ordinary people in methods of survival, methods of combat, and so on, lies along that same line. Prepare for the what-if, and if the people who prepared awaken as Anomalous Ability Users in the Phase World and return to reality, those people will change the world into a better place to live. There will also be humans who use anomalous abilities to brawl among ability users, or commit crimes with their powers, but nothing in this world rolls along only in pleasant directions, does it? Where there's a disease, there's a cure. You can see it just by looking at dynamite. Used well, it's medicine. Used badly, it's poison."

Ding-dong, dang-dong. Ah. Class was over.

"Ahem. Then we'll continue next period. Class president."

"Yes! Attention!"

At the class president's shout, everyone straightened.

"Bow!"

"Thank you for the lesson~!" the class answered, all together.