Trying to Change This Novel's Genre - 4
Fujimoto Eiji, son of the Fujimoto chairman, had prized blood and name above all else — as every head of the Fujimoto household had before him.
Blood meant kin. Name meant honor.
The Fujimoto family was a house of ancient pedigree, one that had long reigned as the effective ruling class of Japan. As its eldest son, Eiji had been raised on a single lesson: these two things admitted no compromise, whatever the circumstances — and he had lived by that lesson all his life.
Money? If the Fujimoto name held, money would pour in by the barrelful. Even a magnate wealthy enough to buy every acre of the Japanese archipelago would bow his head beneath the Fujimoto name the moment he set foot on Japanese soil.
Laws crafted over hundreds of years. Loyal retainers who would throw themselves gladly into a pit of fire. A culture that could not conceive of any other ruler.
Before all of that, money was nothing more than a number on a page.
Power.
Power was not something a handful of coins could buy. It was forged by those who bore the name, ruling generation after generation — and so that power had to be inherited by blood kin alone, by those who carried the Fujimoto name. The power of Japan had been completed in the name of Fujimoto.
And that was why Fujimoto Eiji cherished his family. Though it was less a father watching over his family than a man lovingly polishing the components of a vast machine.
Fujimoto Eiji expressed love in the only language he knew.
That language was survival of the fittest.
When his daughter, Fujimoto Sumire, became a magical girl, the principle did not change.
The moment he learned his daughter was a magical girl, he conceived a facility — one that would abduct other magical girls to serve as lab rats in her place, sparing his precious jewel from the experiments.
The moment he learned that magical girls possessed supernatural abilities, he calculated what would need to be extracted from those lab rats.
The moment he learned those fruits were worth far more than expected, he ordered his underlings to bring in more. Many more.
Everything was to be spent in service of his daughter and the Fujimoto name. There was no room for hesitation.
"Test Subject No. 2. Forty-two manifestations of supernatural ability. Fourth test cycle complete."
"......"
"...Nearly fourfold. And from five subjects, no less."
Barely three days earlier, every test subject except No. 11 had failed to break past ten manifestations, and the staff had been on the verge of considering administered awakeners. The planning director of Fujimoto Group's strategy division had complained that the research sample pool was too small — by those standards, this result was nothing short of encouraging.
The ones who used to come out of testing gasping for air don't even break a sweat anymore.
Eleven test subjects, one week of trials — as a research result, the rate of change was eerie. But the researcher held to his personal conviction that no prejudice was warranted in the uncharted territory of supernatural ability, and simply repeated the trials, mechanical and precise.
If supernatural ability can grow through mere repetitive training like this... I may need to reconsider that request for additional test subject samples for the drug trials.
His eyes flicked sideways.
The researcher glanced at the list on his PC — three hundred and eighty-nine prospective samples in total. With no prior case of human experimentation on record that could be applied to supernatural abilities, he had requested a generous number, anticipating that some trials would burn through subjects quickly.
At the current pace, rapid change registers from repetition training alone. The drugs can wait.
He set the research log down on the table with a clack, and as always, tossed a single loaf of bread to the test subject girl.
"Not bad. Take that and bring me No. 3."
"......"
The girl clutched the bread bag carefully to her chest, turned, and walked down the facility's single corridor toward the dormitory.
She used to snatch it and bolt like a starved animal, drooling. Has she simply despaired of her situation?
These subjects were supernatural possessors whose physical capabilities were freakishly superior to ordinary people's. Any resistance to testing would only drive up the cost of resources consumed by the research — of that there was no doubt.
Which was why, the moment formal trials had begun, he had implemented ration restrictions to break their spirits.
In just three days, they've turned completely mechanical.
Teenage girls, weak in mental fortitude — even a ration restriction lasting only a few days had proven devastatingly effective. Satisfied, the researcher moved on to preparing the next experiment.
The dormitory air hung thick and stale, steeped in the scent of girls who could not wash. The roar of the logistics warehouse directly overhead droned on twenty-four hours a day; comfortable was the last word anyone would use for the place. And yet within it, a frigid silence had settled over the spot where, all week, the bonds forged between the girls had kept a low, constant murmur of conversation alive.
"......"
"......"
"......"
Even Ichika and the other girls who usually carried the mood sat with their chatterboxes firmly shut, stealing wary glances at one another.
Before long, the girl with dyed-orange hair forced herself to speak.
"Chief. This is, uh, kinda awkward, ma'am!"
"Shut it, Kyoko."
Aside from one girl currently out in rotation for testing, ten people occupied the dormitory — split precisely five and five, seated in two rows against opposite ends of the room, facing each other.
At last Kyoko could bear it no longer. She sprang to her feet, jabbing a finger at the girls across the room.
"Who the heck ARE those people anyway?! You could at least tell us that much, ma'am!"
"Kyoko! Sit down! They're watching!"
"Hyah?!"
Ichika whipped her head around, checking all four corners of the room where CCTV cameras had been mounted. Her constant, nervous darting glances at every camera made her ponytail wag like a dog's tail.
"They don't even stop us when we sneak food, so aren't they obviously okay?"
"......"
"...Sorry, ma'am."
It was true — through yesterday, they had wolfed down convenience-store lunches smuggled in from outside, and there had been no reaction at all. For men who were institutionalizing food-based behavioral control as their standard playbook, it was distinctly out of character.
"So Nene, Yumi, Tomoko, Momo, and Yuzuki are definitely safe, right?"
"Haah. How many times are you going to ask me the same thing?"
The 'thing' wearing Nene's face finally answered.
"We've shared how many meals together now. Don't you think it's about time you trusted me?"
"You never put a single bite in your mouth."
"I can eat 'outside,' so it doesn't matter."
"......"
"Do you have any idea how much I've spent buying you all those lunches?"
"The one getting the raw end of the deal is us, you know."
Honestly, Ichika had almost entirely stopped suspecting her. But whenever she thought of that fox-eyed woman and her freakish ability — and of the ten other girls who called her "Chief" and looked up to her — she held onto her suspicion out of sheer duty.
"It's good that you have a sense of responsibility."
"Don't change the subject."
"I haven't changed it once, so stop snapping at me."
"......"
"There's too much security around the facility. I've got another clone circling the perimeter now, trying to figure out how we handle it."
A thought suddenly occurred to Ichika, and she voiced it.
"Could we... get everyone out the same way?"
"You're not seriously thinking extracting them one by one is the same as them all swarming out at once?"
"If it's you, I figure you could pull it off."
"Five is my max for a swap like this. The rest of my bodies are needed for other things."
"Got it."
Ichika leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes again.
"If... if everyone makes it out of here safely. I will never, ever forget this debt."
"I'll hold you to that promise."
"......"
Kyoko quietly sat back down — the conversation seemed to have wrapped up somehow, without her quite noticing how.
The second-in-command of the test subject magical girls was, in her own way, quick to read a room.
Hearing the conversation in the dormitory draw to a close, I turned my attention back outward.
I had trained over and over to peel my awareness away from my physical body and observe through my clones — but executing multiple tasks precisely, all at once, was still beyond me.
It felt like running six stock charts on live feeds while playing a game on the last remaining monitor.
The six clones outside my primary control handled themselves autonomously well enough, but whenever one got pushed into an extreme situation, I had to focus my consciousness to steer it through.
Maybe I'm just not used to this power yet. Why on earth did I end up with illusion magic, of all things?
The girls I had smuggled out through the body-swaps were currently hidden in my apartment, with strict instructions not to set foot outside. Just in case, I'd asked Haruko to keep watch over them, so that front could rest easy for now.
Far fewer test subjects than I expected.
Perhaps the experiments hadn't yet escalated to full scale — the total number of test subject girls was eleven.
Every one of them came from an orphanage or institution with no private space of her own — which was how their supernatural abilities had been spotted in real time. If any of them had had a guardian, even flaunting Basic Magic in public wouldn't have gotten them abducted like this.
Once they realized these girls alone would cap the scale of the experiments, they'd have started expanding the subject pool. That much was obvious.
In fact, among the reports I'd secretly confirmed, there had been explicit mention of expanding the candidate sample list.
Haruko's name was on that expanded list.
Repetition training alone yields poor research results — so, the plan went, administer drugs to force the subjects into an awakened state, or accelerate their metabolisms to the brink of death to drag out unconscious manifestations.
Reading a research proposal so transparently devoted to multiplying its victims made my teeth chatter.
So that's how hundreds of them died. That's how Ichika's eyes went bloodshot in the original timeline.
In my past life, all of this had been sketched in a few lines of background exposition. But standing here now, face to face with the actual faces of the test subject girls, the reality of it was crushing.
Vwooong.
I stood atop an eighty-one-meter container crane and gazed down at the Fujimoto Heavy Industries logistics warehouse — then, without quite knowing why, turned my head toward the sea breeze.
The wind hit my face, rough and salt-heavy. On the horizon, the sun was beginning its descent, its light shattering into scattered fragments across the water.
Light.
Reflection.
"Oh."
Illusions in the "flashy but unreadable" style — spectacle that gave no hint of the ability behind it.
If I staged the illusions with fireworks, it would land. It would sell.
Come to think of it, among the supplies I'd stockpiled against the apocalypse, I remembered there were fireworks.
The round trip from Tokyo Bay to Shibuya would be a bit of a haul. But no helping it.