Pioneers of the Future (Part 2)
Ansoloc White handled the vocals, Ermi Faust the drums, Sokoa Janet the guitar, and Chemeri Agerst the bass.
Under the moon, fire flows in our veins,
Breaking free, shattering iron chains.
No rules to bind us, no laws to restrain,
With wings on our bikes, we ride through the rain.
Dust and thunder follow our flight,
We rule both the sky and streets at night.
When we rise, the winds start to sing,
The night sky bows to our wings.
We are the outlaws, shadows in flight,
Riders of chaos through the day and the night.
No mercy, no fear, no place we belong,
Living fast, burning bright, and gone before long.
Fueled by fire, engines roar like storms,
Our bikes defy gravity, breaking all norms.
Every road, every cloud is ours to claim,
Escaping pursuit, we fly without shame.
We’re untamed spirits, born to be free,
Between earth and sky, no law can decree.
With steel beasts that soar on wings,
We conquer the night, fearless kings.
We are the outlaws, shadows in flight,
Riders of chaos through the day and the night.
No mercy, no fear, no place we belong,
Living fast, burning bright, and gone before long.
Faster than storms, stronger than steel,
Our bikes carve trails the stars can feel.
Scars in the sky trace paths we’ve drawn,
Nothing can stop us—we ride till dawn.
We are the outlaws, shadows in flight,
Riders of chaos through the day and the night.
No mercy, no fear, no place we belong,
Living fast, burning bright, and gone before long.
Gone before long...
Like ghosts in the stars, we ride till dawn.
Under the moon, fire flows in our veins,
Breaking free, shattering iron chains.
No rules to bind us, no laws to restrain,
With wings on our bikes, we ride through the rain.
Dust and thunder follow our flight,
We rule both the sky and streets at night.
When we rise, the winds start to sing,
The night sky bows to our wings.
We are the outlaws, shadows in flight,
Riders of chaos through the day and the night.
No mercy, no fear, no place we belong,
Living fast, burning bright, and gone before long.
Fueled by fire, engines roar like storms,
Our bikes defy gravity, breaking all norms.
Every road, every cloud is ours to claim,
Escaping pursuit, we fly without shame.
We’re untamed spirits, born to be free,
Between earth and sky, no law can decree.
With steel beasts that soar on wings,
We conquer the night, fearless kings.
We are the outlaws, shadows in flight,
Riders of chaos through the day and the night.
No mercy, no fear, no place we belong,
Living fast, burning bright, and gone before long.
Faster than storms, stronger than steel,
Our bikes carve trails the stars can feel.
Scars in the sky trace paths we’ve drawn,
Nothing can stop us—we ride till dawn.
We are the outlaws, shadows in flight,
Riders of chaos through the day and the night.
No mercy, no fear, no place we belong,
Living fast, burning bright, and gone before long.
Gone before long...
Like ghosts in the storm, we ride till dawn.
As I watched their performance with Cleas, we spoke to each other through telepathy.
They call themselves idols, but this is just heavy metal. Are these girls even managing to keep their heads above water? Honestly, and they’re still young enough to have built and flown those aerial motorcycles themselves.
There’s no need to think of it that way. Even back when the very idea of idols didn’t exist, there were singers who drew the kind of reactions idols get now. If anything, the symbolism is stronger because it gives people in this era a chance to remember their original intent.
Is that so? In any case, they said this performance was originally meant to be released as an album, and that they handed out flyers as a trial run. Getting people all the way out here must have been quite a hassle.
You mean the time-space distortion? Since the passage through the immaterial realm is so brutal, their own emotions and thoughts become seared into them, which increases their violence. To be honest, though, couldn’t it be because the Nanocrippler malfunctioned somehow? It’s gone beyond our control, so we can’t even track it.
That’s one possibility. But if so many possibilities are being produced, what does that ultimately mean?
Right. Not everyone would have fallen the same way for the same reason. Each of them has a story that seems different, at least to themselves, but it all ends in the same kind of behavior. And that’s because you made it so, didn’t you, brother?
Yes. Even if that weren’t the case, the customs the people already had were nothing more than a system that our Diagrams of Mystery had clumsily engineered through intellectual fraud to keep the truth buried in secrecy. At a time like this, when they need to step into the open, there’s no way they can preserve that system. So we’re making them fight one another as much as possible. We’ve added excess upon excess to everything they’ve ever pursued, distorted their thinking under the influence of the immaterial realm, forced them to preach unconditional endurance while, in front of those being told to endure, using anger as though it meant the same thing as patience; in doing so, they commit hypocrisy, and then they pile up arrogance by oppressing others until everything looks ridiculous. Yet when it comes to judging themselves, they’re lazy enough to find even that a chore, and they call that adaptability intelligence. Drunk on the arrogance that follows, they silence other people’s mouths without a second thought. Rather than strengthening their virtues or compensating for their faults, they devote all their strength to tearing down others’ virtues and magnifying others’ defects—so much so that they can do nothing else. They worship that as their essential origin, and try to make their superiority real only by doing so, when in truth they aren’t like that at all. Their lives are a mass of contradictions: they will never insult those who are already respected, yet they still cling to the notion that they’re above reproach. In the end, it’s far more efficient to make them live as people who never truly recognize the most basic human essences—change, rage, plague, excess—and yet depend on them for their entire lives.
Exactly. Honestly, if someone heard that much, they’d understand just fine, wouldn’t they? Letting people do whatever they want is, in the end, not so different from America handing the rest of the world over to the other nations and then quietly occupying Earth. Even if they know, they can’t do anything about it unless emotion gets involved. And that is exactly why we’re called the Diagrams of Mystery. No one can carelessly define good and evil in the first place. There is no doubt that good and evil exist, but the line between them is far too vague. If you tell a man-eating monster to eat only bad people, then when someone asks how it can possibly distinguish good people from bad ones, the only answer you can give is that it’ll know when it sees them.
By the time the performance ended, the girls came to us before we had even risen from our seats.
"How was it?"
"It reminded me of the famous singers from the early days, when the very concept of idols was just beginning to take shape. You were like Elvis Priestly himself."
"But this is heavy metal, no matter how you look at it. If you’ve been calling yourselves idols because of your age, then you don’t need to do that anymore. Of course, the people who looked down on you were more at fault, but you don’t need to tailor yourselves to their false standards. We’ll be behind you now."
"So do what you want. That is the essence of freedom and capitalism."
With that, we formally presented them with a contract and decided to make a major investment in them, just as we had with Michelle Merin. In situations like this, there might normally be accusations of favoritism toward a specific local group, but we had already layered our justification with the immaterial realm several times over, so there was no issue. From this point on, every one of their actions would become part of the causality we would be orchestrating.
BEEP
Once the time-space distortion was switched off, people finally came flooding in all at once.
"Woooooaaaaah!!!!"
Hah. So they really do separate public and private affairs? Good. Then this settles it. From now on, we’ll begin by observing both their cognition of the immaterial realm and the bodily changes caused by Nanocrippler infiltration, then use that to make the soldiers appear mysterious and formidable—something human beings can’t bring themselves to challenge, yet still find vaguely disturbing. At the same time, we’ll provide genuine practical support while deliberately provoking their habitual collectivist thinking so they understand what’s happening. From there, the one thing that’s absolutely certain is that they respect the group itself, which means they’ll develop a compulsive need to root out subversives early. That will make them treat one another like subversives and even shoot each other dead, the way starving people fight over who gets to eat whom. And if we base them in one precisely designated place and make the soldiers adhere to even stricter discipline, then whenever people look at them, they’ll feel a relentless unease and worry about accidentally offending them. If I analyze all of that together, the end result is just a matter of empty praise and legitimacy. In that case, my partnership with Michelle Merin and my relationship with the UN forces centered on Ansoloc White are now clear enough. Of course, the exact details will still need to be heard directly from him. After all, I never asked for his reports and simply had him keep patrolling and handling things on his own, which bought me time to meet with Merin and time to stop by here in the first place.
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