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light-novels

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Suspension 1

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The question isn’t whether or not you can trust someone.

It’s whether or not they’ll stab you in the back.

1

To make a long story short, I successfully rappelled to the ground with Hime-chan in my arms. I’d done it before when I was in the ER Program (wearing a hundred-pound backpack), and the rope she had improvised out of the various filaments was way sturdier than I’d imagined. It took some time, since I had to favor my dislocated shoulder, but the fact that no one got hurt, and that we weren’t attacked in mid-climb, was enough to make it something of a success. Once we were safely on the ground, Hime-chan tried to wind the various filaments back onto their respective spools, but in this she seemed to fail; she’d been too diligent in fixing the rope in place.

“These wires really are useful in all kinds of ways. You can use them in places of a rope like this, or you can make traps out of them.”

“Hmm…traps, right.”

I’d certainly heard of illusionists and such using lines in similar ways. String users, or maybe you’d call them wire users. I’m no assassin, but these could also be used as a weapon. Or was that a shamisen string? I don’t really know much about it.

“Wire─or string, huh. Hey, Hime-chan.”

“Exqueeze me?”

“Couldn’t someone who was really good with these kinds of things create the locked-room scenario in the Director’s office?”

Hmm? Hime-chan cocked her head. “Are you talking about the needle-and-thread trick?”

“Maybe a version of that. A locked room isn’t actually physically airtight. There’s got to be a seam somewhere. Someone could set the whole thing up even without entering, even if the door is locked, just by manipulating lines like these. The ventilation shaft you came through would work just as well. Either way, they could wind filaments like these around the Director’s body while she’s in there, then pull, and presto: the Director is sliced to bits…maybe?”

“That’d be impossible.”

“How can we know without trying it?”

“I knows. You’re optimistic about the wrong things, Master.” Hime-chan finally gave up on retrieving her lines and came to stand beside me. “First off alls. How did Mr. Culprit suspend the Director’s head from the ceiling? Wouldn’t that be impossible without getting inside the room?”

“Oh, right…”

“And wouldn’t you have to get inside the room at some point to wind the wire around her body in the first place?”

“Yeah…no, hang on a second. If there’s a ventilation shaft, then it isn’t a locked room at all. If the murderer got in and out that way…”

“They couldn’t got in that way. I told you, didn’t I? The fan was screwed into the ceiling, so no one could got in that way, and if they got out that way, they couldn’t return it to the way it was originally. Even if the Director had invited them inside, they couldn’t lock up after themselves on the way out, regardsless of whether they used the window or the ventilation shaft or the door. Ms. Jun checked them all, anyway. Didn’t you notice?”

“Uh-uh…”

I didn’t notice.

So the ventilation shaft was out, huh? The hand-scanner on the door was unquestionably insurmountable (even Aikawa couldn’t get it open without resorting to violence), which meant that the only possible point of breach was the window or that ventilation shaft.

“Plus, if someones was good with these wires they could definitely chop someone to bits, but the wounds would be a lots cleaner. They wouldn’t be all ragged like those were.”

Oh. True, the murder weapon was a chainsaw, wasn’t it. If Aikawa thought so, anyway, I figured she was probably correct. Jun Aikawa, contractor. The number of dead bodies she’d seen had to be on a different order of magnitude from someone like myself.

“A chainsaw…hm. Wait. Hold on a sec, Hime-chan. I was more or less joking when I said it, but…could you? Dismember someone? With those wires, I mean…chop them up, shred them?”

“Uh huh. They’re like a jigsaw. I tolds you, you’ll get cut if you touch them? Basically the same principle. Tensile strength is a question of how quickly and how briefly you apply force, and to how small an area. Precisely because these filaments are so fine, they have the capacity to dismember a human body.”

“Hunh. Like getting a paper cut?”

“When it’s used as a weapon, they call it a wire saw or something. I learned abouts it in class. Monofilament swords, garrote wires, rigid cords. So-called concealed weapons, you know? Even a beginner can sever a finger if they follow the proper procedure, and a master can supposedly slice someone to bits with nothing more than a roll of electrical tape.”

“Seems like the kind of manga Aikawa would like. I hate to sound like Tamamo, but wouldn’t it be quicker to just stab someone with a knife and get it over with instead of going to all that trouble?”

“Sure. But it has all kinds of practical applications that a knife doesn’t. If you create a network of lines operating on the principle of the pulley, you can mounts a multilateral attack. Like a spider web, you know? Which is why the threads are called webs, and the people who use them are called weavers. This is a genuine, age-old combat technique. It’s the reel deal.”

Weavers, sure. Sounds totally normal.

“Nothing worthwhile has words like ‘genuine’ or ‘quintessential’ attached to it in this day and age. Damn…in the old days, people thought up some crazy stuff.”

Maybe they had no other choice in an age when life-or-death combat was a daily occurrence, but still, turning string into a deadly weapon?

“Right? Almost no one learns that kind of sci-fi trickstery these days anyway. It’s like something out of fantasy, and you definitely can’t learn it overnight. It’s like you said, Master, much quicker to just stab someone with a knife.”

Which is why it’s usually used for safety, like we just did, said Hime-chan, before doing that thing where she whipped her finger up and snapped it back down.

“Almost no one─means that there are still a few people who learn it?”

“Right. There’s even one here at the academy─they calls her ‘Zigzag the Spider.’ Crazy, huh?”

“‘Zigzag the Spider’…you say.”

“Uh huh. She’s a third-year named Yuma Shisei, not that anyone calls her by her real name anymore. She and Hagihara are the top students here. Of course, the lines that ‘Zigzag’ uses aren’t like these. Hers are the genuine article.”

“Weavers and webs… Doesn’t make for a very realistic story, does it. Is it really gonna be okay to introduce that kind of thing into the narrative?”

“Seems more realistical to me than a master detective or a locked-room murder. At least this kind of thing has a historical basis.”

“What a dicey remark.”

“Call it a disclaimer.” Hime-chan began stowing the reels back in her pouch, complaining, “No-o-o, they’re all tangled ups.” But unrelated to this fuss, a flickering candle of unease had lit itself in my mind.

If this “Zigzag,” this Yuma Shisei─whose superiority even Shiogi Hagihara and Tamamo Saijo acknowledged─were to take the field against us, would I be able to protect this bumbling girl, who seemed inept at pretty much everything? This was not a hypothetical question. “Zigzag” seemed unavoidable if we were going to forge ahead in our attempt to get Hime-chan out of this academy.

We had to come to a decision about what to do. Rejoining Aikawa was probably our best bet─as long as we were with the world’s strongest, this “Zigzag” was nothing to fear─but we didn’t know whether or not Aikawa was still in the Director’s office. In which case, should the two of us attempt an escape on our own? While avoiding the watchful eye of the “tactics expert” Shiogi Hagihara?

“A thorny problem…”

In retrospect, however, that “problem” was a triviality not even worthy of the name.

Caught up in pondering the triviality─I completely missed Hime-chan’s expression as she spoke the name Yuma Shisei.

If I had properly taken stock of that expression, the look of someone speaking with pride about her own honored “teacher,” mixed with a certain sense of resignation and a soupçon of contradiction and inconsistency, things might’ve been different. I might’ve been able to glean something of the relationship between Hime-chan and Yuma Shisei.

This was an absolutely irredeemable─tactical error.

“Any way you slice it, seems like we’re going to have a seriously tough time with this…‘Zigzag.’”

“We are. To be honest, without Ms. Jun, our only option would be to runs away. ‘Zigzag’ always wears gloves, so you’ll know her the moment you see her. Weavers always wear gloves, otherwise they’d cut their own fingers off.”

“Gotcha. Something to recognize her by.”

So, all we have to do is look out for someone wearing gloves?

“Oh, speaking of top students, that girl from before─Tamamo Saijo, she’s the number-one combat specialist among the Hang ’Em High first-years. They call her ‘the Dark Knife,’ she’s a feared extremist.”

“Sure didn’t seem like it…”

“Don’t judge a book by its cover. Tamamo is the great hope of the academy, not like Hime-chan. You just got incredibly lucky, Master.”

“Lucky, eh?”

It had certainly been a close call. If Hime-chan hadn’t shown up, and if I hadn’t landed my subsequent counterattack…

But that had also probably earned me Tamamo’s undying enmity. The very thought was enough to freeze my blood. To be honest, I was way more compatible with a tactician than I was with someone like her, where you never knew what they were thinking.

“Tamamo doesn’t usually get sent on such insignificant missions. She probably got involved because of Ms. Jun… I expectorate Hagihara was behind it.”

Advancing another level in the game.

“Even if we didn’t have to worry about ‘Zigzag,’ there’s no way Hime-chan and Master could contend with a strategy devised for Ms. Jun. As long as she’s still here, we should do our leavened best to join back up with her.”

A baking competition?

“I think you mean ‘our level best.’ Though I don’t think dividing our forces was such a bad strategy─nor is you being with me instead of her, Hime-chan; I doubt they’d expect it.”

“But the danger is too dangerous.”

“Yeah. We might as well give up on figuring it out on our own, and leave it to the professional…”

As I walked a little ways away from the school building, it occurred to me that out here we had a bit more breathing room than we did inside. We had a better view of our surroundings, and there were fewer places for someone to hide. Hime-chan seemed to take it for granted─and I had taken it for granted─but if Shiogi was indeed the one currently devising the anti-Jun Aikawa strategy, did she know that the Director was dead? Shiogi was a tactician, a staff officer. She was very much not a simple student, top or otherwise. So I was pretty sure she’d have to check in with the Director at regular intervals, even if she did so through the “staff room” rather than directly─in which case, it was very unlikely that she and the other students didn’t already know about Noa Origami’s murder.

And if they didn’t─then someone was concealing it. And if that was true, then the only conceivable candidate would be the “culprit.” Someone at this academy─was manipulating the picture for her own ends. If it was a struggle for power, then maybe it was someone from the “staff room”…or.

Or, if it was one of the students.

Who would be most qualified to do such a thing?

“Hime-chan. What kind of a girl is Shiogi?”

“Huh? Why do you ask? That’s a bolt from a clear blue moon.”

“I mean, I’m just interested. As Mencius says, ‘Know thyself and know thy enemy, and you shall meet no danger even in a hundred battles.’”

“That’s Sun Tzu.”

Corrected by Hime-chan.

“You’re surprisingly uneducated, Master.”

And the salt in the wound.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Ever heard of Fermat’s Last Theorem? I was the one who proved it!”

“Y-You was?! I had no idea, I can’t believe I was so rude! Sorry!”

“…”

Aaand she actually believed me.

“Anyway, I’d like a detailed report on Shiogi. Will you tell me whatever you know?”

“Let me see. Well, she’s very intense. Severe, is that the word? If she weren’t then I guess she might not be able to work as a tactician, but it still feels out of the ordinary. She’s like the Director that ways.”

“She’ll do anything to achieve her objectives?”

“No, Hagihara herself doesn’t have any objectives. She just adopts whatever strategy’s most effective to complete the task she’s been given. Hagihara doesn’t have any will of her own.”

“Interesting. I guess it’s not the place of the tactician to have her own objectives. If every piece on the shogi board had a will of its own, it’d be pretty hard to play.”

“In that sense, it’s less that Shiogi’s suited to being a tactician and more that she isn’t suited to being anything else.”

Hmm. Like me, just as Aikawa said─though, were we really alike? Shiogi and I were the same insofar as we had nothing inside ourselves. But it seemed like her options were even more limited than my own. Though that probably wasn’t her own fault, it was because she was stuck in this academy.

That’s the difference between people who belong to an organization and people who can’t belong to one. At that point─my interest in her was abruptly aroused. Including the suspicion that she’d murdered the Director.

“But just because she’s a tactician doesn’t mean you can let down your guard. Every student at this school acquires some skill at self-defense, including her.”

“Yeah, I learned that the hard way.”

“Kendo is Hagihara’s specialty. She’s second dan.”

“Second dan? That seems pretty average for this place.”

“No, in kendo, second dan is nothing to sneeze at. Since ancient times they’ve referred to it as Kendo Sun Vulcan, you know.”

They definitely haven’t.

Shiogi Hagihara─Tamamo Saijo, and finally Yuma Shisei, huh? What a batshit-crazy motley crew of outstanding warrior-scholars. The road ahead was fraught with peril. If there was any saving grace, it was that the students who favored a direct assault, like the Dark Knife and Zigzag, tended to lack strategy.

“I gotta say. Shiogi, Tamamo─they’re pretty interesting girls. If only I hadn’t met them in this insane place.”