I Saved Too Many Girls and Caused the Apocalypse: Volume 15 Page 3

  I couldn’t say anything to that. All I could do was clench my fists. The War of All that I had been hearing about since day one... To me, it had always been something far off in the future. Uncertain, almost unreal. Hearing the details of what had happened—what was happening—changed that. It was now very, very real to me. But here I was in the future, unable to leave the doctor’s room... Maybe that was for the better. If I went outside and saw the damage with my own eyes, everything I’d heard so far would probably weigh on me even heavier.

  “...”

  After everything the doctor had said, I had a much better grasp of the War of All. But...

  “Well, that’s enough about the war. Let’s move on to talking about what happened in the past that needs to be rectified,” she suddenly declared, drawing a hasty conclusion to the topic.

  If she was bringing up the past now, she must be talking about how my hometown was attacked by the extremists who’d kidnapped the heroines. Satsuki had already been filled in on that much because the doctor had messaged her about it when we arrived.

  “For now, let’s try to do what we can. Satsuki, can you find out where Rekka’s heroines are in this time period using your Magic of Omniscience?”

  “I’ll give it a try,” Satsuki said, activating her magic.

  Her blue mana glowed softly, filling the room with light that formed a pillar up through the ceiling, reaching for the heavens. That was how her magic connected to the Akashic record. After a while...

  “It’s no use. Just like back then, the Akashic record doesn’t yield any results for their location.”

  “I see. I had my suspicions, but this must mean the mastermind behind the extremists is involved too. We haven’t been able to find out anything about the mastermind via the Magic of Omniscience, so we can assume they have some way to hide from it or block it out...” the doctor explained to me with a quiet sigh.

  “But you said yourself this practically confirms they’re involved with the kidnappings too, right? So why don’t we start by marching into the extremists’ headquarters?”

  “We don’t have any other leads right now, though. And that’s no easy task, you realize? We only have the four of us.”

  Okay, the doctor had a fair point there. Against an organization with giant robots at its disposal, it was reckless to go march on their base with just four people—three of which weren’t even really combat trained. But I wasn’t fazed. In fact, being at a huge disadvantage was the norm for me. And if I was lacking strength, then the first thing I needed to do was...

  “Let’s increase our numbers,” I suggested.

  “Increase our numbers?”

  The doctor and Satsuki both cocked their heads at my suggestion.

  “I don’t know how it is for future Rekka, but I’m generally powerless. I can’t do anything without someone else’s help. That’s why the first thing we should do is get some friends together.”

  I knew that what had just come out of my mouth was ultimately pretty pathetic, but I couldn’t help it. It was the truth.

  “Do you have any friends in mind?”

  “Well, the only people I know I can rely on are the girls... So I’ll seek out their future selves here in this time line and make friends.” I continued, “I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get them on board or not, though, so it’s probably best to start with the heroines I know I’ll most likely be able to convince.”

  I looked slowly at L, the doctor, and Satsuki in turn.

  “There are common heroines between my story and future Rekka’s, right? I mean, Satsuki’s right here, and you guys mentioned Iris earlier.”

  “Well, yes. There are others,” the doctor confirmed.

  “Then let’s start with them. I know their stories, and we might have some sort of connection.”

  My best shot here was probably to make the most of the fact that I was “the same but different” from the Rekka they knew. Tugging at their heartstrings a little would probably be the best way to recruit them.

  “Let’s see... To start with, are there any common heroines that belong to the pacifist or dove factions you mentioned earlier?”

  “Hold on. I’ll bring up a list for you from the agency database,” the doctor said, fiddling with a computer terminal in the room.

  As I was waiting for her, I felt someone’s gaze fall on me... and I turned to see Satsuki with a faint smile on her face.

  “You really are Rekka... I knew you’d come through for us all. I’m so touched I could just cry,” she murmured with misty eyes.

  Chapter 4: Searching Out Connections

  Now that we’d decided on a plan—recruiting the heroines of the future to help us—we had to put it in motion. And that meant going outside... which was a problem for me considering I’d been missing in this time line for a while now. Anyone who saw me would probably raise a fuss over it. The doctor had brought me here to the future without permission, after all. No one knew I was here. That meant I’d have to keep my identity a secret as we made our exit from agency HQ. And the same went for L, who was functionally a defector.

  “Well, R and I hid the fact that L was working with the extremists, so that shouldn’t be a problem,” explained the doctor.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded casually, but wasn’t that a pretty dangerous game to play? I had to seriously wonder for a moment, but then it dawned on me that it was perfectly in character for the doctor and R.

  “W-Wait a minute,” interjected Satsuki. “This is all news to me.”

  “Oh, really? Then you stay quiet about it too, Satsuki,” instructed the doctor.

  “Huh... Well, all right,” Satsuki acquiesced with a sigh. “But whose side she’s on doesn’t change the fact that she’s been missing all this time, right? I was shocked to see her when I walked in.”

  “You sure didn’t seem like it,” L chimed in, eyeing Satsuki dubiously.

  “Th-That’s... That’s because Rekka was here,” Satsuki said, bashfully fidgeting with her fingers.

  She’d apparently been so preoccupied with me that it overrode her reaction to L in the heat of the moment. It was... kind of embarrassing. But L only glared harder at me and my reddening face.

  “A-Ahem... What I mean to say is that there are plenty of employees here that know L, so someone’s bound to cause a commotion if they see her.”

  Yeah, I suppose that was the normal reaction to suddenly seeing someone who’d supposedly been missing. L and I were in the same boat in that regard, so we’d have to come up with some way to stay hidden.

  If only Harissa were here, we could use her invisibility magic to sneak out quietly...

  She was my go-to girl in situations like this. I really needed to find the heroines—my heroines—as soon as possible.

  But just then, L said, “If it’s a disguise you want, I have something for that.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a device that can alter your appearance with a hologram,” L said, pulling out a small gem. “You place it over your head like this.”

  She held it over her head just like she’d described... and it started floating all on its own. It then flickered for a brief second. Suddenly L no longer looked like L, but a rather intimidating-looking yakuza guy.

  “Yikes!”

  “This is how it works,” the yakuza said with L’s voice.

  It was kind of surreal, but apparently she could modify her voice in much the same fashion if she so chose.

  “Wow, that thing does make for a great disguise. It’s really handy to be able to change your height and stuff.”

  “That’s because I’m not wearing the disguise directly.”

  Basically, the crystal floating above her head bent light to manipulate the way people saw the object or person below. L disappeared into an illusion—a hologram being projected over her. Her mouth movements and expressions were all preserved through facial tracking, so the effect was perfectly nat
ural. The hologram also adapted itself to include any objects she happened to be carrying. She had to be careful about that, however. For example, if she fired a laser gun she was holding, the beam would still fire from where the gun actually was rather than where it appeared to be in the hands of her taller hologram. It could jeopardize her disguise since the hologram was purely audiovisual. And the same was true about touch. If anyone physically came into contact with her, the jig would be up.

  “That said, using doorknobs, operating consoles, and performing other close-range tasks isn’t an issue.”

  Apparently simple things like that could still be covered by the projection from the gem. In other words, she just had to be careful about projectile weapons or anything else that might leave the range of her hologram.

  “The hitch is that I only have one of these,” L casually announced after explaining how the gem worked.

  “Shouldn’t you have opened with that?”

  “Facts are facts; the timing doesn’t change the truth. I had another one as a spare, but that little gremlin girl broke it.”

  “Gremlin... Fam, huh?”

  Fam was a gremlin, a kind of monster known for putting delicate electronics on the fritz courtesy of a strange signal they emitted from their horns. Fam normally suppressed that ability with a special headband, but... I wonder what L had done to Fam? Whatever. L was right—facts were facts, and the fact of the matter here and now was that we only had one hologem.

  “Well then, Doctor, Satsuki, do either of you have one of these hologem things?”

  “I know where to get one, but it’s agency property. We’d have to fill out a requisition form, and there’s not exactly time for red tape right now. We could just try and take it, but that could backfire if we trip an alarm...”

  “Hmm... I’d like to get outside as quickly and quietly as possible.”

  I looked around the room. I was hoping to get a glimpse of things outside, but unfortunately there weren’t any windows in the doctor’s room.

  “Say, Doctor, I recall you mentioning we were in space. Does that mean we’re on some planet?”

  “No, this is a colony.”

  “By colony, you mean one of those big spaceships just floating in space?”

  A certain famous anime came to mind as I imagined that, and the doctor confirmed my imagination was more or less correct. The colony that comprised the agency headquarters was surprisingly not all that large. It was roughly one quarter the size of my hometown and housed just shy of a thousand workers.

  “For the record, this room is within the colony’s employee residential block. The spacecrafts, both for personal and business use, are in the next block over.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Since we were on a space colony and not a planet or anything, we’d need space suits or some kind of spacecraft to go outside. My original plan was just to sneak me and L out of a window or something and then have the doctor and Satsuki come pick us up, but that was now, well... out the window. Based on the way the colony was designed, we’d have to make it to the next block over to board a ship.

  “Then I guess we don’t have a choice...”

  When I said that with a sigh, the three women in the room all cocked their heads. I had a backup plan in mind, but I considered it a last resort. I didn’t really want to do it, and I knew L certainly wouldn’t. But desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.

  “So, L, hear me out...”

  L must have sensed something was up, because she turned my way with an extremely disgusted look on her face.

  ▽

  We were now walking down the corridor to the bay with the doctor in the lead. The wall and floors here had the same futuristic look the doctor’s room did, making it feel all the more like Iris’s spaceship. There were still no windows in sight, and I was starting to think it was a little stuffy, when...

  “Geh!”

  “Hey, don’t make strange noises.”

  “Ummm, L, you’re kind of strangling me. Please stop squeezing your thighs together,” I whispered.

  “That’s your fault for swaying,” she muttered as she relaxed her legs, which were currently draped over my shoulders.

  “Rekka, L, we can still hear you, so try to refrain from needless chatter. From our perspective, it sounds like you’re talking to yourself.”

  Oops. At Satsuki’s warning, I quickly shut my mouth.

  But what else were we to do with only one hologem? In order to make it work, I’d suggested that L ride on my shoulders. This way, L could put the gem over her head and it could theoretically cover both of us. We had to adjust the motion tracking settings a little bit, but that was a piece of cake for the doctor.

  L and I had taken the time to change out of our burnt and ripped clothes while she worked, but I guess that step wasn’t technically necessary since we had the hologram disguise. As for the hologram disguise, we’d “borrowed” the appearance of a random male employee at agency HQ whose work area was as far as could possibly be from the residential block. The doctor had pulled up his employee photo on the console in her room, and L had used that for reference to generate the disguise. Then we went on the move.

  For the record, L was controlling the upper body of the disguise while I was controlling the lower. But Satsuki was totally right—people could still hear us. So when I talked to L like I just had, it probably did look and sound like this guy was talking to himself.

  Actually, since L’s the only one with vocal mimicry, I should just stay silent altogether.

  I’d been careless earlier. Fortunately, however, no one walking down the corridor was paying attention to us. It seemed like they were all too busy to be bothered. I guess the aftermath of the extremists’ attack was still unfolding, after all.

  So this is the chaos the doctor had abandoned to come get me? If she hadn’t moved so rapidly, I would still be running around being chased by the giant robots the extremists had sent after me. But now that they knew I was here in the future, they should at least leave my hometown alone. I guess you could say I’d saved the past in a way by coming here to the future, but there was still more to do. While I obviously had to save the kidnapped heroines, I also wanted to do something about what was going on here in the future too. If I didn’t, incidents like this would just keep happening, and I wasn’t going to stand for my hometown being destroyed over and over. I’d have to defeat the mastermind behind all this to put a stop to it no matter what.

  “...”

  After turning several corners and going down an elevator, we finally arrived at our destination: the spacecraft bay.

  It’s huge...

  Perhaps I should have expected it, but this place was way bigger than our school gymnasium. I couldn’t even see the roof unless I tilted my head back 90 degrees. Over 20 spacecrafts were crowded into the wide space that we could see, varying in size from the spaceship equivalent of speedboats to mega yachts.

  “Pardon me. Do you have a moment?” the doctor walked up and asked the departure attendant.

  “Yes, of course. Just one mome—oh, Doctor Laputa! Wh-What can I do for you?”

  The attendant looked up from a pile of paperwork and panicked a little when she saw the doctor. It seemed even she was in the middle of handling all kinds of things. There really wasn’t an area around HQ that wasn’t hectic right now...

  “I received a call from XXXXX. I’m making a visit myself, so please prepare a smaller spacecraft for me.”

  The “XXXXX” part was a strangely pronounced word that I didn’t understand. Probably some kind of space language. At any rate, saying she got a call was only an excuse. The doctor was just trying to net us a ship we could use.

  “You’re going yourself, Doctor?”

  “It’s related to the current incident, and I need to explain the circumstances. If we lose their support, we won’t have a leg to stand on. So yes, I’m going myself.”

  “Understood. Just a moment, please.”

&n
bsp; “Make it one with a sublight speed warp drive.”

  “Understood.” The attendant then rummaged in her desk for something. “Now, let’s see... Who all will be boarding with Doctor Laputa?”

  “Satsuki Otomo.”

  “And L—I mean, Dienz Ormando.”

  L almost gave her own name instead of the name of the male employee we were disguised as.

  Whew, that was close.

  A chill ran up my spine for a moment there, but the attendant hadn’t seemed to notice L’s slip of the tongue. She then finished what she was doing and handed the doctor the key to a small spaceship.

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s my pleasure, Doctor Laputa.”

  “See you then—”

  The doctor gave a little wave to the attendant, and we began the descent into the bay, when all of a sudden the doctor froze up on the spot. Wondering what was wrong, L and I looked up ahead to see...

  “Huh?”

  Right there at the bottom of the stairs, coming up towards us, was a man. But he looked familiar for some reason. Like I’d just seen him recently... Wait, I had seen him recently!

  Ack, it’s the real deal!

  This guy looked just like the picture the doctor had shown us of Dienz Ormando. But what was he doing here? According to the doctor, he worked in a totally different block. I guess maybe the chaotic aftermath of the attack had agency employees juggling all sorts of tasks they didn’t usually. He must’ve had some kind of job to do here, but what were the odds?! This was bad news.

  “Huh? There are two Mr. Ormandos?”

  The attendant had now noticed what was going on too. We all froze, no one quite sure of what to do next.

  Can we come up with an excuse? No.

  We could try our best to talk our way out of this, but there was no guarantee that would work. There was too much risk involved, and we could end up blowing our only chance to make it outside. We had to get to that spaceship no matter what.

  “Run!” I yelled, rushing forward to trip Mr. Ormando, who was still taken aback in shock.

  “Wah!”

  In his surprise, he fell backwards. I then put L down and turned back to Satsuki and the doctor, who had yet to move.