Editing Internet Shrine Maiden Tsugumi-chan:Volume1 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 5===

“Hey, Mugikko.”

“?”

“Stop getting so far ahead. This place is terrifying, so shouldn’t we be working together to make decisions?”

“…Is what happened at the Rending Pool still bothering you?”

Being bound to a child ghost and nearly killed couldn’t have been fun.

''In the real ghost industry'', there was no room at all for feelings of pity when it came to a Malign Spirit of a headless child or something.

“Detective Onii-sama Kouga-san said we’re your chance at survival if you end up passing out at a haunted location!”

“That won’t be happening, so it isn’t necessary.”

They couldn’t find an entrance to the parking lot. The metal fence covered by soundproofing sheets surrounded it on all sides, but it was more like a sequence of fences with a set length. That meant there were larger gaps in places. It looked like they could slip through there and avoid having to climb over or do anything weird.

“Mh.”

The online shrine maiden turned to the side to slip through, but part of her still caught on the fence.

Her chest.

“…Curse these things.”

Otsugo Water Level Control Canal.

Also known as the haunted Vanishing Canal.

“Wow,” gasped Rainy when she got a good look.

This urban blind spot was located below the giant elevated railway. Rusty, abandoned cars arranged in rough lines, piles of unidentifiable scrap metal, and a single prefab hut. The nearby seawater canal was only 5m across, but it still provided a powerful salty smell. The smell was somehow rawer than a tourist beach.

“So this is a haunted location where at least seven people have vanished,” muttered the online shrine maiden.

The sunlight combined with the elevated railway overhead created a harsh contrast between light and shadow.

The shadows seemed almost solid, making the space below the railway seem all the more mysterious. It felt like a different world cut off from the ordinary city, as if it were surrounded by “keep out” tape.

“Th-the vibes here are bad. The air feels so solid and heavy. Even though it’s still daytime…”

“If a place is haunted, the ghost will appear even in the bright summer sun. Like the Kunekune, or the many white hands extending from the sea.”

The dazzlingly white light reflected off the ground and the thick dark shadow of the railway.

Domed security cameras were installed on the railway’s bridge piers, but they were cracked. Probably broken.

“…”

The parking lot appeared to be divided into a few different areas. More fences covered with soundproofing sheets cut through the inside too. There were no gaps there to slip through.

“What would you do, Mugikko? If you were alone?”

When Tsumugi groaned, the gyaru sister placed her hands behind her head and grinned.

“Muh hee hee. Now do you see why having a team is important? Okay, Yuhi. Does that area have a different exit? Or does the fence open somewhere?”

“Let me see. Hmm.”

Yuhi, who apparently frequently visited the TV station, nodded a few times.

“No barbed wire on top, so if we could… Hey, Onee-chan, push that wooden crate over.”

“Eh? Why me, Yuhi?”

“I’ve seen the prop people doing this. Are you going to make Yahirodono-san do all the work?”

''Oh, so she already assumes I’m doing it,'' sighed the online shrine maiden even as she obeyed.

By pushing and stacking the crates according to the straitlaced sister’s instructions, they ended up with a three-step staircase which looked sufficient to clear the tall fence.

They jumped down on the other side.

The online shrine maiden looked back.

“How do we get back?”

“We can just stack something else.”

This was also a parking lot, but the vehicles here were different. They were all shiny black luxury cars.

(Hm? Why would these be out here in the salty sea air?)

“Dwah!? What’s that huge bug on the sideview mirror!? I-it’s the size of my palm! Is that a paranormal phenomenon!?”

“Onee-chan… That jumbo dragonfly is fake. Have you never seen a bug repelling product before?”

Setting it up in such a conspicuous spot seemed like a lot of trouble. There were also some reflective cards suspended by strings.

People had disappeared. Several of them.

That knowledge made the prefab hut look creepy.

“Oh, god. Another fence with soundproofing sheets?”

Why divide the space up so much? And there didn’t seem to be any crates or tires to push and stack here…

“Climbing over would be tough in that shrine maiden outfit, wouldn’t it? It has a lot of loose cloth and it looks big and heavy.”

“Ghh…”

“Okay, that’s enough of that. Onee-chan, can you handle it?”

‘Sure thing.”

With a short approach run, the gyaru sister planted her shoes on the middle of the building wall and grabbed onto the base used to hold the air conditioning unit on the roof. In a flash, she had climbed to the top of the prefab hut. Was this more of her taking advantage of obstacles like in climbing and skateboarding? She easily made it up the height of three meters. Soon a yellow and black rope, which she must tied on somewhere, dangled down. The hut was located alongside the fence, so they could jump to the other side from the roof.

In theory anyway?

“O-Onee-chan, you grab Yahirodono-san’s hand and pull her up… I’ll push up on her butt from down here.”

“No fair, Yuhi! I want your job!!”

The online shrine maiden’s face rapidly heated up, but she had no choice but to go along with it.

Tsumugi fought deadly Malign Spirits all the time. She was confident in her ability to move around in the horizontal direction, but she was a master of the Japanese-style shuffle. She wasn’t used to moving much in the vertical direction.

Really, how was she supposed to climb straight up with only a thin rope!?

“Teamwork, Yahirodono-san, teamwork. Mgh.”

“Is it just me or are you two trying to humiliate me?”

Eventually, all three of them dropped down on the other side of the fence.

The atmosphere had changed. Growing heavy.

“Um…we’re pretty far in, aren’t we?” whispered the straitlaced sister. She may have been anxious.

Tsumugi looked around and let Yuhi handle yet another fence up ahead. The chain-link door had a lock, but the straitlaced sister picked up a permanent marker someone had dropped nearby and, stuck it through the chain link, and pushed on the knob on the other side of the door.

Through there, they found large trucks and windowless work vans.

“Th-this is the Vanishing Canal. We know there’s something going on here. Let’s take a look around. The missing factory workers might still be ali-”

Rainy stopped mid-sentence.

Because she heard a muddy ''splash''.

It was too viscous and heavy to be a wave.

Wooden pallets for forklifts were stacked up near a large truck and they all chose to hide behind them. The sisters stood up on their toes to peer over the top, but the online shrine maiden had to peek out from the side. She couldn’t stretch high enough to see over the refrigerator-sized stack.

Something was there.

No, someone. Not a Malign Spirit.

“(People?)”

Some men had their backs to the girls. They were all large, but they didn’t look like a parking lot supervisor or cleaner. Maybe it was sweat, but the backs of their white dress shirts were wet enough for the Japanese-style tattoos below to show through. And the muscular men had rolled something heavy from the back of a truck before lowering it to the ground and dropping it into the 5m-wide canal. Hence the ''splash''. It was a metal drum. Since it didn’t float back up, it must have been filled with heavy concrete or plastic.

The gyaru sister nearly cried out, but the straitlaced sister reached from behind and covered her mouth with a hand.

“What…is that?”

But Yuhi still asked a trembling question. Her tone suggested she already had a very good guess and was desperately hoping to be told she was wrong.

Were these men simply dumping a metal drum?

Of course not.

“I thought this was a haunted location where a Malign Spirit’s Groan keeps phones from working. I thought it was a ghost making people disappear.”

“There are other explanations.”

People walking by the Vanishing Canal kept going missing.

Delivery drones frequently crashed in the area.

The online shrine maiden’s trifold phone had unnaturally lost its signal here, but…

“This was my mistake. I should have examined it more carefully. A Malign Spirit’s Groan isn’t the only way to keep a phone from receiving a signal. You can find jammers for use in conference rooms in the office section of any electronics store, or someone could physically break the antenna for the closest tower.”

The security cameras on the elevated railway’s bridge piers had been destroyed too.

Physically, not by the Groan.

Also, the adjustable bridge piers were still functioning since the bridge above hadn’t collapsed. The adjustments were being made.

“Wait a second, Mugikko. Are you saying…?”

“Haunted locations with unpleasant rumors might look like abandoned ruins at first glance, but it’s not uncommon for them to be private property. Or to have been confiscated to pay off an outstanding debt.”

And the Vanishing Canal was a parking lot.

As creepy as it was, someone likely did own it.

“Businesses tend to fail in deserted areas. And property taken by criminal groups will be patrolled and guarded by members of the group. Sometimes people will jump the fence or break the lock on the door as a test of courage and get into trouble for it.”

“Criminal groups…hold on, shrine maiden. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You must be joking. You don’t mean…?”

“That is exactly what I mean.”

Tsumugi was sweating now.

She wanted to call the detective right away. No, she was willing to skip that step and call the police. But her phone wasn’t working. To an unnatural extent.

There was something here the criminal group wanted very much to keep hidden.

Like that metal drum.

It had looked just the right size to fit a human if their limbs were folded up.

“The people passing by here late at night must have seen something. Something worth intentionally jamming communications to prevent it from being reported or streamed. So once those people were noticed and caught, they were eliminated using the same cover-up infrastructure.”

No, it didn’t even matter if the victims had actually seen anything.

Maybe they had simply been looking at their phone as they walked by. Even if the passerby hadn’t noticed what was happening, the criminals might suspect they had snapped an incriminating photo. And they might launch a preemptive attack before the passerby left the jamming area and their photo could be backed up to the cloud or posted online.

Daytime wasn’t necessarily safe either, but maybe the First Icemakers employees kept vanishing on the way home at night because their phone’s backlight lit up their face in the darkness.

The true identity of the Vanishing Canal was obvious now.

The Otsugo Water Level Control Canal was a gap between two neighboring megafloats. And New Sea City floated atop the ocean more than 500 kilometers south of Tokyo.

This wasn’t an ordinary seawater canal. It might look like a small river, but it had a true depth of thousands of meters.

New Sea City was home to all sorts of leisure, including cutting-edge drone shows and amphibious aquamobiles, but this was why diving was generally forbidden.

What would happen if a metal drum packed full of heavy concrete or plastic were dumped into the sea like this?

It would never surface again. No one would ever find it.

Moving now could give away their presence. Ducking behind cover, the online shrine maiden muttered bitterly.



“This is a yakuza body dumping site.”