Editing Sorcery Hacker:Volume3 Phase02 (section)

===Part 6===

They returned to find Teleria’s cooking was just reaching its climax.

Their timing had been impeccable.

It was already dark out and there were stars in the sky. The mountain nights were frigid, so Ayato let the warmth of the heated mobile home soak into his heart.

However…

“Ah!”

He heard a shout of surprise from the bathroom.

He looked over to see Mamilis running out with only a towel wrapped around her wet brown skin.

“C-C-C-Coach! Emergency, emergency!!”

“What’s this, Miss Mamilis? I wasn’t expecting a surprise like this until my birthday.”

“You aren’t getting any indecent surprises on your birthday either!!” Henrietta covered his eyes and then turned to the dark elf. “So what is this emergency!?”

The far too defenseless grandma’s girl shivered while holding her body. She was tall, so her brown legs were very noticeable sticking out from the bottom of the towel.

“Th-there’s no hot water when I turned the red faucet.”

“Oh, that. We’re only borrowing an empty place, so the maintenance probably isn’t up to date. I bet I can fix it if I mess with it a bit.”

“But I’m cold now.”

“Here, Miss Mamilis. This is called a washtub. The kitchen appears to have hot water, so you can fill it up there.”

Shortly thereafter, Teleria yelled “why aren’t you wearing any clothes!?” from the kitchen. Towel-clad Mamilis ended up placing the filled washtub in a corner of the kitchen, sitting down inside, and holding her knees between her arms. The warm water must have been nice because her long ears twitched happily. After soaking up the water, her towel clung to her skin.

“(Hm, I feel like the winning move for me is to claim I can’t fix the bath after all.)”

“I will be keeping my eye on you while you work on that, dangerous individual.”

He ended up working in the bath with a bayonet-equipped sorcery gun jammed against his back. He felt like a prisoner forced to defuse a landmine and suspected this violated some kind of war treaty.

“Miss Henrietta, what do you think Miss Mamilis washes first in the bath? Her hands and feet, her chest, or maybe her long ears?”

“Does imagining such things help you fix the bath in any way, shape, or form?”

Meanwhile, an argument broke out in the kitchen. While warming herself in the washbasin, Mamilis had noticed the night’s menu.

“But I said I wanted to do a cookout.”

“We can’t do that, Mamilis. We went to all this trouble to hide ourselves, so we can’t risk spending a long time outside with a fire lit, right? And a fire would stand out even more at night. Now it’s time to eat, so come to the table.”

“Hmph!”

The silver-haired grandma’s girl puffed out her cheeks in only a towel, but she still ate the white stew served to her at the table without too much complaint. However she felt about it, she could not fight the allure of food. In a way, that proved Teleria’s skill more than anything. The fluffy blonde cook removed her apron and started eating as well.

“Ayato, I gathered all of the sorcery devices you had taking measurements. You can extract their data in the next room.”

“I appreciate it.” The black-haired boy absentmindedly thanked her. “Now, Miss Mamilis. You might be interested to know the mobile home’s stove is simple enough that it can be removed and operated independently. That means we could place it in the center of the table and cook skewers on it. You could even place your own skewers on the makeshift grill yourself.”

“What!? Now you tell me, Coach!!”

“That would fill the room with smoke and leave a smell!” protested sensible Teleria, but the dark elf’s enthusiasm was more powerful. They were only borrowing this mobile home after falsifying the records and it was one of hundreds of thousands at the bottom of the towers. It might not be very nice, but since they planned to move hideouts fairly frequently, they didn’t have to worry much about cleaning up.

The brown girl hopped excitedly around so much that her wet towel nearly came loose, so Ayato made sure to give one word of warning.

“Just make sure to open a window for ventilation.”

“I will. I love you, Coach!!”

What a small price this was to pay for the towel girl’s love.

The fridge might not have the right meat and veggies for grilling, but they could always order more with the butterfly delivery service. The service used your location data, but the user information was easily altered for a Sorcery Hacker.

Autonomous sorcery devices actually borrowed a portion of their managers’ subconscious mind, but as long as those managers never noticed anything amiss, they would never consciously notice what Ayato’s group was doing.

Ayato put in an order and a sorcery device carrying a cooler larger than a birthday cake soon flew in through the small window.

“Heh heh. It is nice being able to order butterflies around with the tap of a finger. I would love to see haughty Micha Angelos’s face right about now.”

“Coach, do you like subservient maids?”

His joke received an honest response from the dark elf. The wicked Sorcery Hacker had to avert his gaze from the extreme grandma’s girl.

“Is that why you like Teleria so much?”

“I am not a hired maid! Geez, I show you a moment’s kindness and you all start shoving the housework onto me.”

“But if we do help, you complain that we didn’t move the kitchen equipment back to its best position or that we didn’t completely dry the dishes. The kitchen is your territory.”

Ayato listened to Mamilis and Teleria’s argument while he poured his white stew into a large mug. He sipped on that while moving to the sorcery devices in the next room. Teleria’s cooking was as tasty as ever. It was an engineer’s habit to find a way to convert any food into something you could consume while working.

He stabbed his Linkage Plug sword into each device and flicked the Crystal Tarot floating in the air.

There was a lot of data and the measurement results were all incomprehensible strings of numbers, but a completely different image would form if he threw it all in a single box and reorganized it.

He transferred the data to the room’s spherical Media Summoner and it displayed an accurate miniature model of the Academy Towers.

Henrietta sat up straight and made sure not to make too much noise when her utensils hit the bottom of the dish, so she could not stand the rude way Ayato left the table and wandered from room to room with mug in hand.

“Are those the measurement results?” she asked.

“Yes, and I have noticed a few discrepancies with the officially released data. There are reversals and slippery areas that would make you fall if you tried to climb the exterior walls based on the official data.”

However, comparing the two maps was not enough to fully identify the Student Council’s secret base. They would not be as easily outdone as that (stolen) uniform fetishist.

“Have you found a route to the top of the gem tower?”

After Teleria chopped up the meat, corn, paprika, and king trumpet mushrooms brought by the butterfly delivery service, she heated the vegetables in the microwave. Meat and vegetables cooked differently, so grilling them both on the same skewer would end up with either the meat burnt or the veggies underdone. That was why you needed to partially cook or boil them beforehand. She was as thoughtful a wife as ever. Ayato wanted to marry her as soon as possible.

Mamilis licked her lips, selected the choicest items, and placed them on her skewer. All while humming.

“You can take care of all that complicated stuff, Coach. There, my big meat special is ready for cooking!”

“I am glad you trust me, but do not leave everything with me. That road leads to dependance. This is part of your training as a Forward, Miss Mamilis, so brainstorm with me. And I know meat is delicious, but make sure to include at least three vegetables on each skewer. Think of it as a tax to Teleria for letting you do this.”

“Then I’ll go with the squash. Oh, and some carrot!”

Teleria smiled as the dark elf excitedly customized her skewer. The initial choice of white stew had probably been a way of getting her to eat her vegetables without complaint.

“I have contacted the Rocket Club. Their help expands our options considerably. Because it gives us a large rocket capable of escaping gravity.”

“Like a ballistic missile?”

Mamilis simply looked confused by the word “rocket”, but Henrietta immediately converted it into another term. She was a Striker who defended the sky city after all. That may have been one of the possible attack methods they had discussed.

In order to prepare her stomach before moving from the white stew to the skewers, Henrietta reached her fork toward a warm vegetable salad she had prepared without dressing.

“Do the Academy Towers ever stop being dangerous? But in that case, why even bother learning the structure of the towers? We can just fly on up to the roof. That might be past the Grade S zone, but we only need to descend one floor from the roof to reach the Student Council Office. I would be more worried about how we leave then how we reach our destination.”

“But would it actually work out quite so well? We can’t just build a big launchpad on the surface when there isn’t a cultural festival going on. The Council would notice before we finished.”

“Are you saying it would go unnoticed during whatever a cultural festival is?”

“It is one of the continent’s most bizarre festivals where pretty much anything goes. If a rocket is going to surprise you, you aren’t ready for the Academy Towers.” Ayato tapped the clear orb with his finger. “Also, the real problem is the walkways.”

“Why?”

“Miss Henrietta, these looked unusual to you from a city defense perspective, didn’t they? They connect the towers at inconsistent heights, creating something like a ridiculous ghost leg lottery. Even though following a set rule, like every tower is connected by a horizontal walkway at Floor 25, would make it easier for security to monitor the flow of people. If the walkways were all at even 10-floor intervals, their security could even be handled by the security colosseums, cutting back on costs.”

“Yes, that would create a vertical version of several main roads with intersecting side roads. The more uniform the urban layout, the easier it is to patrol and set up checkpoints. Are you saying the Academy Towers have a logical reason to not do that?”

“It is very intentional. That and the inconsistent height of the towers disturb the unseen air currents covering the entire area,” explained Ayato. “The winds can be hard to predict around any tall structure such as a lighthouse or a belltower, but these have the walkways artificially added on. Launch an aircraft vertically without accounting for that and it will veer off course or lose control altogether. You could think of it as an ''invisible labyrinth'' set up outside the towers. Board a rocket without solving that and we will likely either crash into a tower or the mountains.”

“Hm. So searching out a rocket or another means of flight would be a waste of effort. And I was thinking we could search out one of the miniature wyverns that escaped into the mountains and try taming it for our use. Are you saying we need even more information to solve this wind labyrinth if we want to take an aerial shortcut to the top of the tower? Since there are flying sorcery devices carrying those delivery boxes, there must be some way through.”

“…”

Ayato held a hand to his slender chin instead of answering.

He only spoke again after a few moments of thought.

“This is much like a crossword puzzle. We do not need all the answers at once. We can start with what we do know. First, climbing the exterior walls is not possible. There are traps not shown on the official diagram and a person or a sorcery device could be lying in wait to send us plummeting to our doom. We know there are reversals and slippery areas to affect our grip, but there could be ways of removing ropes or ladders. Using tools would not be enough to solve that.”

Ayato raised one and then two fingers.

“I also do not recommend trying to fool the security system so we can use the stairs or elevator inside the tower. There are a total of 10 security colosseums at the boundaries between the grade zones on the way up. Each of those contains a large sorcery device gatekeeper, each of which would make a challenging foe. Our exhaustion and the risk of injury goes up each time, so we would be out of stamina by the time we reached the top and probability would eventually get the better of us. It isn’t even a matter of skill or strength. Assume that climbing the tower that way would be more difficult than winning ten rounds of rock-paper-scissors in a row. Without draws.”

“Munch, munch. So inside and outside are both out? Then aren’t we out of ways to get up there, Coach?”

“You yourself rejected the idea of using a flying machine, dangerous individual. Don’t tell me you hope to force your way through those problems with this rocket you have prepared for us. That sounds awfully risky to me.”

They were mercilessly shooting down every idea, but Ayato smiled.

Having someone else around to provide external stimuli really did help inspire him. The hint had been there in front of him all along.

He looked to the food on the table that Teleria had made and Mamilis and Henrietta were happily eating.

“By the way, Miss Henrietta. Didn’t you say before that the standard way to attack an elevated stronghold is to cut off their supply line and starve them out?”

“And you said it wasn’t possible.”

“But who is supporting this pleasant lifestyle and how? Things get nicer the higher you go, but I seriously doubt the privileged members of the Council are heading out every morning to draw water from the well and lugging it up to the top floor. Even the elevators only go up ten floors each. Do you think those sparkling elites pass through each of the security colosseums while carrying a backbreaking load?”

He had his plan mostly formulated now.

He let out a slow breath and organized his thoughts. He lined up several ideas in parallel, compared the cards in his hand, and tested to see where the correct answer was hidden.

He had a clear image now.

But he wanted 100% certainty since he was going to be involving Teleria and the others. Those girls weren’t joining him because of money or a contract – they were doing it out of trust. That was an invaluable treasure to a filthy Sorcery Hacker who could never rid himself of his suspicions no matter how many times he double checked something. 

“I just need one more piece,” muttered the black-haired boy.