Editing Sorcery Hacker:Volume1 Phase2 (section)

===Part 7===

Knowing a name made all the difference.

You could not stop people from talking, so simply asking around could produce results even without needing tricks like specialized Sorcery Hacking.

Ayato pointed his thumb at Teleria who was standing next to him, ignorant of what was to come.

“This girl collects handcuffs for her ‘hobby’, but she lost the key to one set.”

“Bfff!? Wait!”

“We’ve heard there’s a craftsman named Alonso who can make another key, so do you know where we can find him?”

After those rough-looking young men guffawed and gave them the information they wanted, the blonde girl protested with her face bright red.

“(Couldn’t you have come up with a better story!?)”

“(Miss Teleria, we are not the knights. If you cannot flaunt your authority to get people to talk, you have to come up with an appropriate question that puts you on their level. And honestly, I feel like I was doing you a favor by not saying it was a key for your chastity belt.)”

“(Nhh! Nhhhh!!)”

She blushed even brighter and squeezed her tearful eyes shut while nearly scratching at his face with her nails, so he made sure to step back and ensure his safety.

The Dark Elf with long silver hair gave them a cold look.

“Coach, can’t the flirting wait until after we solve this problem?”

“You have a point.”

“It can wait forever!!”

At any rate, after gathering some information, they finally discovered where Alonso Bercouli’s hideout was located. It was in the lower levels of Wind Castle Town Silphine. After riding the artificial air currents to the ground, they found a stagnant darkness. The sunlight of the starry sky did not reach here. There was not actually a ceiling overhead, but there were so many high-rise buildings that one or another of them was always casting a shadow on the ground. The entire area was gloomy and did not seem like a place anyone would want to live. They had gone to the effort of creating a livable environment at an altitude of 30,000 esoule<ref>Approximately 36,000 meters.</ref>, so it almost felt like it took more effort to let things deteriorate this badly.

“Silphine AX, the bottom level trunk area.”

“It feels like it ended up a storage space because no one wanted to go here.”

“And then underground craftsmen started hiding out here, so it may have reverted to its roots.”

A young Curse Master in nothing but a cape and a tall Assassin, whose assault rifle was equipped with a trident bayonet, were walking around like pals, so it felt like they had stumbled on a post-apocalyptic world. …That combination sounded like a honey trap where the people who came looking for a curse after seeing the advertisement would be executed “for the good of the world”. The woman in an exotic dress featuring some large slits may have been a bloodthirsty Martial Artist searching for powerful foes.

Ayato’s group had struggled to find even that one cheap inn, so taking away living space to create storage space seemed like the pinnacle of luxury. If they had not been able to find a room, they might have ended up here.

It did not take them long to find the place they were looking for.

He had probably intended to hide it at first, but that had eventually become impossible. Scrap metal and wreckage had flooded out of the entrance on the surface. He must have been gathering sorcery tools like refrigerators and ovens so he could retrieve their gemboards.

“Miss Teleria, Miss Mamilis. Prepare your sorcery guns.”

“Eh? Okay.”

“Coach, won’t they go on alert if we step in with guns drawn?”

“You’re being naïve. Underground workers like this don’t go on alert because something happens; they’re on alert year-round.”

(A vacuum crystal, a mist mana streetlight, an auto-sorting trashcan, an air pollution sensor, a vending machine, a pay phone, and a public mousetrap. Yeah, that’s a good starting point.)

“W-wait, Ayato. Ayato! You don’t have a gun, so you shouldn’t move out ahead of us.”

“Don’t be silly. If anyone’s going to face that magic, it’s going to be me. I’m not going to demand a ladies first policy for that.”

Of course, if this was someone dangerous enough to shoot them without any warning and the two girls were taken out first, Ayato would be helpless to fight back, so his real reason for insisting on protecting them was to ensure they still had someone with a weapon.

He whispered something as if flipping a switch.

“Miss Teleria, Miss Mamilis. I have no one else I can rely on. …You are my only hope.”

“Ah, f-fine…”

“?”

Teleria blushed for some reason, but Mamilis just looked puzzled. That statement may not have been guaranteed to work on everyone.

“(Ahhh. How can he say things like that so easily? I swear he has talent as a tamer.)”

“(I’m pretty sure he has precisely none of that.)”

While the two girls whispered to each other, Ayato stabbed his Linkage Plug sword blades into different nearby sorcery devices to create the antennae needed to expand his processing space. He viewed the floating Linkage Monitor crystal tarot card displays to see he had reached Level 15. That was enough freedom to give his Sorcery Hacking actual lethality.

But the hard part was still to come.

“Mr. Alonso Bercouli? I have something to discuss with you.”

Instead of the entrance half-buried in junk, he used the metal shutter. It was sitting half open, so he slowly approached while calling out to the person inside.

The response was dramatic.

The fearsome lightning flash of sorcery gunfire blasted through the shutter while melting it.

This was a surprise attack.

But this also must have been unexpected for the man on the other side. That lightning would not normally have broken through the shutter. Ayato had immediately stabbed his sword into the wall of the building to take control of the shutter and lower it as a makeshift barrier.

This was the same as with the dragon breath from before.

The barrier in between somewhat diverted the ballistic path so it just barely missed him.

(What was that? Lightning!? Was it a strengthened version of Tertiary High Voltage!?)

“Tch!”

A hoarse tongue click came from inside.

When the initial attack failed, the man immediately switched gears to escape. These were the actions of someone with survival skills. But it was not enough. Ayato had already hacked into the building’s wiring to control the shutter, so why had the man not assumed that would apply to the other exits as well?

This was nothing as gentle as the back door locking itself.

(That entrance is Level 7. I can manage that!)

After waiting for the man to throw open the automatic door, Ayato remotely shut it again, and forcibly at that. It was a lot like a spring-loaded trap. The tongue clicker tumbled right back inside like he had been tackled through the door.

“Bwah!?”

“Miss Teleria, Miss Mamilis.”

Ayato spoke coldly as he stepped into the junk-filled building where a man lay on the floor.

“Aim your guns.”

“O-okay, okay!! I’ll talk!!”

He had already let go of his sorcery gun, but the elderly man still put his hands in the air while on the floor.

Teleria belatedly raised both her suppressor-equipped full-auto handguns and groaned as she glanced through her dot sight to view the sorcery gun lying on the floor.

“Uheh, a single-shot grenade launcher?”

“No, it’s a magnum with that caliber.”

Grenade launchers had the special effect of self-amplifying the power of the designated magic, so they would explosively spread destruction from the point of impact.

But the lightning bolt launched by this old man had pierced through the metal shutter to directly attack them. There had been no explosive expansion in every direction. That meant it was likely a monstrous magnum with a barrel thick enough for Teleria’s arm to fit inside. It would use a massive disintegrating lead bullet and lots of mist mana to create the penetrative power to punch through most anything.

“You pulled this out and aimed at my head the instant we showed up, so I assume you’re prepared for what comes next.”

“What can I do to get you to leave here? Tell me! Or do I have to leave to satisfy you!?”

The elderly man was already shouting in desperation and Ayato saw the Dark Elf grimace in response. She was a grandma’s girl and she probably had an idealized view of the elderly, so seeing someone like Alonso who was old but not exactly dignified may have been a sad sight for her. Like watching a baby bird rot in the egg instead of hatching.

She had to look away, but the grandma’s girl’s troubles were not over yet.

“What…is this? Eek! C-Coach!!”

“Miss Mamilis, you do not have to look if it pains you.”

The machinery she saw sitting in the dark had been a shock. The foot-pedaled lathe used a monster fang shaped like a crescent moon and the still was lined with the stomach of what appeared to be a phoenix.

It was all very efficient, but none of it was the mainstream style.

Mamilis’s grandmother probably had not used this kind of equipment. These were the replacements used by someone who fell to this level and could not acquire top-of-the-line equipment.

Seeing the guts of “fellow” demons made the Dark Elf feel faint, so Teleria supported her. Ayato glanced over at that and decided to settle this as quickly as possible.

“We are searching for the owner of an anti-dragon rifle with an estimated caliber of 0.01 esoule<ref>Approximately 12.5 millimeters.</ref> or higher. It is a monster of a rifle with a focus on power and no thought given to recoil. Does that ring a bell?”

“…”

The old man’s eyes wandered in silence and Ayato glanced over to a corner of his garage. He saw a Media Summoner shaped like a boxy water tank that had some obvious modifications made to it.

“Should I tell Silver Anvil about this nice place you’ve found for yourself here? A guild isn’t going to be too happy with an underground craftsman ruining their reputation. It looks like you have a proxy filter set up on your mist mana connection terminal so your Media Summoner can’t be traced and you can work on shady jobs without worrying, but do you really think that’s going to fool the guild for long if they really start working to hunt you down?”

“If I tell you, ''she'' will be upset.”

“A group of human traffickers might have been killed by the handmade weapon you made from the ground up using a mana-conducting silver tube. Your client decided the best way to thank them for a job well done was to eliminate any possible trail leading back to them. Now, who do you think will be next? Who else could lead someone to them?”

“…”

“They seem to be fairly trigger happy. A lot more than you seem to believe. How faithful you are isn’t how this sniper decides what to do. If you want to survive this, I would recommend cooperating here.”

“Dammit,” cursed Alonso.

Then he shook his head.

“I really don’t know her name. She named herself more than once, but it was always a different name, so I doubt any of those are trustworthy.”

“Could you give us something to work with?”

“Critical Disaster. That’s the name of the anti-dragon rifle I made. I’ll give you the designs, so you can use those however you want.”

“Did the sniper get her ammo here too? With a fully handmade weapon that doesn’t conform to commercial standards, the cartridge caliber isn’t going to match.”

“Is that some kind of trick question? The ammo and cartridges all use mist mana. All you need is a packaging device to apply the impurity powder to the inside of the tube, inject the mist mana, and heat it to apply the film. A search on a Media Summoner is enough to learn all that.”

“She also completely ignores the recoil. When making precision shots with so much firepower, I doubt she’s just placing it on the back of one of those bugs and letting it do the shooting. She must be taking the recoil to the shoulder, so where is she getting the medicine or pain relievers to deal with that?”

“That’s outside my area of expertise.”

“Then we’re done with you. I think it’s time we went out into the public square and began loudly telling the knights that we discovered who owns Critical Disaster thanks to some info from Alonso Bercouli. Most people will have no idea what we mean, but the guilty owner herself will know. She’ll be here to kill you with the very sorcery gun you made for her. Our new plan is to lie in wait for her here.”

“Hey, how likely are you to succeed in that?”

“She outdid us last time, so it’s impossible to say what will happen this time.”

“Dammit!!” After loudly cursing, the elderly man breathed a heavy sigh. “I did once deliver a collection of brown bottles full of pain relief pills to her hideout. I can’t guarantee she’s still using the same place, but is that good enough? Now I have to start my life over yet again. I really do have to skip town now, so I hope you’re happy!!”