Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume5 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 6===

The Live Among the Threat Theory


“I’ll go this time. Now that Imi’s gotten the ball rolling, I’ll go with something really out there, just like she wanted.”

The next to take the mic was the gyaru-ish girl named Hashizaki Tayori.

“As I’m sure you all know after fighting the Threat yourselves, they tend to be pretty big. And they’re made of metal. The teachers would probably know more since they actually dismantled and looked inside that one called the Armored Warrior, but the point is their corpses don’t rot.”

She did not receive any kind of response.

She didn’t know what the teachers had seen, but it may not have been something they were keen to remember.

“They kill humans on sight. We still don’t know why that is, but we know it’s true. But they seem to have some level of camaraderie among themselves. Well, there are some ants that will resort to cannibalism when they’re mad, so we can’t fully trust in that.”

“You aren’t suggesting what I think you are, are you?” asked Yamada Deiri, but Tayori ignored him.

“We’ve defeated quite a lot of Threats at this point and we would have recovered their corpses too. So we just have to wear those. At the very least, that should reduce the frequency of attacks a lot more than as undisguised humans.”

They would hand Earth over to the Threat.

On the condition that the Threat did not attack them.

Kiyosawa Hadome led the rebuttal.

“There aren’t enough of them for everyone. And like I said, I can’t accept a plan that abandons the other 5.5 billion to die.”

“That’s true, Sensei, but a lot of the Threats are big. What if we look at it more like public transportation, such as buses or trains, instead of anything personal? That introduces the question of where us humans would live most of the time, but as long as we had a largescale hideout, it would work.”

The idea was based on a lot of assumptions, but it did make sense. And even if they couldn’t agree to it immediately, some part of it could be combined with aspects of the other theories proposed later on.

So far, anyway.

“B-but in that case.”

“What is it, Nekoumi-kun?”

“We have no real guarantee that would fool the real Threat. We might look a lot like the Threat with the defeated shells around us, ''but that’s only from our point of view'', isn’t it? I’ve heard that a flower that has evolved to have bugs carry its pollen will show completely different patterns under a blacklight. To know how good a disguise this would be, we would need to know exactly how the Threat views the world.”

“How is that a problem if we’re using real Threat parts?”

“They might change after death like a flower’s colors fading when it withers after being cut from its roots. When humans die, we rot and become something else entirely. Really, it would be unusual if they didn’t change.”

This was not limited to the ordinary five senses.

For one, the Threat wasn’t human. They might have further sensory organs. They could have a sensor that detected radiation or a sixth sense that detected neutrinos. If they had X-rays or terahertz radiation that let them see through objects, they might be able to see right into the giant shells being worn as disguises.

“The Threat strengthens themselves by tearing away the usable parts from the unmoving corpses we create. We saw that with the decoys and the real ones inside Second Grimnoah. Th-that means they have some way of distinguishing between a living Threat and a dead Threat. Wearing a stolen shell sounds really dangerous to me because they’re sure to notice all sorts of things we wouldn’t. From their viewpoint, wouldn’t we look like a monster walking around wearing human skin?”

To avoid that, they would need to know how to distinguish between a living Threat and a dead one. And from a Threat perspective, not a human one.

“Not to mention that the Threat might not be more accepting as we approach the right answer. I mean, we humans think stylized anime figures are cute, but we find hyper realistic mannequins to be creepy.”

“I don’t like you applying that first part to all of humanity, but is that really how it works?”

“I can sleep like a baby and have the sweetest of dreams when I have my favorite body pillow with me, but I would be terrified if I found a strange mannequin in bed with me. I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep.”

“???”

With 300 million Threats pouring down all across the planet, they wouldn’t have time to figure out how the Threat worked.

Especially not to a point that they would know what the Threat liked and what the Threat found to be creepy.

“At the Port of Kobe, we saw the Threat flashing lights on their bodies in a regular pattern, right? What if we set up LED lights to flash in that same way?”

“A-again, we only know what that looked like from a human perspective. What if they actually communicate using chemical scents synthesized using those lights? Our scentless Christmas lights would stand out and get us attacked even faster.”