Editing Cute Kunoichis:Volume1 Chapter3 (section)

===5: Smokey Maze===

Once all the necessary preparations were complete, Sugiyado Souha was finally invited into the tanker truck that acted as the investigation team’s headquarters.

(Now, then. It’s 3PM – time for the banks to close.)

He checked the wall clock while losing himself in thought.

He had already gotten himself involved and taken a sympathetic view of the twins, but he could not forget that Kuhou Ouka, Hanasawa Bara, Nantou Hoozuki, and Shizukuma Asagao had no future if the twins captured them.

He had to prevent the investigation from making any progress while still allowing Guren and Suiren to save face.

That would be the best plan. Perhaps it was best described as allowing them to fail gracefully.

He toyed with the large scarf over his mouth as he thought.

(Ouka’s group is headed to the stock exchange’s server room now that they have a copy of Top Idol Shitou Kyouka’s biometric data. They’re after the classified information secretly stored there because the shogunate is afraid to keep it too close at hand. A normal bank wouldn’t have the capacity to store that. Ouka’s group thinks the secrets of my final mission are hidden there.)

That much was correct.

But he could not allow Shirazaya Guren and Suiren to discover that answer.

How could he create a convincing false answer on top of that?

(Ouka’s group made an appearance at the airport and Shitou Kyouka has gone missing. That much is already known.)

Since the entire event had been fixed and the top idol was planned to win from the beginning, she would not have left early. That would normally be seen as a slight to the sponsors who had paid a lot of money setting it all up.

Also, the twins knew about the poison Sugiyado had been given there. At this point, trying to claim he had nicked himself with his own poisoned blade would only arouse suspicions against him.

If anyone could not put two and two together here, he would honestly be impressed.

(I suppose the best option is to send them in the wrong direction when deciding why my students abducted the idol.)

But only if saving his students was his only goal. If he set up a spectacular failure for Guren and Suiren, who could say what those cruel samurai would do to them.

He had to send them in the right direction but have Ouka’s group stay just one step ahead of them. Also, the reason for the delay had to come from the armored samurai, not the kunoichis. And the failure had to so obviously be theirs that they could not possibly shift the blame.

That was no easy task, but that was why it would win him a reward as great as the survival of both sides. It was worth doing.

(Those girls clearly wanted to abduct Shitou Kyouka badly enough to use the modular nuclear reactor as bait. What reason can I invent other than the real one? Or to put it another way, what answer would I find a surprise yet still accept as legitimate? Can I up the scale to a level above a nuclear reactor?)

He breathed in and then out.

And he began speaking.

“There may not have been a real reason for it.”

“What?”

Both twins wrinkled their brows.

He himself was unsure if this would hold water, but right now he had to gather speed, like he was pushing a minecart down a sloped track.

“Shitou Kyouka is known even outside the country, right?”

“Y-yes. The Shogunate must think a talented entertainer will help give them a good name because they have taken the unusual step of releasing her songs overseas. Similar to how we can see Hollywood movies and Western action movies here.”

“That makes her the perfect target that even foreigners would recognize.”

He chose his words carefully.

He used the lag in conversation as a “gap” to draw the twins’ attention.

“I don’t know what led those girls to strike back at the Shogunate, but I doubt even Elite Ninjas could last long against an entire nation while on their own. They need someone new to back them.”

“You mean…?”

“This was a demonstration. By abducting a world-famous idol, they’re advertising that their skills can help anyone hoping to attack this isolationist nation. For that matter, the original modular nuclear reactor may have been intended as a souvenir. Those people circling the archipelago’s skies in their giant flying aircraft carriers must be dying to get their hands on some new ‘made in Japan’ merchandise.”

“You’re saying they did all this not for some physical cash or diamonds, but to create intangible connections!?”

“I doubt that’s their only objective, of course. You two should know all too well how much a powerful backer increases your options. They could flee overseas and enjoy themselves there, or they could use all the new equipment and funding to continue sneaking around Japan and cause trouble here.”

“…”

The psychological scars of their past experiences helped make it sound all the more real to them. Anyone other than those twins might not have fallen silent like this.

He did not let it show on his face, but he apologized to them in his heart.

“So once they have made contact with the knights and musketeers waiting out at sea and in the skies, they hope to throw a big party. This is going to be much bigger than what four individuals can do. They will invite those bored foreign berserkers into the country to start a legit war. Guren, Suiren, give me a list of the important targets those heavily-equipped knights will likely attack first. If any of those are facilities or people that Ouka’s group would want to see attacked, then that’s probably what they’re after.”

He upped the scale again.

The modular nuclear reactor was a nuke, but it was still small. Even if it was made to explode, its destruction and contamination would only cover a diameter of a few hundred meters. The word “nuke” held a lot of power, but when looking at the actual number of people who would be harmed, there were other, crueler ways it could be used.

Now he only had to wait for the enormity of the threat to sink in.

In his short-sleeved dress shirt and loose pants, he peered into the twin kunoichis’ eyes. It took more than a deluge of words to convince someone of something. At times, silence could be a powerful weapon.

“Understood. We will take that into consideration for now.”

“Of course you will. The more options you’re looking out for, the better.” He shrugged while hiding his joy inside. “Then could it be possible they’re after money? Like having the idol agency pay a ransom or something? Or do they have some direct connection to Shitou Kyouka? This might actually be a cheap grudge or jealousy. If not, maybe we should consider the possibility of it being an attack on the airport or idol festival management.”

He rattled off possibilities in quick succession to keep their minds off of any more attractive possibilities than the wrong one he had given already. If Shirazaya Guren and Suiren came up with a list of better theories and even arrived at the stock exchange answer he had to steer them away from, it would sound a lot cheaper if it bordered on the variety of answers he had already given. The weight of words had more of an effect than people thought. It was hard to rid yourself of an impression you had already arrived at.

“I still don’t see why it had to be Shitou Kyouka, but I suppose we should follow the foreign backing theory for now,” said Guren.

“If we narrow our focus down to the front line in New Yokohama Domain, the options look like this.”

While toying with her right earlobe, Suiren added several pins to the map on her laptop.

The water services, the power line in from the mainland, the communication cables, the New Yokohama Aeromonolith broadcast tower, New Yokohama Station, the various Shogunate facilities, and the people given VIP treatment – from samurai to wealthy merchants. The aforementioned stock exchange was even on the list. Seeing it there was enough for his heart to leap in his chest.

But he could not back out now. If he was going to work with the twins to stop his students, he had to guide the Shogunate almost all the way to the goal.

“Here.”

He boldly pointed at one option himself.

It was a location across the street from the stock exchange he could not have them discovering. It was a mere 20m away.

“New Yokohama Mint. Now that new ATMs can detect the Ultra 8 counterfeit money created by the Kingdom, they lost one inroad to gathering foreign capital. But if they gained one of the real printing presses, they could turn all that around. The profit from that would far surpass a black market deal over a mini-nuke. Hand that over when they’re in their time of need and Ouka’s group is sure to earn their praise.”

“But those supposedly have three different tracking devices installed. Even if they gained the plans to the mint and located one, could they really remove all three of them on the spot?”

“Good point. That just means they need some way of instantly destroying all of the sensors without dismantling the device. What the Kingdom wants is the hardware made by expert craftsmen, not the programming inside.”

“?”

The twins both tilted their heads, making their hair extensions sway, so Sugiyado winked and told his biggest lie yet.

“The modular nuclear reactor. Powerful radiation should be able to destroy the circuitry used for the transmitters. If you’re after the components rather than the circuitry, you can wipe out the tracking devices with a burst of radiation. No light or noise necessary.”