“Hey, how about you start taking this seriously? You’ve got a Concept Core, don’t you?”
“You’re gonna regret asking that.”
The maid doll expressionlessly reached for her back, pulled something out, and swung it below the light of the setting sun.
“Gram. I’ll be using 1st-Gear’s power of writing.”
The maid doll held a magic marker in her left hand and raised Gram in her right.
Izumo jumped down from the platform and continued running alongside the train.
As he made his way along the concrete elevated structure, he thought about the traits of his and his opponent’s weapons.
…Gram can give form to writing.
V-Sw could regenerate and evolve the things it destroyed.
The concept space was set up so both powers could be used to their fullest. Izumo would be able to use Gram’s power to an extent and the maid doll would be able to use his power to an extent.
And on the train’s roof, the maid doll raised Gram and wrote something on it with her marker.
“ ‘Form’? What is that supposed to do!?”
When she heard that question, the maid doll’s expression changed in the wind.
She smiled.
She then adjusted her grip on Gram.
It almost looked like she was going to stab it into her own gut, but she instead let it pass below her arm and toward the western sky.
“Do you know what the western region between Shinjuku and Ikebukuro is called?”
Izumo thought and frowned.
“Hyakunin-cho…”
“Exactly right, boy!!”
The maid doll stabbed Gram into the air.
A sword should not have been able to stab into empty space, but Gram did just that with a roar.
A moment later, white cracks ran through Hyakunin-cho’s sky.
The surveillance plane flying through the concept space attempted to move away from the oddity.
Inside, some automatons were monitoring the situation below.
“If we move away, the accuracy of our scans will drop!!”
“Please try to understand. This is a battle between weapons that support entire worlds. Get too close and we would be destroyed in an instant.”
The pilot automaton gave control instructions by mouth while conversing via shared memory.
However, her thoughts received no response from the surveillance automatons.
She tilted her head when only silent static arrived.
“What is the matter?”
“Oh, um, well… I think the surveillance equipment may be malfunctioning. From the moment Gram stabbed into the air, the sensors’ meters have maxed out. …But that would mean…”
Some time passed and the pilot determined it to be hesitation.
After hearing a breath, the automaton looking at the surveillance equipment gave a panicked shout.
“Here it comes! Gram is activating!!”
Her voice grew to a scream.
“The world is going crazy!!”
“Come forth, One Hundred Dolls!!”
As soon as the maid doll swung Gram as if pulling it from the air, Izumo looked to the buildings and roads spread out below the elevated train track.
“————”
They all stood up.
Dolls made from the city itself tore themselves from the earth.
A din of destruction filled the air as a literal one hundred of them stood.
Those city dolls had no faces and their arms and legs had no definite form, but they were all about twenty meters tall.
However, the maid doll did not even watch them stand. Instead, she wrote “Bullet Train” on Gram.
“How about you deal with them!?”
As soon as she stabbed the blade into the still-smoking train, its speed increased dramatically.
Its motor sounded loudly, its horn blared, and the bullet train shot forward.
It was now moving much too quickly for Izumo to keep up, even with his charms.
“Dammit!”
As he cursed, he saw the last train car pass by to his side.
The train vanished up ahead and a single sight remained for him.
“…!!”
The hundred giant dolls raised telephone poles and signs as they charged in at him.
The maid doll lowered down atop the accelerating train.
The wind was so strong that even standing up would blow her away.
“How fast have bullet trains gotten these days?”
As she muttered to herself, the maid doll heard something.
The hundred dolls made from the city had crashed into the elevated train track.
That cut off the power lines and the acceleration came to an end, but the train was still moving plenty fast and it was already on the straight line to the Ikebukuro region.
The maid doll saw what she needed to win in Ikebukuro.
She then checked behind her.
The hundred dolls were a material weapon created by combining V-Sw’s destruction and rebirth with Gram’s writing concept.
She saw those dolls forcefully destroying the elevated track and continuing to run.
A few of them had destroyed themselves by running into the track, but over ninety of them still remained.
The sounds of shattering glass, smashed asphalt, and breaking building materials rang loud.
They came together as a tremor of rushing footsteps and created an advancing force of all-around destruction.
It was a great din.
But the maid doll noticed that the hundred dolls had stopped their advance.
…That means the kid must still be alive.
She made a visual search and indeed found her enemy.
He was no longer on the elevated track. Instead, Izumo flew through the air in his white armored uniform.
He had likely activated a few dozen charms at once to perform a great leap that smashed the elevated track below his feet.
An explosion of water vapor surrounded him in the sky to the east of the track.
The stress this great leap put on his body was apparent even from the outside.
Blood seeped from the base of his clenched teeth and blood spurted from the muscles in his arms that he had torn from overexertion.
All that effort had earned him a brief reprieve at an elevation of one hundred meters.
But the hundred dolls were already running toward his landing spot. They raised their hands toward the sky to seize Izumo’s life and raced through the streets even as their movements destroyed their own bodies.
The maid doll realized it was all over.
Izumo would definitely need to catch his breath once he landed. No matter how tough his body was, a one hundred meter leap would have to do some kind of damage.
The dolls would then rush in and perform countless several hundred ton body presses, effectively ending it.
Just as she decided this was as far as it would go, a voice reached her from the sky.
“Hold on there! This isn’t even close to over!”
She looked up toward Izumo’s voice and saw his white sword had fully opened.
…He’s going to make a max power strike?
That seemed like a stupid idea to her. The rules of destruction and rebirth were in effect. V-Sw ruled that power, so destroying the dolls with them would only return them to their original urban form and an attack measured in the hundreds of meters could never destroy every last one of the hundred dolls.
A few of the dolls had noticed Izumo’s intention, so they began hopping to the side in repeated feints.
However…
“Hey, I think you’re forgetting something important here!”
Izumo swung his great sword in midair, but not at the hundred dolls.
He swung it at the city itself.
He repeatedly struck at the city between Ikebukuro and Shinjuku.
He carved in lines of light that formed writing.
“Do you know what this part of the city is called!? Do you!?”
Izumo made the final stroke to complete the three characters torn into the group of buildings below.
“Ookubo!!”
A moment later, the five hundred square meter section of the city stood up and became Ookubo.
As he fell, Izumo looked at the giant hand growing up from the earth.
“Come on out, Ookubo!!”
The district of the city known as Ookubo stood up while taking Waseda University’s College of Science along with it. The college’s sports ground formed a giant hand that caught Izumo.
Once Ookubo stood up, he was over two hundred meters tall.
Wind wrapped around him and the speed of his rise created explosions of water vapor at different points on his body. When the maid doll saw him, she cried out.
“Who the hell is Ookubo!?”
“How should I know!? I was really hoping I’d get to do this in Kabuki-cho!”
A moment later, Ookubo struck a triumphant pose with Izumo standing on his right palm.
“———!!”
And he roared.
The hundred dolls crashed into his legs, but Izumo ignored them and yelled.
He let out a rough breath and swung up V-Sw.
“Punch them, Ookubo!!”
Ookubo bent over and struck the ground down below.
The left fist smashed the ground, the next strike split the city, and the following ones sent the dolls scattering.
The overwhelming attack noisily broke the dolls to pieces, but the hundred dolls remained resolute.
Without fearing destruction, they began beating on Ookubo’s shins with telephone pole bats.
“Bear with it, Ookubo!”
But then they began striking his little toe with telephone pole hammers.
“I know what it’s like, Ookubo!! Kick them, Ookubo!”
Ookubo kicked up from below.
The speedy kick had a radius of one hundred meters and the foot at the end easily broke the sound barrier.
The vicinity of Kabuki-cho was thrown into the air in a single strike, the hundred dolls were sent flying by the shockwave, and they destroyed the elevated track or the large buildings around Shinjuku Station as they did. A doll made from an apartment building collided into the Tokyu Building, creating a cascade of broken glass. Another doll flew head-first into the side of the Keio Department Store, sent a café on the upper floors flying out into the air, and broke out the opposite side.
Others rolled along the ground, destroying the city as they did, and turned the entire Shinjuku region into a zone of destruction.
But amid all that noise, the train carrying the maid doll entered Ikebukuro.
Izumo caught his breath on Ookubo’s arm and looked north.
While facing the various buildings of Ikebukuro, he pulled his cellphone from his pocket.
And after a moment…
“It’s me,” said a voice.
“Oh, the idiot, huh? …I’m guessing you’d know better than Chisato, so what kind of land is Ikebukuro?”
“It is my land. It has my name written on it. In my atlas.”
“Try a little harder next time. Anyway, I’m in the Shinjuku area right now.”
“Yes, Hyakunin-cho and Ookubo-cho are there, aren’t they? The dumpling shop in front of Hyakunin-cho’s shrine and the soba shop in front of Ookubo Station are both quite delicious.”
“We’ve already used both of those.”
“What an odd turn of phrase,” said Sayama. “But anyway, Ikebukuro contains Tokyo’s famous Sunshine 60. That giant building was built on the site of Sugamo Prison which held war criminals during World War Two. Sounds like a place our enemies would like, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Izumo nodded. “Sorry, I just found something I need to do.”
He hung up and faced forward.
He had ended the call for a simple reason.
The tallest building in Ikebukuro and all those around it had suddenly started blasting explosive flames from near their base.
“Oh, c’mon. I have no idea what’s going on anymore.”
The maid doll stood on the Sunshine 60’s wall as the setting sun washed over it.
She was supported by her own two legs and Gram which was stabbed into the building’s wall.
The sixty story building was shooting smoke from its large-scale ground floor.
That white smoke was the smoke of a launch.
And this was not restricted to the Sunshine 60.
One hundred of the surrounding buildings, hotels, department stores, etc. were all trembling and shattering at the bottom while blasting smoke toward the earth where it spread out and produced great wind and noise.
The structures of reinforced concrete were producing that explosive smoke for a single reason: the words written on Gram.
“Go! Super-Ultra ICBMs!!”
The Sunshine 60 shook in the light of the setting sun.
It vibrated, produced an even louder roar than the surrounding buildings, and slammed smoke into the earth.
The smoke filled the parks in every direction, blew away the cars stopped in the roads, and collided with nearby buildings.
The tremor shattered the high-rise’s windows, the resonating roar did the same to the surrounding buildings, and the packaged structures like convenience stores were easily knocked over.
Wind blew and the earth trembled.
“Fly!” shouted the maid doll while writing on Gram with her pen. “Willpower!!”
As soon as the extra word was added, the willpower-driven Super-Ultra ICBM began to float.
The sixty-story building was over two hundred meters tall and it briefly stopped in midair as if hesitating, but…
“———!!”
All of the tallest structures in Ikebukuro, a group of buildings with numbers reaching triple digits, tore free from the foundations binding them to the earth.
With a destructive launch, all of the buildings flew up into the sky in perfect synchronization.
A few of the automatons cried out as they viewed their consoles below Kanda.
“Impossible!!”
Dozens of orange lights had appeared on the ceiling map to indicate giant flying objects.
All of them were large missiles made from vertically-rising buildings.
The concrete and glass formed the outer shell and the shops and products inside formed the explosives.
“The city…is flying?” blankly asked one automaton.
#8 nodded.
“Originally, this power could make an entire world fly,” she said. “And this is the power of one of the enemies we fought for so long during the Concept War.”
Glass shards scattered like rain at sunset while the buildings loudly accelerated toward the heavens.
They were all wrapped in massive rings of water vapor and they broke through those rings to continue their skyward journey.
An ICBM made its way to extreme high altitude before dropping back to earth.
The maid doll used Gram to stand on the side of the Sunshine 60 as it rose vertically toward the transparent evening sky. With the Prince Hotel, securities building, and other structures accompanying them, it felt like an ascending battleship.
“The weapon that symbolized the Cold War is flying from the place where World War Two ended. Clever, don’t you think?”
The rapidly-moving buildings broke through the clouds.
The massive white and gray objects destroyed the clouds and danced through the sky like a pod of whales leaping from the sea.
The buildings soared up from the clouds and slowly formed their downward-facing trajectories.
They drew parabolic arcs, their hard bodies groaned, and the containers measuring in the hundreds of meters pointed back toward the ground.
They fell straight down.
Their target was Shinjuku, where Izumo was.
To correct their course as they plunged back into the clouds, the maid doll twisted Gram like a joystick.
The buildings responded by surrounding themselves in a thin gust of wind and turning completely upside down.
They faced downwards.
The Sunshine Hotel as well as the Prince Hotel and other buildings began to fall as if eager to continue on.
Crimson light and shimmering heat came from their bases and the tallest building fell with the others joining it.
The elements of one district dropped toward another.
The clouds became a cold mist as they plunged into them.
Once they passed through the other side of the clouds, Shinjuku and the rest of Tokyo came into view.
The tallest missile which took its name from the sun only began to move after seeing the others begin.
And then the massive structure accelerated.
White mist trailed from every corner on the front end as the colossal warhead advanced.
As if pushing on the smaller warheads which had gone on ahead…no, as if greeting them, the representative of Showa era Japan’s architectural technology headed toward Tokyo.
It lined up alongside the Prince Hotel but did not hesitate.
“We’ll be going on ahead.”
The maid doll gave an informal salute and passed the hotel by.
This time, all sixty stories of the giant falling structure were awash with the sunshine for which it was named.
The ground was visible.
Even the distant Imperial Palace could be seen from this height. The cars were stopped, so the exhaust-stained air was washed clean by the wind and the city grew clear.
This city had been firebombed during the war and had grown upwards after the war, so none of its prewar form remained.
On top of that, the Shinjuku region had been destroyed by the previous battle.
But that will end here, thought the maid doll on the side of the building that began to accelerate in its fall.
This one strike would end it all.
He had lost to Kazami during the Army’s attack, but he was stubborn enough to write off what she had said as the ramblings of a child. Those were things he had thought countless times but had never been able to believe.
But, he thought with a small smile of resignation.
“I’ll believe in it a little. …That’ll give what I’m doing here some purpose.”
The fall was truly underway now and the Gs were strong enough to almost blow the maid doll upwards.
But the building continued on.
Pieces of itself, its contents, and smoke scattered from it as the Ikebukuro-launched high-rise building fell toward Shinjuku. It seemed to be announcing that Shinjuku was its rightful place.
Acceleration pushed the fall onward.
The wind blew up from below and produced a deafening roar.
The streets of Shinjuku had already come into view. The setting sun lengthened shadows, but there were no shadows in that torn-up and smashed land.
The maid doll smiled bitterly at the fact that actual dirt was visible.
“There’s nothing wrong with modern days. Cities are the makeup people put on the earth.”
And…
“We were the ones who made all that!!”
They continued down.
The shockwave of impact and the explosion of the massive structure would at least annihilate Shinjuku.
Only the earthen crust would remain.
As long as the maid doll wrote the word “barrier” on Gram just before the explosion, she would be fine.
The building was now less than a kilometer from the surface. Its acceleration continued and would reach its peak in the instant of impact.
…End it.
End our war, thought the maid doll.
And in that moment, she saw movement through the wind.
A figure was moving toward the point of impact. The figure was running and destroying Shinjuku in the process.
It was Ookubo.
Izumo had Ookubo run to a certain spot.
That was where the ICBMs launched from Ikebukuro would hit.
That spot represented modern Tokyo.
It was Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.
Izumo had Ookubo come to a rapid stop in front of modern Japan’s tallest building.
A roar filled the air as Ookubo stomped a foot down into an underground mall, gently slid to a stop, and held Izumo out toward the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.
Izumo lowered his hips to bear with the inertia, but he did not lose sight of his enemy.
The giant shadow was not far above him now.
The shaking of the air was enough to shatter the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building’s windows, but Izumo did not care.
He stared up at the falling object that was so large that it did not seem to be accelerating at all.
“That’s pretty cool.”
He quickly raised his brush. This bladed brush was named V-Sw and held the power of destruction and rebirth.
“But I’m more modern than you!!”
He swung V-Sw again and again.
The front face of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building shattered, concrete and glass flew everywhere, and words took form.
“A real man’s gotta go with one of these!”
A shout from the surveillance plane reached the Kanda Laboratory.
“Izumo-sama has finished writing! It says…”
A pause.
“‘Beam Cannon’!!”
An electrical discharge raced between the twin towers at the top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.
The bluish-white electricity linked in the twilight and created a massive incidence of ball lightning.
The discharge suddenly vanished and only the ball lightning remained.
“———!!”
A moment later, the twin towers of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building shattered.
They did so for two reasons.
The enormous structure falling from above had struck them and a ring of bluish-white light had shot from the ball lightning in every direction.
A light sound filled the air and it sounded a lot like an inhalation.
At the same time, the ball lightning floating between the twin towers grew smaller.
“…!!”
And light from the ball lightning pierced straight through the Sunshine 60 from the roof to the first floor.
Meanwhile, the Sunshine 60 crashed into the top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.
“!!”
This created explosive pressure.
Instead of an actual explosion, large-scale pressure spread out and pressed down on the air.
The impact and the exploding ICBM created a great flash of light.
The light enveloped everything.
In it, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building was crushed from above, spread out like a blooming flower, and was swept away by the impact such that not even a fragment remained.
In just an instant, bluish-white light came from all of the Sunshine 60’s windows and then the building was smashed to pieces as if someone had struck it.
The power built up inside exploded which sped up its collapse yet reduced its overall strength.
Nevertheless, it caused wide-scale destruction.
Light instantly covered a radius of several kilometers and everything in range was knocked outward and crushed.
The other falling buildings were hit from below and destroyed, but their midair explosions were swallowed up by the light spreading below which was more than twice as powerful.
There was no sound. The shockwave exceeded the speed of sound.
As that shockwave spread, the dome of light pushed a wave of water vapor ahead.
Before long, the shockwave flew several times farther than the light itself.
The buildings of Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Shibuya, and the surroundings wards were immediately knocked over, trees flew, and cars and trains blew about as easily as dust.
The clouds above were pushed outward and a wave of luminescence spread through the sky along with a trembling shockwave.
The sound arrived afterwards.
Dozens of loud, deep sounds rumbled together.
“——————”
Light vanished from the blast site and the earth was blown into the air.
The reflected force that crashed into the ground blew away everything there.
This was pure destruction.
Only the earth below remained.
However, something flew through the smoke and dust that had quickly risen to the heavens: two lights.
The surveillance plane had escaped the range of the blast and it now checked on the flying lights while hopping along the high-speed air currents.
Thin trails of light arced through the sky as they flew west, toward the setting sun.
The twin lights flew quickly alongside each other.
They were two swords which had flown from the center of the blast.
They were the Concept Core weapons named Gram and V-Sw.
When the surveillance plane saw the flying lights, an automaton’s voice rang out.
“The battle has ended…”
Some static filled her transmitted voice.
“…in a draw!!”