Chapter 75 - The Invader I

1

Since we’re already talking about movies, I might as well reveal my tastes: alien movies are my favorites.

To narrow the genre down a little further, I like movies tagged #Disaster #Invasion #SciFi #Apocalypse.

You know, films like War of the Worlds (2005) or Mars Attacks! (1996). That sort of thing.

Some people might find my tastes a little unexpected and ask:

"Earth’s already being invaded by anomalies, and you go out of your way to experience the same thing in movies? What’s fun about that?"

But that question misses the point. They’re fun precisely because movies and reality aren’t remotely “the same.”

How should I put it? It feels like watching fantasy.

For starters, those movies don’t have any awakened. There’s your first little “inaccuracy” right there.

"Wooow... A-aliens that suck human blood to refuel and reshape the environment. That’s original. But those alien robots look awfully flimsy in the legs. A few snips with aura and they’d topple right over..."

"Their strategy’s strange, too. They know how to lie low for thousands—tens of thousands—of years, but never thought to scout Earth’s ecosystem beforehand? Why? A reconnaissance unit operating for just a year would have identified all the problems."

"B-because they’re stupid...?"

"Oh. Nothing you can do about that, then."

Just listening to Sim Aryeon and Seo Gyu as we watched a movie together should give you an idea of how people in this era took sci-fi alien-invasion disaster movies.

Their accuracy was such a mess that we could enjoy them all the more as fantasy. Though that probably wasn’t what the directors intended.

If I had to pick a movie that got reality relatively right, I’d say Annihilation (2018). It did a good job of portraying how ordinary people perceive the void.

Anyway.

There’s one cliché that crops up frequently in almost all these movies.

“The aliens seem completely invincible and plunge humanity into despair, but ta-da! It turns out they had one fatal weakness all along!”

That cliché.

Personally, I call it the “Achilles cliché.”

You might object that Achilles was, after all, a human being. Well, from the Trojans’ perspective, someone like Achilles was alien enough.

Aliens in movies join the anti-vaccine movement en masse and die in droves from Earth’s viruses, or their brains explode from the mysterious waves generated by the rhythm of country music. Real anomalies aren’t that kind to humanity.

But sometimes, very occasionally, anomalies show up that are considerate enough to have an “Achilles’ heel,” as though they stepped straight out of a movie.

I encountered the kindest alien of them all in run ninety-eight.

2

To be honest, I didn’t even realize it was an anomaly at first.

Not because I was stupid. The thing genuinely threw people off.

"It’s Meteor Strike!"

"There, over there!"

"It’s not coming this way, is it...?"

For starters, from a distance it looked exactly like a meteorite.

Its timing was unfortunate, too: precisely year nine. In other words, the Continent-class anomaly Meteor Strike had already devastated South Gyeongsang Province and was merrily pissing all over the world.

Naturally, if something that looked like a meteorite fell from the sky at that point, all I could think was:

‘Ugh. Meteor Strike’s acting up again.’

What’s more, this “meteorite” fell not inland, but in the middle of the East Sea. Not near Ulleungdo, either, but in the Yamato Basin, close to the Japanese archipelago.

I hadn’t heard any news of Atlantis relocating from the Atlantic to the East Sea, so the area was quite literally uninhabited.

Naturally, I put it out of my mind. Being a regressor keeps you far too busy to look after the marine ecosystem as well.

But things got a little strange in the runs after we began killing Meteor Strike.

"Undertaker, did you see the meteorite fall toward the East Sea last night...?"

"Pardon?"

"So you didn’t know. A shooting star fell last night. Heh. I was worried it might be Meteor Strike again. It was briefly the talk of SG Net, with posts flooding in. But, well, nothing happened in the end..."

"Oh, a meteorite has always fallen into the East Sea around this time. So it was just an ordinary meteorite."

I heard several more eyewitness accounts afterward, but continued to pay it no attention for a long time.

About a hundred tons of rock fell onto Earth from space every day anyway. This one just happened to land in the East Sea, and its timing just happened to overlap with Meteor Strike. It wasn’t anything particularly special.

Then, one day in run ninety-eight, I happened to be visiting Kanazawa, Japan.

I had business with the Magical Girl Council, the most powerful group in the Japanese archipelago—their equivalent of our country’s Awakened Federation.

For the record, the group is packed with awakened who are about as crazy as we are, but have evolved their craziness in an entirely different direction. I’ll probably get around to talking about them someday.

Better if I don’t.

The meeting ran late that day, so I ended up walking along the beach well into the night with the magical girl the Council had assigned to me.

"So, we’d really like you to lend us your abilities in the operation to kill Inunaki, Undertaker, meow."

"I can help. But as I told you last time, hand over the Camera."

"Well, the Camera’s a bit much, even so. You know we only have three of those treasures ourselves, meow. We could offer you plenty of other compensation instead... Oh?"

"Hm?"

The magical girl pointed toward the East Sea. Despite the rather chilly weather, she insisted on wearing a Gothic Lolita outfit covered in frills and carried a black umbrella even in the middle of the night.

Her fashion sense alone would have been a rare sight anywhere on Earth, but an even more astonishing sight was unfolding over the East Sea.

I saw it. Being a regressor had put my aura training several levels above everyone else’s, and my eyesight had been enormously enhanced as a result.

"..."

"Waaah! A shooting star, meow!"

The magical girl hopped excitedly up and down on the sand. Unfortunately, I couldn’t match her enthusiasm.

Because...

"... A disc?"

"Huh?"

"No, that thing... The thing that fell into the East Sea. It’s not a meteorite. It’s a disc... A saucer-shaped aircraft."

"Huh? A UFO?"

The magical girl tilted her head, speaking in a manner that made me want to bite her to death. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was already accustomed to their behavior and managed a reluctant nod.

That’s right. An unidentified flying object. A UFO.

This was the moment beings from outer space made their full-fledged debut at center stage.

3

Since a magical girl had been with me when I spotted the anomaly, an investigation team was assembled quickly.

Perhaps it was the weight the word “UFO” carried, but the Magical Girl Council took the matter seriously.

"We’ll deploy the aircraft carrier White Blossom on an investigation mission, meow. Undertaker, please join us, meow!"

"Ah, yes. Well..."

For the record, the Magical Girl Council owned a total of thirteen full-fledged aircraft carriers. By the standards of the days when civilization was still intact, that made them one of the strongest naval forces on Earth, alongside the US Navy.

Except they were all small fishing boats and cruise ships that had been illegally modified and had the words “aircraft carrier” painted on them.

What do magical girls have to do with aircraft carriers, and why were they playing dress-up like this? How should I know?

Their headquarters building’s official name was “New Tokyo-5–Neo Kowloon Walled City: Shrine of the Unknown.” I’m telling you, they’re total lunatics. And they always call me “Undertaker” in English. I wouldn’t have wanted to visit either, if it hadn’t been for work.

No, anyway. Right. These lunatics are emphatically not the main characters of this episode. Nor should they be. Because they... No. Never mind.

At any rate, we arrived in the stretch of sea where we believed the meteorite had fallen and began our search.

And then...

"We’ve found the craft, meow!"

We found the UFO seven hours after beginning operations at sea. Whatever their mental eccentricities, they were competent people, and they accurately located the flying saucer drifting on the surface.

The magical girls gathered on deck, chattering noisily.

"Whoa. Undertaker was right. It really was a UFO, not a meteorite, meow..."

"Observation. Fell through the atmosphere and struck the water. Assessment. Exterior in relatively good condition. Conclusion. A product of a civilization whose technology far surpasses humanity’s."

"... ...!"

"Remarkable. Look at the ripples on its surface. If we approach carelessly, won’t an alien leap out at us?"

An uneasy murmur ran through them.

As the waves rolled in, the UFO repeatedly dipped below the water’s surface and rose again. Its surface was densely covered in an intricate network of pipes, like the engine compartment beneath a car’s hood.

Our first encounter with aliens.

Not just the magical girls, but even I—who had seen it all, on land, at sea, and in the air—felt a little nervous.

"There’s no response so far. I think we’ll have to go inside ourselves before we can settle this, whether by talking or fighting."

"Mewww..."

"I’ll go in first. Anyone coming with me?"

"Meow. We’ve busted our asses for seven hours. Backing off now would make it all pointless, meow. We’ll follow, so lead the way, meow."

I nodded. Then, leaving the magical girls to watch our rear, I entered the UFO without hesitation. As I’ve said, their heads weren’t quite right, but as anomaly hunters, they were professionals.

SPLASH, SPLASH.

The UFO’s interior was dark. It had already begun flooding, and the water reached our ankles. The moment I stepped into the passage, a smell like gasoline rushed into my nostrils.

"The stars—guide—the dawn of humanity, meow."

A light sparkled.

As the magical girl recited her incantation, lantern-like orbs of light began drifting slowly around her.

As soon as we could see, the other magical girls began activating their magic in turn.

"Presence—detection—visualization."

"... ... ..."

"Though—no footsteps sounded—your footprints—are imprinted on my heart."

In an instant, our search party was equipped with magic for illumination, radar, voice transmission, and concealment.

This was what enabled the awakened to keep resisting, somehow, in an archipelago upon which eight million anomalies had descended. It was a different kind of magic from Dang Seorin’s Spell-Song Chanting.

Song and rhythm were the essence of Spell-Song Chanting; the Latin lyrics were merely a by-product of Dang Seorin’s personal tastes. This magic, by contrast, consisted solely of poetic language.

In fact, this “poetic magic” was the standard for magic-type awakened. Spell-Song Chanting was a school developed single-handedly by the maverick Dang Seorin.

["Most peculiar."]

We conversed through voice-transmission magic.

["No matter how far I extend my detection magic, I sense no presence. Machines, machines, machines. It is filled with nothing but machines."]

["Conjecture. Nonliving aliens. Hypothesis. Intelligent beings whose entire bodies have been replaced with machinery."]

["It’s a total maze in here, meow. There’s a good chance they’re lying in ambush, so we mustn’t let our guard down, meow."]

["I really can’t sense a thing. Undertaker, do you notice anything strange?"]

["No. Wait—."]

They stopped short.

At my words, all the magical girls halted at once. It was a well-trained response. Even more impressively, they all waited for my next move without so much as asking “What is it?” or “What’s wrong?”

Swallowing the thought that they would have been wonderfully dependable people if only they didn’t talk so strangely, I took five steps forward.

TAP, TAP.

I prodded the “object” lying in the corridor ahead with the tip of my sword. I even infused it with aura, but the object showed no response. Only the ankle-deep water rippled.

"... Dead."

There was no longer any reason to communicate through voice transmission, so I muttered aloud.

"Meow?"

"They’re already dead. All of them."

In the UFO’s dark corridor, more than 120 alien corpses lay packed together, covering the passage. Their limbs had melted until their original shapes were unrecognizable.

4

The “East Sea UFO Crash Incident” of run ninety-eight ultimately remained an unsolved case.

Why had aliens whose technology was clearly far superior to that of present-day human civilization been wiped out inside their own ship? Had they already been dead before it crashed into the East Sea?

I found it hard to contain my curiosity about this new anomaly.

It was a mystery involving aliens, after all. How could I possibly resist?

And so, in the very next run—run ninety-nine—I made thorough preparations.

This time, rather than searching after the UFO fell, I intended to go to the crash site ahead of time and wait.

"Meow? You want to use an aircraft carrier? Now, now. Even for you, Undertaker, we can’t just lend out a military asset when our Council has only seven..."

"The next time you go to clear Inunaki Tunnel, I’ll help you with no strings attached."

"Ship One, White Blossom, setting sail, meow!"