There Was No Secret Evil-Fighting Organization (srsly?!), So I Made One MYSELF!
世界の闇と戦う秘密結社が無いから作った（半ギレ）

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Chapter 10: Konnichiwa! I’m a Terrorist!

Volume 5: † The Double Wings of Shade †

As Touka-chan had once said, in order to help someone, that someone had to be in need of help.

In the same vein, in order to gallantly save your school from terrorists, your school needs to be under attack by terrorists.

If you did a survey of every single student all over the world and they answered honestly, you would learn that 300% of them had imagined themselves beating back terrorists that came to attack their school. However, if this actually happened, it would be a huge issue.

First of all, there were bound to be casualties. Even random drive-by shootouts would cause casualties — there was no way that terrorists wouldn’t.

Even if the terrorists were taken care of without a single casualty, the parents would flood the school with unreasonable claims, clamoring for school staff to take responsibility by quitting. The mass media would dig up every tiny detail related to the incident, exacerbating the wound and kicking up a huge fuss about how ineffective the relevant policies were. The government would then push out some showy but ultimately pointless policy changes that just makes everything more difficult for everyone. In the end, everybody loses.

The students and school staff who were assaulted would suffer great psychological trauma that would negatively affect them for the remainder of their lives. Some of them might even take their own lives. There were too many precedents from school shootings in America.

Reality very rarely worked out as imagined. Terrorists attacking schools was not a thing, and even if it was, each and every incident would be a terrible catastrophe. Terrorists were bad. Period.

Even so, students still dreamed of beating back terrorists. The very idea was exciting and so kewl.

Terrorists would suddenly crash into an otherwise normal, peaceful day to plunge my school into the depths of terror!

Both my teachers and classmates would be so frightened that they could only blindly follow the terrorists’ orders!

Then BAM! I appear! Everyone is terrified and the terrorists are all holding machine guns but I gallantly defeat them all!

The cheers and applause shake the entire building! Amazing! So cool! No, no, that won’t actually happen, but what if… heh heh heh.

I used to be nobody important, but because of this incident, the cutest girl in my year falls for me…

…was how the dream went.

I had dreamed the same thing more times than I could count when I was a student myself. I had outgrown it by now, of course.

In exchange, now I dreamed of a random druggie bursting into Ama-no-Iwato and spraying the place with bullets. I would use telekinesis to stop all of the bullets, seize his gun, crumple it into a ball, chuck it into the trash bin, and coolly say, “Kindly note that the firing of guns is prohibited in our establishment.”

Hell yeah! It’s so cool! I so want to do it!

Damn, I haven’t changed a bit since I was a student, huh.

However, no matter how much someone dreamed of something, dreams were only dreams at the end of the day. Reality was cruel like that.

No way were there terrorists who would assault a school. And again, if there were, it would be a huge tragedy.

But then that was where Amaterasu’s behind-the-scenes team came in. It was our job to realize these impossible yet much-coveted dreams using whatever means possible.

So then.

The linchpin to the terrorist event that we were planning was to make it seem like a drill.

A notification was sent out to everyone in the middle school division of Ashinohara Academy — the school where Mikyou-chan would be transferring into — that there would be a disaster prevention drill where the school guards would pretend to assault the school as terrorists.

That way, no one would take it seriously when the terrorists came. Because they would think it a drill. Duh.

However, there would be a small incident that causes Mikyou-chan to realize that the supposedly fake terrorists had been replaced by real ones. The teachers and other students would have no clue. Mikyou-chan would be the only one in the know.

She would raise the alarm and go, “These terrorists are real!” but no one would take her seriously. After all, the notification had gone out and everyone knew that this was just a drill. That left Mikyou-chan, the only one who knew the truth, to stand up against the terrorists by herself. However, because she was still weak from having been hospitalized this whole time, she would have no recourse but to use her superpower.

Then things would happen, blah blah blah, the terrorists get defeated and the school returns to normalcy. This was the general outline of the plot that we were going with.

Of course, if Mikyou-chan used her power in front of everybody, then our secret organization would no longer remain secret, so the idea was to make it so that only a small handful of students would witness her exploits. This was the common “please keep it a secret from the rest of our classmates” trope. Sharing secrets was a tried and true way to deepen relationships.

This had been the case with Satou-kun, the “normal” kid who “coincidentally” found out the secret identities of his schoolmates. Now, he was close enough to Shouta-kun to make plans to see a fireworks display and was on manga-exchanging terms with Chris. Touka-chan was the sole exception — according to rumors, he had distanced himself from Touka-chan after learning how obsessed with Buddhism she was — but two out of three wasn’t too bad.

Kaburagi-san proceeded to get everything ready at Ashinohara Academy, the stage for the coming event.

On top of being the largest investor of the school by far, Kaburagi-san also held the position of board chairman, which I understood to be similar to being the owner. If she gave the order to bark, the entire school would become a dog house. Her word was absolute in Ashinohara Academy. Even I thought “a drill to prepare for a criminal organization attacking the school to target the children of influential parents” sounded suspicious as heck, but she still managed to get it approved. The power of money is frightening indeed.

That said, “We’re doing the drill tomorrow. Cheers!” would be asking for too much. The teachers would have to adjust their teaching schedules and the parents had to be informed. Because Kaburagi-san wanted to be thorough with preliminary preparations to make this suspicious disaster prevention drill seem as unsuspicious as possible, it ended up taking a bit of time. It was a stroke of luck that the timing worked as well as it did in matching Mikyou-chan’s transfer.

As for the all-important terrorists, I caught real ones and had Baba break them in.

I had originally thought about scouring overseas places famous for terrorist activity and smuggling them into Japan. Before I went to the trouble, however, I thought about checking within the country just in case. To my surprise, I learned that we had domestic terrorists too. I suppose we did have the Tokyo sarin gas attack, too. Even though our country is famous for being peaceful, I guess we aren’t entirely without our own divisive elements.

The terrorists I captured were planning on blowing up the Tokyo Sky Tree. When I found them, they had already amassed more than enough explosives to carry out their plan. Perhaps things would have been a bit dicey had I not found them when I did.

Maybe I had prevented a major incident. Or… maybe, even without my intervention, the group might have been caught by the Japanese police’s counterterrorism force. I guess no one would ever know.

So, I caught these domestically-sourced terrorists and passed them along to Baba, who locked them up in a secret room and trained them for days on end, converting them into full-on fanatics. If Baba told them to climb on top of a traffic light naked and slap their own ass with their eyes rolled back, they would do it without hesitation. Because they had been proper terrorists, they would have no problem whatsoever “acting” like terrorists.

These were basically real terrorists who had their dreams crushed and were trained to pretend to be Ashinohara Academy guards acting as fake terrorists who would get exposed by Mikyou-chan as real terrorists but were actually just playing the part of being terrorists…

Yep, that’s confusing! Even I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it.

Baba helped us source the weapons for the terrorists from the armory of the former Tanioka-gumi and we loaded them with blanks. It was enough that they looked like guns and made gunshot sounds.

Of course, we also had the terrorists carry a few live rounds. After all, if any of them were captured and it came to light that they were only carrying blanks, that would raise questions. Even though normal people probably couldn’t tell the difference between blanks and actual bullets, it never hurt to be careful.

Last thing to consider was the safety net.

We had to make preparations for the possibility of Mikyou-chan using her powers in front of the general public and outing herself as an esper.

Which shouldn’t be too big an issue, actually.

After the Super Water Sphere Incident, we had been diligently making inroads into the Japanese police force, mass media, and politicians. Our encroachment had made so much headway that even if Mikyou-chan accidentally used her powers a little, as long as it wasn’t too large-scale and overt, we could reliably hush it up. Amaterasu was a secret, sketchy organization that had most of Japan’s influential powers in its pocket.

As our preparations for the terrorist event came to a close, Mikyou-chan transferred into the first year of middle school at Ashinohara Academy. It was a pretty weird time for it, considering how winter break was right around the corner.

Her debut wasn’t bad and wasn’t good — it was basically just meh.

Mikyou-chan had made a script for her self-introduction beforehand. I was somewhat alarmed to see lines like “humanity should be erased” and “espers should be worshipped” on there, but when it came time to actually introduce herself to her class, she reverted to saying the generic stuff in a small mumble. In other words, she was aware of how alarming the stuff she usually said was.

Despite being a middle school first year, Mikyou-chan was only as tall as a fifth year in primary school. Being sick for so long had also left her looking unhealthily thin and pale. She was actually pretty cute, despite the gloomy look she always had on her face. Because of her parents’ educational policy, she had actually been quite diligent with her studies and was now going through second year material despite being a first year. On the other hand, she was absolutely terrible at sports and could not even run 50 m in one go.

Her classmates approached her out of curiosity about the new transfer student and because of her cuteness, but the mask that she had put up during her self-introduction came off almost immediately as she started passionately expounding on the most efficient way to spread a deadly virus around the school. The other kids just went, “Uwahhh…” and learned to keep their distance. Sadge.

The general opinion was, “Ah, a weirdo’s transferred in.” That said, kids with a similar frame of mind weren’t all that uncommon among that age group. As such, although they were slightly repulsed, the other kids did not particularly dislike her and there was no indication of bullying. How things develop from this point on would be entirely up to Mikyou-chan herself.

While everything surrounding the gene therapy and the transfer was going on, our two latest members’ powers as espers were still growing steadily. Now, depending on the circumstances, they could contribute in battle as well.

The most noteworthy development for Mikyou-chan was that her shadows could now interact with matter. The output was still very weak — it took all she had to lift up a cup — but she could indeed move things with her shadows. I was curious to see how she would use her powers in battle against the terrorists.

Shige-jii, who was now working as a janitor at Ashinohara Academy courtesy of Kaburagi-san — Mikyou-chan had begged for the arrangement because she was anxious about going to school for the first time — was already nearing his growth ceiling due to having started his training earlier than Mikyou-chan. The range of his spatial powers was set in stone at five meters, which was more than enough as PSI drives could serve to extend the range without limit.

I was slightly disappointed that we wouldn’t get to see a grandpa toying with enemies by teleporting in circles all around them. There wasn’t a whole lot of freedom with a range of only five meters.

Kaburagi-san had thoroughly planned out every detail of the terrorist event, making preparations for every development she could think of. The most likely possibility was that Mikyou-chan would go look for Shige-jii as soon as she realized the terrorists were real and they would work together to defeat the intruders. However, there was no telling how things would really turn out.

Every last esper was a complete weirdo. Things could go to plan, but things could just as easily go completely off the rails. This made me both excited and uneasy.

Regardless, the terrorist event is tomorrow. Let’s check out cameras one last time to ensure they’re in perfect working order.

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Footnotes

Wow! Such empty!