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 6: The Universe Is in Danger Because of Sago’s Telekinesis

Volume 6: Assailant from the Future

          After Rin-chan retrieved the time machine that she had left on the roof, she and Kuma-san headed for Ama-no-Iwato, furtively making their way through the hustle and bustle of the night streets. The hulking giant and pretty high school student made such an odd pairing that their efforts to go unnoticed were largely ineffective, but the intimidating aura that Kuma-san gave off enabled them to reach their destination without being approached.

          “Good even— Oh, it’s Dad! You look so young, Dad!”

          The moment Rin entered the store, she spotted me mopping the floor and rushed over, vaulting over a table in her way. I caught her in a gentle embrace, turning a little to offset her momentum while patting her head.

          Oh, you like head pats? Then I’ll pat your head for as long as you want! Who’s the world’s cutest daughter? You’re the world’s cutest daughter!

          “You’re so warm, Dad!” she gushed.

          After letting her do what she wanted for a while, I adopted a serious face and asked, “So, who are you?”

          “Seriously, Master? You can’t recognize your own wife?” Shouta-kun snorted from the counter seat where he was nursing a black coffee.

          The only customers at the bar today were Shouta-kun and Shige-jii. Shige-jii was currently wasted after having downed XYZ, a cocktail with high alcohol content, in an effort to impress Shouta-kun.

          As the Hasumi and Hinokage families had strict curfews, the girls were rarely here at this hour. Shiori naturally could not be here at the same time as her daughter without creating a time paradox, so she was absent as well.

          “This girl is 1 cm shorter and 1.1 kg lighter. Her pupils are a different color. Shiori cut her nails this morning, but this girl still has hers. Lastly, Shiori wouldn’t cut her hair for no reason. This is not Shiori.”

          Shouta-kun leaned back a little, looking weirded out at the way I rattled off my observations. “Uh… Ooooookay.”

          “You sure know your wife well!” Shige-jii guffawed.

          Oh, whoops. I was just making stuff up off the top of my head, but now I seem like a weirdo whose special ability is knowing my wife’s exact measurements. Even close lovers can’t get such precise numbers from a mere hug. I can, in a split second, but that’s thanks to telekinesis.

          “I came from the future! I’m your daughter, Dad! My name is Rin. Nice to meet you!”

          “My daughter, huh.”

          “Call me Rin!”

          “Welcome to our time, Rin.”

          In response to my curt welcome, Rin beamed like a blooming flower.

          It’s like daytime has come in and filled our dim store. Ugh, this cuteness is beyond what’s allowed on the mortal plane. I pronounce you guilty of over cuteness!

          “No, no, no, hold on a freaking moment. What’s happening?! And why’re you so calm about it, Master?! Argggh!” Shouta-kun whirled toward Kuma-san. “Kuma-san! Explain please! Who’s this person?! You sure she’s not Kaburagi-san?!”

          The large man shrugged. “I don’t really know what’s going on either. According to her, she came from the future to stop the world from ending.”

          “Huh? She came from the… How?”

          “With a time machine.”

          “As in…that contraption over there?”

          “So she says.”

          The two directed their attention to the machine with a bunch of exposed wires carelessly left on a table nearby.

          “I can only think of one person who can build a time machine,” Shouta-kun groaned.

          Kuma-san nodded. “I heard that after she died, she joined Tsukuyomi as a mechanic.”

          “Tsukuyomi again? Seriously, what’s with them? It’s like a freaking convention of nutcases over there.”

          Shouta-kun’s grumbling was understandable. After all, the relationship between Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi was supposed to be antagonistic. They knew they were enemies, but not really why. And considering how Shouta-kun’s first encounter with them went, hearing their name was hardly going to bring a grin to his face.

          “Guys, can we talk? I wanna share why I came from the future and what I’m supposed to do in this time. Um, that’s Hazama-san…right? Should we wake him up?”

          Satisfied with my pampering, Rin grabbed a chair and beckoned us over. Kuma-san, Shouta-kun, and I joined her at her table, but Shige-jii remained at the counter, snoring softly with his mouth half open and a struggling monkey in his grip.

          “Nah, let him sleep.” Shouta-kun waved a hand dismissively. “He’s going senile already. Things’ll get complicated with him awake.”

          Grandpa, they’re talking smack about you! But I totally get what Shouta-kun’s saying. If Shige-jii sits in, he’d definitely say something stupid and dig himself into another hole.

          Rin-chan nodded in understanding in spite of the coldheartedness of the comment and began speaking. “I assume everyone already knows that Dad’s in resonance with the World Shadows? Dad’s power is flowing into them, and their power is flowing into him. As long as they’re around, Dad won’t die, and as long as Dad doesn’t die, they’d never completely disappear. And you guys are trying to save him by looking for an Artifact that can destroy only the World Shadows while still hunting down the ones that pop up, right? That’s what’s going on at this time?”

          Everyone nodded.

          Yep, that’s the plot we’re going with. It was thanks to me being connected with the World Shadows that I managed to come back to life after the Betrayal arc, and the Artifact that the two secret organizations fought over in the Ancient Ruins arc supposedly had the power to eradicate the World Shadows.

          “Thing is, Dad and the World Shadows had always been equal in strength, but when he married Mom, a crack opened in his mental defenses. On the day he got married, the World Shadows’ power rushed into him and his mind started being dyed with darkness. After losing that equilibrium, it was impossible to get it back. That’s why the World Shadows are now growing stronger. They used to only attack espers and those with a Seed, but now they’re starting to attack normal people too.”

          Understanding dawned in Kuma-san’s eyes. “So that’s why I got attacked.”

          “Whoa, whoa, whoa! That’s a fucking crisis!” Shouta-kun slammed the table and leaned forward. “Can’t we do something about it?!”

          Rin-chan smiled forlornly. “In my time, it was already too late by the time we realized what had happened. Three years from now, Amaterasu finally finds an Artifact that helps Dad protect his mind and regain the balance of power. But by then, he’d have already killed practically half the world’s population.”

          Both Shouta-kun and Kuma-san turned to me with their jaws dropped.

          Damn, that’s a heavy story. Sorry for being a heroine who gives in to the dark side. Maybe I should start practicing lines like, “Ugh, the darkness in me is going berserk! I… I can’t control it any longer. Run away!”

          “But don’t worry!” Rin-chan said cheerfully, thrusting a hand into the air as if to dispel the heavy atmosphere. “I know where the protective Artifact is. If we go grab it right now and have Dad put it on immediately, we can prevent him from going out of control. Then the future will be altered and the world will be at peace! That is what I’ve come back to do!”

          “Oh, sounds simple enough! Brilliant idea, Rin! High five!”

          “High five!”

          The two high schoolers were acting like everything was resolved, but Kuma-san was a lot more cautious.

          Raising a hand, he asked Rin, “Would doing so create a time paradox? What will happen to you in the future when we change the past? Will you disappear? Or will your memories be altered?”

          “Well, I won’t disappear and I’ll still be me. But when the past is changed, the future will too, and my memories will get rewritten.”

          “Your memories will… But the ethics of—”

          “That’s still better than half of the world dying, right?” Rin-chan interrupted.

          The question of whether human lives can be put on a scale is asked often, but I guess when you weigh the lives of 3.5 billion people against memories, it’s pretty obvious which is worth more.

          After pondering for a while, Kuma-san spoke up again. “The reason that Master is in resonance with the World Shadows is because he tried and failed to eradicate them. If you’re going to change the past, why not go back then and prevent this predicament from occuring in the first place?”

          Oh damn, Kuma-san sure isn’t gonna make this easy. All his questions make sense, though. The way he’s always on his guard is why we never really cast him in our schemes. Well, that’s why we find him so reliable, though.

          However, when it came to caution, he was no match for my wonderful wife. Rin-chan replied as if she had the answer readied beforehand. “The time machine was made today, so today’s the earliest I can come back to. Also, only people with a time-related superpower on my level can time travel with precision. Especially when using the time machine that Baba-san made. It’s quite rudimentary. Someone using it to travel twenty years can end up being off by up to three years.”

          Good explanation for why she had to come alone!

          Kuma-san then proceeded to ask a few more questions. Rin-chan answered a few on the spot and meekly admitted she didn’t know the answer to the others. She handled the questioning so well I couldn’t help being impressed.

          If it was me sitting in that chair, I know for a fact I’d get flustered and end up acting suspicious as hell.

          The last issue that Kuma-san brought up was the time machine.

          “Can the time machine be used any number of times? For example, if you fail, can you go back in time again and redo things?”

          “It’s not a good idea. Again, the machine that Baba-san made is not all that good. There’s no telling how many times it can be used before it breaks. In the first place, there isn’t enough time force to do so. Oh, time force is the energy needed to travel through time. Time force is pure esper energy, though, so you technically can substitute it with telekinetic energy.”

          Shouta-kun perked up. “Really? If Master can charge it, it means we can use it as much as we want!”

          “I said, the machine could break.” Rin-chan gave him a long-suffering look. “Each time it’s used, it expends 10^70 Joules of energy. Imagine what would happen if the machine breaks and all that energy is released all at once.”

          “Just don’t let it break, then.”

          Uh, no, that would be a huge problem. Don’t bring up an astronomical number out of the blue!

          Judging by how casual he sounded, Shouta-kun probably could not comprehend the scale of the number Rin-chan just cited. Neither did Kuma-san, while Shige-jii was still just snoring away. Catching on that I was the only person who got it, Rin-chan grabbed a paper napkin and produced a black magic marker.

          She first drew a bomb. “Okay, let me put it into perspective. The nuke that was dropped on Hiroshima produced 6 x 10^13 Joules of energy. The meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs was a billion times more powerful than that. Five billion times that is enough to reduce planet Earth to dust. A thousand trillion times that can erase the Sun.”

          Next to the bomb, Rin-chan drew a dinosaur, then Earth, the Sun, and lastly, a large whirlpool.

          “If you times that energy by a hundred million, you have enough to wipe out ten whole galaxies all at once. A thousand trillion times that is 10^70 Joules. That’s energy on the scale of creating and destroying entire universes. Now do you get it?”

          Ah, Shouta-kun’s face looks like the universe cat meme. And Kuma-san looks like he kinda gets it but isn’t quite there yet. Come on, 10^70 Joules is going way too far. The genre of this arc is sci-fi, sure, but such an astronomical number is beyond… I mean, there’s no way I can… Wait, can I produce it?

          At this moment in time, I was still training up my output. My training method was basically compressing telekinesis using telekinesis and trying to contain it all inside a small spherical barrier. Lately, I had started feeling the expansion and shrinking of explosions within.

          I had thought it was only nuclear explosions, but what if it was actually Big Bangs?

          Suddenly feeling anxious, I picked up a pencil to calculate the current value of my output.

          So, my growth rate is 1.3. Considering the number of times I’ve grown… Oh, f— Yep, I should stop training my output. The universe is in capital letters DANGER. How have I gotten this far and STILL not reached my growth ceiling?! If this is a joke, it’s not funny!

          “Just saying, Dad did all that damage without being able to use his full strength. He was exhausted from his nonstop mental fight against the World Shadows. Any normal person going through what he did would have turned insane and died a hundred times over. And with what’s going to happen soon… Sorry, no, it’s too early to talk about this.”

          “What the hell, Rin?! You can’t leave us hanging like that!”

          Rin gave Shouta-kun a cryptic smile, then changed the topic. “Please tell the other Amaterasu members about me. So, our game plan is to pick up the protective Artifact ASAP, have Dad charge the time machine, then I’m going back to the future and we’ll all live happily ever after. That said, we might have a slight problem—”

          Abruptly, the bell on the door of the bar rang and three people barged in: a fat man carrying a guitar and wearing a fat cone on his head, a ninja in black with a lithe build, and a big man riding a wheelchair and wearing a plastic bag from a convenience store over his head.

          The guitar fatty aimed the tip of his traffic cone at Rin-chan and growled, “There she fucking is! We got you now, thief! Return our time machine!”

          “You see, I’m currently being chased by Tsukuyomi.” Rin stuck out her tongue cutely. “Save me please!”

          Here we go! Ready… FIGHT!

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Footnotes

Wow, such empty.