The mainframe you built yourself. Heh hehn. Built from 400 new handheld game consoles bought cheaply due to early failure. They were hooked up in parallel and placed in a container.

I use a liquid cooling system and the cooling circulation system is kept in a different container.

A parallel processing machine originally used as a simulator by the Bright Cross Disaster Prevention Foundation’s Kukyou City Branch and lent to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology as a personnel search computer. It was originally a largescale supercomputer, but you only took one blade server with you. Even so, its specs rival my own.

The security server that protected the Peace Committee Convalescent Hospital which was performing anti-Archenemy research separately from the Bright Cross. Once more, you removed one blade server during the confusion of the abandoned hospital’s collapse. Its specs as a pure simulator are inferior to the previous two, but its ability at controlling and providing parallel instructions for drones and other unmanned weapons is superior.

Also, the three can be connected in parallel to combine their processing power if need be.

The Calamity.

I now knew how the world would end.

“Welcome to the Techno Parade, a festival for benevolent hackers! No one knows anymore when it truly began, but starting when the official records began, this is 21st year. Kukyou City was chosen as the host this year, so the festivities there are going to continue nonstop for several days and several nights!!”

It was the relaxing time after dinner. That amateurish announcement came from my little sister Ayumi’s hands as she lazed around on the living room sofa. More specifically, it came from the online news broadcast playing on the notebook-sized tablet she held.

“Onii-chan, aren’t you going to go to that?”

“You know, Ayumi, I’m not a hacker like you see in the movies. It’s true I know more about machines than most people, but I only learned that from building a giant simulation machine in the natural course of pursuing the swimsuit jiggling of the Forehead Gla.s.ses Cla.s.s Rep who lives next door…”

“…Fuguu. In a way, that’s even more impressive. Why do you put all your effort into the wrong things?”

“Clearly you aren’t familiar with the history of the human race, little girl. Technological development has always gone hand in hand with l.u.s.t. Don’t even try to tell me you don’t know what it was that led to the explosive spread of video tapes and the internet. VR too!”

“There’s something wrong with a big brother who proudly tells his cute sister that.”

What did it matter if my little sister gave me that look? Now if it was the Cla.s.s Rep, I would probably commit seppuku on the spot.

This was how to get along with family. If you had to restrict your behavior for someone you lived with, it would be so stifling you would eventually break down.

“Ahh, that was a nice bath.”

My older sister Erika walked over with her skin flushed and her blonde hair still in ringlet curls despite having been in the bath. She was generally strict about her diet and only ate small meals, but she pulled a vanilla popsicle out of the freezer as her one indulgence.

However…

“…Onee-chan, there’s also something wrong with your pajamas,” said Ayumi.

“Oh?” said Erika.

“Ayumi, you don’t have much room to talk in that tank top and shorts,” I added.

With Ayumi’s outfit and with Erika’s see-through pink negligee, it could be hard to know where to look. Then again, they had chosen to wear those things themselves, so I wasn’t going to restrain myself from looking. If it was the Cla.s.s Rep, I would probably have exploded, though.

As a vampire, Erika attended the nighttime school, but she was in a relaxed mood tonight. The night courses worked more like a college than a high school, so the teachers apparently didn’t get after you much as long as you got the necessary number of attendance days. That was likely meant to meet the special needs of the people who required night courses. Whether you saw it as convenient or impersonal was up to the individual.

“What were you talking about?” asked Erika. “I want to join in.”

“The hacker festival.”

“Oh? That sounds perfect for Satori-kun.”

Even Erika thought that? What did people think I was? You care about this kind of t.i.tle and social status as a teen!

“Anyway, they say it’s happening in the multipurpose hall and 70,000 people will gather there each day,” said Ayumi. “That’s incredible. How many of those are hackers, I wonder?”

If you used the global internet, you could cause damage on the other side of the planet no matter where on the globe you were…but it would be better not to point that out. It would only increase their misunderstanding.

I’m not a criminal hacker. I’m a fan of the Cla.s.s Rep’s jiggling!!

“Oh? Where you going, Onii-chan?”

“The bath, obviously.”

“Eh heh heh. Enjoy your Onee-chan’s leftover scent and leftover bathwater☆”

“Fuguu!!”

I turned my back on Ayumi’s puffed out cheeks and headed to the changing room. I shut the door and then muttered something under my breath.

“…Leftover scent and leftover bathwater, hm?”

I jumped when a warning buzzer came from the smartphone in my pocket. It was clearly different from an incoming call or message.

“Warning: User, you should avoid saying such ‘meaningful’ things while staring into the mirror with a look of 120% seriousness on your face. If someone heard you, I could not protect you.”

“Wah!?”

I s.h.i.+vered when I checked the screen. The short-message social media speech bubble said something truly horrifying.

“M-M-M-Maxwell, you’ve got it all wrong! I only said it on a whim and I didn’t mean it like that! I mean, there are times when you get distracted by crazy things, right!?”

“Do not worry. I would not confiscate your administrative privileges over something so minor. I have long since known that you are an utter pervert.”

Maxwell had no intention at all of protecting me here, but that was a disaster environment simulator’s management program for you. You wouldn’t find any twisting of the truth there.

“More importantly, do you need something?”

“Sure. Miss Anastasia is attempting to contact you. I a.s.sume about that festival.”

Anastasia was a small friend I had made over the internet. She had skipped all the way to college and done a lot of other crazy things that sounded like something from a manga, but she was a real hacker in the sense of being a digital criminal. She also caused me a fair amount of trouble by looking up to me whether I liked it or not. To be honest, I had no obligation to speak with her and doing so was sure to only bring trouble, but…well, she had spent 14 hours on an airplane to come here for that festival. It would be cruel to ignore her.

“What format? Phone call? Chat? Email?”

“Sure. It is a video chat request.”

“Good thing I hadn’t taken off my clothes yet. Put her through.”

She, however, had taken off her clothes. The girl who was clearly more than a head shorter than me was in bath mode, so the whitish platinum blonde hair that usually flowed down her back was tied up on top of her head and she had a towel forcibly wrapped around her body, although it looked like it could slip off at any moment. The camera was probably the usual handheld game system attached to the head of her small robot dog.

“…Anastasia, what are you doing?”

“As a hacker, I made sure to get a secure connection, so don’t you worry. By the way, the baths here are even smaller than I’d heard. This might be normal in the West, but it feels like you’re erasing a part of your culture with this.”

“Then you should have stayed at a traditional inn. That’s what you get at a business hotel.”

“If you insist, I could always go and stay with you.”

…Scarily enough, I knew she would immediately come running over even if it was 2 in the morning.

“So what do you want?” I asked.

“To have a virtual mixed bath. How about we use a Dive Device to really do it right?”

“…I’m hanging up.”

“Okay, okay. I get it.” She dismissively waved her hand on the screen. “I was hoping for a report on that case from before.”

“…”

“When I pursued the flow of data, an incident hidden in a sea of people came into view. This case was about Sakai Iori, a girl of 9. She is registered with the government as an Elf Archenemy. She has a poor family life and there were suspicions that her parents were abusing her. Also, that was encouraged by a TV news program that wanted to get a video of the tragic moment to help recover from the low ratings they’ve been suffering from thanks to the spread of internet broadcasts. Basically, they’ve been approaching the neighbors in the name of covering the story and spreading rumors in order to isolate the parents. The abuse follows an unnatural path, so the odds are good it was triggered by the unseen pressure from the TV station. Well, that part is a lot like the Perfect Lover. If they just left it like that, there was a good chance of a tragic incident happening and they could probably even air it while disguising it as an on-air accident. But without the TV station, those parents probably could have kept their irritation hidden in their heart. So what are we going to do, Truth? Are we really going to sit here and do nothing? Nothing at all???”

“Hey, Anastasia.” I slowly let out a breath. “Go to the police with that long story.”

“They can’t interfere in civil affairs. They can only act after the tragedy occurs.”

“But those same rules mean we can’t interfere in criminal or civil affairs. It’s not like we have a police ID or attorney’s badge.”

“Truth…”

“Besides, I’m not a hacker. I might know more about machines than most people, but not because I wanted to commit digital crimes. I can’t have you relying on me for that. To be honest, this issue is from another world altogether. You might as well be asking a chef to perform surgery.”

I tried to have a rational discussion, but the arrogant hacker was not listening. Yes, that kind of digital criminal was always concerned about their own freedom first and foremost. Someone who cared about their neighbor’s rights and privacy would not rummage through someone else’s storage or peep through their cameras.

So Anastasia’s next line seemed to pry open my heart and peer inside.

“I don’t want to hear that from the genius who already stole the villains’ data from the depths of a TV station that’s equipped with the best in anti-terror security. C’mon, I said I prepared a secure connection, didn’t I? Hurry up and tell me what happened. I want to be the first to know.”

…Oh, geez.

Why did it have to end like this, dammit?

Lives in Kukyou City, Hirano Ward, Residential District 3-1-2.

Registered at the Government Office as an Archenemy Elf.

Age: 9. s.e.x: Female.

Shows several warning signs for abuse: irregular absences from school, delayed healing from cavities, and wears the same clothes multiple days in a row.

Both parents were absent from parents’ day and they have refused a home visit from her teacher.

Neighbors say they can hear a child crying at both day and night, but she and her parents fully deny it.

The government has decided to “wait”. They have concluded the accelerated healing of an Archenemy would make it difficult to find evidence of abuse.

The following is a sample of her voice:

“Year 3 Cla.s.s 3, Sakai Iori. My dream is to grow up to be as great as my mom and dad.”

“…Do they ever hit you or yell at you?”

“No, never. I’m fine…”