Alicization Invading Read online

  So he decided to kill her.

  On Alicia’s last day of school, after she said her good-byes, Gabriel invited her to go into the woods behind their houses when they got off the school bus. He guided her there along his secret route, skillfully evading all the security cameras along the roads and fences, ensuring that no one saw them, walking over fallen leaves to hide their tracks, until they reached his secret laboratory, which was hidden in an especially dense area of shrubs.

  When Gabriel put his arms around her fragile body, she returned his embrace, having no idea of the countless insects that had perished in this space. The girl sobbed and hiccuped, telling him she didn’t want to go anywhere, that she wanted to stay there in that city with Gabe forever.

  In his mind, he silently reassured her that he’d make that come true. He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out the tool he’d prepared: his father’s four-inch steel needle with a wooden handle, used for killing insects.

  He stuck the sharp end into Alicia’s left ear, pressed his other hand against her right, then rammed the implement all the way in to its base.

  Alicia blinked in wonder, not realizing what had just happened, and then her body abruptly went into violent spasms. A few seconds later, her blue eyes lost their focus.

  And then, Gabriel saw it happen.

  Something luminescent, like a tiny gleaming cloud, emerged from Alicia’s forehead. It floated gently toward him, right between his eyes, and passed without sensation directly into his head.

  The soft sunlight of the spring afternoon around them vanished. Instead, powerful beams of light shot down through the branches of the trees directly overhead. There was even the faint sound of bells.

  Gabriel’s eyes welled up with tears of unfettered joy. He was viewing Alicia’s soul…and not only that, he understood that he was seeing what her soul was seeing.

  The tiny glowing cloud, over a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, passed through Gabriel’s head and rose, higher and higher, guided by the light of Heaven, until it disappeared. The spring sunlight and the chirping of the birds returned.

  As he sat there, cradling Alicia’s lifeless and soulless body in his arms, Gabriel wondered whether what he’d just experienced was true or merely a hallucination brought about by his extreme excitement. But whichever the answer, he knew that for the rest of his life, he would be seeking that experience again.

  He took Alicia’s body to an oak tree he’d found with a deep, gaping pit beneath its roots and tossed her body down into it. Then he examined himself very carefully, plucked two long golden hairs from his body, and dropped them into the hole, too. After carefully washing the needle, he returned it to his father’s tool kit.

  The local police never succeeded in finding any clues to Alicia Clingerman’s disappearance, and the case went cold.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Gabriel Miller awoke from this brief but deep reverie. He pulled away from the reflective-mirror glass and headed to his work desk on the western wall of the room. The instant he sat in the Norwegian reclining chair, a phone icon began to blink on the thirty-inch display panel embedded into the desk’s glass surface.

  He tapped the icon, which brought up the face of his secretary, who began to speak.

  “I apologize for disturbing you, Mr. Miller. Mr. Ferguson, the company COO, would like to have dinner with you tomorrow. Shall I make the arrangements?”

  “Tell him my schedule’s full,” Gabriel immediately replied. His usually implacable secretary looked a bit startled by this. The chief operating officer was the vice president of the company, the number two man at Glowgen DS. Gabriel was just one of ten executives, and he wasn’t important enough to turn down an invitation—under typical circumstances.

  But the secretary’s expression faded in a second, and she said, “I understand. I will let him know.”

  The call ended. Gabriel sank back into his chair and crossed his legs.

  He had an idea of what Ferguson wanted. He was going to try to convince Gabriel not to participate in a particular exercise that was on the schedule. But secretly, the COO’s intention was the exact opposite. The wily old badger was hoping he would venture into danger and wind up on the KIA list. After all, Gabriel was the son of the previous CEO and was the company’s biggest shareholder.

  For his part, Gabriel understood how stupid it was for a corporate executive to take part in a live-combat scenario with actual gunfire being traded. Even if he had combat experience of his own, the CTO’s job was to draw up overall tactical plans from the safety of the company office. There was zero need to expose himself to the danger of the battlefield.

  But for the sake of his top-secret master plan, he couldn’t sit back and miss out. This was a strategy that directly linked to the life goal Gabriel had had since the day he saw Alicia’s soul leave her body.

  The client in this case was not their primary partner, the Department of Defense. Instead, it was the National Security Agency, a department they’d never dealt with.

  When two NSA agents visited this very office last month, they succeeded on multiple fronts in stunning Gabriel, who did not experience normal emotions as others did.

  For one thing, the operation would be extralegal, completely off the books. This made sense, as the plan was to send Glowgen’s combat team on a naval submarine and attack a ship belonging to an allied nation, Japan. And if casualties resulted on the other side because of combat, so be it.

  The point of the operation was to steal technology.

  When he heard the details, Gabriel was so stunned—or perhaps elated—that he gasped. Fortunately, the agents didn’t notice.

  It was called Soul Translation technology. A stunning machine, developed by a tiny arm of the Japan Self-Defense Force named Rath, that could scan and read the human soul.

  As a devout seeker of the soul, Gabriel had been keenly fascinated by the full-dive tech coming out of Japan. It was what drove him to play against Japanese players in Gun Gale Online and study the Japanese language. He even spent tens of thousands of dollars to get his hands on one of those hellish devices that were supposed to have been destroyed: the NerveGear. But not so he could wear it, of course.

  After the controversy over that deadly game, Gabriel expected that continuing development in full dive would taper off. But no, they’d continued clandestine research, and now they were on the verge of unlocking the secrets of the soul.

  To Gabriel, this NSA offer was as good as fate.

  For one thing, Glowgen DS was big but still just a PMC. There was no way they could spurn an offer from the NSA, which was more powerful than the CIA at this point. They convened a quick board meeting and chose to accept the contract by a margin of two votes. To maintain the secrecy of the mission, they chose operatives with dirty pasts and expertise in wet work whom they could lean on for the combat team.

  And Gabriel nominated himself to be CO.

  Naturally, they would hide Gabriel’s role as company executive from the combat team. They were the types of people who, if they found out his identity, would take him hostage and demand ransom from the company instead.

  And Gabriel had to undertake this risk in order to go.

  The NSA agents told him that not only had Rath’s STL tech succeeded at reading the human soul, they could even make clones of it. Once the artificial intelligence code-named A.L.I.C.E. was complete, its soul would be loaded onto Japanese drones that would overturn the balance of military power in East Asia.

  He didn’t care about war in Asia—or anywhere in the world, for that matter. But the moment he heard the name Alice, Gabriel’s mind was made up.

  She would be his.

  He would do whatever it took to get the soul contained in that tiny medium called a lightcube.

  “Alice…Alicia…,” he murmured, leaning back into his chair. That faint smile had returned to his lips.

  When Gabriel’s grandfather founded Glowgen, he intended it to mean “generating glow.” He thought of it as
the glow of prosperity and happiness, but to Gabriel, his heir, it conjured only the image of that golden glow emerging from Alicia’s forehead as she died.

  What generated that glow? The soul, obviously.

  It was all fate at work.

  A week later, Gabriel and eleven squad members flew to Guam, then took a nuclear submarine from the local naval base into Japan’s territorial waters. Right before the operation began, they switched to a tiny ASDS submarine that ferried them to their assault on the Ocean Turtle, a massive marine research craft.

  He didn’t know whether they’d take the vessel bloodlessly or whether one side—or both—would suffer losses. But Gabriel was certain that Alice and the STL tech would be his. He could give the NSA some random lightcube and a copy of their research.

  Soon…very soon. He’d done his experiments on a number of people since Alicia, and he never got any closer to the true nature of the soul—but it would be in his grasp before long.

  He would get to see that beautiful cloud of light once again.

  “…Your soul…will be so sweet…”

  This time, as he closed his eyes, Gabriel said the phrase in perfect Japanese.

  2

  Captain Dario Ziliani, commanding officer of the Seawolf-class nuclear submarine Jimmy Carter, was a true submariner, who rose through the ranks from cleaning out torpedo tubes to his current position. His first sub was a Barbel-class diesel, an extremely cramped vehicle, the meager interior of which was largely occupied by oil stench and clangor.

  Compared to that, the Seawolf class, the most expensive submarine ever developed, was more like a Rolls-Royce. Since being named captain in 2020, Ziliani had given his sub and crew all the care he could provide. The harsh training paid off, and now the high-tensile body, S6W reactor, and crew of 140 were unified into a single organism fast enough to swim freely in any sea, provided it had the depth.

  In a way, the Jimmy Carter was like Ziliani’s baby. Sadly, he would soon be phased out of active service, forced to choose between working on land or early retirement, but he knew that if his recommendation, XO Guthrie, was put in charge next, she would be in good hands.

  But then, like some dark cloud over his impending change in life, Captain Ziliani got a strange and ominous order just ten days ago.

  Jimmy Carter was designed to support special-operations missions, and it had systems that worked with Navy SEAL forces. One of them was the presence of a miniature submarine on the aft deck.

  On several occasions, she’d sailed deep into foreign waters with SEALs on board. But these missions were always to support peace for the United States and the world at large, and the men who rode on those missions shared the same sense of duty as Ziliani and his crew.

  But the men who’d boarded in Guam two days ago…

  Ziliani went back to meet with them once, and he nearly ordered his officers to launch them out of the tubes. A dozen-plus men lounging around in disarray, blasting music from headphones, playing poker for keeps, littering beer cans around the place. They were not regimented sailors. They could barely pass for proper military.

  Only one of them, their tall commander, who apologized for the mess, seemed to have any sense of decorum at all. But his stunningly blue eyes…

  When Ziliani took his outstretched hand and gave him a hard stare, he felt a sensation he hadn’t had in many years.

  It was from his childhood, long before he enlisted in the navy. He’d been swimming at the beach in his hometown of Miami when a great white shark swam directly past him. He didn’t get attacked, fortunately, but he did look into the shark’s eyes as it swam by. They were like bottomless pits that absorbed all the light that touched them.

  And in this man’s eyes was that same dark void…

  “Captain, I’ve got something on the bow sonar!” said one of the techs, pulling Ziliani out of the memory. “It’s a nuclear turbine. Identifying now…Match. That’s the megafloat, sir. Distance to target: fifteen miles.”

  He snapped back to attention. He was in the command center and needed to give orders.

  “Maintain depth. Speed one-five knots.”

  The helm repeated his order, and then there was a brief sensation of deceleration.

  “Do we know where the Aegis defense ship is located?”

  “Gas turbine–engine signal at forty-three miles southwest of target…Match. JMSDF Nagato.”

  Ziliani stared at the two dots on the large display screen. The Aegis ship would be armed, but the megafloat was just a research facility, as he understood it. And their orders were to send that band of armed ruffians for infiltration. To a Japanese ship—an allied nation. It didn’t seem like the kind of operation the president or DoD would approve.

  Then he remembered what the black suits who’d brought him the orders straight from the Pentagon had said.

  Japan is undertaking research on that megafloat that will put them at war with America again. The best way to maintain peaceful relations is to bury that research in the darkness, where it belongs.

  Ziliani wasn’t young enough to take them at face value. But he was also old enough to know that he didn’t have any option other than to follow orders.

  “Are our guests ready?” he murmured to his executive officer, who was standing nearby.

  “On standby in the ASDS.”

  “Good…Maintain speed, depth to one hundred feet!”

  Compressed air cleared the ballast tanks of seawater, lifting the considerable hull of the Jimmy Carter toward the surface. Slowly but surely, their distance to the dots on the sonar shrank.

  Would Japanese scientists die? Most likely. And he wasn’t going to forget his part in this operation until the day he died.

  “Distance to target: five miles!”

  Ziliani steeled himself and cast aside his misgivings. “Disengage ASDS!” he commanded. He felt a minor vibration—a sign that the cargo on the aft deck had been released.

  “Disengaged…ASDS is autonomous.”

  The little submarine containing a pack of wild dogs and one shark picked up speed, charging toward the belly of the giant turtle floating on the sea.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IN THE FAR NORTH, OCTOBER 380 HE

  1

  Alice Synthesis Thirty placed the freshly washed plates in the drying basket and wiped her hands on the bottom of her apron before looking up.

  Beyond the window, tree branches had scattered many of their yellow and red leaves with the chill of the last few days. The winter really did arrive here much earlier than in Centoria.

  Still, the light of Solus looked warm in the first blue sky they’d had in days. On the thickest branch of the closest tree, a pair of climbing rabbits could be seen pleasantly sunning themselves.

  Alice smiled as she watched them, then turned and said, “The weather’s so nice today; perhaps we should pack a lunch and go to the eastern hill.”

  There was no response.

  In the center of the little wooden cabin’s main room, which combined a living space with a dining room and kitchen, there was a plain, unfinished wooden table. Seated at one of the matching chairs was a young man with black hair. He did not react to Alice’s suggestion. He simply gazed, expressionless, at a nondescript point on the table.

  He wasn’t solidly built to begin with, and by now, he was noticeably thinner even than Alice was. His bony structure was clearly visible through his loose clothing. His empty right sleeve, hanging limply from the shoulder, only added to his pitiable appearance.

  His eyes, black as his hair, were empty. They reflected no light and suggested his mind was distant, completely shut off from the outside world.

  Alice stifled a pain in her chest that never dulled, no matter how many times she felt it. In a cheery voice, she said, “There’s a breeze today, so we should bundle up. Hang on—I’ll get your coat for you.”

  She put her apron on the hook next to the sink and headed to the bedroom. She gathered up her long blond hair and covered it w
ith a cotton scarf. A faded black eye patch went over her vacant right eye socket. One of the two wool coats on the wall was hers, and she carried the other one under her arm as she returned to the main room.

  The young man hadn’t budged. She put her hand against his scrawny back, and he awkwardly got to his feet.

  But that was all the black-haired boy could do. He couldn’t even walk a single mel. She put the coat over him from behind, then circled around and tied the strings at his neck tight.

  “Just one more thing,” she told him, rushing to the corner of the room.

  Sitting there was a sturdy chair made of a light-brown wood. Instead of feet, it had metal wheels—two big and two small. An old man named Garitta who lived alone in the forest made it for them.

  She grabbed the handles on the back of the chair and rolled it over to the young man. Before he could start wobbling or topple over, she sat him down on the leather seat, then threw a heavy lap blanket over his legs to keep him secure.

  “There! Now we can go.”

  She patted his shoulders, took the handles, and rolled the chair toward the door on the south side of the cabin.

  Suddenly, he tilted his head and reached toward the east wall with his left hand, fingers trembling. “Aaah…aaah…”

  They were no more than guttural vocalizations—nowhere close to words. But Alice could sense what he wanted right away.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll get them for you.”

  Hanging on sturdy hooks on the wall were three swords.

  On the right was Alice’s golden longsword, the Osmanthus Blade.

  On the left, the pitch-black sword he had once worn, the Night-Sky Blade.

  And in the middle, the masterless white weapon, the Blue Rose Sword.

  First, Alice took the Night-Sky Blade off the wall and tucked it under her left arm; it was nearly as heavy as the Osmanthus Blade. Next, she lifted up the Blue Rose Sword. This one was only half as heavy as the black sword—inside the scabbard, there was just one half of a blade.