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DRT1.1.11: Byakuya-sama is God, section 11
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Danganronpa Togami Volume 1: Multiple Counts of Attempted World Domination
Chapter 1: Byakuya-sama is God
11
The Mercedes would have just plowed through the historic capital, but the other cars and the reignited protestors impeded our movement.
I tried to activate Borges, before I remembered that the connection was cut out. I couldn't guess at our enemies' locations. For someone like me, who was all too reliant on Borges, it was almost as if I had been blindfolded.
The Mercedes adeptly maneuvered around any obstacles, getting some distance between us and the demonstrators, but the roads were too complicated to gain much speed.
The town was lined with cute stone houses. If I thought about it, my mental image of Prague had been limited to what had been recently constructed there. But it was a town with a long history, spanning back to when it had been a fort city. It was a war capital, built to prevent enemy invasion. In that Praguian sky...
There was a flying baby.
A completely jet-black baby was flying as if it were crawling through the air.
...I think that probably you won't understand what I'm saying, but I'm just trying to tell you exactly what I saw, and this is all I've got.
Incidentally, there were a gap running down where the baby's eyes and mouth should have been, making it look very eerie. And very absurd.
When I'm faced with absurdity, relying on Borges is just reflex. If I was just doing a search, I could at least do one using local data.
BORGES=SEARCHRESULT
#22785571
CLASS\ART
TITLE "TV TOWER BABIES (INF.)"
A TV tower (216 m/709 ft. high) erected during the Communist era rises above the cadastral district of Žižkov in Prague 3. The regime change was followed by an image change, and to renew the outside of the TV tower, giant babies were installed, as in the search term.
Incidentally, the American TV channel CNN ranked the tower 4th on its "World's Ugliest Buildings" list.
Empowered by knowledge, I regained my composure, and a hypothesis popped into my mind. What if Souda-san, the Super High School Level Mechanic, could make the Prague tower babies fly?
But why would he do such a thing? Princess Sonia. Souda-san. What was everyone doing? Did they betray the Academy? Why didn't they tell me? Were they planning on killing me?
The flying baby turned in the sky, before doing a nose-dive down towards the Mercedes. Its face split in half, and something long and thin came out from the middle of it.
"That's a machine gun!" Hiroyuki-san shouted.
Machine gun? I couldn't handle the idea of him going so far out of his way to try and kill us. I felt like throwing up.
Takka takka takka. The sound of the gun firing was less intense than I would have imagined.
"What even!" Hiroyuki-san turned the car sharply to the side, going for a U-turn. The turbulence only made me feel even more sick to my stomach.
The Mercedes turned a corner into a shopping district, ignoring the traffic lights. There, the citizens of Prague were going about their daily lives. A leisurely shopping trip. A relaxing date. A man hitting up the bar. A couple holding hands as they walked. A mom pushing a stroller. More citizens tirelessly protesting... A Mercedes zooming through the shopping district drew a lot of negative attention. We were subject to a lot of critical looks.
Until the flying baby showed up, that is. The civilians looked up at a bit of their local landmark flying through the sky with a mix of bewilderment and incredulous laughter. The flying baby, apparently unconcerned by the civilians, began firing at the Mercedes again. Takka takka takka.
"No way!" I was the one who cried out. I hadn't thought that it would turn out like this. Without any basis for the assumption, I'd been convinced that "they probably wouldn't get civilians involved" or "they'd probably only do that as a last resort". Why would I ever think that? This world is full to the brim of murderous intent, the value of a life is surprisingly cheap, and it's all too easy to pile up the corpses. I've seen it myself.
In the course of avoiding a rain of bullets, the Mercedes spread a rain of blood.
A baby in a stroller, tucked into eternal sleep with blood as its blanket. Kids in shorts who were missing over half of their heads. A dead student with a mouth full of pizza that was covered in red something, whether it was ketchup or blood...
Bit by bit, the normal scenery of Prague was becoming abnormal. The flying baby kept making casualties as it closed the distance between us. I could see it clearly in the rearview mirror.
"Third-Rate Conglomerate." Byakuya-sama opened his mouth. "What happened to your jet engine?"
"Mmmmmwell, about that. We can only use that once."
"Don't show your trump card right away. Or if you do, then at least make sure you have something even better hidden away."
"Oopsie. My bad. Wait—ohhh dearie. A pincer attack?"
An armored car was coming towards us from the front. At a speed that would probably kill anyone who set foot in the road... no, it was already getting multiple people caught up in the fray.
It was Princess Sonia inside the car. She was killing people, no matter who they were.
Going forward, death was going to keep coming to lots of people worldwide, wasn't it? I was seized by the most terrible premonition.
"Don't you have any moves left, Third-Rate Conglomerate?"
"Well, I did use up my trump card. Why don't we just try scraping past the armored car?"
"That does seem like a move someone from a third-rate conglomerate would think of. Go down that side road."
"Why?"
"You third-rate conglomerates should shut up and do as I say."
"For crying out loud! It's just third-rate conglomerate this, third-rate conglomerate that with you. I don't care if it's third-rate! A conglomerate's still a conglomerate!" Hiroyuki-san kept grousing, but even so, he turned down the side road.
Byakuya-sama gave directions whenever we came to a fork in the road, and before I knew it, we'd escaped pursuit. Both the abominable flying baby and the ruthless armored car were nowhere to be seen.
"Why?" I asked, without thinking.
"Isn't it obvious? It's because I was guiding us," Byakuya-sama said, his face... missing its glasses.
"Byakuya-sama, um, where are your glasses?"
"You mean the glasses with the transmitter on them? I threw those away."
"Huh?"
"Hand me a replacement."
"R-Right away, sir." I immediately took out a replacement pair of glasses.
"Hmph. They're probably attacking those glasses right about now."
"By transmitter, did you mean..."
"Stop and think about why they would leave my glasses intact when they stole everything else from me, down to my shoes and my underwear. Those glasses might have been insurance. They were thinking ahead to my escape."
"I have a question."
"I'll allow it."
"If you knew about the transmitter, then why did you leave them on?"
"The transmitter guaranteed that they would appear before me. Then I might have had the chance to defeat them or extract information from them. I don't enjoy playing defense."
But, protested the softer side still left in me. If you had just thrown away those goddamn glasses right off the bat, wouldn't the townspeople still be alive?
Of course, I knew that it would be pointless to speak in hypotheticals after the fact. It wouldn't have been any different from saying "it would have been better if you had did this", or "you didn't need to do that"—they were just my impressions that I could safely share as an outsider.
We'd both lived through the Worst Incident in Togami Family History, so we both knew that amassing a mountain of corpses was the only way to survive. We'd do whatever we had to. If there was a spoon in our jail cell, we'd use it to dig a way out. If we had guns to our heads, we'd keep smiling until the moment the bullets were in our brains. This was just how Byakuya-sama and I lived.
Stay tuned for the next update next Sunday (PST)!
Read the rules before commenting! They're different from the DRK rules!!
Danganronpa Togami Volume 1: Multiple Counts of Attempted World Domination
Chapter 1: Byakuya-sama is God
11
The Mercedes would have just plowed through the historic capital, but the other cars and the reignited protestors impeded our movement.
I tried to activate Borges, before I remembered that the connection was cut out. I couldn't guess at our enemies' locations. For someone like me, who was all too reliant on Borges, it was almost as if I had been blindfolded.
The Mercedes adeptly maneuvered around any obstacles, getting some distance between us and the demonstrators, but the roads were too complicated to gain much speed.
The town was lined with cute stone houses. If I thought about it, my mental image of Prague had been limited to what had been recently constructed there. But it was a town with a long history, spanning back to when it had been a fort city. It was a war capital, built to prevent enemy invasion. In that Praguian sky...
There was a flying baby.
A completely jet-black baby was flying as if it were crawling through the air.
...I think that probably you won't understand what I'm saying, but I'm just trying to tell you exactly what I saw, and this is all I've got.
Incidentally, there were a gap running down where the baby's eyes and mouth should have been, making it look very eerie. And very absurd.
When I'm faced with absurdity, relying on Borges is just reflex. If I was just doing a search, I could at least do one using local data.
BORGES=SEARCHRESULT
#22785571
CLASS\ART
TITLE "TV TOWER BABIES (INF.)"
A TV tower (216 m/709 ft. high) erected during the Communist era rises above the cadastral district of Žižkov in Prague 3. The regime change was followed by an image change, and to renew the outside of the TV tower, giant babies were installed, as in the search term.
Incidentally, the American TV channel CNN ranked the tower 4th on its "World's Ugliest Buildings" list.
Empowered by knowledge, I regained my composure, and a hypothesis popped into my mind. What if Souda-san, the Super High School Level Mechanic, could make the Prague tower babies fly?
But why would he do such a thing? Princess Sonia. Souda-san. What was everyone doing? Did they betray the Academy? Why didn't they tell me? Were they planning on killing me?
The flying baby turned in the sky, before doing a nose-dive down towards the Mercedes. Its face split in half, and something long and thin came out from the middle of it.
"That's a machine gun!" Hiroyuki-san shouted.
Machine gun? I couldn't handle the idea of him going so far out of his way to try and kill us. I felt like throwing up.
Takka takka takka. The sound of the gun firing was less intense than I would have imagined.
"What even!" Hiroyuki-san turned the car sharply to the side, going for a U-turn. The turbulence only made me feel even more sick to my stomach.
The Mercedes turned a corner into a shopping district, ignoring the traffic lights. There, the citizens of Prague were going about their daily lives. A leisurely shopping trip. A relaxing date. A man hitting up the bar. A couple holding hands as they walked. A mom pushing a stroller. More citizens tirelessly protesting... A Mercedes zooming through the shopping district drew a lot of negative attention. We were subject to a lot of critical looks.
Until the flying baby showed up, that is. The civilians looked up at a bit of their local landmark flying through the sky with a mix of bewilderment and incredulous laughter. The flying baby, apparently unconcerned by the civilians, began firing at the Mercedes again. Takka takka takka.
"No way!" I was the one who cried out. I hadn't thought that it would turn out like this. Without any basis for the assumption, I'd been convinced that "they probably wouldn't get civilians involved" or "they'd probably only do that as a last resort". Why would I ever think that? This world is full to the brim of murderous intent, the value of a life is surprisingly cheap, and it's all too easy to pile up the corpses. I've seen it myself.
In the course of avoiding a rain of bullets, the Mercedes spread a rain of blood.
A baby in a stroller, tucked into eternal sleep with blood as its blanket. Kids in shorts who were missing over half of their heads. A dead student with a mouth full of pizza that was covered in red something, whether it was ketchup or blood...
Bit by bit, the normal scenery of Prague was becoming abnormal. The flying baby kept making casualties as it closed the distance between us. I could see it clearly in the rearview mirror.
"Third-Rate Conglomerate." Byakuya-sama opened his mouth. "What happened to your jet engine?"
"Mmmmmwell, about that. We can only use that once."
"Don't show your trump card right away. Or if you do, then at least make sure you have something even better hidden away."
"Oopsie. My bad. Wait—ohhh dearie. A pincer attack?"
An armored car was coming towards us from the front. At a speed that would probably kill anyone who set foot in the road... no, it was already getting multiple people caught up in the fray.
It was Princess Sonia inside the car. She was killing people, no matter who they were.
Going forward, death was going to keep coming to lots of people worldwide, wasn't it? I was seized by the most terrible premonition.
"Don't you have any moves left, Third-Rate Conglomerate?"
"Well, I did use up my trump card. Why don't we just try scraping past the armored car?"
"That does seem like a move someone from a third-rate conglomerate would think of. Go down that side road."
"Why?"
"You third-rate conglomerates should shut up and do as I say."
"For crying out loud! It's just third-rate conglomerate this, third-rate conglomerate that with you. I don't care if it's third-rate! A conglomerate's still a conglomerate!" Hiroyuki-san kept grousing, but even so, he turned down the side road.
Byakuya-sama gave directions whenever we came to a fork in the road, and before I knew it, we'd escaped pursuit. Both the abominable flying baby and the ruthless armored car were nowhere to be seen.
"Why?" I asked, without thinking.
"Isn't it obvious? It's because I was guiding us," Byakuya-sama said, his face... missing its glasses.
"Byakuya-sama, um, where are your glasses?"
"You mean the glasses with the transmitter on them? I threw those away."
"Huh?"
"Hand me a replacement."
"R-Right away, sir." I immediately took out a replacement pair of glasses.
"Hmph. They're probably attacking those glasses right about now."
"By transmitter, did you mean..."
"Stop and think about why they would leave my glasses intact when they stole everything else from me, down to my shoes and my underwear. Those glasses might have been insurance. They were thinking ahead to my escape."
"I have a question."
"I'll allow it."
"If you knew about the transmitter, then why did you leave them on?"
"The transmitter guaranteed that they would appear before me. Then I might have had the chance to defeat them or extract information from them. I don't enjoy playing defense."
But, protested the softer side still left in me. If you had just thrown away those goddamn glasses right off the bat, wouldn't the townspeople still be alive?
Of course, I knew that it would be pointless to speak in hypotheticals after the fact. It wouldn't have been any different from saying "it would have been better if you had did this", or "you didn't need to do that"—they were just my impressions that I could safely share as an outsider.
We'd both lived through the Worst Incident in Togami Family History, so we both knew that amassing a mountain of corpses was the only way to survive. We'd do whatever we had to. If there was a spoon in our jail cell, we'd use it to dig a way out. If we had guns to our heads, we'd keep smiling until the moment the bullets were in our brains. This was just how Byakuya-sama and I lived.
Stay tuned for the next update next Sunday (PST)!
Read the rules before commenting! They're different from the DRK rules!!