Chương 96: 066 – Crimes and Statistics

"Sorry for not making it dark enough for you to see," Namine said, voice still cheerful but taking on a clipped tone even as Princess Megumi suddenly made herself scarce at a dead run.

"Jenny, please describe what they missed to our pajhadin guests. Blues! Establish defensive perimeter and bunker and take firing positions! Whites, scout in force! Make sure those daikaito can't get close enough to steal any of our guests! Yellows! Prepare to hold and defend in force! Pinks, establish sensor boundary! Don't let us get blindsided!""" Yes, Medic!"" everyone said cheerfully. Between one moment and another, Loren found herself in the eye of a storm of movement.

Bright walls of vennplate began to snap into place around them, fusing together and causing their colors to blend as they formed walls and a ceiling. A beat, then the walls seemed to turn transparent, even as tall slits opened in them at regular intervals. Kaedekin moved into place in front of those gun slits, drawing guns from holsters and raising them up to the opening.

Other Kaedekin exited though an opening that quickly closed behind them, drawing the weapons at their belts as they took to the air, while more Kaedekin stationed themselves on the roof while drawing out sword, axes, clubs, hammers, and spears. Finally, there were Kaedekin who were taking out the large tablets they were carrying and summoning glowing balls of light to their hands.

The balls flew, exiting the bunker though the gun slits and moving out in different directions as the Kaedekin who'd made them focused on their tablets. Sera was among them, her possessed computer open like a book in one hands, a flame flickering to life in her other. Energy Flame, Loren saw, and it seemed to be… acting as some kind of antenna for the computer, with Sera acting as a relay between the two. Not that it seemed to be needed, as the spirit in the computer seemed to have partially fused to Sera's soul.

Was that why all the Kaedekin had a possessed computer on their person? It acted like some kind of… Oh! That was the 'neural interface', wasn't it? The spirits possessed the computers, and then partially possessed the Kaedekin, acting as direct mind links to their technology, one that could parse any command and offer true zero-latency, because thoughts wouldn't have to be translated into code or commands. That still left the question of where they were getting all these spirits, but holy shit!

The air tanks had been left away from them under a glowing dome of vennplate, with writing on the dome that read 'Pressurized Air Tanks. Highly explosive. Do not shoot'. The dome was just transparent enough to show the spare tanks inside. Distantly, Loren could feel heat. Not the heat of open flame, or the heat of the unseen sun—star, whatever—radiating down on the planet. Now, this was the heat of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Pyrotheurgists burning bright as they used their magic all at once.

As the Kaedekin around them all seemed to dance around them, moving from place to place yet never colliding with each other or the excursion party, Loren saw glowing points of light and heat rising into the air. Kaedekin Pyrotheurgists, flying the only way children of the Flame knew how: by blasting force from their hands and feet like rockets, and letting Newton's Laws handle the rest.

Distantly, she heard the Kaedekin around her calling out as their rocketing kin flew at the streak of light like missiles that were feeling a particularly personal grievance.

"Defenses, ready!"

"Firing lines, ready!"

"Sensor coverage, ready!"

"All right! First Contact Office is battle ready!" Namine declared. Her pistol was in her hand, her hands going through some sort of pre-check pattern seemingly without contact with the rest of her, finishing the gun being pointed at the ground and one finger being held next to the trigger guard parallel to the barrel, ready to shoot. Her smile hadn't changed all this time, though there seemed to be a determined edge to it without any change to the cheerfulness.

"Sorry about this. We weren't expecting for this to happen. Don't worry, we won't let anything happen to you, though right now I'm afraid we'll need to defend in place while the situation is in progress."

"What is the situation that is progressing?" Commander Bronze said. There was little of the humoring tone he sometimes used when speaking to the Kaedekin, only the steel of one of the ship's senior officers. His tone remained politely but Loren got the sense that might change.

"Criminals have decided to stage a heist of the College of Flames," Namine said, the smile fading slightly as a certain grimness entered her tone.

"Members of the college are currently in pursuit. All the Rangers stationed in Irorimachi have already been informed, ETA… 45 seconds. From the message that the phantom thieves left behind to taunt people, it seems their target was the Crown of the Princess, an irreplaceable historical artifact dating to the founding of the college."

The words caused a reaction from the Kaedekin around them, who had transitioned from smiling, cheerful tour guides to determined professional soldiers in the time it had taken for Namine to give out her orders. Now they looked like professional soldiers who looked disapproving and a little angry.

"You mean Night Raider?" Commander Bronze said.

"Phantom Thief Night Raider, yes," Namine corrected.

"They're a newly emerged supervillain who's been on a crime spree, stealing irreplaceable historical artifacts, and have single-handedly managed to become the most prolific supervillain in our system's history. It seems they've decided to add Megumi's crown to the list of their thefts." This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

"What do you mean, 'most prolific'?" Commander Bronze asked.

"According to most recent crime statistics, she's personally managed to increase the overall total number of crimes committed on Surcease and the whole Dancer system by an order of magnitude," Namine said grimly. Huh. She didn't think the Kaedekin had crime… why was everyone looking at her like that?

"I said that out loud, didn't I?" Loren said.

"Yup," Sera said.

"And we're very flattered you think so, but we're only people. We still have crime."

"Unfortunately," one of the Kaedekin holding a gun ready to shoot out of the bunker said.

"Is that violent crime or all crime?" Commander Bronze said.

"Because I was informed that your civilization considers singing loudly in the middle of the night to be a criminal offense." Namine blinked.

"No, it isn't! Who told you that?"

"Captain Trout. He said he learned it from you." Understanding dawned on her face.

"Oh, you're talking about the Songstress. No, we don't consider singing loudly at night to be a crime. Lots of people do that, it doesn't mean we consider them criminally insane.

To be considered criminally insane, you need to keep doing it every night for four years even after everyone's asked you to stop because the party's over and they're trying to sleep, explained why you need to stop, punched you in the face to make you stop, confiscated your karaoke machine to make you stop, confiscated all the karaoke machines you made to replace the first karaoke machine afterwards, at which point you start going out into the woods to find raw copper ore to smelt down into wire so you can start building karaoke machines by hand…

at that point, you're criminally insane and what you're doing is, by definition, a crime." A strange expression came over Commander Bronze's face.

"Every night for four years?" Namine nodded.

"She started getting punched in the face a couple of months into the start of the first year. If getting punched in the face most nights for four years isn't making you stop doing something, it's safe to call you criminally insane. It's not like they didn't want her to sing, she was apparently great at parties. She just wouldn't stop singing while everyone in the neighborhood was trying to sleep."

"…still, it seems a bit excessive to specifically criminalize only her for it, given that you said it's not actually a crime," Commander Bronze said in the tones of someone trying to sound reasonable but is already privately agreeing with the other person's point.

"She was originally declared criminally insane forty-nine years ago. She's still doing it.

Her most recent punishment sentence was seven months ago, where she spent six months at a dairy farm cleaning up after the cows, because she gathered raw copper ore, smelted it into wires, made circuit boards from glass that she made from raw sand, manually programmed it into a karaoke machine, hooked it up to speakers she made with electromagnets and paper made from fallen leaves, a microphone made from more electromagnets and leaf-paper, and started singing in the middle of the night once she'd put it all together."

"Criminal offense," Commander Bronze said, nodding sagely.

"Completely understandable." Others nodded as well, no doubt picturing the utter nightmare of having someone like that as a neighbor. Yup, definitely a criminal offense. Still, a part of Loren felt glad to hear this. Granted, it was a very small, petty, and meanspirited part, but it was still glad.

After seeing the Kaedekin showing off their advanced technology, advanced science, plentiful resources, that meanspirited part was happy to see that despite everything, they were flawed, imperfect people whose planet still had crime and whatnot.

She spiritually tried to step on and squash that part of her, because crime was always a serious issue no matter the world, and the fact the Kaedekin still experienced it meant not all was perfect in their seemingly utopian society, but try as she might, a little bit was still there. Which was uncalled for, because the Kaedekin had been nothing but nice and weren't deserving of her schadenfreude. It's not like they pretended they were better than everyone else and that they didn't have any crime.

They just seemed embarrassed and ashamed by the fact that members of their society committed crimes at all.

"Though for the sake of comparison, what other behaviors cause someone to be declared criminally insane?" Commander Bronze asked. Namine frowned.

"Well, before Night Raider appeared, there was the Kid-napper. She took her van to schools during recess and offered the little sisters there candy. Then she'd tell them she had more in her van, and when they got there, she'd have them lie down on the mattress she had in it—""I quite understand," Commander Bronze said, even as Loren stared in horror. She'd thought people luring children into their vans with candy was just something her mother had tried to scare her with!

Okay, that squashed that last bit, this was no laughing matter, the Kaedekin had all her sympathy.

"There's no need to go any further into the details."

"Yeah, I don't like thinking about it either…" Namine said.

"All those little sisters…" She shook her head, a disturbed looked on her face.

"Anyway, that's the sort of crimes we have."

"And this Night Raider managed to dramatically increase it singlehandedly?" Commander Bronze said.

"Yes," Namine said, once more sounding grim.

"She's not just part of a crime wave, she is the crimewave. And we fear it's only going to get worse. Already, this year's crime statistics has substantially exceeded the normal average." Commander Bronze nodded grimly, then paused.

"For reference, what is the normal average?" The embarrassed look came over Naime again, and every Kaedekin in the impromptu defensive bunker suddenly began studiously avoiding everyone's gazes. Given they'd all been keeping their eyes out for the criminal, this was actually impressive levels of discomfort.

"Five to seven per year," Namine said, with the air of something being painfully pulled out of her.

"Some years, when things were really bad, it could go up as high as nine. This year historically already has the most crime yet at over twelve crimes and still rising, with Night Raider being responsible for three of them, and the number of criminally insane people having risen to thirteen. Which is also a historical high… or a new low, depending on how you think of it."

"… You have an average range of five to seven crimes," Commander Bronze said in a strange tone, " per year."

"At least two of the crimes is usually the Songstress," Namine said with the air of someone speaking for the sake of completion, and looking absolutely disgusted with what she was saying. … All right, either the Kaedekin were playing a joke on them, or they were being honest. Either way, Loren had to resist the urge to punch them in the face, because are you fucking kidding me!? Give her back her sympathy! And her schadenfreude! Then one of the Kaedekin on the roof of the bunker started shooting.