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雨天決行 (Episode 10: Rain or Shine)
Preface
There is no preface.
Main Text
Uten Koharu didn’t dislike rainy days.
If you asked her whether she liked them, she would hesitate a little.
She didn’t love them, but she didn’t hate them.
Raindrops clung to the window.
The white walls of the research complex turned a shade of gray.
Footsteps grew quieter.
Everyone moved a bit more quickly, spoke a bit less.
On days like that, the world’s edges seemed softer.
That’s why Koharu felt a little safer when it rained.
She didn’t have to think about where she came from, or why she’d been placed here.
The rain fell, and that was reason enough.
It was raining that day, too.
She sat in front of a terminal in the seventh underground research section of the Pharmaceutical Technology Division of the Jibang National Army.
On the screen was the same string of characters as yesterday:
R33.3R
Even if she deleted it, it returned.
Close the file and it would still be there.
Open a different terminal and it would appear.
Even when she copied it onto paper and tore it up, she felt as though the same numbers lingered on the margins of the next document.
It had to be her imagination.
She tried to believe that.
But her body reacted too honestly to dismiss it as a trick of the mind.
Her fingertips were cold.
Her throat was dry.
She could hear rain in the back of her ears—even though she was underground.
“Technician Uten.”
A voice came from behind her.
She turned.
A man in a lab coat stood there.
She knew his name, but they weren’t close.
In this research facility, knowing someone’s name didn’t mean you knew them.
He looked at the terminal.
“When did you open that file?”
“Yesterday.”
“On whose orders?”
“During routine document organization.”
“Routine?”
The man didn’t smile.
Koharu didn’t either.
No one in the complex showed unnecessary expressions.
Unnecessary expressions meant unnecessary records.
“Close it,” he said.
“Yes.”
She closed the screen.
But just before it disappeared, the text changed for an instant:
R33.3R
Below it, a short phrase:
First Generation Incomplete.
Koharu held her breath.
The man didn’t notice.
Or maybe he pretended not to.
“Technician Uten.”
“Yes.”
“An additional order came from above today.”
“An additional order?”
“You’re to move to Storage Room Seven. Alone.”
Her brow twitched slightly.
Alone. When that word was used here, it was rarely good.
“The purpose?”
“To retrieve old biological records.”
“Authority?”
“You’re granted temporary access now.”
“Co-workers?”
“Not necessary.”
Not necessary.
When she heard it, something stung in her chest.
It was a work matter, not a judgment of her worth.
Still, the word hurt.
Not necessary.
Needed.
Qualified.
Unqualified.
Approved.
Pending.
Released.
Words she shouldn’t have known sank to the back of her mind.
They usually lay buried in the mud, but only when it rained did they ripple to the surface.
She rose to her feet.
“Understood.”
The man held out a small authorization card.
She took it.
It was cold.
“If an unregistered trail reaction appears in the vault, isolate it before reporting.”
“Isolation?”
“Yes.”
“If the subject is human?”
He paused a beat.
“Treat it as a research subject.”
She said nothing.
That answer wasn’t an answer, but that was common here.
Human.
Research subject.
Specimen.
Test subject.
Collaborator.
Protected individual.
Words changed; the treatment changed.
A change of treatment could change someone’s life.
“Technician Uten.”
“Yes.”
“Any questions?”
“None,” she replied. It was a lie.
But sometimes questions were forbidden. Asking could alter your position.
Somehow, she knew that.
The corridor to Storage Room Seven was long.
White walls.
White floor.
White lights.
Only her footsteps echoed.
There were no windows—naturally, since it was underground.
Still, she heard rain.
Saa...
Saa...
Saa...
The sound drew closer.
When she reached the vault door, there was a small shadow at her feet.
A frog.
She looked down.
A small gray frog.
It couldn’t be real, she thought. There should not have been a frog in front of an underground vault.
Yet it was there, staring at her.
“Where did you come from?”
Hearing her own voice surprised her.
Of course, the frog didn’t answer.
She squatted, hand outstretched.
Before her finger touched it, it hopped and disappeared through a crack in the door.
“Wait,” she blurted, startling herself again.
She didn’t know why she wanted it to wait.
She held the card to the panel.
The door opened.
The air changed.
It smelled old—not of chemicals, not of dust, but of something alive.
The smell of rain-soaked earth.
Inside, Storage Room Seven was different from the rest of the complex.
It wasn’t white.
Metal shelves lined the room, holding old containers.
Transparent tubes.
Black boxes.
Stacks of paper.
She wondered why there was paper. It was too old.
Extremely old records were sealed just as they had been before digitalization, she had been told.
She checked the shelf label:
Section R.
Row 33.
Third level.
She stopped.
Thirty-three.
It had to be a coincidence. Anything else would be troublesome.
She opened the box on the third shelf.
Inside was a thin record tablet and a small slip of paper.
On the paper, written by hand, were the words:
Proceed in the Rain.
She read them.
In that instant, the room’s lights went out.
It didn’t turn completely dark.
An emergency light glowed red.
No alarm sounded.
Only the rain grew louder.
Saa...
Zaa...
Zaa...aa...
Though she was underground, water dripped from the ceiling.
One drop.
Two.
Then rain.
She stood rigid.
Impossible.
This was a sealed underground vault.
Water shouldn’t fall.
Yet the rain continued.
It drummed on the containers’ surfaces but did not wet the old paper. Only the floor grew wet.
It was a strange rain.
It didn’t touch her shoulders.
The rain seemed to avoid her.
Something moved at the far end of the aisle—not a frog.
A human figure.
She tightened her grip on the card.
“Who are you?” she called.
No answer.
The figure drew nearer.
A white gown.
Dry hair.
It was a girl.
She looked about Koharu’s age.
No, she looked younger. Or older.
Her face was unclear.
Only her eyes were visible, and those eyes knew Koharu.
“First Generation,” the girl said.
Her voice blended with the sound of rain.
“Who are you?” Koharu asked.
The girl did not answer.
Instead, she extended her hand.
In her palm sat a tiny frog.
It jumped to Koharu’s feet and vanished.
In the next moment, metal rang out deeper in the vault. Something had opened.
Koharu ran.
She hadn’t meant to—her body moved on its own.
At the far end.
Where the oldest shelves were.
In the sealed section.
There she saw a container she had never seen before: a transparent cylindrical tank.
It should have been empty.
Yet a handprint remained on the inside.
A small hand.
A child’s hand.
Below it was engraved:
R33.3R
The full name below that:
Royal Third Ratio Recurrence Test Subject.
Uten Koharu.
She read it.
She couldn’t not.
Something split in her mind.
Not a memory—something from before memories.
Before words.
A white room.
Transparent walls.
Every meal recorded.
Every sleep recorded.
Recorded crying.
Recorded laughter.
Reactions when praised.
Reactions when scolded.
Reactions to being patted.
Reactions to being ignored.
Reactions when she was played the sound of rain.
Reactions when she was shown footage of frogs.
Koharu fell to her knees.
She couldn’t breathe.
It hurt—not as pain but because her sense of self had expanded too fast.
Outside what she’d thought was herself, countless unknown selves pressed in, all at once trying to return.
“Stop,” she said.
She didn’t know who she spoke to.
The vault door clanged shut.
She turned.
The man in the lab coat stood there.
He wasn’t alone.
There were several men and women, all in isolation suits.
The man spoke.
“Reaction confirmed.”
Another voice followed.
“Mirage Frog Trail, first stage manifested.”
“Target, confused.”
“Prepare to restrain.”
Target.
She heard the word.
Target.
It meant her.
So she wasn’t human after all—she was an object.
The moment she thought that, the rain stopped.
The world went silent.
At her feet, a frog croaked.
Not one.
Two.
Ten.
A hundred.
Countless frogs rose from the water on the floor.
They were not real.
They were phantoms.
Yet, though phantoms, they were there.
The men in lab coats stepped back.
Though phantoms, the emergency light swayed.
Someone’s hand dropped the restraints.
Koharu stood.
She was quieter than she knew.
She was afraid, sad, angry—everything was there, but none of it was strongest.
The strongest feeling was simply: No.
She didn’t want to be returned.
She didn’t want to be locked up again.
She didn’t want her name reduced to a number again.
She looked at the men.
“I am Uten Koharu.”
No one answered.
The frogs croaked all at once, like rain.
“Restrain her!” a man shouted.
Koharu didn’t move.
A frog hopped to the feet of one man.
He saw his shoes sinking into a swamp—that was his hallucination.
Another man saw the walls turn into water tanks.
A woman saw countless eyes gazing down from the ceiling.
No one was hurt.
There was no blood.
No pain.
They simply couldn’t move forward.
They couldn’t approach her.
The Mirage Frog Trail wasn’t meant to kill—at least not then.
It showed each person their accumulated fear.
It returned to those who reached out the memories of being touched.
It passed to those who tried to confine her the sensation of confinement.
It wasn’t gentle, but it was not mere violence.
Koharu walked.
She passed between the men.
No one could touch her.
At the door, she looked back once.
“Report this,” she said. Her voice trembled, yet she spoke.
“Uten Koharu is not a research subject.”
The door opened.
She stepped into the corridor.
The rain was gone.
In the distance, thunder rumbled.
Around that time, out at sea, Gorai Otome opened her eyes.
“It’s here,” she said.
She didn’t yet know what had arrived.
Yet one of her nine Ant Lions faced toward Jibang.
Another toward the Telecommunications Administration Bureau.
Another toward the town where the boy lived.
The last toward the mountain where Shuu rested.
Otome laughed.
“What a pain.”
But there was a hint of anticipation in her voice.
At the same time.
The screen in Kaisa’s room paused for a moment.
He clicked his tongue.
“A lag?”
Yet in the depths of the game, a whale sang.
He shouldn’t have heard that.
He took off his headphones.
The room was quiet.
Still, he looked at the sky.
No rain was falling.
Yet one drop of water slid down the outside of his window.
Meanwhile.
Shuu awakened again.
The wolf was howling.
He sat up and scratched his head.
“It’s started,” he said.
Then he thought a bit and corrected himself.
“No, it’s back.”
It didn’t matter which.
Either way, it wasn’t something sleep would cure.
Meanwhile.
Under Misora’s desk, a tiny ant had become two.
One was black.
The other was a wet-looking gray.
She looked at them and was silent for a while.
Then she murmured, “They’ve increased.”
No one heard her.
Yet the record remained:
First Observation Record, addendum.
Uten Koharu.
Mirage Frog Trail.
First stage manifestation.
Subject refuses the term “target.”
Declares her own name.
After she typed that, Misora hesitated.
Then she added one more line:
This record is not about her escape.
This is the record of the first time she chose her own place.
Save.
She didn’t send it.
Not yet.
Misora leaned back in her chair.
She was afraid.
Yet she felt she could breathe a little easier.
Someone had said, “She is not a target.”
That alone, for some reason, pierced her heart.
Uten Koharu walked out of the research complex.
The rain had stopped.
The sky was still dark.
But a little light peeked through a break in the clouds.
She took a deep breath.
There was nowhere to go.
No orders.
No protection.
No allies.
Even so, it was better than going back.
At her feet, a frog hopped.
She looked at it and smiled a little.
“Where do you think I should go?”
It didn’t answer.
It simply hopped toward the road.
She began to walk.
Rain or shine.
It wasn’t something someone else told her this time.
Now it was something she decided herself.
Afterword
There is no afterword.
what if i intruput like as i am meidioting to complain about ah there's no hope for left vertical reader symptoms patients...I was conquered and I am behaving in front of foggy Canadian teacher. So if I try to explain about Hiiagi Shu, details and collectable information won't reach to readers. while I am writing this thesis, the band album from yesterday's rising ep the lightwalker came up. their might have there lucid dreams, there acted catastrophic and and maybe to the readers（cunt）were in my head. upcoming Metallica album jacket opposite of stone sour s absolute zero album, ofcause coly said no one laughing now. I was like serious？ seems so.happy world mofo ah ma gachilic got anger. see I am corrupted.those were reason of why used AI for translation. を貼り付け形式にして
What if I interrupted the story as myself, rambling and complaining?
Something like:
"Ah, there's no hope for patients suffering from left-vertical-reader symptoms..."
I was already conquered, acting politely in front of some foggy Canadian teacher figure.
If I tried to explain who Hiiragi Shuu really is, or gather all the scattered details and collectible fragments around him, none of it would ever reach the readers.
While writing this thesis, I noticed that the band album from yesterday's Rising EP, The Lightwalker, had appeared again in my mind.
Maybe they had lucid dreams.
Maybe they acted catastrophically.
Maybe, to the readers, they were only voices that existed inside my head.
Then I remembered the upcoming Metallica album jacket. It felt like the complete opposite of Stone Sour's Absolute Zero artwork.
Of course, someone would say:
"No one's laughing now."
And my reaction was:
"Seriously?"
Apparently so.
Happy world, huh?
Then my inner gachilic side got angry.
See?
That's what I mean when I say I've been corrupted.
Those are the reasons I ended up using AI for the translation in the first place.
.....,....,......,.....
translation be like those
so, meidical hollowing symptomer me, left 9 and 10 at JPV, I will strudy how to sort writing.
but episode 10 all written by AI, I am not escaping, I just of I have chance to talk I can write others with low spec.
I hoolay human, people and efforting every.
bye. notice, invisible, no rights, etc aren't importants.
I am hating my shootable era will psyche with war broadcasted news.
fucker ranmarururururu....is that voice changer stock？ idm
let it be
