CHAPTER 19

  I’m losing track of time.

  “It’s hard to believe it’s only been two months. It feels like it’s been forever.”

  I acknowledged the sentiment with a pained grimace.

  “Try standing behind the same counter every day, for sixteen hours a day.”

  “Shit. Yeah, sorry.”

  Toshi, the delinquent I used to refer to in my head as “Short”, looked genuinely apologetic. Lately, it occurred to me that it was rude to keep thinking about people with made-up nicknames. It dehumanized them, and kept up that wall that was starting to suffocate me.

  I chuckled.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m just kidding. I’m used to it. But, yeah, I agree with you. It feels like things have been like this forever.”

  It appeared that human beings were very resilient, that is, if they didn’t get eaten by monsters at least.

  The area had started to settle into a new normal. We still had no idea what happened, how extensive the damage was, or how long things would continue like this, but the time for hiding in homes and waiting for rescue had ended.

  There was still no sign of the government, other than the group of public servants cobbled together by the Governor, the de facto leader of the group now known as the Co-op.

  Besides the Co-op, there were several other factions, like the Heroes, the Babasaki Neighborhood Association, Skip City, and other groups up North in Yono, and further to the East in Kawaguchi. Beyond that, we still didn’t have much information.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an update on the monitor and moved to check the system.

  “Time to get back to work.”

  Toshi straightened up and stood in front of the counter expectantly.

  I scrolled through the current online orders until I found what I was looking for. A brand new order for one small bottle of water.

  I pulled out the pad of paper I used for these updates, then pulled up the full order details. In seconds, I transcribed the information entered into the notes section of the order onto the pad, then ripped off the page and handed the paper to Toshi.

  “There you go. Thanks for shopping at One Mart!”

  He gave me a smirk. This had become our inside joke.

  Toshi had started acting as my personal courier, and in a way, this had given him a considerable amount of status in the surrounding community.

  Not long after the store started taking online orders, I realized something that could be important, perhaps even critical, in this new reality.

  When placing any online order, there was a special field where customers could enter a short message. This was an open field that allowed users to specify any notes that were not covered by the order form, like requesting a specific pickup time, or asking for the delivery to be delayed to a specific date.

  It occurred to me that this could be used to send one-way text messages, and when I mentioned this to the Governor, he immediately put together a plan, as though he was already waiting for this discovery.

  Communication had been one of the biggest challenges for the various organizations and groups. Scouts had to return to a headquarters to make reports, patrols were isolated from each other, and messengers, critical in the cooperative efforts of the fractured leadership organizations, were slow, and took great personal risks traveling alone.

  While far from ideal, being able to use the store as a communications hub, one that could receive messages from anyone with a working smartphone, would greatly improve the efficiency of communications in the area. We quickly worked out the details of how it would operate, and almost overnight, the store had become the center of the recovering city of Saitama.

  Patrols no longer needed to travel back to the main headquarters just to report on what they had found. This was particularly important when they encountered trouble.

  Most of the local factions were also included in this network, so coordination now became much easier and more efficient. I was hesitant at first, not quite trusting all the various leaders with the details of the store’s abilities, but the Governor insisted that it was imperative that the different groups needed to work together, and this would go a long way in helping knit the tattered pieces of civilization together again.

  The way the system worked was that when an order for a single bottle of water came in, I would pass the notes on to Toshi, who would then take them across the street to the Co-op branch office that they had established in the old office building opposite the store.

  Messengers there would then be dispatched to the main headquarters, or to reply directly. It seemed clunky at first, but soon the resulting improvement in communication speed was obvious to everyone.

  In exchange for this extra service, I had proposed a charge of one monster core per message. When I explained my request, I played it up as a naive understanding of the new barter economy that had been spreading, and the Governor quickly agreed, though I think he might have suspected something behind the idea.

  I had no idea at the time, the chaos and tragedy that this idea would spawn, and how much I would eventually regret that plan.

  Soon, I was transcribing more than a dozen messages a day, often more than double that. Mostly status reports from the various scouts, patrols, and even the heroes, but also correspondence from other factions who had been brought into the network.

  I learned a great deal about what was going on, and quickly had gone from a shut-in, isolated from the world, to one of the most knowledgeable people in the area, at least regarding current events. Not all of what I learned was easy to accept, however.

  According to various estimates, anywhere from fifty to as much as ninety percent of the population of Saitama had perished during, or soon after, the disaster. When the central government district had been scooped out of the earth, as much as twenty percent of the population had disappeared instantly, along with most of the disaster mitigation and evacuation center equipment and supplies.

  The area south of the Arakawa River, including all of Tokyo, was cut off completely. It was now covered with a thick wall of smoke of unknown composition, and so far, no one had been able to penetrate it more than a few meters and survive. There had been no contact at all with the neighboring cities like Kawagoe, Kawaguchi, and Koshigaya.

  I also found out why they had started to refer to the stones as “Monster Cores” instead of Goblin cores. While I had only seen the giant frog-like monsters, they were not the only new monsters to have appeared.

  The gobs seemed to come from the rivers, and had quickly overwhelmed the area, making it into their nest, but to the East, giant boar-like monsters, now called Orcs, had appeared. From the descriptions I had read, the orcs were the size of a small cow, had two extra arms, and two sets of large horns on their heads. They could stand on two legs, and attack with their arms, or run on their six legs at tremendous speed, using their horns like bulls, to impale their victims.

  Even worse, to the North, were giant birds, known as Rooks. The Rooks were completely black, absolutely silent in the air, and could easily pick up two grown men in the night without anyone even noticing until they were gone.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  This, it seems, was the reason people still disappeared from the streets at night, despite there not being a gob seen in the city center for weeks.

  While the gobs seemed to be an endless horde, constantly pouring out from the rivers, the Orcs and Rooks were less common, but much more deadly and harder to combat.

  Local groups of citizens had armed and organized to the point that they could handle small groups of gobs, but so far, only the Heroes had been able to take out any of these more powerful monsters.

  “Welcome to One Mart! How did it go?”

  “They seemed worried.”

  Toshi came back in and reached out his hand, dropping a small green pebble onto my palm.

  “Worried? Why?”

  The message I had sent seemed normal enough. It was a regular update from Skip City, a group to the South-East that had built up a fortified base inside a natural science museum that had managed to survive the disaster.

  They seemed quite cooperative with the other groups, and protected the Eastern flank of the cleared area of the city.

  “I don’t know. The guys just acted like they didn’t believe the update. I think there must be some tension between Babasaki and Skip City.”

  Politics. Great, just what we need.

  “Figures. That guy is getting on everyone’s nerves.”

  The Babasaki Street Neighborhood Association, or more precisely, its President, Mr. Sawa, had been getting more and more aggressive in its dealings with the other groups.

  This was likely because its area of control included both the headquarters of the Co-op and this store. President Jerk had been using every opportunity to increase his power base, and had ruffled a great deal of feathers in the process. Still, largely due to his control of the areas that had benefited the most from the presence of this store, he had amassed a large number of followers.

  Thankfully, he lacked the authenticity and perceived authority of the Co-op and the Governor. The Governor had personally intervened repeatedly to ensure the relative stability and independence of the store, while at the same time, the Co-op actively distributed supplies to the surrounding groups to ensure the resources were spread out as fairly as possible.

  The results had been good. Slowly, the communities were coming together, and for now, things had started to stabilize. That made me worried, since what I was contemplating might throw the whole setup for a loop.

  “I think that should be the last one for today. You can head off if you want.”

  “I’ll wait for another ten minutes or so. Anything else you need?”

  “Nope, just remind everyone about the meeting tomorrow.”

  Toshi nodded, then walked through the aisles, grabbing a few items, a couple of cups of instant noodles, some riceballs, and a large bottle of soda. I quickly rang up all the items, then went over to the freezer and grabbed an ice cream, and added that to the pile.

  I paid for everything with my own wallet, placed it all in the sack that Toshi had dropped onto the counter, and gave him a cheesy smile.

  “Thanks for shopping at One Mart!”

  Toshi grabbed the sack, then went outside and sat down in the old, beat-up office chair that he had positioned outside the entrance of the store. He peeled the paper wrapper off the ice cream and ate it while reading an old, worn magazine.

  He had even managed to attach an umbrella to the chair so that it blocked out the sun and kept him dry if it rained. It wasn’t strong enough to last through the rainy season, but for now, it seemed to function well enough.

  From that space, Toshi would spend most of the day, just sitting there, reading old comic books that he had scavenged from who knows where, and wait for me to signal him with a new message or an errand. In exchange, I would let him take food back for himself and his older brother, whom he lived with somewhere nearby.

  I didn’t know his exact living situation, and I hadn’t asked. No one seemed to ask about those kinds of things anymore. There was no one who hadn’t lost someone close, and for now, people were trying to focus on surviving.

  In this way, I had worked out a truce with the initially abrasive delinquent. I had a similar arrangement with his friend Ken as well. He was still running through the town, charging up phones, but now, he had a backpack full of batteries, and rather than food, he collected as many monster cores as possible in trade for his visits.

  In exchange for those stones, he got as much food as he needed for himself and his grandmother, who had made it through everything, but was disabled and unable to leave the house. Ken favored more practical food items than Toshi, opting for rice, soup, and vegetable side dishes, over junk food and snacks.

  These two would often hang out together in front of the store, and had become essentially my employees, though it was ridiculous to think of a part-time convenience store temp worker as a boss.

  Despite my early impression of them, they both worked diligently, and seemed to enjoy the status they had gained by associating closely with the infamous magic convenience store.

  The only thing that was missing was the third member of the trio. Wataru, the big one, had been drafted early into the service of Babasaki, where he was tasked with a variety of jobs, from helping with street cleanup, to acting as a guard for the president when he went outside.

  We all knew that Wataru hated getting stuck with all that, but his parents were both members of the Association’s leadership committee, so he didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter. He would stop by and hang out with his friends whenever he could, and he would often share little bits of information with me about the internal dynamics of that group.

  Since the day that he had been thrown out into the street by the AI, I had not seen President Jerk even once. According to Wataru, he bore a significant amount of animosity toward both me and the store, and would often rant to anyone who would listen how it was both an unreliable method to distribute critical supplies and a possible danger to public safety that should be barricaded.

  I did see his wife, or at least the woman I thought was his wife, from time to time. She would stop by the store, bow politely, and shop for some basic items like everyone else. She would always pay only in cash, and sometimes would freeze up, seemingly confused by something. Luckily, she never visited alone, always accompanied by an assistant, or a guard. To me, she seemed like a kind old grandmother, but I never let down my guard either.

  After Toshi left, and I saw some of the solar-powered lamps turn on in the Co-op hub across the street, I relaxed a bit. I would be alone until the next day, and had some things to prepare for.

  I reached under the counter and pulled out the dish that I kept there. Inside were a couple dozen of the small green stones. There were also a couple of dark purple stones in the dish.

  I grabbed a handful of them and put the dish back, leaving it with about half the stones, including the two purple ones. Holding the rest carefully in my hand, I walked over to the ATM by the window.

  I carefully checked outside to make sure there wasn’t anyone, or anything, loitering beyond the property before I began my new nightly ritual. I inserted my digital wallet card into the machine, then navigated to the Account Deposit screen. The insert cash door opened, but instead of feeding in bills, I dropped in the handful of green rocks.

  Modern-day ATMs were impressive. They could easily handle both paper money and coins for deposit, but I had never heard of them being able to handle anything besides legal Japanese tender.

  I actually had Mrs. Sawa, the wife of President Jerk, to thank for this discovery.

  On at least three occasions, I had seen Mrs. Sawa try to use the ATM. Currently, the only function that still worked was to charge up a Wanma Digital Wallet with cash. This was a lifesaving service for me, since now, customers could do this without my assistance, whenever they wanted.

  When Mrs. Sawa used the ATM, however, it appeared that she was attempting to use it like a normal ATM, both to withdraw and deposit money into a regular bank account. This, of course, failed each time.

  On each occasion, I tried to patiently explain that access to regular bank accounts no longer worked, but that she could deposit or withdraw funds from a Wanma Digital Wallet.

  She would give me a look of confusion at first, but would quickly apologize, shake her head like she had simply forgotten, and slowly walk out of the store. She never got angry or frustrated. She would walk out as though nothing strange had happened at all. The looks that her escorts gave me, a mix of sadness and concern, caused my heart to shudder a bit.

  Once, when she was trying to deposit money, I realized that she had dropped in a few of the small green monster cores into the deposit box. Perhaps she was conflating the cores with money, since they were being used that way now. When it had failed, she flagged me over to assist her.

  Again, I explained how deposits to bank accounts were not currently available, and was about to cancel the transaction when I noticed something strange. The amount of the deposit was an unusual number.

  I pressed cancel, and the door opened. Inside, there were three, ten-thousand-yen bills, and three small green stones. This was very odd, since the failed deposit was not for thirty thousand yen, but was for over forty thousand yen, and was not a clean amount ending in zeroes.

  I looked over to the escort, who was looking at the magazine rack, trying to give the old woman some space while she did her business. The man wasn’t looking at us, so I quickly tried to start the deposit process again.

  [Amount to Deposit: 43,216* yen]

  Before anyone could see what I had done, I cancelled the transaction, retrieved the old woman’s money and stones, and handed them back to her, along with her bank card.

  Just as she had the other times, after I explained the issue, she calmly apologized, then explained that she had simply forgotten. Then she left without any problem.

  Later that night, I successfully tested a new theory. What I discovered had shaken me to the core with its deep ramifications. It was a secret that I had since kept to myself, but one that I knew I would not be able to hide forever. For the past several weeks, I had been preparing for the worst, all that time, praying that no one else figured out what was happening.

  I knew that I was almost out of time, so the meeting the following day would be the next step in my plans. Hopefully, my preparations had been enough to weather the storm that was surely coming.

  I glanced down at the ATM screen to check the information on the transaction.

  [Deposit Successful]

  [Customer: Huang, Ming]

  [Amount Deposited: 58,344* yen]

  [Account: Wanma Digital Wallet #24601XXXX]

  [New Account Balance: 1,192,468 yen]