World's First Demon Lord 68 Research and Planning

May 1, 1:33 pm, Tokyo, Japan

"You've done a lot of work," said Bunta, impressed. "How did you even finish this?"

Sakura smiled as she watched him look through the documents on her screen.

"I've still got a whole bunch of other stuff to go through," she said. "But I think we're gonna need an expert to go through the rest."

Bunta and Michi both nodded. They were quite impressed by Sakura's efforts. After all she had done, it was hard not to be.

One of the perks of living in an internet cafe was the fact that no one cared if you stayed all day on your computer. Of course, that was also one of the perks of living alone. But after living with Michi and Bunta for a while, Sakura was glad she had an excuse to return to some of her more gremlin-like habits.

"Are you actually enjoying this?" Michi asked her at one point. Around the 24 hour mark, when Sakura was on her seventh cup of coffee.

"Why do you think I wanted to be a journalist?" she replied. "What other job would let me do research like this on my own?"

Michi didn't know how to respond to that.

It all started a couple days before, when she and Michi were making their way back from the train station. Since the last train had already run, they decided that maybe they should just rent a hotel room for the night. Michi took out his phone to tell Bunta, only to find it full of messages from Bunta.

"I think he wants you to call him back," he said, after listening to an angry voicemail.

Sakura obliged.

"Finally," said Bunta, not even saying hello. Sakura would've been annoyed, if it weren't for the very next words he spoke.

"I cracked the hard drive."

He then went on to explain how although he had managed to crack the hard drive, there was still a whole lot of information to go through. Terabytes of it.

"Most of that is probably just video though," said Bunta. "But if it's not, then you're gonna need an army of people to look through all this."

Sakura did not care. Finally, she was getting somewhere with this hard drive! She made sure to rest up well that night. The next morning, as soon as she got back to the internet cafe, she got to work.

Luckily, the hard drive was actually quite well organized. That made things easier to sort through at a glance. However, their manner of organization and naming was for scientists. Sakura would need to decipher the meaning behind each folder and file name before being able to know exactly what they offered.

The first thing she did was sort everything into usable and non-usable. Basically; things she could understand, and things that were too full of jargon for her to comprehend. She would need to get an actual scientist to look over that in the future, but for now, she needed to see what she could use.

Once she had done that, she began to slowly read and sort through all the things she determined "usable." This was slow, tedious work, but it was the only way to properly know what all these files were about.

Michi had offered to help, but Sakura declined. She knew that missing a single line, a single important phrase, could be the difference between a breakthrough and finding nothing.

As she read, she slowly compiled a document of all the most salient points, another document of names of all the people involved (that were mentioned), and another document for all other facilities and locations mentioned. She made sure to keep a detailed list on which document she found every bit of information.

Michi watched her progress for a while, and he was suddenly very happy that she had declined his invitation to help.

Sakura only stopped when she needed to use the bathroom, and twice to sleep. Both times she slept only four hours. By the time she was finished in the early morning of May 1st, she was exhausted.

But very satisfied. There was nothing quite like the satisfaction of a good few days of sleepless reading and organization. She had stretched, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes.

She needed a shower. And a nap.

But first, she sent a copy of all the documents to Bunta and Michi. Then, she crashed for a few hours.

Which lead to now, this video conference, where they were discussing everything Sakura had uncovered.

"So the lead scientist is someone named...Dr. Larsson?" said Michi.

Sakura nodded.

"There were quite a few documents that needed his signature to approve of stuff," said Sakura. "Not to mention he was the one who authored most of the jargon stuff I couldn't understand."

"Do we know what the project actually is?" Bunta asked. "Cause I don't think I understand what you wrote down here."

Sakura bit her lip. This was tricky.

"Well...from what I can see...it looks like the whole point of the experiments is to create, uh...hold on I wrote it down..."

Sakura quickly looked through the documents she wrote.

"...ah, yes here. 'To create a superior hybrid human life-form capable of housing and sustaining extrdimensional souls.'"

Bunta and Michi were silent. The atmosphere of the call became weirdly tense.

"...that doesn't sound like a real thing," said Michi, the first to break the silence.

"It sounds like something from a manga," Bunta agreed. "Or a light novel."

"You can argue about what it sounds like, but that is literally what is written on these documents," said Sakura. "Or are you saying that all of these documents are some elaborate hoax?"

Michi turned to Bunta, whose face was scrunched up in displeasure.

"No, these are...the documents that we copied over," said Bunta. "So unless Neurix was expecting you to copy that entire computer over and made a dummy...then no, this is actually what they are researching."

Sakura nodded, but didn't say anything else. Michi looked between the two of them.

"Hey, hey, c'mon," he laughed nervously. "You're not actually saying that this is what they're doing, are you?"

Neither Sakura nor Bunta replied. Michi's laughter died down.

"Are you actually telling me," he said, "that Congo, the world's largest corporation, is trying to create bodies to house the spirits of aliens?"

A beat passed.

"Technically, I think they mean the spirits of otherworlders. Spirits transmigrated over from other dimensions," said Sakura casually. "Y'know, like in that Re:Z*ro anime."

Michi's mouth gaped like a fish, opening and closing, but with no sound coming out. Bunta simply looked tired. He rubbed his temple with his fingers.

"I know...that this isn't important," he said slowly. "But...is there anything in there...about otherworlders coming to this world?"

"What do you mean that it isn't important?" Michi practically yelled. Sakura heard someone shush him, and he apologized.

"I didn't find anything in the stuff I could understand," said Sakura. "But..."

Bunta's eyes shot up.

"But? What do you mean, 'but?'" he said, voice rising. He hadn't reached Michi levels yet, but he would if he kept going.

"There were some documents in the pile that I couldn't understand about...artificial souls and transmigrated souls," said Sakura. "Here let me send..."

She sent a bunch of files over. She had not been able to make heads or tails of them, but they all had titles like "energy levels, dispersion rates, and type of transmigrated souls" and "inter-species compatibility of souls and their relation with their dimension of origin."

Sakura thought Bunta's eyes would pop out of his head from the way he was looking at those documents.

"This is..." began Bunta, trailing off.

"...a lot," Sakura agreed.

"But it's not proof," she went on. "It's just something that the scientists are researching. For all we know, it's all just theory, with no practice."

"But what about the monsters?" asked Michi. "Those are definitely not theory."

"All that proves is that they are trying to fuse humans and animals together," said Sakura, shaking her head. "The reason why they're doing that seems to be to create...a body to house a transmigrated soul. But just because they can fuse bodies together, doesn't mean that they have proved that souls can transmigrate dimensions."

"Or even that other dimensions exist," said Bunta, calming down. "Although...from the looks of these documents..."

"We don't know what they say," said Sakura, exasperated. "We're not scientists. We need to get actual scientists to read this and tell us, not rely on our own limited knowledge to understand a couple of words. For all we know, we could be misinterpreting everything."

Bunta nodded.

"But like Michi said as well, these people are clearly not only working on theory," Sakura continued. "These people are fusing human and animal bodies. That has to be some sort of crime."

"If not against human law, then against the laws of nature, surely," muttered Michi darkly.

"From that, I'm guessing that the lab is buying dead bodies off the police to use in their experiments," said Sakura, ignoring Michi's commentary. "There is no evidence of this in the files though. It's mostly scientist stuff, records of experiments, papers on findings, that sort of stuff."

"However, from the admin stuff that was there, I did find a few...interesting reports," said Sakura, scrolling down to the specific section on her screen.

"Right here, page 6. Second paragraph."

She waited for the boys to get to that part and read it.

"Subjects...escaping?" said Michi, eyebrow quirking.

Sakura nodded.

"Here is my hypothesis," she started, and began to break down her thinking.

From what she gathered, it looked like the lab first did animal-animal fusions. It went well, but some of the monsters were much more powerful than they expected. This caused them to break free, and kill some innocent civilians.

"Which is why they hired Jason Tachikawa," said Sakura. "I think he's their monster hunter."

"That would explain why he's at all the crime scenes," said Bunta, stroking his chin.

"But, wait," said Michi. "If they have monsters on the loose that kill people, and some guy catching them...that means the dead bodies..."

"Are caused by the lab as well," said Sakura. "Which they cover up by paying off the police, then taking the dead bodies away for their experiments."

"That's..." Michi exhaled. "...that's screwed up."

"This is just a hypothesis," Sakura reminded them. "Going off of what we've seen Jason do so far, and the info we found on the hard drive. We still need proof."

They were all silent as they digested all their information.

"Okay, so we still need to clarify a few things," said Michi, counting off on his fingers.

"We need to figure out where Jason's place is on all this. We need proof that they are bribing the police," he put up two fingers. "We have proof of the monster existing an escaping, but nothing about them killing I guess."

He looked at Sakura for confirmation, and she nodded.

"So we need killing confirmation. What else?" he asked.

"We need to establish who is at the top of this," said Sakura. "You mentioned Dr. Larsson before. He's definitely at the top of the lab, but he's writing these reports to someone."

"Who?" Bunta asked his first question in a long time.

Sakura shook her head, sighing.

"It was redacted," she said, frustration evident. "Any way to-"

"Nope," said Bunta. "If it's redacted in the document, I have no way of recovering that."

Sakura figured as much.

"So we need to find out who is actually at the top of all this," said Michi, putting up another finger.

"Can't we just find out who's paying for all this?"

Sakura explained that all of this was happening on the company dime.

"So we know that it must be someone high up at Congo," she said. "But how high?"

They all fell silent again, thinking about the worst case scenario…

"We've got our work cut out for us," Bunta muttered.

"Step by step," said Sakura. "We'll do little by little."

She then lay out her plan; first, get a scientist, preferably someone verified and trusted, to look over the labs and research for this.

"I can work on that," said Bunta. "That sounds easy, I want to do something easy."

Sakura and Michi smiled.

"That leaves the other plan to us then Michi," said Sakura. "The plan to track the detective."

"Weren't we already doing that?" said Michi, confused.

"Yes, but now we're specifically looking for when he is called in for a murder or something," said Sakura. "That, or a call from Jason."

"And then what?" asked Michi.

Sakura smiled.

"And then," she said. "we go Monster Hunting."

Chapter end