Chapter 145: Returning Empty-Handed? (Patreon)

"The power's on, so why isn't the main console responding?" Isac made his way to the console under a light overhead that kept guttering on and off, only to find not a single indicator lamp lit, and no hum of operation from either of the equipment racks flanking it.

"You have to throw the switch to start it up." Hayasaka Ai stepped up beside Isac, her bare hands flicking quickly across several buttons before she hauled the lever on the console down to its lowest position with all her strength.

As the lever dropped, the indicator lights on the console began to flicker, and a low electrical hum rose from somewhere inside.

"No signal." Kaguya held the radio in her hands — it had power now, the display still reading 89.3, but this time there wasn't even a scrap of speech, only the hiss of white noise.

"The tower's still not fixed?" Isac looked out the window at the red-and-white steel tower, standing there in silence, same as always.

A searchlight beam was trained on the electrical box at the tower's base, and Isac noticed the indicator light on it glowing red instead of green.

"Looks like there really is a problem." Hayasaka Ai had spotted it too, and without hesitation started for the stairs to go check it herself.

"I'm coming down with you." Isac wasn't about to let Hayasaka Ai go down alone. Then he turned to Kaguya and Yukinoshita Yukino. "Keep an eye on the console up here. If anything comes up, just shout — we'll hear you."

"Got it. Be careful." Kaguya nodded at once, without hesitation.

"Don't worry." Yukinoshita Yukino's answer was just as brief, but the meaning was clear enough.

Isac and Hayasaka Ai each grabbed a gun, picked up their tools, and headed downstairs.

In the corner of the ground floor, the generator rumbled away, thick cables trailing from its rear toward both the console upstairs and the electrical box outside.

Searchlights had been mounted at the station's entrance, along the fence, and even at the base of the tower. Some were completely dead; others, despite faulty contacts, still limped along.

The searchlight above the electrical box was one of the latter.

Isac and Hayasaka Ai walked up to the box, the light overhead flickering now and then like something out of a classic horror movie.

Fortunately it stayed lit most of the time, so Hayasaka Ai didn't need to set up another light source.

She pulled on insulated gloves and opened the box. Her eyes swept quickly over the interior before finally settling on a battery — one clearly pulled from a car.

Even with the power connected, its indicator light never came on, which meant that however intact it looked on the outside, it was actually dead.

If it doesn't work, swap it.

Hayasaka Ai flipped the switch to cut the power, quickly pulled the battery out, and reached a hand back over her shoulder.

Isac, quick on the draw, slapped a spare battery into her waiting hand. Hayasaka Ai fitted it into the box, connected the wiring, and flipped the switch back on.

As the green indicator light on the battery lit up, the whole box hummed to life.

Isac looked up, about to call out and ask whether Yukinoshita Yukino and Kaguya on the second floor had picked up a signal yet, when he spotted Kaguya at the window, pointing at something not far behind the two of them, shouting down at them:

"Wolves! Watch out!"

Wolves?

Isac followed the line of Kaguya's pointing finger and immediately spotted the wolves she meant.

Whether it was because of the aurora or not, the fur of the wolves out on the distant slope gave off a faint shimmering green glow, paired with eyes that shone with the same eerie light — an unsettling sight.

They didn't seem to be closing in for an attack, though. Standing just outside the tower's fence, they pawed restlessly at the snow underfoot, looking like they wanted to advance but didn't quite dare.

Were they afraid of the guns?

Isac raised his muzzle, aiming at the nearest of the green, aurora-lit wolves.

But it showed no reaction at all — no retreat, no attack.

That alone was proof enough: it wasn't the guns making them hesitate.

If not the guns, then what?

"They seem to be afraid of the light?" Hayasaka Ai said, as if she'd hit on something, pointing up at the searchlight overhead.

The wolf pack had surrounded the tower, yet their steps never carried them past the outer perimeter — and the searchlight overhead was the only variable in play.

As if to prove the point, the searchlight washing over Isac and Hayasaka Ai suddenly dimmed.

The instant the light died, the wolf nearest them lunged, utterly heedless of the Glock 17 in Isac's hand.

Bang!

Muzzle flash flared.

The wolf, its whole body glowing faintly green, staggered mid-stride but didn't stop — even at the very end of its life, it kept pressing its attack on him and Hayasaka Ai.

It managed three more steps before finally collapsing into the snow, lifeless.

Its death seemed to enrage the pack surrounding the station. Within seconds, another wolf glowing that same shimmering green lunged in.

It was answered by another heavy gunshot.

This time it was Hayasaka Ai who fired.

A flattened orange-red fireball flashed from the shotgun's muzzle, and a spray of lead shot cracked into the charging wolf like an iron whip, sending it flying — the wolf beside it caught the spread too, pellets punching into flesh and drawing a short, pained yelp.

Even so, the wolf that had only been grazed kept coming, dragging a mangled leg, limping straight toward Isac and Hayasaka Ai.

Just as Hayasaka Ai was about to fire again, a beam of light shot down from the station's second floor.

A blazing white beam lit up the whole area around Isac and Hayasaka Ai. The wolves that had already closed in skidded to a hard stop, then bolted away from the lit ground even faster than they'd come.

Looking up, Isac saw Yukinoshita Yukino standing at the second-floor window, a flashlight held up and blazing straight down at them.

From where Isac stood, the flashlight was bright as a bare bulb — so bright he couldn't even make out Yukinoshita Yukino's upper body.

"So bright." Isac squinted, but his feet never slowed — he grabbed Hayasaka Ai beside him and bolted for the station.

The flashlight tracked them wherever they ran, and only once they'd made it into the range of the station's own entrance light did Yukinoshita Yukino swing the beam away, turning it instead on the wolves that had been chasing them.

The wolf caught in the beam let out an agonized whimper and bolted sideways like a startled cat, as if the flashlight's beam were electrified.

As the beam kept tracking toward it, the wolf abandoned its companions entirely, bolting for the tower's outer edge without a backward glance, stumbling over its dead packmate's body on the way.

That afraid of light?

Watching this, Yukinoshita Yukino's eyebrows lifted slightly. Then she repeated the trick, swinging the beam onto the second wolf below, then the third.

Every single one reacted the same way — whimpering and scattering, chasing each other off into the nearby woods.

And so the crisis came to an end in the most absurd way imaginable.

The real hero of the hour, it turned out, was a flashlight they'd picked up from an old mine, of all things?

Isac and Hayasaka Ai worked together to barricade the ground-floor door with planks. The strange wolves had been chased off by Yukinoshita Yukino's flashlight, but there was no guarantee they wouldn't come back — better to seal the door first and worry about the rest later.

Back on the second floor, Isac thanked Yukinoshita Yukino right away. Without her timely help, he and Hayasaka Ai would have burned through plenty of ammunition.

When the wolves had closed in, he'd already braced himself to empty his whole magazine if it came to that.

"Come to think of it, Yukino, how did you know the wolves were afraid of light?" Isac asked, curious.

Yukinoshita Yukino shook her head. "I didn't. I just saw your searchlight go out and figured I'd shine some light down for you, so your shots would land more easily."

"I never expected those strange glowing wolves to be that afraid of a flashlight. Pure luck, I suppose."

Hayasaka Ai set her toolbox aside and cut in. "Lucky those wolves had that weakness too. My shot just now dropped one outright, and the spread caught another as well — did a fair bit of damage."

"But even wounded, it didn't back off at all. Kept dragging its injured leg straight at me and Isac. Its aggression was frightening."

Hayasaka Ai had run into aggressive wildlife before, but she'd never seen anything as reckless with its own life as that wolf.

She finally understood just how bad the lookout tower's work log had meant when it described wildlife going berserk — berserk enough to throw its own life away.

Paired with that fur glowing an eerie green, it made for an especially unsettling sight.

"And this is just wolves. If it were a bear, it'd probably be even worse."

Judging by how hopped-up those wolves had just been, a bear might well be able to shrug off bullets and land one last hit before it went down.

In fact, if Yukinoshita Yukino hadn't stepped in when she did, those aurora wolves might well have broken through Isac and Hayasaka Ai's line of fire and closed in for a melee.

And once things got that close, given how fearless of death the aurora wolves had shown themselves to be, getting hurt would have been all but guaranteed.

"From now on, on aurora nights, we stay indoors whenever we can. No going out unless absolutely necessary — and even then, bring a flashlight," Isac said.

Yukinoshita Yukino couldn't help a small smile. "We already don't go out at night, you know."

Isac thought about it. Fair point.

Joke aside, Isac turned to look at Kaguya, who was still fiddling with the radio.

"So? Any signal now?"

Kaguya shook her head, her expression turning grim.

Just a moment ago, the radio had stopped producing even white noise. If the LCD display hadn't still shown 89.3, she'd have thought it was broken.

"It's gone silent," Kaguya said, her voice low.

If she had a choice, she'd rather it were just broken.

After all, there were two possible reasons the radio would stop putting out white noise: either it was broken and couldn't pick up the channel at all, or it wasn't broken, had picked up the channel just fine, and the other end of that channel was simply silent.

The second possibility meant there was no one on the other end at all, which meant there was no rescue to speak of.

They'd considered this possibility before setting out, of course, but now that it had actually happened, the disappointment was hard to shake.

They'd trekked all this way to the tower, spent so much time and effort fixing it, only to be told in the end that the intel had been false.

No — maybe the intel had been real once, and they'd simply arrived too late. There was no telling now whether any other humans still existed on this planet besides themselves.

"All right, don't make that face. Look on the bright side — at least we've ruled out one wrong answer, right?"

As leader of the survival squad, Isac clearly wasn't about to let the group's mood keep sinking. He clapped his hands to pull everyone's attention back to him.

"Besides, we didn't come all this way for nothing. We took down two glowing wolves, didn't we? That's two more pelts to bring home — the kind that glow in the dark, no less."

"Call it a net win."

Win or lose? A profit either way!

"You really do have a unique way of comforting people," Kaguya couldn't help but needle him.

If only the location were right. If they were still back at the mayor's house in Mountain Town, Isac had another, far quicker way of comforting people — guaranteed effective, even precisely on point!

"Hey, things are what they are now. Complaining won't summon a rescue team. Better to spend that energy figuring out what we do next," Isac said, spreading his hands.

"Fair enough." Kaguya nodded in agreement.

Just as the three of them were getting ready to settle in for sleep, Hayasaka Ai suddenly called out to stop everyone.

"Wait — I think my phone's downloading something?"

"Downloading something?"

At Hayasaka Ai's words, the other three exchanged glances, each seeing the same confusion in the other's eyes.

Out here in the middle of nowhere with no signal — where would a download even come from?

"Maybe you're misreading it?" Kaguya said.

Hayasaka Ai shook her head, and without explaining further, simply set the phone down in the middle of the group so they could see for themselves.

Three heads leaned in over the small screen — and sure enough, there was a progress bar, steadily creeping forward, the percentage number at the end ticking upward too!

It was just moving slowly. In the time they'd been watching, the bar had only crept forward about 1%.

But one thing was certain: it really was progressing.

"Could this be an installer you already downloaded before, just now getting around to installing?" Yukinoshita Yukino guessed.

A progress bar didn't necessarily mean it was downloading. The signal indicator in the phone's top-right corner still showed no service, so where would the network for a download even come from?

"Unlikely. This is an internal-issue device — all the software was already installed at the factory. Installing anything new afterward requires authorization from the main host system." Hayasaka Ai shot down Yukinoshita Yukino's guess.

"Why overthink it? Once the bar fills up, we'll know what it is, won't we?"