Did You Become Literally Power Hungry?!

Phone and internet service had been out across the entire island of Shikoku for a whole week. At first, it didn't seem like much of a crisis. The island, for as many people that lived there, was a very small place that didn't require much effort to get from A to B. But the longer the island was without its precious phone and internet, the more people slowly became crazy.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at work. Not even the triumphant return of Sakamoto to the Journal could do anything to lighten the mood.

“This is sooooo boring!” Mr. Kaneko said as soon as I entered the office. “I need my daily fix of cat videos and baseball highlights… My life is empty if I can't watch Shotaro Ooyama hit his record breaking home run!”

“Aren't you subscribed to SNN?” I asked him. “You can get all the sports highlights you want, whenever you want.”

“It's not the same!” Mr. Kaneko cried out. “I can't argue with Takumi Chigatta on the TV. But I can pull up my iPear at any time to tell him to put the Tigers higher up on his tier list.”

“And I can't get enough fashion tips just by watching Sunday morning talk shows!” Aoki complained. “Those outfits they wear are so two years ago!”

“A- and I can't engage in flame wars at the library with people o- over whether Kai deserves to be… be with Miku or with Sora!” Masuda added.

Everyone just stared at her in confusion for a moment.

Mr. Kaneko then stood up from his desk and said, “It's decided then! We need to get to the bottom of this mystery, since it seems J-Tel cannot.” He then pointed right at me, saying, “Tanaka! You and Sakamoto made such a great team once before, I'll be sending the two of you out to the J-Tel office in Matsuyama.” Before I could even say anything, he also added, “And get snappy with it, you two. Los Angeles is playing against the Tigers in an international game tonight!”

Seems we had no other choice…

•

Fortunately for us, the journey to Matsuyama was just two hours across the mountains. The largest city on the island of Shikoku had a J-Tel office built into the mountains that was responsible for maintaining all the phone and internet traffic on the island. If there was any sort of problem with either on the island, we assumed this would be the first place to look for clues.

The front doors were unlocked, which was to be expected for a company headquarters during totally normal business hours. We anticipated someone would be inside to greet us, but there was nobody at the front desk. All the lights were on, but nobody seemed to be home.

“This might be useful,” Sakamoto said as he picked up a piece of paper. I did not get to see what was written on the paper.

We decided to explore further. Room by room, we explored the complex. Offices, conference rooms, restrooms, every single janitor's closet, every single nook and cranny of the building was devoid of humanity. And yet, all the lights were still on.

“Everything seems to be in working order,” Sakamoto observed, “but nobody's here, so the problem must be somewhere inside.”

We ventured deeper into what seemed like the abyss, where the technicians would work on a daily basis. Where most of these kinds of buildings were built upwards, reaching into the sky, this one was built into the ground. The further we explored the building, the further under the ground we went. Here, the hallway lights dimmed gradually, lending to an air of uncertainty. The call center was empty as well, but we did spot something hiding in a corner. It was the shriveled up, barely human-looking corpse of one of the technicians. Having judged from the uniform he was still wearing, he was one of J-Tel's technicians. His name tag read Paul Murakumo.

“So uh… who's Paul Murakumo?” I asked Sakamoto. The thought never crossed my mind that he might not have known either.

“According to the directory, Paul Murakumo is the chief inspector,” Sakamoto answered, showing me the paper he picked up from the front desk earlier. “Why do you ask?”

“We've got a problem then,” I said. “Paul's dead.”

“The chief inspector is dead…” Sakamoto realized. “We might be getting in over our heads…”

“We may want to call the authorities,” I suggested. “This might be too big for us to handle.”

“Mr. Kaneko wanted us to figure out the cause of the outages,” Sakamoto visibly hyped himself up to keep exploring the building. “We have to keep looking.”

“How much more of the building have we got to explore?” I asked him.

“Not sure, but we don't have much further to go,” Sakamoto answered.

The deeper down we went, the more hallways we explored, the more bodies we found in a similar condition to Paul Murakumo: shriveled up and barely looking human. Every body we found only gave us a greater and greater sense of looming dread. Whoever, or whatever, killed these people must still have been inside the building. The only living thing we found inside the building aside from ourselves was a cat that ran out of a janitor's closet on our way down to the bottom of the building. In total, we found a dozen corpses in this condition.

We finally made our way to the bottom of the complex, the data center. It was a giant room full of switchboards, computers, storage units, and miles and miles of cables littering the floor. As with everything else in the building, everything in here seemed fine aside from the mess of cables and the strange odor of…

“Ah-CHOO!” I sneezed. “There's cats in here.”

“Allergic?” Sakamoto asked.

“Oh, big time.”

My nose didn't lie to me. Slowly, one cat after another began to emerge from among the giant black data towers. Before long, the room was full of cats of all colors and breeds. Hundreds of cats filled the room, occupying every single open space possible. It took everything in my power to not go into a sneezing fit.

“I don't understand…” Sakamoto said. “Why would cats take up residence in a dangerous place like this? There's cords and wires and heavy machinery everywhere.”

“I don't think those are any ordinary cats, Sakamoto…” I replied, holding my nose to prevent myself from sneezing.

The cats suddenly noticed our presence, their eyes glowing in all kinds of colors. They meowed a low, booming chorus of meows, almost as if they were expecting us. One by one, they slowly approached us, their meows growing louder and more ferocious the closer they got to us.

“They sure as hell look like regular cats to me.” Sakamoto said. “But why are they looking at us like that?”

The first of the cats got ready to pounce. It wiggled its little behind as it got into position. Claws were out, and it continued its long, droning meow. These were no normal cats; something told me they were Hollows. And they were hungry.

Aichi explained to me when we first became contracted that Hollows fed on magical energy. In my mind, it was like a sort of symbiotic relationship where we provided each other with magic, companionship, and emotional support. But something was wrong. Aichi never said anything about Hollows attacking humans and literally sucking the life out of them. Nor did he bring up them stealing electricity from human operations, for that matter. For them to be doing that, something had to have been horribly wrong. Whether it was an absence of magical energy or some kind of affliction affecting the Hollows or I didn't even know what… None of this was making any sense to me, but yet it was the only possible explanation.

The first cat leaped towards us, then the second, and then a third. However, the two of us had good enough reflexes to avoid them.

What had been depriving them of magical energy? Why would they feed on phone and internet data? If electricity was the closest thing they could find to magical energy, wouldn't they have been…

At that moment, the power shut off inside the entire building, and quite possibly in the entire city of Matsuyama, plunging us into total darkness. Only the faint glow of hundreds of cat eyes remained.

“Run…” I said quietly.