Project Necro is an official initiative by Re:Library.

Amaterasu’s boss’s telekinetic range is officially stated, on paper, to be large enough to cover all of Japan. The World Shadow that appears in various places across the globe is usually eliminated by espers whom the boss scouts locally and awakens on site—but since they die in action quickly, turnover is high and stability is lacking. Japan is pretty much the only country where the World Shadow can be eliminated stably without casualties.
*As expected of the boss’s home turf. Amazing, Amaterasu!*

When the boss occasionally slips away from Ama-no-Iwato, it’s to scout replacements for fallen espers, or to hunt World Shadow in areas with no espers.
It’s definitely not because he went to Hokkaido to watch draft horse racing, and of course he never buys betting tickets. There’s no way he’d be first in line at a New York theater on the opening day of a new American comic movie, nor would he ever frolic around in an amusement park with his wife in tow. Perish the thought.

Amaterasu’s boss is a nihilistic, hardboiled nice guy who carries the tragic sin of having, through his own arrogance, turned what was once harmless World Shadow into something powerful—and who continues to fight it to atone for that sin. Naturally, he would never secretly dispose of all his erotic doujinshi upon getting married, then after wavering decide to keep just a few hidden away. The boss would never do something like that. Never!!!

Anyway, given those parameters, it’s impossible to locate and secure Shouta-kun—who is apparently surviving somewhere in the Amazon—while staying in Japan, as the range isn’t enough.
And so, to solve the problem, it was decided that I would personally fly to the Amazon.

Locating and securing Shige-jii had been accomplished through distributing flyers, so there had been no problem with me sitting around warming a chair in Japan. But with Shouta-kun, we don’t know where in the Amazon he is. There’s no way we can plaster flyers across the entire vast Amazon.
Because we prioritized rescuing the elderly Shige-jii—who might have just passed away in his sleep without doing anything—we ended up leaving Shouta-kun to survive for four whole days.
If he failed to secure water, he could already be dead (though with the application of his freezing ability, that probably wouldn’t happen). He might also be, at this very moment, hovering between life and death after being bitten by a venomous snake (though with the Absolute Zero Guard, he’d probably never be bitten).

Given that Shouta-kun is far tougher than an average high schooler, I think he’s fine. But that doesn’t mean we can take our time searching.
The boss, belatedly realizing the situation, will fly to the Amazon, bring the area into his range, and use wide-area telekinetic search to locate Shouta-kun. That’s the best approach—and that’s what we’ll actually do.

Shiori will accompany me to the Amazon. She’ll form and lead a local search team, taking the lead in gathering and processing information.
While I use telekinetic clairvoyance to painstakingly search every corner of the Amazon, Shiori will use both manpower and brainpower to search. A two-pronged search.

Anyway, after accomplishing yet another unauthorized overseas trip number who-knows-what through telekinetic high-speed travel, we arrive in the Amazon. But where to start?
The Amazon refers to the tropical rainforest in the Amazon River basin of South America. It covers a vast 5.5 million square kilometers—enough to fit 14 Japans inside—and its canopy hides the ground, making visibility terrible. Even with psychic powers, finding a single person in a place like this is utterly unrealistic.
But we do have some clues. Logging in the Amazon is ridiculously active, and roads are cleared to transport the cut timber. It’s unlikely that the smugglers Rin hired went deep into the trackless wilderness to abandon Shouta-kun. More likely, they used logging/transport roads to move him and abandoned him nearby.
On a map, I draw red lines for the roads stretching from the airport into the Amazon, then shade in the area that an inexperienced person could travel on foot from there in four days. This excludes most of the Amazon from the search area, narrowing it down to where Shouta-kun is most likely to be.
From 14 Japans, we’ve reduced the search area to 2 Japans (eyes rolling).

Even combing through 2 Japans’ worth of territory is brutal.
Brutal, but this is the best move I can make right now. While Shiori comes up with and arranges a better plan, I search the jungle with telekinetic clairvoyance.

It’s a hopeless search.
If Shouta-kun is lying under a fallen tree to sleep or curled up quietly in a tree, I might miss him. I have to search every nook and corner carefully, which slows the pace and wears my nerves thin. The same dense jungle stretches endlessly, with no landmarks, and I often end up searching the same place twice.
All I find are insects, fish, frogs, birds, and monkeys. Stray even a little off the road into the jungle and the loggers vanish from sight—no one to be found. After hours, I finally spotted a human figure… only for it to turn out to be brown-skinned indigenous people, nothing like a Japanese person. The sense of futility is crushing.

After searching for 24 hours straight.
Remaining search area: about 1.996 Japans.
*My spirit… is about to break…*
*Unless we narrow down the search area further, this won’t work.*

However, this is part of my supervisory responsibility, connected to this whole made-up extraordinary show. I absolutely have to avoid mental trauma or death. I wouldn’t be able to face the person themselves, and I couldn’t possibly apologize enough to their parents. This is no time for me to be broken in spirit. Even if it feels like a waste of effort, if there’s any chance of finding them, I have to act.

At the 24-hour mark, Shiori had organized a search party of 300 people in total. At the same time, she gathered eyewitness reports of Japanese people and requested the cooperation of indigenous people familiar with the jungle. Two-thirds refused to cooperate, but we managed to secure the help of the remaining one-third.
Surprisingly, even among the indigenous people, the younger generation was open to interacting with the outside world, and some had even learned Portuguese (the official language of Brazil, which covers most of the Amazon) and English. Communication with the indigenous people, the most reliable presence in the jungle, wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible either. And “indigenous” doesn’t mean “primitive”—they wear shoes, polo shirts with logos that seem to be secondhand from China or America. Even living in the jungle doesn’t make them uncivilized.
Thanks to establishing this cooperation system, our search efficiency skyrocketed. On the sixth day after the disappearance—the day after Shota-kun’s mother filed a missing-person report—we finally found him.
Through the indigenous network, we learned that he was in a Hoppo tribe village deep in the jungle, and we confirmed that he was safe.

The Hoppo tribe village consists of about forty small, stilted houses with thatched roofs of dried grass and bare wooden plank walls, gathered along a tributary of the Amazon River. Transportation is mainly by canoe. They say it’s “quite close,” only a one-day trip one-way from the nearest bus stop.
*One day for a one-way trip is not close. Your sense of distance is way too different.*

Shiori and I rushed to the village via the fastest route—time-stop plus telekinesis-based high-speed travel—and found Shota-kun with his worn-out school uniform draped over his shoulder, sunburned but looking perfectly fine. In fact, he even had a cute, dark-skinned girl by his side. *Hey, who’s this girl?! …No, that can wait. The important thing is that he’s safe. Truly, I’m relieved.*
When we arrived at the edge of the village, scattering branches and leaves with a blast of wind, Shota-kun waved an ice spear as a signal.

“Master! Master, over here! I knew you’d come to get me!”
“Are you okay? …Yeah, you’re okay.”

I ran up to him, checked that he wasn’t injured, gave him a light hug, and patted his head—at which point, looking displeased, he pushed me away. *Oh? Embarrassed, maybe?*

“Of course I’m fine. I’m not a kid.”

*You’re not an adult either. And honestly, if you woke up to find yourself in a jungle with no explanation, even an adult with plenty of survival experience could end up dead.*

“Who is this?”

The cute, dark-skinned girl who had been watching our reunion with curiosity tugged at Shota-kun’s sleeve and pointed at me.
I doubted my ears. *Wait? Did this girl just speak Japanese?*

“This is my boss I told you about. Hmm, well, you can just call him Master.”
“Got it. Master, I’m Kaya.”
“O-oh.”

When I shook the hand she offered with such familiarity, Kaya-chan smiled happily and shook it up and down. I wasn’t imagining it—right here in the middle of the jungle, she was speaking a distant foreign language fluently. *Why?*
Kaya-chan looked about twelve or thirteen. Her healthy, dark-brown skin was almost entirely covered by a baggy blue T-shirt with a Japanese soccer team logo, worn like a dress. She had silver hoop earrings in both ears, swaying between her long black hair as it fluttered in the wind.
After introducing herself, Kaya-chan took a step back and began eyeing me up and down while licking a small ice spear she held in her hand. *…Has this kid been tamed with food or something?*

“Man, it was rough. Let me tell you about it.”

According to Shota-kun, Kaya-chan is half Hoppo tribe, half Japanese—her father is from the tribe, her mother is Japanese. That’s why she understands Japanese, as well as the Hoppo language. She also knows a bit of Portuguese and English.
On the first day of being stranded—“woke up and was in the jungle” kind of inexplicable situation—Shota-kun quickly found a river and secured water, essential for survival. But since he was thirsty, he gulped down the raw water without any treatment and, unsurprisingly, got stomach trouble. Apparently, it didn’t occur to him to at least pasteurize it.
That’s when Kaya-chan happened to come by. Finding Shota-kun writhing in pain and leaking all sorts of things from all sorts of places, she called some Hoppo tribe adults, who carried him back to the village. Thanks to Kaya-chan’s devoted nursing, he recovered in two days.

Shouta wanted to return to Japan immediately, but he was convinced that leaving without doing anything for the villagers who had helped him for free would surely get him roasted alive in the fires of hell. So, he wondered if there was any way to repay them.
Through Kaya-chan’s interpreting, he asked the villagers if there was anything troubling them. They told him that lately, a huge and ferocious jaguar had been ravaging their livestock night after night. At this rate, a food shortage was inevitable.
So Shouta volunteered for the night watch. On the second night, he put his freezing ability to full use—turning the jaguar into an ice sculpture and saving the village from crisis.
Most of the villagers seemed to think Shouta’s freezing ability was magic, but since they were the kind of people who would also label smartphones and drones as magic, it was unlikely anyone would take the story seriously even if it spread.

Still… getting dumped in the jungle, rescued by a dark-skinned, beautiful girl who speaks Japanese, defeating a rampaging jaguar, becoming a village hero, and being accepted as a member of the tribe—
*Does that actually happen???*

Shouta was already the one in Amaterasu with the strongest “main character aura,” but I never thought he’d be able to spark such an entertaining chain of events entirely on his own. Though it did all start because of Rin-chan, I suppose it’s possible to say this kind of thing can happen once in a blue moon.
*Never underestimate Shouta’s protagonist buff. Why can’t all of humanity be born with that?*

Since his parents had already filed a missing person report, it was decided that Shouta would be forcibly repatriated right away. While I was getting the details from him, Shiori had already found the village chief and wrapped up negotiations. *Smooth as ever.*

The villagers waved with smiles—though with a hint of reluctance—as they said goodbye. Standing right beside Shouta, waving alongside them, was Kaya-chan with a small bag in her hand.
When Shouta pushed her back, saying, “Hey, you’re staying here,” she didn’t move.

“I’m coming with.”
“Huh? No way. Kaya, be a good girl and wait in the village.”
“If I’m not there, who’s gonna change Shouta’s diapers?”
“Hey, shut up, you idiot! No, Master, this isn’t what it sounds like! I swear, it’s about when she was nursing me back to health!”
“No need to be embarrassed. I’ve seen your pee-pee, so changing your diaper is basically nothing.”
“Aaaahhhh! Just… just kill me already…”

Shouta’s voice cracked as he crouched down, covering his face.
*Ouch…*
Even if the caretaker is a beautiful girl—no, especially because she’s a beautiful girl—having her handle your bathroom needs is pure torture unless you’re into that kind of thing. *What did Shouta do to deserve this? Isn’t that way too high a price for befriending a cute girl?*

After discussing with Shiori, we decided to bring Kaya to Japan as well, since she had helped save Shouta. She had always wanted to visit her mother’s homeland. Passport and visa formalities were skipped, of course—we just took the telekinetic express, bypassing customs like always.
All that was left was to pick up Rin-chan, who was under suspension in the Sahara Desert, have her properly talk things over with the Victims’ Association, and then stage the “return to the future” event.
It had been a long, grueling battle.