Project Necro is an official initiative by Re:Library.

Ever since Kaburagi Shiori took office as chairwoman a few years ago, the average academic deviation score of Private Ashinohara Academy has been steadily rising.

Ashinohara Academy used to be an ordinary school, but the new chairwoman poured an enormous amount of her own money into it and, using her bottomless network of connections and negotiating skills, carried out sweeping reforms across the board.
The aging school buildings were completely renovated and reinforced against earthquakes. In addition, air conditioners were installed in every classroom, the number of teachers, janitors, and administrative staff was increased, water coolers were installed, all clubs were outfitted with the latest equipment, new uniforms were designed by a famous designer, and tuition fees were reduced, among many other improvements.
A school with good facilities and good teachers naturally becomes popular. It is located in Tokyo and has decent transportation access. Normally, such schools would charge correspondingly high tuition, but Ashinohara Academy did not. Despite having one of the best learning environments in Tokyo, tuition costs were comparable to those of public schools.

As a result, applicants flooded Ashinohara Academy. In the year the chairwoman took office, the rate of its high school applicants was 1.8×, but it climbed sharply year by year, reaching an astonishing 16.2× last year. As competition increased, so did the deviation score.
Students who passed through this fierce competition and received their education in such an excellent environment generally produced results worthy of it. The once-weak baseball team, which could barely make it past the second round of regional qualifiers, reached runner-up at Koshien in just a few years—enough to let one imagine the brilliant achievements in other clubs and academics as well.

Chairwoman Kaburagi—who changed her surname to Sago after getting married about a year ago, though many still habitually call her Chairwoman Kaburagi—is both the spark and the engine behind Ashinohara Academy’s rapid rise, and a person truly worthy of her accomplishments. Exceptional beauty, a beautiful voice, eloquence, charisma, academic credentials, and wealth. She holds a genuine noble title and has close ties to foreign royalty, yet was born into an ordinary household. In fact, she herself claims that until middle school she was chubby, with a face like a squashed frog and a grating hoarse voice—so much so that it could even be said she started with a severe handicap.
She is a formidable woman who overcame adversity and, with momentum to spare, shot all the way up into the stratosphere.

On the other hand, some people find such a perfectly crafted success story suspicious. When confronted with abilities and drive that border on the unreal, it is natural to suspect there is something going on behind the scenes.
Watanabe Takumi, a second-year student in the middle school division of Ashinohara Academy, was one such skeptic. He had read light novels where a seemingly kind and capable school chairperson was secretly up to no good behind the scenes.
However, last month, when the chairwoman’s single word of command resulted in a new shelf for the latest light novels appearing in the library—previously stocked only with stiff, educationally “appropriate” books—Takumi came to trust her completely. That chairwoman “gets it.”

Now then.
After school that day, as Takumi was about to stop by the library on his way home, he noticed a female classmate sneaking into the janitor’s room.
Her name was Hinokage Mikyou. She was a favorite of the chairwoman in question, and also the only daughter of the director of a large hospital.

Perhaps because she was a favorite of such a formidable woman, Hinokage was never short on strange anecdotes.
In art class, she always used only red and black to draw pictures that looked mentally unwell, and it was well known that when called on during a moral education lesson about the value of life, she had bluntly said, “I think people should just die.” Her belief in human extinction was common knowledge among her classmates.
That said, she was not simply a straightforwardly crazy and dangerous girl.
When Takumi caught a cold and missed school, Hinokage gave him neatly prepared loose-leaf notes covering all the classes—complete with illustrations of a monstrous mascot explaining things (according to her, it was a drawing of a common marmoset).
He also clearly remembered how, after a disaster drill last winter, she muttered, “I’m glad no one died,” and looked genuinely relieved for some reason.
For some reason, she also got along well with Hasumi-senpai, a third-year in the high school division who quietly enjoyed popularity among the boys.
Incidentally, the one who openly enjoyed popularity was the blonde, blue-eyed beauty Najeen-senpai. There was a crude joke often heard that if you combined Najeen’s face and personality with Hasumi’s chest, you’d get a weapon of mass destruction against boys. Takumi wholeheartedly agreed.

Among the many strange stories about Hinokage, one was that “Hinokage Mikyou often goes to the janitor’s room.”
The janitor’s room belonged to the elderly custodian. It wasn’t off-limits, but no one went there. The principal’s office was the same—you were allowed to enter, but no one did. It just felt awkward and out of place, and there was usually no reason to go.
Yet Hinokage went there frequently. She seemed to be on good terms with the elderly custodian and would drop by whenever she found time.

Takumi was curious about what the janitor’s room was like inside. He had no particular business there, but every time he passed it during class changes, he felt a vague curiosity about what the inside looked like. If nothing happened, he would probably graduate without ever setting foot inside, and that seemed like a waste.

Curious about what was going on inside, Takumi quietly approached the janitor’s room Hinokage had just entered. Pressing his ear to the door, he could hear Hinokage’s voice and that of the elderly custodian. He could tell they were talking, but not what they were saying. For an ordinary janitor’s room, it was oddly well soundproofed.

Would it be okay to go in? Would he be looked at like, “What’s this guy doing?” If Hinokage could freely come and go, another student should be fine—but still…
As he hesitated, a strange sound came from inside the room. A low whirr, like the startup sound of an old air conditioner or something similar.
The sound stopped almost immediately, and at the same time, the voices stopped as well.

Did they notice me!? Panicking, Takumi knocked preemptively before the door could be opened. Better to knock himself than to be caught listening at the door.
However, not just a few seconds but dozens of seconds passed with no response. Frowning, he knocked again. Still no response.
“Excuse me,” Takumi said nervously, and gently opened the door to the janitor’s room.

The janitor’s room was a small, compact space. In addition to storage for cleaning supplies like mops, buckets, dusters, and wipers, it had appliances like a refrigerator and a television. There was no bed, but it looked comfortable enough that one might think someone lived there. The air conditioning was running.
However, something was conspicuously missing.
There was no one there.

Takumi had seen Hinokage enter this room, and he had heard voices just moments ago.
Yet Hinokage was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the elderly custodian she had been talking to.

Confused, Takumi looked around the room. There was only the single door he had entered through; there were no other doors leading to other rooms.
The only place someone could hide was inside a locker. Trembling at the thought of someone being inside—confusing and terrifying as that would be—he mustered the courage to open it, but no one was there.
Then where had the two of them gone?

The only possible answer to this inexplicable mystery was the window.
The window was closed, but unlocked. It was about 60 cm wide—not large, but big enough for a person to pass through.
He didn’t know why, but the two of them must have gone outside through the window.
He had no idea how that could have happened. But given the situation, there was no other possibility, so that must have been it.

And there was one more mystery in the janitor’s room.
A silver, metal object shaped like a doorframe sat there. It was just the right size for fitting a door into, and stood alone by the wall.
It didn’t look like a practical tool, but it was too plain to be an art piece. It had what appeared to be a fingerprint authentication display, a keypad for password input, a camera lens, and a small microphone, so it seemed to be some kind of security device. Was this what had made that strange startup sound?

Let sleeping dogs lie. The creepiness outweighed his curiosity, so Takumi decided not to investigate any further and slipped out of the janitor’s room while glancing around nervously.
It was the strangest experience of his life.

Hinokage Mikyou passed through a transfer gate and arrived at the tavern inside the underground great cavern magic castle in Antarctica. A few seconds later, Hazama Sorashige followed her through.
Everyone except Sago Shiori was already gathered in the bar.

The boss of the secret organization, Sago Kinemitsu, was as usual polishing a wineglass with a surly, scowling face that made it impossible to tell what joy he found in living.
Hasumi Touka had Ig perched on her arm, feeding her monkey food while gently whispering sutras into her ear. Takahashi Shouta, puffing on a chocolate cigarette and filling the air with sweet smoke, was awkwardly responding in halting English as the smiling and cheerful Grand Duchess Ermentrude Bates chatted at him enthusiastically.
In the corner of the bar, sitting quietly apart from the others, was a girl Mikyou had never seen before. She had a worn, paint-chipped machine gun resting on her knees and was staring intently at the boss’s movements. She had wheat-colored skin and chestnut hair, and her sandy combat uniform turned her natural cuteness into something gallant. She had to be Medu Sagrogo, branch chief of the small Middle Eastern nation of Marlstan.

For the record, Adelheid Untersberger of the German branch was absent due to attending a friend’s birthday party, and Paula Port of the American branch was absent because she was baking pizza.

“Master, the usual.”
“…………”

When Mikyou leaned on the counter and ordered, the refrigerator opened by itself, milk flew out, a glass and white powder danced through the air, and in no time, strawberry-flavored Milk Make was complete. The master then personally drew a skull on the surface with cocoa powder to finish it. It was named “Human Extinction Strawberry Flavor.”

Instead of immediately sticking in a straw and drinking as she usually did, Mikyou took it and headed toward the corner of the tavern.
Taking care of a newcomer was also a senior’s duty.
She thrust the glass toward Medu, who was eyeing the boss suspiciously while he was shaking a milk carton to check how much was left. Medu blinked in surprise.

“Drink?”
“××××, for me?”

When spoken to, Medu replied in heavily accented Japanese, sounding confused.

“If you don’t want it, I’ll drink it myself.”
“WANT IT!”
“Oh, okay.”

A little taken aback by Medu suddenly raising her voice, Mikyou handed over the glass.

“Sago-sama’s ×××××……”

Medu’s murmured reaction was abnormal. One could even call it perverted.
She cradled the cheap drink as if it were a multimillion-yen ultra-luxury wine, took a small vial from her pouch and poured a little into it before carefully stowing it away, then took a sip and shuddered, took another sip and sighed blissfully, and finally began twitching and convulsing.

“Gross…!”

Mikyou was so put off that it slipped out of her mouth, but Medu was completely absorbed in the Human Extinction Strawberry Flavor and didn’t hear her.
I should avoid getting involved. Having decided that, Mikyou quickly left the area and went to kick Sorashige’s a̲s̲s̲, as he was smugly ordering a cocktail with an absurdly long name and troubling the boss.

After a short while, the transfer gate at the tavern entrance opened, and Sago Shiori, second-in-command of the secret organization Amaterasu, appeared. Today she was wearing a pop, floral-patterned yukata, giving off a summer festival vibe despite it being winter, but by now no one bothered to comment on it.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. Let’s begin. Ruu-denka, please take this. Medu-chan, ×××, ×××××××××.”

Shiori handed out documents written in each person’s native language to the halting-Japanese speakers and briskly began the scheduled meeting. Everyone straightened up and fell silent.

“About the artifact you recovered last time: after examining it, we found that it has the ability to sever and separate Kinemitsu-san’s connection to the World Shadow. Strictly speaking, it’s a conceptual severance ability.”
“Hoh… conceptual severance, you say. Quite impressive. If I were thirty years younger, my own ability would have sufficed. Truly, one does not wish to grow old.”

Sorashige immediately tried to put on airs, and was ignored by everyone.

“So if we use that thing to burn away the World Shadow, our fight is completely over, right?”
“No, it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

When Shouta asked, Shiori made a troubled face and took out a stone-shaped artifact in a semi-transparent plastic case from her pocket.

“When you use this artifact, it seems to sever concepts indiscriminately. We ran experiments over the past few days, but the effects weren’t stable—things that were severed would float, become unrecognizable, turn to dust, or make you feel an irresistible urge to destroy them. To get the desired result of severing Kinemitsu-san from the World Shadow, we need to stabilize the effect.”
“But how?”

Holding back Ig, who was about to throw peanuts at Shiori, Touka tilted her head.

Mikyou thought they would probably have Kaneyama Tech develop some technology for it again, but Shiori’s answer was different.

“This artifact has been passed from person to person over a long period of time, but if we return it to the land where it was created—its birthplace—the effect stabilizes. That’s true of other artifacts as well. So we just need to take it there. The problem is… it seems Tsukuyomi was behind the organization that had this artifact.”

“Ahh,” Touka and Shouta groaned in unison.

“This is going to turn into another scramble.”
“Tsukuyomi…?”

Mikyou tilted her head, unable to follow the conversation, and Shouta whispered an explanation.

“Tsukuyomi’s a shady psychic secret organization. They messed with us before.”
“Huh. Which is stronger, them or us?”
“Obviously us. They don’t have any fire users. Probably. They do have a blond ninja, a guitar-playing fat guy wearing a traffic cone, and a loli granny though.”
“Huh? A ninja, a traffic cone, and… what?”

Her brain stalled at the absurd combination. Was it some kind of comedy troupe?

As she tried to process the nonsense information, Sorashige muttered beside her.

“Well, compared to Susanoo, they should be easier to handle.”
“Susanoo?”
“Even Shouta-kun doesn’t know? Susanoo was a psychic secret organization of the underworld that I fought when I was young—”
“Ah, yeah, got it, the usual. That’s enough. Please stop.”

Even when interrupted, Sorashige merely said, “It seems this story is still too early,” with a lonely tone, maintaining his relaxed expression. Mikyou respected this old man’s dignified presence, but had no intention of emulating it.

Next, Shiori took out a map, spread it on the table, and marked the artifact’s place of origin with a red symbol. Everyone leaned in to look, and everyone groaned or tilted their heads in confusion.

The mark was clearly in the middle of the ocean.

“It’s on the sea?”

At the princess’s particularly clueless remark, Shiori smiled.

“It’s in the sea—or more precisely, the seafloor. This place has another name. I’m sure you all know it. That is—”

Shiori said, sounding a little excited,

“Atlantis.”