CH 28

A few days after the criminal escaping incident, Hiroki’s company received a request for police assistance in the search.

In addition to the wide-area search from the sky by helicopter, they also seem to be conducting human-wave tactics using foot patrols.

[They want to search the premises, right? That’s fine. Just give them a tour of the site so that they don’t get involved with the equipment and cause an accident.]

Hiroki gave instructions to the General Affairs Staff through the receptionist.

Of course, the main intention of his words was to keep them away from the hole, but MCTBH has many other dangerous chemicals and facilities that could be dangerous if they are approached.

The police wouldn’t want to accidentally go missing after all.

As the company grows, for better or worse, relations with the local police are inevitable.

Employees aren’t some holy people of virtue, and as the number of employees increases, it’s inevitable that some will commit minor violations or incidents.

In such cases, it’s the locally hired people who have police officers in their families who can play an active role.

Although they aren’t specifically hired because of their connections with the police, such people are assigned to the General Affairs Department to coordinate with various groups and deal with the police.

The search was apparently a request to look around the property to make sure the criminal wasn’t hiding there, and it ended after an hour with no success.

However, the handler with the police dog tilted his head, saying “I wonder if there are bears near this company…… I’ve never seen this guy this scared.”

According to the employee who showed the police around, the dog was apparently so frightened that “it had tucked its tail between its legs, looking so pitiful” that it couldn’t even search anything by scent.

[President, you aren’t keeping some sort of hidden pet around here, right? Like, do you actually have some pet tiger around?]

[What kind of person do you even think I am?]

The employee who had spoken lightly intended to say it as a joke, so Hiroki responded to him with the same lighthearted tone.

Well, he isn’t exactly lying. He certainly doesn’t have a pet tiger.

★　★　★

No matter how big an incident is, if it doesn’t directly involve someone in their life, the incident fades away for those not involved.

The serial murders of Black Company executives’ families that shook all of Japan isn’t an exception to this rule.

Even though the police made the historic blunder of surrounding and chasing down the murderer, only for it to end up escaping, with many people ending up getting fired because of this, and even though the conspiracy theory that the murderer was staged by the police to distract attention from the failure of the administration was talked about on overseas media, even if the uTubers who analyzed the video of the escaping criminal raised outrageous theories, such as that the criminal was a monster and not a human being, and the public opinion on the internet was in an uproar, these theories had no effect on the people leading normal lives…… and people gradually went back to how it was normally.

It was also the same case for MCTBH, as the company has been busy installing new equipment and expanding their site.

The results of various waste treatment tests using test pieces showed no problems at all, so the company decided to proceed in earnest with the capital investment and business expansions.

Radioactive markers, polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, hexavalent chromium, and so on…… Anyhow, they tried throwing all kinds of liquid wastes, but it seems like there really was zero leakage.

Ishida, who was analyzing this data, had his eyes wide open.

[What in the world is going on…… I would need to do more tests……]

Saying this, seemingly wanting to investigate what was inside the hole so badly.

[Yes, well, feel free to do so. I can always give you the push anytime.]

But upon hearing that response, he turned pale and quickly denied it.

Ishida is doing a good job of running the company, and since Hiroki finds it troublesome to find another collaborator to dangle on top of the hole, he hopes that he will continue to work diligently for a while.

The hole is now surrounded by a box-like building covered with 30cm thick reinforced concrete and 3cm thick lead. It looks like a tofu building built by someone who lacks architectural sense in one of those Craft games.

It’s a cube with each side measuring about 20 meters, but when it exists in the real world, it feels very foreign and oppressive.

There’s an air-conditioning exhaust port on the ceiling, and on the side, the drum cans could be connected through a transport pipe from the outside to dispose of liquid waste. 

There’s only one entrance and exit for people.

Only two people, Hiroki and Ishida, can enter this room, and they would have to go through three authentications just to gain access.

For those inside and outside the company, within this room is supposed to be “the company’s super-secret equipment”, and the hole is completely covered with a steel plate so that it can’t be easily seen from the outside.

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On the ground surface, pipes for depositing liquid waste and negative pressure air conditioning are directly connected to a lid, which is also equipped with a valve for shutting down the system.

The drums are automatically brought in by an automatic loading line, and the lid, which is about the same diameter as the drum, is automatically opened when the drums are dumped.

It’s a high-performance steel lid.

To put it simply, the equipment is covered so that the lid doesn’t reveal the presence of the hole to others, while the process proceeds almost automatically.

Hiroki’s job is now not to laboriously throw waste into the hole, but to maintain this automatic waste disposal and transport system, seeing to it that the waste is continuously being thrown into the hole without delay.

Unfortunately, the season for Hiroki working as a manual laborer has ended.

[It does feel easier, but the response from doing things like this doesn’t really feel good……]

Remembering the time when the hole was still in the corner of his yard and could be closed for a while just by throwing a tree branch in it, Hiroki felt a little sad.

He was even missing the days when he had just started accepting construction waste and had to work hard all day long with a shovel to throw piles of boards and concrete into it.

He was sad that the lid made it impossible for him to do his daily hobby of “watching the hole on the monitor while drinking in the evening”, so he had a nap room built in that room as the owner’s privilege.

With that, he can now sleep near the hole.

Being near the hole, he will definitely have good dreams.

While the hole in the waste disposal line was continuously filled with a huge amount of waste incomparable to manual labor, under the room that was covering it, not to be seen by others, the hole was getting bigger and bigger……