Chapter 21: On the First Day of Enrollment, a Status Window Opened (5)
There is a term, confirmation bias. It refers to the tendency to select the information given to one to fit one’s own view.
Which is to say, once one begins to suspect, it becomes unbearable. Enrique’s situation was exactly that.
“That madman looks dangerous.”
4 days. For 4 days this fellow had been lying in wait, chewing dry rations.
When she first brought disciples into the assassination squad, Enrique had taught them “patience.” That whether rain fell or insects settled on them, they were to stand still in place and observe the target.
She hadn’t meant for it to be used in that sense.
Unlike herself, a vampire, that fellow is human. Unlike her, who has no elemental weakness so long as she avoids sunlight and blessings, he has things essential to staying alive. (Enrique was even an Elder with resistance beneath the sun.)
Basic things like sleep, meals, rest.
Enrique narrowed her eyes and glared at Ivan for a while, then let out a deep sigh.
At her age, being made to care for a fellow of his age. As jokes go, this one is malicious.
“Hey. Disciple.”
“……”
Ivan stood like a stone statue without answering. However deeply he was concentrating, to fail to detect a voice at this distance.
Judging by the movement of his eyes, is he in the middle of a Lip-Reading Art? He’s kept up that exhausting business for quite a while.
Enrique shrugged and slipped a hand into her sleeve.
Click. Bang—!
And fired a revolver just so. Flawless craft, with no momentum whatsoever in the motion. An unwavering line of fire aimed precisely at the back of his head.
Ivan tilted his head aside to evade and leapt down from the tree, axe in hand.
“Enrique……?”
“Yes, you brat. First let’s get out of here. A gunshot’s been heard, so who knows what troublesome things will come crawling. Let’s go to your place.”
“That’s a bit difficult right now.”
“It’s quite difficult for me. Elise would cry again if she knew about this, boy. I’ll get a look at your orphanage while I’m at it.”
Enrique seized Ivan by the scruff of the neck and hauled him along. Ivan glanced at her face and put his axe away.
The Grand Master is a flippant woman and slightly mad, but she isn’t the sort to talk nonsense.
So let’s at least hear what’s so urgent. Ivan slipped naturally out of Enrique’s arm and walked ahead.
“The place may be somewhat untidy.”
“Yes, yes. Let’s just go.”
***
A short while later, Enrique set foot in Ivan’s orphanage for the first time.
The first impression she felt was bewilderment.
“You really aren’t raising an assassination squad, are you?”
“A misunderstanding.”
“Really……?”
Enrique looked blankly around. From the very smallest to the grown ones on the verge of graduating. Little things were trotting about all over and not a single footstep could be heard.
Discipline of this order would be hard to find even in her own organization. What on earth has this bastard been doing. Enrique let out a hollow laugh.
“If you have a curriculum schedule, share it with me. I couldn’t raise my own children like this.”
“Provide a regular daily routine and meals designed with nutritional balance in mind.”
“What mad nonsense is this brat spouting.”
Enrique snorted and resumed walking, then stopped again.
“And what’s that. Isn’t that demonfolk?”
“It is.”
“Of all the……! Do you even understand that if this gets out, you and him and this whole place are dead?”
“I understand.”
Ivan shrugged. Off in the distance Aiphelos was teaching the children something.
One of the children came running pat-pat-pat and drove a fist into Aiphelos’s side. A considerable feat. It meant landing a surprise close-quarters unarmed strike on a Centurion who had ground through 30 years of battlefields.
The child cried hooray! and ran off pat-pat-pat again. Out of sight in an instant.
“Everyone needs a chance to live like a person.”
Listening to Ivan’s words, Enrique narrowed her eyes. Embracing demonfolk while actually preparing to ambush students.
“We’re here.”
Ivan silently opened the Director’s Office door. With the curtains drawn, the office was dim.
Enrique moved to take a step forward and stopped. A fine booby trap line ran directly in front of her instep.
Dozens of such strands. A single shaft of sunlight slanting between the curtains revealed them like a spiderweb.
“What is all this……?”
Even without light, a vampire has darkvision. Which is to say, blackout curtains cannot conceal an interior space from her.
Booby traps, well, one could pass off as paranoid security fixtures.
But this.
“What in the world have you been doing with yourself?”
Ivan disassembled the booby traps without a word. Undoing the snares hooked to the lines one by one, he touched the lamp in the corner of the office.
With a pak, a magic power lamp bloomed blue and lit the room.
The interior was a wreck.
***
Dozens of document bundles. Someone’s profile packed densely in neat script. Slips of paper bearing personal names and red thread connecting those slips.
At every point where such things tangled and ran together like a spiderweb, memos had been inserted without exception. Read them one by one and they’re ordinary lines of conversation.
The sort of thing that ought not to exist in ordinary form. Circumstances of someone having conversed, projected speech patterns, meanings between the lines, and intonations inferred by observing shifts of the hyoid bone. Lists of projected regions of origin according to intonation……
Even tracking an international criminal under a Counterintelligence Command red alert would not involve labor of this order.
And against students, no less.
Alone, without sleeping, continuously for days.
Enrique’s face hardened by degrees. This situation, this appearance, this whole pattern of behavior was familiar to her.
This is the trace of a certain mental illness. Of the sort close to panic attacks. Perhaps older than that.
The sort occasionally seen among those who ground through long stretches on the battlefield. Not a particularly rare sort.
But precarious as a time bomb……. Even now Prichenkaya is rotten with drug addicts wandering the streets in this state, war veterans among them.
Enrique drew a deep breath.
“Ivan.”
“Hm.”
“Sit.”
Ivan’s face was still expressionless. It felt as though she could see clearly what face he was wearing beneath that dreary beard.
As a matter of course, he was registering nothing abnormal at all.
“When did you last sleep.”
“……About 6 days ago, I think.”
The last time he had fallen asleep, he’d been having a nightmare amid the document files.
It had been a truly horrific feeling, and since then he had deliberately not slept. Superhuman will, one might call it.
But Enrique looked at him with bitter eyes.
“Talk to me. What is all this? Right up until Dmitri asked me to look in on you, I thought you were trying to protect the children.”
That was natural enough, since it had looked as though he were only following the Hero’s Party’s children around. And that had been a welcome thing. It meant he was worried enough about the children to step out personally even after retirement.
But the traces visible here say otherwise.
“Who are you trying to catch? The Yansk University bomber?”
“No.”
“Talk. Just honestly. Even I know by now. That you’re truly, wretchedly bad at conversation. Just from the beginning, disciple.”
Enrique gripped Ivan’s hand tightly and gazed steadily into his eyes.
An old freak who had lived beyond a century did indeed carry persuasive weight equal to the years.
Ivan met her two earnest eyes, then sighed.
A moment later Ivan’s mouth opened.
It was a vast confession.
***
Suppose, just supposing, that there was such a person.
A person who turned their back on the place they lived and everyone they knew, departed, and was dropped, just so, into a world they’d never seen.
That is, for instance……
As if they had loved a novel they were reading so much that they stayed up all night, drifted off, and fell into that novel’s world within a dream.
However hard they try, the dream doesn’t end, and the world still feels like the story inside the novel.
Not wanting to die, or wanting to return, they try everything they can. Fortunately they seem to have had talent, and were able to adapt and live well.
After that person has experienced everything through to the novel’s final page, this thought might occur to them:
Why doesn’t it end.
Perhaps there is some other condition. Considering that the most likely solution might be suicide, suppose they watch the situation for several years.
And amid all that, one person pops up out of nowhere.
Presumably an outsider from the same hometown.
Now he thinks this:
Is this world truly nothing but a world inside a novel. Was everything I experienced nothing but the novel’s prologue. Is my name on a single page of the novel that fellow read.
And if it is, if that is so.
What form will the ending I meet take? Tragedy? Comedy? No, before that.
Are I and my life nothing but a single line of prehistory? Am I nothing but a character taxidermied outside the story about to unfold anew?
Such thoughts.
More and more disjointedly. Yet with a gaze full of conviction, looking straight at his master, he went on.
Wrapped in as much kindness as he could manage, enough that even this pre-modern old fogey might be made to understand.
***
“……So. To summarize…… you’re actually a possessor.”
“Hm.”
“And you recently confirmed there’s one more of them.”
“Hm.”
“And you’ve decided you have to kill him.”
“……Hm.”
“That’s terribly logical of you, disciple.”
Enrique let out a deep sigh and dry-washed her face. She leaned back against the sofa and stared at the ceiling for a moment.
Damn it, there were memos stuck to the ceiling too. She was curious how he’d even attached them.
“There’s honestly so much I want to say to you, but I should apologize first. I thought you had followed us all the way to the Demon King’s Tower.”
The time she’d spent with this fellow had been so long that she had, all too naturally, assumed he had climbed the tower with them.
It had been Enrique’s mistake. In truth it had been everyone’s mistake. The excuse that they hadn’t known his condition was meaningless. Taking him in as a disciple and then neglecting him amounted to the same thing.
“The Demon King’s Tower?”
“Yes. Strangely, we all regarded you as part of the same party, but thinking about it, you weren’t. We assumed it was something you’d naturally know, so we never bothered mentioning it.”
Enrique paused for a moment, then shook her head.
“Max isn’t a Tiless man.”
“You mean his nationality differs? But……”
“No. Hear me out first. Max…… Maximilien. That fellow isn’t of this world.”
Enrique looked straight into Ivan’s face and spoke as though biting off each syllable. As if to carve it directly into his mind.
“You aren’t the first. And you won’t be the last.”
***
She had called them “possessors” for convenience, following this fellow’s phrasing.
But expressed more precisely, these aren’t possessors but “the dragged-in.”
That is, the fellows who pop out from somewhere, one or two at a time, whenever the world’s scales tip.
Not a common occurrence, but every other century or so, without fail, one or two appear.
Popping out just so, as though to season a world in turmoil, doing “something,” and vanishing.
Enrique knows such fellows. She’d actually met a few of them.
Maximilien. That man too was one of them.
Ordinarily homesick for his hometown, yet admirably setting out for the battlefield.
Which is why even she, a vampire, had followed behind him. He was that sort of person. Standing before everyone with a smile, and making everyone follow.
Hero, Champion, Demon King-slayer, and one ordinary man. An outsider who remained lonely to the end. Now vanished.
That is how Enrique remembered that man.
The brave outsider who drew his sword to protect a commoner girl who had taken him in back in Tiless.
“Which is why we don’t say a Hero is ‘born.’ We say a Hero ‘appears,’ don’t we.”
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