Tying Up Loose Ends (2)
Yeongeun took one look at Franc's reddened face and broke into a mischievous giggle.
"There isn't much to think about, is there? We just keep on as we have — gather up the upper-grade and high-tier Phase Stones we'd otherwise scrap, stockpile them for energy, and start developing alternative power drawn from nature. We prepare that way, and once our Seoha's place in the world is so high that no one can even dream of challenging it, that's when we announce the truth."
"And you believe that would suffice?"
"Every class needs its one resident tough, or the outsiders start running wild. And when the outsiders run wild, it's the ordinary, decent kids who suffer, isn't it? So we wait until Seoha has grown enough to fill that role, and only then do we tell them."
"That is... surprisingly persuasive."
After that Hwayeon and Yeongeun tossed out one alternative after another, though most of it was nothing but armchair theorizing.
One thing was certain. I had to grow faster, and I had to do it together with the Grand Blue raid team. ...And even that, I suspected, wasn't really for anyone else's sake. It was for me and my family — though to Yeongeun, Korea seemed to count as family too.
"..."
I stole a glance at Franc, sitting there in silence, and found both her cheeks puffed out round and full.
She still hadn't gotten over it. I set about gently coaxing her, sulking as she was and refusing to take any part in the meeting.
"Everything that's come up is only a hypothesis. It means a future like that could arrive, not that it will. So take it as an early warning, and let's prepare for it. Don't pout. All right?"
"...I am not pouting."
"For someone who isn't pouting, those cheeks are looking awfully plump and sweet, like a little fortune pig— ah, ah, right. You're not pouting. Right!"
Franc's eyebrows had begun to climb, and I hastily corrected myself and pulled her into a tight embrace.
Whoa. That was close.
"But Myrddin... Do you suppose the legend of King Arthur, the one everyone dismisses as mere storytelling, was true in its entirety? I cannot tell how much of what he said we ought to believe."
"No need to overcomplicate it. It's a fact that Phase Power in reality keeps rising, and even now low-grade Aberrants turn up from time to time. So we do as our Seoha says. We assume stronger Aberrants will appear from here on, and we have countermeasures ready in advance. Hmm. Maybe we ought to draw up a manual, too."
Hwayeon and Yeongeun cut their attention off from that thread entirely and set about drafting, between the two of them, an emergency manual built on the premise that the closing of the Phase World would constitute a national disaster.
They even switched on their Certifiers to trade opinions, scribbling away with such enthusiasm that they looked like genuine, terminal work addicts.
Franc, nestled deep in my arms and still twitching her cheeks, soon let out a sigh, slipped down to sit between my legs, and spoke.
"I would not mind being teased however much you like. I only hope it never comes to so many innocent people being sacrificed."
"I feel about the same."
I said so, but I know my own character well enough. Put hundreds of millions of people who have nothing to do with me on one side and my family on the other, and I am the sort of man who would choose my family without a second's hesitation.
"If Seoha set his mind to it, he could achieve so very much..."
Franc fidgeted inside my embrace, a finger pressed to my chest, and it seemed she wanted me to take the lead in preparing for what was coming.
Of course, if by my own effort I could make a world where more people lived in one piece, the way my parents taught me, then I would. But it was obvious I would spend myself on saving the people precious to me and solving my own problems, rather than throwing my life away to rescue strangers I don't even know.
Case in point: at that very moment my head was full of exactly three things. Pinning down the location of Alastor's Terrible Dark Castle in my Phase World and killing those mongrel bastards. Dealing with Ha Cheolsu. And crushing the Rogue Imugi.
Say any of that out loud and Franc would be hurt, so I decided to go along with her for now.
"I don't know if I can manage anything grand enough to be called an achievement. For the time being, let's start small — with running the foundation."
"Yes."
It struck me all over again what a selfish bastard I am. Who had I inherited this personality from?
Dad used to say I sometimes showed a side that was the spitting image of Mother. Had I gotten it from her? Or else...
When I first heard Myrddin's story, it had felt like the sort of thing that would turn the world upside down. But after reading the manual Hwayeon and Yeongeun had spent thirty minutes drafting on the closure of the phase passages, I no longer felt there was much reason for it to become that grave.
I was sitting there with a considerably lighter heart when the talk suddenly veered somewhere strange.
"So you're saying it started back when Seoha reached C-Class on Mount Elephantros?"
"Yeah."
"And the midpoint was Alastor's Terrible Dark Castle — the one we saw in Britain not long ago."
"Yeah."
"Honestly. How could you not breathe a single word of that to us? Did Seoha not trust us?"
"Uh... yeah?"
Huh? Wh-why is this going that way?
"Franc, did you know all of it?"
"No. I had a vague sense that Seoha was preoccupied with something, but I never imagined it was a matter like that. And whenever I asked, he brushed it aside as if it were nothing."
"W-wait! Th-that's— I mean, it was because of a hunch! It wasn't that I didn't want to tell you. I had a feeling I shouldn't!"
The air around me seemed to be turning cold, so I waved my hands in a rush and made my excuses — and the young ladies glared at me with thoroughly displeased faces. For the moment, they seemed to understand.
"Looking at how often Seoha's hunches hit the mark, it isn't that I fail to understand. But is there anything else you've been hiding?"
Anything I was hiding... was there? There wasn't, was there?
Even so, I told them everything I could remember, and all three of my lovers nodded.
"All of it is things we already knew. From now on, if something doesn't make sense to you, or if you think it might be dangerous, talk it over with us. Four heads put together can find a better way than one person thinking alone."
"Yeah. Got it."
And then the one thing left. I brought up the Return Points that opened onto the Middle Ages.
"Return Points appearing in reality. The weather anomalies just before one forms. Did you happen to ask Myrddin whether Return Points existed in the medieval era as well?"
"...No."
"I see. Had we been able to confirm that, we might have found the link between the Aberrants' world of the past, the Middle Ages, and our own reality. A shame."
Ugh... I could have sighed at my own stupidity. It felt like splitting into two trips, then three, something that ought to have been finished in one.
"Seoha~? Don't you worry about it. That one went and said something so careless when she never even went out and suffered to learn any of it herself, you know? Seoha must have been badly hurt, learning the secrets of the past, and instead of praising him for what he brought back in the middle of all that..."
"Hm?! No! Seoha, that isn't it. It is something I am curious about, yes, but it isn't important in the slightest! It is nothing but my own curiosity — what Seoha found out is...!"
Startled by Yeongeun's rebuke, Hwayeon denied it desperately.
Behind her, as she waved both hands, Yeongeun wore the smile of a little devil. Keep that up and she'd be scolded again the moment she was caught.
"I know, I know. Yeongeun, that's enough, and Hwayeon, settle down. It's late, and we'll have to sleep before long. We still have to deal with Sophia before that, so let's wrap this up quickly."
Only then did Hwayeon catch on that she had been teased. With a face like someone chewing an unripe persimmon, she glared at Yeongeun, who was grinning away.
Then she switched on her Certifier and an internet searcher, looked up weather anomalies involving fog, and spoke.
"Sudden weather anomalies... You said the fog that appeared at Stonehenge was extremely thick. How thick was it? I don't see it in the British local papers either."
"Thick enough that I couldn't see the back of my own hand with my arm stretched out. Honestly, if it hadn't been for Spatial Perception, I wouldn't even have known a Return Point had formed."
"It seems a weather anomaly has to reach the level of a disaster before the papers take notice. Fog that is merely heavy doesn't appear to make the news. I think this will require a direct investigation."
Franc, searching the internet on the laptop set atop the living-room table, knit her brows like a student handed a riddle she couldn't quite parse.
Yeongeun, who had been digging through the local British Certifier community, propped her chin on one hand and asked.
"Shall we request an investigation from the local press? Pay a modest fee and gathering the information shouldn't be difficult."
"Expand the scope to the entire world, and I cannot begin to guess the expense, nor the manpower required merely to organize the data. Inefficient."
"That's true. And plenty of countries already have their eyes on us, so the moment we make a move like that, the mayflies will come swarming. Even so, we can't simply not look into it... What do we do."
"Merlin, that great sage, said he met Jeral Packard. If that is true, then Return Points have been appearing in reality for at least sixty years. Sixty years is more than enough time for records to vanish. It feels as though we have struck a wall before we have even begun."
I watched my lovers trading remarks, then rapped the table twice and spoke.
"If it's actually connected to the past, I think we're better off pretending we don't know. And anything to do with Jeral Packard — look into it and all we'd get is pushback from inside the Ability User Federation. How about we just bury it?"
At that, the three of them nodded as well.
"Thinking of time paradoxes, it does seem like picking at a scab. And the fact that it's stayed unknown these past sixty years suggests it isn't something that exposes itself easily."
"Has any other country seen a major issue concerning the Middle Ages blow up over the past several decades?"
"Hm? No."
Yeongeun answered at once, as if it weren't even worth considering, and Hwayeon offered her conclusion with a careful expression.
"Then we may assume that, Jeral Packard included, not a single person who crossed over has ever returned."
"Clear weather turns overcast, and a fog rolls in so thick you can't see an inch ahead. Of course there's no guarantee it's always this kind of fog, but anyway — a Return Point holds for a short while, and when the fog vanishes, so does the Return Point, doesn't it? So how likely is it that an ability user happens to be standing at the site of that weather anomaly? And even if a Return Point did appear, how many people would up and cross over on a whim, out of sheer adventurousness? And what are the odds that someone who saw a Return Point in reality would doubt their own eyes and report it to the Ability User Federation?"
Yeongeun strung out a long chain of hypotheticals, then shrugged and went on.
"Plug in whatever probabilities you like, and there's still no particular reason to treat it as important. Even if we tried to turn a profit off it, the method of crossing from reality into the medieval past is far too random."
"So in the end, everything I gained by going to the Middle Ages comes down to the secret of my past, and the knowledge that the forced summons to the Phase World will stop someday. That's it?"
While I sat there feeling as though I'd gone all that way just to dig a hole for nothing, Yeongeun fiddled with my cheek and smiled softly.
"There, there. Still, the more information you have, the more choices you have when something goes wrong. So our Seoha did plenty well enough, all right? Don't be disappointed."
"Heh heh. All right."
We had talked for quite a while, and nothing had been settled in a way that cleared the air. I felt as if I'd eaten a heap of steamed potatoes with nothing to wash them down.
"Well then. All that's left is today's highlight, isn't it?"
With a cool, eerie little laugh, Yeongeun crossed her legs and gave an order to Hiarid, seated on the sofa in the corner of the living room.
"Hiarid? If you go to the room at the far end, there should be a penniless little blonde in there. Would you bring her?"
= Yes. =
Hiarid, who had washed up and was sitting quietly in her assigned seat, rose at once and walked to the room where Sophia was.
Morgan le Fay crossed my mind for a moment — that meeting which had ended on a poor first impression — but I decided to let that story pass.
Pushed out by Hiarid and made to kneel in the living room, Sophia wore a green V-neck T-shirt and a brown pleated skirt that fell to her shins. Thoroughly cowed, she kept her eyes on the floor.
She must have eaten well these five days; she was noticeably fuller than when we had found her in Netheravon.
Yeongeun tapped the girl's head with a pointer and spoke.
"Seoha doesn't know yet, does he? I'll tell you what happened after this girl came over to Korea. First we interrogated her and scraped together what we could, and unexpectedly, she wasn't with Japan's Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office."
"Isn't the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office Japan's intelligence service? If she isn't with them, then whose is she?"
A spy would ordinarily belong to an intelligence service, wouldn't she? But what came out of Yeongeun's mouth was something else entirely.
"The Greater Japanese Empire Radiance Society."
"...What is that."
I frowned at the intensely Japanese, ultra-nationalist ring of the name, and she set a hand on the crown of Sophia's head and went on.
"About seventy years ago, the Japanese government declared a state of emergency to minimize the damage from the Japanese ability-user incident, and started gathering up what few ability users remained. They needed hunting dogs for the work, but the vested interests, who held most of Japan's wealth, didn't want the existing hunting dogs. They wanted special ones that obeyed only their orders. That's how the Greater Japanese Empire Radiance Society was born. The worst ultra-nationalist organization in history, built with the government's help."
"The name alone is enough to turn your stomach."
"Right? The founding purpose of this intelligence outfit, with its sigh-inducing name, was to collect and consolidate information on ability users awakening inside Japan, forcibly assign them to raid teams that were written down as government property and read as private property, and to circulate at their own discretion the Phase World's new materials and new energy — the byproducts of Aberrants, and Phase Stones."
So they had even converted the very crimes they committed into a means of lining their own bellies.
"There's something I'm curious about. The wrong was committed by the Japanese Diet, so how did ability users end up shouldering the blame? However much one says the state is its people, a democratic society wouldn't have forced a thing like that through. From what I've heard, even then only a handful of key figures in the Japanese parliament were punished, and that was the end of it."
"That was all because of the contract. They were caught by the unequal, poisonous clauses they signed when they joined their raid teams, under the pretext that the individual had to sacrifice for damage done to the nation."
"..."
"The Special-type ability users who fell for Japan's scheme back then and were sent over to Japan numbered 1,700 in all. You learned that, didn't you? And the number of ability users Japan was required to provide as personnel in compensation was 5,100. They had to send them to the countries they had kidnapped ability users from, at a ratio of one to three."
Here I learned another lesson about life. Always read a contract down to the last line — or else find a lawyer who handles nothing but contracts and have them check it.
"The ratio of government-affiliated ability users to civilians in Japan at the time was something like three to seven, wasn't it? There were close to forty thousand ability users based in Japan, and this is where the Japanese government made its worst mistake. After the incident, they decided to forcibly conscript the government-affiliated ability users bound by the contract, and ship them off to other countries under the name of compensation."
"Whoa..."
"Think about it. Imagine our own country using a contract as a pretext to drag out its government-affiliated ability users and shove them into somewhere like the South African bush, or the jungles of South America. Refuse, and they take your family hostage. What would you have done, Seoha?"
"What would I have done?! I'd have flattened them!"
Take Mom and Dad and my sister hostage and ship me off to the South American jungle? They'd have to be dying to get themselves killed.
"However bound they were by contract, forced execution was another matter. The moment that fact spread through the community, nearly thirty thousand civilian ability users felt their safety under extreme threat and fled Japan in droves, emigrating to advanced nations and great powers. Overnight, Japan lost the ability users who could be called one of the great strengths of the state."
She asked me — so why is she carrying on as if she never needed the answer? Yeongeun shook her head and simply continued.
"So they emigrated, and the ability users left behind in Japan were only the government-affiliated ones bound by the contract — about eleven thousand. Send 5,100 of those away, and the number plummeted until barely five thousand were left."
"Ability users ought to be able to apply for asylum, shouldn't they? They couldn't even manage that?"
"In the event of a grave national crisis, they were to provide every duty and all of their labor. The term of the contract was for life. On top of that, it had been notarized by the Ability User Federation, so they were bound fast — asylum wasn't an option. They would have had to abandon every status they held and disappear. Do that, and the government might well take their families hostage, so it wasn't that they chose not to. It was that they couldn't. Of course, it isn't as if no ability user applied for asylum. But other countries couldn't accept those applications. They had already enjoyed every benefit there was to enjoy, and the moment things turned against them, it looked like a breach — an attempt to walk away from the contract."
"Benefits?"
"Japan gave ability users contracted to the government a fifty-percent reduction on all their taxes. With a benefit like that, isn't it obvious that thirty percent of all ability users would end up government-affiliated?"
Was a fifty-percent tax cut really that enormous? I tilted my head, unable to judge the scale of it, and Yeongeun offered a comparison.
"Most IWO member states, our country included, only give about fifteen to twenty percent."
"...Yeah. That's enormous."
So a single mistake had evaporated thirty-five thousand out of forty thousand ability users, evaporated their families along with them, and come with massive material reparations on top of that. No wonder the country had staggered.
The government commits the crime, and the people take the punishment. What a remarkable country.
"Anyway. The Greater Japanese Empire Radiance Society. The name is a pain to keep saying, so I'll call it the Japan Society, all right? The Japan Society was an intelligence outfit organized to revive Japan, but at some point its nature curdled, and it turned into an organization that terrorized star-class ability users in neighboring countries — anyone who became a thorn in its eye."
"Unbelievable... So the attitude is, if we can't have it, neither can you."
Yeongeun's throat must have gone dry from all the talking. She poured herself more barley tea, took a sip, and went on.
"And once the sixty-year compensation period ended, they used that contract as a shackle. They started either bringing home their own ability users whose term of loan was up, or approaching the ones who had secured a place as concubine or wife to some high official or conglomerate, so they could use them as industrial spies and the like."
Sign one contract wrong, and there goes a life.
"Sixty years on, ninety-nine percent of those 5,100 ability users were dead, and the survivors numbered only about forty, all of them Physical Reinforcement types."
"That's all? Five thousand and sixty of them died?"
"Natural death, accident, missing, killed in combat in the Phase World. Vanished in the Phase World. Murder, suicide... There are plenty of ways to die. And of those forty, the ones caught in Japan's scheming numbered twenty, they say."
"What about the other twenty?"
"Their hostility ran deep, and their families were all dead besides, so they simply disappeared, I'm told. Anyway, we pulled all of this out of this girl and leaked it to the press through a reasonably trustworthy back channel, but the reaction was less satisfying than I'd hoped. That was disappointing."
I shot a hard glare at Sophia, standing there so meekly, and she ducked her head lower still, fidgeting with her fingers.
"What kind of reaction was it?"
"First, Japan flatly insisted no such thing had ever happened. And most of the Japan Society's senior posts were ordinary people — most of them brought over to our country, punished, and now missing. We sent pigeons out to see whether any records remained, but when that Nippon government of theirs was turned inside out, it seems they destroyed every document on the incident. We couldn't find a thing."
Nippon?
"So nothing came of it at all?"
"No. There was a large-scale investigation into the occupations and residences of the Japanese ability users who had come to those countries, and of their descendants. But according to Sophia, aside from Britain, they never so much as reached into any nation that counts among the great powers. That's also why no enormous uproar broke out. The countries they actually reached into were shaky inside and out, so they weren't even caught; there's no evidence; and the people in the departments we might have held responsible, we already cleaned out entirely. So the whole affair is fizzling away."
"I can't see Britain sitting still for it."
"They did express considerable displeasure. They've even said they wouldn't shy from cutting diplomatic ties, but that looks less like genuine fury and more like a show put on for their own citizens. And it might also be them minding our Seoha's gaze."
A show for appearances...
"The entire Adelberg family came over to our country, didn't they? Because of that, the British government and the royal family are treading very carefully, afraid that if they rage too hard it will turn into raging at our Seoha. But anti-Japanese feeling is running high among the public, over Japan pulling this sort of outside meddling twice — that's the way to put it, I suppose. So the British government is acting in a way meant to soothe its people. The truth is, it's reparations in name only. Japan is so utterly broke right now that you could shake them down and not a crumb would fall. I'm told the British government privately has no idea which way to turn."
With her own story on the table, Sophia looked ready to burrow straight into the floor.
"What happened to the twenty Japan approached?"
"Aside from Ichika Adelberg, the whereabouts of sixteen can't be determined — used up as attackers or as spies and then discarded, for all anyone can tell. The remaining three went back to Japan and are missing as well. So except for Ichika Adelberg, every Japanese ability user dispatched in the name of compensation is either dead or missing."
"Ah — the ability users who attacked me at the training ground in Shinchon-dong. Don't tell me..."
"Oh? Hmm... That could be. There were ten Physical Reinforcement ability users among them... wasn't it?"
"Eleven."
Having half doubted and then received a definite answer from Hwayeon, Yeongeun's face twisted as if she had bitten into something unbearably bitter.
"Good grief. The numbers line up exactly."
There really is no lower grade of human trash. How had people capable of doing a thing like that so casually come to sit at the center of Japanese politics?
"Japan... I want to stop caring about it. It's too irritating, it hurts my head, and if they provoke me any further I feel as if I'll genuinely want to wipe Japan off the map."
I pressed at my temples, then muttered, staring with cold eyes at Sophia as she clutched her skirt tight in both fists.
"So all that's left now is..."
Punishing that thing.