Cleanup (3)
The moment Franc, Captain Romin, and I boarded the plane with the peculiar name Black Bride, it rolled down the runway and lifted off, as if it had been waiting for nothing else.
Seated on the finest sofa in the cabin, I looked out the window beside me at the endless green land below, and Captain Romin began twisting her hair around her fingers and sneaking glances my way. I turned, wondering why she was staring.
“……!”
She whipped her head aside, quick as that. She had been repeating the same motion for a while now, and it grated more than it had any right to.
If she had something to say, she could simply say it. I couldn't understand why she kept peeking at me in a way so precisely calculated to get on my nerves. At first I had tried to ignore it, but the glances kept coming, and the irritation built until I thought a vein might burst at my temple.
“If you have something to say, say it. Stop stealing glances at me. It's irritating.”
I said it while glaring at her coldly, and Captain Romin shrank in on herself at once and bowed her head.
“Seoha.”
At my irritable reaction, Franc offered a faint smile and stroked my hand. The annoyance eased a little because of it, but even with her head hung low Captain Romin was still stealing looks at me, and I swallowed the sigh that wanted to escape.
I suppose that's just the kind of person I am.
You know how it is. Some people, if you leave them alone when they're angry, cool off on their own and go back to normal. Then there are people like me—leave us sitting in a wounded mood and the anger only piles up and piles up, until in the end it curdles into hatred. I'm the latter type.
A bond that had started with the buttons done up wrong from the very first one. Enraged that they had tried to kidnap my lover, swept up in a thirst for revenge, I had twisted the lives of two aberrants however I pleased, just to strike back at them. After that I had received a meaningless apology with no heart in it, nothing but a transaction, come all this way, and killed—on a whim of my own—the Muscle Bear whose life I had warped with my own hands.
I looked out the window and let out the sigh I could no longer hold. I felt Captain Romin flinch in the seat across from me, but I didn't turn my head.
Better not to look.
For a while I watched the world go by in silence, while Franc took out her phone and moved her fingers now and then, searching for something. Was the inspection going all right, anyway? You'd think at least one text or call would have come from Yeongeun or Hwayeon by now, but it was quiet.
Thinking I might at least send them a message, I switched on my Certifier, and a large stream filled the main screen of the Certifier community. The footage wore a live mark. It was being broadcast in real time.
Wondering what the video was, I fixed my eyes on the screen. In it, some weirdo in a black coat, face half-hidden behind long bangs, was looking at a Certifier...
That's me?! It wasn't just the combat footage—this was a twenty-four-hour live broadcast?!
I stared at the screen in a daze, then sighed without letting it show and rubbed the back of my neck. A baseless embarrassment came crashing over me like a tsunami. Had I done anything strange in front of the camera? The thing that would be a problem was... that prickly, fussy side of me, wasn't it.
Ah. So that was why Hwayeon and Yeongeun hadn't called. Because it was being broadcast live like this.
Since I had already turned the Certifier on, I wandered idly through the community screens. An enormous number of posts were being generated at speed, flipping over to the next page again and again. Skimming nothing but the titles, what kept coming up were posts like these.
And every so often, something else slipped in among them.
...What the hell is a man-hymen?
No matter how I turned it over, the mental age of the Certifier community's users couldn't be more than about fourteen. You'd think ability users could talk with a little more gravity, a little more dignity—quietly, and with some class. Even I got secondhand embarrassment from it sometimes, the kind that curled my toes. Honestly...
I shut the Certifier off, and Darky squirmed out of my coat pocket and poked his head up. He glanced around, grabbed the hem of my coat, climbed all the way to my shoulder, and worked his mouth at me.
“Boss. Ain't ya hungry? It's been a long time since ya skipped lunch, sir.”
Captain Romin, still peeking at me with her head down, must have spotted Darky too. Her head snapped up and her eyes went wide. Franc, a little startled by the sudden reaction, looked at her, then turned her gaze to Darky.
“Captain Romin.”
“Y-yes?!”
“If there's something simple to snack on, bring it.”
“Ah, yes!”
Captain Romin took off at a run, brown hair streaming behind her like a scullery maid's, and the camera was still pointed at me. No—turn it off while we're traveling! I said to film only during combat!
Ugh... Even being filmed for a short while felt uncomfortable. How did celebrities manage those variety shows that filmed ordinary daily life?
When I asked for food, Franc lifted an eyebrow slightly.
“Seoha. Are you hungry?”
“Not really. Darky seemed hungry.”
Franc turned to Darky with a look that asked whether he was hungry, and Darky went round-eyed as if to deny it, shaking his head from side to side.
“Ack! I ain't hungry! I was just worried 'cause Boss skipped a meal, that's all!”
“Then you don't need any food?”
“...Y-yeah. I need it.”
The little faker slid down from my shoulder, walked across my thigh, jumped from my knee, and landed on the table.
Just then Franc seemed to see something on her phone. She tilted her head, looking at Darky.
“Dural? What is a Dural?”
“Hm?”
“I saw a post on the live board saying Darky looks like a transparent Dural.”
Wasn't that the final boss from an old fighting game? Now that I thought about it, he did look the part. A body like black translucent liquid, long flowing hair... Was Dural bald?
“Probably a character from an old fighting game.”
With nothing else to do, and a cloth fine and soft enough for the job in sight, I drew the Heavenly Cloud Sword and said it while slowly wiping the blade. Franc didn't seem particularly interested either. She nodded and watched me polish it.
Darky showed not the slightest interest in the talk of what he resembled. He toddled around the crystal table in little steps, reached into a wooden basket holding several kinds of candy, and started unwrapping them.
By the time he was on his ninth piece, Captain Romin came up from the lower deck with food she had gotten from a stewardess. Thin flatbread made of wheat flour—what they called a tortilla—wrapped around ground beef, bacon, vegetables, and a yellow sauce, along with french fries, a salad, and cola.
She had brought the two trays floating on the wind. Seeing Darky up on the table, she flinched in surprise, then set one tray in front of me and one in front of Franc.
“Oh! This is shawarma!”
Darky, taking an interest in the tray Captain Romin had brought. Shawarma, though? This was America. It was probably a beef wrap.
He looked back and forth between the trays set before me and Franc, then stared up at Captain Romin and worked his mouth.
“Why ain't I gettin' any? This discrimination? Wanna get hit? You wanna get hit?”
“Uh, uh?”
When Darky swung a fist with an unpleasant look and kept working his mouth, Captain Romin made a vacant sound and grew flustered. If you couldn't read lips, Darky only looked as if he were opening and closing his mouth, so of course she wouldn't know what he was saying. Even so, she seemed to grasp that his reaction wasn't a good one. She looked back and forth between me and Darky with an awkward expression.
“I wasn't planning to eat, so you eat it all.”
“Oh, yessir!”
Delighted by my words, Darky threw himself at the beef wrap and began nibbling it from the corner, bit by bit. He took a bite of a french fry the size of his own head, dragged the emptied basket over, flipped it, stood on top of it, and drank cola through a straw—and in less than ten minutes he had polished off the entire tray. Still unsatisfied, he started staring fixedly at Franc's untouched beef wrap.
Aigoo. That appetite.
Franc smiled and pushed the tray over in front of him. Overjoyed, Darky set about conquering the beef wrap all over again.
Food that broke down the instant it entered his mouth made for a strangely fascinating sight. I watched it at my leisure, finished polishing the Heavenly Cloud Sword, and put it away.
We had been flying for roughly thirty minutes, so I looked out the window to see how far we had come. Beyond the small pane, a yellow-brown land came into view. Cracked, uneven canyons and mountains filled my sight—more wasteland than desert.
Soon an immense stretch of extremely rugged, deep valleys and gorges in reddish brown opened before me. Hills that had risen from the flatland dropped away all at once into cliffs, and along the canyon floor a great river ran fierce and strong. It was a majestic sight.
The last time I had come through, I had passed too quickly while searching for aberrants to really see it, but this looked like the Grand Canyon. A scale on which a person would truly seem no larger than a speck of dust.
Carved away and eroded, flaunting its brutal ocher mountain forms, the Grand Canyon seemed to hold a power that rendered aberrant and human alike equally insignificant.
...Langue Dran excepted.
While I was taking in the view, Darky finished Franc's share as well and returned to my coat pocket with a satisfied look. Once he vanished from sight, Captain Romin wore an expression that was, somehow, regretful.
I folded my arms, leaned back in the seat, and closed my eyes, and Franc looked at Captain Romin and asked.
“How much farther is it to Las Vegas?”
At Franc's question, Captain Romin checked the time, confirmed the Grand Canyon gorge outside the window, and then spoke.
“In just a little while, we'll be entering Las Vegas airspace~. They say the White Thorn Turtle is in Paradise~, so after we land at Jean Airport, forty kilometers south of Las Vegas...”
Listening to her explanation, I turned the Certifier back on and opened the map. About a hundred kilometers left to Las Vegas.
Rather than landing at the southern airport, going back into Las Vegas, catching the White Thorn Turtle, and returning, it would be better to fly out and deal with it the moment we passed near the city, then come back.
A few more minutes passed, and far outside the window I spotted a place where black smoke was billowing up. Beneath it, a ruined city was faintly visible. A city where countless plumes of black smoke had gathered into one enormous cloud... It had already lost any function as a city.
I stood, belted the Heavenly Cloud Sword at my waist, and took Franc's hand to help her up. Captain Romin looked at me with an expression that said, You can't be serious.
I pulled Franc in by the waist, grabbed Captain Romin by the shoulder, and Space Leaped straight out of the plane. Captain Romin's face said, I knew it.
This time, the moment I let go of her arm, she called the wind and lifted herself—and stuck out a chest that wasn't worth looking at, preening. I stared openly at that barely-there chest, then let a look of pure disdain cross my face. Captain Romin's expression crumpled at once, and she covered her chest with both hands.
Below my feet, sheer mountains ringed an enormous lake, and when I lifted my gaze a little, the edge of a city sending up black smoke here and there came into view.
I glanced around, then kicked off a Wall of Space with Franc and launched myself toward Las Vegas, and the cityscape came into view almost at once. At the same time, white beams of light were flashing where the high-rises clustered in the city center, and now and then dust clouds erupted explosively. The White Thorn Turtle was in the middle of destroying the city.
Thinking that if it had been night, a reddish fireglow would have been rising, I watched the white light burst out in succession, then pulled Darky from my pocket, pushed him into the cleft of Franc's breasts, and spoke.
“That thing's main attacks are ranged, so Franc, stay with Darky. Darky, protect Franc.”
“Y-yessir!”
“Yes.”
Perhaps conscious of Captain Romin, who had caught up almost at once, and of the camera beside her, Franc said nothing more and simply embraced Darky. A moment later, black translucent liquid spread from between her breasts and wrapped her body without a single gap.
Mm. Darky might be a slime, but unlike a certain cartoon, his mental age wasn't low. He was sharp, his intelligence was excellent, and his sense was just as good.
Even now, he had reshaped himself into something like the ceremonial armor a lady knight in a fantasy might wear, and because of it Franc looked as though a knight-maiden had stepped straight out of a tale. I took a photo to keep, turned around, and flicked my fingers in front of Captain Romin, who was staring at Franc with her mouth hanging open.
Snap.
“Eek?!”
“That thing is dangerous. If you don't want to die, follow slowly from behind.”
“Ah, okay!”
Leaving Captain Romin, who had begun to tense as she swallowed hard, I launched myself toward Las Vegas with Franc.
The closer we got, the louder the thudding grew, and an acrid, stinging reek came rolling in.
Guoooo—!
Ziiing. Kugung, dudududu...!!
I pinpointed the White Thorn Turtle's location at once. It would have been stranger if something rampaging with that much noise were hard to find.
A building sliced on a diagonal by a thick beam collapsed, gray dust billowing and scattering. The White Thorn Turtle rammed what remained with its body to bring it down, then ground it to powder under its feet, step by careful step. It didn't seem to have noticed me, eighteen kilometers away.
The path it had taken was easy enough to read—nothing left but the traces of crushed buildings. It was pouring all its attention into silently grinding structures to dust. It must truly hate buildings that bore the touch of human hands.
“Did it come to hate humans because of me? Or is this just simple retaliation.”
I muttered it while glancing at Captain Romin flying in from a distance, and Franc, brows faintly drawn as she watched the thing obsess over pulverizing buildings, said:
“It seems its hatred of people has grown stronger, and it's expressing that feeling by destroying the traces of where people lived, like that.”
Not a very productive creature. If only it would forget the grudge and live quietly... No. I was the one burning with a thirst for revenge against that Rogue Imugi bastard and the Meo Azitos. I was the one who had made that thing into what it was. For me to say something like that was ridiculous. To that thing, I must be the same kind of bastard as the Meo Azitos. The thought pulled a foul little laugh out of me. Heh heh heh.
After reducing a building of more than thirty floors to powder, the White Thorn Turtle shifted position, crushed the sphinx sculpture beside it underfoot in a single step, and began rubbing its shell against the black pyramid-shaped building behind it. At that, the building—its entire surface covered in glass—began to slowly crumple.
Kwachang. Ujijik... Kugugugung.
It was only rubbing its whole body against the building, and yet the structure screamed through rebar and concrete as it slowly came down. Watching the pyramid vanish in a rising cloud of dust, I thought the owner was probably weeping tears of blood.
I was clicking my tongue at the sound of collapse carrying all the way to us when Captain Romin—fearless, or perhaps just oblivious—crept up behind us and began capturing the White Thorn Turtle on camera from our rear.
I watched it silently smash the twenty-story black pyramid for a moment, then focused a Mana Cannon Mk2 into each hand.
“I'll be back, then.”
“Please be careful.”
A Mana Cannon Mk2 charged with roughly fifty thousand TP tore an amorphous hole in space across a range of about three hundred meters. So if I moved to a point four hundred meters from the thing...
I accelerated my thoughts, reinforced my body, then concentrated the Mana Sieve through my entire frame and raised an aura. And with Space Leaping, I appeared behind the thing that was wholly absorbed in crumpling the building... or so I thought...
The instant I revealed myself behind it, it flinched and went rigid, just as the Muscle Bear had—but that lasted barely three seconds. Without so much as a glance at me, it went back to destroying the pyramid.
My figure was hidden in the dust cloud, but there was no way the White Thorn Turtle, capable of sensing Phase Power, had failed to notice me. And yet it looked as if it were ignoring me and destroying only the building...
That sight seemed to accuse me in a different way from the Muscle Bear, which had turned eyes full of fear on me and screamed, and my chest went tight and hollow.
“...I'm sorry.”
I offered the White Thorn Turtle an apology I felt, for reasons I couldn't name, that I had to give, and threw the Mana Cannons condensed in both hands... but the thing didn't stop destroying the building until the cannons arrived and detonated, and it never once looked at me.
The two holes that burst open, wavering, merged into one a little larger and swallowed the White Thorn Turtle. When the hole vanished, not a trace of it remained.
I was staring blankly through the dust at the place where the White Thorn Turtle had disappeared when Franc came up from behind and carefully drew me into her arms.
“Seoha...”
“...”
My heart was heavy.
The desert tortoise's silent accusation left a heavy ripple in my chest, unlike what I had felt with the Muscle Bear.
I was human, and aberrants were nothing more than a relationship of killing and being killed... I didn't understand why my chest felt so tight.
I looked down for a long while at the wreckage of the building the desert tortoise had left half-destroyed, and then a wind laced with TP blew in and swept the entire dust cloud away. Through that wind—strong, but not rough—as the dust scattered, I could see Captain Romin. She must have raised it to blow the cloud clear.
Having driven off every last grain of the thick gray-white cement dust, she arrived beside me, looked around at a place where several hundred meters in every direction had been erased as cleanly as if by an eraser, and called out in a voice edged with excitement.
“Incredible~. To pulverize even the White Thorn Turtle in a single blow~ Chairman, you truly are invincible~?!”
“...Not really.”
At the innocent impression of Captain Romin, who knew nothing, a sensation like something twisting inside my chest surged up without warning. Seeing the camera still running beside her brown hair only made it worse.
Beyond that lens, the bastards running the American government were watching, no doubt. From somewhere absolutely safe.
Before I knew it, my mouth opened.
“As you can see, I've disposed of both aberrants for you.”
The voice was so cold I wondered whether it was even mine. Hoping my eyes were every bit as cold, I lifted the Heavenly Cloud Sword, sheath and all, and aimed its point at the camera lens.