Chapter 18
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 18
"It's like sealing away the self you want to protect, locking it deep inside. Even ordinary people who've never gone through Mental Control Training sometimes lose memories or fracture their personalities from trauma. In our case, we do it consciously."
Ilay added the explanation. My expression only grew darker.
It wasn't that I didn't grasp the theory. I just couldn't picture myself actually pulling it off. The mind doesn't split into neat compartments like the body does. It's more like a liquid—the moment your control slips even a little, its shape collapses and everything bleeds together.
"Is that even... Damn it. You're only telling me this because it is possible, aren't you."
I let out a sigh.
"Luka, when we smile, the brain assumes we're happy even if there's nothing to be happy about. Our brains are dumber than you'd think. If you set out to fool one, you can. A psychological test only ever peers into your surface consciousness."
"So how do you actually do it?"
Ilay paused a moment before answering.
"You pattern your behavior and your thoughts as if you're brainwashing yourself into being a soldier loyal to the Empire. You live your life playing that loyal soldier. And then that loyal soldier persona starts to overwrite your surface consciousness. What began as a fake becomes real. The brain just thinks along with what our body does."
Repeated acting reshapes the mind, until the brain accepts the performance as reality.
Hearing it laid out like that, it sounded surprisingly plausible. It didn't seem impossible.
"What's the catch?"
"If you hold that fake persona too long, it gets harder to strip away, and your original self sinks deep beneath your subconscious. Like a box dropped into the ocean—rusting shut until it can't be pried open. And even if you do manage to open it, it'll have fused with the fake persona by then. No separating them."
"Makes sense, I suppose. Even if we call one 'fake' and the other 'real,' they're both technically real."
Ilay nodded.
"As expected. You catch on fast."
"Where did you even learn something like this?"
"Books, foreign records. Bellato especially has a lot of interesting ancient documents. Records of humanity from back when they still lived on Earth."
That tracked. The descendants of the humans who'd clung to Earth until the very end were the Bellato Federation.
"Luka, for about two months before the Selection Test, I imitated my father. He's the most loyal soldier I know. Every morning when I woke, I'd recite the names of the past Emperors one by one and offer a prayer of gratitude..."
Ilay walked me through his method. I listened and mulled it over. It didn't seem as hard as I'd feared.
I don't even need to imitate anyone else.
I just had to act like my past self. Back then, I'd scored obscenely high on every psychological test.
Not a flicker of doubt toward the Empire, seething with hostility at any hint of subversive talk...
A bitter taste filled my mouth. It struck me all over again just how much I'd changed.
"Thanks for the advice."
"Don't mention it. I don't know what you're planning, but be careful, Luka."
"Never thought I'd hear those words from you of all people."
A sigh slipped out of me.
"Unlike me, you're no noble. You've got no background shielding you. You have to be even more careful than I do."
He wasn't needling me. Ilay was genuinely worried.
Even if Ilay got caught rigging his own psychological test, his prestigious family would find some way to slip him out from under it.
For me, it would be the end. Stripped of my prosthetic limbs and thrown onto the streets—if I was lucky. More likely, dragged off to some place that didn't even appear on any map, to do forced labor until I dropped dead.
I turned my back on Ilay and raised a hand in farewell without a word.
* * *
Building my outer persona didn't take long. I only had to project my past self exactly as I'd been. And it wasn't as though that past self was wildly different from who I was now.
Even taking a psychological test right this moment, my raw score wouldn't come out that low.
The problem was that my old score had been absurdly high.
Command would see the drop and read it as a warning flag—the first sign of subversive thinking.
First, I cut off contact with Ilay. Knowing why, Ilay didn't try to reach me either. He was the single most anti-Imperial person I knew.
My meetings and training with Kinuan I couldn't skip, though. I made sure not to let him drag my mindset in the wrong direction. Fortunately, Kinuan never once brought up what had happened at the orphanage. He treated me the same as always, as if none of it had ever occurred.
Kinuan often took me down to the Lower District. Mostly for training. Today was no different.
"Luka, you've got twenty seconds. Subdue everyone inside."
Kinuan spoke in front of a bleak building in the Lower District. He offered nothing else.
Whirrrr.
I bumped the output of my prosthetics up to a moderate setting. The faint hum of the machinery buzzed through into my biological parts.
Rattle.
The doorknob at the entrance wouldn't turn. Locked from the inside. That meant nothing to me.
Crunch!
The grip strength of my prosthetics could tear through steel plate. I wrenched the handle, shattering the lock, and kicked the door open in the same motion to clear my line of sight.
All right. Time to begin.
I pushed my concentration to its absolute limit, slamming every scrap of information entering my vision straight into my brain—like a dry sponge drinking up water.
Normally, when a person concentrates, their field of vision narrows. But I widened mine while cranking up my focus at the same time. This was the sensory expansion unique to the Akies Combat Style.
Throb, throb.
A headache was already building.
A gang's office.
Gang members were scattered carelessly across the run-down room. On a wall display, an adult video of a man and woman played, data chips littering the floor beneath it.
Three of them sat crowded around a table, absorbed in a card game. Another sprawled on a bed, eyes glazed, clearly high. One sat on a shredded sofa watching the porn, and there were signs of life in the bathroom too.
I'd expected a gang. Even before opening the door, I'd caught the faint scent of gunpowder and the bitter, unmistakable tang of energy weapons.
Not even a full second had passed.
Observation, complete. Next came insight. Then judgment.
Weighing their appearances, their posture, their weapons, I gauged each one's threat level and set my target priorities. In an instant, my preparation was done.
I released my leashed Combat Reflexes like a drawn bowstring loosed. I'd been trained to react to any and every threat.
Crack!
I dropped low and lunged. The concrete under my feet shattered as if torn open.
The gap between me and the gang member holding a shotgun vanished in an instant.
"Wh-What—?!"
From his eyes, I must have simply materialized in front of him the moment the door swung open. His mind went blank. He couldn't even process the situation, let alone shift into a fighting stance.
Clang!
I flicked the shotgun's barrel upward with a finger. His arm flew up with it, leaving his chest wide open.
Smash!
My fist drove into his chest. Beneath the skin, Shock-Absorbing Gel had replaced his dermal layer. I'd guessed as much the moment I saw those waterlogged-looking pecs.
But it couldn't swallow the full force of the blow. His back bowed like a shrimp.
His eyes rolled white as he blacked out. Yet thanks to his locked mechanical fingers, his grip on the gun held firm.
Snap!
I twisted his fingers back, forcing them past their range until they cracked one after another.
Whoosh!
I snatched the falling shotgun and swung it to my right. I didn't need to look to know where the enemy was. The whole scene was laid out clean in my head—the room, every hostile, mapped in vivid 3D across my mind.
Since none of the others had managed a real move yet, there were no variables to account for.
Recognizing the shotgun, my right arm adjusted itself. With the sound of gears meshing at my elbow, the joint stiffened as if starved of oil.
Bang!
I fired one-handed, without so much as bracing the stock against my shoulder. My locked right arm absorbed the recoil flawlessly. This was why high-end prosthetics were worth the price, even at the same power output—the small auxiliary functions turned out to be surprisingly useful.
Ping!
The shell ejected in a clean, stylish arc. Heat shimmered in the wake of the spent casing.
"Aaaargh! My haaaand—!!"
A sharp scream rang out. Only after firing did my gaze finally settle on the target.
The shot had blown clean off the hand of the gang member on the bed. Biological, going by the way blood and flesh sprayed everywhere. White bone jutted pitifully from the severed wrist.
"W-What the hell! Fuck! Fuck!"
Only now did the rest start reacting. Two of them were already down.
Bang!
A full three seconds passed before the first shot came at me. The one who'd been watching the porn had finally squeezed his trigger. He hadn't even pulled his pants up—his ugly lower half hung out for all to see.
"Y-You dodged it?! Die! Just fucking die!"
Panicking, the shooter hammered the trigger again and again.
I tipped my head back to slip the rounds and watched him with a bored expression. Every last one of them was pathetic. To think men who made their living on violence could grow this soft.
In his terror, he missed even when I stood perfectly still. I didn't need to dodge at all. What kind of god-awful marksmanship was this?
I fired back. He was wearing a chest guard, so it wouldn't kill him.
Bang!
He flew backward into the wall display. The screen shattered, and the woman's moaning dissolved into static.
With that, every armed member was handled. The rest carried only knives and stun batons. Naturally, they trembled as they stared at me and my shotgun.
Looking at these idiots, wasting a bullet on them felt like a waste.
"If you don't want the limbs you scraped together every last coin to buy blown to pieces—knock yourselves out."
The one holding a stun baton hesitated, then jammed it against his own chin. The others didn't wait for one another; they scooped up dropped batons and did the same. Acrid smoke curled up as they dropped, one by one.
The farce was over. At last, I turned my eyes toward the bathroom.
Now, just that suspicious presence in the bathroom...
I scowled hard. The instant I focused on it, I registered how deeply wrong the sounds and smells leaking out were. A woman's faint groans... and a stench I really, truly did not want to name crawled into my head and put images there.
"Fucking bastards..."
I was holding back an enormous amount right now. I wanted nothing more than to stamp on the heads of the men at my feet and grind them into paste.
Creak.
I pulled the bathroom door open.
A woman in tattered rags was shaking violently. The chain running from her shackles was bolted hard into the wall, and dried blood from repeated nosebleeds crusted her upper lip. Between her thighs and beneath her feet, the stench and residue of endless abuse clung to the floor.
Grit.
I ground my teeth. The doorknob crumpled in my grip.
Clang!
I seized the shackles bolted to the wall and tore them out. Rust flaked from parts of them—a testament to how long they'd been there.
I looked at the woman. Her cognition had rotted away. She couldn't even form words. Curled into the corner of the bathtub like a cornered animal, she only let out low, dull whimpers.
"Well done, Good Boy. About twelve seconds."
Kinuan said, stepping in late. I answered without turning to look at him.
"Can't I just kill every last one of these bastards?"
Kinuan narrowed his eyes as he took in the state of the bathroom. He spotted the naked woman too.
"Even scum like them have a role to play. We're outsiders here. We shouldn't interfere too deeply and throw this place's order out of balance."
"What kind of order does trash like this even—"
I bit the sentence off. My head was running too hot. I wasn't thinking straight. I needed to cool down.
"There are countless people in this world without the power to protect themselves, and this woman is no different. Have no power, and this is what becomes of you. You know that truth better than most, don't you?"
Kinuan said, slipping off his outer coat and draping it over the woman's shoulders. For the briefest instant, something flickered through his eyes.
Is she someone Kinuan knows?
Maybe I was imagining it. If someone he knew had ended up like this, could he really speak this calmly about it?
This woman had fallen to this wretched fate because she had no power. And I had clawed my way this far precisely because I refused to live like that.
Normally, I'd have looked down on a woman like her. Written her off as a fool who failed to grab the chances the Empire handed out.
But seeing her up close now, I couldn't bring myself to blame her. All I felt was pity for her... and rage at the grotesque architecture of this society.
I was confused. The mental state I'd so carefully assembled to pass the psychological test was coming apart at the seams.
"I'm heading out."
I tossed the shotgun aside and walked out.