Chapter 99
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 99
The underground was drenched in death. Screams, gunshots, and the sound of prosthetic bodies shattering echoed through the air.
It was all the sound of Iskan taking out the trash. He was going to slaughter every last customer in this establishment. No matter who they were.
We were cleaning up the Empire's filth.
Crunch!
I ground my heel into Bao Zakanan's head as I swept my eyes across the room. Serrated knives, hammers, nails, flamethrowers, skinning devices... studded whips, and tools whose purposes I didn't even want to guess at, all strewn about in a chaotic heap.
The floor was soaked with bloodstains that would never wash out. I couldn't even begin to guess how many lives had ended in this place.
"Disgusting bastard."
I looked down at Bao Zakanan. I wanted to throw my full weight behind my foot and crush his skull right there.
"Hi—ugh, k-uuugh..."
Bao Zakanan was whimpering. He was wearing makeup, dressed like a woman. The sight beneath his upturned skirt was a grotesque spectacle. I didn't even want to describe what he'd plugged into himself. A faint buzzing hummed on and off.
Utterly repulsive.
It wasn't just the slaughter that turned my stomach. If there had been a proper reason for the killings, I wouldn't have felt this deep a disgust.
There was no grand cause here, no justification. Even morality and ethics had evaporated.
Just desire.
This was a place where people died for one reason alone—to feed the dark cravings and appetites of others.
A twisted fetish for tearing apart pure, organic humans.
I'd assumed Bao Zakanan harbored dark desires. But I never imagined they ran this deep.
The patrons of this place were all nobles who had lived for a very long time in full-body prosthetics.
At that thought, a wave of nausea rose in me, and I clamped a hand over my mouth.
Bile seeped through my clenched fingers. I looked down at Bao Zakanan. He wore a top-tier full-body prosthetic, the kind anyone would envy.
Full-body prosthetics.
Nobles who had lived so long without flesh and blood.
Are you craving the flesh and blood you lost?
A sense of loss, tangled up with envy and jealousy... perhaps it had all warped into this grotesque fetish.
This, too, was the darkness of the Empire.
"Y-you're with the Imperial Guard, so y-you know who I am. I'm with Information Security—Urgh! S-stop! It's going to burst!"
I pressed down harder on Bao Zakanan's head. A cracking sound rang out from his metallic skull.
Even the usually cold-blooded Bao Zakanan was terrified. In the end, he was just another ordinary human who couldn't hold on to his dignity when death came knocking. Strip away the outer shell, and he was no different from a lower-class citizen.
"I'm not here as the Imperial Guard right now, Bao Zakanan. I'm here on behalf of the Custoria family."
"What does that have to do with m—Gwaaaargh!"
I applied more force with my leg. The pressure built like a hydraulic press. As Bao Zakanan's head cracked, some of his internal components tore through his artificial skin and popped out.
I really wanted to watch his head burst. But I had to hold back.
"Just talking to you disgusts me. I don't want to drag this out, so just answer my question. Why did you kill Nikolaos?"
I didn't ask whether he'd killed him. I spoke as though it were an absolute certainty.
"Ha, haha... What are you talking about? Me? Nikolaos?"
It seemed he still had enough room to lie.
"Hmm, right. Guess I've got the wrong guy, then. In that case, just die like the rest of the vermin outside."
I ground my foot down harder.
Crack!
Fractures spread across his head. Even the floor beneath his skull began to split.
"W-wait! I'll talk! I'll talk!"
Only then did I ease off.
Bao Zakanan gasped for breath. Light from his circuitry bled through the cracks in his head, the glow shining through his artificial skin and spreading like veins.
"And tell me how you colluded with Nemesis."
"What on earth are you—No, I—I get it!"
Bao Zakanan screamed as I lifted my foot slightly, threatening to stomp again.
Bang! Kaboom!
The commotion outside grew louder. Iskan's cleanup wasn't over yet. There must have been an awful lot of trash to deal with.
That worked in my favor—it made threatening Bao Zakanan even easier. He, too, must have realized something was very wrong out there.
"Y-you're the adopted son of the Custoria family, aren't you? Right—then you wouldn't know what kind of man Nikolaos really was. Heh, hehe. Are you trying to get revenge?"
Bao Zakanan said, pushing himself up off the floor. He pulled a shard of metal from his temple and stared up at me. Class is class; as expected of a high-ranking official, he'd already recovered his composure.
"I just have a small debt to settle. Why does that corpse over there look like Nikolaos? I think I've already got a fair idea of what your horrible little desires are."
"Horrible desires? Not wrong, but... ah, fuck. Seriously. Why the hell am I stuck in this state right now..."
Bao Zakanan spat curses like a common gutter-dweller. He glanced at the corpse that resembled Nikolaos, then dragged his eyes back to me.
"...The one who came to me first was Nikolaos, that little whore. Believe it or not, I don't care. He wanted to climb the ranks fast, using me to do it. And honestly, I thought of him as my lover. I backed him. He was capable, so there were never any problems."
"What kind of bullshit is—"
"I'm not like you monsters with modified brains. I can't do high-speed thinking. You think someone like me could spin a convincing story on the spot? Besides, a lie made up in the moment is easy to see through."
Bao Zakanan's eyes were sharp. What he said was true.
"And?"
I kept my voice flat. My gun was still trained on him.
"That piece of trash... he threw me away. You know what that means, kid? I was devoured! Fuck, I was actually sincere—but that bastard... the second he didn't need me anymore... he tossed me aside!"
Bao Zakanan's voice cracked.
"You knew from the start he came to you with exactly that intention."
Once again, I understood just how far Nikolaos would go to climb the ladder—a man who'd do anything. I'd felt it when he approached me so brazenly. He really was an extraordinary man.
"Of course I knew. But that's exactly why you're still a naive kid. When you fall in love, you want to believe the lies."
Bao Zakanan said it with bitter self-mockery. I was starting to get irritated. I had no interest in some old man's sob story about love.
"I'm not here to listen to you whine. So—did you grow to hate Nikolaos for abandoning you? Is that why you hired Nemesis to assassinate him?"
I cut to the heart of it. That was the whole point of this mission.
Bao Zakanan hesitated. And my hand moved in kind.
Slam!
I seized him by the hair and smashed him into the wall.
"Cough—gasp—ugh..."
A choked scream tore out of him. Artificial fluid streaked with red pigment leaked from his nose and mouth.
Bao Zakanan was a clever man. I had to keep the pressure on so he couldn't scheme his way out. Even setting that aside, I was barely holding back the urge to rip him apart.
"Alright, alright! Damn it! To be precise, it wasn't collusion. If I were really in bed with terrorists, would I still be breathing? And why the hell would I ever stoop to colluding with bottom-feeding scum like them?"
Even if it wasn't direct collusion, he must have done something close enough. Close enough that it amounted to the same thing. This was just wordplay.
"So you want to keep playing word games?"
"T-this place—it's probably one of Nemesis's funding sources. There's no proof, of course. Nothing's certain. But... they recorded everything I did here. Those despicable scumbags set a trap to get leverage over officials and nobles like me. If I'm a colluder, then so is every single person who ever set foot in this place!"
I frowned. It was almost funny, hearing him call anyone else despicable.
"So did you hire Nemesis to assassinate Custoria?"
That was the second time I'd asked. I had no intention of asking a third.
The Custoria family had ways of extracting information that didn't depend on a man's mouth. I could just use those.
"Hey, kid. You're just an adopted son. If you want to protect the Custoria name for your own advancement, don't dig any deeper. This is the only way we both walk away alive. End it here."
Bao Zakanan clamped his mouth shut. For the first time, I sensed a flicker of resolve in him. It seemed he wouldn't give this up easily.
I see.
I bit my lower lip and shut my eyes tight. In my mind, the Empire's web of connections wove itself together in a tangled pattern.
Maybe Nikolaos's assassination was...
My high-speed thinking was closing in on an answer. It was one of the conclusions I'd kept in the back of my mind all along. But I'd hoped it wouldn't come to that—which was exactly why I'd come here, hoping to find a different one.
"And I've taken out a little insurance of my own. I could hardly hand my travel routes over to the Empire's security firms. Couldn't exactly go around bragging about visiting a place like this, could I? Sometimes you have to entrust the important things to people with absolutely no stake in the matter."
Bao Zakanan muttered it. I was still trying to parse what he meant. But before I could, my instincts screamed danger.
Zzzzt.
A chill shot down my spine. And yet there was nothing in the room to signal a threat.
There'd be no one behind me. I knew that without looking. But the unease crept over me all the same.
Respond to the threat. Move to fight.
My brain fired the same command at my body, over and over. My fingertips trembled. My pupils blew wide open. Independent of my will, my 'brain' and my 'body' reacted.
Like a programmed machine, I responded to the situation.
I didn't know yet what the threat was. But my brain and body did. Interpretation and explanation would come later—only then would I understand what kind of danger I'd faced.
Our consciousness and ego are merely parts of the brain.
Slide.
I looked at the wall to my right. It split open, and blue light spilled through. An energy beam punched through the wall, streaking straight at me.
Yes—an enemy had appeared. The battle was on.
I threw myself sideways, twisting my upper body. I hit the floor shoulder-first and rolled three times into the corner. In the middle of it, I deactivated my mask, waking my dormant sense of smell.
Hiss!
The beam bored through the wall, leaving a bright red trail of residual heat. A high-output energy weapon—the kind you rarely saw on the civilian market.
Whir!
I began preheating the Shock Pistol Ruina. With my other hand, I'd already drawn Crucis.
I hadn't seen the enemy yet. But a strange, unfamiliar scent drifted in. Whatever was out there, it probably wasn't human.
Hum.
A vibration ran through my hand. The pistol was fully preheated. I squeezed the trigger toward where the enemy ought to be.
Thud!
A dull report rang out. The energy-charged round slammed into the wall.
Kaboom!
The wall exploded. I pulled the trigger again before the debris could even scatter.
Through the drifting rubble, the enemy came into view. A shock round was already flying at him. If he dodged this one, it meant he was no easy opponent.
Whirrrr!
My guess was wrong.
He didn't dodge. An energy shield materialized from his forearm. The translucent barrier caught the shock round dead-on. Blue smoke from the neutralization reaction billowed thick through the room.
"Well, would you look at that."
The words slipped out of me. Honestly, I was surprised enough to let something that flippant slip.
Sssss, sssss.
The enemy wore a helmet that fully concealed his face. Even so, I could tell the shape of his head was off. His snout jutted forward, unmistakably inhuman, and his arms hung long enough to reach his knees. Orange stripes, etched like scars across the blue skin visible between his armor plates, glowed faintly.
Just as I'd guessed—an alien.
...An Equesian.
I'd only ever seen them in footage and data.
The Equesians are a warrior race that makes its living as mercenaries. And my dagger, the Grakken Boot, was originally one of their weapons.
Without looking, I swept my right arm—the one holding my blade. The knife took both of Bao Zakanan's legs off in a single stroke.
"Ugh!"
Bao Zakanan groaned. Even with his pain receptors dialed down, he'd still feel something.
"Hey, alien. If you want to take your employer, you'll have to kill me first."
That alien had to be the bodyguard Bao Zakanan had contracted. Odds were there was a similar one attached to Iskan too.
Ssshh.
An alien, mechanical breathing hissed out from behind the Equesian's mask.
—That is the plan, human.
The mechanical voice of a translator device rolled out of him.
Clack!
The Equesian slung his long firearm across his back. In its place, he drew a rod and gave it a snap. The rod telescoped out, and a spearhead sprang from the tip.
Whoosh.
He stepped over the collapsed wall and planted himself before me. He leveled the spear he'd been spinning and pointed the tip at me.
Different race or not—he was a warrior, just like me.
"Hmm. First time we've met, but... I think I like you."
I holstered my own firearm and thrust Crucis forward. Reflected on the blade, my lips were curled into a grin wide enough to bare my teeth. This really is a chronic illness of mine.