You Actually Believed That?
The Captain believed that? It was a dark room. Not just in the visual sense, but the kind of dark room where the chilling metallic clangs of tools and instruments echoed at random intervals, making it extremely inappropriate to describe in any detail.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Someone entered that dark room. It was a middle-aged man wearing a fedora pulled low enough to shadow his eyes. What stood out was the contrast between his black leather gloves, swollen as if they might burst from the pressure inside, and his leisurely stride.
“Wake him.”
At the middle-aged man’s cold command, the buckets of water that had been floating around the room all surged forward at once, dumping their contents onto the black rocking chair positioned in the center.
“Huuuuaaa…!”
The sound of a waterfall crashing down lasted only a moment. The deluge, half-mixed with bodily waste and blood, soaked the floor. The rocking chair jerked violently for a second before falling still.
Whatever had been bound hand and foot to the chair took a sharp, gasping breath and lifted a face so pale it looked like a ghost’s.
“Ready to talk now?”
“Ghhrr…”
The low-ranking sailor, his body so badly damaged he resembled a giant doll stuffed with blood-soaked cotton and rags, could only make gurgling noises. He was clearly in a delirious state. He might have dismissed the man before him as nothing more than a familiar, harmless hallucination.
Given a little recovery time, normal conversation might have been possible. Unfortunately, such consideration was not something one should expect here.
“Tsk.”
The middle-aged man, who had crouched to meet the sailor’s eye level, clicked his tongue and stepped back. Another man holding a large pair of pliers immediately took his place.
“Pull them out.”
“Yes, sir.”
The large pliers moved toward the sailor’s already mangled and mostly missing fingernails.
Crunch!
It sounded like a cocktail glass being crushed.
“Aaaaaaaaagh!!!!!!!”
The scream came a beat later. The middle-aged man calmly returned the rust-covered pliers to their original spot and resumed his previous posture.
“Feeling more awake now?”
“Ghhrr… C-Captain…”
“Good. Now you’re showing proper respect.”
The Captain carefully lifted the low-ranking sailor’s eyelid, making sure none of the blood stained his leather gloves.
“Hmm. Where should I begin?”
“Cough… P-Please, just spare me once…”
The low-ranking sailor answered in a servile tone. The Captain looked pleased; his disheveled mustache twitched.
“Ah! Let’s set that matter aside for now! That filthy water you brought… or rather, that so-called waterproofing agent. Surprisingly, it turned out to be the real thing.”
“R-Really, sir?”
“Of course. Don’t you know my personality? I don’t lie.”
In his hazy state, the sailor wouldn’t have been easily surprised by anything, but his groveling attitude seemed slightly at odds with his true feelings. A faint spark of life returned to his eyes as he dimly realized there might be a way out.
“Thank you! From now on…! No, I will never disappoint you again!”
“Heh heh… That goes without saying, so let’s not dwell on it. Anyway, the real main topic starts now. I hear you acquired thirty barrels of waterproofing agent for thirty shillings. Thirty barrels of the stuff that’s skyrocketed in price because of the war. You couldn’t have stolen all thirty… so how exactly did you manage it?”
“Cough, cough! I’ll explain everything…”
After a bout of coughing, the low-ranking sailor began recounting everything that had happened at the harbor in as much detail as possible.
“…And that’s how I was able to obtain them.”
“Fascinating. The price is one thing, but a kid who looks no older than ten… There’s no way a child like that could have made it. Right?”
With his thumb resting on his chin, the Captain slowly, almost lazily, circled the rocking chair like a circuit judge about to deliver a verdict.
“Hmm… Very well. That should work. An excellent idea.”
“C-Captain? It seems you’ve come up with something good.”
“Oh yes. Quite good indeed.”
“Congratulations. Then, if you could perhaps untie me now…”
“Hm?”
The Captain’s eerily calm footsteps gradually slowed. His eyes, now tinged with confusion, rose to look at the sailor.
“What are you talking about?”
“Pardon?”
“You committed embezzlement, didn’t you?”
“But earlier you clearly said you’d spare me…”
“That was me forgiving the sin of failing to obtain the waterproofing agent. The crime of embezzlement still remains, doesn’t it?”
“What do you…”
“You need to reflect on your actions.”
You son of a bitch. You never planned to let me live from the start, did you? Go find your whore mother and father rotting in hell and rip them to—
The low-ranking sailor spat out his rage along with a mouthful of blood. With a blade buried near the cervical vertebrae at the back of his neck, he couldn’t even close his eyes. He wore an expression as if trapped in a horrifying nightmare, and slowly, his movements ceased.
“Grind him up and scatter him into the sea.”
“Understood. And Captain? It’s about time you left.”
“Already? Are the preparations complete?”
“They are. Smuggling is a business where time is life, after all.”
“Well done.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The factory’s outdoor storage yard. It was a bright afternoon with a gentle breeze. The sky felt like a vacuum sucking in every fluttering heart, and suddenly Helen got the feeling that she had reached the most precarious point in her life. She gave the coin pouch hanging at her waist a few light taps.
“Phew… You’re still here, huh.”
The weight of roughly thirty shillings inside the pouch made the ever-anxious Helen smile. Although it was hard to call the deal perfect thanks to her very first customer, who had used every low-down tactic imaginable—including threatening to cancel the transaction unless she lowered the price—she still believed she had successfully opened the first channel of business.
“Hoo… Let’s forget about yesterday. Now that I have some breathing room, I’ll be a lot firmer from now on.”
She picked up one of the lemons she had brought from home and squeezed it with all her strength. With a sharp, almost sermon-like burst of sound, lemon juice poured out in streams.
“Ugh, that’s disgustingly sour.”
A few stray drops of lemon juice trickled down the awkward spot where her cheek met her jaw before dripping onto the floor. She roughly wiped the juice running down her chin with her thumb. It was a bit messy, but even taking that into account, it didn’t diminish Helen’s natural loveliness one bit.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
“Break’s over! Back to work!”
A hoarse voice, in stark contrast to the clear ringing of the bronze bell, echoed all the way to the storage yard. Helen, who had been sitting carelessly on the ground, brushed the dirt off her backside and trudged back into the factory.
“Goddamn it.”
Helen scowled as she gathered up the chimney cleaning tools. She wanted to throw everything away and head straight home. But she couldn’t. Even though she had gained the power to turn trash into money, without any other way to obtain that trash, she was stuck with the factory for the foreseeable future.
Of course, there was the option of buying the trash with money, but that was impossible for several reasons. Setting aside the ethical issue of overlapping with the existing waste collection companies, buying it directly would draw far too much attention.
Just imagine it. A kid who buys utterly useless coal tar suddenly starts selling something that looks exactly like waterproofing agent? Even the slightest suspicion would lead to an investigation… Actually, there wouldn’t even need to be an investigation. A little suspicion and careful thought would be enough to expose the secret recipe immediately.
People in the old days might not have had the idea, but they weren’t idiots who couldn’t think of it. Considering that the very reason coal tar waterproofing agents were developed was due to the supply shortage of existing waterproofing agents, it was only natural.
That was why Helen still came to work at the factory. To secure as much capital as possible before the market was flooded with copycat products backed by massive capital—
“Fuck. Who the hell would pay money for garbage like that?”
Finally, Helen revealed her true colors. She wasn’t wrong, but one could only wish she’d phrase it a little more politely.
Anyway, skipping ahead a bit, Helen had once again successfully survived another day inside the factory chimney. She was currently pushing a handcart she had bought at a reasonable price from a nearby junk shop, its bed filled to the brim with buckets of coal tar, as she climbed the hill.
The coal tar buckets weighed roughly one hundred kilograms. The handcart itself weighed twenty kilograms. The total moving load came to one hundred and twenty kilograms. For an adult man, it was a weight that could be managed with a bit of effort. But for Helen, who hadn’t even properly grown yet and whose abdominal muscles were still underdeveloped, it was an overwhelmingly heavy burden.
Of course, she had done her best to minimize the strain. She had concentrated the heaviest buckets right above the wheel axle to reduce the load on her arms, smeared the axle thickly with leftover tar residue to smooth out the badly rusted metal, and dramatically lowered the friction coefficient. Still, every time the wheels hit a rock on the gravel path, the rolling resistance sent the full one hundred and twenty kilograms slamming back into her shoulders and waist like a continuous barrage of brutal torture.
“Gaaaaahk.”
A bizarre battle cry burst out of her involuntarily. Having watched those poor elderly 6.25 War veterans on TV, she now felt a deep sense of empathy for their miserable later years. Helen made a commendable vow that if she ever returned to her original world, improving their treatment would be her top priority.
“Hup! Hup! Hup! Haaaaah!!!!”
Shouting energetic cries like a marine—well, more like a very determined rooster flapping its wings—she wriggled her way up the hill like a stubborn little creature. Before she knew it, she was facing a downhill slope.
Helen looked at the descending view of the tall, soot-stained chimneys and buildings, along with the gently sloping path ahead, and treated it like a solid midday highway. She took a step forward.
“Yeehaw!”
The gravity she had considered a major obstacle while pulling the cart now began smoothly pushing it forward instead. Facing the wind blowing toward her, Helen smiled.
But her smile didn’t last long. It quickly turned extremely unnatural. The problem was that she had momentarily forgotten the fact that the laws of physics are strict and impartial toward all things.
“Huh? Huh?”
Helen’s footsteps grew faster and faster. The frequency of the cart’s rattling increased as well. The one-hundred-and-twenty-kilogram cart, once filled with dreams and hopes, had begun accelerating down the slope and had now transformed into an eight-ton runaway truck with a broken steering wheel.
The surrounding scenery stretched out into a single long line before blurring together. Realizing she couldn’t stop the increasingly fast cart with the strength of a girl her age, Helen began to scream!
“Nyaaaaaaaaaagh!!!!”