A Genius Is a Monster in Human Form
"You're back. Finished with your training?"
...
"Still not much of a talker, I see. Do you hate us that much?"
"...Someone like you? How could I not?"
It was, somehow, a face with a glimmer of regret showing through it. Truly, a face far too ill-suited to an assassin—all the more so for a man who abducted orphans and raised them into killers.
"...No. I suppose you can't help but hate me."
"You know me well enough."
"Yes. I know it all too well."
With those words, he slowly rose from his seat, leaving behind the book and quill that had been scratching away at something until only moments before. His eyes, brimming full of regret, turned toward me.
"Stay sharp. I won't be giving you any time to prepare."
...
"Survive today as well. That is my hope."
That day, too, I was beaten black and blue like a dog. All in the name of "training."
"Cough... cough...!!"
"How fortunate. You've survived today as well."
"...Fuck off. You're the one who beat me half to death."
Coughs ripped out from deep in my throat, and the blood I kept spitting up told the story of exactly what shape my body was in. All of it mixed with my own reek into a stench foul enough to gag on, but he didn't seem to find it unpleasant in the least. Still seated exactly where he'd been, he simply took up his pen again. Without a word.
"...Fuck. How long am I supposed to keep doing this shit?"
The words just burst out of me. Me, who until so recently had been a modern man. One sentence packed with every complaint and grievance, every injustice and every hatred—asking why I was being put through such antiquated training in such an antiquated place.
"Until the day you can survive on your own two feet."
He answered my grievances without so much as a flicker of reaction, the scratch of his quill carrying on all the while.
"Fuck—so when the hell is that supposed to be?!"
That non-reaction was what drove me maddest of all. It was as good as saying that no matter what I did, nothing would ever change.
That this hellish routine—this fucked-up training in this fucked-up place, day after day; choking down slop even a dog wouldn't deign to look at; and when night fell, dragging my wrecked body off to close my eyes and sleep—might never, ever change. It terrified me. It sickened me. And so, spite goading me on all the more, I screamed.
"The day you become strong enough, I'd imagine."
"And what exactly counts as 'enough'?!"
"Stronger than that Number 19 girl, at the very least?"
"...Oh, give me a break."
Number 19. A girl my own age who had, despite that, gone and defeated an instructor.
At some point, she had stopped receiving training altogether. Even the instructors had concluded she was more than they could handle.
Honestly, I only knew all this secondhand—I'd never actually seen her skills with my own eyes. But whenever the instructors happened to bring up Number 19, the words Heavenly Killing Star were never far behind, and that alone made it abundantly clear that her strength was nothing on the level of kids our age.
"Are you insane?! How the hell am I supposed to beat that monster bitch?!"
"A monster... you say."
"What, should I graciously switch to calling her a genius instead? That monster?"
"A genius... now, that's not wrong."
Scratch, scratch—the quill's maddening rasp rang through the room, and then, for the first time that day, the corner of his mouth moved, after never once so much as twitching before.
"A genius she is. A genius at killing people."
"I know that! So for fuck's sake, lower the bar already!!"
"Then tell me—do you know how geniuses behave?"
"...?"
I wondered what kind of nonsense that was supposed to be. It didn't line up with a single thing we'd said so far—a question that came clean out of left field.
"What kind of bullshit is that, all of a sudden? Are you coming down with something?"
"Heh heh... You're the only brat alive who'd dare be that insolent with an instructor."
"Bullshit. If you people punished every kid who cursed you out, you'd have cycled through us dozens of times over by now."
"...True enough, I suppose."
"Enough with the nonsense... What do you mean by that?"
"Exactly what I said."
Do you know how geniuses behave? Obviously not. I was no genius.
I was the dim-witted punk who had to get beaten half to death with his own body before he could barely, barely manage to absorb a single technique. That was exactly the kind of brat I was.
"You know this as well as anyone... For a genius, nothing stands in the way."
...
"The twists and trials of life that everyone else must endure—geniuses are the ones who, from birth, never get to experience them."
But even for them, very, very, very rarely, a bend in life comes calling—one that wears the name of "trial." A bend that, if they overcome it, will bring them something tremendous, but if they fail, could drop them straight off the edge of a cliff. Such a bend finds everyone at least once.
"...What exactly are you trying to say?"
"How do geniuses face that trial?"
"...Ha, what the hell have you been going on about this whole—"
"Shall we start with the dullards?"
The dullards give up the moment the trial stands before them. They console their worthless selves with the claim that such a place was never reachable in this lifetime anyway, and strain to dress the surrender up as reason.
And what of the merely mediocre? Unlike the dullards, they don't shy away from the challenge. But they would rather prepare first—right up until they feel certain they can clear the trial. When that preparation will end, no one knows. Their thinking is that either way, all they need is to get over the trial eventually.
And last of all, the geniuses. Their conduct is... recklessness itself, in the most literal sense. They neither abandon the trial and live content with the life they were handed, as the dullards do, nor lay honest, methodical preparations, as the mediocre do.
I would stake my life on it: the moment they meet the trial, they will charge straight at it. Because they trust their own ability without a shred of doubt. Even if that trial were something so terrifying, so hideous, so repellent that it curdles the stomach—even if their odds of crawling out of it alive were a bare ten percent, or lower still—they would not hesitate.
Because inside their heads there exist only two things: survival and death. Two outcomes balanced in perfect halves, and nothing besides. And they can always choose survival. By their own strength, and theirs alone.
...
"Heh... That's the face of a man who hasn't the faintest idea what I'm getting at."
"Isn't that obvious?"
"Well. You'll have all the time in the world to understand it later."
For the first time, something called a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. Whether that smile was an empty one or a sneer, I couldn't say. But one thing was certain: he had smiled.
"That's enough. Off with you, now."
"...Yeah."
The words that finally left his mouth were a parting line as boilerplate as they come. We were seeing each other after so long, and that was all he had to say? Honestly—the man was as tight-lipped as ever.
"Next time, mind that body of yours a little better."
"...I shall endeavor to."
And in that instant, everything around me began to shine. A great tide of light, vast enough to swallow it all—the stone walls sodden with damp, the quill and book with their ceaseless scratching, even that needlessly expressionless face of his.
When my eyes opened once more, what greeted me was the gritty scrape of glass shards against the inside of my mouth and the copper tang of blood.
"Oho... you're a rather entertaining one, for an inferior species...!"
...
The scene unfolding before my eyes was a battle: an old man so emaciated he looked ready to collapse at the slightest touch, and a pink-haired figure who felt impossibly, achingly familiar.
...
I judged there was no time to stand around leisurely taking stock. That very instant, I began slowly hauling my body up out of the earth it had been planted into.
My wretched frame peeled free of the ground with a crunching rasp. The grinding pop of my joints every time I lifted myself grated on my nerves, but that wasn't what mattered now.
I turned my head and made my way, slowly, toward the figures lying collapsed around me. In case—even just in case—something had happened to the girls.
"...Don't tell me—"
"Haaah... haaah..."
"Thank god."
Their bodies never stirred, but mercifully, they were still breathing. And then someone appeared at my side. No—several someones, to be precise.
"Good day to you."
"Friends of the young lady's, I take it?"
"...Who are you?"
I asked after their identities, but truth be told, I had a fair idea already. They were wearing the very same clothes Charlotte had worn at the Imperial Palace only days before.
"Please, put your guard down. We are people of House Charlotte."
"...Is that so."
"Yes. First, we will see you all evacuated from this—"
"...I'll leave them in your hands. All of them."
"...Pardon? W-wait, just a—!"
Swallowing down the blood still surging up from deep in my mouth, I walked straight past them. My destination: the spot where those two were tearing into each other with everything they had.
...Even flat on my back, half-conscious, he's the one who surfaces in my mind. Of all people.
Back then, he was a man I'd have gladly cursed six feet into the ground. And yet, seeing him again after so long—no one had ever been so welcome.
"A remarkably... a remarkably fine inferior species, I'll grant you..."
"Haah... haah..."
"And yet, inferior all the same."
Before my eyes, one monster and one genius were locked in a struggle to the death. No—perhaps they were two geniuses. Geniuses have always been called monsters, after all.
"My body shall be the kindling, and my mana the ember..."
I recited the tongue of dragons. To bend this world's natural order, if only for the briefest of moments.
With every single syllable, my mana—only just barely recovered—raged and thrashed, and whether as its backlash or not, a crackling, searing heat spread through my whole body.
Thin smoke came billowing up from the back of my mouth, and even with my body feeling like it might give out at any moment, I was unafraid. Because a thing like me could never beat the monsters without going at least this far.
"The flame shall become the fire demon, and the fire demon yearns to become the storm..."
I could feel the air all around me streaming toward me, as if someone were drawing in a long, deep breath.
"Hm...? That child...?!"
"...What? There's no way the potion could be taking hold this fast—?!"
The more lines I recited, the more keenly I felt the gazes of those two monsters swing my way—but I did not stop. If anything, the words only spilled out faster.
"The storm yearns to spread, and spread again, across the world..."
With every phrase that followed, the glass shards still lodged in my mouth kept stabbing at the inside of it—but I held firm, and drew in a deep, deep breath.
The revulsion I felt toward that old man, and the fury—I let none of it show. Because even those emotions, every last drop of them, I would pour into this language.
"The fire demon rides the oil upward—"
FWOOOOOSH—
A crimson storm tore toward one of the monsters. The monster wearing the face of a genius.