The City in Darkness (2)
Jaeseong Samuel, commander of the Armed Police Team under the District General Security Team, had a splitting headache.
The cause sat across his desk, chattering away without pause — a young female reporter.
Her name was Kevin. A senior reporter with the Daily Mars branch office in the Commercial District.
"I'd like to ask you, as the man ultimately responsible for the recent riot in the Residential District, about the cause of the incident and the measures being taken."
"I already told you I can't discuss that. You ought to be asking the Residential District or the Port District people about—"
"I did ask over there, and they said the operation was under the overall command of Armed Police Team Leader Jaeseong Samuel."
"I'm not the one in charge, so I really couldn't say—"
"If it's not you, then who is? Oh — don't tell me it's your secretary, the one busily brewing coffee out in the hallway?"
Her insolent tone made Jaeseong's irritation spike, but he couldn't afford to speak carelessly.
Daily Mars was operated by the Prime Capital Zhao Family.
With less than a week left before the Board of Directors Meeting, getting on the wrong side of a Prime Capital news outlet would be a disaster he could never clean up afterward.
Jaeseong himself was a Third Capital with a foot in MegaCorp's upper echelons. He knew, at least vaguely, that the Noble and Prime Capital families were quietly jockeying against one another for influence.
So what would happen if he mishandled this and it cast a shadow over the Board Meeting? Lyla would personally throw him into the Entertainment District. Of that he had no doubt.
So I'm the one who has to stomach this, too…
"This was a joint operation. I wasn't the sole commander — several teams were involved, and…"
All Jaeseong could do was circle the conversation in rings and dodge responsibility, exactly as he was doing now.
And so another two hours of pointless back-and-forth dragged on.
Most people would have given up long before this, but this insane woman showed no intention of leaving. Unless he threw her something, she seemed ready to camp out for days.
Stubborn bitch! When the hell is she going to leave?!
Work that demanded his immediate attention was piled up around him like a mountain. He couldn't stay chained to a reporter forever, and at last he raised the white flag.
"Ask again, then. The Residential District—"
"Enough! Fine. I'll give you the name of a survivor from the operation. Take it up with him."
"If I find out that name is fake—"
"He was the first in the Port District detective team to report the incident, so he'll know it better than anyone."
At the pleading look Jaeseong sent him — please, just leave — Kevin gave a nod. Two hours of grinding him down had paid off, and she was certain the man wasn't lying. She rose from her seat.
"If this turns out to be a lie, you can look forward to tomorrow's article."
At her warning, Jaeseong silently ground his teeth, cursing her with his eyes. Kevin smiled back in open provocation and left the office.
"Port District, huh."
Once outside the building, Kevin took out her comm device.
"Hey, it's me. I need a detective from your end who took part in that Residential District operation the other day… What? Aw, come on. I just want to ask him a few questions. Yeah. Yeah. He's on leave today? Uh-huh. Right. The Official Residence Area in the Administrative District? Thanks."
Comm device stowed, she headed for the subway station.
Rush hour was long past, but the platform was still fairly crowded.
Because the city stood in open space, private vehicles were permitted only to civil officials. Beyond that, institutions with special functions — hospitals, police, and the like — were allowed to operate special-purpose vehicles.
So until the trains stopped running at eleven, the station was always packed with people like this.
The subway carried Kevin to a station in the Official Residence Area of the Administrative District.
Her source's destination wasn't far from the station at all.
Clean, cheerful houses, and between them streets paved in polished marble.
The sight was so lavish it defied comparison with any other district, and Kevin whistled under her breath.
Walking the marble sidewalk, she reached the address — but before pressing the doorbell, she scanned the surroundings. The home of her interview subject was as neat and tidy as every other house on the street.
Every single window is covered?
That was the one difference: curtains hung over each and every window, as if the owner couldn't bear for anyone to peer inside.
This might be an exclusive. No way I'm letting it slip.
Kevin was a MegaCorp reporter through and through. Which is to say: so long as it fed her scoop and her promotions, she couldn't have cared less what her subject thought about any of it.
If he's in a bad place mentally, all the better for me.
Ask a broken man a question, and everything pours out of him.
Kevin fixed her best sales-floor smile onto her face and pressed the doorbell hard. She waited. No response.
"Huh?"
A car sat in the private parking spot, so the man was definitely home.
Kevin pressed the bell again.
Still no answer — but that didn't matter to her. She would simply keep ringing until he came out.
Ten minutes of relentless doorbell-pressing later, a sound finally rose from inside. Footsteps drew closer, and after a moment the door opened.
The man who answered could only be described as a living skeleton.
Kevin extended her hand with practiced ease to a man who looked like a terminal cancer patient.
"Hello, Team Leader. I'm Kevin, senior reporter with Daily Mars. You're Detective Team Leader William, I take it?"
"……."
William raked his hollow eyes over her, top to bottom, and moved to shut the door at once — but Kevin had anticipated it, her foot already wedged in the frame.
Denied his door, William finally spoke.
"…What do you want?"
"I have some questions about the disturbance in the Residential District, Team Leader."
"I have nothing to say."
"There were quite a few casualties in that operation. I'm curious what caused it — and what, exactly, you were chasing. It would be so good of you to cooperate in the name of MegaCorp citizens' right to know."
"I'm under no obligation to answer you."
"And if you won't answer, then I'll have no choice but to write my article based on the… incomplete materials I do have."
In other words: she would fill the piece with nothing but ugly speculation and run it anyway.
At Kevin's veiled threat, William's face contorted — the snarl of a wounded wolf, terrifying to look at. She wasn't frightened in the slightest.
The standoff ended with William's sigh. His voice carried the flat exhaustion of a man with no energy left to waste on anger.
"What is it you actually want?"
"It's a bit awkward out here. Would you mind if we spoke inside?"
Whatever her words implied, she didn't wait for an answer — she simply walked straight into the house.
"My, it's quite different in here from the outside, isn't it?"
And Kevin was right — the interior was a complete wreck. Unwashed clothes and bowls of half-eaten food lay strewn about without a shred of order, and the air was thick with a stale, sour stench of a place long unventilated.
William offered no reply. He walked to the table and sat down.
"…Ask your questions quickly. I'm busy."
Kevin settled onto a grimy chair as naturally as if it were her own living room. When she produced a small recorder and gestured to ask if that was all right, William flapped a hand — do as you please.
"Then let's begin with an overview of the operation in the Residential District."
The interview ran for well over an hour. Gone was William's prickliness from the doorstep; he answered meekly, almost docilely.
But his cooperation aside, the longer the interview stretched on, the worse his condition became.
William swallowed pills several times in the middle of answering. They were among the strongest painkillers money could legally buy — Kevin recognized the brand at a glance.
No visible wounds, though. If it were PTSD he'd be on antidepressants, and those aren't.
Even after the pills, the headache clearly hadn't let up — he pressed both hands against his temples hard enough that it looked as though blood might seep out between his fingers.
Her interview subject was obviously suffering, but she had no intention whatsoever of stopping. If the man broke down mid-interview, that was just more drama for her exclusive.
The pills are one thing. But why does he keep checking his watch?
William was also glancing at his watch with unnatural frequency. According to her source, the man was on leave — no urgent business anywhere — and yet he radiated barely contained agitation.
Wait. Could this actually be a jackpot?
An interview wasn't only about the answers. A subject's behavior, his reactions to certain questions — all of it could become article material in its own right.
She quietly savored the premonition of a big score.
Toward the end of the interview, she put her final question to William.
"You've said that a man named Sander is already dead. Do you know anything about the criminals who were dealing with him?"
"……."
For the first time in the entire interview, William fell silent. Kevin didn't miss the flicker that had crossed him a heartbeat before.
The instant she'd asked, the skin around his eyes had trembled, just barely. Which meant he knew something about the culprits.
"I'll ask again. The ones who were dealing with—"
"Listen."
"Yes?"
"I don't know about the rest, but I can't answer that one. Not for my sake — for yours."
For my sake? What's that supposed to mean?
It made no sense to her, but William seemed entirely sincere.
"If you're threatening me, then Daily Mars — no, the Prime Capital Zhao Family — will by no means stand idly—"
"Ha. Prime Capital? Do you really believe those useless people could protect you? Watch yourself. Though I doubt my warning means much of anything now that you've already set foot in this house."
With those words, William rose from his seat and moved to the door. He opened it and stood there without a sound.
A wordless demonstration: we're done, get out. Kevin ran back through what she'd gathered in her head.
She'd gotten plenty. There was no reason to remain in this filthy house a moment longer.
"Thank you for your cooperation with the interview, Detective Team Leader William."
"……."
William's eyes said skip the pleasantries and get out. She stepped outside wearing her most saccharine smile.
"Kevin, was it? You'd best not go wandering alone at night."
"I beg your pardon?"
That was the last thing he said before shutting the door in her face.
What the hell was that about?
Taking his words as a threat, Kevin bristled with irritation. She was reaching for the doorbell again when her comm device chimed.
"The branch chief."
He'd want a report on today's interview, no doubt.
"Yes, Branch Chief. I just wrapped up the interview. What? Ugh, who do you take me for? Of course it was a success. Yes. Yes. I'm heading over right now."
Clamping the comm between her neck and shoulder, she hurried off toward the station.
Someone was watching her go.
William, from inside the house.
He watched until she vanished from sight, then picked up his comm device.
I think that's about done.
I rose from where I had been crouched, folded in on myself, all day long. The dried secretions caked over my exoskeleton flaked away in a fine powder, and I stretched all six of my arms at once.
The coverage area was so wide it took longer than I expected.
My nest was complete, here in the city's hidden service tunnel where I stood.
A passage that had once held nothing but the garbage of workers long gone now resembled the innards of some great living creature.
Down the walls, the ceiling, and the floor flowed a dark brown secretion like springs that never ran dry, while spores lodged in every corner spat out the mucus without pause.
If an ordinary creature were to wander into this unventilated place, the toxic air wouldn't let it last long.
There really is nothing like a big nest for peace of mind.
The finished nest measured five hundred meters across.
It was vanishingly small next to a city spanning sixty kilometers, but once linked into the network, it could cover roughly a quarter of the city.
I can sense the entire Residential District, and maybe a third of the Commercial and Entertainment Districts? That much, at least.
Unlike the research vessel, a city never stops moving, so reading every fine motion of humans and machines would be beyond me — but if I focused, I could track the movements of any enemies hunting me.
The moment I stood and stretched, hunger crashed over me.
Building the nest burned through most of my reserve energy.
Ever since the fight with the armed police, I'd been receiving a steady food supply through a new slave.
William — detective team leader of the Port District.
I had caught him through Armed Police No. 103, and I hadn't killed him.
A clever one like him was too good to simply eat.
William was the only person who had ever tracked me down on his own, and one of those who had driven me into my hardest fight. In the long run, he was a man who could profit me — at least compared to No. 103, whose mind had been half gone.
So that day I spared William's life and devoured No. 103 instead.
His whole body paralyzed, William had watched me eat a living human being before his eyes, and his will to resist had shattered completely. He had submitted to me entirely — before I'd even implanted the parasite.
His submission and the parasite, of course, were separate matters. I planted the parasite in his head anyway. Like nearly everyone else, he convulsed at the intrusion, but he put up no real fight.
With William made my slave, I took possession of every document he had concerning the brokers.
Thanks to that, I now knew exactly which containers held the smuggled creatures.
No longer did I need to enslave anyone from the Cargo Storage Team or the Smuggled Animal Monitoring Team — I could raid the containers myself.
Though I do need William's help whenever I go.
The cameras were the one thing I couldn't handle on my own, so I relied on him for that.
Under the pretext of concentrating port security on high-crime zones, William had arbitrarily reshuffled the camera placements and the androids' patrol routes. Perhaps he carried real weight within the Port District security team — not a soul questioned his motives.
Every time the cameras or patrol routes changed, he reported the newly blind spots to me. Thanks to him, I could move through the Port District with ease.
Of course, feeding too often would invite suspicion, just as it had with Sander — so I limited myself to eating a smuggled animal once every three days.
And as it happens, today is a feeding day.
I was just thinking I ought to start waking the sleeping ones when the comm device on the floor rang.
William?
A call before it was time to replace his parasite — unexpected.
Come to think of it, signals kept coming earlier too.
While I'd been building the nest, telepathic pulses had flown from his parasite several times — reports that the host was entertaining thoughts harmful to me, requesting permission to inflict pain.
It wasn't betrayal. The parasite inside him was a Stage 5. A single treasonous thought would kill him outright in an agony beyond imagining.
Those pulses were best read as a light warning system, nothing more.
Something's happened. I'll take the call.
I answered the comm and asked him in No. 103's voice.
"What is it?"
「There is one hunting you, Master.」
"Hunting me?"
「Yes. A reporter affiliated with a media outlet called Daily Mars, operated by a Prime Capital.」
A Prime Capital running a media company?
Media — that would be the Zhao Family, wouldn't it?
In the lore, the Zhao Family was the Prime Capital that dominated the media sphere — news, entertainment, all of it. They weren't direct-combat players; they dealt in information itself, which had made them an utter nightmare to fight in the game.
The bastards opened branch offices on planets with fewer than a hundred residents.
If they couldn't get a foothold on a planet, they'd launch a satellite into orbit nearby and beam broadcasts down into it. Completely unhinged.
Players who stood against MegaCorp were forever being drowned under these people's vast intelligence networks.
That's why I went hunting for a signal-blocking trait back then, of all things.
This was reality, and I was growing in ways utterly unlike the game — but what was coming was coming, all the same.
A reporter.
If my enemy was a reporter, she had to be eliminated. Left alone, she would make my life endless misery.
「I caught her on the camera I installed inside the house. I'll send the photograph by mail.」
A mail notification appeared on the comm screen.
I'll deal with this one today.
A brown-haired woman, sitting at a table.
Utterly unaware of the fate closing in on her, she was simply smiling.