The Easiest Way to Become a Bastard
"How is there not a single person who knows anything?!"
And so another storm of blood blew through.
Lupin, fury boiling over, made for the members-only pub off to one side. From who knew where she produced a sack, and hard liquor went glugging into it in a rush. The sack swelled taut. Satisfied, more or less, she jammed the one bottle she'd held back against her mouth.
"Pfft—!"
The instant it touched her lips she sprayed it out in a glorious mist.
Someone was staggering out of the boss's private room.
"Wh-what? How are you already on your feet?"
It was Vatslava. She came crawling out like a ghost, a dark bruise blooming across her forehead.
Lupin, who had once spent days in the grip of sleep paralysis after a horror movie at a company workshop, very nearly sent the bottle flying at Vatslava's head.
"M-Miss Lupin. This is… what on earth……."
"Ah. I cleaned up. It's safe now."
Only afterward did the thought catch up with her. If she'd meant to kill them all anyway, had there really been any need to throw the ashtray? A flicker of belated regret—and then she rationalized it. Vatslava had been a traitor. One hit was fair. And since that single blow had wiped the grudge between them clean, it hadn't been entirely meaningless violence.
"Let's get you to a hospital first."
The treasure-chest scam had been paid back in treasure chests. The backstabbing, if you counted the ashtray just now, was settled too. Vatslava was now Ordinary Person No. 1—qualified, you might say, to be treated as Lupin's equal. That was why she'd suggested the hospital. Vatslava, however, did not appear to understand the situation in the slightest.
"Um. Did I… die too, by any chance?"
"You're alive and perfectly fine. Not even bleeding. A welt came up, but."
"R-right… I suppose…."
In front of people she knew—the important ones—Lupin was ordinarily kind. Before the swaying Vatslava could argue, she had already crouched with her back turned.
"Climb on. I'll take you to the hospital."
"Yes. No. I mean—no. I'll go by myself."
"On the way here I saw there was nothing around. What are you going to do if someone snatches you?"
She'd said it out of pure concern. But the karma of kidnapping pricked Vatslava square in the chest. Unable to bear the guilt, she bowed her head, trembling from head to toe.
"I've committed a crime worthy of death. I'm truly sorry…!!"
Lupin didn't miss the opening. She hoisted Vatslava onto her back as she was. The flesh against her hands and along her spine was soft—which stood to reason, now that Vatslava, so long classified as recyclable trash, had at last been successfully recycled. Seeing her again as an actual person—my, what a warm one—Lupin briefly considered giving her fingers a little wiggle, then shook her head. She hated being pawed at by strangers herself. No reason the other woman would enjoy it. She promptly drilled manners into her wicked hands.
"You don't need to apologize anymore."
"But. The things I did……."
"We found the treasure chest, didn't we? Cheers."
Lupin toasted the empty air with nothing in her hand.
So. What now? Drop her at the hospital and tell her to sort out the rest? If I'm doing that, I ought to take one more gold bar.
She trudged back toward the boss's private room. The treasure chest opened, and the gold bars inside still blazed. From her back, Vatslava asked in a puzzled voice.
"Uh… you're not taking them?"
"I took everything I need to take. Look."
Far from taken, they were still sitting in the chest. What filled the sack wasn't jewelry at all, but bottles of liquor. Gold bars: a grand total of two. To Vatslava, who had done every desperate thing imaginable just to eat, it was beyond absurd. Her forehead throbbed and her skull ached, but even then she swiftly calculated what the bars in the chest were worth.
Five across, four down, five layers deep. One hundred gold bars in all. A thousand gold apiece—a hundred thousand gold. Stolen goods, so say half got skimmed in the wash; even then it matched the bounties on Milwi and the Vladimir brothers. With money like that she could raise a decent mansion on expensive land in the Republic's capital, hire servants, live in swaggering comfort, and still have plenty left over.
And she was really going to throw it away? Vatslava's guilt vanished on the spot.
"Um. Or what about taking the boss's head, and the Vladimir brothers', and collecting the bounty?"
"Don't worry about money. If I run out, there's someone who'll give me more."
Toss a relic to a collector and money came out. And as the dealings had stretched on, sometimes money came out even without a relic. By Lupin's common sense, that was only natural.
"And why would I walk around lugging people's heads? They'll think I'm some crazy bitch."
Never mind who had left the corpses strewn across the safehouse floor. But what could you do? That was the sort of person Lupin was. To one who wandered the world, a heavy load was luxury and hindrance both. Five years of travel had taught her that a single gold bar would last a month. She wandered until she found clean water and washed; sleep was a matter of picking somewhere high and lying down. Mad magical beasts did attack from time to time, but they snagged on the thread sensors she'd set in advance and became her next meal. So one gold bar was plenty. Exchange it for coins and spend them as operating funds—and if it came to it, swing a fat purse of gold like a bludgeon. Anything more was extravagance. Heavy, and nowhere decent to keep it.
When Lupin showed no particular interest, Vatslava asked.
"Th-then. That chest of gold bars. May I take it?"
"If you can carry it…."
"Just as far as the nearest bank… you wouldn't carry it for me, would you, Miss Lupin?"
Equal person to equal person or not, Lupin's priority was opening the next treasure chest. She hadn't particularly wanted a companion, either. There was no reason at all to grant the request.
"Rava, you live here with the treasure chest."
"Ah! I understand. I understand. Then……."
In a flash Vatslava stacked ten gold bars, then picked several bottles out of the sack.
"These… what about these?"
"My liquor…."
"I'll—! Cocktails! I'll make you cocktails! You liked the Cosmopolitan, right!"
Lupin's ears pricked. Cocktails interested her a great deal. The drink that had gently soothed the sorrow of a world without treasure chests—the first sweet liquor she had ever tasted—was none other than Vatslava's special Cosmopolitan.
"Can you make other cocktails too?"
"O-of course. I know at least fifty kinds."
"And if you study, that number goes up?"
"Yes! I'll study!"
The truth was, Lupin had lived most of her life not knowing what a cocktail even was. Dinners at a small company were all the same: refuse soju and they called you precious, called you difficult. Now and then, if the president or a director was in a good mood, you got treated to a bottle of expensive liquor. That was the extent of it. Even after she'd taken over this body, it had been cheap cloudy rice wine when she was broke and hard liquor when she wasn't—two choices, and nothing else. Stop by a bar for a cocktail? Who had time? So the cocktail she'd ended up drinking on an errand meant for hard liquor could only have been a whole new world. Her tongue was more sensitive to sweetness than before, but Lupin neither knew nor cared about that. She simply wanted a cocktail. And if she was going to have one, better that it come from someone who made them well.
Vatslava's charm score shot up at a stroke. She had earned the right to sit Lupin's companion interview. Interviewer Lupin cleared her throat and smoothed the line beneath her jaw.
"In that case. Would it be better to travel, and learn from bartenders in all sorts of regions?"
"Well… it would be good for picking up a variety of recipes, wouldn't it? Every region puts forward a different drink as its signature……."
"So. The conclusion is, you want to travel with me?"
"Uh… if I could. I don't have anywhere else to go now, anyway…."
"Is that the whole reason we'd have to travel together?"
"Huh? Yes. Well……."
Interview candidate Vatslava swallowed hard. A tense moment. The interviewer's verdict:
"That won't do."
"Why not?!"
"Well…."
Her feet were far too slow. Getting here, Lupin had matched her pace, and it had taken far too long. She was far too weak. If one ashtray knocked her out, a single punch from some shaved-head thug would have pulverized her from the chest up. Had she been fit to play porter, it would have been convenient to dump this and that on her—but for those two reasons, Lupin couldn't. Three strikes. Final interview: rejected. Too long-winded to say it all aloud, so she summed the evaluation up in a single sentence.
"You're useless."
"Urk."
Not the sort of thing you said to a person's face. In a real interview, the boss would have come out and bowed in her place.
"P-please reconsider, just once!"
Vatslava leapt down from her back and pressed her forehead to the ground before Lupin. She was desperate too. It was a harsh world. A woman with no house and no connections, if she meant to live, had no choice but to cling to the strong. Money without power couldn't be kept; however she coveted the gold, without Lupin it might remain nothing but a dream. She hadn't grabbed Milwi's rotten rope for nothing. Partly because Milwi had taken her precious ring—but also because she had decided that using their strength was better than being beaten to death.
But the new rope that had dropped down was slick. Lupin seemed determined not to let anyone hold on.
"No. I won't change it. I'm not changing my mind."
"Please……!"
In that instant, something red gleamed on Lupin's finger. Vatslava, about to prostrate herself and beg again, shot upright. Carefully she cupped both hands beneath Lupin's, as if to receive them.
"This… ring. Where did you get it?"
"Now, now. This is awkward. We can't travel together."
"That's not it. This ring…. I wondered if perhaps you found it in the boss's chest……."
So that was it—the ring she'd pulled from the safe a little while ago and slipped on at once, figuring a relic would come in handy someday.
"Yep. That's the one."
Vatslava went pale all at once.
"That. It's my mother's keepsake."
Now that she thought of it, Brother Taechang had told her. A precious ring left by her mother. I love you, my daughter Vava. So Vava was what they called Vatslava. For Lupin, who had been shortening it to Rava the whole time, there had never been a shock quite like it. In any case, if it was a parent's keepsake, she ought to give it back.
"What. Why won't this come off."
But the ring wouldn't budge, as if it had been set with industrial adhesive. No matter how she strained, all she managed was to hurt her own finger. Vatslava stopped her.
"It's… an item under a binding curse. Once you put it on, you can't take it off until you die."
"Huh? So I have to wear it until I die?"
Vatslava wore a troubled look.
"I'm afraid so?"
"What if I cut the finger off and stick it back on?"
"Well…. The boss already ran quite a few experiments……."
Quite a few members had already been sacrificed to the ring. They'd tried cutting off the finger. Burning it in oil and fire. Even dissolving it in acid. No matter what they did, the ring reappeared somewhere on the body, as if by magic. One member, when the ring migrated somewhere rather precious, made the truly staggering resolve to just cut the whole—
"Stop! Stop! I get it."
Lupin decided she would become the bastard who coveted someone else's parents' keepsake.
