A Pleasure to Meet You, First Apostle
The sky was opening, slowly. What showed through the faintly parted seam was not a sight eyes could bear. Even to look, even to feel, stirred a sense of sin. No—merely to live and draw breath beneath it was reason enough to take one's own life.
"That... is Heaven..."
Tears of rapture spilled down his face. The moment he had longed for was drawing near.
"Just a little more. Only a little."
He laid a hand upon the pillar that joined the heavens and spoke to Heaven's daughter within it.
"I know this is not a state of affairs you welcome. But the opening of Heaven is inevitable. I beg you—put away your anger."
There was no answer. He had not expected one. She had already delivered her warning. What he was doing now was only the ugliness of a hasty heart.
"Several apostles have departed. Great ones who spent their lives in the service of good have gone in vain. Will you not acknowledge their labor?"
The tears ran again. Rage and regret. Guilt and anguish. Sorrow and solitude. They fell a drop at a time, like dew beading on a leaf.
The drops became nourishment and vanished. The First Apostle's eyes grew colder and colder.
"...If a righteous order is established, I mean to follow them myself. If I am hateful to you, then cooperate with me—at once...!"
By the time even the sob had faded from his voice, the feeling had left the First Apostle's face.
"...Very well. If that is your will, what am I to do? I shall change your mind."
He drew the damp Stone Tablet against his chest. It crumbled dryly, and stone dust drifted from its edge.
He slammed his head into the pillar. A thread of blood mingled with the tears.
Taking those tears upon his tongue, the First Apostle forced the words out as if he were wailing.
"The prophecy you have been waiting for is coming. That absolute men call prophecy—I will shatter it."
Let me show you how fleeting a thing hope is.
There was no respect left. No reverence, either.
A part of what had ruled his spirit evaporated in a single instant.
"Wait only a little. I will bring before you the ones you have waited for so long."
The First Apostle turned his back. There was no bow toward Heaven. Unnecessary gestures were useless now.
"I am he who enacts the will of Heaven. All but the One, I forsake."
The Stone Tablet moaned, a low hum. Will you truly?
The last tear clinging to the First Apostle's chin fell.
"That One is the guide who leads the righteousness of the world, and the angel who stands proxy for Heaven. By the contract, see it fulfilled."
A calf lowed, long and mournful.
An angel stripped of its wing-feathers blew a trumpet.
The Stone Tablet drove itself into the First Apostle's chest.
"......!"
Chewing down a soundless scream, he took the whole of the shock upon himself.
Skin tore. Ribs caved. The lungs were shoved aside to left and right, and the heart burst under the pressure from without. Crunch. Crunch. The meal of chewing flesh went on. Aged hide and lumps of meat looked as though they would taste foul, and yet the juices—tough at first glance, then splitting deep—had a savor worth the work of the teeth.
A banquet laid before a child starved for dozens of days. Who alive would refuse it? Salty meat, and bones here and there to grind the teeth clean. A rare dish to restore the body—was it not sweet as honey?
Gnaw. Gnaw.
...I have to endure.
He had steeled himself for this. Only something of this order could be called an ascetic ordeal anywhere that mattered.
This is only the beginning...!
Slurp. Slurp. A delighted cry, and the meal was over. The guest who had been served a fine banquet paid the host the price that was owed.
"Haa..."
His skin tightened with a faint sizzle, growing firm and full. The wrinkles softened. His beard lengthened all the way to his waist, and his eyebrows turned white. The immortal's robes became garments the color of old bronze, and a staff with a crooked tip settled into his hand.
The First Apostle, a man in his middle years, took the headwind of time full in the face.
What stood there was an old man who had outlasted the hardships of the years and armed himself in conviction.
"Good. This is good."
A hoarse sound leaked from his throat—the voice of an old man near death.
"An apostle, after all, ought to have a handsome shell as well. A look the public would know on sight... it suits me very well."
The First Apostle drew his robes neatly shut. The Stone Tablet buried at the center of his chest vanished from view.
"Let us go. On to the final trial that would bar my way."
He brought the staff down.
The path split to left and right and paid him homage.
It was the procession of a great apostle.
The one who had been gazing up at the sky noticed the guest's arrival.
"You've kept me waiting. Going to leave a guest standing out here? The sun's already beating down."
"Ho ho ho. Is that so? I don't feel particularly sorry."
Facing the masked eccentric, the First Apostle laughed softly and stroked his beard.
"Makeup, at that age? How does a man even end up looking like that? Did you call in a special-effects crew?"
The phantom thief swept a hand along the First Apostle's beard. Against his index finger the cold was alien enough to raise gooseflesh.
"What's it called these days. Early-real topter? There's that sort of thing, isn't there? Getting old is no excuse for falling behind the trends."
"It's early adopter. And from the look of you, you're a cosplayer. What kind of early adopter is that?"
"Cosplayer? You mean the people who imitate characters."
The First Apostle fiddled with his staff, eyes bright.
"...Looking at me, who comes to mind?"
"Let's see..."
The phantom thief drew the moment out. In the meantime he produced a folding table and chairs and set them up, laid a few simple refreshments at the center, and—returning the hospitality with which he himself had first been received—poured tea and offered it.
He breathed in the fragrance once, then slowly opened his mouth.
"Looking at you, Moses comes to mind."
The prophet and leader of ordinary imagination: one cloth over the body, a staff, a long beard. That air of mystery about him.
"Your sync rate is remarkable. Drop by Comiket and you'll be baptized in photographs."
Well. I'll be reading you as the wizard of the Fellowship of the Ring sooner than as that gentleman, but still...
The phantom thief drank. A soft slurp.
The First Apostle wore a strange, crooked smile and looked down into the tea. Black and murky. Had there been no fragrance, he might have mistaken it for coffee. He threw it back in a single draught. Gulp. Gulp. It tasted of water laced with crushed flesh.
"The tea is quite all right."
"Lying doesn't suit you, First Apostle."
The phantom thief pushed a sweet into the mouth of his mask. Crunch. Crunch.
"You shouldn't have a sense of taste. How would you know the flavor?"
"That is precisely why it is all right."
He drank again of the tea that welled up of its own accord.
"I can make all things all right. In the end, even the taste of tea will be all right."
"How optimistic of you."
"And you? Are you all right?"
The First Apostle lifted a sweet. It was white and smooth—exactly as if it had been peeled from that mask.
"You seem to be having rather a hard time of it... Wouldn't you be better off going inside to rest?"
"There is no consideration more irresponsible than consideration offered for courtesy's sake, First Apostle."
A tap. A finger traced the crack in the mask, and the fissure filled as if by magic. But it was a stopgap, no more than smearing cement over a pillar already split.
"You'd do better to nurse your anger and sneer. Don't play at being a person."
"Oh my... Have I been found out?"
The First Apostle kneaded his own face with both hands.
"Do I look angry?"
"No."
"Then..."
Knead. Knead.
"Do I look sad?"
"Cut it out."
"Very well."
The First Apostle returned to that first smile.
"So you gave everything. Mr. Madness-of-Conviction, still keeping a human shape."
"And you are striving to be human. O Chaos, hidden behind a mask."
"I am unmistakably a person. I shit, and I eat."
"If you are a person, then I am unmistakably a person as well."
Slurp. The two of them drank at the same moment.
"Did you know? You're the only apostle left."
"The Tenth Apostle remains."
"Can she really be called an apostle?"
The First Apostle did not answer. The phantom thief pushed his chair back. A scrape. Footsteps. A firm stop.
"Don't go dragging in someone who has nothing to do with this. Let's finish it between you and me."
The hand that settled on his shoulder was light. The eyes turned this way were sharp—no. Grotesque was the better word.
"Can you bear it?"
The First Apostle read the unease in those eyes. The man was putting on ease, but he was being hunted. What hunted him, the First Apostle did not care to know. Touch a dam that is ready to break, and the result is already decided.
"The one who must bear it isn't me. It's you."
"I wonder..."
The First Apostle rose. The phantom thief's face drew close.
"Perhaps we ought to have that talk after you've saved them."
The mask was silent. He was working not to let the feeling show.
"O Final Trial. Do you mean to keep standing here like this?"
Will you spend the time, and at the end of spending it, meet the Heavenly Road?
"That would suit me perfectly."
Let us welcome the new age.
"............"
Shadow fell. The sky burned the dawn away. A long shadow stretched out ahead.
The phantom thief passed a hand over his face.
Sweat beaded on the First Apostle's brow.
Was there still some of it left?
His lips trembled and went blue. His fingertips shook whether he willed it or not. An emotion flashed through his mind in an instant—the black negation that has crouched, without cease, beside humankind.
Fear.
"First Apostle."
Fear covered half his face.
The darkness deepened. The sky deepened. The prophecy deepened.
"I made a promise, so I won't cross the line."
Radiance struck down through pitch-black dark. A moon rose, holding the light of the sun—always beside them, seen every day, a celestial body. The moon shone clear.
"Though even I don't know what will become of you."
Fear showed half the face. Contrary to the color of the moon, the black of Chaos rippled.
"Well. You won't die."
I'm not a murderer.
Just an ordinary phantom thief.
"...That's what you'd like, isn't it."
He offered up, as the price, a terror that filled even the soul. His chest grew hot.
"Still putting on airs?"
How amusing.
"You're young. Then lose it, once."
And despair.
While you hold someone who has gone, and will not return.
The first time will be hard. Given time, it's nothing much.
Only one experience among the many a life contains.
...Ooooh.
The moon wept. Mournfully. For whom was that weeping?
The phantom thief drew back. Standing beneath the moon, he bent at the waist in a bow.
"...?"
...Ooooh.
The full moon became a half-moon. The First Apostle's mind went faint and far.
"You... you..."
Who are you?
The phantom thief introduced himself, as he always did.
"I am a phantom thief."
"Phantom."
"Do be kind."
⊳ Roadman, San-gun vs Tenth Apostle
⊳ Hong Yumin vs Heavenly Road
⊳ Dan Miryu, Sword, Hwang Seokgu, Captain Kid — en route
⊳ Pele — aghast at an unidentified power
⊳ First Apostle vs Phantom