It's a Little Stifling
I looked left. A collapsed building stood there. I looked right. A car lay smashed from the landing, German-made. I looked ahead. The owner of that car. When it broke he hadn't fled; he had charged me instead. An impudent little insect.
"Khk. Hhk."
"Let my dad go!"
I looked at the girl hanging from my arm. A filial daughter.
"You have a fine daughter."
The owner wrung his hands. His breath was being crushed shut, and still his eyes alone were desperate.
"P-please, my daughter, khhk, at least......"
Not a man begging for his own life, but a father looking after his daughter's safety. A fine picture.
Ah. I missed this. My own father and mother had been just the same.
"Please save my dad! I'll do anything!"
Clinging hadn't been enough for her. She dropped to her knees and begged, and the face fouled by terror and tears was quite a sight to look at.
Don't. Desperation is all well and good, but it won't do a thing to keep you alive. You're making me think of my daughter.
A crunch.
Ah. Remembering the old days, I had tightened my grip without meaning to.
"Kyaaaaaaaah!!!"
The daughter screamed. I took that scream as a comfort to the heart.
Thud.
Screams grate. I sent the child off to her parent's side.
"Go on. Share a father and daughter's love."
Will the two of them have each other? If they mean to, I could tell them how it went. From experience.
"From a man's point of view, of course."
I ran my tongue over my lips. Not once since I became an apostle. It wasn't that anyone had forbidden it. I simply didn't think it would feel as good as it had that day.
The hunger boiling up in me, I was already spending on another pastime.
"Run!!!"
"Police! Somebody call the police!!!"
"Aaaaaaaah!!!"
This. This was it.
I felt rapture. I felt fulfillment.
They suffered because of me. They had been wounded because of me. They had lost the people precious to them because of me. They had died because of me. Great or small, I had given them a meaningful pain.
Pain. A person is completed in pain.
No pain, no gain.
"Nothing is gained without pain."
Another word for it: ordeal. Another word: hardship. Another word: wounds.
Within the pain I granted, things lower than insects would be completed. Only a completed being can look upon Heaven.
"Do not, I pray, collapse beneath the pain."
My face showed in a mirror shard lying by itself. I touched the corner of my mouth. I seemed to have smiled without knowing it.
"That is as far as you go."
A bell chimed. With the sound, the mirror split. No. What had split was my face.
My vision went red.
"Heavenly Punishment. Your atrocities end here."
"The crime of harming innocent citizens and throwing the world into chaos."
"Receive Heaven's retribution, and repent of your sins."
I wiped around my eyes with my palm. In the cleared sight, beautiful women were standing: women in shrine-maiden robes one might see in a historical drama. Unlike the usual red hakama, the three wore black, yellow, and blue, and their looks were so full of character that they seemed less shrine maidens than idols.
Who were they? I turned my memory over with care. Was there anything on them?
If you meet shrine maidens in Japan, be careful. Not ordinary shrine maidens. The ones dressed in blue, in black, in colors like that.
The Seventh Apostle's explanation came back to me. When had that been? When I was new, perhaps.
"And just where are you looking!"
The maiden in the black hakama had closed to within arm's reach. The sword at her waist flashed.
"Draw!"
The strike surging up from below drew a line the length of my body. A splendid straight line. I thought I would split along the diagonal.
I reeled. Blood poured. A trained body had kept the cut from reaching my heart. My organs...... had they been hit?
"Haaaaah!!!"
The line did not end at one. A second stroke, a third, a fourth, wild lines coming on and on, carving me fine as marbling through meat.
"Fall back."
The maiden in the black hakama turned a somersault and dropped away behind me. Acrobatics you would only see in a film.
A rippling of strings?
I had been wondering where it came from when I realized it was the mirrors ringing us round. The maiden in the blue hakama brought her hand down, and mirrors of bronze loosed their light.
"Judgment!"
The beam screamed as it struck. This hurt rather a lot. The light was hot, as if I stood before the sun. My flesh burned. No. It had gone past burning and was melting away.
The light of the mirrors died.
"So you still won't die......"
When the maiden in the blue hakama lifted her hand, the mirrors stacked themselves at her fingertips.
"Ooooh."
"That Heavenly Punishment......"
"Who are those shrine maidens?"
The insects who had been fleeing looked my way as if they had never run at all. Their fear was fading.
"Be at ease! People of Korea!"
The maiden in the yellow hakama, standing at the center, snapped her fan open and cried out.
"We are heroes of Japan, come to aid Korea! The Heavenly Punishment ends in our hands!"
At the shout in Korean, the insects began to mutter.
"Japan? They came to help us?"
"They're shrine maidens, so it must be true, right? Their Korean's good."
"Did Japan even have heroes like that?"
"Who cares if they're Japanese! My friend died because of that bastard!"
Had they not heard the news from the next city over? Standing there instead of running was comical. That was why they were insects.
"Please evacuate at once. This place is dangerous."
"Follow our directions."
The other two maidens moved the insects clear. A few of them lost their heads entirely over the maidens' looks.
The maidens met them with smiling faces and kind words, but as always there were those who could not master their feelings.
"Heroes?! What were you doing while people were dying! If you were going to come help like this, you should have come sooner!"
An old insect. The ones around him didn't stop him. They only stared, dumb and blank, and the maidens' expressions hardened.
The maiden in the yellow hakama covered her mouth with her fan as she spoke.
"Don't engage. Things like that are everywhere. We've done as much as we mean to."
"Wh-what!?"
The maidens looked at the old insect with icy eyes, then came to stand in a line beside the one in yellow. She let the words fall, cold as a final warning.
"Anyone who wishes to watch may watch. We will, however, find it difficult to answer for whatever harm follows. This is your last warning."
The insects grew noisy. The maidens ignored them cleanly.
"Heavenly Punishment. Let us put an end to this."
The maiden in the yellow hakama said it with spirit.
I thrust forward the arm where the bone lay bare.
A boom. The shockwave shot out, skimmed past the maidens, and swept away the insects who did not know their place.
"Aaaaaagh!!!"
"Save me!"
"Mom!!!"
The insects who lived fled. In an instant the street was quiet.
"There's something I want to know."
A soft welling, and again. Flesh grew. Feeding on my pain, it closed the wounds. Every injury the maidens had dealt me was gone.
"Do you know pain?"
"......What do you mean?"
"I am asking whether you have suffered pain, and completed yourselves."
The eyes of the maiden in the yellow hakama narrowed. The one in black sneered.
"Listen to this bullshit. A Heavenly Punishment, all right. Mad, just as one ought to be."
The maiden in the blue hakama added a word.
"Talk like that isn't worth an answer. Don't lose sight of the objective."
The maiden in the yellow hakama folded her fan. Light gathered at its tip and fired.
A thin shriek of air. I couldn't dodge. It was too fast. Jerking my head aside was the most I managed.
"Does that answer you?"
I touched my neck. It had grazed me by a hair. A little less luck and there would have been a hole through the middle.
"I see...... So you do not know pain."
I took the three of them into my eyes. They did not know pain. They did not know the pain of a body breaking, of a mind falling in on itself.
Ah. How sad. Not to know the path of completion.
"Rejoice. I will teach you pain. Pain is completion. Through the pain that is me, arrive at completion."
"......We must decline."
The maiden in the yellow hakama shook her head.
"Kill him only so far that he doesn't die."
"Understood."
Killing intent settled cold in all three pairs of eyes.
I wondered. Would they be completed within pain? Or would they, instead, lay pain upon me?
Show me.
I want to suffer, too.
I want to suffer again the pain of killing my family with my own hands!
"Hahahaha!!!"
Below the highway, a choked road came into view. From inside the car, Hong Yumin was lifting it into the air.
"How much longer?"
Captain Kid, locked white-knuckled on the wheel, asked it raw with impatience.
"Ten minutes at best."
"Damn it."
Captain Kid slammed a hand against the wheel.
"If only the TA had been all right!"
"......It won't be much longer."
"Grrhk."
Captain Kid and Dan Miryu ground their teeth.
Phantom stared quietly down at his smartphone. The news was on. Across the screen drifted a city in ruins, and an estimated count of the dead.
"Child of Man. Are you all right?"
Pele asked it, worried.
From the moment he saw the news, Phantom had gone silent. Hong Yumin watched him from the corner of her eye. Her heart was pounding. She was unsettled.
When. When had she seen a sight like this?
Was it the first time the Dan couple had sat her down to a meal?
She couldn't remember.
But she had seen it.
Phantom.
No.
A human.
That thing.
Phantom.
"......How should I put it."
Beneath the mask, a human fell silent. It stirred.
Phantom smiled.
"It's a little stifling."
The words that slipped from the mask dragged up a memory she had no wish to uncover. Hong Yumin realized that it existed. Phantom's mask. A human's mask. It held that inside it.
"Don't worry. I'll finish off every last one of them."
"Thank you. You're a comfort, as always."
"Obviously! Who do you think I am!"
It was faint. So very faint.
Anger.