I'll Tell You Now
A phantom thief?
"I've never heard of one."
"He hasn't been active long, so I wouldn't expect you to know the name. A greenhorn. He hasn't even sent a Calling Card."
A greenhorn, was it. Hardly. That was like mistaking a pterosaur for a newly hatched chick.
Phantom gave a light hop and landed between the Eleventh Apostle and the shrine maiden.
"A yellow hakama... I didn't realize Amaterasu's shrine maiden was in Korea."
"......!"
Kana flinched. This freak knew the Shrine. Knew it well enough to name it at a glance.
"We'll save the questions for later. For now, tuck yourself away somewhere, nice and tight. I have a moonlit dance to dance with the Eleventh Apostle."
Phantom cut her a sidelong look and turned to face the Eleventh Apostle. What rose in her was less offense than relief.
I run while he stalls.
How long he could last against a Heavenly Punishment, she couldn't say. Even so, a second bought was still a second.
"You ought to give up on running."
Duuuunnn—!
The sky washed green. A vast green wave, like a tsunami heaving up off the sea, closed around the place and held it.
Kana understood at once. This was the barrier that had risen during the Seoul terror attack.
Caught.
That freak was one of the Dan Clan. Nothing else explained it. That the Seoul terror had been aimed at the Dan Clan was an open secret.
Weren't they still supposed to be in Hawaii?!
Was the intelligence wrong, or had the board been laid with exquisite care? Either way, Kana was shut in, unable to move an inch.
"I have a great many questions for you. So please, don't waste a thought on anything futile."
Cold sweat broke across her at the sight of Phantom's emotionless mask.
Checkmate.
"Are you quite finished talking?"
"Yes. Thank you for waiting. Because of you, I was able to give a warning."
Phantom and the Eleventh Apostle left the shrine maiden behind them. She was shut out of this place entirely now, a stranger to it.
"It's quite all right. If anything, I worried it might inconvenience you, spending your time on an insect."
"It is an inconvenience. Enough that I'd thrash her this instant, if I could."
Phantom gave a small shrug.
"But there's someone I have to thrash first. Priorities."
"Is that so..."
The Eleventh Apostle smiled, wide and bright.
"An honor. To be made such an object by a man like you."
"Honor is too much. I'm only an ordinary phantom thief. Not a special one."
"How modest."
The Eleventh Apostle lifted his arm. Through the gaps in his raglike clothes, a massive forearm rippled with muscle.
"Do you see? I became like this after looking at you. How long has it been..."
He blew out a rough breath.
"It stirs me. What sight you'll show me. What power."
The Eleventh Apostle's muscles pulsed, and that alone threw up a heat shimmer. Smoke rose from him, smoke no human body ought to be able to give off. Phantom's sleeve fluttered.
"Excited?"
"Immensely!"
"As much as when you raped and killed your family and relatives with your own hands?"
The Eleventh Apostle's face hardened for a moment. Then he drew a smile brimming with killing intent.
"...Not quite that much. Not yet."
"It would be a problem if the finest moment of your life sat anywhere near meeting me."
The Eleventh Apostle held his tongue. Asking how that man had uncovered his secret would have looked pathetic.
"And you? Aren't you excited?"
"Hmm... Hard to say."
Phantom took his chin in hand and tapped one foot.
"I'm not."
"A pity. That you can't enjoy so fine a moment."
The Eleventh Apostle spread his arms. The smoke seeping from his muscles billowed thick, then thinned away to nothing.
"Did you know? I hold pain to be the completion of a human being."
"No pain, no gain. Your creed."
"Hahaha! You know even that! I can't bear it!"
This phantom thief was criminally good. He was going to fall for him at this rate. Had the other apostles ever been handed a moment like this?
"Yes. Pain! Austerity! Trial! Tribulation! Only these mature a person and drive them on. Those who have never suffered them are hothouse flowers! Insects that gave up thinking in a comfortable room!"
No!
"Worse than insects! An insect struggles to survive! A human doesn't!"
The Eleventh Apostle's eyes of frenzy flashed.
"Humans hate pain, and the moment they suffer a little they swell up as if they've become something."
And that is why it is necessary.
"Continuous pain! Only the pain that cools the blood and shatters the mind! Only that is the road to completion."
Is it not beautiful?
"Jesus of the Bible! The Buddha! Even the countless great ones set down in the records of the world! They suffered pain beyond imagining. They endured it and overcame it, and that is why they could be written down!"
Those who couldn't are nothing but ornaments dressing up the great.
"I want to suffer pain. I want to know pain. I don't want to settle. I don't want to rot while blaming the years."
Becoming something better is more addictive than any drug, more thrilling than any gamble.
"Is that in the same vein as the harm you do to other people?"
"What are you saying? I become their pain, and I give them the drive to grow."
The blessing of a tedious everyday life.
"Of course, I also look forward to the ones who come for revenge. An ordinary person who knows nothing, standing up to a Heavenly Punishment — isn't that splendid growth in itself? Growth like that would be painful enough even for me."
"A kind of investment."
"An excellent metaphor."
The Eleventh Apostle stamped his foot and shoved his face in close to Phantom's.
"I wonder. How painful will you be to me? Whether, afterward, I'll regret you in pain."
And so I have to ask.
O my pain.
The Eleventh Apostle pleaded. He wanted his creed to be right. He had lived for completion, soaked his hands in blood past counting, and carved himself down to the bone.
He needed a stimulus. The stimulus called pain.
The Eleventh Apostle looked at Phantom.
Phantom's mask looked back.
The pupils of the mask were black. Blacker than the night sky. Blacker than the cosmos. An abyss deeper than the abyss — an unknown so complete it was difficult to imagine that anything existed there.
There is nothing.
No
thing
at
all.
"None."
"Pardon?"
"Eleventh Apostle. You won't do."
A full moon took its place at Phantom's back. Moonlight pierced the green veil and fell over him.
"Things haven't been going my way lately. It's stifling."
There was light, and still the surroundings darkened. Even the green veil that had been serving as a lamp did nothing. It was like the deep sea, hundreds of meters down. Sound, sight, breath — he could feel none of them.
"I let live someone who ought to have died. I let live someone who ought to have died more than that. I let live someone who ought to have died many times over."
As if the tightness had climbed to his throat, Phantom loosened the necktie knotted there. The dark ate the tie, and it was gone.
"If I hadn't been there, a great many people would have died. A great many would have been made wretched."
He was driven back. The distance at which their breath might have touched vanished from sight. The Eleventh Apostle was left alone, cut adrift in the dark. From within it, only an emotionless voice went on.
"I was sure things had gotten better... They haven't. The world is still shit, and people die like garbage."
It makes me cynical. As if I'm spending myself on a useless effort.
Beyond the dark, a flame caught — turbid, chaotic, a candle battered by the wind and knocked this way and that.
"I know. I know. Whining like this is premature."
But.
A complaint or two is allowed, isn't it?
I'm human too.
"Every last one of the bastards I have to face isn't even a person. Some of them were never human. Some of them quit being human."
The Eleventh Apostle felt the flame, already at the tip of his nose, pressing down on his chest.
"You. You. Trash like you."
The Eleventh Apostle detonated his power. The flame thinned, wavered, and went out.
"...Take the life advice to someone else."
His hands trembled, faintly. Sweat filmed his eyes.
This isn't what I expected.
What is that thing?
I wanted a battlefield, blood and flesh in the air, resolve smashing into guts.
Why am I in a place like this?
Something.
Is wrong.
"Ah. I went and showed a weak side without meaning to. I shouldn't be like this already."
A sigh.
The Eleventh Apostle drew every muscle tight.
"Eleventh Apostle. Your ability was Pain Stock, wasn't it? You stockpile physical and mental pain and convert it into energy. Pile up enough of that stock, and erasing a city is nothing at all."
"And what of it?"
"I'm curious."
Phantom appeared at the Eleventh Apostle's back.
"That ability you gained by losing everything along the way. I wonder how long it holds up in front of real pain."
"Common pain won't move me. I'm in pain even now."
The Eleventh Apostle tapped his own head.
"I tampered with my brain so mental and physical pain stay on at all times. Can you break through that and make me suffer?"
"You asked a moment ago. Whether I know pain."
Phantom's face draped itself over his shoulder. The mouth had split long, and the eyes had drawn out thin. The white of the mask narrowed. The abyss widened.
"I'll tell you now."
Encyclopedia of Pain
"Endure it."
The chaos of pain.
"One request."
I would like you to last a long time.
If this ends too easily,
I don't think
I'll be able to vent it.
This
irritation.