Let's Start with the Simple Things
"Let's start with the simple things."
BRAAANG!
CRASH!
Something struck him and flung him away. A body hard as steel twisted out of true.
"First, the pain of a traffic accident. A ten-ton truck does hurt. I'll give you that."
And then—
WHOOOSH.
CRASH!
"Rebar dropped from above hurts as well."
Now.
"Shall we keep going?"
CRASH!
He hurled the rebar that had crushed him straight at the Phantom Thief. It struck home, and the Phantom Thief went sailing far off.
"A cheap trick."
Crunch. He set the broken arm and shoved the mashed organs back down into his gut. This much was nothing. Nothing at all. It did not even rise to the ache that follows a meal.
"Why do you imagine this is where it ends?"
SHUNK!
His arm came off, taken by an enormous cleaver swinging down from above. The blade drifted through empty air, then drove for his head. He caught it in his remaining hand. It punched through the palm and jutted out the other side.
"Hah!"
CLANG!
He kicked with his knee and snapped the cleaver in two. Past the broken steel, he found the Phantom Thief.
"Have it ba—!"
"I don't accept returns."
SHK-SHK-SHK!
Stakes erupted out of his body. Eyes, nose, mouth — they made no distinction. They ran him through as if they meant to skewer all of him at once.
"Kh—hk!"
He yanked free the stake plugging his mouth. A lung came with it. His weight dropped.
"How much Pain Stock do you have? Still short?"
The Phantom Thief swung an iron mace. He took it on the skull and shattered it, then drove a stake into the Phantom Thief's chest and, using the stake as a conduit, detonated his Stock. Half of it. Every pain he had been given, paid back in full.
"Take it...!"
KRA-KOOM!
The Phantom Thief's flesh blew apart into thousands of pieces.
"Hah."
Meat poured down over him. He spent Stock to knit the wounds, then slowly drew out the stakes that had grown from his body like hair.
"Now why would you pull those out?"
"Kh!"
The Phantom Thief stood there whole and scoured his lower half with a flamethrower. He ignored the searing and kicked. His toes sank into the man's temple.
Bang! Bang!
Even in midair the Phantom Thief drew a gun from his coat and fired. A hole opened in the heart. The neck snapped backward.
WRRRRR!
Before the damage could be put in any kind of order, a chainsaw chewed into his throat.
"Grrghhk!!!"
He burned Stock as it happened. The saw, howling at full spin, caught on flesh that would not stop regenerating and was forced to a halt.
"You're not getting away!"
"Oh."
A hand shot out like a snake and closed around the Phantom Thief's throat. He tightened his grip. Twist it now, and the man would die.
"With strength like that, you couldn't wring a chicken's neck."
The Phantom Thief's finger twirled. His own vision spun with it, around to the opposite side.
"Ghk—kh—ghk!"
He did not let go. He swung his arm and slammed the Phantom Thief into the ground, then pinned both arms under his legs and took the mount.
"To be made to suffer in so many different ways—!"
Crack. He wrenched his neck back to where a neck belonged.
"This is a first."
"You seem to have room to spare."
"Of course I do."
He tore the chainsaw out of his neck and brought it down on the Phantom Thief's face. The mask stopped it. The saw burst apart.
"I'm used to my body coming to pieces."
"Then shall we try another line?"
With a soft slip, the Phantom Thief vanished like a mirage. In the quiet dark, he was alone.
"Dad?"
He flinched, swallowed, and turned his head. A little girl sat there, playing with building blocks.
"Wow! You're home early today!"
The tails of her hair flew as she clung to his leg, and he felt the living warmth of her.
"Honey? I thought you still had work."
His wife, apron on and vacuum in hand, asked it as if nothing in the world were wrong.
"Dad, can I have some allowance? I want to go out with my friends."
His son, watching television and kicking his feet, held both hands out. He had missed this. God, he had missed this sight. He slipped a hand into his pocket — not the rasp of grimy rags, but the feel of well-pressed jeans — took out his wallet, and pressed fifty yuan into the boy's palm.
"Huh? Fifty?"
"Goodness, isn't that far too much?"
His wife was startled. Well, of course she was. There had never been enough, so he had always doled it out in pinches, and now this.
"Think of it as future allowance, paid in advance. The boy's grown. He ought to learn the feel of money."
"Even so... you know how rough it is around here."
"He won't be going anywhere."
He stroked the head of his son, who was bouncing on his heels with fifty yuan in his fist.
Thud.
"And he won't have any reason to spend it."
"Wh...?"
A soft drop.
"Not you, either. Not our daughter."
"Da...d?"
"Hon...ey...?"
Crack. His palm went strangely light. The warmth was going out.
"You're not going to enjoy it? I prepared so carefully."
A mask budded up over his daughter's face, her neck already broken.
"Didn't you miss her? Your own daughter."
"If you meant to stage this, you should have waited until she was older."
"True. She was very young."
Thud. A cold touch found his back.
"I loved you... How could you betray us...?"
His wife, her head lolling down at her chest, drove a knife into his back. The voice spilling out of her was grotesque.
"I loved you too."
"Then why!"
"I got sick of it."
He kissed her mouth. The taste of love was still sweet, no matter how much time had passed.
"Live decently, work yourself to the bone, and nothing comes back."
He had given what little money there was, donation after faithful donation, and carved hours he did not have so he could go and volunteer.
"It felt like trying to bail out the sea with chopsticks. Dark. All the way down."
"Why...? Why on earth...? No one was even making our lives hard..."
"I know. I was lucky. The only people around me were good ones."
Rank had never mattered. He had met every sort of person, and kept their company.
"But that doesn't change how dark I am inside."
"......That's sophistry."
"What does it matter? That's the reason."
Her hands crushed tight around his throat.
"Die! Die! Just die!"
"......My love."
Let's meet in hell.
BOOM!
Everything around him was scorched to waste. The landscape of memory vanished clean.
"You spent quite a lot of Stock. Did it hurt that much?"
"It hurt. Quite a lot."
His heart had torn. To kill his family again... that was something that ought to happen only in a dream.
"For all that, the smile won't leave your mouth."
He touched his lips. The corners had split all the way back to his ears. So he had gotten excited without even knowing it. It must have felt good. It had.
"I don't know whether I ought to thank you for this, or curse you..."
"Be honest. It was wonderful, wasn't it?"
The Phantom Thief held a family photograph up to his face. There was no telling when it had been taken. From the eyes of everyone in it but him, bloody tears ran.
"The pleasure of killing your family a second time. The pain. And you, growing on the strength of both."
You're glad of it, aren't you?
"Well... it was good."
"Then that's all that matters."
Clap. Clap. Clap.
"The family's finished, so why don't you meet the rest of your blood."
The Phantom Thief pointed behind him. The kin he had killed were standing there. He swung a fist and erased them in a single blow.
"Family is enough."
"A pity."
He steadied his breath, and he admitted it. The Phantom Thief's pain was strong — stronger than he had ever imagined. But—
"Do your worst. My will does not break."
He set his stance and tuned the energy so that none of it would be wasted.
First, this space. What do I do about it?
The space itself lay under the Phantom Thief's feet. If he could not get out of here, victory was a long way off.
Can I break it?
He could. Zero into one. One into a hundred. He spent Stock and spread the energy wide, and he perceived the space itself. It was sticky. It was void. It seemed to be eating him. Frightening. Terrifying. And yet—
Ah.
He was growing. Inside a crisis without precedent, he had grown. His mind set harder. His flesh grew sounder.
I was not wrong.
A realm he had never been able to see opened in front of him. He finished cracking the hard shell, and made ready to rise.
"Without pain—!"
There is nothing to be gained!
He seized the space in his energy. Not by throwing a fist. He shattered the thing itself, and raised a realm that belonged to him alone.
A domain of his own.
Within it, he is omnipotent.
"Hahahaha!!!"
Laughter broke out of him for sheer joy. What was this? It was enormous! Had the Phantom Thief already reached a realm like this? Truly, the strongest rival alive!
"Break!"
CRASH-SHATTER!
The darkness broke. From within the shattered fragments, the Phantom Thief looked his way.
"This is the final act."
He laughed, full of himself. He could not be certain of victory, but the weight that had tilted the scale had come level again. Darkness remained. The pain would go on.
"The one who wins is me!!!"
He wrapped himself in omnipotence and went forward. More. More. At the end of this, he would be complete!
"Haaaaah!!!"
And then he— he—
"Huh?"
"Aren't you going to continue?"
The Phantom Thief tossed aside a ruined length of chain.
"Wait. Wait a moment..."
Something was wrong. Why. Why. How much time had passed? Ten days? A hundred? A year? No. Far longer than that. As if... hundreds of years? No. This was not right.
How much had he grown? He had grown monstrously strong. Strong without a limit. Let every apostle come at him at once, and they still could not beat him. And yet. Why?
"Eleventh Apostle. Why have you stopped?"
The darkness drew near, and with ease it pulled down the domain he had raised through advance after advance.
"You have grown stronger. In pain."
Just as you wanted.
"Your power passed the point of completion and went on into a realm beyond even that."
Astonishing.
"And you find that strange?"
It's going well.
"I became the pain you wanted."
I became the hardship. I am the one who furnishes the trial.
"You have to overcome it."
It isn't over. A little more. More. Hold fast.
"There is a great deal I have not shown you."
"No... even so..."
"There has to be an end?"
A contradiction.
"You never once allowed that for anyone else."
You made them suffer however the mood took you.
"And you yourself are to be excused?"
"............"
"Say something, won't you."
I'll grow tired of waiting.
"......Ha. So it's a bluff."
"Pardon?"
"Even you... cannot keep repeating this forever."
Time is finite. The world keeps turning.
"Stay with me too long, and you'll be the one in danger."
Drag this out, and Korea would be finished. He looked at the darkness with a sneer caught in it. The darkness rippled.
"You seem to be laboring under a misunderstanding."
The one light in the sky glittered. A moon appeared overhead, sudden and alone.
"Who gave you leave to decide that this is over?"
What are you so sure of, leaping to the end like that? Measuring the whole of it by common sense?
"I told you I would show you."
The Encyclopedia of Pain.
The Chaos of Pain.
"Yes. You endured well."
For a human.
"So?"
But this is only the first page.
"Not even a period has been set down."
Time?
"Where, in pain, do you imagine there is such a thing as time?"
You've been carrying a faulty sort of common sense.
"Eleventh Apostle. Are you proud of holding a conviction?"
Do you think that because a conviction is right, it will last forever?
"Put it to the test. That conviction of yours."
Step past it.
"I will make ready."
And you will rise to meet it.
"How many moves do you think I have?"
"......"
"Do you imagine it ends in the tens of thousands?"
Now.
"Let us begin."