Chapter 28
Chapter 28
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 28
Chapter Title: Bread and Candy (5)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The next morning, Ronzo woke up staring at the unfamiliar ceiling of a motel room.
"Ugh... my head..."
A splitting headache came with a body heavy as lead. His memories from the club last night... faded after the beautiful woman's smile and the sweet glass of liquor.
He struggled to sit up on the creaking bed.
"Urgh..."
Then Ronzo's eyes caught sight of an unidentified blue powder scattered across the bedsheet.
"...?!"
And with it, a fragment of last night's memory struck his mind intensely. A sensation of his entire body melting in overwhelming pleasure that took his breath away.
He gasped sharply without realizing it.
"Hah... haah...!"
His anxious gaze swept the room and stopped at a small table beside the bed.
There lay a few blue pills that looked like candy. Cold sweat poured down his body like rain in an instant.
He knew what they were. The worst synthetic drug that had recently started circulating in the back alleys, rumored to ruin your life with just one taste.
Heaven Candy.
Realizing what had happened last night, Ronzo desperately rubbed his dry face with trembling hands, trying to calm himself.
'No... it'll be fine. It was just once. A mistake.'
He tried to dismiss it as a stroke of bad luck, as if nothing had happened, and return to his normal life.
So he forced himself to act casual as he left the motel, heading to start the "respectable" mercenary job scheduled for the next day.
But it was already too late to turn back.
"Damn it...!"
No matter how hard he tried to focus on the client's briefing, nothing stuck in his head.
His body felt impossibly heavy, his fingertips trembled faintly, and above all, he couldn't concentrate.
The memory of the greatest pleasure in his life and the blue pill that gave it to him kept resurfacing, disrupting his daily routine.
In the end, over the next few days, he made one ridiculous blunder after another, and the job failed.
From that day, Ronzo's shining fixer career began to crumble.
'It's okay... if I just hold out a little, it'll get better.'
Ronzo reassured himself. At this point, he had no idea this was all part of an elaborate scheme targeting him.
He blamed himself, believing it was just a one-night mistake he could overcome with sheer willpower.
But Heaven Candy wasn't the kind of drug you could quit with willpower alone.
Once you'd tasted it even once, it was a devil's noose you could never escape.
He endured sleepless nights in agony for days, but frail human resolve crumbled before the drug's temptation.
In the end, Ronzo set out again, craving that blue candy.
"Heaven Candy—all of it you've got!"
Soon, he poured every penny of savings he'd scraped together from mercenary work into buying the drug.
But the deliberately inflated price devoured his fortune in no time, and it still wasn't enough. When the money ran out, he ended up in debt to the dealer. To pay off that massive sum, he had no choice but to take on the "dirty jobs" the family assigned.
Ronzo was no longer in a position to pick and choose jobs.
His role had completely devolved from fixer carrying out requests to blood-soaked hitman.
"Here you go. This week's supply."
"Q-quick... give it to me...!"
As time passed, Ronzo sank deeper into the abyss.
When high on the drug, he wasn't hungry, didn't hurt, wasn't tired.
He'd hole up in a dingy room all day without eating or washing, giggling like an idiot.
Or suffer in withdrawal agony.
His eyes grew emptier, his body skin and bones.
Even his colleagues, who tried desperately to bring him back, left one by one.
"It's a shame to see you like this. This is the last bit of goodwill for old times' sake. Don't come around anymore."
The envelope from an old comrade he turned to in desperation went straight to buying more drugs.
'No... I can't... I shouldn't...'
His mind screamed it, but he couldn't stop his hand reaching for the drug.
"You bastard! Get your shit together!!!"
"Ronzo, you've changed. You're not the man I loved anymore. I realized it too late. Goodbye."
In the end, even his longtime friend who truly worried and his lover who pleaded through tears gave up and left.
Now, no one remained around Ronzo.
He was a perfect loner.
But the saddest part was... when he realized he was truly alone, he felt secretly glad there was no one left to stop his dosing or nag him.
============
It was one day when he indulged only in the drug's pleasure, forgetting even the flow of time.
Ronzo happened to catch his reflection in a broken mirror shard hanging on the wall.
In the mirror stood a scrawny wreck in filthy clothes, eyes hollow.
Dead black pupils.
Sunken cheeks.
Lips cracked like a turtle's shell.
'Is... is that really me?'
In disbelief, he approached the mirror. The face was so changed. Nowhere was the fixer Ronzo Javier, once called a "supernova" tearing through the back alleys.
It was too alien, repulsive, terrifying.
A wave of nausea and deep self-loathing surged up. He punched the mirror's face.
Shards rained to the floor, but he roared on heedless.
"Aaaah... AAAARGH!!!!"
He'd tried quitting the drug a few times before, but always collapsed under the horrors of withdrawal. This time was different. The junkie's image in the mirror terrified him more than death.
'I have to quit... this time, no matter what...!'
He found every last packet of Heaven Candy hidden in the room and flushed them down the toilet. With trembling hands, he locked the door and boarded up the windows, imprisoning himself.
"Grrgh..."
Hell began immediately. Agony like his bones twisting. Revulsion like thousands of bugs crawling under his skin. Cold sweat poured, he vomited bile.
Grotesque hallucinations danced before his eyes, screams of the dead and mocking voices echoed in his ears.
Any sense of time was long gone. He rolled on the floor screaming, bashed his head against the wall, bit his own arm.
He thought dying might be better, countless times.
How much time passed?
Ronzo barely held on with his tattered body.
Passed out on the floor, nearly unconscious. But he'd made it, he thought.
This time, he'd broken free of the cursed drug's chains. With that faint smile.
But...
When he came to, Ronzo lay sprawled on the cold back-alley pavement.
'Wha... what?'
Before him loomed the familiar drug dealer's face and grimy boots.
'What happened? I was clearly locked in the room...?'
His memory cut off unnaturally. Nothing from the gap surfaced.
The one certainty: now Ronzo was begging for drugs again, groveling like a dog at the dealer's feet.
"Still haven't snapped out of it? Heh, take that, suck it down, and you'll want more?"
The dealer yanked Ronzo's hair, mocking him.
Then shoved his shoe toe toward his face.
"Last chance. Lick it clean with your tongue, and I'll toss you one for free."
Ronzo hesitated briefly. The last shred of his humanity screamed refusal.
But the creeping withdrawal and drug craving drowned it out.
Eyes squeezed shut, he stuck out his trembling tongue and licked the filthy boot.
He tasted dirt and grime, heard his dignity shatter.
Tears flowed in despair and misery.
"Puhahaha! Good~ boy! Fucking dog!"
The dealer roared with laughter at the sight, then finally tossed a blue pill to the ground.
Ronzo snatched and swallowed it like he'd been waiting.
In an instant, the hellish pain vanished, his mind went white.
Indescribable supreme bliss flooded him, every cell alive again.
Ronzo was happy now.
But...
Such a terribly sad happiness.
"Ah... aaaah... aaah..."
He mumbled nonsense, foaming at the mouth. His limp limbs twitched in spasms.
Watching the pathetic display, the dealer muttered in contempt.
"What? Totally gone now? Time to scrap this one. Got good use out of him though."
The dealer's voice faintly reached his ears, but Ronzo couldn't think.
No, didn't want to.
He just shed tears and smiled faintly in that terribly sad happiness.
As always, heaven's candy took him back to the past.
Ghostly faces of those he'd sent away flickered before him.
Comrades he'd roamed the alleys with.
Friends who'd worried till the end.
And the lover he'd once loved more than anything.
Sometimes, faces of family from long ago, ones he could barely remember.
In the hallucination, Ronzo wept and laughed, endlessly apologizing to them.
But today felt somehow different.
Amid the hazy visions, a being he'd never seen appeared.
A figure approaching in dazzling light, impossibly beautiful. Like... an angel.
So he realized. The addiction was finally dragging him to death's door. Was that angel here to take him at the last moment? Should he repent now?
Didn't matter. Angel or devil, if it freed him from this wretched life, he'd gladly take the hand and follow anywhere.
'Sorry... everyone.'
In fading consciousness, his final thought.
He regretted not living a proper life.
'Just once... if I could go back just once... I would...'
Suddenly, warm, dazzling light enveloped him.
Not the cold despair he'd expected as his end, but a warmth seeping into his soul's depths.
In that peace, Ronzo slowly opened his eyes again.
"........."
Dazed. The drug's noisy haze in his mind was gone like a lie.
Instead, startlingly clear, a voice right before him.
"Are you okay?"
Ronzo slowly raised his head. There stood the angel he'd seen.
Not a hallucination after all.
In the bewildering situation, he could only stare blankly at the unreal being before him.
The angel tilted her head slightly at Ronzo, then quietly extended both hands as if testing him.
In one hand, a simply wrapped ordinary loaf of bread.
And in the other...
The candy he'd craved and hated so much: one Heaven Candy pill.
The thing that stole all his happiness and gave it all back, viciously.
Ronzo's gaze shook violently.
"............"
But something was off. The obsessive urge that surged just at the sight of the drug... wasn't there now.
Instead, in his empty mind, a sensation long forgotten faintly rose.
'I'm... hungry.'
The primal feel of an empty stomach.
The basic life demand to chew, swallow, gain energy—something he'd completely overlooked.
His trembling hand slowly reached out into the air.
And what he finally grasped...
Was the bread.
"........."
Ronzo tore open the bread wrapper with shaking hands. He crammed it into his mouth greedily.
Nothing special—just a hard plain loaf.
But in this moment, it tasted better than anything in the world.
The sensation of chewing food, sliding down his throat, the primal satisfaction of a filling belly. It all made him feel alive again.
Tears burst forth uncontrollably.
"Sob... ugh... huu..."
Like a child, he collapsed to the ground and bawled.
Sobbing with emotions he couldn't name—grief, joy?
"Thank you... thank you... thank you..."
Face a mess of tears and snot, he repeated those words endlessly.