Prologue - Mad Dogs
There's a vulgar saying that a club is the best medicine for a mad dog. It means that no matter how far beyond reason a creature might be, physical force can still bring it to heel. People will preach about ethics and morality and insist it's no way to handle anything, but I doubt many would go so far as to deny that it works.
…But what happens when the mad dog who's supposed to be on the receiving end of that club is the one holding it in his teeth?
"Runt, what are you doing all alone, moping around like that?"
I was deep in a profound debate with myself when a smell — the kind that whites out your brain after a single whiff — hit my nose and wrung a cough out of me, and a raspy voice smacked the back of my head.
"Ah, shit, you reek of cigarettes. Back off before you talk to me. Ugh, that burnt stench."
"Not my smell. It's coming from over there."
Dreams do come true, apparently. Whether out of consideration for the embarrassment I was about to suffer, or simply to set the record straight, the old man fished a cigarette out of his coat, clamped it between his lips, and pointed behind us with his free hand.
Fwoooosh—
Behind the old man and me, an entire village was burning with methodical thoroughness — like one of those frescoes of Hell you might, if you were lucky, catch in some centuries-old cathedral.
"Tch… Runt, you got a match on you?"
"Why are you asking a guy who doesn't smoke for matches? There's plenty of fire right over there."
The same question, every single time, from a man who knew full well the answer every single time — enough to grind your teeth down to the gum. I couldn't even spare a sigh, and simply pointed to the place that happened to have fire to spare.
"Oh."
And did that lunatic actually take it for another stroke of genius? He nodded with a look of dawning enlightenment, headed back into the scene, and pressed the cigarette in his mouth against a small corpse that had shared the village's fate and was only barely holding its shape.
Tss—
"Thanks for the light."
The madman who had just used a corpse as a lighter — perhaps, in his own head, this counted as manners or common decency — took a drag and bowed his head slightly in mourning. Then, as if stretching out a kink in his back, he abruptly gave the corpse's head a light kick.
Whump—
A corpse already burned to its limit and holding its shape out of sheer momentum naturally lost all semblance of a human form at even that gentle kick, collapsing into ash that scattered wide on the wind like dandelion seeds.
"…! No, for fuck's sake — why would you even do that?"
One grain of the corpse's ash, flung by the old man's kick, had landed square on my cheek. Sure, it was just ash — already burned to nothing — but that hardly made it any less disgusting, and I scrubbed it off in a fit of revulsion.
"If you half-ass putting out a cigarette, next thing you know there's a wildfire. That's just how it goes."
"Oh, for fuck's…"
In that single sentence, the man had somehow ping-ponged between decency and lunacy more times than I could count. The irritation boiling up in my chest and the curses climbing my throat both sank away in an instant, and some strange, deflating exhaustion left me nothing to do but sink back down where I sat.
Had someone pumped drugs into his skull back when he was young? Or was it the opposite — he'd been denied the medication he needed, and this was the result?
As that small question bloomed in my mind, my comrades began trickling back one by one from the burning village, and a sigh slipped out of me before I could stop it.
Remember that bit about the mad dog and the club? Astonishingly — and despairingly — the mad dogs in question are those very men.
And not just any mad dogs, either. A shadow unit hailed as the Shield of the Imperial Family — sworn protectors of the imperial household, the most mighty and exalted beings in this land. Cerberus.
That's us. That's me.
'Fuck, I'm itching to retire.'
Forget the imperial family — I had never been a noble or even a soldier. So how the hell had I ended up running with those lunatics? Steeling my resolve once more to make it back to an ordinary life, I thought back on the first button of it all — the one I'd fastened wrong, and wrong by a country mile.