Sixteen Chances
My parents were kidnapped.
I was fifteen.
Fifteen isn't a number anyone would call "many," even as a figure of speech — and yet I can say with pride that I'd already been swept through more waves than most people face in an entire lifetime.
"Mom, Dad, your son's hooome..."
And that monumental first wave had broken five years earlier, when I was all of eleven — courtesy of my own parents.
In place of my busy parents, I had gone alone to hold the funeral for my grandfather, who'd lived and died by himself on a mountain far from the village, and this was the home I came back to after half a month away.
The house that should have wrapped me in drowsy warmth and melted my fatigue, that should have smelled of rice good enough to make my mouth water, that should have echoed with my parents' familiar voices — instead, it was a shambles, my mother's cherished furniture smashed to pieces and debris strewn everywhere.
Thud. The sight I never could have imagined drained the strength right out of my hands, and the pack on my shoulder dropped to the ground. I ignored it and stepped inside without a word.
Once in, I searched the living room first, then the bedroom, the study, the bathroom, even the storage shed — every last corner of the house. Nowhere did I find a single trace of my parents, and at that confirmation I sank straight down onto the floor.
"...Whew."
What I felt in that moment was relief.
"They're not dead..."
The worst-case scenario that had flashed through my mind the instant I saw the wrecked house was this: my parents' corpses left lying somewhere inside, or great stains of blood soaked into the rooms — evidence of some catastrophe no one could have cleaned up.
But whoever had torn a house apart in the middle of a village full of people wouldn't have bothered with cleanup. No — the bastards had taken my parents alive. Kidnapped, not killed.
Thinking it through like that cooled the heat rising in my chest. As I racked my brain for a way to find them, one clue surfaced, and I picked the pack back up off the floor and set off without a moment's hesitation.
I don't know how many hours I spent combing through the house, but by the time I noticed, the sun had sunk low and night was closing in.
Around the time the clamor of drinkers and diners began to seep faintly out of the village's bars and eateries, I made my way down the familiar street and stopped in front of the tavern my father frequented.
"Whew."
Walking into a tavern alone at the age of eleven felt wrong on some gut level, so I took a moment to steady my breathing and pushed the door open.
Jingle—
The bell hanging over the door rang out bright and clear. The handful of patrons scattered across the tables glanced my way, then quickly lost interest and went back to their booze and chatter.
Only two gazes stayed on me.
One belonged to the barkeep. I walked over to the counter where he stood and took a seat.
"What's a kid want in a bar? Your old man's not in today."
"He's not home, so I was hoping you might know where he went."
"Your dad...? Isn't your old man the fruit peddler? Heard things were tight at home, but..."
To the barkeep, my father was just one regular among many, and his face now crumpled as though he suspected us of running off in the dead of night.
"It's not like that. More importantly — you know that guy who drinks with my dad all the time? Any idea where he is?"
Whenever Dad came home drunk, he'd sometimes ramble about the bar, and as far as I knew, he always drank with one particular man.
"..."
Still lost in his own delusions, apparently, the barkeep pointed out the spot with a look of pity that didn't suit his thuggish face at all.
No, it's really not like that.
And sure enough.
The place he pointed to was exactly where the second gaze had been fixed on me ever since I'd walked in.
"Hey, squirt. Your name's Gul, right? What business does a brat have in a place like this?"
"Mister, where's my dad?"
"Why're you asking me about your old man?"
He played innocent so cleanly that a stranger might have actually felt sorry for him.
But I'd learned the art of playing people under my grandfather, and I had seen it, clear as day — that man, no, that dumbass, had let his mask slip for half a second and smirked.
"Oh. So you don't know."
Suspicion stacked on top of suspicion left no reason to hesitate. I slipped my hand into the pack on my shoulder and drew out two thick blades.
"What're you pulling out—"
"If you don't remember, I'll just have to make it come back to you."
Only now catching on that things were slipping out of his control, the dumbass opened his mouth to say something — nothing about my parents, so I ignored it.
Shhk. In the interest of a sincere, heart-to-heart conversation, I carved off his shoulder with a nice generous cut.
"GRAAAAAAAAH!?"
Thud. His left arm, sliced through as cleanly as a cook hacking apart a rock-hard potato, dropped limply to the floor.
The dumbass burst into tears and wailed like a five-year-old girl whose doll had been snatched away, and from his reeking shoulder, blood poured out even harder.
"My arm, my arm... Gah!?"
"You lost an arm, you crippled piece of shit, and you still haven't figured out the situation?"
Thwack. Apparently all those years of living hadn't taught him to read a room. I kicked the sniveling idiot square in the chest, and he toppled backward off his chair, rolled across the floor, and slammed into the wall.
"Wh-what the hell is with that kid!?"
"He's got a knife!"
"Wasn't that Gordon who just got his arm chopped off?!"
The few remaining customers — who had come for a peaceful drink and instead watched a man lose his arm, which was apparently so shocking — screamed and panicked.
"Shut the fuck up, all of you. If you can't keep it down, get the hell out."
Whoosh. Desperate to learn my parents' whereabouts even a single second sooner, I hurled one of the two blades over my shoulder, and it buried itself deep and clean in the tavern door I'd come through.
Thunk.
Having enjoyed the spectacle of a fairly thick wooden door caving in like a block of tofu, the patrons obligingly fled or found somewhere else to look.
With blessed silence at last, I walked over to the dumbass — Gordon, was it? — who was still clutching his shoulder and trembling, seized him by the bangs, and slammed his head straight down into the floor.
WHAM.
"Ugh!?"
A grown man of perfectly average build, his head caught in the grip of a mere eleven-year-old, put up no resistance whatsoever as his face plowed into the floorboards — and naturally, the nose jutting out from it snapped, blood gushing free.
I shifted my legs back a step so his blood wouldn't spatter my clothes, then drove his head into the floor again.
WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.
Deliberately asking nothing, I kept pounding his face into the ground like a pestle grinding grain, over and over and over.
"It hurts! Ghk!? Stop, p-please stop..."
By the time the skin of his face had begun to pulp, he seemed to have grasped that screaming alone wouldn't get him anywhere.
My conversation partner had finally developed a willingness to talk, so I let go of the head I'd been holding.
"Talk."
"...?"
Grandpa always said it: when you deal with dumbasses, establish discipline first.
"Keep it short."
"..."
"Want me to shorten your other arm too?"
I pressed the blade — still slick with the blood that had spilled when I took his arm — up against him, and his comprehension improved dramatically. He hastily changed his tune.
"P-please stop, I'm begging you..."
"Five, ten, fifteen... yeah, sixteen times."
"...What?"
"I'm giving you exactly sixteen chances."
"Ch-chances...?"
"From here on, every time you fail to answer my questions honestly, one chance goes up in smoke. Lying, obviously. Dodging the question or talking back — that costs you one too. Understood?"
"I, uh..."
"Clock starts now. Where are my mom and dad?"
"I d-don't know... GRAAAAH!?"
"Still hasn't come to his senses, huh? Fifteen left."
Despite the kind and thorough explanation of the rules I'd just given him, he'd gone and dug his own grave, so I grabbed his remaining arm and took off his thumb.
"Please! Please! Stop!"
"Fourteen."
Shhk. This time, the index finger.
"Ghhk...!"
"That's right — every time you feed me bullshit, you lose another one. Got it? Let's try again. Where are my mom and dad?"
"I-I really don't know, I swear I don't..."
"Thirteen..."
"W-wait, hold on! I don't know where, but I know who took them! I swear it's true!"
I'd been toying with the idea of lopping off a toe next, just to mix things up a little — and right at that moment, some actually useful information finally surfaced.
"Talk."
"Well, it's like this..."
According to Gordon, my parents had been struggling to make ends meet and had borrowed from some private moneylender or other.
Even so, they'd worked hard and paid the interest on time, every single time, so the lenders had never pressed them — but then a different crowd of bastards took over the lender's operation, and those were the ones who'd snatched my parents.
"Wait, what the fuck — we had debt...?"
I knew business had been slow lately, but I hadn't thought it was bad enough for loan sharks.
Learning this hidden side of my parents' finances came as a small shock, but it wasn't what mattered right now.
"Okay, so why the hell would anyone kidnap a model debtor who pays his interest like clockwork?"
"Th-they couldn't pay this month's interest, so they're being taken as an example..."
Paid faithfully for years, miss one payment, and they drag them off?
"Fine. Now I just have to hunt down where those bastards are. And you."
"Y-yes...?"
"That 'missing' interest payment this month — you stole it, didn't you?"
"...!"
I was a clueless kid who hadn't even known my parents had debts, but I did know this: the shop's takings this month hadn't fallen short of last month's.
And why would a man who was neither family nor business partner, just some drinking buddy, know all these intimate details? Because he was involved, obviously.
An insider, in other words.
"You just dodged my question, didn't you? Ten."
"What? N-no, wait... AAAAAH!?"
Shhk—
My business here concluded, I finished the job — the remaining shoulder and both thighs — then punted him out of the tavern like a ball and headed out into the street to find the thugs he'd told me about.