The Closed City (5)
Three years had passed since Yuel took office as lord.
In those three years the crime rate in Swaepedosi had plummeted at a geometric pace. People killed people far less often; the days when a fresh corpse turned up in some alley every morning dwindled to almost nothing.
She trained the beasts with fear.
She put collars on them and made them human again.
The people of the city still feared their lord, yet they no longer feared the night. They stopped carrying a blade in their coats out of suspicion of their neighbors; mutual distrust thinned as well.
And so three years went by.
The blood dried. A city that ought to have been stained crimson ran dry of blood. To the one who had built this place, that was hardly a desirable result.
“God has spoken!”
A shove between the shoulder blades—God himself prodding the backs of men.
“Kill, and kill, and kill again!”
“With the blood of sinners we shall prove our purity!”
“Take up your blades! Kill!”
Sweet words were whispered into their ears; their hearts were shaken. Emotions were whipped into frenzy, impulses stoked, and the shackles called restraint shattered. The norms Yuel had spent three years building began to collapse in an instant.
“My lord! On Daimel Street—!”
“A massacre in the second district…!”
“They’re rising up in packs! As if possessed—suddenly—!”
The fire caught.
Once lit, it spread with terrifying speed.
“Ahaha, aha! God—God is speaking!”
“Aaaaaaaaaagh!”
“Kill! The more you kill, the more God rejoices!”
Here and there, people who claimed to have heard the “voice of God” began swinging blades. There was no foreshadowing, no context.
A kindly stall-keeper who only yesterday had smiled and handed toys to children turned into a raving butcher overnight and slaughtered those same children. A man famed as a devoted husband murdered his wife. An old man who no longer had the strength even to lift a sword, waiting only for his own death, killed two passersby.
Those who had been human became beasts.
“……”
Yuel stood silent before the spectacle.
Everything she had gritted her teeth to build came down in a single breath. At a mere whim of a god, a single gesture of a divine hand, human lives became worthless.
“Ha.”
Faced with such a moment, some kneel. They laugh hollowly that their lives never had value and simply let go. Or they resign themselves: what can a mere human do against the will of a god?
“Bullshit.”
Yuel was not one of them.
She could not abandon her life—what rested on her shoulders was not hers alone. And her pride would never allow her to yield.
“Fuck that. Fuck all of it.”
She was a capable ruler.
And she was the Masterpiece the previous lord had forged.
“Execute.”
She unleashed her troops. Those who had gone mad were executed with even greater cruelty. She turned the law into a net and bound the entire city. By any means, by every method available, she dragged the criminals in.
If God goaded humans into frenzy,
then she would restrain them with terror.
As emotions ran hotter, the fear the citizens felt toward Yuel grew immense. She equated her own existence with the law itself; the dread she inspired became dread of the very act of breaking the law.
In the plaza of the lord’s castle, the blood never dried.
“Ohhh! God—God—!”
Again: Yuel was a capable ruler.
“The warrior God desires has appeared!”
She was simply not a warrior herself.
“Wh-what…?”
“With blood I shall prove my purity.”
“Ghk—!”
There were those who slipped her grasp, prowling the city and soaking their hands in blood. When the number of humans they had killed approached a hundred, a change occurred.
Aura erupted from the weapons in their hands.
Aura—the mark of a Sword Expert.
Men who had never swung a sword in their lives, who knew nothing of handling mana, became Sword Experts. They had simply killed enough people to reach that realm.
That was the turning point.
Until then, Swaepedosi had possessed no powerhouses of Sword Expert caliber. In other words, it also possessed no means of suppressing those who had become such.
“R-run!”
“Ghk—!”
“Retreat! Retreat!”
The lord’s personal soldiers were cut down by the Experts. Before blades wreathed in aura, their weapons and armor meant nothing.
“……”
Yuel was capable, yet as men armed with the logic of pure force began to appear, the scales slowly tipped. Before her subordinates she maintained her composure, but the moment she returned to her office she hurled the documents from her desk and screamed.
God whispered in her ear.
Give up.
What meaning is left?
The god of Swaepedosi whispered into the ear of every human who resisted. It shook her. Yuel’s hand drifted, almost of its own accord, toward the sword lying on the table.
A spin—then a vicious stab.
With her fountain pen she drove the tip straight through the back of the hand that had been reaching for the blade. Raising the blood-dripping hand, Yuel narrowed her eyes.
I will not become a beast.
I will live as a human and die as a human.
Repeating that mantra, she searched for a way.
……In the original history,
she brought the murderers in.
She drew in the killers who had become Sword Experts by slaughtering people, granted them power, and used them to hunt the other Experts. When any of them grew too large and stopped obeying, she used another Expert to cut them down.
Poison. Ambush. Traps in the rooms where they slept. Every method imaginable—Yuel pressed them down.
She grew steadily more mechanical. She employed every means at her disposal; to stabilize the city she committed every necessary crime. In another sense, it was the process of shedding her humanity.
The human who refused to become a beast
became instead a precision machine that was no longer human.
Even as her emotions wore thin and eroded, she still refused to become a beast—and someone began to call her a doll. That was what happened in the original history.
If I bring the others in…
The choice a human made while thrashing for an answer in a situation that had none.
Even if I have to give power to murderers—by any means necessary…
History that would have repeated itself if no one intervened.
Tap.
But—
“……”
Tap. Thud. Someone rapping at the window frame.
A creak as the window swung open.
A sound that would never have rung in the original history filled the bleak office.
“You again.”
“Yes.”
“I… have no time to talk with you right now. I’m busy, so…”
“Yuel.”
“……”
“You asked me once, remember?”
Najin stepped into the room she had locked.
“What I was doing outside before I came.”
An abrupt topic.
Yet it was a question Yuel had definitely once asked.
“I did a great many things, but the very first of them was this. And I did it in my hometown—a place that looked a lot like this city.”
Why was it?
Yuel felt she already knew what he was about to say.
“Executioner.”
Najin held out his hand to her.
“You don’t need to compromise.”
“……”
“Leave it to me.”
“Leave what?”
“Didn’t I already tell you?”
Najin gave a short laugh.
“Hunting down the bastards who aren’t fit to be called human—that used to be my specialty.”
“Haah…”
Yuel dragged a hand down her face.
She hesitated, deliberated, fell silent—and at last burst into laughter.
“You madman.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“I’m the only one who gets to say it. And you’re the only one who gets to hear it.”
The sword she had always gripped, the sword she had never been able to set down—Yuel placed it in Najin’s hand.
A person who would never have existed in the original history.
Into a city that had begun to drown in madness stepped a being who had not been stained by that madness, who understood Yuel, and who willingly offered himself as her hands and feet.
Not everything changed.
But something, unmistakably, did.
Men who had killed their way into the ranks of Sword Experts appeared everywhere. They competed with one another to slaughter still more humans and dyed the city in blood.
In their minds, no one could stop them.
Reaction speeds overwhelmingly faster than anyone else’s. Dynamic vision sharp enough to bat arrows from the air. Bare fists that could shatter stone walls; bodies reinforced with mana that produced several times an ordinary man’s output.
How sweet mana was!
And aura? Even the mad lord’s soldiers trembled before blades that sliced through iron armor as if it were paper. The more people they killed, the stronger they became—and the sensation of omnipotence filled them.
“A warrior blessed by God walks with us!”
Followers even appeared. Leading those drunk on the voice of God, the Experts savored the sweetness of privilege. And while they were still intoxicated with themselves…
Thud.
Someone appeared.
“……”
A shadow swayed across the lanterns that hung along every street of Swaepedosi. The Expert narrowed his eyes and studied the man who blocked his path.
No mana could be felt.
An ordinary person.
The moment he realized that, the Expert burst out laughing and puffed up his bulk. Why should a Sword Expert feel fear? There was no need for him even to act.
A glance.
One signal of the eye and the fanatics who followed him would clear the obstacle. Sure enough they shouted, “This is the domain of God’s warrior! Who dares—!” and advanced on the young man barring the road.
They advanced—
Crunch. Boom. KRAAAAAASH!
In the darkness, the sounds of something breaking and bodies slamming into walls rang out in rapid succession. In mere seconds the fanatics were either embedded in the masonry or face-down on the cobblestones with their skulls cracked.
“……”
The Expert blinked. What… had just happened? He hastily drew aura. He leveled his sword at the youth who was calmly walking toward him.
I am a Sword Expert. There is no way I lose to some ordinary man who can’t even handle mana…
Thinking that, he charged Najin.
The thought was not wrong. The gulf between a Sword Expert who can reinforce his body with mana and draw aura, and an ordinary person, is immense—just as a knight cannot be beaten by dozens of street thugs.
But Najin was a Sword Master.
Even if he could not draw aura, even if he could not handle mana, even if his physical ability had been reduced to that of an ordinary man, even if every one of those restraints was crushing his body—
technique that had once touched transcendence did not simply vanish.
One step.
The Expert brought his sword down. He aimed squarely at Najin, yet the blade cut only empty air.
Two steps.
As he tried to raise the sword again, a sudden weight settled on his hand with a solid thud. It was the foot Najin had planted there. The instant that weight vanished, blood sprayed before his eyes.
“Ah?”
It was his own blood.
Slick.
Najin’s sword passed through the Expert’s neck. No superior cutting power of aura was required, nor the brute strength to smash walls. If the angle and the force of a swing were precise enough, even a crude blade could take a man’s head.
That made one.
Sword of the lord in hand, Najin crossed Swaepedosi. He scoured every corner of the city, rooting out criminals; he easily hunted the powerful foes the castle soldiers could not touch; he dragged wanted men out of hiding by the hair and flung them into the plaza.
“Fuck—it’s the lord’s hound!”
From a certain point onward, that was what they began to call him.
“That bastard can’t even draw aura! Rush him! We’ve got a warrior who can—!”
“Fuck, Calix from the next district said the same thing and got done in! Don’t stand around—run first—!”
“H-hyaaaaaaaah!”
He can’t draw aura. He isn’t even fast enough to lose with the eye. So he’s someone we can take. Every last person who said so ended up displayed in the plaza, proving with their own corpses that they had been wrong.
Originally far more manpower would have been needed.
Yuel would have had to violate her own principles and employ every dirty method imaginable just to catch them—
and even then, failure to seize them at once would have produced still more victims. Najin hunted those criminals. Of course, with a body reduced to ordinary limits, he could not scour the entire city in a single night.
No matter how fast he ran, some incidents slipped past him.
The number of criminals he could drag in overnight was never large.
You know, right?
……
Even this only buys time.
Merlin spoke; Najin answered with silence.
He knew.
This was no fundamental solution. In a city whose destruction was already decided, all he was doing was slowing the speed of that destruction.
“It only buys time,”
he said, “but from where I’m standing, time is exactly what she needs. Even a moment to catch her breath.”
Every time Najin took another step, a certain woman who had been festering in her office, eyes bloodshot, was finally able to release the breath she had been holding.
“For now, that’s enough.”
Eyes narrowed, Najin looked up at the sky.
He felt he finally understood how this city was put together.
“Merlin told me once,”
he murmured. There had been a madman who theorized that simply killing enough humans could make someone a Sword Master.
On the day he first met Yuel,
Merlin had pointed at her and said, The one who actually did it is that human, Yuel Razian. She killed her way up to the realm of Sword Master.
Of course that had happened outside this city, not within it. Yet Najin could not believe the two were unrelated. Turning the story over in his mind, he let his gaze drift.
He looked at the city.
Then he looked past it, toward the master of the sky that held the city on its threads. Beyond the night-sea of the heavens, he felt someone’s gaze.
Hermann.
Merlin said.
A transcendent who holds the Star of Omniscience.
Najin was certain.
This city was an experimental ground that some transcendent had built to prove a theory of her own.