Not a Single Word
Could composure and haste ever coexist? I knew the two were concepts that hardly sat well together. But every so often, reality demanded both at once.
"The shelter is in the basement of the movie theater! Everyone, please evacuate calmly and quickly!"
"What on earth is going on? The gate alarm never even went off, so why is it this chaotic...? Is there a fire?"
"I don't know. We didn't detect any rise or drop in mana at all, but a rift suddenly opened in Theater 6. We've sealed every passage connected to that area, and we're waiting on hunters and a rescue team. This isn't the time—please evacuate immediately."
Like now, when lives hung in the balance.
And in situations like that, people generally did as they were told. Fail to, and it wouldn't be only your own life you were putting at risk.
Exactly like this.
"Out of the way! I won't let my child die here...!"
"Is your kid the only one with a life? Nobody here wants to die!"
"You shove your way five seconds ahead and you might end up fifty years early in the grave! Don't push or cut in on the stairs! The path's already narrow enough!"
No one in this world wants to die. That is why people spend a lifetime thrashing for a way to live. But every so often, someone forgets that when that thrashing starts to hurt other people, it comes back as a blade aimed at their own throat.
Of course, even when those people made everyone around them scowl, direct punishment was rarely handed out on the spot. The anger you just finished venting had a way of coming home like a boomerang. Shove someone down the stairs because their nuisance got on your nerves, and if their neck snapped and they died for it, the crowd might mutter that they had it coming—that it served them right. The law, however, would still punish you.
You would feel wronged, no doubt. The other party had been doing something dangerous enough to get people killed. You had only paid it back in kind, and maybe you were simply unlucky enough that they died. But a chain reaction of malice has to be broken by someone. Otherwise revenge begets revenge, and that revenge begets still more revenge, and the cycle never ends. That is why the law exists—to serve as society's safety net, even if someone ends up feeling cheated.
Whether out of fear of that law, or simply because they disliked the idea of it turning against them, ordinary people would dodge a nuisance and curse it under their breath. They would not readily step forward to stop it. But to say that was usually the case was, of course, to admit there were exceptions.
"You damn woman! You keep shoving like that and your brat's gonna tumble down the stairs, snap their neck, and die!"
"What did you just say? You done talking?"
Everyone was already racing the clock to evacuate—and still, there were people picking a fight on purpose.
"Excuse me—can you fight later? We need to reach the shelter first. If you brawl here, you'll back the whole line up."
"Go on past. I've got business to finish with this hag."
"Then finish it by yourself, mister. You trying to die here? And who do you think you are, talking down to me when we just met?"
"Then who do you think you are, lady, shoving people aside and thrusting your kid in everyone's face?"
Someone tried to break it up, and the conflict only climbed higher.
Watching the evacuation, though, I didn't feel any particular irritation. Part of that was distance—I wasn't the one filing down those stairs, so whatever happened on them felt far away. And besides, I already knew that this, too, was simply what humans were.
There were people like Helena, who would burn everything they had for revenge and still be unable to turn away from a dying child or the sick, and would step forward to help. And there were plenty of people who, without needing a life-or-death crisis to excuse them, would try to chew the meat off someone already wasted to skin and bone even when their own belly was full. Helena herself had been born as the heroine of a revenge tragedy written by villains like that. I would say both kinds were profoundly, unmistakably human. I had watched black, white, and every shade of gray among them across a very long span of years.
Well—I did prefer stories of love and hope, of courage and happiness. At the very least, I preferred a story that tried to move forward in pursuit of those things. Even so, watching villains squabble among themselves didn't particularly wound me. That, too, was human. It only made me a little sad. A little sorry for them.
Today, though, something about it sat wrong.
Of course it did—they were raising their voices and causing trouble for everyone else. It would have been stranger if watching that had put me in a good mood. Still.
This conflict... doesn't it feel staged?
Even a fool wouldn't deliberately stall for time when their own life was on the line. Not unless they had some other purpose.
...Don't tell me the rift that opened without a gate alarm going off was something they induced. What if they're stalling on purpose, fully intending to hurt people?
"What's the play, nyang? We evacuating too, nyang? Or we smash our way in, nyang?"
"Hmm. You already know this, Nyangnyangbeam. A gate whose scale and rank haven't been identified is dangerous even for a B-Rank Hunter."
"Honestly I'm kinda spooked too, nyang. But if I hole up in the shelter with everyone else, what's that gonna look like, nyang? Fuck-nyang, a girl's gotta have some pride, nyang. And if things go south, Miso Cheonsa-nyang's gonna back us up, nyang?"
"Fufu. You do have a habit of putting far too much faith in me, Nyangnyangbeam. I wonder if you'd be a little less reckless if I weren't around?"
"That's just common sense, nyang? You look before you leap, nyang. My own life's the most precious thing I've got, so I'm not about to throw it away, nyang. You wanna save other people, you gotta stay alive first, nyang."
I looked at Miso Cheonsa, who had been talking with Nyangnyangbeam all this while over that same uneasy feeling. She would have been just as aware as I was of what was happening on the stairs. And yet she showed no sign of wanting to intervene in the situation at all.
Was she trying to keep her word from before—that affairs humans decided among themselves ought to be left alone? Or was she the one behind all this?
Then again, leaving humans to themselves was Miso Cheonsa's motto. I doubted she would do anything so vicious as deliberately handing down a trial just to watch how they responded.
...This is making me look back on my own old days, for no good reason. Still, I had never imposed trials on purpose. Anyway.
"I don't know much about mana or any of that. But this feeling... it's far too familiar."
"Ah, Helena knows what it is, nyang? Then Yeonmin knows too, nyang?"
"Yeonmin would have known already. We felt this countless times in that other world. The remnant of the demon we destroyed last time must have been parasitizing people's hearts—and now it's begun to move."
The cause of the incident had been guessed at from a quarter I hadn't expected at all. I had thought she was simply a good shot. Had she always been this sharp?
At any rate, it wasn't something I had even begun to suspect—but if Helena was right, the bizarre scene on the stairs suddenly made a rough kind of sense. Even a considerable fool wouldn't block the path and pick a shouting match in the middle of an evacuation. That wasn't a you-die-I-die situation. That was terrorism on the level of you-die-and-we-all-die-because-of-you. It would have been effective enough if terrorism had been the point from the start, of course. But a mother with a child in tow and a perfectly ordinary-looking man suddenly deciding they no longer wanted to live was a lot less plausible than someone tampering with their hearts.
The human mind was so terribly fragile. Let your guard down for even a moment and you would find yourself carrying out what you had been told, even when it was no longer your own will.
That was why I liked Helena. Through every sweet illusion the demons laid out, through every threat and every coaxing whisper, she had never once given in.
So I put my weight behind her words. If I wouldn't take Helena's side, who would?
Mmm. Am I being too biased?
"I don't know what the feeling is like, but I think Helena is right. People are fighting terribly on the stairs right now, and I don't think it looks natural at all."
"So it seems. Someone is clearly goading their hearts into acting this way. Very well, you two. Why don't you go put on a splendid show?"
So what if I was biased? It was persuasive enough that even Miso Cheonsa was playing along.
"This feels like a setup, nyang. Wasn't character education supposed to be us loafing around in the classroom, eating lunch, and going home, nyang? Why are we doing field drills two days in a row, nyang? Don't tell me Miso Cheonsa-nyang cooked this up just to turn Helena-nyang into a hunter, nyang?"
"Now, now. However overflowing I may be with plans to put you to work, Nyangnyangbeam, I would never deliberately cause an incident. Come now—hurry along and resolve this situation."
"Fuck-nyang, so you WERE planning to work us like dogs the whole time, nyang!"
...Ah. So that wasn't it. She had intended to send Helena and Nyangnyangbeam out from the start. But if that was for the sake of giving Helena more experience, then from where I stood, I could only welcome it.
While the two of them bickered back and forth, Helena drifted quietly over to my side, her eyes complicated. She flicked her gaze here and there, hesitating over the words, then reached out a hand only to let it fall and speak instead, looking thoroughly put out. It was terribly cute.
"...Please don't push yourself for no reason. Just rest. Unless it's truly dangerous, stay put."
"Ehehe. Even so, if you're in danger, I'll step in."
"I'll do everything I can not to get hurt, so please don't exert yourself either, Yeonmin."
"Yes—as long as you don't end up in danger, that is."
I was grateful she was worried about me. Even so, she couldn't tell me to sit still when she herself might be the one in danger. Miso Cheonsa had already said I was allowed to step in if it looked like someone might die. If things went well, I might even turn everyone in this movie theater into cute girls.
Whether she had read that little flutter of excitement, or was simply annoyed that I wouldn't meekly nod along, Helena whipped around with her face full of sulk. Nyangnyangbeam followed her toward Theater 6, where the incident had broken out.
And in that instant, the hair-trigger tension on the stairs finally snapped. On the path down to the shelter, a fight erupted.