Speak Honestly, Earn a Beating
Beyond the passenger-side window, the downtown streets blurred past.
Towers stood packed together like a jungle, and through them two worlds moved at once: office workers in suits, faces worn hollow with fatigue, hurrying along, and women loafing at café tables with all the time in the world. This was Fullerene — the city where I was born and raised. The fourth most populous city in the Azurik Free Federation, it was large enough to matter, and as the Federation's easternmost city it touched several nations at once and served as a hub of trade.
My master had put me in the car and was heading into the city center, which, for me, was a rather novel experience. As a rule he kept me locked in the house all day and did nothing but beat me.
Thud!
Even now, he answered a perfectly polite question with a sudden fist. His knuckles drove into my face in the passenger seat, and for a moment my head snapped with the blow.
What did I even ask?
Something along the lines of whether he'd saved up a decent sum, what with setting up a newlywed home with his wife — and he had flown into a rage and laid into me on the spot. Hot-tempered by nature, he detonated the moment the subject of his dead wife came up. Nothing to be done about it. To him, I was the enemy who had killed her.
Honestly, though, I had no memory whatsoever of killing his wife, and I was fairly convinced I wasn't the culprit. Saying so would only earn me a worse beating, so I held my tongue and changed the subject in a hurry.
"So where are we going?"
"The bank. I need to see how much money I can actually use right now."
"Ah, right. You have to protect me from that strange woman."
"...... You have a gift for getting on my nerves. Get this straight — I'm not doing it for you. I just hate wasting the money I spent making you."
"Whatever you say."
So long as I stayed alive, I didn't much care. To be honest, I liked the woman called Daera far more than I liked my master, but she seemed to hate me, so for the time being I had no choice but to make do with the master I had.
"And don't run your mouth about Daera. She's an old friend of mine — and the daughter of Elferit, the bank president who partners with our office."
"If you're that close, why does she torment you?"
"In her own way, she's worried about me. I'm sure of it..."
"Looked to me like she just likes you."
"Daera? Don't be ridiculous. To me, she's like a little sister."
"Oh dear..."
Even I, with no experience of romance whatsoever, could tell at a glance that she was completely gone on him — and yet he seemed to have no thoughts about her at all. A shame, from where I stood. I wanted him to meet some other woman soon and make her a lover, or a wife.
The sooner Master gets a new woman, the sooner I can sleep in peace at night, all by myself.
Neither a girlfriend nor a wife would ever tolerate the sight of her man screwing a doll. And then I would have my nights of freedom.
At any rate, we had gone into the bank — a grand one, the sort of place someone like me would never have reason to visit in a lifetime. On a weekday afternoon the lobby was packed with people drawing numbers and waiting their turn. Line up behind them and we would have been stuck there for hours at least. Fortunately, that didn't happen.
The moment my master stepped inside, one of the tellers recognized him and led the two of us up to a quiet room on an upper floor. Some special service for the bank's VIPs, by the look of it. There he spoke at length with a middle-aged man who appeared to be an executive. I was a layman when it came to legal matters, so I couldn't follow a word of it. Roughly, though, my master wanted to draw on the assets of the Dragonheart Office without a Magic Crest, and the bank kept repeating the textbook line that a Magic Crest was required.
In the end he withdrew having confirmed nothing but the gap between them — and even so, he wasn't the least bit cowed. As if he had expected exactly this, he walked back down to the first floor with his head high.
"All I needed was to confirm that ownership of the office's assets is still mine. Put it this way: I may not have the key to the treasure chest, but the chest itself is still mine."
"Is that so? I don't really get it, but if you're fine with it, then things must be going well."
I had no interest in headaches, so I answered vaguely.
The moment we came down to the first floor, however, a headache of an entirely different kind was waiting.
"Everyone on the ground! Lift your head even a little and I'll grind you to powder!"
By pure coincidence, robbers in black masks were in the middle of hitting the bank.
The interior was chaos. People lay trembling face-down on the floor; several teller windows had been smashed; cash and documents were scattered across the ground. There were already victims. A few human corpses — burned past recognition, hardened black — lay sprawled where they had fallen, feeding the terror in the room.
In their hands the robbers carried swords of a peculiar length, about sixty centimeters, neither long nor short. They were tools called Magic Armaments.
A Magic Armament is what a human needs in order to use magic, and its name changes with its form. Shaped as a sword, it is a Magic Armament Sword; as a spear, a Magic Armament Spear; as an axe, a Magic Armament Axe. I was using weapons only as examples — a Magic Armament doesn't have to be a weapon at all. But anyone who means to wield magic as violence, the way the robbers in front of me did, will be holding one shaped as a weapon without fail. The most common of them is the sword. Easy to carry, broadly useful, and, should it come to close quarters, hardly a bad thing to have in hand.
At any rate, the moment they saw the two of us coming down from upstairs, they leveled their Magic Armament Swords our way and shouted.
"You two — on the ground, now! What are you standing around for!"
Magic Armaments were aimed at us, and neither of us felt a shred of tension. It was a predicament more dangerous than staring down a gun barrel, and my master only yawned.
"Capra. Deal with them."
At his order, I stepped forward. On the face of it the command was absurd — they were armed with Magic Armaments, and my hands were empty. But he hadn't given it for no reason.
Shwing...
All at once, a sword sprang into my hand. The blade ran about ninety centimeters, the grip twenty-five, for a full length of a meter and fifteen centimeters — a longsword of the plainest sort, without ornament or engraving.
Where it came from, even I didn't really know. A sword appearing out of empty air could only be explained as magic, and yet, as I've said before, I have neither the intelligence nor the talent for anything of the sort. So I had no idea how this longsword emerged, or from where. All I knew was that after I became a Magical Puppet, whenever a moment came that called for a weapon, the sword would leap out of its own accord and settle into my grip. It was an uncanny thing — like a cursed doll in a movie, always back in my hand no matter where I tried to leave it — uncanny enough to give me the creeps.
"You — you're a mage!? Die!"
As I came on with a sword in hand, one of the robbers, deciding I was a mage, cast. At the tip of his blade, flame compressed into a sphere and came flying.
A classic fireball. No bigger than a basketball, but not something to take lightly — that much fire is more than enough to roast a person well-done. I wasn't particularly tense. The sword of unknown origin in my hand had one particular trait.
I swung at the fireball. The magic that met the blade lost its form on the spot and vanished. As you can see, the sword had a bizarre power: it could erase magic itself.
"What...!?"
His spell gone, the robber froze in shock, and in that gap I charged.
The old me wasn't a fast runner, wasn't strong, and wasn't much of a fighter. The body I had after becoming a Magical Puppet was a being on an entirely different plane — because a Magical Puppet is made not with human blood, but with the blood of a Twisted Beast.
Twisted Beasts are an aberrant order of life, different from ordinary creatures at the level of kingdom itself. Even in the modern age they remain mankind's enemy, and their bodies are of a different order from a human's. They wield, as naturally as breathing, the magic humans can use only through tools; their muscle is hard as steel; every physical capacity far surpasses that of ordinary animals. A Magical Puppet made with that blood holds a body that transcends humanity by a wide margin.
The same was true of me now. My strength could tear thick iron plate with ease. My speed could overtake a car without effort. My eyes were sharp enough to follow a bullet. Even now, the robbers in front of me looked as if they had stopped in place. A sword that could cut magic, joined to the body of a Magical Puppet — against any ordinary mage, I was confident I wouldn't lose.
Still. Better to finish this quickly.
Magic was dangerous all the same. So long as a Magic Armament was in an opponent's hand, carelessness was forbidden. I dashed in and swung wildly at the robbers, still blank with shock, their expressions not yet returned to them. From the moment they let me close, their fate was sealed.
A little later I was nudging the heap of hacked corpses with my foot when my master came up behind me.
"You carve people up with remarkable enthusiasm."
I couldn't say why, but something in his tone sat wrong with me.
"Should I have left one of them alive? You never told me to take prisoners."
"That matters too, I suppose. But what I want to say is something else. Don't you feel any guilt at all when you kill people?"
"You told me to kill them, and now you're blaming me?"
I asked, genuinely incredulous. He shook his head.
"I'm not reproaching you. I just want to know your state of mind. The first day I killed someone as a mage, I couldn't sleep. It's better now, but I still feel foul on any day I take a life. You don't have that?"
"Ah... so that's what this is. You're more sentimental than I thought."
I shrugged.
"When do you think a person dies, Master?"
"I hope you're not about to give me some philosophical answer. Forgotten by the world, that sort of thing."
"No, no. I mean it literally. Literally — in what sort of case a person dies."
"I don't follow the point of the question."
"Figures. I'm not good with words. My answer, then: a person dies when their luck runs out."
"Luck? Are you talking about fate?"
"No... it's a little different."
I scratched my head and gave an awkward smile.
"The point is, everything in this world happens by chance. We're born into it by chance, live by chance, and die by chance. These people died because they were unlucky. Even if I hadn't killed them, they would have died anyway — at the moment their luck ran out badly enough that dying was the only thing left."
"In other words, even if you hadn't killed them, they would have died for some other reason. Is that it?"
"Exactly!"
Pleased that he'd understood, I snapped my fingers. The next instant a cold question came back.
"Then the fact that you killed my wife and my colleagues — that, too, was nothing but rotten luck?"
"Mm... well, yes?"
I answered honestly. As a reward for my honesty, he drove his fist into my gut.
"Ghk...!"
His strength was terrifying. He could land a blow hard enough to slam even into a Magical Puppet's body, because mages of a high order reinforce themselves with magic. He left me clutching my stomach, face twisted in pain, and strolled out of the bank at his leisure. I staggered after him, barely keeping up.
