006: Suppression
Anyone who understood what a gun could do would freeze the moment its muzzle turned on them.
So when the nun in front of me leveled one at my chest, I figured the mere fact that my legs hadn't given out was already enough to call myself brave.
"D-don't come any closer! You all know how dangerous this weapon is, don't you? Sister Selenia, if you don't want to get hurt again, step back! Out of the way!"
She made full use of that fear, sweeping the muzzle this way and that to threaten everyone around her.
The nuns and the women priests dissolved into pandemonium at once. They tangled over one another in the rush to flee and went down in a heap on the floor; someone tried to scramble over the chairs and sent the long pews toppling backward like dominoes. Perhaps because these were the callings that most often filled the healer's role in a fantasy world, no one seemed to be badly hurt. I had no idea how a fall could end with four people stacked into a tower of backsides, but the important thing was that they weren't injured.
The monks and the male priests weren't rushing in either. They must all have heard the rumors of what happened when I was shot. To anyone without the relevant knowledge, a gun was probably just a thing that arrived with a clap of thunder and dropped its target in a spray of blood before the mind could even catch up.
Not that I retained any memory of it happening that way. My body still seemed to carry a fear of guns; it had locked stiff and wouldn't move properly.
Even so, I knew. That pistol was not going to fire. I was the one who had locked the safety when I handed it to Sister Victoria. All I had to do was buy time until my frozen body could move again—until the tension eased, even a little.
"Please calm down. You don't actually want to fire that and turn yourself into a murderer, do you? It isn't too late. Put the gun down and surrender quietly."
"S-surrender? I already stabbed Sister Victoria! After that, do you really think the others will just let me go?"
"Then why did you stab her?"
"You think I wanted to stab her?!"
Her hands shook violently, and she was shouting at the top of her lungs, tears streaming. Resentment, or the sense of being wronged—I couldn't tell which. Either way, stabbing Sister Victoria and stealing the gun had been her choice, and then she had the gall to insist she hadn't wanted to do it.
"Did someone take your family hostage and threaten you into stealing it?"
"My little sister is sick. I prayed so hard to Nals, but Nals never answered. I begged the priests here too, and she only got a little better for a moment—she just kept being sick. They say she needs medicine. Getting that medicine takes an enormous amount of money."
"So you thought you'd sell that and make a bit of coin?"
I knew that feeling. I had spent my whole life trying, never doing anything wrong, and then illness came and handed me a terminal diagnosis.
Personally, I don't believe in gods. If one exists, it is neither all-knowing nor all-powerful, and it isn't good. If that's all it amounts to, does it even deserve to be called a god?
Her sister being sick was a pitiful thing. It did not justify driving a knife into Sister Victoria. If she was going to do it, she should at least have staged the thing properly, hidden it somewhere, and sold it once the search was over. Getting caught red-handed with it out in the open and kicking up this uproar—what was the point of that?
It was so pathetic, so stifling, that I ended up angry myself. And blood moving through the body on the back of anger is the opposite of tension.
While I dragged the talk out, I studied the pistol and confirmed that the selector was still set to safe. Did that woman even know how to work the thing? What were the odds she'd fumble it by accident and spray the room? Even in the worst case—even granting that she knew how to operate the pistol—I had the feeling that, as I was now, I could take her down before she thumbed the safety off and pulled the trigger. This delinquent nun's body would be faster than that woman's thumb.
The moment the certainty settled, I moved, taking the opening while she peddled her circumstances as a sob story.
"No one answered my prayers—!"
"By that logic, you think I wanted to be stuck in the slums? I didn't want to hear you people call me a whore who sells her body, or say I went into the back alleys for drugs. I threw myself in to save a kid, and they gossiped about me for it."
"Hk—!"
A technique I had replayed in my head from noir films and special-forces movies came off my hands as if I had drilled it. One hand drove in and trapped both of hers on the pistol; the other arm hooked her arm and bent it inward. In the instant I closed the distance and ran the sequence through, the muzzle swung up toward the sky.
At the same time the pistol went click, click as she hauled on the trigger. The safety was still on, so it didn't fire—but she clearly knew that pulling the trigger was what sent a bullet. She had meant to shoot me dead.
Fury surged at that, and I drove my fist into her face.
I wasn't the sort of person who hit women. I had barely ever thrown a punch at a man, for that matter. I'd scuffled as a kid, sure, but even in the army I had never hit a junior. Something about this woman, though, made me want to hit her. I was a woman now too, so it was fine, wasn't it? Something I never would have dared in my previous life.
My fist met her cheek with a dull thud.
Even then she clung to the pistol with vicious tenacity. If anything, she shoved that voluptuous body of hers into me, trying to turn it into a grapple. She must have been desperate beyond reason to sell the gun and scrape together her sister's medicine money. Resolve, however extraordinary, only went so far—this body seemed to have combat techniques of its own, worn into the muscle. I let the weight bearing down on me flow past, pivoting on the leg behind me. As she lost her balance and stumbled past, I drove my shoulder in and shoved harder, so she would go down harder still.
She hit the floor with a crashing clatter.
I bent the hand still gripping the pistol up behind her back and kept the pressure on until she let go. A joint might pop at this rate, or a bone might break. But this was a fantasy world. They had healed a gunshot wound, and Sister Victoria's stab wound, in a flash; if a bone or two broke, some other priest or nun would mend it, wouldn't they?
More unsettling than any of that was the way my body had moved on its own, without my deciding to. As if the body remembered, and I had simply been carried along. Still—if the talent was already there, wasn't it better to use it? Getting shot was the more frightening prospect, so I decided not to dwell on it. Like a man.
Only when I had driven her all the way to the end did the nun release the pistol. From the way she was bawling, she hadn't lost consciousness. The instant I decided that settled everything, I felt a keen edge at my back.
"Do not move, Sister Selenia. And you will slowly set the otherworldly weapon on the floor."
"That object is not something a mere nun ought to possess."
Something jabbed my back as they spoke. The threat that they might run me through was not merely verbal. While the nun I'd subdued was rampaging with the pistol, they had stood there and done nothing; now that I had her down, I must have started to look like an easy mark. Judging by their voices, they were standing a fair way off. So they were cheaply keeping something like a spear on me without giving me an inch, ready to skewer me whenever they pleased. The feeling was that they had the point against my back because even if it went wrong, healing would cover it. Either way, it left me thoroughly foul.
"Give me a break. Unbelievable. When this woman was throwing her fit you were all too scared to do a thing, and now that I've bagged her I look easy? Makes me sick. Nothing happened while she was holding it, so you figure I can't fire this gun either?"
Even the obligation to speak like a proper nun had started to sicken me, so I sneered with every cutting word I could drag up. The two men who had taken position behind me—priests or monks, I couldn't tell—answered calmly all the same.
"Sister Selenia, that is not our meaning. Earlier we could not move, lest a reckless attack injure our brothers and sisters."
"The Church will commend you for subduing the offender. We are doing this only out of concern that you might be consumed by that otherworldly weapon and cause an accident. Please set the weapon down. We have brought a sealing case."
My head conceded that it sounded plausible. Just as they said, a nun was slowly bringing an open wooden box up in front of me. It still turned my stomach. If they were going to act like this, they should have handled it themselves before I stepped in. All of it was because they thought they could put me down with weapons. My back was already prickling; I didn't have to look to know they were pressing the spear hard enough to draw blood.
And this delinquent nun's body kept whispering at me. Aren't you angry? This much, you can take. It was so much like a devil's whisper that I turned the muzzle toward the floor, released the safety with my thumb, and fired.
A recoil heavier than I'd expected jumped through the hand on the pistol, and as if startled by it, I felt the sharp thing fall away from my back. If it had been me, I would have driven the spear in. Anyone could see it was a sudden break. If they were willing to heal me afterward anyway, they could have just stabbed me, subdued me, and treated me after. Had they stabbed me, I would certainly have held that much of a grudge—but I had already started to dislike them, so the resentment sat the same either way.
The gunshot rolled through the church, and in the instant silence took everyone, Hamil seized the room in a low, powerful voice.
I had been wondering whether they would brand me a heretic and have me killed. Being told, instead, that they would take me to the Holy See was unexpected enough. Or maybe the words were a smokescreen, and they meant to lead me off where no one could see and dispose of me. But was there any need for that? It would be easier to kill me now, using the others as meat shields. Ah—or they meant to lull me into dropping my guard and finish it with no one hurt. I did not let the suspicion go.
"Yes, Brother Hamil."
At the Inquisitor's command, the other faithful began putting the place back together in a cowed scramble, unable even to meet my eyes. Not one of them apologized after what they had done, and that drove my mood straight into the gutter.