The First Step Toward Human Qualification
The protagonist of No Longer Human lay collapsed on the ground, desperately dragging his body away from me. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?!”
Does not inflict injury. Any sufficiently strong impact will unconditionally knock the target unconscious.
My moonlight bat knows no mercy. With a solid CRACK!, I didn’t aim for his head. Instead, I smashed the pathetic knee that had tried to abandon his girlfriend and run. The guy curled up, clutching his knee, and let out a scream that sounded like a mosquito on drugs. A pathetic, high-pitched whine that had probably never produced a loud noise in its entire life. His desperate cry was swallowed by the crashing waves of the night sea and never echoed far.
“Pathetic. You can’t even scream properly… Get up! Fight back!”
Whether the Intention Transmission skill wasn’t working or his will was just that weak, instead of standing, he dropped into a dogeza-like posture and kept muttering something under his breath. At this point, I could tell something was off.
Hmm… I figured a few hits would piss him off enough to fight back. Guess I judged him too much by my own standards.
He might have thought Tsuneko was dead and had simply given up. Leaving the protagonist trembling and muttering to himself, I walked over to the unconscious woman.
Sleeping in that position is gonna give her a stiff neck.
I picked her up and laid her down beside the guy who was still shaking in dogeza. When I saw him sneaking fearful glances at me, my blood boiled again.
“Haa… Hold it together, Kang Cheol-in. This is just the first step in his human qualification process…”
WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM!
I tried to hold back, but my bat didn’t. By the time I came to my senses, I had already rained blows down on the prone bastard’s torso. When I checked on him, his eyes had rolled back and he was out cold.
I dragged the unconscious couple far away from the shoreline so the sea breeze wouldn’t twist their faces while they slept, laid them close together, and covered them with my cloak.
“Looks like we’re gonna need a more fundamental solution.”
Perched on a nearby tree branch, I stared down at the sleeping protagonist and pondered what to do with him.
What was his core problem? Fundamentally impulsive and completely lacking in responsibility. That’s why he kept skipping high school to fool around. A guy with no backbone, pushed and pulled by whoever was around him. On top of that, he was deeply cynical about humanity… Throughout the story, his health was always terrible. There was even a part where he received a tuberculosis diagnosis, but considering how long he lived, it probably wasn’t real tuberculosis. Come to think of it, this guy had wanted to go to art school but was forced into regular high school. And the delinquent who turned him into a regular at brothel drinking parties? They’d met at an art studio he’d snuck off to instead of going to class.
Alright. I think I’ve got a feel for what to do with him now.
A healthy mind lives in a healthy body. Cut out the debauchery, build up his health through exercise, and most of the basic problems should sort themselves out.
The night sea lay quiet under faint moonlight. Between the rustling leaves, my shadow flickered as I looked down at the peacefully sleeping couple.
The man and woman who had tried to die together on the night sea in Kamakura lived to see the morning sun.
Though perhaps “lived” isn’t entirely accurate.
Because that night, my dignity died a miserable death.
Tsuneko seemed to believe the whole thing had been nothing more than a nightmare. That made sense—she woke up to a refreshing morning sun with no horrible injuries, no bruises, not a single mark from the violence she’d suffered.
But I remembered it clearly.
The eerie shadow that had suddenly pounced on Tsuneko. The goblin’s eyes that slowly turned to look at me. Those eyes knew me. I could feel it without a doubt. They were piercing straight through my disgusting insides. That’s why, faced with the brutal violence it unleashed, I could only lie there prostrate, begging for mercy.
Even when it shouted something incomprehensible and reached its terrifying black hand toward Tsuneko, I trembled with self-loathing at my own powerlessness. I couldn’t tell anyone about this fear. Not even Tsuneko. I brushed it off as a joke, saying it was just a bad dream from the night before.
Was it really just a dream?
My soul was covered in stinging wounds, yet my body—supposedly subjected to horrific violence—bore no marks whatsoever. There was no way that wasn’t the work of a goblin.