Chapter 409: Social Tidying Up (1)
Chapter 409: Social Tidying Up (1)
Svetlana’s words confirmed that Baek Si-hyun’s skills were even more impressive than I had anticipated. At the same time, the incident she described had the potential to become the catalyst for a major problem.
Of course, since my two former subordinates—those idiots—had attacked someone without any prior agreement, it was closer to mutual negligence even if an issue did arise.
However, someone dying is not a matter that can be easily overlooked.
Fortunately, the victim was Svetlana, who brushed it off with a simple, "As long as I didn't die, it's fine." Had it been anyone else, the scene would have been turned upside down that very day. It was an incident rife with potential for trouble.
It was a relief that the victim was who she was, and that they were people we wouldn't have to see again once this was all over.
Anyway, with the situation settled for now, I left the unconscious Montague in the care of my two disciples and Ultimate, then infiltrated a certain building with Svetlana.
There, we witnessed a scene that was ordinary, yet profoundly bizarre.
A woman was doing exactly what an average American might be expected to do.
She sat on a sofa, staring at the television, munching on potato chips, drinking beer, and occasionally laughing.
It might be my own prejudice, but her behavior could be described as the quintessential, textbook example of a mundane American routine.
However, looking at the details, it was nothing short of grotesque.
The television was flickering with nothing but static, seemingly broken long ago. The bag of potato chips she kept reaching into was a mere scrap of plastic, the bottom and the opening worn away into a gaping hole from repeated contact.
The beer can, at least, maintained its shape since it was made of metal, but even that was riddled with rust and in poor condition.
Despite the fact that neither food nor drink was actually entering her mouth, the woman on the sofa repeated the motions over and over.
She was completely broken.
Was it only here? Were other places more normal?
No, the probability of us accidentally stumbling upon a severe case of infection was abysmally low.
I had to assume this was the typical sight in Detroit.
Though not yet confirmed due to a lack of information, Detroit had to be considered effectively collapsed.
To the point where a war of extermination via the Defense Force should naturally be carried out.
I was a bit late in realizing this.
If I had known it was this bad, I would have pressured the Management Bureau even harder.
When I was looking around with Ultimate and Gilga, I saw some people who seemed relatively sane, but to think the first person I saw upon entering a building would be in this state.
My decision not to enter buildings to check the interiors—out of fear of being spotted—had come back as a lapse in judgment.
A small mistake and a slight loss of time.
In the grand scheme of things, it was a negligible loss, but all great disasters are born from the accumulation of such tiny failures.
Still, I couldn't afford to be recklessly impatient.
Therefore.
"Svetlana."
"Yes."
"Go check the next room as well."
I had to confirm that this encounter wasn't a fluke. Before more mistakes piled up due to incorrect information.
"My Shadow Stealth will be deactivated. Will you be alright?"
"I'll be fine for a moment. Given my years of experience."
"Understood."
The brief exchange ended quickly.
Sshhk.
With a sensation like something being pulled out, I rose from the shadow.
I hid in the darkness, concealing my presence and observing the woman for about a minute.
Sshhk.
This time, I was sucked back into the shadow with a sinking sensation.
Svetlana was there, her expression as stoic as ever.
"The next room is the same," she reported calmly.
Right.
They say if a coincidence happens twice, it's a certainty. I had to assume the majority of Detroit's residents were in this condition.
The problem was, a single question began to sprout regarding this situation.
How did the Management Bureau fail to notice until things reached this pathetic state?
The excuse that this was a slum wouldn't fly.
As I’ve said time and again, it’s not that the Management Bureau can't control the slums; it’s more that they leave them be because it’s easier for maintaining social order.
They let them become hotspots where villains or those from the Otherworld who aren't on the Bureau’s leash can gather.
However, they don't just leave them blindly.
The Bureau knows all too well that if such people gather in one place, they can become uncontrollable. That’s why agents are dispatched to the slums to dig into internal affairs…
Are you telling me those professional agents were all neutralized in an instant, unable to send a single shred of information back to the Bureau?
Even if they fell victim to wide-scale mental manipulation, it would be normal for them to leave at least a brief warning like, "The atmosphere has been strange lately," before they were compromised.
As I was lost in thought regarding the current situation.
"Oh, is it that time already?"
Without any warning, a sudden change occurred.
The woman, who had been performing her repetitive, unrealistic daily routine, stood up from the sofa while uttering a mundane remark.
She left her potato chips and beer can on the table and disappeared toward the kitchen.
"What shall we do?"
Svetlana asked for my orders, and I replied.
"Follow her."
My intuition was telling me.
I had to see this.
That it would be The Key to everything.
Arriving in the kitchen via Shadow Stealth, a surprisingly clean kitchen came into view.
Being a house in the slums, it was far from hygienic, but it was neatly organized.
In front of the sink, the woman was humming as she washed a kitchen knife and a cutting board.
It was a scene so ordinary it was almost mundane.
After washing the board and knife, she hummed as if everything was ready, placed the board on the counter, and gripped the knife.
Thud.
A sound that didn't seem like it belonged in a kitchen during cooking echoed through the room.
The sound of a kitchen knife slamming hard into the cutting board.
What was severed was the woman's own left hand, placed upon the board.
"..."
Even Svetlana gasped at the sight.
A scene so gruesome that even she, who had orchestrated countless hellscapes, could find no words.
However, the woman who had severed her own arm continued her actions, humming as if this were nothing out of the ordinary.
Blood sprayed from the stump of her left hand, but she continued her task as if accustomed to working with one hand, staining the kitchen floor red as she proceeded with her "cooking."
She filled a pot with water using one hand, placed it on the gas stove, and turned on the burner.
Then, she began to butcher the meat.
The knife moved twice.
Above the hand bone, below the hand bone.
As if her strength had also transcended human limits, the woman's left hand was soon divided into the back of the hand, the palm, and a section of bone with meat still attached—parts that were impossible to name properly.
The back of the hand and the palm were soon hung on hooks above the sink, sprinkled with salt, and put through the process of draining the blood.
In the meantime, the woman's left hand had regenerated.
It happened while we were so captivated by the sight that we hadn't even noticed.
There was no need to see any more.
There was no reason to burn this image into our eyes.
Though we had experienced many things, both Svetlana and I knew that such sights were not good for one's mental health.
However, the mundane normalcy mixed into the woman's actions…
And the intuition that we had to see this through kept us rooted to the spot.
The butchery continued.
The bone with meat still clinging to it. She dipped it briefly into the water, which hadn't yet reached a full boil, to parboil it.
Perhaps due to the hot water, the meat began to turn limp, and the already meager amount of flesh shrank significantly. Yet, as if even that was a vital source of nutrition in these slums, she continued to scrape off the tiny bits of meat.
The first parts she disassembled were around the fingers, where the meat was easier to tear away.
Since the only bone with meat attached was a single finger bone, she lightly carved out the meat around the joint where the metacarpal and the phalanx connected, and the clinging flesh was easily separated.
Once five long strips of meat were separated, the woman took out silver tools from the cupboard and continued.
The meat attached to the metacarpals was difficult to remove despite its small quantity.
The woman peeled it away using pliers, a crab fork, and kitchen shears.
It was a precision job performed so perfectly that one might think her left hand had regenerated specifically for this task. Within minutes, the meat was thoroughly stripped from the bone, leaving behind a pure white shape with not a single shred of flesh remaining.
As that task finished, the water began to bubble and release steam, and the back of the hand and palm hanging on the hooks seemed to have finished their initial processing.
The woman now began to move busily, even stopping her humming.
After removing the fingernails from the meat of the back of the hand, she placed the pieces in a metal colander and rinsed them in cold water, finishing a brief blood-draining process.
She sprinkled salt once more and gave the colander a vigorous shake.
Then, she tossed the meat into the pot of bubbling hot water.
I thought she was going to cook the meat through, but contrary to my expectation, she lifted the pot after about ten seconds and poured it into the sink where the colander sat.
Only the slightly parboiled meat remained in the colander.
The work continued.
Perhaps because different parts had different sensitivities to heat.
The meat, having been briefly parboiled, now showed distinct divisions between skin, fat, and veins.
The woman placed the meat on the cutting board and began to hack away with her knife, removing those small, undesirable parts.
White fat, long tendons, and blood vessels.
Even skin that anyone could tell was of human origin.
As a result of that work, impurities remained in the sink, and minced meat remained on the cutting board.
Only a small amount of poor-quality brown minced meat, which was hard to trace back to its human origin and seemed pitifully meager compared to the effort and labor involved.
Through this, I understood.
That was not a cooking process.
It was a process to make the raw material of the meat unrecognizable.
The woman looked at the finished minced meat with satisfaction, then went to the refrigerator, opened the freezer, and took out some meat.
Meat that didn't smell like a human.
It was of such low quality that I couldn't be certain, but it was likely a mixture of chicken and pork.
Why create new meat when she already had that?
But my thought was cut short.
The woman dumped the meat from the refrigerator onto the cutting board, mixing the new meat with the minced meat she had just created.
A single pile of meat was formed.
The subsequent process wasn't very important.
The woman began to make meat pies, humming all the while.
"For my hungry neighbors~ I'll make a meat pie~ and share it with them~."
Accompanied by a song that was mundane yet filled with dread.
"The butcher man~ looks scary~ but he has a kind heart~."
The meat pies were gradually completed.
Along with the song that explained everything.
The drugs weren't the problem.
The true source of contamination was something else entirely.
With a method like this, the moment a single person was contaminated, the spread would become utterly uncontrollable.
In urban areas where distribution is strictly managed to prevent such terrorism, it might be different, but in the slums, beyond the reach of the Management Bureau, this was a contamination with no solution.
Likely, the agents had also encountered such food without knowing and their minds had gradually broken down.
As I obtained the answer to my question.
The meat pies were finished.
They were taken out of the oven, steaming hot.
The woman was happily packaging them with a smile.
As she lifted a pie to take it to the "kind butcher man."
"Sorry I'm late."
I thrust my hand forward.
My reinforced, razor-sharp fingers pierced her chest, bursting her heart in an instant.
She died instantly from my strike, and with only her smile remaining, she slowly began to melt away.
Some might judge my current action as complacent, while others might call it cruel.
Both are partially correct.
Revealing myself like this when the enemies are watching me through the people they control is undoubtedly a complacent act.
However, calling it cruel is incorrect.
Once broken to this extent, this woman could never be brought back.
This was information I had gathered while examining the bodies of the Regressionist Terrorist Group members we captured a while ago.
Their minds were completely shattered, but their bodies hadn't yet transformed.
Even so, the Management Bureau had judged them untreatable.
They said a mind that has turned violent and destructive cannot be restored by any means.
While they could be controlled to some extent through continuous conditioning and mental manipulation, returning them to their original state before they took the drugs was impossible.
If that was the case for them, could the residents here—whose bodies as well as minds had broken down beyond the human realm—ever be returned to their original state?
Therefore, this was an act of mercy.
Feeling the blood flowing over my fingers and the back of my hand, I thought so.
I shook the blood from my hand and spoke over her melting remains.
"Svetlana."
"Yes."
"Besides yourselves, which team members responded to the call?"
"Excluding myself and Montague, whose identities the Management Bureau is aware of, I was told it's uncertain if the others will definitely answer the summons."
Well, that makes sense.
The members of the Assassination Team are all the type who wouldn't be surprising to find as corpses somewhere in the slums.
"However, I was informed that Red Cyclone, Dr. Sandman, and White Crafter are highly likely to join."
...Who?
"Not their Hero names. Their real names."
"Edward, Brantley, and Harvey. Those three."
Aha.
Wait, that lineup is strange.
"...Are all three of them alive?"
"If the Management Bureau says so, then they must be."
It was a strange thing that those three—who wouldn't have been out of place dying a sudden, miserable death the day after the Assassination Team disbanded—were still alive.
Actually, come to think of it, Montague is that kind of person too, and he's perfectly fine.
Well, regardless of their survival or their character, it was certainly a good thing for this particular task.
If Montague, Svetlana, and those three joined the team, the speed of the operation would definitely increase.
Now then.
"Let's go back, Svetlana."
"Yes."
With those final words, we submerged back into the shadows.