Chapter 55: Have You Young Punks Ever Been Tortured? Ever Been Drugged? Huh?
Chapter 55: Have You Young Punks Ever Been Tortured? Ever Been Drugged? Huh?
“You know, I’ve been quite busy lately.”
“Mmph! Mmmph!”
“Protecting justice is important, sure, but it’s not more important than the survival of humanity, is it?”
“Mmmph! Mmph!”
Besides, since this was about my own story, I put in even more effort.
“It was a truly horrific war. Heroes were sacrificed, soldiers died.”
“Mmph! Mmph!”
Can’t he make a different sound?
He should at least try to break the stone wedged in his mouth and speak. Isn't he a Hero? He should try a little harder.
“I was there too, you know? And I did some reflecting. I wondered if I had been a bit too harsh.”
The children of a bright future, newly awakened to their status as Heroes.
The shining stars who chose the rugged path in the face of hardship to prove their own justice.
Green Green. The girl I broke was one such shining star—a Hero.
At the time I broke her, she was merely a seed in the soil, having yet to receive the fertilizer known as hardship.
It was a mistake on my part.
However, I found room for improvement through that action.
“Children are innocent. …No, that’s not quite right. Children simply lack judgment. They’ve never experienced hardship or had to make a choice.”
The reason they are clowns is that they were only ever taught how to be Heroes who act like clowns.
If so, then perhaps society is to blame.
The Society that raised them that way.
“What I’m saying is, it’s too early to stand them before justice and judge them. They’re young, aren't they?”
“Mmmph! Mmph!”
The man before me nodded frantically, tears streaming down his face, as if agreeing with my words.
Flatterer.
This fellow didn't understand my sense of justice at all. He was just shaking his head to avoid making me uncomfortable.
He couldn't have understood. How could he?
Even the fervent Danger Rifle only understood after her limbs were shattered.
“And you’re on the younger side too. Is there really a need for me to break you just to give you a taste of hardship?”
I placed a finger on his forehead and pushed with immense force. Hard enough to compress his skull, hard enough for my finger to dig into his flesh.
“Mmmph! Mmph!”
He shook his head violently from side to side. An act of denial.
Because my finger had pinned his face in place, it looked more like he was twisting his head rather than shaking it.
Does he want to live that badly?
Even as the skin on his forehead pinned by my finger began to tear and his head became slick with blood, he did not stop shaking it.
“Right. So you’re saying there’s nothing about you for me to judge yet?”
As if he no longer had the strength to even muffle a sound, he simply shook his head vigorously.
He endured the pain of his jaw twisting and the stone in his mouth turning crimson.
Driven by the single-minded desire to live, he seemed to have forgotten all pain.
“Really? You think you’re still clean?”
I twisted my lips into a bright smile.
Our eyes met.
His eyes were distorted, saturated with terror.
This is the final question.
Your fate will be decided by this.
I stared at him for a moment, but he did nothing.
Can he not answer?
Or is shaking his head the only way he can express himself?
I yanked the stone out of his mouth.
Perhaps because I had dislocated his jaw to shove the stone in, white fragments flew through the air as I forced it out, but that was none of my concern.
“Your mouth is open now. Speak. Should I let you go without breaking you? Do you still think you’re clean?”
“Augh… ugh…”
Having lost the ability to speak from the pain, he could only let out incoherent whimpers.
“Answer me.”
Gulp.
His Adam's apple bobbed heavily.
The sound of him swallowing the blood pooling in his mouth.
“I… I didn’t do anything wrong. Pleathe thpare me…”
Because his teeth and tongue were mangled, his pronunciation was grating to the ear.
“I see. So you’re saying you’ve done nothing wrong?”
This man’s fate was decided.
No, it had been decided from the very beginning.
The only purpose of this question was to determine the severity of his judgment.
Crack!
I kicked the stone that had fallen to the floor back into his mouth.
The stone lodged itself inside once more, and he wailed with a face contorted in agony.
“You just kicked away your last chance. Your chance to atone as a Hero.”
I gave him a beaming smile. I wondered how this smile looked through his eyes.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
The Pry Bar in my right hand sliced through the air, making a loud whistling sound.
A meaningless gesture intended only to instill fear.
“I told you I was on that battlefield earlier, didn't I?”
First. One.
Crunch!
His right hand was destroyed.
There was no need to lessen the pain as I did for other Heroes.
This guy wasn't even a clown anymore; he was just something that had given up on everything.
I made sure the bone protruded through the skin.
I made sure to mangle the nerves as much as possible.
I made sure blood clots formed between the layers of flesh.
What I was giving him wasn't hardship, but punishment—intended to strip away everything he had.
“Guh… ugh… ugh…”
I spoke to him as he bit down on the stone, driven mad by the pain.
“I saw an interesting scene there. Dozens of wounded soldiers. And a Hero assigned to escort them safely to the rear.”
Every time a word left my mouth, the man before me trembled.
He must have realized what he had done wrong.
“But that Hero abandoned his duty and ran away. Anything to say for yourself?”
I reached toward his mouth as he rolled on the ground, shivering.
Seeing my hand approach, he struggled frantically to get away, but there was nothing he could do while already restrained by me.
Once again, I pulled the stone from his mouth.
Perhaps because his mouth was already ruined, the stone came out easily this time.
The pain he had feared didn't come.
I looked down at him as he lay there, bleeding from the mouth and trembling.
“Anything to say?”
“I had… no choice! How wath I thuppothed to thurvive that?!”
He hasn't broken yet?
His mental fortitude is impressive.
I suppose he had enough skill to be picked for the escort unit, after all.
“I had to thurvive too! That’th why I ran…”
I don’t need to hear any more.
Thwack!
Taking advantage of his open mouth, I kicked the stone back in.
Is it because a Hero is still a Hero?
Perhaps to avoid being hit by the same thing twice, he reached out his left hand toward the flying stone.
“If you had just stayed still, your left hand could have remained intact.”
To stop his resistance, I stomped down on his hand with my boot.
The sensation of bones being crushed traveled up through my foot.
No matter how necessary the task, this sensation is always a bit unpleasant.
“Aaaaaagh… ugh.”
Plop.
The stone wedged itself back into his mouth.
Having been shoved in several times now, the hideous gray stone now sat naturally in his mouth.
With his right arm ruined and his left hand crushed, the creature rolled on the ground, screaming in pain.
He began to roll away from me. Was it an expression of his instinct to survive at any cost?
“It hurts more if you resist, child.”
Thud.
The sharp head of the Pry Bar pierced his flesh.
With a slight tug, he rolled across the floor and back in front of me.
I uttered the final words that would break him.
“Shall I tell you something? All those soldiers lived. Not a single one died, thanks to Heroes far weaker than you who held the line.”
He stared at me with eyes full of disbelief and terror.
That’s right. You made the wrong choice.
Even if you couldn't have escorted them all.
If only you had protected them to remain a Hero until the end.
“The Management Bureau’s transport unit arrived shortly after. Those guys will be hailed as Heroes, they’ll get medals. Their pensions will probably go up, too.”
In truth, they lived because I arrived, but I didn't say that.
It was information he didn't need.
The result was that the Heroes and the wounded soldiers all survived, and you made the wrong choice.
“If you had stayed, all that glory would have been yours. But look at you now.”
In a dark, abandoned factory, being kidnapped and tortured by a Mutant.
While some other Heroes are receiving awards.
“That is the choice you made. The choice to give up being a Hero, to betray what it means to be one. Even though the other side led to glory, you let go of the hardship and the choice.”
Now, I suppose I must strip away everything you have as a Hero.
Whoosh.
I swung the Pry Bar again.
This time, the left arm.
I had to balance it with the right.
However, I showed a bit of restraint and didn't make the bone protrude through the skin.
Instead, I shattered it into pieces to ensure a permanent disability.
Unlike other victims who might overcome their hardships and return as Heroes.
I made sure he would lose everything as a Hero by leaving him with a permanent handicap.
I hadn't intended to take his left hand as well, but that was his own doing.
He interfered with my work, so I simply responded accordingly.
This man doesn't even deserve to face hardship.
This wasn't a sacrifice for a grand cause, nor was it his own sense of justice, nor was it the act of an entertainer seeking desire.
He was a human who purely chose his own self-preservation.
An existence unnecessary to the collective known as Heroes.
“Guh-guh-guh-gah!”
Perhaps the stone blocking his mouth had shifted as his teeth fell out.
A sliver of a scream escaped. Even if his mouth became a mess of wounds, it was a scream that had to be let out.
With that final scream, his eyes rolled back.
Perhaps unable to endure the agonizing pain, he began to spray bodily fluids from every orifice.
He fled to the far side of consciousness, where pain does not exist.
“You can’t run away.”
I pulled a small plastic rod from my pocket.
An autoinjector filled with stimulants.
An item I had relied on countless times on the battlefield.
A simple device that injects the drug just by pressing a button against the thigh or abdomen. But now, it was being used not to save someone, but to inflict pain.
I pulled up his clothes and pressed the button against his stomach.
Thump.
With the cheerful sound of the internal spring popping, the drug flowed into his body.
A potent stimulant with narcotic effects. It forcibly awakens lost consciousness and makes one hypersensitive to stimuli.
After a short moment.
“Cough… ugh… aah?”
“You’re awake? Then let’s continue. You still have two legs left.”
His time of suffering was far from over.
* * *
“If you were going to beg for forgiveness, you should have made the right choice from the start.”
I spoke to the man who now lay unusable, his limbs mangled.
He looked like a maggot squirming on the floor.
Even if he wanted to flee from the pain, the stimulants prevented it. His mouth, which should have expressed that pain, was blocked by the distorted stone.
All that remained for him was regret and agony.
Countless regrets must be swirling in his head.
If only I hadn't run away then. If only I had stayed just a little longer.
But the past cannot be undone.
The past choices remain, continuing to haunt everyone.
“Ugh… ugh-mmph…”
It’s over for him.
Even if his limbs are restored through treatment, all that awaits him is the revocation of his Hero status by the Management Bureau.
The Bureau’s arrest team is already on its way for him.
They’ll probably arrive in about an hour.
Would the Management Bureau provide complete treatment for a man stripped of his Hero status?
A man who is neither a civilian caught in an incident, nor a disabled veteran, nor a Hero.
At best, they’ll just set his bones so he can at least walk and move.
“How… how did it…”
“What? You have more to say?”
“How did it come to thith…”
He managed to twist his mouth enough to spit out the stone and speak.
Resting his aching body back on the ground and stretching out his broken limbs, he turned his face upward.
He stared at the ceiling with an expression of total surrender. At the sky he couldn't see, blocked by holes in the plywood.
“I wanted to be a Hero… what I wanted ath a kid…”
“….”
“Like the Hero… who thaved me…”
Had he only now realized his true desire?
But it was too late. He had traveled too far down a path to feel regret now.
Swept away by a twisted society, he had abandoned his duty as a Hero.
No one knows if he was naturally inclined toward self-preservation or if he became warped as he grew up.
All that remained was a beautiful dream of the past, a broken reality, and a future at the edge of a cliff.
Even without me, the result would have been the same.
The slaughtered soldiers and Heroes.
His wrongful actions revealed through investigation.
Expulsion by the Management Bureau.
The only things that changed were the number of victims and the time it took for the truth to come out.
Perhaps he thought that even if he were expelled, he would at least keep his life.
And as he wished, he kept his life. In exchange for the permanent disability caused by my sanction.
…As I thought of that, I felt a strange emotion for a moment.
An unnervingly calm emotion.
Even though I had performed countless tortures—tasks—while feeling immense guilt, I had never been able to control my emotions like this.
What was different this time?
…Does it matter?
I ended my thoughts. Scattering the Black Particles blooming from my clothes, I walked toward the entrance of the abandoned factory.
Toward the bright outside where the light poured down.
“The Management Bureau’s task force will be here soon. Stay put.”
With those final words, I threw myself into the light.