Song Seongyeon: "So-and-So Is the Bomb Bitch's Accomplice"
All of my memories had come back, and the story as a whole had more or less been pieced together. All that remained now was Nayami's memory.
It was late by the time I finished, but Seongyeon, loyal as ever, had waited up for me.
"...What exactly are you doing over there?"
"Hm? Oh, you're back? Look at this—I was playing with Natalia."
"Hahh! Hahh! Hahh! Hahh!!"
Natalia was down on all fours like a dog with a collar around her neck, while Seongyeon strolled about holding the leash. I'd left them alone for over three hours, and apparently this was what she'd found to do in the meantime—put her newly enslaved Natalia through mutt training.
"All sorted out?"
"Aren't you even going to ask why I'm late?"
"Seres filled me in during Auntie Brigitte's turn. You were busy briefing everyone about the Natalia situation while you were out, so don't stress over it."
And on top of that, she'd gone right ahead with the mutt training, loud and proud. Ever the guild master—the one thing she never wastes is time.
"What did you tell them?"
"I told them straight up: the girl got her brain scrambled by a Tower gimmick, and Bronze Shield kicked her out for the tyranny she pulled there. Our own members know exactly what she used to get up to, so they all said they'd seen it coming."
So it had gone over without a hitch.
"...And whose taste is that outfit?"
"I dressed her myself. Why? Something wrong with it?"
She was decked out in a fur-trimmed bikini that brought some Dangerous Beast or other to mind. Gray fur matched to Natalia's hair color veiled her brown breasts and the mound between her legs, and the tail at her rump and the animal-ear headband had been done up exactly as they'd looked back when she still had her beastification skill.
"Woof!"
"Why is a lion making dog noises?"
"Oh. Then, um... Grrrrr~?"
"Never mind. Do whatever comes naturally."
I had, after all, just come from watching the scene where she'd been strangled to death, yet I couldn't even work up any anger. This girl's personality was still sitting in my coat pocket even now—there was no punishment left to hand down.
"...So where are the other two? Why'd you come alone?"
"Their heads hurt, they say. I heard them out and came ahead, so let's keep this between the two of us."
"Because of the memories?"
"Memories aren't the light little things we took them for. Both of them got their dark histories pumped back in and have been moaning about it ever since, so I'm letting them rest until tomorrow."
"Fair enough. The two of them did pull insane stunts all over the place. Their exploits were the kind that got laughed out of the room—tell anyone, anywhere, and they'd sneer, what the hell is that supposed to mean?"
I chuckled. Seongyeon knew every last thing the two of them had gotten up to. Unlike those two, who had only just recovered their own memories, she had watched everything they'd done from the sidelines, all this time. Measured against two women who'd merely had their memories handed back, hers was the road that had truly been hell.
"Why are you giving me that look?"
"Because looking at you makes me pity you."
"Excuse me? Out of nowhere?"
"Turns out those two have been through a lifetime's worth of shitty ordeals. Pool their memories together and it still wouldn't measure up to yours alone, would it?"
You'd have to mash the entirety of both women's memories into one just to reach Seongyeon's scale. My remark seemed to genuinely startle her.
"I never dreamed I'd hear something like that come out of your mouth."
"Anyone who saw what those two pulled would say the same."
"I've never even had the chance to have this kind of conversation before."
"All the more pitiful, then. You poor son of a bitch."
Whether the coarse words consoled her in some strange way, Seongyeon's eyes went noticeably softer. Anyone could see it—that was the face of a female in heat. She ought to have been minding her expressions, but she was flaunting her womanhood without an ounce of restraint.
"Let's head inside. There's a real mountain of things we need to talk about."
"Did you turn up something important?"
"I did. Something enormous."
Going by the look of her, she'd have loved to have it out with me then and there, but the matter at hand came first. She let go of the leash, left Natalia to her own devices, and the two of us settled in with drinks and sorted everything out.
First, I laid out the Suni situation—the specifics of what had led the two of them, memories restored, to brand her an enemy.
▸ One day, without warning, Suni's attitude flipped—and that was the first thing held against her.
▸ Just as Seongyeon had been saying all along: a sudden switch to open hostility.
▸ From that point on, Suni went out of her way to make contact with every woman around me.
▸ After meeting the darkened Suni and talking with her, any day I found myself unable to remember what we had discussed, my head would explode that very day, without fail.
▸ Seres and Brigitte were both certain: even with the conversations themselves erased from memory, Suni had made them aware of Song Seongyeon's secret.
"So it played out exactly as I predicted. Suni's been detonating your head by leaking my secret to the women."
"She never made contact with you?"
"Never. She has to know I'm a regressor, so she's clearly been using only the people around me—thoroughly, at that."
That was my read too. No idea how she wiped the memories, but she must have a skill for it.
"I can't for the life of me figure out why she turned hostile, or what sets it off... but the map is proof enough: Suni is either regressing just like me, or tracking me step for step."
"The map..."
My gaze settled on the map spread across the table. A declaration of love scrawled across it in enormous letters, drawn so that the someone held dear could climb all the way to the ninety-ninth floor.
"Say Suni really didn't deceive us about her skill. Say she truly staked her life, over and over, on random teleportation to draw this map. Wouldn't that make it an act of sheer, unadulterated madness?"
"........."
The Seongyeon sitting across from me was every bit the madwoman herself. A tribute masochist who'd thrown away her entire life for the privilege of gifting me her skill. A Bill Gates of time, regressing again and again to start life over from the top. What would have driven me out of my mind long ago, the lover before my eyes had been repeating for hundreds of years...
'...And you're one to talk, calling this madness?'
A map of madness. A love of madness.
The two of them had judged, from their returned memories, that Suni was an enemy—but I had my doubts that she'd really drawn this thing herself.
"Enough about Suni for now. We started with a hunch, now we've got hard evidence, and the two of them have confirmed it besides. We'll summon her to the Skyscraper later and grill her as a group, so let's leave her alone until then."
"Planning to tear off that mask Suni wears, this time?"
"Even if we can't, that's fine. One squeeze from us—a simple 'we know everything'—and she won't be able to move a muscle. With Suni pinned down like that, we prioritize the fiftieth floor, and if that doesn't settle it, the assault on the hundredth."
Her plan, in other words, was to strip away the curse and free me from the bomb necklace. But Seongyeon didn't know—didn't know that I was aware of her gender. She hadn't noticed there was no bomb around my neck at all.
'I could blow it wide open right here... but who knows—this might actually come in handy.'
If Suni's primary weapon was exposing Seongyeon's true identity, then this, too, could become an asset—or a trap.
"...What? Did something good happen?"
When I smirked at a moment like this, she skewered me with a suspicious glare. Apparently it had never even crossed her mind that her identity might be turned around and used as a weapon.
"Can't tell you just yet. Let's move on to the Madam."
"Right. What made those two suddenly decide the Madam was an accomplice?"
"Hear the story first."
Suni could wait for the Skyscraper, so tonight belonged to the Madam. I gave her a detailed account of why the two women had come to see her as an accomplice.
▸ Every cycle in which the Madam became my 'heroine' followed the exact same pattern.
▸ In them, I would grind the women around me down—hard, cruel, breaking them in through training.
▸ Brigitte was always wedged into the picture, and Seres right beside her.
▸ In every such cycle, the two of them wore pig masks over their faces and were handled strictly as tools—kept from recognizing one another.
▸ Not a single Madam-as-heroine cycle escaped this pattern.
▸ And Seongyeon, naturally, was shut out entirely—she never even appeared.
▸ Crucially, the problem was this: whenever the Madam stepped forward like that, Suni never blew up my head.
At this, Seongyeon's eyes narrowed once more. She pressed her chin into her palm, deliberated hard, and let out a short groan.
"Cycles where the Madam became your heroine... the Madam...?"
"You didn't know?"
"The Madam's been your woman plenty of times. But on the surface—at least in front of me—everything was always harmonious. I never once heard that you were seeing other women whenever you were seeing the Madam."
"No chance he was meeting them behind your back?"
"........."
She deliberated again. This time, though, not for long.
"...Do you know who, out of all the women you've ever been with, actually made it to marriage with you?"
"Who."
"The Madam. The others—your head would blow up before long after you started dating them. The Madam was a different animal. If the others only rarely made it as far as marriage, the Madam got there every single time, seizing control from the moment you became her man so you couldn't so much as glance at another woman."
"That never struck you as strange?"
"It's not as if the Madam was the only one to reach marriage. I told you just now—rare as it was, other women have made it that far too. So I simply chalked it up to the Madam being unusually lucky."
She knocked back a glass and crossed her legs.
"When did the two of them start getting the pig treatment?"
"After we left the Tower. If you're right, it must have been during my time outside the Tower, after I married the Madam, that he drew in those two—or other women."
"Say the Madam really is an accomplice. Once you're married, it gets hard for me to keep watch on you—so she may have made her move then, deliberately."
Well, obviously—when you're openly married, you can't exactly waltz up. Newlywed life outside the Tower, no less? To anyone with eyes, the intent to put distance between himself and Seongyeon stank to high heaven.
"I get why he'd spend married life outside the Tower, out of your reach. But then..."
"Mm-hmm..."
My doubts and Seongyeon's overlapped. Why on earth had the Madam done such a thing? The reason slipped beyond our reach.
"Fine—say the Madam is Suni's accomplice, and that even marrying me served a purpose. Then why, in that case, would she draw in the women around me—those two included—and force that training on them?"
"No idea."
"How am I supposed to figure it out if you don't know?"
"But you were always happy whenever you married the Madam. In those cycles, I figured I had no need to intrude, so for the most part I left you be."
"You? Leaving me alone? Of all people?"
"I wanted you to be happy—genuinely. I decided I didn't need a place at your side, and a lot of the time I simply watched from a distance. I even caught myself thinking that perhaps, if you became happy, my curse would break. ...Not that anything of the sort ever happened."
That was how she put it, but Seongyeon's idea was, no exaggeration, the correct answer. Had my happiness carried through to the very end, the Tower Lord would have forgiven it. The only problem was that the two of us were sitting here—which meant my happiness had never lasted to the end.
"So how did those cycles—the ones where you married the Madam—end?"
"Didn't Seres and Auntie Brigitte tell you? What they told me was: they were living just fine, and then the world suddenly switched off—like an old tube TV going dark. They have no memory of anything after that, so they can't even say whether they died along with it. They figured you might know, and sent me to come ask you."
"Fair enough, from those two's perspective."
The way she took it all in stride—as if she already knew the reason—clued me in that something had, in fact, happened back there.
"It's because I—the center of the regression—die, and the world resets. I brushed it off at the time, but looking back, whenever I married the Madam, the cycle almost always ended with me being murdered. Not a hundred percent of the time, but close."
...Just as I'd thought.
"Again?"
"I literally just came from watching the scene where you, me, and Seres died together as a set."
"Ahhaha~! Hehe. So there were times like that too, huh. Did it hurt, really?"
She was cackling at her own death, and I laughed right along with her—the two of us must have looked like complete lunatics.
"You're right, though. There were so many times she'd appear out of nowhere, not a reason given, and try to kill you. Now that I think about it—she does trade in human trafficking. Maybe she was moving on a big payday from somewhere."
And with that, another thread connected.
"Where the money came from is obvious. That woman's tangled up with the black market this cycle, isn't she? We already know the Cartographer or Suni is standing behind it. So there's your answer."
"I see... and there it is, tied back to Suni again...!"
Seongyeon clapped her hands together and, in an instant, unearthed the link between the Madam and Suni.
"Remember the hotel built on top of the underground black market?"
"The Worldwide, or whatever it's called?"
"Yeah. Just as Auntie Brigitte has manufacturing locked down, the Madam has her grip around every tourism venture on this side. But that district isn't under OP management—so why a hotel and a black market sprang up there out of nowhere has been a mystery all this time, hasn't it?"
"And that mystery unravels too, so long as Suni and the Madam are holding hands?"
"Exactly. The Madam runs the hotel, Suni runs the black market, and everything clicks into place. For all we know, they were laying the groundwork to kill me or box me in through Natalia—same as last cycle."
With that, even the Madam's involvement snapped perfectly into place. Why she would join hands in something like that, though, remained anyone's guess.
"........."
"Whew."
...I lit a cigarette, one foot planted beyond a horizon where case upon case kept stacking up. To steer this cycle toward a happy ending, the two of us had no choice but to rack our brains straight through the night.