Thirty Seconds
♪♪~♩~♪ Fire dispatch! Fire dispatch!
-WHY is that going off NOW?! Who's in charge of the bell?!
-We're all geared up and ready, what's the holdup!
-And here I thought we'd get through today without it!!!
-I specifically said I never want to hear that in the CAAAAR...
The moment I settled into the passenger seat of the Morning, the dispatch bell rang, and the firefighters flared up at the sound as if they'd been waiting for an excuse to blow their tops.
'They're... actually people, aren't they?'
Faceless beings. The faceless.
I'd assumed the firefighters were just NPCs, like the passersby.
But here they were, reacting like a bunch of neurotics—one fuming about the bell going off late, another snarling that he was going to wring the neck of whoever was responsible, and even the rookie complaining that he hated hearing it in his own car.
Take away the missing faces, and their reactions were completely human.
'No sign of lust, though.'
I caught my own reflection in the side mirror as we slowly pulled away.
A white-haired bombshell in a high-exposure swimsuit. Anyone would do a double take at a body like this—it would be strange not to.
Back when I was a man, I certainly would have.
And yet neither the passersby I'd met twice, nor the kind firefighter who'd helped me earlier, had so much as scanned me up and down or fixated on any particular part of me.
If anything, they looked at me the way you'd look at a single human individual—neither male nor female.
And oddly enough, that was exactly why I liked it.
It meant, at the very least, that the faceless born of the Rules treated this suddenly-changed body exactly the same as they would have treated the man I used to be.
"...!"
So there I was in the passenger seat, musing about the faceless, when the view through the Stalker's eyes showed me the fire station—
and the Morning pulling out. The car I was riding in.
"Hey, hurry! It's behind us! It's right behind us!"
-It's all right. I trust my seniors.
BOOM.
No sooner had the rookie spoken than a fire engine came screaming out of the station at breakneck speed, and the instant its siren wailed to life, it slammed head-on into the Stalker as it lunged to chase us down.
Then, with the Stalker embedded in the building's wall, it opened up with a relentless torrent of water cannon fire.
"Whoa!"
The sight was so spectacular that I couldn't help letting out a cheer like a little kid.
I'd frozen solid for three whole seconds when I glanced back and saw the Stalker's face—I'd honestly thought it was over. And then the fire engine appeared, like salvation itself.
-Let's go.
So said the rookie, magnificently, urging us forward—
but strangely, the car began crawling ahead at a snail's pace.
"Um, this is way too slow?"
-It's a children's protection zone.
"I'm sorry, a WHAT...?"
-Firefighters have to obey the law.
"There's a FIRE chasing us right now! A literal fire!"
-My seniors will handle it.
"Oh, for God's sake..."
A children's protection zone, materializing out of nowhere. It wasn't in the rulebook, and the sheer absurdity of painstakingly obeying traffic law in this desperate moment had me on the verge of cursing out loud.
But I closed my eyes, counted to ten, calmed myself, and tried to work out why the rookie was acting this way.
Children's protection zone = 30 km/h limit. Firefighters obey the law. The fire engine's earlier burst of speed.
I was genuinely furious, but once I thought it through, it made sense.
The faceless of the fire station had been assigned the role of firefighter.
A firefighter must be a law-abiding citizen, and this was currently a children's protection zone—therefore the speed limit could not be exceeded.
My justification that a fire was chasing us didn't hold, because the seniors had already departed to deal with it.
"That thing is an arsonist! It's a STALKER! It has a record!"
So I prepared a different justification.
It was true enough—it was a fire that moved on its own, and it had a criminal past.
-My seniors can handle it.
"God damn it."
Not a crumb of traction.
This accursed embodiment of the Rules genuinely seemed to believe a fire engine could drive off the Stalker.
Or maybe the Rule itself had locked this vehicle's speed at exactly this.
'On the surface, at least, it's a close match.'
The frustration was about to drive me insane, so I cut the conversation short and switched to the Stalker's point of view.
The fire engine was fighting brilliantly.
After that first head-on collision, it doused the wall-embedded Stalker with water—and whether that was because of the fire nature or some special chemical solution, I couldn't tell, but the Stalker kept melting and regenerating in an endless loop.
This was a Stalker that had caved in a three-story building with a casual swipe of its hand, and yet the fire engine was astonishingly dodging the debris it hurled—rolling its entire chassis sideways, even leaping clear.
Sometimes it bent into an S-curve so fluidly it looked like living liquid.
'I don't think it can win like that.'
Still, it wasn't enough.
For one thing, their speeds were about even.
The Stalker kicked and hurled debris to throttle the engine's momentum, while the fire engine targeted the Stalker's hook-shaped toes, steadily grinding down its mobility.
If anything, the engine had the edge in sharp cornering—but the speed limit meant it couldn't take those corners hard, so no matter how badly it wanted to close the distance, it couldn't get close.
But look a little deeper, and the picture changed.
The engine's front end, crushed into that gouged, blade-like shape from the initial collision, was rattling loose—perhaps a price for taking the counterattack head-on.
The water cannon, unable to keep pace with the Stalker's mobility now that it had sacrificed everything else to protect its toes, was starting to miss more and more often.
And whenever the engine slipped behind the Stalker, the Stalker's restraints fell away—meaning the engine had to stay in front at all times, forced to shadow every forward lunge.
'Three to five minutes, tops.'
It wasn't that the fire engine was fighting poorly.
It was pouring on the water with real dedication, and its accuracy had been respectable.
But the ever-growing field of building fragments kept blocking its shots, and—perhaps because its assigned role, firefighter, existed to put out fires—its extreme aggression was proving fatally predictable.
The Stalker, quick to notice, apparently realized that if it simply stopped, the engine wasn't going anywhere. So it halted, then ringed the engine with building debris, sealing off every escape route.
Whether the engine failed to notice, or noticed and drove in anyway, I couldn't tell—but its options had shrunk to two: take a massive slab of concrete, or get snatched by the Stalker's grasp and torn apart.
'Experienced. Ruthlessly so.'
At first, when the Stalker hurled fragments at what seemed like completely random spots, I couldn't fathom why.
But watching through its eyes later, I understood: like a go player laying stones, it had seeded the board early, plotting each move one by one until the opponent's path was cut off entirely.
And just before that slowly constricting net reached perfect completion, the Stalker briefly tore its gaze from the struggling fire engine—
and glanced at a clock mounted inside the cabin.
'Five minutes have passed.'
Five minutes since this car pulled out and the engine rammed the Stalker.
In a mere five minutes, the Stalker had disregarded even its own role as fire and pressed the engine to the brink.
'Police station should be ten to fifteen minutes out.'
Earlier, a passerby had told me—at roughly emergency-alert pace—the fire station was ten minutes away, the police station an hour.
If the gap between the two stations was fifty minutes, then at around 30 km/h, ten to fifteen minutes was a conservative estimate.
'Two more minutes and I'll have plenty of time to escape.'
Two minutes. That was all I needed the engine to buy.
Even if the Stalker came after us at twice the speed I'd seen, I'd be safe.
I was running those numbers when a new variable entered the field.
WEEEEOOOW! WEEEEOOOW!
A siren sound, thickened and swollen into something enormous, loud enough to reach us even from this far away—
three more fire engines had arrived as reinforcements.
-Reinforcements are here!
"We're saved!"
The rookie and I pumped our fists at the sound.
The Stalker had barely managed to stall a single engine—there was no way it could handle three more on top of that.
'There it is! We're done!'
Just in case, I checked the Stalker's point of view again.
The three newly arrived engines, clever as could be, stayed on their own side of the line and opened fire without crossing it.
The Stalker, only free to move between its anchor point and the line, couldn't even approach the newcomers—it simply endured the torrents from four engines, wrapping itself in building debris.
'Buying two minutes is a lock!'
I wasn't even hoping they'd kill the Stalker.
Get it near death, and it would trigger its ability—that much was certain.
But I'd smiled at the thought that surely, if one engine could hold out for five minutes, four could hold for two more—
and my happy circuits were firing on all cylinders with 'maybe we'll actually catch it after all—'
'Come to think of it... how many minutes has it been since then?'
The forgotten fact surfaced.
And the line moved.
'Huh...?'
Two seconds.
The time it took the Stalker to dodge every last drop of water and position itself in front of the fire engine.
Seven seconds.
The time it took the Stalker to tear apart every firefighter inside the engine, seat itself in the driver's cabin, and hijack the vehicle outright.
Twenty seconds.
The time it took the hijacked engine to ram another, destroying them both.
Thirty seconds.
The time it took to smash the engines watering side by side, slaughter their crews, and steal the single one still intact.
Thirty seconds flat.
In thirty seconds, every fire engine was wrecked, the firefighters were torn apart, and a fire engine was stolen.
"Huh?"
Three minutes after the Stalker starts moving, the line moves.
That was the rule. And so the Stalker had played the part of a beast trapped by the first engine—waiting, biding, for the line to shift—
and the instant it shifted, it shredded the first engine and all three reinforcements alike.
"Son of a—!"
The stolen engine came after us impossibly fast.
For a split second I wondered, 'Wait—does a fire truck with its siren on get to ignore the children's protection zone?' But no. Of course not.
'The role! The ROLE is the problem, damn it!'
The role.
It all came down to the role.
The Stalker is the Stalker. It is fire.
It answers to no law.
But a firefighter? Bound by the law.
'A lost traveler... a lost traveler...'
Which meant I had to persuade the firefighter—give it a justification to break the law.
Using my own assigned role: a traveler, lost.
-What do you think you're doing?
I'd already yanked my foot over to the accelerator. If things stayed on this course, that screaming fire engine would run us down before I could finish talking.
The moment I pressed it, I felt it—an enormous, frigid gaze settling on me.
'So this is the Rule.'
The faceless. Embodiments of the Rules.
Just as the Stalker had paid a penalty for rewriting the world and flipping the board,
I, too, could be penalized—for ignoring the speed limit of this zone and racing toward the exit.
"I'm a traveler who lost her way. I got lost because my house burned down."
-...
Storytelling. Storytelling was everything.
Why I was lost. Why I was flooring the accelerator.
I had to persuade it. Make it believe.
"My house burned down because of a stalker. That woman chasing us—she's the one who burned it."
-Continue.
Thankfully, this didn't seem to be the wrong approach.
It wasn't treating me as a criminal, and it wasn't punishing me—it was listening.
"Remember the sirens a minute ago? That awful racket? Notice it's gone quiet? She probably dealt with them."
-...Your seniors. Dealt with? I find that hard to believe.
"That woman is a Great Anomaly... no—she's one who rewrote the world itself and paid for it."
I started to argue with the title of Great Anomaly, then stopped myself.
This was a place of divided roles—the title might not carry any weight here.
"I know how strong the fire station is. But that woman can't be stopped by fire engines. That's why I was heading for the police station."
-...Hmm.
"When she rewrote the world, she didn't spare a single thought for her surroundings. She won't going forward, either. Not even for the people caught in the blast."
-That is... certainly plausible.
"So someone has to stop her. Now."
-...Understood. Damn the tickets—we'll peel a few off and be done with it.
"Hoo..."
Somehow, the persuasion landed.
The crushing weight of that gaze lifted, and the faceless rookie returned—resolute, as if he understood me completely and would give everything he had.
WEEEEEOOOW
-That's cutting it close.
After nearly a full minute at full throttle, the police station came into view.
But right behind us, the engine that had sounded so dependable minutes ago was closing in, howling a bone-chilling siren.
"Please... please..."
It was razor-thin.
The Morning was a touch slower.
But the gap between us was already wide enough that, even if it never fully caught up, we'd make it inside in time—or so I thought, right up until the engine behind us sprayed water.
The light little compact shuddered helplessly, and my senses, sharpened to their absolute limit, whispered that the car was beginning to slide—just a hair at a time.
"No..."
Despair.
There was nothing inside this car that could stand against that overwhelming violence.
When I covered my face with my hands, swallowed by the despair of watching our chassis slide toward the abyss—
the rookie's voice reached me.
-Thank you for everything! Keep your feet off the floor at all times!
"I'm sorry—WHAT?"
Whether the door popped open on its own, or he'd opened it the moment he saw me drowning in despair, I couldn't say—but the rookie kicked me straight out through the open right-hand door.
In the same instant, the Morning, its weight thrown off, skidded wide, and a heartbeat later was struck by the fire engine, crushed beyond all recognition.
And I—thanks to that slick, water-drenched road—glided in one long, unbroken slide, all the way to the doors of the police station.