Chapter 142: Submission 3
Chapter 142: Submission 3
No matter how well-adjusted you think you are, when the entire world gets swapped out from under you, a few things are bound to feel a little off. The small, mundane stuff especially. You can't help it.
"Still, isn't that taking it too far? Doesn't it scare you?"
She wanted to stay forever in the dream world. Put another way, she was ready to abandon her physical body in reality.
To the people of this world, was that some glorious thing—dwelling at a Constellation's side for all eternity? But all it conjured up for me was a brain in a vat. The Matrix. It didn't help that I'd lived my previous life without any religion at all. Fanatical thinking like that just struck me as more frightening than anything.
Which is why I stopped Kim Ha-eun from devoting her entire life to repenting through service and devotion in my dreams. Stopped her with my whole body. Literally.
"But you still have to take care of your body in reality, you know?"
"Yes, y-yehhhss...."
I set Kim Ha-eun down on the office floor, her hips wrung out, a shivering, trembling mess.
I'll admit I pushed the point a little hard, but what can I say—I'm a Constellation. I shut down her plan to give up her physical body and run the dream city full-time. I'd finally managed to talk her into continuing to live in reality. I wasn't about to act like a parent dropping a child off at the playground, though; I made her promise she'd only tinker with magic in the city for a while and then definitely come back out. Then I slipped out of the dream on my own.
'Inside this little thing...'
The palm-sized stone was still glimmering. I still couldn't wrap my head around the fact that a whole metropolis was crammed inside that tiny rock, plus thousands of tin-can city-management robots, plus my Incarnation Kim Ha-eun. Part of me wanted to stick around and explore the futuristic robot city a little longer.
But by now, hadn't they already delivered a fresh suspect from the Northern Continent to the Academy?
Even for a killer who'd slipped through the Academy's barrier and infiltrated the grounds, escape wasn't going to be an option this time. Not when a demon with murder in her eyes had started tearing the city apart in a systematic sweep.
'Not even a dictator back on Earth could pull off something like that.'
They weren't just grabbing people at random. They were checking every single person in the city. In my old world, my old Earth, that would've been impossible. Here, with magic on the table, it looked perfectly workable. Honestly, it probably had less to do with magic and more to do with the Constellations themselves.
It was a weekday, broad daylight. Naturally, office workers were at work. Office workers, the self-employed, students, civil servants, Incarnations—by a rough count, a hundred thousand people busy with their daily lives. And now an order had come down: halt all of it, assemble in the streets, and submit to inspection. No functioning democracy could pull that off, and most dictators would think twice. But here? Here, it was possible. Because the order didn't come from a mayor or a president.
Once the words "by the Constellation's command" got attached, people grumbled a little but ultimately fell in line. With that kind of voluntary cooperation from the citizenry, the rest was easy. In a world where summoned beasts and Clones existed, there was no reason to fret over how long it'd take to process such a massive crowd.
And here was the result.
"Ngghh, hnngg—"
"Faster than I expected."
"A deal is always swift and precise. That's the demon way."
A man bound at the wrists and ankles, writhing on the floor in the ropes. Wilhelmina, tablet in one hand, multitasking paperwork while waiting for me. Beastkin guards who'd edged closer amid the commotion to stand watch over me. And among the guards, eyes blazing with unmistakable fury—the victim's older brother.
...How the hell did he even know about this and get here so fast?
'Feels like I'm the only useless one in the room.'
I'd ducked into the dream world for a quick fuck, and by the time I came back, a massive operation I'd expected to take months was already wrapped up. I genuinely felt like an RPG newbie who'd accidentally gotten carried by a guild bus. Had I actually done anything myself? Besides striking obnoxious poses, pulling wild ass-pulls, and spamming Charm at somebody else's company, that is. Most of the real hints had come from the knowledge and intel The Incinerating Tyrant fed me. Whether it was out of lingering nostalgia for his empire or fascination with the sheer rarity of the Dream Demon species, The Incinerating Tyrant was backing me to an almost absurd degree.
Not that I'm the type to look a gift horse in the mouth, obviously.
And Wilhelmina, the demon Constellation... well. When you've had orbital bombardment threatened over your head, I imagine just about anybody can find it in themselves to offer some pretty devoted support.
"So. What do you want to do with him?"
"Take him and run some experiments."
the real reason The Incinerating Tyrant needed me started now. Unlike an Incarnation, we had to drag a Constellation out of the Sanctum he'd burrowed into. The man hadn't just been any Constellation—he'd been the emperor of a galactic empire. There was no way in hell he was going to let some corrupt corporate hack's assassination plot slide.
Doing human experimentation in reality would obviously destroy the subject, and with only one specimen on hand, that couldn't be allowed. Which left exactly one option, didn't it?
I grabbed the slumped Incarnation by the hair. Even that much made him flinch in pain—he must've been beaten to within an inch of his life. I don't have a taste for pointless torture or violence, so I skipped straight to forcing my magic power into him and carving my way inside. What was he afraid of? What was he thinking? A perfectly Dream-Demon line of thought.
My vision swam, and then I plunged into his memories, unimpeded.
What unfolded before my eyes caught me a little off guard.
So many people, so many minds—or maybe not just minds, but souls. I'd seen a wide variety of unconscious minds by now, but this was a first.
"What the hell is this...?"
A back alley so dark there wasn't even a streetlamp. Trash cans of every kind lay scattered everywhere. The whole place practically screamed, "I had a miserable life!" Where most people rendered their bad memories dark and small, this assassin's unconscious was saturated in gloom from start to finish. On a hunch, I stepped toward the nearest trash can—a huge cylindrical drum big enough to hold a person.
When I pried open the lid, a puff of blackish fog wafted out, along with a crumpled tin can. Stagnant, filthy water pooled inside it, sloshing faintly and reflecting a blurred vision of the past: a grimy kid getting cuffed across the ear for stealing bread out of hunger.
'So even this world has things like this.'
A world where Constellations descended to meddle in human affairs. Even so, it wasn't some crime-free utopia. There were thieves, there were robbers, there were rapists—women, that is—and, naturally, there were abandoned orphans and back-alley slums. Not that any of this was going to stir up sympathy and soften my heart. That back alley was still more comfortable than a world teeming with radiation mutants.
What I was after was the direct cause. The skill to fool the Academy's barrier. With that level of talent, couldn't he have lived like a king anywhere? I didn't know much about barrier magic, but he'd punched right through the Academy's defenses. He had a gift that could earn him the love of a divine being, and he came from the Northern Continent. Forget his shitty past—he could've been snorting drugs, driving sports cars, and living it up in a luxury mansion, just like the partygoers I'd seen.
So why, out of all the paths available to him, had he become the Incarnation of Heart of the Exiled Serpent and turned assassin? It'd be like a Messi-tier soccer player making millions a week deciding to just kick people to death with his lethal legs instead. Why on earth would someone that incredible become a hired killer? The question practically asked itself.
Out of all the numerous Northern Continent Constellations, why Heart of the Exiled Serpent specifically?
I needed to find that memory. Only then could I trace it back and burrow into Heart of the Exiled Serpent himself—the Dream Demon memories The Incinerating Tyrant had given me were whispering that to me, low and urgent.
'There sure are a lot of them.'
Was he trying to argue with his whole chest that he'd had a tragic backstory? Every piece of garbage filling this alley was crammed full of miserable memories. Getting slapped for stealing bread. Getting caught trying to pick pockets by an Incarnation and handed over to the cops. Getting raped in a back alley because he was a man. Huh. Out of absolutely nowhere—a hair-of-the-golden-blonde reverse-rape porno just popped up.
I skimmed past most of the countless memories along those lines. But the memory of the contract between this Constellation and Incarnation—surely that wouldn't be some dented, rusted can or tin. Wouldn't it be a brighter, cleaner memory?
Nothing of the sort was in sight.
Dented cans, rusted tins. Torn and filthy books, broken toys. A radio with a smashed corner, a cracked TV. A junkyard without a single object in normal condition. In this whole dim, oppressive place, not one thing was intact.
Which meant there was exactly one thing that shone bright.
I lifted my head and looked up. In a back alley with no streetlamps, it was the sole light source that let me see at all.
"That huge thing is... a memory?"
A crumpled tin can and a full moon. What kind of memory was this, to stand out with such an overwhelming difference?
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A boy abandoned by his parents, shipped off to a garbage orphanage. A daily life where dabbling in crime and selling his body to women for a meal was the norm. Getting beaten when caught, getting raped, and in the middle of it all, forming gangs and fighting among themselves.
And into that horrifying routine, a miracle came crashing down. A Constellation appeared directly—in a back alley that no Incarnation, not even the government, ever bothered to reach.
'Lucky bastard.'
So the story wasn't that a supremely talented Incarnation had contracted with Heart of the Exiled Serpent. For whatever reason, the bastard had gathered a pack of back-alley delinquents, boys and girls mixed together, and by sheer dumb luck, one of them just happened to be a man with staggering talent.
"Will you come with me?"
"Wh-who are you?"
When I'd heard "corrupt corporate type," I'd pictured a balding, greasy middle-aged man with a gut. A face like a toad. But the Heart of the Exiled Serpent in this memory looked immaculate. Hair slicked back with product, pale skin, a knife-sharp gaze that gave him the look of some villainous young noble lady. Then again, if he was from a sci-fi future where they developed entire planets, maybe he'd just gotten a little cosmetic science done. No, wait—more to the point, it wasn't a middle-aged man. It was a woman.
Right. Come to think of it, The Incinerating Tyrant also came from a gender-reversed world. The "businessman" being a woman was so obvious to him it hadn't even been worth mentioning.