What Only I Can Do
Zeo Frizian Ernest — a man who regarded everyone but himself as beneath contempt, who lived his entire life weighing nothing but his own gain and loss.
A man who despised the syndicate that had seized his weakness and bound him with it — and who despised its leader all the more.
Hoping to strike back at Shatrira, the organization that had used him, he had spent years digging into the leader's past.
The man was so closed-off by nature that tracing his footsteps was never an easy task, but Zeo never stopped.
Was it luck? Or was it that the leader had once been talented enough to be personally absorbed into the organization? Whatever the reason, through tireless, grinding effort, Zeo finally succeeded in reaching the truth about the leader.
It was an achievement no one else in the world had ever attained — and he didn't stop there. He went so far as to document it.
A flawless, untarnished victory.
That was what he believed — and in his delusion, while he was still congratulating himself, the leader, sensing something was wrong, had him killed.
Not by his own hand. He was simply deceived under the pretense of exterminating monsters and handed a mission that was utterly impossible to survive.
In a deep forest, in a place where no one would ever come, he died alone, in silence.
And then, as if to flaunt it, something possessed that dead body. That is how I came to this world.
Why the leader doesn't kill me — me, who now wears Zeo's flesh, the very Zeo Frizian Ernest who somehow clawed his way back to life — I don't know. But one fact is perfectly clear.
I am, right now, the only being in this world who knows the leader's weakness.
A fierce rush of euphoria. Concealing the emotion was an ordeal in itself. How could such an opportunity have fallen into my lap?
The greatest problem had always been that knowing the leader's weakness meant nothing without knowing where he was — but with circumstances aligning like this, it was impossible to quell the excitement.
"Why would anyone go this far out of their way, anyway?"
"There's talk that Tocalos has been poaching members lately. Maybe they're getting desperate."
Amid the buzzing murmur of voices, I picked up a few pieces of information I hadn't known.
Tocalos — the organization currently locked in open, bitter hostility with Shatrira. There had even been direct armed clashes.
So much for playing it cool — you got impatient, didn't you, Leader.
This was my chance. A heaven-sent opportunity, the first and the last — my one chance to escape this filthy, repulsive organization.
Hoo. Hoo. I steadied my breathing quickly. There was nothing to gain from letting my emotions show. I was already under watch.
The only reason I was still alive was the leader's whim, nothing more.
Until the day we came face to face, I would have to hoard strength and information alike, praying that whim never changed.
Which meant the first thing to do now was return to my lodgings and form a plan. There wasn't the slightest reason to remain here any longer.
I slipped away quietly — moving slowly, naturally, like a being that had never belonged in a place like this to begin with.
At first, I walked. The point was to leave without drawing the slightest attention.
As expected, no one marked me. Not a single pair of eyes turned my way. Everyone was too busy wrestling with their own reactions to the shocking revelations.
The moment I registered that, my feet were already tipping forward.
Tap, tap, tap — footsteps that had rung out in even rhythm gradually lost their balance and kept accelerating.
"Haah…… haah……."
The crack spread to my breathing as well. The version of me who had breathed evenly was long gone.
By the time I'd left the building behind, what had begun as walking could hardly be called anything but running. I was sprinting flat out.
My mind was a jumbled, tangled mess — nothing could calm it. And so I ran for a long, long while.
"……"
Until a vague, formless sensation finally caught up with me.
Slowly, insidiously, an anxious energy crept up through my legs. It felt like ants swarming over every inch of my body.
The euphoria of moments ago was gone, and insects called dread, unease, and fear wrapped around me without a single gap.
So what if I knew the leader's weakness? How — by what means — could I do anything alone?
In this underground society, where killing was taken for granted whether it was necessary or not, I was an outright heretic.
A being who could do nothing on my own,
too weak to take even one life by my own hand. Me, armed with the most fragile mind in all the Underground. Utterly, hopelessly useless.
My sprint slowed by degrees. Breath and heartbeat alike found their pace again and settled back into balance.
Tap, tap, tap — before I knew it, the run had become a walk again.
No — I went further and stopped entirely. Now I was someone who couldn't even walk. Staring blankly down at the ground was all I could manage.
"Pffahaha……"
A mound of dirt — a thing far removed from anything organic or mechanical, yet identical to me in one respect: it could not move on its own.
Yes. Cruel as it was, this was reality. I was a castaway — someone who couldn't keep up with the society I'd been thrown into.
My current position was one where I couldn't even properly wield the power I'd been given.
In a place where killing was the norm, I flinched at the very act of harming another. What, in the end, could someone like me possibly do?
'Then you should be all the more grateful. Someone corrected a mistake you weren't even aware of, and asked nothing in return.'
"……A mistake. So it was a mistake."
Ironically, what surfaced in that moment was a single line from Robin, branded into my memory — and her act, quietly laying to rest the people she'd only knocked unconscious.
Perhaps that really had been genuine consideration, after all. Doubt had crept in on me now — but more important than that was the fact that I had laughed.
It came less from happiness than from emptiness, from sheer absurdity — but I had laughed, and that fact didn't change.
When I surrendered to that feeling, my feet began to move again. Far slower than the desperate sprint, but the point was that I was moving.
Why was it Robin's face that came to me now, of all times? The question drew a blank, so I forced myself to ignore it. I just walked. Shuffle, shuffle.
Shuffle, shuffle — quietly, and miserably.
"……That's—"
I stopped dead in my tracks.
It wasn't that my mind had wavered again. It was the enormous building before me — it had swallowed my gaze whole.
I couldn't tear my eyes away. Something extraordinary was calling to me. I was certain of it.
"……What is this?"
To put it more precisely: that building was calling out to people.
I had merely had my gaze stolen by it, but all around me, people were drifting toward the building in droves, one after another. Their eyes held no focus at all.
Which meant that not one of them was there by their own will.
A building that swallowed people whole. I couldn't tell what it was, but one thing was sure — it had not been made with good intentions.
Otherwise, there was no explanation for this kind of compulsion.
Only because I had at least some resistance to mental attacks had I escaped — if my defenses had been even slightly weaker, I would have been drawn in there with the rest of them.
"……"
And at exactly that point, I began to weigh my options. What should I do?
Wasn't the right thing simply to turn a blind eye and go home? Who knew what lurked inside?
Was there any reason to hurl myself into uncertain danger? It could just as easily turn out to be nothing at all.
This was the Underground City, after all — everyone here was a bad person, so what would it matter if they died?
"……Pffahaha!"
A hollow laugh — my own. I'd entertained such a despicable thought that now I'd started laughing outright.
I clutched my head and thought. I am a weak creature. I cannot hurt people. I am terrified of laying violent hands on another with a cruel heart.
Taken to the extreme, you could call me someone who failed to adapt to society — a social misfit, and I'd have no rebuttal. The results spoke for themselves.
So what could I actually do? The only act available to me — to me, who wanted not to cross the line, who wanted to hold it — was this.
"……I have to do good."
Entering a building whose doors stood wide open was, in the first place, no difficult task.
All I had to do was blend in among the crowd and let myself be carried toward wherever it was pulling me.
I kept my senses sharpened, pressing onward while watching for any trace of a mana current around me.
Nothing had actually happened yet, but the tension gnawed steadily away at my mental fortitude.
My whole body ached with exhaustion, but a reason that flimsy was no excuse to stop my feet — so they never stopped.
My eyes had stopped trembling, too.
"……"
In passing, I looked to see whether anyone else was holding onto their mind the way I was. There wasn't a single one.
Every last of them had lost the color in their pupils and walked inward, for all the world like corpses — that was all any of them did.
But conversely, that made finding the source all the easier.
As long as I stayed buried in this crowd and kept moving, I would inevitably reach the answer at the end of the line.
What was their purpose? Because this was the Underground City, beyond the reach of the law's hand, it was all the harder to determine. A place the royal court had abandoned outright, after all.
And yet — going to the trouble of such elaborate means to gather people meant that someone needed them alive and sound.
At the very least, my safety was guaranteed until I reached the destination.
"……Here it is."
Lost in one thought after another as I walked, my steps eventually reached their end.
At a series of branching paths, the people began splitting off one by one, dividing among the floors.
The moment of choice. Without hesitation, I headed for the third floor.
The instant I stepped inside, I understood what had been used to draw the people in.
A massive mana stone affixed to the room's ceiling — ensorcelled with charm magic. And a fairly high-grade version at that; up close, even I felt myself waver.
Then I looked around. People, people, people — all of them unconscious. The only one in his right mind was me.
Though if I widened the definition beyond people, there was one other thing still intact. A device stood at the center of the room.
A powerful current of mana flowed through it — stronger than the stone in the ceiling. I laid my hand on it and began slowly reading out its circuitry.
A grotesque structure. And yet, a familiar one.
With every piece of the device's construction I pieced together, another bead of sweat welled up on my forehead.
A thing that could serve good or evil alike, its direction determined purely by the intent of the one who used it — employed in any number of fields.
Even in my old world, a thing that had stolen the lives of countless people.
"……This is a bomb, isn't it."
The conclusion settled into place. The reason the master of the charm magic had gathered all these people was —
To test the power of this bomb.