Because I Wanted to Swallow Your Contradiction
"Come on, hurry up. This place is popular—if we're late, we might not get a seat."
Like dust drifting on the wind, drawn along by a breeze I couldn't resist, I was at her mercy. Robin, without a doubt, knew a great many things.
Which restaurants served the best food, which seat at which hour held the finest view, which route to take for maximum efficiency.
In short, she knew exactly where to go and what to do to have the most enjoyable time possible.
"Not like that, Zeo. Start with the silverware on the outside, like this."
Setting aside the fact that, midway through, her table manners turned out to be impossibly erudite.
The meal was delicious, and there was plenty of pretty scenery along the way. I couldn't deny that I'd felt something like enjoyment.
"So? Not bad, right?"
"...I suppose not."
"...Oh, come here for a second."
But maybe it was that anxiety-riddled face of mine that she couldn't stand. Robin yanked my cheek toward her with an almost sulky expression, then whispered.
"Is defection still that scary to you?"
"...It's not like I'm contributing anything to the organization. I just show my face and play around."
I pulled my face away with a sour look and turned to her. She was smiling.
Exactly half mockery, half amusement, blended into one. It wasn't a pleasant sight. I could only meet it with coldly cooled eyes.
"So, you're still thinking the same thing?"
"...What thing."
"You brought it up with me last time, remember?"
She meant the last mission we'd gone on together. For the record, Robin's answer back then was that she didn't yet have such thoughts, and I'd accepted it.
"Then this time, let me ask you instead. Still thinking the same thing?"
But I hadn't been fully convinced, so I turned the question back on her. The flow of the conversation, naturally, became mine.
Rather, Robin's eyes sparkled with interest. Not a metaphor—her eyes literally did that.
"I haven't thought about it deeply. Probably the same."
The word probably grated on me terribly, but the meaning came across well enough. She'd answered my question kindly, after all. It was my turn now.
I bowed my head. Slowly, I leaned toward her. And whispered into her ear.
"...The next time the guild master shows himself, I'm going to act."
Back in my place again, I found Robin still smiling.
But the fist clenched tight was my unwavering resolve—my heart. It may have been trembling, faintly, but I had not opened my hand.
"Do you have a method?"
"...I do."
"You're wavering. Sounds like you don't have much conviction."
"...What I can say with certainty is that I know a secret no one else knows. His secret."
"I asked for a method, not the means. With that precious piece of information, what exactly are you planning to do, and how?"
she asked. It was a kind of mockery.
The implication being: could someone too spineless to kill a single person really put a golden piece of information to good use? An attempt to break my will.
"...Even if I haven't managed to devise a method, even if my conviction wavers constantly—I still have to do it."
"So in the end, you have no plan. Why the insistence on doing it?"
"Because I have to go back. No matter what."
I murmured the words, desolate. The first step toward returning to my original world weighed this heavily—a remark closer to lament than declaration.
"...You're certain, then. Even if I tried to talk you out of it, nothing would change."
Her snickering smile, paired with that nod of affirmation, rounded out the meal.
Seen only this way, she looked like such a good person. So why was it that she harbored something so black inside?
"So, where to next?"
"Secret~ Just follow me."
Once our little friction ended, she was leading me along again. She said she had something to show me for a moment, and I was following. Still clutching the food we'd packed away to take with us.
For the record, she hadn't told me our destination. Her reason: it would be more fun that way.
It was such an utterly Robin-esque reason that I accepted it and asked no more. I simply watched her walk ahead, humming a tune.
She did glance around from time to time, muttering something under her breath, but that level of impulsive behavior was business as usual for her.
I simply watched. That was all.
"..."
Robin Lydian Musica. The White Snake. A woman whose easygoing manner had earned her connections far and wide—but in truth, cruel, without the slightest hesitation when it came to harming someone.
And yet, inexplicably warm toward me, never stingy with her kindness.
'To sum it up, I just wanted to see your ordinary, human side up close—your contradiction. There. Do you get it now, at least a little?'
I shook my head. Thinking about it too deeply would only give me a headache.
"Hurry up! At this rate it'll be dark."
"...Right."
In the end, I emptied my mind and quietly followed behind her.
She was unnaturally animated. Normally she'd have been at my side chattering away, but right now she was too busy guiding me.
Come to think of it, she'd said before we left that there was something she absolutely had to show me. I'd tried to guess what it was, but nothing came to mind.
Looking back, I didn't actually know much about her. And once that thought landed, something began to feel off.
She saw through everything about me, and yet I knew nothing about her at all. A sense of the unfair crept in alongside it.
"...Robin."
"Hm? You called?"
Purple. I looked at her. Like a star burning bright enough to cast light into the dark.
Perhaps because of the moonshadowed, lusterless silver hair that accompanied it, her face—like a patch of night sky shrunk down and held in miniature—seemed all the more distant today.
She closed her eyes, then asked:
"What... I'm just asking in case, but—what do you like?"
"...Hmm."
I'd asked with a fair amount of courage, but the answer fizzled out into a convenient dodge. Of course it did, I thought, and sighed, letting my head sink.
We kept walking, of course, even through all this. The sound of leaves crunching underfoot—sha, sha—was oddly memorable.
And so we walked. Followed. Gazing only at Robin's back, the most excited I'd seen her in ages.
"What do you think I'm going to show you?"
How far had we come? Just as my feet were starting to ache, she spoke.
"...No idea."
My answer mirrored hers—not out of any desire for revenge, but simply because I genuinely didn't know.
I couldn't even begin to guess. Even the feelings I held were murky.
Half was something I couldn't name even to myself, and the other half was expectation and anxiety split precisely down the middle. Far too ambiguous to define clearly.
"Boring. I'll see if you react the same way after you've seen it."
She stopped right where she stood. Pointed a finger, traced it through the empty air. At the end of that line stood a small house.
With just this much, the clues were far too sparse for me to understand anything.
When I looked to Robin, hoping she'd hurry and explain, she silently raised her index finger to her lips.
The gesture people make when sound needs to be kept down. The instant I grasped her intent, I went silent, and Robin moved forward slowly.
With the food she'd packed earlier, Robin approached the house and gently set the bundle down by the door.
She didn't forget to pull three gold coins from her coat and tuck them in as well.
Then she returned to where I stood and smiled. She tossed a decent-sized stone to make a noise. One, two, three on her fingers—and the door opened.
Out came a tiny child. A little girl dressed in clothes that, sorry to say, could only be called threadbare.
Even at a glance, I could tell. Their household was in dire straits.
For people like them, the gift Robin had secretly prepared must have seemed like rain on parched earth. The words that followed proved it at once.
"Big Brother! More food came!"
"...More?"
And then a little boy appeared—likewise a bit gaunt, but looking a touch more mature than the girl.
But it was a different word that caught my attention.
'More.' A single word that implied her current act was no one-off performance for my benefit, but something she had been doing all along.
Robin hid behind a tree and watched the children. Then she looked at me. Her expression said: if you have questions, I'll answer anything.
"...Why do you help them?"
"People help people. Does there have to be a reason?"
"...Then why hide your identity while doing it?"
"Getting tangled up with something as filthy as me does nobody any good. What's the point of showing my face?"
"..."
"Maybe I should make you practice your poker face too."
Every reason was more than valid—they deserved to be called praise. And yet, coming from the person in front of me, they somehow didn't look positive at all. It must have shown on my face.
"It just reminds me of the old days. Honestly, this kind of thing is pretty fun too."
A faintly bitter look. It wasn't obvious, but her expression had clearly sunk lower than before.
I didn't respond to that. For a while, I just focused on settling the awkwardness rising in my chest.
I hadn't expected to see this kind of unconditional charity from her.
"...What, isn't this about the time to start asking about your past?"
"That might be rude."
Robin's expression cooled almost imperceptibly. In the end, I didn't press. Anyone could see it was a painful past, and I figured dredging it up would only be a burden.
"Still... seeing your ordinary, human side has settled me a lot."
"Is that a compliment? Thanks."
"...Yeah."
I turned my head away. The children rejoicing over the food, and Robin watching them with soft eyes.
I'd assumed such a sight was something I'd never witness in my lifetime. It seemed, once again, that I didn't really know her at all.
The thought followed, and then something bloomed behind it. Perhaps she'd only just now taken out a piece of herself she'd always carried.
"...Robin."
"Hm. You called?"
With the most serious voice I'd used all day, I called her name. The name I loved most—and feared most.
"...Can a person not live without hurting other people?"
I cast the thought into that pond.
Robin had called my nature—my aversion to killing, my reluctance to harm anyone—ordinary.
Which meant that Robin, too, arrived at this: her moral compass was not broken.
Then why, in God's name—
"...You can tell right from wrong. You of all people."
Why did she walk willingly into the darkness, fully able to tell the two apart?
I clenched my hand. I searched her eyes. To see what dwelled in Robin's irises, I poured everything out.
I looked. I looked. Just looked, blindly—as though digging for something asleep in those depths, peering in.
As though trying to find it.
"...You know it. You know that hurting someone, taking a life—it isn't right."
I pleaded, praying it would reach her. I begged her.
"...Can't you stop?"
Robin closed her eyes. No answer came.
Only the laughter of children overjoyed by the food filled the silence. Nothing else reached either of our ears.
She didn't speak, and neither did I. We simply held our silence, each waiting for the other to break it first.
"Let me ask you one thing in return. Do you really think you can walk out of that organization right now without shedding a single drop of blood?"
And then—poke—Robin's finger stabbed into my forehead. The silence shattered like thin ice, utterly destroyed.
It didn't hurt. It had truly been a light gesture. But I could tell, at least, that my plea had failed.
"You said it yourself. That you must leave the organization. Did you honestly believe you could accomplish that without a drop of blood?"
"What does that have to do with—"
"Oh, it has everything to do with it. Deeply, darkly, everything."
Her finger slid slowly down my cheek. From face to neck, from neck to chest—like watching the dew of early dawn.
The finger that had burrowed so deep stopped at my chest. And drew a line. A perfectly straight line, not trembling in the slightest, drawn deep.
It was from this moment that Robin's finger began to feel like a serpent's tongue.
Before me stood the White Snake. The finger tracing my chest was its tongue.
Quietly, very quietly, coiling around its prey as it drew near—that kind of thing.
"I'm going to give you two choices now. Listen first, then pick one. Whatever you choose, I'll follow."
"What are you even—"
"Shh."
I tried to say something about this incomprehensible situation, but her finger—the serpent's tongue—pressed against my lips and cut me off.
From then on, every choice vanished except one: to listen quietly to her words.
"One: I stop killing. For the rest of my life, unless circumstances are truly extraordinary, I'll live without hurting a single soul."
The instant I heard it, I flinched. My body froze mid-motion. Even my rebellious lips stopped. That was how staggering the news was.
Because it was everything I had always wished for. If she walked the right path, there could be no greater satisfaction.
The reason I feared her was simply, purely, her unpredictable violence. Nothing else.
Which meant I should never have considered the second option at all. There was no better choice than this.
"And the opposite: you use me in your plan."
At least, not until I heard what came next.
"Then the killing won't stop, but your odds of leaving the organization skyrocket. Whether or not someone gets murdered will be the deciding factor in whether your operation succeeds or fails."
Countless thoughts swarmed my head, but there was nothing I could actually bring out. My mind, so chaotic that the thoughts snapped off in tangled clusters, was like a forest after a typhoon had torn through it.
The felled trees were my spirit. The flowers and grasses ripped up by the roots were my thoughts and feelings.
Excessive a metaphor as it may be, my head truly was that scrambled in that moment.
"...No. That's sophistry."
"Then try saying it right now. Roughly is fine. Tell me the method you, holder of that precious information, have devised to leave the organization."
I snatched up the last remaining bouquet of thoughts and tried to argue—but even that was blocked. The White Snake rebuked me with a colder expression than I'd ever seen, and my hands shook.
Because I already knew. I knew my so-called plan was worth less than a tower of stones piled up at random.
"When everyone's gathered together, I expose the guild master's secret, and then the others will kill him on their own, and everything descends into chaos—"
"Pff. HAHAHAHA!"
She laughed, loud and deliberate. The loudest laughter I'd heard from her in ages.
"...You know, the first word out of anyone's mouth should've been flimsy—but I have an even more striking impression than that. Want to know what it is?"
The rag I'd held out was smashed to pieces, and her frost-cold voice rang hollow through the air.
It had already become an echo—reverberating inside my head as well.
I didn't answer. No—I couldn't. She'd already frozen my mouth shut, too.
"It's a contradiction."
Not a single word of it was wrong. My will had broken long ago; there was nothing left to resist with.
I met those purple eyes that felt colder than ever today.
There should have been only one pair, and yet somehow the sensation came over me that they were staring at me from every direction at once.
"You said killing people isn't right. That it's wrong. You said it with your own mouth."
I chose silence. Not because I didn't want to argue this time, but because I couldn't. There wasn't a single crack in her logic to exploit.
"And yet the very moment you're actually confronted with violence, you compromise—and hand the deed off to someone else's hands?"
My plan, the very crystallization of contradiction, was hypocrisy itself.
"Now, choose. Shall I quit killing, the way you want? Or shall I help you?"
The weighing began. It seemed level at first, but gradually the scale tilted to one side.
Was that the side where light shone? Or the side where darkness burned its whole body to light the way?
"..."
I answered, and only then did Robin withdraw her ominous air, a smile blooming back at the corners of her mouth.
The Robin I knew best. It was not a welcome sight. I could only lower my head in disgust—at myself.
"It's all right. Zeo, you don't need to blame yourself. It's fine now. I told you, didn't I?"
Watching me, Robin laughed out loud. What could have pleased her so much, I couldn't say.
"That compromise isn't such a terrible thing after all."
All I did, in the end, was quietly accept my own contradiction.