Only the One Who Flees (6)
It was only very recently that the girl called Sakuragi Honoka had set foot in the hidden world.
As the danger surrounding Anathema Production itself had climbed, the company had incurred an obligation to brief its own people on those risks and the precautions they required. That knowledge, accordingly, had been passed on to Honoka as well, newly taken in as a Gen 3 member.
Even so, it remained nothing more than theory.
Every one of them might have been an Anathema VTuber bound up with the anomalous, but they were people who lived blended into society without a seam showing. They hid the marks of the uncanny and looked no different from any ordinary human, so none of it had ever felt real. Her older sister—eight feet was too much to claim, but seven she cleared without question—was the one whose physical traits showed the most, and that said all that needed saying.
Which was why, for Honoka, whose entire experience came down to Tsunashi Tenka briefly showing her wolf ears, this was the first time she would lay eyes on a wild-caught yokai rather than a farm-raised one (?)—and one whose monstrous features stood out in full.
"Uh……."
What had her reeling now, though, was something else entirely. The first impression these anomalous beings made, now that she had actually met them, had strayed badly from anything she expected. Four arms. A neck nearly a meter long. The outward shape itself was close enough to the yokai she had always pictured. So what, then, was different?
"Don't fuck with me… how is this thing throwing Not Responding heeeeere?!"
"Oh, shit. Save it. …Everybody, hit Control-S!"
"I already saved the second that 'huh?' came out."
…Every last one of them was hammering at a computer, looking halfway like a corpse.
For an instant the sight left her unable to tell whether she had stepped into a shadowed cave on the sacred mountain where an oni lay sealed, or wandered by mistake into the office of an IT black company.
"This is, um, uh……."
No—she had heard they were making a game. She had simply assumed they would have set up an office somewhere down in the village below. That she would ever witness a scene like this inside a cave was something she could not have imagined.
"…Is it really all right to do it this way?"
Once she had taken the situation in, that was the question that came out of her, naturally enough.
Not every anomalous being possessed a body superior to a human's, but most of those here were large of frame and looked considerably strong. And those same beings were pressing on with the work in a state so ruined that it would not have been strange if they collapsed where they sat. She could not help but worry. Even a run-of-the-mill black company didn't go this far, did it?
"Unpaid labor, twenty-four hours a day. If one can spare the wages with lesser spirits that need neither eat nor sleep, what is there not to like! Subtract the cost of equipment and the electric bill, and expenditure is nil!"
"No, what I'm asking is whether that's actually all right…?"
At Honoka's question, the purple-skinned oni who seemed to be in charge drew her shoulders back and spoke.
"It is quite all right. Every one of them is my retainer. What does it matter how I work them? Had I not taken them in, they would never even have gained a self enough to complain as they do."
"Mmm……."
"The strong devour the weak. That, truly, is the law of this mountain. Does the honored fox spirit not agree?"
"Well… it's not exactly wrong."
The oni had glanced toward Inari as she spoke, as if demanding assent, and Inari, though her expression was a little sour, nodded.
One could not quite shake the sense that the treatment was too harsh, and yet it was no lie that in the hidden world, power was justice. Above all, left to themselves these things would roam the mountain and, at the worst, bring trouble even to the humans living below it. Caught like this, their strength drawn off in exchange—for Inari, it was a state of affairs she might as well welcome.
"……Did you just say you are working these yokai for free?"
If there was a problem with that theory, it was this. By the theory's own logic, the highest "justice" in the room was the living incarnation of fair exchange.
Clack. A gauntleted hand closed into a fist.
"Er… um, honored spirit. And who is that red-haired young lady…? Her presence is, ah, terribly amiss, is it not…?!"
"A tax collector, so I hear?"
"A tax collector? Wait—gauntlets, and a red-haired tax-collection contractor? There is no one like that but an Apostle!"
The words burst from the oni's mouth in a voice little short of a scream.
Small wonder. Only now had she realized before whom she had been going on about unpaid labor.
One might think the matter unrelated to the taxes that organization so obsessed over. In truth, the "tax" of which M&Z spoke differed somewhat from what people ordinarily imagined. To put it precisely, "due payment for services rendered" was the fitter phrase. From the safety guaranteed by public order—itself maintained because a state operated an agency for the hidden world—all the way to praying to the fortune deity Mary Tepes so that a game program's random numbers would be guided in one's favor: in any field even slightly entangled with the anomalous, they saw to it that every form of compensation was settled, justly and without fail. That was both the work and the creed of Matthew & Zacchaeus—the tax-collection contractors.
Obtain labor in front of such a person without paying any particular compensation for it, and would they truly sit still? If you thought otherwise, you would be invited to look once more into those eyes overflowing with killing intent and say it again. Or else to confirm whether you were in the pitiful condition of having every organ by which a living thing senses danger—vision among them—broken past use.
"W-what is this. Shall we say the code of this mountain is so… customary law. Yes. That is what it is. No—if one has subjugated them by strength and made the bond of master and servant certain, is that not itself legitimate…?"
"……."
"E-er, so, that is correct, is it not……?"
"……."
"…If I match the minimum hourly wage under current Japanese national standards, that would suffice, yes?"
The Apostle, Kiira Korhonen, said nothing at all. She only stared at the oni of that uncanny color.
That alone was enough. The persuasion advanced with simple ease, and the oni raised the white flag.
"You need not pay wages."
"Eh—ehh?"
"Did you not say so yourself, just now? It is legitimate not to pay the value of labor to a slave owned by someone."
"Therefore, there is no need to pay compensation for it. Is that not obvious?" Kiira added, tilting her head a fraction.
"However, should one follow the precedents of several interpretations of legal principle established to date within Japan, the class of lesser spirits laboring at the present workplace are regarded as belonging to the land in question. Strictly speaking, the law deems them natural resources. If the land is public, payment for their use must be made to the Government of Japan; if private, to the landowner. I will calculate the exact sum and send it along, so I ask that you remit the funds at your earliest convenience."
"Heaven and earth are a complicated, uncanny place indeed……."
In short, put forward the pretext of slaves to justify paying no wages, and she would accept it—but in exchange, one was to pay a slave tax.
The oni had only ever heard that the woman was mad for taxes. Meeting her in the flesh for the first time, she could only look as if the whole affair were absurd.
"Very well. I shall do so. …And yet, for such a matter, you wore a rather indignant face."
She had been giving off an aura little short of killing intent, and what actually came of it was a fairly lenient demand. Honestly, from Kiira's atmosphere alone, the oni had braced for the workplace to be smashed and herself dragged away.
"Ah… that is simply closer to a matter of nature. An occupational disease, one might say."
"Nature?"
"It is much like a Korean literature major who has seen a misspelling, or an engineering student confronted with pseudoscience. Separate from the killing intent one feels, it is a situation in which one must not actually kill."
"……?"
She did not really understand. Still, she was being told she would be spared, so she decided to nod.
"In any case, it is well that this has resolved so cleanly. Truly well. I am most grateful for your mercy."
"It was not intentional tax evasion, only an error born of simple ignorance. Forgiving this much is only natural. …I would."
"……?"
The oni was staring this way with a vacant look, as if the meaning had not reached her. Watching that, Kiira Korhonen Barbara thought—
"A slave? What did you just say? I apologize. I seem to have developed a slight problem with my ears. Would you repeat that, just once more?"
—But would that Bartholomew forgive it too? So she wondered.