Don't Cry. Don't Cry. - 4
I stopped by Victoria's dormitory with her, and then we went back out.
From the main gate I followed the road as it ran on and on. Grand mansions rose to either side, but they shrank little by little before long, and the shops began.
Victoria walked this way about once every three days, so the route was deeply familiar. In truth, every path the Harvester traveled with any frequency was familiar to me.
I followed her, and I knew where we were going before we arrived. A good smell drifted along the street, and the people coming the other way each carried food in their hands. The place we came to was an alley where the restaurants had gathered in a cluster.
It was somewhere she used to slip out to now and then, back when she attended the Clockwork Knight school. She hadn't been entirely without friends. She had always been a hearty eater, and after she gained her power her appetite had roughly tripled. The thing devoured an absurd quantity of calories. Which was to say it was not a power that created something out of absolute nothing. It did far more work than the calories that went into it, of course, but magic was the same.
Victoria painted a smile across her whole face and ran into the alley. I followed her in.
The moment I stepped inside, countless eyes locked onto me. Doubt, jealousy, hatred, interest — every kind of feeling tangled together in those stares.
Am I really that strange?
"Oh my. You didn't put that on on purpose? An outfit like that. It isn't something an ordinary person could wear, is it?"
Merryweather said it from beside me, pointing below my neck. She was smiling, but she couldn't hide the look of someone taking stock. Working out what I liked and what I disliked was only natural, if you were Intelligence. Gathering details like these and reading a person from them was called profiling, and that meant cooking a person down into a state that was easy to know. I had no wish to show weaknesses in myself that I didn't even know I had, so it grated a little.
The outfit, though.
Now that I looked, there was a difference. This was a reasonably well-off neighborhood, and still the cloth was of another quality. I didn't care what I wore, but people dressed according to their station. Even Kanna alone knew every sort of fabric, and the clothes made from them. She didn't merely know the kinds. She had memorized how what a person wore changed with the occasion, with their place, and with the hour. That was how much clothing mattered to human beings — a culture by which you revealed yourself and came to know the one in front of you. I would use it if I needed to. That was for when I stepped outside and meant to exert influence.
With someone calling herself a bodyguard at my side, what was anyone going to manage besides theft, at most? Thinking that, I walked toward Victoria, already well ahead of me, buying food and packing her mouth full of it.
"Bell, want some?"
"I don't eat much."
"Right, you don't. You really ate almost nothing at home, either. That's why your height. Your height. Mm. It's not that you're small. Yeah."
She must have remembered the day we first met, halfway through saying it.
"Isn't Bell small?"
Merryweather asked from the side.
"This kid. When I first met her she was about twenty-five feet, wasn't she? If anything, this body is the one that feels off. What was it she said? That it resembles the body she used before……. Huh? Why did I say that?"
Victoria clapped a hand over her mouth. She glanced at me to see how I'd taken it, and I shrugged. I couldn't sense it myself, but there was a good chance Merryweather also had some function that loosened a person's tongue. Twisting cognition was not something you could do only in particular places, like the Royal Academy. You could do it outside as well. This.
I looked at Merryweather.
I couldn't see any object that seemed to carry a function like that. Was she hiding it inside her body? It was a technique I wanted. Anything that worked the mind had a great many uses. But the mere fact that it could be used was a threat to human beings. It became something unclean, so not knowing might actually be better. Above all, even if I took the memories of the Merryweather standing in front of me, I would most likely learn nothing about the tool except how to use it. I needed the side that made the thing. So I would have to give it time. I would spend my days like a thoughtless fool, powerless, until every suspicion had faded and they finally began to use me. It was the only method I had ever succeeded with, so it was the only thing I had to offer.
Yes. I was confident I could succeed.
"It's something I'm allowed to say, that's all. Victoria. I've never hidden that I'm a monster."
I answered as if it were nothing, as if I had simply given Merryweather a proper reply. I disliked concrete figures. With a number attached, I stopped being whatever shape of monster each person imagined and became an object that was easy to grasp. That I was allowed to say it, though, was true enough.
"More to the point, Victoria. Didn't Beatrice scold you last time for eating too much?"
"Th-this is just a once-in-a-while thing, so it's fine! And I don't gain weight, because of my power!"
Even so, I had no intention of taking it from her. There was no need to clutch the box of fried food to her chest and turn it so I couldn't see.
"Oh my. You don't gain weight?"
"Ah, you don't know about Mali? This."
The moment Victoria spoke, a small droplet formed in the air. It moved this way and that, became a little picture, and then turned into the name Mali. And then, softly, moisture returned to air that had dried in an instant.
"After I use this, I get incredibly hungry."
Victoria used it every day. When she washed in the morning and the evening, and usefully, here and there, through the rest of ordinary life.
"Wow! It really doesn't use a single drop of mana~ How does that even work? It shouldn't be possible. How strange."
Merryweather stared hard at the place where the droplet had vanished. Her pupils were fixed, so perhaps this person could see mana with her eyes. A powerful mage? Or perhaps the perception-twisting was no special object she carried, but her own technique. No. That was odd. A mage that strong, serving as an Intelligence operative?
Hmm.
I could raise my estimate of this kingdom's level a little. By the scale of development Daegon had made for invasion, it became a slightly troublesome world. Taken by itself, of course, it was still a level the vanguard Daegon had prepared could defeat without much difficulty. The problem was that in this world, nature had been vaster and stronger than the civilization spread across it. There had been many monsters that even Daegon's vanguard could not handle, let alone people. Put another way, this kingdom was humanity, making a civilization in a world where monsters like that lived.
Of course, analysis of that sort didn't let me do anything with it. Still, I meant to keep at it. If I did everything I was able to do, surely it would be of use someday.
I am diligent.
Meanwhile, leaving Merryweather to mutter strange words and fix her gaze on the empty air, Victoria smiled with her whole face and ate. Then she felt me looking, broke off a piece, and held it out, but I refused.
Wondering if staring made her uncomfortable, I looked around. A gaze would land on me now and then and slip away again. I was that much of a curiosity. But when, among those looks, I found worry, I turned my eyes up to the sky.
In the world, surely, there was a handful of good people and a handful of bad, and between them a great many who swayed in the middle. That was the world I knew, and the model of humanity on which I rested the assumption that if I gave myself, I could keep receiving warmth.
When I lowered my head, the alley was still full of people coming and going, and of good smells. A bad person would have a hard time coming to a place like this. For now, this far still lay within the reach of public authority.
That was when I noticed someone approaching me with malice.
A child exactly my size. Set beside Victoria, three years younger, five at the most. And a little apart from the child, one grown man wearing the same expression. Not that their faces were alike. They were looking at me with the same feeling.
The man came on while forcing his eyes toward somewhere far away, moving as if he meant to claim he hadn't seen me because I was short. I thought we would collide. His body swayed as if we might — and then he simply brushed past.
In the gap while the man drew the eye, a small hand reached for me and seized a button on my clothes. A button made, in its way, of precious metal.
Tok.
The hand pulling at the button dropped to the ground. I couldn't tell what had cut it. The cut was clean.
"Mm. That won't do, little one."
Blood ran in a steady thread from the severed face.
"A-aaaaagh!"
Merryweather ignored the child's scream of pain as if it were nothing, and lifted the little severed hand.
"I'm on bodyguard duty right now, you know? You can't just go stealing other people's things."
Then, as if showing it off to everyone watching, she held it up, spread the fingers, and drew my button out from among them. She pinched the button in an exaggerated pose and brought it to me.
"I made the mistake of failing to stop it before it was stolen, but since I've caught it like this, you'll overlook it, won't you?"
I took the button.
The alley had gone quiet. There was only one sound left: the child, gagging now, clutching the severed wrist. The one who had blocked my path was gone the instant the child screamed. So. This was that. A common stroke of misfortune, and the righteous judgment carried out by one who held power.
I had accepted the button.
"Yes. I'll overlook it."
What was I supposed to do about the torn clothes? I was still turning that over when Victoria came this way with anger on her face.
"Merryweather. Cutting off a child's wrist is far too cruel."
Victoria glared at her and planted herself square in front of her, as if she meant to fight.
"Oh? That's strange. Doesn't the august law of the land say a thief has their wrist cut off, regardless of age?"
Merryweather asked it slyly, as if Victoria were the one saying something odd.
Step. Step. At an unhurried pace she came up in front of Victoria, drew a finger along the point of her chin, and asked.
"Rather, bringing Bell to a place like this all of a sudden. You wouldn't happen to have some other intention, would you?"
Ah. I knew this one well. The planting of suspicion. She was trying to isolate me. Had the royal house finally begun to think of using me?
Hehe. To be the one it was done to, in person. A laugh rose in me.
Then I ought to take Merryweather's side.
"That's right. Victoria."
I picked up the child, soaked through with the sweat of pain. About twenty kilograms. In the units they used here, some fifty pounds — very light. So that I might be isolated all the further, just as Merryweather wanted, I took the child by both shoulders and lifted them high. I hadn't even gripped that hard, and still a terrible groan spilled out. I brought the child around in front of Victoria, where she could see easily, and asked.
"What should we do about this?"