Don't Cry. Don't Cry. — 13

I took a moment to set my memories in order.

I had been sure something snared me on the way home, once the afternoon classes were done. The light through the window was afternoon light, true enough. The day of the week was not.

Today was the weekend — a stretch of hours when no one would think twice if I lay in bed from morning to night. The people who share this lodging never interfere, whatever I do. And there had been no Harvester at the Royal Academy from whom I might have learned the exact time.

Only two Harvesters make the trip to the Royal Academy and back: Victoria and Kanna. Kanna, though, was in her hometown, hard at work crushing the monsters that kept flooding in, and Victoria has a habit of heading straight out the moment class ends. For me to lose the date itself, someone must have gone to a great deal of trouble planning how to drop me into a trap.

Berne City no longer has weekdays or weekends, and the Harvesters living in Brightshin have no notion of a day off. It left my head swimming.

Even now the city has gathered around the Purple Twilight Society to fight the soldiers coming in from beyond its walls. Things there have gone as far as they can go. The police are supposed to hold the inside and the army the outside, yet the army turned inward and attacked — all to bury a fact that isn't worth anything at all.

I was glad I had filled the Brightshin Slums with Harvesters ahead of time. From the way events were running, most of the Harvesters in Berne City were likely to die. Anything powerful and easy to see becomes an easy thing to crush. Oppose them, and you are dragged off whether you took part in the protests or not. That part is fine. Should anyone manage to flee, the hatred will come to a boil at just the right heat.

Hehe.

It was afternoon regardless, so I finished every assignment the Royal Academy had set, ate, and slept. Tomorrow the weekdays would begin again.

Morning came. I went to the Royal Academy as I always did.

Today, though, Merryweather's face was terribly pale, and fear sat in the look she turned on me. I had an idea why, which made it hard to ask. The fighting in Berne City was still underway, and it had grown worse since yesterday.

However strong the citizens, an army that levels its weapons at them ought to wipe them out. They had resisted anyway. They had even driven the army back, and the situation had turned grave.

First: even someone capable of powerful magic is no different from a civilian if the magic cannot be cast. This world is a civilization of magic. There are no weapons such as powder guns.

The first protest had risen to demand an investigation into the truth of the disaster in Berne City. From the next one on, the demonstrators brought their reason with them. Use a power unit too hard, and mana twists into something strange, and the twist accumulates. After that, machines that run on mana can no longer be used. That is the flaw. The units then drink mana to excess, and the mana in the air itself thins. Put another way, one can make a region where mana runs short. The protesters who had lived through the Berne City incident used exactly that.

Berne City is a place where the newest arts are piled into one heap, and power units overflow there. They set them running and turned the city into a kind of mana vacuum — and a Harvester's supernatural power works whether mana is present or not. A soldier who enters wrapped in a stout clockwork machine finds the clockwork simply stopped. There is no need, then, to kill him with any power. He becomes a coffin ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that used to move. He cannot flee. Inside the machine, the crowd stabs him to death.

The soldiers who caught on did change their tactics, and took to hammering the city with magic from far away. Most spells die on the way in. Even techniques that hurl a projectile cannot punch through a forest of buildings packed tightly enough to deserve the name Buildingrad and smash the whole heart of Berne City. So the army has been sent in, and Berne City is still fighting.

If Merryweather had heard of that, there was nothing strange in her fearing me. To make a Harvester is to say that I can produce people who call up supernatural phenomena without depending on mana at all. An intelligence service ought to be afraid. Thinking so, I stepped into the classroom. Today, too, Victoria sat apart from me.

She had found friends the moment I drew away. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠A little longer apart, I thought, would do no harm. One worry remained. Victoria does not know what is happening in her hometown of Berne City. The papers are silent about it to a suspicious degree, so it would be stranger if she did. I would rather she stay ignorant, if it can be helped. Once the matter of Berne City is finished, I hope she is not dragged off later simply for having come from there.

Turning that over, I found morning classes done and lunch upon me before I noticed. Until two days ago Merryweather would have been chattering about this and that. Today she said nothing, and only watched my mood with care. For the present I pretended not to see it.

I did not mean to pretend forever. The moment classes ended, I was going to make a new Harvester. That would show me what the kingdom intended to do about them. If they truly disliked my making more, Merryweather would stop me. If she did not, it would mean they did not regard the Harvesters themselves as the problem.

Turned to attack, what was happening in Berne City could be used to invade other countries. In an age when the world is not bound together, people go to war often. Only when the loss of fighting grows vastly larger than anything war can win do they barely manage to stop — and even then they count only the losses of whoever leads. In a kingdom, the king's. Where capital rules, the capitalist's. In a tyranny, the tyrant's. This place is a kingdom. A war could be started here with ease.

So, for the first time in a long while, I ate a quiet lunch, returned to the classroom, and sat through the afternoon lessons. Then I left the Royal Academy at once and made for a place where people fit to become Harvesters gather. This destination, too, lay inside Brightshin.

As I had last time, I meant to take the long way around, the better to set places I had never seen into my head. After a certain distance I would go almost straight, and someone might realize I was wandering the capital with a purpose. Any world has a great many people smarter than I am. So one day I go east, and the next day west. I think of it as moving without a pattern while I fill in a map, but a clever mind might still read a rule out of what I do and see what I intend. That chance is not zero. Expecting to be found out at any moment, I walked again today.

Today's road was thinly peopled. Not a press of the poor on the order of Brightshin, but set off from the streets where crowds come and go — a narrow way with shabby buildings standing few and far between. Merryweather, who would have had something to say if she were truly an escort, watched me with fear and hostility both.

As I thought. She was no escort.

And before that, a witch had attacked me. A witch by the name of Maleficent. I had managed, somehow, to reach the region lying beneath the surface of sleep and drive her off, but I would have to be careful. I am a peculiar sort of monster, and in some corner of my heart I had grown proud, certain that no magic could truly touch me. Hadn't Yuanshi Tianzun said I was as good as the opposite of mana? I had taken that for immunity. I had not known I would be weak to an attack upon the mind.

At some point the spell had taken me. Bell's body lay stretched on the bed the whole while, and still I was convinced I had lived through an ordinary day. Other people's time had stopped in the afternoon, which meant that Bell's body itself had been under the magic. Objectively, I never rose. I lay there all day and woke when afternoon came. In Bell's own sense of things, she got up in the morning, attended class, and on the way back turned toward some strange place. In the other Harvesters' sense of things, time passed as usual and halted at one hour of the afternoon. When a single body's perception is twisted, I — riding that body — share its moment.

That was why I had felt nothing amiss yesterday. It was the weekend, so Victoria never went to class at all. She stayed quietly in her room, studying the clockwork knight's art. When I met her inside the hallucination, I, looking out through Bell's eyes, believed I had also seen Bell through Victoria's. I hadn't known I was weak to a thing like this.

In the memories of Great Kun and Yuanshi Tianzun, the passages fit for a dry laugh lit up. I pretended not to see them.

I walked on through a district the light never reaches, and came at last to a quarter where the lower sort live. Not so far fallen as Brightshin. The moment I stepped in, I found someone collapsed on the ground.

A liquor bottle in his hand, his face flushed so red that anyone could tell he was drunk. One joint was missing from the fingers around the bottle, and through the split shoes his toes showed bone, stark white. A dying man. Common enough, in a place like this. I sat down in front of him.

Before I could get a word out, he lifted brows gone soft with rot, turned those clouded eyes on me, and lurched to his feet to bring the bottle down on my head.

It burst with a crash.

Hm.

Not a heartbeat of hesitation in it. The bottle flew apart, shards scattering in every direction, and with them a little of my blood and the fluid of my brain.

“Huh? What. Why aren't you dead?”

Blood ran from my head, and one side of my sight dyed itself red.

“I don't die.”

“Hah — what is this. So I've lost it after all. I don't remember ever seeing a brat like you.”

A vicious hatred, and resignation, with despair soaked all the way through. A light, hovering at a distance that only just failed to touch what lay above me.

Like this, he was farther than I could reach. Which was to say he was still good and lively.

I set my hand against his cheek. He startled as if struck, then reached out, seized a handful of my hair, and yanked.

He really did nothing but attack.

A hideous crack. Scalp and all, the skull — glass still buried in it — tore free. From the feel of it, the brain was showing.

“If you pull that hard, it breaks, you know?”

The man, my scalp dangling from his hand, stared at it without expression, then moved his eyes back to me.

“You a monster?”

“That's right. You've heard of me at least once, I'd think. No — here, perhaps I ought to say it this way.”

I straightened, and I told him.

A contract formula that everyone who had any business knowing it knew by now. It had been on the broadcasts. It had appeared in the papers more than once. Even a person with no interest at all would have heard the words at least once — at least, if they lived in the capital.

The man looked from the piece of me in his hand to my face and the wound, and nodded.

I pushed myself into him at once, and while I was at it I bent reality into the shape I wanted. Skin split and cracked, and blue skin came shoving through. A heavily muscled man stood where he had been.

A wounded soldier, discharged and thrown away the moment his body failed. Wounds and sickness taken fighting monsters along the kingdom's border, parasites knotted all through him — an ordinary human, partway through dying.

He stared down at his own hands, dumbstruck, then pulled off his shoes and worked his toes. His breath would come easily now, and he would no longer hear the screaming in his flesh. He settled back into his prime, took the stance of the soldier he had once been, and looked at me.

“What do you want from me?”

“Do what you like now. Whatever you couldn't do until today, whatever you wanted to do. Anything is fine. That's what I want.”

And as I turned his body into a Harvester, I got my regenerated body up off the ground. He watched me with complicated eyes, but once he was a Harvester I had no further interest in him.

I had been attacked, and the woman who was supposed to be my escort had not done a thing about it. So I turned, quietly, and looked back at her.

Merryweather was staring at me, her face rigid with terror.

A human would have died on the spot. I am not human, so I lived. Even so, an attack is an attack. She had no intention of guarding me whatsoever. I ought to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠mention it to the king, or to the prince — and, while I was at it, report that a witch had attacked me too.

With that in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠mind I started again toward my destination, and the man came after me from somewhere near Merryweather. She did not so much as move, though a Harvester was coming up beside her. What could she be thinking?

I took the two of them to a house where a child lay dying of sickness and hunger both, boils broken out over the whole small body, and I made that child a Harvester.

One Harvester wept and called it a miracle. One rejoiced over a body newly made well. One stared straight at me. And Merryweather watched with something very near to hate.

That was how the day ended.