Chapter 194
The south of Berne City. A neighborhood where detached houses stood in one long row.
This was where Victoria used to live.
The last time I saw it, the streets had been full of color. Now they were bleak. Scorch marks showed where fire had swept through, and here and there I caught sight of houses with their doors and windows boarded over in planks. The ones that weren't boarded looked even more desolate: the doors that had once sealed their entryways were smashed clean through. We passed those dim, gloomy houses and arrived at our destination.
"This is it?"
"Yes."
The front door had split in half and fallen inward, and the windows nearby were shattered. It was the middle of the night, so I couldn't see well into the rooms, but the place didn't look lived in. Even so, just in case, we went inside.
"It's a wreck."
Wavery moonlight showed the interior, torn apart as if someone violent had ripped straight through it. The kitchen was the worst.
A number of memories glittered at once. Cut the logistics of a city of any real size, and the food vanishes in an instant. Besiege a city you're trying to take, and it collapses from within before very long—that old piece of strategy, and the average volume of provisions moving in and out of a city. Light spilled into all of those memories.
In other words, the place had been looted.
Was this a city out of an apocalypse story? If all anyone could do was consume what was already here, then sooner or later the survivors would have to fight one another. In a situation that dire, the losing side might still be lying around. So I searched the house, room by room.
Thank goodness.
"There are no dead."
"Ah. So that's why you insisted on looking inside?"
"Yes."
While I went through every corner of the house, I wondered what Polaris had been doing—and found she had straightened the living room. The spot where we had once sat together and watched television was cleared enough to sit. The set was thick with dust, but intact, so the house had probably been ransacked for food. From what I remembered, it was a fairly expensive thing. Which meant it would be hard to find anything to eat in this house, or in the ones nearby.
I looked at Polaris, sunk into the sofa and breathing hard. From her point of view it wasn't particularly cold, and she wasn't physically spent, so it had to be mental fatigue. That.
I went to her and took her hand.
"What?"
"Come with me."
I kept hold of her and led her to the room where I used to live. It had been meant for guests, so there wasn't much in it, and the bedding was stored farther in. In other words, it was a place where someone could sleep. I pushed her onto the bed and fetched a blanket.
"Wait—you're telling me to sleep? Now?"
"Yes. Polaris. I might be all right, but you need to sleep."
It was still early autumn, so the night wasn't all that cold. A small mercy, at least.
"I'm still fine."
"But you're exhausted. Not your body. Your heart."
I indicated that ample chest as I stated the fact, and Polaris started to say something, then never quite got her mouth open. What was supposed to be a simple errand—find someone she knew and bring them back—had become a matter of passing through a place where something vicious was underway. No different from having been in an accident. Too harsh a thing for a girl to go through.
Warmth would be coming in soon, and for the first time in a long while the cold had eased just a little, so I had room to spare. A struggling Polaris looked ready to be difficult about it, so I simply pulled her into my arms and lay down, and closed my eyes.
Polaris let out a small sigh and closed hers. Not long after, she fell into a deep sleep.
See? I told you she was tired.
If she put her strength into it, something like me would be easy to shove aside. That she hadn't made it obvious. I put my own body to sleep as well and focused a little more on Victoria's point of view.
Right now, in the center of Berne City, two factions of the Purple Twilight Society had told Victoria to come under them, and were fighting each other over it. For the record, both meant to swallow the Society and strike out on their own. One was thinking of founding a country outright. The other seemed intent on carrying on as a religion.
The people surrounding Victoria in central Berne City no longer wanted the truth brought to light. Fighting Marquis Gaston's army here had taught them how strong they were. They had power, so they meant to change the world with it. That was what they told themselves.
I might have thought the same, if I hadn't noticed the man who kept appearing in the Harvesters' sight, stoking their desire. An ordinary face, with no flaw worth pointing out. And yet he moved cleverly from place to place, crying out around anyone with power that this strength could do so much more. Sometimes he slipped in among the radicals. Sometimes he joined groups that had no intention of fighting at all. And at once he incited them.
It wasn't some terribly special method. By day, bombardment came down in scattered bursts, so most of them hid between the buildings. By night they came out, lit fires, and did the work of staying alive—making places to sleep, reinforcing their forts, searching for food. When the work was done there were long stretches when people gathered, and he wedged himself into those gatherings, said something about how hard the day had been, built a little intimacy, and then criticized the present situation. That was all it took. They caught fire on their own.
In any world, curse politicians over drinks and people blaze up. Human beings are stirred that simply. And when body and mind are both worn down, it is especially easy to resent someone else. This was what you got when that piled up and swelled past all proportion.
It would have been enough to escape Berne City in every direction, spread across the whole country, and simply tell people what had happened here. Instead they had chosen isolation, and the path of fighting.
Mmm. The corporate side was definitely several moves ahead.
What happens when, into a place like that, there appears the person who smashed the nobles the corporations had co-opted, and the command of their army? A dangerous person.
Between glimpses through the Harvesters' eyes, he went around whispering—only loud enough for those close by—that Victoria was suspicious, that she might be a stooge of the royal house. And that suspicion spread with astonishing ease. Tell it to one or two people, and whoever heard it ran straight to their acquaintances and whispered that she might be dangerous.
Of course, given the situation, warning people you knew to be careful wasn't strange. But what if you set it off on purpose, and all at once? No one could tell where it had started, and it disguised itself as the opinion of the people. It might not have worked in ordinary times, but expose them to extreme conditions for dozens of days and reason wore away, little by little.
If they had lived this way from the start, perhaps it would have been different. Most of the people here had been ordinary citizens of Berne City—city people, from the most refined city in this world.
In a situation like this, what happened if Victoria said she would join neither of the two factions with the loudest opinions? She became the enemy of both loud groups. Not one. Two. And in terms of emotional distance, Victoria was the farthest person from them, even if she had often been on the news, even if she had been the one out in front helping people when the great incident struck Berne City. Precisely because of that, the question sank in: why not me? Why does only she get to go off to the capital and live well?
What I did was tremendous. What someone else did was trivial. Plenty of people think that way. So even if, objectively, it was the same—or the other person had actually failed at the work—it looks different when you look at yourself. Seeing oneself objectively is an extremely difficult skill. Most people don't know how to use it. They have only heard the name, or they mistakenly believe they are already using it. And there is jealousy in it, too. When someone else does well, it twists the gut, and the desire to drag them down is so obvious it hardly needs explaining.
To the people hostile toward her, Victoria said she had no interest in them—that she was only looking for her family. But the people who heard it took it for an excuse, because she had not become one of them. In other words, everything an enemy says is bad. First they shout that it is a lie, deny it, and try to break her. I am right. You are wrong.
Haven't I seen this somewhere before?
Once the loudest voice started cursing her, the others followed, one by one, and cursed Victoria too.
Do you know what the most frightening part was?
Even in a situation that would have crushed an adult flat, Victoria's heart did not waver at all. If she had been tense, her breathing would have quickened and she would have sweated. None of that.
Then someone attacked. It wasn't a Harvester's power, at least. It was a stone someone had thrown. Unfortunately, even turning the memories over, the Harvesters' sight didn't show who threw it.
Not just the stone—the whole area around it was sucked into the pillar. Dozens of people who had been standing where the stone came from were, quite literally, crushed in the water.
Victoria. Killing people doesn't bother you anymore?
Heehee.
Darker still because it was night, the water heaved with a bleak glimmer.
"I can't control my strength right now. Anyone else want to get in my way?"
Victoria asked it standing still at the roadside.
Every mouth closed. They had seen with their own eyes what happened if they resisted now.
Those who had gained power in Berne City, in this world of a mana civilization, had laid hands on a technique that could stop devices running on mana, and they could use abilities that had nothing to do with mana at all. That was why they were strong.
Even a warrior still carrying arts from before the age of technology used mana to reinforce the body. What happened if you poured contaminated mana into that? At first they used the mana stored inside them, but once it ran out they drew more from outside. And what happens if you put cooking oil into a car that needs gasoline? If anything, it was more fatal the closer someone was to the warrior type. From their own perspective they could still swing a sword at the start, so they charged in full of confidence—and then they broke down at once. So they died all the more wretchedly.
The Harvesters in Berne City were confident in their own abilities. Until now, any enemy who entered the city turned into a fool on the spot. All they had done was kill people who used to be stronger than they were, and had since grown weak. And then an overwhelming superior version appeared as an enemy. Most of them looked at Victoria and were seized with fear.
Mmm. What a shame.
If she would show a little more violence, I thought more warmth might come in... At this rate, Victoria would persuade the people around her and get what she wanted.
That man who had been flickering in and out of the Harvesters' sight since earlier. Wouldn't he do something...