Beauty and the Beast — 11
"Belle!"
Victoria comes running.
I do not go to her. I stand where I am and let my eyes pass over every person in this place. If I broke into a run now, I would grow that much more human, and they would come back to their senses all the sooner. The seeds have to sprout. For my part I would like more than a few dozen of them to slip out of control, though in truth even one would be a great deal. However poor the odds, I still have to try. Leave it undone and the chance is zero. Do it, and even a hundredth of a chance appears—no. Even a thousandth.
"I take in anyone. But people, unlike me, do not forgive those who betray them. So choose, before it is too late."
I said it on purpose. Then, without a glance for anyone else, I received Victoria as she reached me.
"Hey—are you all right?"
"Yes. I'm all right. I don't die. Even with only my hand left, I didn't die, did I?"
At that, Victoria's expression goes distant for a moment. Yesterday must have come back to her: my hand lying on the ground, and Polaris seated before her, half charred black, the one who had protected her. It remains in the memories I keep, as well. A rather cruel sight. What she makes of it, only she knows.
"Even you. I thought you were dead."
"So did I."
I had not known I could return to life with nothing but an extremity spared. Nor had I known that the weapon mounted on that eight-wheeled vehicle was strong enough to melt human bone in an instant. I lived, so I will call it fortunate and leave it there.
Through Victoria's eyes I watch the people around us stare up at the sky and crawl this way and that across the ground. Fear is contagious, and they are failing to gather themselves far more easily than I expected. Did they even hear me?
Victoria takes my hand and turns back the way she came. Am I walking too proudly? Let me go here, and the ones who become the rebel band are the soldiers in this place.
That was when it happened.
Flash.
Light flares, and in Victoria's eyes my head bursts apart to one side. A considerably powerful attack. What is it? The skull is quite hard, and this went clean through it in a single stroke. Not a gunpowder weapon. Then what?
Victoria turns her gaze toward where the attack came from. There stands the man in a noble's dress who beat me, leveling a staff set with a great jewel.
"Get this water off our heads, now!"
He shouted it at Victoria. No—if the water overhead is what frightens him, shouldn't he be shooting Victoria, not me?
Ah. Of course.
If Victoria loses control as things stand, very few of the living things here will survive in any real sense. The enormous mass of water, swollen so absurdly it could draw a laugh, stretches all the way to the sky over Berne City, far to the west of here.
"All of you, take up your weapons and aim them at the girl down there! You bitch. I don't know what kind of bitch you are, but if you don't do as I say, that thing thrashing around down there dies too. Understand?"
He is the man leading this army now, and his judgment really is sharp. From the place where he stands, he is at least choosing what can be called the best option available.
At his cry, those clad in clockwork and those who can work magic close in around Polaris. Were this a situation in which magic could not be used, it might be another matter, but an opponent with strength like Polaris's is not so formidable an enemy. Fighting monsters of that kind is what the armies of this world are for. Yet every means of resistance rests on mana, and so in Berne City they died with a simplicity that was almost laughable.
Here, we are still outside the reach of the device that erases mana.
The Purple Twilight Society, rushing toward this place in the grip of a foolish fervor like children trailing after the Pied Piper, had halted the moment the sky began to flood. Under those conditions, the leader's choice—to kill one person as an example and use a hostage to force the situation somehow—is not a bad one.
I will say it again. Choose correctly at every moment, and still, if the premise was wrong from the start, you can never arrive at the right answer.
"Which is why a thing like that will not kill me. Humanity."
I shaped the words by moving my upper jaw against my lower. Nothing remained above the nasal bone, so the air leaked and the voice came out a little deflated—and for that very reason it caught the eye all the more.
Crunch.
I stamped reality back down and returned to what I had been.
Hah. Two great regenerations in the same place, and unlike the last time, the world did not crack. Is this, too, something one grows used to? I'll think about that later.
I look around at the people staring at me, soaked in horror. Among them, Victoria wears the face of someone who had thought I would be all right. So she, too, has come to understand that I am not easily killed.
"Even you, if you make a contract with me, will hand me over."
In the first world, the power of religion was so great that everything I did became the work of a god's apostle, or else the work of a god. Not here. So here I let them see me show mercy, and by my actions I persuade them that nothing they do will change which of us stands above the other.
"I do not rule. I cheer on everything a person does. If there is something you want, you ought to take it in your hand, and those who dream—I want them to see the dream come true."
Whatever that dream may be, if it is something desired, it comes free, doesn't it?
"But humanity is different. It oppresses, it abuses, it seizes."
I am condemning what he has done until now. The people of this world have a justice of their own. They know how to think a thing through and tell good from evil. They possess that ordinary nature which follows what is right and hates what is crooked. However much they belong to an army—no, precisely because the situation is this extreme—they will have to judge, if they mean to live.
Of course, choosing my side is the worst choice of all!
"I do not want humanity to die. Stay here, and the royal house will name you traitors."
Yes. The words wear the disguise of being aimed at that leader, when they are meant for the people listening around him. Which side will they decide is right? Will the seeds I sowed germinate? I look carefully over the field.
"Humanity ought to dream more."
I said it with the wish folded inside: that they would go on, without end, killing and being killed, and give their warmth to me.
Only one person has to betray. On a battlefield, a traitor is executed. That leader in particular would cut one down in a single stroke. I trust he has at least the art of keeping a body of men from collapsing when their spirits strike bottom and scatter in panic. I have faith in human malice. That is what I am aiming for.
Just one. Only one has to come forward.
And one does.
"I—I'll follow you. M-my little sister—the one who saved her was you."
Little sister? Looking at his face, something catches in memory. The day Berne City burned. A girl dying with burns all over her body, whom I made into a Harvester. He is that Harvester's family. Of course. If he belongs to the Berne City Defense Force, there is nothing strange in his family having lived in Berne City.
As the young man comes toward me, the leader shouts, theatrical, pitched so that others will hear him far and wide.
"Traitor! A traitor, in my own army—how truly it grieves me! Witless soldier! Surely you know what becomes of a traitor in an army? Summary execution!"
Flash.
Light sweeps through, and the man's upper body is torn apart.
Heehee.
Very good. He reacted exactly as I expected.
A human body is harder than one thinks. Even what is called an instant death takes time before death is actually complete, and that interval is the opportunity. A contract can still be made within it.
"I will give myself to you. In return, later, once you have finished all of it, I will take everything you hold then. How does that sound?"
Silence spreads. The man, upper half and lower half divided and fallen away to the other side, swells and turns to porcelain. Then, like new life breaking an eggshell, he crawls out through the broken porcelain, his hair dyed purple, his skin gone blue.
I step up before him and speak.
"Because I have been set inside you, it is still all right to dream."
Words as vague as a dream are understood as whatever meaning the listener wants to hear.
"Th-thank you."
He drops to his knees and bows, and among those around us someone falters and starts toward me. The moment the leader sees it, his face locks hard.
"Traitors! Deserters! Every fool of your kind—summary execution!"
Light and flame run wild, and people die. I make Harvesters of them. A Harvester wounded here can never recover again, and yet the living are so seized by the sight of people rising that they fail to truly see it, and throw themselves forward to protect me.
And in the course of that—
"What?"
A Harvester comes forth who has gained the power to meet an attack. The light from the staff scatters, helpless, as if it had popped out of a toy.
The countless warmth fallen around me checks my cold, if only a little. Only a very little. And yet, set against nothing, what a thing even that is.
Hehe.
"I will keep speaking for as long as it takes. Come to me. I will portion myself out to humanity."
Of course I know that the leader has killed too many by now for surrender to be possible. I also know that among those who bowed their heads to me there is a spy dispatched by the firm of Gunn & Rupu, and I pretend that I do not. I am chambering the next move.
Information gathers. Warmth gathers. The Harvesters increase.
This time, too, my choice was the right one.