Chapter 220: The Dream That Was Lost — 15 (End)
No one accepted the goodwill I offered. Of course they didn't. Lives were hanging in the balance — what could possibly change just because a single monster barked? It only made them angry.
It wasn't as if no one among the protesters in front of me recognized me. But there were no Harvesters. Which is to say, there was no one who could properly prove what I was capable of. Perhaps that was why they reached out and seized me.
"If it's you, those bastards will have to listen to us."
"I'm sorry. Sacrifice yourself for us."
A rough hand came down on my shoulder.
"You didn't do anything wrong."
That was what I told them. Of course, no one truly heard me. I had done the least of what I ought to do. So it was all right to set that thought aside now, wasn't it?
I walked straight toward the sharpened wooden stake. The point drove clean into my chest, and the man's face twisted at the sickening give of it.
"Huh?"
A wet puncture. It had pierced the heart dead-on, and blood sprayed forward. The person standing in front was drenched in a sudden fountain of it.
"Aaaaah!"
The one actually soaked in blood only stood there looking dazed. It was the woman beside them who screamed.
"What do you think you're doing!"
The man next to him grabbed the one who had stabbed me by the collar and shouted.
"I— no, I wasn't trying to—"
The beastman shook his head, flustered. But no one believed him. I had picked the most vicious-looking one for exactly that reason.
Blood ran in streams from the wooden stake buried in the center of my chest, and at last, in his panic, the man lowered the hand still clenched around it. The smell of blood spread in every direction.
"Belle. What are you doing?"
From behind me, Victoria asked in a perfectly calm voice.
Contrary to what I had expected, though, no one came this way. The smell of blood is foul, yet once it seeps into the nose it easily paralyzes reason. Let confusion break out even once, and they would kill and be killed, one after another, like dominoes. That was what I had believed. It didn't happen.
Mm. Starting a fight so I could lap up a little warmth — a failure. And paralyzing Victoria ahead of time — a failure as well.
I stayed on my feet and pulled the stake from my chest. With a wet sound, blood poured out in streams. At the same time my skin turned whiter still. Any living creature would already have been dead. In truth, no blood was reaching the brain cells, and the muscles were slowly going slack.
But life isn't all that important to me.
The vessel is.
"People can't stop unless there's blood and a corpse laid out in front of them, can they?"
"No — even so, how could you go and do it like that."
Ah.
I had been wondering why no one was moving, and when I turned around I understood. Behind Victoria, an enormous column of water was spinning round and round, swelling larger and larger.
Well, of course. Once a force that overwhelming is on display, a person dying is hardly the problem.
"Is your life that cheap?"
"Didn't you know? As far as I know, at least, I can't die."
Which means it is the cheapest thing there is. Who would find value in something they hold without limit? All the more when it is something you want to throw away, and cannot.
"Victoria, you've turned into a complete thug."
"If I hadn't done this, the soldiers back there would have thrown magic this way. I might be fine, but to anyone else it would have looked like a horrific murder."
Mm. At least for now, she still had enough reason left to use her power for someone else's sake. What she had gone through in Berne City not long ago seemed to be sitting heavily in her mind. That was why she hadn't been so shocked when I died.
To take a situation that ought to have fallen into chaos, and stop it by seizing everyone's attention with an even greater force. That is the taste of power. Sweet. Unfortunately, she had used it to prevent the chaos. Leaving well enough alone would have been better for Victoria.
Anyway. My flesh was beginning to creak, so I pressed down on reality and regenerated the wound.
"Shall we go?"
"Even the clothes mend…… Right. Let's go."
Victoria looked over my clothes and started walking. At that, everyone cleared the path ahead of her. Of course, not a single person stepped aside because they thought they ought to. A thin stream of water shot straight ahead and ripped sideways with a tearing sound, carving open a road. Some people did try to resist. But they were shoved aside by the water the way one is shoved by an iron bar.
In the end, none of it had been enough to stop her. Thinking that, I followed after Victoria.
We cut through the crowd and went on for a long while before the line of protesters finally ended. A few people trailed after us from behind, whatever it was they were after, but the moment Victoria flicked a glance back, they halted mid-approach. No — they couldn't move. Rings of water were sloshing around their ankles. Try as they might, they could not give chase.
She was using her psychic power as if it truly were her own body. The more she used it, the more naturally it came to her — in that sense, it was like flesh. No. Wasn't she using it even more freely than her body?
What is a psychic power, anyway? Strangely, I have no memory of knowing anything about this. Even Daegon and Yuanshi Tianzun, who hold the most information of all, come back with nothing when I search. Psychic power remains lost in the fog.
Thinking that, I followed the main road toward the Clockwork Knight School.
Dinnertime was still a long way off, yet half the sky over the capital was filled with murky smoke. The weather had turned cold enough that sleeping outdoors would freeze a person to death. Even in winter this country stays mild enough, by the yearly average, that the water does not freeze — but for the people living here, it was cold all the same.
Lower my gaze just a little, and there were buildings with their windows boarded shut, and shops whose frames had been reinforced with iron plate. It wasn't that the streets were empty of people. They simply weren't standing there to buy anything. They stood with paper placards hung around their necks, written with pleas to be given work. Many of them were grimy from being unable to wash. Every face was bleak and sunken, and together they occupied the streets from one end to the other.
We crossed a city like that. It was hard to believe this was the capital of a nation. And only two months had passed, yet the price of food had tripled. The shorter a thing's shelf life, the higher its price had climbed.
In step with the mood of the city, Victoria's expression hardened little by little. Not because a place like this was difficult to walk through with one's sanity intact. Because it was not white smoke but black smoke rising from one particular place. A place Victoria knew. The place we were headed, just now, to study.
Victoria's steps grew faster and faster. Before long she left me behind and broke into a run toward it.
I knew what was happening at the Clockwork Knight School. So rather than hurry to catch her, I kept walking at my own pace.
Right now the Clockwork Knight School was a shambles. Around lunchtime, the citizens of the capital had smashed through the school walls. Worn down to the bone, they poured in with sticks and began beating everything to pieces. Of course, the students still in the middle of their studies were included among the things to be beaten.
The citizens' logic went like this. Because of you, we shiver in the cold and starve. Because you made those garbage clockwork machines, we suffer like this. The Clockwork Knight School has stood here since long ago, so all of you are evil, and we are the messengers of justice come to put you down.
Strictly speaking, this was not revenge.
It was venting.
They needed something to be angry at. With the economy plunging toward the bottom, they needed someone onto whom they could shift the blame for all of it. By rights that culprit should have been the king, and whatever the facts, it should have been the king who took the abuse. But this country had handled the press far too well. It had made three companies into the enemy, explained in detail what abnormalities the clockwork machines they built were causing, and propagandized with perfect clarity exactly whom one ought to hate.
Yet all of that appeared only in the newspapers and on the broadcasts. The people could not feel it. All they could feel was the cost of living climbing until they could not manage even a single meal — never mind raising the temperature of houses growing colder by the day.
Life was turning more horrific every day, and the thing they wanted to resent was too far away. So they manufactured a scapegoat they were permitted to beat to death, naming it the source. They designated a target on which they could take revenge with their own fists. Not the nobles, still beyond reach in places far too high, but a school attended by commoners like themselves. A place tied to the clockwork machines that had made this cold, hungry reality.
What the place actually was, whether it truly bore any guilt — none of that mattered. It did not even matter that this was where they carried out the research to improve the faulty clockwork machines and return people to the lives they used to have. There was a suitable target onto which they could pour their feelings, and so the citizens went to the Clockwork Knight School, dragged the teachers and students out and killed them, smashed every last thing, and burned it all.
Several Harvesters were among them, so I knew it well. Every one of those citizens, as if mad, dragged out students who had once been the children from next door and tore them to shreds. Man or woman, old or young, they looked upon the corpses and stamped them underfoot. As if doing so would turn a society that had become horrific in the space of half a year back into what it was.
Of course, the students there did not simply take it. They had clockwork machines. Some of those machines serve as heavy equipment in this world. They rode them and fought. Blood sprayed. People died.
What I had tried to create earlier was happening here. They had killed their fellow citizens, so now there was no one left to stop them. No — there were some, but they were immediately made into people who were not. They were murdered. And so they died.
Once the traitors had been dealt with that way, the rest flew into a rage to the tops of their heads that their righteous own had died, and attacked all the more savagely. Anyone with even the slightest connection was seized and tortured to death.
Yes. This is what humans are.
They lay their own misfortune at someone else's feet. They shift the blame, and with that as their reason they beat the other to death. The pleasure to be had in that moment is considerable. It is a pleasure learned long, long ago, back when they first began to gather into groups, for the sake of keeping those groups intact. Remove the enemy of the group, and the group lives.
An instinctive pleasure. It isn't a bad thing. Without a reward of this kind, no one would ever have taken up a weapon for the sake of the group. Groups that lacked this reward fell apart and perished. This is a product of evolution. A trait acquired by that social animal, the human.
If whoever was acting as the leader here were to set them straight, there might still be some chance of turning their hearts……. But the security forces were not working hard to hold this place. Perhaps they simply lacked the troops to spare. The greater part of their strength was stationed around the Royal Academy.
And so, where there was no one to stop them, they killed one another and died. Victoria arrived at a place where nothing burned but meaningless hatred.
Her face drained white, she looked at the teacher who had carved time out of the day to tutor her even after she transferred to another school. Strictly speaking, what had been the teacher was a lump of meat crushed flat against the ground, and she stared without a word at the citizens trampling it — laughing brightly, chattering, dancing.
Victoria had come face to face with a reality in which only emotion is right.