Christmas and Omens
With the back of that bastard’s neck still trapped in my hand, I only tilted my head, signaling that he should guide me.
“Ghh...”
“Is this the first time a stallion like you’s been grabbed by a woman? Or were you always this cocky even in front of civil servants?”
“I’d really rather not say...”
Whack.
“Kuhk!”
Crash.
“Let’s see. Your gang’s right here.”
“Who the hell are you!”
Click.
At once, gun barrels swung toward me.
“Always the same sort, aren’t you? Hired guns, hackers, drivers... You all gathered here together to make one big score, didn’t you? Still, do you even know who I am?”
Yu Huin-rok spoke to them in a voice that was already dying.
“Th-that man is the director of the United States National Security Agency... s-so... you absolutely mustn’t... touch him...”
“Just aiming guns at me is already rude enough. You’re all going to be arrested right here. Did you think you couldn’t see the US troops stacked behind me because of this narrow entrance?”
When I casually stepped aside, there were the main battle tanks, already aiming their cannons at them at point-blank range.
“If you want to be turned to powder by a tank shell, keep holding those things. You motherfuckers.”
“I’m counting to three. Don’t drop them now, and I’ll take that as you begging me to kill you.”
“Three...”
At the Americans’ savage warning, the men finally threw down their guns. Of course, even if they had tried to fire, those weapons had all been mass-produced by Jeracle and Cleas in the first place; the moment they were aimed at me, an ID lock would have engaged, making discharge impossible anyway.
Whack.
Whack.
Whack.
“Just because you succeeded every time before doesn’t mean you’ll succeed next time. That’s the essence of induction. And when inductions clash with other inductions, the side with the superior intelligence wins. Even if that weren’t the case, why in the hell do you think I couldn’t do this to you when a Third World War has already broken out? It’s been over three months since martial law was declared!”
Then the cannon fired at point-blank range.
BOOOOOOM!
“Aaaaagh!!!!”
But what had been fired wasn’t a missile, only an explosion of brutal noise. Even that was more than enough to shatter their bones, make them bleed miserably, and plunge them into shell shock. For me, who did not possess a human body to begin with, such noise was nothing more than a meaningless nuisance.
Slowly levitating into the air, I exhaled a majestic violet mist and advanced toward them at an unhurried pace.
“I am a being fundamentally superior to the likes of you. So remember this well. When handling what is good, I will always proceed through lawful procedures and order, fostering prosperity at the level of the individual so that it may intertwine and entangle across society. But when eliminating evil, there is no need for restraint of any kind. That is your ending, your apocalypse — something you must never take lightly. Never laugh. Never live carelessly. Never look away. Always listen. The only reward for those who do not understand this is death.”
They nodded furiously, trembling with terror and dripping tears.
“No further words are needed for those who cannot grasp something this simple. So go on, and tell everyone. I shouldn’t have to waste any more breath on bastards like you. Otherwise, I’ll take your worthless lives whenever I please. People who fanaticize that if there’s something good, then something inconvenient must exist only for them — I really hate them. And that’s exactly what you pieces of shit are.”
Crack.
The instant those words ended, every one of their spines snapped under my telekinesis.
“Aaaaaaagh!!!!!”
“If any shred of good still remains in you, then you know what must be done.”
And without looking back, I left them there to rot.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Cleas side — a little later
Melin approached me with a self-satisfied smile and said, “Blending into the crowd and overwhelming people through sheer numbers — both methods are old, but effective. The problem is that once they’re broken, they’re equally finished.”
“I know. And the two are perfect opposites. Politicians don’t even think about that; in fact, they have a strong tendency to push both at the same time. Their essential arrogance belongs to the sort of people who can’t sleep unless they do. No matter how meticulously you plan, humans always have habits they can never fix. Even when those habits reach the point of endangering their own lives.”
“And there’s the selective anger disorder, too. They’ll bark and bare their teeth at people weaker than themselves, but the moment someone stronger shows up, they turn meek as lambs.”
“All they can do is shove with brute force and whine about it. Human emotion evolved in a way that always insists it’s right. Even when they discover the side effects, they still remain obsessed with progress through the community, confidently deciding without a shred of evidence that the rule about strengths compensating for weaknesses applies only to them. But real progress exists only when that’s absent. Paternalism and political correctness haven’t just produced the weakness of the powerless, anti-intellectual tendencies, and endless factionalism through the infringement of individual freedom — they’ve also utterly failed to prevent the rise of hyper-conservative concepts imitating them. If you look at it that way, you could even say they expose a genuinely negative tendency toward conservatism as a whole.”
“The whole world’s a battlefield now, after all. Even if they lose their reason, if they’re willing to stake their lives on forcing their will through, there’s nothing to forgive. Besides, these days there are practically no jobs worldwide except for experience-hire positions. So while there are cases of people in their fifties still living off their eighty-year-old parents, cases of them becoming criminals or joining criminal organizations are rare.”
“That’s old news. The world now effectively regards them, and even their guardians, as if they’ve become the criminals of old or joined criminal organizations. You’ve got trash spending all day slouched around, doing nothing but childish nonsense on games, social media, and internet boards, not to mention the drug use, and when they’re bored, masturbating like idiots. Is there even a single difference between them and the criminals who deserve to die? Not by our standards, of course. But ordinary people have no basis for saying otherwise. Deep down, they unthinkingly fanatically believe that such a difference must exist.”
“Who said otherwise? I mean, peace only comes when everyone either throws away all weapons, or one side possesses a weapon that is absolutely invincible.”
“Half wrong. Even if everyone throws away weapons, that doesn’t mean fists and feet stop working, does it? If you walked into a sauna and found a muscular giant sitting there bare-chested in a chair, silently staring at you, wouldn’t you feel intimidated? You can kill people with bare fists and bare feet just fine. And from the start, humanity is an instrumental existence unlike the other animals on Earth; if you just pick up rocks or farm tools for resistance and gather in a crowd, that becomes an army. How can the people who can’t even preserve the peace of one nation speak about world peace?”
“Oh... yeah, I guess so....”
“In the end, no fight breaks out when the hierarchy of power is clear. If it isn’t clear, then people fight to determine it.”
And so the matter at the Rio Grande came quietly to an end. In the first place, it was glaringly obvious which side had first been blinded by rage and humiliation into committing insult and crime; those swept up by the mob psychology of the hippie terrorists were, beyond question, accomplices. And with martial law already declared, they should have counted themselves lucky not to have been killed by the bullets or missiles the US troops had fired at the outset. In the end, the result — paid for with a single gender — became a lesson that anyone foolish enough to provoke the United States would be made to pay any price.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Jeracle side — Mephauric, Earth time, December 25, 2045; 5:00 a.m. by Mephauric time; Waskiye Niebo
Step.
Step.
Creak.
“Ah, Minister, you’re here?”
“Yes. I hear Mr. Silverin Howard and Mr. Mike Jim volunteered for the UN forces seven months ago. And they’ve trained well since then, enough to be assigned to the front-line units.”
“They did? I’m happy about that too.”
A normal human might not have read beyond that and simply asked why I was pleased that they had volunteered. But I was not normal; a statement like that was enough for me to grasp the meaning without difficulty.
“Given that I was already quite fond of the bread here, and considering that those two were worried about you from the start — not just because you’re a baker, but because they knew you’d be struggling to run this place alone — then when you say you’re happy, you mean you’re glad that you’re managing things well enough that Mr. Silverin Howard and Mr. Mike Jim can serve in the UN forces without trouble.”
“Yes, that’s right. Lately the number of customers has been dropping a bit too, so it’s not hard to tell.”
“Because there are that many more people coming here for rations, of course.”
“Exactly. Which is why I’d like to ask you for a favor.”
“Go on. I can guess what it is, but still.”
“Please don’t go out of your way to tell other people about this bakery.”
“Understood. And you know this too, don’t you? These days, among soldiers as well, there’s a tendency to hold Christmas Mass on Christmas.”
“What? Seriously? In the middle of this war?”
“Yes. But don’t worry. It isn’t that they want to enjoy themselves personally; rather, they want to protect people safely so that everyone else can enjoy themselves. They’ll spend the entire twenty-four hours of Christmas on external patrol.”
“Well, easing up a little while still keeping things safe is important, that’s true. But if you think about it the other way, doesn’t that also mean they won’t have as much time to watch for internal enemies?”
“It does. That said, your finances shouldn’t be so tight that you have to keep working even on Christmas, should they? If things were truly that bad, Mr. Silverin Howard and Mr. Mike Jim would already be here helping again. Since they’re not, how about closing shop for Christmas and doing what you really want to do this time of year?”
“Well, all right. Then maybe I’ll try being Santa Claus?”
“Do that. Of course, there are very few people in this camp younger than us, but precisely for that reason, if you could become a model who symbolizes dreams and hopes they’ve never been able to have, there would be nothing better.”
Of course, the fact that she was in truth a throne angel of humility, and the reason she had not wanted the bakery advertised in the first place, was that once her work was done she would reveal her true form and act almost like a vigilante, rescuing and caring for people on the battlefield. But even though humanity could recover its dreams and hopes through her overwhelming ability, they could not possess the same aspirations and humility she did. So, in the end, she was content to live at least somewhat in this modest way. She, too, agreed that — just as with me and Cleas — deciding another’s fate was nothing more than the work of trash, something one should never do. It was only that, unlike me and Cleas, whose coldness came from the fact that we scarcely possessed the very concept of emotion, she was far more pure and vividly maidenly.
And so she donned a Santa Claus outfit and personally carried enormous piles of presents from the homeland, handing them out to people herself. For an ordinary person, it would not have been strange to collapse from exhaustion and die, but as a throne angel her physical capacity was far beyond the point where simply roaming an entire planet could wear her down. Rather, she was able to make good memories without so much as a single drop of sweat.
Michelle side —
Helping people like this, just like Santa Claus, was one of the things I always wanted to do... but if I’d suddenly done it alone, I’d have looked suspicious, wouldn’t I? The transcendent power I’ve gained would be hard enough for people to accept as it is. Jeracle... wouldn’t know this either, would he?
As cold and serious as he always was, the story behind him, along with the fact that he always showed a certain amount of kindness here, had slowly made him feel familiar to me. Even so, because that feeling surfaced only now and then, I hurriedly pushed it aside and focused on my own work. Reminding oneself in this way is good only for meditation; when dealing with the affairs of the world, it only becomes a source of laziness and emptiness. What I needed now was not emotion, but resolve.
“Ah, thank you!”
“Merry Christmas!”
“That you are alive means you have the chance to spit those gifts back out and turn them into prosperity.”
“I hope what I’m giving you won’t merely be something to commemorate this one day.”
“A path is something you carve out for yourselves based on the goodness you already possess. And it shines brightest precisely when others insult you and say there is no path meant for you.”
“There is no such thing as a correct decision made by thinking you’ve taken rational action when, in fact, you merely acted out of anger. Inside your hearts, an ignorant level of admiration for reason and the arrogance that whatever you do must be right always coexist. There is no such thing as justified bullying. Rather, people invent reasons in order to bully. There is no such thing as good bullying or bad bullying in this world.”
I know very well what Jeracle’s position is, so rather than feeling left out that I couldn’t do this with him, I felt honored. This romantic, beautiful atmosphere in the snowy square existed for everyone to enjoy, and all I could do was be grateful that he was the one protecting it.