The Savior
"For a man they call the Savior, you're awfully eager to kill."
"Kill one man, and you might save a hundred."
At the rate my mouth was running, I was liable to save a few myself just by talking.
The Savior's inner circle had watched the whole thing, and they stayed calm from start to finish, as if this didn't even qualify as an impulsive act. Elder Heo was still sprawled in sleep. The only person in the room who couldn't settle was Dr. Myeong, and even she only fidgeted where she stood, not daring to cut in.
"Talk. Why did you kill the Special Forces Commander?"
"No idea what you're talking about."
Instead of answering, he ground the muzzle deeper into my forehead.
"Digging in like a brute won't change a thing."
"No? I can change your fate, and your friends' with it. Right now."
I had killed the Special Forces Commander. That much was true. All I'd done was spend one expensive round to send him off quick, rather than leave him to a painful death.
The place where he met his end was open ground. Room enough for someone to have been watching from far off. It was the same ground where I'd faced Thumb Man and the sniper right afterward, and given how far the rumor of that fight had traveled, there had certainly been a witness.
But this doesn't feel like pressure backed by real information.
If he'd had that, there would have been no reason to show his hand this late.
"I'm not lying. Curious? Come to the Claw Farm with me. You'll see he died in the air raid. Look hard enough and you'll find traces of the other men, too."
"And I'm supposed to believe that?"
Time to stake my life on a gamble.
"Shall we go together? If we get there and I'm wrong, I'll set the barrel to my own forehead and pull the trigger myself."
"I don't believe you. You could have killed him and dressed the scene to look convincing. You seem to know just how much the staging matters."
I'd cut nothing from the Special Forces Commander's body but a finger, and I had never moved the corpse. I left it where it lay and walked away.
Bluster, then. Just as I'd thought. He had no solid witness. The Savior was pitching this fit because he had found a flaw in my story.
Everyone gathered here, the General among them, had missed it. Only the Savior had caught the error. There had to be something that only he knew.
"How about this, then. A trade. We each ask one thing we want to know, and we answer honestly."
"A trade? I don't believe this. You trade when both sides need something. The only one with anything to lose right now is you, with your life on the line."
"Nothing you need? Then pull the trigger. Why so slow?"
I'd pushed him this far. He'd cock the hammer.
Click.
Right. Still in the palm of my hand.
"My patience is about to hit bottom."
"It hasn't yet?"
"......"
The Savior, who I figured had been close with the Special Forces Commander. He would want the truth. If I died, he would be the one left wanting. Killing me got him nothing.
No. Kill me, and he might take a serious loss.
The hand-raising vote he had postponed was set for an hour from now. A vote on whether to accept me as a friend of the settlement. The result was obvious without looking. They were already prepared to call me one of their own.
And in the middle of that, he drives everyone out and kills me? He would exhaust himself explaining it. The General would never pass up a chance to put the squeeze on him. Lose the people's trust, and he loses the war of opinion against the General.
Which meant this man could not kill me easily.
"You think killing you gets me nothing."
"Well? Starting to feel like a trade?"
The Savior let out a long sigh.
"Fine. Then I'll ask first."
Even as he said it, he didn't take the gun off my forehead.
"No. I ask first."
"......Have you lost your mind? What are you so sure of, acting this shameless?"
"I ask first."
"What could you possibly be counting—"
"Me first."
"......"
His patience had finally run dry. He turned past me and spoke to Dr. Myeong, who was trembling behind my back.
"Has this bastard always been like this?"
"Well, uh...... hmm."
Take your time.
"You can tell him the truth. This man has no intention of listening to a word you say."
"Shut up. I asked the woman."
"He...... there are times I don't understand him. No, quite a lot of times, actually—"
"So he was always a nutjob?"
"Put simply, yes?"
"The two of you are equally spare with your words."
"Dr. Myeong's a bit of a nutjob herself."
"This bastard—"
"I told you to shut up."
Worn thin, the Savior looked farther back, found Elder Heo still asleep, and sighed even deeper.
And so, with his patience dried up completely, this was the choice he made.
"......Ask first, you crazy bastard."
He lowered the gun and dropped onto the floor in a heap.
If he had answered cruelty with cruelty, there would have been no way through. The General had said as much about him.
"You ought to count yourself lucky your opponent is me. If it had been the Savior, not a word out of you would have mattered. By now either the woman or the old man would have been bleeding."
But I had never believed the Savior would turn violence on me. I had my reasons.
When I sat down facing him, Dr. Myeong sat as if she meant to hide behind me.
"Wouldn't it be wiser to have your goons step back? Too many ears for a private talk."
That was a courtesy, for his sake. Nothing good would come of too many people hearing this.
He seemed to agree. He gestured at once for his inner circle to fall farther back. He didn't dismiss them outright. They doubled as his guards.
"Ask, nutjob."
"What I want to ask is obvious."
"Which part of your story I realized was a lie. That's what you're curious about?"
"Would you be so kind as to answer?"
A snort came out of the Savior before anything else.
"Answering is easy. But you really are a certified nutjob."
"Hm?"
"This isn't a question that helps you survive here, is it?"
"Who said I was asking in order to survive? I said I'd ask what I was curious about."
"Nutjob...... Fine. Whatever. I'll answer. The part was—"
He hooked his index finger over the trigger and started spinning the pistol in circles.
This one wasn't normal either.
"Ah, this? Don't mind it. The trigger's stiff as a board."
Not normal.
"Honestly, I was impressed by your performance."
"It was an act. I'll give you that."
"The logic locked together, piece by piece. I nearly teared up myself. A postman that clever. The civil service has really raised its standards."
"You saw through a clever postman's lie, which makes you the smarter one. Is that the speech you're working toward?"
"Pfft."
He was enjoying himself immensely.
"No. I was genuinely impressed. It was a near-perfect story. I didn't find the hole because I'm clever, and not because you showed a gap."
Of course he hadn't.
"You had information only you knew."
"Right. The Special Forces Commander and I had a promise."
"A promise?"
Tsk. So that was it.
Come to think of it, the Savior's manner had turned strange right at the Claw Farm.
"If what you said happened there was really true, the commander should have left his men to pin the raiders down and gotten himself out. He would have come back alive and reported to me in person."
"Must have been that important a promise."
"I called it a promise. It was an order. There's no way the commander would have broken it."
Not a flicker of doubt in him. The trust between the two of them had clearly run deep.
This was the very reason I had expected he wouldn't lay hands on me.
"My turn to ask."
"You want to know why I killed the Special Forces Commander."
"Did you really kill him?"
"You're thinking maybe I didn't."
"A little."
The Savior knew the commander well. Which was why—
"Not the kind of story he'd tell just anyone...... I'll grant this much. It does look as if the Special Forces Commander spoke of his own accord."
He knew the things the commander had told me hadn't been forced out of him. He didn't believe I could ever have been the commander's enemy. That only made him more curious.
Why fabricate the commander's end? A man close enough to have heard something that private from him. Why?
The reason he hadn't put a bullet through my forehead was the same. With a thread like that between us, I could afford to act like a lunatic.
"I did kill him. But he was already dying. All I did was shorten the time he spent in pain."
"So that's how it was......"
"You'd have something that comes to mind."
No chance he hadn't known the commander's condition.
"The side effects of the combat stimulant."
So he had known.
"That's why I told your goons to stand well back."
"I appreciate the consideration, but they already know that much."
"Not what I'm about to say."
Was the Savior ready to take the truth?
"There's more?"
"Setting the commander aside. How the rest of the men died."
"Ah."
"No interest in the men at all, then."
"It's less that I have no interest, and more that I wonder whether I'm even allowed to care about them. Whether I have any right......"
"Hm? Weren't you close?"
"Only with the commander. The rest reported to me because they had to. I tried, in my own way, to get along with all of them......"
"Must have done plenty to make them hate you. Well. Having dealt with you, I can see the unlikable parts aren't exactly few."
The man who had answered every joke had nothing to say. He only slipped the pistol he had been toying with quietly back into his clothes.
He looked like someone in need of saving.
"I did things worth hating. I'm the one who issued the commander his drugs. When they said I was killing him, that wasn't wrong either."
"You didn't force them down his throat."
"He asked, and I got them for him. That doesn't change anything."
"They were wearing a lemming for their insignia. Weren't they men who had already offered up their lives?"
"The General made that insignia. I never wanted the men to die, either."
The Special Forces Commander I had met had seemed ignorant of the side effects. Hearing the Savior, that hadn't been the case. He had carried out the mission while forcing himself to look away.
Well. The commander hadn't been uniquely strange. Everyone has moments like that. Times you walk a road whose end you can already see.
I understood, now, what that order dressed up as a promise had meant between them.
"The promise that he had to live and come back was a kind of emotional support."
"......"
"Even while you were helping him on toward death, you still weren't wishing he would die."
"Something like that...... I felt the same about all the men. No one would believe that now."
A third party might hear it and wonder what kind of bullshit that was. It wasn't really bullshit.
Taking someone's side only has to help that someone. The Savior and the Special Forces Commander, at least, would have understood each other exactly.
When two people speak in a language only they can understand, misunderstanding has a hard time forcing its way in. The whole thing rests on boundless acceptance. The will to understand can matter more than whatever words actually cross.
"Ahem."
A rustle behind me. I turned. Dr. Myeong had leaned forward, torso stuck out, like someone with something she badly wanted to say.
"My doctor friend seems to have something to say. Mind giving her the floor?"
"I was wondering anyway. So she really is a doctor?"
"Of course."
"Among the confiscated goods, there was a government-issued ID."
"A Grade-A physician on staff at Headquarters."
"And the old man dying back there. He really is a core appraiser?"
"Longest-serving appraiser at Headquarters, I'd bet."
"What kind of disaster did they cause, for elites like that to come rolling all the way out here?"
"Finish this job cleanly, and they'll be back at their posts in Headquarters."
"I heard that secondhand. So it's actually true the government threw its desk staff into field operations?"
"Want me to perform that one for you, too? Would you believe it then?"
"The government bastards have gone mad as well."
The Savior leaned to the side and met the eyes of Dr. Myeong, hidden behind me.
"If you've got something to say, say it."
Still on her knees, she dragged herself across the floor until she was beside me.
"Uh, so, speaking as a doctor. It isn't as if I've only seen one or two patients suffering the side effects of combat stimulants."
I had pulled her in hoping she might say something useful, but the preamble had me worrying this would be nothing but noise.
"And I have never seen a single one of them regret it. I mean...... that commander of yours wouldn't have regretted it either."
The Savior tilted his head.
"I never said I thought he regretted it."
"Oh...... right."
She seemed to have fretted far too much over something I had once told her.
"When you can't tell whose tune you ought to dance to, don't take the General's side. Take the Savior's."
That had been for a moment when you had no choice but to act. It was not an invitation to stick your nose in for no reason.
Just as I was about to signal her with a look—stay still—
"Still, it was good to hear. You're a fine doctor."
"Haha...... I'm glad. I hope it helped."
She shuffled back on her knees and hid behind me again.
It had helped, by accident.
"Your friend's right. Soldiers who use combat stimulants don't regret it, even when the side effects are about to kill them. They figure that without the drug, they would have died sooner."
"The commander seemed to think the same. There are people like that."
Everyone in the Lemming Unit I had belonged to was like that. Never having to talk about those bastards again was a considerable happiness.
Anyway.
The mood had softened, so it was time to tell the truth as if it were nothing.
"He wouldn't have regretted it even after killing his men with his own hands. They were only still alive because he had borrowed the stimulant's strength."
"What did you just say......?"
"The hallucinations. In a way, those were luck. Most die before the side effects get that bad. You could call it a long life, for his kind."
"Hallucinations......"
The man in front of me became a puppet with its strings cut, all at once. He could not lift the head he had dropped.
A moment that called for a doctor's professional prescription.
"Dr. Myeong."
"Mm?"
"Even so, the Special Forces Commander wouldn't have regretted it. Right?"
"O-of course not!"
"You're sure?"
"Yes!"
"That thing you just said. Put it in words you can take responsibility for."
"Put it? How?"
"If you had to stake something on those words, how far would you go?"
"Uh...... your life?"
A short laugh escaped him.
"Oh. He laughed."
"Don't call him that. He may not look like much, but he is the Savior."
"A little late to wriggle out of this on your own, isn't it?"
"What did I even do? I've been respectful this whole conversation."
"......The both of you have been curt from the first word to the last. Stop bickering."
The Savior fumbled the pistol out again. This time it was not to threaten, and not to play with.
"The commander gave me this. The first gift he ever gave me, and the last."
"A gun, as a gift, is usually for self-defense."
"Close enough. He said the trigger was so stiff it would be hard to fire carelessly, so it would suit me perfectly."
"It really does suit you."
He looked down at the pistol and turned it over slowly in his hands. Then, as if he had decided something, he squared his shoulders.
"You're that one, aren't you. The postman who can see ahead even with his eyes covered."
The story from my first meeting with the special forces. I had covered my eyes, turned the odds inside out, and ended in a fistfight with the commander. No chance he hadn't passed that along to a Savior with a particular taste for battlefield stories.
"If you knew, you might have said so earlier."
"I wasn't sure. But the more I turned it over, the more it sounded like you. Civil servant standards may have risen, but I didn't think there'd be another talent like that among postmen."
"A compliment soaked in contempt."
"The commander rather liked you."
"Now that one's a real compliment."
When the Savior stood, the inner circle that had fallen back came forward. He waved them off again, lowered his voice, and went on carefully.
"......I have no idea what that means. Plain speech, please."
"No more chatter. There's no time. The General and the others will be back any minute."
"I'm not looking for a career change."
"Doing as I say may also be the way you leave this place alive. If you want to live to a ripe old age as a postman, listen to me."
"Being a postman until I die is a little......"
The Savior looked at Elder Heo and snapped his fingers.
"Wake that old man, too. You've even brought a doctor and an appraiser. Perfect material for a Savior."
"Any chance of a kinder explanation?"
"You don't happen to have a truly spectacular performance, do you?"
"Hm?"
"You said you could see ahead with your eyes covered. What kind of ability is that?"
"Hmm."
"I'm not asking what the ability is. I'll keep at least that much courtesy. In any case, using that ability of yours, could you give them a real performance? Something magnificent. Something that would shock every last one of them."
Did I have a choice?
"I'll need a few things."
"Things?"
"Cores. Six of them."
Looked like I had ended up in the same boat as the Savior.