Illusion
Tin Can had said it.
Rain.
The salvation they had truly needed.
"This... is it a coincidence?"
"Because we offered a sacrifice?"
"You think that actually makes sense?"
"Oh, and using a Core without laying a hand on it does?"
Natural reactions. None of them could have imagined an ability that fired by consuming a Core. I had never seen a Core ability with conditions like that either, outside my own. By now, there was no chance the General would keep his mouth shut.
"Of course! This is coincidence—coincidence! I will not tolerate this performance. It's a fraud!"
He took the bait beautifully. Before I could get a word in, the brother and sister stepped forward first.
"You dare! Insolent wretch!"
"Th-that's right! Fraud, in front of—in front of whom do you think you're standing! Insolent!"
They were well and truly swept up.
"Brother, Sister. It's all right."
I quieted the two of them and eased my right foot to the side. The slip that had been pinned under my sole all along came into view.
"The sacrifice was offered by the temple's goo—by the temple's clever priests. They made a wish along with the offering. What they wished for is written on this note."
One of Tata's lackeys strode over, snatched the note up, and spread it open toward the crowd.
Please, let it rain.
The General froze like a statue of Justice, scales in hand.
Rolling along just right.
Staging, as ever, was the whole of the thing. I could have announced from the start that I would bring rain, and used the Core after. A twist lands harder. I had left just enough room for it to look like chance, drawn the General out into the open, and dropped him with the counter. The note was the finisher—paying him back in the very coin he had used.
The contents of the parcel he had sent to drag a Postman out.
You have been kidnapped.
That was the flavor. Sweet.
"Wait, so he really is a god?"
"He doesn't look like one..."
Nothing said a god couldn't be built like a person. Even so, it was better to draw the line somewhere sane.
"If I put it in terms you can grasp, call me an agent of God. Something along those lines."
I wasn't entirely sure what I was saying myself. In a moment like this, though, whatever fell out of my mouth would pass for sense.
"Gods were real?"
"We're standing in a temple. What are you even saying?"
"It wasn't just for show?"
"Hey. You blasphemous little shit."
Off in the corner stood Tin Can, wearing a thoroughly stupid face. For a second I thought he was looking at me. Look closer, and his eyes had no focus in them at all. Soul gone clean out of him. However bright the man, he wasn't going to find a seam in this performance.
"You. Tin Can."
"Yes? Huh? No—yes?"
"You seemed like a sharp one. What do you make of all this?"
"Uh. Well..."
Tin Can, clever in all the ways that did him no good. He seemed to catch dislike from every side, but everyone here would still grant that he was bright. Borrow the mouth of a neutral third party—neither the General nor the Savior—and the whole mess would tidy itself.
"Part of me wonders if it's a Core ability, but—"
The first possibility anyone would reach for.
"I've never heard of a Core ability that controls the weather..."
Never having heard of a thing was no promise it didn't exist. Gain a rare ability, and the ordinary move was to hide it. Rumors of the I saw such-and-such an ability somewhere variety spread fast, and the owner of a rare power got pinned down almost at once. I had never told a soul about the ability to see probability, and I had never heard of anyone else who had gained it, either.
The General, of course, did not let the opening pass.
"Not knowing a thing doesn't mean it isn't there! There could be any number of ability users who command the weather! Nothing in this world is absolute!"
"Tin Can. Finish it."
Don't shrink. Say the whole of what you think.
"More than anything, a Core nobody touched losing its power, and the rain arriving at that exact moment—it's too neat... But maybe what matters isn't whether he's really an agent of God. Maybe what matters is that it's raining. Right now."
He didn't disappoint. Straight through the heart of it.
"So even if this is, like the General says, just some Core ability we never knew about—rain is still more than welcome."
"He's not wrong."
"A human who can make it rain is a god and a savior. What else would you call it?"
That would do. Time for the last stroke.
"The brother and sister here are a capable Core appraiser and a doctor. Once the show of hands is finished, I promise you they will help you. Regardless of the result."
"They do hand over exactly what's needed, clean and precise, but..."
"And because they're that precise, it gets suspicious all over again."
"He said regardless of the result. We don't lose anything either way, do we?"
"That's just talk. You really think it won't matter?"
"Enough of the blasphemy. Has it not occurred to you he might truly be God's agent?"
"That bastard's swallowed it whole."
"It really is raining. What more do you want?"
And right then, of all moments—
"Huh? Did the rain stop?"
The sky cleared.
Hell of a sense of timing.
Think it through, and there was nothing strange about it. My ability didn't manufacture the impossible. It made the unlikely—but possible—come to pass. The condition I had held in mind this time was for the rain to last as long as it could. This place, though, had been locked in a brutal drought. This much was probably the limit.
"Calling down the weather's grace is no easy thing. The sacrifice was a mere six Cores. For that, it rained plenty."
Where the water ran short, I would make up the difference by running my mouth.
"This is... delicate."
"Six Cores, and he calls that mere?"
"Give you a hundred and you still couldn't make it rain."
"It's genuinely hard to call."
"Keh-hah! Agent of God, and this is all he's got?"
The General's rap began.
"A miserable little spit of rain changes nothing. A sacrifice? So what. A Core loses its light without a hand on it? Fine. I'll grant you it's a curious show. And that's all it is. Six Cores spent, and God blows his nose once and calls it finished? Well, the show was entertaining, so if you want it, I'll set you a stage on a regular schedule. How about it, Mr. Song-and-Dance?"
The General looked as if he could use a stage himself. Judging by the pitch of that voice, he and Hocheol would get along. In any case, I had done everything I could do. As he said, a brief fall of rain couldn't grow the settlement's crops, and he wasn't wrong that it hadn't earned the price of six Cores.
So nothing would change?
Not quite.
From here, the choice—
"General. For a Hyper-Democracy, you do an awful lot of talking."
—belonged to the crowd.
"Ha! Just what I wanted."
The General raked his eyes over the press of bodies. Half of them, at the least, would be his. The trouble was that the other half would not all be Tata's. A good number would be holding to the middle.
"This show of hands should have happened sooner. Sorry for breaking the flow. Then let's proceed with the vote that was scheduled."
Tata, too, studied every face in turn. Even so, his side could be counted as mine. Anyone who followed the Savior was likely to follow an agent of God as well.
"Agent of God. No—Postman!"
It was the vote I had proposed, but the last shout had fallen to the General.
"Anyone who thinks the Postman is our friend, raise your hands! Anyone who doesn't, don't move a muscle. Stay exactly as you are!"
And with that, the performance came down.
"I heard Teacher went out on an operation with a doctor and a Core appraiser. I'm a little worried."
At the sound of Min Yeo-jin's voice, the short hunter's ears twitched.
"Is that strange? I heard a Postman always gets sent in at least once."
"That's true, but I heard Postmen don't go out until the second wave. I was wondering why he left so soon. First in results—maybe they're managing him specially."
"Well... maybe? But how did you even hear that? You're on the training ground every day."
"The doctor and the Core appraiser who went with him are famous. Plenty of people saw them leave. If it reached my ears, everyone knows."
The hunter scratched at the side of his nose. He had only ever cared about the Postman; he knew nothing about the two who had gone along. They were familiar faces inside Headquarters, the sort nearly everyone recognized—but only by the standard of people who had lived at Headquarters a long time. A hunter who had only just become a trainee was bound not to know them.
"It won't be an easy mission for Teacher, either."
"Why? Haven't you always said he's incredible?"
"The doctor's famous for not listening to anyone, and the appraiser's famous for not being able to hear them."
The hunter barely choked down the laugh that tried to burst out of him.
"Hm? What's wrong? Stomach bad?"
"Ah, yeah. A little. Feels bloated."
"Want me to rub your back?"
"Ah—aah! No!"
The refusal left his mouth first. Regret came flooding in right behind it, and while he was wondering whether to just ask her to rub it after all—
"But there's a bigger problem than that..."
Min Yeo-jin let out a sigh so long and deep it seemed her insides might come with it.
"What problem? What is it? What is it?"
What she drew out, creased and crumpled, was a map.
"Since I became an instructor I hardly go outside, so I've lost my sense of the ground. I got myself a map. I wanted to check Teacher's mission route."
Tap.
Min Yeo-jin's finger came down on a point roughly halfway between the Human Meat Factory and Headquarters.
"See this mark?"
"They say there's treasure buried there?"
"I got the map from a Postman, and the Postman marked this by hand—"
Tap. Tap.
The finger jabbing the map lost its strength a little at a time.
"This... is a mark that an air raid is scheduled. There's no facility out there, so no air-raid warning, and nothing to defend the place either. Still, a raid is over in an instant, so to be passing through right then and get caught in one, you'd have to be spectacularly unluck—"
"Pfft!"
"...?"
"Ah, sorry. My stomach's really bloated. Something keeps coming up."
"Need medicine?"
"I'm fine. There's an exercise I do whenever my stomach's off. A folk remedy, you could call it."
The hunter stood, set both hands on his hips, and looked up at the sky.
"They say if you laugh hard enough, your stomach just clears right out."
Headquarters shook with the sound of the short hunter performing his folk remedy.
Dr. Myeong faced the patients stacked up in the settlement. Elder Heo faced the unappraised Cores, stacked even higher than the patients.
"Sister Myeong's stamina is infinite, so she can see to every patient."
"Excuse me? Whose stamina is infinite? No—who said that?"
"But there's a limit to how many Cores Brother Heo can appraise. The work eats mental strength."
"Are you hearing me? Hello?"
The two of them started in on the relief work, keeping their distance from me from stretching too far. By then the General and his inner circle had all cleared out of the temple. Once every eye had gathered on Dr. Myeong and Elder Heo, Tata sidled over to my side.
"That was close."
"It was."
A win by two votes.
"But there were more than ten abstentions, weren't there? I've heard that if the invalid ballots outnumber the margin, they run it again. No such mercy here."
"Hyper-Democracy has no need of a revote."
One thing was certain. This creature called Hyper-Democracy was a magnificent piece of work. Whatever the matter, it needed none of the usual fuss.
"That many abstentions is strange, though. Add up everything I've seen since I came here, and today is still more."
"The vote that followed went easily enough."
Right after, there had been a yes-or-no on preparing for war.
"I can't pretend it wasn't thanks to you. I'll say thank you, and leave it there."
The result was a victory for the Savior's side, the side against the war. This time the margin was wide. And the abstentions cleared twenty.
"I don't entirely understand it, if I'm honest. That a performance could carry this much weight. Frankly, your show threw logic to the dogs. It was nothing but a curious bit of spectacle."
Tata had changed his tune.
"Didn't you say majority rule is an illusion?"
"I did. I suppose what surprised me is that it was an even greater illusion than I thought."
Well. I saw it a little differently.
"Maybe all they needed was an occasion."
"An occasion?"
"The ones on the General's side. How many of them were true inner circle—people who would stay with him even with a knife at the throat?"
"That sort would be few. One in five, at the outside? The same would be true of my side."
"Then the rest could have crossed over at any time. More than that—they may have wanted to cross, and simply couldn't, because the situation never gave them room."
Tata looked puzzled for a moment, then caught the shape of it.
"Bundled in with their own side, they couldn't quite bring themselves to betray it? But then something eye-opening happens, and they use that as their justification to cross?"
"Correct. And the way you people vote, everyone can see exactly who throws in with what. That makes crossing harder still."
"Then, among the ones stuck to the General..."
"Plenty of them had been against the war from the start. The General's ambition had no hold on reality. When they saw the rain, every one of them must have thought, this is the moment."
"Without an occasion, would they all have marched to war pretending they wanted it?"
"Of course."
That was the blind spot of majority rule. It could set the cohesion of a faction above any one person's conviction. Logic, belief, values—all of it shoved to the rear. Gather the votes somehow, and that was the end of the matter.
"Then maybe it would be a little better to reform the system. A secret ballot, instead of a show of hands..."
Tata, you innocent thing.
A short breath of a laugh escaped me.
"What? What's funny?"
"Why change it? It's your world now."
"...You're right."
Somewhere in the middle of it, Elder Heo had keeled over and drifted back off to dreamland. I could only hope Dr. Myeong's stamina really was infinite.
Time to leave.