The Price
Can't see it anymore.
I looked back. The settlement, ringed in anti-aircraft guns, was gone. We'd actually made it out—and not one of us looked glad of it.
"We can stop running."
"Hah... yes, sir..."
No pursuit in sight. From the look of things, they'd never even set out. My postman's uniform was soaked through with blood, and not a drop of it was mine. All of it had run out of Captain Choi, slung across my shoulders. I didn't think he was coming around. His heart still seemed to be beating, but even so, I couldn't leave him. Do that, and Jo An-na wouldn't follow.
Light, at least. Small mercy.
Running with Captain Choi on my back wasn't as hard as I'd expected. A man in his prime, and yet unbelievably light—he'd been a rack of bones to begin with, and now he was short an arm and a leg.
"Hah... hah..."
The one truly suffering the run was Staff Sergeant Jeong. Limping along at a sprint, he'd gone down more than once and scraped himself raw in the bargain. The moment I set the captain down and started checking him, Jo An-na came over.
He's probably already dead...
Captain Choi's face was bloodless. Jo An-na sat beside him and closed both of her hands around the one he had left—his left. The right arm was likely rolling around in the dirt somewhere by now. None of us had been in any state to go back for it, and bringing it along wouldn't have changed a thing.
If he wakes up and asks where his arm went, I'm willing to tell him I'm sorry we left it.
To my surprise, she didn't cry. I'd been sure of great fat tears, and there wasn't a hint of them. All at once I remembered the way her face had changed the instant she threw her knives. Maybe I'd been underestimating her. Maybe she was pretty well worn down herself.
Meanwhile Staff Sergeant Jeong and Jo Shin-hye stared off at the far hills, as if they couldn't bring themselves to watch the captain and Jo An-na like that.
Then—
"Khack..."
"H-he's alive! He was alive!"
A last flame caught.
"You were alive—thank God...!"
There was something pitiful in the hope brightening Jo An-na's voice. Captain Choi wrung out what strength he had left and worked his lips.
"Don't talk!" she said. "Breathe deep!"
When a badly wounded man forces himself to speak, you're supposed to stop him. With Captain Choi, I wasn't sure there was any point. If he had something to say, better he said it before he died.
"Before it's too late... I have to tell you..."
"Oppa!"
"Listen carefully, Postman..."
Hearing him out cleared up a little of the mystery. Someone he didn't even know had repaired the anti-aircraft gun. He should have stayed beside it and watched the work, but he'd been in bad shape, so he'd left it to his men and simply come back. That was why he hadn't known the part I'd sabotaged had been repaired along with the rest.
I'd said that if anyone slipped, the one who slipped would die. Precisely to keep this from happening.
Up on the wall sat the anti-aircraft gun those bastards treated as sacred, and Captain Choi was the only one who could go up there freely. There'd been no choice but to trust him with the whole of it. It had been the best we could do. It hadn't been the best result.
If only the one who screwed up dies, that's luck. The rest of us nearly died with him.
Even so, I wasn't cruel enough to take a man already in shreds to task for it. And here he was, handing over information even while he died. Still—it should have been a hard fault to find. Whoever had found it was good. So why fix only the one thing? Had they not noticed the rest was broken?
"The Postman's plan... was airtight... I let my guard down..."
Maybe it was the guilt. His breath clung on with a stubbornness that didn't match the rest of him, and Jo An-na said nothing, only kept hold of his hand.
"Khack. I... I..."
The captain's voice shrank until I couldn't make out a word. Jo An-na pressed her ear right up against his mouth.
"Mm-hm... mm-hm..."
She nodded hard, answering whatever he was saying. I couldn't hear any of it anymore, and I didn't need to. It had the feel of something strictly private. He'd have last words meant only for her. That was enough. I wouldn't have been comfortable if the last thing he left in the world was a confession of failure, delivered to me.
A little later, the captain's hard-fought life came to an end.
Whether she knew it or not, Jo An-na stayed there a long while with her ear still inclined, holding him. To the very last, Captain Choi never asked where his right arm had gone.
Scrape. Scrape.
In the stillness, the sound of shovels rose and fell, one answering the other. While the older sister held the younger, Staff Sergeant Jeong and I dug. There was no leisure for depth. Even so, the captain was blessed—he'd be buried, however shallow. Dying outside a settlement and still getting a grave was luck enough.
Thud.
We laid him in the hole. The body would stay here. The blood of his that had soaked my uniform, though—I'd carry that back to headquarters. After-sales service, and this one was free.
"Staff Sergeant Jeong."
"Yes, sir."
"No superiors left, and no men under you either. I don't see why you need to keep being a staff sergeant."
"Now that you mention it..."
The kid had stayed composed even while he watched Captain Choi die. Corpses were familiar. A reality in which he belonged nowhere—that would be strange. That was why he wore the face of a man who'd lost the whole world.
"From here on, please just call me by my name. Nice and easy."
Jeong Hocheol. A drifter with no settlement. If that were all there was to say about the man, well and good. The problem was that the records still had him down as an armed deserter. I'd brought him out, of course, because I had a way to deal with that.
"Hocheol."
"Yes, Jeong-guk hyung."
Too close, too fast. My skin crawled. Hearing Jo An-na say oppa from the sidelines had already been hard enough.
"No. You just keep calling me Postman. Please."
"Ah. Yes, sir."
Right. Don't cross the line.
"Anyway, Hocheol."
"Yes, sir!"
"Feel like being a postman?"
"Sir?"
After we'd buried the captain, everyone changed into the spare clothes we'd brought. Wandering around in uniform was out of the question. It went without saying that we left no marker on the grave. Better it not catch an eye and get dug up. None of us was coming back anyway, and Jo An-na wasn't about to lose her mind and return insisting she be buried beside him. What kind of lunatic risks their life to come all the way out here just to lay someone in the dirt next to a dead man?
We ate beside the captain's unmarked grave. Everyone except Jo An-na, who said she wasn't hungry and would go without. Not that I ate because I had an appetite.
"But, Postman, sir—how did you handle the anti-aircraft gun?"
"Hm?"
"You stopped it from working, didn't you? What did you do, exactly? I was stuck in the bunker, so I never saw how it went, sir, I mean."
"Even if you'd seen it, it wouldn't look much different from right now."
"Sir?"
"Forget it."
I didn't fully understand it myself. What was he going to get out of looking? What was clear was this: the Core ability I'd always had—the ability to see probability—had evolved. Once I'd confirmed a probability, I could overturn it.
So the rumor was true.
Talk that a Core ability could evolve had been thick on the ground. If someone who already possessed one succeeded in using an Ability Core a second time, the story went, they didn't gain some other power. The ability they already had evolved. The only way to know whether that was true was to try it yourself. Nobody who'd managed the evolution was going to open their mouth and announce, I did it! Be too special, and disaster finds you. Headquarters was full of people looking to use a human like that. Moderation in all things is best. Now and then, someone too remarkable simply vanished overnight. That, too, was only a rumor—but the talk was that the Ministry of Future Technology did the kidnapping. Dragged them off and dissected them, or something of the sort.
Dissected? If it ended at only that, you'd be lucky.
Either way, I had one more secret that needed hiding.
"If it's awkward to explain, then... anyway! We made it because you shut that gun down, Postman, sir. You've still got the same presence you had on active duty."
"What presence."
"You always finished things fast and clean, didn't you, sir."
Back then it had just been the burning desire to get back, wash my feet, and sleep.
"We'll say that's what it was."
"And on top of that you lived through the anti-aircraft fire, didn't you? Whoo—heaven's own luck, I tell you, sir."
I'd survived on my own ability, and here the credit was being reassigned to heaven's luck.
"What I did was—"
No. Keep quiet.
"What was that just now, sir?"
"I said it was luck. Heaven-sent. That's all."
As the talk picked up a little, Jo Shin-hye joined in.
"We lived because of you, Mr. Jeong-guk."
Her tone was stiff in a way I couldn't quite place. She wasn't the sort used to saying things people liked to hear. In any case, she'd stayed calm the whole time, just as I'd expected—but I'd been wrong to think that calm came from years of experience. Watching her, I could see the real reason.
If she breaks, Jo An-na has nowhere to lean.
Jo Shin-hye had probably always been that kind of person.
"The two of you surviving was heaven's luck more than anything I did. I was sure you'd taken a direct hit."
"Well... that's true enough."
Jo Shin-hye wouldn't meet my eyes. The sisters and the captain had definitely been caught in a concentrated barrage. The three of them ought to have been blown to pieces and mixed together. We shouldn't have been able to bury them one by one; we should have had to sweep the scraps into a single grave. And yet these two didn't have a scratch. Even the captain, far from dying on the spot, had still had enough left afterward to leave last words. They hadn't hidden in the bunker the way Hocheol had. So how?
One possibility presented itself.
Maybe one of the sisters has a Core ability.
Defensive abilities were on the common side, as Core abilities went. But you couldn't just come out and ask. Asking whether someone had a Core ability was only illegal when the other party was a registered Hunter—treated as an attempt to leak classified information, and punished hard. These sisters weren't Hunters. A question wouldn't make me a criminal. Still, morality sits above the law. Not being a crime doesn't mean you get to do it, and asking outright about a Core ability was a serious breach of manners. Right up there with cursing someone's parents.
But if it really was a Core ability... which of the two has it?
Well. The curious one is the one who loses. None of my business, anyway. The sisters had come through safe because of it, and that was enough.
Once even Hocheol started celebrating the escape, Jo An-na—quiet as a dead mouse until then—made herself known.
"...We got out because of you. Thank you."
I could almost smell Captain Choi, buried so shallow. And the old stink of zombie meat that had hung in the office.
"Yes. Fortunate. Not all of us together—but it succeeded."
Right. We'd escaped. Captain Choi was a pity, but no one was going to regret getting out on his account. Not Jo An-na, and not even Captain Choi, up above. No one had come out and said they had no regrets. I could tell anyway. These were people who'd lived twenty years in a world like this—some of them more than thirty. No. People who'd survived it. So they'd all be thinking the same thing: that life is an endless run of things you can't help. That didn't mean they believed in anything like fate. Fate? They wouldn't give a damn whether such a thing existed. All they knew was annihilation. Things you can't help, happening without end—that was annihilation.
"Just in case you're wondering... Mr. Jeong-guk?"
Jo An-na put the certainty in me herself.
"Don't worry. I don't regret it... Everyone agreed to your plan. And..."
Her lips twitched, as if something more was waiting behind them.
"...And Oppa ended up like that because he neglected the job he was given. Watching the gun..."
She hadn't shown a tear when the captain's breath stopped, and now her voice was breaking. The death of someone close couldn't have been a first for her, or even a second. Assigning blame for a death—that she wouldn't be used to. If she kept sniffling, it would get in the way of traveling together. It wouldn't touch me. Hocheol and Jo Shin-hye, who went soft the moment it concerned Jo An-na, were another matter.
Not that that bastard Hocheol has any right to begin with.
Leave it like this and it would turn into a nuisance. Time to put a hand in.
"The captain didn't die because of that."
"What...?"
A lapse. Neglect. That wasn't a killing offense.
"The captain died because those bastards killed him."
"Ah..."
The wetness that had been about to spill broke apart, just barely, and held. Don't give her time to think.
"We don't have time to waste. We have to reach headquarters before the date changes three times. Let's move."
I stood, and the rest of them moved as one. That, I liked. Not a sluggish one among them. They were qualified to survive.
"Miss An-na right behind me, Miss Shin-hye behind her, Hocheol at the rear. Single file. Step only where I step."
"...I'll trust you."
Jo An-na fell in at once, and right on her heels—
"Don't you worry about a thing, all right?"
Jo Shin-hye patted her sister's shoulder and stuck close.
"Leave the rear to me, sir!"
Hocheol dropped into a familiar posture and took up the all-around watch. And so the return, in earnest, began.
Speaking of which.
The heat inside the bag seemed to have bled out completely. What had been causing the trouble?
A soft slide.
When I eased the bag open and looked inside, what I found there was—
Nothing in this world comes free.
It was the price.