The Specters Scatter
"I'll give you the information anyway."
"I never promised I'd pass it on."
"Do what you like with it. You're the only one I can ask right now, and I don't have a choice."
He looked desperate enough. I couldn't say how much use his information would be, but I meant to miss none of it and keep every word.
I think I've already found a way to smash the raiders.
From here on, what mattered was predicting their next move—getting a step ahead and laying the trap. For that, even a trivial scrap had to be treated as precious. Drive them out, settle the situation around here, and everything afterward would come easier. Play it right, and there might even be a tidy reward in it.
"Now that friend Kim-ssi, he had a core on him, didn't he? Never did use it, all the way to the end."
If the Physiognomist had it right, the raiders would be holding Kim-ssi's core. Provided they hadn't used it yet.
"Awful hard to call a thing precious when the risk runs that steep. Failure rate was ninety-eight percent. And if it failed, the effect was permanent paralysis, head to toe."
A ninety-eight percent chance of failure, and a side effect that bad. Odds like those made it very likely an Ability Core—the sort of thing money couldn't buy. Nothing like the 99.99 percent core I'd used myself. A core with a failure rate that extreme was garbage in all but name. Even as a last resort, the chance of success had been far too low, which was why Elder Heo had asked me whether I meant to scrap it.
Ninety-eight percent was a different story. A two percent chance of success was at least a number a person could live with, and cores like that never came up for sale no matter how much cash you hauled in.
Meanwhile, the special forces scout was getting worse.
"It was exactly like this earlier. Started with the hands shaking..."
He was staring down at both trembling hands, trying, it seemed, to close them and open them again. They wouldn't move the way he wanted.
"You put all your faith in the antihistamines and started shooting combat stimulant even more often, didn't you?"
"It wasn't only that. I'd heard the side effects were bad, but I'd never actually seen them. I didn't think it'd be this bad."
"Were you the only one using it? They called you special forces, so I figured the whole unit fought hopped up on the stuff."
"Even an idiot knows combat stimulant wrecks the body. If that was standard issue, it'd be the same as telling everybody to go die. I bought mine out of my own pocket."
Fair point. There had been a unit stupid enough to issue the stuff. The Human Meat Factory's special forces were better than that.
"There were others besides me who used it now and then. Side effects or no, they all died fast in a fight."
"I've seen that plenty of times. Get drunk on combat stimulant and you lose your fear. No matter how much your body improves, do something reckless and you die. No exceptions."
Come to think of it, this one was doing pretty well. Even in the Lemming Unit, people rarely died of the stimulant's side effects. Usually they died in the fighting before it ever got that far.
"Damn it... it's shaking worse and worse."
"If you knew it was poison, why'd you pour so much of it into yourself?"
"That's—"
The man who had been shaking with dread suddenly smiled.
"Because I've got to leave my name in history."
What a joke.
"Pfft."
"Laugh all you want. Doesn't sting. Not even a little."
"I'm not laughing at you."
"You're laughing right now, you bastard."
I understood him far too well. That was why it was funny.
Leave his name in history. This one's lost in a delusion too.
He wasn't any different from me—the man who had volunteered for high-difficulty missions just for the chance to ride the Subway once. The difference was that my delusion could only be fulfilled if I stayed alive, while his could be fulfilled even in death. That difference had decided which of us lived.
"So that's why you were so set on getting word to the Human Meat Factory? It won't even make some grand history. Just the settlement's own records. You sure you're all right with that?"
"What does that matter? That place is the whole world to me."
Well. If that was how he felt.
"What do you want them to write?"
"The valiant special forces! The strongest unit there ever was, bound tight by the bond between brothers!"
God. How original.
"Does that at least get your family a living stipend?"
"Something more precious than money comes of it. Not just for my family—for everyone in the settlement. Hope!"
Nothing sells hope quite like a cliché. I'll give him that.
"I'm not asking you to do it for free. If something happens to me, you can take everything I'm carrying. There's a magazine in there. It'll be worth something."
"That's the sort of thing I can do without your permission."
"Annoying little bastard."
Now he was getting to the point.
"What needs passing on is intel on the mercenary. I didn't learn a thing about the raiders, but the mercenary—I met him myself."
His legs were beginning to shake as well. He didn't have long.
"Male. Thirty at the outside, early thirties if I'm generous. Very tall, and thin as a rail. Small head, too. The proportions were strange."
"What kind of intel is that?"
"I'm serious. Strangest proportions I've ever seen on a living person. Run into him someday and you'll know. That's the bastard."
Put like that, one man did come to mind.
No way.
He wasn't finished.
"And I think he's got a cold right now."
"Walking around with a runny nose?"
"He kept covering his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. The kid who tipped me off said the same—that he looked like his nose was bothering him the whole time."
That was important. And it was lining up, more and more, with someone I knew.
"Any idea what time of day that mercenary came to scout the settlement?"
"Hard to say. Does it matter?"
"Take a guess."
"Well... they said he looked like a drifter, so it was probably daytime. A stranger showing up at night would be too suspicious."
"And the hour you met him today was daytime too."
"Sun's still high. Of course it was."
I was fairly sure I had it. A former Hunter instructor I knew very well. A man who had once been a colleague.
I can't even remember the last time I saw him.
If it really was that man, he'd be a difficult problem.
"Shit... I can't."
He looked as if he couldn't stay on his feet another moment. In the end he slumped against a Giant Rod and sat, the picture of a man leaning on a gravestone. I crouched to meet his eyes.
"What are you doing? Hurry up and finish the game."
He was looking only at the casing standing out at the thousand mark.
"If you miss too, it's a draw, so throw already."
Even now, nothing in his head but billiards. His competitive streak was something else.
"If that's what you want."
The two casings I'd been holding in my left hand had been shedding a blue light for some time.
What to do. This would be the last amusement he ever had. End it in a draw?
"Hey, postman. Go easy on me and you're dead. Do it right."
"Hm."
"Were you actually about to go easy, you son of a bitch?"
"I'll do it right."
If I was going to win anyway, winning cleanly was the polite thing.
When I first gained the ability to see probabilities, I'd needed training before I could use it at will. The method I'd hit on was billiards. Set a casing down, throw, hit it—over and over, checking the odds and learning how to control the variables. Use the ability now, and I could make the shot with my eyes closed.
Whoosh.
I flung one of the casings in my left hand far out. It didn't even come near the one sitting at the thousand mark.
"You little shit. I told you not to go easy."
It had landed much farther off, standing perfectly upright.
"Well? How far would you say that is?"
"Hm?"
"Fifteen hundred, at least."
Whoosh.
I hurled the remaining casing with everything I had. It flew straight as a fastball—
Crack.
—and drove dead-center into the casing I'd thrown first.
"Well I'll be goddamned."
I never used the ability when I played billiards with anyone else. The skill looked suspicious to anyone with eyes. In front of this one, it didn't matter.
"How'd you do that?"
"First, I check the odds on which throwing posture will leave the casing standing, find the best one, and throw."
"Odds?"
"I've drilled a few postures into my body. For each one, I've practiced exactly how the force has to be handled."
"The what now?"
"Second, I check the best odds on which posture, and how much force, will let me hit the casing I threw first. Then I throw. That's all."
Of course, since I'd practiced it as billiards, controlling the variables was difficult with anything but a shell casing. In the end it was only a parlor trick.
"I don't follow a word of that, but you were never an ordinary postman, were you."
"Something like that."
"Ha. You'd do fine without the stimulant."
He forced his torso up from where it had slumped against the Giant Rod and sat straighter.
"Something was blatantly off from the moment you fought me with your eyes covered. I figured you had to be on a better stimulant than me."
"Sharp eyes. All you managed to see was that."
"Come to think of it—you still wearing that armor I shook you down for?"
I hiked up my jacket and the shirt beneath it and showed him the body armor I wore hidden against my skin.
"Wow. This guy..."
He looked thoroughly fed up.
"That's the one, right?"
"Hunter-grade body armor."
"What the hell are you?"
"A postman."
"Fuck."
He stared blankly up at the sky. I thought the strength had finally gone out of him, but then he started chuckling again, little bursts of it.
"To think I traded punches with a man like this. Played billiards with him, too."
While he laughed as if he couldn't believe it, the trembling gradually subsided. The side effects had moved on to the next stage.
"Damn it. Starting again, is it."
"Everything you're seeing and hearing right now is fake. Hallucinations, voices—that's the end stage of the addiction."
"Fake..."
His face began to knot, as if the pain had found him.
"Feels like half of it's fake, and half of it's real."
What was he looking at?
"Of all times, it was when I went up against that mercenary. That was the first time the side effects showed. I only realized later it'd been a hallucination."
He went on, staring at some point far away. I followed his gaze. All I could see was empty plain.
"...I couldn't tell friend from foe."
So his first hallucination had struck him in the middle of a fight. Bad luck. He would have had no choice but to trust what his eyes showed him. That explained the blood splashed all over his clothes, and why he had come back alive alone, without his comrades.
"I wanted to leave my name in history... Well. Maybe this leaves a name in its own way."
"Who's going to remember that well enough to write it down?"
"The mercenary will. I can still see how rattled he looked."
"That's probably someone I know. He's not the type to go around talking about it, so relax."
"Now that's a tempting story. Wide Foot the postman, are you."
I had no desire whatsoever to be a Wide Foot.
"I'd be grateful if you passed what you know on to the settlement, too."
"Hm."
"If you don't want to, then at least deliver everything I said, exactly as I said it. I'm asking you... ugh."
The skin of his face crumpled tighter and tighter. Was he ringed by the ghosts of his comrades? His features twisted so hard the tears ran sideways. The pain had reached its peak.
"I've got an injection that'll put you under. With that, you can go easy."
Left as he was, he would thrash for an hour at least before his breath gave out.
"Don't... waste the medicine... on me..."
"I got what I needed. Call it a courtesy."
"Urgh..."
I drew Backscratcher without delay. Eyes squeezed shut, he saw nothing.
"Make sure... you tell them..."
"Yeah. I'll see to it your name stays in history, just like you wanted."
Looking at him now, he really was more innocent than he seemed.
"History doesn't become history only when you set the facts down exactly as they were."
"Urk...?"
"Even if the historian writes whatever he pleases, what remains is still history. Sometimes you put in things that never happened. Sometimes you hide things that did."
"Kkh..."
The reasons for that are many, but just now I could have explained it this way.
Because it's a delusion I can actually grant him.
That was enough. For a little while, I would sit in the historian's chair. I could be this man's Subway.
"I'll write your history."
Click.
I pulled the trigger without hesitation, and—
Bang.
He swayed and fell before he even had time to notice. One round. Swift and exact.
I looked slowly around. The military unit that had driven off the monsters was long gone. On the open plain, with nowhere to hide, there wasn't a sign of another soul. Everything had ended cleanly. The only witnesses were specters.
I sat and waited until every one of them had scattered. The blood still running out of him was too warm for me to go rifling through his things right away.
Around the time the sunset came on, the shadow of the Giant Rod covered the corpse. Only then did I begin, slowly, to go through what he had been carrying.