The Cradle
Green.
A green Ability Core. Lucky bastard.
A Core's color is only an index of the odds that using it will succeed. The type, and the amount of energy packed inside, decide those odds far more. Fuel Cores succeed often. Ability Cores almost never do. And the more energy stored in one, the worse the chances get. Still, when the type is the same and the energy is the same, color starts to matter. The red I'd used last time was the worst shade there is. The green this one had just used carried the highest success rate of all.
"I'm not... dying like this!"
Bloodshot eyes rolled wild. A body full of holes twitched without rest. Not even a zombie or a monster would have looked more wretched than he did now.
Backscratcher was already trained on his forehead. One pull of the trigger and it would be over. A foul curiosity crawled up anyway. Could he actually pull it off? The instant anything looked wrong, I'd fire. That was enough. So just a little. Just a little longer.
"Hhh..."
Thumb Man rolled his eyes back and drooled.
"It's coming in..."
Was he feeling the Core energy climbing his veins? If I'd worn a face like that, it would have been the worst.
"You little... you've got something too, don't you?"
He broke off mid-sensation and spoke. A man who'd been dying a moment ago had his strength back. Absorbing Core energy would do that. It didn't mean the use had succeeded. The rally was only temporary. Success or failure — I'd have to watch a little longer to know.
"You can't see what's in front of you, and you still hit a sniper from this range? In one shot?"
"What are you asking? You saw it. So it makes sense."
"That gun's hunter-grade, and the shield — that's what the officer bastards in the army carry, isn't it?"
This is why I can't just haul the good gear out whenever I feel like it. Even the riffraff know it on sight.
"Shit... I picked the wrong man. Figured a bottom-rung civil servant would be easy to tail."
"Judging people by their job doesn't get you far."
"Why stay a postman when you've got an ability like that?"
"What's wrong with being a postman?"
"Damn it, fine, a civil servant's lot beats mine... ugh."
There it was. The reaction.
"...Tch."
His face said he was about to vomit.
"Cough... why the hell am I..."
Splat. Splat-splat.
Blood surged from the hole in his belly. Then it came from his eyes, his nose, his mouth, even from under his nails — from every opening and seam in his body.
"Shit, shit! Of all the side effects, I had to draw the filthy one...!"
Abnormal, massive hemorrhage. A failure effect from Core use that I'd seen before. It always ends in death.
"Why only me..."
He couldn't finish it. He folded, strengthless.
Getting any closer meant stepping into the pool he'd made. I crossed the sticky mess and looked down at him.
"Goddamn... unlucky... right to the end..."
Did he think he'd lived an unlucky life? Blood kept seeping from the tip of the only thumb he had left.
"You really think that was luck?"
He rolled his eyes up at me with what effort he had. The skin of his whole body was going pale. Before I soaked myself any further, I fished the special-forces bag out of the blood. What was already drenched was a lost cause. I'd seen what I came for, and I was about to step clear of the pool when he wrung out the last of his strength and got his mouth open again.
"If it isn't luck... then what the hell..."
"A civil servant... born lucky... of all people..."
Lives decided by luck alone are rarer than people think. Doubly so for someone who's already lived decades. Circumstance always weighs on you, but the same conditions don't hand everyone the same life.
"Your hands end up like that because you were unlucky too?"
Fingers cut away as punishment.
"I didn't... have a choice..."
Was he trying to say there had been no way to live except by stealing? I had no interest in preaching thou shalt not steal on a ruined earth. Headquarters might be another matter. Out here it was practically lawless. Civil servants like postmen at least get a minimum of protection — kill one, and the army goes through the motions of deploying. Everyone else is a citizen in name only. The state does not answer for the people of this land.
"It was just luck... wasn't it?"
So if you mean to survive, there is a great deal you have to give up. It starts with the small things — cleanliness, amusement. Morality and love, luxuries like those, go without saying. But there is one thing you can never tear free, no matter how badly you want to abandon it.
Cause and effect.
Every result has a choice behind it.
"Where are you going...! At least answer me... before you go..."
Choice isn't always free, of course. Plenty of times you're forced into one. But unless every choice you ever made was forced on you, no one walks clear of cause and effect.
"Am I... wrong?"
I don't know the exact story that left his hands like that. This wasn't a moment when asking would get me an answer, and even if I heard one, I wouldn't believe all of it. The chance was thin, but it really might have been a wrong he'd suffered.
"Am I... wrong...?"
Even so, I could tell. It had come from a bad choice of his own. Someone truly wronged never blames luck. There is always a person they resent.
"Aaaagh...!"
The one who blames luck is only the one who bet on it. They throw the dice and decide the whole of it rides on the roll. They hand the choice over to luck. That is the problem. Luck made the choice, and they cannot accept that they are the ones who have to live with the result — even though throwing the dice was a choice they made themselves.
Hoping for a one-in-ten-thousand miracle is no sin. When the miracle doesn't come, swallow the price.
His eyes were wide. Blood had pooled over the eyeballs.
"Gk..."
His jaw fell open on a dying rattle and locked that way. Inside his mouth, a tongue stood rigid, frozen stiff with terror.
The bleeding stopped. The life that had been gasping stopped with it. His own small world closed like that.
I never gave him an answer, not to the end. I didn't deny what he believed out of principle, and I didn't affirm it the way you affirm a thing you pity. He must have wanted confirmation that he had ended up like this truly because of luck — whether that thought was right, or wrong. One of the two. That was the answer he wanted. If that was all it was, there was a way to check, so there was no need for me to answer. There was a method that suited his way.
He can flip a coin on the road to the afterlife.
Heads, or tails.
I walked a familiar route and didn't notice until the sun was fully down. Taking the safest detour I could, even a short distance ate up an age. I'd shut my eyes for a bit, gotten up, and been walking again for about an hour. The first settlement was close. The real start of the mail run.
The bag now held a special-forces man's fingers, an electric razor, and about twenty rounds of assorted ammunition.
Ah. And the antihistamine.
I'd taken the medicine he hadn't managed to finish. Even so, the load was lighter than before. I could throw away the six Cores that had gone dark as the price of using my ability.
Twenty-four Cores left.
Sell every round I'd just picked up and it would barely come to the value of a single Core. The razor had to serve as my ticket into the Human Meat Factory, so it wasn't money.
Keep trading like this and I'm in trouble.
I remembered the trip back to headquarters with the Jo sisters and Hocheol. That was the first time I'd met the special forces — blindfolded, fighting bare-handed. It hadn't been a matter of life and death. It had still been worth spending an ability. Six sets of body armor, won from that bare-handed fight, had far outvalued the six Cores I'd burned.
And this time?
Surviving at the cost of six Cores was cheap, of course. I would have handed over my entire fortune if that was what it took, not merely six. The problem was something else.
Did I really have to spend Cores to live?
I replayed the moment I'd faced the sniper. A step or two back, and a Giant Rod had been driven into the ground. With the armor, the shield, and a meat shield, I could have reached the far side of that rod without dying. From there, a safe standoff would have been possible. The standoff would have favored him, of course. He was a sniper, and my weapon was a handgun. To aim a pistol properly I would have had to put my head outside the cover, and a sniper watching me through a scope from a safe distance would have been faster.
But I didn't have to kill the sniper to survive.
I could have stayed behind the Giant Rod and simply dragged the standoff out. He'd looked like a beggar at a glance. Going through his things confirmed it — short on food, short on water. I was far ahead of him in stamina, too. Turn it into a waiting game and he would have worn out and left. There had been a way to live without using a Core.
Reminds me of when I was a rookie Hunter.
I used to burn abilities on work that didn't need them. Not just me. Every Hunter goes through it. Once you have power, you want to use it. They pass through that phase and come to understand what wise use looks like. The ones who never learn show off strength they don't need to spend, and become stars in that sky up there.
Stay a little calmer.
The ability had grown stronger, and I'd slipped back into who I was then — the days when I couldn't hold the power and just ran wild. That doesn't mean hiding it is the answer. It means being wise about it.
Survival depends on judgment.
It isn't the strong who survive. It's the ones who mean to.
Sentries with rifles stood on the settlement wall.
"Postman."
I held up my ID and raised both arms. Usually it takes that much before the muzzles come down. The sentries here hadn't been pointing guns at me for a while already.
"You're here."
"I'll get it open. What are you standing around for? Get down there and open the gate."
"Idiot. Forget the rotation again?"
"It's your turn to go down, remember?"
"Here we go."
Those two bicker every single day. If they're going to live like that, couldn't they at least stagger their shifts?
"All right. Time to settle it."
"Just what I wanted."
Wait about three minutes and one of them comes down. In the end they throw the rotation to the dogs, and whoever loses the on-the-spot contest climbs down. The method changes every time.
"Scissors—"
"Rock—"
"Paper!"
"Paper! Shit."
Thinking about it, I could see why they kept the same shift even while they fought. This was what they lived for. And in truth, both of them probably remembered whose turn it was just fine.
Creeeak.
"Come in. Watch your step there."
There's a spot you don't step on. A trap. I'm used to it now.
"Lot of mail today?"
"Turned over a few corpses on the way."
"Nice little side income. We'll say the search is done. You know the rule once you're in?"
"Act like I was searched."
"Excellent."
This settlement sits on the safest delivery route in Seoul, which means I come and go constantly. Inside, people had already poured out to collect their mail. There was, of course, no guarantee any of it was theirs.
"Nothing again today? You're not holding something back, are you?"
"Look for yourself."
Anyone asking why nothing came for them gets the manifest in their own hands. The document, drawn up at headquarters, records every piece of mail bound for each settlement.
"Damn it, that's weird..."
They'd probably been told something would arrive by a certain day. And that promise, of course, would have been written in a letter they'd received before. Mail going silent is common. It stops if one of the people writing dies. It stops if the postman carrying it dies. Sometimes there simply isn't money left to send anything. Lose your settlement and become a drifter, and you no longer meet a postman on any regular schedule. Or you just stop wanting to send anything at all.
I, the postman, had arrived alive, so "the postman died" was off the table. That left the rest, and not one of them was something anyone wanted to believe. So no one tries.
One by one the mail found its owners and left, and a single letter stayed where it was, stubborn. The name on it belonged to someone I always saw. Strange that she hadn't come out today.
"Mrs. Park! A letter from your younger sibling, ma'am!"
Last time I was here, she'd told me about that sibling. Sick with something that could kill them any day, hanging on one hard day at a time.
"Mrs. Park!"
She'd said her back was bad. Had she finally reached the point where she couldn't walk out? If so, I'd have to carry it to the house myself. What a pain.
"That woman died."
"How?"
"Looks like food poisoning."
A return. The sender pays the return fee and takes it back.
"Food poisoning for certain?"
"Moon-ssi's Son confirmed it. The tall Moon family."
"Why didn't the clinic owner check?"
"That gentleman's gone too. According to Moon-ssi's Son, it was all food poisoning."
Paying money to get your own letter back, when it isn't even a valuable parcel, looks a little strange. Everyone pays anyway. It's the only way to hear the reason for the return in any detail.
The man filling me in had the widest reach of anyone in the settlement. I'd heard his name once. It hadn't stuck. Calling him Madangbal — Wide Foot — was easier anyway.
"So Moon-ssi's Son is the one looking at the bodies now?"
"That's right. He's the clinic's new owner."
"Was that man a doctor?"
He'd looked like a useless idler to me.
"A doctor? Please. He was just an unemployed bum. But those hands of his are a real healing touch, I'm telling you. There's power in them. Real power."
Another load of nonsense. So much nonsense I didn't even want the explanation.
"Anyway — the clinic owner saw them, and he said the cause of death was food poisoning?"
I wrote the reason on the back of the letter that would be going back.
Return reason: Addressee deceased (food poisoning / official settlement examination)
If Mrs. Park's sibling pays the return fee, that record will reach them properly. Provided the sibling is still alive.
"My civil-servant friend. Busy today?"
There's a reason Madangbal is Madangbal. Say I'm not busy and he'll try to talk my ear off. Listen, and there's nothing special in it — just ordinary talk about his own life, about how the settlement is running. That's where his rapport comes from. Ordinariness.
"Busy."
This run includes an air-raid warning. Time isn't exactly tight, but there's no reason to linger.
"Still. Can you spare a moment?"
What was this? I'd been dodging the conversation every time, so had he prepared a new routine?
"For what?"
"You know how to read a Core? A postman must have some business at headquarters, right? If not, never mi—"
"I know how."
The answer jumped out on its own.