Special Clause
While Jeongguk was busy delivering the mail, somewhere else, someone was thinking of him.
"Stop dawdling. Get over here and sit. Hurry up."
It was broad daylight, and the mercenary was already through his second drink. The raider chief who had hired him was moving as carefully as he could, but it hardly mattered — he was already in the palm of the mercenary's hand. The man had caught the raider's scent from several hundred meters out.
Pleasant-faced, polite, for a raider. That face was his weapon, and the trick that had made him chief.
"A sense of smell like magic. Incredible, every time. Moments like this, it really sinks in that you used to be a hunter."
"Hunter instructor."
A mercenary who had once instructed hunters, and the raider who had hired him. Between them, they had already laid two settlements to waste.
"Former hunter, former hunter instructor — what's the difference..."
"There is one. It's different."
"Could you please not use that alien language?"
"Okay."
"Anyway. You weren't difficult to find."
"That'd be true for anyone."
The mercenary was a harder man not to recognize than to recognize. An unusually small head and long legs — the proportions people called an eight-head figure.
He checked the time on his wristwatch. A habit.
"Fifteen minutes left of lunch. Keep it short. Just the intel."
"A few hours ago there was a small disturbance on the road over into Yeongdeungpo. That's about the size of it. Otherwise, perfectly calm. Geumcheon District is as yawn-inducingly peaceful as they say. We cleaned out two settlements and the army never so much as showed its face. This job ought to be easy too."
In truth, the raider had been watching that small disturbance for reasons of his own. No need to share them with the mercenary.
"Is that so. I've thought it over. After this job, I mean to end the contract."
"What? Why?"
The man had been raiding settlements with some success, thanks to the mercenary.
"Are our terms not to your liking? We can raise your fee."
"Strictly personal."
"And what would that be?"
"You and I aren't on terms for a personal conversation."
"Picky. Just as you'd expect from a former hunter."
"Instructor."
"..."
"Article 1, Clause 1. The contract may be terminated whenever Party A wishes to terminate it."
"Yes. You're Party A. A shame..."
The mercenary kept checking his watch. His lunch hour was nearly gone.
"Tell me about that small disturbance you mentioned. I was planning to head for Yeongdeungpo after this job anyway."
"It's nothing much. One of my men was lying low nearby and saw it. Two third-rate raiders got shot dead by a postman passing through."
"A postman?"
The glass had only just reached his lips. The mercenary set it back down.
"Yes. A postman."
"Distinguishing features?"
"He looked through a telescope, supposedly. Nothing special about him."
In fact, the report his subordinate had sent was more specific. A young man in his twenties, and a handsome face. That was exactly why the raider had been paying the disturbance any mind. The moment he heard the description, he had thought of someone he had seen once before. In front of the mercenary, though, he went on playing it as nothing.
"Ah, I left this out. His shooting was apparently quite good. After the postman left, they checked, and the other side had been carrying a sniper rifle."
"The postman's weapon?"
"A pistol, I think. They didn't see it clearly, but the sound's different, isn't it?"
"A skilled postman..."
The raider found the gravity on the mercenary's face strange.
"You call that skill? It had to be luck. He's just a postman. A bottom-rung civil servant."
The mercenary looked quietly down into his glass.
"There are two postmen in Seoul you need to be careful of."
"Do they charge a lot for delivery?"
It was the sort of line that ought to have earned a laugh. The mercenary's face stayed grave.
Completely gutted.
Black smoke was climbing off the settlement when I arrived. A fire must have broken out while the raiders swept through. It had burned most of the place and was only just dying down, embers still clinging here and there, popping as they ate, bit by bit, through what little trace of a life had managed to remain.
Ugh. Smells like carcinogens.
No need to go all the way inside. Passing alongside was already the shortcut. Even so — should I call it curiosity about how things stood in there? Or curiosity about whether anyone was left?
One thing was strange. I couldn't see a single body.
There was no way a place raiders had swept would be without corpses, and no way they would have bothered hiding them. You don't raze a settlement in the open and then tuck only the dead away, as if that makes it not have happened. Had everyone actually managed to flee? I couldn't make sense of it.
Someone's been digging through this.
Here and there in the ash, signs that someone had searched the place. Very recently. Not the work of the raiders who had struck first. Other raiders passing through might have played the hyena, or it could have been a search party sent from a settlement nearby. Either way, once traces like that turned up, there was no reason to stay. Anything worth taking would already be gone.
By this point, a kid who's been hiding, barely alive, is supposed to come running out in tears.
That didn't happen.
As a rule, the mercenary answered whatever the raider asked. For some reason, he was reluctant to talk about the postmen. The two in Seoul, the ones a man ought to be careful of.
"Why do you even want to know?"
"Because you won't tell me."
"That's your reason?"
"Hide something, and people only get more curious."
The raider's real interest in talk of postmen lay elsewhere. Not long ago, he had kidnapped a postman by the name of Kim-ssi. He had done it because he needed antibiotics at once, but a crime against a civil servant was a dangerous thing — the day a report went in, the army would roll out. And of all people, two postmen had watched the kidnapping: a potbellied older man, and a young one with a striking face. He had meant to take every one of them, but those two had not bitten, and so they had remained as witnesses.
He had been uneasy about it already, and now he was starting to fear that one of those witnesses might be among the postmen the mercenary said to watch for. The particular problem was the postman his man claimed to have seen through a telescope a few hours earlier. It sat badly with him that the one who had dropped a sniper with a pistol looked like the young postman he had seen when he took Kim-ssi. He could not help thinking the man might have come this far because he was looking for him. To avenge the dead postman. In the end, the raider decided to pay the mercenary for the information.
"Hm."
The mercenary stared down, unblinking, at the single cigarette the raider had set before him.
"The postmen I mentioned. There were two."
"..."
The raider laid down one more cigarette. The mercenary put one between his lips at once.
"There is a condition. I won't tell you how I came to know about them. That part is strictly personal."
"Understood."
"One of them goes around with his face covered."
"What? Covered with what?"
The mercenary said nothing. He worked the cigarette between his teeth until the raider sighed, pulled out a cheap match, and lit it for him.
"They call him Mask."
"Because he wears a mask? Attention-seeker would suit him better."
"Blood trails him."
"Hearing the epithet, yes — attention-seeker it is."
"He runs illegal deliveries. There are big fish who find him useful. His clients are in Future Tech, of course, and in the Geofront as well."
"So he's got people behind him. Definitely someone to be careful of."
"I heard he vanished recently, though."
"Hm? He's not dead, is he?"
"He might be."
The raider's fist tightened of its own accord.
"If he's already dead, isn't that useless information? Hard to call it something worth trading a cigarette for..."
"A man dying doesn't erase his traces. Information stays alive."
"..."
Thinking it over, it was not entirely useless. At least the two postmen he had met had shown their faces. One dangerous man avoided, then.
"Then please finish telling me about the other one."
"That one is definitely still alive."
"A name? An alias?"
"He uses a false name every time. Even the one I know is a name he doesn't use anymore, and I don't know the alias he's using now."
"Then isn't there some kind of feature? It isn't information if you can't recognize him."
"Late twenties. Handsome."
"...?"
"A man who doesn't spare a thought for how he looks. Grime always running down his face, and still staggeringly good-looking."
The face of the young postman who had stood beside the potbellied man rose in the raider's mind.
"Damn it..."
A handsome postman in his late twenties was hardly one of a kind. The problem was that the raider's bad feelings had never once been wrong.
"I didn't know you hated handsome men that much."
"Why does that postman need to be handled carefully?"
"Hm?"
"You have to tell me that much. I gave you a cigarette."
There was a reason the mercenary had not wanted to talk about the postmen. The matter of Mask was neither here nor there. But he did not want to go around running his mouth about the handsome one. A matter of courtesy, toward someone who had once been a colleague.
"If you'd rather not, please give the cigarette back."
It was not about the cigarette. The mercenary could not accept breaking a contract — not from himself.
"He's very strong."
To him, the job mattered more than courtesy.
"You mean he fights well?"
"That's true as well. Even a competent hunter couldn't beat him one-on-one."
"But he's a postman...?"
"No. Two-on-one wouldn't manage it either. Maybe not even three."
A single drop of sweat slid down the raider's spine.
"To put it precisely, he never takes a fight he would lose. He's very sharp. That's the true strength."
"Handsome, and strong besides? A goddamn beast... no. What an unfair world."
"Hm. Now that I think of it, I don't believe I've ever looked at that man and thought the world was unfair. I wonder why."
While the mercenary sank into thought, a shadow settled beneath the raider's eyes.
"...Why is a man like that working as a postman?"
"Who knows. Truth is, the part of him that's really strong is something else."
"Sorry?"
"Luck."
The raider's face said he had no idea what kind of nonsense that was.
"He's peculiarly strong in things decided by nothing but luck."
"A god of gambling? Something like that?"
"He doesn't gamble at all. He hardly even attempts things that can only be done by luck. He always just avoids them."
"What are you saying? A moment ago you said his luck was—"
"I'm saying he seems to avoid it on purpose. He doesn't want his luck found out."
Which left only one thing to think of first.
"At that level, isn't it a Core ability?"
"No."
"How can you be so sure?"
The mercenary had seen for himself what ability that postman possessed, back when he was a hunter. Drug Appraisal. It was impossible to hold a second ability when you already had one, so that luck of his had to be nothing but luck.
"You ought to know. It's an unwritten rule not to speak of Core abilities. Even when the ability belongs to someone else."
"..."
The raider went quiet. He thought for a moment, then set a magazine on the table. It was packed with the finest ammunition.
"There's still time before the settlement raid. Please do one more job for me before then."
"I told you this job is the last. Do you listen when people talk?"
"Article 2, Clause 3. If an element appears that interferes with a contract in progress, an additional commission to remove it shall be accepted unconditionally. Correct?"
A foul feeling took hold of the mercenary. But keeping a contract to the letter was his creed.
"What is it."
"Do you remember the postman I mentioned? The one who took down a sniper with a pistol."
The mercenary's bad feeling proved correct.
"That postman is interfering with this job?"
"Yes."
"Huh? Why?"
"He's after my life."
"A moment ago you talked as if you barely knew him."
"It was strictly personal for me as well."
"...Fine."
There was nothing wrong with the raider's logic. Nothing interfered with a job like someone gunning for your life.
"Is he one of the two postmen I told you to watch for?"
"I'm not certain."
Even so, the mercenary still had a way out.
"In any case, I can't take that job. Article 1, Clause 2. For any reason—"
The raider pushed the magazine on the table closer to the mercenary.
"According to the contract, this seems to be the proper compensation."
"I'm only talking about subduing him. Nothing beyond that."
"The contract doesn't say what level 'subdue' means. But a man like you will keep it within what I can accept, I'm sure."
The raider had a thorough grasp of the fact that the mercenary was a man who did his work straight.
"...I'll break his legs. Thoroughly enough that he never walks properly again."
"But didn't you say that postman was skilled enough that several hunters coming at him wouldn't matter?"
"Didn't you say you weren't sure? Well. Even if it is the postman I know, a contract is a contract. I'll see it done somehow."
"Good. Even luck like that is finished, if he can't walk."
Something faintly ill clung to the raider's manner. The mercenary asked again about a thing he had confirmed when they first made the contract.
"Just to be sure. You've never raided to the point of killing a civil servant, have you?"
"Of course not. We have a line of our own. Touch the wrong civil servant and the army comes after you. That would be serious trouble."
"Then that's a relief."
A red light blinked on the wristwatch. The signal that lunch was over. The mercenary took the magazine and left at once. No goodbye — as if the raider he had been speaking with a moment ago were not even there to see.
I had put enough ground behind me that the settlement and its black smoke were gone from sight. For the next two days I would have to make the rounds of several settlements, deliver what mail remained, and pass along the air-raid warnings. After that, I would break ground on the Subway reconstruction project. Nothing on the route was particularly dangerous. It would not be difficult.
So long as I don't cross paths with the raider band and the mercenary roaming this stretch.
Maybe that thought had been the spark.
From the other side, a familiar silhouette was drawing near. An unusually small head. Long legs. A man with proportions you could not forget after a single glance.
An old colleague. One I had spent a long time forgetting.