Kangaroo
I gave Clock-out Man the operation's start time.
"The timing has to be exact. To the second."
"You're standing there talking to me about time?"
Clock-out Man tapped his wristwatch with one finger. Tok, tok.
"Right. Wasted my breath lecturing a time maniac."
"Not a maniac. Precise."
Precisely a maniac.
Following my plan, Clock-out Man reset the timer on the bomb. One was already planted along the settlement's northern wall, and the moment it blew, the raiders were to launch their assault. Set into that wall was a massive gate marked with a kangaroo—a beast out of pure fantasy—and we were going to blast it open so they could pour through.
Kangaroo. That was what the settlers called this place.
"Then I'm counting on you, bro."
"Yeah."
Taking on a raider band that size was no small thing. Not that there was no way to win it alone. I still had twenty-four Cores left, which meant I could fire my ability a full six times. But winning wasn't the whole of it. How you won mattered too. If I had to burn a Core every time I wanted a victory, that was no different from living on borrowed time. I couldn't fight a war of attrition forever.
You don't always have to give flesh to take the bone.
A true win was smashing the other side without spilling a single drop of my own blood. No need to pull a killing move for a few dozen raiders. The real question was whether I could sweep up the leaders in the same net.
"Can you still track the leader? You'd remember your client's scent."
"I was about to bring that up. Haven't caught a whiff of him since this afternoon."
"Nothing?"
"Happens sometimes, so I let it go. But it still hasn't come back."
Clock-out Man could smell the dead for days.
"Any guesses?"
"Something with a strong scent nearby will bury a person's smell easy. Happened a few times back when we ran ops together, bro. You remember."
"I do. But that was always temporary. Somebody roasting meat that reeked, that sort of thing."
"Usually, yeah. Aside from that, nothing comes to mind..."
Come to think of it, Clock-out Man had paid their hideout a visit last night.
"When you told them to move the raid up, was there anyone new?"
Father, for instance.
"Just a few small fry?"
So he didn't know Father's scent.
"The small fry, I can smell just fine. Getting closer, too. They're definitely headed this way."
And catching the leaders was the part that mattered.
"Your client did show up for every raid, though. That's solid?"
"Rock solid. He hated leaving it to his men. Didn't trust them, if you ask me."
So Mother was definitely in. Then both leaders would be there. No chance Father, the one who handled the fighting, would sit this out.
On to the next thing.
"How are the settlers?"
"No problem. Moving exactly the way you told them, bro."
"Good."
"Honestly, I was a little surprised. Figured, what if they just don't follow orders?"
A fair worry, from where Clock-out Man stood. I hadn't worried at all.
"Told you not to."
"These people trust you a hell of a lot more than I expected."
Even the sentries up on the wall didn't point their guns at me. That said enough. It wasn't simply that I'd all but monopolized deliveries in the area. What mattered was that there had never been a single misdelivery, and that I'd still been faster than any other postman. The brisk trading I did during the two-hour wait before the mail was gathered had played its part, too.
Trading with settlers during that wait was something every postman did. Always drifting from place to place, a postman tended to double as a trader. What set me apart from the ordinary ones was that the goods I sold were certain. I checked them with my probability-reading ability and only sold what I'd confirmed wasn't fake. Almost no one walked away from a deal with me unsatisfied.
Well. I buy a little cheap and sell a little dear.
Even so, so long as the goods were solid, everyone was happy. Nothing builds trust faster than money changing hands. Which is to say, trading with the settlers was never only about making money. It was trust, banked against a crisis that might or might not come.
They're the ones who trust me. I don't trust them.
The settlement armory was opened. An old man came out to represent the rest and began issuing each settler a weapon that suited them.
No exceptions.
The children had to take up arms as well. Pistols went to them first—light, and lethal enough to count. A kangaroo was engraved on every grip.
Even so, those small fern-soft hands couldn't hold them properly, and the guns kept slipping free with a clatter.
"Careful with that."
I picked up a fallen pistol, handed it back to the child, and tested the weight in passing.
Light. Far too light.
No need to read the odds. An empty magazine. Claw Farm wasn't so poor it couldn't spare a single round, and yet they were handing out guns with no ammunition in them. That meant the children hadn't received proper firearms training. Negligent discharges happen more often than people think. Entrusting a gun to children—untrained children—was dangerous. Leaving them empty-handed was dangerous in its own way, so they were being given pistols to hold for show.
The reason their shooting drills had never been done properly was obvious. This region had been peaceful for a long time.
"Don't rest your finger on the trigger unless you've got a reason. Understand? And don't go taking the magazine out unless a grown-up says so."
The old man pressed the warning on them again and again as he handed the pistols out. He wanted the children to believe the guns were loaded.
So they haven't even been trained to bluff with an empty gun.
Settlers from anywhere else would have been appalled. Not teaching a child past five how to keep their own body alive? They'd assume the kids had been picked up off the street. A life lived in a different world is something you simply can't understand. For these people, this was how you protected a child.
A life in which that child never has to hold a gun.
That was how Claw Farm had meant to shield its children—and its children's hearts—from ruin.
"Mom, it won't fit in my pocket."
"There's a holster at home. Come on, I'll get it for you..."
A little girl followed her mother away, the pistol clutched tight in both hands.
Well. In the end, you couldn't exactly call the settlement's policy a success.
That didn't mean anyone had done wrong. Wasn't the outside world supposed to be a land of equality? The values had simply been different, and so had the choices.
That's enough sentiment.
No room to stay soft tonight. The raiders were already close.
Midnight, and Claw Farm lay silent. What broke that hush was the bomb the mercenary had planted.
BOOM.
One great blast tore out the massive gate in the northern wall and the defenses around it all at once. The signal for the assault.
"It's started! Everybody, charge! If you gotta piss, piss down your leg and charge anyway! Don't stop!"
"Yes, sir!"
"We go in and take the armory first! Move!"
"Let's go!"
Through the northern wall, now wide open, the raiders walked into Claw Farm without shedding a drop of blood. Same as the last two raids, nothing stood in their way. They came storming in, victory already as good as theirs—and then:
"Halt! Everybody, halt!"
Father stopped his men cold.
"What's wrong, sir?"
"...Something's off."
Tension locked Father's jaw. The air inside Claw Farm was nothing like the last two settlements.
"Why is it so damn quiet?"
The settlers should have been startled witless by that explosion. Dozens of raiders on top of it—the place ought to have been screaming loud enough to hurt.
"Maybe they all ran again?"
The vanguard captain at Father's back was just as thrown.
"In this little time? No. Impossible."
Every raid, the settlers had bolted like lightning. But it had always been by a hair, and every time he'd seen their backs as they fled in a panic. Now there wasn't a single settler in sight.
"Something's here..."
Father swept the surroundings, frantic.
"You think the intel leaked?"
"Nobody knew but us and the mercenary. Leaked from where?"
The mercenary had bought off a few settlers, yes, but only so they'd spread word that the raider band had been wiped out. The assault plan itself was known to the raiders and the mercenary alone. Two settlements in the area had already been hit, so the others would have been on edge. Even so, it made no sense that they'd abandoned the place ahead of time over a raid whose when and how they couldn't know.
"How the hell did they know to run...?"
"Could it have come from the mercenary?"
All the mercenary had received so far was the retainer. The rest of the pay came after a successful raid.
"What does that bastard gain by leaking it?"
"The other way around, maybe. The settlers could have bought him."
"No way..."
It wasn't impossible. And yet—
"Even then, ditching the whole settlement doesn't make sense..."
"True. If they knew the raid was coming, they should've dug in and held the place."
"Don't tell me..."
A chill ran down Father's spine.
"Don't tell me we walked into a trap."
"N-no way."
The vanguard captain forced a laugh, trying to shake the tension off, and only managed an awkward face. The raiders looked around. Inside the settlement, the traces of people living there until moments ago were still plain. Lamps were even still burning in a few of the houses.
"No... If it was a trap, something would've happened already. Long since."
"R-right! They all ran. Intel must've leaked, sure, but they got scared and bolted. That's gotta be it!"
And then Father remembered the blast from a moment ago.
"...Explosives. Could it be explosives?"
"Explosives, sir?"
"The charge that blew the wall. What if they planted more of those all over the place?"
"Sir!?"
A bead of sweat slid down the vanguard captain's cheek.
"Then we need to run, right now!"
"Hold still."
Father fought to get his calm back. He was a veteran among veterans, a man who had slipped past death more times than he could count. The trick that had let him alone survive, and climb all the way to leader, while every comrade around him died—
"A cold head."
The composure Mother had taught him.
"Sir...?"
"Stay calm. Think. Use your head."
Panic meant death. Every death Father had ever watched had gone that way.
"Goddamn it. Of all the times for that bastard not to be here..."
Mother's absence was fatal. Father could cool his own head well enough. The problem was that the cold head had nothing in it.
"That bastard would've noticed something..."
He was right. Mother had noticed something long ago. That was why Mother wasn't here.
"We should run, now!"
"No... Think about it. It isn't a trap."
Father's brain was spinning harder than it ever had in his life. The vanguard captain had never seen that face so serious.
"If it was a trap, they wouldn't need to lure us inside. They could've set it out there."
"Oh. Now that you say it..."
Father's answer was perfectly reasonable. Sabotage inside the settlement would have cost the settlers, too. No need to turn a perfectly good home into a battlefield. The traps should have been outside.
"I'm sure of it. They just ran!"
"Yes, sir! That was it!"
They were already in. Pulling out now would have been ridiculous.
"The armory! We take the armory first, like we planned!"
"Yes, sir!"
The vanguard captain broke into a run toward the direction he'd memorized. But—
"You idiot!"
Wrong direction. More precisely, the captain had moved on old information.
"S-sir?"
"The armory moved!"
"Ah...!"
The mercenary who had come to say the raid had to be moved up a day hadn't stopped there. He'd also brought the latest word: the armory's location had changed.
"I remember now, sir!"
"You gonna get your head on straight, you little shit?"
"Sorry, sir!"
In truth, the armory had never moved at all. Every bit of it was nothing more than a plan laid by a certain Postman.
"Snipers, all of you up on the wall! Forget the inside—watch the outside! Be ready in case somebody hits us!"
"Yes, sir!"
"The rest of you, grab anything worth money! Move!"
Father headed for the armory with the vanguard captain and a handful of veterans. They threw open the warehouse the mercenary had named.
The door banged.
"Huh?"
A bare room. A few odds and ends scattered on the floor.
"The weapons... aren't here?"
"Shit."
First a leak. Now bad information.
"Did that mercenary bastard actually sell us out?"
"Or—maybe they took all the weapons with them when they ran!"
That had a logic to it.
"Yeah. Now that you say it. Obvious, damn it... Am I rattled? Head's not turning over."
"Doesn't this settle it, though? They ran."
The vanguard captain was beaming.
"Sounds right. Grab whatever's worth money and get out. I've had enough of this. Miserable claw-freak bastards."
"Yes, sir!"
And then—
"Sir, what's that?"
The vanguard captain had found something unfamiliar sitting in the center of the warehouse.
"Hm? Some kind of machine?"
"Looks like a spider. All those legs."
"If it looks like money, bring it out."
"Yes, sir. Let's see..."
While Father dug through the junk in the corner, the vanguard captain started looking over the device in question.
"There's writing on the body. Is this its name?"
"What's it say."
Father answered without looking. Those words became the man's last.
DAMAGE METER
"A damage... meter? What is this thing?"
And just then, something vast showed itself in the sky over Claw Farm. Like a condemned body plunging through the dropped floor of a gallows, something enormous was falling, shouldering the clouds of the night aside.