I Am Not Pride
Dark pressed in from every side, thick as ink. The air stank of garbage and rotting blood. It was a narrow, filthy back alley, and I was the only one in it.
One monster stood before me.
Spit strung down from a maw split far too wide. Horns had sprouted wherever they pleased, and the skeleton beneath the hide was twisted out of any natural shape. A low-grade demon, not even granted a name.
It scraped out some grotesque sound and took a single step closer.
Click.
I opened the cover at the rear of the gun, pushed a round home, and shut it again before setting my cheek to the stock. Cool wood met skin that had already gone hot.
I am a nun.
More precisely, a combat nun whose work is shooting demons dead.
I lifted the muzzle and laid it on the thing's brow. What I held was not a holy book, but a long gun. I had no faith.
My lips barely stirred, and golden holy script assembled itself in the empty air.
Calling, strictly for the job, a name I do not even believe in.
The golden letters drew into a band and wound around the black barrel, turning as they went. This was not a prayer. It was the reading aloud of a procedure.
In my head I drew only the result. A sacred round. A trajectory punched through the demon's skull. The holy script that had been circling the air gathered at the lip of the muzzle.
I put strength into the finger laid across the trigger.
The last line.
Bang!
The head burst outright. The demon folded to the ground, and black blood welled out in a thick slick, soaking the alley floor. The reek of it filled the narrow space.
I lowered the smoking muzzle and looked down at the corpse. A short sigh leaked out of me.
This work was simply not my aptitude. I was not the sort of person who belonged on a site like this. A blatant error in personnel classification.
The appeal had not even been received. No review, no notice, no one assigned to the case. The party that had handed down the judgment had not shown itself since that day.
The memory drew my brow tight.
For the record, I have been classified as Pride, one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Let me say this in advance. I was wronged.
All of it is the fault of that bastard up there.
So. I will tell it from the beginning.
Assistant Manager Kim. Cause of death, acute cardiac arrest. They said he had worked day and night for days on end and collapsed at home.
When I heard that a subordinate of mine was dead, the first thought through my head was not grief.
Pathetic.
I know. I am not a particularly fine human being. My character is twisted as far as it will go, and if someone calls me a heartless individualist, I have nothing much to say in my defense. But so what? Is individualism a bad thing? If each person properly handles exactly one person's share, society rolls along just fine.
"Team Leader, I am truly sorry. This is the proposal I stayed up all night revising..."
"Assistant Manager Kim."
His face came back to me — a few days before he died, bloodshot eyes, holding the papers out.
I took the proposal and flipped through it fast from the first page. I did not need to see many sheets. The problem was obvious. From the start, it was not the direction I had ordered.
I closed the document and pushed it to the corner of the desk.
"Is this company a school?"
"Sir...?"
"I asked whether this is a place that hands out awards for effort and claps for you. You went completely against the direction I gave you. Why is the excuse that you stayed up all night being offered here?"
"Th-that is — coordination from the related departments ran late, so I had to compile the data alone..."
"And does that change the result?"
Assistant Manager Kim shut his mouth.
"If you cannot resolve it today, it goes onto this personnel review exactly as it stands. See to it yourself."
His face was already half dead, so I informed him of reality. I had not cursed him. I had not struck him. I had not put a knife to his throat and threatened him. If you cannot do the work, the evaluation drops. That was ordinary common sense.
The work I had assigned him was an amount that could be fully handled inside the given period. At least, that was my judgment.
And then a person died.
Two days later, the funeral hall.
He had been my subordinate, all the same. If I, the team leader, did not so much as show my face, the talk behind my back would be inevitable. I took an envelope of condolence money and went to the mourning room.
The particular smell of a funeral hall, heavy air pressing down, stung my nose. I had laid flowers before the portrait and was about to bow my head to the chief mourner.
"You."
I looked up. A woman in mourning clothes was glaring at me as if she meant to tear me apart. Assistant Manager Kim's wife.
"This is your fault."
"..."
"You killed my husband! You demon bastard!"
She lunged like an animal and seized me by the collar.
"Let go of me. Now."
"Sister-in-law! Calm down!"
The people around us rushed in, horrified, but the woman would not release her grip, vicious to the last. Sharp nails raked deep across the nape of my neck. The collar of the shirt I had ironed to a knife-edge crease crumpled. The tie I had knotted so neatly went crooked and cheap.
In that instant an uncontrollable disgust surged up. My brow knotted hard. I struck her wrist away with force.
"Agh!"
She staggered back. I flicked at the crumpled collar, irritable, and opened my mouth.
"I regret it. But I never once assigned Assistant Manager Kim any work that was especially unreasonable."
For a moment the mourning room went quiet, as if cold water had been thrown over it. The bloodshot eyes of the woman went slack and blank.
"What...?"
"Neither the workload nor the schedule differed from those of the other employees. If Assistant Manager Kim found it too much, it was not because I deliberately dumped an excessive amount of work onto him."
"My husband came home at dawn every single day!"
She screamed again, as if spitting blood.
"He worked weekends! He couldn't even manage one proper meal, he chewed stomach medicine while he worked! If that isn't effort, then what in the world is!"
It was the first I had heard of it.
Effort. That was the word that caught worst of all.
"I am not denying that he worked hard."
Her eyes trembled in small, fine shakes.
"Only, the time one spends does not guarantee a result."
"...What?"
A murmur rose on every side. Hostile stares, sharp enough to stab. It was a place where a family had died. They were never going to like me standing there and sorting right from wrong. But their being offended, and my being wrong, were separate matters.
I had come out of an orphanage. No parents, no money, no connections to watch my back. While other people drank on their parents' money, I worked three jobs. While other people slept, I cut my own sleep and filled in what I lacked. In the end I graduated second in my class from a top university. And at thirty, I became the youngest team leader since the company's founding.
That much is what one may call effort.
Failing to carry it alone, and dragging it all the way into the weekend. That is a trace. It is not a result.
Talking at a wall would only have wasted my time.
"I have paid my condolences. I will be going."
I straightened the crooked tie until it lay true, turned without a backward look, and left the mourning room. Behind me the quiet was enough to raise the hair on my neck.
In that instant something massive slammed into the back of my head.
"Kh—!"
Light burst across my eyes, and the strength dropped clean out of my legs. I hit the floor through a hideous pain and barely managed to turn my head.
Assistant Manager Kim's wife stood there, dragging in rough breaths. In her hands was the heavy fire extinguisher that had been standing beside the entrance. From its base, red blood dripped. My blood.
So in the end, she settled on me as the cause.
Even as my consciousness fled at speed, there was no fear. It was so absurd that irritation rose first.
A person never dies of only one cause. His body may already have been poor. He may have failed to judge his own limits properly. His ability at the work may have been lacking. There may have been variables I did not weigh enough, the way there had been with the related departments. And that woman had set every one of those possibilities aside and named me, alone, as the cause. Because that was the simplest. Admitting that her own husband might also have been at fault would have been difficult. Making a villain out of me alone must have been far easier.
How primitive.
My vision cut to black.
And like that, I died an absurd death.
I opened my eyes.
White.
There was no ceiling, no walls, no floor. I could not even tell which way was up and which was down. The whole of it was an empty, pure-white space. And yet beneath my feet there was the strange sensation of standing on something solid.
"...What is this. The afterlife?"
"Where the fuck are you looking, you piece of shit!"
A shout exploded right beside me, loud enough to split an eardrum. I turned my head. A man built like a bear was glaring at me, eyes shot with blood.
"Eyes down. I'll rip you to shreds."
I was already dead, and he meant to kill me again. A truly contradictory, and stupid, threat.
I studied the man's face in silence. Familiar. The human beast from the news, who had torn several police officers apart with his bare hands. And in the empty air above the crown of his head, a strange red sigil wavered like flame.
...Wrath?
From right beside me came a sound that crawled the skin. A wet swallow.
A woman with a tangle of hair was staring at my forearm as if she meant to bore a hole through it. She swallowed spit that glistened.
"Meat... That would taste good..."
The cannibal murderer who had mixed human flesh into food and sold it. Above her head floated a sigil in the shape of a great mouth, teeth bared.
Gluttony.
Very naturally, and very quietly, I took one step to the side.
When I took my eyes off the two of them, the rest of the faces ranged around us came in at a single glance. A serial poisoner who had killed for the insurance money. A woman who had chosen only influencers to murder. An actor from a drug scandal, who had turned the people infatuated with him into human wrecks one after another. And a human sprawled spread-eagle on the floor, snoring.
Every one of them was a face I had seen at least once on the news. Irredeemable trash, who had sent more than a few people on to the next world. And over their heads, strange sigils had risen all at once.
Greed. Envy. Lust. Sloth.
Add the Wrath and the Gluttony from a moment before, and the total was six. With me, seven.
Once things had gone this far, an obvious concept rose of its own accord. The Seven Deadly Sins, which corrupt human beings.
Then the one remaining. Which is to say, my share.
...Pride?
I turned the word over in grave thought, and then I shook my head, decisive.
No. This is not right.
Even so, there is such a thing as a line. I had never torn a person apart, and I had never used anyone as an ingredient. I had seized my success by bone-grinding effort, inside legitimate rules. I was nothing more than an ordinary, competent citizen.
And these were beasts that could not even govern their own reason. Revolting serial killers. I was the same grade as that?
It did not hold together. It went past unpleasant and arrived at insult. This was a clear administrative error.
I did not care whether the thing managing the afterlife was a system or a god. When the person responsible appeared, I intended to seize them by the collar if I had to, and lodge a complaint that would stick.
At that very moment, a heavy vibration rolled through the white space where there had been nothing.
It was not a sound that entered through the ears. It raked the inside of the skull and drove itself directly into the mind. A voice I could not identify.
"At last. All of you are gathered."
Wrath, who had been pouring out killing intent. Gluttony, drooling. Even Sloth, who had been snoring, cracked one eye.
The clamorous space went still as the dead.
The voice paused. Then it declared again, bearing down upon the whole of the space.
"Come."
A short silence.
"You trash."