There Was a Plan Until It Exploded (1)
I knew there had to be something he believed in. Ever since he started handing out free medicine and meals to hundreds of patients in Graveyard Valley. Devoting half a century to charity with no hope of repayment would have been impossible without an extremely solid foundation. But to think he was actually a power player with real backbone.
“Universal human values, my god.”
“Why? Are you suddenly catching feelings?”
“Just don’t talk to me for a second. This is all too sudden.”
Benny’s eyes narrowed, the corners tightening with clear annoyance. Nathan ignored it and leaned his elbow against the wall like a farmer after a brutal day in the fields.
“Sorry. I’m ideologically very confused right now.”
“Ideologically?”
“The power-hungry elf obsessed with me is supposed to be an ugly villain. That makes it easy to understand and puts my mind at ease.”
He spoke as if joking, but the thought made sense. Santra. Kada Sakano. Mornid. Even the Winter King, though Nathan had never faced him directly. Benny nodded.
“Yeah. The misconception that the weak are good and the strong are evil is everywhere. But just looking at you, not everyone who fights well is a thug, right?”
“It’s not exactly that.”
Benny tilted her head slightly and stepped closer. Cold sweat had beaded on Nathan’s face where he leaned against the wall.
“Is there something more you haven’t told me? Which one is the fake identity? Somnus? Or Benny?”
“My real name is Vanessa. Somnus is the disguise—an alias I created when registering the business. I wanted to keep work and personal life separate.”
Only then did Benny understand. “I see why. You’re wondering if I approached you with some hidden agenda?”
“Exactly. Admitting that suspicion honestly also means I respect you that much. So I’d appreciate it if you’d be honest with me. If I find out later, I don’t think I could handle it.”
Panic flooded those young eyes that had not yet seen twenty years. Nathan could guess what he was thinking. The possibility that the person before him might also be a traitor.
Benny reached out as if to calm him and took a step back, giving Nathan room to breathe.
“Yeah. In most convenient stories, only a fool takes them at face value. The kind souls in these Heavens who gave without any price have gone extinct, devoured by selfish old men and desperate young people.”
Before suspicion could fully rise in Nathan’s eyes, Benny continued quickly. “But I think my own kind has done enough. To the lost souls in Graveyard Valley below. To me. And to you. Honestly, it’s too unfair. If they want blood, let them fight each other. If they want to gamble, they can play with coins or marbles. Those greedy bastards act however they please from their favorable positions, so isn’t it only right that someone stands on the other side of the unbalanced scale?”
“A sense of justice? Really? That’s it? You’re risking the foundation you’ve built over hundreds of years for a race that can only live a few decades—for that alone?”
More logical scenarios flooded his mind. That every hardship Nathan had endured was part of a scripted play. That his father, secretly an elf, had trained him to supply gladiators to the Heavens, and everything he had experienced was packaged as drama for the elves beyond and broadcast for their entertainment. At least compared to being this devoted to a man ten times younger, met less than a month ago—
“Whatever. In this tiny world where there’s nowhere else to run, what fun is there in living without that much romance?”
But romance belonged to the realm of the irrational. Nathan quietly searched Benny’s eyes. She lifted her chin defiantly and stared back, as if inviting him to look his fill.
“What? Why?”
He couldn’t tell whether those petal-like eyes were so clear and pure because they were sincere, or if they only looked that way because he desperately wanted to believe they were.
When Nathan swallowed hard, Benny slapped her own forehead.
“Kluck. You’ve figured out my dark intentions, Sapiens.”
Nathan flinched. Benny hurled the box she’d been carrying under her arm at him. He caught it without thinking.
“Now that it’s come to this, there’s no helping it! Your guess was right. There is something you have to give me. Wahaha.”
Wahaha? Nathan’s eyes twitched as he peered inside the steel box. It was completely empty.
Right. Benny had been wearing this on her head until a moment ago. He had never felt more pathetic. After spending a moment asking himself if he was an idiot, Nathan looked up.
Benny peeled the gloves from her now-free hands and spread them open. White, pretty hands with occasional calluses. Long mechanical parts dangled from the ends, gleaming.
“What is that attached to your hand?”
“Part of the disguise made to fool even the skeleton. I’m quite serious about hiding my identity. It’s not only on the hands. Don’t I look strangely tall right now?”
Now that he noticed, even though her shoe heels were thin, their eye levels were nearly the same. Originally there should have been a full head of height difference. She must have been wearing equipment on her legs as well.
“An application of prosthetic technology. Anyway, the main point—what I want is this.”
She curled the fingers of her left hand into a circle and extended the index finger of her right. Benny slid the finger into the circle. Then pulled it out. Then slid it in again. The sound of flesh sliding against flesh lingered in his ears.
“How is it?”
A gesture with unclear meaning. Nathan only furrowed his brow.
“Your wrists are thin compared to your height, so it looks a bit awkward. If you want to create that kind of bulk, you should pad the wrists too.”
“The concept for Somnus is to look deliberately long, thin, and grotesque, you know? Not that. What do you think of this?”
The index finger continued sliding in and out of the circle. Nathan, who had been staring in a daze, muttered.
“What exactly is this ‘this’ you’re talking about?”
“Oh, right. I guess they don’t have this gesture on the ground.”
Benny drooped her shoulders as if her excitement had cooled. A smile unconsciously spread across the corner of Nathan’s mouth.
“A gesture. It was a gesture. Good thing I didn’t know it. What if it was a curse against someone’s parents in our world?”
“Parents? It is related to the act of becoming parents.”
Benny grinned. Only then did Nathan understand. He felt his neck flush bright red in an instant.
“F…”
“You finally understood.”
“…What about the Gladiator Fight? Didn’t I receive my freedom in exchange for being forced to fight?”
“Nominally, yes. But I won’t use you for something like settling corporate disputes. There’s no rule that there can only be one gladiator. If a fight comes up, I can just put armor on Ramkaf and send him out. You have a different job, Sir Knight.”
Benny lifted her head with renewed energy and suddenly clung to Nathan’s chest. Her face was full of desire—purer and deeper than any elf’s he had ever seen.
“A knight sets out on a journey of wandering without reward, slays the princess, and saves the dragon.”
“The roles of princess and dragon are reversed. And wipe your drool before you speak.”
Nathan found it extremely frightening, in a sense somewhat different from before.
“Slurp. Saves the princess and slays the dragon. But unlike you, Sir Knight, I’m a materialist. I’ve decided I want compensation for being rescued. Won’t you embark on an adventure that contains the possibility of becoming parents with me?”
“What does that mean?”
The familiar voice that would normally have brought comfort. Yet Nathan felt a dizzying vertigo like the moment of death. Wiping the moisture from the corner of her mouth, Benny turned. She hurriedly snatched the steel box from Nathan’s arms and pulled it over her head.
On one side of the dim corridor where they stood, a pitch-black oval suddenly appeared. Soon two women stepped out from the space beyond it.
One was someone he never wanted to encounter in his lifetime. And the other was—
“An adventure containing the possibility of becoming parents?”
At this moment, someone he did not want to meet. Aspen, her face utterly emotionless, asked in a voice like an inanimate object.
Nathan closed his eyes and imagined. What if he had simply died to Mornid without the help of a miracle? At least then this moment would never have arrived. He had thought jumping from someone else’s bedroom window like some gentleman was far removed from his fate.
“Aspen.”
“I’m asking what that means, Outer Wing Knight. I’m extremely curious about what exactly has been happening all this time.”
Between dying from honesty and offering a ridiculous excuse, Nathan chose the former.
“I’ll say it plainly, without addition or subtraction. Being direct makes me a madman and making excuses makes me an idiot, so I’ll just be the madman. We mutually consented and slept together.”
“Really?”
Aspen swept her hair back. Then she simply stopped moving. The Double Wing looked like a person trapped inside her own body. The inner turmoil beneath the motionless shell was visible.
Nathan briefly reflected on what he had just done.
Should I stick my face in a basin of water and commit suicide?
“Everyone shut up. Don’t make my head hurt any more.”
Santra, who had shot a glare at Aspen behind her, turned to Benny and growled.
“What is this, you novice?”
Benny, who had been stunned by the bomb Nathan dropped, hurriedly reverted to her Somnus demeanor and answered.
It is not “novice,” it is Somnus. Even if we cannot be said to be on the same level, I am also a proper business owner. I ask that you treat me with appropriate etiquette—
“Etiquette? After causing the biggest accident thirty million credits can buy, you want etiquette?”
If you coveted ownership of the Sapiens, you had plenty of opportunity. The method was simple. Before I left after the bidding ended, you simply had to bid more than thirty million credits.
From beneath the veil, Santra inhaled sharply. She looked as though she could barely contain her rage. The opponent was a mage. There was no telling what she might do. Nathan, who had tensed instinctively, felt slightly relieved when Santra pressed her forehead and sighed.
“This is not something that can be glossed over with sly words, Benny. You young and foolish Hedonic. Did you sell your sense of reality to a pawn shop somewhere?”
My name is Somnus. By the way, what is Hedonic?
“Stop the third-rate play, Benny. Since you didn’t respect me, I have no reason to respect your Hedonic!”
Santra finally exploded in a shout. “You had no intention of getting involved in the Gladiator Fight! For over a hundred years, even when I advised you to join the board if you didn’t want to yield! Yet now you throw off the mask of a harmless idiot, unsettling the corporations and provoking the Winter King at the same time? Did you want to feel what falling feels like? Have you gone mad because you want to carve away your own flesh? And I told you to stop the play! Take off that trash-bin mask. Now!”
Benny hesitated for a moment, then removed the box like a scolded child. Rebellion still burned in her eyes.
“Since I bought him, Nathan Maia is mine. If you wanted him, you could have bid even ten thousand credits more.”
“You want to stage a scene where two corporate owners compete over a ground-dweller whose name is on the northern kill list? In front of a group of monarchs’ representatives? A blood wind would sweep through the eastern corporations. The victims would be innocent people and the very acquaintances you cherish! Is that what you want?”
“Innocent people? The acquaintances I cherish? Were there any of those left in the Heavens? After having them taken away little by little for the past hundred years, I’m honestly confused. No one will easily take what is mine from my hands anymore! Not you, and not that old bastard in the unheated wasteland who deserves to die! This is my Hedonic!”
Santra fell silent. Flames blazed in Benny’s eyes. That heat reminded her of a certain time. A time that could never return.
“So.”
Nathan, who had been quietly focused on the conversation, flinched. Even amid the loud exchange between the two elves, Aspen’s whisper came through clearly. It carried a color that stimulated a sense of crisis, like the sound of a longsword being drawn.
“So that’s Benny.”