What a Monster
Watching Colt move the stacks of bills, James clenched and unclenched his hand, gauging the strength still left in him.
“That’s enough, Colt.”
“Huh? There’s still a lot left.”
James lifted one finger. “I’ve recovered a little of my strength.”
Mana answered his will in a quiet surge. The mental force that let him command magic had returned to him, at least in part.
“Oh!”
Whoosh.
Mana rose at his bidding and lifted the bundles of cash into the air; the floating bills began stacking themselves neatly, one after another. In no time at all, the work was finished.
“One, two, three……”
The moment the sorting was done, Colt started counting, trying to calculate the total. While he was at it, James went to his own vehicle and connected the trailer to the pickup truck.
Clack.
Then he walked over to Colt’s car and opened the trunk. His own bag was inside, along with Colt’s, which Colt had brought along.
“……”
James took only his own bag and carried it back to the passenger seat of the pickup.
“Travel prep is done.”
Having finished his preparations so simply, James returned to the trailer and found Colt still counting the stacks of bills.
“Two hundred and twenty, two hundred and twenty-one……”
“How long are you planning to keep counting? There’s still way more than half left.”
With a flick of his hand, James sent a surge of mana through the piles and split the cash into two halves.
“Ah……”
It wasn’t exactly half and half. One side was Colt’s forty percent, and the other was James’s sixty. It was the same ratio they had agreed on from the start.
“...Damn. Now I’ve got to count again.”
He would have to start from the beginning, but even that was a pleasure to Colt.
“Heh. All right then... one, two……”
James shook his head and said, “Out of fifty-six million dollars, Colt’s share is twenty-two point four million. Mine is thirty-three point six million. Exactly sixty-forty.”
“...Whoa. Fast.”
“If I pay back the hundred thousand dollars here, Colt’s share goes back up to twenty-two point five million.”
At James’s gesture, one stack moved over onto Colt’s pile of bills.
Thump.
One bundle of hundred-dollar bills was ten thousand dollars, and ten such bundles bound together made exactly one hundred thousand.
“Heh. So you really are paying it back in the end?”
“It’s my car and my trailer.”
James wanted the numbers settled cleanly.
“You keep calling it a gift.”
“If you’re going to give me a gift, give me something better later. For the record, I don’t accept gifts under a hundred grand.”
Besides, although they were splitting it, the amount could never come out neatly in exact units of one hundred thousand dollars. There had been loose bills left unbound.
“There’s still plenty of unbundled cash.”
As the teleportation finished, the scattered bills floated up into the air. At a glance, it was still worth several hundred thousand dollars.
“Let’s use the loose change for our travel money.”
“Loose change? You call this loose change?”
“This isn’t the time to be arguing about what counts as loose change.”
“Heh, fair enough. Hahaha.”
“Colt can keep that.”
“Got it!”
And just like that, the “loose change” went into Colt’s hands.
“The casino’s going to notice too. Let’s get out of here before this gets noisy.”
They had settled the split, so it was time to leave.
“Wait. Come to think of it……”
Colt suddenly remembered what greed had made him overlook.
“How the hell did you get all this money?”
He had accepted it back when James said he’d won money playing poker at the casino. The James Colt knew was a real magician, the kind who could pull cards from his sleeve at any time, anywhere. And since Colt also knew James could read an opponent’s cards, he had firmly believed there was no way he could lose at a card game.
But you said you lost at poker—so how’d you still get the money? What trick did you use?
“You definitely said you were going to win money from poker at the casino. At this scale, though……”
With this much cash, it no longer sounded like a casino job. It sounded like a bank robbery. But since the casino would notice, it clearly hadn’t been a bank.
“Could it be... the casino vault?”
“Correct. I robbed the casino vault.”
James felt no guilt at all about robbing it.
The casino was too greedy.
He hadn’t raked in some absurd winning streak or walked out with a mountain of chips, but the casino had been so desperate for money that it had even brought in dealers and professional players to crush him. That was enough to shake off the last traces of guilt he had been carrying.
I’ll rob them again next time.
“...What kind of magic did you use?”
He didn’t mind telling Colt; for anyone else, it would have been another matter.
“I’d been going to the casino every day to leave my traces behind. Then I used the money that had entered the vault as a medium and pulled all the surrounding cash over here. In one shot—pow!”
“That’s……”
It was theft, plain and simple, with no room left for excuses. Stealing was a completely different thing from winning money in a game.
“Why are you making that face? Feeling guilty?”
“Hmm……”
“Compared to what the casino’s been bleeding out of us, this is nothing. They’ll probably recover the money we took in just a few days.”
“...Yeah. Better than robbing a bank, I guess.”
They were still stealing someone else’s money, but somehow robbing a casino felt a little less evil than robbing a bank.
“Get in the car. They haven’t figured it out yet, but that could change at any time.”
“If the money disappeared from the vault, they’d have noticed already. There must be cameras in there too. We really need to leave fast.”
“You think I wouldn’t have planned for that?”
Right before he executed the teleportation, James had cast an illusion spell over the vault to fool the surveillance cameras. Even now, the casino’s security feed was still recording the stacks of dollars sitting exactly where they should be.
“But that only buys us a little time. We won’t end up as suspects, but staying in Las Vegas would still be a bad look.”
He had pulled off the theft without leaving a trace, but James was still, at heart, no different from Colt: a small man trying to keep his conscience intact. It wasn’t about whether he would be named a suspect or not; it was, quite simply, a matter of conscience.
“……”
Colt stared at the mountain of cash for a long moment, then sprang to his feet.
“All right. When else am I ever going to get to touch this much money? Let’s go! Right now!”
“Come on, Colt.”
Vroooom.
The trailer loaded with the fortune pulled out behind James’s pickup, and Colt’s car followed after them.
That evening, the casino vault was opened. The heavy steel door swung smoothly wide, and several security officers entered with the casino manager.
“This way.”
“Yes, Mr. Kent.”
The cash to be deposited at the bank the next day had grown a little larger. The security officers, clearly used to seeing piles of money, began unloading the fresh cash and stacking it neatly beside the mountain already inside.
Then one officer’s elbow brushed against a stack of bills piled high beside him.
Rustle.
The bundle vanished as if it had never existed, revealing empty space where it had been.
Thud. Thud.
But the security officers were still busy with their assigned work and didn’t notice a thing.
Kent scanned the vault, then looked toward the workers and barked, “Hey. Fill the empty space beside it first.”
“Uh... that’s strange.”
Until just a moment ago, every slot had been full.
“What do you mean, strange?”
“It was filled just now.”
“What are you talking about?”
Kent, who had been waiting at the vault entrance, stepped inside.
“Here……”
This was the spot I filled yesterday.
He remembered it clearly. He had been here yesterday too, sorting cash with the security officers.
But it’s gone? No—disappeared?
“!”
This was an emergency.
“Stop work. Everybody back off and stand up!”
The security officers jumped to their feet at once, and the massive steel door slammed shut again. Kent ran straight for the control room.
“Jefferson!”
“Yes, Mr. Kent.”
“Check the vault cameras! Right now!”
“From when would you like me to start?”
“From yesterday, when I entered the vault, up through the present!”
“Yes, sir.”
With practiced fingers, Jefferson manipulated the program and replayed the moment from yesterday when Kent had walked into the vault.
“Play the vault interior at the same time.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kent had opened the vault just like he did today, and two security officers were carrying heavy bags inside.
Right. My memory is solid.
The officers had neatly stacked the cash they brought in to fill the empty space, even moving over loose bills from other piles to make the total balance out.
There was definitely five million dollars stacked there.
But in today’s vault, there was no sign of it.
“Go further ahead. Play at ten times speed.”
“Yes, sir.”
The vault was a place maintained with such strict security that not even an ant could slip through. Even with the footage running at ten times speed, the same image remained, repeating over and over, and that in itself was proof.
“Go back thirty minutes.”
“...Yes, sir.”
Even when Jefferson rewound to a recent point, the screen showed the same thing as before. The pile of bills was still there.
...So it was still there thirty minutes ago?
“From here, play at three times speed.”
The first change in the footage came when Kent once again entered the vault with the security officers.
“Huh?”
Even then, the recorded image still showed the stack of bills.
What the hell is going on?
He had just checked the empty space inside the vault, and yet the footage at the moment he stepped in still matched what he saw before him.
“Was there an incident?”
“Confirmation comes first.”
Kent still couldn’t tear his eyes away from the three-times-speed footage. As Jefferson watched the recording with him, he spotted something strange.
“Oh?”
Kent was staring too, stunned.
“!”
They just... vanished all at once?
“Rewind it. Slow the playback down more!”
“Yes, y-yes!”
Jefferson rewound to just before the bills disappeared, then replayed the footage slowly from that point.
The security officers were faithfully carrying out Kent’s orders, and then, at some point, the bills were simply gone. Right beside the officers, they had vanished without a trace. Kent had been inside the vault at that exact moment.
“...What in the world is this?”
“Zoom in and replay it again! Even slower!”
“Yes.”
The officers’ movements slowed to the pace of tortoises, and Jefferson and Kent focused on the screen.
“!”
“!”
The moment the bills disappeared was the very instant one officer’s elbow brushed past them.
“……”
“How can something like this happen……”
Because Jefferson voiced what Kent wanted to say, Kent was able to think through the cause more clearly.
Something impossible happened? But this was, literally, impossible. Which means there must be something possible behind it.
“Could there have been a problem with the machine?”
At Kent’s question, Jefferson remembered that he had recently checked the cameras to make sure they were functioning normally.
“...The surveillance cameras show no issues, and neither does the recorded footage. That was confirmed again the day before yesterday.”
“Then how do you explain this recording?”
“Well……”
If Jefferson had known the reason, there would have been no need for this conversation in the first place.
“There must have been a problem with the machine. Or maybe there was an accomplice on the inside.”
“Shouldn’t we report this to the police first?”
“We should inform the chairman first......”
The fact that the casino had been robbed was already beyond dispute.
It’s important to catch the thief, but what matters even more is the casino’s reputation.
If word got out that their security was so weak they couldn’t even properly guard the vault, it would be the end of them.
“Jefferson, look into the recent movements of the employees who have access to the surveillance cameras and central system.”
“...Yes, Mr. Kent.”
“And make absolutely sure this information doesn’t leak outside. Understood?”
“...Yes.”
But what had happened at Kent’s casino also happened at another casino the next day. In truth, it had all occurred on the same day; only the time at which it came to light had differed.
And because the same incident had struck several casinos, the information they had tried to hide finally burst out into the open.
Kent read the headline, crushed the newspaper in his fist, and cursed in fury.
“Damn it!”
Still, it was a small comfort that it hadn’t only been his place that got hit.
“...What a monstrous bastard.”