Is There Someone Who Spent Twenty Years Trying to Legally Kill Cursed Food? (1)
"What are you doing, sunbae?"
"Huh? I nearly died without being able to move a finger after that succubus got me. Nothing says the exact same thing won't happen again."
"Given our line of work, yeah. Pretty much."
I was sitting on the sofa sketching something when Dias set two heavy lumps down on top of my head and asked. I wanted to smack her right then and there, but that was the shortest route to a jail cell, so I let it go.
"So I was going to ask you for a weapon I can use when the only thing I can move is my mouth."
"Custom work's going to cost a fortune, though...?"
"It's fine. I've got a guy I know who makes weapons like a damn artist."
Back in college, there was a classmate who dumped our entire group project on me because he had to prepare a weapon for a contest. The others were no better. One pulled off the miracle of his parents holding a wedding, divorcing three days later, and remarrying, and another vanished for a whole week insisting this deal absolutely could not fail. The two who ran off to the contest and the deal wore their palms raw begging me to please, please handle the group project properly—because if this assignment didn't go right, they wouldn't graduate.
"Looking back, I was such a sucker. I really did the whole thing by myself, and I even put their names on it."
"What about the guy who caused the miracle?"
"Left him off, obviously. And the even more ridiculous part? He was an AI. Ten minutes with him and the research would've been finished. Son of a bitch."
"...I've wondered for a while. Do AIs have parents?"
"If you're curious, ask the forum. The ones you set off will explain it very kindly."
Maybe I was too soft back in college. I drank so much coffee it might as well have replaced the blood in my veins, and somehow I got the assignment done. In the end the project was a success. Those two bastards won the contest, closed a deal with a major corporation, and went on to thrive. They weren't entirely ungrateful animals, though, so we've kept in touch and stayed friends to this day.
"Now that I think about it, I'm pissed. He wouldn't even have graduated without me, and I had to beg just to get a single artifact out of him?"
The more I turned it over, the more it rankled. These were people who wouldn't have graduated if I hadn't pulled top marks on that group project. Shouldn't they have been falling over themselves to help, instead of me having to clasp my hands and plead? I squeezed the pencil I'd been drawing the blueprint with hard enough to crumple it, and the poor innocent thing snapped and died for nothing.
"But this isn't so much a blueprint as... just a doodle, isn't it?"
"I sketch it roughly like this, send it over, and he just makes it."
I wasn't a dwarf, or any race built for this sort of work. There was no way I could produce a proper blueprint. Click. I photographed the bootleg plans—nothing but a rough shape and a list of functions—and sent them to my acquaintance.
Once that one-sided notice was delivered and I'd stuffed the phone into my pocket, it started wailing like a child freshly woken from sleep.
Jingle—
I'd tossed aside the doodle that dared call itself a blueprint and was enjoying a bit of downtime when the bell rang to announce a customer. Another one, right on the heels of yesterday. The review posted on the forum had been so violently written that it seemed to be advertising us just fine.
I headed for the door to greet them, but the customer who ought to have been standing there was nowhere in sight. Thinking it might have been a delivery instead of a customer, I was about to ask Dias—
"Over here. Here."
A voice from somewhere. I looked all around and still couldn't see anyone, so I concluded this customer had to be a ghost. Ghosts can't be seen unless they choose to show themselves first, so I asked nicely.
"If you happen to be a ghost, could you show yourself? If appearing is too embarrassing, you can sit in the chair and talk for now..."
"I am not a ghost!! I am right here!!"
The shout rang out, thoroughly incensed at being mistaken for a ghost, and a snow-white hand rose above the chair. Only after I moved the chair aside did I see a little girl short enough to have been hidden completely behind it. Her hair was pure white, as if a field buried under fresh snow had been set down on her head, and her eyes were black—the exact opposite of that hair.
"...Dias. Is there a lost-child center nearby?"
"I'll look it up."
"Now then, little kiddo~ Where might your parents be?"
To anyone watching, she looked like a girl who had lost her parents and wandered in by mistake. I lowered myself to her eye level and coaxed her gently. The moment I did, she ducked her head and started trembling all over. She must have been badly frightened after losing them.
Vrrrrrr!!!
"Yeah. Go on, cry all you wa— wait. Vrrr?"
It was closer to the low hum a machine makes when it powers up than to a child crying. The sound wasn't coming from the girl in front of me. It was coming from right beside my face. I turned my head, and chainsaw blades were there to welcome me.
Follow the chainsaw that had appeared out of nowhere, and you found a slender hand—one I'd taken for a child's—gripping, in a single fist, a chainsaw as big as her entire body.
"What did you... just say? Little kiddo?"
"...Shall we try resolving this with a conversation first?"
"As it happens, I was thinking of a conversation as well. Say hello. This chainsaw's name is Conversation."
"I meant the kind of conversation that's actually in the dictionary!!"
The moment she lifted that chainsaw one-handed, I knew she wasn't a little girl. What stood in front of me was a perfectly grown woman, short only because of her race. Most short races get extremely angry when you treat them like children solely for their height. There's even a saying: if you mock a short race for their stature, pray they aren't armed.
VROOOOOOM!!!
"Purge the heretic!!"
A chainsaw built to cut wood had lost the word wood and came swinging at me with nothing left but the purpose of cutting. The blade filled every last inch of my retinas. She maintained it so well that my face reflected in it like a mirror. For a brief moment my life flashed before my eyes, along with the thought that something that sharp might at least kill me without pain.
"There's a cucumber hot dog over here!!!"
"Heretic!!"
Bang!! Shrrk-krrsh-krrsh!!!
Dias hurled a cucumber hot dog into the air. As if something had possessed her, the woman wrenched the chainsaw off its path toward me and ground the cucumber hot dog into powder. I didn't waste the opening that bought me.
Slime
Shluk!! The instant my race changed to slime, the chainsaw carved for my neck. But I'd already let my body sag out of the way, and the saw only split blameless air. I stretched an arm toward the opening her attack had left, trying to bind her, but she spun in midair and slipped free. It felt uncomfortably like watching Dias lose her mind completely and go on a rampage.
"...So you were a sli—"
"Be quiet!!!"
Clang!!!
She locked onto a slime's greatest weakness—the core—and moved to swing the chainsaw again. Fortunately Dias had already leapt into the air and brought a bat down on the woman's head, cutting the attack short. When the slime already spread across the floor tried to wrap her body, she fought back by lashing the chainsaw every which way. That, too, fell apart when Dias brought the bat down on her head a second time and properly settled her.
"Wow. Even if I treated you like a kid, is it really okay to attack someone you've just met? You're not scared of the police?"
"She's an inquisitor. They can kill anything they designate a heretic. What's there to be scared of?"
"No wonder she kept going heretic, heretic earlier."
Inquisitor. The word usually means someone who punishes those who act against the Church, but here it was a little different. The biggest difference was that they had nothing whatsoever to do with the Church, and they decided heresy for themselves—whether the target was an object or a person. When an inquisitor executed someone they had named a heretic, the police did not charge them with a single crime.
Heretic Executioner would have suited them better than Inquisitor. At a glance, you might ask whether it was right for one person to hold power that overwhelming. It was, in fact, overwhelming power. The problem was that becoming an inquisitor took twenty years all by itself, and the process was anything but easy. People who had been through it said the difficulty was a doctoral program and special-forces training smashed together. Even after completing every stage, fail the final exam and the retake alone took ten years. Start the moment you came of age and you were forty at the finish. Fail once and you were fifty. Most people never even considered it. And yet the woman in front of me had become an inquisitor all the same.
"So. Let's hear what brought you here."
"Tsk... I came because I wish to find a heretic."
"And who, exactly, is this heretic you're talking about?"
An inquisitor doesn't brand just anyone a heretic. They fix on a single concept and brand everything related to it. The one in front of me would have a standard of her own, so I decided I'd take the request or refuse it based on what that standard was.
"When I went to a Michelin restaurant."
"Yes."
"I am searching for the heretic who introduced a sardine pie to me as a dessert that merely looked the part."
"...I'm only asking because I'm curious. The reason you became an inquisitor is...?"
"I designate, as heresy, cursed foods that violate ethics. Obviously."
So she had endured a process that takes twenty whole years just so she could destroy cursed food with a proper justification? Solely to kill cursed food?
"Are you insane?"
"Geniuses are inevitably treated as lunatics by ordinary people."
"Do you only kill the cursed food? Or do you kill the people who make it, too?"
"Obviously, only the food. If they keep making it, I keep destroying it until they break. That is sufficient."
The words climbed all the way to my throat—and someone like that tried to clear-cut my neck with a chainsaw just because I mistook her for a kid?—but I hadn't felt killing intent anywhere near yesterday's succubus, so I had nothing to say. If she'd truly meant to cut me, she probably would have stopped the chainsaw at the last instant.
"She's never actually killed a person. She has killed a great deal of food, though."
"How do you know that in so much detail?"
"There was a time I looked into becoming an inquisitor myself."
"Good thing you didn't. Well... in that case, I have no reason to refuse the request. I look forward to working with you."
I shifted my race back to human and held out my hand, and the inquisitor gripped it tight. Twenty years of training on par with the special forces will do that. The moment she properly took my hand, it shattered.
"How did you find Arim's Errand Agency?"
"The pervert saintess told me. A place that introduced her to no fewer than two new pleasures, she said."
"That's advertising, in its own way."