The Contract
"Just call me Granny Ryu. That's what everyone calls me."
"All right. Granny... Ryu. But when you say a contract, what exactly do you mean?"
The pre-dawn air, still thick with the smell of grass, retreated as proper morning finally arrived.
We faced Granny Ryu with the first rays of sunlight streaming down through the window washing over us.
Her face, so creased it was hard to find a single smooth patch of skin, radiated not just hard-won experience but a strange, indefinable pressure as well.
"Exactly what it sounds like—a contract. A promise exchanged between two parties... you'd do just as well to think of it as a kind of deal."
"We don't have anything to offer, though."
"Heh heh... whatever gave you the idea you had nothing? You've got the finest thing of all."
"...You can't have Noah."
I stretched out a hand to shield Noah.
But Granny Ryu simply smiled and shook her head.
"That's not it. Like I said—if I'd meant you any harm, I'd have made my move long ago. Now, to get to the point... my condition is simply that the two of you stay in this village."
"...?"
I couldn't make sense of Granny Ryu's proposal.
How could simply staying in the village be something worth trading for?
We'd already planned to remain here for the time being anyway.
As I stood there with a question mark practically hovering over my head, Noah spoke up.
"...It's a matter of duration, isn't it. Am I wrong?"
"Oho. The little miss has a decent head on her shoulders. That's right. I'd like you to stay in this village for six months. That's my condition."
It wasn't a bad deal for us.
Six months was a fairly long stretch, but we needed time to learn about this bizarre world anyway, so it was hardly a burden.
Besides, with a stable base of operations provided, we had no particular reason to rush out of this village.
"You said a contract. Then what exactly do we get in return?"
"The right to ask me anything you like."
"...That falls a little short, I think."
"How could it? Isn't information the thing you need most of all right now?"
"What makes you say that?"
I threw out a bluff.
For reasons I couldn't fathom, Granny Ryu apparently wanted us staying here, so a little firmness couldn't hurt.
But her next words nearly drove me out of my seat.
"Well, obviously—you're not people of this era. I imagine there's quite a lot you don't know."
"!!"
...
Clatter!
The chair went tumbling across the floor.
Damn it—I can't let my reaction show like that!
I kicked myself for my rash behavior.
I should have just played dumb, but the sheer unexpectedness of her words had thrown me completely off balance.
And now I'd done nothing but prove her right.
"Please calm yourself, Jun."
"Noah..."
"I poked at you once and hit the mark dead center, I see. Khekhek... You'll need to work on managing your expressions, my boy. Take a page out of the little miss's book. Looking at her face alone, you'd never guess a needle could slip in."
"Please stop toying with us. You've already confirmed everything through your [Divination] anyway, haven't you?"
"Ohohoho... Divination isn't nearly so all-powerful. It's terribly vague and abstract, you know... The only reason I could guess at your true nature is that there were a few similar cases in the past."
"!"
Cases like ours?
Don't tell me there had been other reincarnators besides me?
But what Granny Ryu said wasn't quite what I'd imagined.
"People who escaped from the [Ruins]. Their threads of causality are thinner than a newborn's—that's the telltale sign. There are other markers too, of course."
"The Ruins?"
"Ah—facilities built by a civilization that came before us... what we call the [Old Humanity]. They're warped in both space and time, so they tend to pop up in entirely unpredictable places. Like wherever it was the two of you crawled out of."
So the research lab must have been a kind of Ruins as well.
People coming out of a place like that—had there been cryogenically frozen humans down there or something?
"Causality is the hardest thing of all to change. And thanks to that, I was able to guess at who you were. Though to be honest, the records only survive among those who've carried on the diviner's line, so right up until I laid eyes on you, I'd dismissed it all as mere legend."
"Hoo... All right. We did come out of a Ruins. So—what do you intend to do about it?"
"Do about it? Who do you think prompted this whole conversation when you insisted you didn't need anything?"
"...Oh."
...
"My spirit's drained... What on earth is that old woman?"
"Hard to say. For my part, what troubles me most is that I cannot discern her intentions at all."
In the end, we entered into a [Contract] with Granny Ryu.
In exchange for residing in this village for six months, we would receive the right to ask her anything we wished.
I'd worried that having discovered our true identities, she might force an unfavorable contract on us or resort to threats of some kind—but mercifully, Granny Ryu held firm to her original terms.
Gaining a way to gather information freely, without having to tiptoe around, wasn't a bad outcome... but something about it left a sour taste in my mouth.
"She's a slippery one. I sense no overt hostility, to be sure, but there's no denying she's suspicious. Whether entering the contract was truly the right choice..."
"...What's done is done. Let's focus on the present."
What on earth was this village?
A mere settlement with the defensive capabilities of a military base, and even a tiger walking around on two legs.
Though the most suspicious person of all was still Granny Ryu.
"...Jun."
Were all [Pioneer Villages] like this?
Come to think of it, the whole pioneer village system was an awfully strange institution.
It was exactly like the American Wild West era...
"Jun!"
"Ah—sorry, did you call me?"
"Hah... this is far too awkward. May we not simply go back to the way things were?"
"We'd look strange to everyone else. Nothing to be done about it."
Normally, Noah appended an honorific to my name every single time she spoke it.
But Granny Ryu had pointed out how bizarre that form of address looked.
She said it made us look like a nobleman and his manservant.
At the very least, she'd advised, I ought to do something about the honorifics.
"Skin that flawless is itself a problem."
"...Shall I add some freckles, then?"
In these treacherous times, being a pair of devastating beauties with skin without a single blemish was said to generally signify high status.
Naturally—whoever didn't have to work for a living could afford such a complexion.
And in Noah's case, add her striking height to the mix, and together we looked precisely like a devoted maidservant raised from childhood in some aristocratic household... or a lord and his favorite mistress.
At first, Granny Ryu had laughed bitterly and said she'd assumed I was some clueless young noble gone off wandering on a runaway adventure.
"No. Your looks are far too conspicuous—as long as you don't deliberately ruin them, people will keep making that assumption. Just go on calling him Jun from now on. Comfortably."
"Understood."
"Now, say it again. You mustn't hesitate in front of others."
"...Jun."
"There you go."
Getting more natural already.
My real inclination was to tell her to just drop all honorifics and speak casually, but that, she declared, she would die before doing.
A matter of her identity, apparently.
"A Singularity, hm... I'd heard the word, but I never dreamed I'd lay eyes on one in my lifetime. Even at my age, there's no end to learning."
An old woman whose true name no one alive remembered.
The aged diviner now known only as Granny Ryu let her cloudy eyes gleam as she turned the strangers over in her mind—the man and woman who had come to her after so long.
The pair carried power well beyond their years, but strength had never been a matter of interest to her.
No one, however mighty, had ever managed to bend the fixed rails of destiny.
'But Singularities are different.'
A Singularity was a bearer of extraordinary power—the possibility of warping a settled fate.
Merely by existing, they loosened the very shackles that bound the world.
'...And yet, looking back through history, this is hardly the first time Singularities have appeared. Now then—what will become of this pair?'
Not every Singularity had brought cataclysmic upheaval upon the world.
Setting aside the few who had ushered in modest change, plenty had been swept up in the world's storms and vanished without managing anything at all.
Against the vast principles that moved the world, the power of a single Singularity had always been too slight.
...And there had also been those who wished for the world never to change.
'Two appearing at once this time, though—perhaps something different will come of it? But my, they do stand out... tsk tsk. I'll have to do something about that before they set foot outside the village.'
To her eyes, the mere existence of Ha Jun and Noah was already exerting a faint but unmistakable influence on the world around them.
If even her powers, withered along with her aging body, could see it this clearly...
Another diviner would surely have gasped in alarm.
"Hoo... Perhaps a new wind may yet blow through this stagnant world. But I won't live to see it with my own eyes. A shame, that..."
Had she met them back in her hot-blooded youth, the two of them might have roamed the continent together.
...But that, too, must simply have been fate.
With eyes full of wistful memory, Granny Ryu fingered the ring on her hand.
For a long while.
[Pioneer Village].
The name was given, quite literally, to villages that carried out pioneering.
And that pioneering meant the act of installing a [Suppression Device] to create an environment that repelled Phantasms—or, as the people here called them, [Monsters]—from drawing near.
Once a Suppression Device fully activated, the creatures wouldn't approach, if only because the thing made their skin crawl.
"It normally takes seven years to activate... and you're telling me only six months of that are left?"
"That's right. And as it happens, that lines up exactly with how long you two will be staying in the village. Funny coincidence, hm?"
A few hours later, Alta came looking for us again and showed us the Suppression Device, kept deep within the heart of the village.
It took the form of a small sapling wrought from blue crystal.
Every so often a pulse of light rippled through it, and I could feel something radiating outward in all directions.
So that strange sensation I'd picked up at the village entrance had been because of this?
"Hold on—this seems like an enormously important object. Is it really all right to tell us where it's kept? You said that if it broke, everything the village has built up until now would come to nothing."
"It's fine. Granny Ryu's word of guarantee is something I can trust. And word is you've made some kind of deal with her—that's the whole reason she arranged for you to stay six months, isn't..."
"Arranged it... how?"
Alta, who had been speaking without any reserve, shut his mouth for a moment and rolled his eyes.
But he soon seemed to sort through his thoughts and continued.
"Hm... well, it's something everyone already knows, so I suppose it can't hurt. To be honest, Granny Ryu's been warning about a danger lurking at the tail end of the pioneering effort for a long time now."
"A danger? What kind of danger?"
"No idea. She never says anything clear. Heaven's secrets, or some such. Anyway—if anything happens, the Suppression Device has to be protected first, so I'm showing it to you ahead of time."
"Hmm..."
"You two wouldn't know this, but the people of this village have staked their lives on the pioneering effort. So for as long as you stay here, at the very least, I want you to cooperate in protecting the device."
It was a courteous manner I'd never seen from him before.
Sincerity shone plainly in the long, vertical slit pupils of a great feline predator.
But—all we'd promised was to stay in this village, hadn't we?
"Of course, I'm not about to ask you to do it for nothing. This is separate from your deal with Granny Ryu... so if you help us see this crisis through safely, I'll compensate you personally as well. It won't be chump change, that much I can promise."
"Oho."
"I might as well hand over one thing in advance. This here—"
Apparently having come prepared, Alta drew something from within his clothes: a mask.
Made of some kind of synthetic leather, it hung limp and floppy in his grip.
What on earth was this?
"It's an [Artifact] that lets you wear a disguise over your true appearance."