I Just Wanted to Stay Quiet
I Just Wanted to Stay Quiet
Life in the Scrap Yard was monotonous.
I was forced to wake up early every morning.
An alarm I had never set would go off.
[The Labor Theorists are trying to overthrow the city!]
[Report them! Only your reports can save the city!]
The loudspeakers the police set up blared at me relentlessly, day after day, as if they never got tired of it, threatening to tear my eardrums apart.
Clutching my throbbing head, I went out to buy groceries.
"The workers' paradise will come!! You dogs of the factory owners!!"
"Grab that bastard!!"
More precisely, I had to do my shopping and get back while dodging the police who were chasing a young Labor Theorist scattering flyers in the market. One wrong move and I would spill all the food I had bought that day.
After throwing together a simple meal at home, I would open the newspaper.
I was hoping to find some news about black mages or demon worshippers.
Of course, there was never any such news to be found.
[The ringleader of the Labor Theorists! Karl Lenaro's whereabouts still unknown!]
[Let us root out the Laborism that is eating away at our society!!]
[Thorough reporting creates a healthy society!]
The only news in the paper was about the Labor Theorists.
Stories condemning how heinous their claims were.
And how badly they were damaging the factories of the Scrap Yard and the entire city. There was nothing else.
It was infuriating to read.
This wasn't a newspaper; it was practically propaganda.
After cooking and eating a rough meal like that, I would stay cooped up in the house, going out as little as possible.
A cold bed with no one else in it.
I kept remembering the moments I had happily rolled around, skin to skin, with Erpa, Iomene, and Almene.
It made me depressed for no reason.
Maybe because I was depressed, I couldn't sleep properly either.
"The Labor Theorists are the evil of society!! They are villains threatening the very existence of the Scrap Yard!! They must be arrested!! Without fail!! Thorough reporting creates a healthy society!!"
That broadcast from the cops blaring outside made it even harder to sleep.
In the end, I could only fall asleep after I deliberately numbed my hearing using Body Modification.
After falling asleep, I had nightmares.
Dreams of going to Hell.
Dreams of becoming a Demon King and destroying the world.
Dreams of the women I loved being ruined because of me.
Because of that, I couldn't stay asleep for long and would often wake up.
I cried often, grew continuously more depressed, and because of that, lost my appetite. At some point, I even stopped going out to buy groceries much.
I wished news about a black mage would appear in the paper soon.
Or that I would at least have a vision in a dream, like before, of black mages or demon worshippers trying to destroy the world.
All I could think was that I wanted to be hit by a curse and die soon.
After I had spent nearly a month like that, depressed.
One day.
"Are you home? I live next door."
A person from next door came to visit.
When I opened the door, a rail-thin woman was looking up at me.
"For over a month now, I've heard crying and loud sleep-talking every single night. The way you scream, it sounds awful. Do you have nightmares?"
At the expressionless woman's words, I could only give a bitter smile.
The walls in this lodging house were a bit thin.
So, all sorts of sounds tended to carry.
It seemed I had cried out a bit while having a nightmare.
"I'm sorry. I'll be quiet."
When I apologized and tried to close the door, the woman blocked it with her foot.
"You. You've been laid off, haven't you?"
"Excuse me?"
"I understand. I've heard even skilled mechanics get fired often. Here."
The woman handed me a basket.
When I looked inside, there were a few pieces of black bread.
"I wasn't going to give you this. We're barely scraping by ourselves, so how could we afford to look after others? But my husband insisted we should. So eat up and cheer up. Don't worry about the money."
I just stared blankly at her words.
Was she showing me kindness? Did she think I was a laid-off mechanic?
I examined the woman carefully.
Her appearance and her clothes.
She did not look like she was in any position to be giving away bread.
The bread in my hands, considering this woman's circumstances before me, was no different from her giving me a piece of her very life.
For a moment, tears welled up in my eyes.
When I needed comfort, someone came and offered it, and it made my heart feel quite warm.
Unable to hide the tears that had suddenly started to fall, I nodded.
"Thank you. I'll eat it well."
Seeing me like this, the woman chuckled softly.
"My name's Anna, from next door. My husband Peter is a mechanic too. Let's cheer up, fellow mechanic. No matter how hard it gets, you have to keep living. Right?"
After saying that, Anna waved and went back to her own place.
Even after she was gone, I held the bread basket and cried for a long time.
It was a small comfort, but it still lifted my spirits considerably.
Right.
It was hard, but my choice at that moment was the right one.
Because I was someone who had to disappear for everyone's sake.
I shoved the black bread Anna had given me into my mouth.
The flavor was bland and the texture was incredibly hard, but the taste didn't matter.
The heart she had put into it felt like it was healing my weary mind and body a little.
***
After that day, I got to the point where Peter, Anna, and I would exchange greetings whenever we ran into each other on the street.
"Heading out again today, I see?"
"Yes."
Peter and Anna always looked exhausted.
They left for work at an hour you'd call the crack of dawn rather than just morning, and came back around midnight.
Anna looked visibly thinner every time I saw her, while Peter seemed to be falling apart before my eyes.
On top of that, when I lay down late at night to sleep, their family's conversations would drift through the wall.
It was involuntary eavesdropping, caused by the shockingly thin walls of the lodging house.
"Jim. Amy. How was today?"
"I only cleaned chimneys for nine hours today. The factory even gave us food."
"Good. You have to look after your little sister. You know that, right?"
"Yeah. I know."
Before I knew them, I had dismissed those conversations as just noise, but now that we were acquainted, all these bits of talk kept entering my ears against my will.
Peter's family, like most of the laborers here, was in a difficult situation.
"Your cough has gotten bad lately."
"Still, it's not as bad as the other women in the factory. Don't worry. Peter."
His wife Anna, who worked at a textile factory, had developed a cough she never used to have.
She said many of the other women workers in the factory were coughing up blood.
"The factory owner announced he's cutting the mechanics' wages. Says he'll cut our pay to 90 Leon."
"How are we supposed to live on that!......"
"He said if we refuse or strike, he'll fire us on the spot and report us as Labor Theorists to be sent to jail. Once you go to the detention camp, your body gets completely ruined. We can't do that. What choice do we have? We have to accept it."
"Those damn factory owners!......."
"Don't say things like that carelessly, Anna. If the police hear, they'll haul you in. Calling you a Labor Theorist."
"Jim and Amy, who are only 3 and 5, are working as chimney sweeps, too. So why doesn't our situation get any better......."
"I'll try to work even harder. What else can we do."
Peter's eyesight was getting worse, and Anna's cough wouldn't stop.
And Jim and Amy, aged 3 and 5, were already working as chimney sweeps at that young age.
The meaning of the black bread they had given me suddenly hit me anew.
With their situation like that, instead of getting angry at me for crying and suffering from nightmares every night, they had given me bread?
I suddenly thought of the gold coins kept safely in one corner of my room.
The thought crossed my mind: what if I shared some money with them?
But I immediately shook the thought away.
This money was something I had taken so I could live while meeting as few people as possible. It wasn't money I had earned to save people.
Considering the danger of the authority within my soul, I couldn't spend money carelessly.
They helped me, but I was in a position where I couldn't help them.
Listening to the stories of Peter, Anna, and their family, I could only feel the guilt growing larger and larger inside me.
In the midst of such circumstances, time flowed on dreadfully, relentlessly.
In the meantime, I did my best within my limits to search for demon worshippers or black mages.
I tried to sleep as much as possible.
In case my prophetic ability would show me a future about demon worshippers or black mages again, in the form of a dream.
And when I woke up, I roamed the dank back alleys looking for demon worshippers or black mages.
Mostly, it was a wasted effort.
Instead of demon worshippers or black mages, I only ran into thugs.
"Do you know anything about black mages? Or demon worshippers?"
"No."
And they, too, knew absolutely nothing about demon worshippers.
"Forget you ever met me. That's an order."
The days repeated: I would erase the thugs' memories and then dejectedly walk out of the back alleys.
And that day was no different.
It was one of those ordinary days when I had come up empty-handed and was leaving a back alley, nothing special about it.
It was only after I returned to the lodging house, washed up quickly, lay down on the bed, and pulled the covers over me that I realized something was strange.
There was no sound coming from the next room.
Normally, the sounds of Jim, Amy, Peter, and Anna talking with each other, and all the noise of daily life, should have been audible. But the next room was deathly silent.
For the first two days, I thought nothing of it.
Everyone had their own circumstances, didn't they?
Maybe they had gone away somewhere for a bit, or work had gotten so busy they couldn't come home for a few days.
But on the third day.
"Clear out this room. Everything inside belongs to us, so take it all. Strip the place bare!!"
That day, as I was returning from another fruitless search in the back alleys, I saw the lodging house manager, who came every month to collect rent, forcibly opening the door to Peter and Anna's room and hauling out everything inside. That was when I realized something had gone very wrong.
"Wait a minute! What's going on all of a sudden?"
At my question, the manager brusquely jerked his chin toward Peter and Anna's place.
"They didn't pay their rent, so according to the contract, I'm disposing of all the belongings in the house. This way, I have to try to make up for the lost rent somehow."
They didn't pay their rent? Peter was a factory mechanic, and Anna and the kids were all working hard, weren't they?
"Where did the tenants go?"
"If I knew that, would I be hauling out their household goods? They've disappeared somewhere. I can't see them! That's why I'm doing this!!"
At his irritated voice, I ran to my room, grabbed some money, and went back to the manager.
"I'll pay this month's rent, so don't touch the house."
"Well, that makes my life easier. Are you sure it's okay?"
"It's fine."
After paying the rent in their stead, I rushed out of the lodging house.
Something had clearly happened.
Peter. Anna. And Jim and Amy.
Where had they gone?
What had happened?
Before I knew it, I was running through the Scrap Yard.
"Peter! Anna!! Jim!! Amy!!"
Calling out the family's names, I dashed around the city in a daze.
"Where are you!! Where are you!!"
Please, let it be nothing serious.
Just let them have been so busy at the factory that they stayed there for three days.
Just let them have accidentally forgotten to pay the rent.
While I was praying that in my heart and running around the city like a madman for nearly half a day.
As the sun set and the cold air and terrible darkness settled over the city.
Both good news and bad news came to me.
The good news was that I had found the family.
The bad news was......
"Mom. I'm cold. I don't want to go in here."
"You have to go in, Jim. Just a little further in, and you won't hurt anymore."
"If we walk in here, we won't hurt anymore. Amy. Jim."
The family of four was about to walk into a bitterly cold river.
And the moment I saw them.
I instantly understood why the entire family was doing that.
Peter's right arm had been severed.
Jim and Amy's eyes were covered with bandages.
Anna was so haggard that blood was dripping from her mouth.
These were symptoms you wouldn't find hard to see if you lived in the Scrap Yard for even a single week.
They were injuries commonly suffered by workers who had met with industrial accidents.