Chapter 21 - A Status Window Opened on the First Day of School (5)

There was a term for this: confirmation bias. The tendency to pick and choose the information presented to you to suit your own views.

In other words, once you started suspecting something, you couldn't stop. That was exactly where Enrique found herself.

"That lunatic looks dangerous."

Four days. The bastard had spent four days lying in wait, chewing on dry rations.

When her disciples first joined the assassination squad, Enrique had taught them patience. Rain or insects, they were to stay perfectly still and watch their target.

She hadn't meant for them to use it like this.

Unlike her, a vampire, he was human. So long as she avoided things like sunlight and blessings, she had no particular weaknesses. He, on the other hand, needed certain things to survive. (And Enrique was even an Elder with resistance to sunlight.)

Basic things like sleep, meals, and rest.

Enrique narrowed her eyes at Ivan, then heaved a sigh.

At her age, being asked to babysit someone his age. Even as a joke, this was downright cruel.

"Hey, disciple."

"..."

Ivan stood like a statue without answering. He was so absorbed that he couldn't even register her voice at this distance.

Judging by the movement of his eyes, was he lipreading? He certainly had been keeping up that exhausting work for a long time.

Enrique shrugged and reached into her sleeve.

CLICK. BANG!

She fired her pistol without further ado. A flawless execution, with no windup whatsoever. An unwavering line of fire aimed squarely at the back of his head.

Ivan tilted his head to dodge and leaped out of the tree, axe in hand.

"Enrique...?"

"Yes, you idiot. Let's move. Who knows what nuisances that gunshot will attract? Let's go to your place."

"Now isn't a good time."

"It's an even worse time for me. Elise would cry again if she knew about this, you know. I can have a look around your orphanage while we're at it."

Enrique seized Ivan by the scruff of the neck and dragged him along. He glanced at her face and put his axe away.

His great master was a frivolous woman and slightly mad, but she wasn't one to talk nonsense.

He might as well hear what was so urgent. Ivan slipped smoothly out of her grasp and took the lead.

"The place may be somewhat untidy."

"Yes, yes. Just get moving."

* * *

A little while later, Enrique set foot in Ivan's orphanage for the first time.

Her first impression was bewilderment.

"You're not seriously raising an order of assassins, are you?"

"You've misunderstood."

"Really...?"

Enrique looked around blankly. From tiny tots to nearly grown children about to graduate, youngsters scurried about without a single audible footstep.

Discipline like this was hard to find even in her own organization. What the hell had he been doing all this time? Enrique gave a hollow laugh.

"If you've got a curriculum drawn up, share it with me. I couldn't train my people this well."

"Provide a regular daily routine and nutritionally balanced meals."

"What the hell are you talking about, you little bastard?"

Enrique chuckled and resumed walking, only to stop again.

"And what's that? Isn't that a demon?"

"He is."

"Of all the...! You do realize that if anyone finds out, you, him, and everyone here are dead?"

"I do."

Ivan shrugged. In the distance, Eiphellos was teaching the children something.

One of the children scampered up and drove a fist into Eiphellos's side. An impressive feat. The child had successfully ambushed a centurion with some thirty years of battlefield experience at close quarters, barehanded.

The child shouted, "Hooray!" and scampered off again, vanishing from sight in an instant.

"Everyone needs a chance to live with dignity."

Enrique narrowed her eyes at Ivan's words. So he had taken in a demon, yet was preparing to ambush students.

"We're here."

Ivan quietly opened the door to the director's office. With the curtains drawn, the room was dim.

Enrique started to take a step inside, then stopped. A fine booby-trap wire stretched just in front of her foot.

There were dozens of them. A shaft of sunlight slipping between the curtains revealed them like cobwebs.

"What is all this...?"

Even without light, vampires had night vision. Blackout curtains alone couldn't hide a room's interior.

The booby traps she could dismiss as paranoid security measures.

But this.

"Seriously, what have you been doing with yourself?"

Without a word, Ivan disarmed the booby traps. He undid the traps attached to each wire, then reached for a light in the corner of the office.

The mana lamp snapped on with a blue glow.

The room was a disaster.

* * *

Dozens of bundles of documents. Profiles filled with dense, neat handwriting. Slips of paper bearing names, linked together by red string.

Wherever those threads tangled and joined like a spiderweb, there were more notes. Reading through them, she found ordinary conversations.

The kind of material that had no business being there under ordinary circumstances. The circumstances of each conversation, the presumed tone, the meaning between the lines, and intonation inferred by observing movements of the hyoid bone. Lists of likely regions of origin based on that intonation...

Even tracking an international criminal flagged under a Counterintelligence Command red alert wouldn't warrant this much effort.

And all this for students.

Alone, for days on end, without sleep.

Enrique's face grew steadily grimmer. This situation, this sight, this behavior—it was all familiar to her.

These were signs of a mental illness. Something akin to panic attacks. Perhaps something more deep-rooted.

The kind you sometimes saw in people who had spent years on the battlefield. Not particularly uncommon.

But as precarious as a ticking time bomb... Even now, Prizhenkaya's streets were crawling with drug-addicted war veterans in this very state.

Enrique took a deep breath.

"Ivan."

"Mm."

"Sit down."

Ivan's face remained expressionless. She felt as though she could see exactly what expression lay beneath that damned beard.

As if it were only natural, he saw nothing wrong at all.

"When did you last sleep?"

"... About six days ago, I think."

The last time he had fallen asleep, he had been caught in a nightmare amid the files.

It had felt truly awful, and since then he had deliberately avoided sleep. It was a feat worthy of being called superhuman willpower.

But Enrique regarded him with bitter eyes.

"Talk to me. What is all this? When Dmitry asked me to look in on you, I thought you were trying to protect the children."

Naturally, since he had seemed to be following only the Hero's Party's children. And she had been grateful. It meant he cared enough about them to take action himself even after retirement.

But that wasn't what the evidence here showed.

"Who are you trying to catch? The Jansk University terrorists?"

"No."

"Tell me. Just be honest. I know by now how goddamn awful you are with words. Just start at the beginning, disciple."

Enrique clasped Ivan's hand tightly and gazed into his eyes.

An ancient monster who had lived for over a century truly had persuasive powers to match the weight of her years.

Ivan met her earnest gaze, then sighed.

A moment later, he began to speak.

It was a lengthy confession.

* * *

Suppose, just suppose, there was someone like this.

Someone who had left behind the place they lived and everyone they knew, only to be dropped into a world they had never seen before.

For instance, say...

They loved a novel so much that they stayed up all night reading, drifted off to sleep, and found themselves in that novel's world in a dream.

No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't wake from the dream, and the world still felt like a story in a novel.

Not wanting to die, or wanting to return home, they tried everything they could. Fortunately, they seemed to have some talent and managed to adapt and live well.

After living through the novel's final page, that person might have a thought.

'Why isn't it ending?'

Perhaps there was some other condition. Let us say they spent several years watching how things unfolded, wondering whether suicide might be the most promising solution.

Then someone suddenly appeared.

A stranger, probably from the same homeland.

Now he began to wonder.

Was this world truly nothing more than the world of a novel? Was everything I went through merely its prologue? Does my name appear on a page of the novel that bastard read?

If it does—if that's true—

What sort of ending awaits me? Tragedy? Comedy? No, before even that.

Are my life and I nothing more than a single line of backstory? Am I merely a character preserved outside the new story about to unfold?

He went on voicing those thoughts.

More and more disjointedly, but with conviction in his eyes, looking his master straight in the face.

With as much consideration as he could muster, so that even this premodern old fogey could understand.

* * *

"... So. To sum up... you're actually a Possessor."

"Mm."

"And you recently confirmed there's another one."

"Mm."

"And you've decided you have to kill him."

"... Mm."

"That's all very logical, disciple."

Enrique heaved a sigh and rubbed her face. Leaning back against the sofa, she stared at the ceiling for a moment.

Goddamn it, there were notes stuck to the ceiling too. She almost wondered how he'd put them up there.

"There's so much I want to say to you, but I should apologize first. I thought you'd followed us all the way to the Demon King's tower."

They had spent so much time together that she had simply taken it for granted that he had climbed the tower with them too.

It was Enrique's mistake. In fact, it was everyone's mistake. Not knowing what state he was in was no excuse. She had taken him on as a disciple, then all but abandoned him.

"The Demon King's tower?"

"Yes. Oddly enough, we all thought of you as part of our party, but when you think about it, you weren't. We thought you naturally knew all this, so we never bothered bringing it up."

Enrique paused, then shook her head.

"Max isn't from Thilles."

"You mean he has a different nationality? But..."

"No. Hear me out first. Max... Maximilien. He's not from this world."

Enrique looked Ivan square in the face and enunciated every syllable, as if trying to carve them directly into his mind.

"You're not the first. And you won't be the last."

* * *

She had used his term, "Possessor," for convenience.

But to be more precise, these were not Possessors. They were the "Pulled-in Ones."

People who appeared from somewhere, one or two at a time, whenever the scales of the world tipped.

It wasn't common, but a few invariably appeared every century.

They would pop up as if to add a little spice to a chaotic world, do "something," then disappear.

Enrique knew about such people. She had even seen a few herself.

Maximilien. He had been one of them.

He had missed his home, as anyone would, yet gone to the battlefield all the same. Admirably so.

That was why even she, a vampire, had followed him. That was the kind of person he was. Standing in front of everyone with a smile, inspiring them all to follow.

A great man, a hero, the slayer of the Demon King, and an ordinary man. A stranger who had been lonely to the very end. Now gone.

That was how Enrique remembered him.

A brave stranger who had drawn his sword to protect a commoner girl in Thilles who had taken him in.

"That's why we don't say a hero was 'born.' We say he 'appeared,' don't we?"