episode_0165

The child is held in the middle like a cat in a human hand.

It must be because I lost the will to even speak due to the pain.

“No, why are you asking Tori that?”

Merryweather looks at me with a strange expression and asks. I look around.

Fear, confusion, anger, but also frustration, annoyance, boredom at not being able to dare speak. Many people look at this with different emotions on their faces.

“The only person here who can sympathize with the child and talk to me is Victoria.”

In fact, it’s forcing you to decide what happens to the child. I think a sympathetic Victoria wouldn’t leave this child with his arm cut off.

Being a harvester is not always my choice. Of course, if I were famous, I would make the choice to be a harvester, asking if there was something I wanted, but that kind of view is not mixed.

So I had to force myself to make my first harvester in the Brightshin slums.

“What would you do if Tori told you to leave it alone?”

Merryweather uses a mean expression. But the child wanted it. He thinks of making it into a harvester.

Shouldn’t we be isolated now?

Put into your mouth the kind of story a monster would tell.

“Do nothing.”

I don’t say things like, “I won’t do it if I don’t want to.” If everything I say has to be true, I have to be careful with what I say.

I looked away from Merryweather, who was looking at me with a curious expression, and looked at Victoria. Victoria wasn’t paying attention to the conversation, but was using her power to stop the blood from flowing out of the child’s hand.

Then, as if he realized something, he looked down at his hands and waved them around.

The hand that had been on the floor rose into the air.

Then it flew to the child’s wrist and stopped a little way away, and the liquid inside came out in a straight line on both sides.

I was watching, wondering if he was trying to kill the child by squeezing more fluid, when he slowly turned his hand until the straight columns of liquid on the cross-section perfectly aligned, and then they immediately connected.

“Oh my god, you can use healing magic from there?”

Light rises from inside the cut surface as if welding the cut area starting from the moisture area. And after a while.

When the light died down, a hand emerged without a single scar.

“Arms?”

The child looks down at his arms, mumbling almost hoarsely. What a terrible way to put it together.

It’s more like repairing a machine than treating a person. Connecting joints, welding things together.

And humans are biological machines.

“Wow, this works.”

Victoria also looks at it with an expression that suggests she never thought that what she did would actually work out. There is a murmur around.

Then he approached the child and felt his arms here and there.

“Yeah. It’s all attached. The arms were more complicated than I thought.”

And then I took the child out of my arms, put him down, and patted his back.

My harvester candidate ran down the alley and disappeared. As I was looking at the fish I missed, Victoria caught my eye.

“Is this right?”

I answer with a deep sigh in my heart.

“Yes, that’s right.”

That’s right for you, Victoria Bett. But remember, my favorability rating has plummeted.

“I thought Bell was a good person, but maybe not?”

Merryweather slowly approached me and asked me a question. Victoria tried to say something but closed her mouth. She seemed to know that I was not a good person.

“By human standards, it’s evil.”

Of course, I know that saying this doesn’t sound really evil. Saying this to yourself is usually useless.

A good person does not act because his actions are good, but because he thinks that he ought to do something.

Because living a good life is normal.

So, a society that respects individuality can easily become an environment where evildoers can easily rise to power. If you can’t tie things down as usual, you won’t have enough power to catch what’s popping up.

anyway.

There is no one who lies more than someone who says they are good. Even Merryweather knows this obvious fact.

So after he said he was bad, he pointed to Merryweather this time.

“Merryweather was bad too.”

“Because you cut off the child’s hand?”

“No. Victoria came out to play, and now Victoria is in a bad mood. Take responsibility.”

If you are too kind, it is difficult to use. No one knows what kind of end a prophet of a universal religion can easily meet.

If you make it a little ugly, people will think that you are just like them, or a hypocrite worse than them, and they will use you comfortably.

Just like the fools who say they don’t like humans who are too perfect, it’s easy to see the fools who find their shortcomings in comparison. They fear God, they hate strong AI, they are afraid of beings who are superior to them in every way.

Because I’ve found my worth by comparing myself to others so far, and I can’t stand feeling undervalued in every way.

So, you create a weakness that is easy to find. Is this what you call humanity?

“Huh, aren’t you taking care of Victoria too much? Or is that it? Dependency?”

“Merryweather Allcat. Are you really an escort?”

I asked him a question as a warning, since he was being so blatant, whether he believed in cognitive distortions. When I said that, Merryweather took a step back and apologized.

“Sorry, sorry. I guess I did it because I was so interested in Belle. It’s hard to know what you’re thinking.”

If you look at the sentence, it’s not a proper apology, but if your cognitive ability is impaired, you won’t feel that uncomfortable.

Even if the ability isn’t that strong, a normal person would probably notice something strange here.

I decided to pretend I didn’t know.

“Yes, I understand.”

That was when.

“That’s him, that’s him.”

I hear a strangely foul muttering. I look towards the direction of the sound and see that it is in an alley, but it is even narrower.

Midsummer. There are eyes looking this way from an alley where sunlight does not reach unless the sun is high in the sky.

They are exactly the same type of people as the poor people in Brighton.

But the gaze is not on me, but on Victoria.

It’s not hard for me to isolate their sounds from the background noises. I can think of many things at the same time.

They mutter these words.

Purple hair. Girl. Powerful healing abilities. Merciful. Gratuitous.

I only know fragments of information. If I put them together, it could be me, or Victoria, or a girl who awakened her healing powers in the slums.

But you are not him yet.

Because she’s never used her healing powers on anyone other than her family, and she used them two days ago.

The Harvesters realize their powers as soon as they gain them, but I don’t know until they use them.

Even if you start out using it with some degree of familiarity, everyone experiences it at first. It’s about experiencing trial and error.

Be sure to experiment to see how applicable your abilities are.

It was then that I realized that the harvester had gained superpowers.

Considering that the girl has been hiding her powers for quite some time, there may be some superpowers out there that I haven’t figured out yet.

I guess I’ll have to look at that part a little more carefully in the future.

That’s it, the people in the alley ran away when their eyes met.

It would be nice to have a little more desire… … .

Meanwhile, Victoria looks around and sighs. There are already many people staring at her.

“You shouldn’t come here again.”

“Victoria made the wrong choice.”

I approached Victoria. If she was in her early years, she would still be a young girl. This child too.

I reached out and grabbed her hand. I gave her some strength and made her bend down. Then I held her head with both hands.

“What do you mean I made a wrong choice?”

Even though I grabbed his face, he asked without letting up his sharp expression.

“Victoria should have died there. Then Maurice would have fallen into despair and built a machine that the company shouldn’t have built, and Beatrice would have been ruined. In the end, their relationship would have been torn apart.”

I’m using Merryweather as an excuse to say what I want to say.

“From the moment you held my hand there, you’ve been making bad choices.”

And then I pulled both of my cheeks together and let go, turned around, and walked towards Merryweather, who was looking at me with an interesting expression.

“It’s still like that now.”

Merryweather is racking her brain trying to figure out what I mean. There’s a high chance she’s working in some sort of place like the Kingdom’s Information Department.

The king I met last time was also suspicious of me.

What is my identity?

It was probably for Aurora. It was too late at the time when I made the contract to save Aurora!

“Go. Merryweather. There’s no one here calling me.”

“Hey, did Tori do something you don’t like? If it’s because of me, I’m sorry, so how about we make up and leave?”

Yeah. It shows some obvious malice.

There’s an intention here that if we make peace, the relationship will become more distorted. That’s funny.

Let’s do that.

“That’s right, Victoria.”

“You seem crazy.”

“I think so too.”

An action that completely disregards feelings. An action that is intended to destroy a relationship by considering the context.

“Are you going to make peace?”

Victoria stares at me in response to my question. And the air is dry. The dry air, devoid of moisture, robs the body of moisture.

On the contrary, my body feels damp. I scratched my body feeling cold.

“Need it?”

“No.”

Victoria stared at me, then walked past me. The air returned to normal.

Victoria doesn’t even glance at Merryweather, just passes her and walks down the alley.

“Yeah. Oh no. But Belle was a bit mean. No matter how much you hate something, you should have made up with it like an adult.”

He immediately divides me into adults and children, and puts me in the weak position. Yeah. That’s easy gaslighting. I shook my head because I was going to pretend to fall for it.

“It was Victoria’s fault.”

I am not bad. Others are bad. That is the kind of denial that a child would make.

Look, Merryweather’s smile is getting brighter.

“Tori was weird. What did he say about cutting off the hand of such a poor person? And he ignored you who was trying to treat him. It was like he was trying to take your place.”

I hold back laughter at the obvious story of threatening my place. You pretend to care, but you’re just trying to distance yourself.

“Is that so?”

“But we have to make up, right? It’s not like I don’t want to, right? But today is kind of like that, let’s think about it later.”

In short, you are telling me to tell you my worries. Telling you my worries means pouring out my thoughts.

He really is from the intelligence agency.

Here, the answer this person would like the most is to ignore me. I didn’t answer and walked towards my room.

Merryweather tries to hide her joy, and tries to soothe me. Every so often, she whispers something that might push Victoria and me apart.

I went back to my room, slowly starting to answer like a crazy person.

Merryweather doesn’t seem to know.

The last time I spoke to Victoria, the air was dry and my stomach was wet.

Victoria said Merryweather was strange and told her to scratch her arm if she knew.

When he asked me if I needed help, I said I didn’t.

Sorry, Merryweather.

Victoria is probably smarter than you think. You need to slaughter the Sahagi and the one who summoned Daegon, so don’t underestimate their nest and the person who tried to blow themselves up.

Victoria is resilient in the face of adversity.

You can detect and deal with insidious methods.

The only way to get some immediate warmth is to side with Merryweather, but this time I plan to take her side.

The time when we can get warmth is far away, but it can be said that a rich future awaits us as long as we don’t cause any accidents.

It’s annoying because I feel like this isn’t fast food, but rather a healthy diet that only considers nutrition.

The important thing is that the plan to build an automatic heating system is progressing without any major problems.

So in the meantime. Several hundred years.

Come and have fun with me.