Ch.159Request Log #014 – How to Face Hatred (7)

“It was a pretty good terminal, but… if it can pay the price of the deal, it’s better to leave it. I understand. I’ll tell you about one of our warehouses. Come tomorrow at twelve. We’ll finish the deal there.”

The address of the warehouse I received from the Idealists afterward was quite remote. It would be better to bring my duffel bag. I certainly didn’t want to get blindsided.

Still, just bringing weapons was sufficient preparation. Clearly, the way those things devoured minds was also magic. With magic, I could resist twice as well as others, and it would only have half its power against me.

After finishing business with the Idealists, it would be enough to find Factory Owner Wilfred and give him a warning. As the Idealists said, a contractor who resolved most problems by killing was a terrifying entity.

No factory owner wanted to get deeply entangled with a detective who had nothing to lose and spent money recklessly. Such people preferred dealing with cautious individuals like themselves who had much to lose.

After finishing the call, I returned to the hospital where Teacher Lanshore was. The room had already been cleaned, and the bloodstains had been burned away with magical flames, leaving only the smell of ash rather than corpses.

Since an angel was right in front of the hospital room door, I spoke respectfully. Though I was no longer a suspect, being too rude wouldn’t be appropriate behavior for an employee.

“Could you turn on the sound-blocking magic, Teacher Lanshore?”

He raised his hand wrapped in plaster cast, and briefly the smell of ozone filled the air. A space where sound couldn’t escape was created around the bed. I went inside and told him:

“This has ruined the factory owner’s plans and served as a warning to him. The old man I killed was a close friend of the factory owner. He won’t bother you now. Well, I’ll still go see him once more to warn him. And since the Idealists aren’t deeply involved in this matter, I’ll just get a suitable apology from them and end it. Are you satisfied?”

Teacher Lanshore hesitated. Since sincere words were coming, I sat down on the chair in front of his bed. The sound-blocking magic allowed one to speak without worrying about being overheard or about one’s conscience.

“To be hon-, honestly… I don’t like the fact that someone died. But I’m so grateful that it wasn’t me that I don’t know what to do. It’s just…”

“It’s just luck. If that old man I killed had come to me asking for help to get revenge on the Idealists, I would have been working with him. But the person who came to me wasn’t that old man, but your follower. That’s all. Is there any need to feel guilty? You were just lucky.”

The hatred seemed to be gone now. When pain is at its worst, one might hate the person who caused it, but death was worse than pain.

It was ridiculous that I was acting like I could change someone else’s life when I couldn’t even resolve my own situation. Now there were only a few months left until the end of the war, and not much time left until I would meet that veteran I saw on the street.

Could I find a way to break the curse by then? I could take a break from work for a while and focus on finding a way to break the curse. But there was no way I could find a better method than Hexenbane.

The fragments of Hexenbane, which had completely lost their power after the poet’s death, had no effect. Breaking a spell that mimicked the power of the God-President was apparently too much even for Hexenbane.

Anyway, whether Teacher Lanshore could become a friend to the workers and a teacher of the streets again was now up to him.

I had kept Teacher Lanshore from dying, and I had prevented him from becoming a different person who crossed a line of no return due to resentment and vengeance, so my client would be satisfied.

“Just luck… The fact that you can answer such a question right away…”

I smirked at those words. There was no need to answer such comments seriously.

“I didn’t dig into your personal matters either. The line a detective must keep is one the client should also respect. Don’t you think?”

Teacher Lanshore nodded briefly. That night, I caught a few hours of sleep in my car parked in the hospital parking lot. After barely three hours of sleep, I woke up by stomping my feet in the air. It was a typical morning for me.

I wasn’t someone who slept late. After looking around the surrounding streets where stores hadn’t opened yet, I went back to the hospital room and kept watch until noon.

With eight angels on this floor alone, no one came to visit. When morning came, I had no intention of eating hospital food, so I skipped breakfast and only drank coffee.

When I couldn’t have alcohol or cigarettes, I missed coffee. And when I missed coffee, I also missed Levi. After this job was over, I would probably enjoy another emotionless date for a day or so.

Taking comfort in that fact, I put on my hat and left the hospital room forty-five minutes before noon. I stationed one of the angels who wasn’t an archangel on this floor in the room in my place.

In the car, I attached a silencer to my pistol. Since I would need to kill eleven, I also packed two spare magazines and drove to the docks. Daytime New York had relatively few cars.

I crossed over to Long Island and headed to the docks. The warehouse owned by the Idealists was easy to spot without much searching. It was covered with graffiti saying things like “commie bastards” and such.

Since they were beings whose human emotions had been removed, becoming one giant hive mind, they didn’t react as long as no one insulted their so-called great ideals.

And if they didn’t respond, such amateur pranks would fade away on their own. I approached the warehouse on the docks covered in graffiti and knocked on the door. It was quite far from my own warehouse.

The peephole in the warehouse door opened, and emotionless eyes briefly appeared. Soon, a bit of life returned to those eyes, and a voice was heard. It resonated from inside as if all the terminals inside were speaking simultaneously.

“You’ve come to keep your promise. Would you mind if we check just one thing?”

“Do as you please. As long as I can get an apology and leave.”

Fighting each other would be a waste of energy. Rather than engaging in a struggle with the Idealists and gaining nothing, I would rather go on a date with Levi or the reporter and gain some peace of mind.

The Idealists made a sound of satisfaction. Yet the terminal swallowed nervously, as if tense. They seemed about to do something provocative.

Footsteps were heard from inside the warehouse, then stopped. The smell of ozone filled the air around me.

Something had walked out and stopped. Yet it had used magic. Now the inside and outside of the warehouse were completely isolated except for the open peephole. I said I wanted them to bring a terminal from Blingkerton who knew how to use teleportation magic.

I immediately turned around and swung my hand at the height where the detective’s head would be. It was clearly empty air, but as my hand passed through, I caught the head of an Idealist terminal that had pushed its head into that space.

I gripped it firmly and threw the body to the ground. I immediately drew my pistol from my waist and put two bullets in its head. I destroyed the head to disable it so the Idealists couldn’t control it.

Thinking they might want to fight, I immediately aimed my gun at the peephole, but the door opened. An Idealist terminal, uncharacteristically with emotion-filled eyes, looked at me.

“Remarkable. Truly remarkable. After absorbing that detective and making him a terminal, I learned many things. How to fight, how to shoot a gun, and how to think. But even he was a dullard compared to you, detective. Thank you for allowing me to test you. Come inside. We have prepared terminals for our apology.”

It seems they just wanted to compare that detective’s skills with mine. Indeed, they had only teleported behind me, and I hadn’t felt the mind-eating magic that the Idealists used.

As they said, when I entered the warehouse, nine terminals disconnected from the hive mind stood at attention, facing forward. The terminal that had guided me here also stood in line with them.

I drew my pistol. I had killed the detective with two shots and had one bullet already in the chamber, so with the remaining six shots, I precisely shot six of them in the head, making them collapse, then changed magazines.

Terminals had no instincts. They only moved as commanded by the hive mind, without will of their own. Though they looked like people, they were no different from cardboard targets. After reloading, I shot the remaining four.

I wasn’t killing them. It was no different from a game of knocking down stacked bottles with a thrown ball. After ten terminals were down, two more terminals walked out from the back of the warehouse. These were still connected.

“Is this apology sufficient, detective?”

“Not bad. Anything else to say? If not, I should go finish my job.”

The hive mind let out what seemed like an incredulous chuckle and made the terminal nod its head.

“We are grateful for dealing with the avenger, and for resolving it without involving us. And you too are a worker. Just a worker who makes a living by killing. If so, you are not our enemy.”

Dealing with a mental entity full of nothing but ideology is exhausting. Only after watching them wrap the remains of the terminals in tarpaulins and throw them into a small incinerator for garbage disposal did I get back in my car.

The day was warm. The streets visible through the car window seemed to have found a bit more vitality, but inside was like this. Just last night, there had been a murder case.

Feeling the bumps as if climbing onto the body of the Industrial Spirit King, I arrived at the factory district, which was emitting acrid smoke from this hour. After arriving at Factory Owner Wilfred’s factory, I put my holster in my pocket and got out. I could see the security guards’ necks tense as they noticed the gun-shaped bulge in my pocket.

Seeing that the security guards were given proper uniforms, it probably wasn’t a bad factory to work at. Before they became more anxious, I spoke up.

“I’m here to see the factory owner. If you tell him I’m the detective guarding Teacher Lanshore’s hospital room, he’ll understand. Would you mind passing that along?”

For them, it was not a bad thing that someone carrying a gun wanted to talk instead of drawing it. One of the two security guards went inside the factory.

Shortly after, that security guard returned with the factory owner’s bodyguard who had visited the hospital room yesterday afternoon. Seeing my face, he nodded, and the factory’s iron gate opened.

While paper mills were full of heat, textile factories were relatively dry and decent places. They didn’t produce much smoke either. Some of the factory workers seemed to recognize me, but they didn’t show it.

Without giving them any attention, I took the stairs up to the upper floor. After reaching the office floor, the bodyguard first took out his pistol from his chest and placed it on the secretary’s desk.

“Enter unarmed. The factory owner said he has something he wants to ask you and to bring you in respectfully.”

If the other person wasn’t armed, I had no reason to be armed either. I took out my holster with the gun that still smelled of gunpowder despite having a new magazine loaded, placed it on the secretary’s desk, and headed to the factory owner’s office.

He would probably know that his friend had disappeared. If he wasn’t the type to wonder where someone who left the factory had gone, he wouldn’t have helped that old man in the first place.

I entered the office and sat across from his work desk. The bodyguard went behind the factory owner again, and the tall factory owner rested his elbows on the desk and looked at me.

“Did he go to see Teacher Lanshore?”

I didn’t react to the word “he.” I knew that old avenger, but it was better to pretend I didn’t know he was involved in this matter.

Since he was now a factory owner rather than an intruder, I showed a little courtesy. Just a little.

“Who is ‘he’? Sir, your bodyguard never visited the hospital room.”

The factory owner made a dubious expression but pushed a newspaper toward me with a large headline that read “Shooting Incident at Major Hospital in New York City.”

“You wouldn’t deny that you did this, would you, Detective?”

This time I spoke honestly. I just needed to pretend not to know what I had heard while clinging to the window next to this office after climbing over the factory wall.

“Yes, that was me. When someone enters Teacher Lanshore’s hospital room with a gun in the early morning, a person stationed there for security would naturally pull the trigger, wouldn’t you agree? I hit him in the head with one shot, so I couldn’t hear who he was. Was he perhaps someone you sent, sir?”

If I didn’t know and he did, it was easier to think he had sent the person. The world didn’t care at all about a man who had come up from West Virginia to New York.

I naturally shifted from casual banter to pressure. Having shaken him by asking if it was his man, it was time to press harder.

“Even if not, you’ll be suspected, sir. If that person was sent by you, the story would fit together perfectly, and why would the angels dislike such a smoothly connected story? Besides, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence. You’re certainly capable of hiring someone, and you visited there yesterday and even had an argument with Teacher Lanshore.”

He weighs his options. He considers whether to say the man was his friend and burn with hatred toward me, or to distance himself by saying he didn’t know the person.

Fortunately, there was one fact that made his decision easier. The old man known only to the factory owner would have already been sent to the morgue, while Teacher Lanshore was still alive.

The dead don’t speak, but the living can testify. If angels raided this factory, or if they arrested the thugs who assaulted Teacher Lanshore, his name would come up instantly.

Moreover, the factory owner had originally opposed the assault on Teacher Lanshore. During his conversation with the old man, he had referred to Teacher Lanshore as innocent several times.

After a moment, he reached a conclusion. Sighing, he touched his forehead as if he had a headache and shook his head.

“No, it wasn’t. One of my friends suddenly disappeared yesterday. I don’t know where he went, and I was wondering if he might have been the one who died at that hospital. Since my friend wouldn’t go to kill an innocent person… I don’t know who died at that hospital. But if it was someone who came to shoot a patient, then good riddance.”

It was natural that Teacher Lanshore, who could control the workers, was more valuable than a friend who had abandoned him after going mad over his son becoming an Idealist terminal.

The issue was resolved. From that day on, for almost two weeks, I guarded Teacher Lanshore’s bedside while the workers were at the factory. The nurse in charge of that hospital room was quite attractive and nice.

Her name was Roxanne, and after chatting a couple of times, she whispered that I could call her Roxy.

After about a week, a consolation gift from the factory owner arrived. After reading the letter tucked between the gifts, Teacher Lanshore seemed to have decided to forgive the factory owner.

The letter contained a truth that I didn’t know, or shouldn’t have known. I knew the contents of the letter but decided to pretend I didn’t. The contents of the letter were beyond a detective’s responsibility.