Ch.170Chapter 25. Bell (3)

Now that I’ve sorted out my emotions, let’s solve the remaining problem.

First,

“So, where is my original body?”

I asked Kagami.

“I don’t know that either.”

Kagami answered immediately without hesitation.

…….

Ah, I suppose that makes sense.

If the government was planning to do something with my corpse, they wouldn’t have taken it just anywhere.

Even if Kagami has informants, they probably couldn’t bring information right away in the current situation.

Moreover, considering the circumstances, all existing informants might have been cut off.

After all, this could be seen as rebelling ‘against the government.’

“But… then…?”

“Then what?”

Kagami asked back, still wearing that smiling face.

“No, I mean. Considering what that corpse might do, shouldn’t we stop it somehow?”

Watching Kagami speak makes me feel somewhat less confident.

I’m not saying my thoughts have changed. I still think we need to do something about that corpse.

It’s just… somehow looking at Kagami makes me feel like I shouldn’t express that thought ‘in this situation.’

“Even if we wanted to stop it,”

Kagami spoke up as I was pondering.

“We don’t have any weapons on our side.”

“Huh?”

“They took Yuka Yuuki’s knife.”

“……”

I looked toward Yuka. She slightly avoided my gaze.

Indeed, in this situation, the knife Yuka always carried was nowhere to be seen.

But there’s no need to avoid my eyes and feel sorry about it.

“And I don’t think you’d want to use another friend’s blood, would you?”

She was referring to Souta.

I nodded.

If we were to directly confront Nirlas, we wouldn’t need just ‘a little’ of Souta’s blood. Our opponent is a being very different from the slimes we usually see.

And I don’t know whether attacks from Koko, or rather me in Koko’s body, would be effective.

Isn’t that right? For some reason, Nirlas didn’t inhabit Koko’s body, but ultimately Nirlas played a major role in creating that body.

If Nirlas planned to be reborn here, he would have considered that much.

“So, there’s no way now.”

“……”

I stared blankly for a moment at Kagami, who was still smiling while saying there was no way.

So, she really hadn’t thought about what to do after bringing me back to life.

Kagami.

Kagami, the head of that religion.

I swallowed dryly.

Come to think of it, Kagami did seem a bit strange. It wasn’t just because of her peculiar outfit of a shrine maiden dress with an apron.

Rather, there was something fundamentally different about her atmosphere compared to the usual Kagami.

The usual Kagami?

What was the usual Kagami like?

Actually, I’ve rarely seen Kagami’s ‘usual’ appearance. I didn’t seek her out unless I needed her, and Kagami also seemed to keep some distance from me.

She almost always had a smiling expression in front of me. Whatever I did normally, Kagami hardly cared and let me be.

I don’t even know exactly how large her religious group is.

“…Kagami.”

I looked straight at Kagami and said.

“Don’t tell me, once I was revived, you didn’t care what happened to this world?”

Kagami just kept smiling without answering.

“What do you mean, what happens to this world?”

“…Yuka.”

I turned to look at Yuka with a slightly dazed expression at her question.

“Well, that is…”

Where should I start and how should I explain?

Yuka knows that I serve a certain god. She also knows that I use blood to borrow that god’s power.

Perhaps she already knows that the god is extremely capricious. After all, that god was the reason Yuka ended up stabbing me with her knife.

But… did Yuka know?

That the god was already sleeping inside my body, and that my soul was suppressing the manifestation of that god.

If she had known that, would Yuka have helped with my resurrection?

“A powerful outer god with no connection to this Earth.”

But before I could explain, Kagami spoke first.

“That’s the kind of being we served.”

Everyone in the room turned their attention to Kagami.

“I received power from such a god and gave birth to several children.”

The atmosphere in the room grew even colder.

Mr. Yamashita, Mr. Fukuda, Hagiwara, and Nakahara weren’t in the room.

Mr. Yamashita and Mr. Fukuda were guarding the door, while Hagiwara and Nakahara had gone up to my room.

It was probably consideration to let us talk among ourselves.

However, Kagami didn’t seem to have considered that when she started speaking.

Kagami’s tone sounded like she had completely let go of something.

“Thinking about it again, I may have actually given birth to only two beings.”

Kagami’s gaze turned toward me and Koko.

“Woo…?”

“However, the first being I gave birth to might have been unable to maintain its form within a human body and was torn into several pieces. Well, who knows about these divine beings.”

“……”

Everyone’s attention turned to me and Koko.

The atmosphere was… somewhat strange.

Normally, when someone realizes that a person they knew is actually a god or monster, they would first show rejection regardless of their previous relationship.

Then they would decide whether to accept the situation or not.

But the atmosphere of the gazes we were receiving now wasn’t like that.

Rather, there were much more complexly intertwined emotions.

And the predominant emotion was sympathy.

“And both beings were failures.”

As Kagami continued speaking, ignoring the atmosphere, the children’s gazes snapped back in the opposite direction.

The emotion in their eyes was ‘anger,’ unlike when they were looking at me.

They probably reacted to her treating me and Koko as failures.

Is Kagami still acting? Like when she pretended to mistreat me in front of the other children?

…I’m not sure.

I’m not sure, but somehow I felt that wasn’t the case.

The calm Kagami had a subtly different atmosphere from the Kagami I knew.

She seemed similar to Kagami when I appeared at Christmas saying I would give her a gift. Though she’s much calmer now than she was then.

“The god didn’t dwell within.”

Kagami continued speaking, looking at me while ignoring everyone’s gazes.

“The first being I gave birth to couldn’t even properly maintain a human form, and devoured every living thing it touched. It wasn’t a god, not even an intelligent being, just a monster living solely by instinct.”

“Woo…?”

Should I take Koko outside? But Koko just tilted her head, not seeming to grasp the situation accurately, so I left her be for now.

It would be disastrous if we left and missed important information.

“After continuing to give birth to such torn beings, the final one I gave birth to was,”

Kagami looked straight at me and said.

“You.”

“……”

What should I say?

In many ways, I had a lot I wanted to say, but at the same time, I didn’t want to say anything.

However, it was clear that my attempt to maintain an expressionless face had failed. I could tell from the way the children were looking at me.

Only Koko maintained the same expression as before the conversation started. Did she already know?

“You were certainly alive, and unlike the being born before, you had the complete form of a human, but again, no god dwelled within. You just lay there without any reaction to whatever happened around you.”

In the end, we decided to leave you as you were.

Even though you were failures, you might be useful someday.

Kagami’s voice resonated.

“…So?”

Yuka finally spoke up.

Her voice was breaking badly.

“Are you saying your perspective has changed now?”

“I suppose you could say that.”

Kagami said.

“It’s strange. When you first opened your eyes and moved, the only emotion I felt was fear.”

“……”

“The more we talked, the more curious I became, and after knowing you weren’t harmful, I even developed some affection. After all, you were the only being I could openly talk to about my situation.”

Was that so?

Maybe it was. For Kagami, I was a being no different from a god, so she could share certain things with me that she couldn’t tell her subordinates.

Among Kagami’s conversations, there were truly important facts and situations, but interspersed between them were her own brief thoughts.

“Now—”

Kagami said.

“Yes, ‘now’ is the most appropriate word. I wonder why. Why curiosity and interest could change into something like maternal affection.”

Kagami closed her mouth briefly and fell into thought.

As we remained silent, Kagami slowly opened her mouth again.

“Actually, I don’t know either. If you had acted like a clueless child from the beginning, things might have been different. If you had shown the behavior of a newborn despite having the body of a teenager, I certainly wouldn’t have liked it much.”

“……”

“For some reason, you acted as if you knew everything from the beginning. From the moment you first opened your eyes.”

Yuka and Yamashita looked at me in confusion.

Their expressions asked what that meant.

For reference, Shii and Souta weren’t grasping the situation at all.

“You knew how this world worked, knew how to behave, and knew how to maintain proper etiquette. When I saw you preparing a meal for me the day we met, I was so surprised.”

“……”

Um.

No, that’s, well.

I was sweating profusely for a different reason.

“But I decided not to think more about why that happened. It doesn’t matter what kind of being you are. Whether you’re a divine being trying to suppress Nirlas, or truly just a being not even a year old who woke up with common sense.”

“……”

Yuka’s face grew even paler.

Hey, if you say any more, Yuka might become beyond recovery.

I seriously considered, as calmly as possible, whether I should reveal my true identity here or not.

No matter what, if Yuka learned she had cut the wrist of a being not even a year old, what would happen to her? Yamashita beside her also had a pale face, but Yuka’s was worse.

But before I could say anything to Yuka, Kagami beat me to it.

“One certain fact is that I gave birth to you.”

“……”

I looked at Kagami with my mouth slightly open.

“Therefore— I decided to stop thinking logically, to stop thinking for gain. I simply decided not to let go of the beings in my hands because of something else.”

Despite Kagami’s atmosphere, her tone remained calm and composed.

But I seemed to see some… emotion between that calmness and composure.

Perhaps because I had met with Kagami occasionally to talk?

Kagami’s eyes looking at me seemed just like when she used to call me a divine being and said she would believe in me no matter what I did.

However, this time those words seemed to be directed at herself.

“So, I probably shouldn’t say this now. It might seem too shameless to say this.”

Kagami spoke slowly, as if exhaling.

“Now I don’t want to lose you. Even if the whole world burns. Whether that’s… a mother’s heart or something else, I don’t really know.”

Kagami smiled.

And the talismans on the floor, which hadn’t been removed yet, glowed blue.

“I thought you would willingly go there. I can’t drive you to death after just bringing you back to life.”

Kagami spoke as everyone in the room was confused.

“……”

I could only stare blankly at Kagami.

*

They say human greed knows no bounds.

It’s because of this greed that people repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

“……”

“…Hmph.”

Nanami Nakahara snorted at Hana Hagiwara, who was staring blankly at her phone screen with an expressionless face.

When Hagiwara looked up, Nanami said incredulously:

“You still can’t let go of that side?”

“…Would you easily let go if you were me?”

Hagiwara said that and then sighed deeply, putting down her phone.

“And I’ve never let go yet.”

“……”

Nanami glared at Hagiwara.

Hagiwara avoided her gaze. After all, Hagiwara was the one who had something to feel guilty about.

“I may not be close with Kurosawa—”

“……”

“—but no matter what, you don’t have the right to tell her to die, do you? Isn’t that too much for someone else?”

This was already the umpteenth time she had heard these words.

It wasn’t just said out of indignation. Nanami was sincere. Hagiwara knew that well.

That’s why she had nothing to say.

Only at the end did she… come over to this side, or whatever you want to call it.

What would happen to her internally?

Even worrying about that might be disrespectful to that girl.

But it was also difficult not to worry at all. After all, Hagiwara was still not an adult.

“……”

Nanami glared at Hagiwara, who gave no particular answer, then sighed deeply and buried her face on the table.

“Haa, who am I saying this to.”

And then,

“Maybe I should just go down to where Souta is—”

As Nanami was muttering that.

Zing.

“Eek!?”

Nanami, who had her cheek against the table, was startled by the vibration of Hagiwara’s phone on the table and quickly raised her face.

“What’s wrong?”

She asked out of embarrassment, but Hagiwara was already looking at her phone with a stiff face.

“What is it… did you get fired or something?”

Nanami, who didn’t attend any church, searched for words and came up with that term.

But Hagiwara didn’t answer for a while, just staring at her phone, then suddenly stood up.

“Huh? Senior? Where are you going?”

“Now—”

But before Hagiwara could say anything.

The window trembled.

And a little later.

From far away, a loud scream was heard.

Nanami felt goosebumps on her back.

It wasn’t simply the scream of many people. It was as if someone with an incredibly loud voice was screaming alone, and the sound spread throughout the entire city.

It was difficult to even imagine a being that could make such a sound.

The only thing she could imagine was some human with a twisted taste playing horror movie screams through a large speaker.

“Senior…?”

But Nanami had just experienced something similar. She had also experienced various other things before.

So she could easily realize that the current situation was not a natural one.

Hagiwara just stared blankly at the door, tightly gripping her phone.

*

The corpse seemed literally alive.

Of course, no one was rushing to do anything strange to that corpse. That was common sense, and above all, everyone moving it knew that the corpse was not that of an ordinary girl.

So even though they were just moving the body of a girl who was merely dead, no one thought it strange to use a large truck like an armored cash transport vehicle.

No one questioned the presence of heavily armed soldier-like people sitting in that truck.

“So, where is this going?”

“Who knows. Probably to some research facility.”

These soldiers also had some knowledge in this area.

So they didn’t think there would be any major problems while having this conversation.

“I heard various places are asking for samples. She’s a girl who doesn’t die even when cut repeatedly. They probably want to research cell division or something like that.”

…They say human greed knows no bounds.

If there are beings like yokai or evil spirits, naturally there would be those who try to use them.

Even if there were evil gods trying to destroy the world, there would be people who thought they could control them.

Greed that never disappears, no matter how much time passes.

And.

Bang!

“…Huh?”

When the side of the truck was torn and a sharp tentacle pierced through his stomach, one of the soldiers made such a sound, unable to grasp the situation.

Then, forgetting even to scream, the soldiers beside him shot their guns toward the outside of the truck.

Bang!

As if something was driving outside, there was a sound of something colliding.

—And such humans are not just one.

There were always those who fought to claim wealth or power first.

The problem always started from there.