Ch.295The Ninth Entanglement – A Carol for the New God (5)

The Industrial Spirit King thought that was enough. He believed that even a cautious detective wouldn’t keep pursuing a matter once they’d questioned it and resolved it.

But he had misjudged the man. He didn’t realize the detective was someone who had decimated the Old Gourmet Society by doggedly pursuing even the slightest hint from a police collaborator when there wasn’t a single clue.

The detective traced back the sense of déjà vu he felt from that one statement. It was something he’d heard before. He just needed to remember where. It felt like he’d experienced the entire situation once before.

Then he remembered. It was when the Industrial Spirit King’s contractors had controlled the Idealists to stage a fake Idealist uprising. He had heard what the contractors said after they had seized most of the terminals.

The detective habitually put on a smile. He needed to appear reassured. The Industrial Spirit King had a wide field of vision, but only from his own body.

“Don’t scare me like that, Lord Spirit King. I thought the Idealists were really up to something and monitoring me. You didn’t get that terminal from the Idealists, did you?”

He deliberately snapped at him, and the terminal let out a hearty laugh. It was a terminal made from a human—with a shaved head and wearing the same uniform—so its laughter was quite distinctive.

“I’m glad you’ve figured out how to be clever. You could speak a little more kindly, Michael. Your words are too sharp.”

The detective sneered at that remark. Since the Industrial Spirit King knew how the detective typically spoke, he continued in his usual manner.

“Being kind to an intruder peeping through your window at 3 AM is something even a saint couldn’t manage. And you know I’m far from becoming a saint.”

“You never know, the businessmen you’ve worked for might throw enough money around to have you canonized as the patron saint of businessmen. The patron saint of union busters, how does that sound?”

“I’d rather throw myself into the sulfur pits of Hell hoping there are more hot springs than fire pits than hear that. Oh, by the way…”

The detective casually changed the subject. He couldn’t detect anything awkward in the Industrial Spirit King’s voice as he spoke like an old friend. He truly was treating the detective with goodwill.

Using a terminal made it harder to hide one’s manner of speaking. Normally, one would choose what to say and select a tone before speaking… but with a terminal, the moment you decided what to say, the terminal would speak.

So he hadn’t come to lie. He had simply sent a terminal to Two Face because he wanted to observe Christmas. The detective didn’t believe that a being as powerful as a Spirit King could be that innocent.

He must have had something to do and came to see what I was doing on Christmas. Yet it wasn’t surveillance. He really… came to see if I was spending Christmas happily. The reason was unknown.

If no conclusion had been reached yet, he could probe a little more. After pausing for half a second, the detective continued.

“I’m still getting calls from someone who might be the Idealists or someone else, and the Idealists said something strange. They called me Michael. Those guys only ever call me ‘detective.’ Perhaps…”

“My contractors called you Michael in the underground of the All-American Idealist Federation. Do you think any of them are still alive?”

Both the detective and the Industrial Spirit King knew they weren’t alive. But while the detective perfectly concealed his cards, the Industrial Spirit King failed to hide his completely.

The All-American Idealist Federation building was outside the factory area where the Industrial Spirit King’s gaze could reach. None of the people who saw the terminals there were connected to the Industrial Spirit King.

So… it’s obvious how he knows. It wasn’t done by the Industrial Spirit King’s contractors. It was done by the Industrial Spirit King himself. Perhaps the contractors were also terminals.

Did I trust the documents from the police too much? If it was the Industrial Spirit King, and if he was the one who instigated the Idealist uprising, he could certainly use magic to turn people into terminals.

The possibility that he had turned the medical examiner into a terminal and sent falsified documents was plausible because the opponent was the Industrial Spirit King. The detective nodded.

“It’s possible, I suppose. Or maybe the Idealists extracted and stored the minds of the contractors. Though it’s sudden at this early hour…”

The Industrial Spirit King was reassured by those words. Coming at dawn might have been foolish, but he did it with good intentions. He wanted even this detective to have happy memories.

Fortunately, that goodwill wouldn’t trip him up. The Machine of the Age murmured. Once this question the detective had was resolved, there would be no problems. The Idealists could rest too.

“No, that can’t be. Even with that magic, they couldn’t turn dead people into terminals. If that were possible, how horrific would the Idealist uprising have been? They called you by name… perhaps because you were an entity worth remembering. To them, you were a savior, weren’t you?”

A savior. People called someone who saved their lives once a savior, but someone who saved them three times was often called a terrifying harbinger of disaster.

What mattered now was that the Industrial Spirit King had been directly involved in the Idealist uprising. He needed to know why. If the reason was trivial, it could be ignored.

The Industrial Spirit King feared the end. So… did he recreate the end he feared by killing all his contractors and causing trouble? That was incomprehensible.

The goal was probably to eliminate the contractors themselves. Spirits and contractors had a mutual monitoring relationship. Spirits could see through contractors, but contractors could also see through spirits.

The Industrial Spirit King had been bound and monitored by those contractors. To break free, he brought in the Idealists and instigated an uprising. To gain freedom. The detective had the answer.

After finding freedom, he also shed responsibility. To conclude that the bodies of the contractors he had controlled were intact, he tampered with the police investigation report. An act to destroy evidence.

The Machine of the Age was liberated the moment he disposed of all the contractors. Instead of being confined to the factory area where he couldn’t stand up or look around, he now had terminals he could send anywhere as he pleased.

Perhaps… the Industrial Spirit King was trying to become human. The detective formed a hypothesis. He might have been trying to gain a body and freedom to become a free individual.

If so, the reason fit simply. He killed the contractors to gain mental freedom, and used the Idealists to gain physical freedom. He accomplished two things at once.

Who could the Industrial Spirit King know? Probably just the reporter and me. Otherwise, it would be only the high-ranking individuals who couldn’t easily spy on daily life. The detective continued his train of thought.

Though the detective didn’t consider himself the standard for humanity, he knew that from the Industrial Spirit King’s perspective, he might appear like Adam. To him, the detective was one of the first “others.”

Moreover, the detective was an unremarkable third-rate operator. He might have seemed second-rate to the Industrial Spirit King, but he would be in that category. So he could think of the detective as ordinary.

He might have caused trouble to become human, and once he could live like a human, he wanted to observe other people. The detective reached a simple conclusion.

Is that too charitable a conclusion? The detective doubted briefly, but knowing his own obsession with an ordinary, human life… he could infer what someone who couldn’t become human might feel.

It was a neurosis that every New Yorker typically had. The detective’s was love. Love for life. It might have once been something greater and grander, but now only his love for his own life remained.

The detective misjudged because of this neurosis. However, he could still ask a question that pierced to the heart of the matter. Their different dreams momentarily aligned. Just for a moment.

“You admire and love people, don’t you?”

The Industrial Spirit King couldn’t help but be surprised by the words the silent detective suddenly uttered. He never thought he would be understood before even properly beginning what he was doing out of pure love.

So the Industrial Spirit King spoke with a voice full of emotion. The Machine of the Age was crying. It was brief. Or perhaps a little longer. That emotion quickly filled his voice with sincerity.

“Can a creation not love its creator? Can it not admire them? You too, the one who made you…”

Yet the detective was displeased. Since they didn’t know each other, their conversation would end in a collision. The detective only needed to confirm that the Industrial Spirit King was sincere.

“I was born from two humans rolling around together. The God-President isn’t idle enough to meddle in that. Anyway… that’s all I needed you to answer.”

They were children of humans. The detective was simply born from two people, while the Industrial Spirit King was born from all people and thought of himself as a child of humanity. A self-proclaimed messiah.

The two shared sincerity but not a shred of truth. The world doesn’t change with sincerity alone. This moment was perhaps the last chance. Or perhaps touching on it now was the worst choice.

The terminal connected to the Industrial Spirit King took off its hat, bowed, and disappeared toward the factory area. The detective returned to his room and picked up a book from the back room of Two Face.

The dawn after Christmas dissipated like that. The detective ate breakfast at Two Face for the first time in a long while, and the industrial spirits, knowing that salvation was planned, operated their machines with even more vigor.

After looking around the factory area, the detective concluded that his thoughts from yesterday were correct. The Industrial Spirit King loved humans and wanted to become human. He believed he had succeeded, and the industrial spirits had become more energetic due to his influence.

That prediction seemed true for just a few days. The Industrial Spirit King was quietly running his machines, and no one was knocking on the detective agency’s door warning about the end.

The agents of the Divine Protection State received a hold order despite there being no signs of danger. They didn’t know what they were supposed to hold, but they followed the order. That’s the kind of beings they were.

At the end of December 30th, the reporter received a phone call. Once again, a voice whose origin was unknown—whether it came from somewhere or was truly made through a telephone—was heard. It was the Industrial Spirit King.

“Are you having a happy end of the year, little elf? I spoke with Michael a bit earlier, but I’m calling you belatedly.”

His voice was gentle and calm. He sounded like a completely different being from the Industrial Spirit King who had been on the verge of going wild to warn people. The reporter answered with a voice mixed with laughter.

She was thinking about Christmas. Remembering the feeling of body heat and heartbeat that had touched at the doorway, she flapped her reddened ear tips. After a brief pause, she spoke.

“I think there’s never been an end of the year like this one, even though it’s very different from previous years. Oh, it’s fine that you contacted me late! Mr. New York is always one step ahead anyway. By the way, Industrial Spirit King! You’re not talking about the end anymore? Are you feeling better?”

The Industrial Spirit King was genuinely happy to hear those words. It was very different from previous year-ends, but it was an incomparably wonderful end of the year. That was what he wanted to hear. However, he hid part of the truth in his answer.

His plan was something that even the Idealists, the original owners of the mind-merging magic, couldn’t guess, so the Industrial Spirit King could smooth over the situation with a very small lie.

“It’s not so much that I’m feeling better, but that I’ve found a way. You know what the God-President always says. Have faith, hope, and love. I’ve decided to follow that advice.”

He had faith in his abilities, hope for the future, and love for people living their individual lives. It was very right but also very twisted. The beginning of the twist was unknown.

Perhaps it was because the God-President didn’t stop the Industrial Spirit King from prophesying. Perhaps it was because he didn’t stop industrialization. It might have been because he didn’t use his omnipotence to keep the world in the medieval era.

But the God-President knew very well that this method was the best. The only alternative worth considering would have been a method that would spill even more blood.

That omnipotent divinity generally made the same choice. Letting things flow as they would was the choice in most cases. Not this time. He had made the Machine of the Age meet the reporter with a warning about the fever.

“Using religion to calm anxiety is a good choice too! Just knowing that the omnipotent God-President is with us can often help.”

“It’s not just about calming anxiety. The world helps those who help themselves. I’m going to work for myself.”

The Industrial Spirit King paused briefly. He wondered if this little elf would understand his thoughts, which the detective had understood. He asked tentatively.

“By the way, little elf. Would it be better to use dice that only show 3 and 4 when playing a dice game, or to use normal dice? I’ve never played since I have neither hands to throw dice nor friends to play with, but I’ve become curious while observing people lately. I would like you to answer.”

The Industrial Spirit King naturally wanted agreement. He wanted an answer saying that if you play a game with dice that only show 3 and 4, at least you won’t lose by rolling a 1 or 2.

But his little elf betrayed his expectations mercilessly. Thinking it was the Industrial Spirit King’s self-righteousness to consider it betrayal, the reporter answered after thinking for just one second, as if dealing with a frivolous question.

“I think most would use normal dice? If you’re not dreaming of rolling a 5 or 6, there’s no need to roll dice at all. It’s a bit silly to roll dice while hoping for stability, isn’t it?”

Instead of asking again, the Industrial Spirit King once more acted self-righteously. He thought she would believe him if he told her that if a 1 or 2 came up, the dice might break and they would never be able to play again.

The Machine of the Age, just like a seven-year-old child, would completely shut his mouth if he wasn’t certain the other person would agree with his question. He had done this dozens of times so far, but no one had pointed it out.

If he had reached the level of a seven-year-old after just two or three months of gaining humanity, it would be commendable, but a seven-year-old mentality was too young and immature to talk about changing the future and overturning the world.

Therefore, he didn’t actually voice such assumptions. He feared being denied and having his resolve shaken. Rather than that, he decided to show the little elf directly.