Ch.301Work Record No. 042 – The God Wearing the Beast’s Hide (5)

El Sueño proclaimed the beginning of a new crusade with perfect timing. He created a purpose for all the abundance his very existence had generated, just as it was about to turn into tedium.

Following his words, El Pastor and La Roca received special gifts from El Sueño: dark red tactical gloves. Considering El Sueño’s nickname, these were essentially emblems of a great warrior.

The freelancer, who existed here yet had never truly been here, knew that religious symbols no longer needed great power. Symbols held power through their mere existence.

The El Sueño cult postponed their boredom, enjoying abundance while continuing their religious exploration. However, someone was merely teaching them strategy and tactics.

They weren’t hoping for anything extraordinary. At minimum, they hoped to learn to throw flash grenades through doorways before entering rooms, and to coordinate to secure interiors from different angles.

Reinforced armor would be nice, but currently in the Mojave Desert, only the Las Vegas Strip could deploy reinforced armor at a group level. No, “could” would be more accurate than “can.”

They were crumbling under El Sueño’s mercy. Even though they weren’t the security team responsible for force, the fact that they played a significant role in the organization’s power structure already placed considerable burden on them.

In the Las Vegas Strip, where specialization and collaboration were survival strategies, undermining another faction’s influence in such a way would inevitably face opposition, no matter how necessary.

And El Sueño was a god who freed people from burdens, fears, and all the constraints binding them. A god who appeared to soothe hearts—something no one else had done in this wasteland.

The reward for that care arrived. A gang hunter wearing a full-body prosthesis kicked open the door of the laboratory where the El Sueño cult was staying. The followers looked at her, but no one raised a weapon.

Jimena Castello despised that composure. The El Sueño cult should not know mercy. They were just a gang that El Sueño had gathered in the name of fanaticism.

Their only purpose should be to kill the Las Vegas Strip, and they had created this cult using someone with personal charisma for that purpose. Such a hastily formed cult shouldn’t possess anything like “the proper form of religion.”

But they didn’t reject the person who kicked open the door to meet El Sueño. The crowd naturally parted.

As Jimena was searching for appropriate words for this situation, she felt herself pulled by strong arms. It was rough physical force, yet it didn’t feel rough. It couldn’t.

She wasn’t actually feeling physical sensation, and there was no softness felt from what might be El Sueño’s body or reinforced armor… but El Sueño embraced her like welcoming a prodigal daughter.

It should have been cringeworthy and unpleasant, but Jimena lingered a bit longer between El Sueño’s strong arms that embraced her like a father. This is… stability. Jimena constantly demanded explanations from herself.

She was screaming inside her head to reveal why she had abandoned her position as a gang hunter on the HR team to come here, and while she had various excuses until now, she could no longer make any.

She wanted this stability. Having lived only in a city on the edge of a cliff where not a single person could be saved, she literally craved this second chance. A craving close to addiction.

El Sueño began speaking in the English she was familiar with. No, Jimena could speak Mexican fluently too, but in her mind, Mexican was just “a language used by gangs.”

When one person sees through another’s secret, the exposed person believes they can see a million of their secrets. In Jimena’s view, El Sueño was showing her special favor.

Whether it was truth or lie didn’t matter. El Sueño’s deception and seduction had given substance to a ghost wandering this wasteland.

When the fake creates the real, and something that never existed shapes something new, what does it matter what’s real or fake? What mattered was that all of El Sueño’s actions were taking care of her.

“The prodigal has returned. I’ve been waiting for you, my daughter.”

Not a few among those gathered in the laboratory knew Jimena Castello. They knew she was the Las Vegas Strip’s vanguard who hunted gang members like dogs while wearing a full-body prosthesis.

In any normal situation, no matter how dignified or charismatic an overboss’s order might be, they would have hurled insults at Jimena, but not now. Because a god was welcoming her.

El Sueño continued speaking, gently holding the shoulders of Jimena who had collapsed before him, for those who didn’t know the truth. He began confirming whether what he had spread had settled well.

“She was a gang hunter for the Las Vegas Strip. Many of you here have probably been tracked, hunted. Would you stop her from approaching me because of that?”

Jimena couldn’t help but fear the response that followed. Because the answer was unified. Because she heard a voice that had become one mass, imbued with sincerity, not just formality.

El Pastor led the chant, but the words that followed naturally continued in everyone’s voices. What the Las Vegas Strip feared was happening. The fragmented was aligning.

“We will not stop her! We were all sinners, bound by the chains of our crimes. But hasn’t the one who is our dream released those chains for anyone, regardless of who they are?”

The voices of a group of mercenaries were also mixed in that thunderous confession of faith. By the time Jimena barely managed to rise, people carrying two vessels approached.

One contained a somewhat acidic liquid, the other dye. It seemed to be dye made from the red mint flowers that had begun spreading through the wasteland with El Sueño. Jimena knew what El Sueño wanted.

El Sueño’s voice, which had previously seemed like it would shake Jimena’s entire body, was now gentle. Though it was simply that he wasn’t using the Calliope module, to Jimena it felt like mercy and gentleness.

“I want to entrust you with an important task, Jimena. Will you become one of my bloodied hands in the Temple of the River?”

This is a rite of passage. Jimena squeezed out her rationality. It was meant to show atonement through pain by dipping her hands in this acidic liquid that would be painful if not for her full-body prosthesis.

But at the same time… she felt no pain. All she felt were damage alert notifications. She could regain everything without giving up anything.

With that thought, Jimena dipped both hands into the acidic liquid, though she understood neither the meaning of the Temple of the River nor the request to become bloodied hands. The coating peeled off, and damage alerts flooded in.

She pulled out her hands. She dipped the two hands of her full-body prosthesis, now in perfect condition for coloring, into the vessel containing dye. The thick dye began to stick to those prosthetic hands that were undergoing chemical heat generation.

When she pulled out her hands again, no one except someone who was there but not there, and Jimena herself, was looking at the Las Vegas Strip’s gang hunter anymore.

They were looking at El Sueño’s bloodied hands. They were watching someone who had been cruel finding a new life. They believed El Sueño’s words about second chances.

Jimena Castello’s conversion stirred the hearts of other gang hunters as well. Someone who existed yet didn’t exist in this place gained a realistic reference for the “showing mercy” plan.

By the day the crusade began to make The Bazaar the second stronghold of the El Sueño cult, more than twenty gang hunters had joined the cult. They weren’t just additional forces.

El Sueño hadn’t persuaded a single member of the Las Vegas Strip’s security team. He had only absorbed the already frowned-upon gang hunters, and the security team was increasing their letters of protest to the HR team.

These were letters questioning who now controlled those wasteland-born gang hunters they had raised despite violating sacred collaboration. But nothing beyond protest letters would be exchanged.

It was the security team that had placed the despised gang hunters at the forefront of hunts to minimize their own losses, and it was also the security team that had tacitly allowed the HR team to grow in numbers.

The mercenaries with artificially bloodied hands from red mint flower dye, former gang hunters, and the original leaders of Los Soñadores each led a group of crusaders.

El Sueño, who had been watching this scene with satisfaction, appeared from thin air. El Pastor approached him and presented a flag. It was a symbol of the El Sueño cult that El Sueño himself hadn’t created.

It was a flag depicting a bloodied fist. El Sueño raised the flag high. The person who shouldn’t exist here was slightly displeased that the flag resembled those from the Extinction War.

But not enough to show on El Sueño’s face. The very fact that El Sueño was holding this flag was an insult to them, because El Sueño was a god who fanatically embraced compassion, mercy, and warmth.

“What shall we take from The Bazaar? Shall we take their freedom?”

“We will take only their pain! Only their fear! We will give them joy and things they can enjoy!”

Jimena no longer called these words civil operations or such. She began to speak of sharing the salvation she had received. She began to surrender herself to El Sueño’s current.

The same was true for others who had tried to measure El Sueño with reason. Los Soñadores and the El Sueño cult loved El Sueño like the product of the most fearsome form of dictatorship.

After raising the flag, El Sueño thrust it down again. He began to shout again in the god’s voice, a painful mix of high and low frequencies.

“I do not need slaves who will serve me eternally in death. I need living workers. I need those who will be the hands and feet of this insubstantial god who walked out of dreams! Will you be martyrs?”

“We will serve while living! We will enjoy while living! Our hands are red not with martyrs’ blood but with the flower water you have brought!”

El Sueño gradually increased the output of his voice module. He shouted to the followers who focused on his reverently painful voice.

“The Bazaar serves The Bazaar’s god. In that fearful pit of war, they worship only money as god. They may do so. Wasn’t it my doctrine to believe in and follow what one wishes? But the clowns…”

The Los Payasos gang appears to follow nothing. If anything, there was art, but the El Sueño cult, full of abnormality wearing the mask of normality, despised that murderous art.

“Do they worship a god? They surrender to perverse and peripheral curiosity, turning lives that should be free, loving, and dreaming into jokes. Therefore, they must die.”

There are many gods in the world. There is money, credit. There is efficiency. There is adaptation. There is nature, there is the past, and there is El Sueño. The world would become a slightly better place no matter which of them one worships.

Because all these things have substance. Like Hollowed Creek, they couldn’t be called religious because they actually worshipped the cult leader while pretending to serve a non-existent god.

Los Payasos must die because they were turning people capable of worshipping that god into their jokes and punchlines.

The Las Vegas Strip must die because it chases only the phantoms of pleasure and illusion. This wasn’t an objective statement from the perspective of an absolute third party. This was a personal opinion and the doctrine of a religion.

The current Mojave Desert was so shrouded in fog that truth and opinion could not be distinguished. El Sueño’s opinion was becoming truth. Even though it wasn’t even a sincere opinion.

Neither the person aware of this fact nor the witch of the wasteland put a stop to this flow. Because all this fanaticism was making the wasteland a slightly better place.

It had become a place where people could have compassion, where showing mercy to others wasn’t labeled as weakness… because El Sueño was different from the gods of the Extinction War era.

As El Sueño thrust the flag down to the ground again, El Pastor shouted in a voice filled with religious ecstasy. It was a statement that swept away all those trivial concerns like a river.

“All gods of this wasteland! The One who watches over us and all other gods! Look upon us! Let us chase away phantoms, burn ghosts and evil customs, and spread truth!”

Both those who worshipped El Sueño as a god and those who were somehow trying to remember, in increasingly fading memories, that he was a human and a corporate justice agent, all responded to that cry.

Not long after that cry began, a communication reached the minds of Los Payasos members who were guarding the exterior of The Bazaar while joking about their next work.

“The El Sueño cult is coming. Prepare. The Bazaar must remain in Los Payasos’ hands.”

It was the overboss’s words. The words of El Pierrot who judges all works. The words directly spoken to them by El Pierrot, who had never been satisfied with any Los Payasos clown’s work.

The clowns rejoiced at that simple fact. They hoped that if they succeeded in this task, even El Pierrot’s face, always wearing sad makeup, might find the laughter that Los Payasos spoke of.

It didn’t last long. Someone approached the gang members who had suddenly begun jumping with excitement, their helmets decorated with bright white, yellow, and all sorts of colorful designs, and polka dots adorning their bulletproof plates.

It was The Bazaar’s guards. The clowns thought they had approached because they saw Los Payasos, who protected them, suddenly jumping with excitement, but they immediately raised their gun barrels and pulled the triggers of their submachine guns.

The clown whose consciousness was fading while creating a ridiculous punchline like “A row of battlefield clowns truly dies in a series of stories” didn’t know why he had been shot.

The Bazaar had grown tired of their jokes. They had decided to choose the somewhat more reasonable fanatics rather than clowns who created art and jokes by tearing apart and reassembling people.