Ch.312The Fifth Twilight of the Idol – Faces Beneath the Mask (1)

In the middle of a wasteland with no surveillance systems, I hand over El Sueño’s body to Fitz & Morrison.

There was virtually no possibility they would misuse El Sueño’s body. Thanks to telling El Pastor a truth that wasn’t quite the truth.

The amount of credits deposited into my account was… enough to buy a house for Eve, another house for Arthur-2 to live independently, and still have plenty left over.

It felt somewhat absurd that I was working for this money while living in a rental apartment and paying monthly rent. I wasn’t intoxicated by the money.

What I’m waiting for now is… meeting Los Angeles again. After enjoying a mediocre party with Silverlining at Eve’s hideout and resting a bit, I just need to visit two more places.

I’ll go to Panacea Meditech to convey that while I may not know Mr. Günter’s attitude, I can change Belvedere’s stance, and then to Belvedere to use the opportunity given by Mr. Günter… after that, I’ll head to Hollowwood Creek.

Working as El Sueño this time, I learned many valuable things. Value can fascinate people. I’ll be able to use the Creek inquisitor that Pastor Bill and I have targeted.

No. He won’t feel used. He’ll believe he’s doing a favor to someone he can open his heart to, that he’s the one in control.

Either way, he’ll be completely liberated from his guilt, so I decided not to feel like I’m doing something bad. I head toward Los Angeles feeling refreshed.

But then, I received a communication request from Dean. He wasn’t someone who would call while knowing I was working. I connect anyway.

I had the silly thought that if I’d worked as El Sueño a little longer, I might have forgotten my own voice, but I didn’t laugh out loud.

“What is it, Dean? I was just on my way back after finishing the job.”

“Let’s have a drink in the wasteland before you go back, El Sueño. I just… have a lot to talk about, man. I’ll send you the coordinates… will you come?”

His words were so direct that even calling them straightforward would be too gentle, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Dean tried hard not to show that he was one of us, but he was still one of us. He must have recognized me.

“That’s classified information, Dean. It’s not something you should be blabbing about. How did you find out?”

Dean, noticing the laughter in my voice, started speaking more comfortably. He’s not an enemy.

“Simple. It was your voice. Apart from the perfect voice modulation… I could hear that last gasp of humanity that only you can make. You know what I mean, right?”

The voice of our kind always sounds different. I’ve never heard the voice of one of our kind more full of vitality and power than Mr. Günter’s.

“I know exactly what you mean. So, why are you asking me to come out? I don’t need to come prepared for a fight, do I?”

“You never know. There might be a Sasquatch living in Joshua Tree National Park. Ah, damn. Now there are no national parks, just wasteland, so even if there were Sasquatches, they’d all be dead by now. Just come as you are.”

I don’t bother holding back my laughter at his silly joke. I turn my bike toward the coordinates Dean gave me. It’s a place that once housed a national park office… but now it’s nothing but endless, endless wasteland.

Dean’s bike was in front of that dilapidated building. Entering through the door that had already fallen off, I see Dean sitting on an old sofa. With nothing suitable to use as a table, the liquor bottle sat on an ammunition box.

I dragged over a sofa that was strewn about inside the building and sat down in front of him. Dean placed a can of neon pink spray paint next to the liquor bottle. It was a color I’d seen somewhere before.

Where was it… Right. The color of the writing at the scene of the Half & Half Company attack. Dean shrugged his shoulders and opened the bottle of liquor.

“I can’t just know one of your secrets without sharing one of mine, Killshot. Yeah, it was me. Half & Half Company was the corruption of this era. Those bastards…”

The first person I thought of was Helen. Bella, who wasn’t an idiot. She wanted to have her own life, and although she did something stupid… luckily, she won her life.

“They were the ones who cultivated idiots who could have become people, saying that if human rights are halved, the price should be halved too. Still, attacking them like that isn’t a solution, is it, Dean?”

Dean seemed somewhat… moved by my response. Did I say something important? Despite saying it wasn’t a solution, Dean poured whiskey into my glass, pushing it toward me.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s not a solution. I just… suddenly got so angry I couldn’t hold back. Even someone who wants to live a normal life has moments like that sometimes, Killshot. Don’t you?”

He was speaking cheerfully, but what had been hidden by that cheerfulness slowly began to show. He was… angry. Angry enough to burst out uncontrollably.

Though I didn’t know the exact reason, considering how much Dean hated megacorporations… I could make some educated guesses. But I decided not to speculate.

A person’s anger is like blood flowing from a wound. Speculating carelessly would be like trampling on that wound with muddy feet. It would be disrespectful.

Instead, I lightly picked up the glass he offered and downed it in one go. With a body that wouldn’t get drunk even if I poured in liters of 40-proof liquor, drinking it straight wasn’t a problem.

“You’re a person more full of anger than I thought, Dean. Aren’t you?”

I answer leisurely while refilling my glass. He opened the ammunition box to show it was full of whiskey bottles and grinned. We weren’t here for just a drink or two. That was certain.

“You’re saying that to me, Killshot? You’re the same. Bill told me everything, man.”

“At least I have a clear target, Dean. I want to kill Hollowwood Creek. To do that, I need to give Belvedere a replacement, and to do that, I need to solve the mutant problem… The path was quite clean. What about you?”

He leaned back on the old sofa and shook his head. After organizing his thoughts for a moment, he began speaking as if it was something absurd even to himself.

“I’m looking for a woman who only remains as a silhouette in my mind. My girlfriend was probably an ideomorph. T-Enter, which lost to Belvedere, accepted the conditions, and I underwent memory erasure… but a void remains.”

Now I understood why Dean had to become a high-risk target for Belvedere. He thinks he lost both Eve and Nadia at the same time. I couldn’t be certain of what he couldn’t remember.

I fill the glass with whiskey again, and after sharing just a few drinks, he puts down the empty bottle and takes out a new one. This time he just throws the whole bottle to me. A glass won’t be enough.

“You were lying, Dean. About just enjoying life and having parties. Even about wanting to live normally. Weren’t you?”

“That part wasn’t a lie, Killshot. I really do just want to live normally. Really. I just… can’t live that way with a hole in my memory that will last a lifetime.”

Without anyone taking the lead, we empty our glasses and open the whiskey bottles to drink straight from them. Drinking genuine whiskey, not synthetic, like water feels… wasteful.

But there was an even greater waste right in front of me. Dean doesn’t want a normal life. He wants the world to be a better place and is ready to fight for it… but he’s denying it.

Why is he denying it? It’s not because he lacks strength. In terms of ability, Dean was no less capable than me. Then… it’s emptiness. Fatigue. It’s because of what everything he had achieved had given him.

T-Enter’s best freelancer, Neonsnake who leaves social scars—all those silly titles had left him with only two reliable colleagues and one hole in his memory, so he was refusing.

Do I want to persuade him? I wasn’t sure. But… I just wanted to say something. When you live in place, the hamster wheel becomes cozy. And then… it becomes even harder to escape.

“I’m the same. Well… I never had a family in my life, but I want to start one with my Eve…. No, even setting everything else aside, honestly, she looks amazing in an apron, doesn’t she?”

“You two are the same. When I was looking for an apron to cook a meal for the Creek kid, Eve found one for me and said exactly the same thing.”

“Anyway, there are countless silly things I haven’t done… and I want to do them with my Eve. For that, right now….”

With those words, I took out a Small Evil from my waist and placed it on the ammunition box. Dean slowly read the ten characters that spelled “Small Evil.”

“I’m just committing the smallest evil. That bastard tried to take my Eve’s life, so I’ll take his life too. I’ll destroy everything he’s built and make sure no one remembers him.”

Dean’s expression slowly hardened. Is the sound of a beast howling coming from my voice right now? I couldn’t tell myself, and since it wasn’t something I could control, I didn’t worry about it.

“I’m proud of my hatred, Dean. I call what I dislike ‘dislike,’ what’s bad ‘bad’… and I fight what needs to be fought. But what about you? What you want to do right now isn’t living normally, is it?”

As if asking me to wait a moment, he reached out his hand, and as if hoping to get drunk, he emptied a bottle of whiskey in one breath while I watched, and I emptied my bottle in response. I look at him. Now I’m beginning to see what kind of person he is.

He is… someone who knows no way of life other than one. And yet he’s a kind-hearted person. Because his humanity and his way of life cannot coexist, he has come to make the sound of a beast howling in that pain.

For him, fighting meant only the assassin wars in the entertainment industry and slaughter with two high-frequency blades. He was tired of that, so he both desires and refuses to fight.

But that’s not the only way to fight. Struggle is just about standing up against something; the method doesn’t matter. If nothing else… I wanted to tell him this.

After both emptying a bottle of whiskey each, we threw each other another bottle from the ammunition box full of liquor. We caught them lightly, and without anyone taking the lead, we opened the caps and continued talking.

“From what I can see, what Dean wants to do now is fight. There are so many things you hate, so many things you need to fight against, but you’re just pretending to be cheerful while forcibly suppressing your anger. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s true, but….”

“Do you think I’m telling you to go in as Neonsnake who leaves social scars and kill anyone until you’re satisfied? No. You’ve seen my Eve for a month. What is Eve doing?”

The narrowness of the world makes people fearful and withdrawn. When I was expelled from the small, cozy world of Belvedere, I remember how… terrible it felt to lose tomorrow.

If I had been thrown into the city without entering the night watch, I might have looked like Dean too. That’s why I needed to speak, and that’s why I could put sincerity into my words.

“Fighting Hollowwood Creek in her own way. Judging by how many times I’ve had to cut up Creek agents, it’s dangerous work, but she seems proud of it. I was envious.”

“That’s fighting too. I didn’t kill people to make Belvedere stop discriminating against ideomorphs, but I fought. That’s what it is. The world is more reasonable than we think, you know?”

There was no need to tell Dean about the unreasonable aspects. He would know much better than I do, so there was no point in mentioning it. Dean emptied another bottle of liquor at those words.

After fiddling with the empty bottle, he accidentally crushed it as if he had misjudged his strength, then dusted off the glass shards from his hands and leaned back on the sofa. He looked at me and opened his mouth.

“How can you live like that, Killshot? If you kill too many people, you lose track of what’s what. If you live like that, you only get used to killing.”

I smiled at those words as kindly as usual. It was a smile I couldn’t make when pretending to be a god who didn’t need humanity.

“Don’t think I’m some great person. After wiping out an entire village for work, even though it didn’t show much… I was a bit troubled at times. Work makes people dry.”

“But you always come back to being your usual self… I guess it’s because you have somewhere to return to?”

“I guess so. And you’ve lost that, haven’t you? That person who remains only as a silhouette. What do you want to do? I don’t think you want to forget, and I don’t think you want to chase that silhouette for the rest of your life either?”

Dean pulled another bottle from the ammunition box and shook his head. He knows that both forgetting and remembering forever would eat away at him… but the memory seems too precious to forget.

With a hearty laugh, he placed his two signature weapons on the ammunition box. They were custom high-frequency blades. The soft neon glow from those two swords was enough to brighten the abandoned building.

“Dual wielding is really impractical, isn’t it, Killshot? Since the blades can’t clash, the trajectories become simple, and using one hand for what should be wielded with two means… less power. But do you know why I use them?”

It was something I had experienced when working as a gardener. So, in the end, I used only one blade, except when performing my signature move of crossing the two blades like garden shears to cut.

Despite showing an understanding expression, Dean didn’t doubt me, even though I only used standard daggers as high-frequency blades. After all, at least 80% of our work was classified information.

Rather, as if confirming that we were similar in this way… he continued speaking with a somewhat frivolous expression.

“I don’t know why. If I’m using them, there must be some practical reason, but there’s no such reason and I can’t remember… so I just keep them because they might be related to that silhouette.”

Those words suddenly made it hard to breathe. If only the habit of smiling mockingly remained, only the sensation of pressing foreheads with someone remained, and my Eve disappeared so I couldn’t remember her… it would be indescribable.

Until now, I had been certain that things I considered taboo because I had a place to return to—like shooting Phaeton Station or starting El Sueño’s holy war—would seem quite pointless. It’s terrible.

I was always the type of person who provided answers, but now answers didn’t come easily. I had never imagined living with someone who had penetrated so deeply into my life being gone.

I could say that we should eliminate options one by one, that we shouldn’t package being fearful and withdrawn as becoming gentle… but I didn’t want to be smug right now.

“I wanted to give you an amazing answer like before… but I can’t think of what to say right now. Because I think I’d be living just like you in that situation. How do you live in such a situation?”

Dean burst into hearty laughter at my honest words. As if suggesting we should drink more first, he offered the whiskey bottle, and I clinked the bottom of my bottle against his in lieu of a toast before gulping it down. I put the bottle down.

“Neither of us has an answer for how to live, but… you do have an answer for how not to live in such a situation, don’t you? Don’t forcibly suppress it, don’t pretend not to be withdrawn, don’t pretend to be okay?”

“If we eliminate options one by one, what remains should be the answer… but still, I didn’t want to be smug and say ‘I have the answer’ in this situation. Did that help a bit?”

Dean nodded while sitting buried in the old sofa. Showing off his unique fashion that looked like military fatigues with lots of fluorescent tape attached, he spread his arms over the sofa and said:

“That part about not wanting to be smug helps. To be honest… I was a bit heartbroken thinking you might not be any different from the tyrants of this era.”

“I’m actually not any different, you know. The high-speed tyrants of this era are also kind to their handful of people.”

Dean shook his head and chuckled. Though he spoke quite playfully, his words weren’t playful.

“You’re kind to more people than just a handful, man. Like… a couple more people.”

Dean started joking around and making silly jokes again. Perhaps this dawn meeting was enough because I could care about a couple more people than others.

Yes, it was definitely enough. It was enough to casually place Small Evil and the social scars on the ammunition box, and it was enough that the only bleeding today was from Dean’s account, which paid for a box of real whiskey.