Ch.43Request Log #006 – Hunting the Hunter (8)

The car soon stops at a building in the heart of New York. Is this where they’re staying? Well, it makes sense—a place where The Idealists’ terminals would have difficulty accessing.

I couldn’t even imagine workers in overalls from The Idealists walking among these high-walled houses where wealthy people lived.

First, I needed to understand how the boss issued commands. Knowing that would allow me to prevent these things from transforming into monsters and running wild. If there seemed to be no way, killing them before entering would be better.

People altered by rituals cease to be human. They lose their intelligence, wit, and humanity, becoming monsters that rampage from the sense of loss. Killing them now would be easier than later.

“So, how does the boss give orders? Does he write them down?”

“No.”

Denying isn’t revealing information. So it’s not written orders, and I doubt they’d handle things so carelessly, but I ask anyway.

“What, he really gives orders verbally? A man who’s trying to hide just calls you over and gives commands?”

This time silence follows. Saying yes would be revealing information. So silence means affirmation.

The distance from inside the house to here is considerable. With walls surrounding the property, there’s almost no chance of voices leaking out. I make sure.

“Then, I’ll go in. Wait here with your ears covered. The three in suits probably won’t meet the boss directly. Kobold, you seem to be the reporting officer.”

I recall seeing that Kobold giving orders to other employees at the factory. Again, silence follows. Affirmation.

Fear and dread spread in the other employees’ eyes, but soon shallow hope appears. Then, reconsidering the current situation, they show uncertainty about whether they should hope.

They must know they’ve brought someone who will kill their boss. They certainly understand what happens to humans consumed by The Idealists’ hive mind.

But once the boss dies, they’ll be liberated. Freed from this cursed ritual. Just imagining it must make their fingertips tingle with overwhelming emotion.

The Kobold gets out of the car. I follow, watching the remaining employees cover their ears. I hope I won’t need to kill them when I come back.

The Kobold heads straight for the door, while I hide beside a pillar to observe. If walls can’t see outside, what use are they as fortresses? They’re just perfect hiding spots.

As the Kobold at the door rings the doorbell, a butler walks from inside the wall.

With my skinning knife drawn, I whisper to the Kobold who’s nervously rolling his eyes. I can’t use a gun in a place like this.

“Is he under the same ritual as you, working here?”

The Kobold answers in a whisper-like voice. In the dawn, his moving lips wouldn’t be visible.

“No.”

“Then is he working with the boss, controlling you?”

He doesn’t deny it. I watch the butler approach the main gate, open it, and turn around without even greeting the guest. Of course it’s affirmation.

There aren’t many mitigating factors for murder. However, killing someone who has used rituals on people is definitely grounds for reduced sentencing. If he’s not under a ritual himself but uses rituals to control people, then he’s also a warlock.

I quietly follow through the open door. The old orc butler doesn’t hear the sound of someone approaching on the grass behind him.

I grip my skinning knife with the blade facing inward. Moving with quiet steps, I deliberately make noise in the last few steps, then rush forward, wrap my arm around his neck, and press the blade against it.

I pull and slice. Only an unpleasant hissing sound escapes the butler’s mouth as he tries to scream, and he staggers while clutching his neck.

He tries to stop the bleeding with his hands, but it’s like a child trying not to let go of sand in their grip. No matter how tightly he tries to hold, the sand will flow out, just like the sands of life.

As he still tries to move, I turn to the front and stab the knife into his inner thigh. I twist it and pull it out. His pounding heart, trying desperately to keep him moving, was driving him toward death.

Warlocks deserve this fate. I grab his head as he falls forward to prevent the sound of his body hitting the ground, and gently lower him.

The Kobold’s role was only to open the door anyway. The Kobold approaches me, trembling as he watched me kill the butler.

“Are there more like him besides the warlock and the boss?”

“N-no…”

Now he’s using formal speech. Not that it matters.

“Where is the boss? First floor?”

“No. That…”

The way he hesitates as if wanting to say something suggests it’s not the second floor. I ask the next question.

“He’s in the basement. Is it on the left side of the main entrance? Or the right?”

“No, no. Neither side. Not at all.”

Somewhere in the center? I look down at the orc lying on the floor, cooling. His shoe soles and the hem of his suit were dirty with mud. He must have spent time walking around the garden.

I remember that basement doors that protrude from houses are usually in the garden. Hiding like a rat. Imagine having a two-story house with probably thirteen rooms and choosing to hide in the basement. That’s not a human life.

“So it’s a basement not connected from inside the house. Behind the house?”

Silence follows. That must be correct. I could trust the Kobold, who would either reveal the truth or become a monster.

“Go back to the car. Don’t come near no matter what happens. Understand?”

“Yes. No, I mean, no. I…”

He stammers as if wanting some guarantee that I’ll spare them, but I turn away. I didn’t come here to save them. Though that will happen anyway.

I go around to the back of what could be called a mansion and find a basement door hidden among the bushes. After opening it, I hide behind the door and look inside. There were lines drawn in blood inside as well.

I don’t enter after opening it. Instead of bullets, a voice shoots out. It was the trembling voice of a human.

“Gregory, Gregory? Is that Kobold bastard here? Today there was nothing…”

So the butler’s name was Gregory. Fitting for an orc. The boss’s footsteps echo as if he’s moving this way, but someone stops him.

“Don’t go out. Gregory would have entered by now. Those guys might…”

The voice was thick with a German accent—a dwarf. These were the very ones who placed captured comrades on the trench line, drew ritual marks on their backs to turn them into monsters, and sent them charging.

How much did we cry while searching for even a piece of human body to leave in graves after we shot those monsters and searched through the crimson flesh? I clench my teeth.

Sensing something ominous, the dwarf warlock approaches the door and erases the blood mark in front of it with his foot. Seizing that moment, I rush in and stab my skinning knife into his neck.

“Kuk, haa, breathe… hide…”

It was a spot where he would die from bleeding if I pulled the knife out, but if I didn’t, he would live at least until I dealt with the monster. A warlock shouldn’t be killed lightly like that butler.

Leaving the dwarf clutching his neck and choking, I look around the basement. To my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the entire scene was visible… there was a chair in the middle of the basement.

There was a person. A human with bloodshot eyes and a gag in his mouth, his clothes dirty with spilled food as if he had been force-fed.

He wore the most terrible expression a human could make. The blood that the dwarf just erased… Is this another employee? Was he resting after placing a ritual to turn an employee into a monster?

It was already too late the moment the blood was erased. The ritual had begun working, and even blowing off his head wouldn’t erase the ritual.

The only door to the basement was behind me anyway, so the boss had nowhere to escape. With a bitter feeling, I craved a cigarette, but there didn’t seem to be time to light one.

I draw my gun. I shake my head at the human who seems to be begging me not to do it. I won’t kill you.

And fear soon becomes pain. An ominous red light begins to leak from his back, and the human starts to writhe. Something like a huge abscess begins to swell from his back.

Flesh grows, and it begins to spread throughout the body like an epidemic and measles. Black shining eyes rise over the spreading ritual infection.

In this state, shooting would just waste bullets. Eight rounds wouldn’t be enough anyway. I wait patiently for the monster to complete its transformation.

Soon the dark red flesh rises from the floor, squirming. The only thing that distinguished top from bottom was the dozen or so eyes embedded in what looked like the head.

It lets out a monstrous cry. It was unpleasantly human-like, and the teeth embedded in its mouth, with corners reaching up to its ears, were human teeth.

“Guh, kwaaa, kwaaaak! Hu, hua, guaaak!”

It seemed to want to make sounds other than screams, but all that came from its throat were monstrous cries and screams. That sad human portrait looks at me with all its eyes. It hates me.

The monster begins charging at me, hating what appears to be a normal person. The speed at which it charges with its muscular body from head to toe was quite threatening.

Rather than shooting immediately, it would be better to dodge. Since it couldn’t possibly change direction while charging like that, I simply step aside and let it crash headfirst into the stairs leading out of the basement.

I aimed for the legs. The monster’s durability is about half of this cursed body, so eight shots should be enough to disable one leg. I squeeze the trigger.

Perhaps because the interior has worn down from firing more than ten shots over several days, almost in rapid succession, the silencer doesn’t completely muffle the sound. It didn’t affect accuracy though.

A bullet lodges in the thigh. Another grazes the calf. Another hits the other thigh, and this time properly pierces the ankle. The creature falls. I put another round in its head.

Moving around, I fire the remaining three shots into the left leg’s side and back. Though there was an acrid smell of gunpowder, the monster was now crawling on the floor.

“Kuk, guaak… hu, haa, hugueak!”

The mouth that had lost language couldn’t even find a way to express pain. As it curls up in apparent pain, I throw away the gun. I needed to prepare.

Though it curls up as if seeking sympathy, after doing so, it would leap up using its arms. As expected, it uses its arms to push off the floor and throws its heavy muscular body at me.

It was time to reveal my identity to the warlock. I grab the monster’s mouth, which was jumping up to bite me, with both hands on the top and bottom. I begin to exert strength with the cursed power of two people.

The monster that had rushed at me, grabbing my shoulders with its arms and trying to tear off my head to eat, instinctively tried to pull away from the unexpected strength, but its mouth was already firmly gripped. I pry it open further.

“Kkuguk, kkik…”

Its jaw joint gradually opens to an impossible angle, and finally, with a sound like elastic rubber tearing, it rips apart into upper and lower pieces. I throw away the torn-off head.

The part with only the lower jaw and torso crawls on the floor, struggling for survival a little, but eventually, after hitting the wall with its connection severed, it quietly collapses.

I look at the warlock. His expression turned to hatred. After his expression mixed with fear and hatred, he began to babble something in German. He was spewing words of hatred while rambling.

Though I wasn’t particularly good at German, I could understand one word. Doppelsöldner. Double-pay soldier. It was a slur, a word spat out in hatred. I approach.

Only then did the dwarf start speaking proper English. He still didn’t beg for his life.

“Still can’t forget what you enjoyed on the battlefield, Doppel? You’re just a monster created by Americans, an intelligent monster, so killing your own kind…”

I grab his ankle. Drawing on the cursed strength of two people, I lift the dwarf’s heavy body as if picking up a broom.

Then I slam him down on the floor as if hitting a rat with a broom. A vibration as strong as when the monster charged across the floor rings out, leaving just as much of a mark.

The dwarf was still alive. Still alive and spewing hatred. I didn’t answer his words. I didn’t want to become someone who spews ugly hatred.

“Why! Don’t want to admit it? I enjoyed it! I enjoyed creating monsters to fight you Doppels who tore apart countless comrades! That’s why I’m still doing it, and you…”

I strike him down again. Now there was only the sound of meat being slammed against the floor. I lift him once more and, with a final throw, slam him down. A wide, red, metallic-smelling mark remains on the floor.

I retrieve my skinning knife from among the remains and sneer. Warlocks, especially those who were warlock-soldiers from the Great War, will truly meet this fate.

“The God-President knows what to say even at times like this. Blessed is he who repays you as you have done to us. Blessed is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks. Satisfied?”

The dead body was more silent than a rookie who had just entered the trenches. I also pick up the gun from the floor, reload it, and fire one shot into the floor. The clock struck three in the morning.

“Why don’t you come out? Your butler has fallen into a long sleep in that grass, and this warlock won’t get up anymore. Come out now and show some human resolve. Don’t make me smoke you out like a rabbit hiding in a burrow.”

A human figure emerges from under a desk in the corner of the basement. It seems he wasn’t hiding under the desk. Perhaps he had made a basement within the basement under the desk.

“I, I can’t use rituals…”

The businessman was worrying about something unnecessary. If he controlled people with rituals, he was also a warlock.

“You just can’t cast them directly. Do you know how many employees will turn into monsters if they don’t obey your orders?”

He shivered as if suffering from hypothermia. His face was blue as if suffering from cyanosis. Even without remarkable intuition, he seemed to know what fate awaited him.

He kneels down. In front of the gun barrel, he starts trembling on the floor with his belly down like a dog, showing no intention to escape.

“I’ll, I’ll contact the hive mind directly. So, please… Having someone who has killed both monsters and warlocks as an enemy is too, too frightening. Please?”

He’s in such a state that he’d shoot himself if I threw him the gun. Still, personal matters are personal matters, and business is business. I grab him by the scruff of his neck and drag him out of the basement.

I throw his body at the entrance of the two-story mansion and finally put the cigarette I’ve been craving in my mouth, gathering mana at my fingertips to light it. Now I feel a bit more alive.

“Right, my story is my story, and business is business. Make the call. Hurry.”

Like a slave happy to be unchained, he jumps up and runs into the house to call The Idealists’ hive mind. He must be out of his mind with fear. Imagine smiling while calling those Reds.

Soon a car arrives, passing by the car containing people who would be covering their ears and trembling, and the dead butler… a terminal wearing a purple suit instead of overalls arrives at the house.

Another terminal goes around to the back of the house, and the terminal in front of me opens his mouth as if displeased.

“Can’t you finish a job without getting covered in blood? We’ll clean up, so disappear first. Oh, and… what is that flesh in the basement?”

“A human. Probably.”

The Idealist terminal makes an expression as if wanting to vomit, but the mental entity controlling it couldn’t possibly vomit.

The bizarre screaming sound of the businessman’s self being consumed rings out, and then silence falls. The businessman, now a terminal, gets up and joins the ranks of The Idealists cleaning the house.

Ah, damn. Another dawn off work without being able to drink. I approach the employees still in the car with their ears tightly covered and show myself. I climb back into the car among them.

“Go home. Look for new jobs tomorrow. And give me a ride to where my car is.”

Sometimes even a man who has dashed people against concrete floors can give others hope.