Ch.57Request Log #007 – The Weight of Life (7)

I had no time to worry about the angels around me. Even if I could barely hold on, death would strangle me the moment I lost focus.

I don’t know much about it, but having your body pushed to the brink of death once a day couldn’t be good for you. I keep my mind busy with random thoughts so it doesn’t shut down.

Still, the second time seemed a bit easier to endure than the first. I placed my hands on my chest, forcing my body to breathe when it wanted to stop. I had absolutely no intention of dying here.

I had to live. Until I decided whether to die or live, I needed to survive.

After that, I might do what I couldn’t do even after drinking a couple bottles of whiskey, or take down the “out of office” sign hanging on the detective agency door. I’ll leave that decision to my future self.

My vision was blurring, but I kept my eyes wide open, watching the direction the half-blood mage fled. That woman had left the War Spirit inside the house and escaped with only that madman and one other person.

Was she the homeowner? Maybe she’d been squatting there, controlling some stranger with hallucination magic. They entered the parking lot and started to escape by car. Damn it, slipping through my fingers again.

The surrounding scene was like a vision of hell. Several dwarves who had been craning their necks to see what was happening lost their strength and fell. Fortunately, they died before falling rather than dying from the fall.

There was a brief sound of furniture and household items falling over as people collapsed, followed by a terrible silence. Everyone was dead.

But then I heard something hopeful. The faint sound of a car crashing somewhere reached my increasingly muffled ears. Someone who couldn’t drive herself wouldn’t be able to control others to drive properly either.

I maintained my focus even as I watched angels with beautifully gold-crafted wings fall, their wings stained black. I staggered forward a step or two.

It felt like all my internal organs had stopped working. I felt like I might vomit, but couldn’t. Gritting my teeth, I moved forward and bent down. With trembling, numbing hands, I picked up the submachine gun an angel had been holding.

The newly loaded magazine was full. I took spare magazines from the angel’s side and pocketed them. Damn, I could feel the weight of the gun, which meant the cold had completely enveloped my body.

More human than usual. I sneered at myself as I started walking. So far, I could only force my stiffened legs to move one step at a time, unable even to tremble properly.

How fast I moved wasn’t important. What mattered was that I was moving. If she hadn’t died in the car accident, I could finish her off myself. I gritted my teeth and took another step.

Unless I forcibly compressed my lungs to exhale, my body tried to only inhale repeatedly, like someone on the verge of death. Well, I probably was on the verge of death. It just didn’t matter.

“Yes, today I’m moving… yes, moving properly. Walk, I said walk!”

I forced my legs to move, legs that could hardly take a step without leaning on something.

I had never learned how to give up. Even after receiving that curse-filled ritual, I never gave up fighting. I never gave up looking for answers.

Someone like me couldn’t possibly let that half-blood mage bitch slip away. I punched my seemingly frozen knee joints to force them to bend as I moved forward. I reached the road.

A couple who had come out to meet each other in the early morning lay dead facing each other. It seemed one had been reassuring the other that they would go check something out, but then they just died.

All stories are volatile anyway. This incident will eventually be forgotten, with just a tiny memorial stone and a day of remembrance once a year, with empty words like “let’s mourn them for just one day.”

Still, today seemed like a day when many of these volatile stories would be created. My knees were bending properly now, and I staggered toward the smell of smoke.

I could faintly hear the sound of flames burning. A red light flickered from the road that curved to the right, and as I passed by an illegal bar where only music from a phonograph leaked out with no survivors, a small explosion sounded.

Please tell me you escaped. Please be wiping your forehead in relief that you got out in time.

Perhaps sensing the death magic exploding, an Archangel descended from the sky. It was too late, but if someone was going to chase the culprit, someone else would have to sympathize with the victims.

The Archangel began to speak directly into my mind through telepathy. When Archangels communicated telepathically, I usually saw their words as text before my eyes, but now it just felt like an unpleasant obstruction to my vision.

“Glory to the God-President. I have good news for you. The bounty has increased because of their mass murder at the docks. It will increase even more considering this incident.”

So the God-President is truly omniscient. This wasn’t typical Archangel talk, but there couldn’t be better words to persuade me. Now I had a personal grudge against someone who had nearly killed me twice.

I responded casually. The Archangel, as an apostle of the God-President, would certainly hear whatever I muttered.

“I don’t care. However much I get paid, or even if I end up in court, I’m going to put a lead bullet in that woman’s head. Oh, right. I wanted to ask something. Dead or alive?”

All the Archangel’s eyes must have been smiling. His voice conveyed something close to ecstasy, not just pleasure.

“That’s right. If you bring this person to us dead, we’ll add the electricity costs that would have been used at the execution site to your bounty. Isn’t that as sweet an offer as manna to you?”

There’s no manna on a battlefield. The only sweetness I could taste there was from the donuts brought by donut girls. Remembering human warmth, I approached the person who had lost that warmth.

In the distance, I could see a car that had hit a streetlight, with fire burning from the leaked fuel. The half-blood mage seemed to have forcibly dragged the madman out, and two people were lying by the roadside where several cars had stopped.

I approached the half-blood mage who was looking up at the night sky with a hollow laugh, as if relieved to be barely alive. She turned her head at my footsteps, which she shouldn’t have been able to hear.

Our eyes met. My gaze, having recovered from the death magic earlier than last time and walked all the way here, met the gaze of the half-blood mage who had clumsily tried to escape only to end up here.

I felt no hostility. Her eyes were filled only with fear. No, they had probably been filled with fear from the beginning. She must have been looking for something to depend on, and ended up relying on that stupid ideology.

The half-blood kid, who seemed to be in relatively decent condition, slowly tried to kneel with tears in her eyes, trembling all over.

With shaking hands, I pulled the trigger, spraying submachine gun bullets near her. I heard a hysterical scream but paid no attention.

“No, shut up. Don’t apologize. I don’t want apologies from someone who thinks she can kill hundreds of people and then end it all by crying and saying sorry.”

She started hyperventilating. She could breathe normally since she wasn’t affected by the death magic, but she was making wheezing sounds as she kept inhaling.

I aimed the gun at her thigh and briefly pulled the trigger. The smell of gunpowder began to mask the scent of The Morrígan’s bath salts again, and the half-blood exhaled the breath she had been only inhaling with a scream of pain.

“Ugh, haa, aaagh! P-p-please spare…”

Listening to her begging for her life, I removed the box magazine the angels had used and threw it away, replacing it with a drum magazine that the angel seemed to have brought as a spare. I loaded it.

I couldn’t just kill her easily. Now that my body was moving properly without pain or numbness, I put a cigarette in my mouth and lit it by gathering mana at my fingertips.

The gunpowder smell was so strong all over my body that I thought I might catch fire when I drew on the cigarette, but that didn’t happen. I suppressed the taste of blood rising from the back of my throat with cigarette smoke and asked:

“Did you say human life has no value?”

The half-blood shook her head. As if it was a completely absurd idea, she began shaking her head almost convulsively, denying her own words.

“H-how could that be? Everyone has their own value, so, precious… Ah, even goblins! I mean, value depends on the person…”

I squeezed the trigger. I gripped the extreme recoil with double strength and double vitality, and kept firing until the hundred-round drum magazine was empty, following from her toes to the top of her head until my eyes stung from the lingering gunpowder.

Now the smell of gunpowder was stronger than the cigarette smell, making smoking seem pointless, so I spat out my cigarette in front of the pulp that remained and stamped it out. I sneered.

“No, you were right. You would have been perfect if you hadn’t made yourself the exception.”

The bounty’s gone. No, maybe I’d get the proper bounty this time since I’d done the angels’ job for them. I approached the madman the half-blood had dragged out of the car.

This person must have been a war veteran too. Seeing how he had tried to hold back the death magic while screaming in refusal, he might not have found a way to break free from the hallucination magic either.

Some unknown metal part was deeply embedded in his stomach, perhaps because the car was completely wrecked in the accident. With such severe bleeding, he wouldn’t live long anyway.

I threw away the submachine gun and pulled out a pistol from my coat. With my other hand, I held out a cigarette pack, extending both hands toward him as if telling him to choose.

With his eyes wide open enough to see his entire pupils, he chose the gun. He pulled my wrist with the gun toward himself. He must know how many people had died from the magic he had unleashed.

Since he chose the gun, I gave him a cigarette too. I put it in his mouth, lit the end, and waited for him to take a deep drag before pulling the trigger twice. This time, I didn’t aim for his face.

As his body collapsed, I watched the cigarette still burning in his mouth, then turned my attention to the angels flying over the dawn sky, having received a request for support.

Ah, I’m tired. Tomorrow, I’d probably go to Valhalla first thing in the morning, whine a bit about how much trouble the dwarves had caused me, and then spend the whole day drinking.

A memorial drink? Probably not a memorial drink. I wasn’t sentimental enough to drink memorial drinks for people whose names and faces I didn’t know. Still, I could consider one drink a memorial.

An unnamed angel flew to where the gunshots had sounded and landed lightly on the ground. Seeing the pulp in front of him, he nodded significantly.

“Looks exactly like the wanted poster. Anyone can see it’s that illegal immigrant. Don’t you think?”

Laughter escaped me. Were these the same guys who usually said they couldn’t pay the bounty because the face was unrecognizable with just one bullet in the forehead?

“Yeah, anyone would say it’s that illegal immigrant. Are you going to verify properly, or is good enough good enough?”

“Good enough is good enough. The only people who could be driving cars alive in this street would be the masterminds of this incident, and it doesn’t look like anyone survived in the car.”

So they were just saying the wanted criminal was dead and that was that. I couldn’t help but keep laughing, so I finally spoke.

“Do angels learn sophistry these days? I didn’t think there were many angels with such good rhetoric.”

“Even angels can’t survive on honesty alone these days. Anyway, if you’re lucky, you might get to see the God-President. If these people had escaped from here, something much worse would have happened, and you prevented that.”

If I couldn’t meet the God-President after hundreds or thousands of prayers begging to be released from that ritual, but could meet him for shooting a nineteen-year-old half-blood mage, that would be nonsensical in its own way.

Yes, I knew the God-President doesn’t respond to anyone in order to be fair to everyone. Still, it should be understandable why I stopped going to the God-President’s church after that.

Leaving the cleanup to the angels who had verified the scene, I walked toward the apartment parking lot where the dead angels were. The angel who had told me about the bounty vomited at the sight.

After waiting for him to empty his stomach, I looked around and noticed the War Spirit was gone.

Wondering if it had left some final orders, I looked around and saw blood flowing down the apartment wall.

With all signs of life gone, I entered the apartment that had the atmosphere of a small tomb in a cemetery. I got into the elevator, which was filled with the spirit’s blood, and pressed the button for the top floor, which was also covered in blood.

The War Spirit seemed to have headed for the roof despite being shot and bleeding. I followed through the rooftop door that had been completely torn off by force, and made eye contact with the War Spirit.

No, not exactly eye contact. Its machine gun barrel was looking at me. There was no sound of rotating barrels.

The machine gun seemed to have broken down while being shot. The barbed wire wrapped around its body was almost cut off, and bullet holes had been added to the spirit’s body, which was already full of holes.

The spirit looked at me briefly like welcoming a visitor, then turned around again. It squatted down in a spot where it could overlook the street where many people had died as death magic exploded.

It looked like it wanted to say something, but it had no mouth. A mouth was a tool for spitting out meaning and words, but a machine gun was just a tool for spitting out lead bullets.

Just then, a gust of wind swept across the rooftop of this apartment building. It was a common building wind in New York. The wind began to blow through the War Spirit’s hole-riddled body.

It became the sound of a whistle signaling a charge from the trenches, then changed to the sound of sirens warning of bombardment. It stood up and spread its arms. It made the wind pass through the holes just made by bullets.

At that moment, all the holes in its body became vocal cords, beginning to shout what the War Spirit wanted to say.

“Look! Remember! Look! Remember!”

The same sound echoed endlessly. It couldn’t simply be the sound of wind flowing through the holes in its body.

Even as that sound reverberated, the War Spirit sat still, looking down at the street where barely a handful of living people remained.