Ch.85The First Twilight of the Idols – Los Angeles Melancholia (5)

If Arthur had truly been just a temple member who believed in and followed only Belwether’s creed, if he had still been a temple member who believed in and followed Belwether’s creed to his core, it might have worked.

But in a stressful situation where everything he believed in was breaking down and unknown gun barrels were pointing at his head, he chose to adapt. Not in the right direction or the wrong direction, but in the direction favorable to survival.

It was he who had corrupted someone who could talk about reaching the stars rather than revenge into a mercenary of this high-speed era, hiding bitter vengeance beneath a smiling face. Everything comes back around.

Fighting was still taking place inside the corporate building. Arthur connected to the communication channel directed to the Shepherd. Suppressing the feeling that his voice might not come out, he barely opened his mouth to speak.

His voice, barely suppressing the still lingering desire for revenge, liquidation, and depression that was boiling inside him, sounded somewhat unstable.

“Branch manager captured alive! Um, how should I say this… Do you need support for the battle happening on the ground floor?”

In this era, when only a head remained preserved in a tank of preservation fluid, it was generally referred to as “captured alive.”

For a moment, all that could be heard over the communication was the heavy explosive sound of the Shepherd’s rifle spewing anti-reinforcement suit bullets. His voice followed afterward.

“Three survivors from Patent Division 4 are retreating toward the break room. Border Collies, if there’s available personnel, send them to kill before they regroup! Compile and report the Special Operations Division kills! So, are you done with your job?”

From the 81st floor where Arthur stood, the busy battle below appeared as mere ripples and small explosive sounds. So much rain was pouring that water was pooling in the branch manager’s office where all the windows had been shattered.

“Yes, I’m finished! Before I report…”

“No, no. Your job is already done. We’re doing what we should have done a month ago. Just overtime work for inefficient people who are a whole month late! Found another Special Ops member! Employee Building Section E-3!”

The communication was briefly cut off with the sound of something sharp piercing flesh. But the Shepherd’s voice continued to ring out. The security chief of a mega-corporation is as hard to kill as an old dragon.

After a loud impact sound like slamming a Special Ops member into the ground, followed by the sound of a high-frequency blade vibrating, the response continued.

“So, you don’t need to help. I’m honored that you learned to work under me, Shepherd Six. Maximum efficiency. Now prioritize escape and reporting! For the company, employees, and shareholders!”

Arthur gave a three-finger salute in the company style after hearing the voice tinged with respect. The Market Keeper remained silent, but at least tolerated that brief moment without rushing him.

Arthur got up, composing himself, and picked up the preservation tank that Walter had been holding. He stood in front of the executive building window where there were marks from Special Ops members scraping down the wall. Only then did the Market Keeper speak.

“You can jump down without issue. Market Keepers has called a vehicle. Let’s go.”

Only then did Arthur realize the height. Adrian had thrown himself headfirst from an even higher place. Because his purpose was death. Arthur, whose purpose was life, jumped down in proper form.

He plummeted toward the ground at an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second. The reinforcement suit could sufficiently absorb the impact of the fall. Another deep indentation was already left in the ceiling of Employee Building Section D-7.

At that impact point lay an almost completely destroyed full-body prosthetic. As if it had resisted until the end, as if it believed it had to, life still remained in the two hands stretched toward the empty air.

It was an immense hatred that could not be reversed. It was the end of a life that made people feel empty and depressed. Next to that depressing end of someone, there were traces of someone else who had jumped through the ceiling into the employee building.

Though they had simply chosen different paths, the results they faced were drastically different. Since they couldn’t linger long, the two jumped out of the corporate building. The Market Keeper’s car was waiting.

After getting in and sitting down, they could rest for a moment. Only the branch manager’s head, losing balance and direction, thrashed about in the preservation tank. Walter had nowhere else to run.

The city was under censorship again. All screens, windows, and lenses had ceased functioning, and no one could ask about what happened at Belwether until Belwether wanted to talk about it.

Ironically, the armored car arrived at an unremarkable kebab shop in an apartment complex. Outside the shop stood two reinforcement suits with sheep head-shaped holograms appearing inside their helmets, not letting anyone enter.

They let Arthur pass but blocked the Market Keeper. The Market Keeper was ultimately just an additive to increase the success rate, and what mattered to the chairman now was only the returned child who resembled him.

After barely passing through the entrance, difficult to navigate while wearing a reinforcement suit, Arthur walked in to see… the usual shop. A clean interior with a broom leaning in the corner.

The difference was that instead of Mr. Günter, the chairman of Belwether Corporation was sitting there. Arthur set down the preservation tank in front of him. The chairman glanced at the contents and then gestured toward a chair.

“Take off your suit and sit comfortably. We have things to discuss.”

Even his everyday clothes that he had left in the trailer were there. The back of the reinforcement suit opened up like unfolding, and Arthur extracted himself from it just as he had been trained, returning to his original attire from the back room of the shop.

The chairman’s personally employed mercenary seemed to have returned to being Arthur Murphy at last. The chairman’s eyes still gleamed with madness and conviction, but at the same time became compassionate, as they usually were when dealing with Arthur.

“You choose. According to protocol, we could refer Walter to the corporate disciplinary committee and make him an immortal of this era, or…”

The chairman leisurely stood up and walked to the wall of the shop. From among pictures of the clean Pacific Ocean and rolling seas, he pulled out a harpoon and walked back to the table. With one corner of his mouth raised in a smile, he said:

“You could stick the harpoon into the whale’s back as you wanted. The latter doesn’t seem like a smart choice. Walter won’t suffer long, and it’s somewhat shortsighted. It’s abandoning even principles. But still…”

Without hesitation, Arthur took the harpoon. This wasn’t about Walter. There was no way to bring Adrian, who was already dead, back to life. The only person left in this matter was Arthur himself.

And if this was an era where reality could be censored and truth could be manufactured, what needed to be done for Adrian wasn’t to have Walter punished according to company regulations and laws.

He wouldn’t whisper to himself to follow principles using a dead person’s voice. He wouldn’t wait for some uncertain tomorrow when the disciplinary committee would finish. All Arthur had was today to complete his liquidation.

Gripping the harpoon shaft carefully so it wouldn’t break, Arthur looked at Günter and asked. Though he couldn’t quite get his bearings, he no longer feared him to the point of suffocation.

“What did you do, Chairman? When your hometown city was destroyed in the nationalists’ war, when everything you believed in burned down, and…”

Günter nodded as if telling a story to a young son eager for an old tale. He even told stories Arthur couldn’t have known.

“We shouldn’t leave out my wife and children. The people I loved last, who died as their skin festered and melted away while receiving useless decontamination treatments in intensive care centers.”

Günter willingly revealed the source of his madness that he wanted to become a scar, wound, and genetic trait. He told Arthur about the bottom of his shamefully intense desire for revenge.

“You want to know what I did? Lift your head. Look around. Does it look like I worked with the nationalists to create a world where wars would no longer happen? No, absolutely not. People tired of war wanted a new era and willingly placed the harpoon in my hand. And I gripped it like this.”

Günter lightly tapped Arthur’s fist holding the harpoon with his palm. He spoke as if proud of a son following in his footsteps. He continued:

“And I took revenge. I castrated them so they could no longer wage war or anything else. I reduced them to half-crippled states, barely surviving with blinking eyes. I burned everything they had too. In their own way.”

A drone flew in, opened the preservation tank, grabbed Walter’s head, and flew up. The preservation fluid had stopped the bleeding and made it possible to clearly recognize the situation. Arthur also stood up, holding the harpoon.

Looking down at the harpoon with unresolved vengeance and residual depression, Arthur finally nodded. After gripping the harpoon shaft as if to break it, he let go and said to Günter:

“I don’t know how to throw it. I was made in a coastal city after the Pacific became like that.”

“Look at this old man’s mind. I didn’t think of that. Don’t grip it too short. When throwing, put your full weight into it… and widen your stance. That’s it.”

The moment Arthur decided to throw the harpoon, Günter’s voice became affectionate again. He adjusted Arthur’s posture as if handing a hunting rifle to a son on their first hunting trip together.

Walter’s still-living head was at this moment neither a person, nor something alive, nor life. It was merely the remnant of unresolved vengeance. It needed to be tied off and liquidated with the harpoon.

After Günter made a couple of adjustments, Arthur assumed a fairly convincing stance. Holding the several-kilogram harpoon as if it were a toothpick, he looked at Walter with a remarkably diverse expression.

There was too much for a young person to contain: the sense of liberation from finally escaping the branch’s power struggles, the feeling that he could finally return to night watch, and still unidentified feelings of being lost and depressed.

Walter tried hard to move his lips and blink his eyes to convey meaning, but Arthur had no intention of listening. Had he ever shown mercy when Arthur was under his gag order? Then there was no need to care.

Like the father Arthur never had, Günter stood behind him and lightly patted his shoulder. In a low voice, he recited a passage from the book that had ignited his madness:

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale… I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee.”

A person who had been struggling to avoid being crushed in the fight between whales now held a harpoon to kill a whale. Or rather, he held a tool to kill someone who imagined himself to be a whale.

Even if it’s revenge, it’s still murder. This harpoon is a murder weapon. Arthur recognized this clearly. Nevertheless, he raised the harpoon to those words. What mattered was whether this was worth it.

It was about stolen lives. It was about the many people like himself who had their lives taken away. Arthur confirmed this. Günter continued:

“For hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee, even from the depths of hell.”

With those words, Günter removed his hand from Arthur’s shoulder. The old Ahab had taught the young Ahab how to throw a harpoon and the mindset to have when throwing it.

The harpoon flew at a speed Arthur had never experienced. Even with the wooden shaft nearly crushed, it flew in an almost straight trajectory toward Walter’s head, which was fixed to the drone.

It was just a flash. The harpoon instantly turned Walter’s pitiful pride, beliefs, schemes, plans, and attempts at deception through surrender into a handful of shattered organic waste.

The harpoon and debris were deeply embedded in the concrete wall, and Arthur exhaled a breath drawn not from his lungs but from his memories and trauma. There was no clear feeling.

The head that had been numbly ringing with vengeance hadn’t quieted, nor had the depression disappeared… a head had simply been pierced by a harpoon.

What had broken were only reason and the idols called Belwether. People remained the same. Arthur Murphy was still Arthur Murphy, and what Arthur Murphy wanted was what Arthur Murphy wanted.

Günter also exhaled with satisfaction. After patting Arthur’s shoulder a few more times in praise, he spoke again in a fatherly voice:

“Yes… good. I’ll give you options, Arthur. You resemble me. Let’s go to headquarters together. You’re still young, almost childishly so, you could gain experience among the hammers and learn how to use people.”

Arthur scratched his cheek for a moment at those words. Headquarters didn’t seem like the right place for him. Even now, his immediate thought was that fighting was probably still going on inside the corporate building.

“Well, since you said you’d give me options… I think I’m more suited to this stinking, rain-soaked Los Angeles than the heavenly headquarters. The top of skyscrapers really doesn’t suit me.”

Günter realized that he himself had given Arthur the confidence to refuse, and felt another migraine coming on. He had thought the stock of such humans had run out after that war, but apparently not.

“You’re impossible to reason with. Don’t refuse the free contract rights too. If you refuse that as well, I have no means of compensation except throwing you a few meaningless blank checks. And you’d probably refuse those too.”

Money was just trust converted into numbers. For someone who could create it, it was merely numbers, and Günter knew this raw gem would surely be wasted.

Arthur finally nodded. He still didn’t know how he should live, but he had already received the confidence that he could somehow survive.

“Well… the company structure will be a bit complicated. I’d be the boss, but I’d have to step in to contract with companies other than Belwether…”

Now that his value had been recognized through the offer, he finally understood what this creeping depression had been.

It was anxiety and fear from not knowing what to follow after destroying Belwether, which had been his life’s guideline, not knowing what to follow to survive. That had settled into depression.

But now he had the confidence that he could somehow survive. When confidence arises, people gain time. He could look for how to live while working as a mercenary.

Arthur felt like light was entering through a crack in an eggshell. Contrary to expectations, the light wasn’t painful. Either way, he was like a baby bird.

The chairman muttered a few words as if grumbling and then called Belwether.

“What do I know? Go back and put your heads together with your boss to figure it out. Belwether! Grant free contract rights to Arthur Murphy, general employee of the mercenary company Night Watch. Let him try living as a freelancer.”

Arthur lightly tapped the side of his head to bring up the HUD. The UI, which had been only in Belwether’s colors of black and white, was replaced with a translucent one that reflected the colors of objects in his field of vision.

This was the most pleasing of all the displeasing decisions Günter had seen in his life. At the same time, it was the most displeasing of all the pleasing decisions he had seen. Günter sighed again.

“Fine. Originally I was planning to take you into the chairman’s security team and censor your appearances in various records as confidential, but things have become complicated. If you want anything else, say it now. I’ll have to invite you to headquarters just for dinner. I’ll contact you later, so don’t refuse that.”

Günter said this was enough, but Arthur wasn’t done yet. What he was about to propose was also an answer to what Günter had said.

“Ah, then I have one request. The right person should be in the right place. So…”

The liquidation was complete only for Arthur’s own life. One shouldn’t be swayed by the words of the dead, but it wasn’t humane to leave the dead to rot on the street either.

Arthur made his proposal, and the chairman accepted it. True to an era where reality could be censored and truth could be manufactured, records were censored and team leaders were ordered to remain silent.