Vengeance Is Mine

by Shiden Kanzaki

  Rentaro finished eating in no time and helped clean up since he had nothing better to do, continuing to stare at the man’s creepy face cover.

  “Why do you wear a mask?” he asked finally.

  Kagetane seemed to also be done eating and had put the mask back on. “Satomi, do you not wear a mask?”

  There was a short pause before Rentaro replied, “What are you talking about?”

  “I can see the mask you wear, you know. The guardian mask you wear when interacting with your Initiator, the Tendo Civil Security Agency Employee mask you wear when you work as an employee of that female boss of yours, and the facing the enemy mask you’re wearing now with me. Aren’t they all different ‘Rentaro Satomis’?”

  Was this man talking about psychological personas?

  “Satomi, did you see my real face just now?”

  “No.”

  “You were right not to try. I’m sure you’ll regret seeing my real face.”

  “You saying you’re disfigured or something?”

  Kagetane shook his head scornfully as he tapped on his mask. “What’s under this mask—is your face, Rentaro Satomi.”

  “Stop messing around, you bastard.”

  “You and I are the remnants of the New Humanity Creation Project. Twins, so to speak. I’m sure you’ve also noticed, right? We’re human, yet we have power greater than that of other humans. Have you ever wanted to kill someone you couldn’t stand? Have you ever wanted to violate a woman by force? That artificial arm could make all of that happen easily.

  “I’m sure you’ve had the thought before, when you were exposed to outrageous violence, ‘I have enough power inside me to make you all into mincemeat.’ I was able to make that a reality. That’s why you hate me. Because you’re jealous.”

  “Shut up!”

  “But you know, Satomi, just like the honor student hates the delinquent, the delinquent hates the honor student, too. Do you know why? It’s because each person can do what the other cannot. Just like you envy me in the bottom of your heart for being able to kill as I please, I also envy and hate you. Even though you are as inhuman as I am, you live comfortably in the world of light. I detest you so much I can’t stand it.”

  Kagetane’s white mask suddenly came toward Rentaro and whispered into his ear. “Come with me, friend. We’re both survivors of the New Humanity Creation Project. We’re special beings. I’ll teach you the pleasures of killing as much as you like. Kidnap a woman, and after you rape her, pluck her arms and legs off and kill her. I’ll teach you how to use money, too. You can buy everything but poverty. You can buy love, and respect.”

  “I’m not going to change how I use my power.”

  A fat piece of firewood broke apart in the flames and fell, sending a shower of sparks into the sky and making Rentaro’s and Kagetane’s profiles dazzle for a second.

  Kagetane wore his silk hat low over his eyes and hid his gaze. “Let me make a prediction, Satomi. You will definitely come over to my side. Without a doubt.”

  “Give it up. There’s no way that’d happen.”

  Next to them, Kohina didn’t seem the least bit concerned about their conversation and silently got another helping of the rice gruel, polishing off most of it by herself.

  They ran out of things to say to each other, and when the firewood burned out, they used that as a sign to retire for the night.

  Rentaro’s body had already reached its limit with exhaustion, and his whole body felt heavy and slow. Even now, his eyelids felt like they were about to close. But there was no way he would fall asleep before the other two. Rentaro pretended to sleep and didn’t let his guard down until he saw that Kagetane and Kohina had truly fallen asleep.

  The bonfire smelled like burnt embers.

  His body clock told him that about an hour had passed, and when he heard Kohina’s regular breathing that meant she was asleep, his eyes popped open, he grabbed his XD gun, and snuck over to where Kagetane and Kohina were sleeping, crouching. They seemed carefree, sleeping on their sides while holding each other and sharing a blanket.

  Rentaro silently aimed his gun at Kagetane’s head.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Kagetane asked without moving a muscle.

  “You were awake?” said Rentaro.

  “What a fine way to treat us.”

  “You don’t seem worried, Kagetane. Is your barrier one that you can pull up faster than I can pull a point-blank trigger?”

  Kagetane didn’t say anything.

  Rentaro glared at Kagetane with hatred. “Did you think that if you were nice to me, that I would cry with joy and be your friend? Did you think to bury the hatchet by putting me in your debt? Too bad. You’re dangerous. As long as you’re alive, you’ll definitely cause another disaster. I have a duty to kill you to maintain public order as a civil security officer.”

  “Will you kill my daughter, as well?”

  Rentaro took a fleeting glance at the soundly sleeping Kohina. “Is she really your daughter?”

  “Of course. Satomi, do you know about the jar of poison? A large number of insects and snakes are put in a large jar and made to eat each other until the last one left is said to be the strongest, the one with the most cursing power. Long ago, when I was still young, I kidnapped five women and artificially inseminated them. At the same time, I also gave the embryos a large dose of the Gastrea virus.”

  Rentaro was at a loss for words. In other words, Kagetane had created artificial Cursed Children.

  “Then, I locked my five daughters into separate underground rooms for six years, training them to kill and brainwashing them. And then one day, I had them meet for the first time and try to kill each other. The one who survived was Kohina.”

  “Why did you do such a thing…?”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding.” “That must be a joke.”—To be able to reject Kagetane’s madness with empty words like that, to preserve his own peace of mind, was something that could have been done only by the Rentaro that existed before he had known what kind of person Kagetane Hiruko really was. Now, Rentaro imagined that Kagetane probably really did conduct that devil’s experiment.

  Kagetane continued. “I wanted to know everything about this world. I wanted to rule over everything and discover the truth. I wanted to know what those girls who were the future of the humans species really were.”

  “You demon. What do you think a human life is?”

  “I didn’t know. That’s why I tried conducting the experiment.”

  “Children are innocent beings! They can be raised to be angels or devils. It’s your fault, Kagetane! It’s your fault that this girl turned into a devil.”

  “Aye, I wanted to try making a devil. But I failed. What was born was an angel that just got in the way.” Kagetane softly stroked the sleeping Kohina’s hair and quietly lifted her chin. “Look at this. This adorable sleeping face. My unsightly, repulsive, sweet little monstress. These girls are strong as a biological species, but they also have an unfixable weakness.”

  Just then, Kohina stirred and made a small sound in her sleep, and then whispered something that seemed completely out of place. “I love you, Papa.”

  The muzzle of the XD shook with a start, and Rentaro was astonished. Why? Why? He wanted to shake Kohina’s shoulder to wake her up and then scream at her, “You’re being tricked! Your dad is brainwashing you!”

  Kagetane looked sideways at Rentaro’s reaction and sneered inside the depths of his mask. “Satomi, what is the happiness of a human? I made this child live for six years confined like a frog at the bottom of a well. But she just kept looking up at the blue sky from the bottom of that well.”

  “Stop screwing around! How many people do you think have died because of you two? Just how many people have you killed up till now?!” His gun hand shook with anger.

  “Please stop, comrade. Even if you could kill either me or Kohina, you’d surely die before you managed to kill the other.”

  Do it, Rentaro S
atomi. If you don’t kill this man today, he will continue to spread death like an epidemic. You won’t get a better chance than this to stop him. Kagetane is bluffing. Don’t be tricked. Abandon your reason. To hell with thinking calmly. Fulfill your duty.

  But no matter how much he thought it, his trigger finger was frozen and would not move.

  Rentaro squeezed his eyes shut. “Damn it!” He put his gun away and went to a fallen tree in desperation, sitting down angrily. “I’m grateful for your help with my wound. But I can’t trust you two.”

  Saying only that, Rentaro watched Kagetane and Kohina as they sprawled on the other side of the fire, his trigger guard still on his gun.

  The flames of the bonfire seemed to sneer at him as they moved. It was the perfect chance. And you just wasted it.

  7

  It smelled like dirt. And grass.

  Rentaro could sense just the slightest bit of light on the other side of his eyelids. His shoulder felt cold, so he tried to pull up his blanket, but he couldn’t feel the familiar smoothness on his shoulder, and his hand waved in the air a few times until his consciousness suddenly awakened.

  He stood up with a start and looked around. He had fallen asleep without realizing. Before him sat the smoky remains of a bonfire with just the faintest warmth still remaining. Realizing that his clothes were tinged with moisture, he looked around and understood why: There was a thin layer of morning mist, and the sky was cloudy. There was still no sign of the sky returning to normal from its covering of Varanium ash.

  There was no trace of Kagetane and Kohina in the spot where they had been sleeping. Rentaro was silent at that—it looked like they left without doing anything to his person, even though they had had plenty of chances.

  He checked the time. It was 8 a.m. He had fallen asleep around 3 or 4 a.m., so he was not fully recharged, but considering the situation, it wasn’t too bad.

  Allowing his feet to go where they wanted, he pushed through the place that had been too dark to see last night. There was almost no undergrowth; instead, it was a mysterious scene with enormous, giant sequoialike trees continuing all around him. As if territorial in their own way, after a while, the stand of trees turned into different kinds of vegetation. The prehistoric Jōmon cedar, sitting in the middle of a nest of roots sticking out of the ground, was where Rentaro had tripped while being chased by the large pack of wolves the day before and thus gotten into trouble. Lichens, too, grew thick between the countless bumps of the fat tree’s bark, and there were smashed cars stuck to the trunks, lifted up as if purposefully surrounded.

  Rentaro gazed at the sight for a while. If he had woken up next to this scene without reference, he would have succumbed to loneliness and despair, believing himself to have been thrown into the distant future where material civilization had collapsed, and he was cut off from returning to his own time.

  It still was not completely clear what effect the Gastrea virus had on plants, but even so, it was hard to separate it from how big they had grown in the ten years since the war. Of course, the plants had gotten better at surviving their environment. There were even absurd instances where there were forests like the Amazon inside Japan, such as during the Kagetane Hiruko terrorist incident.

  The area where Rentaro found himself was part of the Unexplored Territory near the Monolith, so this was still not as bad as other places.

  There were two days until the replacement Monolith arrived.

  “So you were in a place like this, huh?”

  Rentaro was surprised by the sudden voice and turned around. “Why are you here?”

  The owner of the voice was who Rentaro thought it was. There was a girl looking at him sullenly with undisguised wariness, holding four short swords; and a mysterious man with a mask and silk hat. “There was one thing I forgot to tell you yesterday,” said Kagetane, holding down his mask. “We encountered that Gastrea you call Pleiades yesterday, once.”

  “Where?!”

  As Rentaro braced himself to take a step toward Kagetane, the man suddenly raised an arm. “Just follow the river upstream. There’s a big Gastrea campground there. I didn’t see where the compressed mercury was being fired from, but that’s probably Pleiades.”

  Campground. Even Gastrea have campgrounds, huh? That was something Rentaro had been wondering about since he entered the forest the day before. He’d been sure that the instant he entered the forest, there would be Gastrea concealed all over the place and had readied himself for that, but in the end, the only Gastrea he had encountered were the wolf ones.

  In other words, the two thousand Gastrea of Gado’s estimates were gathered in one place resting—like a human company of troops.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Rentaro demanded. In the past, the man in front of him had tried to summon the Zodiac Scorpion in order to break down the Monoliths. And his motivation for committing the crime was to restart the Gastrea War to give the New Humanity Creation Project a reason for existing—in other words, he had fervently wished to be needed.

  From Kagetane’s point of view, the current Tokyo Area where the Monolith had collapsed by chance should have been his ideal. Even though Kagetane had saved Rentaro last night, the biggest reason he couldn’t trust Kagetane was because of the worst-case scenario: that Kagetane was on the side of the Gastrea.

  Kagetane narrowed his eyes behind the mask and laughed. “Now, I wonder why? I don’t really think about things like that much.”

  How serious is he? Rentaro wondered.

  “If I had to say, it’s because I like you. But unfortunately, if you continue like this, you will definitely die.”

  Rentaro couldn’t help but be at a loss for words.

  Kagetane continued. “You’ve been strange since yesterday. You said you were working separately from your Initiator, but you don’t seem worried about her at all. You seem to be prepared for the special mission of defeating Pleiades, but there is no sign of your adjuvant around at all. If this was an official mission, then it would be a little hard to think that they would send a lone Promoter out to assassinate a Gastrea. In other words, it is reasonable to assume that you left your squad because of your own justice or were banished for some reason.”

  He couldn’t make a single strangled sound because it was exactly as Kagetane had said. Rentaro wanted to retort with something sarcastic, but he reconsidered, thinking that he couldn’t buy the location of Pleiades for all the money in the world. Honestly, thanking Kagetane would be offensive, so he snorted and walked past them, starting to walk toward the river for now.

  But with the sound of his boots stepping on dirt, Rentaro noticed that there were other shoes mixed in. “Hey, what are you doing?” Stopping and looking back partway, he saw that Kagetane and Kohina also stopped short, as he suspected, about ten paces behind him.

  Kagetane shrugged and spread out his arms. “I wonder what? You just happen to be in the path upon which we are also heading.”

  “Do what you want.” Rentaro snorted in desperation and hurried forward quickly, but he soon heard footsteps behind him again. Rentaro succumbed to the mysterious feeling of annoyance mixed with bewilderment.

  After the wolves in sheep’s clothing came Kagetane in sheep’s clothing…

  It was such an unfunny joke that he felt his cheek spasm. “You bastards walk in front.”

  “No thank you. I do not want to suddenly be attacked from behind.”

  Rentaro scratched his head. Damn it, what the hell is this?

  After following the river for a while, Rentaro left its banks and climbed up a small mountain to check the time. As morning turned to afternoon, the temperature rose, and with the warming air, their body scents would be lifted higher; it was safer to gain altitude to keep the Gastrea from sensing them before climbing down again at night.

  Rentaro looked sideways at Kagetane and Kohina next to him, not letting down his guard. He couldn’t calm down with them there, but Kagetane said he didn’t want to walk in front either, so tha
t was the compromise. His bizarre companions traveled with him, as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

  Next to him, Kohina was loudly—intentionally so—breaking the bar of chocolate Kagetane had given her while continuing to check Rentaro’s movements. She seemed to be saying, Papa said I can’t kill you, so I won’t kill you…just yet.

  Because chocolate bars were a lightweight, high-calorie food that didn’t take up much space, they were fitting for survival supplies, and Rentaro had heard that the self-defense force and other military organizations gave it to their soldiers as portable provisions. He had thought this since watching the food preparation process yesterday, but Kagetane seemed to be even more of an expert at survival than Rentaro had ever imagined. It was nice to have someone like that in his party—of course, that was if he was an ally and not an enemy.

  “Satomi, look at that.” After they had climbed up a steep protruding rock face for a while, Kagetane handed Rentaro a pair of digital binoculars.

  Rentaro checked the state of his wound where the wolf had bitten him and kneeled down, looking through the binoculars in the direction Kagetane indicated. He got chills like someone had put a block of ice down his back and ducked reflexively, looking at Kagetane.

  “Did you see it?” Kagetane asked.

  “Below that?” said Rentaro.

  “If it’s in the same place as it was yesterday, then probably, yes.”

  Rentaro looked hesitatingly through the binoculars again. In the optically enlarged world, there was a large flock of bird-shaped Gastrea flying in a circle over a fixed spot, and underneath were trees densely woven together, their thick canopy spread out such that it blocked even sunlight.

  Suddenly, a dull noise echoed and a titanic tree shook hard; the birds it housed hurriedly took flight en masse. The leaves at the tops of trees rustled, and he could tell that a large being was moving through the forest. Rentaro’s heart thrummed with nerves. It was there. There was some kind of land-dwelling Gastrea in that area.