「 Who am I? 」
It was a question that had tormented me for a long time.
Looking back, I'd never really lived as myself. I had always changed colors like a chameleon to suit whatever surroundings I happened to be in.
The most recent example was the Guard.
‘Yes, sir. I'll do it!’
For a long time after my appointment, I'd lived as the kind of ‘obedient Junior Guard’ they wanted me to be.
Going further back, it had been the same at the magic-tool factory.
‘How the fuck is that our fault? Keep fucking with me and I won't put up with it either!’
There was intense friction and conflict between departments at the factory, and the inspection team I belonged to was always butting heads with someone.
Since I was young and couldn't afford to be looked down on, I acted like a ‘vicious dog.’
Going even further back, it had been the same at school.
‘Ultimate Move, Limping Footwork―’
I was a child who spent all day looking into people's eyes, wondering whether there was hatred in them.
If I didn't want my bad leg to hurt me emotionally, I had to make myself look like a ‘cheerful cripple.’
And if I went all the way back to the beginning, it would have been the same in my half-collapsed household.
‘I'm fine, Mother. It's only a scrape.’
In a family that was falling apart, I had to be the ‘mature child.’
「 Who am I? 」
And so, even now that I was twenty years old, I still didn't know who I was.
It was something that depressed me whenever I thought about it….
But it wasn't all bad.
Because thanks to it, I'd developed one skill I was better at than most people.
Acting.
EP2 ― Serial Killer, Sitri (1)
When I opened my eyes, I was in an unfamiliar hospital ward.
Where am I?
“My glasses….”
I reached out and found them.
Once I put them on and looked around, it seemed to be a communal ward.
There were nearly a hundred beds, and countless patients were groaning in pain.
Why are there so many patients?
For that matter, this didn't seem like an ordinary hospital ward at all.
“Ah, you're awake.”
A nurse spoke as she wiped the sweat from her forehead.
“You were unconscious for about a week.”
“A week?”
“You had a concussion and severe bleeding in your left eye. We couldn't determine the cause, so you were transferred to the hospital.”
“Ah.”
“There was nothing else wrong with your body. If you'd like the doctor to make rounds…… that might be difficult today.”
After she finished speaking, the nurse started dressing another patient's wounds.
“Aaagh! Air raid warning!”
Cries of pain continued around me.
Why are there this many patients?
For now, I got up and checked my body.
Maybe because I'd been lying down for a week, I felt a little weak, but otherwise I was fine.
Once I took up my cane, I had no trouble walking either.
‘Bleeding in my left eye?’
1208 immediately came to mind.
He'd put his hand near my left eye.
I looked into a mirror.
My eyes looked no different from usual.
They said it had been bleeding, yet I didn't even feel the slightest discomfort.
What had 1208 done to me?
And why had my eye started bleeding?
‘He said I resembled his flesh and blood….’
He had spoken as though his own child were dead.
Then had he opened up to me because I resembled his child?
But what puzzled me most of all was who 1208 actually was.
“Clear the way!”
“Move aside! Make room!”
That was when it happened.
The doors opened, and a whole group of patients were carried in on stretchers.
There were not even enough beds left to lay them on.
The patients were placed on the floor for the time being, and nurses rushed in from all directions to tend to them.
But as a guard, I found their identities strange.
Most of the patients were heavily built or had fierce-looking faces, and the vast majority were men.
On top of that, I saw plenty of tattoos.
‘Gangsters?’
That seemed to be it.
I recognized some of the designs.
The problem was that if all these people were gangsters, they belonged to different organizations.
Their tattoos were different.
“That fucking bastard….”
Just then, the middle-aged man in the bed beside mine muttered a curse.
I decided to ask him what was going on.
“Excuse me….”
“What the hell do you want, kid?! Ugh….”
He grabbed at his waist.
Perhaps the nurse had been too busy, because on closer inspection, something looked slightly wrong with the dressing.
“Damn it! Damn it…!”
The middle-aged man angrily scratched around at the bandages.
Blood seeped through them in time with his movements.
That didn't look good.
It was almost as though something was inside those bandages….
That was when something strange happened.
「 All-Seeing Eye 」
The ‘magic tool’ hidden inside my eye opened its aperture.
Huh?
What is this….
At the same time, information flooded into my head.
It had never happened before, yet somehow I immediately understood.
‘It’ was inside my left eye.
It was a magic tool.
And it possessed the power to 「Analyze」 everything in the world.
This was…… the magic tool 1208 had given me!
At the same time, words appeared before my eyes.
Mana!
The magic tool had used the mana residing within me to exercise a supernatural ability.
The moment I thought about using that ability, something astonishing happened.
I could suddenly see straight through the man's bandages.
There was a broken blade lodged inside.
Backward-facing barbs like those of a harpoon protruded from it.
Because of that, every time the middle-aged man twisted his body, the blade dug in deeper.
“Aaaagh! Damn it! What the hell is this?!”
I spoke up.
“Stop scratching! You mustn't scratch it!”
“Wh-What the hell, you little brat?!”
There was no time to ask permission.
I rushed over and unwrapped his bandages.
“Huh!? Y-You bastard!? Do you want to die?”
“Stay still! There's a blade lodged in you!”
“What?!”
I disinfected my hands with some antiseptic nearby and carefully began removing the blade.
It was a small, broken fragment.
That was probably why the overworked nurse had overlooked it.
“Grrgh!”
But I happened to have earned full marks in the first-aid section of the Empire-wide Guard recruitment exam.
And one of the subjects covered emergency treatment for harpoon-type weapons.
When I carefully extracted the dark-blue blade, the middle-aged man's eyes widened.
“You…. Hmm….”
“Please don't speak too much. I'll bandage it again.”
Fortunately, antiseptic was lying around everywhere.
After disinfecting the wound and wrapping it again, the middle-aged man's expression became much more comfortable.
“What are you? A nurse?”
“Pardon? No….”
“Strange. It feels much better. I kept telling those nurse bastards that something felt wrong, but they just told me to stay still….”
I was bewildered too.
If the 「All-Seeing Eye」 hadn't shown me the wound so clearly, there was no way I could have done that myself.
Meanwhile, I decided to ask what I'd been wondering about.
“Do you happen to know why there are so many patients here?”
“…….”
The middle-aged man sighed and answered quietly.
“Why else? The gangster bastards started fighting each other. The northern and southern gangs are having a full-blown gang war across the Gesenna region right now.”
What the hell was that about?
A gang war in our city?
“When did it start?”
“About a week ago, I think.”
A week.
It started the day I lost consciousness.
“Then is the Guard just standing by?”
“What the hell are you talking about? How could those fucking pigs sit around doing nothing in a situation like this? Plenty of those pigs have probably died all over the place too.”
Uh.
Suddenly, 1208's voice brushed past my ears.
‘You, too, were fated to die on the first day of Samsunjeol. And in accordance with the natural order, you have spent the entirety of the life allotted to you and arrived at this day. Yet I would rather you did not die.’
When was the first day of Samsunjeol?
I hurriedly checked the calendar.
‘……That was yesterday.’
Then—
I'd survived whatever this ‘natural order’ was.
I had a feeling.
Something enormous was happening.
I needed to go meet 1208 immediately.
I was hurriedly getting out of bed when—
“Y-you…….”
Someone on the floor reached a hand toward me.
It was a man.
Someone dressed in black.
‘Is he calling me?’
Startled, I widened my eyes and looked around.
It seemed he really was calling me.
“J-jo…….”
“Are you all right?”
For the moment, he was a dying citizen, and I was a guard.
I quickly crouched down and supported him.
“J-jo…, kuh….”
His breathing seemed about to stop at any moment, yet he barely clung to life as he tried to tell me something.
“R…….”
R?
“Run…….”
Run?
Was he telling me to run away?
I had no idea what was going on, but the urge to save him surged through me.
「 All-Seeing Eye 」
Once again, the ‘magic tool’ hidden inside my eye opened its aperture.
Information flooded into my head.
Something mysterious happened.
First, the clothes he was wearing contained magical power.
I could see circuits of magical energy running from his head all the way to his feet.
But when my gaze pierced one layer deeper, I was shocked.
‘What the hell is this?’
Huh?!
‘There isn't a single intact organ left….’
It looked as though someone had run a blender inside his body.
Not one of his organs retained its proper shape.
‘Then how is he still alive…?’
On top of that, some kind of pitch-black writing had been carved into his relatively intact heart.
As though it had been branded there with fire.
It seemed I could have learned something more, but from this point on, I did not have enough mana.
“Nurse! Nurse!!”
I desperately called for a nurse.
Loudly enough that the patients nearby grimaced.
But there were far too many patients, and no one came.
“Run away…….”
In the end, the man left only those words behind like a final death cry and closed his eyes.
A person died.
“…….”
My heart pounded.
Someone had died right in front of me.
Even if he had nothing to do with me, it was shocking that someone who had been breathing and speaking only moments before was now dead.
“…….”
For now, I felt like I needed to move.
But there was a problem.
“Nurse, do you know where my uniform is?”
“No idea. We didn't have enough room for beds, so we removed all the lockers and things like that.”
The nurse answered irritably.
I was flustered.
But I could not keep questioning her.
With half-dead people lying all over the place, she wasn't going to care about me whining about my uniform.
But I could not go outside wearing my hospital gown either.
It was soaked in blood.
“Would it be all right if I wore someone else's clothes out?”
“Do whatever you want. Whatever.”
After watching someone die, I was scared.
The thought that I might die the same way….
After thinking for a moment, I decided to wear the clothes of the man named Arman who had just died.
If a gang war had broken out, I could end up in danger.
And when I'd looked at his clothes with the 「All-Seeing Eye」 earlier, they'd been a magic tool.
I used to work in a magic-tool factory.
Judging by the magical circuits woven into the clothing, it seemed to belong to the 『Protection』 or 『Concealment』 category.
In other words, they were clothes that could protect me.
“Hmm. This patient's dead too.”
“Let's get the body out.”
But when I returned to the ward, male nurses were about to place him inside some kind of box on wheels.
“Ah, wait.”
“Hmm?”
“Could I… maybe wear his clothes?”
“Go ahead.”
They roughly stripped the clothes off him and handed them to me.
It was a pitch-black, coat-shaped rain cloak.
It had a hood that could cover my head and carried a mysterious air.
‘There's a spider emblem inside.’
For the moment, I thought nothing of it and left the hospital ward.
That was the cause of all my trouble.
***
“You fucking bastard. You're a gangster, aren't you?”
“Pardon?”
“Hey! Get over here! There's a fucking gangster here!!”