A cadet at a government-designated military academy had recently acquired a worry. The discipline he was held under? The danger of facing the Resistance Army? Self-restraint? None of them compared to his present worry.
In truth, if not for that one matter, he would still have been smiling and enjoying his cadet days.
The crisply pressed uniform, the varied meal plans, the pride of standing against the Resistance Army; not one of them failed to suit him.
But none of those positive elements could lighten the worry.
―Uncle, is that blood.......?
―Ah, no. I got some paint on me.
―Are you insane? What on earth are you doing out there?
His uncle's flustered manner that night was unnatural somehow. It was not the expression of a man looking at his nephew but the edged reaction of a man facing government troops.
For the cadet, who had lived alone with his uncle since childhood, it was a situation he could not help suspecting.
"However I think about it, it's strange."
There were many suspicious points.
The things he had worked to look away from meshed together, growing the suspicion and forcing conviction on him.
Above all, his uncle's firmly shut room, which he had been told never to enter.
The cadet, who had skipped school without leave and come home, confirmed that the house was empty and clenched his fist tight.
The only warmth in the house was a single flowerpot set where the sun fell well.
In the house he had returned to unannounced after a month, everything was unfamiliar.
"Let's not do this, all right?"
Opening the door was simple.
The first thing that caught his eye was a bed with no trace of anyone having slept in it.
Pale dust had even gathered on the neatly smoothed blanket.
On the tissues scattered messily beside it was blood that had dried black, and on the desk lay photographs spread out in haste.
The cadet slowly drew one of them out and rubbed his eyes.
Because the person photographed affectionately with his uncle had the same face as a Resistance Army leader he had seen at some point.
"Uncle, you were with the Resistance Army......? Ha, haha. Ha?"
The cadet clutched his face, and the corners of his mouth twisted grotesquely.
So did the shadow cast beneath his feet.
·
·
·
For days now he has not been able to reach his uncle.
Was he caught by the government troops? Did he learn about the room and grow angry? He had waited for an explanation that it was all a misunderstanding, so had his uncle decided even that effort was unnecessary?
So...... had he been abandoned?
The cadet, biting his nails from anxiety and restlessness, snapped to attention at a murmur that had suddenly grown busy.
From a distance he heard the words "rooting-out operation."
The cadet's greatly dilated pupils shook precariously.
"A report of an ability user has come in. Cadets are to cooperate."
He had been found out. It was certain that his being with the Resistance Army had been found out.
His uncle's family relations had already been handed over, and they had come to seize him.
'No. I can't be caught here. I still have to find my uncle.......'
The cadet shot up from his seat and fled the school just as he was.
Voices called from behind, but he paid them no mind.
He had to find his uncle.
Being put down like a dog like this was not an option.
·
·
·
As a result of turning from reality and fleeing, the cadet was not even given a chance to explain.
He fled, ran, rolled, and walked again, over and over.
Then again, it was a chance he had kicked away himself.
There was no way his uncle would appear before a nephew who had made such a clumsy, foolish decision.
The cadet slipped into an empty house and thought while looking at the torn wallpaper.
"It's unfair. I'm hungry. I'm sleepy."
The Resistance Army, damn them.
I wish every last ability user would just die.
It was around then that someone approached the cadet as he sat curled up in the old ruined house where insects crawled.
"How could you—!"
"Shh."
Round glasses. They were the glasses his uncle always wore.
But it was not his uncle's face.
To get hold of a clue, the cadet buried his questions and followed the man.
With a composed manner, as though used to it, the man shook off the government troops.
It went unspoken, but even the cadet could not help noticing that the man was with the Resistance Army.
The cadet was deeply confused.
Because in his short life, the Resistance Army were beings that ought not to exist.
"Go in. Go and run without looking back."
"Why, why would you do this for me....... Who are you.......?"
"There will be someone to help you. Be sure to stay alive."
That was the last of it.
Pushed inside through an old iron door, the cadet forgot his own situation and marveled at the exotic scenery unfolding before him.
"Ah......, he said to run."
Belatedly he moved his shuffling legs.
At first a single slow step, and before long he was making enough wind to lift his bangs.
Before he knew it the scenery changed, and huge buildings rose up.
People walking briskly, the sound of cars, the smell of food wafting from restaurants.
Things that made him feel alive.
"......"
The place where the cadet stopped was in front of a standing signboard.
The signboard, marked with break-time hours and decorated with today's recommended menu, was utterly ordinary.
The cadet, who had stood in front of the restaurant for a long while, tilted his head.
However he searched his memory, the street was unfamiliar.
Or else―
"The world of the Other Side......?"
Once he became aware of it, the faces of everyone passing by smeared and turned into mannequins. He could feel gazes from people whose eyes, noses, and mouths had vanished.
At that skin-crawling grotesquerie, his scream could not even get out and was swallowed inward.
Staggering, the cadet left the street and hid himself in a gap between unfamiliar buildings.
Blegh. He emptied his stomach from instinctive revulsion and wiped the cold sweat beaded on the back of his neck.
When every sound he could hear began to grate on his ears, the cadet covered both ears and leaned his back against the wall.
"I learned about this."
About the Black Zone, the world of the Other Side, and ability users.
Theory and reality were nothing alike.
"It's horrible."
Merely breathing felt as though it would turn his stomach inside out.
The gaudy neon of the signboard blinking right beside him broke down his sense of reality further.
The cadet could not bear it.
If it was the Resistance Army fighting things like this, then what on earth had the government troops been doing all this time?
Why were they leaving something like this alone?
"They could just sweep it all away."
The moment the shadow stretched long, feeding on the neon light, rippled―
―RUMBLE—!
With a sound like the sky collapsing, the ground shook.
No, precisely, it was the sound of a building two blocks away collapsing.
Thick dust blew in along with a fierce wind.
Screams and sirens faded into the distance, and beside it another building likewise came pouring down.
"Hack, cough."
The cadet covered his nose and mouth and waved a hand in front of him.
When the dust cleared just enough for him to make out his surroundings, the scene of a completely wrecked street spread out.
The sight of something not even properly visible blowing the buildings away one by one was startling enough, but the sight of the world itself twisting was even more appalling.
Just then the cadet spotted someone standing in the middle of an intersection a block away.
Anyone could see that he was the chief culprit behind this.
The cadet hid himself and clamped a hand over his mouth. It was certainly the administrator his instructor had spoken of, the one said to control an Other Side.
"He isn't here. Did you fix the coordinates properly?"
"......"
"You're not lying? I came without even cleaning up after myself, so if it's going to be like this......."
"......!"
"Your excuses have improved. You haven't been off watching something strange, have you?"
"......?"
"Let's not talk. Wait a moment. If he's nearby, he'll be detected."
What the administrator was looking for was the cadet himself. However he thought about it, no other conclusion came out.
―Be sure to stay alive.
It was then that the last words of that unknown man's charge suddenly came back to him.
The cadet turned his head and looked for a place to hide.
To get away from a bastard who blew up whole buildings, it had to be a sure one.
In the darkness beneath the cadet's feet, a small ripple formed.
"Oh, found you."
A skin-crawling voice came, along with a light laugh.
***
"Uuuurgh."
"Ooough."
I sighed as I watched Seo Mok and Sophia sprawled over the office desks conversing like zombies.
However much they had poured down, the zombies could not escape their hangovers and refused to look at the sunlight.
Well, I was no different on that count.
When I deliberately blocked the breakdown of the alcohol, I got drunk remarkably fast.
"Ichi, are you a cheat character?"
"What do you mean?"
I distinctly remember him drinking the most, and yet the only survivor among us was Ichi.
Because it was Ichi who had laughed at the sight of Seo Mok and me sprawled on the café terrace across the way and dragged us to the office.
"That. Team Head Charon said to hand it over by today."
"Haha, that man, really. He wants to see me far too much."
I doubt that.
It is also a way of telling him to turn in his spy report.
"Is there nothing I can help with?"
"Oh, is this the new hire's 'please entrust me with work and then leave me alone' posture?"
"That means you don't need it, right?"
"Yep."
Ichi grinned, took the documents he had received, and waved his hand lightly.
My plan to slip in and find out how things were going was blocked with ease, and when I glanced at one of the two making strange monster noises, Sophia, whose eyes met mine first, shot upright.
"It seems we never properly introduced our new hire."
Then what was that yesterday?
Was it not a full ten hours of fellowship-building cum self-introduction?
As if in sympathy with my disbelief, Seo Mok clicked his tongue and moved seats.
No one paid any attention, right up to Seo Mok crumpling himself into the plush sofa and pressing a cushion over his own head as if he did not want to hear it.
"We will be using young Do Hae as non-combat support, so everyone take note. You are not to push him out front and use him as a shield."
"You were the first one to use me, though?"
"It was before he joined, so it is fine."
"......"
"Our young Do Hae knows a great many things, so shake him down thoroughly and take care not to give yourselves a stomachache."
"Sophia, is that really an introduction of me?"
"Would it be an introduction of me, then?"
Sophia finished the introduction no one was listening to and left for the day, saying she had urgent business; Seo Mok, snoring asleep in the corner, was left alone on account of his insomnia; and Ichi, who had finished sorting the documents with practiced skill, went out saying he had external work.
There was no trace whatsoever of the splendid feats and teamwork of the Ability Office I had known from the original work.
They do say you have to experience a thing yourself to be broken out of your fantasies.
It was an idle afternoon.
―TAP! ―TAP! ―TAP-TAP!
What saved me from falling into a nap along with them was the repeated sound of something knocking.
When I opened my closed eyes and looked around, the Other Side Administrator, stuck fast to the window glass outside, was calling me with its dainty hand.
'What if it gets caught?'
The moment the thing noticed I had seen it, it circled once along the glass and scurried down.
This is that. However I look at it, this is that.
And the date is exactly right, is it not?
'Protag, is that you?'
I shot up from my seat, opened the window just like that, and jumped out.
From behind came Seo Mok's cry of "You madman!" but I ignored it.
Meanwhile I could see the thing, tiny as it was, crossing the road and climbing straight up the hotel wall.
I stopped an oncoming car, rushed inside in haste, and Room 404 had already entered the Other Side.
Not the car horn I had heard outside, but the horns of cars at some intersection surrounded by tall buildings.
Among the cars speeding past there, I seized the Other Side Administrator by the throat.
"Did you catch him?"
"Yeah. But it's unstable."
"What do you......."
At the same moment a nearby building was blown away whole.
Whether to describe it as exploding or as being crushed.
Watching the buildings split apart in a chain reaction, I drove my fist into the Other Side Administrator's awkward smile.
"You little shit, are you trying to bury me?"
"N-no! It's not that! Agh!"