Clang! Kkgeureuk...
"Damn it, this is seriously..."
My spear struck the shell over and over again with no force behind it. It didn't even leave a scratch.
The Abnormality we'd encountered outside the Mirror Dungeon after so long—according to Faust, "the Walking Pearl"—was an enemy that matched me almost disastrously badly.
Because nothing I did worked on it at all.
A speed battle built on quick reflexes and broad situational awareness? What was the point if even a full hit didn't do any damage?
And sure, you could say wearing it down still worked, but if it weren't for those larvae boring into our bodies and steadily dragging our condition down in real time, maybe that would've mattered.
As it was, the longer this dragged on, the more advantage the other side gained. So what we needed was a short fight... but against an Abnormality, that was impossible for someone like me, who lacked absolute power.
If I knew its weakness, I'd have tried to exploit it, but this was our first run. There was no way we'd know something like that.
For now, all I could do was deal with the sticky green mucus the pearl kept spraying everywhere—the source of the poison.
And even that wasn't my own judgment, but the order Dante had given us... which meant he'd judged I didn't have much I could do in this fight.
Correct. Right. I really was useless in this battle.
If only we could open that shell, it looked like there might be something workable inside... but that was out too, because I didn't have the strength. I'd only given Dante a heads-up and was waiting for someone else to do it.
Splat! Splat!
"Ah! Dante, do something about this!"
And since it was also spewing a liquid full of writhing larvae from inside the shell, Ms. Rodion was out of the fight too.
She'd probably do it if asked, sure, but she'd end up hating us for it. She really hated bugs and things like that, surprisingly enough.
Anyway, I get that.
"...Why are you sticking behind me?"
"You're used to this kind of thing, aren't you? Couldn't you handle it a little?"
"Haah..."
How shameless...! Honestly, I'm really being worked to death here.
Somehow, the amount of mucus flying into my face felt like it had doubled. It wasn't my imagination... not with someone standing behind me.
I'll get revenge for this someday...!
As I kept bursting the mucus while hauling around one extra burden, the main force finally found the Abnormality's weakness.
Sinclair had been straining and trying to pry open the gap in the shell all this time, and he'd finally done it!
"I-I did it!"
""
Boom!!! Hwoooosh───
The blast of mucus that erupted right after swept away everyone who'd been close to it.
Still, the only people left alive were me and Ms. Rodion, who'd been standing farther back from the start, plus Dante and Queequeg, who'd only been giving the fight a little support.
What a headache. So this was the thing we had to drag out with the two of us.
"Haa..."
The moment I recognized my role, the toughest identity I could currently use was equipped.
Fast. As always, efficient. Maybe Dante really did have more talent for command than Otis.
No, was that just a matter of situation? Small-scale command and large-scale command were entirely different fields.
...Either way, it didn't matter. What I had to do was the same.
I grabbed the massive plow and charged at the shell.
*
I shook off the mucus, the poison, and the dead larvae plastered all over me.
In front of us was the Abnormality, its pearl completely shattered and beaten down so hard it had reverted to an egg.
...But does the after-team really come all the way inside a whale's belly to retrieve this thing? That's a hell of a job. Not that we're in any position to talk.
After shaking ourselves off as best we could, we started examining the inside of the right atrium.
Maybe because the whale was so massive, even its heart was enormous. Or maybe that was because there was a real heart inside it.
Queequeg didn't show much of a reaction even after seeing us come back to life. If anything, she'd shown more emotional fluctuation when Ishmael died once.
Well, maybe she thought that level of healing made sense since she'd also neutralized the white-flower phenomenon.
Was it something like Ricardo? He hadn't been all that surprised by resurrection either.
Then my eyes were drawn to the tattoos covering Queequeg's body from head to toe.
Tattoos. Ricardo and the Middle wore markings like that too. Queequeg didn't glow purple like they did, though.
No, wait. I hadn't noticed because parts of it were gouged out here and there, but was that a Middle tattoo?
Looking closer, I could see a pattern that was strikingly similar to the tattoos on the little brothers' bodies. It had been erased in patches, so I couldn't say for sure, but I couldn't deny how similar it looked.
Could she be a runaway from the Middle? I hadn't expected to see a human who'd survived after doing something that insane.
As I stared at Queequeg, who was leading us at the front, I noticed Ishmael's gaze beside her linger briefly on the tattoos.
And then my consciousness was dragged back into memory again.
The time was, again, when Ishmael was aboard the Pequod. I didn't know the exact point.
The place was inside the cabin. The most striking thing was Queequeg cutting her own body with a knife.
"Queequeg? What are you doing?"
Thud, tteudeudeuk...!
[Queequeg would, very occasionally... spend nights lonelier and more painful than anyone else. In a dark corner of a room with no light, Queequeg would look down at her arms... and with the little dagger she carried for cutting harpoon ropes.]
Swish! Sseogeok.
[She was tearing into those arms as if they were nothing but an empty canvas.]
Queequeg, who had kept silently gouging at her own arms, finally spoke in a low voice.
"This is the price."
[Queequeg's body, seen up close, had been butchered by unknown tattoos and the wounds she seemed to have carved into herself to forcibly erase them.]
"This... you did this to yourself?"
"Yes."
"Why on earth...?"
"Shame. It was branded. On my shell. By my own hand."
...The Middle, right? She really did seem to be one of them. There were no white mucus stains, and the tattoos still retained a shape a little closer to their original form than they did now, so I could recognize them. Those were the Middle's tattoos, as far as I remembered.
Ishmael desperately tried to stop Queequeg from continuing to mutilate herself.
"Queequeg... don't do this. If you keep moving from Nest to Nest, you might find a way to erase the tattoos cleanly. So hurting yourself like this isn't good."
"It was branded. In a special way. So it can't be erased. By ordinary means. And even if I found a way... I wouldn't erase it like that."
"...Why?"
"There is no way to cleanly erase the past."
My earlier guess was spot on. I hadn't expected Queequeg to be such a tough person.
No, maybe stubborn was the better word. Among the current Singularity and the old ones, there were surely methods to erase something like that.
...That was a slip. Her goal probably wasn't to erase the tattoo in the first place, but to tear open her past itself.
[Among the sailors aboard the whaling ship, one's own "past" was an unspoken taboo. Most of them were either being chased by their past, wanted to wash it away in the waves, or had thrown themselves toward the cliffside surf because they needed money in one way or another.]
After that, Queequeg stopped mutilating herself and quietly looked at Ishmael before speaking.
"Ishmael. You knew, didn't you? I came from the Middle."
"...I guessed as much the first time I saw that enormous amount of tattooing."
[It was said the Middle never gave up. There was a story drifting through the Backstreets, something everyone knew but no one could simply laugh off. A child had bumped into someone passing by and dirtied their clothes with the ice cream they were carrying. The person, now with soiled clothes, comforted the child who'd lost the ice cream and sent them home.]
Ah, I know this one. Not that there's really anyone who doesn't.
[But the person they'd bumped into had been a Middle executive, and the clothes they'd worn that day happened to be their favorite. From the next day on, no one who saw the child's family was ever heard from again—except for the child. It might be a joke or an urban legend, but no one treats it like that. That was what the Middle was.]
They really are a bunch of petty bastards. That story was probably true too.
"But the Middle I heard about..."
"U, uuh...! Haa..."
"I heard the Middle accepts everyone... but never lets anyone leave easily..."
"That's right. The Middle remembers. It doesn't forget. Ever. So no escape. But I was caught. Someone said it. To me, after I was caught. If I wanted to run, I had to erase everything about the Middle. If I couldn't erase it, I'd be caught in the end. My tattoo is the Middle's brand. So I had to tear up the brand too. My speech has the Middle in it too. So I tore up my tongue and my brain. By my own hand. Went to some doctor."
"....."
So there really was a doctor willing to do that. He must've been one hell of a lunatic. Probably someone who wasn't afraid of the Middle's retaliation, or someone too stupid to think that far ahead.
"And then I ran again."
"You had your speech taken away... your whole body torn apart so you could erase the tattoos... and you're still being chased even now... For a price, that's far too..."
"It's not like that. Back then, I was... that. A maggot."
"What? That's a little extreme for a metaphor..."
"I crawled through a cesspit. Thinking that was all there was. I believed I'd know the world there. They wanted to make me into a 'little sister.' So I killed a lot. It wasn't orders that killed. It was my hand. The me who wanted to be respected as a sister."
She'd been a pretty big shot, huh. A little sister... Once you got that far, you'd be treated as a considerable powerhouse in the City.
It was a past that was, in its own way, shocking, but Ishmael showed not even a trace of disgust.
"...No. Right now... we're all just cocoons. The shedding hasn't even started yet..."
"Shedding..."
"Yeah. After this voyage ends... let's look for it together. A way out of the cocoon..."
"How?"
"I don't know either. That's why I'm saying we should look together."
"This is the first time. Ishmael. You've said you don't know."
"....."
[And so one begins to think about the future after getting off the ship.]
A small smile rested on Ishmael's lips as she spoke of the future.
I didn't think I'd ever seen a smile that relieved before. Was Ishmael happier back then?
Personally, I like that hopeful Ishmael a little more.
The Ishmael of now is swallowed by a single purpose... so she brings up memories I'd rather not think about.
The story of the past drifts a little further into what comes after.