Deathwish (3)

Nobody tangled up in the main scenario was ever an ordinary human being, and finding one among them with nothing but good traits was asking a great deal.

A fair few of them had to be avoided at all costs, and the one in front of him right now was in the running for the top spot.

Deathwish, Katya Heinkel Craven.

A ‘key figure’ whose weight in the scenario rivaled Noelle’s.

As for the traits he could remember:

Cantankerous, capricious, self-destructive and utterly willful.

And for all that, the power she had been born with was horrifyingly strong. Every one of those elements made the fallout of a situation ‘going wrong’ about as serious as it could get.

“…”

Given the way the game’s story flowed, every one of the leads was bound to end up with blood on their hands sooner or later. But whichever route you took, the one who had killed the ‘greatest’ number of people had to be the girl standing right in front of him.

Not that she murdered indiscriminately, or was some piece of trash who enjoyed turning violence on the innocent. But press a certain ‘switch’ of hers, so to speak, touch the one sore spot she let no one touch, and this girl would carry out a massacre without batting an eye.

Going by appearances alone, she looked like a young lady from a rich household, strolling the streets at her leisure without a care on her face. Perhaps the better description was a time bomb on its best behavior.

…And here was the quest, telling him to settle things peacefully with someone like that. As though something distinctly unpeaceful were certain to blow up.

The thought alone was ghastly, but now that something like this had surfaced, he would have to keep his wits about him.

…A crisis might also be an opportunity.

Played well, it might turn out to be exactly that. A sharp rise in favor meant, in other words, a good handful of skill-copy rights dropping into his lap. Surely.

“I’m bored.”

They had walked along quietly side by side for a good while, neither of them saying a word, when the girl spoke up out of nowhere.

“Isn’t there anything to do?”
“…I thought I was supposed to keep you company. Wasn’t there something you wanted to say?”
“Nope, nothing like that.”

“…”

“I really did call you over just because I’m bored, that’s all. I was in the middle of something fun and it got interrupted, didn’t it?”

She answered with a beaming smile, and Aiden was left speechless where he stood.

No.

Surely there was plenty to ask about. Why he had cut in just now, how she knew who he was: either one alone was enough to get a conversation going, wasn’t it?

“Or how about you entertain me yourself?”

“…”

“I’ve got a few pretty good ideas for ways to play with you. Want to hear—”
“—Anything’s fine, whatever it is?”

Katya cackled as Aiden cut straight across her words.

However you looked at it, that was no way to show courtesy to royalty, but from what he knew of her, she was not the sort to care about that kind of thing. She was direct about absolutely everything, so there was no need to overthink it.

“Anything’s fine by me.”
“I’ve got something to do, so come along if you’re coming.”

Aiden said it and set off ahead of her. Katya checked where he was headed and snorted.

“A gun shop?”

The imperial capital’s back alleys were naturally a place where anything at all could be had, and a gun, which normally required a troublesome ownership license, could be bought too, so long as you paid.

“Is there any point to something like this?”
“Because I need it.”
“Why?”
“Let me turn that around: why are you curious about the reason?”
“You can use a supernatural power, can’t you.”

“…”

And how do you know that?

He asked Katya with a look, and she tilted her head to one side. Her answer came back at once, awkwardly.

“…That sort of thing, you just know at a glance.”

…She certainly could tell an awful lot the instant she looked.

That aside, explaining why he needed a gun was a somewhat complicated business. Exactly as Katya had said, people who could handle a supernatural power had no particular reason to take up firearms. But for the ‘traits’ Aiden believed he had, no tool suited him better than a gun.

“A supernatural power becomes far more precise when you give it a form like this. You may hold it in your body, of course, but putting it into a weapon is more efficient.”

He remembered hearing that explanation from Noelle once before. A supernatural power worked fine on its own, but loaded into a weapon, its efficiency doubled. A very simple concept.

For Aiden, who handled ‘several’ supernatural powers, that made the choice a little tricky. The weapon needed a good number of parts, and above all he, with no combat training whatsoever, had to ‘be able to use’ it.

On that count, classical cold weapons like spears and swords never made the list. Aiden had no connection whatsoever to that sort of thing.

Naturally, the most suitable option was this one.

A firearm. A convenient weapon built from a good number of parts.

“Come on in—”

The gun shop’s owner was a genial old man who threw a brisk, friendly greeting at his new customer. Considering just how ghastly a disguise Aiden had put on, service of this standard deserved full marks.

“…Do you have a pistol a beginner could handle?”
“Yes sir. Have a look over this way!”

That he met a request so at odds with that voice and that face without the least flinch, still brisk and friendly, said it all.

“I don’t think buying something like this is going to mean much.”

Katya, who had been trailing at his heels, grumbled something along those lines and went on peering around the place.

“Weapons exist to kill people, don’t they? The things in here are for self-defense.”

…Embarrassing as it was, self-defense was precisely all Aiden wanted. But before he could get those words properly across, Katya had plainly gone from complaining to acting.

“Shopkeeper— the cartridges?”
“Ah, you’ll find them if you check the drawer.”

Whistling, Katya rummaged through the chest of drawers and before long pulled out rounds that matched the pistols laid out on the display stand.

Up to here, nothing about it was especially strange. The situation was normal enough that neither the owner nor Aiden gave it a second thought.

“If you’d like to try the weapon out, the back yard is—”

The problem was.

Before he could even finish, Katya had the loaded gun leveled.

At her own head.

“Hold on, miss—!”

Before the flustered shop owner could even get the words out, an ear-splitting gunshot rang through the shop.

“…”

The shell casing rolled across the floor, and Aiden’s jaw dropped.

Divinity had flared up around Katya’s body the instant the gun went off. It was the very same thing Aiden had handled the other day: a flame that sensed danger to its user and moved on its own. The round that touched that ultra-high-temperature divinity had melted away without a trace.

“—Even held down as far as it will go, it still pops out like this. So annoying.”

With a short laugh, Katya set the gun, smoke still curling off it, back down on the display stand with a thud.

And then.

She worked straight along the display stand, picking up the guns ranged there one by one and doing much the same thing. Pick one up, load it, put it to her own head, fire. As though, perhaps, she were comparing them.

Aiden and the shop owner both went stiff and watched the performance, and the phenomenon kept repeating: every round she fired was blocked and melted by the divinity wrapped around her body.

“Ah, right.”

Of course, the further along the display stand she went, the larger the caliber of the firearms. Soon enough Katya was picking up something you would have to call a hand cannon rather than a pistol, and aiming it at her own head.

“This one feels pretty good.”

And having said that.

However easily the divinity had been stopping pistol rounds, a slug of that caliber was evidently beyond it, and the slug punched straight through.

But.

“…”

Aiden watched the scene unfold with the blood draining from his face.

Even with her head blown clean off.

Katya was calmly turning around.

Her face, punched through and pulped by the round, squashed back together and stuck to itself like a doll molded out of clay. Every gap filled with the same ‘divinity’ that had flowed out on its own a moment before, the instant she was in danger. As though it would not permit its wielder even death, as though it would not tolerate a single drop of her blood spilled, it ‘regenerated’ the wound cleanly, without leaving a trace.

“This much is the least you need for usable firepower. You’d be better off buying from here up.”

And the girl herself.

Even with her own head burst apart by a bullet.

She did not so much as blink. Her expression did not change in the slightest.

As though,

truly,

she ‘could not feel a thing’.

“The divinity I’m holding down as hard as I can is about the same as a few thin iron plates layered on. Shouldn’t it be able to punch through that much to be any use in a fight?”

Groaning inwardly, Aiden looked at Katya, who was holding a pistol out to him with that beaming smile still on her face.

He knew this girl’s trait from the game.

Painlessness.

And, a long way past that stage, insensibility.

Katya Heinkel could feel no sensation of any kind; that was the price of commanding divinity this absurd. Her divinity ‘automatically’ erased anything capable of doing her harm, and so every external stimulus was blocked out entirely.

Seeing it in person, this is completely—

A monster, surely.

Even though she had said with her own mouth that she was suppressing her supernatural power to the limit, calling her effectively immortal would be no exaggeration. He felt he understood why she carried as much weight in the main story as Noelle did.

And clearly at least one other person agreed wholeheartedly with that assessment.

At the hard metallic clack from the counter, Aiden and Katya both looked over at once. The owner, gone pale as death, had a loaded gun aimed at Katya.

“Get out of my shop.”
“…This looks a bit ugly, doesn’t it? I’ll pay for every round I fired, so—”

A light flashed in front of Katya’s eyes as she spoke. That would have been the divinity erasing the round the shop owner had fired.

“I said get out, you monster…!”

The voice forced its way out thick with tension. His violently trembling hands made it plain that he was no more used to threatening people than anyone else. Most likely panic had half taken hold of him at the sight of Katya calmly doing something insane.

But.

At the sight of it, the corners of Katya’s mouth stretched wide.

“I’ll grant that I might look a bit odd.”

On the surface, it was the same silly smile as ever. But Aiden, skilled at reading the mood of the people around him, could pick out the difference at once. Beneath that expression sat a killing intent that felt like it could split skin open.

This girl reacted with enormous sensitivity to other people’s ‘hostility’.

“Leading off by shoving a bullet into me, though? That puts me in a bad mood.”

The moment Katya said it and took a long stride toward the counter.

With a click.

A switch moved inside Aiden’s head: his own private alarm, the one that went off whenever an extreme situation came along. The sensation was much like the one just before Noelle swung her sword at him that other time.

If he stayed still like this.

That man was going to be put through something terrible.

And, in the current situation.

That was absolutely not a development he could welcome.

Aiden groaned and clutched his head in both hands. This was already the second time since he had met this damned princess that someone could die if he did not step in.

And.

At the very least.

He was not a man who could let something like that slide without a care. Especially not when he had the means to stop it.

He hurriedly operated the window that always came up when he copied a skill. He had looked over roughly what was on offer once before, so choosing was easy.

The only way to keep Katya from doing something insane here and now was to turn her attention elsewhere, because he had no way to stop her physically.

And as for cooling the temper of someone capricious, cantankerous and utterly willful?

There was only one way: draw the target’s ‘interest’.

That settled which skill he would take.

While Aiden worked the window¹, colorless flame surged around Katya’s body as she strode toward the counter. The blazing divinity soon took form, forged itself into the shape of a blade, and took precise aim at the man standing behind the counter.

Without delay: fired.

The shop owner went past pale and turned purple. He had the look of a man who had just foreseen his own death.

“…?”

And.

Katya’s eyebrows arched in a long curve, no doubt because she had spotted Aiden cutting in and flinging himself between the two of them.

But an instant later, those eyes went wide.

Probably.

Because the arm Aiden had thrust out as he cut in was punched straight through by that blade of flame.

“That hurts—!”

And Aiden’s arm, as he screamed, was being regenerated by a brightly burning divinity.

It was the very sight he had seen a moment before. Exactly the same as Katya ‘herself’ regenerating her burst head.

It hurts.
It hurts…!

Thanks to this, his arm was intact, but pain was pain all the same. Aiden clutched his arm and writhed.

Everyone knows the worst pain a person can feel is a burn. Having a whole arm run through by a blazing blade was agony beyond describing, so a reaction like this was only natural.

But.

“…”

Katya’s eyes, watching him, were filled with shock, as though she were looking at something that absolutely could not exist.

“Ahjussi…!”

While Katya stood frozen in a daze, Aiden spat the words toward the counter like a groan.

“Run, now…! Shit, this hurts like hell, seriously…!”

Catching his meaning, the owner turned on the spot and bolted.

Fortunately, pulling a stunt like this seemed to have paid off at least a little: Katya clearly could not have cared less about the owner slipping away.

“—That’s exactly like mine.”

Her cheeks were trembling. The face that always wore a grin was, just this once, badly contorted.

“Hey. Aiden. Answer me. That was ‘my’ divinity, wasn’t it?”

Still squeezing out tears from the agony, Aiden looked blankly back at her.

“Aiden, did you say?”
“What, did you think a flimsy disguise like that would fool me? More to the point, answer me. What on earth was that just now?”

…So she had come up to him knowing full well who he was from the very start.

He had sensed she knew a bit too much about him, here and there, and that running into her by chance had been a little too convenient. But instead of asking anything more about it, Aiden only sighed again inwardly. That was not what mattered right now anyway.

“…It was.”

There was no point in lying. She was no fool, and nobody could be deceived about something like this.

No, to put it precisely.

What he had to deceive her about was a ‘different part’.

“The same as mine, you say.”
“You can see that for yourself, can’t you.”

“…”

At those words, Katya’s face turned stranger still. Her glistening eyes held an ‘excitement’ plain enough for even a fool to read.

“But how in the world—”
“—How I ‘feel pain’, you mean?”

“…”

Katya froze mid-motion. Her gaze wavered wildly, as though she had been struck right at the heart of it.

Aiden knew why this girl went around shooting herself in the head as though it were nothing.

For someone born to it, being past painlessness and into insensibility was a curse of a ghastly order. It meant going on and on with no stimulus at all, hollowed out, alive only because she could not die. She kept up that eccentricity because she wanted, somehow, to ‘feel’ something, even a little.

On that count.

Part of the reason this girl had been so shocked a moment ago was that Aiden had used her own ability exactly as she did. But the greater part lay in the fact that, holding an ability like that, he was feeling pain vividly.

And so.

“Want me to tell you?”

“…”

Katya’s body went rigid. It was unmistakably the look of someone who had been hit exactly where it hurt.

And inside Aiden’s head as he watched her, the switch was still clicking over.

The situation had blown up in an instant, and he had handled it more or less by improvising. But having come this far, he could afford to tack on one more thing. Surely he ought to take everything there was to gain while he was at it.

“If you want to know.”

On that front, it was time to be faithful to his real line of work.

Fraud. Telling the other party lies.

“Would you do one favor for me?”

And turning it to his own profit.

“…”

Aiden looked at the windows surfacing one after another and let out a sigh of relief.

Clearly.

The feedback on what he had gained was intuitive, too. That much was certain.