This whole time, I’d been thinking it was weird.
Abel Arsene Schoenberg had declared he was going to make a new world without sin but was simultaneously carrying out countless crimes. There was a big inconsistency there.
How could Abel hate human sins and still commit them himself?
Maybe he felt that a few sacrifices were necessary, and that since everyone was evil anyway, it didn’t matter if they were sacrificed. That resolved the inconsistency to some extent. It was the “necessary evil” mindset.
However, it felt as if the gap between Abel’s philosophy and his actions couldn’t be explained so easily. Not unless I hypothesized the existence of a second malicious being who was Abel’s polar opposite—someone like Cain, who’d become history’s first murderer when he killed his brother.
“Of course, the name Cain is just a placeholder.”
I was sure this guy had another personality. Abel, a genuine victim who was trying to create a world without evil, and Cain, the aggressor who symbolized the malice of the human race. Maybe he’d been carrying out this plan, which ordinary people couldn’t wrap their heads around, because both personalities’ minds were inhabiting the same space.
“See, one of my friends had something similar,” I told him. I was remembering the black-haired girl with red eyes. “So—Professor Moriya. It’s a second personality who’s been carrying out all your crimes, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t sure which name to call him by—Abel or Cain—so I’d gone with that old familiar one instead, then waited for him to evaluate my deduction.
“I see. So that’s your answer?” The professor laced his fingers together and closed his eyes. He stayed like that for five seconds. Ten. Twenty.
Then his eyes opened—and the situation started unraveling.
“In that case, you fail.”
The next thing I knew, golden chains had appeared from out of nowhere and hauled me up by my arms.
“……!”
Abel had attacked with a code. Even if he couldn’t kill the Singularity, it was apparently easy enough to temporarily restrain me.
“The ‘split personality’ hypothesis as a whole isn’t bad. However, it won’t do for you to base your reasoning off a friend. Research should be subjective, fair…and original.”
From the way Abel spoke, he might have been advising a seminar student.
“I haven’t been taken over by the personality you term ‘Cain.’ If I had to say one way or the other, I am the one controlling Cain, the code of the Original Sin. There is no other interpretation. A fiendish alternate personality is carrying out my crimes? I don’t use such self-serving logic. I’ll swear that on God’s name as many times as I must.”
Abel picked up the telephone receiver, his eyes wide.
“I believe in the rightness of my wrongdoing.”
A code that would make the leaders of every country push the buttons that triggered certain weapons—that was what he was about to execute right now, right in front of me.
“Stop…!”
There was only one way I could make him stop, though. I had to take my life into my own hands and—
“So you think it’s all right for a Familiar to just disappear without letting his master know what he’s doing?”
I thought I heard a voice from somewhere.
The next moment, the window shattered and a flash of light filled the room. The hand Abel had reached toward the receiver with now had a shining aqua-blue arrow sticking out of it.
“That blue light… It can’t be.”
The arrow had punched right through Abel’s hand and pinned it to the desk.
“How on earth did she acquire a will this strong?”
It wasn’t anything as intense as agony, but Abel grimaced as if he couldn’t shake the strangeness of what was happening.
“You probably wouldn’t understand, Abel.”
Just how many times had the girl who’d fired that arrow been unfairly attacked, only to look up at the sky and grow stronger? Even if she could never run again, she would remain a shield of justice.
“The tables have turned.”
Since Abel’s attention had been diverted for a moment, the gold chains binding me had come off. I leveled my gun at him again. I probably couldn’t kill Abel, either. But if I could at least bind him the way he’d bound me—
“Have they really?” Abel asked, without turning a hair. “I was genuinely startled by your wills. They’ve grown far stronger than they were when I observed them long ago. However, even at this level, they won’t be able to counter my codes. They only appear capable of it now because I’m dividing my power between this and another location.”
He was splitting his power between two places? Did that mean he was currently in the middle of rewriting the human race’s malicious genes with his code? No, if that was it, he wouldn’t have gone out of his way to tell us.
“Did you really think I was simply standing idly by on the matter of the Singularity all this time? Did you think I’d resorted to using conventional weapons because it alone couldn’t be killed? —My analysis of the Singularity is complete.”
Just then, Abel’s right arm was severed at the shoulder. Freed from the arrow that had pinned him down, he immediately closed the gap to stand right in front of me.
“I’d planned to discard my right arm, but I have the perfect spare.”
Someone else’s arm sprouted from Abel’s shoulder. I knew whose it was. He’d stolen it from Ookami the Enforcer during a fight.
Abel looked at me and smiled.
“I am the Phantom Thief. When I truly want something, I steal it.”
I didn’t even have time to run before Abel’s right arm plunged into my stomach.
“______________!”
Right. If he couldn’t kill me, he could just steal the key to analyzing the Akashic records. The power of the Singularity itself.
Weirdly, it didn’t hurt. There was no blood. However, I could feel something being dragged out of me. He’d definitely taken something: the power to change the world.
“Why are you smiling?”
It was the first time I’d seen Abel look surprised.
It wasn’t really that surprising, though, was it?
“Think about it,” I responded. “Would I even want an ability that always puts me dead last in the morning horoscope?”
This power has never once been useful in my day-to-day life. You can have it. Steal it all you want. In exchange…
“You’re going to give me back Siesta’s will.”
As my mind began growing hazy, I stuck my own left arm into Abel’s chest. A hint of pain flickered across his face.
“…Kimihiko Kimizuka. Don’t tell me all along, you…”
That’s right. I’d had a mission that was only possible to carry out in this single moment, when the paths of the Singularity and the Phantom Thief intersected.
I hadn’t chosen the world but the girl.
I sensed the echo of something familiar just beyond my outstretched fingers.
“You’re in there, aren’t you?”
In exchange for the power to save the world, I had Siesta’s heart clutched in my left hand.