“No, don’t! Stay back! Please let me go!”
The scream of a young woman facing a murderer, for instance. Ookami seemed to have heard it, too; his eyes never showed much emotion, but they’d widened slightly.
That wasn’t the only voice I’d been hearing, though. Countless screams echoed, so terrible they made me want to plug my ears.
“I’m scared! Dad! Mom!” “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts! Stop, please; forgive me!” “I’m begging you, just spare the children! Anyone but them!” “Why do you steal from us?! You take everything! This is our country!” “I hate this. I can’t die and leave them behind… I can’t die…”
The sound of life being corrupted and crumbling away. These weren’t just scenes that Abel had experienced in his other lives. Through that murky torrent of light, we heard the last screams of people all over the world from the past several thousand years. That supernatural form was an accumulation of everyone whose lives had been taken by human malice.
That was how Nagisa had heard Abel’s voice. How she’d been able to listen to his will. Everything was in there. She was extending a hand to those who had been driven to despair by the unfairness of the world and lost their lives. Saving Abel meant saving the souls of all these dead people.
“Go,” Ookami said. “If you let the Ace Detective die, I’ll kill you.”
“…That’s scary stuff.” I gave a wry smile, but by the time I looked up again, Ookami was gone. It had probably been only his will that had actually come here, the way Nagisa’s and mine had once done long ago.
Still feeling that burning pain, I pushed myself to my feet. I managed to get back up. The will Ookami had left behind must have filled up my empty organ, which I found seriously irritating. He was going to act all self-important again because I owed him one.
“Unfair.”
My feet were still unsteady, but I headed in Nagisa’s direction regardless.
“…Nagisa!”
But just then, the shield that had been protecting us finally crumbled, releasing that torrent of human malice and the screams of those whose lives had been tainted by it.
“Kimihiko!”
At the last second, I caught Nagisa’s fingertips, and we took each other’s hand. We knew exactly where we needed to go and pushed ahead, struggling against the current. Nagisa was crying, but she wiped her tears away and kept going. We walked forward, hatred and sadness raining down on us from head to toe.
“……Dammit.”
The torrent grew more forceful until eventually we couldn’t even breathe, let alone keep walking. Churning malice poured into us, as if we were swallowing seawater, and I almost lost my grip on Nagisa’s hand. …That hand was the one thing I couldn’t afford to let go of. After all, stories begin by taking someone’s hand.
“Let’s go, Nagisa! We’re going…to Abel!”
In order to save everything, we’d—
“I’m proud of you two.”
Just then, a ray of light cut through the torrent, separating it to reveal a girl. No—she seemed too sacred for a term like “girl.” The first thing I felt seeing her was awe.
She wore a dress of white and gold. On her back was one large white wing, and behind her streamed hair that seemed to have grown long in seconds. It was Siesta. Through the power of the System, she’d taken the form of a goddess.
“Let’s save the world together.”
Crystals of light gathered, and a weapon with a crescent-shaped blade materialized in her right hand, shining gold. No matter how many times her will burned, she’d keep fighting as long as she was on the battlefield. That was how this proud ally of justice, who had come back from the jaws of death time and time again, chose to live.
“Abel? Arsene? Or is your real name something else?”
Siesta took off running so fast she practically vanished.
I couldn’t see her; only her voice seemed to linger where she’d been. She lunged at Abel, who held his greatsword at the ready.
“Who are you? What is your name? Your will…?”
“This body has but one will.”
It was the first time Abel had spoken here on the battlefield.
By the time my eyes managed to catch up, the fight was already over.
Siesta’s sword slash had been just a little faster, and she’d shattered Abel’s bone armor.
“_____________! I won’t…forget. This will…won’t let me…forget.”
Abel staggered but managed to stay on his feet and let out a shout.
“Their deaths weren’t in vain. They were killed by evil, but their last wills won’t ever die!”
Abel had wanted to make us understand.
Humans were evil. As such, they had to be punished. We couldn’t pretend that all the people who’d been killed by evil had never existed.
And yet, on the other side of suffering waited a utopia. We could make a world where crimes never happened, where the human race had been freed from malice. “Why can’t you understand that?” Abel had asked the Ace Detective from the top of a mound of one hundred billion corpses.
“Professor Moriya,” Nagisa responded not as a detective but as a student. “This is why I accept the world, unfair as it is.”
In the next moment, sound and light enveloped us.
Countless images began to stream past all at once, just as they had in the darkness Nagisa had been trapped in.
Someone presented a bouquet of roses to somebody in a hospital bed. They weren’t “get well soon” flowers but for a marriage proposal.
In the entryway of a house, a young boy saw his father come home and froze to the spot, crying. His father had just returned from two years on the battlefield.
It was the anniversary of the death of a woman’s mother. A crowd of relatives had gathered in a Japanese-style room of the family home, where her baby gave a first joyous cry.
“Because the world is overflowing with moments like these, too.”
True, the world was warped. There was no end to the violence and discrimination and poverty. As long the Seven Deadly Sins existed, people would keep opening the door to misfortune every day. For that reason, if someone put a utopia where malice didn’t exist beyond that door instead, people might cling to it. But—
“We want to live so we can find a neighbor who we can get angry at how ridiculous this unfair world is with and join in laughing it off.”
I stood next to Nagisa, and Siesta came up to stand on her other side.
Humans lived in a way that was bound to make them unhappy.
But in the spaces in between, there were also times of laughter.
Silly banter with a classmate; listening to the songs of an idol singer we adored; making up with someone we’d never gotten along with; rushing out of a room we’d holed ourselves up in; searching for a new dream, a new reason to live; drinking extra-special black tea—in each one of those moments, we felt our reason for living.
People were bound to be unhappy.
But that was why we left on journeys to find happiness.
“And where do the last wills of those who died in the process go?” Abel—no, Professor Moriya—asked. This would likely be his final question. “They weren’t able to grasp even those brief moments of joy. Who will soothe their regrets?”
“We will—those of us who remain. We’ll make sure of it.”
Those weren’t just empty words or convenient excuses.
Nagisa planned to live as the detective, and she would spend her whole life extending a hand to those people.
“I see,” the professor muttered briefly. It almost looked like his expression softened very slightly.
Suddenly, something crawled out of his body—a shadow. The darkness grew, and before long, it had formed the silhouette of an enormous witch wearing a dress that looked like a curtain.
“Is that the code of Cain, the Original Sin?”
Professor Moriya had always sworn he wasn’t being controlled by that thing. He’d said it served him. But now the shadow fled, having lost its vessel.
It made for the System’s inverted pyramid, enveloping the light. The enormous shadow engulfed the Akashic records, attempting to swallow them.
“Destroy them,” the professor said. “If nothing else, destroy the Akashic records and the sins of the human race with them.”
No one had used a weapon, yet great cracks began to run through the System. It probably proved that it wasn’t just the detectives who were here: The wills of those who weighed justice on the scales had all voluntarily chosen to abandon the Akashic records.
“Even if you destroy them, a new world will come one day.”
And with Abel’s words lingering in the air, our surroundings were enveloped in light.