Jörg tried to stop his corpus as he stepped forward. His legs froze. Looking practically paralyzed, his corpus stood in astonishment at the bizarre events occurring inside his own body.
Jörg continued to resist with all his might. He was glad to have detached even this much from his corpus.
He pleaded with his corpus from within.
“The war is over. Germans and the French don’t have any more reason to kill each other. Don’t let Fritz kill him. If you’re really his friend, stop him!”
Fritz shook with excitement. “He really killed him?” he asked Nil. “It was really him?”
“That’s right. No doubt about it.”
Fritz stepped resolutely forward toward Hubert.
Just then, Milos appeared in human form and stood in front of Fritz, his arms spread wide.
Fritz frowned at him suspiciously. “Move aside.”
“Don’t believe anything Nil says. Do you know that man? You can’t remember the face of every single soldier on the battlefield.”
“…No, but I remember that guy.”
“Nil put that memory in you. He’s trying to change you from a soldier to a murderer.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he’s playing with you. That’s how he is.”
“Nil has no reason to lie.”
“He has scores of reasons. He’s a monster. He enjoys tricking humans and causing destruction. You should know who you’re dealing with.”
“And who are you?”
“I’m someone who helped your best friend.”
Fritz turned to look at Jörg’s corpus. Jörg stifled his corpus’s movements, but to his friend, his corpus must appear as immobile as someone in the depths of shell shock. Fritz ran over to check that everything was okay with him.
Just then, Jörg’s corpus slipped free of Jörg’s control and spoke hoarsely. “Don’t worry about me. Do something about him.”
The words stunned Jörg. Regardless of how deeply his corpus carried his grudges during the war, Jörg couldn’t believe what half of his soul had just said. Jörg struggled harder to silence his corpus, but the man slipped free again and said, “I’d do it if I were you. Hurry up, take care of him!”
“No!” Jörg yelled again. “Look at him—that Frenchman. Shelling scarred his face, and he’s missing a leg. He can’t even hear anymore. Our army did that to him. That was war, and we didn’t have a choice. We hurt their comrades like they hurt ours, and we hurt ourselves as well. It’s the same with him. He may be from a different country, but he’s a soldier like us. He suffered the same hardships we did. They destroyed other people’s bodies and ruined their lives, but they suffered the same things themselves. And you still want to take the life of our comrade in suffering.”
But Jörg’s speech must have not reached them, because his corpus joined Nil in trying to stir Fritz to action. “Don’t think about him. It’s what you want that counts.”
Jörg was horrified. They were halves of the same soul—but his corpus didn’t even try to listen to a word he said. Maybe this was what it was like for the ancient blood to control a human. This ancient blood that never showed mercy to an enemy resonated with Fritz to extract revenge.
Just then, Nil removed a Dreyse M1907 from his coat and pressed it into Fritz’s hands.
“A pause in the fighting doesn’t mean the end of the war,” Nil continued. “People can’t detach from their feelings that easily. Decades can pass, but the mental wounds of war don’t heal, and their souls will continue to erode. Those who fought on the battlefield, those who suffered on the home front, those waiting for relatives to return home—they’ll all continue to curse the war their entire lives. If you want revenge, now’s the time. Shoot him with this gun before you lose sight of him.”
Jörg pleaded wildly:
“You had to kill each other on the front lines. I’ve also killed enemy soldiers who left their families behind in their hometown. Which is precisely why we must not kill each other after the war. There’s no reason why you should be the only one who gets revenge. Come on, Fritz. You’re not your normal self now. You’re not all here.”
In the next instant, Milos moved like a flash, grabbed Fritz’s wrist, and twisted. He slipped behind him and pushed him face down, pinning him to the ground with a knee. Fritz struggled like a massive fish out of water, spitting insults. Just seeing how violently Fritz struggled made Jörg realize how important a friend Norbert had been to him, speaking to a pain that burned Jörg’s chest. That resigned Fritz who so calmly talked about his memories with Norbert was nowhere to be seen. Beyond respecting Norbert as an artist, he must have relished a sense of friendly competition and hoped to compete as rivals after leaving the army. That opportunity had been lost forever. And a Frenchman had stolen it from him. Hubert might not have been the one who shot Norbert, but a French soldier certainly had.
Jörg thrashed wildly inside his corpus. He couldn’t stay in there anymore. He had to find some way out…
An unbearable sensation like all of his skin tearing away tormented Jörg as he almost broke free from his corpus. Pain assaulted the entirety of his body as it slowly ripped apart. And then Jörg tumbled out of his corpus.
The assault of breaking through Nil’s magic agonized Jörg’s corpus as well. Jörg pushed his dizzy, wavering corpus down to the sidewalk, gripping the man’s chest with both hands.
“Why? Why would you believe anything Nil says?”
Jörg’s corpus stared up in wide-eyed disbelief, mouth agape. He obviously hadn’t understood the situation.