Reina looked directly into Higano’s blue eyes, but her focus was somewhere else.
“However, even though I had done this all for myself…I reached my mental limit. No matter how good I was at repressing my feelings, I couldn’t escape the guilt of killing my mother. It hurt to be around my dad. I ran away from home to try to reset my life.”
“It wasn’t your average running away, was it?”
“No, it wasn’t. I’d thought about turning the Bumblebees into Reina Myoko. I prepared for a long time. I never appeared in photos. I didn’t let anyone get to know me or even notice me. I wanted other people to not know if I had really existed or not. And I knew it was possible to pull this off with my own ability to amplify my presence, seem larger-than-life. Once I had made the Reinas, I could take revenge on all the people who had demeaned my father. Of course, there were many ways to take revenge. But I guess it was just like me to choose this rather ridiculous method of creating the Reinas.”
Basically it was her “nature.”
Nevertheless, her desire to avenge her father and her guilt over killing her mother made her seem more human. Reina was far-removed from the mystique her initial impression gave off.
“It might be weird to say this, but it was fun to watch everything work out even better than I’d dreamed it would. The Bumblebees became even better Reinas than I imagined, and they gradually turned that unexpected revenge into a reality. At times they even exceeded my imagination.”
The problem was—
Obviously, what didn’t add up was—
“Ha…ha…haha,” Higano began to laugh.
He reached for the attache case under his desk. He entered a code into the lock and took out the contents.
Inside the case was a masquerade mask, the kind that rich people wore at parties. The mask was dazzlingly decorated with jewels and a golden butterfly. This was what had earned Higano the nickname Masquerade.
He put it on.
Under the mask, Higano’s smile widened, broadening from his usual grin into an innocent expression that clashed with his cold demeanor. Most people would consider this look, so different from his usual, charming.
But Higano himself, his eyes twinkling as he smiled, thought he looked ugly with this expression of pure joy. He didn’t want to be seen this way in public.
Yes, the mask was a way for Higano to hide his face.
“Ahhhhaha…haha.”
Truth always stripped itself bare before Higano’s superior intellect. It was automatic for his mind, incredibly simple, monotonous work. And for Higano, all of life was merely a repetition of that monotonous work.
However, on rare occasions—extremely rare occasions—Higano discovered an unexpected answer in the truths he compulsively drew from the world. He was overjoyed when he encountered these answers. They were the only time he ever felt alive.
“You’re Reina Myoko. Which means this.” He tried to suppress a smile beneath the mask. “The Reinas copying your life are trying to kill the original Reina.”
The blood drained from Reina’s face.
Higano thought of the Japanese foliage spider. Before giving birth, the females built leaf nests shaped like rice dumplings, making an enclosed space where they lay their egg sacs. After the children are born, they begin to eat the only source of nutrition in the tiny space: their own mother. They devour the mother’s innards and kill her. For the mother, the nest she made herself as a breeding space was also her own coffin.
Just like these women. After giving up their past selves and taking on new lives as Reina Myoko, they no longer had any need for the parent who produced them. They stole her name, her life—everything.
The problem wasn’t Reina Myoko.
It was the Bumblebees.
The Reinas, counterfeits from the very beginning, were clearly unnatural.
“They peeled off my mask and didn’t need me anymore.”
This was the worst-case scenario Reina had to face.
“I was extremely skilled at misdirections, but the Reinas I created weren’t. The Reinas weren’t duplicates of me—they were copies of my illusion of Reina. The illusion of Reina was greater, more pure, more capable, and more beautiful than me, the real thing. The girls who faithfully copied this illusion surpassed me before long. They each became monsters of their own creation. Monsters that manipulated people and things as they desired and had the ability to destroy others in brutal, cunning ways.”
Reina’s shapely lips were quivering.
“I, on the other hand, was unable to get over my attachment to my father. Rather than become a monster like them, I returned to our relationship. Then I even got pregnant…and of course I wanted to have a child with the person I loved. But I couldn’t make things more difficult for him. So after much hard consideration, I aborted it. The sense of loss I felt once the baby was gone was awful and I was overcome with a sense of emptiness. I felt that nothing mattered anymore.”
Reina looked into Higano’s blue eyes and said, “I decided to stop being Reina Myoko.”
“But the Reinas wouldn’t let you exist that way.”
“Yes. It didn’t matter that all they saw of me was just an illusion; that didn’t change the fact that I was Reina Myoko. I had shackled them. But when I tried to escape, they finally realized the critical thing was to maintain the system of Reinas we’d created—to eliminate my real existence behind the illusion. The real Reina Myoko was actually an obstacle for their future development and ability to become a sanctified ‘Reina Myoko.’”
It was a crazy story.
Much stranger than Higano could have predicted himself.
Which is why he was smiling under his mask.
“It’s starting to make sense. I imagined that the Bumblebees were unusual, but other than trying to kill you, was there anything particularly monstrous that they did?”
Reina nodded. “One made hundreds of millions through the secret club of celebrities.
“Another got into politics as a secretary and plotted to take down a political party through a member of the National Diet.
“And a third hijacked the aims of a massive humanitarian aid group and was trying to incite a war.”
“They were serious threats,” Higano said.
They seemed worse than serial killers, he thought, but he quickly laughed and realized that it was comparing six of one, half dozen of the other.
“They no longer have any feelings. They have no true selves. They are a system, and not even I, their creator, can stop them. However, as the one who brought them into the world, I have to do something about these monsters. I was about to give up, but it looks like I might have one last chance.”
Reina had seemed hopeless, but now there was determination in her eyes.
“Please, Mr. Serial Killer,” she pleaded, bringing her hands to her heart. “Please kill me—kill Reina Myoko.”