Not only was Karamori barely reacting, but he was also showing no sign of wariness toward Nanba, who was practically a stranger. He didn’t seem to care what happened to him at all.
Still, Nanba kept smiling.
“By the way, that’s a pretty flower in your right hand.”
“…A flower?”
Karamori looked at his right hand in confusion and saw that the business card had transformed into a single red rose.
“What…?”
The rose leaped into the boy’s face.
“Ah!”
He reflexively leaned back to dodge, but the rose vanished before it reached his face. His eyes went wide.
“Oh my. What’s going on here?” Nanba said playfully.
Karamori looked up at Nanba and was stunned to see that the entire hospital room was suddenly decorated with colorful flowers. He was understandably bewildered. It had to be some sort of magic trick, but he had no idea how the man had done it.
“Finally, an expression befitting your age! That was a little bit of magic, but not of the variety with which most are familiar.”
Nanba snapped his fingers. The color of the flowers began to fade, then they vanished into thin air. The business card that had turned into a flower was back in Karamori’s hand.
“That was Mirage, sort of like a superpower of mine,” Nanba said. “I can create fun little illusions to mess with people’s minds. I can even make them tangible.”
He snapped his fingers again, and the business card in Karamori’s hands turned into a large bouquet of flowers. Strangely, the boy could feel their weight.
“Well, part of that was a simple magic trick, though,” Nanba said, turning his wrist to reveal a business card on the back of his hand. It had probably been there when he’d made it look like it appeared from out of nowhere. “I’m pretty sure you already pieced this together because of that sword, but there are some strange phenomena in this world that science can’t explain.”
“…”
The boy cast his eyes down at the mention of the sword.
Nanba shook his head. “I’ll save the full rundown for when you’re ready, but I’ll tell you this now: That was an accident. You aren’t responsible for what happened.”
The magical sword Tyrfing even appeared in Norse mythology. It was an ancient blade that had survived right up until the modern age. Through their research in that facility, Noary had figured out some of its powers.
Tyrfing grants its wielder one wish for the privilege of ruining their life. Once drawn, it forces you to slaughter people until its bloodlust is satisfied. The wielder enters a trancelike state during that period, under which they’re helpless to stop the killing.
“…Even though I killed hundreds of people with my own hands?” Karamori asked Nanba.
“You were powerless to resist, weren’t you?”
“But it’s still true that I killed them…”
Karamori wrapped his hands around his knees and buried his head in his lap.
“You can do wrong without being at fault. Yes, you killed those people. But you had no say in the matter and are not to blame. You don’t need to beat yourself up about something you were forced to do. I wanted to make sure you understand that. What you really need to think about is your future,” Nanba said.
“…My future? I don’t have a future. Nothing but bad things are going to happen to me.”
Nanba’s eyebrows rose slightly. No one was supposed to have told the kid about the sword ruining the life of its wielder.
“Why do you think that?” he asked without breaking his smile.
“I can hear some kind of voice. I think it’s the sword’s. It says it wants to destroy me.”
“Right… Yeah, I remember reading that in the report.”
Tyrfing destroyed the lives of its wielders. That was part of its legend from Norse myth, and experimentation had proven it to be true.
Tyrfing did grant one wish to its wielder; however, the wielders experienced nothing but pain and misfortune after that, and it was never long before they met an untimely and gruesome death. There was no avoiding it—no matter how careful the wielder was, Tyrfing would bend fate in unnatural ways to ensure it got its way.
Researchers had locked one wielder in a perfectly secure room with nothing dangerous inside. Within a month, another vanit inside the facility inexplicably went berserk and destroyed the entire room from the outside, killing the wielder. Before that, the wielder had cut the inside of their mouth on a sharp piece of metal that just happened to make its way into their food and gotten into a fistfight with a researcher who just happened to start an argument with them. There was a string of other episodes of misfortune that the researchers had been powerless to stop.
The sword had manipulated fate to ensure they would suffer and die. There was no other explanation.
Nanba looked at Karamori’s right arm. A dark flame-shaped mark was peeking out from underneath his bandage.
It was a marker. The shape grew as wielders went about their normal lives and receded when they suffered misfortune. The larger the mark grew, the more unnatural and absurd the wielder’s misfortune became.
However, Noary had thought of a way to combat this.
“You don’t have to let the sword destroy you. It’s possible to stave off that fate,” Nanba said. “As you mentioned, the sword wants you to suffer, and it’ll do its best to make that happen. But I have a special way for you to avoid that.”
He had intended to have this talk once the boy was further along in his mental recovery, but there was nothing else for it now. He learned toward the bed.
“You can become a Noary special investigator. It’ll be a dangerous job full of painful experiences, but by choosing to subject yourself to that kind of work, at least you won’t suffer misfortune at random. You’ll have control over your painful fate. Maintain a proper balance between your difficult job and everything else, and just maybe, you’ll be able to live a normal life. We’ll give you proper training and support, so—”
“No. I’m not doing that,” the boy refused. His tone left no room for argument. “…I don’t care anymore if I live or die. If the sword wants to destroy me… Let it. It’d be selfish of me to live a happy life after what I did.”
“…Well, I won’t tell you to make a decision right now. Just think about it, okay? I don’t like to watch people suffer.”
The boy kept his head down.
To Shin Karamori, the chirping of the birds outside sounded hollow, and the wind sounded incredibly lonely.
Karamori’s counseling and treatment continued. Nanba visited him many more times, but his mental state didn’t improve much. He was being treated in secret, far from his home, because of his unique circumstances, so he had no friends around to visit and cheer him up, either.
The turning point in his recovery came one month into his stay at the hospital.
It was the height of summer, and though the hospital was air-conditioned, the sunlight streaming through Karamori’s window made his room feel quite hot. He left his room to buy a drink at the convenience store inside the building.
His wounds had almost completely closed, and the full-body pain that had been tormenting him when he was admitted had greatly subsided. He’d grown nearly three centimeters, and his short-sleeved shirt revealed arms that were noticeably more muscular. That was likely the influence of Tyrfing, which was still trying to make him fight. His body was preparing—or rather, being forced to prepare—for the combat it believed to be inevitable.
His heart, on the other hand, remained broken. Nanba gave him a mobile device to contact his friends, but he had no desire to use it. He just spent his days idly. He didn’t even feel like buying his favorite snacks when he went to the store for a drink.
Yet today, something broke his routine.
“Waaah!”
Someone cried out as an avalanche of instant ramen cups fell to the ground next to him. Karamori looked up in surprise, his face showing rare emotion, and saw a woman on the ground in a flower-patterned hospital gown. The IV drip she was hooked up to hadn’t fallen over, but she could have seriously hurt herself.
Karamori instinctively rushed over to her.
“A-are you okay?”