“I am not going to get along with you.”
“Whaaat?!”
The abandoned mine was as quiet as the surrounding mountains. The clatter of the mine’s workers was long forgotten, as was the smell of dust that likely permeated the place, having been replaced by the refreshing smell of the trees.
“Wait a second. Why didn’t you just grab the book while it was still at your house?” Pyrovault asked, looking at Untitled in the hands of the one-eyed man.
“I had to leave it there. If I hadn’t, Hitsugi would not have opened the book and drawn Second to my house, nor would Second have gone to investigate the trees I get this paper from…which Noary calls Duplicator Trees,” Asahi Fujinaka said.
The hook-nosed man cocked his head. “I’m not following… Can you manipulate fate or something?”
“No, nothing of the sort. I just wrote the event ‘Asahi Fujinaka obtains Duplicator Trees’ into Second’s timeline. That means I bound myself to that fate, too, if just slightly. I didn’t know how I would obtain the Duplicator Trees, just that I would.” Asahi Fujinaka laughed jovially.
Pyrovault shot him a cold look. “And now your wife’s dead and the doll you created to be your daughter hates you. Was it really worth it?”
“Those were unfortunate sacrifices,” he said, looking up at the sky. There was no hint of regret in his voice. “Pyrovault, Vanit Slayer killed your son, right? Is it revenge that fuels your desire to kill him?”
Pyrovault waved his hands in protest. “Oh, stop. I ain’t that sentimental. I mean, that sword was dragging him around like a rag doll. He’s already suffering a fitting fate, too. Ninety percent of me wants to kill him just ’cause I want a good fight.”
“Is the final ten percent for your son?”
“Kind of…? I wouldn’t call it ‘revenge.’ Killing the kid’s just… I don’t know… It feels like something I should do as a parent. Does that make sense?”
“You wanted to try being a normal person?”
“Yeah, that’s it!” Pyrovault said, snapping his fingers.
Asahi Fujinaka smiled bitterly. “I’ve been there. But the attempt left you feeling surprisingly—”
“Bored,” the two men said together. They both laughed.
“Maybe that’s what it’s like to yearn for something. The feeling is always most beautiful before you obtain it,” Asahi Fujinaka said.
“You’re wrong. That’s only true if you dirty your hands on your way to achieving your goal. That’s what ulterior motives do. Right now, my passion is killing, and yours is research. Anything we truly desire will shine brightly in our hands if we obtain it the right way,” Pyrovault said, puffing out his chest.
Asahi Fujinaka smiled sadly. “…It’s that light that’s the problem. It draws me like a moth to a flame.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pyrovault looked at the one-eyed man, but he didn’t say anything else. “Eh, whatever. I’m going to sleep. I doubt you need a bodyguard right now.”
“Yeah. Goodnight,” he replied as Pyrovault turned around and walked away. When his footsteps faded from earshot, Asahi Fujinaka was once again left in the silence of night.
Relying on the light of the moon, he walked a short distance and stopped beneath a water storage tank located behind the workshop. He closed his eyes and Untitled glowed in his hands. It then opened and produced a middle-aged woman wearing an apron. Her wavy shoulder-length hair blew in the breeze.
Her cheeks were wrinkled by stress, but her big powerful eyes distracted from them. Those eyes and the rest of her features closely resembled Hitsugi Fujinaka.
Asahi Fujinaka’s one eye lit up with joy, but there was hesitance in his expression as well.
The woman looked bewildered, unable to process the situation she had just been dropped into, but as soon as he saw Asahi Fujinaka and Untitled in his hands, her face fell sadly.
“Oh… I see.”
“Yes. It turned out I couldn’t escape my nature as a madman…”
It was Tsumugi Sasaki—the woman who had been his fake wife.
Grave Nest didn’t allow its members to retire easily, so when Asahi Fujinaka had declared his intention to do so, its leaders had offered him a compromise: the position of CEO of Grave Nest’s new front company. He considered it a fair offer that reflected Asahi Fujinaka’s achievements in the organization.
When he accepted it, Tsumugi Sasaki had been assigned to him as an observer and point of contact with Grave Nest. Their marriage was a guise, a falsehood. Yet, sometimes, a falsehood can become a reality. Tsumugi had only been assigned to live with him for five years but ended up staying with him for another fifteen. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why.
“What happened to our daughter?” Tsumugi asked.
“She’s alive. But she learned the truth of her existence.”
A dry slap echoed through the night as Tsumugi struck Asahi Fujinaka.
“I despise you,” she said.
“…”
Those words pierced Asahi Fujinaka’s heart, but he accepted them with a sad expression.
All his life, he had been a man who couldn’t contain his curiosity. He would find himself doing anything to satiate it, even if it meant ignoring all sense of danger or morality.
Others complimented his inquisitiveness until they learned that he was willing to risk human lives in the pursuit of knowledge. That quickly shut people up. They had only one word for him after that: madman.
No one believed it, but he did possess a general sense of morality. At least, that was what he thought. But when his curiosity gripped him, it overwrote that sense. That was how he was able to distinguish himself in Grave Nest, an organization full of researchers willing to conduct inhumane experiments.
But when his curiosity subsided, he was always left with a certain feeling. That he was fundamentally different from other people. That he truly was a madman.
That was the reason he wanted to leave Grave Nest. As long as he conducted research for that organization, the mad side of him would continue to manifest. He was tired of living with that feeling. He wanted to quit his research, place himself into an environment that would not stimulate his curiosity, and bury his madman tendencies however deep he could.
The attempt had actually succeeded…for a little over twenty years anyway. He had been able to use the final product of his curiosity—Untitled—and repress his urges to live a relatively normal life. Occasionally the scales of his mind tipped in favor of curiosity over ethics, such as when he created his child, Hitsugi, but he didn’t do anything that harmed other people.
Having Tsumugi—a woman he truly loved—was a major part of that. She was his rock. Yet even so…in the end, he couldn’t escape his true self.
Thirteen years after he made Hitsugi, inspiration struck him with an idea that threw off all his inhibitions. That was when his plan, which he knew most would consider evil, began.
“I could tell you to quit, but I know you won’t listen,” Tsumugi said.
“That’s right. I can’t stop. I’ve got something I have to try, no matter the cost.”
“I’ll say it anyway: Please stop. Whatever you’re doing. Nothing can possibly be worth killing me and who knows how many other people. It’s not right. I’m begging you. Just this once, restrain yourself.”
Asahi Fujinaka closed his one remaining eye. He felt pain in his missing right eye, which he’d crushed himself for an experiment long ago.
“…I can’t. My desire to do this is too strong.” He opened his eye, which glittered as brightly as the stars with the light of curiosity.
This time, it was Tsumugi’s turn to shut her eyes.
That was Asahi Fujinaka in a nutshell. Was this the destiny of a person born as a madman? He was incapable of repressing even his worst tendencies and had tried and failed to avoid this path in life. Perhaps he was just another victim of a fate written in stone.
“It won’t make a difference…if I tell you to just force yourself to quit?” Tsumugi asked.
“No. I can’t possibly do that after coming this far.”
Tsumugi shook her head, her shoulders slumping drooped dejectedly…then she slashed a dagger at his neck in a blur of speed. A dull thunk broke the silence of the night.
“You better thank your lucky stars I noticed you bein’ all weird and followed you. The hell’s going on here? Who’s she?”
The dagger had been blocked by a thick arm belonging to Pyrovault, who had approached without either of them noticing.
“I wasn’t acting suspiciously. And this is my wife,” Asahi Fujinaka said.
“Your wife?” Pyrovault turned his beady eyes on the one-eyed man. “Didn’t she die ’cause of your plan? Why’d you summon her? You’re just gonna make things harder on yourself.”
“I summoned her because I wanted to. That is all.”
“Eh? …You make no sense at all, man. If you can create any kind of person you want, at least make her so she won’t try to slit your throat.”
“I could do that. But…unpredictability is what makes other people interesting.”
“Huh?”
“Sorry for worrying you. I’m done here.”
Asahi Fujinaka placed a hand on Untitled’s cover, and Tsumugi’s form began to distort. The sadness that had seeped into his expression mere moments ago was nowhere to be seen, making him look just like an aloof middle-aged man enjoying life to the fullest. Even Pyrovault was thrown off by his inexplicable behavior. The only person who understood the true emotion beneath his mask was Tsumugi Sasaki, who was currently reverting to a string of text and disappearing.
He was all alone.
That was his punishment for walking the path of a madman. No one would understand him or even see the value in trying. Loneliness. There was no other life available to him.
Tsumugi looked up at the crescent moon as she faded away. It glowed unmatched in the sky, forbidding the approach of even a single cloud. Try as one might to reach up and touch it, it would remain forever out of reach.