She was plainly, undeniably disappointed in my answer. Joanne let out a long, heavy sigh and threw herself back into the torture chair.
“Let me put it to you in plain terms,” she said. “The cult, the Orthodoxy side—none of that ever mattered to me in the first place. I couldn’t care less. Everything except my future with you is garbage.”
“What?” I froze at the sudden confession. While my mind struggled to catch up, Joanne went on, a mad grin twisting across her face.
“All I want is eternity with you. I don’t need anyone else. Every other human being can disappear for all I care.”
This was the conclusion reached by the new Joanne. A chaos that had slipped completely off the rails of my own thought patterns now stood before me, wearing the shape of a girl I knew, and it brought with it a terrifying answer.
“Which means,” she said softly, “the faction that should win… is the third camp. Oakley Faction. We destroy the Kenneth Orthodoxy and the Aros Temple Cult. That loathsome phoenix of the Orthodoxy faith, the beloved cult founder I used to adore, every last one of them dies. The people of the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid… No, every human being in the entire world dies. The only ones who need to win are us. A small world for just the two of us. That’s the only true happy ending.”
The worst kind of chaos.
The silent, unseen fusion of our minds had surfaced in the ugliest possible form, and now it had started to drag me toward a future I knew nothing about.
“W-What… are you even talking about?” I asked.
Joanne was spitting out utter nonsense. I couldn’t follow her at all. It felt like the floor had vanished beneath my feet and I’d been dropped straight into an endless abyss.
Weren’t we the ones who staked our lives to melt our minds together, to share a single self? Weren’t we supposed to be partners with no secrets, bound together by fate?
“Oakley Faction…? You’re planning to trigger an internal split and drag things into even deeper chaos?”
“That’s right. Everyone in the cult trusts me. If I just keep my head down and play along until we’re ready, I think it’ll be easy to carry out the plan. Don’t you?”
“I mean…”
Joanne’s thick-soled boots tapped and scraped against the stone floor. That hard, clacking sound gnawed at my nerves. It merged with the pounding of my own heart and echoed in my skull, unbearably grating.
She walked over to where I’d unconsciously backed up against the wall and hopped onto the desk beside me. Letting her legs swing like a pendulum, she went on in a light, almost chatty tone.
“I’ve been thinking, you know. If we’re gonna wipe out the Aros Temple Cult and then live out our twilight years, there’s not much reason to cling to this idea of coexisting with the Kenneth Orthodoxy. You, Oakley… You were vaguely planning to wipe out the heretics and then just sort of drift over to the orthodox side, weren’t you?”
“That’s…”
“Let me flip it around and ask you instead. Why are you so hung up on defecting to the Orthodoxy? If surviving is all you care about, those guys are more likely to be dead weight than anything else. Or is there some reason I don’t know about? Some reason you just must cling to the Kenneth Orthodoxy…”
Joanne laced her fingers together and looked up at me from beneath her lashes, a gesture meant to shake me, to pull at my composure.
Now that our two minds had blended, the current Joanne was a warped mirror of my own true feelings.
I knew the answer to her question. It’d be stranger if I didn’t.
The reason I’m so fixated on the Kenneth Orthodoxy—
Because I carried knowledge of the original story, I understood the Orthodoxy far better than most. I had a solid grasp on their internal workings, more or less. With no fear of unknown threats on that side, of course, I was drawn to them, clinging to what felt “safe.”
“People who try to play nice with everyone never last long,” she continued. “Deep down, you’d already noticed, hadn’t you? Even if you keep going like this and manage to destroy the Aros Temple Cult, there won’t be any safe haven waiting for you on the other side, with the Kenneth Orthodoxy.”
What I’d brushed off as a proposal born from pure insanity, the founding of a third power, started to gain a disturbing weight, a terrible sort of plausibility, with every word she spoke.
“Don’t underestimate the absolute organizational power of the Orthodoxy. Those guys will hunt you to the ends of the earth and demand the execution of the one most responsible for destroying Daskel. Compared to the Aros Temple Cult, they’re a legitimate institution, but they show no mercy to anyone who defies them. They’ll keep coming until they’ve confirmed your corpse with their own eyes.”
Even so, I wanted the Kenneth Orthodoxy to win.
If Aros’s ambitions were ever fully realized, the millions of orthodox believers living in this country would be led straight to extinction. If stopping that calamity meant piling up sacrifices along the way, I was willing to pay the price.
If the Orthodoxy didn’t win, there was no point in me surviving at all. That conviction swirled in my chest like a dark vortex.
“And there’s your lifespan problem,” Joanne went on. “If you’ve got the wrong idea, I’m sorry to break it to you, but a human lifespan isn’t the time you stay healthy up to the moment you die.”
Once the topic of a lifespan came up, it was only natural to focus on a natural and healthy one.
A healthy lifespan would then be the span of years a person could live their daily life without needing anyone’s help.
Take Japan, for example, with an average ten-year gap between healthy lifespan and total life expectancy. In other words, for people born from gestation sacs like us, the average lifespan might correspond to a physical age of around thirty, but the period we could live healthily and independently would be even shorter than that. That was what Joanne was getting at.
People born in the facilities had their bodies pushed past their natural limits with drugs to accelerate their growth. As a result, the breakdown of their cells, from aging and every other cause, was accelerated too. I’d heard that believers who ended up bedridden early from the backlash of those drugs, unable to sustain their basic bodily functions, were turned into feed for the gestation sacs.
I was eighteen. Realistically, I had maybe twelve years of life left. But the window during which I could afford to throw my body around recklessly was far shorter.
“You don’t have nearly as much time left as you think to just retire and relax somewhere. At best, the next few years are going to be your peak, Oakley. And with all the crazy crap you’ve already put yourself through, who knows when things are going to start giving out. But with my plan, we can solve your lifespan problem. That’s what I wanted you to understand.”
So that’s it. I finally understood why Joanne was so set on building a third faction.
She wanted to save me.
The arrow that had once pointed toward Aros had lost its target, and all that force, all that mass of feeling, had swung around to stab into me instead. That was why she could talk about such insane things.
Before all this, I’d believed that once everything was resolved, I could just disappear somewhere, hide myself, and eke out a quiet little life.
But that little fantasy of mine had the usual flaw all daydreams suffer from: it quietly erased the entire process in the middle.
It never stopped to consider the concrete problem of how I’d actually shake off my pursuers. Or maybe deep down, I’d already understood it was impossible, and my subconscious simply gagged and buried any dissenting thoughts.
During her fusion with my mind, Joanne must have felt that contradiction inside me. She’d probably racked her brain, desperate to find a way to resolve it.
The answer she’d arrived at was the annihilation of both Orthodoxy and heresy at the hands of a third power.
A reckless solution from a girl who had decided that everyone except Oakley Mercury could burn.
The promise that she could solve my lifespan problem was tempting.
Human beings cling to life with a ferocity that borders on madness. No one could handle being told they had a high chance of being dead by thirty.
You can never escape death, yet you keep thinking of it as something that happens to other people in other stories. When it finally stands in front of you, just staying sane is a challenge. That’s what “death” really is.
“And how, exactly, do you plan to fix my short lifespan?”
“We take your brain and transplant it into one of the specimens in the incubation tanks. Move your self into a brand-new body. Do that, and you might as well call it eternal life.”
Joanne’s voice tapered off as she looked away. My eyebrow twitched in pure revulsion, and she gave a little flap of her hand, as if to wave off my reaction.
“Relax. I don’t have that kind of tech… yet. It’s just one possible option on the table.”
“Then what is your method?”
“Who knows? I can’t tell you.”… Maybe all she’d really wanted was to see whether I’d bite at the idea of escaping my early death. She’d dangled the bait just to find out whether I’d reach for it or not, and even that simple information, to her, was probably a major gain.
Her small lips curled into a bow-shaped smirk as she savored the fact that she’d found a weakness that might rattle me.
“I’ve killed a lot of people,” I said quietly. “And I made excuses for myself. Told myself it was to save the millions who’d die later otherwise. There’s no going back from that. I don’t get to suddenly start acting like my own life is the thing that matters most.”
“You really will die, you know,” she said. “You don’t want a future where you and I can spend an eternity together?”
“It’s tempting,” I admitted, “but there are things I can’t compromise on, things more important than that.”
The goal of surviving and slipping into retirement somewhere out of sight was something I’d only clung to before I realized my memories had been tampered with.