Ougai grinned. “True. However, you wouldn’t gain anything by disobeying me and going to him, either. Am I wrong?”
“That’s the second thing I wanted to say, Boss. There’s nothing in it for me. There’s only one reason why I’m going. Because he is my friend. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
The guards placed their fingers on the triggers. However, Dazai paid them no mind and simply strolled to the door as if he were going for a walk. The guards looked to Ougai as they waited for orders. Without saying a word, Ougai crossed his arms while he gazed at Dazai’s back with a faint smile. Then Dazai opened the door and walked down the hall until he could be seen no more.
“The last volume was amazing,” I said.
I’d never read a book that drew me in so much. Every word touched my heart, and I saw myself in every character. The man who gave me that book said it was awful, but I felt the complete opposite. I read it in one sitting practically without eating anything all day. The moment I finished the book, I opened it up again to read once more.
It felt as if every cell in my brain was reborn after reading that book. Once I’d finished it, the world I’d known before completely changed. Before that, all I had was killing. I would kill people for the mission—rob them of their lives. That book opened my eyes like the sun at dawn. That last volume had only one flaw. There were a few pages near the end that
were torn out, so I never knew how one of the key scenes unfolded. It was a scene where one of the characters, an assassin, explained why he gave up killing.
There wasn’t enough information on the following pages to guess why he did, and not knowing caused me so much anguish. Not only was that scene an important turning point in the story, but it was also crucial to understanding the assassin. The book was nowhere to be found new or used anymore, so I couldn’t confirm that missing part. That man with the mustache never showed up again, so I couldn’t ask him, either.
After worrying about it for so long, I came to one conclusion.
—“Then you write what happens next.”
I decided to write it myself. I would become a novelist and write a story about why the man stopped killing. But to become a novelist, I needed to sincerely know what it meant to live.
So I stopped killing. There was one line in that last volume right before where the pages had been torn out. It was something the protagonist said to the assassin.
“People live to save themselves. It’s something they realize right before they die.”
I continued to think about what that meant after I vowed never to kill again. There probably wasn’t any deep meaning to it. It was more than likely just a line to connect information with more information. But whenever I read that line, I thought back to the older man who had so mysteriously given me that book. Even now.
Did he know I worked as an assassin? Had he approached me to get me to stop? Was the reason he gave me the last volume, tore out those pages, and told me to write what happens next because he wanted to tell me to save myself? That was what I believed with almost no doubt in my mind.
He had told me his name the first time we met. I had forgotten it for so long, but it was only just recently that I remembered.
His name was Souseki Natsume.
The same name as the name of the author on the cover of that novel.
“I was a hero,” Gide said.
Gide was in a war. He fought for his country and for justice. He fought for his friends who joined him by his side. During a past war that stretched the globe, he had made countless victories and saved countless allies.
Gide was a hero.
He was a soldier who protected his country, fought for its inhabitants, and believed that his destiny was to die for them. During a certain battle, Gide led a mere forty men into battle and conquered a stronghold of six hundred people. He defeated every single one of them and captured the stronghold.
However, that was a scheme thought up by his own allied base. When the country was already finishing up a peace treaty, Gide was used by military staff executive officers in an immoral ploy to crush one of the enemy’s key locations and rob them of their transport network.
Since peace had already been declared, Gide’s actions were deemed a war crime, and allied soldiers were sent to kill him for his betrayal. To ensure their survival, Gide and his forty men had no choice but to plunder the enemies’ equipment, become the enemy themselves, and break through his former allies’ siege.
Numerous soldiers came to kill the traitor. Gide and his men took the enemies’ pistols known as grau geists, donned the enemies’ military uniforms, and fought to the death against their fellow countrymen.
They mimicked the enemy soldiers and became the ghosts of the deceased. Gide and his men killed their pursuers to survive, but they didn’t have anywhere to live. They were criminals of war, dead men, a military with no master. From there, they wandered the lands. They took on dirty work as illegal mercenaries. These former heroes were no more. Their lives, which they were supposed to lay down to protect their country, were used for no one. They just dulled their senses, dirtied their hands, and lost their reputation. Several men in the group even killed themselves. Gide didn’t stop them; he lacked the words to do so.
But there were also those who didn’t die. They were soldiers at heart, and they believed killing themselves would strip them of that right. They fought, suffered wounds, and lost their friends, but they still got back up. It was proof that they were once soldiers, that their blood still drove them to be such militants. They searched for a battlefield—a place to prove they were soldiers—a place that would help them remember who they were even if it meant dying. They became ghosts who wandered the battlefield. Their homeland and pride forever lost, they became spirits of the wasteland in search of an enemy.
Time was still extending endlessly. We continued to foresee and respond to what the other was going to say. Not even a second had gone by in the real world, where I’d just killed the Mimic soldiers while Gide killed the Mafia soldiers. In this world, I got ready to point my gun at Gide, who was surely going to do the same.
“The final moment is near,” Gide said in that world of eternity.
“Tell me one thing, Gide,” I said back. “Did you never want to go after something else? Couldn’t you have changed how you lived your life somewhere down the line? Something different from searching for a battlefield or a place to die…”