Black Bullet, Vol. 1: Those Who Would Be Gods (11 page)

The only reason Rentaro, who was completely average in athletic and shooting ability, had been able to survive this long as a civil officer was that his hunches were never wrong. That hunch told Rentaro to get away from this place as quickly as possible. “Enju, it’ll take a little longer, but let’s go home from the other side—”

“Catch her!” At almost the same time a rough voice screamed these words, the crowd broke apart and a single girl ran out. The girl was carrying a supermarket basket full of food. The logo on the basket was from a large chain that Rentaro had also been to before.

When the girl looked at Enju and Rentaro standing in her way, she stopped suddenly. Rentaro couldn’t move, feeling as if he had been bound hand and foot. She was wearing a denim skirt with a leather belt and a tasteful white tunic. However, her face was sooty, and her clothes bore similarly sooty stains that made it unclear when the clothes had last been washed, and there were signs of repairs in many places. Like the food she was currently hugging close to her, they had probably also been stolen.

He could tell at a glance that she was a child who lived in the Outer District. In addition, the girl’s eyes that reflected Rentaro and Enju were wine-red. Like Enju, she was one of the Cursed Children.

The countless hands that reached out from behind ended their long face-off. When the grown men and women used their hands to violently push down her back, even Rentaro could hear the sad creak of her bones clearly. The fruits and vegetables fell out of the basket around Rentaro’s feet.

“Let go!” The girl’s handsome face, which had been forced to lick the asphalt, twisted, and she bared teeth like a tiger’s as she thrashed and raged. Not a single onlooker had pity for her.

“You thief! You’re the trash of Tokyo Area.”

“All right, good job! Take that, you stupid Gastrea.”

“Shut up! Stop screaming, you murderer.”

“If only you Red-Eyes didn’t kill all my relatives…”

“Go to hell, you Red Devil!”

Rentaro tapped the shoulder of someone near him. “Hey, why is she…?”

“What do you mean, why? That brat stole food and then half-killed the security guard who tried to stop her!”

Looking at Enju’s face, it was pale, as he expected, and she was shaking. At that moment, the girl whose name they didn’t even know looked at Enju.

As long as one of the Cursed Children hid her red eyes, she looked just like a normal girl on the outside. That was why there was no way she could have known that Enju was one of the Cursed Children by looking at her. But for some reason, the girl looked at Enju and reached out her freed hand, asking for help.

Rentaro quickly brushed that hand away and glared at her.
Stop it. Don’t get Enju involved
.

The girl drew a sharp breath and looked at Rentaro’s expression, her fear clearly showing.

“What in the world are you all doing?” At the moment, police officers cut through the crowd to settle the situation. The pair consisted of a skinny man with glasses and a well-built man with a crew cut. Rentaro calmed his heart, thinking inside that this lynch-mob-like situation would finally end. However, the police officer with glasses let out a cold “Oh” as he saw the now-silent crowd holding the girl down and lording it over her. Forcing the girl to her feet, strangely without even really asking the people around what had happened, he put handcuffs on her wrists.

Giving the dumbstruck Rentaro a sideways glance, the man with the glasses saluted a representative of the crowd with thanks, pushed the girl into the police car, and drove off. Did that police officer really know what crime the girl had committed?

After the girl disappeared, the onlookers dispersed in twos and threes after grumbling to themselves. It all happened in a flash. Afterward, only Rentaro and Enju remained. There was no helping it. There was nothing he could have done about it. Feeling uncomfortable, he pulled Enju’s hand to go home. As he did, he looked to his side, surprised. Enju had her hands in fists and was glaring at Rentaro.

“Why didn’t you help that girl, Rentaro?!” she shouted at him.

Rentaro was overpowered. Her eyes had turned a pale red. The people who were scattering looked back their way with suspicious expressions on their faces. Rentaro felt shaken but forced it down inside. “It’s nothing,” he said, willing them to believe him.

Rentaro took Enju’s arm and pulled her into an alleyway between two buildings. From the exhaust pipe came a smell that bothered him. “It couldn’t be helped, Enju. Under those conditions, if they found out your identity, they would have lynched you, too.”

“But you hit away the hand of someone asking for help!” she said.

“There are things that I can and cannot do! Besides, what she did was definitely a crime! Even if the environment of the Outer District is bad, it’s still illegal to commit a crime.” Without thinking, he replied with logic even though he knew it would only put fuel into the fire of Enju’s anger.

Enju shook her head fiercely. “That’s just an excuse. If you wanted to save her, you would have been able to. You are a champion of justice. There is nothing you cannot do!”

“Don’t force your childish illusions on me. I can’t do anything… I can’t do a single thing.” With that, Rentaro suddenly returned to himself. Enju was holding back her sobs as she cried. As he reached out his hand to her shoulder, she stepped away from him.

“Hey, Enju… Could it be… Did you know her?” he said, unsure.

But Enju nodded as she cried. “When I lived in the Outer District, I saw her around. I never talked to her, but she remembered me, too.”

“I can’t believe it. But… But when I hit her hand away, I was desperate. I wasn’t thinking that deeply into it…” Rentaro couldn’t talk anymore after looking at Enju’s eyes. He asked the conscience in his own heart. He didn’t need much time to make a decision. “Enju, can you go home by yourself?”

“Huh?” she said.

Before he knew it, his legs were moving on their own. He dashed out of the alley, and looking quickly left and right, his eyes rested on a boy riding a scooter waiting at a traffic light. Tapping him on the shoulder and making him turn around, Rentaro immediately flashed his civil officer license. “I’m a civsec officer. A Gastrea has appeared in the area, and I need to borrow your scooter.”

“H-hey, wait. What’re you talking about?” said the boy.

“Looking at your build, you’re still in middle school, aren’t you? Think we can settle this peacefully?” Getting agreement from the flinching boy, Rentaro took the scooter from him violently. With a roar of the engine, he made a U-turn and turned it to face the direction the police car had gone earlier.

He didn’t put on a helmet, and he ignored the traffic laws. If he were stopped, he could thrust his civsec license in their faces and make them understand the situation, but he would lose a lot of time.

Weaving dangerously through traffic, Rentaro’s heart was beating hard with nervousness about a danger worse than a collision. Why did the police take the girl away without asking the girl or the victim a single question? What was behind the excessively simplified procedure? Also, it looked like where Rentaro was heading now was not an important police station or even a local police station. If he kept going this way, he would get closer and closer to the Outer District.

Rentaro prayed to the god he didn’t even believe in.
Please let me be worrying needlessly.
Even as he thought this, the Monolith barrier that had looked so far away grew larger and larger, and there were traces here and there of buildings that had been destroyed and abandoned. The dark side of the flourishing Tokyo Area, the Outer District.

Just as he started thinking maybe he had passed them somewhere, he twisted around and discovered a police car parked next to a radio tower that had been bent in half. Rentaro put the brakes on about thirty meters before he reached it in order to keep from making too much noise. Then, he hid the scooter in what appeared to be the ruins of a gas station and approached carefully.

He wondered why he was sneaking around like this, but for now, he trusted his hunch. He approached the police car, going around through the dilapidated buildings in front of him and cutting in. The first floor of one of the buildings he passed through was only exposed steel beams, and the concrete walls inside were scraped away, with wallpaper and wiring drooping like a horror movie. When he touched it with his hand, something plasterlike peeled off and crumbled away. It was hard to believe that it had only been abandoned for ten years. It was dead silent around him, and there was no sign or shadow of people anywhere.

Crouching as he approached the police car, he peeked inside, but as he suspected, neither the girl nor the police officers were inside. Disgusted with himself for being inwardly relieved, he turned his attention to the radio tower facility, and began moving toward it. Going under the broken iron fence, he heard unexpected voices and hurriedly leaned his back against a nearby wall.

Slowly peeking around the corner, he saw the backs of the skinny spectacled officer and the crew cut officer. A little distance away, made to stand in front of the iron fence, was the girl from earlier, unmoving. She must have had some idea of what was going to happen to her, and turned pale and shook with uneasiness.

The officers with their backs facing him turned quiet, and Rentaro gulped in the uneasy atmosphere. As he frowned, wondering what in the world would happen next, the silence was suddenly broken by a gunshot.

Blood gushed from the girl’s head, and she fell to her knees. She slowly touched her head and looked at the blood that dripped from it, trying desperately to understand what had just happened. Then, like raindrops came a rush of bullets, and her stomach, chest, arms, and legs were riddled with holes. Her body twitched as if she had been shocked, and she was thrown into the iron fence behind her.

“Shit, she’s still alive?!” As the skinny spectacled officer approached her, he shot three more bullets into her head. The girl fell forward onto the ground, and as a torrent of blood flowed out from where she landed, she stopped moving.

Rentaro covered his mouth with both hands, swallowing the scream that wanted to spill out of him.

The police officers looked as if they had been cursed by something and looked left and right, quickly running away from the scene.

With shaking legs, Rentaro walked over to the girl, got on his knees, and put his hands together.
Damn it
, Rentaro cursed inwardly. Holding her upright, he hugged her, not caring about getting his clothes dirty. He could feel her body growing cold from blood loss, and Rentaro shook with the rage that welled up within him.

Wasn’t it the job of the civsec officers to bring justice to the innocent citizens? To protect the innocent citizens? And be a champion of justice?
Damn it, why the hell did I just watch? I did nothing while a child was being murdered in front of my own eyes! What is right? What is wrong? Who is the enemy I should defeat, anyway?

Rentaro succumbed to his unbearable thoughts and shook his head vehemently. At that moment, the girl in his arms choked and coughed up blood. Rentaro opened his mouth slightly. She was alive. She could still be saved. Before he knew it he was running, the girl in his arms.

IT WAS AROUND 2:00 A.M.

In the spring night’s lingering chill, so unlike the daytime weather, Rentaro staggered home. He didn’t know if it was from exhaustion or not, but he had an almost unbearable thirst and a pounding headache. A lot happened that day, so it could have been the aftershocks of everything.

Now that he thought about it, holding a thirty-something kilogram girl in one arm and driving a scooter took extraordinary strength, but in his desperation, he hadn’t felt her weight. It was probably the same as how some people drew out great strength during a house fire.

As soon as the girl reached the hospital, the ER doctors took her, and she disappeared into the operating room. As the operation took place, Rentaro sat on a chair in the hall being asked questions by another doctor. The doctor made an unpleasant expression when he heard that the girl was from the Outer District and had no relatives. Occasionally, if they operated on an orphan from the Outer District with no family registry, let alone insurance, they would not be able to get the operation fee from anyone, and the hospital would have to bear the cost. If Rentaro had not said he would cover the cost at that time, at the last moment, he probably would have been fed the transparent lie that there were no surgeons available.

At the end of the eight-hour-long operation, the girl narrowly escaped death. The fact that the bullets were small in caliber, that they were not Varanium but regular lead shots, that as one of the Cursed Children, she had miraculous powers of regeneration, and that she had a tough skull—if any one of those factors were lacking, she would
not have been saved, the surgeon who operated on her explained. Thankfully, the graying doctor was someone who understood the circumstances. He said, “You should tell the police who it was who shot her as soon as possible,” but Rentaro only said good-bye with a bitter smile.

He was honestly glad that she had been saved, but he couldn’t completely rejoice when he thought of the operation fee and the cost of the hospital stay that he would have to pay later. On the highway in the middle of the night, Rentaro conscientiously stopped at the traffic light, but looking around, there were no signs of pedestrians or even cars anywhere.

After a while, he finally saw his eight-tatami-mat apartment. The lights were off. Of course, Enju would not be awake so late into the night, but he had hoped that maybe she would be, so he felt a tinge of loneliness.

“You seem tired, Satomi.”

He drew his gun reflexively and pointed it at the voice. Looking slowly behind him, there was a gun pointed at the tip of his nose, as well.

Before it had been customized, it had probably been a Beretta, and in the gas port at the top, there was a muzzle spike attached for close quarters combat. On the large stabilizer to reduce the kickback at the mouth of the gun, there was a bayonet housing attachment. There was also a long extension magazine with extra bullets. On the left side of the slide, there was a party seal that said, “Give the life with dignity.” On the right, it said, “Otherwise, give the death as a martyr.” Embedded in the grip was a medallion modeled after the evil god, Cthulhu. Sharp spikes covered the angles of the weapon. And the one holding the gun was—