Vol. 1 Chapter 2 – Memoirs of the Sand Wolf

Three years ago, aside from Dias and Cardiel, there had been six other companions. Though there was a year or two of difference between them, they were all boys and girls of roughly the same generation.

At the time, they had not owned anything like a tank. They were a team that hunted small mutants, each taking up their own weapon, such as rifles, machine guns, or flamethrowers.

Cardiel had been the center of the team because of her beauty and intelligence. Dias, on the other hand, was plain in every way. If one had to describe his personality, he was dull-witted but honest and upright. He rarely joined in the conversations. No, to be accurate, he could not join in.

He did his work. His skills were not bad either. However, those who stood outside the circle of others were prone to being looked down on, and within the team, an atmosphere had formed where it was acceptable to take Dias lightly.

There had been many times when even those far less skilled than him had acted as though he should be grateful that they were letting him stay.

Once things reached that point, leaving the team and going elsewhere would probably have been the best choice. But Dias’s skill as a sniper was only decent at best, and it was unlikely that another group would welcome him with open arms. In short, even if he were accepted somewhere else, he would likely be treated no differently than now, like a decoration left sitting there. Being poor with words, he could not imagine himself negotiating a transfer properly either. In the end, although he was dissatisfied, he resigned himself to the current situation.

A single gunshot rang out clearly through the dry air.

Beneath the cross engraved in the scope, a lizard the size of a pig collapsed.

『Good』, Dias muttered, then slowly lowered his rifle. The man standing beside him with binoculars raised shouted,

“Hit!”

But no words of praise came from their companions. There were only voices like『Oh』or『Yeah』said in tones with no real interest, as if to say, good work earning some pocket change. As for Bardo, the older leader whose body was a size larger than the others, something about it seemed to displease him, and he twisted his face in obvious discomfort.

The general flow after defeating a mutant was to cut off its head, place it in a cooler box and exchange it for money at the hunter office. However, no one tried to run over to the corpse fifty meters away. Since Dias had killed it, it had been decided that Dias should go retrieve it. And yet, when they exchanged it for money, the reward was not split eight ways evenly. Bardo took a slightly larger share for himself. It was a selfish arrangement.

When the others defeated a mutant in close combat rather than by sniping, Dias did receive a share, so he could not complain too strongly. Of course, there were plenty of things he wanted to say. If the sniper had taken down the enemy, then would it not be reasonable for one of his companions to take on the role of cutting off its head? But Dias’s thoughts were already occupied by resignation, by the belief that saying anything to these people would be pointless.

“I’ll go.”

He said it in a murmur, not directed at anyone in particular.

“Hurry up.”

Bardo said it with an attitude that made it sound as though Dias had inconvenienced him.

Dias gave no reply. He picked up the cooler box and saw, then started forward. From behind him, he heard an exaggerated click of the tongue.

“Ah, Dias…”

Hearing a cute voice unsuited to the bloodstained wasteland, he turned around. There stood a beautiful girl one year older than him, Cardiel, her mouth half-open as if she was unsure what she should say.

Was she going to say she would help him, or perhaps offer some words of appreciation? Just as Cardiel lifted her face as if making up her mind, another female hunter, Alda, cut in between the two of them.

“So, like I was saying. Hey, Cardiel, are you listening?”

She forced the conversation onward with some trivial small talk.

Cardiel gave Dias an apologetic smile that said, 『Sorry』and Dias gave a small shake of his head that said,『It’s always like this』. The fact that she felt even a little sorry in the corner of her heart about how badly he was treated was enough for him. If she forced herself to defend him, Cardiel might also end up being treated poorly within the team. He did not want to drag her into something so stupid.

Only fifty meters.

And yet, the rifle and decapitation kit were heavy enough to dig into his shoulders. Overhead, the scorching sun shone mercilessly and the cracked earth made the footing poor. Thinking that the mutant’s head would be added to the load on the way back made him feel sick of it all.

He always kept the thought in some corner of his mind while hunting, wondering whether there might be a chance to leave the team. Wouldn’t it be better to earn money by sniping alone? What he did would not change but at least he would feel less unpleasant from being looked down on by others.

After thinking it through, the answer he reached was always the same. No. It was too dangerous. He would not always be able to attack one-sidedly from a distance. What would he do if a mutant got close to him? If he were surrounded, certain death would be waiting. Or if trouble broke out with another hunter team, he would be helpless all alone. The reason people could not leave the herd, even while feeling its unfairness, was also to protect themselves.

Work was like having one’s life held hostage. How wonderful it would be if he could simply say,『Those guys piss me off, so I quit』.

Just as he was thinking that, the ground suddenly shook, and Dias lifted his face from the sea of dark thoughts. Something large and black was heading toward his companions. Then, carrying on the wind, he heard gunshots and screams.

What was happening? He did not know. He did not know, but it was something unbelievably terrifying. The temptation to run away alone surfaced in his mind. At the same time, however, he remembered that Cardiel had tried to call out to him when they parted. Apparently, his connection to them as companions had not yet been completely severed.

“…Damn it!”

Dias shouted words that could have been either a curse or self-mockery, threw the cooler box down where he stood, and broke into a run with his rifle in hand.

What attacked the group was an existence known as a medium-sized mutant. It had a spider’s body and a dog’s head, an appalling form. It was a shape that could not exist according to the laws of nature and precisely because it could not exist, it was a mutant.

Its head was no cute little doggy either. Its eyes were bloodshot bright red, its fangs were constantly bared, and drool endlessly streamed down from both corners of its mouth.

A fusion of spider and dog, about two meters tall, came attacking in a rabid state. It was only natural that boys with no experience fighting medium-sized mutants would fall into panic.

One of them was struck by the dog-spider’s charge, slammed against the rock wall and killed instantly. Crushed internal organs spilled from his mouth. Another had his abdomen pierced by a spider leg and was coughing up bloody foam.

“Uwaaaaaah!”

The remaining members screamed and fired their weapons wildly without aiming. The man with the spider leg still stabbed through his abdomen directed a look of hatred at them but they paid no attention. Bullets flew everywhere and the man’s head was trampled by the lead bullets of panic, turning into chunks of flesh. No one heard his final words of curse. No, even if they had heard them, in that state of panic, they likely would not have understood them.

Ignoring the rain of bullets completely, the dog-spider charged even further, until at last it sank its fangs into Cardiel’s leg and lifted her up.

At that instant, the companions finally regained reason within their terror, and hesitation stopped their movements. If they fired now, they would hit Cardiel. But if they did not fire here, the damage would spread even further. As their agitation spread, wondering what they should do, the dog-spider acted as if their feelings meant nothing and sped away with the same tremendous speed as when it had appeared. It was a tragedy that had taken place in just over ten seconds.

As Dias came running back, the dog-spider passed by his side like a black gale. At that moment, he felt as though his eyes met Cardiel’s despair-filled expression. It was only for an instant. He did not even know whether Cardiel was conscious.

Why did our eyes have to meet? If only they hadn’t. The moment he thought that, Dias was seized by violent nausea and covered his mouth. Intense self-loathing attacked him without end. He could not stop feeling sick at himself for thinking that way even at a time like this.

The area was wrapped in a silence that made it hard to believe a savage mutant had been there just moments ago. All that remained were countless shell casings, two corpses and Cardiel’s despair-filled scream stuck deep inside his ears.

There were those whose faces twitched with fear. There were those who wore dim smiles, relieved that they had survived. No one said a word and no one could move from the spot.

Amid it all, Dias bit his lip, gripped his beloved rifle tightly and stared down at his feet. He had been unable to move. He had been unable to do anything. Even if he had raised his rifle when they passed each other, he probably could not have done anything, but that was merely hindsight. He had not even thought of moving.

He felt pathetic. His position up until now had also been terribly pathetic, but that had not been self-loathing as a coward or a sneak. And what would happen now to Cardiel, who had been carried away by the mutant? Most likely, she would be dragged into its nest and made into food. While calling for companions who would never come, she would be eaten alone and die.

Dias raised his face and observed his companions. Every one of them was pretending to worry about Cardiel. Even at this point, they still wanted to remain good people.

“…Well, I guess it can’t be helped.”

His voice came out so bright that even he found it strange. It did not mean that he thought it could not be helped if Cardiel died. Rather, once he resolved that this was the place to throw away his life, all other worries vanished.

He shouldered the backpack he had set down after sniping, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and silently began walking. He headed with firm steps toward the direction in which Cardiel had been abducted.

“Hey, where are you going?”

Bardo called out from behind him, but Dias did not answer. He simply stared straight ahead and pushed onward.

“I’m asking what the hell you think you’re doing!”

His shoulder was roughly grabbed, but he forcefully shook it off. No, it would be more accurate to say he struck the other man’s arm away. Dias, too, could no longer remain calm. Perhaps because Bardo’s legs had gone weak from the terror earlier, he lost balance from the force and landed on his backside.

“Don’t get in my way.”

With a look of contempt, Dias said only that one sentence, then began walking again. Bardo watched him go for a while with his mouth hanging open, dumbfounded. Eventually, when he came back to himself, his face turned crimson and he began shouting.

He said that acting on one’s own would endanger everyone’s lives. If they were going to rescue her, they should make proper preparations before going. If they had discovered a medium-sized or larger mutant, they had a duty to report it to the hunter office. All of it was reasonable. That is, assuming Cardiel had time to spare, and assuming they did not have the eyes of beaten dogs.

“Since when did you get so damn important, you useless piece of crap!”

Bardo deliberately jogged up to him and walked beside him, shouting while spitting.

『That’s my line』, irritation began piling up inside Dias. This man had arbitrarily convinced himself that he was unconditionally superior simply because Dias never said anything, and had acted arrogantly all this time. Dias truly wanted to know since when he had become so important.

When Dias snorted with laughter, perhaps Bardo’s anger reached its peak and his hand moved toward the handgun at his waist. Catching that out of the corner of his eye, Dias turned and swung his rifle up.

He had reached his limit.

And perhaps, somewhere in his heart, he had been waiting for this day.

Dias’s lips lifted slightly and he struck Bardo’s head with the rifle butt. It was the first time he had ever hit someone’s head like that but from the feeling in his hands, he could tell that the skull had cracked.

Blood spurted out, and Bardo crumpled to the ground, as if his strings had been cut. It was a dangerous way to fall, unconscious, but by now, this man’s life was nothing more than a trivial matter to Dias.

The remaining companions looked around, tried to rise, and seemed about to take some sort of action. But in the end, they could do nothing and lost sight of Dias’s back.

There were fresh giant spider footprints that had not yet been carried away by the wind, and marks that looked as though something had been dragged.

As Dias stepped across the dry earth, he asked himself why he was doing this. Even if he managed to save Cardiel, he could not imagine his companions accepting him again. No one would be satisfied. Not his companions, and not Dias himself.

Thinking about it carefully, even when they had fought together as companions, he could not remember ever speaking to Cardiel about anything other than work. At most, perhaps greetings and the weather. Why was he going to rescue someone like that? Even if he succeeded in saving her, there should be no reward waiting for him.

On the other hand, his enemy was a mutant that had slaughtered his companions in an instant and vanished like a storm. It was not something a boy with poor weapons and little experience as a hunter could handle.

Even saying he would save her was practically blind recklessness. About eighty percent of it was nothing more than suicide.

“Really… I’m such an idiot…”

Even as he mocked himself, his feet did not stop. He walked for a while, thinking, and suddenly realized something.

Somewhere in his heart, he was enjoying this situation.

His life was one in which nothing good came from living and there was not the slightest hope that things would improve from here on. He was only alive because he had no particular reason to die.

And now, he had gained a plausible reason.

To go alone and save the beautiful princess carried away by a monster. This was exactly the kind of romance boys dreamed of. The problem was that the princess’s smile would probably never be directed at him but he was already half-intending to die anyway. As long as he had the fact, the excuse, that he had desperately tried to save her, the rest did not matter.

“It can’t be helped, huh.”

He accepted everything. His own fate of death and the fact that he had been disliked within the team. There was no way someone who always seemed to be chasing the shadow of death from the corner of his eye would ever truly get along with them.

He lowered the rifle from his shoulder and lifted it to eye level. Dried blood was stuck thickly to the rifle butt.

“Maybe I did something a little bad…”

He smiled wryly as he said that but the faint guilt soon scattered like mist. He understood why he had been disliked,but there was no reason he had to stay silent when insulted.

A dark smile, almost like defiant acceptance, rose onto his face, and his steps gained even more strength.

To scatter brilliantly in battle. For all those who made killing one another their livelihood, that was a sweet temptation. In that regard, he was not particularly an exception.

However, even after accepting his fate of death, it had to be said that his outlook was still naive. Later, he would be made to realize that within society, where people’s intentions were complexly intertwined, it was difficult to die cleanly and neatly without leaving anything behind.

The place he reached after passing through the sand and dust was a ruin. What had once been a high-rise building had collapsed and was lying on its side. The lower half was buried in sand as well.

Forty stories tall. That was now the width of the building, while the size of each floor had become its height.

Dias entered through a suitable hole in the wall, took a headlight from his backpack and hesitated for a while with it clenched in his hand. The ruined building was full of countless holes and destroyed walls, so a fair amount of sunlight did enter. But that did not change the fact that it was dim inside. Turning on a light meant revealing his own location. So what should he do?

After thinking for a while, he reached the conclusion that, since his opponent was a spider-type mutant, whether there was light or not, it would most likely recognize his presence either way. Even if it made little difference, turning on a light in the enemy’s territory placed a mental burden on him. He forced down his rough breathing, readied his rifle and began searching.

The ceiling and floor were walls, and the walls were the ceiling and floor. Just walking was enough to disturb his sense of direction and make him dizzy. Especially when moving through a staircase room that had fallen sideways, he nearly fell several times despite not tripping over anything.

He carefully advanced, avoiding the broken, collapsed shelves. Anything that might have been useful had been taken away and whatever remained had been destroyed.

He felt as if he had stepped on something like a dry branch, so he looked down and saw discolored bones. With the place in such a ruined state, he could not tell what kind of room it had originally been but now it seemed to have become a restaurant.

“What a joke I can’t laugh at…”

As if shaking off his disgust, he spat out saliva mixed with sand.

Because it was the ruin of a high-rise building that had fallen on its side, it was considerably spacious. He had worried that, if things went badly, just searching it might take several days, but unexpectedly, he found a clue quickly. At a certain point, spider webs were stretched all over the place.

They were not like ordinary webs. The threads were thick enough to look clearly white at a glance. The enemy was close. Sweeping away the spider webs with the tip of his rifle, Dias moved his eyes left and right and advanced even more cautiously.

Before long, the presence grew much stronger. An indescribable stench and lukewarm air enveloped Dias. There was a green, grassy smell unique to insects, different from plants. There was the body odor of a beast. And blended with those was the smell of fresh blood. After inhaling it, Dias’s head began to pound violently.

He entered the room with a sliding step. In the corner, within the darkness, something was writhing. There was the sound of countless things rubbing together. And then, a nichari-nichari sound, wetness and flesh mixing together. Was it the sound of chewing, unlike anything human?

His instincts rang an alarm, telling him he must not go any farther. His heart contracted violently and his mouth was so dry that his tongue stuck to it. Run without looking at anything, and do not turn back. His mind and body made the same proposal together.

Dias did not obey it.

『…I came here so I could die while looking cool. I’ll be damned if I let myself be lumped together with the people who oppressed me』.

A man’s pride. In this situation, it was not merely useless, it was practically harmful and yet it bound Dias in place. He had come this far, even after crushing the head of a companion who had tried to grab him. There was no way he could turn back now.

There was one other reason.

Dias pictured the smile of the flower-like girl his eyes had always followed. He wanted her to live. If he could save her safely, then perhaps even his worthless life would have had at least some meaning.

He wanted her to be happy.

Even if the person standing beside her then was not him.

Once he confirmed what he had to do and the reason he had to do it, his resolve, which had begun to waver, settled into place, and his breathing steadied slightly.

Making up his mind, he readied his rifle.

Ahead of his gaze, within the circle of light cut out by his headlamp, was a spider the size of a fist.

It was a baby spider with a dog’s face.

Several dozen puppy-spiders had gathered in one place, writhing and devouring.

Within the trembling ring of light, at the center of the puppy-spiders’ mad feast, Dias saw Cardiel.

Her left hand remained, but her other limbs had been torn off.

“Hiii!”

Dias let out a pathetic scream and leapt backward. Every plan he had of dying while looking cool vanished completely. All that remained here and now was a fear that clawed at his instincts.

“What is this…? What the hell is this!?”

He muttered to himself, not directing the words at anyone in particular. If he did not let out even a little of his fear, he felt as though he would not be able to stay sane. He could not even be sure whether his two feet were properly planted on the ground.

Illuminated by the headlamp, Cardiel’s pale, emotionless face tilted slightly and turned toward Dias. Her glass-bead-like eyes were looking at him, but whether they actually recognized him was doubtful.

For now, the first thing he had to do was tear the spiders away as quickly as possible. With sweat seeping into his hands, he readied his rifle, hesitated for a moment and then realized how pointless it was.

If he fired, he would hit Cardiel too.

At this point, he had no choice but to brush them off by hand, but to avoid being bitten, he decided to wrap his sunshade cloak around his arm. However, his panic kept getting ahead of him and he could not take it off properly.

While he was preparing for the rescue like this, no one interfered with him. Cardiel’s consciousness was uncertain and the puppy-spiders continued their meal without caring. Carnivorous flies seemed to have gathered as well, hoping to share in the leftovers.

No one was looking at Dias. Not only humans but insects and monsters too. They saw him as nothing more than something that merely happened to be there.

『…Screw this. Every last one of them is ignoring me. Even these damn bugs』.

Seized by intense irritation, he strode over to the puppy-spiders and swept away the one writhing on Cardiel’s stomach with his right hand, tightly wrapped in the cloak.

Then he grabbed another spider, slammed it down, and crushed its body underfoot with his anger and his full body weight behind it. The puppy-spider’s corpse scattered bodily fluids, sending up an acidic, irritating stench.

Its spider body had been crushed into a mess, and only its dog’s head rolled away.

Only after he had gone that far did they finally recognize Dias’s presence and the danger he posed. Like scattering baby spiders, they all fled at once. The spiders, dozens of them, vanished so perfectly that he could no longer even tell where they had gone.

He brushed away the carnivorous flies buzzing around and checked Cardiel’s condition.

Her clothes had been devoured along with her flesh, so rather than wearing them, it was more like rags were clinging to her. The bite marks on her pale breasts and stomach, visible through the gaps, looked agonizing.

However, surprisingly, there was little bleeding. White, sticky threads were spread across the severed ends of her limbs, seemingly suppressing the blood loss. That must have been their habit, preserving their prey alive like this while continuing to feed on it.

He somehow endured the feeling of stomach acid rising in his throat, and instead, tears spilled down one after another. Was this really that Cardiel? Was this the girl who had once run so gracefully, so gallantly, through the world of sand and dust?

Ignoring Dias as he sobbed, Cardiel continued staring up at the wall-like ceiling with emotionless eyes.

But she was certainly alive.

And precisely because she was alive, she was pitiful.

Before long, Dias stopped crying. He grabbed the rifle he had set beside him, stood up, and pointed the muzzle at Cardiel.

“Do you want to live, or do you want to die… which is it?”

Stillness and silence enveloped the place. Even the buzzing of the flies did not enter his ears. They simply stared into each other’s eyes.

Cardiel’s lips moved faintly.

It looked like four syllables.

Dias had no knowledge of lip-reading. Nor was he calm. He could not tell whether it was『tasukete』save me or『koroshite』kill me. The number of syllables was the same, but the meanings were complete opposites. This was not something that could be excused with,『Oops, I made a mistake』.

In the faint light of the headlamp, he felt as though he saw something shining at the corner of Cardiel’s eye. Was it a tear? Perhaps it was only an illusion shown to him by his own desire for her to live. But with that, the path he should take became firm.

He lowered the trembling muzzle, dropped to his knees on the spot, lifted Cardiel’s body up, and hugged her tightly.

“I’ll save you. I swear, I’ll save you…”

Again, tears overflowed endlessly. Even if it was an illusion, it was more than enough as a reason for a man to risk his life.

A deep shadow fell over the two of them.

Feeling the powerful pressure behind him, he turned around. The sound of rubble being crushed underfoot. The hot, raw breath of a beast. Red eyes glowing brilliantly in the darkness.

It was the giant dog-spider.

The entrance and exit were blocked by the dog-spider’s huge body. Countless holes had opened in the walls but they were only large enough for faint light to shine through, not for them to escape.

Right now, how did Dias appear from this mutant’s perspective? He was a great sinner who had destroyed its nest, stolen its prey and killed its child.

『…I got lost and wandered in. I’ll leave right away, so forgive me. There’s no way it would accept something like that, huh』.

Dias turned toward the dog-spider in a way that shielded Cardiel behind his back, raised one knee, and readied his rifle.

The tragedy in which the dog-spider had trampled them in an instant, and the empty corpses of his companions, returned to his mind. One-on-one, with only a single rifle, this was not an opponent he could beat. The enemy could not move freely inside the cramped room either, but even so, the difference in combat strength was obvious.

It was nothing as impressive as saying he was properly aiming his gun. Fear had invaded his entire body, his hands were shaking, and it was all he could do not to drop the rifle.

He turned his head slightly and looked at Cardiel.

…Should I shoot Cardiel dead so she won’t suffer any more, then blow my own head off and kill myself? Better that than the two of us becoming preserved food for a mutant.

At that moment, something appeared at the edge of his vision. Dias felt his blood go cold. It was far too blood-soaked to be called a ray of hope. But the cold resolve and judgment of a hunter made him pick it up without hesitation.

He threw it right in front of the dog-spider, which looked ready to leap at any moment.

It was the head of a puppy-spider.

For an instant, the dog-spider’s movements stopped.

A dark light dwelled in Dias’s eyes. The trembling ceased.

He fixed his aim perfectly on the red eye glowing brilliantly in the darkness. A dry cracking sound rang out, and the bullet was sucked into the eye. Fresh blood scattered as if a crimson jewel had been shattered.

“Gyaaaaaaaaaa!!”

A scream loud enough to make the building seem as if it would crumble echoed through the ruin. The dog-spider began to thrash, slamming its body wildly into the walls and ceiling.

As rubble of all sizes rained down, Dias held the rifle in his right hand, lifted Cardiel under his left arm, and ran past the dog-spider’s side.

As he ran, bitter emotions surged into Dias’s heart all at once.

The fact that he had used a corpse.

The fact that he had exploited the bond between parent and child.

The battle between humans and mutants was not caused by differences in beliefs or claims, nor was it because they hated one another. It was simply a struggle for survival. In the midst of that, the guilt that he had committed a cowardly act he should never have done weighed heavily on Dias’s shoulders.

He lowered Cardiel behind a rock, repositioned her on his back, and tied her in place with rope. He wore his backpack in front, and gripped his rifle in his right hand. Using his sunshade cloak, he wrapped both himself and Cardiel together, making them look like a two-person cloak act.

Preparations were complete.

If he walked for about half a day, they should reach the city.

After that, he continued walking in silence for about thirty minutes. When he looked back, the ruins were still visible.

There was no sign that the dog-spider was pursuing them. As he walked, he thought for a while about why.

…Could it be because it was protecting its children? One had been killed, so it would not be strange for it to remain there just in case, keeping watch. Perhaps it had suppressed even its rage at having one eye destroyed, and prioritized its love for its offspring above all else.

He did not understand the feelings of beasts. Much less the thoughts of a vicious mutant.

But looking back now, he felt as though the dog-spider’s expression had changed in the instant he threw the puppy’s head. As if the color of sorrow that had appeared in its red eye was something he had crushed.

His mood sank endlessly. And yet, he did not stop walking. Instead, even more strength filled both his legs.

The life left at the very end, the life on his back. The one and only precious thing. If he could not protect her to the end, then he really was nothing but trash.

Treading firmly across the dry, cracked earth, Dias advanced one step, then another.

Cardiel, carried on his back, clung tightly to him with her remaining left arm. Although she had been tied to him with rope, was she worried that she might fall? Or was she frightened by some other anxiety?

“Hey…”

Cardiel whispered beside his ear in a hoarse voice.

“Why did you do something like this?”

It was an abstract question but there was no mistaking what she meant. She was probably referring to the fact that he had recklessly infiltrated the dog-spider’s nest, and was now pushing himself to carry her on his back.

He wondered how he should answer, but no clever words came to him right away. From the moment the dog-spider attacked until now, he felt as though he had only been tossed around by the circumstances surrounding him.

Under the pretext of rescuing Cardiel, he had thought that, if things went well, he might be able to die while looking cool. Then things turned out far worse than he had expected and he could no longer simply abandon her. To put it briefly, that was what had happened, but he still had no confidence that he could explain it well.

“A lot happened and I reached a point where I couldn’t back out.”

“What is that supposed to mean? I don’t understand.”

“What a coincidence. Neither do I.”

She probably was not satisfied with that, but she did not press him any further.

The sun beat down mercilessly over their heads. When he happened to look at his wristwatch, it was already past five in the afternoon but there was no sign of the sunlight weakening.

If possible, he wanted to rest in the shade of a rock until it cooled down, but once night fell, mutants would become more active. Wasting time would be suicide.

There was another reason he did not want to take too long.

Cardiel had not complained of pain even once until now. Her arms and legs had been cut off. That was not the kind of pain one could simply endure by trying hard enough.

Dias formed a hypothesis: perhaps the dog-spider’s paralytic venom was suppressing her sense of pain as well. As time passed and the venom thinned, if intense pain suddenly attacked her, there was no way Cardiel’s weakened body could withstand it. On top of that, perhaps the spider silk sealing the cut ends of her limbs was beginning to peel away, because drops of blood were drawing a dotted line along their path.

Every possible condition drove Dias forward, urging him to move faster.

He no longer even sweated. He felt nauseous. His vision warped.

It was truly nothing special. He tripped over a tiny crack in the ground and fell forward. Raising a cloud of sand and dust, he sank down where he was.

He could not stand up.

His stamina had already been wrung dry, and the thing he carried was too heavy.

Whether it was dozens of seconds or several minutes, he could no longer tell. As he lay there half-dozing, he realized that his cheek was being stroked. It was Cardiel’s remaining left hand.

“It’s okay now…”

She whispered sweetly from behind him. He tried to ask what she meant by『okay』but the words would not come out.

“Let’s die together here. Just the fact that you came for me, just the fact that you’re staying with me, makes me happy…”

Saying that, she let her dry lips crawl along the nape of Dias’s neck.

A sweet temptation of death.

Wasn’t that exactly what Dias had been seeking? He could die together with her while putting on a brave face. It was the development he had wished for.

But he stood up.

Planting his elbows, he lifted himself. Pushing against the burning earth with his palms, he staggered, but still rose to his feet. Whether she was eaten in a spider’s web or dried up in the wasteland, neither was a death fitting for her. As if I’d let her die in a place like this.

“A good woman really knows how to motivate a man…”

A faint smile appeared on Dias’s ghostlike face.

His stamina had long since reached its limit. The only things making him walk now were pride and vanity.

『…Men always do reckless things to look cool in front of women. That’s right. I haven’t got anything wrong』.

He laughed aloud at his own unbelievable stupidity. At that moment, blood spurted from his dry, cracked throat, and he hurriedly swallowed it down. Every drop of blood and every bead of sweat was precious moisture.

Cardiel did not understand why Dias was laughing. She thought perhaps he had lost his mind, but apparently that was not quite the case. She quickly stopped thinking about it. Whether he was sane or mad, it was not as if she could do anything.

For now, she would simply entrust herself to his broad back. Thinking that, she closed her eyes and immediately lost consciousness, wishing that she would never open them again.

Several hours later, they reached the city and tumbled into the hospital while exposed to strange stares.

His memories of that time were terribly vague.

The surgery was a success.

That said, it did not mean her arms and legs had grown back. It merely meant that they had managed to stop the bleeding. Cardiel lay on the bed, and the sight of her elbows and knees, rounded after losing their ends, was painful to look at.

Cardiel had an IV inserted into the one left arm she still had, and she stared up at the dirty ceiling with hollow eyes. The anesthesia had long since worn off, so she should have been conscious but she exchanged no words with Dias, who sat on a backless chair beside the bed. He did not know what he should say. The words would not come out.

Before long, Dias half-rose from his seat and said,

“Well then, I’ll be going home.”

“Huh? Where are you going!?”

Cardiel widened her eyes as if the very idea was outrageous.

“Well, back to my own house…”

“Oh. Right… of course…”

Dias held out his right hand, then hurriedly pulled it back and offered his left hand instead, lightly gripping the fingers of Cardiel’s left hand. It was not that he had wanted to shake hands, so his right hand would actually have been fine, but it seemed he was still unsure how to deal with her, wounded as she was in both body and heart.

“I’ll come visit you again. Tomorrow, and the day after…”

What would happen beyond that? He had no room to think about it. The future ahead was so dark he could not see even an inch in front of him. While knowing that what he was doing was nothing more than postponing the problem, he could only offer vague words of comfort.

“What about the surgery fees? What did you do?”

“I’m a man without hobbies, after all. The one thing I do have is savings.”

As far as the surgery fee was concerned, that was true. But with that, he had used up the meager savings he had. As for the hospitalization fees, he would have to find a way to scrape those together from now on.

Silence flowed between the two of them once more. The bustle outside the window, the voices of people living their lives, felt strangely distant.

Just as Dias turned on his heel and was about to leave the room, a『Hey』called out to his back.

When he turned around again, Cardiel had a slightly embarrassed look on her face and was touching her fingertip to her lips.

“At a time like this, when you’re saying goodbye… there’s something else you’re supposed to do, isn’t there?”

It was a sweet voice, coaxing a man.

If this had been the peaceful everyday life of just a few days ago, he would probably have jumped for joy. Now, however, it made him think about what meaning her affection and her actions carried.

He did have the conceit that, by crossing the line of death together, he had managed to earn a certain level of esteem from her. But what she was seeking now was probably not so much proof of love as it was a guarantee, something meant to keep a man tied to her. Understanding all of that, Dias swallowed down every complicated feeling rising inside him.

If he shook off her temptation here, it would likely only stir up her anxiety. He was a man led astray by a woman’s charm, working like a cart horse. That was fine.

Leaning over Cardiel as she lay on the bed, he pressed his lips to hers. Neither of them had any moisture in their skin and it was only their dry lips pressing against each other.

He was hardly the type to be at that age where one was in love with the idea of love but he had never imagined his first kiss would taste this bitter.

He pulled his face away, gave her a faint smile and left the room. He could not stay in the hospital room any longer than that. He felt like crying at how miserable he was. Cardiel was probably crying alone right about now as well.

They shared the same anxiety and the same worries, yet only their hearts did not overlap.

Dias began working as a solo hunter.

He could not corner enemies nor could he handle multiple opponents. He searched for small mutants that had separated from their packs and sniped them. It was inefficient, but there was no other way. Before, he had reluctantly continued working with a team he did not want to be part of because going alone was dangerous. Now, even knowing the danger, he had no choice but to do it.

According to the rules of the hunter office, when a mutant was killed, a part of its body had to be cut off and submitted as proof. Basically, that meant the head. If it was another body part, the bounty could sometimes be reduced.

Because his main method of attack was long-range shooting with a rifle, after bringing a target down, he had to walk several dozen meters just to retrieve the proof. Under direct sunlight, he had to go back and forth again and again along rocky paths with poor footing. Whether he defeated the enemy or failed to defeat it, Dias’s stamina continued to be shaved away.

There had been many times when, before he could reach the corpse he had killed, another team made up of several people had stolen it from him. Officially, killing between hunters was taboo but it was not as if anyone was especially watching, so that rule could not be trusted.

When a group of armed people surrounded a smaller number, humans could become endlessly arrogant. Dias understood that well. He could easily imagine himself being killed after an argument. When his kill was stolen, he would leave silently and search for the next prey.

Each time he swallowed the unfairness of the world, he felt as though his body grew heavier.

He had also tried to report information about the dog-spider to the hunter office and receive an information fee, but it had already been reported, and the fact that he had destroyed one of its eyes was not taken into consideration at all. Later, he heard through rumors that it had been hunted down easily by a veteran hunter team and the money had disappeared as drinking expenses.

He was a little curious about what had happened to those puppy-spiders, but he shook his head and decided to forget it. If all of those dozens of puppy-spiders grew into adults and attacked the city, it would be destroyed in no time. Besides, in front of Cardiel, whose arms and legs had been eaten, there was no way he could ever say that those children were pitiful.

Without ever knowing how to atone for the sin of exploiting love and destroying that eye, the pitiful mutant parent and child vanished into the sand.

After all, people say this world is ruled by the law of the jungle. But how many say that while truly understanding what it means, rather than boasting about it for appearances?

Was a splendid hunter who faced reality someone who could point at a being shaken after having its child’s severed head thrown at it, and laugh loudly, saying, 『What an idiot』?

That alone, Dias could not accept.

He repeated a cycle of going out to hunt mutants in the morning, then visiting the hospital in the evening.

Cardiel’s mental state was terribly unstable and the way she treated him varied from day to day. There were times when she gently thanked Dias for his efforts and times when she cursed him violently.

Dias silently accepted all of it. Whatever the process had been, the result remained a fact: he had failed to protect her completely.

Whether she was manic or depressed, one thing never changed. Whenever it was time to part, she would plead with a face that looked ready to cry, saying, “Please come again.”

Being needed by Cardiel. That alone was the hope and pleasure left in Dias’s chest. But it was far too fragile to live by while clinging to it.

He was worn down completely, both physically and mentally. Part of it was because he continued reckless hunts in order to earn money, but more than anything, what made it painful was that he could see no path by which this life would improve in the end.

If things would someday get better, then he could endure his present suffering. But if all that awaited him after suffering was to die by the roadside, then what was this if not hell?

The same could be said of Cardiel. Having lost her arms and legs, she could no longer work as a hunter, and could not even live her daily life alone.

She lived today, survived tomorrow, and then what? While Dias was gone, she was simply left alone, waiting and staring up at the ceiling as anxiety threatened to crush her.

Dias began spending more and more time each day staring at his rifle. Where should he point it and fire? Of course, a silent tool for killing people would never answer, but he could not stop asking it.

One evening, when he went to the hospital to visit her, he passed a woman he recognized in the corridor.

Pierced by a gaze openly filled with malice, he wondered for a while who she was. By the time he finally remembered that she had been one of his companions until that incident occurred, her back had already disappeared from view.

It was not that Dias had especially poor memory. Right now, he was being chased by the need to deal with the problems directly in front of him, and everything else belonged to the past.

Former companions were like people shown on a cathode-ray tube. Even if he could see their faces and hear their voices, they were strangers, separated from him by a distance that could not be helped.

The woman had come walking from the direction of Cardiel’s hospital room. This was probably not a coincidence. She must have gone to visit her and said something.

Thinking that someone who had done nothing back then had come wearing a knowing face, offering consolation that was neither poison nor medicine, or maybe even a lecture, made discomfort rise inside him. It felt as though a fly had flown into his open mouth.

Someone had stepped with muddy feet into the world that belonged only to Cardiel and himself. On Dias’s face, whose emotions had been worn away and whose expressionlessness had become habit, anger surfaced for the first time in a long while.

However, he could not go visit her with that face, so he needed to calm himself in front of the hospital room.

“What am I doing…?”

There was no one in the dim corridor to hear that soliloquy.

He knocked, and without waiting for an answer, entered the hospital room.

Cardiel turned her face toward him and twisted her mouth. Even if it was only a forced smile, she had shown that she welcomed him. That alone was enough.

It was a somewhat exaggerated and overly romantic way to put it but Dias felt relieved that the world belonging to the two of them had not been broken.

“I saw that one in the corridor just now.”

Since he did not remember her name, he said it vaguely. Her very existence was unpleasant but he was grateful for the fact that she at least provided a topic of conversation. Today, it seemed he would avoid a visit with the bad aftertaste of simply staring at each other in silence, then leaving in silence.

“Alda came to visit me. After all this time.”

At the contempt mixed into the words『after all this time』, Dias inwardly grinned. The world of the two of them, that flowerbed, had not been trampled.

Hearing the name Alda, he finally remembered.

…Now that I think about it, she was there. The one who was always flitting around Cardiel, trying to get scraps of the popularity she had with the men.

What had a woman like that thought when she saw Cardiel as she was now? In the first place, what had she come here to do? Had she come to look down on the fallen state of someone who had once received everyone’s envy, and take pleasure in it? Thinking that, dark emotions rose inside him again.

Dias’s calm side mocked himself, thinking how busy he had been, getting angry and relieved over and over again.

“What were you talking about? I don’t have a very good feeling about it.”

“Good guess. First, she gave me a completely formal apology, saying she was sorry they couldn’t save me. After that, it was mostly badmouthing you. She kept saying it was your fault for rushing ahead and that if everyone had worked together, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“And did you believe that?”

At that question, Cardiel gave a light snort.

“As if. If anything, I understood it clearly. Those people abandoned me. They just want to make it so they did nothing wrong, so they’re finding fault with you.”

Avoiding the danger of total annihilation for the sake of saving one person. Cutting off someone who could no longer move. As for the actions of hunters, those were correct. But that was not something they should push onto someone else as responsibility. They only had to say clearly that they abandoned her in order to live.

As expected, those people were half-hearted. They had abandoned a companion and yet they still wanted to remain good people. Not even a fragment of nostalgia for his former companions remained inside Dias.

“I thought it was a situation where every second counted.”

“I’m sure it was. If you had gone back to the city first, rested, resupplied, then said,『Let’s go, let’s do this, ei-ei-oh』and all that… by now, I’d probably be nothing but a head, right?”

She let out a sigh and looked up at the ceiling. What was she seeing on that dirty canvas?

“I asked Alda, while she was serving me the full-course meal of insults,『What were you doing at the time?』”

“That’s harsh. No matter how she answered, she’d end up disgracing herself. What did she say?”

“Nothing in particular. She pretended she hadn’t heard me and just kept talking by herself.”

“What a cowardly woman…”

At Dias’s murmur, Cardiel gave a big nod.

“Ah, that’s it. That’s exactly it. I felt like there was some word that fit perfectly to describe her character, and that’s the one. Yes, she’s a coward.”

Getting excited over speaking ill of others could not exactly be called a healthy pastime but it had been so long since conversation had flowed this easily that they lost sight of when to stop.

『…Sorry, cowardly Alda-kun.』

Dias narrowed his eyes and gazed almost dazzled at Cardiel’s profile, which had recovered just a little of its vitality.

“You’re the only one who properly listens to me…”

Her heated, moist eyes turned toward Dias. Behind her long eyelashes, her bewitching gaze captivated him, and in that moment, Dias clearly realized it.

He loved her.

This was different from the days when he had watched her from afar, admired her and given up.

『…No one ordered me to do this. No one forced me. It isn’t obligation or duty. It’s me. I’m fighting because I want her to live. Because I lost sight of something this simple, I ended up crawling across the wasteland with that servile look on my face. I was a complete idiot』.

Though his life was at rock bottom with no light in sight, it was also the moment in Dias’s listless life when he felt the greatest sense of fulfillment.

Lights-out time was approaching. Since Cardiel sometimes thrashed about when left alone in the dark, she was permitted to sleep with the lights left on, but visitors still had to leave.

The hospitalization fees were already overdue. If he acted selfishly and said that staying a little longer should be fine, the hospital’s impression of them would worsen even more. Though reluctant, he had no choice but to withdraw.

Dias stood up and gently stroked Cardiel’s cheek. Her skin, which had regained just a little of its luster, seemed to cling to his fingertips.

“Could I… do that one more time?”

At Dias, who stiffened with embarrassment, Cardiel smiled and nodded. Their gazes intertwined, their fingers played with each other and then their lips touched.

It was different from the kiss before, which had felt like stamping a seal on a contract. Now, life filled their bodies, and their feelings reached each other. Dias’s eyes widened at how much of a difference that alone could make. A numbing pleasure traveled all the way down his back, and his body trembled with a bururi.

Cardiel’s fingertips slipped free from Dias’s hand and wrapped around his neck.

“Nn…”

The fact that she was the one seeking him filled Dias’s heart with happiness. His free right hand was naturally drawn toward the swell of her chest. Cardiel’s body gave a slight twitch.

『…Not good. Did I get too carried away?』

It was a needless worry. Perhaps sensing Dias’s panic, Cardiel parted her lips from his, traced the tip of her tongue along Dias’s ear, and whispered bewitchingly.

“Everything you do, everything you want to do, I’ll accept it all. I won’t reject anything. But…”

Cardiel lightly pushed Dias’s body away, leaving just enough distance for them to see each other’s faces. Then she showed a mischievous smile and flicked out her red tongue with a chirori.

“This room doesn’t lock, you know.”

That smile gave Dias the certainty that they had regained a tiny piece of their old everyday life. His chest grew hot with emotion. Dias clasped Cardiel’s left hand between both of his own and bowed his head deeply.

“Thank you, Cardiel.”

“Huh? No, I think I’m the one who should be saying thank you…”

“I was saved because of you.”

“No, um… no matter how you think about it, I’m the one being saved here. Hey, wait, are you listening?”

Ignoring Cardiel’s confusion, Dias did not raise his head for a long time. The tears welling up in his eyes refused to go back in, so he could not move.

In the end, a nurse making her rounds scolded him, and Dias was chased out while bowing his head again and again.

***

“Alda came again.”

Without looking at Dias, Cardiel said that while staring up at the ceiling.

Although her emotional ups and downs were still severe, she had been showing affection more often than before. Because of that, her attitude of not even trying to look at him left Dias somewhat confused.

…Still, that woman again?

When he pictured that woman’s face, as if her only reason for living was to envy and mock others, discomfort made wrinkles gather between his brows.

The fact that she had served as the trigger that rapidly brought him and Cardiel closer together was fine. But honestly, her role was already over, so he wanted her never to come again.

“She acted all self-important and told me she’d introduce me to a job.”

Cardiel continued speaking indifferently, in an emotionless voice.

A job introduced by a woman who surely envied her, while she was in this state, without arms or legs. What was she going to say? What had Cardiel been made to hear? An ominous air flowed through the hospital room. Dias felt as if coal tar had been poured into his stomach.

That day, Dias had been in a good mood before coming to the hospital room. The hunt had gone well, he had killed several mutants and he had exchanged them for money all at once. As a result, for solo work, it was quite large. At the hospital reception desk, he had practically forced payment on them for the overdue amount and several days of hospitalization fees from now on, then came straight to the hospital room.

The fact that the hunt had gone well was ultimately just coincidence. Still, he had wanted to rejoice with Cardiel over the fact that they had gained even the smallest bit of breathing room. And yet, that woman had.

Suppressing the hatred rising from the pit of his stomach, he waited for Cardiel to continue. No matter how unpleasant the subject might be, they had to face it directly and share it together.

“She told me there’s a woman without arms or legs taking customers in the basement of this hospital…”

He had expected it. But actually hearing it from Cardiel’s mouth made him feel as if the words had struck him across the head. His lips trembled. Sweat seeped into his tightly clenched fists. Even so, did he still have to keep listening?

At last, Cardiel turned her face toward him. Her hollow cheeks. Her empty eyes, looking at nothing in particular. At an expression that reminded him of a god of death, Dias felt a shudder run through him.

No, perhaps she truly was possessed. By a despair deeper than death.

“It seems there are quite a few people in the world. Men who get excited by missing limbs, or men who like playing with women who can’t move…”

“Enough. Stop!”

Dias’s angry shout echoed through the hospital room. For an instant, Cardiel looked at him with frightened eyes, then immediately turned her face away. The person in the next room was shouting while violently pounding on the wall but Dias ignored that.

Until now, Dias had never raised his voice in front of Cardiel. Anger and disgust kept entering his body one after another, but in front of her, he had suppressed them as much as possible. Yet the dam of his reason had burst, and everything had flowed out. Along with bitter regret, he calmed himself, chose his words carefully, and spoke to her.

“I love you.”

Cardiel listened to those words as if quietly enduring them. He had shown her affection many times before. But this was the first time he had told her he loved her directly, face to face.

And yet, she wished he would not say it with such a pained expression.

“What about you? Was it only my fantasy that our hearts had connected? Was I just some pathetic unpopular man who got carried away because a woman was a little kind to him?”

“Dias, I…”

Large tears spilled from those jet-black eyes that seemed as though they might draw him in. Cardiel had fallen into confusion and cried out many times before, but this was the first time he had seen her cry while the light of reason still dwelled in her eyes.

“How long am I supposed to keep being your burden…?”

He had been wrong.

She had not ignored Dias’s love. Precisely because she loved him, she had seriously considered selling herself.

She knew that the man she loved was going through reckless hunts alone for her sake. Whenever she thought that one day his overexertion might catch up with him, that he might expose his corpse in the wasteland and never return, her chest felt as though it would tear apart.

And if he abandoned Cardiel, then surely Dias alone could start his life over. No matter how much she thought about it, she always arrived at the same single point: she was a shackle holding him back.

Instead of answering, he forcefully pulled her shoulder close. Cardiel’s body fit completely within Dias’s arms.

“Please don’t think you’re a burden.”

A low, sincere voice whispered beside her ear.

“Meeting you is the greatest happiness I’ve ever had.”

Not every part of those words was necessarily his true feelings. They were probably strongly meant as comfort. Even knowing that, Dias’s gentle voice could not help but melt Cardiel’s body and heart.

She could put no strength into her body. If Dias let go of her now, she felt as though she would simply roll off the bed.

Meanwhile, as Dias held Cardiel close, he reflected on his own naivety.

…Nothing about the situation has improved. What am I getting so happy about just because I hunted a few extra mutants? It’s like looking away from a debt that keeps swelling, then celebrating because I picked up a few coins.

While he had been getting carried away like that, Cardiel had been agonizing alone and trying to walk the path of self-sacrifice. He hugged her even more strongly, while making sure not to hurt her.

“I’m sorry…”

Cardiel did not really understand what he was apologizing for. But she did understand that it was because he was thinking of her.

“Mm. It’s okay…”

She nodded obediently.

“Don’t listen to Alda’s words. She wants to hand you over to an underground brothel and pocket a commission. Or maybe she just wants to point and laugh as you fall as far as you possibly can. Either way, you mustn’t take her seriously.”

“Mm. From now on, I’ll only listen to your words…”

Dias’s heart hit the brakes at that, wondering whether that was really okay. But when Cardiel’s mental state tilted so extremely, perhaps it was better if she depended on him.

He no longer really knew what the correct answer was.

A few days later, half of Alda’s face was blown away, and she died instantly. When a person’s head was sniped with a bullet meant for mutants, it was no different from ripe fruit.

Through the binoculars Dias was peering into out in the wasteland, Alda’s figure happened to appear by chance.

Had she already slipped into another team? The companions with her were different from the old ones.

He switched to his rifle and caught Alda’s figure inside the scope. She was talking about something with her companions, laughing in a way that seemed somehow to mock others. Perhaps the people involved were enjoying themselves, but from the perspective of a third party, it was the kind of laugh that made one feel sick.

Was she laughing about him and Cardiel?

When he thought that, his finger moved to the trigger as if being pulled there.

Then it burst.

As if her body did not believe it had died, she took her time slowly collapsing. Alda’s companions were disorganized, raising their weapons and looking around, or hiding behind cover.

“Guess I actually hit her…”

Dias muttered as if it had nothing to do with him. As if he had grown tired of watching their commotion, he took his eye away from the scope and left the spot.

A wasteland with no witnesses. A sniper shot from one thousand meters away. The culprit was never identified.

Since the incident, Cardiel was not the only one who had changed. Dias could feel the sociability within him being scraped away. He had never been especially good at dealing with people to begin with, but lately, his interest in anyone other than Cardiel had become extremely faint.

“At least mutants are better. You can exchange them for money…”

He muttered coldly, spitting the words out. Even while knowing that he was rolling down a dangerous slope, he could not stop.

On his way to Cardiel, he happened to run into a doctor who had just come out of her hospital room.

“Um…”

Dias called out without thinking but then he no longer knew what he should say.

It would be strange to ask about Cardiel’s condition. She had not been hospitalized because of an illness, and it was not as though leaving her alone would make her arms and legs grow back. He would probably only receive some harmless answer about her mental stability or pulse, and that would be the end of it.

There should have been something he wanted to ask. As he searched for the answer in his head, the man smiled broadly and spoke to him first.

“You seem to come visit her all the time. That’s a very good thing for the patient’s mental state. Let’s see, I believe… yes, you’re Cardiel-kun’s husband, Dias-kun, was it?”

Dias did think it was questionable to suddenly call a patient and the people connected to her with “-kun,” but the scholarly atmosphere this man carried made it feel strangely natural.

“No, Cardiel and I aren’t husband and wife…”

“Hmm. Then why don’t you hurry up and marry her?”

Dias thought it was none of his business but his cheeks still loosened. He was confident that he and Cardiel loved each other, but being seen that way by a third party felt like receiving a guarantee of their affection, and it pleased his heart.

“Ah, I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Marco. I’m not exactly a regular doctor at this hospital, but I got dragged in to help. I’d appreciate it more if you called me Doctor rather than Sensei.”

“I’m Dias. I work as a mutant hunter in this city.”

The man who had introduced himself as Marco held out his right hand.

For a hunter, entrusting one’s dominant hand to another was taboo, so Dias thought for a moment about what to do. No, perhaps precisely because it was an act like entrusting one’s life, it served as proof of trust. Thinking that, he took Marco’s hand.

At that instant, a cold sensation ran down Dias’s back. Marco was smiling with his entire face, but only his eyes were not smiling. His already narrow eyes looked even narrower because of his nearsighted glasses. Behind those eyes, which drew gentle arcs, Dias even felt as though he might be keeping some sort of monster. Once he let go of the hand, the dangerous feeling vanished. The man before him was an ordinary doctor wearing a gentle smile.

“So, wasn’t there something you wanted to ask?”

Without giving Dias time to wonder what that chill from earlier had been, Marco urged the conversation forward.

Rather than trust, it was the judgment that he could not hide anything from this man that pushed Dias onward. He straightened his back, looked directly at Marco, and said,

“Is it true that in this hospital’s basement, women with missing limbs are being made to take customers?”

Thinking that if one wrong step had been taken, Cardiel might have been thrown into that place without him ever knowing, Dias’s expression naturally grew severe.

In contrast, Marco nodded with a completely calm look, as if no matter what was said to him, it would simply slide off.

“Yes, it seems they run that kind of charity business.”

“Cha… charity business?”

Dias froze with his mouth half-open, stunned and furious. Noticing the look in his eyes, as if he were staring at an unpleasant rare creature, Marco finally understood what Dias was thinking.

“Ah, in other words, that’s it. What you want to say is this: you cannot forgive a prostitution organization that exploits unfortunate women.”

Human thoughts were complicated and strange, and Dias was somewhat unhappy at having them summed up in a single sentence by someone wearing a knowing expression. But he had no particular material with which to argue, and if he started picking at the details, there would be no end to it, so Dias nodded with a face like a Noh mask.

“…That’s right.”

Marco looked Dias up and down, observing him, then spoke as if admonishing a poor student.

“It isn’t rare for hunters to lose parts of their bodies while fighting mutants. Arms, legs, ears, noses, eyeballs, and so on. Well, it’s not often that someone suffers as badly as Cardiel-kun. Or rather, when someone is abducted by an adult dog-spider, normally they die.”

It felt as if Marco was indirectly saying she would have been better off dead, and Dias was wrapped in a gloomy feeling. He knew he was overthinking it, but the thought of whether what he was doing was truly for her sake remained stuck in the corner of his mind.

“So, then. Here’s the real question. How do you think a hunter who suffers serious injuries and can no longer keep working is supposed to live after that?”

“Change jobs, maybe…”

The doctor’s mouth twisted in a malicious direction. Apparently, that was not an answer this impromptu teacher liked.

“I know it’s not really something to say in front of a hunter, but think about it. A person with no education, who has only trained to kill, loses their arms and legs. Now then, who is going to hire someone like that?”

Dias turned it over in his mind, but no answer came. Of course not. Dias himself knew painfully well that being a hunter was a job that did not transfer to anything else. Because there was nothing else he could do, he continued hunting all alone.

Even if one boasted that dying by the roadside was a man’s aesthetic, the moment one stepped off the path, it became miserable.

“So you’re saying the prostitution organization is a place that takes in women like that?”

“I’m saying it has that side to it. I don’t believe for even a micron that the director of this hospital is some saintly person either. If anything, I’d say he’s more like a parasite with just enough sense not to kill its host.”

That was a terrible way to put it. While Dias found himself feeling sympathy for a hospital director he had never met, Marco’s speech grew even smoother.

“How difficult it is for one person to save another. I suppose that isn’t something I need to tell you at this point. Not to you, who keeps repeating suffering and action.”

“I understand… or at least, I think I do.”

“I’m sure you do. You don’t exactly look like you’re hunting casually while whistling and picking your nose. In fact, what is with that complexion? Aren’t you the one who needs hospitalization?”

Marco tilted his head and peered into Dias’s face. His expression seemed genuinely worried as a doctor.

“No, I’m fine. Right now, I don’t even have time to rest.”

“I see. Well, if you say so, that’s fine. But with sturdy-looking types like you, fatigue simply doesn’t show on the surface. It definitely builds up. If you keep pushing yourself too hard, one day your knees will suddenly give out. Truly, with no warning at all. So suddenly that even the person who collapses won’t understand what happened.”

After rattling that off quickly, Marco threw his gaze into the air and began thinking about something.

“So, did you accept the matter about the underground prostitution?”

It was an abrupt change of subject, but Dias did not falter. He straightened his back and bowed deeply.

“You are right, Sensei. My thinking was lacking.”

However, the expression stuck to his face when he lifted it was far from convinced. It was more like,『I understand for now, so I won’t complain any further』.

That was fine, Marco thought, nodding in satisfaction. Having no choice but to sell one’s body in order to survive was only a second-best measure and could hardly be called a healthy social system.

As if he could allow a young man to be satisfied with something so absurd. Rather than saying something clever like『that is just reality』he wanted him to agonize over it, and if possible, improve it.

Marco took a liking to this honest, straightforward young man.

“In the end, it all comes down to money. That’s where everything arrives, isn’t it? If you’re an earning hunter who personally owns a tank, then you could start a business after retirement and if you lost your arms or legs, you could probably buy neural-connection prosthetics too…”

Suddenly, Marco’s shoulders were firmly grabbed. Dias stared straight at him with heated eyes. Was this the strength of a hunter? Marco tried twisting his body away somehow but he did not move even a twitch.

“That’s it! That’s it!”

“What is?”

“Prosthetics! Neural-connection prosthetics! If she had those, Cardiel should be able to get better too. How did I never realize this until now!?”

Dias was excited, as if he had received a revelation. A means to escape the prison of unfortunate reality had been lying so close to him all along.

“Yes, I understand that you’re happy about something, but could you let go of me for now?”

“Ah, excuse me.”

Dias released both hands with a pat and stepped back apologetically.

While worrying whether marks had been left on his shoulders, Marco said wearily,

“The reason that information never reached your ears until now is…”

“Yes?”

“Because it isn’t something poor people can buy.”

He said it plainly. It was an unavoidable fact, but Dias wished he had wrapped it in a little more softness.

『…Give up』. That’s just the kind of person he is.

Though they had only known each other for a few minutes, Dias had come to understand Marco a little. He bore no malice, nor did he intend to belittle the other person. It was like a scholar calmly laying out data.

“Specifically, how much would it be?”

Dias still persisted. Thin as it was, this was finally a ray of hope he had found. He could not simply nod after being told that poor people should disappear.

“The cheapest ones would be about the price of one light tank, I suppose.”

He had been naive. He had thought that one prosthetic arm might cost about as much as the rifle slung over his back, but even if he bundled together dozens of such rifles, it would not reach that amount.

Because he had no tank, he was hunting small mutants bit by bit on foot.

In order to earn big money, he needed a tank.

A prosthetic arm cost about as much as a tank.

That three-way contradiction bound Dias tightly.

“Did I end up confusing you instead, when I only meant to give advice?”

“No. Thank you for your valuable opinion. I would like to think for a while about how I should move from here.”

After bowing once, Dias entered Cardiel’s hospital room. Marco gazed at his back for a long time, as though dazzled by it.

Even after they parted, Dias found himself thinking about Marco.

So he asked Cardiel whether she could ask the other doctors and nurses about him and investigate what kind of person Marco was within what she was able to do. Cardiel became enthusiastic and readily accepted.

Since she could not move and could not even go to the hospital lobby, he told her not to push herself, but she was fired up as if she had found her mission.

At this point, Dias could no longer say,『I was just a little curious, that’s all』.”

He also tried telling her about neural-connection prosthetics but her reaction to that was weak. She, too, must have agonized over it alone. During those rare interactions with others, when hospital staff visited once or twice a day, she had apparently asked various questions and then been blocked by the wall called money.

“Dias, please don’t push yourself. If you get desperate and overdo it, and then end up dying, everything will be for nothing.”

Instead, she ended up worrying about him.

“It only matters if you live. Only if you’re alive…”

Cardiel’s eyes, filled with deep love and sorrow, stared fixedly at Dias.

He was so grateful for her feelings that he could have cried. On the other hand,

…There’s no way things can stay like this.

That thought occupied a large part of his mind.

He had seen hope, but it was far too distant, out of reach.

If he had to compare it to something, it was like discovering a lump of gold deep within a cave, only for it to be far too heavy to bring back. He had no tools to shave it down, and no means to melt it. While thinking of the person waiting for his return, all he could do was claw at it until his nails tore off and blood sprayed out, screaming and crying.

To reassure Cardiel, who repeatedly reminded him not to push himself, he wrapped both hands around the one left hand she still had and gently told her that he promised.

However, at that moment, the hardness of Dias’s hands was transmitted to her, and she saw through him. This person hasn’t given up on the prosthetics. He’s still keeping the possibility of obtaining them in the corner of his mind. And surely, he’ll do something dangerous for my sake again. A man’s lies are exposed through little things like this. Dias still did not know the terror of what was commonly called a woman’s intuition, which could sense such discomfort.

Later, Cardiel proudly told him that she had properly gathered information about the self-proclaimed Doctor Marco. Perhaps many nurses enjoyed rumors or perhaps because a patient who was usually shut away had unusually spoken to them, they had gone along with her. Either way, Dias was grateful. In his heart, he thanked nurses whose faces he did not even know.

As the man himself had said, Marco was not a doctor employed here. Apparently, he was the owner of a factory in the city.

“A factory? Why would someone like that wear a white coat and help out at a hospital? Actually, what kind of factory is it?”

“Hmm, how should I put it? If I had to sum it up in one phrase… a hunter’s general store?”

“A general store… That’s a pretty old-fashioned way to put it.”

“There’s no other way to describe it. I’ll explain properly, so listen to your teacher, Dias-kun.”

Seeing Cardiel laugh brightly made Dias feel a warmth spreading through his chest. While suppressing the urge to leap at her and hug her, he nodded and urged Cardiel to continue.

“They say he handles all kinds of things related to hunter activity, from producing guns and ammunition, to tank maintenance and a whole lot more.”

Dias pictured several factories in the city. Was it that one? Or that one? He thought about it, but could not reach a conclusion. A small-time hunter like him did not negotiate directly with factories and bought his ammunition from retail stores, so he was not familiar with them.

But if that was all, then Marco was just an arms merchant, not someone who could be called a general store. Perhaps reading that doubt on Dias’s face, Cardiel continued.

“They also do prosthetic adjustments for hunters whose hands get eaten off, whose legs get blown away and things like that.”

That explained why he was so knowledgeable about prosthetics and so familiar with hunters’ circumstances.

“So he helps out because he has knowledge of cybernetic medicine. Or is he looking for customers?”

He also thought,『I was poor, so I got turned away at the gate』 but that was too self-deprecating, so he did not say it.

Cardiel suddenly lowered her voice, yet there was a somewhat amused tone in it.

“From here on, it’s just the level of rumors, but… apparently, at the factory, they’re doing suspicious human experiments and they may or may not be looking for test subjects…”

Dias was about to say,『That’s ridiculous』but his mouth twitched, and the words did not come out. The chill he had felt when they shook hands, and when he had looked into the depths of Marco’s eyes, returned to him. He could not bring himself to dismiss it as impossible, as nothing but a rumor.

“This is where you’re supposed to laugh, you know? Why are you making a face like a child who’s scared of ghosts?”

“Hmm… I really wonder why.”

“Can you go to the toilet by yourself? Should Onee-san go with you?”

“If I can’t, I’ll come ask you again.”

The two looked at each other and laughed. He had never thought the day would come when they could exchange jokes like this.

Cardiel suddenly smiled gently and asked,

“Was I useful to you?”

Only then did Dias finally realize it. The reason she had been in such high spirits since earlier was…

『…Could it be because she was able to work for my sake?』

Perhaps that thought was too conceited. But seeing her smile made him want to believe it.

“You more than exceeded my expectations. Thank you, truly! No, that was wonderful. Truly, truly…”

Dias was unaccustomed to praising others or flattering women, but this time, in order to respond to Cardiel’s brave feelings, he wrung every bit of his poor vocabulary dry and praised her.

At that moment, he could not even imagine that having heard this suspicious rumor would later become something that decided their fate.

They ended up being forced out of the hospital room.

There were countless people, hunters, peddlers, and others regardless of occupation, who were attacked by mutants and suffered serious injuries and the current situation was that no matter how many beds there were, it was never enough.

From this point on, even if Cardiel received treatment from doctors, there was no expectation that she would improve. It was only natural that a patient who sometimes fell behind on hospitalization fees would be among the first to be pressured into leaving. Dias himself was aware that he had been using the hospital as a nursing facility and he had no cards in hand with which to object.

When Dias promised that he would definitely come back later to pay the unpaid portion, the receptionist merely returned a cold gaze that held no expectation whatsoever.

He stood up with Cardiel held in his arms. Cardiel wrapped her left arm around Dias’s neck and clung tightly to him. From the outside, he looked like a man carrying a koala, but what filled their hearts was nothing so heartwarming.

As Dias turned on his heel, the words『Take care』were thrown at his back with the same nuance as『Hurry up and get lost』.”

Under the blazing sun, Dias continued walking with his head slightly lowered. Cardiel buried her face in Dias’s chest and did not even try to look around.

Just like when they had barely escaped with their lives from the dog-spider’s nest and tumbled into the hospital, they continued walking in silence while exposed to strange stares.

Cardiel’s trembling came through the arms holding her body.

Looks of contempt. Scornful whispers.

The malice of strangers they did not even know rained down on the two of them in many forms.

Dias glanced back over his shoulder. In his posture while carrying Cardiel, there was no way he could do it, but he felt like drawing his rifle and firing wildly. He hated everyone who looked down on him, everyone who hurt her. Forced to endure the humiliation, Cardiel did not even have more than one fist left to clench.

“Hey, Dias…”

Still with her face buried against him, Cardiel murmured in a muffled voice. Dias lifted his face as if waking from a nightmare and lovingly stroked Cardiel’s back.

“What is it?”

“…No, it’s nothing.”

There must have been mountains of things she wanted to say, things she wanted to ask, and things she wanted to talk about. But Dias also understood that those things would not become words.

“It’s okay. I understand. I understand, so…”

“Mm…”

As if shaking off the malice clinging to his back, he began walking quickly.

Dias’s room had been made by remodeling an underground parking lot. Beyond a downward slope, small rooms stood lined up in a row. His was one of them.

He released the electronic lock and opened the heavy iron door. Inside, there was only a bed, a toilet, a desk, and a rusted pipe chair. It was bleakness taken to its extreme. It was like a prison without iron bars.

He laid Cardiel on the bed and when Dias sat down on the pipe chair, fatigue pressed down on him all at once. It was a fatigue so heavy he felt as though his entire body had turned into lead, as though he might never be able to stand again.

At the same time, however, he felt relieved. Here, no one would see them. No one would point and laugh. It was a paradise at the bottom of the earth.

“We’re alone together, aren’t we…”

Cardiel murmured while looking up at the gray ceiling.

“Yeah. Just the two of us in this room.”

“Rather than a room…”

She moved only her neck and looked at Dias. In her eyes, as expected, there was exhaustion and a faint sense of relief.

“In this world, I mean.”

He thought for a while about what those words meant. There were plenty of humans in the outside world but among them, were there any they could trust? Any they could love?

Neither Dias nor Cardiel had any interest or expectations beyond each other.

“Yeah. In this world, it’s just the two of us…”

Within those words of despair, there was a tiny trace of sweetness mixed in.

Suddenly, he remembered the myth of Pandora’s box. Why had she opened the box of calamities? Surely, she must have had a reason to do so. Dias, too, had no intention of letting go of the love that remained in his hands. Even if he were struck by countless calamities.

It could be called the natural result that the two of them became joined not only emotionally, but physically as well. If anything, it had taken too long.

One day, when Dias returned from hunting, Cardiel said with a slightly nervous expression that she wanted him to wipe her body.

“Um… me?”

“Who else do you think there is?”

That was perfectly reasonable. This was not a hospital room and there was no one to care for Cardiel except Dias.

From the plastic water tank placed in the corner of the room, he poured water into a washbasin and soaked a towel in it.

Though nervous, he took his time unbuttoning Cardiel’s clothes. Through the gap in the shirt that parted in two, her white skin and full breasts appeared. Her pale pink tips flickered into view, and Dias’s gaze busily moved between being drawn toward them and being pulled away by reason.

Cardiel’s current outfit consisted of only an oversized shirt on top and a single pair of shorts below. When one thought about it carefully, it was far too provocative.

Dias wondered what he should do from here and what she intended by this. As he stood there, confused and hesitant, wringing the towel tightly, Cardiel’s voice reached his back.

“Hey, Dias. I know you’re always holding back with me in all kinds of ways, but sometimes, I want you to strongly desire me from your side. Otherwise, I get anxious.”

Cardiel toyed with the collar of her shirt with her fingers, making the fabric flutter lightly. To be honest, she was extremely embarrassed. If Dias did not respond to this, then she would simply be some indecent woman. Although she had tried to act bold, now a blush spread across her cheeks.

In truth, she was anxious about how things really were. Before the incident, that would have been one thing. But now, her arms and legs had been torn away and the hair that had once been glossy and beautiful was mixed with white. Though she had recovered somewhat compared to when she was rescued, her body had grown thin, with her ribs slightly showing.

Did she still have any charm left as a woman?

What did Dias think of her?

She wanted to ask but the words would not come out. She was afraid of hearing the answer.

Enduring a suffocating feeling as if her organs were being gripped in an eagle’s talons, Cardiel suddenly saw her vision spin around. It took her several seconds to understand that she had been pushed down.

Dias’s body covered hers. Her lips were sealed by his, and his rugged hand opened her shirt wide, searching around her chest. Before long, when their lips parted, Dias whispered beside her ear.

“I’ve wanted to do this for so long too. I wanted you…”

Cardiel cried out in triumph inside her heart. She had known that there was probably a heat of desire in the way Dias looked at her. But when she compared that with her own body, now missing its arms and legs, anxiety had wrapped around her like chains, asking whether she had the right to be loved.

Now, Dias was seeking her intensely. That alone felt as though it melted away every inferiority complex she had.

That said, even if she was crying out in triumph, during a romantic first experience, in the middle of an affair of passion, she could hardly actually shout,『All right!』So instead, as if pressing her own body against him, she put strength into the left arm wrapped around Dias’s back.

She gave herself over in ecstasy to his powerful yet gentle caresses. Then, when Dias himself finally entered her, large tears spilled from Cardiel’s eyes.

“…Is it painful?”

The way he asked not『Does it hurt?』but “Is it painful?』revealed Dias’s anguish.

“You idiot. What are you saying at this point?”

Cardiel laughed and pinched Dias’s nose. As Dias raised himself in confusion and twitched his nose, Cardiel watched him with a satisfied smile, as if she had gotten him good.

“Right now, I was thinking that… maybe I’m happy.”

Dias’s confusion only deepened.

Her arms and legs had been eaten. She had wandered through hell. Now, in a single room resembling an underground cell, she was being held by an unimpressive man. What about that was happiness?

Still joined together, he thought for a while, then reconsidered. If she said she was happy, then what he should do was not belittle himself.

Whether it was reckless or impossible, anything was fine. He had to move forward little by little. He would save money and buy her prosthetics. They did not need to get everything all at once. Even having both hands alone should make a huge difference.

Looking straight into Cardiel’s moist eyes, he whispered gently.

“I love you, Cardiel.”

At that confession filled with every feeling he had, Cardiel smiled while crying.

From an outsider’s perspective, it was terribly distorted. But for the two of them, a happy life together had begun. When he returned from hunting, there was a woman there to welcome him, and at night, they embraced each other and slept in the same bed.

Until now, even when Dias returned to his room, he had never had anything to do. He would repeatedly disassemble and reassemble his gun, over and over, and when he grew sleepy, he slept. His life had been more than merely tasteless. Thinking about it now, it even felt natural that he had grown endlessly depressed and wanted to die.

Only through connecting with another person did he finally understand that the way he had lived back then had been abnormal. Above all, what was abnormal was that he had accepted and resigned himself to that as the role assigned to him.

For the sake of a woman who had lost her arms and legs, he ran alone through the wasteland carrying a rifle. Others would point at him and laugh, calling him a fool. But Dias could say with confidence that they were wrong. Because she was there, he could remain a human being instead of a stone lying by the roadside.

When Dias returned, Cardiel would immediately open her shirt, spread her legs that only reached the knees, and seek his body. Several times in one night, and every day at that. While wondering whether Cardiel might actually be extremely lewd, Dias gratefully responded, but the situation was apparently not that simple.

Cardiel’s desires and thoughts were directed toward one single point: she wanted to be useful to Dias and she wanted him to be pleased. Then, as for how she could accomplish that, she had no means other than physical service.

There were other reasons too. While Dias went out hunting, Cardiel was left behind in this room all alone. In a dim underground room, with no entertainment and no work, her days consisted of nothing but staring at the gray ceiling.

Even when she had been hospitalized, it was not as though she had talked with others that much, but she could still hear the bustle of the city from far away, and she could sense the presence of people. This place was completely cut off from the outside world.

In a silence so deep it felt as though it would make her ears ache, she had no choice but to wait for hours for her lover’s return. Gradually, she began to feel as though her own existence was growing faint. Only the heat and pleasure of the body allowed her to confirm that she existed.

Perhaps worried about her, Dias had bought her books before, but in this state, there was no way the words would enter her head. She simply repeated the cycle of reading a few lines, tossing the book aside, then staring at a few more lines and setting it beside her.

Only the time to think was infinite. In an environment like this, thoughts always tended to move in a bad direction, and then in an even worse direction. She was seized by the fear that Dias might open the door, leave, and never return. He might be attacked by a mutant and lose his life, or he might grow tired of her and abandon her. Either one could happen at any time, without the slightest warning.

One day, Dias returned with an injury to his head, and that greatly increased Cardiel’s anxiety. Blood was faintly seeping through the tightly wrapped bandage.

“It’s nothing, just a scratch.”

Dias said it with a smile, trying not to worry her but Cardiel immediately saw through the lie.

After all, until just a few months ago, she too had worked as a hunter. By seeing the wound, she could understand to some extent what kind of injury it was. That was a wound that, with one wrong step, could have been fatal.

“No, I let my guard down a little. Normally, I would have dodged something like that easily, but…”

This, too, was a lie. He was not the kind of man who would underestimate an opponent and grow careless. Most likely, he had found a medium-sized mutant and pushed himself too hard. She did not even need to think about why. It was for Cardiel.

Dias still seemed about to line up more clumsy lies but Cardiel clung to his body and cut off his words.

“Please, don’t go anywhere…”

“Huh? Yeah, I won’t. I’ll always be by your side.”

Strength filled Cardiel’s arm as she clung to him. 『Always be together』meant exactly what the words said. This was not a conversation about continuing their current lifestyle. She wanted him to understand that.

“Please, Dias. Don’t go anywhere. Stay beside me forever. Don’t abandon me…”

Something was wrong. Dias felt a chill run down his spine. Cardiel was crying as she repeated those unclear words over and over.

Dias cupped Cardiel’s cheeks with both hands and tilted her face slightly upward. Her black, moist eyes were somehow hollow. The light of sanity was fading.

He recognized that face. It was the same state she had been in right after he rescued her from the dog-spider’s nest. But why? Hadn’t the wounds of her heart, even if not completely, at least been treated?

He remembered what Cardiel had just said. She did not want him to go anywhere. She did not want him to abandon her. Both had to do with Dias. Suddenly, a breathlessness and heaviness like he had swallowed an iron ball assaulted him. Greasy sweat seeped from all over his body.

Had she become like this because he had left her alone? In this dim underground room, unable to do anything but wait for Dias’s return, enduring the anxiety and fear that one day he might not come back, enduring and enduring until her mind had been scraped away.

『…Was I the one who drove her into a corner?』

But then, what was he supposed to have done? To live, and to move forward, they needed money. To make use of his own abilities and earn efficiently, there was surely nothing he could do except hunt.

…In the end, does this mean our fate was checkmated from the very beginning? That we were only turning our eyes away from reality and struggling uselessly?

Dias hugged Cardiel’s body tightly, rubbed his cheek against hers, and said,

“It’s fine if I take a day off from hunting. Tomorrow, why don’t we stay together all day?”

“Mm…”

Though her consciousness was unclear, the reply that came back sounded somehow happy. In his mind, alarm bells rang violently, warning him that this was the first step toward ruin but there was nothing he could do anymore.

He went hunting, then took one day off. He went hunting, then took two days off. The amount of time he spent resting grew longer. Cardiel’s nervous exhaustion had become severe and he could no longer take his eyes off her.

One day, when he returned from hunting, Cardiel was lying limply on the bed, showing no reaction at all even when Dias entered the room. Her gaze wandered vaguely through the air, and drool was dripping from the corner of her mouth.

No way, he thought, and rushed over in a panic, placing his hand against her neck to check her pulse.

She was alive.

He gave her water, lightly slapped her cheek, and kept calling her name.

“Ah, Dias…?”

She spoke as if she had only just noticed him.

The greater Cardiel’s love and dependence on Dias became, the more the fear of losing him grew without limit and the greater the mental burden became while she waited for his return. It had finally reached its limit.

Dias, too, was distracted by thoughts of Cardiel left behind in the room and had nearly died several times during hunts because his attention wandered. The worst possible vicious cycle had taken shape.

Now the two of them were on the bed, huddled close together in a daze. There were no words. They were merely feeling each other’s body warmth. That alone was the only peace left to them.

He had even sold his beloved rifle, exchanging it for a week’s worth of water and food, but even that was about to run out.

“Hey, Dias…”

It felt like it had been a very long time since he had heard Cardiel’s voice so clearly. Dias looked at her face in slight surprise.

“Do you… hate me?”

She had returned to sanity. But he understood that it was like a candle flame flaring up for an instant before going out.

“Hate you? Why would I?”

“Because I’m getting in your way, aren’t I? If I weren’t here, you could have walked your own life, couldn’t you?”

“That’s not true, Cardiel.”

Dias spoke gently as he stroked Cardiel’s cheek. She smiled with a ticklish expression.

“My life exists because you’re in it, Cardiel. I’ll say it now but when you were abducted by the mutant, I didn’t think for a second that I could save you.”

“Eh…Then why did you come? It wasn’t exactly a distance or place where you could just go take a quick look, was it? And it’s far too tasteless to call it a tourist spot.”

“I wanted to die while looking cool. My life was boring, a life where nothing good seemed likely to happen even if I kept living. I wanted to say goodbye to it quickly. I was only alive because I didn’t even have a reason to die. Honestly, I thought I’d found a good excuse.”

Cardiel looked at him in exasperation. Dias, who had been smiling wryly as he spoke, suddenly seemed to think of something and said,

“No, that’s not quite right. It’s not that I was only thinking about dying. In some corner of my mind, I also thought this might be my chance to have you.”

“That suddenly became very vulgar…”

“A man’s fantasies are like that. If one of the other men among our companions had said he would go save you, I might have run away. There would have been no benefit for me, after all.”

“But in the end, you did come. Even if your goal was to hold that over me and sleep with me, I’ve never heard that kind of line from your mouth. Something like,『You were saved thanks to me, you know what that means, don’t you, guhehe.』”

“I wasn’t exactly in a position to do that…”

The two looked at each other and laughed. It was not something to laugh about at all, but at this point, all they could do was laugh.

“What surprised me most of all was that you were a virgin.”

“You suddenly went straight in there… Well, in more ways than one, you’re the only one who went in. What is this, a flow where we’re allowed to say what we really think? Did you see me as some woman who obviously slept around?”

“I didn’t think you were wildly playing around with men but there were always plenty of men around you.”

“So instead of a circle princess, I was a hunter princess, huh? That doesn’t sound very flattering.”

Cardiel lowered her long eyelashes and said this in a bored tone.

“I never once felt any charm as men from those followers, but if you ask whether I got carried away because they pampered me, then yes, there was definitely some of that. When I think that someday I might have been swept along by that kind of mood or atmosphere and ended up being held by one of those boring men, it truly sends a chill down my spine.”

“Swept along by the atmosphere, huh.”

“You shouldn’t underestimate an atmosphere once it has formed. It’s like a poison that slowly eats away at your mind. You thinking you had no value, or wanting to die, wasn’t that also a kind of thinking that accumulated because of how the people around you treated you?”

“Yeah, that’s true. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I worked, the people around me looked down on me. Even people who were clearly weaker and lazier than me. It wasn’t a matter of right or wrong. An atmosphere had formed where it was acceptable to treat me that way.”

When that kind of treatment continued, a person’s character would fall in the direction of thinking that no matter what they did, it was pointless, and that everything no longer mattered. The result was Dias, a man with low self-esteem in all sorts of ways.

As expected, Cardiel was not merely beautiful but also intelligent. Dias felt happy about that as if it were something about himself.

“The conversation took quite a long detour but the reason I found a path to live by, and a goal to aim for, was because you existed. I don’t hate you at all. If anything, I want to thank you. Thank you, truly, for being with me.”

Cardiel nodded with a satisfied, slightly tired expression. Dias was seized by the fear that if she closed her eyes, she might never open them again, and he held her tightly.

Cardiel stretched her neck just a little. Understanding what she wanted, Dias pressed his lips to hers.

In the end, he had only been struggling uselessly, and had not been able to protect her. What had he lost to? He had not even lost to a medium-sized mutant. He had blown off the head of a former companion who had mocked people. He had lost to the faceless enemy called reality, a monster far too enormous and hideous.

There was no lie in the words he had spoken to Cardiel. Since the incident, the time they had spent together had often been painful, but at the same time, it had been happy. At the very least, he had possessed a sense of purpose.

While staring at Cardiel’s face, which looked as though it might vanish at any moment, he thought back on the past. The spider’s nest, the wasteland, the hospital, the underground room… something caught in his memory.

The man he had met in front of the hospital room, Marco. A hospital helper, the owner of an arms factory, and a cybernetic doctor specializing in prosthetic adjustments. When he had asked Cardiel to investigate him, what had she said?

『…He’s looking for test subjects for human experiments』?

He had thought so even when he first heard it, but it was an incredibly absurd and irresponsible rumor. However, if that rumor were true, then there was still something he could sell. There was a young man with a sturdy body right here.

『…The fact that I’m clinging to something like this is proof that my head is finally breaking. In the first place, I don’t even know where Doctor Marco is』.

A magazine that had fallen onto the floor entered his view. It was a book he had casually bought in the hope that it might ease Cardiel’s boredom.

He picked it up and flipped through it. Perhaps the publishing industry was struggling too, because about half of it was filled with advertisements. Among them, his fingers stopped on a page introducing firearms.

『…Hey, hey, you’ve got to be kidding me. If the magazine I bought by chance just happens to have a firearms ad, and by chance, Doctor Marco’s factory address happens to be written there…』?

If that were the case, he would have no choice but to feel some sort of fated guidance. Since he could hardly believe he was loved by God, it was probably some trap laid by the devil.

He swallowed saliva that had lost its moisture and turned sticky, then carefully ran his eyes over the page. He could not find it. But would there really be an advertisement without the company name on it? What were customers supposed to do if they wanted the product?

After searching for a while, he noticed that his own finger was covering the bottom right of the page. Slowly, as if crawling across the paper, he moved his thumb aside, and there, written in small letters, were the words『Maruko Works』.

“No, seriously… you’ve got to be kidding me, right?”

Even while wearing an expression of disbelief, Dias found himself feeling as though he might try betting on that suspicious rumor. It was far too thin and fragile to be called hope, and the logic itself was broken. Even so, if there was still a possibility of saving her.

As an aside,『Maruko Works』was a major sponsor of that magazine and its advertisements appeared every month.

The proposal to go outside was something Cardiel rejected with all her strength. To her, the outside world was nothing but a cursed land where malicious gazes rained down.

Quietly dying while being watched over by the one she loved. To her, that was a sweet dream. Dias seemed to regret that he could not save Cardiel but compared to being abandoned by her companions and dying as she was gnawed away from the edges as preserved food for a hideous mutant, the difference was like heaven and earth. Her heart had been saved enough.

Her resolve was firm. She was also satisfied enough. Trying to struggle uselessly at this point was nothing but unnecessary.

“Isn’t it already enough? I want to die here together with you…”

“I want to live together with you.”

Dias, who was always soft on Cardiel no matter what, refused to back down this time alone.

“It may be against your wishes but I still can’t give up. Please, just once, listen to my selfishness as a man.”

When Dias bowed his head so solemnly and said that, Cardiel could no longer say anything.

It was an action meant to save Cardiel, but instead of forcing it upon her as a favor, he had called it his own selfishness. When he looked straight at her with eyes overflowing with sincerity, she felt herself wanting to entrust everything to this man.

『…Ah, I really do love this person so much that there’s nothing I can do about it. This is the weakness of falling in love, so I suppose it can’t be helped. I’ll let him choose how we die』.

She reached out her left hand, took Dias’s hand, and smiled gently. That alone was enough for their feelings to communicate.

Just as he had done when they headed from the hospital to this room, Dias held Cardiel in his arms and wrapped her in his cloak.

When he climbed the vehicle ramp and went outside, the sun welcomed him roughly for the first time in several days. Its brightness made Dias wrinkle his brow and narrow his eyes. He felt as if the sun itself were rejecting him, telling him this was not the world he belonged in.

He did not want to attract much attention but in this city, there were more people out at night than during the day. That made sense, since the rough hunters went out to hunt during the day, then returned at night, raising their hoarse voices as they went around drinking.

He took the page torn from the magazine, the firearms advertisement, out of his pocket and headed toward Maruko Works while checking the address again and again.

For several days, he had eaten nothing and drunk only water and now he was walking under the blazing sun while carrying Cardiel. His head was hazy, and combined with the unfamiliar roads, he lost his way several times.

『…And yet, this is still far better than when I returned from the dog-spider’s nest. What the hell is wrong with my life?』

With a wry smile that had recently become almost a habit, he took the canteen from the holder at his waist and moistened his throat. Then he let Cardiel drink as well, and somehow felt a tender affection as though he were feeding milk to a baby animal. Of course, he could never say that in front of her.

By the time the side of his face was dyed in the color of the setting sun, he finally arrived at Maruko Works.

As usual, he drew attention from the people passing by, but somehow, he felt as though there was no contempt mixed into those gazes. When he thought about why, he realized this was a factory that handled prosthetics, so they were probably used to seeing people missing parts of their bodies. Such people were also their customers.

Dias stopped a researcher-looking man who had come out of the factory and told him that he wished to meet Doctor Marco. The man seemed to understand the situation and personally guided him inside. Perhaps it was not unusual for customers with complicated circumstances to suddenly visit.

Judging from the fact that the man had been carrying a bag, he had probably been just about to go home. Feeling that he had done something inconsiderate, Dias bowed his head politely again and again and thanked him.

They entered the reception room they were guided to. Dias seated Cardiel on the leather sofa, then sat down beside her.

His hips sank more than he expected.

It was completely different from the cheap bed in Dias’s room. Feeling the gap between rich and poor from such a small thing, his heart sank even more than his body did.

Despite the sudden visit, Marco appeared in less than five minutes. It was indeed the same man he had met at the hospital. But unlike then, there was no faint smile on his face. It seemed they were not especially welcome.

“Well, it’s been a while. I remember you, Dias-kun. So, what brings you here today?”

His tone was strong and slightly quick, as if warning them not to waste time with idle talk. Judging that roundabout phrasing would only worsen Marco’s impression of him, Dias stated his request plainly.

“I would like you to give her prosthetic limbs.”

“Hmm. And the money?”

“I don’t have any.”

Marco let out a large breath, in a way that seemed a little deliberately exaggerated. He had probably expected something like this to some extent from the moment he was called.

“Dias-kun, I did indeed feel a certain amount of goodwill toward you. That has all vanished just now, though. If you’re thinking that because you’re a pitiful person and the other party is rich, he’ll surely give you charity if you ask, then you’re underestimating me a little too much.”

Dias accepted Marco’s gaze straight on, a gaze like he was looking at filth on the roadside. While wondering whether this was really the attitude of someone who had come begging, Marco continued speaking.

“Let’s say I gave Cardiel-kun over there prosthetics for free. Then what happens after that? Am I supposed to hand them out one after another to every person who swarms me, demanding that I give them the same thing for nothing? I’d be bankrupt in three days.”

Marco had told the same sort of story many times. He had regretted it and he had been betrayed before. Having to tell such a tedious story to a man he had once liked was gradually making Marco irritated.

“I have no intention of becoming a slave to the weak…”

It was a voice like a curse echoing up from hell. But the man before him did not flinch. Instead, he nodded as if to say he understood.

『Is this guy even listening to me?』Marco wondered suspiciously, frowning. If Dias were to say,『I understand what you’re saying, but please give her the prosthetics anyway』then what should he do? Just as his irritation was about to switch over into anger, as if a switch had been flipped, Dias said something completely unexpected.

“I do have something I can offer as payment.”

“Oh?”

“My life.”

What the hell is this guy saying? Marco and Cardiel both wore the same confused expression. Cardiel in particular had heard from Dias that he had some kind of plan, but she had not been told that he intended to become a sacrifice.

Dias stopped Cardiel with his hand as she tried to object, then continued.

“I heard that you are conducting some kind of human experiment, Doctor, and that you are searching for test subjects. A young man with a sturdy body. I would like you to put a price on him.”

A declaration of resolve.

Then silence flowed.

This was probably the point where Marco should have laughed and sent them away, or shouted and thrown them out. In fact, he tried to do exactly that. But one thing occurred to him. There was one piece of research he wanted them to help with.

“Dias-kun. You may be trying to make a contract with a devil right now, you know?”

“The angels never did anything for us.”

Perhaps he liked that answer, because Marco smiled and nodded. It was a different sort of smile from before, one with naked curiosity exposed.

“Very well. If you don’t mind a used, outdated model, I’ll give you a set of prosthetics.”

“Thank you very much!”

Dias bowed so deeply that his forehead almost struck the desk.

If Cardiel could move on her own, she might be able to distract herself. Once she grew used to operating the prosthetics, perhaps they could even go hunting together.

He had no idea what kind of conditions would be placed on them from here, so he could not rejoice openly. Even so, one of the walls standing in front of them had been destroyed.

“Now then, about the experiment I want you to help with.”

“Ah, yes.”

When Dias raised his head, Marco was smiling, and deep within his eyes, Dias thought he saw a light of madness. The chill he had felt at the hospital returned.

But that was fine. Precisely because he was that kind of man, he had accepted this proposal.

However, as Dias gazed at Marco’s face, he felt an even colder sensation run down his spine.

Those eyes were not looking at him.

The declaration came from Marco’s twisted lips.

“I’ll have her do it, not you.”

Hadn’t he just been warned only moments ago?

This was a contract with a devil.

Cardiel was placed in a wheelchair prepared at the factory and Dias pushed it as they walked. It was an elaborate one, even fitted with an IV.

If possible, she probably should have been lying down, but because she herself wanted to stay with Dias every moment and know what was going to happen from now on, they were moving together like this.

Marco, who walked at the front and guided them through the factory, was in high spirits.

“Neural-connection prosthetics are…”

Dias’s mind felt hazy, as though a fog had fallen over it, filled with anxiety and regret. But considering what was to come, this was no time to stop thinking. He pulled himself together and listened to Marco’s explanation.

“It is a technology in which surgery is performed to attach special sockets to the severed ends of the body, then connect those sockets to prosthetic limbs, allowing them to be controlled freely by brain waves. But here, one question arises.”

Marco flipped the hem of his white coat and turned around lightly.

“What happens if something other than a prosthetic limb is connected? Can it be moved? What do you think?”

“That… I think it could. Theoretically.”

“Hoho. And why do you think that?”

“Because strictly speaking, prosthetic limbs aren’t arms either.”

“Haha! You understand, don’t you? Exactly. Even if we call them prosthetic limbs, they’re only manipulators. Robot arms. We are merely forcing something far removed from a living body to move.”

Perhaps growing excited as his speech continued, Marco’s breathing grew rough. He grabbed a machine gun flowing along the conveyor belt and thrust it before Dias’s eyes.

“Then what about this!? If we modify it for neural connection and attach it, will it move? It would, wouldn’t it! A chainsaw? A machine gun? They would move too, wouldn’t they!”

Cardiel lifted her face and exchanged glances with Dias. Is this guy really all right? That was probably what she wanted to say. Dias felt exactly the same.

As if their feelings were none of his concern, Marco slapped Dias’s shoulder hard, again and again, and said,

“I’m sorry for saying earlier that I’d lost interest. You truly are wonderful after all. I think we can become good partners.”

“May I interpret that to mean you do not intend to use us and throw us away?”

Dias put strength into his eyes and stared straight at him. If he were the one being used as the subject of the experiment, he probably would not have asked that. It was because Cardiel would be used in the experiment that he had to confirm it.

What a good man he really is, Marco thought, grinning.

“Of course. I’ll speak frankly too. The experiment we’re about to perform will, to put it plainly, cost money. If Cardiel-kun dies, that would be a problem for me too. She must live and accomplish it.”

In front of a large double door, Marco operated the authentication device beside it. He scanned his fingerprint and passed a card through it. With a heavy gakon, the lock released.

“Now, shall we go? Toward our brilliant future!”

He kicked the door open and entered. Whether there had been any need to kick it open was another matter. It was probably just to raise the mood. He seemed quite excited.

What lay beyond this point?

Strength filled Dias’s hands as he gripped the wheelchair handles.

Before he realized it, there was a soft sensation stroking Dias’s cheek. Cardiel’s left hand was touching his cheek, trying to calm him down. His eyes met Cardiel’s as she looked up at him.

“It’s all right. If the two of us are together, we can do anything.”

Cardiel had long since steeled herself. In that case, continuing to look anxious forever would only pour cold water on her resolve. Dias forced himself to nod and stepped forward.

Inside, it looked like a large garage. Straight ahead, illuminated by the lights, stood a heavy tank gleaming black. In contrast, Marco’s bright white coat stood out.

He struck the tank’s armor with his fist. Gon-gon, heavy metallic sounds echoed through the silent garage.

“Prosthetic limbs move through neural-connection technology. Heavy firearms, too, should be able to fire if modified specifically for that purpose. Then, what about this fellow?”

Saying that, Marco let out a private, amused chuckle.

Dias and Cardiel wore almost the same expression.

As expected, they were uneasy.

“Do you understand why I designated Cardiel-kun as the test subject?”

Marco’s laughter reflected through the garage, as if it were coming from every angle. It was the roar of a madman who sought to fuse a living body and a weapon, and give birth to a new life.

“After all, we’re talking about moving a tank. A single arm won’t be enough. We’ll need both arms and both legs working at full capacity.”

“Please wait a moment. Cardiel still has her left arm.”

Dias hurriedly corrected him, but Marco said it as though it were nothing.

“It’s in the way, so we’ll have no choice but to cut it off.”

Dias doubted his ears and lost his words.

“We should also trim the right arm, which remains up to the elbow, back to the shoulder.”

Losing both hands and losing one hand were completely different situations. For Cardiel, her remaining left hand was the only freedom of movement still allowed to her. Because she had her left hand, she could eat simple meals, and she could read books. With difficulty, she could even go to the toilet by herself.

This man was saying he would cut away that remaining hope with the single phrase,『It’s in the way』. Had this man thought even a little about Cardiel’s feelings? No. Perhaps he was simply incapable of understanding other people’s feelings at all.

Anger began to simmer up inside him, and Dias moved only his eyes, looking around. Where had the machine gun Marco had been holding gone? He found it on top of the tank.

It was something that had come along the production line. Naturally, it probably was not loaded, and he did not even know whether it could fire. But as a blunt weapon, it should have more than enough power. He had done it once before.

Those dangerous thoughts of Dias’s were interrupted by Cardiel.

“I understand. I accept that offer.”

Saying that, Cardiel bowed her head deeply, taking care not to fall from the wheelchair.

“Wait, wait, wait! Cardiel, do you understand what you’re saying!? He’s talking about cutting off your left arm!”

“He’s offering a chance for someone who failed to die properly to fight once more… and giving me a machine to do it with, isn’t he?”

It was a dignified declaration. Her resolute beauty brought to mind a queen upon her throne, overwhelming Dias and silencing him.

“Besides! You went ahead with a plan to become a test subject yourself and asked him to save me, all without telling me! Are you trying to say it’s fine for you, but not for me!?”

“No, that’s not exactly what I…”

A somewhat rare scene unfolded, with Cardiel lecturing him and Dias falling into confusion. If one considered their original personalities, perhaps this was actually how they were supposed to be.

Marco cut in between the two with a『Now, now』. In appearance alone, he looked completely like a neighborhood uncle trying to stop a married couple’s quarrel.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t be the one saying this, since I’m the very person who told her to cut off the arm but I think Cardiel-kun is right here. Self-sacrifice that doesn’t consider the person left behind is nothing but a nuisance.”

“Ngh… You’re right…”

Dias drooped weakly. While thinking that Dias’s tendency to get heated easily, yet still understand when spoken to properly, was one of his good points, Marco continued.

“We’ll prepare a room for you here, so first, please take your time and focus on recovering your strength. The surgery to attach the connection units will come after that. We also have our own preparations, so it should be in about a week.”

“Yes. Please take care of us.”

“There’s no need to be so formal. From now on, we’ll have a long relationship. We are good partners. Heh, heh…”

Though an ominous shadow remained, the die had been cast. Cardiel smiled at Dias, who still wore a bitter expression, unable to accept it from the heart.

“With this, we’ll be able to fight together.”

He had no words with which to answer that smile, and could only look down.

There was a simple hospital ward within the factory grounds, with an operating room and hospital rooms prepared. It seemed the facility’s title, a place that answered every need of hunters, was no lie.

Dias, who was always calm and composed during hunts, became terribly restless as Cardiel’s surgery approached. He repeatedly stood up and sat down for no reason.

Marco watched him with amusement, but perhaps he gradually began to pity him, because he spoke as if to encourage him.

“Attaching connection units is easier than an appendix operation. There’s no way to fail.”

“Is that how it is…”

“I could do it with my eyes closed.”

“Please keep your eyes open.”

Jokes aside, Marco’s skill was certain, just as he himself boasted of being a genius. Perhaps he was used to these kinds of operations, because he proceeded through the amputation of the left arm, trimming down the right arm, and attaching the connection units to all four limbs one after another, taking only about an hour.

After another three hours or so, the anesthesia wore off. Cardiel woke up, and visits were permitted.

With anxiety and expectation in his chest, Dias entered the hospital room. Cardiel had a blanket draped over her shoulders and was sitting dazedly on the bed.

Yes, sitting.

She had hands, and she had legs.

When Cardiel noticed Dias, she averted her gaze as if ashamed and pulled the blanket closer.

Wondering what was wrong, he approached, and then froze in shock at what he saw peeking through the gap in the blanket.

Her fingertips were silver three-pronged claws, nothing like those of a human being.

Her legs had iron rods extending from pointed triangular ends, with cords running here and there. They were objects that looked as though the functions of the human body had been distorted and exposed as much as possible.

Both the hands and the legs were better described as industrial robot arms than prosthetic limbs. The sight of them extending from the shoulders and knees of a beautiful woman was pitiful, comical and cruel.

“Hey, Dias…”

Cardiel murmured in a hoarse voice.

“Do you love me?”

“I love you.”

His answer was clear, showing not even the slightest trace of the disturbance from earlier. Of course it was. This alone would never waver.

“You’re kind, so you say things like that so easily, but…!”

Cardiel tried to stand and press closer to Dias but perhaps because she was not used to moving, her knees suddenly gave out halfway through. Dias caught her body.

For a while, the two of them held each other in silence.

“I’m always being supported by you, aren’t I…”

“If you weren’t here, I wouldn’t have been able to stand.”

He lifted Cardiel’s body and slowly lowered her onto the bed. To be honest, she was very heavy. But Dias did not let even the slightest hint of that show.

“Thank you. I’ve calmed down a little.”

“That’s good.”

When Dias also sat down on the bed, Cardiel leaned against him and entrusted herself to him as naturally as breathing.

“According to the Doctor, I’ll have to practice moving these for a while. It’s like rehabilitation. I have to teach my mind that these hands and legs are mine. That these are… my hands and legs…”

The three claws clicked together with a kachi-kachi. Somehow, the sound seemed lonely.

“Once that’s over, next comes…”

“The tank, huh.”

The two of them thought in silence for a short while. Then, as if spitting the words out in unison, they said,

“A tank, huh…”