Different Faith (1)
Emotion Sickness Case, Number 13-465.
Paimon's demon realm, the Emotion Scale, had spread beyond the Central Continent and taken hold of the Southern Continent.
"Guh. Ugh!"
A hulking man left alone in a vast mansion groaned face-down on the stairs.
Clovis, a great magnate of the Kingdom of Kale.
Second in the kingdom's financial hierarchy, one of the hundred wealthiest men on the Southern Continent.
"Why, why…?"
Clovis wore a broken expression.
"Why does it keep hurting?"
At first he had killed a maid.
Next, a friend. Then thirteen wives. Then seven children.
It had all happened in a single day, and just now he had slit open the belly of the woman he loved, Kasey.
"Could it be… she's not dead yet?"
Clinging to the last of his sanity, numb with pain, Clovis hobbled down the stairs.
Wives and children with eyes still open lay collapsed on the cold floor and stared at him.
"Ugh! It hurts. It hurts so much."
It was a pain no human should have to bear.
"Kasey, are you still alive?"
A large hunting hound lay with its entrails spilled, its tongue lolling.
"Die. Just die already. I can't take it."
Every time he stabbed with the longsword the sensation was as if his bones were being shattered.
"Aaah! Aaahhh!"
Only when he saw the dog's corpse, and that there was nothing left to stab, did Clovis come back to himself.
"What am I supposed to do? I killed them all! What else do I have to give up so the pain will stop?"
The thrown longsword ricocheted off the wall and struck a shelf of porcelain.
"Ugh!"
His face drained of color as the trembling vase toppled and shattered on the floor.
"No! No!"
He rushed over, picked up one of the hundreds of fragments, and his hands began to tremble.
"Damn it! How much was this worth? You stupid bastard!"
In that instant, Clovis realized his pain had returned to normal.
"Money—"
A new avenue opened in his mind, and his first reaction was to shake his head.
"No. How can it be about money I earned? I haven't rested a day since I was seven—no one could be happy that way."
"You sons of bitches! Mutts! Filth! How dare you covet my money! Who could live like you?"
A single shard of porcelain was worth less than a speck of dust, yet the pain surged again.
"Aaah, no." Terror seized Clovis and his limbs shook.
"Please, someone stop this. I'll give a hundred million gold—no, a billion—fix me, please."
Please, please…
"AHHHHH!"
As his threshold rose, a torment twice as terrible as before gripped his whole body.
"Someone save me! S-someone save me!" Sixteen hours later.
By the time the World Health Organization arrived, the burning mansion had lit up the dawn.
Puuuu.
Seriel closed File Number 13-465 and looked at Clovis lying on the bed.
The corpse was black and hard like coal.
"Shall we cremate him immediately?"
She signed the file compiled by the mental mage and stood. The inspector draped the body with a sheet.
"Yes. We sent out notices, but no one came forward to claim a funeral. Predictable, really."
A lonely death.
"Understood. Process it as you see fit." Seriel's expression stayed composed as she left the mortuary and returned to the lab.
Memos lined the walls and a large graph recorded events hour by hour.
Reality rushed back.
"Ha."
The details of the victims' lives had long since been buried beneath the hundreds of reports arriving every day.
"Hah! Hah! Hah!"
Why couldn't they be cured?
Helplessness swelled within her, and she desperately summoned anger to deny it.
"Aargh! This is infuriating!"
She grabbed whatever was at hand and flung it.
"Hold it! Hold it in!"
Even though she knew anger wouldn't solve anything, her body no longer obeyed her brain.
Shirone slammed the lab door open.
"Seriel! What's going on?"
When she came to her senses, the room was a mess and blood dripped from her hand.
"You're hurt? Why are you so worked up—that's not like you."
As he stepped closer to check the wound, Seriel lowered her arm and, voice trembling, said, "Shirone."
Reading despair in her eyes, Shirone realized the blood wasn't the real problem.
"Seriel, I know it's hard, but—"
Seriel collapsed onto his chest, burying her face as she gripped his lapel and sobbed.
"Aaa… ughhh…"
Her cry was full of sorrow.
"It's okay."
Repeating the only words he could, Shirone rubbed her back.
"It's okay. Everything will be okay." Time passed somehow.
After she'd cried until her clothes were wet, Seriel's breathing slowly steadied.
"…I'm sorry."
She clutched Shirone's lapel tighter, unable to show her face.
"You don't have to apologize. Cry as much as you need. No one doubts you gave your best."
If not everyone in the world, then at least he didn't.
At last Seriel lifted her head a little and stuck out her lower lip.
"If Amy finds out she'll kill me. Don't tell her until I say so."
"Ha. Got it. First, let me see your hand." Although Seriel specialized in restorative magic, this was more a matter of nerves than wounds.
The cut was long but, fortunately, not deep.
"How did you get so worked up?"
Sitting for Shirone's treatment, Seriel lit a cigarette.
"I don't know. Lately I've been having nightmares. Maybe I should cut back on the number of cases I review."
Shirone managed a wry smile.
"Yeah. It takes a toll."
"Emotion Sickness. You have to peer into a person's deepest self. It's not something a mere civil servant could endure."
Seriel turned her head.
"You're incredible. How do you stand it? If I were you I'd have lost my mind."
"You're doing fine. After analyzing countless cases you made the guidelines. Just remember: you saved far more people than the ones you couldn't."
"Yeah."
Seriel was grateful.
"Oh—there's a favor I wanted to ask. Could you go on a field trip?"
"A field trip? For what?" Seriel stubbed out her cigarette and rifled through her desk.
"Where did it go?"
She sank to the floor and sifted through scattered documents until she found a sheet.
"Here. Take a look."
Shirone glanced and saw a map marking regions where Emotion Sickness cases had been reported.
"One red dot equals a hundred people. You could get more precise by lowering the unit, but this is enough."
"Okay, I see it."
The distribution was plainly abnormal.
"The Emotion Scale's illness spreads on the wind. Humans play a role in transmission, but once most nations enacted quarantines the spread slowed. So—"
Shirone took over.
"The frequency of Emotion Sickness should be highest on the Central Continent and taper off as you move southwest. But looking at this map, there are gaps—blank spots as if the wind stopped in places."
"Right. It's like there are windless zones on the Southern Continent. At first I thought it was a demon invasion, but when I asked the Rami Church they said the infernal army was halted at Kale's border. So I checked whether those regions were administrative or military strongholds."
"If they were, announcing the deaths could be a national weakness."
"But they weren't."
Seriel pressed a finger to the map.
"My investigation found no reason anyone would hide reports. Most of the areas were ordinary, featureless provincial counties."
"You sent investigators?"
"I reported it up the chain. If my reasoning convinces them they might issue urgent orders, but it's uncertain they'll set aside the nobles who must be dealt with first."
Seizing their assets was a sensitive matter.
"Waiting for a decision from above frustrated me, so I kept thinking. Then one thought struck me: what if the cases aren't unreported at all, but some regions are actually resisting the Emotion Sickness?"
They fell silent.
"Hmm. Even if that's true, for it to happen across the entire Southern Continent simultaneously is huge in scale. And these aren't major cities, just small towns…"
Shirone stopped and drew an imaginary line connecting the empty spaces on the map.
"It's a route of some kind."
"Same thought. So I dug through everything overnight—local specialties, even materials for farm tools. Nothing matched. I hit a wall, and last night I decided to brute-force it. If an item produced in one region was distributed across the Southern Continent, the production site would be the biggest beneficiary."
"You checked everything?"
There was only one way to find the production site.
"I pulled reports starting from Number 1 and began plotting points one by one. After a couple hours I realized I didn't need to. A place that had never appeared even once came to mind."
Shirone concentrated.
"So I stopped looking at the map and flipped through documents until that place showed up. The result was zero. An entire kingdom with no reported Emotion Sickness cases."
Seriel drew a border above the southernmost Iron Kingdom on the map.
"You know where that is?"
When Shirone pictured it, a chill ran down his spine.
"The Kesia Kingdom."
The place where Fermi was.
"It's drugs."
"A drug trafficking route. Produced in Kesia and spread throughout the Southern Continent. And wherever this drug is distributed, Emotion Sickness cases aren't reported."
"But… is that possible?"
"That's the problem. We tried every morphine, sedative, tranquilizer—even special compounds—but none alleviated the symptoms. What could this be? What kind of substance can counter Emotion Sickness?" Shirone covered his mouth and thought.
It was too suspicious to be coincidence. Fermi's involvement in trafficking began long before the demon realm opened. He couldn't have foreseen this situation…
A sound escaped him.
"Oh."
It might exist.
"Because it's Fermi."
Shirone shook his head.
"I honestly don't know. But the idea that he stumbled into this by luck is even harder to believe. If all this was planned…"
What had Fermi proposed to him on that day he couldn't remember?
"And why did I… accept that offer?"
"Go to Kesia."
Seriel, looking at Shirone, pressed the ends of a ballpoint pen between both hands and said, "No investigator can realistically verify this. Fermi already controls Kesia, so any official response would be awkward. I know it's a difficult ask, but I want you to go and check personally."
"All right."
Suppressing Emotion Sickness was important, but this was also someone Shirone absolutely had to meet before the upcoming Crusade.
"I'll leave now."
Once again, Shirone set out for Kesia.