Chapter 306 |
Sealed City (4)
The office in the Lord's Keep was not luxurious.
A rough wooden table, a few lamps to light the dark, a coat rack, a sofa, and a small side table. That was everything in the room.
Too plain for the residence of the City Lord.
If there was one thing that could be called a luxury, it was the bottle in her hand. Yuel set it down on the table and spoke.
"There's exactly one good thing about becoming City Lord. Know what it is?"
"What is it?"
"This. This right here."
Tap, tap. She knocked on the bottle with her finger.
"Is that so?"
"Yep. You can't drink this just anywhere, so enjoy it while you can. Ha, I was saving this to drink alone."
Elsewhere, it was common liquor, but in Sealed City it was rare. She slowly tilted the bottle.
"As for me."
Liquor pooled along the inside of the glass.
Watching it gather, she kept talking.
"I don't like spilling my guts to people or rambling on about the worries I'm carrying. Why? Because it changes jack shit. If I open up, the only thing that happens is the number of miserable people goes from one to two."
Her eyes sank.
"That's how I've lived, and how I meant to keep living."
Or so I meant.
Yuel lifted her head.
She handed the full glass to Najin and gave him a crooked grin.
"You messed that up."
"What?"
"Why do you keep coming around and stirring shit up? I said I'd just be miserable on my own, so why do you keep coming and talking to me? Are you hitting on me?"
Najin laughed like it was absurd.
"Me? Hitting on you?"
"Am I wrong? I may look like this, but my face can hold its own anywhere."
"Can't deny that."
In the future, if people in the Empire talked about great beauties, she would always be in the top three. There was nothing to pick apart in her looks. Past Yuel, who looked exactly like that woman, was just as striking.
"Well, right or wrong, let's say you are. It'll make me feel a little better."
"Then let's say that."
"Heh, good. A toast?"
"A toast."
She raised her glass.
Clink, their glasses met.
"So."
After a sip, she brushed her wet lips with her thumb and tilted her head. Her snow-white hair slipped down across her collarbone. With her head still tilted, she tossed out the words.
"Only today."
He did not need to ask what was only today.
"Only to you."
I'll tell you what's inside me.
Muttering that, Yuel curled the corner of her mouth. A teasing smile hung on her lips.
"I'm a filthy pain in the ass. What can you do, though? Even if you aren't hitting on me, you seem very interested in me as a person..."
One more sip.
She tilted her glass.
"If you're that curious, I'll show you. Even if you want to leave in the middle, you can't, got it? Even if my drunk habits are shitty, deal with it."
"I've seen someone charge a giant when drunk. Ordinary drunk habits won't shock me."
"I like that."
Using the liquor in her glass like a lens, she looked at Najin sitting across from her. Red liquor, dyed by the color of her eyes, rippled. Her unsteady eyes swayed like the liquor in the glass.
"Would someone just kill me already."
She murmured it, then grinned.
2.
Yuel was weak to alcohol. She got drunk fast.
Watching her keep tipping back glass after glass, she looked like a born drinker, but in truth she got drunk quickly, and getting drunk itself was the point for her.
Because when she poured it down, she could breathe.
The sharpened nerves loosened. Thoughts packed into her head settled down. What floated up then were the things she usually buried deep inside. Her throat itched. Words she would normally swallow rose to the surface.
"The former City Lord was my godfather."
She muttered.
"When I first dropped into this city, it was a complete mess. The place was split into factions, with gang fights breaking out everywhere, and people dying every day. It was the kind of city where gouging out a kid's eyes just because he looked at you funny was normal."
Her eyes sank as she recalled the past.
"The former City Lord took me in as his adopted daughter. Maybe the spark was that I muttered in front of him, 'This city doesn't need a kind leader like you.' Do you know what that man said after hearing that from a sixteen-year-old brat to his face?"
He laughed.
And he looked genuinely pleased.
"'Right. I've been waiting for a child like you.' Then he started teaching me things. Like he was testing me. Fuck, I should've run right there."
Another sip.
"Hoo, I had to be smart, right? Guess he liked me a lot. Then that old bastard handed me the legal code he'd spent his whole life preparing and said this."
When I die, announce this legal code.
In your name, saying you made it.
"What kind of fucked-up thing are you saying, old man? I tried to say that and run, but he shoved a sword into my hand. Then he lifted my hand and drove it into his own heart like this."
She made stabbing motions in the air, over and over.
"He used my hand to kill himself. It was no different from murder. While dying, that old bastard told me, 'The next City Lord is you.'"
She was only eighteen then. Her godfather, the one pillar she had in that city, killed himself in front of her eyes. The hot blood that had splashed her face and hands that day, that red sticky blood, was still vivid in her memory.
Yuel came to hate blood.
She came to fear someone else's blood.
Trembling in front of the old man's corpse, the girl saw people flooding toward the Lord's Keep. Rebels. She realized what she had to do.
"I dragged the old bastard's corpse out and threw it before the rebels. In front of them, I shook the head and said I'd personally executed the City Lord who ruined this city. Then I declared I would announce a new law."
The former City Lord, who shouted ideals, who was kind, who believed other people were kind like him, met a miserable end. Murder and suicide at the same time.
What he left behind was the law he had built with his entire life.
That law was airtight. It did not trust humans one bit and treated all of them as potential beasts. As Yuel read that code, tight as a net, she could only smile bitterly.
Because she could not imagine what that damned old man had felt while writing that legal code, after receiving proof that his beliefs, his way of life, his everything, had all been wrong.
"As that damned old bastard asked, I distributed the code under my name. Then I pulled the rebels into the Lord's Keep and used them as private troops. I cleaned up the city."
From age eighteen to twenty.
For two years, she purged the city's criminals.
"How many did I kill? More than thirty thousand, less than fifty thousand, so around forty thousand. Anyone who killed people got hunted down and crushed, no exceptions. I cleared things out once, and only then did it finally become a place people could live in."
Her voice shook as she said the number, forty thousand. With trembling hands, she snatched her glass and emptied it.
"Now the people in this city follow the law well. There are still a few who break it and turn into beasts, but it's definitely less than before. But..."
Yuel raised her hand.
In her eyes, her own hand was soaked in blood.
"How long do I have to keep doing this?"
She groaned.
"I can't leave this city. So do I do this my whole life? How many more do I have to hunt down and beat into the dirt? Why do I have to do this at all?"
Yuel was torn. She wanted to stop. Blood scared her. She hated killing people. She was exhausted from acting. But she could not stop either.
Her godfather's request.
From today, you are the City Lord.
Those words bound Yuel's hands and feet like a curse. Peace made by her godfather's death. Yuel ended up believing she had a duty to keep that peace.
"He left it to me because he knew what kind of person I am. Fucking old bastard."
She chugged more liquor.
Hoo, she exhaled and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
"I walked all over the city trying to hand this seat to someone else. No one. Nobody. No one worth raising, no one worth putting in this chair. They all have a beast inside them, and if you put one of them in the City Lord seat, it's obvious what happens."
She could not see anyone who could do it as well as she could.
No one could restrain desire as much as she could.
"Every time someone dropped into the city, I went to see them. Is this one decent? Is there someone I can leave this seat to?"
"So that's why you met me first."
"Yep. Want to be City Lord?"
"No thanks. I don't think I can do it as well as you."
"I'm joking. One look tells me you're not the type to suit power."
She buried herself into the sofa backrest.
"I hate it. All of this. I hate all of it."
Muttering that, Yuel felt something strange.
The man in front of her was someone she had known less than a month. She did not know him well, did not know what kind of life he had lived before coming here. Too many things were unknown.
Yet for some reason, he felt familiar.
For some reason, she felt she could open up to this man. Maybe she just wanted to feel at ease.
He had already seen who she really was. He already knew she was acting. Maybe it would be okay to tell him.
"..."
That man listened to everything in silence. No extra questions, just quiet listening. That silence felt comfortable to Yuel.
"Fuck, I was a mathematician."
Yuel wiped at the corner of her eye.
"These aren't hands meant for carving people up. These fingers were made to write beautiful equations, made to hold a pen, not a blade..."
Her fingers trembled.
"Why me. Why is this happening to me."
"Then why not quit?"
Yuel lifted her head. Her eyes were soaked with drink, but the light in them had not gone out. She let out a booze-heavy breath.
"The moment I do, I become a murderer."
"..."
"As long as I sit in this seat, I am a ruler who executed my godfather for the greater good. My godfather's death has meaning. But if I run from this seat without finding a proper successor..."
If she turned away from responsibility and left this place.
If the city went back to the way it used to be.
"My godfather's death becomes worthless. In that moment, the former City Lord dies for real, and by my own hand."
She laughed bitterly.
"Only then do I become the murderer who killed my godfather. No different from a beast."
She looked straight at Najin.
"You know... in this damned city..."
In this city full of beasts, where everyone would become a beast someday.
"I want to die as a human. Not a beast."
That was Yuel's wish.
After hearing it, Najin smiled. Yuel was heavily drunk, but the smile he showed in that moment, and the voice that came from his mouth, were carved clearly into her eyes and ears.
"That's admirable. Truly."
Najin raised his glass. Yuel blankly held out hers, and clink, Najin's glass met it.
"I'll help you."
So that you can die as a human.
That was the last thing she remembered hearing before Yuel's consciousness cut out. She was bursting into laughter and saying something, but she had no idea what she was saying.
That's admirable. Truly.
Turning that single sentence over and over, Yuel closed her eyes in a drunken haze. She felt a little lighter.
3.
Blink.
Yuel blinked. Her eyelids were heavy. Her body was heavy, and her head throbbed. How much had she drunk yesterday? It felt like the first time she had ever drunk this much.
"Ughhh..."
Groaning, she pushed herself up. As she rose, something slid and fell to the floor. It looked like a coat, but it was not hers.
Ah, this again.
Why was that coat on her? The one that man always fluttered around as if asking, "Recognize this?" Judging by the situation, someone had draped it over her. She blinked her hazy eyes, then suddenly widened them.
Like a bucket of cold water dumped into her head.
Fuck, no way?
Yuel hurriedly checked her body. No. A button or two on her shirt was more undone than usual, but that was all. She even remembered undoing those herself. She had never been this drunk before, so she could not gauge her own drunk habits.
The missing stretch in her memory.
What the hell did I do after that? She pressed her throbbing temple with her fingers. Then a voice came from behind her.
"You tugged on my sleeve saying, 'Is that warm? It looks warm as fuck. Let me wear it,' and whined, so I gave it to you."
It was Najin.
Yuel turned her stiff neck toward him, and her eyes shook.
"Me? I whined?"
"You also said you were exhausted, said, 'Fuck, I'm exhausted to death, why are you giving me shit,' and got teary."
"I, no, I did? That's a fucked-up joke..."
Flinch. Fragmented memories rose in her head.
A scene flashed by, her completely drunk self tugging on Najin's sleeve and babbling.
"Sniff. Do you think I'm doing this because I want to, ngh? I have to do it. I have to. Not me, there's no one else..."
I'm screwed.
"AAAAAAAAAAAH!"
She screamed.
"Fuck!"
Yuel's face turned bright red.
Fuck, fuck. Screaming, she buried her face in the sofa. Even her ears were red. Najin shrugged and handed her a cup.
It was warm tea.
Not scalding, just cooled enough. Holding the teacup in both hands, Yuel glared at Najin.
"Tell me honestly. Weren't you caught flirting with women outside and sent here?"
"No way. I have been confessed to, though."
"You have, huh. Well, fuck, with that face it'd be weirder if you hadn't..."
Cursing to cover her embarrassment, Yuel sipped the tea. She did not know exactly what happened last night, but one memory was vivid.
That's admirable. Truly.
A short sentence. And him saying he would help her. Turning those words over, Yuel glanced at Najin. Then in a small voice, she started to say, about yesterday, uh, thank y...
「Last night, God delivered a prophecy.」
Outside the window.
A loud voice rang out from outside the Lord's Keep.
「God has spoken. Those who fell into this city are all sinners. They are the cursed! By killing sinners and drenching our bodies with their blood, we must prove our purity!」
It was not one or two voices.
Dozens, hundreds of voices were echoing through the city.
「God has promised.」
「Only the purest warrior can leave this hell.」
「Kill, kill, and kill again!」
「With sinners' blood, we will prove our purity!」
Shouts, screams, and the sound of something bursting.
"For fuck's sake."
It was the sound of the city going insane.