I had my tools. I had decided on the ending. All that remained was to see how magnificent a performance I could give.

Now, then. Shall we begin?

"I know. I know everything. How ugly you are. What terrible lies and deceit you used to drive promising young people to their deaths."

"Don't be ridiculous!"

"Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma. Even you yourself, Kanisen."

His head snapped toward my voice. I heard him click his tongue when he failed to find his target. After looking around in the wrong place, Kanisen turned and began narrowing his search, checking his surroundings more carefully.

There wasn't much room left to evade him. The closer he came, the harder it would be to maneuver. I needed to finish my preparations before then.

"Once you came down here, you were all doomed to die, weren't you? If the operation succeeded, you'd blow up with Tantalus and be buried beneath the bottomless pit. If it failed, you'd die facing the Military State's pursuit squad. The moment you entered this place, you Resistance members were dead already."

"We were prepared for that! Don't belittle our resolve!"

"Hah. Don't belittle it? You're the one who belittled their resolve."

With a sneer, I calmly laid out the truth I had read from him.

"You didn't let them decide for themselves. You forced them into a situation where they had no other choice."

'Answering that sophistry would be foolish. Let him keep talking. For now, I need to concentrate on his voice and pinpoint his position.'

Kanisen stopped answering. He was telling himself that he had fallen silent to find me, but my mind reading could see the feelings beneath that excuse.

Inside, he was snarling desperately to suppress the truth that would come from my mouth.

Not much longer now. Carefully slipping out from beneath the cabinet, I spoke toward the wall with the instrument panel, letting my voice echo off it.

"You had the ability to break through the Military State's cordon and escape, didn't you? You had time to hide in a supply crate, didn't you? With that much breathing room, perhaps you were beyond saving, Kanisen, since you were already a wanted man. But the others hadn't been identified yet. They had a chance to play innocent and pretend to be ordinary citizens."

Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma—all of them.

They had only been preparing a terrorist attack. Outwardly, they were just the sort of immature young people you saw everywhere. They had expressed subversive views, and perhaps one of them might have been unlucky enough to get caught in a mass arrest, but there was no knowing that.

Yes. They could have survived.

"But you didn't save them. No, you drove them to their deaths instead. You were the one who'd been discovered, so why did they have to flee too?"

"Nonsense."

"What if you hadn't told them you'd been discovered while you were fleeing? What if, instead of ordering everyone to assemble and escape, you'd told them the operation had failed, and to hide the evidence and wait for another opportunity? What if you'd told them to leave you and save themselves?"

"Nonsense!"

"What if you hadn't presented the road to death as the only option to people who didn't know what to do? If they'd gone to a safe house instead of infiltrating the supply system with nowhere left to run, couldn't they have survived?"

Shaking. Breaking. Crumbling.

Kanisen's steadfast will, his heart armored in nobility and chivalry—all of it was crumbling before his guilt.

I was the trumpeter of the conscience within him.

It spoke through my mouth, but what was truly eating away at him was his own ideal.

With his wounds gouged open, Kanisen lost his composure and shouted.

"No! They were all warriors. Every one of them wanted to serve the cause, even at the cost of their lives! A dog who submitted to tyranny has no right to insult them!"

"You're the one insulting them, Kanisen. They wanted to pay with their lives to win the future they desired. Joining your suicide mission wasn't on the list of things they wanted to buy, even at the price of their lives."

CRAAASH!

Kanisen hurled the steel pipe with all his strength. Charged with fierce energy, it struck something. A haphazard pile of debris collapsed in one sweep, and broken boards bounced.

"Shut up!"

Kanisen shouted and made noise indiscriminately, as though he no longer wanted to hear my voice.

And I was such a kindhearted soul that whenever someone told me to shut up, I simply had to give them an extra word or two.

"Once the Military State stopped you for questioning, you were a dead man, Kanisen. Sooner or later. Whether you killed yourself or were shot dead. From the moment the soldiers rang your doorbell—no, from the moment the Military State's leadership planned that mass inspection—there was no way to save you."

"What do you know?!"

Everything.

I repeated that to myself, then kept talking as I shifted positions to evade his pursuit.

"But you always wanted to spend your life on something meaningful. You wanted to sacrifice it for greater honor. A surprise inspection by the Military State, your terrorist plot exposed, then death while resisting arrest. That pathetic, meaningless future had no place in your plans. Was it a hunger for glory, or a thirst for revenge? You didn't want to die alone, so you recklessly summoned your comrades and tried to force the plan through."

"I said shut up! Don't talk as though you've read my thoughts!"

I was only telling him what I had read in his thoughts, yet he was the one getting hurt.

Nothing surprising about that. Usually, what hurts a person most is their own unsatisfactory self.

"Once you hid in the supply crate, your only remaining path was to sneak into Tantalus. With Tantalus emptied out after the prison break, the inspections wouldn't be too strict. The one problem, perhaps, was that a crippled Tantalus wasn't worth risking your life to attack."

That was obvious. A group dissatisfied with society only attacked a prison when it had some use for the people inside. Whether it meant recruiting the prisoners or releasing them to put a strain on the administration, there had to be people inside for it to work.

If he had believed Tantalus was still intact, attacking it would actually have been a fairly decent choice. Leaving aside whether escape was possible.

But put another way...

"Kanisen. You were smart enough to know that a mass prison break had taken place at Tantalus."

A prison without prisoners...

"And yet you persuaded the other Resistance members to carry out the attack."

Wasn't worth destroying.

"Even knowing it was worthless, you put that thought aside. What a tremendous target Tantalus was, what it symbolized to the Military State. In that cramped, dark supply crate, you repeated those things over and over like brainwashing. To deceive them—and yourself."

That was why Kanisen had deceived them. He knew Tantalus was worthless, yet convinced them to join him. Instead of solemnly telling them that there was still time to plan for the future, that he would act as a decoy so they could escape, he demanded their lives.

Not for their country.

Not for justice.

"You asked them to die for you."

"Shuuut uuup!"

Rage devoured reason. Now he ran without looking back. Unarmed, he tore through the debris with both hands, pursuing me in a straight line. His sole thought was to beat me to death and silence my jabbering mouth.

The greater the self-love.

The stronger the belief in one's own nobility.

The higher and sturdier the walls around the ego, the more vulnerable they were to an attack from within.

"What could the likes of you possibly know?! They wouldn't have hesitated to spend their lives to bring down the Military State! That resolve won't have changed! If we can destroy Tantalus and leave even a trace of our names in the history books! If future generations can remember us! Isn't that enough?!"

Kanisen charged, overturning a desk with both hands and shoving a fallen cabinet aside. Ignoring the cuts on his hands, he tore away steel beams as though brushing aside branches. Now he rampaged in every direction, ready to bring down all the wreckage around him. His indiscriminate charge left me no choice but to keep retreating.

"I won't give you an easy death. I'll catch you and tear you to pieces with my bare hands!"

Provocation successful. Though I wasn't sure whether that was a gain or a loss.

He was a little too worked up. Shall I calm him down?

"Ahaha. Calm down, old man. What's the big deal? All you did was demand that other people sacrifice their lives. It happens all the time. The Military State does it constantly! You hated the Military State so much that you ended up just like them! Hahahaha!"

"I'll tear that mouth apart first! I'll chop your tongue to pieces! Let's see if you can keep babbling after I've carved out your lungs!"

Oh dear. If he caught me, we'd have a human slaughterhouse on our hands. What grade would I be? Now I was curious for no good reason.

Anyway, humanity's greatest weapon was reason. The moment he lost his reason that thoroughly was my opportunity to win. I took the packet and a card from inside my clothes and concealed them in my hands.

Once again, I had only one chance.

Well, I'd only ever had one chance.

I gauged the distance. As he overturned some debris, our eyes met through an empty bookcase. I turned my back with a slightly startled look. An explosive crash followed, and he brutally knocked the bookcase over and pursued me.

I vaulted, ducked, and ran. Behind me, Kanisen charged like a tank, his entire body shrouded in bullet-repelling energy that knocked everything away. A chair with broken legs flew through the air, and a broken lamp bounced away like a ball and shattered.

CLINK! CRASH!

I could hear the havoc unfolding in real time. Even getting clipped by him would leave me seriously injured.

"Stooop!"

As he ran, Kanisen snatched up a nearby chair back and hurled it straight at me. It made a terrifying sound. Forewarned by my mind reading, I barely managed to duck before it smashed into the back of my skull. The chair back flew overhead. The sound of it slicing through the air made my head spin.

"I'm seriously going to die at this rate."

I rounded a corner and hid behind the wall. Rather than keep running to gain distance, I held my breath and pressed myself flat against it. I heard his pounding footsteps in pursuit.

I read his thoughts. Consumed by rage, Kanisen was close behind. I focused, gauging the distance between us through mind reading.

Two steps.

One step.

And now.

I aimed at the shadow blurring into view and fired.

BANG!

"Hup!"

At the gunshot, Kanisen flinched and raised a hand to his eyes. An instinctive response. In the instant his body stiffened, I threw away the gun and shot out from around the corner like lightning. Lunging at Kanisen, I swept out the card hidden in my hand. As it passed my wrist, the card transformed into a sharp spike.

I thrust the spike with my entire weight behind it. Kanisen's eyes widened.

"Take this. This is the spike that killed Delta!"

The point headed for his temple. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best strike I could manage. And that strike...

'Exactly what I expected. Parlor tricks!'

Kanisen saw it clearly with those wide-open eyes.

His right hand shot up and seized my fist. Gripping hard enough to crush my hand, he twisted it off course, then bent my wrist until I dropped the spike. At the same time, his other hand grabbed my collar and slammed me into the wall. For a moment, I felt weightless. Then my entire back struck the hard wall.

"Gah!"

I was choking. I hastily grabbed his wrist, but it wouldn't budge. It might as well have been stone.

Kanisen muttered, his face grim.

"After all that talking, I trust you're prepared to die."

"Gh, wai... t. Gah."

"I can't quite hear you. Where did all that composure go?"

"Gh, gh."

I can't talk unless you loosen that, you bastard. I desperately tapped the hand around my throat. At my repeated taps, Kanisen relaxed his arm as if to say he would hear me out.

Ah, now I could breathe. Gasping for air, I spoke.

"Ta, ta-da!"

"What?"

It had been a good script. I smiled and raised both arms.

"Pickpocketing successful. Look at your left wrist! I've stolen something very important from you!"

'Pickpocketing? My left arm? What is he playing at now?'

Even so, his gaze naturally went to the wrist of the left hand holding my collar. He couldn't help it. Whether told to look or not to look, once made aware of something, a person couldn't help noticing it.

Kanisen looked at his left sleeve in puzzlement.

Finally, you're looking this way. Ah, I can't wait.

Brimming with excitement, I cried out.

"Your freedom!"

His left sleeve had been ripped open. Through the torn fabric, Kanisen's biometric terminal was exposed.

An individual's Arche Avatar. A device created by converting biometric information into mana. A symbol of the Military State's authoritarian control, and precisely for that reason, something even Resistance members had to have inscribed to avoid trouble at inspections.

A packet was plugged into that terminal.

Kanisen muttered blankly.

"A clothing... packet?"

It wasn't an ordinary clothing packet. It had been stored in a prison, alongside the instructor's uniform packets. That packet I had been so delighted to discover...

Bore a symbol shaped like a chain.

'A restraint suit packet!'

Alarmed, he tried to pull the packet out, but it was already too late. The packet forcibly siphoned mana from his biometric terminal. Recognizing his avatar, it began to vibrate.

Then it unraveled, strand by strand, and coiled around him like thousands upon tens of thousands of snakes.

The arm choking me withdrew. I landed on the floor, rubbing my smarting throat. Kanisen was putting up a futile struggle against the restraint suit engulfing him. Of course, it didn't last long. A trap tailored to the individual, the Military State's most dreadful invention for controlling human beings was something an "ordinary" powerhouse like him could never break free of.

I bowed deeply to him and announced,

"Pickpocketing upgraded: reverse pickpocketing! A resounding success!"