Chapter 174: Eyes of the Fairy (4)
TL: SHW
"A researcher? Who?!"
Even though she'd hit the floor with a pretty loud thud, Gamble sprang to her feet, apparently unhurt.
I looked at Gamble with an indifferent face.
"If I told you, would you know who it was?"
"Urk...!"
Gamble grimaced and hunched her shoulders.
It was the face of someone who'd belatedly realized that while she was confident she'd know, she couldn't admit to knowing.
Gamble was in no position to scold Hope. What good was keeping her mouth shut? It was all over her face.
Even when I tried not to think about it, Sandra Gamble of Pharos kept coming to mind. If a person could change that much in just a few years, I couldn't help suspecting that it wasn't just Hope, that Gamble had also been swapped out, a Changeling or whatever it was.
"Nngh...."
Gamble righted the fallen chair and sat down. She, too, had all sorts of papers spread out across the table in her room. They weren't neatly organized documents like Lee Mi-seon's.
The wide-open notebook and scattered papers were a mess. Formulas and blueprints tangled together like doodles in barely legible handwriting.
"......!"
Still, Gamble was more guarded than Lee Mi-seon. The moment she noticed where my gaze was headed, she hurriedly flipped the notebook over.
"You don't need to hide it."
"Urk...."
"We belong to the same Guild now anyway, don't we?"
"S-still, that doesn't mean I've signed over my intellectual property rights!"
"Though it will be published under the Guild's name."
I picked up the notebook Gamble must have been working in before I arrived. The scrawled cursive was hard to make out, and the drawings were less blueprints than doodles, lines slashed carelessly together.
To someone who didn't know better, anyway.
To me, who knew the finished form of the Mana Measuring Device....
How should I put this. It looked like a bit of a waste of time. If only I could trust Gamble as completely as I did Hong Seok-young, I'd hand over the Mana Measuring Device blueprints stored in my Mana Watch and save us all some time. Wouldn't Gamble analyze the future's blueprints and spit out the next step?
Of course, it stayed a thought. With Gamble, I couldn't conveniently blame the Ark the way I always had. If she asked how I knew all this, what was I supposed to say? Tell her I came from the future?
Snatch.
Gamble took the notebook from my hand. I spread my palms wide to show I meant nothing by it.
"In any case, what the experiment was really for, why Hope said it would be a waste... those are the sorts of things I'd like to know."
"......"
"And even if his health is fine right now, there's no telling whether it'll stay that way."
Gamble's eyes wavered.
"He's the only little brother I have. I need to know, don't I?"
"...Didn't you say you underwent the experiments too?"
"Ah. Well."
I shrugged.
"I've lived just fine to this age, so I'm probably all right."
Gamble's fingers twitched, the notebook resting on her lap.
I waited a long while. A good ten minutes must have passed.
Still, I didn't leave my seat. Partly because Gamble's expression kept flickering through changes as she thought, but mostly because she never flatly said she couldn't answer.
That's how it usually goes with people who think too much. They've made up their mind not to do something, but then a reason to do it comes along. They try to dig up some excuse to keep putting it off, but more often than not, they fail to convince themselves.
The fact that she hadn't refused outright in the first place was as good as saying she'd tell me.
"His health... should be fine."
"Is that so."
"If it weren't, he would have died in the early stages of the experiment. When I looked into it, it wasn't unstable to that degree. There shouldn't be any children who actually died."
I thought of the countless embryos that had died before my brother was born, then erased the thought.
"That research... didn't go in the direction Michel wanted."
"You mean the Simple Controller."
"Though I don't know if that's actually possible. Shanshan told you that research failed, right? He's right, it failed. But it also succeeded."
"......"
"Not that Michel would know what she succeeded at. If Sem Bloom were still alive, maybe."
Hope had persistently insisted that Sem Bloom be killed. So Bloom had some means of finding out? Even so, I couldn't believe Bloom was a better Mage than Michel. 'Michel doesn't know, but Sem Bloom does', huh.
"Originally, the reason he came here... came here was to frame Shanshan. Michel said it was to erase the failures so no evidence would remain, but it's obvious, isn't it."
Even knowing that, Hope couldn't kill Sem Bloom with his own hands. No, he'd even gone so far as to save him.
If Bloom had been able to communicate with Michel in real time, killing him wouldn't have guaranteed that information about Woo I-rok stayed contained. So it had to be something else....
When I asked Gamble, she told me surprisingly readily.
"If Bloom dies, the information about who killed him passes to Michel."
"Ah. There are Mages like that."
"Yes. Bloom happens to be one of them."
There are some like that, now and then. The ones who want to screw over their enemies even from beyond the grave. Not that I couldn't understand the sentiment, and there was even a time when casting an explosion spell on one's own heart, set to detonate the moment of death, was all the rage among Mages. It was banned after a Mage in Sweden died of a heart attack and took out an entire building, though.
Looked at that way, Bloom was on the tame side. After all, it still wasn't illegal to permanently enchant a part of one's body with an explosion spell.
In any case, I'd gotten the answer I wanted, so I steered us back to the subject.
"So Bloom came to frame Hope and happened to discover my brother?"
"Actually, running into Hunter Hong Seok-young and you inside that dungeon wasn't part of Bloom's plan. He probably meant to open the dungeon to tie everyone down, finish his business, hurry out to plant the frame-up, and then slip back in. With a dungeon open, it makes a perfect alibi, doesn't it?"
"...But then Hope interfered, and he ran into us?"
"Yes. Still, he made sure Shanshan's face was seen, so he probably figured the goal was accomplished."
"If the goal was accomplished, why push ahead with the attack?"
"To screw Shanshan over that much more thoroughly?"
"Ah, right...."
I nodded, unenthused.
"Hunter Hong Seok-young, or should I call him Master now? President? Boss?"
"Whatever's comfortable."
"Then I'll go with Boss. If Boss got lucky and killed Shanshan, all the better, right?"
"Hmm...."
"But Boss killed Sem Bloom, and there was no chance to report to Michel. If Michel had found out, she would have come to take the kids whether I was here or not...."
"I see."
"Yes."
"......"
"......"
Gamble beamed.
I gave her the exact same smile back.
"How about you stop talking in circles and just answer my question?"
"Haha...."
"The reason Sem Bloom tried to take the children. What was it?"
"Ugh......."
I'd thought all her agonizing was over, but Gamble was still hesitating.
She was a fellow Guild member now, so I'd been keeping things civil, words only. Should I scare her a little? No, she was practically a Non-Awakened, so....
"O-okay, fine, fine!"
At last, a declaration of surrender came out of Gamble's mouth.
"Don't tell anyone else."
"Anyone else, meaning...?"
"Urgh, I'll concede as far as Boss. But no one else."
"Are you worried it'll leak? They're people who can be trusted."
"That's how it looks from where you're standing. I'm not naive enough to trust people I met only a few days ago."
That made me want to ask what reason she had to trust Hong Seok-young, then.
She might have done her research on him to make contact, but that was hardly the same as meeting someone in person.
I eyed Gamble suspiciously, then relaxed my expression. Well, she was offering to talk; I'd hear her out first and judge after.
"Like I said, Michel's research was applied in a completely different way."
"Yes. Could we get to the point, please? You already told me that part earlier."
"...So, a kind of."
Gamble swallowed hard.
"Sensitive to... sensitive, to Mana."
Gamble's voice sank lower and lower.
"They succeeded in creating a body resembling a monster's, a Fairy's to be exact."
*
What could I even say.
Gamble's story was shocking, but at the same time, it wasn't surprising.
They say when a person hears something shocking enough, the senses go... numb, supposedly, but no. Nothing that feeble.
It was just that some part of me thought, well, somewhere out there, that could happen.
If anything, my impression was that this kind of research suited the Ark far better than Artificial Awakened did.
The Ark's purpose. I still couldn't be sure it was Michel's will, but at the very least, the parents who gave birth to me called their research humanity's debt. The debt humanity owed them. They believed that if the research succeeded, humanity could evolve to the next stage. My brother might have known the specifics, but that was all the information a child like me could access.
'Hwijae. You remember what this ajeossi told you, don't you?'
Before I went off to get my Hunter License, my father held me back and said it again and again.
'About being able to see Mana....'
'Don't tell anyone, I know. I got it! Seriously, how many times are you going to say it?'
'Of course this ajeossi believes you'll do fine, Hwijae. Even so.'
'I said I got it!'
...So he did know, didn't he?
Sure, this time around they'd fled before we raided the Research Lab and we couldn't get the data, but back then it was different, wasn't it? It just wasn't left in the Agency's database; the odds were high the research data had ended up in my father's hands. The lab director and the researchers had all been hauled in, one after another.
He must have known.
That must be why he kept pressing me about it.
"That's not to say they raised a Fairy or anything like that.... They only imitated one, close enough. So, what should I even call this. Nnnngh...."
Gamble gnawed at her nails, groaning.
I spat out the appropriate word in her place.
"Artificial Organs?"
"Ngh, isn't that, a little harsh?"
"I'm one of the parties concerned, so it's fine."
"......"
Gamble drew in a deep breath.
"It wasn't what Michel wanted, but that doesn't mean she didn't want it. Especially the eyes. Eyes that can see Mana."
Gamble looked me straight in the eye.
"I heard you can see it."
"Yes."
"That doesn't mean you can really see the way a Fairy does. At most, you can only see Mana, the flow of Mana, no?"
"...Is a real Fairy different?"
"They're monsters born from Mana. Of course they're different."
Gamble fidgeted with her fingers as she spoke.
"Uh, I'm only repeating what Shanshan told me, though. He didn't even pay attention when he brought the kids over.... But after running into you, he said it seemed like Michel hadn't been completely wasting her time after all."
"...What happens if Michel finds out?"
"That's why Sem Bloom tried to take your brother.... She'd probably verify it every way she could, then try it on herself, don't you think?"
I frowned.
Gamble didn't notice and went on.
"It means there's now a possibility she could replace her eyes, and beyond that maybe her whole body, without some contract plastered with restrictions, right? A woman riddled with misanthropy like her would do it this very instant...."
Misanthropy?
"The ones who underwent the experiment, it was your brother and... one more, right? I heard that kid is sensitive to Mana too."
"...Yes."
"If you want to avoid trouble, you'd best keep it hidden as much as you can."
I intended to, without being told.
***
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