*
Dante side
In the end, the leopard who had finished off even the silver-haired woman sneered at the thirteen dead bodies.
"What is this, some kind of group suicide game? Not exactly pleasant."
After introducing themselves as apostles of justice or a magic bus or whatever, their meaningless deaths didn't even leave me feeling hollow.
And to make matters worse, even the faint memories I had left after becoming a clock-headed thing were gone too.
Just as I was sinking into despair at having lost all hope, the woman called the lion grabbed me by the collar and hauled me up.
...That was when the anomaly happened.
"Tell the snake, false lion."
"This is an unstoppable flow."
A man with red eyes burst out from behind me, parting the forest. He swung the crimson gladius in his hand a few times, then—
Thud—
"Ugh... Aaaagh!"
With a speed too fast to see, he severed the lion woman's limbs.
"Red... why?"
The wolf, flustered, tried to somehow respond to the attack.
Swish—
"Agh...!"
The one with the ominous red eyes casually cut the wolf's limbs off too, as if it were nothing.
Then he turned those dreadful red eyes toward the leopard, the only one still with all four limbs, and said,
"Do you know why I only cut off their arms and legs?"
"Because that way, you—still intact—will have to drag them out of here in a panic."
"You're the only one who can substitute for the arms and legs they need to run away."
Only then did the leopard realize who he was. It glared at him venomously and said,
"...Red Gaze."
"Don't glare at me like that. Compared to what you lot did, this is nothing."
...That was true. Hadn't all thirteen of the people who had suddenly barged in been killed? It wasn't even death—just two people having their limbs torn off while still alive. Relative to that, it was clearly a minor matter.
"If the injuries are that bad, the higher-ups will still think you did enough. Treat it like a medal."
...
Seeing that the leopard gave no answer, the red-eyed man's atmosphere suddenly turned vicious.
"Or..."
"Do you want to leave your life here?"
"..."
At his threat, the leopard fell silent, then soon began fleeing with the wolf and lion whose limbs had been cut off.
And I looked at the thirteen bodies lying cold and dead before saying to him,
As if he knew what I was going to say, he cut me off.
"Nothing is too late, Dante."
"All we need is..."
"Time to turn back."
A bad feeling crept over me.
And that bad feeling turned out to be true.
<...!>
The pain struck all at once, as if my heart had been split into several pieces.
Then came the ribs, the large intestine, the stomach, and the lungs.
Then every place I couldn't even name began to writhe and burst apart in agony.
In the fading haze of consciousness, all I could feel was...
the people around me grotesquely restoring to their original shapes, and
"From here on out, it's going to be excruciating, Dante."
the voice of the red-eyed man.
*
Saramago side
My consciousness returned. Then my vision gradually came back, and sound slowly reached me.
And the very first thing my restored hearing caught was someone's shriek, torn raw.
After that scream, Ishmael's voice came through.
"What happened? Did we... come back to life?"
Faust answered Ishmael's question.
"We merely reversed the time that had been bound to us."
...Naturally, that wasn't exactly an answer I could understand. Wasn't it about time someone explained things in a way people could actually follow?
Ignoring that thought, I gave my body a quick test to see whether anything was wrong.
"Ah, ah."
After vibrating my vocal cords a few times, I confirmed that speaking wasn't a problem and asked Mr. Gregor,
"Are you all right, Mr. Gregor? I've never seen or heard of a technique that can fully resurrect a person like this."
"Yeah, no kidding. Something like this should be impossible unless they brought back some kind of Singularity."
Gregor said this while twitching his insect arm. I'd thought I'd just mistaken it during the fight, but that really was an insect arm, wasn't it?
Come to think of it, he must have had that arm on the bus the whole time too... Was my eyesight getting bad?
Setting aside the matter of my own body for a moment, I thought it was about time to start sorting through my memories again.
The reason was that I'd become curious about the word [Singularity], which seemed to mean something completely different from what it did in my original world.
Following that question and tracing my memories, I learned that a Singularity referred to a mysterious technology beyond human understanding.
...If I'd known this would happen, maybe I should've looked at the setting a little more closely.
But there seemed to be one more person than I expected. Aside from Dante, who was collapsed over there, there was another one... Vergilius?
The red-eyed man who had somehow appeared and was watching us opened his mouth.
"If everyone's restored, then carry your collapsed superior and get back on the bus."
At those words, Otis quickly hoisted the collapsed Dante onto her back and climbed aboard the bus.
"What are you all doing! The Manager has collapsed, has he not? Lay him down somewhere soft so he can rest, and hurry up and get ready!"
Had that person already forgotten what he'd said to Dante when they first met?
"It's only been a little while, and he's already like this..."
...I still hadn't exchanged a single word with Ishmael, but I felt like we'd probably get along quite well.
And just as Vergilius's gaze from behind began to feel sharp enough to sting, we were all able to board the bus.
*
Some time after everyone had boarded the bus, our collapsed Manager, Dante, got back up.
"Twitch-twitch. Did he wake up?"
"At last, you've come to your senses. I was about to be a little disappointed if you'd failed to endure and gone to the grave."
Then, having realized that Dante had gotten up, Charon introduced herself.
"Fresh morning. I am bus driver. Charon."
"It's not morning, but I suppose it is fresh. How are you feeling, Dante?"
Was that really something you say to someone who just fainted?
Dante, who had just woken up, answered with a weak ticking sound, perhaps to show how hurt he was by the sarcasm.
Tick... tock... tick... tock...
"He's ticking... Haa, this is rather troublesome if we can't communicate."
After saying that, Vergilius began his introduction in an unusually gentle tone.
"I am Vergilius... If you can hear this properly, then at least act as though you understand something, Dante."
At Vergilius's instruction, Dante nodded.
But do Dante's words only reach the prisoners? At the very least, they didn't seem to reach Vergilius.
"Good. Hearing isn't a problem, then. Let's depart for now, Charon."
"I'll depart. Vroom vroom."
With that as the cue, the bus, which had been still for a moment, began moving again with a driving sound that seemed to rise from some deep place below.
"Do you remember who you were?"
At that, Dante shook his head.
"You'd like to recover your original memories, wouldn't you?"
This time he nodded. For some reason, it felt like watching a pet.
"Smooth. Can't everyone just communicate like this with gestures?"
Apparently pleased with Dante's brisk communication, Vergilius asked Faust in a satisfied voice,
"What do you think, Ms. Faust?"
At that, Faust replied,
"Faust would prefer not to."
"There probably won't be that many situations where we can move our bodies so smoothly."
That was certainly a fair point, considering we'd be dying, breaking apart, and resurrecting over and over again.
And Faust looked steadily at Dante before saying,
"Dante."
"Dante is your name. You've even forgotten your own name."
Our Manager's memory seemed to be in a pretty serious state. People usually don't forget their own name...
"You'll grow used to it gradually."
Something about that exchange must have struck Dante as odd, because he suddenly asked,
"Faust can hear you as proper words."
But if he doesn't have a mouth, can he even eat things like food?
"Did that old-fashioned idea come about because you changed your head?"
"The notion that one can only converse if they have vocal organs such as a tongue or vocal cords is an anachronism."
Come to think of it, robots can speak just fine too. I was surprised to find that this was something that applied in my original world as well.
Then again, does that head maybe eat without a mouth?
"...Your words can be sent to one person, or delivered to everyone."
I remembered that during the fight earlier, I had heard only the commands directed at me, not the ones sent to other people.
So that was the secret behind that strange phenomenon.
"Ah, I should correct that. By everyone, I mean only the prisoners."
Faust seems to have a perfectionist streak. I didn't really feel the need to correct it.
Dante, having apparently found something odd in Faust's words, asked again with a ticking sound.
"The people sitting behind you..."
"The ones who were fighting in your place just now."
When Faust finished speaking, the first to lose patience was the golden-haired prisoner holding a massive spear.
According to the memories of my previous world, the prisoner named Don Quixote opened her mouth.
"Ohohoho!!! So thou art the final piece to join this journey! I know not how long I have awaited thee!"
That was the signal. The prisoners all began opening their mouths at once, eager to air their curiosity.
"Hey, mister, where'd you sell off your head?"
"So it was you. Thanks to you, my shattered spine has been restored as good as new. Did you perhaps work as a doctor in a Nest?"
Unless some special technique was involved, even a doctor working in a Nest wouldn't be able to repair a shattered spine...?
Maybe this body was a little lacking after all. Flustered, I was about to ask Mr. Gregor something, but...
"All of you, shut up. Nothing is more unpleasant than overlapping noise."
Vergilius, irritated by the prisoners' chatter, cut them off and restrained their voices at the same time.
Well, apart from that, what came out of his mouth was enough to draw every prisoner's attention and shift the topic.