**
"Two hundred and fifty thousand ann."
In the back alleys, at a place that looked like District 25, the pawnshop owner said firmly.
"That's all it's worth? That's ridiculous..."
"No, it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? It's old, so it's full of scratches, and it doesn't even have a proper sheen."
"Honestly, in another shop, it wouldn't even be worth two hundred thousand ann."
No matter how I looked at it, that was just a blatant lowball.
"The rest is... all useless junk."
"That brings the total tax you'll have to cough up to four hundred thousand ann."
And then Ms. Rodion's slow monologue began.
"Why do the poor only get poorer the more they work?"
"It's honestly absurd. The more money piled up in the pawnshop owner's safe,"
"the more our neighbors had their memories weighed out and treated like pocket change."
The District 25-like background shifted into a group wearing mostly white uniforms.
The one at the center was Sonya, so was that group Yurodivy?
"Sonya always gathered people by mixing in difficult words,"
"and beneath him, an organization called Yurodivy was formed."
"At first, it was fine. Even the empty-headed idiots were head over heels for Sonya's words, and they helped the struggling people in the back alleys."
"But Sonya only wore an expression that said something was missing."
Ms. Rodion's expression twisted little by little, and her voice began to rise.
"In the end, Yurodivy became a group that was more obsessed with sitting around a table and thinking about how to change the back alleys and the Nest than actually helping people outside."
"That's why I left them."
"You can't feed starving neighbors with armchair theory!"
Then the Sonya that had seemed like an illusion suddenly turned back toward us.
"But I told you over and over, Rodion. We had to wait for the right time."
"Sonya, sorry, but that 'right time'..."
"Even when Yurodivy's youngest... little Ivan was picking through food waste,"
"even after he died from choking on his prayers, he never came."
"For a great cause, we need greater power and more detailed policies, for the redistribution of wealth."
"And in order to move in that direction, petty noise is bound to arise."
"Petty? We started out to help the petty in the first place."
"What you were doing, what Yurodivy was doing, wasn't the direction I wanted."
"So you decided to step in yourself?"
"Of course. What our village needed was..."
"Not someone who would just sit around waiting for that uncertain day to come,"
"but someone who could pick up the axe in front of them without hesitation."
The illusion shifted again.
Now it was to a grand-looking mansion, or maybe a castle, with a sly-looking old woman inside.
Ms. Rodion was in that illusion too.
Holding a blue, winter-like axe that looked vicious just to look at.
"That day, most of the neighbors had probably gone more than four days without eating."
"And yet the wind showed no mercy, clawing viciously at the cracked skin of the starving."
"I knew of a safe that held enough money for our neighbors to gorge themselves for three days and nights without making a dent."
"So what did you do?"
At Sonya's question, Ms. Rodion, who had been continuing her monologue with a flat expression, finally looked flustered for the first time.
"...Wait, can I stop this now?"
"This is a kind of confessional created for you as the Golden Bough resonates."
"And a confessional is usually a place that exists for a sinner's repentance."
Was this intense feeling that made me not want to say certain things also all because of the Golden Bough?
Scenes like this... they were quite similar to the time during the last mission when Mr. Gregor's arm went into a fit. Yes, very similar to that scene.
"If that old woman had changed her mind at the end..."
"But, Rodion..."
"That old woman who had lived her whole life only exploiting her neighbors."
"You knew she wasn't the kind of person who would suddenly embrace everything and hand over her money."
"If you had known that, you wouldn't have picked up an axe in the first place."
After Sonya finished speaking, the scene that seemed like an illusion, or perhaps a memory, began to progress little by little.
"Poor little Rosion, you must think you're some great savior..."
"But demanding my money so boldly doesn't change anything."
"You're no different from the beggars in those back alleys. Just vermin."
At the old woman's words, the atmosphere in Ms. Rodion's memory changed.
"Yeah."
Crunch!
"I was the one who split her head open."
"Like cutting open the belly of a golden goose, I cleanly split the old woman's skull."
At that moment, Ms. Rodion's reflection in the window behind the old woman looked like nothing more than...
"In the end, someone had to do it. Right?"
...a murderer consumed by rage toward something.
"The golden goose is the tale of a fool who cut the thread of opportunity with his own greed,"
"but we were the unfortunate ones, so hungry we could have chewed through her brain and still not been satisfied."
"And her belly was definitely full of golden eggs."
"Yes, that old woman was a tax-collecting tyrant with immense power in District 25."
"But the reason she could run wild like that was... because her younger brother was a member of the Middle."
Wait, the Middle?
A chilling premonition pierced my head.
No, could I even call it a premonition? A member of the Middle, one of the strongest of the City's back-alley organizations, the Fingers, would never sit still if someone around them was harmed.
If anything, this wasn't a premonition. It was inevitability.
"I swung the axe for the starving neighbors. Was that wrong?"
"No, you swung it for yourself."
"You couldn't bear the fact that you weren't just an ordinary person."
"Do you know? The Middle... never forgets those who lay a hand on their own."
"What matters to them isn't who did it, but what happens if someone touches them."
In the memory, I could see residents dying at the hands of the Middle's members.
"The joy of the back-alley residents, who had finally chewed on a decent cut of meat for the first time, became corpses and piled up like a tower."
"Just like the tower of cars piled up outside the casino."
"I know how painful and guilt-ridden the days after that were for you."
"How you came to realize you were no different from the fool who split open the golden goose."
"After that day... nothing felt like it was truly mine anymore."
"It was all because of me..."
"It's okay. Rodion."
Sonya cut off Ms. Rodion's words and barged in.
"You see, Rodion."
"I searched through thousands of books, tens of thousands of documents, to change the world..."
"And I met people all over the City."
"A world where the exploited can finally break free from the ruling class's exploitation and gain true liberation."
"That's the world I wanted to create."
By then, Sonya's expression had changed into one of realization.
"But the answer wasn't in 'changing' things. A page already written wrong can never be turned back."
"Look carefully. This is the world you and I can reach."
The Sonya in the illusion linked arms with Ms. Rodion and pulled her along.
"A world you can build through the Golden Bough you resonated with..."
And the ideal worlds he imagined were shown through the illusion.
"May there be no one starving on the earth."
"May everyone have the right to pursue spiritual and intellectual pleasure."
"...If you join me, I'll give you that world as a gift."
"As if nothing had ever happened in the first place."
Ms. Rodion quietly closed her eyes after hearing Sonya's offer.
...Was she thinking it over?
Given what I'd heard about Ms. Rodion's past, I could see why.
An ideal world where her sins vanished, where everyone was happy.
It was a seductive illusion anyone would be tempted by.
And then that illusion shattered.
"Sorry, but I'm going to have to refuse."
Surprisingly, the words that came out of Ms. Rodion's mouth were a refusal.
"Why..."
"I don't want to get warm yet. I'd rather keep shivering in this cold a little longer."
"Until I find the answer to when I'm allowed to grow warm, I'm going to stay here a while longer."
Ms. Rodion slowly turned her head toward Sonya and said,
"And Sonya..."
"You knew in advance that I'd lose my temper and go charging in first, didn't you?"
And then a light rebuke that didn't fit the heavy mood from just moments ago shattered the atmosphere.
"Rodion, you may not understand, but you had no sign."
"I came expecting you to have one, but instead I can see it on the other friends."
What was this "sign" supposed to be?
For some reason, even though we live in the same City, there are more things I don't understand than things I do.
"A sign? What do you mean..."
Fortunately, it wasn't just me who had no idea this time.
"Besides, you can't even see signs. Which means... you don't have the power to lead anyone."
"But I'm different. So for a better world..."
"Yes, I think you said something similar on top of that table piled high with books."
"...That's why I can't be with you."
"Words exchanged on a table, or words spoken from a table, can't feed the neighbors after all."
Just as the mood was about to turn serious again, Ms. Rodion's tension rose ever so slightly.
"You know it too..."
"How could a wild bastard ever go under some fussy bookworm? Hah!"
Yes, that was Ms. Rodion all right.
Only then did the lighter mood make me feel a little more at ease.