"Come on, come on! Don't be shy, have another drink!"
The clink of a bottle against a glass rang out as liquor was poured into the prisoners' cups.
"I'm good..."
"Why are you holding back now? Here, one for you too, Verg!"
"······."
The drinking party was growing more and more heated, especially thanks to Ms. Rodion, whose tension had shot through the roof.
"...Come to think of it, doesn't the knight drink?"
"A proper bus driver doesn't drink and drive."
"That's a fine attitude."
By now, the prisoners with weaker tolerance were getting drunk and losing their heads.
Me? I'd been pacing myself from the start.
I didn't even like alcohol all that much to begin with.
Thud!
"Kathy..."
Heathcliff, who'd been guzzling it like water ever since he got drunk, was the first to go down.
He seemed to be babbling nonsense in his sleep, and it was not a pleasant sight.
"Heh, I knew he'd end up like that the moment he started drinking like it was good. Wait, are we on a ship? Why's it swaying so..."
Thud!
Ms. Ishmael was out too.
Since she was a sailor, I'd assumed she'd have a high tolerance, but I guess not.
In fact, she looked like she'd barely ever drunk at all.
"Haa..."
Dante, who was most likely going to be stuck cleaning up this mess, let out a helpless sigh.
Why?
Because Dante was a clock-headed thing.
He didn't even have a mouth, so how was he supposed to drink?
"Charon, let's head back soon."
"Okay, Verg."
And then Vergilius, who'd been drinking in moderation the whole time, hurriedly fled to the bus with Charon, who looked like she'd already finished eating.
I wanted to complain that no matter how much he didn't want to babysit these people, running off first was a bit much, but...
"Manager!! This Otis will personally feed you!!"
"No, Otis, I can't eat food..."
...If I were him, I wouldn't want to clean up this disaster either.
Before I knew it, a headache had started pounding at my temples, so I stood up to get some air for a bit.
"Hm? Saramago, where are you going?"
"Just stepping out for some air."
"Oh? Hurry back~"
Ugh, getting around the collapsed prisoners was a pain in itself.
Carefully slipping away from the table, I stepped outside the restaurant.
"Phew..."
Still, a little fresh air made me feel alive again.
Since I was out here anyway, maybe I should buy some hangover medicine in advance.
I could just get enough for the prisoners' headcount.
Ah, should I get some for Vergilius too?
With that light thought, I bought some hangover medicine and went back to the barbecue place, and then...
"What, they all collapsed? How boring..."
"······."
Everyone except Ms. Rodion and Dante had collapsed.
Why was Sinclair down too? Did Ms. Rodion feed him alcohol or something?
"Ah! Saramago's back? Since you're here, sit down and have some drink..."
Thud!
Good, now they're all down.
I wanted to lie down beside them and pass out too, but I had things to do.
I rummaged through Ms. Rodion's pockets and found the cash.
Let's see... here it is.
I settled the bill at the bar and now...
"...Should I carry them?"
"Yeah..."
At that moment, Ms. Faust, who'd seemed to be drunk and collapsed, suddenly woke up.
"You were awake?"
"Faust is not foolish enough to not know her own tolerance."
"And she also knew that pretending to be knocked out would keep troublesome things from happening."
"I must maintain the bus, so I'll be off."
And then she left on her own.
That was very Faust of her, but still, shouldn't she at least help clean this up?
"······."
But none of us had the confidence to win an argument against Ms. Faust, so we started carrying the prisoners out one by one.
···
"Hup."
Did we get everyone?
I only got my freedom after carrying six of them.
Every single one of them had atrocious drinking habits, honestly...
"—Kathy, Kathy!!"
"—Run, Rocinante!!"
"—Manager!!!"
That's right.
Exhausted in body and mind, I threw myself onto the bed in my room.
It had been a tiring day, and the moment I lay down, sleep came rushing in, so I surrendered to it and fell asleep at once.
**
"...Ggh!"
A violent headache forcibly dragged me out of sleep.
"Aaaagh!!!"
I knew this headache.
Right, it was very similar to the one that came when someone tried to forcibly rummage through my memories.
But the intensity was on a completely different level.
"――!!"
Wasn't there a saying that if something hurts enough, you can't even scream? I never expected to experience that with my whole body.
The pain of someone forcibly tearing through my head tormented me for several minutes before it finally subsided.
"Haa, haa..."
My whole body was slick with cold sweat.
Looks like I needed a shower.
Before my entire body turned sticky with sweat, I grabbed some clothes and headed for the shower room.
When I finished showering in the quiet men's shower room and was about to leave, a mirror in one corner happened to catch my eye.
Out of pure curiosity, I wiped the mirror and looked at my face once.
Yes, seeing it was pure coincidence.
...No, maybe it was inevitable, driven by my subconscious.
The me reflected in the mirror wasn't all that different from the me I'd first seen on the bus, reflected in the window.
Black hair with a faint bluish tint, and a face with a generally gentle impression.
And...
Black eyes with a bluish cast, like staring into the depths of the sea.
—Had my eyes always looked like that?
At the sudden question, I stared hard at my eyes.
And what was reflected there was countless, endlessly varied versions of myself.
...What is this?
Goosebumps rose all over my body, and I instinctively tore my gaze away from that deep something.
For some reason, I felt like I shouldn't know this yet.
A feeling that it wasn't time yet.
It was similar to the feeling I'd had when I tried to dig through memories from two years ago.
The sensation of being possessed by something was unpleasant as hell, but if I stayed there any longer, I felt like I'd keep staring into those eyes forever, so I headed outside.
After changing clothes and stepping into the hallway, I fell into thought.
It was an awkward time to go back to sleep, and I didn't really want to sleep more anyway.
And it's not like I had anything else to do... should I chat with Dante or something?
Since I didn't have any better way to kill time, I decided to talk with Dante, who was on night watch.
" Saramago? What's wrong?"
"Ah, I woke up in the middle of the night. It felt awkward to go back to sleep, so I came out."
The bus was scheduled to start operations at 6 a.m.; in about an hour, I'd be forcibly woken up anyway.
"Ah, Dante."
""
"When are you going to do the extraction this time?"
"Extraction... should we do it now?"
"If we're doing it, let's go quickly. I'm curious how much madness has piled up."
Maybe it was the early hour making our emotions more erratic, but we rather impulsively decided to do an extraction.
From the engine room of Mephistopheles, the sound of chains violently unfurling could be heard.
Clatter-clatter-clatter!!
When the extraction target was nearby, a hole-like mark would appear in that person's chest, so I hadn't realized it before, but apparently it wasn't an act that had much to do with the extraction itself.
Otherwise, those chains wouldn't be making a hole in the air and piercing through it.
Soon the chain pulled an identity out of that hole, and Dante obtained information about it.
Well, most of them were probably duplicates by now.
But duplicate identities were useful too.
Duplicate identities were reduced to fragments of that person and sent toward another system in Mephistopheles, the vending machine.
The prisoners' original identities, which were treated as the dud result of the extraction, were also fragmented.
Now, if you consume a certain number of those fragments, you can get an identity from the vending machine equal to the amount spent.
It was a very intuitive pity system.
But it seemed this time the identities weren't duplicates.
"LCCB Assistant Ishmael and LCCB Assistant Rodion?"
Oh, Ms. Rodion succeeded in getting an identity too.
Then I was the only one left.
Without even a chance to think, Dante finished checking the identities and immediately extracted one.
And a chain flew straight into my chest and lodged there; judging by the red color, it seemed to have succeeded.
"I hope it's a usable identity..."
Before I even had time to worry, memories I'd never seen before began forming in my head.
Unable to resist my curiosity, I tried to peer into the identity's memories, and my mouth moved on its own.
"Um, you must be the client? I'm from the Seven Association."
Was this the phenomenon Ms. Ishmael had gone through?
I knew I'd have to do it someday, but having it hit me at such an unexpected moment was pretty disorienting.
Of course, that was that, and the identity was the identity.
Judging from the scattered memories and what I'd just said, I seemed to belong to the Seven Association in that world.
Probably as someone in Section 5.
The Seven Association, huh. That's not bad.
Considering how Yi Sang's combat ability changed dramatically after obtaining an identity, it seemed promising in battle, and the Seven Association's intelligence network would be useful anywhere.
After thinking it over, I decided it was a perfectly decent identity.
As I thought that much and looked back toward the engine, I could also see a golden possibility, one that didn't appear very often.
I didn't know whose identity it was, but I was pretty jealous.
I'd just gone from having no identity at all.
If Gregor hadn't received a duplicate, that meant someone had at least two identities now, right?
After seeing that far, Dante seemed to think any further extraction was premature and stopped there.
Sure enough, one rare golden identity and one identity for each prisoner was enough.
There's a saying that if the market is up, you should keep going, but isn't there also something about mean reversion?
By then, a lot of time had passed, and some of the prisoners might wake up early, so that was probably part of the decision too.
For the little time left, I might as well look through the Seven Association identity's memories a bit more.