"...My house. Kromer will definitely be there."
"You knew that bastard?"
"Damn it, all that ear-splitting laughter is giving me a headache."
"...We met at school."
Apparently, they had been close in the past.
...Judging by that crazy woman's fleeting obsession, maybe they had been more than ordinary friends.
"Oh? So you were friends? If you were, I'd like you to talk some sense into her..."
"We weren't friends. Kromer killed my family."
Well, I'd better keep that thought from earlier tucked away in my head.
I absolutely had to make sure it never slipped out of my mouth...
"..."
"I'm sorry."
Seeing Sinclair's face freeze solid, Ms. Rodion apologized.
Anyway, we should probably move soon.
-Zzzzt.
Then, one of the prosthetic heads hanging from the tree slowly turned toward us.
The light leaking from the prosthetic flickered on and off like a lamp.
"Sin... cla... ir. Tch... zzzzt..."
"Why... did you... come back..."
"...Sinclair, are those the neighbors?"
Ms. Rodion asked while looking at the shattered prosthetic bodies.
"I think so... I hope they weren't..."
Staring at the wires sparking with crackling flames, Sinclair answered with a dark expression.
And the head that had barely been making noise soon stopped, drowned out by a flood of static.
Then, a song rang out.
"Silent night..."
From the hanging heads, the same song poured out all at once.
The hymn echoing from the many different heads, stripped of any human brain and left with only shells, settled over the flames.
"Holy night..."
Looking at that hideous, revolting scene, Mr. Ishmael said,
"So heresy here means... prosthetic users, after all."
"It's been quite some time since prosthetic users became visible in the City..."
"And yet there are still plenty of people who feel alienated by the sight of them."
That was true. Even in the Nest I lived in, there were more than a few people who felt a faint aversion to prosthetics. A person shaped like something that wasn't human was that alien.
"...Our village,"
"Our village was called the 'holy land of K Corp's prosthetics industry,' to the point where most residents worked in high-end prosthetic parts manufacturing."
"Kromer had been watching our village for a long time."
"Your family too..."
At Mr. Gregor's cautious words, Sinclair calmly agreed.
"Yes, my father was the head of a new prosthetics company."
"So..."
"No."
"In my view, people like them don't have any grand ideology."
"They're just... just lunatics fascinated by madness and violence."
"Don't try to understand insane people, Sinclair. It won't do you any good."
...
After a brief silence, Sinclair, who had been staring for a long time at the Christmas tree hung with the neighbors, turned toward Mr. Dante.
Please don't be hurt.
"Manager, there's something I've wanted to ask you for a long time."
"
"That... how does it feel?"
"
"Yes."
"How does it feel to have a prosthetic instead of a head?"
The instantly chilling tone in Sinclair's voice gave me goosebumps.
I thought I felt a trace of killing intent... or was that just my imagination?
"Hmm... well..."
Faced with the somewhat difficult question, Mr. Dante fumbled awkwardly, unable to find his footing.
"Ah! I-I'm not trying to pick a fight."
"...I-it was a rude question. I'm sorry."
"
Mr. Dante's expression as he said that seemed to say, Everyone else has said far ruder things than this, so what.
"I don't have any memories from before my head was replaced anyway... so I can't really answer."
"I see..."
"I've always wondered. What it feels like when something else takes the place of your head..."
"My family said it was no different from wearing a hat and hanging a clock from your neck, but..."
"No matter how hard I tried to imagine it, I just couldn't."
It was true that studies had been raising some pretty serious findings that people who had prosthetics, especially those who replaced their heads with prosthetics, often complained of depression and other symptoms.
It was certainly a strange, alien feeling to have your head replaced by something else.
So Sinclair's reaction wasn't strange at all.
"Because of that, I was the only one who survived."
"You were young, so the prosthetic procedure must have been frightening. You don't need to feel guilty over something like that."
Mr. Dante offered Sinclair that small comfort, but what Sinclair had said earlier... was a little different in nature from Dante's reassurance.
"No..."
"That's not it..."
"I'm not as innocent as you think, Mr. Dante..."
Sinclair quietly lowered his head.
Mr. Dante seemed to be trying to think of something comforting to say, but nothing came out, and before long only the unpleasant crackle of static and fire lingered around us.
And the ones who broke that noise were the newly arrived inquisitors.
This is getting old. Where do they keep crawling out from, like cockroaches...
**
Fortunately, Guido still hadn't caught up to us, or he wasn't among the mass of inquisitors that had arrived.
The battle without a strong enemy ended fairly smoothly, and we were slowly making our way deeper into the village, toward Sinclair's house.
And then, my eyes happened to fall on one particular place.
In a corner of the village, prosthetic bodies were piled up like garbage.
Among them, there were even a few still letting out pained groans, as if their consciousness hadn't gone out yet.
And among them was also an inquisitor, ignoring them as he drove a nail straight through someone's chest.
"The heart should have been pierced, yet the body still beats."
"It must be an iron-reinforced heart. Even the human core has been tainted by heresy."
"Filthy. To think they would profane flesh and bone like this."
As if performing a sacred rite, the inquisitor took a bottle from his coat and began carefully sprinkling its contents.
...The foul, headache-inducing smell drifting from afar was a familiar one. It was oil.
"Soak in human oil, body of heresy."
"You who cannot even return to the earth, scatter as smoke at least."
Fwoosh!
And when the lit match met the oil-soaked prosthetic bodies, a fierce blaze erupted.
Soon, with the crackling of flames, a choking stench spread everywhere.
That stench was a little different from the smell of flesh burning when a person is burned alive.
Before long, with a crackling sound, the faint lights flickering in the prosthetic bodies finally went dark.
"You speak of purification with your mouth, yet you've created hell."
"The Nail and Hammer have always been devoted to interpreting humanity."
"There were even those who condemned people with prosthetics, saying pain was an experience one ought to endure. Though they never acted it out like this."
"I've been thinking this for a while... why are you so familiar with N Corp, anyway?"
"...Because I was an N Corp employee."
...Huh?
Seriously? Mr. Meursault was an N Corp employee?
"Huh...? You worked with those people?"
"I never worked with them, but from the perspective of affiliation, yes."
Since he was such a man of few words, this was probably the first time I'd heard him talk about his past.
There were plenty of Sinners who had spoken about their origins, fragments of their past, various traumas, and so on, but he had always swallowed his own story.
No, given his personality, maybe he had simply never felt the need to talk about his past until now.
"Why didn't you say so sooner? So you carried around one of those bizarre weapons too?"
To Mr. Gregor's probing question, Mr. Meursault gave a reply that was perfectly, unmistakably him.
"Was there any need to?"
Of course, there were naturally people who hated that way of speaking.
"What... hey, then how am I supposed to tell whether you're on the same side as those bastards or not?"
"I mean... I call that manager bastard 'clock-head,' but I don't think he's the kind of guy who deserves to have his head cut off and burned."
...So he did think it was fine to smash him with all your strength and split his head in half?
Hmph, anyway.
"Even if you dress it up with words like purification and whatnot, all I see are lunatics who just needed an excuse to kill people."
"Tell me. Are you the same as those bastards?"
"There was a time when I thought about such things."
"I never gave an answer as to whether I was the same or different."
"Then give me an answer now! If that manager bastard ordered you to butcher every last villager, would you just follow along?"
"Must I give an answer? It would not help in carrying out the task."
"An employee moves according to orders. It should be written in the employment rules that man, Vergilius, put out as well."
"If the manager tells me to act, I act. If my thoughts are needed, I will provide them, but I have no habit of running my mouth when there is no need."
Mr. Heathcliff's expression twisted more and more at that infuriatingly calm attitude, in which he only stated his own thoughts.
"...What? Are you crazy? You don't look all that different from those guys who replaced their heads with tin cans."
"There is a clear difference in that I am composed of 16% protein, 60% water, and 7% minerals."
"Also, unnecessary heavy metals are not among my components."
Mr. Meursault's words, spoken like that, reached the Sinners' chests colder than usual, colder and more detached.
So cold it ached in the heart, enough to make one unconsciously avoid him.