I hurriedly used my body like a wall to block Henry’s view. There was nothing here that was good for a child’s mental health. Of course, it wasn’t good for an adult to see either. How many times in your life would you see someone getting beaten with exercise equipment? I never wanted to see it again.
An irrepressible joy flashed across Baek Aeyoung’s face as she held the gun, but it vanished just as quickly. Sumire was clutching her thigh, groaning, and cursing in slurred words; Baek Aeyoung immediately aimed the muzzle at her head.
Shin Haeryang’s hands quickly patted over Sumire’s clothes, then he took a magazine from the pocket of her pink cardigan. As Shin Haeryang checked Sumire’s forearms and wrists, Baek Aeyoung asked,
“Is that all? Nothing else?”
“No.”
Watching the two of them talk while checking Sumire’s body for other weapons, from a third party’s perspective, Baek Aeyoung and Shin Haeryang looked like armed robbers. Just as Baek Aeyoung was clicking her tongue as if disappointed, Kang Sujeong approached while holding a kettlebell. Then, still looking stunned, she said to Shin Haeryang,
“You threw that? I—I thought you were going to hold the plate and use it to swing at someone.”
“I aimed for the torso, but the weight makes that impossible.”
“No. …Team Leader. I have no intention of throwing this.”
As if she thought she was being given advice on how her team leader threw kettlebells, Kang Sujeong shook her head furiously.
The barbell plate Shin Haeryang had thrown had struck a person’s thigh and was now rolling on the floor. Just in case, I lifted the plate from the floor, and curses rose all the way to my throat. I could lift it, but I wasn’t confident I could throw it that far, that high. No, this thing wasn’t made to be thrown at people in the first place. Isn’t that person’s thigh broken?
Just as I expected, Sumire was clutching her thigh and practically sobbing, but the two people closest to her paid it no mind at all.
More precisely, because Sumire was holding her thigh with both hands, Shin Haeryang was able to tie her wrists more easily with parachute cord. Tumanako, who had been watching all of this, slowly closed his gaping mouth. Henry was trying to lift a 15kg plate himself, so I set it completely down on the floor before he could get hurt and approached the three of them.
To begin with, Sumire Uehara’s appearance was completely different from the Infinite Church believers I had seen at the Second Undersea Base. The Infinite Church believers all wore black clothes and baseball caps with pointed ends, and even at a glance they gave off the impression of a dangerous armed group. On top of that, just looking into their eyes was enough to feel that they were lunatics with conviction.
But the person in front of us was entirely different. Sumire Uehara wore a thin blouse with a pink cardigan over it, along with faded jeans. Her shoes were heeled, and her long, wavy hair was let down as it was. She also had makeup on her face.
Her hands had nail art, or perhaps pink-colored nail polish. On top of that, her nails were 3 to 4cm long, with several glittering stickers shaped like hearts or stars embedded in them. If she hadn’t been carrying a gun, it would have looked as though Shin Haeryang and Baek Aeyoung had attacked an ordinary woman on her way downtown to shop or go on a date. Worried that Sumire couldn’t take her hands off her thigh and kept crying, I asked,
“How’s your leg? Does it hurt a lot?”
“Uhuuhk! Don’t touch me! Uhuuhuhuhuk!”
Sumire Uehara cried wildly as she shouted. It seemed the plate had scraped her soft flesh when it struck her leg, because she was bleeding. I took a towel out of my bag and put it in Sumire’s hands. Tears streaming down her face, Sumire used the towel with her bound hands to press down on her bleeding leg. Then she vented her resentment at Baek Aeyoung, who was right beside her.
“My leg! Uhuuhuhuk! Why are you doing this to me! Uhuuhuhuk!”
Baek Aeyoung answered while keeping the muzzle aimed at Sumire’s head.
“You were carrying a gun.”
“Ah. It hurts so much. It hurts so much! I didn’t shoot! I didn’t shoot! If I didn’t shoot, isn’t that enough?!”
Baek Aeyoung let out a small, “Ha!” Then she raised the corners of her mouth as if dumbfounded and said,
“If you weren’t going to shoot, you should’ve thrown it away. The safety was off and everything—who do you think is going to listen to you say that? Is there anyone going around with you? Where did all the men go?”
“…I don’t know!”
“If you don’t answer properly, you’ll get a hole in your face. Speak clearly.”
There was sincerity in Baek Aeyoung’s words. Sumire gritted her teeth, then answered as if in pain.
“All the men went to Baekho-dong! Why are you asking me this?! …Why are you here?!”
Beyond her tears, Sumire looked at Shin Haeryang and scowled. She was probably asking because a person who was supposed to be at the Baekho-dong escape craft port was in Central-dong. It seemed the Engineer Team Na people really had thought Shin Haeryang was waiting at the Baekho-dong escape craft port. Seo Jihyeok, who had been roaming the area and keeping watch, said,
“She seems to be alone.”
Hearing that, Shin Haeryang questioned Sumire.
“Where are the others?”
“I don’t know! Uhuuhuk! What are you going to do about my leg! My leg!”
Shin Haeryang gave a simple reply to those words.
“Answer properly before I make the other leg the same way.”
Perhaps the threat didn’t sound false, because Sumire swallowed down tears and snot before barely managing to answer.
“We split up in Central-dong! I’m alone.”
“What about Takahashi Yurie or Tamaki Yuzuru?”
“Ms. Takahashi followed the team leader. How would I know about Tama-tama?! I don’t know!”
Apparently, the members of Engineer Team Na weren’t all that close. Seeing as she was acting alone in this disaster. Normally, in a situation like this, people would try to move together no matter what. Shin Haeryang continued questioning Sumire.
“Why did you break the escape craft?”
“I don’t know because I didn’t do it.”
“Then who did?”
“I don’t know. Someone did, I guess. I really don’t know.”
Sumire answered while shaking her head wildly. …Looks like she really doesn’t know. The moment I thought that, Shin Haeryang dragged over the 10kg barbell plate on the floor and picked it up. Then Sumire looked at the barbell plate, her face crumpling as she quickly said,
“I didn’t do it! I saw Yamashita telling Tama to break it!”
“What, and where?”
“…The escape craft in Baekho-dong.”
The expressions of the Baekho-dong residents, myself included, became a mess. Tumanako, who had been standing like a stone statue, looked as if he would charge at Sumire any second, and Yu Geum barely held him back. Shin Haeryang asked Sumire again in a low voice,
“The reason?”
“They said they wanted all of you and the Russian team people to die. If something happens to the undersea base, you’ll get on the escape craft first.”
Including the engineering team, Baekho-dong had about eighty residents. If you combined the people in the two engineering teams, there were fourteen in total. They wanted fourteen people dead, so they destroyed an escape craft that other people could ride too? Shin Haeryang furrowed his brow, then asked something else.
“Was it your country that fired the torpedo at the research center?”
“Torpedo? You mean the bomb? I don’t know.”
Yu Geum hurriedly cut in beside Shin Haeryang and asked Sumire,
“What about the Jujak-dong escape craft? Why on earth did you break the one in Jujak-dong? The researchers have nothing to do with the engineers.”
“What about the Jujak-dong escape craft? The escape craft there broke too?”
Yu Geum stared blankly at Sumire, then quietly shut his mouth. Shin Haeryang looked at Yu Geum for a few seconds, but then asked Sumire gloomily again.
“…How did you get the gun?”
“Mr. Suzuki gave it to me.”
“Suzuki Senru? How did that bastard bring in this many rifles?”
“I don’t know. He said if gunshots rang out in Central-dong, people would panic and run to the escape craft. He told us to shoot people. I didn’t do anything wrong!”
As Shin Haeryang silently glared at Sumire, she clenched the towel and said,
“I didn’t know it was a real gun. Until Dmitri asked where we’d gotten a real gun, I thought it was a heavy model that only made a loud sound.”
“What about Dmitri?”
“…I really didn’t know it was real. And he’d been drunk since morning and throwing liquor bottles, then he got irritated at us first, telling us to hand over the gun.”
“Did you kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you seen Irina?”
“…I don’t know.”
After observing Sumire, Shin Haeryang immediately refuted her.
“Don’t lie. Did you kill her?”
“I’m not the one who shot! …Mr. Ichita shot her. I don’t know if she died or lived. She just collapsed and stopped moving.”
Every time Sumire said something, Kang Sujeong pressed a hand to her forehead with a dizzy expression, then used Shin Haeryang’s pad to send the same message to the Russians, including Vladimir, through messenger. Dmitri and Irina are said to have been shot by Engineer Team Na. Whether they are dead is uncertain, but prioritize the team’s escape.
At a glance, Shin Haeryang’s messenger inbox was bursting with messages sent by people from various countries, but because he hadn’t checked a single one, it had reached the point where messages weren’t receiving properly. Kang Sujeong wrote the same thing on the undersea base bulletin board and posted it there as well. At some point, the undersea base bulletin board had become flooded with an enormous number of posts cursing Shin Haeryang. Kang Sujeong read one or two, gave a small laugh, and turned off the pad.
“Where were you headed?”
“…To my room.”
“Why?”
“I was going to hide and do nothing.”
Hearing that, I let out a sigh. Just as Lee Jihyeon frowned at Sumire’s hoarse voice, Shin Haeryang asked again.
“What’s your relationship with the Infinite Church?”
The man named John, who had been quietly listening to this conversation, moved only his legs to come closer and went, “Mmmph?” before shaking his head wildly. Sumire looked at her broken, bloodstained nails, then asked Shin Haeryang back with a tearful face,
“What’s that?”
“The religion that was on the broadcast.”
“I don’t know. I don’t believe in things like that.”
Seo Jihyeok, who had been looking around, came over, looked at Sumire and her nails, then said,
“Good lord. With nails like that, they’d break while she was trying to find the trigger.”
At that, Baek Aeyoung said to Seo Jihyeok while keeping the gun muzzle steadily fixed on Sumire.
“Even with those nails, there’s no problem shooting. The issue is reloading.”
“Uh… is that so?”
“…She can reload too. She’s just slow as hell. If you let your guard down and get robbed by a kid like that, you’ll die, you know?”
“So after getting robbed, I’d even have to die by your hand? Go easy on me.”