I got into the car and stared blankly out the rain-streaked window.
I wondered if heading into the mountains in this rain wouldn’t be dangerous, so I asked.
But the answer I got from my senior was, if anything, it was better.
“It’s better, actually. There won’t be any civilians.”
“…….”
“If it isn’t one of our voices, then every voice you hear will belong to a victim.”
Saying that, my senior put one earphone in one ear, then handed me the other.
“Memorize these voices from now on.”
“…What?”
When I froze in confusion, my senior frowned and put the earphone in my ear herself.
Soon after, ordinary sounds and horrifying death cries began to play, mixed in roughly equal measure.
Men, women, children, the elderly.
The voices of victims struck my ears, regardless of age or gender.
At one moment, I could hear the sound of someone smiling happily in everyday life; right beside it, the death rattle of an old person would newly ring out.
They said there had been well over two hundred victims, so in a way, it was only natural.
The voices continued to play, and as I listened to them, I trembled all over.
The ordinary voices were one thing.
But I really couldn’t get used to the recorded death cries.
People dying while calling out for their mothers, lovers, wives, husbands, older brothers, older sisters.
People screaming that they wanted to live.
There were even sounds of people saying nothing at all, merely laughing hollowly before their breath was cut off.
They were all voices recorded by Action Section 3.
Goosebumps rose all over my body, and I looked at my senior.
“…….”
“S-Senior.”
With an utterly expressionless face, my senior was listening to it as if it were music while looking through photographs of the victims.
“What.”
“Are… are you okay with this…?”
I asked because I wondered if she really was fine, and she looked at me before dropping a curt reply.
“Yeah.”
“…….”
When she saw me unable to continue, my senior sighed and answered that she had simply gotten used to it.
“I got used to it… even though I didn’t want to.”
“…….”
With a slightly bitter expression, my senior took several Forget Me ampoules from inside her coat.
“From now on, we’re going to erase these people from this world.”
“…….”
“We’re minimizing the pain of their bereaved families.”
The Bureau also erased from this world those who had become anomalies, or those who had fallen victim to anomalies.
The first reason was that if anomalies became known to the public, there was a high possibility of chaos.
The second was to minimize the suffering of those affected by anomalies.
It might seem truly bitter, but from the perspective of someone who couldn’t remember, they wouldn’t remember anyway, so there would be nothing to grieve over.
Thinking that the way they did not care because the people left behind were anomalies was very much like the Bureau, I lowered my head.
‘Am I… lucky, then?’
All my acquaintances were dead, I had no guardian, and there was no one to grieve for me.
In other words, after the pain of becoming an anomaly, I wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of losing something else as well.
“…Senior.”
“What.”
“Is… is this really right……?”
Even so, I wondered whether it was right to use this thing to erase everyone’s memories.
No matter how much they were anomalies, was it really right to erase people who had once been human so easily from others’ memories?
“…….”
After hearing my words, my senior thought for a long time.
I had heard that she, too, had once been caught up in an anomaly, so I stared at her blankly.
After thinking for quite a while, my senior called my name and spoke her opinion with an expressionless face.
“…Sion.”
“Yes…….”
“You’re looking too much at ideals.”
“…….”
“If it’s going to be painful, it’s better not to know they ever existed at all. You should know that well, shouldn’t you?”
Because my senior knew everything about my past, she let those meaningful words slip.
I knew.
If I hadn’t known how my mother died—no, if I hadn’t even known that I’d had a mother in the first place—my life might have been a little better.
But I didn’t want to forget.
Because she was someone precious to me.
“Even now… it still torments me.”
“…….”
“…It’s better not to have memories like that.”
Saying that, my senior clenched the ampoules in her hand.
I couldn’t understand her.
After all, my senior was also suffering without using the item, unable to forget her past.
Surely, she didn’t want to forget her memories of someone precious.
“…Don’t question the Bureau’s work. The moment you do, you die.”
My senior spoke those cold words.
Looking at her blue eyes, which seemed especially cold today, I nodded.
Though, of course, I would only suffer without dying.
* * *
Before stopping by the mountain.
We repeatedly visited the homes of the victims’ bereaved families and sprayed small amounts of the ampoule.
Since I walked around wearing an eyepatch so my eyes wouldn’t be discovered, no one realized I was an anomaly.
It was just a little difficult being treated entirely as a woman.
“We’re from the government.”
The final house we finally stopped at.
There, Senior Yeonu said the exact same thing the section chief had said at my house.
Then a woman came outside.
She was a woman who had lost her husband and child, cut off all relationships, and shut herself inside her home.
“…Hello. What brings civil servants all the way here……?”
Dark circles beneath her eyes, and a room piled with trash.
Looking at it, I felt a sense of déjà vu.
‘…It’s exactly like the house I lived in.’
The inside of the house looked exactly like mine had when severe depression and lethargy had overwhelmed me.
As I stared at it, I felt Senior Yeonu’s gaze.
“…Hurry, spray it once.”
“Ah… yes…!”
Until I sprayed the ampoule, Senior Yeonu naturally made small talk with the woman.
“Ahaha, your taxes are a little overdue.”
“Ah… is that so…? I must have forgotten.”
“For now, we came to issue only a warning.”
Senior Yeonu lied brightly as she said that.
In the meantime, I hid my presence and sprayed the liquid into the woman’s house with a hiss.
Then the woman swayed slightly, dizzy.
“…I haven’t been able to sleep.”
“Ah, is that so? Then please go in and rest. We’ll be on our way now.”
Saying that, my senior bowed her head.
I hurriedly bowed as well, and the two of us left the place.
My senior, who had been holding her breath, covered the area around her mouth with a wet handkerchief and handed me a wet towel too.
“One minute. Wait.”
“Yes….”
I exhaled the breath I had been holding and swallowed the bitterness for a moment.
Like this, one more person had been erased from this world forever.
I was seized by the sensation of guilt washing over me, but.
“…Let’s go. Time to catch a bird.”
“Yes…….”
The thought that we would soon be able to avenge them seemed to make that guilt subside, if only a little.
* * *
When we arrived at the mountain behind the neighborhood, my senior opened a black umbrella and got out of the car.
When I tried to share that umbrella with her.
“…You have your own.”
“Ah.”
“…Don’t stick to me. Are you trying to get us killed together all at once?”
“S-sorry.”
My senior guarded against me with a chilling wariness and tossed me a new umbrella.
When I opened it, the car drove away with a simple “good luck.”
I stared blankly after it, then entered the rainy mountain together with my senior.
The mountain looked extremely rugged.
The trees were twisted grotesquely, and despite all this rain, there was no life to be found in the grass.
Something was terribly wrong.
Even as I thought that, I moved my feet.
The soil was muddy.
“Don’t be too scared.”
“Hic…….”
“The moment you panic, I’m cutting off your head and running with just that, so keep that in mind.”
“Wh-why?!”
When I asked in alarm, Senior Yeonu replied as if it were only natural.
“Because your body moves on its own when you die.”
“…Ah.”
“It uses your body better than you do, like it was the original owner.”
Saying that, my senior used her scabbard to batter away the branches.
I quietly followed behind her.
In any case, owls didn’t appear at this hour.
This was literally just a preliminary survey of the scene, so there was no need to worry.
Thinking that, we continued to slowly inspect the mountain.
“…The owl sounds are probably made by the anomaly.”
“Is… is that so?”
“Yeah. Because it looked like it imitated the sounds of the living things it killed.”
Saying that, she told me that this forest had originally been famous as a habitat for owls.
Of course, she also added that recently, many owl corpses had been found, eaten by something.
“It seems a large number of owl corpses were discovered.”
“…!!”
“But the sound of owls suddenly starts being heard in large numbers at dawn… isn’t that strange?”
It was strange enough to be anomalous.
On top of that, the people who entered the mountain afterward disappeared without a trace.
The fact that it was an anomaly that played the death cries of its victims made it even more chilling.
And a short while later.
On the mountain, we—
“…O-owl, an owl corpse.”
“Bag it.”
We found the corpse of an owl.
Its stomach had been torn wide open, but there were no organs visible inside.
It truly looked as though only the outer shell remained.
The stench was overwhelming, and after putting on gloves, I slowly placed it into a plastic bag.
“Shall we go down?”
“…G-go down?”
“Yeah. We’ll send it to the Research Department, then camp nearby until dawn.”
“Ah… w-we’re sleeping here?”
“Yeah.”
My senior said that running away was absolutely not allowed, and that dying was simply dying.
“…This isn’t a simple investigation mission like last time.”
“Hic.”
A hiccup escaped me from the tension.
My senior looked at me like that, took the owl corpse from me, and we descended the mountain together.
The rain began to fall harder and harder.