Chapter 7
Objectively speaking, Yegor Vladislav was a pervert.
And not just any pervert—he was a pedophile.
What's more, he had no interest in fictional children.
He was a 'real' pedophile who preyed on actual children, boys and girls alike.
Of course, he was fully aware that pedophilia was a vile sexual proclivity.
In fact, he was a sociable man, adept at hiding his tastes from those around him.
But.
"Hey, little one. Where are your parents?"
"……They're dead."
He wasn't an idiot who'd refuse a perfectly laid table.
Especially when there'd be no consequences for eating from it.
"Then why don't you come with me, little girl? I'll give you all the delicious soup and meat you can eat."
Grumble.
At his words, the girl's stomach gave a small growl.
Yegor cheered inwardly.
How long had it been since he'd had a human girl, instead of a gynoid?
And she was an orphan, too.
He could kidnap her, rape her, or sell her to a brothel without any consequences.
Besides, she was wary.
The warier a child was, the more satisfying it was to win her over with kindness and lower her defenses.
"……Yes. I'll go with you."
More than anything, she was beautiful.
Though she was young, the lines of her face—from her cheekbones across her cheeks and jaw to her chin—were exquisite.
Her long, fine eyelashes shimmered in rainbow hues as they caught the light, just like her hair.
The only flaw was her comparatively murky red eyes.
But they were still far better than the rotten-fish eyes most orphans had, so he didn't give it much thought.
"All right. Climb on."
Savoring the flatness pressed against his back,
Yegor headed for Fantasy Tower, the safest place where no one would suspect him.
Along the way, he told acquaintances he'd found a lost child and was taking care of her until he could find her parents.
He'd "protected" children many times before, so nobody suspected him.
"This is……."
First, he took the girl to the First Dining Hall.
It was only natural that a hungry child would grow fond of an adult who fed her until she was full.
The depraved thrill of earning that affection, then defiling it, was one of the things that excited him most.
"Thank you for the meal."
The girl began to wolf down her food.
How many days had she gone without eating?
The thought crossed his mind, then was swept away and dissolved into foam in the waves of his lust.
He intended to fill her up below as much as he filled her stomach.
"……Thank you."
The girl politely bowed to him.
Her waist, bent at a right angle, looked especially slender, while her silver hair brushed the floor under gravity, like silk.
……Her offered-up buttocks.
He wanted to grope them ravenously right then and there, but forced himself to hold back with all his might.
"Come along. I'll take you somewhere to sleep."
"Yes."
It was time to harvest the fruit, now ripe.
The girl followed his words without the slightest suspicion.
How could a girl who'd just arrived at Fantasy Tower know her way around?
The path he led her down went not to the staff quarters, but to Fantasy Tower's central control room.
-Caretaker Yegor Vladislav. Welcome.
As Yegor and the girl entered the control room, the door closed without warning.
Now it was a perfect sealed room, one that wouldn't open without Yegor's authorization.
"Mister……?"
Thud.
Yegor quickly knocked the girl down and pinned her crossed arms with his right hand.
He pressed her feet down with his left leg so she couldn't put up any useless resistance.
"W-why are you doing this? Weren't you a good grown-up?"
"I may not be a good man, but I can teach you some good things. Don't worry. I'll savor you for a long time."
"……."
Had fear and shock sent her into a panic, leaving her unable to speak?
That was very nice in its own way.
Just as he thought that and began to undo the belt at his waist.
"You piece of trash."
"Gonna fuuuck youuu."
A blow to the back of his head.
He nearly lost consciousness from the surprise attack, but barely managed to pull himself together and turn to look at his assailants.
A man and a woman, removing their cloaking devices.
"Ah."
And an old man whose left arm had been replaced with a prosthetic.
He knew exactly who the old man was.
The Devil's Left Arm.
A veteran of countless battles.
Commander of Task Force 42.
Brigadier General Ramirez.
"Guh!"
The fight was over in an instant.
It had been three against one to begin with, and Yegor—who had no body modifications besides jump-resistance procedures—stood no chance against three of the Federation's elite soldiers.
It was hardly even fair to call it a fight.
"What a hopeless piece of shit. I'm sorry, Rubedo. You must've been really scared."
"Not really. I was terrified when he started undoing his belt, but thanks to this human garbage, I got to eat my fill for the first time."
Rubedo had been hungry the entire time.
From the moment she'd been dragged to Mars until now, after arriving at Fettuccine.
The moment Mijeong's power turned her into a little girl, her stomach had been empty, and she hadn't been able to eat a thing until Yegor brought her to the dining hall.
"You didn't even feed the kid, Brigadier General?"
"I assumed they'd fed her on Mars."
"How does that make any sense? She's at the age when she's growing like a weed."
"……The field rations taste like shit. I doubt she'd have eaten them even if they gave her some."
"Ugh, every time you open your mouth, it's just another excuse."
Yangyang seemed even angrier now than when she'd watched Yegor undo his belt.
Unwilling to get swept up in that bizarre spectacle of a subordinate chewing out her superior, Sergeant Kang Chanwoo looked down at a living human piece of trash.
The Fantasy Tower caretaker of Fettuccine, crawling on the floor with all four limbs broken.
"Yegor Vladislav."
"……!"
"Why are you so surprised? I only said your name. You're the one who's more surprising. So Madam was telling the truth. Not only was the Fantasy Tower caretaker in cahoots with the chaos faction, he was also a severe pedophile. Can you see the goosebumps on my face? They showed up when you started undoing your belt."
Kang ran his hands up and down over his face.
How shameless.
Rubedo thought.
"……Madam?"
"What, did we get the wrong guy? You don't know Madam?"
"I don't fucking know her…… Ugh, how many pimps are there in this neighborhood? You think I'd know who you mean just because you called her that? You've got the wrong guy……!"
"Hmm…… You have a point. Then how about this? This Madam isn't just any Madam. She's a vicious pimp who killed a mercenary because she found him annoying, then sold the entire family he supported to space pirates. Surely you'd know her if you were the one arranging deals between her and the pirates?"
Yegor's face, already twisted with the pain of his broken bones, crumpled even darker.
"Y-you son of a bitch…… Don't give me that bullshit."
"Pardon?"
"I may be a piece of shit who fucks kids, but selling people to pirates is physically impossible for me."
"So you're saying you would have, if it were possible."
"……."
As Yegor vehemently protested his innocence, Lieutenant Yangyang, who had been chewing out Ramirez, walked over.
Ramirez, whom she'd been berating, sighed in relief and brushed Rubedo's tousled bangs aside.
"They were gynoids, not a family. Kang Chanwoo, don't confuse people for no reason. He's already trash—how much worse are you trying to make him?"
"Lieutenant. They were that mercenary's family."
"Quit saying that kind of bullshit and get lost. Hey, Yegor. Tell me just this one thing, no more, no less, and I'll let you live."
A glimmer of hope returned to Yegor's eyes.
To think he might stay alive despite having his treason against the Federation and his disgusting secret exposed to Task Force 42.
Today was certainly his lucky day.
"A way to contact Sigma."
"……Y-yes. Of course I'll tell you."
Yegor squeezed his eyes shut and struggled for a few seconds before making up his mind and speaking.
"The Furnace. Fettuccine can't handle the enormous volume of waste produced by 24th-century civilization on its own. But we've got money to spare, so we regularly load garbage onto rockets and send it to the Furnace. I'm fairly trusted, so I have the authority to tamper with the rockets and their cargo on the governor's behalf, and sometimes, at Sigma's request, I launch rockets into space carrying whatever items they want."
"I asked you to tell me how to contact them, and you're telling me something weird. Ha, you're completely useless. Open the door."
"……Yes."
-Caretaker Yegor Vladislav. Goodbye.
At his command, the tightly shut door opened.
"Now leave me here and go on your way. Today, I saw nothing and heard nothing. I broke my arms and legs by falling down the stairs."
Yangyang glared at Yegor.
"So you'll keep your promise and spare the life of this insignificant caretaker, right?"
"Just die."
Bang!
Yangyang fired without even hesitating.
Yegor left the world with a face as craven as his crimes were vile.
"Whoa, didn't you say you'd let him live?"
"I'm a woman who says one thing and does another."
……So cool.
Rubedo swallowed the words that had risen to the tip of her tongue.
Her affection, which had plummeted from all that cloying physical contact, felt like it was surging back up.
"In the end, we didn't get anything useful. He was just siphoning off garbage at Sigma's direction. There was no point in me going to all the trouble of disguising myself as an orphan. I really thought I was going to get raped."
"No, this is plenty."
Ramirez slung Yegor's corpse over his shoulder and led the way.
"Fettuccine's governor couldn't possibly be unaware that rockets full of garbage were being diverted. That's all money. Rockets don't come cheap."
"Then…… Yegor's corruption was tacitly approved or even supported by his superiors, and the planetary governor has joined forces with Sigma?"
"That's right.
"So we have to have a showdown with an agent of the Martian Senate?"
"No."
Even if they opted for an elite strike instead of an all-out war, fighting an entire planet was absurd.
No matter how ruthless a Federation soldier was, he was still just one person.
In the end, a soldier's just a knife for killing chickens.
"Then what are you going to do? To draw out the people who hired Sigma to attack us, we'd first have to cut off their enforcer, Sigma. But Fettuccine's governor is backing Sigma, and the governor of a colony planet is an agent appointed by the Martian Senate. In the end, that amounts to the Martian Senate backing Sigma. So we've established that the Martian Senate didn't hire Sigma, but Task Force 42 is just a special operations unit. We have neither the grounds nor the power to take them on."
"Meet force with force."
And there was a different blade for hunting tigers.
"In politics, you have to fight with politics."